Every Theory of Consciousness Explained | Dr. Richard Brown

Summary

Podcast Summary: Camp Gagnon – "Every Theory of Consciousness Explained | Dr. Richard Brown"

Release Date: March 3, 2025

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Introduction

In this enlightening episode of Camp Gagnon, host Mark Gagnon engages in a profound discussion with Dr. Richard Brown, a cognitive neuroscientist, delving deep into the multifaceted theories of consciousness. The conversation traverses various scientific and philosophical perspectives, aiming to unpack the elusive nature of consciousness and its underlying mechanisms.

Defining Consciousness

Dr. Brown begins by addressing the inherent ambiguity surrounding the term "consciousness." He outlines multiple senses in which consciousness is interpreted:

1. Creature Consciousness: Being awake versus being asleep. (00:48)
2. Awareness of the Environment: Being responsive to external stimuli. (00:48)
3. Conscious vs. Unconscious Mental States: Differentiating between what one is aware of internally versus underlying, unnoticed processes. (00:48)
4. Self-Consciousness or Introspective Consciousness: Being aware of oneself as a self and having access to one's own mental states. (00:48)

Dr. Brown emphasizes the distinction between these interpretations and what philosophers refer to as phenomenal consciousness, which pertains to the qualitative aspects of experience—the "what it is like" component. (02:48)

Theories of Consciousness in Neuroscience

1. Global Workspace Theory

Dr. Brown introduces the Global Workspace Theory (GWT), pioneered by Bernard Baars and further developed by Stanislas Dehaene. GWT posits that conscious experience arises from the widespread broadcasting of information across various brain systems. He articulates:

"When someone's conscious of it and they say, oh, I saw it, then you have projections to their prefrontal cortex which become lit up." (11:03)

This theory suggests that consciousness functions as a central hub, integrating and disseminating information for higher-order processing and decision-making.

2. Integrated Information Theory

Another prominent theory discussed is the Integrated Information Theory (IIT). This theory, though controversial, attempts to quantify consciousness through a measure called phi, representing the degree of information integration within a system. Dr. Brown explains:

"If a system has high phi, as they say, then they say that system is conscious." (47:49)

IIT asserts that consciousness correlates with the extent to which a system's internal information states are interconnected.

3. Attention-Based Processes

Attention mechanisms are also explored as a foundational aspect of consciousness. Dr. Brown references the famous Invisible Gorilla Experiment to illustrate inattentional blindness, where individuals fail to notice unexpected objects when their attention is focused elsewhere.

"Some people spot it right off the bat because accidentally they happen to be looking right there. But to someone else who's paying attention to the ball... they just don't notice it." (48:50)

He discusses the debate on whether consciousness is synonymous with attention or if consciousness entails a broader awareness.

4. Recurrency and Feedback Loops

The role of recurrency—feedback loops within the brain—is another key topic. Dr. Brown highlights that the brain possesses more feedback connections than feedforward ones, suggesting that these loops may play a crucial role in generating conscious experience.

"Some people think that rather than global broadcasting, what you need are these feedback loops..." (54:00)

5. Higher Order Theories of Consciousness

Finally, Higher Order Theories are examined, which propose that consciousness arises not just from experiencing stimuli but from a higher-order awareness of those experiences. Dr. Brown elaborates:

"Consciousness is the thing that hears the voice." (56:15)

This perspective suggests a dual-layered process where the brain first processes information and then becomes aware of that processing.

Phenomenal Consciousness and Philosophical Perspectives

Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"

Dr. Brown references philosopher Thomas Nagel's seminal paper, which questions whether understanding the physical processes of a bat's echolocation can fully explain the bat's subjective experience.

"Even if we knew everything about the bat's brain... we still wouldn't be able to answer the question, what was the bat's experience like?" (05:00)

Philosophical Zombies

The discussion also touches upon philosophical zombies—hypothetical beings identical to humans in every physical aspect but lacking conscious experience. Dr. Brown explains:

"Philosophical zombies are imaginary creatures that are physical duplicates of you or me, but they lack consciousness altogether." (79:00)

This concept challenges physicalist theories by questioning whether identical physical processes can yield consciousness.

Consciousness in Non-Human Animals

The conversation explores the presence of consciousness in animals through phenomena like sleepwalking and blindsight. Dr. Brown provides real-life examples:

"There's a case where there's behavior but no phenomenal consciousness... Do you see it? And they say, I don't know. It's like an X." (28:15)

These cases raise questions about the correlation between behavior and conscious experience in animals.

Challenges and Debates

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Dr. Brown emphasizes David Chalmers' Hard Problem, which differentiates between the easy problems (explaining cognitive functions) and the hard problem (explaining subjective experience).

"The philosopher David Chalmers has called this the hard problem of consciousness." (06:13)

Dualism vs. Physicalism vs. Panpsychism

The debate between dualism (mind and body as separate), physicalism (mind as a product of physical processes), and panpsychism (consciousness as a fundamental aspect of all matter) is thoroughly examined. Dr. Brown expresses skepticism towards dualism, favoring a physicalist approach but remains open to other possibilities.

"Consciousness could be physical... or it might not be, but it's an open possibility." (72:27)

Limitations of Current Neuroscience

Dr. Brown discusses the constraints of current neuroscientific methods, such as fMRI's inability to precisely map complex conscious experiences.

"FMRI is very crude... We don't know what kind of activity would we expect." (66:13)

This limitation hampers the development of comprehensive theories linking brain activity to consciousness.

Open Questions and Future Directions

The episode concludes with reflections on the unknowns surrounding consciousness. Dr. Brown advocates for humility and openness in scientific inquiry, acknowledging that our understanding is in its infancy.

"We have some promising ideas, but we're like inching across the start line. We're nowhere near the finish line." (69:28)

He encourages continued exploration and interdisciplinary collaboration to unravel consciousness's mysteries.

Personal Views

Both Mark Gagnon and Dr. Richard Brown emphasize the importance of maintaining an open yet skeptical stance towards various claims about consciousness and related phenomena. Dr. Brown advocates for grounding beliefs in empirical evidence while acknowledging the limitations of current scientific methodologies.

"We should approach the problem with that kind of humility of not knowing." (93:50)

Conclusion

This episode of Camp Gagnon provides a comprehensive overview of the prevailing theories of consciousness, highlighting the intricate interplay between neuroscience and philosophy. Dr. Richard Brown's insights underscore the complexity of defining and understanding consciousness, advocating for continued research and open-mindedness in tackling one of science’s most profound challenges.

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Notable Quotes:

• "Consciousness is the thing that hears the voice." — Dr. Richard Brown (56:15)

• "If a system has high phi, as they say, then they say that system is conscious." — Dr. Richard Brown (47:49)

• "We have some promising ideas, but we're like inching across the start line. We're nowhere near the finish line." — Dr. Richard Brown (69:28)

• "We should approach the problem with that kind of humility of not knowing." — Dr. Richard Brown (93:50)

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This summary captures the essence of the engaging dialogue between Mark Gagnon and Dr. Richard Brown, providing listeners with a structured and insightful exploration of consciousness theories without the interruptions of advertisements and non-content segments.

Transcript

[Mark Gagnon]

I would like to know what consciousness is. Does it exist?

[Richard Brown]

Does it exist? Oh, all right. You're awake. Right now we say you're conscious, but if I hit you over the head, knocked you out, we'd say you're unconscious. I won't do that, obviously.

[Mark Gagnon]

Thank you.

[Richard Brown]

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[Mark Gagnon]

Some people don't believe hypnosis is real and sometimes it isn't real. But then there are other cases where there is real hypnotism.

[Richard Brown]

I think the evidence is there that this is a real phenomenon and only some people can be hypnotized. I can't, so don't try.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now there are other people that I' talked to on this very podcast, great people. But then they tell me truly unbelievable things, for example alien abduction, and that breaks my brain. How do you parse this experience?

[Richard Brown]

One possibility is that there are these aliens, most likely lizard overrulers. In the government, obviously, you can have very profound experiences that seem real, but they're hallucinatory.

[Mark Gagnon]

Richard Brown. How are you, sir?

[Richard Brown]

I'm great. How are you?

[Mark Gagnon]

I'm excellent. Thank you so much for joining me. All right, let's just jump into it.

[Richard Brown]

Okay?

[Mark Gagnon]

I would like to know what consciousness is. Does it exist, and if so, where? And could you just lay out some of the different theories that people have about consciousness and kind of just like really walk me through how I can even start to wrap my mind around this question?

[Richard Brown]

Uh huh. Okay, so does it exist? Oh, shit. All right, so the word consciousness is like multiply ambiguous. So first of all, before you would do any of those things that you were asking, you'd sort of have to ask what you meant by the word consciousness. So, for example, you're awake right now. We say you're conscious. But if I hit you over the head and knocked you out, we'd say you're unconscious. I won't do that, obviously, but it depends. I'm showing great restraint. But. So when you go to sleep at night, you're unconscious. Okay, so in one sense of the word, conscious means being awake versus being asleep. In the literature, sometimes people call that creature consciousness because the word conscious is applying to the whole organism. On the other hand, we could say that you're conscious when you're aware of something. So when you're aware of something in the environment, like you set your, I guess that's iced coffee. Strange choice in the middle of the winter, but okay, you set your iced coffee on the table, so you were aware of the table in some sense. So awareness in this sense, we could say is like being informationally responsive to the environment in an appropriate way. But of course, psychologists and neuroscientists like to say there's such a thing as being unconsciously aware. So, you know, famously, maybe Freud started this in the west at least, talking about unconscious beliefs and desires. But it's kind of, you know, we've come a long way since Freud and cognitive psychology generally posits that there are many unconscious states in your mind which are guiding your behavior, maybe even influencing the things that you say, but of which you have no awareness. So there's conscious versus unconscious in the state of a mental state being conscious or a mental state being unconscious. So that's already three different senses of the word conscious, whether it applies to the creature, whether it applies to being aware of something in the environment, or whether it applies to you being aware of some internal state of yours. On the other hand, People talk about self consciousness or introspective consciousness, where self consciousness is kind of being aware of yourself as a self. Introspective consciousness involves access to your own mental state, sort of knowing what you're thinking, what you feel, like, you know, if you're in pain, you can sort of tell where the pain is, like, what the intensity of the pain is, and whatever mental activity you're engaged in in that moment. We call introspection. So those four things, if I'm counting correctly, maybe five, I would want to distinguish from what philosophers are generally interested in when they talk about consciousness. And that is what we call phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is a jargon tech word that we made up, but it's supposed to, like, name something which is ordinarily common sense, namely experience. And the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who's a emeritus at nyu, wrote a paper called what Is it like to be a Bat? Where he introduced this locution that we use a lot. And it's something that it's like. So we say that there's phenomenal consciousness when there's a something that's light from your point of view, when there's a distinctive experiential quality or aspect attached to each one of these things. And so each one of those things that I was previously mentioning, it looks like we could at least have some way that they come apart from phenomenal consciousness. So, for example, when you're unconscious in the creature sense, you could have a dream, and dreams are plausibly phenomenally conscious, like you're having an experience in the dream state. On the other hand, there are some cases maybe where you could be creature conscious without phenomenal consciousness, or at least where it looks. Maybe that's the case, for example, sleepwalking.

[Mark Gagnon]

What's up, camp family? What's up, campers? Two big announcements. Don't skip this. Two massive announcements. The merch store is back open. That's right. Camp Goods is back in stock. We got these hats that I'm wearing right now. I've been rocking them both on here on flagrant. I've been wearing them on stage. We got a bunch more hats like the ones behind me. You can see them all here on the website. We also got some shirts. Oh, man. What is this one right here? Come on now. Come on now. Camp Gear for all terrain. We got some other ones. What is this one right here? Oh, this one's beautiful. This one might be one of my favorites. The colors. The colors are absolutely crazy. This is Camp Gagnon Vintage wisdom across the Globe. Come on now. We got all that and more on the store. We also got these sick mugs right here. You might have seen me maybe sipping from one of these in some of the recent episodes. These are sick. They are all available on the website Camp Goods Co. Check it out. Link is in the description. And by supporting the merchandise, you are obviously supporting the show. You're supporting me, and you're obviously, you know, supporting all the amazing people that make the show happen, like Christos, who is currently throwing me T shirts from underneath this desk here. So please check that out. Additionally, I'm on the road. That's right. I'm doing my one hour of standup comedy. Some of. Some of the. The greatest jokes ever written. Okay, that's not true, but they are my jokes and I wrote them. And I'll be in Rochester, New York, March 26th, and I'll be in Portland, Maine on April 27th. 1. I'm. I'm doing with Joey Avery. You know, Joey Avery, a friend of the show. He sat across from me many times and I'm explaining some things to him. And he might be my dumb friend, but he is a brilliant standup comedian. And we will be there in Portland, Maine. If you are in these areas, please come out. And we're adding a ton of dates all through the summer. So check out my website, themarkgagnon.com for all tour dates and updated info. Come hang out with me. I talk to every single person after the show. If you want to kick it with me, maybe have a drink, I'll be there and I will see you guys on the road. Let's get back to the show.

[Richard Brown]

So people who sleepwalk are aware of the environment in some sense as they walk into the. An embarrassing story. When I was young, I would sleepwalk and we had this big potted plant in our living room, and I would go and pee in the plant.

[Mark Gagnon]

No.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, it happens. So if you're thinking that the potted plant is a toilet, then there's gotta be some sense in which you're aware of the environment you're in, but in some weird, distorted way. And we sort of know that people who are sleepwalking are not acting out their dreams. So they're not dreaming at that time. So that opens the question, are they, like, alert in some sense, aware of the environments? Alertness comes on a scale, you could be more alert or less alert, but are they not experiencing anything? So I think that there is a good question whether you could have phenomenal consciousness in the absence of these Other things. It's also the way I think of like Roomba and self driving cars. So Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner, is clearly, in my view, aware of the environment that it's in. It drives around your house.

[Mark Gagnon]

It has sensors.

[Richard Brown]

It has sensors, exactly. It processes information. When the batteries get low, it goes and charges itself. When its bags are full, it empties itself. When it goes from the hardwood onto the carpet, it changes modes. So these are all.

[Mark Gagnon]

Are you getting paid by Roomba? I mean, that's a lot of, a lot of sales. Pitching for the Roomba?

[Richard Brown]

No, I can't even afford a Roomba. But I do watch a lot of roomba videos on YouTube where they playfully interact with cats, which I find hilarious.

[Mark Gagnon]

When the Roomba fight. Yeah, that one's fire. I like that.

[Richard Brown]

Like I thought it's one guy who like built tanks like a cardboard like things that he put on top of the roombas and the cats get inside of them.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, wow.

[Richard Brown]

Swipe at each other.

[Mark Gagnon]

I made 150 bucks out of Roomba. A Roomba knife fight. And that's for real. That was actually awesome. But this is a digression. Yes, sorry. Get yours [e-mail].

[Richard Brown]

All right, well, I was also gonna mention self driving cars, which are showing some awareness. I would say they're creature conscious, they are kind of alert, they're aware of the environment, they stop at the stop sign, turn left at the light or whatever, but they don't have any experience as far as I can tell. So there's nothing that it's like from the Roomba's point of view, from the robotic vacuum cleaner, not to mention a brand, I guess. Okay. From the robotic vacuum cleaner's point of view, there's nothing that it's like to change modes or to go back to its charging base or whatever. So what we want to understand then is where does phenomenal consciousness in the sense of experience, in the sense of there being something that it's like from your point of view, fit into these other more tractable kinds of consciousness related problems. And the philosopher David Chalmers has called this the hard problem of consciousness. Because all of those other things that I was mentioning look like they could be explained by analyzing some function by talking about, okay, so this is what it means to be alert and aware. What it means is you respond to the environment in the appropriate way. And then we as scientists go and we try to see what mechanisms are in play. When you're alert and responsive to the environment.

[Mark Gagnon]

You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries.

[Richard Brown]

You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns.

[Mark Gagnon]

McDonald's breakfast comes first.

[Richard Brown]

My dad works in B2B marketing.

[Mark Gagnon]

He came by my school for career day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day.

[Richard Brown]

Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be. To be. It can give a theory.

[Mark Gagnon]

You can look in the brain and be like, this part lights up and this happens, and this part does this.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. But when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, it's not as clear that that can be done. And so, for example, there's a phenomenon called locked in syndrome, which has recently been discovered 10 or 15 years ago, where some patients who seem to be in a coma, when you put them in the FMRI machine and you say, for example, imagine playing tennis in a regular person, a neurologically intact person. When you say, imagine playing tennis, your motor cortex lights up. So the part of the brain that controls the arm and the legs, et cetera, will start to become more active. And some of these patients who were seemingly non responsive show that same kind of activation, not as great and not exactly the same, but still to a level that is very surprising. So it looks like they were aware of the instruction to imagine playing tennis. And it looks like they try to follow that instruction and the brain is responding in the appropriate way. But there's a question about whether they have experience. So are they hearing the sound of the voice in the way that you're hearing my voice, or is it just automatic processing that's unconscious in some sense, which they are not experiencing? And of course, to answer a question like that, what we would need is a theory of what phenomenal consciousness is and what level kinds of brain activity would be associated with that. And there's many different approaches to trying to answer this question, but that's basically what philosophers are really interested in, whether it's even possible to give an account of that kind of consciousness in terms of what the brain is doing?

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, that is a phenomenal explanation that I feel like gets the average.

[Richard Brown]

Person, no pun intended, phenomenal.

[Mark Gagnon]

Well, it was intended, now that you pointed it out. Okay, now that I can get credit for it. I mean, no, that is a phenomenal explanation for the average person that doesn't understand where current state of philosophical study of consciousness. I think that gets people kind of up to speed as to why this is being a question and what really the discussion, the delineations are. And experience is the most interesting thing. People talk about that like experiencing redness.

[Richard Brown]

Yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

Or like, you know, these different sort of qualities of things.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, this paper, what does it mean to be a bat?

[Richard Brown]

What is it like to be a bat?

[Mark Gagnon]

What is it like to be a bat? It's an interesting question. Can you sort of expound on why that paper was so seminal and why it's so important to understanding this idea of experience?

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, so it was written in the 70s, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe earlier actually. So I should check my sources. But. So at the time, people were very enthusiastic about so called reductive theories of consciousness whereby to reduce one thing to another is to show how in some sense it really is nothing over and above the other thing. So, for example, water can be reduced to H2O in this sense because you have some phenomena that you identify in some common sense way, and then you have some way of identifying it from a scientific point of view. And to reduce it is to simply show in some sense that all the properties of the common sense level thing can be explained in terms of the lower level phenomena. So, for example, water is liquid at a certain temperature and we can explain why that is because of the way H2O, the properties that it has, by.

[Mark Gagnon]

Atomizing everything, things can sort of be reduced in an explainable way.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly. And so people were sort of optimistic at this time that you could do that with consciousness. And the main question was like, so how is this going to be done? Like what activity in the brain or in the body, when that's a whole different story? Because there's a long tradition of us working our way to the brain. But for example, if you feel pain in your toe, the old days they used to think the pain was in the toe. And so if you have a paralyzed person who is able to wiggle their toe when you tickle their foot and then they say they don't feel it, there was a real life question about whether is there consciousness in them to toe? Like is there some sort of experiential aspect that the main person is cut off from? And I think that this is still a question, I would say, but I think the majority consensus is that we've worked our way into the idea that there's no pain in the toe. But there's pain in the brain which represents or somehow makes you think or feel as though the pain is in the toe. So that's a, that's a whole different story. But anyway, so we're focused on the, on the activity of the brain. And Nagel wrote this paper saying, okay, so when there's a conscious state, there's something that it's like to be in that state. And he said, consider the bat. Bats are mammals. So we sort of assume that they're conscious, but they are very different from us in many different ways. Obviously, echolocation was the big thing that he was pointing out. And so bat could fly around the room and avoid all the obstacles, hone in on, you know, a moth or some tasty berry or something like that. Go right for it, grab it, put it in its mouth. But what is it like from the bat's point of view? And his idea was that even if we knew everything about the bat's brain, even if we understood in extraordinary detail everything that was going on, we still wouldn't be able to answer the question, what was the bat's experience like? So to make it a bit more concrete, the bat is using echolocation. So it's making this high pitched sound and the sound is coming back and it's guiding its behavior. But is the bat doing something which is like seeing? Is it using sound to generate visual images in its brain so that it sees with sound? Or is it more like what we would think of as hearing? Is it, you know, like a blind person tapping a stick on the, on the street and using the sound to judge how far things are away? Or is it some other kind of mode of experience that we can't imagine that's neither like sight nor like hearing? And the idea is that even if we knew everything about the bat's brain, we would still have this question of, all right, so what's going on in the mind of the bat? What is it like for the bat to engage in these ideas?

[Mark Gagnon]

Like birds can see different colors? I think that is true. I'm not a scientist, but I think they have a different number of rods and cones in their eyes. And so they're able to sort of see, or I've actually even heard the theory that they can almost see magnetic waves or in some way interact or feel magnetic waves. And it's an interesting question. You go, okay, yeah, sure, they can do that. Yeah, but what is that experience like, exactly? How do they interact with these magnetic waves when they're, you know, flying north or south for winter or summer. Like, is it just. Is it a vibration they feel? Is it sound? Is it put into visual, you know, sort of, you know, tracking on the earth?

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. So there is a big debate about which animals in nature have phenomenal consciousness. I think it's safe. Well, I would say it's safe to say mammals definitely in some birds, but a lot of people will dispute that. And so it ranges all the way from only humans have it all the way down to no worms and bees have it all the way down to. Well, no, it's pervasive. And anything that's living, in a sense, has it. So there is a wide range, even plants. So I know some people who would say even plants have consciousness in a sense. So there's a wide range of dispute here. And I think part of the problem is because we don't really understand what phenomenal consciousness is. I mean, we all have it, so we're immediately acquainted with it. It's obviously there. But, like, what its conditions to arise are is still a mystery. But my favorite example is chickens. So chickens can see in ultraviolet light, whereas we can't. So we just get the Roy G. Biv. And I don't know about you, but when I found out about these other kinds of light energy, I was very annoyed that I wasn't able to see in that. It's like a sliver thing. Yeah, it's such a sliver. It's so annoying. So it's like all of this infrared light. Snakes have some ability. Some snakes have the ability to use infrared light. Bees and chickens have the ability to use ultraviolet light. There's all sorts of X rays. This phone can pick up radio waves. I can. That's annoying.

[Mark Gagnon]

Maybe you are.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly. Positive. Good explanation, but. So if you think about a chicken who's looking at an apple and assume that you believe chickens can have experience, that they can see colors a good. And their chickens are very intelligent, probably smarter than pigs, according to some scientists. Anyway. So imagine that you're looking at the apple and so is the chicken. Now, the apple's reflecting light of all these different frequencies. Some of it's in what we call the visible spectrum, and some of it's in the ultraviolet spectrum. So all of that light's hitting my eye, and the ultraviolet light is invisible to me. And I see the apple is red or reddish yellow or whatever. But a different version subset of that same light is hitting the chicken's eye. So is it having a color experience, one that I can't imagine, or is it somehow producing, like a red or an orange, but using ultraviolet light. So these are the kind of questions that Nagel was bringing up. And his idea was, well, it's kind of paradoxical, according to him, because we have good reasons to think that something physical is going on that explains or accounts for consciousness. But at the same time, we don't really know how to complete a theory which would allow us to say what that would link the physiological goings on to the consciousness that's going on. And his official diagnosis in that paper was that it has something to do with subjectivity and that there's a kind of tension here because when we try to do science, what we're trying to do is become more and more objective. We're trying to reach what he famously called the view from nowhere, which is we sort of go from the way we see things to. And then we transcend that to a more and more abstract level where we leave out our particular viewpoint. So our theory of electromagnetic radiation doesn't really mention us. It starts with us. We see colors, and we're like, what the hell is light? But then by the time we get to Maxwell's equations, we're out of the picture. And it's just these, you know, relationships between these. These abstract things. And at the very abstractest level, if that's a word, the most abstract level, knowing English suddenly, at the most abstract level, the completed picture of the world from a physical point of view would leave, would not mention any points of view, subjectivity, phenomenal consciousness, or anything like. I'm ready for my life to change. Abc Sunday, American Idol returns. Give it your all.

[Mark Gagnon]

Good luck. Come out with a golden ticket. Let's hear it. This is immense.

[Richard Brown]

I've never seen anything like it. And a new chapter begins. Carrie Underwood joins Lionel Richie, Luke Bryant, and Ryan Seacrest on American idol. Season premieres Sunday, 8. 7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu. Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids spending. With real time notifications, kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Try Greenlight risk free [e-mail] Spotify that. So Nagel kind of had this idea that there's this tension, but the more scientific you become, you kind of leave out the Very thing that we're trying to explain. And maybe you can't even get to a point where. Where you can explain phenomenal consciousness in terms of the physical goings on. Because to explain the physical goings on is to necessarily abstract away from the subjective point of view. So it's almost like we're in this kind of very. As he puts it in the paper, it's like if you went back to Socrates and tried to tell him, Socrates being the very clever, Socrates being the philosopher in ancient Greece, and you said, oh, did you know that energy and mass are identical in some sense? And he would say, bro, what are you talking about? Translating Lucy from the Greek. But we understand because we have Einstein's theories that equals MC squared. And you have to know a lot of math and understand a lot of stuff. But to someone without those concepts, I mean, it's even hard for us to understand in some sense. But even not knowing anything about modern physics and the trajectory, like Socrates would just have no chance of understanding what you mean when you say energy and mass are identical. And Nagel sort of thinks that's the position we're in when we say consciousness is physical. So it's like we just can't really understand what it would mean for consciousness to be physical because of this subjectivity stuff, which involves this subjective point of view there being something that it's like and all that kind of stuff. So that kind of set off a lot of debate about this topic. It's related to the philosopher David Chalmers, what he calls the hard problem, which I mentioned earlier. But I think the Nagel version of it is. Well, I like it a little bit better, but I like Chalmer's version too.

[Mark Gagnon]

You know, so I'm curious, the experience component.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

How can we tell what things are experiencing? Senses or, you know, sensory input? Right. Like you could. My cat experiences things, you know, I mean, my cat's seen some in my house where I'm, you know, I'm sorry.

[Richard Brown]

You want to know.

[Mark Gagnon]

Sorry for what I had to see. But it's. It's experience something, you know what I mean? Or like, you know, a chicken, right? Like there's a loud noise, all of a sudden it runs away. Like that is an experience. So how can we maybe like, slice this question of experience to be a little bit more clear to, you know, and obviously this is contested, so maybe even laying out a couple different theories as to why some people would say, you know, chickens have experiential consciousness, or is it exclusively only to humans? And how can I frame like what are the criteria I can use to frame that question?

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, so I think when you talk about other animals, there's a harder problem here not to use coin any weird terms or anything. But the issue is that when you want to know what I'm experiencing, you ask me. So if you say, do you see this? What color is it? I can tell, yes, it's reddish or no, I don't see anything at all. But you can't really do that with an animal. So all we have, the non human animal. So all we have when it comes to non human animals is their behavior. And as I think, well, the self driving car and the Roomba example illustrate it seems possible to have behavior with no experience whatsoever. And in fact the very idea of there being unconscious mental processing seems to be the kind of thing where you have behavior but no experience. So for example, the sleepwalker that I mentioned who's walking to the refrigerator to make a sandwich with cigarette butts and mayonnaise is aware of the environment in some sense. But it's an open question whether they're having any kind of experience. My feeling is that probably not. I mean, we don't know for sure. But my experience having been sleepwalked, having been a sleepwalker. English is coming back to me slowly. Having been a sleepwalker, I could say that I certainly didn't seem at the time that there was any experiential component to it. Because when I woke up the morning and my mom was telling me, hey, you pissed in the fucking plant. I was like, what? No, I didn't like you're crazy. And I just completely, as far as I was concerned, not there. Now maybe I had experience and I forgot it. You could always tell some story, but it's from my point of view. It's like there was this snap of a finger and I woke up in the morning with nothing in between. So it seems at least a possibility that you could have behavior in the absence of experience. And another more scientific example. I'm going to answer your question, I swear.

[Mark Gagnon]

No, no, no, this is great.

[Richard Brown]

Another more scientific example is the notion of blindsight, which was discovered in the 1980s by the Scientist named Larry Weiscrantz. So there is this subject, his name's gy. We always use the letters to preserve their anonymity. So we don't know his name. I mean you don't know his name. But anyway, so the guy GY had some damage to the visual part of his brain. In particular what's called the occipital cortex, which is the primary visual processing area. So if you know a little bit of anatomy, light hits your eyes, some stuff happens in the retina. It goes to the thalamus, and then from the thalamus to the cortex. And then from the cortex, it starts spreading out, and you have these two pathways going either over towards your ears in the temporal area or up towards the top of your head, called the parietal area. Okay, so these guys blindsight. Subjects have damage to the primary visual cortex, and they say that they're blind. So they say they can't see. And the way the visual cortex is organized, damage to one little area results in blindness in one specific part of your visual field. So if I just take out this part of your visual cortex, there'll be a little hole in your visual field here. Now, you won't notice the hole there. In fact, GY explained it as kind of like the back of your head. He was like, you can't see things behind your head, but you don't feel like there's a hole in your visual field. You just feel like if someone holds something behind you, you don't see it. So if you present something to him in his blindfield, he says, I don't see it.

[Mark Gagnon]

But he's also not experiencing blindness, which is fascinating.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly. He's not like, having this little black circle or this blank area, like, missing something.

[Mark Gagnon]

Are you blind in your elbow? You know what I mean? You're like, no, I just don't see out of my elbow.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

I don't even have any frame of reference for what sight out of my elbow would be.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. And so. But the weird thing is that when you present a stimulus in that area and then you say, guess what it is? Well, he says, I don't know. I already told you. And they say, yeah, but just like, if you had to pick something, like, say what it is. And so one example, they'd use they present pluses or X's, and they would say, so tell us which one it is. And he said, I have no clue. And they were like, just guess off the top of your head. And you say, I don't know an X. And it was an X.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is this like the snow and the chicken experiment as well? Like the chicken claw and the snow? We're like, that's.

[Richard Brown]

Oh, with the Ledoux thing, that. That's the split brain. Okay, so that's.

[Mark Gagnon]

I'm derailing us.

[Richard Brown]

No, no, no. That's related. Because the similar question could come up. But in those kinds of cases, what's happening is you sever the brain. It's a connection between its two hemispheres. And so information that comes in from the external world is being sorted in. What's on the right side of the world goes to the left part of my brain. What's on that side of the world goes to the right part of my brain. Those guys share information, so I have this unified visual experience. But if you sever that and you cleverly present things to opposite sides in the right way, then the person or the speech center is being on the left. So whatever they see that's on the right hand side, they'll be able to say that they saw it. But if you ask them to point with their hand what they saw, they'll point to the thing that they deny seeing. So that's the chicken and the chicken claw and the shovel. If you present the chicken claw on one side and the shovel on the other, then if the chicken claw is on the right hand side, the subject will say, oh, I see a chicken claw. And they say, now point to what you saw. And they point to the shovel. And then they're like, huh, that's weird. And then they say, well, why did you do that? And then they'll say, well, because, I don't know, you need a shovel to scoop the chicken shit or something like that. So they make up a story about why they behaved in that way, even though they deny that they saw the shovel. And the question with respect to phenomenal consciousness, to bring it back to that would be. So is the left side, sorry, the right side of the brain, which is controlling the left arm and causing it to point at the shovel, is that having an experience which is detached from the other side? Or is it just an unconscious processing unit which is computing some stuff and guiding behavior, but without any sort of experience at all? Now, without control to the. Without access to the lips and the, you know, the mouth, it can't say anything to you. So all it can do is to express itself by using, you know, this side of the brain is controlling that. So there's a question about what's going on on that side of the brain. Like, is it. Is it like a separate self? Is it a separate center of consciousness, of phenomenal consciousness? Or is it just a fancy computer? Basically, that's, you know, computing some informational stuff and answering questions in the way that Siri or Alexa would, but without any kind of experience. So that would still tie in. But it's different than Blindsight, because in Blindsight, you're actually having damage to the visual part of the brain. Whereas in the split brain cases, they've severed the connection between the two hemispheres, but the visual cortexes are intact, so there's no damage there. So they're related, but different.

[Mark Gagnon]

I see so.

[Richard Brown]

But in blindsight, though, they are able to do things using information coming in from vision, but they don't see it. They say, like, I don't consciously experience it. And there's even one very well known case which just came out recently of a guy named TN who's the most complete case of a human case that has almost the entire visual cortex destroyed. And there's a video of him walking down a hallway where he like, sidesteps trash can and avoids a printer that they put there. And he says he doesn't see anything. And so people have said, well, maybe he's using echolocation. And it's like, well, it'd be very hard to do the task, namely to walk down this hallway. He was instructed to walk straight down the hallway and that there were no obstacles. And unbeknownst to him, they put all these obstacles in his way, and he just meanders his way right around through them. So this is a case where, if you take it seriously, a case where there's behavior but no phenomenal consciousness. And so it does. And there's. I mean, I could go on and on about this, which I actually am doing, but I could go on even further. There's a lot of kind of evidence that you could have complex control of behavior in the absence of experience at all, which brings up the question, what's going on in some of these animal cases where there's a kind of complex behavior? So is your cat who is hearing a loud noise and turning in that way, are they experiencing the sound of the noise? Or is it the case that they are kind of like a robotic vacuum cleaner that's processing information and orienting their head? Now, I personally believe that animals are conscious. So I'm not trying to argue that they aren't. But what I'm suggesting is that there's a scientific issue about what would count as evidence. And one of the problems here is that if behavior can be produced unconsciously, like without experience, then you can't simply say there's behavior of a certain sort, therefore there's consciousness, because it's possible that that could be explained by unconscious processes. So just to be clear, I am not advocating that we should think that cats are unconscious. What I'm saying is that you can't just Naively say the cat behaves in a certain way, therefore it's obviously conscious. That's good enough for common sense and a good reason not to kick the cat. But it's not a good enough scientific reason that you could cite to say this proves that they are conscious in this way. Because if you trace it all the way down, single cell organisms behave too like a single celled paramecium or some simple organism will move away from harmful stimuli, will search out nutritive stimuli. And so if you want to say that those things have experience, I guess you could, but on the other hand you might just say no. They're just kind of mechanisms that are built in a certain way so that they, you know, if there's a concentration of sugar over here, they'll kind of motor towards it, and if there's some kind of acid over there, they'll motor away from it. So I think the question of what, what the right criteria is that would allow us to answer the question you asked is very difficult. Now, that doesn't mean we should give up. And people have different opinions about this. My own view is that what we should do is try to understand phenomenal consciousness in our case. So if we knew what consciousness was in humans, then we could look around and go, okay, so this is what it is now, is it over there? Is it in the cat? Is that same thing that we think is important in the cat? Is it in the paramecium or, you know, in the plant, in the universe at large or whatever? So that would be the strategy that I think is the most fruitful, is to start with humans to look at the theories of consciousness that we have, which is what you originally asked me about, and to try to identify which one of those is on the right track. And then once we had that to try to look around at other creatures. Now not everyone agrees with that. And some people think, well, we can do what they call a theory, light sort of approximation where we look for some distinctive kind of behavior that could only be done with respect to consciousness or when the animal is conscious. It's, for example, sometimes think learning is a universal associative. Learning is sometimes brought up in this case, and simple organisms that could be like classically conditioned, trained to react to some stimulus. You know, that's pretty low level stuff, maybe even plants can do that. But if you want to learn how to react to higher level things, like for example, I like getting my paycheck because it allows me to get other things. So I have this like higher Level ability to see the connection between the PayCheck and the PlayStation 6 that I.

[Mark Gagnon]

Want to get like a raven. Problem solving.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Would be like a high level equation that shows complexity.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. So the problem with that, in my opinion, is that so far, as far, we haven't found anything which doesn't look like it can't be done unconsciously. So every time someone says, you need consciousness to do this, man, like creativity, like problem solving, anything of that nature, it looks like we can find cases where that is being done but without consciousness. So for example, one kind of famous study in this area was having people think about mortgages on homes and they were giving them, okay, so would you take this mortgage or that mortgage, so 20 years with 9% interest rate or 10 years with 5% interest rate or things of that nature. And one group, they just let them sit around and hash it out for as long as they wanted to. In the other group, they gave them the conditions and then distracted it with some other task like watch the screen and identify when there's a vowel and they flash a bunch of letters. And then so instead of letting them think about it, they distracted them. Whereas the other group, they got to just sit around and think as much as they wanted to. And at the end they said, now answer the question, which one would you prefer? So the group that got to think about it perform worse. They pick the overall worst mortgage, whereas the group that was distracted by the letter kind of thing picked the better mortgages on average. So they picked the ones that were like actually in their benefit and. But they didn't sit around deliberate, whereas the other ones did. So that kind of looked like there was some kind of complex problem solving without like a conscious experience of doing it because they were distracted by this other thing. So there were unconscious processes guiding their behavior. And commonsensically, this happens all the time. Like if I want to solve a problem, I go and do the dishes or I play resident evil, you know, I'm distracted by something else. And suddenly I go, oh, right, this is how I want to put that sentence in that paragraph, or this is what I need to do. And. And it's like, okay, but I wasn't sitting there thinking about it. It just pops up.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, it's counterintuitive. There's the whole notion of overthinking. Doesn't seem like it should exist. Exactly right. Like how can you get in the way of your own conscious thought? Exactly. And by doing other activities to distract yourself, you actually come up to better solutions.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly. So there are people who would dispute. There's ins and outs and quibbles, but that's sort of the way that I think of these things. So I wouldn't say we want to immediately jump into the hard cases of bees and octopuses or octopi or whatever you want to call them. That stuff is very hard. So, you know, octopi, octopussies, whatever. James Bond. Okay? So those guys have, you know, neurons in their. In their tentacles, and there's no centralized brain, and they solve problems and do interesting things. But are they conscious? That's, to me, a very hard question. Because they could be very complex machines. And in some sense, the human brain is a kind of machine that comes with a kind of experience as well. So my view is we should look at the theories that we have on offer. And now I'm just kind of focusing on cognitive neuroscience and psychology. Not really get into the metaphysics of it. But we can shortly. But we kind of have, like a handful of big ideas. So if I can go into that part of the spiel, I will.

[Mark Gagnon]

I'd prefer if you didn't. Okay, so we'll just leave it at that.

[Richard Brown]

It's been.

[Mark Gagnon]

No, no, no, please, please take us down that road.

[Richard Brown]

That.

[Mark Gagnon]

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[Richard Brown]

So I think in neuroscience, in psychology generally, the most venerated idea is something called the global workspace. So global workspace theory was kind of invented by this guy named Bernard Bars and been championed by another guy named Stanislaus Dehaan. He wrote this book, came out 10 years ago, something called Consciousness in the Brain. So he's sort of a well known guy, French guy, we won't hold that against him. But he's a well known scientist and his lab is very interested in this idea that when you have conscious experience, there is a kind of competition amongst low level processors in the brain and for getting the information sent out to a wide array of user systems, of consumer systems. And the traditional way that has been formatted is to think of like for example, you have various states in the visual cortex which are connected to the prefrontal cortex. And up here in the prefrontal cortex, we have parts of the brain that control behavior, planning, attention, working memory, all of these things that we think of as very cognitively oriented. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Used for controlling behavior. And what they have shown in their lab is that if you present a stimuli to someone that's subliminal so that you flash it very quickly, or use a mask, which is a weird image that comes right after it, which blocks, excuse me, the conscious processing subjects will say, I didn't see it. And what you see in the brain is like localized activity but not widespread activity. Whereas when someone's conscious of it and they say, oh, I saw it, then you have projections to their prefrontal cortex which become lit up. In other words, the information looks like it's been shared with a lot of user systems. And so the idea that what consciousness is is kind of widespread sharing of information amongst these various information processing subsystems is a kind of idea that we'll start in the 80s. And there's some evidence for it, but it's not like established to be true, but it certainly is like an area where a lot of people are interested in looking. The problem, I would say, is that it's not 100% clear that in cases like TN who's walking down the hallway that he doesn't have kind of some information that's being widespread and shared because he's using that information to guide his behavior. He's avoiding his legs, are aware of it.

[Mark Gagnon]

It seems like everything based off his behavior has some type of sensory experience.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

But yet there's no experience that can be documented.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. So that maybe is a prompt for Global workspace Theory. Of course, another problem for it is that the people who test it don't really try to think about what would falsify it. Instead, what they think of is, is this consistent with the theory? Like, if, you know, we would expect this, do we find it? Oh, we do. But they don't really come out and say, if my theory were wrong, then you would expect to find the following things and then look for those things. So it's those kinds of tests I think that we need. And there's been a lot of siloing of researchers. Like people who like global workspace theory tend to use certain experimental designs and work with certain people, and people who like other theories tend to work with different people and use different experimental designs. And so there is kind of a Growing recognition, yes. That there needs to be more cross talk between these camps. And I'm involved actually in a couple of, you know, multidisciplinary groups of people that are trying to work on something like this. But before I get to that, let me finish the perusal. So global workspace theory, I think, is one of our main theories of consciousness, of phenomenal consciousness. On the other hand, sometimes people think that information and integration of information is important. So this has led to what's called integrated Information theory, which is, you know, kind of a controversial theory. Some people don't like it, some people really like it, some people are indifferent to it, I guess, but not very many. Most of them are kind of on one side or the other. But the integrated information theory basically says that when you have information in a system, and so take a simple example, you have three components, A, B and C. And they're interconnected in some way and they can perform some tasks, like light up a light. If you sever the connection between A and C and the system can still do all the same jobs, then that connection between A and C wasn't really important. But if you sever the connection between A and C and it can't do what it did before, then the information in that connection is somehow integral or integrated into the system in an important way. And their idea is that the brain has areas. They quantify this notion with something called phi, which is a measure of how integrated a system. There's a lot of math behind this theory, so we don't need to go into that unless you want to. But that's one of the reasons people like it, is because there's a lot of math and it's not like wishy washy in that sense, but anyway, so if a system has high phi, as they say, then they say that system is conscious. Now there's some really weird predictions that the theory makes. So for example, one of the weird predictions is that you could have some system of logic gates, like for example, simple and, or gates which could have very high fi. So, and they don't even need to be like instantiated in a physical system. They just need to like you could write them down on a paper. And the way that the theory says is like that system is conscious. So some people have said, well, that's like a reductio of the theory. Other people have said, no, we want to test it. And if it's right, then you have.

[Mark Gagnon]

To accept that consequence that these equations on a piece of paper could be.

[Richard Brown]

Conscious, more conscious than you actually.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, wow, it is a higher five than a human.

[Richard Brown]

Yes, exactly. So. So that's. And so some people think, yeah, is this really a scientific theory of. And so there's some debate about that, but still, it's an idea that people are pursuing.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Richard Brown]

The third idea, I would say, is attention, and attention based processes. So some people have the idea that, well, maybe attention is what consciousness is. And it certainly intuitively seems that the things we attend to are the things we experience. And there's some work in cognitive science that suggests that maybe when you don't attend to something, you don't see it. So I don't know if you're familiar with inattentional blindness or what's called change blindness, but there's a very famous example of this where this guy, Dan Simons, a psychologist, he set up this experiment where he had two basketball teams, one wearing white jerseys and one wearing black jerseys. Do you know this one? The invisible gorilla. Yeah, exactly. So the surprise.

[Mark Gagnon]

Could you explain it, though? It's great if anyone doesn't know.

[Richard Brown]

Okay, so you have the two teams, and subjects are told to count the number of times that the players in white pass the basketball to each other. And so they're all moving around, you know, hood, hood, hood, like Globetrotter style. They're passing the ball back and forth, and you're counting. I do this to my students, and they're very proud. They're like, 19, professor. That's how many. And we're like, but did you see the gorilla? And they're like, huh? So during the time when they're following the basketball around, as it's being passed, a guy in a gorilla suit walks out. He stops in the middle of the players. He waves at the camera. Where's the camera? I can't wave to it. But anyway, he waves at the camera and then walks off. So he goes all the way across, stops right in the center, and then exits. And the surprising result is that some number of people don't. Some people spot it right off the bat because accidentally they happen to be looking right there. But to someone else who's paying attention to the ball going from here to here, and the gorilla's here, they just don't notice it. And when you say, did you see the gorilla? Or actually when you say, did you notice anything strange about this video? They'll say, no. And then you say, watch it again, but don't count. And then they see the grill and they go, what the.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's a different video.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly. They're shocked. Like, it's bizarre. So that's inattentional blindness. It's closely related to change blindness, which my favorite example of has to do with tastes. So they did this at a supermarket where they had people come up and taste jams, and they gave them two different jams. They said, pick your favorite one. Like, which one do you think tastes better? And then they would say, well, I like the plum one, or I like the raspberry one. And they'd be like, okay, so can you taste it again? And, like, really focus on the taste and tell me why you picked that one. Like, what is it about this one? Now, unbeknownst to them, in 50% of the cases, they switched the jam for the other one. So if you tasted plum and said you like that, they gave you raspberry instead. And the surprising thing is that people taste it and they go, yeah, you know, I just like this one better. Cause it's more fruity. Like, it's fresher, Tastes less sugary. I think it's like, just got a really nice flavor. And then they're like, well, that's the other one. They're like, huh. So that's a very striking phenomenon where, like, you would think you would. And some people do notice. They're like, hey, man, that's not the one I tasted.

[Mark Gagnon]

Similar, but different there. I read a study where they asked people if they could tell the difference between two red wines.

[Richard Brown]

Yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

Have you heard of this? Yes.

[Richard Brown]

Well, they tell. One's expensive and one's cheap.

[Mark Gagnon]

Similar but different.

[Richard Brown]

Okay.

[Mark Gagnon]

They said, okay, two red wines. Here are the two cups. Have a drink. They were actually sommeliers when they did this, and they tasted one, they said, oh, this one has this in it, and this one has this. They had to try to guess the regions. Unbeknownst to them, one of the red wines is actually a white wine that was dyed red with food coloring. And if I were to ask you, could you tell the difference between red and white wine? You'd be like, yeah, of course.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

But if I'm asking you to tell the difference between two red wines and one of them happens to be white, they had no idea. And they sort of just assessed, like, oh, this must be a Bordeaux, and this one's a Pinot, or something like that.

[Richard Brown]

Wow.

[Mark Gagnon]

And these are, like, train Somalians.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah. These guys know what they're supposedly doing.

[Mark Gagnon]

And based off of what their focus was, they were completely blind to whatever the actual sort of perceptive experience was.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. So these are very striking phenomena. And so some people take these kind of results and they say, look, what a consciousness is, is just what you're attending to. So if you didn't notice the gorilla, it's because you were attending over here. And so what you were conscious of, what you experienced is where your attention was located, and the gorilla is invisible. Whereas on. So there's a big controversy about this, though, because some people say, no, you did experience the gorilla. You just didn't notice your experience of the gorilla. So they say you had a phenomenally conscious experience. It was outside of your attention. So you can't report on it or say that you saw it, but it was there, you just didn't know about it. And so this gets back to this question of how does phenomenal consciousness relate to awareness and all those things that we're talking about earlier? But so this is the debate about attention. A more modern version of this is associated with the neuroscientist Michael Graziano. And he argues that consciousness is not attention, but it's our model of attention in the sense that we have like a model of our body in the brain. We also have a model of what we're attending to. He calls it the attention schema theory. And so the idea is that while attention and consciousness are strictly separate, we have a kind of internal representation of what we're attending to, and that's what consciousness is. So I'd say that's our third big idea, something about attention. Our fourth big idea, I'm just going through these quickly so we can go back to any of these. But our fourth big idea involves something called recurrency, which is feedback loops in the brain. So it's actually kind of surprising the more. I mean, the brain is very interesting and there are like, you know, the average person has 86 billion neurons as far as we can tell. You know, people change that level. And I saw some, like American textbooks say it's 100 billion. So obviously we're smart. But actually there's. Anyway, I don't want to get distracted. The point is that there's very many of these cells called neurons, and they're highly interconnected. But surprisingly, there's more feedback connections than there are feed forward connections. So there are a lot of connections between this part of the brain and this part of the brain. But there are more connections going back, feedback. So feedback is something that's very important for how the brain operates. Otherwise there wouldn't be more of those kinds of connections. Like there's something going on there. And what we find out when we study how these neurological processes unfold in time is that when you see something, there's an initial activation in the sensory area. So visual stuff here, auditory stuff here, et cetera, and then it starts sweeping forward. So there's what we call the forward sweep, and then there's the feedback, the re entrant feedback loops, as we say it. And so some people think that rather than global broadcasting, what you need are these feedback loops, that there's something important about the information going back to the lower areas and modifying it in some way. But that could happen relatively locally. So you don't need to send information to the prefrontal cortex. It could all just be looping around in the visual areas, like visual area V4, as we call it in V1, kind of looping back and forth. So that's what's called local recurrency. And it's most associated with a neuroscientist named Victor Lama. So there's been a debate, okay, how widespread does brain activation have to be in order for you to experience something? Does it have to activate all the way to the prefrontal cortex? Does it only need to activate some relatively local areas in the visual areas? Does it have to involve attention? Does it have to involve integrated information? So those are four big ideas that come from the neurosciences. And then finally, I would say there's a fifth big idea which comes from philosophy, actually. And didn't these other ideas all originate in neuroscience and they're kind of put forward by neuroscientists? But the fifth big idea is what we call higher order theories of consciousness. So higher order theories of consciousness have a long history in philosophy, both eastern and western traditions. So depending on who you talk to, it could go back to various philosophers. But the basic idea is that instead of just being aware of the environment, we also need to be aware of our awareness. So that just simply seeing the whatever that shi Shia shay, sheesh. Just seeing that on the table could happen unconsciously. But in order for me to experience it, I need to somehow be aware of that thing happening in my brain and what I call an inner awareness, an awareness of our awareness.

[Mark Gagnon]

I've heard this quote, the consciousness is not the voice in your head. Consciousness is the thing that hears the voice.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah. And I guess that would be somewhat similar. Exactly. Uh huh. So that there's a kind of higher order process which is somehow aware of what's happening at the brain. And that's a very confusing idea to a lot of people because they say, like you Know, a squirrel doesn't need to think about its own or be aware of its own experience. It just experiences the world. But how do we know that? So a lot of my work actually is kind of focused on clarifying the higher order theory in neurological terms and saying, well, what would you expect to see in the brain if a higher order theory was right? One of the interesting kind of things is that if you have these two layers of content, like if you see red, what happens if you're aware of that is seeing green. So what if your higher order awareness misrepresents what's happening at the lower order level? And a lot of people have said, like, that's an objection to these kind of theories. That's kind of ridiculous. Whereas what I do is I say, no, that's an empirical prediction of these kinds of theories. So it actually is something we would expect to see, that you could find cases where someone is acting as though they're seeing red but experiencing green. Very counterintuitive idea. But of course, many of our best empirical theories have these extraordinary counterintuitive predictions. People thought like, you know, this is ridiculous. And then you test it and find out, oh, lo and behold, look what happens.

[Mark Gagnon]

So that case, could you just clarify that? Like, what exactly does that mean that you're saying that you're experiencing green, but you're actually experiencing red or vice versa?

[Richard Brown]

Yeah. So according to the higher order view, we have these two layers of awareness. One, an awareness of the external world, which is probably largely responsible for controlling behavior, and the other, an awareness of that first level of awareness, the way I would put it in terms of representation. So we have a representation of the red stimuli in the environment and then a representation of ourselves as seeing the red thing. So the higher order theory says that's where the consciousness is. It's not down here at the representation of the environment, but it's up here at the representation of our representation of the environment.

[Mark Gagnon]

The interplay between the perception and the representation.

[Richard Brown]

Is that fair to say? Well, perception is a word that might apply to the first level, depending on how you want to use it. But yeah, some kind of higher order perception, perception of the first order stuff. So, you know, my own version of this, I call it the horror theory, the higher order representation of a representation, so that we have representations of the environment and then we have a representation of those representations, a higher order representation. And the idea is that's where the consciousness is. It's not at the first order level, it's at the higher order level. And Those two things can vary with respect to each other.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is it possible to use an example that could kind of walk us through the representation of the representation?

[Richard Brown]

Yeah. So, well, let's take one example. Let's start with common sense and then go to something more scientific. So my wife likes blue cheese dressing, and I like ranch dressing. And so we often have both of these kinds of dressings in our house. And every once in a while I'll accidentally eat her salad. And I'm expecting for there to be a ranch taste, vegan ranch for anyone listening. But okay, whatever, they're still good. And instead I bite into it and I get this disgusting taste. And I'm like, this ranch dressing is awful, dude, it's bad. And then my wife says, oh, you're eating blue cheese. And then I go, oh, it's good. So the exact same taste in my mouth when I was expecting ranch taste, and I get this other taste. I'm like, this ranch is bad. It's horrible. This is disgusting, this is awful. But then when I find out, oh, no, it's actually blue cheese, and I reassess my experience and I go, oh, this is actually delicious blue cheese dressing. So, but the same chemicals are in my mouth, the same taste is going on in my experience. It's just that the way I expected it to be changes how I experience it. Now, that could be the case that it's my awareness of that. So it could empirically, we don't really know. But one possibility is that the same first order representation of the taste is there. It's the same, but I'm aware of it in different ways each time. Another kind of case that people like to talk about is something called dental fear, which I don't know if you're familiar with this, but it's a phenomenon that happens at the dentist where you go into the dentist chair and they anesthetize you, and so your nerve is numb. And then they come in to start drilling. And the patient says, I feel pain. And the dentist says, well, actually, you can't be feeling pain because the nerve is numbed. And then they go, oh, yeah, it's not pain. So now usually the typical explanation from the dentist is that they experience vibration and they have fear, and they erroneously interpret that fear plus vibration as a painful experience. But once you. They don't give you more anesthesia, once they explain it to you, then you kind of realize, oh, yeah, that wasn't pain. You had the same vibration and fearful state, but now you recognize it as a fearful vibration state. Not as a painful state. And for a long time, actually, I was in grad school, I heard about this, and I actually read a bunch of dental articles on this. It's a real phenomena. And then I actually experienced it in the dentist when I had my first root canal. It's a long story, but I've been into an olive that had a pit and crap in my tooth. It's fucked up. So I had to get a root canal, and I was in the dentist chair, and the nerve was dead. I was completely anesthetized. And I was like, this hurts. And he was like, oh, I'll give you some more Novocaine. And he put the needle in my mouth, and then he took it out, and he's like, is that better? And I was like, did you really give me more Novocaine or are you messing with me? And he was like, yeah, I didn't give you more Novocaine. And I was like, oh. But it felt better, though. Like, I recognized that it wasn't like, it's a real mind trippy thing when the thing that you thought was paint turns out not to be painted.

[Mark Gagnon]

So, I mean, not the exact same thing, but placebos might function in a similar way.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Your perception that this thing will have a certain effect, then cause it to have the effect, despite the thing not creating any effect at all.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that your perception and awareness can create physiological feelings. Like this thing not causing you pain or causing you pain will actively change whether or not you're feeling pain.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. So there's a debate about what's actually happening in the brain when this is going on.

[Mark Gagnon]

That could be the awareness thing of, like, the third big idea that we're talking about.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. That's exactly right. So one idea is that when you originally have the vibration state, the fear somehow causes the vibration state to turn into a pain state. So maybe these people really did feel pain. Or on the other hand, maybe they were aware of something that was in pain as being painful. And there are all sorts of interesting cases where pain and painfulness come apart. So one is called pain asymbolia, which is a fancy way of saying it's asymptomatic pain. So these people who have pain asymbolia can tell you that something hurts. They can tell you whether you're burning them or poking them with a needle, but they don't care about it. In fact, they often smile when you're doing it. And researchers are very, like, hesitant. They're like, I'm going to burn you now you tell me, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, how painful is it? And they'll be like, yeah, it's a 10. But not nervous chuckling, but like, they just don't experience the painfulness of the pain. They know it's pain. They can say it's pain, but they don't experience it as painful. So how to interpret this is a big debate. Like, people are really. I mean, you get similar cases in, like, morphine, you know, where you have a gunshot, wounded to the gut, and you're like, I don't give a. It doesn't bother me. I can tell it hurts, but I don't care about it. So obviously, pain is a complicated state that involves like, a sensory component, an emotional component, what's called an affective component that you evaluated as good or bad. And, you know, usually these three come.

[Mark Gagnon]

Together because you could work out, and you're like, oh, this hurts really bad. But I'm liking that it hurts that it was good for me.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

It hurts. That's the affective part.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Richard Brown]

So anyway, these things are very complicated, and we don't know what the right way a lot of these things, like, we're looking at them and they're going, okay, so it could be, you know, supporting a higher order theory. It might support an attention theory, it might support global workspace. But what we need to do, in my opinion, is look more closely at, like, the predictions the theories make and test them. So one group I'm involved in, just to take one example, we're actually trying to use hypnosis. The researcher doesn't like the word hypnosis. He prefers what he calls phenomenological control. His theory basically is that some people have the ability to control what they experience, and if you suggest to them a certain thing, they'll experience it that way. So what? So, you know, okay, one example is you show them a happy face or a sad face. So, you know, cartoon. Like, you can just show, like a cartoon happy face or a frowny face. And then you try to hypnotize them into seeing it as a happy face. So you show them the sad face, but you hypnotize them into seeing the happy face. And then we want to put them in the FMRI machine and say, well, what happens to the set of people who experience it in the opposite way? And if a higher order theory, like the one I have been talking about is right, then you would expect to see some representation in the brain of the happy face and then somewhere else in their Brain, a representation of that as a sad face. And they should be able to come apart in that way as opposed to having competing representations in the visual areas. Maybe it's in the prefrontal cortex or some other way where this higher order awareness is located. So that's.

[Mark Gagnon]

Could it be imaged in an fmri, these two sort of states acting simultaneously, but in hierarchy.

[Richard Brown]

Yes. So if they're located in dip. I mean, FMRI is very crude. People think it's very advanced, but it's.

[Mark Gagnon]

Actually very crude when you're doing this type of very specific work.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, because we don't really know what we're looking at. So what we're looking at is blood flow and we're sort of saying, well, blood's going there, so there must be some shit happening there. But it's like, you know what's happening there? I don't know, like stuff, dude, stuff is. It's stuff. But if we. That's clearly more complicated. And it's the particular kind of activity that's going on there, which is going to be important, not just that it's happening there, but like what's happening there and that we're not really at a level or anywhere near the level of being able to say, like, what kind of activity would we expect? Like literally what would the neurons be doing if it were this way or that way? So instead we're limited to these crude ideas that, oh, cognition occurs roughly up here. So if it's cognitive, then it would be up here. And so if you think of higher order wellness awareness as like self consciousness, then we would look for areas in the brain related to self consciousness. If you think of higher order awareness as like metacognition. So like tip of the tongue phenomena where you say, I know the name of that actor, but I can't remember it. What was his name? He was, you know, in fight club. And so they're clearly aware of something in your own mind, but you can't like say it. That's the tip of the tongue. So is it more like that? Then you would look in areas associated with that. So all these questions are extremely complicated and require like a level of care that hasn't really been shown yet. So instead people kind of crudely say, is it in the front or is it in the back? And it's like, okay, well that's extremely crude. And it still is a way to get some data. I'm not knocking neuroscience, but it's not like gonna. Until we know more about what the brain does and what These various theories predict, then we're not sure. Like, just for example, the global workspace theory says information has to be broadcast to the prefrontal cortex. Okay, great. Attentional theories say attention is located in the prefrontal cortex. Probably higher order theories say, well, maybe awareness of those states is in the prefrontal cortex. So now you see something happen in the prefrontal cortex. Is it an awareness of the lower order state? Is it attention to the lower order state? Is it globally broadcasting the lower order state? Well, we don't know until we know more about what those things actually are in the brain. And that's just in humans. So taking it to animals, of course, just complicates things enormously because the animal can't say, I see blue, or, like, I don't see nothing. So that's why I think even in the case of humans, the job is very complicated. And that's why, in my opinion, we should start there. We should really try to understand, like, which of these ideas is right. Maybe none of them are. Maybe they have to be combined into some, like, conglomerate. Maybe we'll find out, like, we've been on the wrong track. And the story I tell about this is, well, if you looked at neuroscience a thousand years ago, they would be talking about fluid in the body being vaporized and hydraulics, you know, the fluid flowing down and your arm moving because there's fluid filling it up.

[Mark Gagnon]

There's humors that are.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, there's. Exactly. And that was a thousand years of that theory where people are like, does, like, memory's located in this fluid and thinking's located in that fluid, and the blood is not. You know, there's the nutritive part of the blood, which is red, and then there's the vital spirits, which is the blue stuff. We're like, no, it's deoxygenated blood. So a thousand years later, we're like, dudes, you're kind of dumb.

[Mark Gagnon]

But a thousand years from now, they.

[Richard Brown]

Might be like, dude, you're kind of dumb. And it's really hard to think about that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Does this feedback thing mattered at all, you idiots?

[Richard Brown]

That may be the case. We're in where the scientists of a thousand years look on us like the way we look on Aristotle. Aristotle said the brain's a radiator. And we're like, dunce. And we're like, the brain's a computer. And they may be, like, done. So I'm not saying we're wrong, but what I'm saying is, like, as someone empirically minded you have to sort of play the long game here. And so I just think that these questions are so, so vexed that we don't. We're at the very beginning, so we have some. Some promising ideas, but we're like. We're like inching across the start line. We're nowhere near the finish line.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. It's a fascinating area of study because on the one hand, it is. It's really a paradox is the way I see it. Because on the one hand, it is this experiential thing that all human beings ostensibly have that we all can sort of vaguely put our hand near. What this thing of consciousness is that I'm having a conscious experience sitting in a peyote tent talking to you and vice versa.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

The subjectivity of that experience is obviously a case by case, but we can agree that there is some type of sort of parity with our experiences. So everyone agrees on that. But then simultaneously, we don't understand what's happening neurologically.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

From a scientific perspective, our brains are still. Still so shrouded in mystery. And then now we're doing incomplete philosophy based off of incomplete science.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

To explain a phenomenon that is fundamental and intrinsic to the human condition.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is.

[Richard Brown]

It's a very weird place.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is bothersome.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. And even worse is like. For a long time, consciousness was almost taboo in science. It was thought to be like, you know, unscientific, or like, woo woo, wishy washy, like, oh, you're a hippie now. You're talking about consciousness, like talking about something serious, you know? And especially in America, there was this period of behaviorism where the behaviorists were a bunch of psychologists who thought that, look, all this talk about consciousness is just not required. You want to explain what the behavior is in response to a stimulus. So you present a stimulus and then you get a behavior. And that's how you explain the mind. You don't need to talk about anything inside. You don't have to go inside the black box. It doesn't matter what's happening in there. It's just stimulus response. That's serious. Why? Because conscious, I can't see your consciousness.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's measurable.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly. That's what's measurable.

[Mark Gagnon]

You shine a light, the rock doesn't move. There's no consciousness.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. So that attitude kind of still is around. I have a. You talk to Joe Ledoux, and he famously said, when it comes to behavior, I'm a behaviorist. When it comes to consciousness, I'm a consciousness guy. So it's like, okay, the attitude that behavior is really still going to be explained in terms of stimulus and response is still out there. It's not the dominant view. And a lot of people will disown behaviorism and say, like, it's a bad word, but it's still there. The idea that what you want to do is operationalize. Like, for example, if you want to study fear in a rat. Well, what are you talking about, dude? You can't say, are you scared? To the rat. Well, you operationalize it and you say, when the rat's afraid, it freezes. What's freezing? A type of behavior. So what you're studying is the animal's behavior, but you're using a word like fear. So when you hear the word fear, you're thinking, oh, is it afraid? But the psychologists are saying, I don't know. All I know is that it's doing this.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. And is the analog for a rat's experience of fear even remotely similar to a human's experience of fear? And, you know, I even think about this with animals sometimes where, like, you'll see, like, a gazelle getting eaten alive.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And they look sort of peaceful.

[Richard Brown]

I don't know about that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Well, you see a lion eating a gazelle, and sometimes they're not, but sometimes you're just like, all right, like, is. Is their experience of being eaten by a line the same as my experiences?

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And yeah, it, like, raises all these bizarre questions.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

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[Richard Brown]

Yeah. So the stuff that we've been talking about so far are the theories of consciousness that are taken serious by neuroscientists. But there's kind of a tradition in philosophy that these theories can't really fully succeed in explaining consciousness because of the hard problem and the Nagel bat problem that we talked about at the beginning. So, for example, in Chalmers work, he argues that we can tell when something's awake or when it's asleep. We can tell when something retains information and uses it to guide its behavior. Those are so called easy problems because they are analyzable in terms of some function and some mechanisms that perform that function. And in fact, that's what science does. What science does is explain functions in terms of mechanisms, roughly speaking. Okay, great. But when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, it sort of seems like it can't be explained in terms of some kind of function. And to illustrate this, people usually use thought experiments. The most famous, I think, is Mary the super scientist, which I don't know if you're familiar with the thought experiment. Okay. So the Rough idea here is that you take this super scientist. She's allegedly like the world's greatest scientist. Better than Einstein, better than Ed Witten, super brilliant mind. But you raise her in a black and white room so she's held captive. It's a thought experiment. Not gonna really happen. You could science fiction it up. As much as you want to make sure that she never sees colors. So do you need to put some of her lenses in her eyes? Do you need to make sure she doesn't ever cut herself? You can. Whatever. So we just sort of pretend that she doesn't know anything about colors, the experience of color, but she knows everything that there is to know about how the brain processes information.

[Mark Gagnon]

And she's aware of the phenomena of color.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah. So she can interact with people outside of her room via a black and white TV screen is how the traditional idea is put. And so she will know that people say fire trucks are red. And she will know that people say the sky is blue and the grass is green. And she will know that when they say that there's light being reflected into their eye, which is affecting their brain in X and blah and Y and Z way. And we even imagine that she knows everything. Like, you know, a complete, like, actually way beyond what we know. So she knows what the brain actually does. Okay. Where we don't. We just. We say vague things like, there's activity in that area, and she knows what that activity is and what it's doing. Okay. So. But she's never seen the color. And then we imagine that she comes out of her room one day and you show her. Traditionally, it's a tomato. I would say, you know, maybe you want something more exciting than that, but you show her the tomato. And then Mary says, the question is, does she learn anything? And many people have the intuition that, yeah, she's going to learn what it's like to see red. She will go something like, oh, that's what red looks like. Like, I knew all about all of this stuff in my room, but, whoa, Jesus, it's red. It's amazing. I love it. You know, so the intuition that she learns something new. And some people have argued that this sort of is a problem for physical theories of consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, because, well, if she knew all the physical facts in her room, but she didn't know what it was like to see red, then it seems like maybe there's more to seeing red than what physical facts can account for. That's usually the way this thought experiment is presented, as sort of a troubling explanatory point for the person who wants to say consciousness is physical, okay? So, on the other hand, people like David Chalmers have introduced what they call philosophical zombies. So philosophical zombies are imaginary creatures that are physical duplicates of you or me, but they lack consciousness altogether. So you hit them, they say, ouch. They fall on their skateboard, they say, what the fuck? Ow. That sucks. But they don't experience anything. They're literally the lights are off inside. But behaviorally, functionally, physically, computationally, whatever other li you want to add, all of that stuff is identical. So Chalmers says, well, if zombies are conceivable, right? If you can really imagine this scenario whereby the exact same physical stuff is there but no experience, then it seems like our world could have been a zombie world. And then you have to answer this question, why isn't it? Why is our world not a world where there's just, you know, roombas running around, not experiencing anything, but behaving in complex ways? Instead, there's us having these kind of conscious experiences, saying, you know, look at that red. It's amazing. Now, the zombies would also say, look at that red. It's amazing. But they wouldn't have any experience. But functionally, they'd be identical.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like an AI, so to speak.

[Richard Brown]

But like a biological AI.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. So it's a physical manifestation of you, perhaps with, like an AI mind.

[Richard Brown]

No, with the same brain. So it has to be physically identical to you. So every neuron you have, it has every connection between those neurons, it has. Every chemical in your brain, it has. Chalmers also thinks that AI could be conscious right now. Yeah. And he thinks maybe there's a small chance that ChatGPT is conscious and that if it's not, then in the future it will. Some system that precedes it will be conscious anyway. So the zombies and the Mary Thought Experiment are the kind of cla. There's another one from Kripke. We could ignore that. But these are kind of the classic arguments against physical accounts of consciousness. Now, myself, I don't really succumb to those arguments. I think that they can be resisted. But a lot of people find them very convincing. Not a tremendous amount in the sense that physicalism, or the idea that consciousness is physical is still the overall dominant view in philosophy and science, according to some surveys done by Chalmers. Actually, that's a minority view, but a significant minority. And vocal, by the way, very Vocal, especially on YouTubes. So. Exactly so. And we haven't even mentioned the third camp here, which is idealism. Okay? But anyway, so if you take this hard problem stuff seriously in the way that Chalmers and Nagel and Frank Jackson's the originator of the Mary argument. He renounced it later in his life, but at the beginning he was very gung ho about it. So if you take those ideas seriously, then it sort of seems like you're left with this idea that consciousness is not something that can be understood in physical terms. That you could know everything about the physical workings of the brain and still not understand consciousness because it's somehow non physical, somehow not a part of the physical world. Now the Chalmers response to this is to say, yeah, but it's still a natural phenomenon. So it's not supernatural, it's natural. So there's got to be some laws which govern the relationship between the non physical properties and the physical properties of our brain. Because it's well established that there are these correlations that whenever you see red, some physiological activity is occurring, and when you see blue, different activity is occurring. We don't know what it's doing, but we can see the correlations. We can see that the brain is activated in these differential ways. So there's gotta be some kind of law of nature which relates the non physical properties to the physical properties. And then Chalmers says, well, but what could that be? So he kind of canvasses several possibilities. So one is what's called property dualism. That the brain has physical properties but also non physical properties.

[Mark Gagnon]

Experiential properties.

[Richard Brown]

Yes, experiential properties. And that leads to a view called epiphenomenalism, which is a very strange view. That the conscious properties don't have any physiological effects, but the physical properties all have their effects, but the experience doesn't. It's just kind of along for the ride. Which is a very weird view that we would like to avoid if possible. It's not logically contradictory, but it's very counterintuitive to say that my conscious experience of being thirsty doesn't produce my movement to get the water, but rather the physical stuff does. And then afterwards it produces the experience. So that's weird. Speaking of which. So the second kind of view that you could have is a kind of dualism, like Descartes, the philosopher, who thought the mind was a non physical substance. Something which was unextended in space and time, not governed by physical laws, but which is where your conscious experience occurred. In my opinion, that conflicts with some stuff we know about the brain. I think we would expect to see in the brain certain anomalous occurrences if that kind of dualism were true. Like if the non physical mind were interacting with the physical brain, then there'd be some neuron which suddenly started doing something. And we would say, why did that happen? And the answer would be like, we don't know. But instead what we find is every time there's a neuron doing something and we say, why did that happen? It's because some other neuron did something, because the environment did something, et cetera. So it doesn't seem like there's room for that. Although we could be wrong. And I always admit that on analogy with the discovery of electrical activity in the brain, which was discovered in the 1790s, hence, you know, people were blown away that this new force of nature, electricity, which they had just previously discovered, showed up in here. And they were like, what the wait, that the lightning. Huh? So hence, you know, Frankenstein being brought back by lightning and all that weird ideas about electricity comes from our discovery that the brain is an electrical organ.

[Mark Gagnon]

And was actually endogenous to us this entire time.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. And so something like that could happen again. There could be some mysterious fifth force of nature. Maybe dark matter is a clue, we don't know, so who knows? But we could discover it tomorrow and be like, oh, did you know that there's this other weird thing that's always been happening and we just never noticed it, so we can't rule that out. But as of right now, I don't think there's a lot of reason to think about a non physical mind being present. Anyway, so Chalmers thinks that's the second option. The third option is panpsychism, and panpsychism is the source in the modern version. Gets its influence from the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was kind of a famous analytic philosopher at the turn of the last century, important in logic and a lot of other areas. Wrote a letter with Einstein against a nuclear bomb. Okay, all this very interesting stuff. He was actually. I'm digressing, but he was actually hired by cuny and he taught at the city College in cuny, but he preached free love and he said that, you know, people should have as much sex as possible before marriage. And it freaked a lot of people out. And he got fired from cuny, they booted him and he went to UCLA after that, you know. Okay, more open to that.

[Mark Gagnon]

This guy's sick as hell. Super chill.

[Richard Brown]

Well, sadly he wasn't, because he was kind. You know, his daughter wrote an autobiography and she said that growing up with him was, was really rough. And, and one of the things I'll never forget from this book that she wrote was that it was like she said, being around him, we were always separated by an invisible veil of concentration. Like, he was always thinking about something. His mind was always on some problem of philosophy or logic trying to solve it. And you could be in the same room with him and he would just be, like, focused on this other problem. So she said it was like being separated by this invisible veil of concentration. It really struck me. That's kind of sad, actually. So he wasn't super chill in that sense, but they're free love all the time. Yeah, exactly, but for logical, rational reasons. Anyway, so Russell famously wrote this paper called the Analysis of Matter, and he wanted to know, what is it? What is matter? Like, we talk about it a lot. Our science claims to study it, but what the fuck is it? Like, what does it mean to say that things have material basis? And his answer was, well, we don't really know. Because when we say that, for example, there's an electron and that an electron has a negative charge, what are we really saying? Well, what we're saying is that when it's in a magnetic field, it will behave in this way, and when it comes into contact with a positive charge, it will behave in that way. And really, it's all kind of relationally defined in terms of all these other physical properties. But we never really say what those properties are. We simply say how they respond to these other things. Like, what is mass? Well, the mass is the type of thing which in a gravitational field acts in this way. Mass is the type of thing, blah, blah, blah. And so we have all these relational definitions of it, which are symbolized in our equations. But when you actually want to say, what is the material stuff? You don't get an answer, not from physics. Physics doesn't tell you, like, what electrons are. They tell you what electrons do. Physics doesn't tell you what mass is. It tells you how mass behaves. So Russell said, that's interesting. Like, we don't really know what these material objects are. We simply know what they do. And the panpsychists then jump up and say, well, what if what mass really is is consciousness? So maybe in the sense of there being something that it's like maybe electrons are simply little bits of consciousness, and then the fundamental aspects of reality will be these little bits of consciousness, and then they get put together to make bigger things, and then we have this experience. So the modern version of panpsychism doesn't say everything is conscious. It says consciousness is a fundamental part of reality which has to be Sort of inputted at the beginning to get the explanation of everything else. So it doesn't say like this cup is conscious. It says the atoms composing the cup have as their intrinsic nature is the way that the author you're reading, Philip Goff, in his book, would put it, their intrinsic nature is consciousness. So that it's a way to try to fit into, at the base level of reality, aspects of consciousness.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, it is an interesting question in that regard, because you've seen the table of taking all of the matter that makes up a human being, this much carbon and this much H2O and this much hydrogen, all these different sort of molecular compounds, putting it on a table and saying, this is what a human is.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

But there's no consciousness that exists on the table. But when you assemble it into this sort of complex organism that is a human being, now, all of a sudden it does have consciousness. Exactly. So I could see sort of where that philosophy is coming from, that is it possible that these things have these sort of particulates of consciousness that when assembled in this correct way, then arises this experience.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. So that's roughly the panpsychist view. So the particulates do have aspects of consciousness. They are consciousness, but just incredibly simple. Very like our consciousness is sort of complex and interesting. The consciousness of an atom, of an electron is extremely simple, according to this view. So that, you know, panpsychism is a view that's out there. For myself, I don't really take any of these views super seriously. I mean, I take them seriously enough. But the only reason that you would want to think about these types of views, panpsychism, dualism of any kind, actually, is because you really take seriously this hard problem of consciousness. So the idea that science only explains structures and functions and consciousness doesn't explain, can't be explained by any kind of structure or function. So I want to challenge kind of both of those premises. So first of all, I would say, why do we need an explanation in order for it to be so? Some things may just be that way. So the idea that we need an explanation in order, that's got to be intelligible to us in order to be true of the world just strikes me as very hubristic in a way, overstepping our bounds. The world may not be intelligible. It may be. It may be, but it may not be. And at the bottom level, certain things just are. It's like that the comedian who said having a conversation with a small child is like getting into a philosophical debate. Why is the sky blue? Because atoms reflecting light. Why do they reflect light? And you get, finally get to the point where you say, because some things just are. Some things just are that way. It may be that way. Now, of course, we have a history, I mean, humans have a long history of wanting the world to be understandable. Aristotle famously said, all people by nature desire to know, which I take as a kind of idea that we want explanations. But some things just are. So if you say, why is the electrons experience this way and not that way? The panpsychist is going to say, because. Because it's fundamental, it just is that way. So every road leads to a stopping point, a point where you have to say, it just is that way. No further explanations are necessary. So I say, if you have to stop there at some point, what makes you think it has to be at that level? Why can't it be at the other level? So maybe consciousness is a physical phenomena and it will never understand it, it just is that way. In the literature this is called brute identities, that consciousness is some kind of thing and it just is that way. My view would be that that's a possibility, that consciousness could be brutally identical to something physical without explanation, because it just is that way. Yeah, I feel the desire to want to explain things, but I just find it very odd that people think that if I can't understand it, then it's false.

[Mark Gagnon]

Sure.

[Richard Brown]

And that strikes to me as just like, who. Who the fuck are you? Like, what do you. What do you what, What? It's gotta be understandable by you. Like, like how could it be something in the brain? Well, I don't know. Like, why do you have to. Anyway, so I get very irritated by that, by that demand.

[Mark Gagnon]

I can see that being hubristic.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. So I would say very hubristic. On the other hand, as what our discussion from before has been illustrating, we're at the very beginning of understanding what the brain is actually even doing. And we don't have a full theory of what the brain does. We don't fully have like a worked out. We have a vague metaphor. The brain is a computer that information processes. We go, okay, but how? What is it actually doing? We don't have an account of that. So it is possible that in the advance of neuroscience we would come to understand why this particular brain state is seeing red, and experientially so. And why that one over there is the feeling of pain. And experientially so. And so I think that people who say, look, we haven't explained it yet, therefore you can't do it is kind of really, again, hubristic. And we have in science many examples of people say you'll never be able to do this, and then guess what? They did it. And I think the biggest thing that the biggest one that people point to is life itself. So in the old days, people used to say, you can't explain life materialistically. There's got to be some vital force, some elon. Vital, some magic, non physical essence that makes the living things live. And now we scientifically at least think that's not true. In fact, being alive is simply having metabolism, having a genetic code that allows you to reproduce and so and so forth and so on. And you know, sure, the average person on the street may say, no, that's not good enough, but the scientists are happy with it. And the problem of life is not something that scientists are saying you can't explain physicalistically. They think they have an explanation of it. It. Even if there's weird cases like viruses where we don't know what to say, Is it alive? Is it not alive? It's not really an important and interesting question from the scientific point of view. It's got some attributes of it, it doesn't have other attributes of it. So something similar may happen with consciousness. And it may be the fact that one of the theories that we have now shows us, ah, if this were the way things were, then we would understand why consciousness is the way that it is. So, and it is striking that the arguments for dualism are all based on these what are called a priori considerations, namely experiences from the armchair without doing any science at all. It's very striking that every argument against consciousness being physical involves what you can imagine. Like, can you imagine a zombie? Well, not if consciousness is physical, you can't. So are you begging the question when you say, yes, I can, are you sort of assuming already that consciousness is not something that can be explained physicalistically or something that is physical? I would say, yeah, sort of sounds like you are, because I have a hard time imagining a conscious agent, excuse me, a biological agent without consciousness. The philosopher Dan Dennett once said, it's like asking someone to imagine a duplicate of you, but without health. It's like, what does that mean?

[Mark Gagnon]

It seems inherently paradoxical in some type of way.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly. If you duplicate you, it'll have the same health effect. That's what it means to be a duplicate. So would something like that be the same with consciousness? My own view is that we don't know that we should have some humility here. But at the same time, if we don't know, then we don't know if consciousness is physical. And that's what I really want to push back against is the idea that we already know that consciousness is not a physical thing. So much so that we have to opt for one of these other views. Hey, if you're convinced, go ahead. But don't go around telling me that physicalism is contradictory or inherently false because of some stuff you imagined. That's great for you, but I don't think it settles the question.

[Mark Gagnon]

Sure, I think that's fair. Now could I rephrase that hubristic statement that I think we both sort of resent this idea that if I don't understand it, then it's obviously not true? Is it possible to say that if no one can explain it or understand it, it then it is incomplete? Would you accept that?

[Richard Brown]

On some days I would, but on other days I would say no, it's not. Because for example, take quantum mechanics, our cutting edge physical theory. Does anyone truly understand quantum mechanics? I would say, you know the famous quote, if you think you understand it, you're wrong, still kind of holds true. There is a quest to try to understand quantum mechanics. What does it mean for a particle to be in a superposition of two states? Is there some classical theory which could explain or comfortable? I don't know, maybe not. But that doesn't mean that it's wrong. So even if no one could understand how it could be true, it might still be true. And that was kind of the point of Nagel's original BAT article. He was saying, look, we don't have any way of understanding how consciousness could be physical. But even so, we have good reason to think that it is physical. So we're in a weird paradoxical position where we think something is true, but we don't understand how it could be true. And I sort of feel like that may be where we end up. Now. It would be disappointing for sure, but I don't think that that would convince me that dualism was true. I mean, I am open to certain forms of dualism. I would think quantum mechanics would be an area where I would most want dualism to be true. Like maybe the non physical mind plays some role in collapsing the wave function. That would be fantastic. But what would count as the evidence for that is more something that I'm worried about. And I don't really trust these a priori things because they seem like disguised theoretical intuitions. Like what you think of as conceivable seems to be really bound up with, well, what you know and what theories you accept. So if I went, you know, if you went back to ancient Greece and found Aristotle and you said, what is water? Aristotle? He'd say, water's a simple substance that has no parts. It's a basic element of reality. And you would say, no, it's made of hydrogen and oxygen in a certain configuration. And Aristotle would say, no, it's not like. Look at it like, you know, I can imagine the world being exactly like this, but with H2O, but with no water. And we would say, no, you can't. Actually. You think you can do that because you don't know chemistry. But if you knew enough chemistry, you would know that any world like ours that had H2O is a world that has water. And it may be the same with respect to the brain. We may get to a point where we realize, oh, these things that we thought we could imagine, we can't. Because the world turns out to not be that way.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. Yeah. And then now we're in the same position as Aristotle.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Say, okay, what is hydrogen?

[Richard Brown]

Exactly?

[Mark Gagnon]

You go, hydrogen is the basic part of this thing that is no longer reductive.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then in a thousand years ago, well, there's actually this other thing and planks or whatever that actually make up hydrogen atoms. Exactly. Okay. So it seems like we're in sort of like this eternal. What is it, Agrippa's Trilemma?

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Where, like, things are either circular or there's this infinite reduction. I forgot what the third one is.

[Richard Brown]

That is brute.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh.

[Richard Brown]

Oh, it just is.

[Mark Gagnon]

Because it is.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And so it's inherently unknowable.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. And it may be that way now, on the other hand. So I. I'm. My view is split between. Maybe it's just that way because reality said so. The philosopher Hume famously said, nature retains the right to trump all of your intuitions. And I kind of really take that seriously, that you could, like, with all sincerity, think the world can't be that way. And then the world would be like, oh, yeah, like, quantum mechanics is true. And you know what's interesting is right before quantum mechanics and relativity were discovered, physicists were saying, we're done. Like, we know everything. And then the two biggest theories that we've ever discovered, 10 years later, the same thing happened with logic. Immanuel Kant said, logic is settled. We'll never. All we need to do is, like, mop up around the outside, and then we Discovered modern logic and our mathematical logic. So anyway, so there's always a possibility we'll have some new theory which revolutionizes the way that we see things.

[Mark Gagnon]

Almost a certainty, in my opinion.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah. And changes what we think is possible because with new theoretical understanding, with new concepts, comes new way of conceptualizing the world.

[Mark Gagnon]

I see. And I can accept that that doesn't bother me. Maybe in the same way that it would bother someone that sort of subscribes strictly to one theoretical view of consciousness. Yeah, that maybe. I think I agree with you. And tell me if. If I do.

[Richard Brown]

Okay, that you do. Done.

[Mark Gagnon]

All right, great. But I guess you are. No, you're not necessarily saying there is one specific view, whether it is, you know, neurological or scientific or these sort of philosophical higher order things. You lean more to one side, but you don't necessarily say, like one theory is affirmatively describing what this consciousness question is.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

But more so, you know, it's difficult to really pin one down. And furthermore, it's probably unknowable forever because it is infinitely reductive.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, almost. Almost. Yeah. I mean, I sort of.

[Mark Gagnon]

Where would you. Where would you.

[Richard Brown]

So maybe it's not unknowable forever because if you. If I imagine, like, what would it be like to know everything, which I sort of think I can't imagine. Like, one time someone told me that I couldn't really imagine that, and I was like, yeah, it would be just like how I am right now where you ask me a question and I simply say an answer, except I'd always be right. So, you know, knowing everything in that sense is just saying the right answer. So, okay, so if we really knew everything, we could give the right answer to everything. If we had like the full worked out theory of everything, which was just like nailed everything, then what would a person in that position, so called ideal conceivers, ideal theorists in ideal conditions who are fully rational, what would their position be? And if I put my. Like, I'm a semi rational creature at best, so I'm nowhere near being perfectly rational or knowing old stuff. But if I kind of imagine what such a creature would be, I sort of think, could they know that consciousness was physical? I kind of think, yeah, maybe they could. And when Mary comes out of her room, when she learns something, what I say is, well, maybe what she learns is like a new concept which allows her to think about experience in a way that she couldn't do from inside her room. And once you had that concept, could she know on the basis of that that it was Physical. I sort of think, yeah, why not? Like maybe she would suddenly know. Oh, that's why this state is like red. Because something that I don't know about. So I can't put myself in a position where I think that it's possible that we could know the answer to these questions. It would require having a good theory of phenomenal consciousness. On the other hand, I also sort of think, well, maybe we'll never get to a final theory. Maybe there's always just, you know, turtles all the way down. There's always a theory and another one and always something else to know. And new theories bring up new questions, and new questions bring up further questions and how I feel. Yeah, so I think that's a possibility, which is they will never know part. So I'm kind of split. And my official position is we don't know, and especially we don't know if consciousness is physical. We don't know if it isn't physical. But we should approach the problem with that kind of humility of not knowing. Yeah, I think, and what I most react to is when people say, oh, you're a physicalist. You think consciousness is physical. You poor. Don't you know about the hard problem and like conception zombies and marry the super scientists. And I'm like, dude, yeah, I know about all that stuff. And it could turn out your way, but it also might not.

[Mark Gagnon]

And it also could be both. It's sort of right. I don't want to like tout the dualism thing, but you know, there is a way to hybridize both where, okay, we've advanced the physical understanding which then advances the non physical questions, and then we solve the non physical question that turns into a physical understanding that then sprouts another non physical question that's a possibility.

[Richard Brown]

And there's also a view we haven't even talked about at all, which is called, I'm blanking on what people call this, but, oh, neutral monism. So there is a view out there that says, look, both what we think of as mental and what we think of as physical are both like not fundamental. And that there's something more fundamental that's neither mental nor physical, out of which both of those things arise. A kind of neutral thing which is neither physical, it's not physical, but it's not mental either. So it's not consciousness, so it's not panpsychism, but that neutral thing which we can't really conceive of because, you know, we, we think in terms of this dualism of mental and physical maybe were wrong about that. And that's a view I also take seriously. So my problem is I take all these views seriously, but I spend a lot of time arguing against dualism because a lot of dualists are so sure that the other side is wrong. And I'm like, you should be equally unsure about your own side. It's fine to have your own personal beliefs, like, you know, to pick a side. But it seems to me to be overstepping to say, look, the case is so shut and dry that you guys are confused, you're making an error, there's a contradiction in your view. And so that's what I want to push back against and say, no, consciousness could be physical for all we know right now. It might not be, but it's an open possibility, especially when all it's based on are these conceivability notions.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, and maybe this is my own personal bias that obviously has errors in its own way, but I am sort of reactively resistant to certainty when it comes to these types of matters, even matters of like, you know, religion and God. Which is why I find the, the idea or the possibility of God to be some type of creator, not necessarily some religious tradition, but just this idea that there is this unmoved mover. I find that to be comforting and I like that. But I also don't tell with any type of 100% certainty that this is the case. I just find it to be an effective catch all for the very end of this reductive thing to this brute thing to say there is a God that created all of this in motion and it just is. And that's where I stop, which again is inherently it's arbitrary that I stop there and someone else stops at this physical form. And I acknowledge that.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

But that's just the place that I personally find the most comfort in stopping. But I also don't tout with some type of 100% certainty that the Christian God of the Bible is absolutely what the thing is. It could be, but it also could not be. And I just choose to believe it because of faith and it makes me comfortable. And that's how I was raised. And I like that.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, very cool.

[Mark Gagnon]

But I do. Anytime you meet some type of like, you know, real hardcore, you know, acolyte or apologist that says like, no, this is what it is, and all these other things are actually not what it is, Yeah, I get a little bit like, all right, I like that, you like that, that's fine. But you do you. I just can't immediately Jump on board and be like, yes, this is, this is that thing.

[Richard Brown]

I mean, in my official position about creators is agnosticist. So. And that's kind of the view I've been advocating this whole time. Agnosticism is the view that I don't know. And this is, you know, to try to put it back into philosophy. I think, like, when we talk about philosophy, we can mean many things. But the thing that I take as most fundamental, the most important thing related to philosophy comes from Socrates, and it's admitting that you don't know. So Socrates famously said, I know that I don't know. And that makes me a little bit wiser than you because you claim that you do know. And that's a bit of a paradoxical statement to say, I know that I don't know. But I think it's very important because one of the things that I take from Socrates, the idea is that if you think you know already, you're going to stop asking questions. This is kind of the paradox of inquiry, right? If you're really certain that astrology is bullshit, then you're not going to take any evidence for or against it seriously. So you might be closing yourself off. I'm not advocating for astrology. I do think it's bullshit, but you might be closing yourself off in that way. So by thinking, you know, it's kind of a real limit on what you can explore. So I think that we should kind of admit that we don't know and like, fully say, I'm comfortable not knowing. And with like. So with respect to consciousness, I say I don't know. I have my leanings, as you said, but I think that we should all sort of admit that we don't know. And with respect to whether there's a create or not, my position is we don't know, I think, but. And I'm more of a agnostic than people like Bertrand Russell, who also famously advocated for agnosticism. But he said he was agnostic about Zeus as well as the Christian God. And I think that we can kind of rule Zeus out. I'm not agnostic about, you know, those kinds of things. I think Zeus, no. But the idea of theism that there's a kind of creator for our world is something that I take. There's kind of some reason to think that it's true. And I also think there's some reason to think that it's false. And I think that I, as a limited creature, am not sure what to think in the countervailing winds of these two Pieces of evidence. So the problem of evil suffering seems to me overwhelming evidence that there can't be any kind of good God around. The order in nature seems to me to be not overwhelming, but somewhat decent evidence that there's some kind of creator of the world that we in. It also might be overweighed by various things, But I take that very seriously. Cosmological arguments. Maybe there's an unmoved mover. Maybe it just goes back for infinity. I'm sort of open to both of them, but I don't know how we're supposed to resolve those kinds of questions. So I remain neutral and I say, I just don't know, and it's okay to not know. And if there is a creator, it might be the creator of the simulation. Maybe that's the creator. It might be the Christian God. It might be Allah. It might be Krishna. I don't know. But we have to be open to that possibility because, well, I think life is a lot stranger than fiction and that the world that we live in is magical. Not in the sense of actually containing magic, but just in the way that it is. Like learning about the way biology works, learning about the way physics is. If that's not enough magic for you, if you need to put into that fairies and gnomes and ghosts as well, then I don't, like, what's your problem? It's already enough here.

[Mark Gagnon]

But quantum mechanics is literally magic. I mean, it feels that way.

[Richard Brown]

It does feel that way, because things.

[Mark Gagnon]

Can be entangled and they move faster than the speed of light. You're like, all right, magic to me.

[Richard Brown]

You technically don't move faster than the speed of light. Oh, really? Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, I thought that was the case.

[Richard Brown]

No, what happens is if you measure entangled particles. So if you have two entangled particles and you measure it one way, then instantaneously, if the other person measures it that way, then it'll come up in a certain way. So if you measure it down, they'll get up and vice versa. But there's no thing which travels at the speed of light.

[Mark Gagnon]

But the information between these two things is traveling instantaneously.

[Richard Brown]

Well, you know, I don't know. That's debated. So some people say it's like, you know, if you have a pair of socks, and I take one of those pairs of socks with me, and then I look at it and I notice it's the left sock, then I instantly know that you have the right one. But is there any magic there? Or weird, like. So it's like, yeah, they might have Interacted in some way previously that determines how they're going to end up later. So there's a lot of debate about this. I don't mean to dismiss it.

[Mark Gagnon]

No, no, no, no. Yeah, that's actually a good clarification.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah. So we don't know. That's again, I mean, we don't know the right way to interpret quantum mechanics. We don't know whether there's a creator. We don't know what the nature of consciousness is. And the more that we are allowed to say that, the more I think that we're open to various roots. So, yeah, I'm against that kind of certainty as well. And it's nice to hear that you're open to that as well.

[Mark Gagnon]

No, absolutely no. I just view everything on like percentages of like how much I believe. And Almost nothing is zero and simultaneously, almost nothing is 100.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Which puts I can accept and I operate sort of, you know, fine. More or less.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

But it does cause me a little bit of anxiety in my day to day life.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Because the comfort of saying this is 100% is way nicer.

[Richard Brown]

Yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

So as a result, like, you know, you bring up astrology, that's not something I ascribe to. I don't really think that there's any type of, you know, astral, you know, truth or prophetic nature to the stars and sort of when you're born, et cetera. But I don't say it's zero.

[Richard Brown]

Right.

[Mark Gagnon]

I might say it's 2 or 3%. That is that that explanation is the truth, so to speak. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because I'm sitting here in my beautiful tent, as you can see, every week, day in, day out, and people always ask, they say, mark, how do I have a tent like that? I want to. I want to sit in a beautiful tent and invite a lover, a friend, you know, someone that I appreciate and adore. I want to give them a good time inside my tent. Well, it's easy, thanks to the good folks [e-mail]. that's right. Bluechew is the original OG brand offering chewable tablets. And what do these tablets do? Oh, I'm glad you asked. They are gonna give you the just in. A stronger, harder and longer lasting sexual performance. That's right. They're gonna help you pitch a tent, any place, anywhere. And the best part, it's all done online. That means you don't have to go to a doctor's office. And you know, Talk to them. Be like, oh, you know, I'm feeling some type of way. Look, this is not for people that are, you know, lacking necessarily. This is for people that want to have the best experience of their life, whether it's Valentine's Day, birthday, a funeral, who knows, whenever you need it. You never know when you could use bluechew. And we have a special deal for the listeners of this program. That's right. Try your first month of BlueChew for free. That's right. Completely free. Mark, is it gonna work for me? Is this, hey, it's free. Why not just try it? Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. And we thank BlueChew for sponsoring this podcast. All right, now let's get after it it and let's get back to the show.

[Richard Brown]

I spent some time as a kid trying to come up with a physicalistic explanation for astrology. So my basic idea was that if the moon can influence the tides, that's through gravity, then maybe the relation of these astrological bodies could influence neurochemistry. So maybe if the moon enters the sun or whatever is in some position, then the neurochemistry might be in some way, I don't know. So do I take that very seriously? No. But do I rule it out completely? No.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's right.

[Richard Brown]

There might be some. I mean, it certainly is true that as a certain astrological sign, I noticed that a lot of my friends happen to be the ones that they say I'm compatible with, and the guys I hate happen to be those other signs. And you go, okay, there's something, some empirical generalization.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is how I feel. But then the issue that I fall into is that now I sort of hear everything and I go, all right, go ahead.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And. And I don't know. I don't know if that's good or bad. My friends that are sort of like more strict materialists, they don't describe themselves that way. They're just like Joe from the coffee shop that's like, no, this is this.

[Richard Brown]

This is that Joe from the coffee.

[Mark Gagnon]

You know what I mean? They just sort of exist and sort of like things are what they are.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

That they look at me like a crazy person because I'm like, is telepathy real? I just listened to a nine hour podcast that says that it is.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And I. And they're bringing up interesting evidence and perhaps there's, you know, scientific parameters that they're using and they're testing. That's not double blind. So it doesn't Actually stand up to SC some type of scientific, you know, credulity. But I look at this and I say, maybe, but I'm. I'm open to all of these things.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Which then sometimes sends me down rabbit holes where I'm like, I'm not just losing my mind that it's.

[Richard Brown]

I mean, I was once on this podcast. Not. Not, you're a very good podcast, but some other inferior podcast.

[Mark Gagnon]

Thank you.

[Richard Brown]

And one of the people that were watching it said of me, they were like, this guy's mind so open, his brain fell out.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. I've heard that. I've heard that before.

[Richard Brown]

Okay. About me.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. I thought that actually just now I wrote that comment. No, but I've. I've felt that about myself. People have said the same thing about me because, you know, on the one hand, I'm like, you know, God, demons, the God of, you know, the Old Testament. That could be true. But then simultaneously, these other gods could also be true. And then simultaneously, nothing is true. Like, yeah, this whole thing is a simulation. You're not even real. You're an npc. And I'm the only person with consciousness. Like, cool. All of these things existing simultaneously, and I'm sort of engaging with them in their own time.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

I sometimes find myself in a position like, what do I actually believe? What is my actual basis for reality? And I'm just sort of looking at every independent theory and sort of trying to pull out the things that I find helpful to navigating my life and then kind of disregarding the rest.

[Richard Brown]

I would say that's a healthy place to be. I mean, I don't believe in the God of the Bible. And if I thought there was a creator, I certainly wouldn't think it was the God it described in the Bible for various reasons, but. And I don't think there are demons or things of that nature, but I know people that do, and they have reasons for thinking that. And they seem like serious people. So, I mean, some of them. So you have to have an open mind about that. I would say that. Take those things seriously. And I again, would say that if you. That there's this kind of, you know, this false belief that a lot of people have that if you don't pick a side, that it's weakness on your part, or like, stupidity or gulab or credulity or any other word that would describe a person who just believes whatever they hear. But I don't think that's true. I think that if you really have this position that's because you're sensitive to different kinds of evidence. And if you want to really proportion your belief to the evidence, then you need to weigh the damn evidence. And the evidence may point to a position you don't want to hold, but that's the way science works. And so I'm open to the idea of telepathy. I mean I teach a psychology class and I tell students like telepathy could be real, but what's the evidence for it? Like currently we don't have a lot of reason to think that telepathy is real, but I could imagine the kind of evidence that would convince people.

[Mark Gagnon]

Gonzalez experiment proved it. Okay, it's actually already that one is settled.

[Richard Brown]

I mean I would dispute that because it wasn't replicated, but I agree that that's the sort of thing that we would be looking for. So as scientists and scientifically minded people, you have to resist dogma. And dogma is simply the idea that I'm going to believe this and I don't need evidence for it. Or the evidence is already good enough, but the evidence can't change. So that doesn't mean that you're like being led willy nilly or that you need to have some like, you know, so online there are these people called presuppers. I don't know if you know of this movement or not, but they basically they argue for a Christian worldview on the basis that they presuppose that God exists and the Christian God, the triune God. And then that explains the. Exactly your team, that explains logic and that explains like why there's a uniformity to nature and all these things. And then they say, well how do you explain that? And if you can't explain it, then you have to admit that I'm right. And I just find that kind of a despicable way to argue because if you have an alleged explanation, that's great, I have them as well. And they don't evolve a triune God. So on the other hand it's perfectly fine to say I don't know, like I don't know what the foundation of logic is. In fact it's a deep puzzle that we believe been talking about for thousands of years. So you know, welcome to the club. So anyway, I just find that this idea that certainty is better than non certainty. So here's my I'm certain in this because it explains what I want to be explained, right? Well you can always poke holes in.

[Mark Gagnon]

That explanation and the inverse presuppositions I would consider. I mean your word Despicable. Maybe it's harsh, but I hear what you're saying, that you know that there is no God and I prove that through this way. So you explain to me how there is no God. Yeah, it's like, well, well, why are you presupposing there's no God? That seems like inherently logically fallacious.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. So I, again, I. Presupposing it either way. Exactly. That's why, I mean, I, I do tend to lean towards there not being a God.

[Mark Gagnon]

Sure.

[Richard Brown]

But I'm open to the possibility that there is one.

[Mark Gagnon]

Precisely.

[Richard Brown]

And I think that's the rational position to hold. It just seems like that's what the evidence suggests and that people who say otherwise are like cherry picking the evidence. Because what I agree with what you're saying is that you can't just say there's no evidence for God. People who believe in God are stupid, they're superstitious idiots. And you can't say, well, people who don't believe in God are suppressing the truth from unrighteousness. Which I hear a lot online actually. That's like you just want to be sinful. So it's like that's why you don't believe in God. It's like, no, I'm just trying to evaluate the evidence and I really don't. I sort of see I'm being pushed in two directions and I just don't feel the need to be more than that. Pushed in two directions, I think it's fine. So I really find it on both sides kind of regrettable that there's so much reaction, reactionaryism, people saying it's gotta be this way and you're so you're gonna get destroyed. I'm gonna own you. Like, you know, it's like all these online discussions would benefit from people sort of admitting that, look, this is hard, we don't know, we would like to know. So what are the sources of evidence? And then you can thoughtfully make your own. Say, oh, I think, think in my view, I would point over here. But then someone equally smart as you, maybe even smarter, might look at all the same evidence and come up with the other conclusion, which should mean something to us.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Richard Brown]

So that's, you know, it would be nice if everybody who knew the same facts came to the same conclusion. But it doesn't seem to be that way, which to me suggests we don't know. So we have to say, look, 99. Yes. And I would want it to be 100, but I don't know how you get there.

[Mark Gagnon]

Which is precisely why, just on a personal digression, why I love philosophy and comedy.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Because in my life growing up, those were the only two places that I found that these kinds of discussions were able to be entertained with openness. That I would go to a philosophy class and I would have a philosophy professor to say, like, why is it wrong for me to murder you?

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And this is a great philosophical question, right? Like, okay, is there a God? Is there not a God? Perhaps there was a threat. I don't know. But it's a fun question, you know, to consider. Or, you know, there's even, you know, more wild ones, you know, like, you know, like heterosexual or homosexual. Sibling incest. Why is that immoral?

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

And these are questions that, again, have pervaded philosophy for a long time.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

That to an average person, when they hear this, they are repulsed and sort of dogmatically close it off and say it is, because it is.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

But every time I went to a philosophy class, it was open, and it was like, all right, well, let's tease it out.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And comedy functioned the same way. Exactly where I would go into a comedy club and I'd hear a guy be like, all right, what if this reprehensible thing isn't that way? Right. And you'd be like, whoa. But it was a funny justification.

[Richard Brown]

And they make you laugh, as to boot. Unlike the philosophy professor.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, exactly. But many philosophy professors have made me laugh.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, that's true.

[Mark Gagnon]

I find it to be very funny. Like, you know, an invalid syllogism, despite being. It's hilarious. Like, they're objectively hilarious, like, because they're sound, but they don't make sense. Now that I feel like I have an understanding of the current state of consciousness studies, and obviously there's much more. We've only scratched the surface, and we will continue only to scratch the surface of surfaces as time goes on. As we. We've discussed, I'm curious about just different states of consciousness and how, based off of what we've discussed, I can sort of use that framework to evaluate things. So, like hypnosis, for example, as you had mentioned before, I find to be a fascinating state. Some people don't believe hypnosis is real.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

And sometimes it isn't real. Like, you'll do a hypnosis show, and sometimes it's sort of like a prompted improv thing. Like, every time I say chicken, you'll laugh, and maybe you get someone that wants to.

[Richard Brown]

It works.

[Mark Gagnon]

Be a funny ham that wants to be on stage and you know, laugh and make a funny show. But then there are other cases where there is real hypnotism, where people's conscious minds are taken offline. Like, there was a case of a woman that was being assaulted by her hypnotist. And so she went in for this therapeutic hypnosis session to quit smoking, I believe. And she was noticing when she would leave, like, her clothes would be sort of misadjusted and things would be different. And her husband said, bring a camera and put in your purse and film the interaction. And they found that this hypnotist was assaulting her. And. Terrible story, but was concrete evidence to me that this woman was not in a conscious state, that this person hijacked her mind. That's a bad way to put it, but put her into a state where she was not able to perceive what was happening to her.

[Richard Brown]

Right.

[Mark Gagnon]

So I'm curious.

[Richard Brown]

Or not able to remember it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. Oh, and there's this other idea of qualia, which I remember studying in college. So I'm curious, I guess, how does this state of hypnosis, for legitimate hypnosis, where someone is taken to a different place, how does that fit in our understanding of consciousness?

[Richard Brown]

It's a good question, and we don't know the answer to it. So there's a whole range of different accounts of what's going on in those sorts of cases. So one is that kind of, as you mentioned, I think maybe when we just. Before that, it's a kind of improv or like a playing along. We know that people in psychology studies want to be useful and helpful. They want to do what the researchers want them to do. So maybe they just sort of are. They feel like, in this context, I should do this. So that's one theory about hypnosis. I don't think that's what's really going on in these kinds of cases. It could be, but I think there is, like, a genuine altered state of consciousness, which is brought about by the subjects themselves. And only some people can be hypnotized. Like, for example, I can't. So don't try. I'm hip to that jive. But, like, people have tried to hypnotize me, and I just have ADHD or something. Like, I just. I can't detach from, like, the control. So I don't. I even went to a therapist once, and they were like, you're gonna feel some buzzing, like, close. Take a breath and see if your limbs start vibrating. And I was like, no. He was like, this works for most people. And I was like, that's social pressure. You're trying to. I know that trick, but. So it doesn't work for me. But some people have that ability where you don't even need to induce them. Inducing them is when you say you're getting sleepy and watch the pendulum. You just say, do this, and they're able to do it. So I think the evidence is there that this is a real phenomenon. And what's going on there is an altered state of consciousness that they are able to enter into an altered state which is distinct from their wakeful state. So to me that seems like a real phenomenon. It's debated in the sciences, so it's not, I wouldn't say, proven or conclusively known to be that way, but that's the way I would interpret those sorts of things.

[Mark Gagnon]

And I wonder if these states can be self induced.

[Richard Brown]

Well, the theory is that that's what's going on. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now there are other people that I've talked to on this very podcast that I've sat in this very chair that will tell me things with full conviction. Many of them great people, wonderful people, smart people, and by all definitions of the term rational, insane. But then they tell me truly unbelievable things.

[Richard Brown]

Like this alien guy that you talked to, alien abduction. I just saw that episode.

[Mark Gagnon]

I'm fascinated by this question and part of my desire to learn about these kinds of things, whether it's religious or alien or ufo. Again, I don't write it off. I have some doubts that there are these sort of beings that are humanoid, coming from other planets, traveling at light speed. I don't really. I put that at a lower percentile of possibility, but it's still possible.

[Richard Brown]

Okay.

[Mark Gagnon]

But I fully believe with 99% certainty that the people that are explaining these experiences to me had these experiences. And that breaks my brain where there's a man sitting in front of me saying I was abducted and there's an emotional response and I'm empathetic to them. I say this is horrible. Horrible that this happened to you and that you believe this happened to you and that they are bearing the trauma of this thing that seems impossible.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

So I'm curious, and again, I don't. You're not a psychologist, you're not going to be able to diagnose what is occurring here. But I'm curious if you have a framework, you know, if you were to speak to this person or people that believe or have had these experiences, how can I parse, you know, I don't. You know the liar, lunatic, lord thing that C.S.

[Richard Brown]

Lyons. About Jesus.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, about Jesus. But I sort of apply it here.

[Richard Brown]

Okay.

[Mark Gagnon]

Either this person's lying, lying to me, or they're insane or having some sort of mental instability or chemical imbalance or what happened to them is true.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And I don't think that they're lying.

[Richard Brown]

And they don't seem insane.

[Mark Gagnon]

They don't seem insane. But I'm also not a psychologist. Yeah. But also the other possibilities seems just impossible. So I'm curious, how do you parse this experience?

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, I mean, and I know I have family members that have had experiences like this. I kind of remember seeing a UFO when I was young. But I don't fully trust that memory. But so I'm always looking for naturalistic explanations. So one, one possibility is that there are these aliens, most likely lizard overrulers in the government, obviously. But I don't think we can rule out alien life. I think we have to take that seriously. Now, whether it's advanced alien life or microbial or whatever, who knows? But the, I mean, you know, so the universe is vast. I'm sure you're aware of the Fermi paradox and these kinds of things that people talk about. It's like, where's all the alien life given the vastness of the universe? Universe. So I'm open to the idea that there are aliens. But also we know that people have very strange experiences under normal conditions. So one is called sleep paralysis. So sleep paralysis occurs. It turns out that in the brain, the part of the brain that lets you go to sleep is different than the part of the brain that subserves your conscious experience. So for example, when you're dreaming about running, your legs don't move. And the reason for that is because the brain paralyzed you as you sleep. Not in the sense of you being really paralyzed, but cutting off the input output to the external limbs. And in some cases, people become aware before their body has become unparalyzed. That's called sleep paralysis, where they wake up and they feel as though they are very heavy, that sometimes they describe somebody sitting on their chest.

[Mark Gagnon]

The hag.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly. So these kinds of experiences, are they supernatural? Well, we have an explanation in terms of the brain function of what's going on. And a lot of times alien abduction stories are related to these kinds of naturalistic phenomena. Not always. I don't think you can explain like, you know, fire in the sky type experiences and, you know, people, but still in these weird dreamlike trance like states where you're in this in between state. I've had very strange experiences in hypnagogic reverie, which is that in between state where you're not fully awake when you're not fully asleep, you can have very profound experiences that seem real, but they're hallucinatory. So one way you could practice this is by holding your hand up as you fall asleep and just keeping your hand up like that. If it falls, it tends to wake you up. So you can stay in this in between state. And one time when I was doing that, I had the experience, I thought to myself, I need to move my car for alternate sized parking. And I had the experience of picking my car up and putting it in my pocket and it seemed real. And then I woke up and I was like, oh, whoa, that was gnarly. Like, but it was like a real, like I, I felt like it was totally normal and natural that I picked my car up and put it in my pocket. Gotta get ready because I gotta move my car.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. I've done this to get ready for school. I'm like, okay, I'm, I'm getting ready, I'm brushing my teeth and then I wake up in my bed.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

I go, oh. That whole experience of getting ready never actually happened.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly. So some of it could be explained in those kinds of terms. Possibly. I'm not saying that this guest that you had on who had some other bizarre experiences, that that explains it, but I'm saying that that's a wedge into trying to naturalistically explain these things. We also know that if you stimulate like a part of the brain, you'll have out of body experiences. We also know that in certain dreams you could have out of body experiences where you view yourself from the third person, so to speak. And if we stimulate a place called the temporal parietal junction in the brain, which is where this part of the brain and that part of the brain meet, sort of right above your ear there, then you'll have like an out of body experience. You'll sort of feel like you're over there looking down on yourself. So we know that these experiences can be, these kinds of experiences can be generated by this kind of neural activity. So could it be a seizure, like an epileptic seizure that doesn't result in grand mal, you know, like shaking and all that kind of stuff? Well, some people think that's what happened to Joan of Arc. Some scientists think that that explains those kinds of phenomena. She might have had temporal parietal junction seizures, having out of body experiences, seeing voices Hearing these sort of things. So is that explaining every one of these things ironclad? No, probably not. But is it the beginning of a way that you could say, well, he's not crazy, but there's something neurologically going on which explains the kind of experiences that they're having? I would say that seems to me to be the default view and that you would want to get rid of that before you, like, accepted that there were aliens abducting you or doing whatever else was going on. We have sleep paralysis. We have these kinds of ideas that there's kind of abnormal activity which doesn't result in irrationality or craziness. So if you have a seizure, then you're not. Not insane or crazy. It's just there's some abnormal activity and it can result in these very profound experiences. So that, to me, is where my default would be, is to say, can we rule those out? And if we can't rule those out, then we have to, you know, when you rule out all the possible, when the impossible is left, you know, Sherlock Holmes. So if. If that's the way it works out, then that's fine. But I think that my default would be very skeptical, which I think is healthy, and to want more evidence. So if we can't ever, you know, if we could produce that same kind experience in these naturalistic ways, that would go some way to saying, okay, so maybe that's what's going on in these cases. On the other hand, I don't think we can fully rule out that, you know, that there needs to be some kind of naturalistic explanation that doesn't involve the aliens. Especially at our moment in time where there's people talking about this in the government and there's all sorts of conspiracy theories. It may, you know, may turn out that we're gonna find out about the aliens very soon. Who knows? I think you have to be open to that. And I don't wanna be super in line with our earlier conversation. I don't wanna be super dismissive about that. On the other hand, I also think we want to look very carefully at the kind of things we already know and whether any of those things can explain these occurrences.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, I'm fascinated by all these types of things because I do think that there is an interplay with consciousness that it could explain them. But that explanation doesn't make them less mystical. It makes them more grounded. But I find them to be equally as fascinating, like precognition, remote viewing, telepathy, these sort of like, you know, fringe science that people well, there was a.

[Richard Brown]

Very famous experience about experiment, about precognition done by the psychologist named Bem was his last name. And he seemed to show that people could anticipate events right before they happened. And then he argued that there was some evolutionary advantage to that, that if you couldn't sense the lion about to attack you right before it attacks you, that you would survive and the other person would get eaten. The problem was that experiment was never replicated. So he had some evidence. But then when other people tried to produce that same evidence, they never got it. They did exactly what he did and didn't find the evidence. So that seems to me to suggest he. It was chance, it was some error in the recording equipment, or there's a giant conspiracy. I mean, I talked to this one guy on my podcast, Consciousness Live, that this guy said, oh, it's a big conspiracy. Like, these things don't want us to find evidence. And if that's your view, that there's. We can never find evidence because they're hiding it from us. Us, then there's no way to test that. And it's sort of less interesting to me because I'm more interested in what can we do. Like, as an empirically oriented person, I think it's premature to rule any of these things out, because what we want is to evaluate the evidence. So we want to take their first personal account seriously. We want to take into account the things we know about how the brain works and what natural phenomena there are. And we want to admit that some things can be explained, but we don't know how. And we want to admit that one of those explanations might be this weird thing you're talking about. And we want to take all of that serious. At the same time, that would be the way that I would approach those sorts of things, so I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand. I'm not going to laugh at someone who says they were abducted by aliens, but I will sort of wonder, like, can we look at your brain a little bit? Like, would you have one of those experiences in an FMRI machine? And could we see whether in such a case this particular kind of activity was occurring, which we know is associated with those kinds of experiences? If so, then I'd be more skeptical. If not, then I'd be like, okay, now, just for fun, take me to your leader.

[Mark Gagnon]

Are there. Are there any. I guess you could say, I'm going to couch all of these types of things in, like, the parapsychological or the phenomena, as sometimes people within that community Will call it high strangeness is what other people call it. Okay, are there any of these things based off of any type of empirical research that you, on a personal basis, kind of are more open to or kind of lean towards?

[Richard Brown]

No.

[Mark Gagnon]

None at all?

[Richard Brown]

No. I know one person. Her name's Susan Blackmore. She's a psychologist who started out in parapsychology, and she set out to try to prove a lot of these phenomena, and she became convinced that they weren't there and now is kind of just a regular consciousness person. And I'm not saying that disproves all of them, but I am saying that a lot of people have had that experience whereby they try to show that one of these phenomena is real using empirical methods, and they end up kind of going, oh, yeah, it's not there. And, you know, we have this guy, the amazing Randy, who I think may be dead recently.

[Mark Gagnon]

James Randini.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, Randini, right. He offered a million dollars for anyone that could, like, replicate these sorts of things. Like, his famous challenge was, can you see my aura? Yes. Well, so if I was standing behind a wall that was exactly my height, could you see my aura over that wall? Sure. Well, then let's do it. It. I'll give you a million dollars. And they're like, can't do it. So I think that those kinds of things lead to the healthy skepticism because we haven't been able to empirically identify any of these things at the same time. Someone who was living 2,000 years ago and you told them the earth was moving, they should be highly skeptical of that because there wasn't a lot of evidence for it. The evidence came later. So maybe we will get to the point where we discover that there is some empirical basis for these kinds of things. We have to be open to that. But as of right now, my own view is all of these things can be explained in some naturalistic way, which doesn't require a phenomena outside of the natural realm of things, you know, But I don't know. Like, you know, I have family members that believe in demons and spirits and claim to have weird experiences that you can't explain. And, I mean, I don't know, you know, what are you going to do? Like, when I was a kid, my mom used to tell me me that she would see a demon walking around in her house, and I would stand at the foot of my bed trying to keep God away from me. And I was like, okay, that's an interesting thing to say to your teenage son. But like, so what are you gonna do? With that. Like, I'm very skeptical of those kinds of things. But at the same time, like, you know, she's not an idiot, she's not insane, like you were saying. So what are you supposed to do with that kind of thing? Well, I would say we have ways to explain them naturalistically. We want to rule all of those out. Another of my favorite examples is deja vu, which is, you know, or precognition in dreams. People say, well, I dreamt about this, and then it came true. You know, my mom once, she called me in the middle of the night one night, and she was like, richard, I had this dream about this guy, and then I saw him at the supermarket. Explain that, Mr. Science Guy. And I was like, okay, well, actually, you know, here's a good explanation for that. You're at the supermarket, so is that guy. You may have noticed him, but not consciously noticed him. And akin to all this change blindness stuff we were talking about, and we know that you typically dream about the things that you experienced are today. So you might have had a dream about that guy based on you seeing him but not being aware that you saw him. And then once you had the dream, you were like, oh, that's that guy that showed up. My dream? No. Do I know that that's what happened? No. But I also know that when we try to evaluate empirically, like, for example, they did this one large study where they took missing children. Oh, they didn't take them, but they took the case. They took the case of missing children. And people calling in saying, you'll find them here, they're dead, they're alive. And they just conglomerated all of these calls. And they said, at what rate are they correct? If someone calls up and says, oh, that kid's dead, you'll find his body here, or, that kid's alive, he's in a trunk over there, or all of these things that people say. They looked at hundreds of these cases, and what they found is they're 49% accurate below chance. So they're as accurate as you would expect if they were guessing on a whole, like, overall. So does that conclusively disprove that you dream about the future? No. But does it show we don't have any evidence to believe it? I'd say, yeah, that we're at a point right now where those sort of things remain to be demonstrated in a standard which is consistent with our empirical standards that we already accept for other things. Now, a lot of times people say, oh, the establishment tries to hide this and doesn't take it serious. That's wrong. Actually, this Bem guy, his study was published. People tried to replicate it and those studies didn't do it. So there was no conspiracy. Like scientists, generally speaking, if there's some evidence, I mean, not all of them, but a lot of them, if there's evidence for some, they're like, holy crap, let's check that out. Can we do that in our lab? And if they can't, then they go, no, that's bullshit. And if they can, they go, well, what do you know? Like, I wouldn't have thought that was the case.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, is it a bit of a Kafka trap that, for example, James Randi's prize, that it's impossible to prove anything empirically, that's not empirical. And so you prove hypothetically that telepathy is a real phenomenon that people can communicate through their minds. And then naturalistically, we prove, okay, there's some type of dark matter that's occurring and by our quantum entanglement, we can get some type of sense of what information is being transferred. And then they say, see, it's not supernatural, it is actually proven empirically.

[Richard Brown]

Yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

And so then therefore they don't claim the supernatural prize.

[Richard Brown]

Well, I would say, yeah, so that's exactly how I hope it goes. Because the idea is that, well, I wouldn't like there to be any supernatural things because if there are supernatural, they can't be explained at all in terms of our normal explanatory things. You could still have evidence for that. Them. But you're right, I think that Randy would have given the prize even if it were demonstrated by some natural phenomenon. If you can really bend the spoon, read the aura, know what the next card is going to be, and it turns out that there's some empirical explanation for that that doesn't downplay it. It still is an amazing thing that no one thought was going to be the case and so doesn't detract from the surprising nature of it. You're right. It would naturalize it in some sense, but it wouldn't take away from the fact that for a thousand years people thought it was bullshit. So that still is an important and interesting thing. Now, of course, if you really are holding out for some supernatural thing, in other words, can't be explained at all by any known naturalistic phenomena, then, well, that might be the case too. You still expect evidence for it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. But by the parameters of our scientific method that it couldn't fit into that method of testing.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like if you told someone 2,000 years ago. Like, hey, I can talk to somebody in China right now in real time.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Say it's impossible.

[Richard Brown]

First they say, what's China?

[Mark Gagnon]

That's right. It's a place that's going to blow your mind. They got big walls on. But if I could then pull out my phone and then call someone, and they had the same phone and the landline. Da, da, da.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

That would be supernatural, but then explained by a very natural phenomenon. So then therefore it's not supernatural.

[Richard Brown]

Yes. So, you know, this is that Carl Sagan quote, that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Right. So in that sense, you're right. It wouldn't be supernatural, but it would still be something which, by what you thought was naturally possible, would exceed those expectations. So in that sense, it would still be mind blowing to find that out. If I found out that you could dream about the future or astral project or any of these other things that people talk about, it would change the way I think about stuff profoundly. I just don't think we have any reason to think it really is there, because it's all based on anecdotes. And when you try to actually look for the evidence, you don't get more than the anecdotes.

[Mark Gagnon]

And the people that I speak to about this type of thing, thing, they typically, when it happens to them, they say, I can't control it.

[Richard Brown]

Right.

[Mark Gagnon]

So I'll get into a study or, you know, if I were to be studied, they'd be like, have a precognitive dream and they say, I can't control these dreams.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

I actually don't want these dreams to happen. They just happen at random.

[Richard Brown]

But that's why these people took thousands of these cases and looked at them. So you don't have to wait for you to do it. You know, it's like if you. If it happens once every, every six months, then we take a thousand people and look at them for one month. You know, so it's like, you know, even if it's sort of random in that sense of not being controlled, we can still do these, what are called longitudinal studies, where a large group of people over a large period of time and look for that kind of evidence. So I still think we would expect to find some kind of results.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. Are you familiar with Rupert Sheldrake?

[Richard Brown]

I've heard the name, yeah. He was on the big Bane theory. Right. Just kidding.

[Mark Gagnon]

No, that's what I was going to bring up. I want to know, what do you think of it? No, He, I believe, and again, this is crackpot popular science that I'm going to try to explain. I have no idea. But he had done a study that I believe is valid, that people could sense above random chance when they were being stared at.

[Richard Brown]

Yes. Feel it on the back of their head.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. That type of thing.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And perhaps there's a naturalistic explanation, but I think people look to that and say, like, oh, there's some type of consciousness thing that's happening. And of course, there's a biological advantage for this. I'm curious if you're familiar with that work or anything.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, I am.

[Mark Gagnon]

What do you make of that?

[Richard Brown]

Well, I think that it's not widely replicated. So this is a problem that we were talking about before with the BEM case, and I think it's also applicable here, is that, yes, that study is very provocative and should be taken seriously. But if I want to do it in my lab using my equipment, how come I can't get the same result? And we don't. If we had done that, then it would be in every textbook, but it's not. So that suggests that the normal methods of science have sort of suggested that something funny was going on in the original experiment. Experiment.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay. Lastly, double slit experiment.

[Richard Brown]

Yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

Going down to the quantum side, of course. But again, people have kind of pointed to this to say, like, oh, is it possible that our observation of reality changes reality fundamentally, that by observing these sort of, you know, light packets that we are disrupting the way that this pattern is being spread on this wall? I've also heard people make the explanation that, no, our measuring technology, just by the virtue of measuring, it's impossible to measure without disrupting it.

[Richard Brown]

Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

I'm curious, is that the position that you take with that experiment specifically?

[Richard Brown]

No. So I, I, so I. There's a more complicated version of this called the quantum eraser. I don't know if you're familiar with this kind of experiment, but the quantum eraser involves setting up. So first of all, you, the double slit experiment, there's the two slits. You send the part, the photon, towards the slit. If you know which one it goes through, then it acts like a particle. If you don't know which one it goes through, it acts like a wave. Oh, yeah, it acts like a wave. And so you get an interference pattern on the other side over there. So some people have said, well, what happens if you could control, like, after the fact, whether you know that or not, not which one it went through, but whether you know it. So one version of this is called the quantum eraser. And there's even one called the delayed quantum eraser, which is a fancier version of this. So on this version of the experiment, you send the photon through what's called a splitter. So it goes through a splitter, and then it downgrades it so that two photons come out. So you send one photon through, then two photons come out. One of those photons goes through a series of mirrors, and the other photon goes on its projected path. Okay. So you can set things up so that you don't know which way the photon went, because one of the reflecting surfaces has a random probability of it going left or going right. And so you can't predict or determine in any way which way it actually went left or right. Okay. So you look at the result of that, and the photons that went through the mirror cases, they just look like random photons. However, if you start pairing them with the photons that they came from, that they got split from, that they're entangled with. In other words, so what happens if the two things are entangled? Well, then an interference pattern starts to show up. So it's almost like if you know which way that it went, then you get the particle behavior. But if you don't have that knowledge, if you don't know it, then you get the interference pattern. So to me, that some people think they'll back. Because this can be done after the experiment's over, you can erase that information the which way, what's called which way information. You could erase that, and then you still get this weird result that by taking that information away, the interference pattern shows up. So some people argue that that shows backwards causation, weird trippy things from the future to the past. I don't think that's the case case, But I do think it sort of suggests that knowing something is important in the quantum system. Some people think you can explain this in terms of decoherence, which is the idea that you don't need to have a conscious subject knowing about what's going on. The thing just needs to interact with the environment in a certain sort of way. And that some people think that's what a measurement is. That measurement of a system occurs when that system interacts with the environment in such a long way that it decohers, which is to say that certain possibilities get ruled out because the things become so entangled. Now, that's a nice mathematical trick, I would say, but it doesn't necessarily really mean that the thing is in a non superposoded state. It means there's limit to what you're gonna. There's a limit on what you will observe when you go and look at it, but it doesn't mean that it's actually collapsed. That's how I interpret it. So I'm very open to this idea that there's something about. That there's something funky going on here with respect to knowledge.

[Mark Gagnon]

That Schrodinger kind of illustrates this with, like his thought experiment.

[Richard Brown]

Yeah, exactly. He's trying to illustrate how weird it is that the cat could kind of be in a superposition of live and dead. So I'm open to the idea, which a lot of people don't like, but that the fundamental nature of reality is this massive superposition until it's observed, until it's somehow interacted with a conscious agent. So I'm open to that idea. It would be a weird kind of thing for sure, and not. Not maybe consistent with physicalism, although maybe it could be as well. I think that remains to be terminate, but I do sort of leave open to that. I've also interestingly thought that maybe this has some implications for God's knowledge, if there's a God. So if God knows everything, then God knows which way these particles are going to go at all times, in which case we should never see the interference pattern because they're always going to be collapsed into the particle pattern by God's knowledge. On the other hand, if God doesn't know which way these paths are going to go, if these things are truly random, such that even an omniscient being doesn't know which way they're going to go, then it looks like maybe there's a limit to the knowledge that God has. So I do sort of think there's an interesting puzzle here for thinking about how like a kind of creator would fit into our physical theory. But anyway, so that's. Yeah, I guess I have more of a. Less of a mainstream view about that stuff. I don't think that my view is required to interpret things this way, but that is. Is the way I would interpret them. That there's something about. It's not just that it's going through one path or not, but it's our ability to know and not whether we actually have the knowledge, but it's our ability to find out which really seems to make a difference.

[Mark Gagnon]

Richard Brown, thank you so much.

[Richard Brown]

Thank you.

[Mark Gagnon]

This was really fun.

[Richard Brown]

Well, I appreciate it. I wanted to say one thing about qualia.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, yeah.

[Richard Brown]

If we have time before you say.

[Mark Gagnon]

Richard Brown, you're the one that doesn't have time. You got stuff to do. You got people. You're going skateboarding or something?

[Richard Brown]

Oh, shit. Well, no, I got students that are about to take a test, so I guess I should probably go do that. We'll have to continue this later because I am now late.

[Mark Gagnon]

Qualia Free Will. We're going to get to all of that another time. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

[Richard Brown]

Thank you.

[Mark Gagnon]

Let's do it again soon. If you've made it to the end of this episode, that's because you rock with us. And for that, we rock with you. You are sophisticated. You enjoy honest, true communication. A highbrow type of person that understands this History is not just dates and names. It is a tapestry of human triumph and tragedy, from the day Nostradamus made his first prophecy to the morning Paul Revere took his midnight ride from ancient oracles to modern revolutionaries. That is why I need you. If you have not already, please sign up for Today in History. Our free newsletter. Today in History brings you the stories that matter, the moments that changed everything, and the secrets hidden in time. Join thousands of history enthusiasts who get their daily journey through time. Don't let another day of history pass you by. Take the conversation to your inbox. Sign up now through the QR code or link in the description Today in History because history's stories shape tomorrow's world. Thank you for watching the episode. We'll see you next time.