Antonio Damasio || Inside Consciousness

Antonio Dimasio. Doctor Demasio is an internationally recognized neuroscientist whose extensive research has shaped the understanding of neural systems and consciousness. With over one hundred journal articles and book chapters, he has earned many prestigious awards throughout his career. Currently, he serves as university professor, the David Dornzeif Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy and Director of the Brain Creativity Institute

at the University of Southern California. His books Descartes Erra, Looking First Notza Self, Comes to Mind, The Strange Order of Things and Feeling and Knowing have been published in translation and are taught in universities throughout the world. In this stimulating episode, I talked to Antonio Demasio about consciousness. People often think that the mind and consciousness are the

same thing. But doctor Demasio disputes this notion. He argues that it's the complex relationship of both our brains and bodies that makes sentient thought possible. Homeostatic feelings like hunger and pain developed before emotions, and along with it came consciousness. We also touch on the topics of perception, mental illness, evolution, panpsychism, AI and machine learning. So it's with great enthusiasm that I now bring you doctor Antonio Demasio. It's nice to

finally meet you. We have some mutual friends in common. I am dear friends with Mary Helen and Maardino Yang. Oh, very highly of view, and it's just yeah, she's having a beautiful career. She was I think the first person we appointed to the Brand Creativity Institute. Now seventeen years ago. Wow, time really does fly. Wow, that's how long ago you guys started that. I remember when you started the institute

and yeah, that's exactly it. Very exciting. Well, today I definitely want to discuss our mutual interest in the neuroscience of creativity. But I wanted to start off today's episode going back all the way back to nineteen eighty nine. One of my favorite papers of yours in the journal cognition called timelocked multi regional retroactivation. Now we're going to have to explain and unpack what in the world that

means to our general audience of listeners. But the reason why I wanted to double click on that because I think that was a really seminal paper. I hope you agree of modern day brain network systems research on consciousness. I see that as a really seminal sort of early ideas. So could you kind of unpack a little bit what

that paper showed. So we were interested in the idea that as you, as you manipulate knowledge, perceptions of every kind, different considerations that we make on what we're perceiving and what we are thinking about based on those perceptions on all of that needs to be stored in some way, and the storage, in all likelihood proceeds by creating arrangements of memories, of traces of all of those events near the places in the brain where they are formed to

begin with. So we have a number of portals into our brain that largely come out of the dominant perceptual systems, particularly of course the visual and the auditory, which clearly dominate in most individuals. And then all the other senses

that we know of. And what is interesting is that those the channeling of information from the sensory probs that are located in the periphery of our body and also the periphery of our nervous system and the central part of the nervous system, they all land in different parts of the brain, which is of course predictable, because we have a channel that goes, for example, from our eyes to a particular region of the cortex, which happens to be visual context, and then the place where the things

that you're hearing right now that I'm hearing of my own voice, they land in another place. And then out of those humps where information is being sent to you have the possibility of creating a sort of encircling where you have not only the immediate processing of what is

being channel at the moment. In this case, for example, I'm looking at your face and your bookcase behind you, You're listening to my voice and probably looking at whatever I have behind me, and so there's that early sensory processing.

But then all around there are structures that can actually take a part the information that is coming in and provide storage for that information, sometimes in a piecemeal form, sometimes in a whole holistic form, So you have the possibility of creating memories for what is being processed right now, and then, depending on how important those things are for your life, they may stay on as permanent memories and be transformed, or they may be just disposed of in

the course of life. And then what it's interesting too, is that most of the time our perceptions are not occurring in one modality only. So for example, right now, there is a visual perception that we're both having an auditory perception, but also lo and behold, we have the perception quote unquote of what is happening in our own body.

For example, if all of a sudden you would be you could be feeling hungry or thirsty, or you could have pain somewhere, that would be perceived as well, except that that would be arranged in a different kind of system. There is a cortical component to it too as well, but by and large it doesn't happen in the cortext that the most important parts they happen in the brainstem. They happen in the spinal cord. So you can have all of this fabrication of traces of things that are

happening to you, inside your body and around you. They go to specific points in the nervous system, not in one. It's very interesting as a parenthesis that very often people that don't know anything about the brain or about the mind studied in detail, can perfectly well believe that all of this is going into one great big tank, one great big sink, and it's all put together. But it isn't. It's all separated at birth. It's all separated and goes

into different points. And those different points where it occurs, they already are signed of a convergence of signals, and then from there they can go to another set of stations where further integration of the signals is done, and by again, the process of convergence of signaling is a little bit of a pyramid going into a point. And then eventually you can and have combinations of those different pyramids, of those different cooking points and create something that is

much larger. That's the great picture than I had for the convergence from multiple reagions. And then what is interesting is that eventually you can have a combination of facts. For example, right now I'm talking to you, I have my perception review. I know that I'm talking to you about this particular process, which is really a process of

learning and categorization and memory making. But I also know that I just talked to my assistant and we talked about a couple of specific things that I need to get done as soon as I'm done talking to you. And I'm also looking at a page from Corriela said, that's the paper where there is a review of my new book. And it's very good. How it says it's a lovely title, Body and Feeling the romance of Damasio.

I love it. I love it better than that. It's done by actually by a major measure Italian biologist anyway. So all of this stuff is being integrated. And what is interesting is that if next week you call me and you remind me of this session we're having, I could perfectly well remember not only parts of this conversation, but part of what I just told you about that

particular review that happens to be on my desk. So things have a way of being integrated by the time at which they're occurring, but also by the happenstance of being here at the right moment, And so things that

are not linked will be linked. Because at that time, in this case, the time in which I am talking to you, my eyes also fell on that page that was here on my desk actually just died anyway, So that's what I had in mind, and it has proven helpful to explain problems of memory as well as making normal memory, because we know that when you can damage one part of this system, you don't lose memory across

the board. You lose certain specific memories and memories of certain kinds, for example that may be more related to the visual system than another. Anyway, very complicated answer for a very complicated subject. Yeah, it's very complicated paper, you know. But the reason why I bring this up is because

I think it's extraordinary. It was a theoretical paper and it seems to have really modern day work, which is really focused on systems level and brain networks, has really borne out a lot of those ideas, if not all of those ideas. So I think it's kudos to you, kudos to you, Thank you very much. There's a sentence in that paper that I wanted a link to your

more modern work, and let me just read this. You rate meaning is reached by time locked multi regional retroactivation of widespread fragment records say that ten times really quickly. Only the latter records can become contents of consciousness. I found that a very fascinating two sentences for a number of reasons. One, there does seem to be something unique

about humans. Areniquely developed about humans in terms of our meaning making facilities, And I'd love to kind of get into what is the neural machinery and psychological process that allow us to do that, and why turtles can't do that for instance. Second of all that second sentence, only the latter records can become contents of consciousness. I wonder if you can pack that a little bit, because you go through a lot in your new book on the

distinction the crucial distinction between mind and consciousness. And so I'm linking the distinction of mind and consciousness, which you make so clearly now with that very complicated sentence that I just read from your nineteen eight nine paper. I hope you're okay with that linkage I made. I think it makes sense in my head. I think it makes

it makes perfect sense. Let's actually start with the things that pertain to the new book, because that may help unpack the older sentence and what I'm trying to do. The distinction between mind and consciousness is critical for a variety of first buying large people confuse the two. And you know, it says if creatures that are minded, be necessarily conscious, and the two things will go together and

could be interchangeable, And that's not the case. The same way. Actually, in our conversation yesterday by email, you mentioned something about your interests in covert processing in things that are not in fact in the mind, that I have to do with it with an intelligence that is capable that is not minded. And these are all different parts of this great big thing that we call or conscious minds, and

that include a lot about conscious process. So if you take simple creatures, I wouldn't start with turtles, but I would certain something even simple like bacteria or a variety of creatures with only a few cells and a humiliated cells.

Those creatures have no nervous system to begin with, and yet they are intelligent and capable within the niche of universe in which they operate, and they can perfectly well detect certain the presence or absence of something, which is really the form of perception quote unquote, not a perception like we have with detailed imaging exactly. Yeah, detecting and sensing a good words for that, except that very often they connote other things in the mind of people and

they can add to the confusion. But anyway, they can detect sense stuff, and they can with the machinery that they have, respond in a certain way that is consonant with what they detect. Now, that is an intelligence thing

to do. There's no question that it is adaptive and intelligent, and it is protecting them because they may detect something that they need, such as for example, food the food particle, or they may detect something that is potentially harmful, and that's good because it's going to protect their body and to allow them to live as long as their machine is meant for it to live genetically speaking. Now, so

that is intelligent, but not minded and not conscious. Now, when you turn to what we do at the other end, and what many other creatures do in between, we have not only the capacity to detect sense stuff, but then we also have the capacity to represent what we detect it and also represent ourselves as victims of the detection, and we have the capacity to know that all of

that relates to our unique argets. So these three tiers are very very important to separate, and unfortunately, in the minds of most people, this is one great big salad. And what I'm trying to do if you ask me what is the most important thing that I think I'm doing right now? In addition to explaining stuff that I'm passionate about, such as how you get to have a feeling, who is actually insisting on the separation? So you have a mind when you are capable of representing something that

you detected. And fortunately for us, we have the capacity to represent tons of things depending on the different sensory channels we have help things outside of our bodies and inside of our Then we have an intelligence provided we are capable of responding to things that are in our environment but not necessarily representing it. And then we are conscious when we connect the thing that we are mindful

of with our own organism. The beauty of consciousness is that, for example, I'm looking at you, I know that it's need looking at you. Why do I know that? Well, that's exactly the problem of consciousness. The image that you are helping generate in my brain is activating a variety of systems that are in my brain and body, and that connects the tool indelibly and in such a way that I have no doubt that it's me talking to you, Scott.

There's no question. That is what consciousness is about. It's about creating the not disputable fact that I am doing my perceptions and you are doing your perceptions, and the two channels of operation, and then the two kinds of operation are over the same type, but they are occurring in different organisms. Yeah, for sure. This is a really unique aspect of your theory of consciousness, which not everyone

in the field has this definition of consciousness. You know, there's a panpsychism is really hot right now, right the pan psychic people. Can I say that the pan psychic people, they wouldn't say it. You have to have that criteria of the organism being able to identify it with itself in order for it to be conscious. And this makes your work very unique and very influential. That you really

are arguing that there's a very important distinction. A lot of people in the field do not make this distinction. You know, we should make that clear. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, And I think that if you don't make those distinctions, I think you actually end up in the place that

led to pan psychism. I think there is a very good reason why pan psycheism myth the moment is popular, and there is an escape people that have come up against the wall of consciousness and then talk about such things as the heart problem of the impossible problem, I really abstracted in their view of what can be and as a result, as anything goes. But the psyche is helpful because well, you know, maybe the reason why you can't explain it easily is because it's everywhere and something

that's not inside us. It's really something that we capture from what's around us, which I find first no evidence for and second no way of testing, no way of doing an experiment that would cope with that. It's like strength theory. It's like strength theory and physics. But I think it. I can understand that I have sympathy for people that feel cornered and not capable of explaining it. But I am sympathy is one thing, and I'm not

in that camp. And there's one thing that we add because that you know, we really through your question where we sort of got to the top of the problem very quickly. But one thing that is extremely important for me is this Most of the things, probably everything that you read about consciousness or for that matter, about mind, always talks about the brain alone. You know, people said, we need to find out how the brain creates consciousness.

Excuse me, why just the brain? Why this insistent insistence on the fact that the nervous system and the nervous system alone is the creator of these things. I dispute that. I don't think it is. But you don't need to go to the surround spirits to find it. It's in your own body. The logical march here is from creatures that are alives, have bodies but don't have nervous systems, to creatures that, eventually our life have bodies and have

nervous systems. And minds and consciousness are ultimate the product of a particular relationship between the living organisms body and the nervous system in that body. It's not that the nervous system is plucked in putting this inside our bodies and flee inside our skull and charged with creating minds and creating consciousness. Not at all. I mean, of course, you cannot have mindset consciousness without a nervous system. The nervous system is there as a partner in the process

that can lead to better life regulation. The nervous system is a servant of homeostasies the same way that the body in general is a possessor of hondo static operations that will allow that organism, that living thing, to continue for an allotted amount of time. Well, it sounds like there are implications there for those who argue we might be able to upload our brain someday and continue our consciousness. It sounds like you're saying, Ah, that's not going to

be possible. You know, conscious is not only in the brain, right exactly, So consciousness by when you analyze what it really means to be conscious, when you come back to the thought that I advanced for you, which is that it's about knowing that I am here in my body, in this life, and that the things that I have in my mind, the representations I have, do not belong somewhere else, do not belong in another organ their might.

How do I know that their mind? Well, they know that their mind, because my nervous system is in constant interaction with the organism in which it is located and without which it could not live. It's not for people who are not as cognitive scientists. They're maybe listening to somewhere verization. There are a lot of technical terms are throwing around, But one implication I see from one of this as well, with the upholding of the brain, is that we may be able to uphold and replicate a mind,

but not consciousness. Well, I mean, maybe might not even be able to do the mind, But it seems like at the very best, maybe what we can do is just replicate Scott Berryer Kaufman's mind, but I'm never going to be able to identify it with the force. Could be sitting in a that of zero ones. You got it, and you've got it right, And that's exactly it. And

that's of course we don't need to go there. But that's exactly one of the problems a artificial intelligence right now is that you can with our current capabilities, we can have something like the contents of your mind in an artificial normal, living creature. If you're going to make

it conscious, that's another story. And for that it's almost an absurdity to think it could be conscious if it's not living, because the entire thing is, the entire notion of consciousness is right now, you can have similacra of consciousness. I have no problem with that. In fact, we have

a paper that you probably you may know about. The paper is in Nature Machine Intelligence on how you make this linkage between between a robot and a real body with minds and conscious capabilities, and it is a it's an interesting thing to discuss. That is very interesting, and we are shooting towards the top. I understand, I totally get. We haven't gone through all the steps yet, and of what is feeling what? I have a million other questions that we were supposed to talk about along the way

before we get here. But this is really interesting. So while we're here for a second, the idea of can we ever make feeling machines? Since since we're kind of talking about that right now, I would like to link that to the idea of why is feeling so essential to consciousness in your model? And how do you even define feeling? And then and then why not let's have fun, let's link that to or not we'll be able to create feeling machines as an implication of that. Okay, very good.

Just a little teaching point for people that are sort of cut in a little of these terms like feeling and emotion. Very often, when people think feeling or hear the word feeling, they immediately portray an emotion, and of course that's the beginning of disaster because the two things are in fact associated one of the time, but are

plenty of the time they're not. So we could start by saying this, what came first feelings or emotions, and in all likelihood feelings did, because feelings are in fact mental expressions of certain states of the organism to begin with, and to begin with that to add with, because when you have an emotional feeling, you are also dealing with

a state of your organisms. But let's start with feelings the way they likely begin in the history of life, and the feelings that must have been the first were what I call homeostatic feelings, and they occurred in creatures with nervous systems. That's very important to realize. And by the way, on once you remember the strong link that I have between feelings and consciousness, you again to have

this link between feeling and consciousness and nervous systems. You know, it doesn't make any sense to talk about it if they're non nervous systems. There don't need any feelings if you're nervous systems anyway, So what feeling, there's an aesthetic feelings first to give in an organism that is multicaluble and has nervous systems, is a sense actually a mental representation of something important that is happening in that body, such as, for example, being hungry or being thirsty, or

having pain or feeling damn good. Those are the fundamental I mean static feelings. Desire is too, but if you don't need to go there to earning, the monitor design its Valentine's Day today. Well, hold on, hold on, we're talking today Valentine's Day, folks, even though we're going to release this later, just so people know. Okay, So what is hunger telling you? You and only you. It's telling you that there's a good time to have sources of

energy brought into your body, and that's unlacking. And if you're thirsty, it's telling you something. And by the way, totally conscious right there, and then that's great consciousness first emergence. It's telling you, in no uncertain terms, this is lacking. You need this. Of course, it's not telling you in so many words. It doesn't use words. It does use the language of feeling with its spontaneous, natural occurring consciousness. And that's why I like to say that feelings were

the inaugural events of consciousness. One fine day, after lots of variations on the theme of organism regulation, this magic potion occurred within living organisms with nervous systems, and that was feeling. And it is so successful. It is so good at telling you immediately drink, eat, requil from an attack, do something because you're having pain and it's probably going to kill you, do something to prevent it or avoid it, or go to the doctor. All of those things were

extremely informational. They were giving you there and then useful information to maintain your life. There's no way you could have proceeded life in a comic to organism with multicided nervous system if you did not have that information. In other words, you went rapidly from five hundred million years ago.

You went rapidly from having organisms that are less than were lucky they would die to organisms that even if they were not lucky, they had enough information to do something useful about that life and to reduce the risk of depth. And that's this makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective and that's where I think consciousness began at

the level of feeling. Now, because you wanted me to say things about feeling for your listeners, then I will also say that the confusion with emotion is a problem because what developed in living creatures as emotions, which don't develop with humans developed before and of course are theatricals. There are certain kinds of expression that you can have in the body and in the face once you have

a face that is manipulable with different muscle groups. It's certain kinds of expressions that register something that is happening to you, something that is in the environment, some reaction that you have to others. Examples feeling an emotion of fear when you are recoiling from something that potentially may attack and which is accompanied by a feeling of fear. So this is where things get extremely complicated and people really need to think a little bit, because then it's

clear as daylight. When you are having the emotion of fear, your eyes bulge, you pull back and and blow and behold, your body changed. And because your body changed, those changes are what produced the feeling of fear. But the emotion itself is a set of actions by the way the word emotion etemologically it is perfect. It's about the Latin a motey. It's to move to the outside. You have its an actor studio. You know, you're just doing things. And by the way, if you have anger, do the

same thing. You know, it's it's a different sort of theatricals, but it's again represented in your in your body. And if you are terribly if you want to seduce somebody, you also do the corresponding theatricals. Then they also are felt because they are represented internally with your nervous system, and they can end up being your feeling, which is subject Emotions by themselves are not subjective. Emotions by themselves

are directed to the outside. Yeah, so there's something I'm trying to understand about in terms of the chicken and egg thing here and the way you described it, it was like emotions come first and then it influences your feelings. But you had said prior that the course of human evolution, feelings probably came first, exactly. So that's where you need to distinguish between the hoboesthetic and the emotional in the

proper set. So the things that came first were the agiostatic feelings, and probably the creatures that had homostatic feelings, if I would have to guess, and I wouldn't bet anything on it, but if I would have to guess, they did not have emotions. They had feelings because they were they were having representations, mental representations of the state of the body, their bodies, and that was the critical

issue here. That's why this has a logic, which is the logic of life and the logic of survival that came first because it was so important for that organism. When you start having emotions, it's at a point in which you have already some complex interactions with other beings, and those other beings can cross you and you get angry, or they can do something, or the environment can do something that threatens you and you get fear and so forth.

So it's a different stage, and it's actually more It reflects a greater complexity of the organism, although in the end they don't need to be more complex as phenomena, but they're they're reflecting something else. But all of this can end up felt, and felt simply means that you automatically know it's in you, it's in your organism, and that also means that you are automatically conscious. The two

things have to go. I hear what you're saying. I'm just trying to think this through my own personal life, because my gosh, you're right. We are such social humans, you know, the humans are such social beings, I should say. And there is a performative aspect to emotions, which I'm now thinking in my head, like, am I ever when I'm just having like an imagination of things, do I ever recoil in fear in the same way physically on the outside. I would look like if I was with

another person and we were both recounting the experience. I'm trying to do the experiment in my head to verify what you're saying scientifically, and it's yeah, you're right. I never really thought about that really. Yeah. So we may have feelings when we're lost in our own thoughts and when we're in touch with our own organism, so to speak. But there is something about emotions that is it seems like deeply social and yeah, it's fascinating. You're right, Oh,

I think it's absolutely social. For example, as you are communicating with me, your face has been you make it now several times by for example, a smile. You smiled when you were wondering if what I was saying is probably right, then you smile in consonants. But that is I don't think it's theatricals in the sense that it was totally deligrated by you. It's probably part of your repertoire emotional phenomenon when you communicate with others, because you

have been doing it all your life. If you have adjusted yourself to doing the same. Web Strene all sorts of things that would be of that kind, or for example, the way your face is on a couple of times already manifested doubt in relation to what I was saying, Oh, or being puzzled but puzzled in a way that was probably not positive, which is perfectly fine. But you will register or what you're doing right now with your you know the fact, and I said it's perfectly fine. You

reacted with laughter and quite behind exactly. But but that is it's all. It's part of the social interaction. You're you're doing it along with me in this social interaction. And this has very little to do with being hungry or being thirsty or being in pain. You know, those

are different things. Those are spontaneously occurring in relation to what your nervous system is getting in an interaction with its own body, or I'd like to say the opposite, it's the organism's own nervous system, because that's the way, that's the way it is, and it is. It's it's

completely different. But by the way, one thing, so that in case we end up because this is so interesting and we're doing in so many directions, so that I don't forget there's something fundamentally different about the perception of our body biour necal system and the perception of the outside world. So for example, right now I'm perceiving you, and I can look out and perceive the you know,

the cinemonical amounts. There's no way that the I can go interactively with the cinemonic amountains over with you, that's the level of the perceptual object. But with my body that happens. So if my body sends a signal from one particular point, say, for example, I actually I'm having pain in an act. Sorry to say, you're not aion anyway, And that's because I was moving books yesterday and the day before, and one of the times I carried too many books in one go and I twisted and I

have a pain. But it's interesting is that there are signals that are coming from the muscles that the muscle fibers that have been disrupted and from it torn, and they are going into the spinal cording in this case the brainstem, and then the central nervous system all the way up to the context, although in many cases don't need to, Okay. What it's interesting is that the signals come in and literally ascend in the nervous system. But the nervous system has the possible needed to respond to

the origin of the perception. So we have a cross stock between our body, it's non neural components, and the nervous system. The non neural components of the body talk to the nervous system, the nervous system talks back. One thing that it does that you experience constantly has to do with pain, or has to do it itch. For example, if you have an itch in your skin, skin is dry, itchy, Well, it's itchy for a bit. You can scratch it a

bit and you'll go, but then we'll come back. But then after a while, even if you don't do anything about it, it will go. And it will go because the samplever system is sending signals back to that place, doing at the local level chemical corrections of the environment so that the thing gets adjusted. So it's never the case that you have a body here and a nervous system here, Like I have my brain here and you

on the screen. There's no way that screen and you are going to do anything to my nervous system directly, whereas in the case of interception that happens all the time. So there's another fundamental way, which by the way, has been completely neglected by anybody that is doing theory on consciousness. With extremely rare exceptions, there's no way that you can

understand this phenomenon without technology and interception. That is, the perception of the interior quote unquote is different in its design, in its operation, from the perception of the outside work. Is that two things that are computly different. Now, of course, in our in our high functioning minds and brains, it

all works together very well. Yes, they are different, and that's those those differences that give you an entry into problems like consciousness and that you can explore and exploit to your advantage. For sure. I mean, if you're if you're a psychopath, you know, you can. Absolutely there's a real huge distinction between feelings and emotions, and if you're

an actor, there's a huge distinction. But it seems like in most people's everyday lives there there's a great feedback between the two that makes it more genuine, so to speak. In my view, there seems to be something different between the way I'm responding to you socially today, an actor would respond to you because I am feeling things that are correlated at a p less than point zero five level with the expression on my face, So it's not completely random, do you know what I mean? Absolutely, I

totally agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. And the connection to acting is only useful to bring home the point that certain things can be fabricated as a level of actions because they have to begin with actions. And of course, what we call a great actor is someone that can do those expressions so well that it looks spontaneous and

real as opposed to being fabricated by technique. Oh you know what, I would even go one step further and say, probably the best actors are those that have a really good congruence between a fabricated emotion and then the genuine experience that I totally agree, and I think and that actually speaks to the distinctions. For example, actor studio actors and non actor studio actors have that kind of different

they're good. It's such a talent, it's so amazing. I mean, I obviously can you learn that, But I do think that there's a certain talent component in there as well. And that's a fascinating question is what is that talent component? And it makes you good to that. I love thinking about the aberrations or the outliers to lots of this

kind of stuff. You know, we started thinking about things like schizophrenia, you know, and the way that those that mind is the different connection altered brain network connections in people's schizophrenia. Would you say that when they're having a psychotic episode that they're not let's say they're having a just associative episode where they're not identifying their contents of their mind with themselves. Would you argue that in those states,

schizophrenic patients are not conscious? Are your definition? Oh no, no, no no, no, I'm never never argue that. No. I think they are conscious because there is a there's something Scott said, something I want to tell you, because you're interested in this and also to your listeners. There's something very beautiful about feelings, whatever they are, there is the continuity.

Amnesthetic feelings have a continuity. That's something that while against somebody said, oh, so you talk about the amnosthetic feelings, and you say that aniosthetic feelings are the reason why you are conscious, and that you require them to be conscious spontaneously. Then but since I'm not hungry all the time, and I'm not harmy all the time, and I'm not thirsty all the time, and then what happens that when I become unconscious between my hunger and thirst episodes, And

I said, no, you're constantly feeling. You have this continuous feeling of being alive. I've called it several times, a feeling of existence, the feeling of being alive. If you meditate a little bit, if you just be quiet, you realize that there's something hammy in you which is being alive. Which, by the way, if you would not be alive, you would not notice it. Do you know that for sure? Are you sure? Do we know that for sure? No? I don't. I don't. I don't know that for sure.

I suspect strongly. Anyway, So this feeling of continuity is extremely important. So when you I have to tell you that I've not I've thought about feelings in psychiatric conditions. I've on purpose sort of avoided thinking about feelings in schizophrenia, but I've thought about them in depression, for example. And I think there's always a continuity, a feeling of existence and humming along because you are in this interaction between

the nervous system and the body, so it's inevitable. So you could say that the other feelings, the feelings of hunger, of thirst and so forth, are sort of if you plot it as a running graph, are things that come the crest on top of that hamming up and down feeling is constantly there on your monitor. That is the feeling of life, the feeling of existence. But as I understand your theory, feeling is a necessary but not sufficient

condition for consciousness. In order for consciouness to occur, there needs to be this real coordinated operation of being, feeling and knowing, And it does seem like incern schizophraic patients, the knowing part is not there. So that's why I ask you the very point of question. According to your definition, it seems like you would say that they're not conscious even though they're feeling. No, But I think that the way in which you're taking that combination being feeling and

knowing is not as literal as that. So, of course, I mean, what are the conditions You have to have a living organism. You have to have an organism that has a nervous system. You have the possibility of interactions of the nervous system and the rest of the body, and then you have the sort of bubbling up sense, which is a feeling that there is life ticking in there. The knowing. It's a very interesting question. Do you need

to be in addition to it being there spontaneously? No question is asked, do we need to have a reflection on I don't think so, And I think that what is failing in schizophrenia is that the level of a reflection on what is happening in that organism. Yeah, so the spontaneous feeling of existence is still there. It doesn't go away, but it's quite interesting. Yeah, I'm not letting this go. I'm not letting this go because it is very interesting. It brings raises a lot of interesting questions,

associative episodes. I'm going to I'm going to think very carefully about your question because of and I would send you an answer. Thank you. I really truly appreciate that this is this is what a good scholarly conversation is about. So we're modeling that right now. So wonderful, beautiful, Let's talk about creativity a little bit. You know, it's a topic we both love, and the neuroscience of creativity. I know you're very interested in complex emotions, things like the

bitter sweet. You know, my friend Susan Kane just wrote a whole book about this emotion, bitter sweet. But I know that you're really interested in mixed valence emotions and I'm absolutely namored with that as well. What's the role of these kinds of mixed emotions in helping us have more complex cognal process like creativity and meaning making? Fair question? Yeah, everything is fair, the it goes in the mix. You know, creativity is such an extraordinary and extraordinary field to look at.

I think that depending on you see it all depends

on what you're working on. If you're if you're writing literary sentences, or if you're making if you're making a painting or a sculpture, A very different different levels of operation, different complexities, and they all take that, they all exploit this amazing high level of consciousness that we have gotten to, which, by the way, is one of the reasons why people are so confused about consciousness and why it is so difficult to bring them down to the simple fact that

feelings us contaneous events in consciousness, because most of what people have been thinking and reading about creativity, about sorry about consciousness, has pulled them up and has taken them to not only high level consciousness, but to the consequences of higher level of consciousness in the form of the creative objects that are around us. So nobody ever started

looking at consciousness from the bottom up. People start looking at consciousness in the extended consciousness that we have when we have this sort of literary sense of the universe together with the science that is a company and creativity is so central to this. But again it sort of pushes you up where you have consequences of being conscious, but where the real operations are no longer in the domain of consciousness, but rather in the domain of knowledge

and creativity, in the domain of manipulation of knowledge. Now, of course, you couldn't manipulate that knowledge if you were not conscious to begin with, if you had not been so richly conscious that you gave to every little bit of knowledge that you have in your brain right now, you gave it the gift of consciousness, which really means you gave it the possibility of connecting with your life.

That's it. You're conscious, even if you're thinking you have just been listening to a particular passage of moths, are or Bach. Those are so incredibly complex in the way they were written or in the way they're being performed by a supersonoist, and that is only available to you if you can bring that that threat into your body and if you can connect it to the state of

your body. At that point, that's great consciousness occurs. But of course we have spent most of our lives thinking about it from the top at the level of extended consciousness, which is not even a good name. I told you I coined it, so it's not fair, but I don't like to use extending it's extended mind consciousness. Well, I completely agree with what you just said, and it links to my own work on reduced de latent inhibition and

creativity and creative achievement. Work I did in my dissertation where creative people tend to have this reduced threshold for that pregating mechanism for kind of allowing in some of that more sensory information and not tagging things as irrelevant. There's also work that obviously like people like Jordan Peterson and Shelley Carson as well. So I think that's more of a bottom up approach along the lines of what you're talking about, right, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, good,

very good. Yes, I got it very good from the famous Antonio Demasia. Yeah. You know. In another area of creativity that really am fascinated with, which I nerd out a lot with our mutual friend and colleague Mary Helen Imerdino Yang, is the default mode network. And I'm worry. I want to hear your thoughts about the default I just saw your emotion there on your face there when I said default mo network. What are your thoughts on that? And it's linkage to creativity. It's too early in the

morning for default network. I love that. I'm still out to sleep. You don't want to go there. Well, it does seem like the default mode network, which is a network of brain areas in the medial surface of the prefrontal cortex primarily that seems to support a lot of different forms of social cognition, imagination, mental time, travel, into the future, and as Mary hand Helen Imerdoyan has talked about it's connection to meaning making and how that could

potentially be connected to creativity. Do you, personally in your own work, do you do you see that as a central hub of creativity of the neuroscience of creativity. Assume you see it as a very important component of any important contributor. I don't know if I would call it the central hub, but something and important. Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely, you should talk about it. You know about it, I

know about it. Well. The thing that fascinates me about the defaultile network, and in relation to our conversation today, is that you can kind of to be poetic about it when you're jamming in the space of your default network, when you're improvising, when you're just in touch with the stream of your mind, not necessarily consciousness, but the mind, right, the stream of mind or we William James, you know called it. You called it the stream of consciously, he

called it. You should have called at the stream of mind. I just realized, I just realized that, but it seems like when we're jamming in the stream of our mind, great amazing creative things come out, you know, when you're doing jazz and provisation, when you're trying to again the state where you're doing poetry. So it does seem like consciousness is not conscious can even get the way sometimes of creative generation. It's could that that that's a perfectly

perfectly reasonable thought. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, maybe maybe you it might not be bad at certain points to sort of separate yourself from that hook, that from from the fangs of consciousness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe maybe maybe that's exactly you know, flights of poetic fancy are exactly moments in which you makes that link more tenuous about that. Yeah, And obviously we can't stay in that state all the

time twenty four to seven. Oh no, no no, it wouldn't be good for it wouldn't be See that that's another interesting call of it, because that it would move you away from the the really life saving consequences of being conscious, which basically have to do with the house management. You know, conscious is basically it's all about keeping keeping the thing going as well as possible. And there there's the flights of fancy that's in another in another sphere, another sphere.

Can I have a question. I know I will have to go very very soon, So can I ask you a question? Of course? Of course. So I'm really interested in pend cycles. I think it's interesting, but I don't. I'm very skeptical. Yeah you don't. You don't buy it. I'm skeptical of it. I haven't not bought it yet. I haven't either. I'm still thinking about whether I should buy it. But yeah, yeah, I'm skeptical. But some of my closest friends, you know, like Anka Harris in her

own right, she wrote a book and consciousness. She loves it. She loves it. Philip Golf, Philip Golf loves it. He'll tell he was on my podcast. He was extolling the merits of it. You know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. I know that people that are very much like as people that can think that there's there's nothing wrong with it other than being wrong. There's

nothing wrong with there's wrong if you fall for it forever. Well, I will say, uh, sort of ending here today, I really do see your the logic of what you've outlined and why consciousness seems to require the coordinated effort of these three called them systems in a way, these three elements of the body that interacting with each other in very unique ways. But this element that the nervous system

is an important part of it does have deepifications. We never answered the machine question, so maybe we should end on that one because we had that threads. That's a thread that's still open. Can we ever have filling machines? And you have argued in your book a new generation of filling machines can probably become efficacious assistance to really feeling humans as hybrids of natural and artificial creatures, no

less important. This new generation of machines would constitute a unique laboratory for the investigation of human behavior and mind in a variety of actual realistic settings. So that's exciting coming down the pipeline. And when we can start to meld fast computer processors with the nervous system so we can get the coordinated effort of the elements you talk about in a way that has like a super duper hyped up processing capability, that could be produce some interesting

forms of consciousness. Right, and you would have to have some kind of body aspect to it and knows you will need to mimic certain properties of a living organism in order to get to it with any hope of success. And right now we don't have that, but I think it's perfectly possible. Yeah, it's possible. And Todio, oh my man, thank you so much for this chat today. It really was delightful to talk to you. We should keep up the nerdy conversation. Very good anytime. I enjoyed talking to

you so much with your book. Okay, all right, take care you too. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page thus Pschology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well,

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