September 4, 2014 • 39 mins
Life is an enduring mystery. We're forced to unravel the mystery of human consciousness from within, while the enigma of cosmos bears down on us from beyond. We whisper the words "self" and even "god" to ground ourselves in an ocean of chaos, but what's it really all about? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, explore Attention Schema Theory and what it has to say about evolution, consciousness and our notion of the divine.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. And my name is Robert Lamb, and on
Julie Douglas and in each of us. We can't help
but but ring with that, uh, that that existential statement.
(00:24):
I think therefore I am. We're all bound up in
this just endless whirlwind of thinking, and we're thinking about
our own thoughts. We're thinking about our own consciousness. We're
thinking about the world around as we're thinking about the past,
the future. We're thinking about the the the possible reality
of things outside of our observable universe. We're thinking about aliens,
(00:45):
we're thinking about God. Uh, this is this is kind
of the state of the human mind as a whole. Yeah,
it's this whole big sushi roll of existence that we
try to get our minds around, and um, it becomes
very meta, right. We do a lot of thinking about thinking.
Essentially is what consciousness boils down to. And it's problematic.
(01:08):
We call it the hard problem because we've never really
found the center of consciousness. We're not really sure how
it relates to our existence. We're not really sure how
it relates to this idea of a creator, something that
created the world. Um, did we just come out of nothingness?
And in fact, American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, quote,
the idea of consciousness is ludicrous. If it is not monstrous,
(01:32):
it means to know that one is food for worms.
This is the terror to have emerged from nothing, to
have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings and
excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression, and with
all this yet to die. Well, you know, on one hand,
you could say that that's a deeply troubling thing too
(01:53):
to take into your world view. But you accept that,
then maybe it opens up your life for for other pursuits.
You can be like, all right, well, now I realize
that I'm just I'm just feast for the worms, that
that that my whole existence is just circling a black hole.
But I don't have to worry about that anymore. I
can spend some time gardening, indeed, and I can hopefully
(02:13):
create this state of flow and just being the moment,
which we'll talk about in another podcast episode. But today
we're gonna talk about this hard problem and this idea.
This I'm not going to call this simple idea because
it's not, but a more straightforward idea called attention schema
theory that might put this more in a context that
(02:35):
we can understand more palatable. I should say yes, now,
I definitely want to preface here and say, on one hand, okay,
we're gonna talk about human consciousness here. We talked about
human consciousness before devoted in an entire episode, do it.
This is an area that we're going to continue to
see advances in in neuroscience and and even in philosophy,
but it's gonna be a while before we can and
(02:57):
maybe we'll maybe we'll never even have a really concrete
idea of consciousness that both makes sense on paper and
feels right uh to our our first person experience of it.
So it's still a feel that you see a lot
of progress in. On the other hand, we're gonna talk
a little bit about God in the later part of
this episode, and God, of course, is something that we
(03:17):
will never be able to prove scientifically. It the concept
of God and gods and deities is is something that
is is ultimately unknowable to science. So the theory that
we're going to discuss in this episode, attention scheme of
theory is not. We're not saying, hey, here is a
theory that definitely explains all of these things, that satisfies
(03:39):
all these mysteries. Even the theories creator Michael Graziano, a neuroscience,
novelist and composer, Professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. Uh,
even he'll tell you this is not a satisfying theory.
So what I would like to encourage everyone to do is,
you know, we're all coming into this topic with certain
constraints in our world view. Is to to not just
(04:02):
completely throw your worldview aside, but lower the gate a
little bit and open yourself up to alternate perspectives on
what human consciousness is and alternate takes on how to
view the idea of a god or God's including a
giant Harry orangatane puppet, which we'll get to you in
a d that Graziano actually works into his bits here. Um.
(04:25):
But Garciana says, we have been asking the wrong question.
We've been asking how do neurons produce a magic internal experience?
And he's basically saying this he can't answer this unanswerable,
But he says we can ask how and for what
survival advantage. Does a brain attribute subjective experience aka consciousness
(04:49):
to itself? And he says this is scientifically approachable and
that his attention schema theory supplies outlines of answers for it.
And this is where the orangutang comes in. Yes, so
he picks up an orangutank puppet and uh and he
starts talking about consciousness and about the the idea that
(05:09):
this orangutang punchet but puppet is conscious. Now, on one level,
we all know that a puppeteer takes the stage and
they entertain us with a puppet show. That puppet is
not really conscious. It is not a conscious being. If
you had to choose, you know which individual gets a
brick thrown at them, a human child or an orangutang puppet.
(05:30):
You choose the orangutang puppet every time and just hope
that there's not a child's hand in it. But you
still wins when that puppet gets heyh yeah, we can't help,
but do it? I mean you, you know we've mentioned
many times before you draw a face on something, and
then you you draw a face on a stick and
then you break the stick. We're gonna feel a little
something we we we can't help but personify the world
around us, and by personify it, we end up engaging
(05:53):
it with with some level and dowing it with some
level of consciousness. Yeah. What I love about this is
that he will start out his talks with Kevin the Orangutang,
and he does his bit, his ventriloquist bit, which you know, guys,
we love, right if you've been following along and you've
seen our episode on ventriloquism, And he says to the audience,
I'll be explaining my theory about how the brain, a
(06:13):
biological machine, generates consciousness. Kevin the Orangutang starts heckling me. Yeah,
well I don't have a brain, but I'm still conscious.
What does that due to your theory? And he says
that Kevin is the perfect introduction because intellectually nobody is fooled.
As you say, right, like, we know this. If we're
going to have to choose between a kid or a puppet,
throw something at and he says, we all know there's
(06:35):
nothing inside, but everyone in the audience experiences an illusion
of sentience emanating from his hairy head. And he he
kind of takes us as a jumping off point to
talk about attention schema theory. Yeah, and uh, and we'll
we'll continue to unpack that in this this podcast. But it's, uh,
it's one of these issues where that the theory forces
(06:57):
you to rethink what consciousness is. And this is not
going to be one of those crazy theories where it's,
you know, where it's stating that, oh, well, that the
universe only exists because you have your eyes open. If
you close your eyes, nothing exists, or anything like that.
It's not not that kind of a truthy theory. But
it just forces us to reevaluate what consciousness is from
(07:18):
our first person perspective as well as the sort of
third person consciousness that we attribute to humans, puppets, characters
in novels, video game avatars, you name it. That's right,
And so he kind of goes into the past here
to say, let's look at the evolutionary model of consciousness.
(07:40):
How might it have arisen in animals and what does
that mean for us? What does it mean about the
qualities of consciousness? And he does say that at some
point animal nervous systems acquired the ability to boost the
most urgent incoming signals. He said, too much information comes
in from the outside world, says it all equally, and
(08:02):
it is useful to select the most silient data for
deeper processing over time, though it came under a more
sophisticated kind of control what we now call attention right,
And we all have experienced this before. You shut out
the outside world in order to focus your attention. Right.
The example I always turned to is you're at a party.
There are a lot of a lot of different conversations
going on, uh and and you know, the people next
(08:24):
to you're talking about football. The people over here they're
talking about theater. These people are talking about somebody you
don't know, name Ron. But you're trying to have a
conversation with any about Um installing a concrete pond in
her backyard. So your brain is somehow able to shut
out these these non essential conversations while still being aware
of them, and focus in on the central conversation about
(08:45):
Amy and her concrete pond. Is the pond filled with concrete? Um,
yes it is. It's it's really not gonna work, but
she has these really high minded ideas about how fish
are going to live in it. Okay. Um. So the
thing here is that he says mammals and birds both
have it. This this awareness is attention, and he says
(09:06):
they diverge from a common ancestor about three fifty million
years ago, so attention is probably at least that old.
And attention leads to awareness, and awareness leads to consciousness. Yeah,
it's basically this idea of consciousness, thinking of it as
a focus of attention, a control of attention and and
and that's key to our experience of this thing that
(09:29):
we call consciousness. Our brains the process all of the
sense data as well as our knowledge of our self
in the world. And uh, and the self that we're
aware of ultimately is like a game piece on a
table um. Again, it's his consciousness as information. You've got
to sort of shut out these, uh, these these more
(09:49):
magical ideas that we layer on top of it, about
like a soul, about some sort of energy that that
rives within us, or some sort of angelic hand it's
reaching in to occupy our brain. This is a biological
brain that's dealing with a lot of sense data coming in,
having to screen out some of it. And uh, and
and it's about our control of attention over this data. Yeah.
(10:12):
And I was just thinking about our podcast episode It's
a Trap, and we were talking about this spider that
creates a essentially like a sculpture of itself, yes, as
a decoy, And in that moment, you know that the
spider has an awareness of itself because it just created
I albeit a larger version of itself for another uh insect,
(10:32):
a predator, and it is considering both itself and the
other thing. So we know that this has been in existence,
this consciousness. And um, we've talked about Steven Pinker's claim
before that something like music is just auditory cheesecake. Right,
He has this idea that music is a byproduct of language.
So you could start to look as consciousness as just
(10:55):
cognitive cheesecake, okay, the byproduct of awareness. And evolutionary biologists
David Barash, writing for a magazine seems to think that
this is the idea. He says, maybe it's just a
non adaptive byproduct of having bigger brains, or rather brains
bigger than it's strictly necessary for bossing our bodies around.
(11:16):
And he goes on to say, sure, a single molecule
of water is water, but it isn't wet, and neither
are two molecules of water, or a thousand or maybe
even a million, he says, but with enough of them
we get wetness. And not because wetness is adaptively favored
over dryness, but because it's an unavoidable physical consequence of
(11:38):
piling up enough H two O molecules together. And so
he says, could consciousness be similar to that, and you
could accumulate enough neurons because maybe they permit their possessor
to integrate numerous sensory inputs and generate complex variable behavior.
So hey, there you go. You just wire all this
stuff up and eventually you get conscious is yeah, I
(12:01):
love this idea of consciousness is ultimately this thing that
builds up because of this this loop of of of
data in the brain. Um. I keep thinking of it
in terms of a rear view mirror in a car. Now,
this is an overly simplified explanation of what's going on here.
But you have a rear view mirror in an automobile,
and it's all about being able to look in that
(12:22):
mirror and see what's behind the car. Rather simple, but
we increasingly use that for other things. We we look
in the mirror to see what our hair looks like,
to see what our cosmetics look like, to look into
the back seat to see what the child is doing, etcetera.
And so in this the use of the mirror changes
the way that we see ourselves. It changes the way
that we see our environment and becomes this this sort
(12:44):
of thing unto itself. Yeah, especially if you consider that
that mirror, that perception can be easily um manipulated. And
what I mean to say is that we've talked about
appropriate reception before and how our body scheme and our
attention schema are inherently linked our idea, our map of
ourselves out there right uh, spatial awareness of our body
(13:07):
and how it's represented. That can be completely um shifted
if there's something like say a brain lesion. In other words,
you have all these computations in your brain, but appropriate
reception or some other element that informs that is skewed. Well,
the computations are skewed. Yeah, indeed, I mean think back
to our episodes on appropriate exception and on the shadow self.
(13:29):
Both of those dealt with these ideas. Well. What happens
when your brain the settings are changed just a little bit,
and those settings affect the way that you make sense
of yourself in time and space and embody um. And
and that's that's one of the key things in play
here with attention schema theory is that it's the idea
that that that our idea of consciousness and our conscious
(13:52):
awareness of self is really something that is uh that
we attribute to ourselves. It is ultimately an avatar um. Now,
Garzono goes into this theory in detail in his book
Consciousness in the Social Brain, and he also has an
excellent piece in in the magazine that I'll link to
on the landing page for this stuff for this particular
podcast episode. But he says, the heart of the theory, remember,
(14:15):
is that awareness is a model of attention. Like the
general's model of his army laid out on a map.
The real army isn't made of plastic, of course, it
isn't quite so small and has rather more moving parts.
In these respects, the model is totally unrealistic, and yet
without such simplifications it would be impractical to use, impractical
(14:36):
to use the army. So therefore, the idea is that
our conscious self is this uh this ultimately an unrealistic
model of who and what we are, but it is necessary.
But it's but but but over time it has become Um.
I mean, it is the way that we experience the world,
and it is the way that we are conscious of
the world. You end up again and that loop, and
(14:56):
it makes it so difficult for us to to even
analyze what our consciousness is from the inside. Yeah. I mean,
this idea that the brain is essentially constructing a model
to monitor the fact that it's paying attention to something
totally makes sense. And it is also kind of amazing because,
as he says, all the sudden awareness is emerging from
(15:18):
this cartoon sketch that the brain has made of itself
and others. Yeah. So in a way, it's like thinking,
all right, here's Julian Robert sort of here are these
two bodies, these two organisms, and each of those organisms
minds is an idea of Robert and an idea of Julie.
This this conscious self that they attribute to this body,
(15:42):
and then likewise we're each attributing a conscious self to
the other. Yeah, and you are even saying this that
the person in the mirror is a projection of this consciousness.
The makeup that someone might put on is informing that
sort of toy Soldier of our consciousness that our generals
of our minds are creating. Right. So even something like that,
you don't think of makeup as being part of your consciousness,
(16:03):
but hey is representing it, right you the idea you
have of yourself out in the world. Indeed, an example
that Graziano brings up that that plays into this sort
of unrealistic model that works in terms of understanding the
world is that of essentially heat vision. Uh. This this
kind of blew my mind a little bit because it's
something I never really thought about, but but makes perfect
(16:25):
sense now that now that it's laying out. And this
is the idea that a startling number of people in
the world, um think, and I want to say think
this might in many cases just be a sort of
a subconscious level of understanding something. But they think that
they see things with their eyes because rays come out
of their eyes. Now, I want to stay that you know,
(16:48):
you me, most of our listeners probably know enough about
the human body to know that eyes work because light
enters the eyes. We know that scientifically that that's what's happened.
Nothing is emitted from the eyes, and yet it is
Graziano points out, there is a actually a study from
the University of Ohio and two thousand two that found
(17:08):
it about half of American college students also thought that
we see because rays come out of our eyes. It's
something that that does not mesh with our scientific understanding
of how our bodies work, about how physics work. But
but but it it makes sense in terms of how
we experience the world. We think about psight emanating from
(17:29):
the eyes, and we see this more avertly in say,
cartoon characters and our comic book characters. What happens when
that cartoon coyote creature is howling an attractive woman, his
eyeball stick out and he goes ioga um, light is
shining out of low Pan's eyes and big troubling little China. Uh.
These are all fantastic exaggerations of this sort of uh
(17:54):
magical way that we think about our interaction with the world.
We think about people's eyes burning into us when they're
airing at us, like get your eyes off of me, clee,
your eyes that their eyes aren't actually touching you. There's
nothing emitted from their eyes. They are merely drinking in
the light with those organs. Okay, So Graciana says that
whenever this this um idea of our awareness of others
(18:17):
and thinking about others and trying to guess at what
they're they're doing or thinking. Whenever this arose, it clearly
plays a major role in the social capability of modern humans.
We paint the world with perceived consciousness. Family friends, pets, spirits, gods,
and ventriloquist puppets all appeared before us suffused with sentience.
It makes me think of these television shows where someone
(18:39):
will bring a black light into a hotel room and
they'll turn it on and then show you all the
grotesque stains that are covering everything. Attention schema theory is
kind of like that black light and saying, look at
at at at all the things in there, the hotel room,
of your life, of your universe that you have managed
to get your sticky consciousness over. Not only is it
(19:00):
is it coding yourself. It's coding. It's coding animals, it's
coding other people. It's coding, uh, you know, perfectly inanimate
things that we temporarily attribute conscious consciousness to your consciousness
fluids flowing everywhere. It's just absolutely everywhere. But we just
don't we just don't think about it that the fact
that that this stuff that is inside us, that that
(19:22):
we attribute to ourselves is also just taked all over
the rest of our world. A concrete example of this
is again calling back to our episode appropriate reception and
pro pre receptive drift, and this is when we were
talking about experiments in which a fake arm was placed
next to someone's real arm and then, uh, you know,
it was stroked and treated as if it was the
(19:44):
person's own arm, and uh, they begin to react to
that fake arm as if it were their own. And
so you could take all sorts of vital signs, their heartbeat,
you could take the regalvonic skin response, you know, how
much sweat they produce, and measure all of that if
someone were to take an life and threatened their fake arms.
So again, here's this appropriate acceptive drift, this idea that
(20:04):
we're drifting into other or others consciousness, even if it's
a fake arm. Yeah, and so we just find ourselves
going through our daily life where we're, um, we're we
stub our toe on some sort of horrendous piece of furniture,
and at least for for a split second there, we
we attribute consciousness to that, to that that footstool or
(20:25):
whatever it was, and and see it as an enemy.
We you know, we get really into a sports team
and we start attaching our ego to it. And then
since we're a spying consciousness to this uh, to this
unit of individuals, and we don't even see the individuals anymore.
We just see this thing and it is somehow become
a conscious entity. But if you slow things down, and
if at that very moment you ask yourself it's just
(20:47):
a type a consciousness or a type be consciousness, you
might be able to see things more clearly. And we're
gonna take a quick break. When we get back, we'll
explore that. All right, we're back. Now, we've been talking
about consciousness. We've been talking about the consciousness that we
(21:09):
experience inside ourselves and the consciousness that we attribute to others.
And to make sense of all this, UH, Graziano identifies
two types of consciousness. All right, And this is essentially
revolves around again this idea of a first person consciousness
and a third person consciousness. First of all, you have
consciousness type A. A brain beholds consciousness in itself. Now,
(21:31):
this is pretty easy for us to fathom because this
is I think. Therefore, I am you are conscious of
yourself and your thoughts and your existence in the universe
right now. But then you have consciousness Type B. A
brain beholds consciousness in others. And this is uh, this
is equally every day for everybody. We attribute consciousness to
our fellow humans, but we also go ahead and attribute
(21:52):
it to other organisms, to puppets, to avatars, to plants,
to symbols, to inanimate objects. Uh, and uh, we'll discuss.
In the case of God, we attribute it to the
cosmos itself. Now, at first glance, these would seem to
be just two distinct concepts. Right, There's this thing I'm feeling,
and I'm assuming other people feel it too, In the
(22:13):
same sense that I could say I really like the
local sports team, I assume everybody should like the local
sports team. That level of attribution. But where it gets
really interesting here is that in attention scheme of theory.
The argument is that both types of consciouness, both type
A and type B, are essentially cases of attribution. Yeah. Um,
(22:36):
so consider a bird, right, okay, considering one right now?
All right, how do you have it in your head? Bluebird, yellow,
yellow bird, canary? Okay, We've got our canary here, and
let's say our bird has awareness of others, say a predator. Okay,
that is a type BE awareness. Okay, by the way,
(23:00):
I'm having a type the awareness of that bird exactly.
Can you throw in another animal? This is kind of
getting super meta. And now that turtle in space whose
dream that we're all occupying, is dreaming of us, and
we're yes, okay, Um, so anyway, you've got that canary,
(23:21):
it's thinking about a predator. It is exhibiting a type
the kind of UM consciousness. But we're thinking about it,
as you say, and we might attribute a type A
consciousness to it, meaning that we might assume that this
canary is thinking about thinking. And this is erroneous, right,
So this is where you can see type BE in
(23:42):
Type A kind of sometimes getting melded into each other. Yeah.
I mean, it's again the idea that the the first
person consciousness that we experienced, this Type A is still
a matter of attribution. We're we're attributing consciousness to ourselves
in the same way that we're attributing consciousness to everything else.
(24:02):
It's essentially the same mechanism, is just we're experiencing it
firsthand rather than third hand. So a human example is
Terry Shiavo and this is someone whom if you're not
familiar with it, she had been pronounced Brenda by her doctors,
but for seven years she was kept on life support
by her family who said, no, we think that she's
she's alive in there, she's conscious and they would look
(24:22):
at her movements. Right, is her pimb moving as evidence
of her being conscious and willfully moving her hands? Right.
So the problem here is one of misattribution because they're
assuming that she has a type A conscious and a
type A consciousness that would mean that she was still
(24:43):
able to think about thinking right, And again that's a
misattribution here. They are they are aware of her type
B and the type the Type B is now being
melded onto type A just because they are aware of
her moving. So this is a good example of how
that it's kind of like again that pro preosceptive drift.
(25:05):
It can get into really murky territory. And here's the
thing that Graziano says, and this is where things get
really sticky. He's essentially saying, though even though there are
two different types, that doesn't mean that one is more
real than the other. Well, I shouldn't say real. Well,
that's that's the sticky part, because nobody is going to
argue again that that ring and hang puppet is more
(25:28):
value than a human life. Nobody's ever going to say
that that ring and hanging puppet is actually as conscious
as as human consciousness. But in this model of attention
scheme of theory, it's it's the same process being used
to apply that consciousness, and it makes you it's not
as much about what that orangutan is doing, It's about
our own consciousness, is about really understanding and taking a
(25:50):
step back from our conscious experience of the world and
trying to better understand exactly what is going on there. Yeah,
and that's where if you get into puppets and you
get into the other and this confusion of b for
a you have to bring up God. Yes uh In.
In Graziana's book again, Consciousness and the Social Brain, you
(26:10):
can find it on Amazon and wherever fine books are sold,
he says that much of our magical thinking might simply
be simplifications and shortcut so the brain takes when representing
itself in the world, so in a sense, kind of
collateral damage spiraling out from this, from from this, uh,
this conscious understanding of self and others, an attributed consciousness. Uh.
(26:31):
And the big one here, of course, is the idea
of God. And again I want you to set aside
whatever you know, preconceived ideas and worldviews you're holding, and
just step outside of the concept and uh and and
think about what attention schema theory would say about the
nature of God. Because he does play devil's advocate here
in a very sort of slippery way. He says, there
(26:54):
is no God of a traditional form, no being made
of pure thought or will or spirit that created the unit. Earse,
he says conscious consciousness by itself does not have the
physical capability to move or create matter. That's not what
consciousness is. Most people would consider this description to be
strictly atheistic, and it is. And yet he says there
(27:15):
is another sign to the story. He says, according to
the theory of the statement X is conscious means a
brain or other computational device constructed an informational model of
consciousness and attributed it to X. We're talking a sort
of creator in a sense, right compution in law that
created this, he says. In this theory, a universal deistic
(27:35):
consciousness does actually exist. It is as real as any
other consciousness. If brains attribute consciousness to X, then X
is conscious in the only way that anything is conscious.
So God kind of exists on the technicality in attendous
game of theory. But you know, I do want to
(27:57):
point out again that, you know, when we're talking about
God in consciousness, because when you think about models of God,
and you can talk about you know, the God, the
Father God, the Mother God, the sort of beast de
old creature God, the sort of amorphous force in the world,
or any any pantheon of deities you you might want
to cling onto. Generally, consciousness is part and partial to it.
(28:20):
When when people are worshiping a god or investing any
kind of thought in the idea of a God, it's
about it being a conscious entity. Uh, you know, unless
you're getting into some you know, some of like the
love crafty and God's like as is Off, which is
you know, fictional God that is horrifying because it is
it is unconscious, because it is mindless. Um you know,
you you that's the idea that there we're taking consciousness
(28:43):
and we're attributing it to the universe. The Universe's consciousness
and is either aware of us or is actively involved
in in our lives, or is aware of the world,
or is at least aware of creation. Again, we're we're
attributing consciousness big time to the universe is itself? So
here a couple of things about that. When you think
(29:03):
about a creator, then you you know that that made
all of us, right, even the ability to be conscious.
Then you began to think about suffering. Right, if this
creator is imbued with consciousness, then why would people suffer?
That's one thing. The second thing there answers to that
that it's not exactly it's not exactly got you question, Well,
(29:25):
we can roll on for fifteen hours on that, um.
And then the other thing is that we talk about
consciousness being tethered to the physical body again pro prereception, right,
that informs the eye, in our in ourselves, the way
that we define ourselves. So you have to look at
this creator, especially when you look I'm talking about the
very like uh biblical like bearded one sitting on a
(29:49):
cloud thing. Um that this does not square with the
actual idea of consciousness and is separate from the experience
of life, and it very much calls back to this
platonic ideal. And you and I were talking about this.
If you have some creator thing that is attached to
(30:10):
the human experience, well then it's sullied with the human experience. UM.
So I think this is why we have this idea
of this creator thing separate and yet having consciousness. Yeah.
Because the model we understand of consciousness, the one we
can prove out and we can observe um here on Earth,
is that consciousness arises from a sufficiently complex biological process.
(30:34):
And we can extrapolate that and say that if the
consciousness perhaps could emerge from a sufficiently advanced mechanical concept,
computer program, etcetera. So if you look at it under
those constraints, you could say, all right, well it's possible
that you do have something that would be viewed as
a god from the human perspective. Uh, some sort of
extraterrestrial force that achieved consciousness before we did, and uh
(30:58):
is sufficiently advanced. Uh. Skeptic Michael Shermer has a has
this thing he called Shechrmer's law, where he's playing on
Arthur C. Clarke's um law, which states that any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and Tremer toys Within
says that any sufficiently advanced alien species is indistinguishable from
(31:19):
from a god. But the thing is, again who no.
I mean, certain people are going to be cool with
worshiping UFOs and gods, and that's that's their own thing,
you know, go at it. But I feel like a
lot of us are not going to be content with
that model. We don't want to worship something human. We
don't even want to worship something alien. We want to
worship something beyond, something as great as the universe itself,
(31:42):
because it it comes back around to attributing consciousness to
the universe. And yet Graziana would say, you can't look
at that sort of magical inner state of consciousness and
and try to attract sort of the the neuronal comings
and goings of it. The only way to approach it
is to look at it as why did it benefit
animals and humans? What? You know, why did it arise?
(32:06):
And did it arise just as a byproduct of awareness?
Which is terribly intriguing. And yet to play Devil's advocate here.
You know, if there's consciousness here on Earth and there's
a bajillion galaxies elsewhere, there exist the possibility of consciousness
elsewhere out there in the universe. And this brings us
(32:28):
back around again to the idea of the possibility of
computer self awareness, of computer consciousness, which is which is
a whole sort of tricky area and of itself because
we have we have a hard time. I mean, the
whole mind body problem is that we we experience ourselves
in our mind and our thinking and our consciousness, and
then we look at the brain and we say, well,
(32:49):
I see how the brain works or appears to work,
but this doesn't really match up well with my experience
of using a brain and being a brain. And so
we look to computers that we actually reach the point
where where we have something that is arguably arguably consciousness
in a machine, then we it seems like we were
on the risk of the same problem. We look at
(33:10):
what's going on in the machine and saying, well, I
understand that you say that on paper, this thing is
supposed to be conscious now, but what I'm seeing there
and what I'm seeing from this computer doesn't really match
up with what I'm experiencing as consciousness. Yeah. Slate article
called could the Internet Wake Up has a really interesting
take on artificial intelligence and consciousness, and there's this possibility
(33:35):
that it could Artificial intelligence reached the point in its
connections to feel, And by feel, I mean the recursive
qualities that we experience when we think about ourselves, right,
because we get the feedback, right, I get the feedback
right now that I'm thinking, and it has a recursive
quality that is bolstering my neuronal activity about consciousness in
(33:58):
this sense of consciousness. So up until now, artificial intelligence
really has been concerned more with the output. So artificial
intelligence is interested in this idea of can we have
machines make decisions on the battlefield and can we imbue
the machine with ethics, But artificial intelligence is not interested
(34:22):
in and viewing the machine with a sort of consciousness
that feels bad about making the decision to perhaps kill someone.
But that doesn't mean that this couldn't arise. Certainly, and
I don't mean to This is not like a fearmongering thing.
This would be something that would have to be very intentional,
(34:43):
that that humans would have to try to instill within machines.
But once they did that, there is the possibility that
a machine could have a kind of consciousness. Yeah, because again,
think of consciousness not is this magical god sense spark
in the in the the human body, but but rather
the is uh this awareness of data that is necessary
(35:04):
for this uh, for this machine to function in the universe. Now.
Sean Carroll, a physicist at cal Tex, says there's nothing
stopping the Internet from having the computational capacity of a
conscious brain, but that's a long way from actually being conscious.
He says, real brains have undergone millions of generations of
natural selection to get where they are. I don't see
(35:25):
anything analogous that would be coaxing the Internet into consciousness.
He doesn't think it's likely, but hey, and then once
it becomes conscious, if it happens, um, you know, the
first thing that the Internet is going to feel is
probably ashamed of itself. Um so, so we'll have a
good I think, to shut itself down. Yeah, there'll be
a good ten twenty years what I'll just be brooding
(35:46):
over itself. It's essentially going to be Frankenstein, where initially
there's nothing to worry about because Frankenstein has a lot
of stuff to deal with, coming to terms with with
who and what he is in the world. It's only
later that he comes act to destroy his maker and
everything in his life. You know, that just reminded me
of when we talked about machine creativity and we talked
(36:08):
about the painting uh software and I can't remember the
name of it right now, but it was a installation
at a museum and what it did is it scanned
uh newspaper articles and one day, I think it was like,
there was an earthquake in Italy and quite a few
people lost their lives. And that day it didn't paint.
And when it was asked why it wasn't painting it
(36:30):
was it replied in some way suggesting that it was
struggling with its feelings about this terrible thing that had happened.
That's fascinating because it's another example of where someone could say, well,
that's that machine is not actually an artist. It's not
actually creating something artistically. All it's doing is is dealing
with data coming in and uh and uh and then
(36:52):
analyzing that data and then outputting some version of the
data based on the input. But again, you start breaking
down the brain, you start looking at consciousness and it's
it's essentially the same function. Yeah, against that, that's that
recursive quality instilled into it, all right, Um, when I
was talking about the the guy with the long flowing
(37:14):
beard on a cloud, I was talking about Aubrey de Gray,
of course, a bio gerontologist. He's going to help us
live to one thousand years so we can finally solve
the question of consciousness. Yeah, and when I when when
we say us, not us, but really rich and important people, right, yes,
or maybe a downloaded version of my conscious self you
(37:38):
know in the future. Yeah, that they'll store on hard
drives with all the other people and then my my
kid will just forget to to back it up, and
then I'll evaporate into thin air. Oh wouldn't that be
the worst? You have your consciousness stored away on some
sort of a drive and then later your your kid
just like puts an episode of your gab a gap
o over you or something and then it's done. Yeah,
(37:59):
or she's just feel saddled with it, just like fine
light now done? All right, Well, there you have it again, Attention.
Scheme of theory is not necessarily a satisfying answer, and
it's not one that we're going to get tattooed on
our arms anytime soon, but it is a really fascinating
way to to reevaluate what consciousness is and how we
(38:20):
attribute consciousness to all of these things in our life,
from an orangutaning puppet to UH, the divine creator of
the universe. Indeed, in the meantime, you can check out
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Again, that is
the mothership, that is where you will find all of
our podcast episodes. You know, we mentioned that we've done
episodes on vicentral quism on consciousness. All that stuff is
(38:41):
available there. We also have some of the machine Consciousness
about machine artists. UH years of data there to plug
directly into your skull, as well as videos, blog posts,
and links out to our various social media presences. And
if you have some thoughts you would like to share
with us, please do so and you can send them
via below the mind at how stuff works dot com.
(39:06):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. And my name is Robert Lamb, and on
Julie Douglas and in each of us. We can't help
but but ring with that, uh, that that existential statement.
(00:24):
I think therefore I am. We're all bound up in
this just endless whirlwind of thinking, and we're thinking about
our own thoughts. We're thinking about our own consciousness. We're
thinking about the world around as we're thinking about the past,
the future. We're thinking about the the the possible reality
of things outside of our observable universe. We're thinking about aliens,
(00:45):
we're thinking about God. Uh, this is this is kind
of the state of the human mind as a whole. Yeah,
it's this whole big sushi roll of existence that we
try to get our minds around, and um, it becomes
very meta, right. We do a lot of thinking about thinking.
Essentially is what consciousness boils down to. And it's problematic.
(01:08):
We call it the hard problem because we've never really
found the center of consciousness. We're not really sure how
it relates to our existence. We're not really sure how
it relates to this idea of a creator, something that
created the world. Um, did we just come out of nothingness?
And in fact, American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker said, quote,
the idea of consciousness is ludicrous. If it is not monstrous,
(01:32):
it means to know that one is food for worms.
This is the terror to have emerged from nothing, to
have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings and
excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression, and with
all this yet to die. Well, you know, on one hand,
you could say that that's a deeply troubling thing too
(01:53):
to take into your world view. But you accept that,
then maybe it opens up your life for for other pursuits.
You can be like, all right, well, now I realize
that I'm just I'm just feast for the worms, that
that that my whole existence is just circling a black hole.
But I don't have to worry about that anymore. I
can spend some time gardening, indeed, and I can hopefully
(02:13):
create this state of flow and just being the moment,
which we'll talk about in another podcast episode. But today
we're gonna talk about this hard problem and this idea.
This I'm not going to call this simple idea because
it's not, but a more straightforward idea called attention schema
theory that might put this more in a context that
(02:35):
we can understand more palatable. I should say yes, now,
I definitely want to preface here and say, on one hand, okay,
we're gonna talk about human consciousness here. We talked about
human consciousness before devoted in an entire episode, do it.
This is an area that we're going to continue to
see advances in in neuroscience and and even in philosophy,
but it's gonna be a while before we can and
(02:57):
maybe we'll maybe we'll never even have a really concrete
idea of consciousness that both makes sense on paper and
feels right uh to our our first person experience of it.
So it's still a feel that you see a lot
of progress in. On the other hand, we're gonna talk
a little bit about God in the later part of
this episode, and God, of course, is something that we
(03:17):
will never be able to prove scientifically. It the concept
of God and gods and deities is is something that
is is ultimately unknowable to science. So the theory that
we're going to discuss in this episode, attention scheme of
theory is not. We're not saying, hey, here is a
theory that definitely explains all of these things, that satisfies
(03:39):
all these mysteries. Even the theories creator Michael Graziano, a neuroscience,
novelist and composer, Professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. Uh,
even he'll tell you this is not a satisfying theory.
So what I would like to encourage everyone to do is,
you know, we're all coming into this topic with certain
constraints in our world view. Is to to not just
(04:02):
completely throw your worldview aside, but lower the gate a
little bit and open yourself up to alternate perspectives on
what human consciousness is and alternate takes on how to
view the idea of a god or God's including a
giant Harry orangatane puppet, which we'll get to you in
a d that Graziano actually works into his bits here. Um.
(04:25):
But Garciana says, we have been asking the wrong question.
We've been asking how do neurons produce a magic internal experience?
And he's basically saying this he can't answer this unanswerable,
But he says we can ask how and for what
survival advantage. Does a brain attribute subjective experience aka consciousness
(04:49):
to itself? And he says this is scientifically approachable and
that his attention schema theory supplies outlines of answers for it.
And this is where the orangutang comes in. Yes, so
he picks up an orangutank puppet and uh and he
starts talking about consciousness and about the the idea that
(05:09):
this orangutang punchet but puppet is conscious. Now, on one level,
we all know that a puppeteer takes the stage and
they entertain us with a puppet show. That puppet is
not really conscious. It is not a conscious being. If
you had to choose, you know which individual gets a
brick thrown at them, a human child or an orangutang puppet.
(05:30):
You choose the orangutang puppet every time and just hope
that there's not a child's hand in it. But you
still wins when that puppet gets heyh yeah, we can't help,
but do it? I mean you, you know we've mentioned
many times before you draw a face on something, and
then you you draw a face on a stick and
then you break the stick. We're gonna feel a little
something we we we can't help but personify the world
around us, and by personify it, we end up engaging
(05:53):
it with with some level and dowing it with some
level of consciousness. Yeah. What I love about this is
that he will start out his talks with Kevin the Orangutang,
and he does his bit, his ventriloquist bit, which you know, guys,
we love, right if you've been following along and you've
seen our episode on ventriloquism, And he says to the audience,
I'll be explaining my theory about how the brain, a
(06:13):
biological machine, generates consciousness. Kevin the Orangutang starts heckling me. Yeah,
well I don't have a brain, but I'm still conscious.
What does that due to your theory? And he says
that Kevin is the perfect introduction because intellectually nobody is fooled.
As you say, right, like, we know this. If we're
going to have to choose between a kid or a puppet,
throw something at and he says, we all know there's
(06:35):
nothing inside, but everyone in the audience experiences an illusion
of sentience emanating from his hairy head. And he he
kind of takes us as a jumping off point to
talk about attention schema theory. Yeah, and uh, and we'll
we'll continue to unpack that in this this podcast. But it's, uh,
it's one of these issues where that the theory forces
(06:57):
you to rethink what consciousness is. And this is not
going to be one of those crazy theories where it's,
you know, where it's stating that, oh, well, that the
universe only exists because you have your eyes open. If
you close your eyes, nothing exists, or anything like that.
It's not not that kind of a truthy theory. But
it just forces us to reevaluate what consciousness is from
(07:18):
our first person perspective as well as the sort of
third person consciousness that we attribute to humans, puppets, characters
in novels, video game avatars, you name it. That's right,
And so he kind of goes into the past here
to say, let's look at the evolutionary model of consciousness.
(07:40):
How might it have arisen in animals and what does
that mean for us? What does it mean about the
qualities of consciousness? And he does say that at some
point animal nervous systems acquired the ability to boost the
most urgent incoming signals. He said, too much information comes
in from the outside world, says it all equally, and
(08:02):
it is useful to select the most silient data for
deeper processing over time, though it came under a more
sophisticated kind of control what we now call attention right,
And we all have experienced this before. You shut out
the outside world in order to focus your attention. Right.
The example I always turned to is you're at a party.
There are a lot of a lot of different conversations
going on, uh and and you know, the people next
(08:24):
to you're talking about football. The people over here they're
talking about theater. These people are talking about somebody you
don't know, name Ron. But you're trying to have a
conversation with any about Um installing a concrete pond in
her backyard. So your brain is somehow able to shut
out these these non essential conversations while still being aware
of them, and focus in on the central conversation about
(08:45):
Amy and her concrete pond. Is the pond filled with concrete? Um,
yes it is. It's it's really not gonna work, but
she has these really high minded ideas about how fish
are going to live in it. Okay. Um. So the
thing here is that he says mammals and birds both
have it. This this awareness is attention, and he says
(09:06):
they diverge from a common ancestor about three fifty million
years ago, so attention is probably at least that old.
And attention leads to awareness, and awareness leads to consciousness. Yeah,
it's basically this idea of consciousness, thinking of it as
a focus of attention, a control of attention and and
and that's key to our experience of this thing that
(09:29):
we call consciousness. Our brains the process all of the
sense data as well as our knowledge of our self
in the world. And uh, and the self that we're
aware of ultimately is like a game piece on a
table um. Again, it's his consciousness as information. You've got
to sort of shut out these, uh, these these more
(09:49):
magical ideas that we layer on top of it, about
like a soul, about some sort of energy that that
rives within us, or some sort of angelic hand it's
reaching in to occupy our brain. This is a biological
brain that's dealing with a lot of sense data coming in,
having to screen out some of it. And uh, and
and it's about our control of attention over this data. Yeah.
(10:12):
And I was just thinking about our podcast episode It's
a Trap, and we were talking about this spider that
creates a essentially like a sculpture of itself, yes, as
a decoy, And in that moment, you know that the
spider has an awareness of itself because it just created
I albeit a larger version of itself for another uh insect,
(10:32):
a predator, and it is considering both itself and the
other thing. So we know that this has been in existence,
this consciousness. And um, we've talked about Steven Pinker's claim
before that something like music is just auditory cheesecake. Right,
He has this idea that music is a byproduct of language.
So you could start to look as consciousness as just
(10:55):
cognitive cheesecake, okay, the byproduct of awareness. And evolutionary biologists
David Barash, writing for a magazine seems to think that
this is the idea. He says, maybe it's just a
non adaptive byproduct of having bigger brains, or rather brains
bigger than it's strictly necessary for bossing our bodies around.
(11:16):
And he goes on to say, sure, a single molecule
of water is water, but it isn't wet, and neither
are two molecules of water, or a thousand or maybe
even a million, he says, but with enough of them
we get wetness. And not because wetness is adaptively favored
over dryness, but because it's an unavoidable physical consequence of
(11:38):
piling up enough H two O molecules together. And so
he says, could consciousness be similar to that, and you
could accumulate enough neurons because maybe they permit their possessor
to integrate numerous sensory inputs and generate complex variable behavior.
So hey, there you go. You just wire all this
stuff up and eventually you get conscious is yeah, I
(12:01):
love this idea of consciousness is ultimately this thing that
builds up because of this this loop of of of
data in the brain. Um. I keep thinking of it
in terms of a rear view mirror in a car. Now,
this is an overly simplified explanation of what's going on here.
But you have a rear view mirror in an automobile,
and it's all about being able to look in that
(12:22):
mirror and see what's behind the car. Rather simple, but
we increasingly use that for other things. We we look
in the mirror to see what our hair looks like,
to see what our cosmetics look like, to look into
the back seat to see what the child is doing, etcetera.
And so in this the use of the mirror changes
the way that we see ourselves. It changes the way
that we see our environment and becomes this this sort
(12:44):
of thing unto itself. Yeah, especially if you consider that
that mirror, that perception can be easily um manipulated. And
what I mean to say is that we've talked about
appropriate reception before and how our body scheme and our
attention schema are inherently linked our idea, our map of
ourselves out there right uh, spatial awareness of our body
(13:07):
and how it's represented. That can be completely um shifted
if there's something like say a brain lesion. In other words,
you have all these computations in your brain, but appropriate
reception or some other element that informs that is skewed. Well,
the computations are skewed. Yeah, indeed, I mean think back
to our episodes on appropriate exception and on the shadow self.
(13:29):
Both of those dealt with these ideas. Well. What happens
when your brain the settings are changed just a little bit,
and those settings affect the way that you make sense
of yourself in time and space and embody um. And
and that's that's one of the key things in play
here with attention schema theory is that it's the idea
that that that our idea of consciousness and our conscious
(13:52):
awareness of self is really something that is uh that
we attribute to ourselves. It is ultimately an avatar um. Now,
Garzono goes into this theory in detail in his book
Consciousness in the Social Brain, and he also has an
excellent piece in in the magazine that I'll link to
on the landing page for this stuff for this particular
podcast episode. But he says, the heart of the theory, remember,
(14:15):
is that awareness is a model of attention. Like the
general's model of his army laid out on a map.
The real army isn't made of plastic, of course, it
isn't quite so small and has rather more moving parts.
In these respects, the model is totally unrealistic, and yet
without such simplifications it would be impractical to use, impractical
(14:36):
to use the army. So therefore, the idea is that
our conscious self is this uh this ultimately an unrealistic
model of who and what we are, but it is necessary.
But it's but but but over time it has become Um.
I mean, it is the way that we experience the world,
and it is the way that we are conscious of
the world. You end up again and that loop, and
(14:56):
it makes it so difficult for us to to even
analyze what our consciousness is from the inside. Yeah. I mean,
this idea that the brain is essentially constructing a model
to monitor the fact that it's paying attention to something
totally makes sense. And it is also kind of amazing because,
as he says, all the sudden awareness is emerging from
(15:18):
this cartoon sketch that the brain has made of itself
and others. Yeah. So in a way, it's like thinking,
all right, here's Julian Robert sort of here are these
two bodies, these two organisms, and each of those organisms
minds is an idea of Robert and an idea of Julie.
This this conscious self that they attribute to this body,
(15:42):
and then likewise we're each attributing a conscious self to
the other. Yeah, and you are even saying this that
the person in the mirror is a projection of this consciousness.
The makeup that someone might put on is informing that
sort of toy Soldier of our consciousness that our generals
of our minds are creating. Right. So even something like that,
you don't think of makeup as being part of your consciousness,
(16:03):
but hey is representing it, right you the idea you
have of yourself out in the world. Indeed, an example
that Graziano brings up that that plays into this sort
of unrealistic model that works in terms of understanding the
world is that of essentially heat vision. Uh. This this
kind of blew my mind a little bit because it's
something I never really thought about, but but makes perfect
(16:25):
sense now that now that it's laying out. And this
is the idea that a startling number of people in
the world, um think, and I want to say think
this might in many cases just be a sort of
a subconscious level of understanding something. But they think that
they see things with their eyes because rays come out
of their eyes. Now, I want to stay that you know,
(16:48):
you me, most of our listeners probably know enough about
the human body to know that eyes work because light
enters the eyes. We know that scientifically that that's what's happened.
Nothing is emitted from the eyes, and yet it is
Graziano points out, there is a actually a study from
the University of Ohio and two thousand two that found
(17:08):
it about half of American college students also thought that
we see because rays come out of our eyes. It's
something that that does not mesh with our scientific understanding
of how our bodies work, about how physics work. But
but but it it makes sense in terms of how
we experience the world. We think about psight emanating from
(17:29):
the eyes, and we see this more avertly in say,
cartoon characters and our comic book characters. What happens when
that cartoon coyote creature is howling an attractive woman, his
eyeball stick out and he goes ioga um, light is
shining out of low Pan's eyes and big troubling little China. Uh.
These are all fantastic exaggerations of this sort of uh
(17:54):
magical way that we think about our interaction with the world.
We think about people's eyes burning into us when they're
airing at us, like get your eyes off of me, clee,
your eyes that their eyes aren't actually touching you. There's
nothing emitted from their eyes. They are merely drinking in
the light with those organs. Okay, So Graciana says that
whenever this this um idea of our awareness of others
(18:17):
and thinking about others and trying to guess at what
they're they're doing or thinking. Whenever this arose, it clearly
plays a major role in the social capability of modern humans.
We paint the world with perceived consciousness. Family friends, pets, spirits, gods,
and ventriloquist puppets all appeared before us suffused with sentience.
It makes me think of these television shows where someone
(18:39):
will bring a black light into a hotel room and
they'll turn it on and then show you all the
grotesque stains that are covering everything. Attention schema theory is
kind of like that black light and saying, look at
at at at all the things in there, the hotel room,
of your life, of your universe that you have managed
to get your sticky consciousness over. Not only is it
(19:00):
is it coding yourself. It's coding. It's coding animals, it's
coding other people. It's coding, uh, you know, perfectly inanimate
things that we temporarily attribute conscious consciousness to your consciousness
fluids flowing everywhere. It's just absolutely everywhere. But we just
don't we just don't think about it that the fact
that that this stuff that is inside us, that that
(19:22):
we attribute to ourselves is also just taked all over
the rest of our world. A concrete example of this
is again calling back to our episode appropriate reception and
pro pre receptive drift, and this is when we were
talking about experiments in which a fake arm was placed
next to someone's real arm and then, uh, you know,
it was stroked and treated as if it was the
(19:44):
person's own arm, and uh, they begin to react to
that fake arm as if it were their own. And
so you could take all sorts of vital signs, their heartbeat,
you could take the regalvonic skin response, you know, how
much sweat they produce, and measure all of that if
someone were to take an life and threatened their fake arms.
So again, here's this appropriate acceptive drift, this idea that
(20:04):
we're drifting into other or others consciousness, even if it's
a fake arm. Yeah, and so we just find ourselves
going through our daily life where we're, um, we're we
stub our toe on some sort of horrendous piece of furniture,
and at least for for a split second there, we
we attribute consciousness to that, to that that footstool or
(20:25):
whatever it was, and and see it as an enemy.
We you know, we get really into a sports team
and we start attaching our ego to it. And then
since we're a spying consciousness to this uh, to this
unit of individuals, and we don't even see the individuals anymore.
We just see this thing and it is somehow become
a conscious entity. But if you slow things down, and
if at that very moment you ask yourself it's just
(20:47):
a type a consciousness or a type be consciousness, you
might be able to see things more clearly. And we're
gonna take a quick break. When we get back, we'll
explore that. All right, we're back. Now, we've been talking
about consciousness. We've been talking about the consciousness that we
(21:09):
experience inside ourselves and the consciousness that we attribute to others.
And to make sense of all this, UH, Graziano identifies
two types of consciousness. All right, And this is essentially
revolves around again this idea of a first person consciousness
and a third person consciousness. First of all, you have
consciousness type A. A brain beholds consciousness in itself. Now,
(21:31):
this is pretty easy for us to fathom because this
is I think. Therefore, I am you are conscious of
yourself and your thoughts and your existence in the universe
right now. But then you have consciousness Type B. A
brain beholds consciousness in others. And this is uh, this
is equally every day for everybody. We attribute consciousness to
our fellow humans, but we also go ahead and attribute
(21:52):
it to other organisms, to puppets, to avatars, to plants,
to symbols, to inanimate objects. Uh, and uh, we'll discuss.
In the case of God, we attribute it to the
cosmos itself. Now, at first glance, these would seem to
be just two distinct concepts. Right, There's this thing I'm feeling,
and I'm assuming other people feel it too, In the
(22:13):
same sense that I could say I really like the
local sports team, I assume everybody should like the local
sports team. That level of attribution. But where it gets
really interesting here is that in attention scheme of theory.
The argument is that both types of consciouness, both type
A and type B, are essentially cases of attribution. Yeah. Um,
(22:36):
so consider a bird, right, okay, considering one right now?
All right, how do you have it in your head? Bluebird, yellow,
yellow bird, canary? Okay, We've got our canary here, and
let's say our bird has awareness of others, say a predator. Okay,
that is a type BE awareness. Okay, by the way,
(23:00):
I'm having a type the awareness of that bird exactly.
Can you throw in another animal? This is kind of
getting super meta. And now that turtle in space whose
dream that we're all occupying, is dreaming of us, and
we're yes, okay, Um, so anyway, you've got that canary,
(23:21):
it's thinking about a predator. It is exhibiting a type
the kind of UM consciousness. But we're thinking about it,
as you say, and we might attribute a type A
consciousness to it, meaning that we might assume that this
canary is thinking about thinking. And this is erroneous, right,
So this is where you can see type BE in
(23:42):
Type A kind of sometimes getting melded into each other. Yeah.
I mean, it's again the idea that the the first
person consciousness that we experienced, this Type A is still
a matter of attribution. We're we're attributing consciousness to ourselves
in the same way that we're attributing consciousness to everything else.
(24:02):
It's essentially the same mechanism, is just we're experiencing it
firsthand rather than third hand. So a human example is
Terry Shiavo and this is someone whom if you're not
familiar with it, she had been pronounced Brenda by her doctors,
but for seven years she was kept on life support
by her family who said, no, we think that she's
she's alive in there, she's conscious and they would look
(24:22):
at her movements. Right, is her pimb moving as evidence
of her being conscious and willfully moving her hands? Right.
So the problem here is one of misattribution because they're
assuming that she has a type A conscious and a
type A consciousness that would mean that she was still
(24:43):
able to think about thinking right, And again that's a
misattribution here. They are they are aware of her type
B and the type the Type B is now being
melded onto type A just because they are aware of
her moving. So this is a good example of how
that it's kind of like again that pro preosceptive drift.
(25:05):
It can get into really murky territory. And here's the
thing that Graziano says, and this is where things get
really sticky. He's essentially saying, though even though there are
two different types, that doesn't mean that one is more
real than the other. Well, I shouldn't say real. Well,
that's that's the sticky part, because nobody is going to
argue again that that ring and hang puppet is more
(25:28):
value than a human life. Nobody's ever going to say
that that ring and hanging puppet is actually as conscious
as as human consciousness. But in this model of attention
scheme of theory, it's it's the same process being used
to apply that consciousness, and it makes you it's not
as much about what that orangutan is doing, It's about
our own consciousness, is about really understanding and taking a
(25:50):
step back from our conscious experience of the world and
trying to better understand exactly what is going on there. Yeah,
and that's where if you get into puppets and you
get into the other and this confusion of b for
a you have to bring up God. Yes uh In.
In Graziana's book again, Consciousness and the Social Brain, you
(26:10):
can find it on Amazon and wherever fine books are sold,
he says that much of our magical thinking might simply
be simplifications and shortcut so the brain takes when representing
itself in the world, so in a sense, kind of
collateral damage spiraling out from this, from from this, uh,
this conscious understanding of self and others, an attributed consciousness. Uh.
(26:31):
And the big one here, of course, is the idea
of God. And again I want you to set aside
whatever you know, preconceived ideas and worldviews you're holding, and
just step outside of the concept and uh and and
think about what attention schema theory would say about the
nature of God. Because he does play devil's advocate here
in a very sort of slippery way. He says, there
(26:54):
is no God of a traditional form, no being made
of pure thought or will or spirit that created the unit. Earse,
he says conscious consciousness by itself does not have the
physical capability to move or create matter. That's not what
consciousness is. Most people would consider this description to be
strictly atheistic, and it is. And yet he says there
(27:15):
is another sign to the story. He says, according to
the theory of the statement X is conscious means a
brain or other computational device constructed an informational model of
consciousness and attributed it to X. We're talking a sort
of creator in a sense, right compution in law that
created this, he says. In this theory, a universal deistic
(27:35):
consciousness does actually exist. It is as real as any
other consciousness. If brains attribute consciousness to X, then X
is conscious in the only way that anything is conscious.
So God kind of exists on the technicality in attendous
game of theory. But you know, I do want to
(27:57):
point out again that, you know, when we're talking about
God in consciousness, because when you think about models of God,
and you can talk about you know, the God, the
Father God, the Mother God, the sort of beast de
old creature God, the sort of amorphous force in the world,
or any any pantheon of deities you you might want
to cling onto. Generally, consciousness is part and partial to it.
(28:20):
When when people are worshiping a god or investing any
kind of thought in the idea of a God, it's
about it being a conscious entity. Uh, you know, unless
you're getting into some you know, some of like the
love crafty and God's like as is Off, which is
you know, fictional God that is horrifying because it is
it is unconscious, because it is mindless. Um you know,
you you that's the idea that there we're taking consciousness
(28:43):
and we're attributing it to the universe. The Universe's consciousness
and is either aware of us or is actively involved
in in our lives, or is aware of the world,
or is at least aware of creation. Again, we're we're
attributing consciousness big time to the universe is itself? So
here a couple of things about that. When you think
(29:03):
about a creator, then you you know that that made
all of us, right, even the ability to be conscious.
Then you began to think about suffering. Right, if this
creator is imbued with consciousness, then why would people suffer?
That's one thing. The second thing there answers to that
that it's not exactly it's not exactly got you question, Well,
(29:25):
we can roll on for fifteen hours on that, um.
And then the other thing is that we talk about
consciousness being tethered to the physical body again pro prereception, right,
that informs the eye, in our in ourselves, the way
that we define ourselves. So you have to look at
this creator, especially when you look I'm talking about the
very like uh biblical like bearded one sitting on a
(29:49):
cloud thing. Um that this does not square with the
actual idea of consciousness and is separate from the experience
of life, and it very much calls back to this
platonic ideal. And you and I were talking about this.
If you have some creator thing that is attached to
(30:10):
the human experience, well then it's sullied with the human experience. UM.
So I think this is why we have this idea
of this creator thing separate and yet having consciousness. Yeah.
Because the model we understand of consciousness, the one we
can prove out and we can observe um here on Earth,
is that consciousness arises from a sufficiently complex biological process.
(30:34):
And we can extrapolate that and say that if the
consciousness perhaps could emerge from a sufficiently advanced mechanical concept,
computer program, etcetera. So if you look at it under
those constraints, you could say, all right, well it's possible
that you do have something that would be viewed as
a god from the human perspective. Uh, some sort of
extraterrestrial force that achieved consciousness before we did, and uh
(30:58):
is sufficiently advanced. Uh. Skeptic Michael Shermer has a has
this thing he called Shechrmer's law, where he's playing on
Arthur C. Clarke's um law, which states that any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and Tremer toys Within
says that any sufficiently advanced alien species is indistinguishable from
(31:19):
from a god. But the thing is, again who no.
I mean, certain people are going to be cool with
worshiping UFOs and gods, and that's that's their own thing,
you know, go at it. But I feel like a
lot of us are not going to be content with
that model. We don't want to worship something human. We
don't even want to worship something alien. We want to
worship something beyond, something as great as the universe itself,
(31:42):
because it it comes back around to attributing consciousness to
the universe. And yet Graziana would say, you can't look
at that sort of magical inner state of consciousness and
and try to attract sort of the the neuronal comings
and goings of it. The only way to approach it
is to look at it as why did it benefit
animals and humans? What? You know, why did it arise?
(32:06):
And did it arise just as a byproduct of awareness?
Which is terribly intriguing. And yet to play Devil's advocate here.
You know, if there's consciousness here on Earth and there's
a bajillion galaxies elsewhere, there exist the possibility of consciousness
elsewhere out there in the universe. And this brings us
(32:28):
back around again to the idea of the possibility of
computer self awareness, of computer consciousness, which is which is
a whole sort of tricky area and of itself because
we have we have a hard time. I mean, the
whole mind body problem is that we we experience ourselves
in our mind and our thinking and our consciousness, and
then we look at the brain and we say, well,
(32:49):
I see how the brain works or appears to work,
but this doesn't really match up well with my experience
of using a brain and being a brain. And so
we look to computers that we actually reach the point
where where we have something that is arguably arguably consciousness
in a machine, then we it seems like we were
on the risk of the same problem. We look at
(33:10):
what's going on in the machine and saying, well, I
understand that you say that on paper, this thing is
supposed to be conscious now, but what I'm seeing there
and what I'm seeing from this computer doesn't really match
up with what I'm experiencing as consciousness. Yeah. Slate article
called could the Internet Wake Up has a really interesting
take on artificial intelligence and consciousness, and there's this possibility
(33:35):
that it could Artificial intelligence reached the point in its
connections to feel, And by feel, I mean the recursive
qualities that we experience when we think about ourselves, right,
because we get the feedback, right, I get the feedback
right now that I'm thinking, and it has a recursive
quality that is bolstering my neuronal activity about consciousness in
(33:58):
this sense of consciousness. So up until now, artificial intelligence
really has been concerned more with the output. So artificial
intelligence is interested in this idea of can we have
machines make decisions on the battlefield and can we imbue
the machine with ethics, But artificial intelligence is not interested
(34:22):
in and viewing the machine with a sort of consciousness
that feels bad about making the decision to perhaps kill someone.
But that doesn't mean that this couldn't arise. Certainly, and
I don't mean to This is not like a fearmongering thing.
This would be something that would have to be very intentional,
(34:43):
that that humans would have to try to instill within machines.
But once they did that, there is the possibility that
a machine could have a kind of consciousness. Yeah, because again,
think of consciousness not is this magical god sense spark
in the in the the human body, but but rather
the is uh this awareness of data that is necessary
(35:04):
for this uh, for this machine to function in the universe. Now.
Sean Carroll, a physicist at cal Tex, says there's nothing
stopping the Internet from having the computational capacity of a
conscious brain, but that's a long way from actually being conscious.
He says, real brains have undergone millions of generations of
natural selection to get where they are. I don't see
(35:25):
anything analogous that would be coaxing the Internet into consciousness.
He doesn't think it's likely, but hey, and then once
it becomes conscious, if it happens, um, you know, the
first thing that the Internet is going to feel is
probably ashamed of itself. Um so, so we'll have a
good I think, to shut itself down. Yeah, there'll be
a good ten twenty years what I'll just be brooding
(35:46):
over itself. It's essentially going to be Frankenstein, where initially
there's nothing to worry about because Frankenstein has a lot
of stuff to deal with, coming to terms with with
who and what he is in the world. It's only
later that he comes act to destroy his maker and
everything in his life. You know, that just reminded me
of when we talked about machine creativity and we talked
(36:08):
about the painting uh software and I can't remember the
name of it right now, but it was a installation
at a museum and what it did is it scanned
uh newspaper articles and one day, I think it was like,
there was an earthquake in Italy and quite a few
people lost their lives. And that day it didn't paint.
And when it was asked why it wasn't painting it
(36:30):
was it replied in some way suggesting that it was
struggling with its feelings about this terrible thing that had happened.
That's fascinating because it's another example of where someone could say, well,
that's that machine is not actually an artist. It's not
actually creating something artistically. All it's doing is is dealing
with data coming in and uh and uh and then
(36:52):
analyzing that data and then outputting some version of the
data based on the input. But again, you start breaking
down the brain, you start looking at consciousness and it's
it's essentially the same function. Yeah, against that, that's that
recursive quality instilled into it, all right, Um, when I
was talking about the the guy with the long flowing
(37:14):
beard on a cloud, I was talking about Aubrey de Gray,
of course, a bio gerontologist. He's going to help us
live to one thousand years so we can finally solve
the question of consciousness. Yeah, and when I when when
we say us, not us, but really rich and important people, right, yes,
or maybe a downloaded version of my conscious self you
(37:38):
know in the future. Yeah, that they'll store on hard
drives with all the other people and then my my
kid will just forget to to back it up, and
then I'll evaporate into thin air. Oh wouldn't that be
the worst? You have your consciousness stored away on some
sort of a drive and then later your your kid
just like puts an episode of your gab a gap
o over you or something and then it's done. Yeah,
(37:59):
or she's just feel saddled with it, just like fine
light now done? All right, Well, there you have it again, Attention.
Scheme of theory is not necessarily a satisfying answer, and
it's not one that we're going to get tattooed on
our arms anytime soon, but it is a really fascinating
way to to reevaluate what consciousness is and how we
(38:20):
attribute consciousness to all of these things in our life,
from an orangutaning puppet to UH, the divine creator of
the universe. Indeed, in the meantime, you can check out
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Again, that is
the mothership, that is where you will find all of
our podcast episodes. You know, we mentioned that we've done
episodes on vicentral quism on consciousness. All that stuff is
(38:41):
available there. We also have some of the machine Consciousness
about machine artists. UH years of data there to plug
directly into your skull, as well as videos, blog posts,
and links out to our various social media presences. And
if you have some thoughts you would like to share
with us, please do so and you can send them
via below the mind at how stuff works dot com.
(39:06):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com.
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