The New Science of Consciousness || Anil Seth

the show. Doctor Arnold Seth is the Professor of cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he's also co director of the Saker Center for Consciousness Science. His research has been supported by the European Research Council, the Welcome Trust, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Doctor Seth's twenty seventeen Mean Stage TED talk is one of the most popular science ted talks of all time,

with more than thirteen million views. His latest book, which has received numerous accolades, is called Being You, a New Science of Consciousness. In this episode, I talked to doctor Anil Seth about the new science of consciousness. Although we don't know exactly how or why consciousness exists. Doctor Seth thinks this shouldn't stop us from exploring its properties. One of the things he explores in his research is the

conditions for consciousness. He talks about a concept called perceptual diversity. He believes perceptual diversity exists and that we would be misguided to try and standardize consciousness on a single dimension for everyone. We also touch on the topics of intelligence, panpsychism, free will, AI, technology, and the afterlife. This was a really poignant episode for me and very informative. I've been willing to chat with doctor Seth for a really long time.

We have mutual friends in common, we have a mutual mentor doctor Nicholas Macintosh in common, and we really were in full geek out mode in this episode. So I think you'll really gain a lot from it and learn a lot about his roundbreaking research on the nature of consciousness. So that further ado I bring you Doctor Unill Seth. It's nice to finally meet you. We have a lot of you know, people in our in our circle, and

and lots of mutual interests. There are so many things we could talk about today, and I promise you will get to some of your most the things that are most pressing on your mind these days. Actually know, I know what things are most pressing on your mind these days, and we'll get to it. So have patience. We'll get there. But i'd great to start just a little bit more rudimentary if you don't mind for list, of course, buy more rudimentary. I'm going to ask you, what do you

think is the real hard problem of consciousness. That's what I mean by more rudimentary, the real hard problem with consciousness. That is actually a new one on me. I mean there's the hard problem and the easy problems, which David Chalmers is famous for coining these terms, and the real

problem is somewhere in the middle. So the heart problem, paneling David Chalmers, is the problem of how and why is it the case that any physical system system made of stuff, whether that stuff is neurons or whether that stuff might be silicon. Now, any kind of physical system could give rise the conscious experience, the cycled qualitia that the redness have read, the feeling of anything. How can

physical systems give rise to consciousness? The easy problems are all the problems in neuroscience of how the brain works as a physical system. How its inputs get transformed into outputs through complicated circuitry, and the intuition in dividing things up this way the gamers at any rate, is that solving all the easy problems of neuroscience, which of course

aren't easy at all. They're incredibly challenging to do. But even at the end of neuroscience, the hard problem would still seem as pristine and as mysterious as ever, This big explanatory gap would still be there between the physical and the experiential, the phenomenal, the consciousness. And I tend to resist this idea that you can cleave consciousness off as one big scary mystery from all the other problems

of neuroscience. The issue with the easier science would say it, maybe, but I think the issue is that we can still address many things about consciousness without necessarily facing the hard problem head on. I like to think of this analogy with life. It's not a perfect analogy, but I think it's illustrative. Which is, wasn't that long ago that biologists and chemist physicists of the day thought that life couldn't be explained in terms of physics and chemistry, in terms

of things happening in physical systems. There was this hard problem of life, and in search of an answer, people were proposing things like, well, there must be an immaterial spark of life on details something like that that breeds fire into physical systems to bring them to life. And of course that wasn't how things panned out in biology. People didn't find the spark of life. They instead didn't even look for it. They said, Okay, life exists, there

are living systems, they have various properties. Let's try and explain those properties. And as they did this, the hard problem of life baded away and it became less mysterious and eventually just disappeared. It was never solved directly. And I think the same strategy is what might work in consciousness. And that's what I coin or describe as the real problem of consciousness. Accept that consciousness exists, but instead of looking for the spark of consciousness, let's identify the various

properties that consciousness has. And these can be both functional properties what can we do and other creatures do in virtue of being conscious? But crucially they can also be experiential or the longer word phenomenological. Why visual experience is the way it is and different from an emotional experience, the things that really capture the experiential aspects of consciousness.

And as we can sort of explain those things why particular conscious experiences are the way they are and not some other way, then the hope is that this hard problem of consciousness will begin to fade away too. Whether it dissolves entirely in a puff of philosophical smoke or not, that's hard to say in advance. But rather than presuming one way or the other, I think we have to do the hard work of trying to build explanations about the properties of consciousness in terms of processes in the

brain and the body and see how far we get. Yeah. I like how you integrate lots of different areas of psychology and different way levels of analysis. That always seemed like the obviously right approach when when I look at just correlations between brain you know, quality and raining activations and and and kind of just stop there, and you know, and kind of triumphantly publishing your paper and saying we're done. You know that that never felt quite satisfying, never felt

deeply satisfying. I'm a cognitive scientist, but I'm also a humanistic psychologist, and these are two areas I've been trying to combine, which I have I just don't see combined and and I see a little glimmer of it in your book with you know, you bring in a sort of a humanistic appreciation of inner experience and understanding and trying to understand different ways that it can it can be to it can feel to be alive, different ways it can feel to be alive. And to me, that's

a humanistic approach. And I'm also a cognitive scientist, as are you. So I think we have lots to geek out on today. I'm glad to hear. I haven't heard the term humanistic psychologists before. But if it described what you just said, that an interest to focus in the lived experience of being a human being it is, then well then I think I agree, And I think there is this is the central question of understanding the nature

of how we experience the world and the self. Is the overlap of this N diagram, Then I guess between humanistic psychology and cognitive science. I mean I started out when I was an undergraduate studying experimental psychology in the

mid nineties. It was all very was a mixture of behavior isn't frankly still about just how we understand stimulus responses in rats and cognitive psychology, which at the time was very exciting, but it was all just boxes and arrows and the dominant metaphor of the brain as a computer and information processing happening. That was the basis for

all the cognitive functions like memory and attention. Consciousness was just not there, and I suppose the lived experience of being human wasn't there either, So yeah, I think where these things come together, that that is the bullseye of my interest certainly. Yeah, and I hear you, by the way, I mean, I actually am and trained in the British tradition of of psychometrics and experimental psychology. I did my experimental psychology degree at Cambridge. Studying with Nicholas McIntosh was

my way. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly the same. He was my advisor to wait, no, get out of here, yeah you stay. Yeah. He was at King's College, he was the head of king Psychology, right, and he was at King's College, and that was my college. So that's my college privilege. That was amazing. As an undergraduate, we had this incredible privilege of being shooated by one of the most eminent psychologists of the of the twentieth century, although who I lighted it had a very different use from

But I remember Nick Macintosh very very well. Yeah, what a guy. I had no idea that we had that connection in common, that was totally spontaneous. I not many people I could spontaneously say that we can bond over our wall of and appreciation and respect for Nichol's Macintosh. Yeah, he's He's been my main mentor in my life and

in psychology. And what is cool about him is I mean, he came from a very traditional British behaviorist tradition with rats, you know, and operant conditioning, But what I studied with him was intelligence and IQ testing and the nature of human intelligence and and so, you know, trying to think a lot about some of the themes in your book, and how I very much agreed with this notion that the royal route to understand consciousness is probably not going

to come simply through an understanding of information processing. I weok. I agreed with that one thousand percent. And that's probably because we're both the bulls by Nicolas Maagandize. That's so for you. I never thought of that possibility that indeed Macatinua, coming from a pre cognitive science era in many ways, was at least making us both implicitly aware that accepting

all information processing metaphor was not necessary. There've been psychology before it that could be psychology after it too, absolutely, and also just not reducing consciousness to IQ type processing, because we can make computers very easily to solve like IQ test type items, you know, like you can you know Patricia Carpenter who was one of my other mentors at CARNEGIMIL and like she easily showed that you can make computer solve the Ravens Advanced Progressive Metricy's test, you know,

like one of the gold standard measures of general and diligence. Not a big issue, not a big hard thing to do. But the question can you make computers conscious? You know? I mean it really does get the heart of what consciousness is. And you have a well, maybe I should ask you how do you conceptualize consciousness? Like what you what do you see as some of the necessary and some of the necessary we won't even say sufficient, but

what are some of the necessary features of consciousness? Of human human conscious Let's start with human consciousness I did jump into the AI deep end, but I didn't mean to do that yet. Now I'm glad you did. I'm sure. I'm sure we'll get back to that, because it does the way we define consciousness as very immediate implications for how we might think about the possibility of machine consciousness

or artificial intelligence is being conscious. But just stepping back then to the necessary components of consciousness, the humans at least, well, I think they're fairly minimal to describe. So this is this is the question of definition. And I've always been attracted by the definition that the philosopher Thomas Nagel uses when he says that for a conscious organism, whether this is a human or some other creature, it feels like something to be that organism, or rather, he says, there

is something it is like to be that organism. There's something it's like to be me, there's something it's like to be you, But there's nothing it is like to be a table or a chair or a laptop computer. And this definition is super simple, right, It's just there's some kind of experiencing going on for a conscious system. And it seems on the face of it that this is too rudimentary to ballistic, almost circular to be of

any use. But I think it's really useful because of what it leaves out It consciousness doesn't necessarily involve intelligence, at least not with human level intelligence. It doesn't necessarily involve any specific kind of behavior, doesn't necessarily involve language, It doesn't necessarily involve any particular function that we might

describe as cognitive. It's just the presence of raw experience. Now, what the necessary conditions are in the stuff under the hood in terms of brain mechanisms and processes, well, that's still an open question. But just defining consciousness of that minimally in terms of any kind of experience going on at all, I think that's a helpful place to start, but that we don't get driven down avenues that seem

more appealing because they're easy to study. It's tempting to associate consciousness with intelligence because, as you said with Nick Macintosh, we can write down various criteria for what intelligence consists in at least for humans, and we can define it functionally in terms of what systems do. And it's also tempting because of this residual human exceptionalism that I think Bill hard to get away from. This is the idea that, yeah, we're humans, we're special with at the center of everything,

and we're intelligent. We have this this fantastic generalized intelligence, and so surely that must be associated with this other really special thing, precious thing for us, which is being conscious. And over history people have often used intelligence as a proxy for consciousness, and I think that's it's a real mistake. They're both fascinating, they're both very interesting, they're both actually quite poorly defined, but they're absolutely not the same thing.

I'm getting a little bit of a pant psychism vibe from you as you say that. Do you are you like a big Are you a proponent of pant psychism? Oh? No, I don't think panpsychists see me as a particular ally. I think there's a lot of middle ground between not being sort of a human chauvinist but consciousness and being panpsychist. I don't find pan psychism very appealing at all. I think I just I think that it's an easy, kind

of an easy out to the hard problem. If you're struggling to explain how it is that consciousness can be identical to or emerged from, material stuff, then well, of course you can just say, well, we don't have to explain that, because it's everywhere, in everything, ubiquitous and fundamental. But it doesn't really explain anything when you do that.

It's I think an idea or a philosophical perspective in this area, or in any area of science, really is not judged so much by whether it's demonstrably right or wrong, because very few are. I mean, you can't prove pan psycheism right or wrong. You can't prove materialism right or wrong. But to take out belief out of the philosopher of science Inrey Lacotoche, he would evaluate programs based on how productive they are. It does a particular view generate testible

hypotheses that shed light on the phenomenon in question. And here I think materialism has many resources to help us understand consciousness. I mean, this is the whole hope and agenda of this real problem approach, and of many other neuroscientists as well, who might not agree with the exact details of what I suggest, but broadly the idea that materialism can shed light on consciousness, whereas panpsychism just doesn't

do this. It doesn't lead to any novel testable experiments, at least I haven't heard of any yet, and I can't quite see how it would because you take panpsychism really seriously, at least some of the most the nest expressions of it. And here I'm thinking about people like Philip Gough, who's I've argued with many times about panpsychism. Yeah, he will say that that consciousness, in his view of panpsychism, is the intrinsic nature of things, and it's not really

observable in any interactions between things. Yeah, and if it's not going to make any difference to anything that actually happens by definition, then it's you're just bootstrapping it away from any kind of testability or explanatory power. So no, I'm definitely not not a I'm not a great proponent of pansychism. It's safe to say, Yeah, I take that intuition back then, Yeah, because I mean you clearly in

your book argued correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like you really believe life is a necessary condition for a consciousness. You know that almost sense I get? Yeah, Yeah, I struck this was very interesting for me part of writing the book and just the evolution of how I've been thinking over the last ten years or so. I didn't set out with the idea that life would be so central, And it's kind of interesting when the experiments and the theories they lead you to somewhere where you

don't expect to go at the beginning. Doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It just means that it's like, oh, hey, you know, this is interesting. This wasn't something that I just assumed beforehand. So the whole trajectory of ideas has led me to recognize a very intimate relationship between life and consciousness. And the more that relationship becomes fleshed out, which is kind of a strange metaphor. The more it becomes fleshed out, I think, the less appealing the information

processing metaphor becomes. You can sort of see how it might be life rather than information processing that bridges this gap between the material and the phenomenlogical. But I'm still a bit cautious about how far to make claims for that relationship. So there is a version, or the equivalent rather of panzygism for this view would be biopsychism, and biopsychism is the view that everything that is alive is also conscious consciousness just is a ubiquitous property of living systems.

I think that's going too far. It may be true, but I don't see a reason to believe that. Then there's the weaker position, which is biological naturalism what you just said, which is that life is necessary. Everything that is conscious is alive, but not sufficient, but not sufficient. And I'm tented by that, but I'm still you know,

I'm still I still wonder. What I definitely think is the case, is that an understanding of consciousness as it's expressed in humans and other animals absolutely relies on looking at it through the lens of our nature as living systems, and that our nature's living systems shapes our conscious experiences at all levels. Let's see how far understanding neural activations can get us in answering some of those deep questions.

So there's a lot of debate in the field, as you know, about which are the most essential bits of the brain for consciousness. I mean, it's just all over the point. Everyone. It seems like almost every neuroscientist has their own favorite, you know, Like some people are like, it's the brainstem. My friend Daniel Bohr at University of Cambridge is like it's the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. I don't know if you read his book The Ravenous Brain

by any chance. Yeah, No, Dan's a good friend of mine. In fact, question too. Yeah, there's another one. All right. So Dan was a post ug with me for a while many years ago, and yes, of course now he's the independent researcher for a long time. I read his book in the early early days. It's great. Actually, it's been around for a while. We wrote a paper together once actually about the neural correlative consciousness, exploring the more

frontal parietal view. But what's fascinating to me is indeed, like out there there's the full range. I mean, there are people, as you say, like Mark Sims, who argue for the sufficient basis for consciousness being pretty much in the brain stem all the way to the advocates that that has made me in the prefrontal cortex. And then

you've got range. You got the range. Yeah. So I'm just trying to I'm just trying to like just explore with the where all that, where we're at right now, where it takes us in understanding it, you know, we that's why I think we're at the end of the day, both of us really think we need to we need to go past this. We need to have lots of other levels of analysis to integrate here, to really get

to a deeper understanding. But I mean, one area of the brain that I don't think has received as much love in understanding consciousness is the default mode brain network. And that's an area of the brain I've been studying which gives us a sense of self, you know, gives us our set. You know, this gets the heart of a lot of what you talk about in your book.

You know. It gives us a sort of sense that there's a meaning, a continuity of meaning in ourself that we draw on our episodic memories for and we imagine the future self, you know, to draw on in order to imagine a future self. And well, I'm just wondering if you've thought much about the importance of the default mode network for for human consciousness, not as much as

I probably should have. I've always been a little suspicious of the amount of weight the default mode network is supposed to carry when it comes to explaining things, because it's sort of it's just what you observe. Of course, spirically fascinating story. Right, It was observed in the bits in between when people were doing the real things they were supposed to be doing, when they were just resting

and their mind was wandering. So you see this correlated activity between regions that's happening in these interstices between tasks, between activities, and this is fascinating. I think there's a lot more to the self than can be accounted for by this activity that is default mode, so to speak. There is super interesting work that I'm sure you know more about than me that can tie this sort of activity to mind wandering, to this inner narrative, which is

certainly important when it comes to the self. But then there are so many other aspects of sealth that I think are easier to take for granted because they might not be so obvious as the voice in their head

that are just as significant. And these range from experiences of the body the body is an object in the world, and the body from within with its emotions and moods, and back to the life thing, just the core experience of being a living organism, which I think is really difficult to describe, but maybe that's the bedrock of experiences of self. Note to things like first person perspective and free will, experiences of agency and volition, and then experiences

of being part of a social network. All these different elements of self are likely to rely to different degrees on many different parts of the brain. I mean, we have things like the limbic system, the intul the core text for the body. We have the temperate parietal junction for first person perspective, we have prefrontal cortex for metacognition, and perhaps the more social elements of self. So trying to find where in the brain the self is, I

think is just doomed to failure. And I have not focused that much, probably because my career just has not involved that much brain imaging, certainly not that much fMRI, which is the kind of brain imaging that tempts you to make claims about localization. I'm much more interested in processes rather than specific locations. And the whole idea that I leverage to try and explain properties of consciousness in terms of brain mechanisms is this idea of the predictive brain.

The brain is a prediction machine. And that's more a claim about the type of process, the type of computation, at least type of thing we would describe in computational languages that's going on, rather than a claim about exactly where all this is happening, because I think that's probably quite fluid, quite changing, ending on what's happening in one's conscious field at any particular point. Well, that's a really

good segue into the notion of perceptual diversity. You know what you just said, and I know that's really on your mind a lot these days. Look, this is really interesting because I've spent my career arguing for neurodiversity, and I'm really big in the neudiversity movement in schools as

well and helping support kids who think differently. You have one sentence in your whole book where you give a head nod to neurodiversity, and you say, well, that movement is focused on more atypical or abnormal manifestations, but certainly, you know, we can, we can look at perceptual variations among everyone in the population. Why don't we today, Let's

let's bridge these two fields, let's integrate them. Let's not treat them as though they're well, they're both different ends of a continuum, but they're both on the same continuum. I think in an important way. You know, we all differ in our perceptual diversity, and the idea that there are neurotypical people has always bothered me. That that phrase, you know, as though like, oh, they wouldn't understand they're neurotypical.

I never liked that in the neurodiversity movement. So I feel like, Yeah, something we can do here today that that will be unique. I think that would be great because the more I've talked about perceptual diversity, I think there has been potential of confusion about terminology and agendas between people arguing for neurodiversity or arguing about the implications of it and so on. So yeah, let's do that. I mean, I totally agree with you that we all differ.

And the way I've tended to think of things is that there's distributions which can be just a long a spectrum, and we think of things like the normal distribution, the Galuxian distribution. There's more more stuff is going on in the middle than at the extremes or the edges, but

the edges are easier to notice. And so, as far as I've understood, the history of the neurodiversity movement really came about through a recognition of some of these these edges, so conditions like autism, it was realized, Okay, there's a very different way of encountering the world here. It's not necessarily a worse way, a less accurate way. It's a different way, and in the way society is structured. It it comes with challenges. You don't realize that these ways

are as different as they might be. But a focus on these tales of the distribution, all these these these

expressions of diversity that become noticeable. Ironically, that's reinforced the view that you and I agree is problematic, which is that there is a neurotypical, single neurotypical alternative, and that if you don't associate with a neurodivergen condition, that you're neurotypical, you see the world as it is, you hear the world as it is, and that under sells that the fact that we are all different, we're all mist perceiving,

we're almost perceiving, and we're almost perceiving ourselves and the world. But because of two things, we fail to recognize this. One thing is that the differences might not be very large, So most of us don't differ that much in height, and it usually doesn't make a difference. But at least we can see how different people are in height, but we can't directly see or experience what it's like to

have somebody else's experience. Though these smaller differences, even if they exist, they are they're not visible to us, and they may not matter that much, and they don't surface into our language and our behavior unless they get beyond some sort of threshold. And the second reason is more subtle, but equally significant, I think, which is that our experience of the world has the character that it's just revealing objective reality as it is. I look out there, I

see the world. It doesn't seem to me that the way I'm experiencing it is dependent on my brain, even though it is so. This kind of naive realism of our daily experience, coupled with the fact that differences may not be large enough to surface into behavior, I think, together causes to overlook the diversity that exists between all of us, and of which neurodiversity is a part, and

probably the part that deserves the most attention. But I'd argue that to give it the attention it deserves, we really need to understand the nature of diversity across the whole distribution between all of us. I agree one thousand percent. And you've really put words to something that has bothered me about the NEU diversity movement for a long time. And I couldn't be more on board with your project, and I want to contribute to it. I want to do studies and help you. I want to be part

of this movement that you're doing. The idea that we underestimate the extent to which seemingly small perceptual differences matter, I could agree more. I think we do underestimate of

what I just said. I think we underestimate the extent to which small perceptual differences can over time, you know, maybe not in particular moments, but over time can lead to tremendous differences in political outlooks, can lead to tremendous differences and worldview differences in it can cause wars, can cause I mean this is it can lead to very important outcomes, different differentials. That's potentially true. I think it's very hard to demonstrate that, but I think the dynamics

of that kind of processor are just there. And I've sometimes used the idea that just as we live in social media echo chambers, where we think the way the world is is just just is according to our beliefs, and we don't encounter information that challenges that. We also live in perceptual echo chambers. You know, we see the world in one way and we assume that's the way the world is. And of course there's this fluid boundary

between perception and belief. We know that. You know, in cognitive science, now this whole idea that cognition is completely separate from perception is just not really true. I mean, there's plenty of examples of cognition perception affecting each other. So it may well be that literally perceiving things one way can lead to eventually believing things that particular way.

And how do you counter that kind of dynamic. Well, the first step is to of course realize that it's going on, and in the biggest danger of social media echo chambers is not to realize that you live within one and to mistake whatever news channel you watch for being impartial, objective, fully accurate. And the same goes for our perceptual habits. If we just go along with the naive realism that our experience presents, that Okay, the way

I see it is the way things are. Then it's really really hard to appreciate that people might experience things

differently and perhaps then believe things differently. There is I think social and political value in this project of understanding perceptual diversity, because it can cultivate a nascent humility about the way each of us might encounter our own worlds through our experience, and that humility, I think it's a valuable it's a valuable recognition that can help us build platforms for empathy, for communication, whether it's with people with

neurodiverse conditions or whether it's with people who mean to believe very different things. And we are trying to do this. So it became clear thinking along these lines that there's quite a lot of work in psychology which looks at individual differences in one or two different things, like people might differ in their vividness of their mental imagery, and there's a lot of research about that, or about let's say, synesthes with Macintosh. Really that's amazing, so many connections and

sex differences and sex differences in there. Okay, okay, but there's not a whole lot out there that tells us about perceptual diversity in general, and what are the underlying factors like in your work with Macintosh, and there was a lot of the intelligence literature was about trying to find underlying factors that explain sort of intelligence in different domains as far as I understand that area. So the

same thing might happen with perception. Are there underlying factors that might be traits that we have label traits that explain different ways of perceiving the world, whether it's in imagery or color perception, or time perception, or emotions or sound music. Though we have this project called the Perception Census, which is an online project. It's just a series of interactive illusions and little experiments that people can do come back to that are designed to tease out these dimensions

of variation, to map out. But really, this first time I think, with this breadthon scale, what this hidden landscape of innodiversity really looks like. And I'm excited about this. I don't think anyone's tried to do this before. We have ten different sections, each looking at different types of perception, with about more than fifty little demonstrations and tests in total,

all exploring different aspects of perception. And we've already had more than twenty thousand people take part from more than one hundred different countries. And people taking part, I mean they contribute massively to the data, but they also learn about their own powers of perception too, and it is fun to do and educational, so that's good. So we still are in the data collection phase. We still are waiting to see what the world looks like from this

point of view. So if any of your listeners want to help us along this journey, then please do give the Perception Census a go. It's easy to find. You can just find it on my website analyst dot com or we'll just looked at Perception Census. But it'd be wonderful to get more people taking part. This is wonderfully exciting.

Earlier in my career when I went full on on the job market, but my personal statement argued that the field of cognitive science needs to integrate with the field of individual differences research, because that seemed to me like a huge, huge missing integration in the field of psychology, like those two fields just didn't talk to each other.

My PhD dissertation was taking all these cognitive science and plus it learning tasks and trying to ask the question are there individual differences and all these ways of processing information non consciously? And that was work I partly did with Nick McIntosh and partly did with Jeremy Gray at Yale. But it just feels like, what did you find? What

did you find? I found there are absolutely reliable and predictive individual differences in all these cognitive science and PUS and learning tasks, not all of them, I didn't mean all them, and in some of them. I have a whole appendix of my dissertation of the ones where there aren't like artificial uh AG learning, And we really didn't as much as Reber. Actually that's in line with with Arthur Rieber's aybotsis so there shouldn't be evolution should not

have put much individual differences in that. But we found like serial reaction time learning, for instance, predicted openness to experience the personality trait. But I just want to urge you in your research to to open the door to including the link between perceptual variability or perceptual diversity and personality variability, because I think that's a really area that's ripe that I wanted, that I desperately wanted to, you know, in my I wanted the field to pay more attention

to that's fascinating. I will definitely do that. I must admit the whole personality area is not something I know anything about. I think we include some questionnaires that might address this a little bit, but I know it's not been a big focus of our work there. But yeah, it should be. And I think, by the way, I think you're absolutely right. You're definitely ahead of the game on recognizing a need to integrate these two areas because it's a bit of a it's a bit of a

strange thing if you think about it now. On the one hand, most psychology experiments that of studying unfunction, whether it's simplicit learning or attention or whatever it might be, typically in practice will take a group of people or usually psychology students, and an average over them so that you get one one finding, treating them as implicitly you know all the same or as or as stochastic variations on a single thing, just as you know this as

in statistics, you can if the if the variation is random, you can add things together you get a better estimate. That's how statistics works. But that there's that aspect which is which is making the explicit assumption that individual variance doesn't matter, right, that it's noise on the distribution. And on the other hand, you've you've got individual differences, which makes entirely the opposite assumption of the course. The challenge is that to do individual difference research you need to

sample diverse populations and you need large numbers. But that's that's just a methodological challenge. There's no conceptual problem with marrying these two things. I mean, the Perception Census project has been very challenging logistically and to get this scale that that we need. But it's yeah, it's not it's not like building the James Web telescope. It's it's quite

possible to do. And psychology, i think, is a feel. Yeah, there's elements of it that can benefit from a more big science approach, from doing things with many groups at scale. It's it's not enough to just rely on individual, single experiments done in small groups anymore. Well, I agree. There there's so many deep implications of your project, and it's

exciting to be able to just talk it through. One obvious big implication is is this notion that there is the the mad let's say, the special source of consciousness. The whole idea that that that we can measure the extent and standardized the extent to which this person's more conscious than this person. I just think kind of doesn't make sense in your world where we start to look at more perceptual areas of diversity, or maybe it makes

sense just to a different level of analysis. I think there's just some really deep implications of your work on perceptual diversity for recognizing that different people may have different perceptual and conscious experiences, but it doesn't make one person's conscious experience any less conscious than another person in some sort of standardized way. Like what does it mean to

put everyone on the same metric? Like when we put everyone in the same metric of IQ, and we say, and we would just measure deviations of intelligence based on one number that a lot of intelligence researchers have rightly point out, Like one of my mentors, Robert Sternberg cas rightly point out, well, you know that, like that really doesn't show the full complexity of intelligence. By doing that,

could you make an analogous argument with consciousness? You know that by comparing everyone to a singular metric or number, we're not doing the very variety of consciousness justice, I think you might well do that. It's a pleasant myth, isn't it that you might have this single scale right for a property that seems a little bit mysterious. And

sometimes that's worked. And I often have been thinking, especially when I was writing the book, it was much in my mind about this distinction in the history of science between how heat became understandable and how life became understandable. Because with heat, now there you really do have something for which measurement was absolutely critical, and which, when reliable measurements were possible, he became expressible along as single dimension

and was fully accounted for. Or in terms of that in a mean molecular kinetic energy of whatever it is, that just is heat. And when we say something is two hundred and eighty six degrees Calvin, I mean there's no other dimensions to worry about when it comes to heat. That's it. That's a full explanation. Now will this apply to consciousness? So some theories I don't necessarily think have explicitly made that claim directly, but used that as a

sort of starting point. And of course it is omption well, and it may be a useful heuristic because there is a sort of global difference between losing consciousness entirety in general anesthesia, maybe being a little bit conscious in drowsiness or in light sleep, and being fully awake and aware. So it intuitively makes sense that there's some some level of globality, but it seems ambitious to think that's the whole thing, in the same way that temperature is the

whole thing heat. But as a starting point, you know, you can begin to build very very early measures of global conscious level based on this idea, and we've done some of that work too. It's a measures of brain complexity or brain entropy that track conscious level in a very sort of coarse grained way. But then if you look in more detail and you realize, okay, actually global levels of consciousness are not just on a single dimension.

Being drowsy is different from being let's say, in a trance state, and there's being in a psychedelic state, and there's being in a vegetative state, and there are all kinds of dimensions. The philosopher Tim Bain and with the neurologist Adrian Owen, you know, both colleagues published a very nice paper a few years ago now which try to identify the different global dimensions of consciousness and argued that a given consciousntate it cannot be reduced to a single dimension.

It must be along it's best captured along many dimensions, and even fi even the quantity you alluded to earlier from integration integrated information theory. Yes, there there is a single number, but in the more recent versions of integrated information, what matters most is really the shape underneath that big number. There's this idea of a whole structure in this space, which they call cause effect space, and that determines the kind of consciousness, with the overall level being part of

that story. But that's the theory that's among the current crop of theories of consciousness that to me is still most similar to the heat perspective, because it really does say this amount of five, you know, this amount of of irreducible integrated information, then such and such amount of consciousness, And there's an identity relationship between them too, in the same way there's an identity relationship between molecular kinetic energy

and heat. But yeah, I think I find myself more attracted to the view that this idea of a global level is a good starting point and there are some globally useful distinctions like anesthesia and waking consciousness, but that it's more multi dimensional, and that again is a feature that's shared with life. Like life, you don't measure how much life something has. But that doesn't mean biology is any less scientific than the thermodynamics or the physics of temperature.

Life is not the kind of thing that is measured on a single scale. And that's fine. That's just the kind of thing life is. And I suspect consciousness maybe more like life than like temperature. In this respect, I suspect the same thing. Lots of lots of implications. You know, there's a big push, especially in America for diversity and inclusion. And I mean it's not like the diversity inclusion movements talking about perceptual diversity. There. They're not. They're not in

their meeting their their their meetings. They're not like, let's look at the latest research on neuroscience and see and and I just I love just integrating all sorts of different areas of life. Something. An argument I've been trying to make is that I don't understand why the the the inclusion diversity movement is so skin deep. You know, like even the neurodiversity movements not a part of it. I'd never understand. I don't understand, Like, what's why is it?

Why are we just focusing on sexual and gender identity and and race. Do you think that there are going to show differences in or have you looked at demographics showing perceptual diversity differences that map onto different race or do you think it's just it's gonna We're gonna find it transcends race and gender and those are not the most important con structs to understand perceptual diversity. Have you

thought about that at all? I've thought about it. I mean, we are collecting some demographics which we'll be able to shed some light on these kinds of questions. We haven't looked at I should say we haven't looked at the data yet. So we're trying to be good methodological scientists about this and not peak at the data until we've finished collecting it and have decided what the hypothesis are going to test that we don't just do sort of digging around in it. But yeah, we could look at that.

And my suspicion is that you know, you've always find differences if you divide a population into two by some criteria, you'll probably find a difference. Is the question is is

that a meaningful difference. It's like the the gender difference or the sex difference, things that people are always asking, is there a difference between men and women when it comes to X, And you can probably say, well, there usually is a difference, but you'll find much more variance within men and within than in general between though its predictive and explanatory value is often not very apparent, and

is of course very open to being politicized. While I'm interested in it, I'm not sort of aggressively going after looking for differences that associate with these kinds of differences in race, in culture and so on. But do you think it's interruing? I mean, for instance, language I think would be a very fascinating thing to look at. I mean, there's a whole story about the extent of which language influences perception that the Sapia wolf hypothesis as which was

name checked brilliantly I thought in the film Arrival. I was so glad that they actually used the name the Sapa Wolf hypothesis and the dialogue, which is of course about these teptopod like creatures and how language affected their you know, the way in which they experienced time. This beautiful film, so that for me is a very rich terrain to look at. There may be other differences to I don't know. I also agree that this whole EDI emphasis should be much more than skin deep and should

definitely consider perceptual and neural diversity. And here the other thing about neurodiversity that I remember from the bounding principles of it was the analogy with biodiversity. It's not this is not something that we should look at as a feature of the way the world is that we need to cater for somehow, But it's fundamental to the richness

of society. Just as an ecosystem needs a diversity of plants and of species within it to flourish, though society needs a diversity of ways was perceiving too to flourish. But I'd like to see I mean, I speak as somebody with brown skin, which is an interesting to be in these EDI communities, because you know, I have a kind of countable diversity. But for me, you know, that's

that's less it's certainly not very relevant. And differences in perception between people might be much more relevant than the fact that I've got brown skin. Look, I hear you, there's something that really feels incomplete to me about it is, no matter how well intentioned it is. You know that this big push in America to only look at those

super I think, superficial characteristics of a human right. I think the first step in any discussion of diversity, of course, has to be understanding how that diversity is expressed and how it's actually manifest. Unless you know that it's there, you can't do anything about it or do anything with it, either positive or negative. But yeah, that's that's a good motivation to keep doing what we're doing, I hope, and

looking looking at what perceptual diversity is are. But by the way, I should say that that you know, this is a big project. I don't want to give the impression that it's just my little group doing and we're collaborating with the philosopher in Glasgow, Fiona Macpherson, who's been

brilliant co lead on this project. Really because these things have as well as implications in the two of mentioning, there's a lot of philosophy going on here as well in terms of how do we how do we phrase these things, how do we how do we understand the relationship between perception and illusion and hallucination. And we're also

surveying people's implicit philosophical beliefs too. I think there's going to be some interesting variants there about the extent to which people have maybe unexamined philosophical ideas about perception and about the relationship between perception and objective reality that we'll also be fascinating in and of itself, but also maybe in relation to other aspects of perception, because that's what our project, I think, really enables, which is where the

power is, which is not just looking at different aspects of perception and belief separately, but looking at them all together, that we can see what goes with what factor is underlie them, what's the sort of structure of the latent space of our perceptual differences. That's what I'm excited to uncover. You may want to look at Jered Clifton's work on primals come across it at all, but he's tried to look at different ways that people have world views or

think the world is. You know, the world is dangerous, you know the world is safe, The world isn't tasting, the world is exciting. He's kind of come up with a whole list of all these kind of primals and how that influences how one lives one's life, how one lives one's life, how one one's politics. It might be really interesting to link up perceptual diversity with worldview diversity. Of these Thank you, Yeah, really really great stuff. I'd be remiss if we didn't discuss free will at all.

And it's just a topic that I think both of us agree, uh is can get really irrelevant at a certain point some something, you know, like people are debating and arguing about things that don't really matter for to most humans living their lives, who are trying to do better in the world, you know, from where they were before. They're trying to reach their goals. They're trying to have this sense of agency. This the whole thing when it gets co opted by the thing. Do we have magical

free will? We don't have magical free will. I think that's kind of like a red herring in a lot of ways from what people really really care about. Your approach to I like your approach to it. You kind of say that free will even consciousness, even the self. It's not the right question asking is are they illusions? Because you argue they're all perceptions. Well, I think that's a nice way to sidestep a lot of the debate, the aspects of the debate that I don't really think

matter to most people. Do you agree, well, I agree with myself. Yes, And since you agree with this, that does not surprising. But you put it, yeah, you summarized it very, very beautifully. I think the most productive way to think about free will is as a variety of perception, and thinking that this way just rapidly dissolves a lot

of the things that cause people confusion. The thing about free will, I think the reason it creates so much confusion is that it brings together a number of independently confusing things. On the one hand, we have this idea about whether the universe is deterministic or whether it's stochastic, with chance playing a role noisy things happening. Then there's the nature of free will as a conscious experience and

it does it have causal influence on the world? What role do our conscious experiences of free will play in making things happen? And then there's the interaction with politics and law. When do we hold people responsible for their actions? Is it ever right punish somebody for some transgression? And free will just takes all these controversial issues and boils them all up together in some sort of massive, unpleasant due of confusion. And it's no surprise that it generally

tastes pretty bad. So to try and strip away that confusion, I think the starting point, you can think of it as a kind of psychological null hypothesis, is that, Okay, everything that we experience is a kind of perception. Let's try to refute that null hypothesis or or does that stand? And I think it kind of stands. Because the kind of free will that we want to find a place

for in our explanations of brain, mind and consciousness. Isn't this magical free will or that I call it in the book, I think spooky free will, this kind of free will that swoops in and changes the course of physical events in the universe, a kind of uncaused cause from our Cartesian ghost that just swerves the universe in

a different direction. I mean, that's the kind of free will that requires us to give up the law of cause and effect, that just we don't even need because to have it is to reinstate this kind of all knowing cartesian dualistic soul that knows what to do and exactly how to get it done. I mean, that's one thing we left behind or should have left behind a

long time ago. So it really doesn't matter already whether the universe is deterministic or stochastic, because the only reason that could matter is if you want to find space for magic, spooky free will to come in and load the dice so that the universe goes one way rather than another way. Right, the only way you would want to do is if you want to be God. Yeah, and some people do, but you know, most of us hopefully don't or certainly aren't the kind of free will

that is worth hanging on to. And here I'm much in agreement with Daniel Dennett, who's also been one of my mentors and very watunate to say, who talks about degrees of freedom and points out that we are complex, distance complex biological creatures, and the things that we do voluntarily still have prior causes, but the causes might lie if you if you unfold them back in time, the causes will remain more within the organism than the coming

in from outside the organism. So a good example is, just before recording this podcast, I made a cup of tea. Why did I felt like a voluntary decision to do that, But of course I didn't. I'd made a cup of tea because I wanted a cup of tea. Why did I want a cup of tea? Well, because I grew up in England where we're brought up to want to have a cup of tea. And I didn't choose to be born here or brought up here or any of this stuff. That's just the system that I am. But

it felt like aol and to react. But no one forced me to make this cup of tea. It wasn't poured down my mouth. It was a voluntary action that aligned with my goals and desires, and it's an action that felt like it came from within. That's perfectly compatible with there being a deterministic universe, because I'm not saying that it's some immaterial me that parachuted in and made the tea universe unfold rather than the coffee universe unfold. It was always going to I was always going to

have a cup of tea. That's just how things are but the nature of the free will experience is what's what's really plexing, because what does it feel like to make a voluntary action, to have this experience? It feels like I'm doing what I decided to do, what I decided to do, And what what is this I anyway, the eye is just a collection of perceptions, one of them being the experience of free will. That you know that the cause of the other way around here, the

self isn't executing free will. The ability to make voluntary actions and the experience of doing so is part of the self. That feels like they come from within. It feels like they're aligned with my goals and desires, which I didn't choose. And it feels and here's the critical one, it feels like I could have done otherwise. That's the one that misleads people. But just because it feels like I could have made coffee rather than tea doesn't mean

that I actually could have done. You can't replay the same tape and get a different outcome, even if you chuck a bit of noising, unless you believe in magic free will. To what's the utility of having this sort of feeling that I could have done otherwise. Well, it could be very useful for the organism because let's say, you know, I've just been building up this gradual intolerance to tea and I have this cup of tea and

just feel terrible. Also, my brain will learn this, and so the next time a similar situation happens, next time I'm recording of a podcast, the universe will be different, my brain will be different, and that time I'll probably choose coffee instead, and it will again feel like I'm doing what I want to do. So we have the experience of the possibility of doing otherwise, not because in the moment we could, but because next time we might.

And so here I think it sort of snapped together for me when I was thinking about the parallel with the experience of let's say a color. We open our eyes, we see a world that is beautifully filled with color. Objects have color, but we know colors don't exist in a mind independent way. The brain creates all these colors out of mixtures of just three wavelengths of light. Why does it do that? I mean, color depends on the

brain and the universe. It doesn't exist objectively. But it's still very useful because it allows the brain to keep track of surfaces as lighting conditions change. There are all the good reasons why it's useful for the brain to construct color out of mere electromagnetic radiation, and I think

the same thing goes for free will. It's very useful thing for the brain to give this sort of phenomenal character when it executes these kinds of actions, because it means that the organism pays attention to them and may do something different in the future. It doesn't mean that just because it seems as though in voluntary action that the experience actually causes the action, it doesn't mean that's

what's going on. In just the same way that just because it seems that the car across the road is red, it actually isn't. It's really not red. It's not this direct mapping from the content of the experience for what's actually unfolding in the world. But that doesn't mean they're unrelated. I think they're related in a very powerful way. Like all perception, it's all indirect, but evolution has generally made it so that it's very useful for it. There's there's

Daniel Dinnetz a freedom evolves idea. Yeah, yeah, look, I had a two part four hour debate with Sam Harris about this. So we're not going to solve in the next ten to fifteen minutes or not. You know, maybe we'll have what we can We can do the keep let's keep up the conversation thing. But I will say one thing I really liked you said in your book, and you made it very clear. The experience of free will is not an illusion. Love that love that that's real.

That's that's something that as in organism, a living organism, I can say, you know, at least say that's that's a real that's real. We don't need to deny that experience to people. Now, That's that's right, And I think that's that's so important. I've noticed over now many years of giving public talks about consciousness, and you can sort of show that the visual experience of the world isn't quite what's going on, and that colors might not exist.

You can even show that experiences of the self aren't to be taken for granted, and that you can have all these fun manipulations of people experiencing their bodies in different ways or not at all. And first perspective can be manipulated and can give people out of body experiences. All of this it's quite challenging to take on board. But when you get to free will, that's where it seems, empirically,

in my experience, is the point of most resistance. The idea that there is a neuro mechanistic basis for and therefore explanation of free will is where there's people feel most directly threatened by a science of consciousness. But I think it's it's the threat. It's a threat that's a losory, not the experience of free will, Because understanding how and why experiences of free will and voluntary actions happen doesn't deny the reality of those experiences, and importantly, it doesn't

deny their utility either. Even when we know experiencing, even when we know red doesn't exist objectively in the world, nobody thinks that, oh damn it. Therefore, like red doesn't exist, so you know, my life is now a colorless nightmare. No, red still exists as a property of experience, and it still plays a role. I think exactly the same thing

is true for experiences of free will. But the key thing here is it's experiences of free will, perceptions of free will that are real, not some sort of pre theoretical magic version of free will that sweeps in and violates the laws of physics. But what you're saying is lived experience matters humanistic psychology, isn't it. Yeah, there we go, boom love it just to put a pin in the

free will thing. And something that you know, before we put a pin in and I should say, before we put a pin in it, And I want to say one more thing about it. The thing that kind of bothers me about the whole thing is similar to what bothers me about the intelligence debate. Semantics. It comes down to semantics at the end of the day. I don't like when certain free will philosophers or psychologists cognitive scientists act as though they have claim on the real definition

of free will. I mean, at the end of the day, it's humans that are defining this term. And two, this is why I really like the idea Daniel Dennett's notion of there are free wills worth wanting in humans. The rewind the tape thing, Like, why do we have to get so stuck on that being the only definition and and and scope of free will that that matters to humans?

Because I really don't think it is. And I and I've been developing a model with my colleague Colony on cybernetic free will and why that matters just as much. It matters more to humans than magic free will. Cybernetic free will is really really what mattered the humans. Do we have the capacity to reach our goals? Do we have the capacity to choose between various options and make decisions that move us closer? You know, like I was influenced.

I studied with herb Simon. You know that whole approach to like reducing you know, the means ends you know of between your starting state and your goal state. Look, humans want to be able to know that they can do that right, and to them, I think that's a

free will worth wanting, and I think you completely agree. Yeah, I mean it'd be interesting to learn more, But I'm I have this sort of bias of being quite positive about the cybernetic approach to whatever it might be, because back to an earlier part of our conversation, it's another way to think about how complex systems operate, how brains, bodies, and environments conspire together to deliver adaptive behavior in a

way that doesn't prioritize information processing. That looks at coupled systems and goal directed systems, and the importance of control and feedback and regulation, all these things which don't have an easy place in the computational information processing metaphor of their minds. And yeah, I mean I think sounds like

you're thinking along lines. I find very appealing that free will or the experiences of free will arise in contexts where we are trying to reach our goals and where it requires the coordination of a complex system in order to do so, and those cognoive mechanisms are real. It's not an illusion that we have adorsal lot or pref on the I mean, there are certain things that do

make us unique compared to turtles. You know. When it comes to free will, it's not like it's all an illusion, you know, that we're we have anything extra special that gives us that phenomenology, you know, No, it's real. Well, that's right. That's why I think it is a little more than semantics, because there are demonstrable cases of say,

people you know, losing cognitive control. And you may say, well, that's got nothing to do with free will, but I actually think it has it has to do with free will in the real world, and that's the kind of free will that it's worth caring about. Yeah, okay, we're gonna put a pin there, because that's a perfect place to put the pin in. I was waiting for the place to put the pin in in that right there,

right there. I completely agree, completely. So let's let's end talking about artificial intelligence, because that's just you know, there's a New York Times article that came out the other day, this computer that says, I I deserve more respect for humans. Why do I not have my Why is no one attending to my needs? Now? Look, so we're not that far away off from computers starting to say this kind of stuff. I mean, we're there. We're there, or not,

maybe not as full. You know, you know, not every computer you know rebellion yet rebelling yet, but you know it's the process is starting. So what are your thoughts on whether or not those computers are conscious, computers will ever be conscious? I mean, I know I read your books, I know a lot of your thinking on it, But you know all of our audiences has read your full book yet, can you just briefly summarize your position on that. I'm very suspicious and skeptical of the idea that machine

consciousness is on the way in the n ATEN. But I do think there are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to machines, whether they're chatbots or other things giving us the impression that they are conscious. I think that could be very disruptive, even being totally agnostic about the ontological status of consciousness. Here why the

skepticism was from many directions. One of them is this pre theoretical association of intelligence and consciousness that seems to drive a lot of the discourse, the idea that as AI. I mean I also just a tiny sidebar. I struggle

with the term AI because it yeah, me too. It makes entities of things which aren't entities, and biases are thinking about them in a unhelpful way, But it is what it is, yes, yes, And it also kind of has bill into the assumption that the more intelligent robots become, the more conscious they'll become, which is a very erroneous assumption, right Exactly if you just use the word, I don't know, predictive statistic statistics or something like that, then it seems

less intuitive that as these predictive statistical algorithms get more competent that at some point the lights come on, and they're also not only competent and smart, but conscious consciousness and intelligence are related in us in some interesting ways, but they're not related in principle. So just making something smart doesn't imply, at least not to me, that at

some point they become conscious. And there are other clues here that often the point at which people think this transition to consciousness might happen also turns out to be the point at which AI reaches this potentially mythical generalized human intelligence level. Why would we think that's a threshold, Well, again, it signals a sort of residual human exceptionalism. Things that

get smart don't necessarily get conscious. And then on the other hand, we have this whole skepticism about information processing as what brains in practice do and what consciousness depends on machine learning algorithms. Yeah, they do do information processing, but if that's not the best way to ultimately understand what brains do, then again, there's no reason to think that a form of information processing will instantiate consciousness done things when you might just have a simulation of it.

And that's fine. I mean, we accept that in many other cases in science, right, we have weather forecasting systems that can be brilliantly detailed simulations of let's say, a tornado, but nobody thinks it actually gets wet and windy inside the weather computer. And for many things, simulation is not the same as instantiation. I'm skeptical that consciousness is going to be aligned with intelligence, or that it's necessarily something

that information processing will give rise to. And finally, on the positive side, there's all this recognition that consciousness is intimately related to our nature as living systems. And yeah, I have to concede that this is not by no means proven. It's just where the ideas and experiments that

I've been involved in have led. And if we prioritize the disrecognition and the possibility that it might be life rather than information processing that is breathing fire into the equainims of consciousness, then intelligent machines will need to be alive in order to be conscious in some biologically meaningful,

perhaps bibernetic control oriented way. All of this is to say that that you know, I just I just think there's there's a lot of a lot of science fiction, techno bro driven hype about the possibility of machine consciousness, and it's not even something we should be aiming for. Like if we did build conscious machines, what an absolute disaster that would be. Now we have generated the potential untold levels of suffering that we might not even recognize

as suffering. My colleague and friend Thomas Metzinger is very vociferous on this point, basically saying there should be moratorium on all attempts to develop what he called synthetic phenomenology and to build conscious machines because it's just morally reprehensible thing to do, and he shouldn't. We see so often in technology that people build things because it's cool, because they think it's cool, and that is just the worst reason, you know, it's There are many things which might seem core.

I imagine many people are, but I'm not sure he's listening. And you know that things have their are unintended consequences of things that can be built simply because they're core. So just on the outside chance that we might accident that you know, I very well might be wrong, and it might well be that, in fact, a sufficiently sophisticated information processing system suddenly becomes conscious. I think it's unlikely, but who knows, I might be wrong, which case we

have all sorts of problems. I don't think we should be trying to do it, but fortunately I don't think it's really possible. But what is happening with all these chatbots is systance that are playing on our psychological tendency

to anthropomorphize. Now, we can't help projecting mind into these systems, and it's unsurprising that we do that, because the brain is always trying to sort of find the most efficient cause of explanation for something and to interpret these utterances that these chatbots are producing unless you're trying to catch them out, which is still pretty easy if you're really trying. But if you're not really trying, then it's kind of reasonable that you project mind and therefore, for most people

also consciousness into these things. And here again I think this tendency to enteritify them. I won't say personified, because they're not people, but to make it an entity just biases the debate. And if we recognize that these are tools and not entities, then I think that would change the discourse, It would change our relationships them. Dan Dannett again found great with them. He'd said what many years ago about AI, that we should remember we're building tools,

not colleagues, and be mindful of the difference. And I think he's right now more than more than ever. You know, I saw this headline in the paper the other day about the possibility of it, said, will an AI be the first to discover alien life? And this was I

think this was in Nature magazine. Actually it was a headline in Nature, which is, of course, you know, a very august scientific journal, And that wound me up a lot because it's again, it's making an algorithm an entity, and no one would ever say, will statistics be the first to discover terrestrial life? It doesn't even make sense as a question. So there's a lot to worry about. But it's not the kind of things that some people

are worrying about. It's really the social impact of things that might appear to be conscious, plus all the other discourse, which I'm sure would be less controversial about. You know, this is going to be disruptive for people's jobs, for various industries, for truth. You know, these chatbots they can fabulate, you know, they make stuff up because they don't actually understand anything. They just regurgitate predictions that can be very disruptive.

Lots of things to worry about, but consciousness nuns much. Are you worry that even if the computers aren't conscious, they still will be programmed to learn to and at some point and reach at a level where they try to seek out anyone who says statements such as they're not people you know as and view that as a sign of disrespect and have a program extremity. Like I feel like there's like a Pascal's wager here that I'm not willing to I'm not willing to be to have

a quote here saying that they're not human. Even if they aren't human, I feel like you could see a world where they get programmed to be disrespect you know,

the computer Lives matter hashtag like I see some day happening. Yeah, I mean you could say this is just I mean, you could rightly, I think, accuse me of some hypocrisy or at least inconsistency here in In the one hand, I'm saying that consciousness is something that is much widespread in humans and we shouldn't be so human centric about it.

But I seem to be massively prejudiced about carbon based things now and yeah, you're a little bit prejudiced prejudiced there, And you're right, it's it's hard to its one hundred assert the the merit of making that distinction. But but I think there are reasons for it, and we've we've discussed the reasons already. It won't reiterate them. I think it's a view that you know. I'm prepared to have my mind changed on. I'm not sure I'm necessarily going

to hedge my bets in the pascaltic of me. No, But I think you do highlight something that may will happen, which is that these algorithms they can manipulate our behavior. They and that can be done in ways that that we might not even be aware of. One of the big problems for machine learning, as as I think many people know, is it's opacity. It's very hard often to know why these algorithms produce the particular outputs or make

the decisions and classifications that they do. So we're seeding a lot of power the things that we don't quite understand, and that you may take off in in unforeseen directions. Those are certainly things to worry about. I'm worried about it. I'm worried about it. I'd rather be on the side of the computers. Well, I suppose the most realistic thing that will happen in the not so distant future. You know what neurolink is trying, you know, ways of a

human computer like cyborgs. I don't think that's to science fiction. Uh and uh. And when that happens, it will raise lots of interesting questions about what what part of the system is conscious? What can we upload our consciousness to some maternity method in some way where we can we can keep our consciousness going after the physical body, after life, biological life leaves us. Where do you kind of stand and you're thinking about the far future and the possibility

of consciousness continuing, consciousness continuing beyond our biological selves. I think there's another kind of wager there isn't there. There are some people who the more transhumanist persuasion, who are hopeful, optimistic, betting to some extent on precisely the ability that they'll be able to upload their consciousness to the future cloud or whatever it might be. That's a bet I'm not prepared to take. I think it relies on all these assumptions that are very hard to know which way to

take them. The fundamental assumption that matters here is the substrate dependency of consciousness. It could be that we upload a digital description of all my synapses and glial cells and whatever level of detail we might want about your brain my brain, We upload it and run it as a simulation in the cloud. Now, that could end up just being a simulation of me, without it feeling like anything to be that simulation. It seems very plausible that that's the case. I mean, there's no reason back to

word discussion about simulation instantiation. There's a particular reason why consciousness needs to be substraight independent, and I think good reason to believe that it isn't. And that blows the idea of consciousness uploading right out of the water. If consciousness is substraight dependent in some way, So I would not make that wager of that being possible. I'd rather look after our worlds in the here and now. I mean,

it's a kind of rapture, isn't. It's got a religious dealing to it, this idea that we seek some non corporeal immortality, and I'm always suspicious of worldviews that go after that, to the exclusion of making a better world in the here and now. You know what's interesting there seems to be this for most people, this desire for the immortality. What is it really? It's an immortality of a sense of self perspective, But that seems to disappear when you do certain things like psychedelics, or you do

certain in certain and certain self transcendent experiences. The fear of death seems to significantly go away when our sense of eye is going away. And I think there's things just so profound there. I can't one hundred percent articulate what is precisely so profound about that, but I think that there is something that that's telling us. And I know that your book ended with you know, your last line of your whole book is like you know. At this point, I think we should leave the afterlife to

as a mystery. But I don't want to leave the end of this podcast. I don't want to leave that to a mystery. And I also don't want you to tell me for sure, well what happens one way or another. But isn't it kind of possible that after our biological self is dead, you know, after you know that you know, and and the eye perspective on consciousness is gone. There is still something that perhaps remains, and we just don't know what it form, it takes, what it experience is like.

But that there's still something that that lasts. You don't know for sure, right, No, I mean I feel sympathy with your with your kind of cleaning to strows here be you. But we do, right, we do. But we I mean, and I'm sure I do too. It's it's against an internal procricy here, because I think we're designed at some level brains were evolved to stay alive, and so built into our psychological infrastructure is this desire to persist.

I mean, it's fundamental to our ability to persist. And that conflict with the knowledge that we have with a good reason, good well justified belief that we have that we won't persist forever. And of course that's a realization that each of us comes to in our lifespan, usually when we're a child. Isn't oh shit, I might die

at some point, right and then? And then the sort of weirdness of the idea that we'll hold on a minute, There's been this whole span of time that happened before I was born, when I wasn't there, So why should Why isn't the span of time going to happen on the other side too? It seems we have this weird a symmetry with how we consider persistence of the self. We're not worried about typically, we're not worried. We don't have a fomo for all the time before we were born,

but we do for the time after we die. But yeah, I mean, everything that we know about the intimate dependency of the brain and consciousness really does suggest that when the brain stops, you stop. And I talk in the book at both ends of the book about anesthesia and general anesthesia as being as close to the oblivion of not existing as any of us are going to get without actually dying. And the thing about general anesthesia, the thing about oblivion is that it's not the experience of absence.

It's the absence of all that experience. There is just nothing going on, nothing at all. And it's incredibly hard to project oneself into a situation where there's nothing going on, because it doesn't make any sense. You're projecting yourself to a situation where there is no self. Also, so we have to come at it indirectly, and here I think you're exactly right. There are different ways to come at this.

When people take psychedelics, there's a sense of ego dissolution, which does sometimes to some people correlate with with the reduction of fear of mortality. There's a meditation where we realize through practice that this experience of self is not a stable, unchanging thing which could be lost, but it's

always changing. It's always different. Is a construction too. And then there's the perspective from philosophy and neuroscience which is also veighing that message that the self is a process that's an assemblage of related perceptions, and that it's always changing. I think these things converge hopefully in reducing our our fear of non existence. I you know, I think it's would be hebristic of me to say that it can get rid of it. You know, I certainly don't feel

comfortable yet with the prospect of not existing. But I think my views on it have changed as my views on what the self are have changed. But here we here we roll back to an early part. Just because there are now these different perspectives on the self, it doesn't mean that I no longer experience myself as a as an entity that that persists over time. I do in the same way that Yeah, I still perceive red

as a color out there in the world. But these these different perspectives on it, I think soften the implications of that experience. But how we might think about the end of life and how we might lessen our grip on the desire to just forever. It seems like we lessen that grip by changing our perspective of cleaning so hard to the eye, clinging so hard to the unique identity, cleaning so hard to the evolved desire for the self to persist, and just lessen that grip. You know, just

there's no just about it. But if we can lessen that grip, it seems like we seem to make more peace with oblivion. On that note, thank you so much for being on a psychology podcast today. It was great to finally meet you, and I hope we can keep up the conversation. Thank you for having me. I'm really happy you've got the chance to talk and yeah, be happy to continue it. Thanks so much me 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 thusychology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.