Diamond Mind
Science, philosophy, spirituality, technology, green energy, current affairs. Hosted by scholar, activist and author, Tam Hunt.
Diamond Mind
Diamond Mind #7: Rainbow Hair and Consciousness: Exploring Illusionism and the Mysteries of the Mind with Sue Blackmore
What if the vibrant hues of rainbow-colored hair could signify a paradigm shift in consciousness studies? In this captivating episode, we engage with philosopher Sue Blackmore, whose distinctive hairstyle is more than just a fashion statement—it's a symbol of her bold exploration into the mysteries of consciousness and all its colorful complexities.
With decades of history in the science and philosophy of consciousness, Sue offers a unique perspective on the evolution of the field, reflecting on its past, present, and an enigmatic future that continues to challenge and inspire researchers worldwide.
Sue literally wrote the book on consciousness studies, the textbook, Consciousness: An Introduction (with her daughter Emily as co-author), which is now in its 4th Edition.
Sue shares a personal story about a transformative encounter with cannabis that altered the course of her life -- strangely similar to my own in my early 20s. More than just a recreational experience, this moment opened doors to profound consciousness exploration, hinting at cannabis as an underestimated entheogen. Her experience prompts a thoughtful conversation on how such rare occurrences can shape our understanding of the mind and its boundless possibilities.
We also talk about 30 years of the iconic Science of Consciousness conference, which she's been involved with almost from the start, as well as what it's like to be a woman in a field still dominated by men.
Finally, we navigate the intriguing worlds of illusionism, "delusionism," self-identity, and the theories that attempt to bridge the gap between consciousness and the physical realm. Our discussion challenges conventional beliefs about the self and consciousness, inviting listeners to question their own perceptions.
As we grapple with the "hard problem" of consciousness, debating some of the key points, this episode offers a rich tapestry of ideas, leaving you to ponder the true nature of our conscious experience and the journey toward unraveling its deepest secrets.
The Diamond Mind Podcast with Talon. All right, we're in business. Thanks again and great to see you. I want to start by asking why rainbow hair?
Speaker 2:It goes back all 30, 35 years. There was a guy called Dave Perrett, a vision researcher. I was in vision research at that time and he had multicolored hair and I just thought it was wonderful. I always wanted to have it. I got my hairdresser down in Devon where my parents lived to do it and when I got home my mother said I was really. It was red, green and blue, big slabs. It didn't pretty weird and my mother said that if I didn't get my hair back to normal she would never speak to me again and she lasted about two years and I've done it ever since. A few years ago I tried to stop. I thought this is enough, you're getting old. There it goes and I tried to grow it out and people said he doesn't look like you anymore.
Speaker 1:Definitely distinctive. So let me talk about the Science of Consciousness conference a bit, because I met you there I don't know, probably a decade ago, I think at the various ones we've been to together in Tucson and probably also in the international ones, and we just had a big milestone 30 years of the TSC conferences which has been a real golden age for the study of consciousness. So could you maybe take a minute and describe your evolution and your views on that conference and how the field has changed in those 30 years, Because you've been there since day one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was there from day one. I was amazing, not day one, day two, if you like. The first Tucson conference was 94 and I wasn't there, but 96 I came. So 94 was when Dave Chalmers coined the phrase the hard problem of consciousness, which was completely accidental, and the phrase just took off a fantastic meme. And that's what everyone's struggling with now is the hard problem.
Speaker 2:So I went in 1996, and I really didn't have any confidence that I could get involved in the field of consciousness at that point. I'd become obsessed with memes through reading Dan Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea and that took me back to rereading the Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins' 1976 book and I had been very ill with chronic fatigue and lying in bed for several months. And I had been very ill, with chronic fatigue and lying in bed for several months and by the time I was well enough to get up I had a full book in my head and I didn't know whether I would dare to write it. And I was determined to go to Tucson 96 and see Dan Dennett. I'd met him once before, ask him what he thought, and I managed to get there with wheelchair service at the airports and everything. I was still quite ill and I got to do something and it was just amazing.
Speaker 2:And apart from having a wonderful evening with Dan, in which he did encourage me to write the Mean Machine, which I then did, I realized that actually what I had been struggling with in my own mind, apart from memes, was consciousness. I'd had a dramatic out-of-body experience, mystical experience really, in 1970, when I was 19. And I'd gone on a wild goose chase over the paranormal for nearly 20 years and I realized at the end of that that the whole paranormal thing is just a waste of time. Sorry those people listening who think I'm wrong, fine, if I'm wrong, that would be really exciting. I really think there's nothing in it and it just takes you away from what's really interesting, which is the problem of consciousness. We really it's a really a mystery now.
Speaker 2:I was there in 96 and there were people like the churchlands and and dan dennett obviously, and dave charmers, all sorts of fascinating people and I went intermittently ever since and the field has gone from then when I suppose francis crick had published his euro just a pack of neurons and those kind of very materialist ideas were dominant, and yet all sorts of other things were beginning to plow as the years went by. The 20th anniversary was brilliant. We had that cover of the Beatles Sergeant Peepers with all of us painted onto it. I'm just behind the Beatles ones Twenty years ago this time 30 years.
Speaker 2:Not really was much made of its 30 years. But I would say to conclude answering your question, that even now, after 30 years of amazing progress and the whole field of consciousness studies going from almost absolutely nothing in 94 to really a thriving field now, all of the theories we have don't work. We really still stuck deeply in the mystery and floundering about in a most amusing and interesting way. But I think we've got things fundamentally wrong and a big change is going to have to happen before we really can understand what's going on.
Speaker 1:I like how you described that in the state of the field. I'm sure you are going to annoy a lot of people there and that's great, so I wasn't going to delve into parapsychology, Sorry go ahead.
Speaker 2:I think the people that I would annoy probably know that I annoy them and they'll accept that and go. She's wrong, that's fine by me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So I wasn't going to delve into parapsychology until later, but you brought it up and I'm really curious about your personal evolution there. So, without delving into that topic too much, I want to ask you. You mentioned already you had a very profound out-of-body experience and I read a bit about it and you said it was like a three-hour long experience and it sent you down this 20-year long goose chase. And now, like experience, and it sent you down as 20 year long goose chase and now, like you said, you don't see any truth to any of it. How do you explain your own personal experience at this point, when you say any of that, the experience.
Speaker 2:I'm not rejecting the experience that I had, far from it, and I'm not rejecting all the near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences that I investigated in that time. Those experiences can be profound, important, enlightening. They aren't always, but they can be, and they're described all over the world, with differences in different cultures, but the basic pattern is the same. So the question is what's going on? What I described as a wild goose chase is the idea that it proves life after death or that it involves paranormal power. I had thought, from having been seemingly out of my body in a way that seemed more real than ordinary life, able to move around and see things, I assumed that telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition, ghosts, pol goes, poltergeist, life after I. Just this proves all of these things, and my materialist lecturers at oxford and I know more than they do because I've been in that kind of institute. And then I did a lot of research. I did a phd investigating telepathy, clairvoyance, all sorts of things. I can't tell you the number of haunted, supposedly haunted houses I slept in and ley lines I chased after and I trained as a witch and I learned to read tarot cards and use my crystal ball, which I still have here. I really went deeply into all of these things and the answers kept coming back. It's all wishful thinking, statistical errors, accidental unintended errors and occasional awful fraud, which just keeps the whole thing going and people just telling stories. The stories improve with the telling and in the end it doesn't help at all. It doesn't get us anywhere, but it goes on being popular. You can easily sell books about how near-death experiences prove life after death and you can easily sell my books on it. It's amazing. We really know now what's happening in the right temporary parietal junction.
Speaker 2:When people have out-of-body experiences, we can explain it. This doesn't force me into materialism, but it does force me into. You do not need to invent paranormal powers, other worlds and so on in order to understand the experience. So that's why I came straight into the field of consciousness studies, because I thought paranormal explanations and theories are not going to help. What is? Ah? Well, I don't even know what this is. How can, can, if this is even the right way of thinking about it, how can this brain in this body be creating this now, creating the real world? I don't know, I don't understand, and that's really after 90 years of being in the field of consciousness studies, I still feel the same kind of in terms of of your own experience, your own UBI that as a valid experience.
Speaker 1:But I'm curious given your current framework and ontology, do you accept that as a kind of clairvoyance or you think it was just an interesting delusion of your own brain?
Speaker 2:You put it in rather condescending terms of interesting delusion, but I suppose that's what I think. Is it a delusion? You can take this in many directions. I would say a delusion. It's only a delusion when you think that something has left the body and traveled on the astral planes or in some other world or in this world, but invisibly and unable to affect it. If you assume that dualism of another part of yourself that goes out of the body, then the the evidence doesn't step up. There are lots of books that says it does. But hang on, I've done all the work and looked into all those cases and they all crumble when you really have a go at them.
Speaker 2:If you take it as some people do not the majority but it's an indication that what we think of as our precious self is literally a construction of our brain, just like everything else. Is that I am not some powerful entity which has consciousness and free will and lives inside the brain. That's how it feels, but it isn't true. What's going on is this self and here I lapse into spiritual, buddhist terms is that we're deluded about the nature of self, and actually the self is an ephemeral construction that comes and goes. It does not have these powers it appears to, but it doesn't and we as conscious entities are part of the whole universe. This is one of the things that happened in that experience that I had. It shifted from a classic out-of-body experience, which is really basic it's here, I am and now I'm out of the body and I'm and it shifted and shifted and I became smaller and larger and all sorts of weird things happened and eventually became a classic experience of oneness with the universe and the experience of endless space and endless consciousness, without time or space making any sense, in a way.
Speaker 2:Gone away now to have had that when I was 19 and try to understand that's what these experiences did. You begin to question the very nature of self rather than turning it into something that's going to survive. Finding religion if you learn, oh, maybe something here has to let go of that illusion. That's why, along with getting into the field of consciousness studies, I began meditation and, after a few different attempts, found a wonderful Zen teacher called John Crook in Bristol. He practiced with him until his death and I've been on many Zen retreats and been trained in Jhanas and other practices and Mahamudra, and all of those go towards teaching the impermanence, ephemeral nature, a constructed nature of the self. So that's what seems to me to be an important thing that comes out of these experiences. So the experiences are real enough to the people who have them. They are and we need to explain them. But you can't explain them by invoking astral bodies and souls and spirits and so on. Got it?
Speaker 1:So it goes to how you explain, not the fact of the experience itself. It's like really an ontological question how do you interpret the experience? Is that kind of where you're getting at? Yeah, okay, absolutely. And just on your 19 year old experience, were you on any substances or was it totally spontaneous?
Speaker 2:It was spontaneous in the sense that I wasn't planning to have it. There were three contributing factors, I think one was extreme sleep dignity, very extremely sleep dignity. It was my first time in moxford. I was absolutely loving it. After a horrendous boarding school, everyone was, everything was horrible. Suddenly, with these really bright people having a great time, I was staying up till four in the morning, getting up at nine o'clock lectures. I'd also joined the Psychical Research Society of the university. We'd been having a Ouija board this particular evening. Now you know, when you've got your arm stretched out with a glass and it's spelling out things and you get this spooky thing and these messages. Glass and it's spelling out things and you get this spooky thing and these messages. So I was in a kind of weird mood and looking back it was oh sorry, my computer is unplugged and the battery is running low no problem plugged in, so I'll say that again in case you want to edit it.
Speaker 2:So I'm spending this evening doing this thing, getting into a funny, weird mood with these spooky things happening and looking back on it. That body scheming is so important. You rest with your body schema. If you spent hours holding your arms out like this. It's like you spent hours painting a ceiling when your arms don't seem to work completely anymore. That's one simple thing. And finally, I promised to go back to a friend's room in college after we'd finished and have some milk and listen to some music. And I did.
Speaker 2:I had a smoke of cannabis, but not very much, interestingly, because I was already in a pretty weird state. So I had a little bit and I didn't want any more because I felt a bit weird and I sat there listening to this music and I wish I could remember what it was, but it will have been Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd or something like that. So I'm sitting in this music, sort of thinking I'm feeling weird, and I start going down the tunnel and I'd never heard of tunnel experiences. They hadn't been described in the literature at all. At that point we're talking 1970. But there I was, going down this tunnel of leaves towards the light and so, and it went from there.
Speaker 2:So I think all those three things contributed. It's sad that so many people say they can't do it and it doesn't count. Why doesn't it count? It's still an experience in consciousness. It's a pattern that unfolds in a way that's been described again and again in the literature. Something has to be changing in the brain for it to happen, and I think the cannabis helped a little bit.
Speaker 1:I find that really intriguing for many reasons, because at 23, I had a very similar entheogenic experience inspired by smoking a joint with my actually a bong with my dad and my brother in Seattle, and never since then has that happened. And so cannabis is not known as being an entheogenic experience or aid.
Speaker 1:It was very similar. It was a very similar kind of tunnel, white light, becoming God, oceanic feeling experience. There wasn't an out of body experience component to mine and it was much shorter than yours. Mine was. I don't know how long it lasted, but maybe an hour max. There wasn't any feeling of leaving my body. It was a feeling of being in my, basically a sense of traveling that tunnel experience, but I didn't interpret it as leaving my body. But yeah, it was actually a profound experience for me and it led me down a certain path in a very real way. And it's interesting too that I would say I'm similar to you not to get too far ahead here or to label you, but it sounds like you maybe say you're a secular, humanist, buddhist, and I'd say maybe I'm similar in that regard too. I'm very partial to Vedanta also, but yeah, it's actually really intriguing to me. I didn't know that was part of your experience, but yeah, very intriguing. So let's shelve that for a second.
Speaker 2:Let me just finish by saying I think you've had the really interesting and important parts of the experience. The out-of-body experience is sidetracked in the way. It's interesting. You got to the profound bit. Obviously that's helped you in your life to want to understand.
Speaker 1:It definitely did, yeah, and I put out a book of essays in 2014. And in my intro I talk about experience setting me on a certain path, because I yeah, I'm not going to talk about myself too much, but yeah, very interesting parallel here between your experience and I thought, one of the person recently who had a similar and theogenic experience from cannabis what's that from cannabis? I don't think so.
Speaker 2:No, no no, sorry, I interrupted. Go on, tell me what you're going to say.
Speaker 1:It seems to be a kind of an occasional thing that can happen from cannabis, but I wonder how occasional it is. Maybe it's just not talked about, maybe it is actually, in the right setting, more of an entheogen than people give it credit for. I think so. So I want to come back to the TSC conference. We were both there in Tucson back in April, a few months ago, on the 30th anniversary. You were on stage at the end of the conference with Stuart Hamroff, the organizer.
Speaker 1:Paavo Pulkanen, a longtime attendee from Finland, organizer Paavo Pulkanen, a longtime attendee from Finland. Christoph Koch, also a longtime attendee and well-known researcher, and then my colleague and mentor Jonathan Schuller was the mediator. And, of course, david Chalmers was also there on stage with you and he needs no introduction. When you spoke about your views, kristof got quite aggressive and pushing back on your views, and this seems to be a pattern, unfortunately, where you were there two years ago with Deepak getting even more aggressive and literally standing up and getting in your space. I'm wondering what you say or do that triggers these inappropriate responses from people.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you think they were inappropriate. I never catered to the two because they were so different. The one with Deepak was horrendous. It was a kind of misogynistic ganging up between Stuart Hamlin and Deepak Chopra me in the middle. Stuart was the chair, the moderator, but even when I did my introductory few minutes that we each had to do, he interrupted me and just started and then if I interrupted Deepak, deepak would jump up. It was just horrendous. All online and the good things come out of that is. I was so angry about that I just couldn't forget it and I wanted to do something to help and I persuaded Deepak recently I saw him briefly this year in Tucson to do a nice sensible online discussion like this, like we're having now, because when I've spoken with him frequently several times we've had a private meal with him and have really good conversations, we'd get him on stage and he's horrible at doing it. So I wanted to solve that problem. So we had recently it just was posted a few weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago on his Deepak Chopra Lala, whatever it's called and we had a very nice conversation. So that, to my mind, has settled that it was just a horrible thing and it wasn't about the content really. It was those two men for some reason ganging up on me.
Speaker 2:The thing with Christoph was nothing like that. He's absolutely not that sort of person at all. He, I think, misunderstands illusionism. So he will describe illusionists and I describe myself as an illusionist, along with Dan Dennett, keith Frankish, many others, one of whom contributed to Keith Frankish's book on illusionism. He describes us as not believing in experience. Not believing the reason is experience. And I I say no, that's not true, that's not what I mean by illusionism. But having had subsequent, just nice email exchanges with a group of deepak and christopher and other people, I realize what he's getting at. He's getting at that dennett and keith to some extent, will say. Dennett will say there's no such thing as qualia and he has a quite subtle argument about what he means by that.
Speaker 2:But his book, the 1991 Consciousness Explained, begins with him sitting in an armchair watching magically the leaves rippling in the wind outside the window and listening to Verdi, I think. Anyway, some nice music. That's what he wants to explain. So he's not rejecting that there's experience and he's trying to explain it. Yes, you might not agree with his explanations, but that's being an illusionist, means it's not what it seems to be. The definition of an illusion is. I looked it up in the dictionary because I got so frustrated with people misunderstanding what I meant by saying consciousness is an illusion or free will isn't. It's not what it seems to be.
Speaker 2:Now, my own view is that, like we were saying about the outer body experience, the experience is real enough that people jump to the wrong conclusion. This is why I call my view delusionism rather than illusionism, because delusion is more intellectual thing. We have these theories about consciousness. The fundamental theory most people have is that the brain creates or secures or gives rise to this stuff called consciousness, and that's, to my mind, a delusion. It's not like that. We have to find some other way of understanding the fundamental nature of all this.
Speaker 2:That's what Christophe was getting at. He thinks all illusionists are idiots and fools because they did not make the existence of experience, and that was what. That's why he was bossing me on that occasion. But he and I have talked about this since this. Unlike the business, the Deepak, this was not about a personal thing. This was trying both of us trying to get to understand each other's viewpoints better, and I've since read Christoph's new book. He gave me a lovely signed copy of his book, which was just a month in April when we were in Tucson. I've read that and really enjoyed it and he too had a dramatic experience that changed. He had it late in life and that's changed his views dramatically.
Speaker 1:Indeed, yeah, and actually I interviewed Christophe twice, so we talked about his experiences and, yeah, he certainly has softened and evolved in his views. Also and I apologize, today is not a good audio day, I have a rainstorm going on in my background here in Hawaii, anyway. So I wanted to explore more this notion of illusionism and delusionism. And let me just kind of state it to make sure I understand the position well, and then let's go down the rabbit hole a bit further. But as I understand it, illusionism and its cousin delusionism is the idea that, yes, while experience is real for the experiencer right here, right now, it is an illusion in that it does not give rise validly to the notion of the self as an ontological construct, it does not support dualism. It may support some form of idealism, but it seems more like an epistemological position than an ontological position. Could you explore that idea a bit?
Speaker 2:Yes, if I understand what you mean, that's what I'm getting at that people think they know something in a certain way because of the experience they have. They jump to conclusions. It's kind of ontological as well, but you think it's just a natural human tendency to jump, to do this. That's how the world appears.
Speaker 2:I've had a lot of um discussions with dan, who sadly died as you know now. I had a lot of discussions with him about this, with him saying the self is a benign user illusion. And what he meant by that was it's like the illusion you have with your computer. You've got all these folders and files and you imagine they're all stacked up like they are. Actually it's not like that at all. There's just bits flying about all over the place, but it gives you the illusion of a filing cabinet with files in it and any other illusions. And he said it's benign and it must have evolved for a purpose.
Speaker 2:My view is that it's not benign, certainly not always benign. In fact, this false view of the self, this dualist idea that there's somebody in here and it has power and so on, is actually malign in the sense that it causes suffering. It's what causes us to be greedy and selfish and frightened of other people and anxious, and all the troubles that we have are about me, and this, of course, relates to my zen practice. I'm not buddhist, but it relates to my zen practice, which is so much about that, about trying to be honest about the nature of self. So I've had a lot of discussions with Dan about that. If you look at other illusionists I'm struggling with the name of the most important other illusionist Michael Graziano.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Michael Graziano, who won't call himself an illusionist, but his view is actually very similar. The self is not what it seems to be, and that's the heart of illusionism to me, and I think I. I'm sorry that michael won't call himself an illusionist, but, on the other hand, if people misunderstand illusionism in the way that christophe has done in the past, then maybe it's better, maybe mich Michael's right to not call himself an illusionist. I'm sorry, I think I've forgotten the essence of your question. We just went rambling on about something or another.
Speaker 1:No, it's fine. And I'm wondering to your point about the name and the misunderstanding about illusionism and delusionism, is that it does, I think, trigger people, because there's a valid point going back to Descartes and long before that. The only thing that I know is my experience and the flow of time in my experience, and so when people say it's an illusion, I think a lot of people are like wait what You're telling me? That I'm not real. So I wonder if there's room for rebranding and even delusionism, I think maybe has the same issue. It's a bit better, in my opinion, for what it's worth, because it does, like you said, get to not real. It's just it's deluding you as to what the nature of it really is. So have you thought about other terms that might work to convey that without triggering people? In a way it does?
Speaker 2:clearly I've tried but I haven't succeeded. But I think what you have said makes me think about is just how hard it is to dismantle the sense of a permanent self, who lives inside the body, who has consciousness and free will, who is the experiencer of the experiences. Who has consciousness and free will, who is the experiencer of the experiences? That is something that comes about in kids around the age three, four. They begin to be self-conscious and have a sense of me and you and all the other things that come about through our lives and through our language. And letting go of that is really hard. I've been practicing meditation every day for 40 years. I know plenty of other people who've done so and gradually the grip of this idea of this important self in here it gets. It's less grippy, if you like, and that's the trouble. So in a way it needs a harsh term about illusionism to say, look, look, what's happening, you're falling into dualism or you've spent your life in dualism. And if you want to really think about consciousness and the nature of space and time and all the things we take for granted, then you've got to examine the nature of self, because that's the height of where the people start the illusion is built up for is that I'm here and the world is out there. Now you may have had in. You've described one experience. You may have had others.
Speaker 2:I've certainly had plenty and practiced as well. Not being it's not experiencing the world as I'm in here and the world's out there, but as it's's all one, it's all this. This body is as much part of this and so is everything. Or thinking about Douglas Harding's the Headless Way, experiencing the world like you can't see your own head, you can't see your own eyes, you can't hear your own ears. And let all that go and realize. There's this amazing void here in which a world appears To transition from the common view of I'm in here and there's a world out there which we can understand through physics and so on, to dismantling. It is not trivial.
Speaker 2:So I can't think of, to answer your question, I can't think of a better name than delusionism, but maybe there is one. Anyone out there got a better idea? Please let me know. But it's harsh, it's a huge time, and I'm not surprised that people don't like it. And they don't like thinking that the paranormal, they don't like the idea that I think the paranormal doesn't exist. They don't like the idea that I think the paranormal doesn't exist. They don't like the idea that death is the end. They don't like all sorts of things which I think are best placed in life. What do you think?
Speaker 1:As you're speaking. I'm thinking about the parallel between the Zen practice of wrapping an acolyte on the knuckles when they're not doing correct posture and your notion of illusionism as a metaphorical wrap on the knuckles minus that our sense of self as a permanent construct is not real and I agree with you fully on that.
Speaker 1:And I definitely agree with you that the it's a very deeply rooted notion of the self being somehow separate from the body. And my personal view again, for what it's worth is that it's very unlikely I don't rule things out because I'm always open to new facts it's very unlikely there is any consciousness separate from matter, separate from the body. But I want to delve in a bit more what you mean by delusionism and the nature of experience and how to explain this mind-body problem which is. I listened to your book I think it's your most popular book Consciousness a very short introduction and I love these little books, they're great. I've got dozens of of them and yours is quite well done and you explain the position to think fairly well. I also have.
Speaker 1:I want to ask you about this quote from your other book, zen and the art of consciousness, where you do you say I don't read the whole thing, but you say there's nothing is to be me, I'm not a persisting conscious entity, I do not consciously cause the actions of my body and consciousness is not a stream of experiences. Now can you explain it, because I mean that to me, just to share again my view. That seems to me to go too far, because I certainly I have something that is very much like to be me in each moment. I agree it's always changing. I'm a whirlpool of energy, but it's something there in each moment that's like to be me and that seems to have evolved over 3 billion years, evolutionarily, because it has a role to play. It helps us in reacting to fast things in the environment that we need to have a conscious mind to make choices about. So I'm curious how you frame that, that quote, within the context of our discussion here today what is it like to be you now?
Speaker 1:it's watching you on the screen, it's about thinking about your responses and my questions.
Speaker 2:So all the qualia, all the little things my mind are what I'm making the little things that run my mind are what.
Speaker 2:You're kind of making that up in the sense that you're describing what's going on here. When you say, what is it like to be me and really sit with that as things change, it's very different and that's a lot what meditation does. Now, one of the things that I have denied and you mentioned in that list so through a list of things I've rejected, but one of those is a stream of consciousness. One of my greatest heroes is William James and he coined one phrase and I can see what he means by it. But there is this tendency for us to imagine that we wake up in the morning and all day long there's something. It's like to be me and I am having this stream of experience. But I would suggest that if you practice a lot of observing what's going on, what you find it, are you conscious now?
Speaker 1:Yes definitely.
Speaker 2:Well, of course, in the sense of being awake and speaking, you are, but very often it's difficult to get people in the sense of being awake and speaking, you are, but very often it's difficult people in the right moment. But if I can talk to myself and ask it myself and I will realize that I have no idea what I was conscious of a moment before, it's like a light coming on when I ask am I conscious now? It's like becoming mindful. It's like being mindful for the first, you know now, and realizing that I wasn't mindful. I was busy speaking and trying to answer your question. And all this thinking is going on and these friends are moving and this body is moving and the sounds and all of that's happening. But there wasn't really a me there until I asked you, michael, just now. And immediately comes a self going oh yes, of course I am.
Speaker 2:And with that follows the assumption that it's the same me who woke up this morning and that I've been having this stream of consciousness. That's one way of getting at it, and I've done this with lots of students and as well as with myself. But another way of getting at it is to think is there really a single stream, because another interesting exercise is to ask yourself what was I conscious of a moment ago? And when you do that and keep doing it seriously, when I can't make you do it now, you put you might like to try it as an exercise.
Speaker 2:What I find, at any rate, is, oh gosh, I something seemed to be listening to that noise of the river out there, and I can remember that I was aware of the fact that my arms were resting on the desk here and they're pressing into them and, oh, I know I was thinking about how difficult this question is and how to answer it.
Speaker 2:I realised that all these things were going on and I've absolutely no idea which ones were in my stream of consciousness. So the story we tell is those things that you listed there, that I've rejected in my books and in the art of consciousness. I called it that partly to make a relationship with motorcycle nations, but what I meant by the art of consciousness is that we need to bring together the science that we're doing in the philosophy with the practice that the art of consciousness is suggesting. Is doing these kinds of exercises, really drilling down into what is it we're trying to explain, and that's what I'm spending my life doing really with my meditation and my writing books and all that well, let me frame it in a biological context.
Speaker 1:yes, I, I think we can agree from a kind of a self phenomenological lens, that there are things happening here now that I feel there's a constancy to my body over time, but it is always changing. And yet we can look at the history of life on this planet and we understand a bit about how mammals have evolved, animals more generally. There seems to be a reason for this feeling of consciousness, and my view is what I mentioned a minute ago. I think it's a way for us to deal with kind of rapidly changing events in our environment that can't be handled through instinct or more embodied cognition. There's that conscious cognition the fast thinking economists talked about that has evolved in humans to allow us to be adaptive to quick events in our lives. And so, given that kind of biological imperative and how we got here, how we have these bodies and this hair and these eyes, is there a different framing of your notions in that context or do you maintain those views?
Speaker 2:A very different framing of the same facts about the world. You're implying that consciousness subtly implying and maybe you didn't mean this but that it does something, that it has some functions and purpose, there's a role for some function, and I disagree. I think somehow consciousness must be intrinsic. It's not something that's exuded from brains when they get to a certain state of complexity, or something that is necessary, so we have to evolve it. Any view like that immediately leads you and leaves you right in the midst of the heart problem, the mind-body problem. What is this separate stuff? I would say, something that tends to be intrinsic.
Speaker 2:I am, at the present, working on an idea that I first spoke about at a conference in 1986 and I called that paper. Then there's only an abstract in existence. It's on my website, but when I rediscovered this, I thought, yeah, I didn't make it up. I was thinking it called what is it like to be a mental model, and my idea then was there's nothing it's like to be a bat. There's nothing it's like to be a frog or an AI system or a human being, any physical thing at all. There's only something it's like to be the models of the world that we built. Now, why did I leave that from 1986 until this year, which is effectively what's happened? Because I couldn't understand what a mental model is, or what a representation is, or what it would mean for a physical system like the brain, or what appears to be this physical system here, to produce models of the world.
Speaker 2:But now at last we have predictive processing theory, controlled hallucinations, active inference. I already had met ideas like that unconscious inference but I'd worked in Bristol with Richard Gregory and he used to talk about perceptions as hypotheses. We're guessing about the world all the time. Now, if you think about predictive processing theory, the fundamental idea is that the brain is a massively hierarchical system and at every level in the system the neurons are trying to predict the input that's coming from the next layer below and in order to do that, they're building a guess, a model, that they're inferring the cause the way they often put it that the neurons are. What they're doing is inferring the causes of the input. They're inferring the course the way they often put it, the nuance of what they're doing is inferring the causes of the input they're about to get, which can be seen as a model, and making a model of what's coming. So the whole system in the end is building up at higher levels, is building complex models of a world of us, and this is all we have. Everything we know about the physical world in our own bodies and everything is through the representations that we built. Reach them in in perception. We're correcting them.
Speaker 2:This is what's meant by controlled hallucinations. We're hallucinating the world and then it's controlled by the input. That's why, when you're dreaming, it isn't controlled by the input. It goes on through the sorts of stuff that is is what we're essentially doing, and those models are not always right and we we end up, various reasons, believing in the self who's in there doing it. But what I'm getting is it is those models that are the subject of experience.
Speaker 2:So it's not me, this thing, that is conscious and it's certainly not the brain that is conscious. That's just leaves you with a hard problem. It is the models that the system is building. They are the subjects of experience, and you can reasonably ask what is it like to be this brain's model of the world? Right now we have an answer it's like whatever the model says. And this model movement is saying there's a screen over there, it's representing screens, it knows about screens, it knows about keyboards, it knows about glasses of water, and it's representing all of those things and that's what it's like to be me now a model of somebody sitting at her desk talking to you I'm getting some intimations of douglas hofstadter's notion of I am a strange loop.
Speaker 1:Would you agree with that framing?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah although he talks about tangled hierarchies, and I'm very interested in what kind of hierarchy this is and what's connected to what, and so on. But yes, I'm very much in that train of thinking. Yes.
Speaker 1:I haven't read your textbook. I know you came out with your fourth edition written with your daughter, which is cool. I'm not sure there's any other mother daughter science teams in the world, but that's really cool. You guys do that. She also has orange or rainbow hair like you, which I like. Um, so in in your textbook you obviously go through a taxonomy of different approaches. Consciousness and I just finished editing a research topic at frontiers in human neuroscience on em field theories of consciousness. I'm curious if you thought much about this category of theories at this point.
Speaker 2:I did recently read something that you'd written about that and I talked a little bit to Jonathan Schugler about that as well. I know he's interested in that. I'm sorry to say there's not much in the book. There's a few paragraphs about it in the book. I didn't realize that these kinds of ideas have come back recently.
Speaker 2:It's so hard to explain the condition. We love doing it, the two of us, but it's so hard because there's so much stuff. The book is 700 pages and there's still loads of things that we've not dealt with at all. But I have problems with those theories in the sense that I'm not sure why it helps. We still have the hard problem and the hard problem I believe, and many other people do as well, is insoluble. It's the wrong problem. It doesn't really make sense. It's just dualism.
Speaker 2:Why does it help to have these resonance and electromagnetic theories? There was a whole phase of 40 hertz stuff in Francis Quick and a long time ago and that kind of didn't go anywhere. Arguably you might need this kind of resonance to tie things together in the brain. The brain is remarkable in the way everything does seem to be tied together. But is it really so much tied together? Isn't it adequate that there are long-range connections all over the place and that really, in some senses, every neuron in the brain is connected by not very many links to every other. But do we need it? I think we're left with a hard problem, because why does it help solve the separation between the physical world and the conscious world? Please give me an answer.
Speaker 1:I shall um understand better yeah, so the rain continues in the background here, so I'm going to speak close to my computer. Please give me an answer and I shall understand better. Yeah, so the rain continues in the background here, so I'm going to speak close to my computer. So there's a couple of summary points I'll suggest. And so you were at the conference and I don't know if you saw Earl Miller speak, from MIT. He's been doing a lot of research on EM field transmission in the brain and Patterns and finding that, as others have suggested for some time now, including Walter Freeman, there are no-transcript.