Ep103 "Could you ever know what it’s like to be someone else?" (Part 2)

can go viral? How am I going to explain what consciousness actually feels like through four movies that got it wrong?

to be someone else. In the last episode, we discussed why we humans are all so different on the inside and whether it's possible that the gaps are unbridgable, and we examine this from the point of view of neuroscience and philosophy and literature. But today we're going to turn to the angle of technology. Could new technology ever allow us to better understand other people? So let's start with an old movie that I saw back in nineteen ninety five.

The movie is called Strange Days, and it explores the idea of wearing this special helmet, and the helmet records the activity in your brain, all of your memories, your feelings, your thoughts. It records that, and the recorded event is frozen in time on a data disk. It's like an MP four file, but one that captures not just audio and video but everything. And then another person can put

on the helmet and they can experience it all. They remember your memories, they feel your feelings, they think your thoughts in that moment. In other words, you can live a moment in the life of another person, and you can also live the same moment of your life more

than once. So in the movie, a guy named Lenny Nero is a former police officer who now works as a playback artist in Los Angeles and ends up finding a recording of a woman's last moments alive, and he becomes involved in a murder investigation, and this leads him to a group of people who are planning a terrorist attack, and so he has to use his skills as a playback artist to stop the attack and save the city. Okay, but here's the part I want to concentrate on. Could

a helmet like this be possible? Could we get our neurotechnology to a point where you could record one person's experience and have a second person live it. And while we're holding that question, I want to give a related example. Some years ago, a futurist named Michael Andisimov proposed the idea of dream celebrities. The idea here was that someday in the future, presumably using nano robotics, people would be able to record and upload their dreams and then other

people could watch them. So, could these versions of the future be possible even though people are so different on the inside, Could we leverage this imaginary futuristic tech in this way to know what it is like to be someone else? Now, I'm not speaking of this just in terms of empathy, which I talked about in the last episode, but in terms of uploading the experience of one person

and then downloading it into the head of another. So let's start today's journey with an idea that I started chewing on a very long time ago when I was in graduate school and learned about a medical procedure called

the Wata test WADA. Now, this is something that was commonly used before brain surgery when the neurosurgeon is trying to determine which side of the brain, which hemisphere is responsible for language, because you want to make sure, as the surgeon, not to damage critical areas involved in speech.

So what you do is inject a sedative, usually sodium amma barbitol, into one hemisphere of the brain and that hemisphere essentially goes to sleep for about five or ten minutes, while the other hemisphere, the other half of your brain, remains active. And this is what allows the neurosurgeon to test which side of the brain is dominant for language.

While one half of the brain is anesthetized, the patient is asked to speak, to count, to name objects, to follow commands, to recognize pictures, and you see if language is impaired, and if so, then whichever hemisphere is anesthetized is the one dominant for speech. Now, after the barbiturate wears off, wham, then you do it on the other side, putting the other half of the brain to sleep and testing everything again. Now you might say, isn't language always

in the left hemisphere. No, it's about fifty to fifty for left handed people. But also some people have a typical brain organization, for example, if they've had early brain injuries, so their language areas might end up in the right hemisphere instead of the left. So this is why you really want to make sure you know where language is before you go cutting around in the brain, because obviously one of the worst things you can do to somebody

is damage their ability to communicate with the outside world. Okay, so what I told you is that this water test temporarily shuts down one hemisphere at a time so that you can assess things. Now, the first time I heard about this as a student, I wondered if it would be possible to repurpose and expand this technique. For example, a cat's brain is a lot like ours, except that we have an enormous cerebrum while they have a larger cerebellum.

So could you put a very specific pattern of sedatives into the brain in just the right regions to mold your brain to be like a cat's. Now, this is just fantasy, of course, no one's ever done this, and it's hard to know.

my book some called Descent of Species. Now, I read this story on the podcast about a year and a half ago, but I'm going to read it again now for a different purpose. And I'd like you to keep your ears out for what the problem is about turning your brain into someone else's. So here's the story descentive Species from some in the afterlife, you are treated to a generous opportunity. You can choose whatever you would like

to be in the next life. Would you like to be a member of the opposite sex, born into royalty a philosopher with bottomless profundity, a soldier facing triumphant battles. But perhaps you've just returned here from a hard life. Perhaps you were tortured by the enormity of the decisions and responsibilities that surrounded you. And now there's only one thing you yearn for, simplicity that's permissible. So for the

next round, you choose to be a horse. You covet the bliss of that simple life afternoons of grazing in grassy fields, the handsome angles of your skeleton and the prominence of your muscles, the piece of the slow flicking tail, or the steam rifling through your nostrils. As you lope across snow blanketed planes. You announce your decision. Incantations are muttered, a wand is waved, and your body begins to metamorphose

into a horse. Your muscles start to bulge, A mat of strong hair erupts to cover you like a comfortable blanket in winter. The thickening and lengthening of your neck immediately feels normal as it comes about. Your carotid arteries grow in diameter, your fingers blend hoofward, your knees stiffen, your hips strengthen, and meanwhile, as your skull lengthens into its new shape, your brain races in its changes. Your cortex retreats as your cerebellum grows, the homunculus melts man

to horse. Neurons redirect, synapses, unplug and replug on their way to equestrian patterns, and your dream of understanding what it is like to be a horse gallops towards you from the distance. Your concern about human affairs begins to slip away, your cynicism about human behavior melts, and even your human way of thinking begins to drift away from you. Suddenly, for just a moment, you are aware of the problem you overlooked. The more you become a horse, the more

you forget the original wish. You forget what it was like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse. This moment of lucidity does not last long, but it serves as the punishment for your sins. A Promethean entrails pecking moment, crouching half horse, half man, with the knowledge that you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point. You cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives. And that's not the worst

of your revelation. You realize that the next time you reach here with your thick horse brain, you won't have the capacity to ask to become a human again.

else or someone else? The problem is, the more your brain becomes something else, then the less you would be able to keep track of the original you who was asking the question. So could you modify your brain to make it like a cat's brain? When you got there, you wouldn't be able to remember what the original question was. So let's think about this and extend this. This is the same as saying I want to be the actor

John Malkovich. If you were actually being John Malkovich, you wouldn't remember what it was like to be you, wondering what it was like to be he. And this is the same problem with the movie Strange Days. During playback with this helmet, the conceit is that the observer temporarily quits his own memories in state of consciousness and takes on that of someone else. Okay, so you can't change your brain to be exactly someone else's and still retain any notion of you.

actor John Malkovich. So for fifteen minutes at a time, people can experience the world through Malkovich's eyes until they're ejected onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.

a confined feeling of a tunnel. In these shots. The edges of the frame are darker, giving the sense that you're looking through a peopole or wearing blinkers. Now, this is very interesting, right, because that's not actually your experience of the world when you're inside your own head. So first, what is the reason that you don't see your own blinks? Is it because a blink is too fast to notice?

After all, it only takes eighty milliseconds. Well, no, that's not it, because if you are looking out in a well lit room and I flick the lights on it off for just eighty milliseconds, you have no problem at all detecting that. In fact, you can detect something much shorter than that. So what's going on why don't you

see your own blinks? Well, the answer is that you have circuitry in your midbrain that sends the motor command to blink your eyelids, and it also sends a copy of this command to your visual system so that it knows a blink is coming. But there's even a deeper answer here. The general story, as you have heard me talk about in many other episodes, is that you're not seeing the world out there. Exactly what you're seeing is your internal model of what you believe is out there.

It's a construction of your brain. Only five percent of the input to your visual cortex is coming from the eye. All the rest is feedback. It's internally generated activity telling you what you expect to see given your entire history with the world. And it turns out you don't need your eyes at all for vision. You can have full, rich visual experience even with your eyes closed. This is the experience you have every night when you're dreaming, So

you only see your internal model of the world. And this is why a blink does not disrupt your vision because your brain knows it's coming, and so your model that I am in this room or I'm walking along the sidewalk, that show continues on even though the data is interrupted every few seconds. So all this is to say that if you were inside someone else's sensory experience, you wouldn't see blinks, and also you wouldn't have tunnel vision.

with assumption. But in any case, you have a sense of a full world around you. So again, if you were actually experiencing someone else's vision, it wouldn't look like a tunnel. So this is a very difficult problem to solve if you are Spike Jones or any movie director and you're given this challenge of presenting what it would be like to be inside someone else's head experiencing their vision.

And in fact, something that struck me is that Jones put in the blinks and the tunnel vision, but he didn't display, for example, the fact that your eyes are making large jump three times a second. These are called the CODs. Even when you feel like you're just calmly observing the world in front of you, your eyes are constantly dashing around to find new information. Again, we're not aware of this because all we experience is our internal model, and our eyes are just seeking new data to put

into that. By the way, if it doesn't feel like your eyes are always dashing around, just get in the habit of watching other people's eyes and you'll see that they're making large jumps every third of a second.

And if your spike Jones and you really really wanted to capture the information directly from somebody's eyeballs, you'd have to take into account that you only have color vision right at the very center of your visual field, because that's where you have cones, the color photoreceptors, and your retina and everything in your periphery is taken care of by rods.

hand and whatever order he wants to put them in. Now, stand just a few feet away from him and look straight at his nose, and have him hold the markers out at his arm's length, but don't look at the markers. Stay fixed right on his nose and try to name the order of the colors of the markers, and what you'll see is that you can't even see the colors. If you're actually trying to do a task that involves color out in your periphery, you just can't do it

because there is no color out there. You have to move your eyes there to see any color. Okay, So let's get back to being John Malkovich. So Spike Jones didn't include all these other flourishes about ciccads and black and white vision in the periphery, but obviously it wouldn't have helped if he did, it would have just made it worse, because real vision is nothing like seeing blinks and looking down a tunnel and seeing siccads and seeing

most of the world in black and white. Instead, the experience of vision is like being embedded directly in a full, rich, colorful world. So this is a tough challenge for a movie director to make an attempt to step into someone else's head. And it's not just being John Malkovich, but lots of movies try this sort of thing, trying to show what it's like for you to be inside someone else experiencing what it's like to be them. So let's

return to the movie Strange Days. As I mentioned earlier, in that movie, you can record an experience from someone, let's say, while they're committing a robbery, and so we'll put aside the problem that you can't experience the whole thing, the emotions, the thoughts, the feelings. But again, we're just going to ask what the movie director did to make us feel like we were inside the visual system of another.

So when the director needed to show us this, he showed us from a first person point of view, because after all, that's what was being sold in the helmet. And what we saw was the camera bouncing up and down, indicating that the first person point of view we were in was running on foot from the cops. Now, that cracked me up because it represents a basic error of what it's really like to be running. When you are running,

your visible world does not bounce up and down. Your visual system takes account of the movement of your muscles and it compensates for that. As a result, your view of the outside world is steady. And this is because your conscious view is a notion of the world outside of you. Your visual system isn't simply there to register the data coming in. Whatever hits your eyes is simply

contributing to the model of a stable outside world. And as I said, a lot of this has to do with your body making predictions about how the world will change when it moves. Just as one quick example of this, do you think it would have helped if the director in Strange Days had the protagonist's hands reaching in in front of the camera. Would this look more realistic as though your own hands were coming into your field of view.

That would have made things even worse, even less convincing, because although we do see our own hands reaching from below our visual fields, we are the ones controlling them, and that makes all the difference. We can predict exactly where they are and when they'll appear, because the regions of your brain that sends commands out to your body also sends copies of those commands all around to the rest of your brain, so that your visual system, for example,

knows what's coming. If you want to read more about this, this is what's known as the motor efherence copy. Let me give you a good example of this point. So let's look at the movie Hatchi. This movie is about a college professor Richard Gere, who finds an abandoned puppy at a train station and takes them home, and they form a very close bond. And every day Hotchi waits at the train station for the Professor to return from work.

But then the Professor dies unexpectedly, but Hotchie continues to return to the train station every day, waiting faithfully for nearly a decade, unaware that his owner is gone. It's a total tear jerker. Now here's the thing. The director wanted to show some of the shots from the dog's point of view, so here's how he went about this.

black and white. Okay, fine, but to drive this point home, we are then back outside the dog and we see the dog roll over sideways onto the grass, and then the director cuts to the internal dog camera and we see the horizon rotate to vertical, and then we're back outside the dog and we see the dog roll over until his paws are sticking up in the air and his head is upside down. And now the camera jumps back into the dog and shows us the world of the garden flipped.

For our fourth movie, take The Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he's this killing machine from the future. So how does the director try to show us the experience of the robot. Well, occasionally the camera switches to the robots first person point of view, and what does that look like? Well, the shot shows the familiar cinematic landscape, whether he's in a hallway or a city street or whatever. But it's

overlaid now with flickering data. You've got these red gridlines and numbers scrolling past, and words pop up and flickers of infrared and occasional diagnostic information. So this is meant to communicate to us. Now you're seeing what the terminator sees. But there's a funny paradox here because what we're really being shown isn't a first person experience at all. It's like the robot has a little film crew living inside his head, filming the world through his eyes and then

adding the heads up display. But that's not how brains or machines work. As we've been talking about, well, to be inside of you is not the same as peering out of your eyes like a camera. Consciousness is our experience of being in the world. So in this case, if your consciousness showed numbers, who's watching those numbers? What this actually suggests is that there's a little Schwarzenegger sitting at the back of his head watching and reading these numbers.

In other words, you don't have a screen inside your mind, even for a robot, even if it were conscious, you wouldn't experience an image with data superimposed. Information is encoded and interpreted in processed, but there's no need to visually represent numbers for itself to read.

consciousness is not like that. You don't see blinks, you don't see a tunnel, you don't see the world bouncing when you run, you don't see the world turn sideways when you turn sideways, and you don't see words displayed in your mind just for you to read and then understand them. So what does this tell us? It reminds us that conscious experience isn't about what your eyeballs are doing,

but instead what you're experiencing as your internal model. And that's why, as clever as these movies are, they can never really show us what it's like to be someone else from the inside. At best, they give us a visual metaphor, but that kind of metaphor is not even close to actual experience. So what we're seeing is that the plot of Strange Days, where you live someone else's experience and the way that they experienced it, is presumably impossible.

So to pull this all together, let's return to the idea of dream celebrities, this idea of recording your dreams and playing them to someone else and becoming a social media star of the nocturnal world. So let's make sure this is clear. You could imagine just getting the visuals of what someone else saw, but there are a couple

of things to note here. If I just measured the activity in your visual cortex while you dreamed, and then I fed that same data into stimulation of my visual cortex, it wouldn't be exactly the same because even in the primary visual cortex there are individual differences, So what I saw would be a warped version of what you saw. Okay, no problem. Some day in the future we could morph from your visual cortex to my visual cortex and warp

the show appropriately. But the deeper problem is your experience would just be like a VR visual experience, which is different than you sharing your thoughts and emotions. For example, let's say a particular face comes into your dream. I'd see that face, but I wouldn't have any idea that to you, to face strikes terror, or maybe the face is someone you have a deep crush on, whereas I don't know who it is. To me, it's just the visual of two eyes and a nose and a mouth.

That's the difference between a purely visual facsimile on my visual cortex and my brain becoming your brain and.

mind to another. I mentioned in an episode a while ago this scene from the Matrix where Trinity says, tank, I need a program for a B two twelve helicopter and he the operator, finds one and loads one, and the knowledge is immediately present in her head. But the problem is that Trinity's new knowledge rests in a network of her old experiences. For example, pulling on the helicopter

stick is similar or to pulling on horses reins. And the only way to get at this and put that new knowledge in is if you knew every detail of Trinity's brain. But again, that's not even the deepest problem. The deepest problem is whether you could ever be two people at once. If you were able to figure out the mapping from your brain to someone else's brain so that you could somehow download his dream state into your head, you wouldn't be you anymore experiencing his dream You would

be someone else with no knowledge of you. And what's the point of that? Okay, so what we talked about so far is the possibility that becoming someone else is going to be impossible.

into someone else's experience. So as one example, we shrunk this vest down to a wristband, and then we had people wear the wristband on one hand and a smart watch on the other, and the smart watch tracks all kinds of things about their physiology, like their heart rate and heart rate variability and galvanic skin response. And we had that data stream from the watch over the Internet and into the wristband. So you are feeling a summarized

version of your physiological signals that are normally invisible. But that's not the really interesting part. The really interesting part was that we now put the wristband on someone else. Say you're a romantic partner, and now he or she can be across the country, but can be constantly feeling your physiology and know when you're stressed and when your heart rate is going up and your galvanic skin response is rising. Now, I'm not totally clear whether this would

be good or bad for couples. But it is a way of opening up a small channel into the experience of someone else. And I think there are many ways that adding new senses could bring you closer to someone else's experience. For example, someone who is born blind is

not able to understand what vision is. If you have a friend who's born blind and you say, yeah, I'm capturing photons from half a mile away, and I can perceive what's out there, and the person walking towards me from a distance, your friend.

a hearing and cited person. So I think as we get better at figuring out how to add senses directly to the brain, we can at least get closer to understanding the sensory experiences that other people may have. And I'll just mention that in an earlier episode, I've also talked about how flexible the brain is in terms of adding new interfaces for moving, like robotic arms that you

could control with your brain. The only point I want to make today is that by coming to have a different body, like let's say you're able to control a robotic trunk, you might be able to get closer to understanding what it is like to be another creature, like an elephant. Okay, so let's wrap up. We set out today chasing a timeless question. Can we ever truly know

what it is like to be someone else? Not just to guess or to empathize or imagine, but to be in their skin, to see through their eyes, to feel with their nervous system. Technology peases us with this dream, from the mind recording helmets of strange days to the dream sharing fantasies of tomorrow's celebrity subconscious. But the closer we approach the boundaries of another mind, the more we

find the self slipping through our fingers. To become someone else is to lose the very self who wants to know that, and we saw that consciousness is not a camera looking out, but a story being told from the inside, a model stitched together from prediction and memory and bodily anchoring. And that story can't be exported wholesale. It's inseparable from the teller. Now, movies try to do this. Directors try to jump into other heads with first person shots and

tilted frames and blinking eyelids and bouncing camera rigs. But even the cleverest cinematography can't breach the firewall of subjectivity. You can mimic a viewpoint, but not the viewing. You can borrow the eyes, but not the mind behind them. And so every attempt to simulate another's experience is like trying to paint a dream with a camera. The image may flicker with familiarity, but the feeling remains out of reach. Okay, but still, when we're trying to understand someone else, we

can build bridges. Maybe they're not full crossings, but they're footpaths. With wearable technology or shared biofeedback or sensory augmentation, we can inch closer, not to being one another, but to understanding one another a little more richly, And.