Neil is one of our experts. In 2012, he gave us an excellent interview on complexity theory, and we've stayed in touch ever since. We do have some serious differences, however, in how we view consciousness. I am a strict materialist and he is an Idealist. This conversation began after I had revised the video I had made from Neil's interview.
https://vimeo.com/44013533
I informed Neil about the changes, and this conversation happened.
omg! I don’t agree with everything quite this way anymore. Lol. Less emphasis on sentience than back then. More emphasis on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems. Lol. But thank you! Mostly I still love this. What made you go back to it?
Oh: and I think I’m now an idealist not a panpsychist.
I am curious about your current stance, if you care to elaborate. What do you mean by Idealist vs. Panpsychist?
At that time I was still positing that space-time was the foundational stuff of the universe. Working with Menas Kafatos we both now agree that non-dual Fundamental Awareness emanates Space-time. Panpsychism: the universe is suffused by consciousness in some fashion. Idealism: the universe arises from consciousness. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27489576/
😲
did i shock you!??!? lol
Shock me? Yes. A little! I have so much respect for you, Neil. The interview you gave me was so powerful, so instrumental in helping me shape my own thoughts about complexity! I even have deep dreams of creating a complexity theory feature-length documentary, about the Darwinian concept of 'Fit', to help explain self-developing systems, the evolution of the universe, and autobiogenesis.
Your testimony has always been so powerful to me, and yet, with all due respect, I draw opposite conclusions from it! I see complexity theory as leading in the opposite direction of panpsychism, and even more, the opposite of idealism. For example, if a paramecium figures out its behavior based upon calcium channels, then panpsychism should only create more complex beings, which also base their decisions on calcium channels. But, instead, we base our decisions upon things like probability and risk and social approbation. None of these things are fundamental perceptions. They are all informational structures, purely context-based. That's the opposite of panpsychism. What we perceive has ZERO to do with what small matter interacts with. 100% divorce. Our perceptions are clearly based upon evolutionary needs. Therefore, perception is not fundamental. It is contextual. It is virtual. It is informational. These truths seem self-evident and obvious to me, and panpsychism doesn't pretend to explain any of them. Do you think Idealism explains anything? Or predicts anything? Or maps onto reality in any way? Because I haven't seen anything that is convincing in that direction. Sorry, that's a little harsh, but yes, that's why I was shocked.
Complexity theory, to my understanding, says we should expect to see the ILLUSION of conscious choice in all kinds of systems. But, if we look deeper, there is no such thing as consciousness. There are only calcium channels.
to be honest, Matt, I think you aren’t confronting the issues raised by quantum physics and by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. If you don’t find ways to address the Copenhagen interpretation and what Godel did for platonic mathematical idealism and the (to me, and to Whitehead) inescapable explanatory limits of formal logic and empirical science, then you are necessarily, stuck with an emergentist point of view. I think you are left with a big explanatory gap. (Currently chapter 9 of the book I’m writing. Lol).
And yes; there is explanatory power to idealism. Your position erases data, a priori, from methods of self inquiry - what the Vienna Circle dismissed as merely “metaphysics”. You have no explanations of different conscious states other than the ordinary. Godels demolirion of the Vienna Circle’s materialist position leaves the door wide open to consider such experiences as data. Emergentist positions can’t explain the vast body of experiential knowledge and don’t bother to try because they are simply dismissed. That’s chapter 8. Lol
Chapter10 - only an idealist position accounts for QM, implications of godels incompleteness, and the wealth of experiential data, verified through second person investigation (as per Varela) regarding substrata of the mind that are rarely experienced without, for example, long, deep meditative practices or good careful systematic use of entheogens, etc.
I hear that you have a well-constructed rationale for your beliefs. But to me, neuropathologies demonstrate clearly that mind is an emergent phenomenon. As brain parts get destroyed, the functions they perform also vanish. That's simple emergence. I don't see how idealism deals with that.
that’s association not causation. Like all the “neurological associations”. Thinking they represent changes of causation is “belief”. It could be that specific parts of brain are required to transduce global consciousness into specific qualia. The lost parts weren’t generating qualia, they were transducing them from something else, Fundamental Awareness.
Have you considered Godel? Do you reject the data available from meditative states? If no to the first or yes to the second, then you are not testing your hypothesis fully.
Do you have a reason to reject alternative causative changes for neurological associations? Or have proof of causation?
Same problem. These are areas where your working hypothesis is incomplete.
It’s not that emergence doesn’t have a powerful essential role to play (I clearly think it does), but emergence alone is insufficient, I think.
I don't think incompleteness is a fault of materialism; it's just the necessary state. We will never know the COMPLETE truth. But the entire evolution of science has been away from us being something special, and toward being just ordinary matter. It's been about demystifying man's place in the universe. Idealism seems to just insist that we hold on to the mystery, by declaring that magic is at the fundamental level. But there's no need for magic. Complexity theory shows us that what we call 'decision-making' is really ion channels, right? It's just matter, doing matter stuff. No magic, at any level in the system.
I’m not invoking magic. I’m explaining data that you dismiss as magic. Why do you reject that kind of data? For a reason other than materialist bias? If you exclude it without any reason other than it doesn’t fit with your instincts then your theory, as I said, is limited, incomplete (not in Godelian terms of course)
As for Godel, he was essentially proving mathematical Platonism, a form of idealism. So you cant just wave him away. Math doesn’t exist to count electrons or sheaves of wheat. We didn’t invent it. Math exists to be discovered in a realm beyond space/time/matter/energy. That’s where Godel points and minds greater than ours have found no way to squirm away from that.
And you haven’t explained the hard problem yet, have you?
Meanwhile please take note that I don’t disagree with many of the mechanisms you describe and posit: there’s plenty of room for How Does All This Happen, even if I’m an idealist. I still believe in chemistry. In complexity. In biology, in neuroscience even! But I think they are more descriptive than determinative for explaining qualia.
How do I explain qualia? If the fundamental reality is pure awareness, then there is nothing but qualia. Space time matter energy are all qualia. Qualia don’t require explanation. That’s all anything is.
Actually, I do think I have an answer to the hard problem, depending upon how you define the HP. If the HP is 'why is there experience?', the answer is that experience is a movie the brain creates for the future. It is a memory. It creates the experience movie so that the future brain can re-experience the event, and learn from it, thereby. My favorite example is a rat, which finds a novel berry. The rat doesn't know whether the berry is poisonous or safe, so it goes into exploratory phase, sniffing and taking small bites. During this phase, the rat's hippocampus is revved up, because it's trying to create a memory movie of the taste, smell, etc. of the berry, just in case it needs to remember it. For the sake of our example, let's say that the berry ends up being toxic to the rat, and a few hours later, the rat feels very nauseous. The neocortex is very bad at linking cause and effect over long time spans, but episodic memory can handle that fine. The rat uses its hippocampus to link the qualia of the berry's taste and smell, to the qualia of feeling ill. Months later, the rat encounters a similar berry. Again, the rat goes through exploratory phase, but now the qualia of the berry elicit the memory of the previous encounter, which elicits the memory of the nausea. The rat, because of this qualia-matching, is able to avoid making the same mistake twice. Qualia are just the sensory components of a memory, for the sake of learning from that memory later. Qualia are especially important mnemonics for pre-language species, like rats, whereas humans can remember a lot purely through language and concepts.
so essentially the “movie” is replaying the experience? That explains the informational aspects, but not the experience of having the experience, which is what Chalmers labeled the Hard Problem. And does that mean that newborns have no experiences of qualia? And adults have none when an experience is novel? And if they have an experience of “novelty” at least, are we hardwired for a “movie” of novelty?
I think relying on neural correlates doesn’t get you the whole way. “It depends on what you call the Hard Problem”. I define it as Chalmers did: how to explain conscious experience, not what the mechanism for information processing might be for sense experiences.
Both are needed snd you know I think your model is smart as that kind of mechanism. But it doesn’t get at the “real” HP as Chalmers stated it. It doesn’t explain the actual “awareness” of the sensations being experienced. In your model, how do you generate the actual awareness of the movie being replayed?
I guess comes to this: what is the screen upon which your movie plays?
that’s where I think there’s a problem for you. The movie doesn’t explain the awareness of a movie. Only the data that make the movie. I think you haven’t accounted for the screen on which the movie plays. That’s why it’s a “hard” problem. That’s always the issue that materialist theories can’t get past.
Again: doesn’t mean your theory isn’t an important mechanism for information processing. The movie projector is half the story and you have an exceptional model for how the projector is built (and the movie camera in the first place). But you have no screen. You have mechanisms for the contents of awareness, but not for the awareness itself.
The experience = the movie. There is no 'experiencer', per se. The movie contains a fictional character, called "I", and within that movie, the I seems to have experience, but it is just a character in the movie. So, I do not become aware of the world, rather this brain creates a movie of me becoming aware.
Subjectivity exists to give memories context. The perceived but fictional 'I' frames the memory's feelings, behaviors, etc. There is a reason why there is a time lag before 'awareness', because that is how long it takes for the information to be put together in the hippocampus. Libet's experiments were showing how long it took the premotor signal to enter into the memory, giving the subjective fringe sense that 'I' chose to move.
Behind the scenes, what's really happening is a dialogue between three networks. The Immediate Action Network (IAN) is mostly the neocortex, all inputs and outputs (i.e. senses and motor/speech), and the decision-making areas (like premotor) that connect the two.
This network was the first of the three to evolve, and can handle most tasks in life. But it has a hard time navigating or learning from single-exposure events, so a second network evolved to help the IAN learn better. That network is the hippocampal one, and made movies of events that happened, for the sake of later learning.
And those two networks needed a third network, the Core or Default Mode Network, to evolve alongside the hippocampal one. The IAN would create codes, based upon its interaction with the outside world. Those codes were sent to the hippocampus, which stitches them together into a master code, the new episodic memory.
That master code is sent back to the neocortex, and it is that reciprocal activation of the neocortex by the hippocampal code that = subjective experience now, and later, = a recalled memory.
So, who experiences it? The Core Network does. The experience itself is the activation of the IAN, but the 'observer' of the experience is the Core Network. The IAN evolved to make sense of the outside world, but didn't evolve to make sense of memories. So the Core Network evolved to do that. It drives the recall process, and tries to learn lessons from the memory.
The Core Network further evolved, not just to make sense of the past, but also the future. The Core Network is in charge of planning for the future.
It uses memory to give the organism psychological continuity, connecting present events to past memories.
And even more important to the HP, the Core Network is constantly receiving information both from the hippocampus and the neocortex about the brand new memory, the subjective experience.
The Core Network uses the information about the new memory to help extrapolate beyond the scene. For example, it's in charge of Theory of Mind, trying to figure out what other people are thinking.
So, there is no 'screen' per se, but the neocortex is as close as we come to a screen. It is the instrument upon which subjective experience plays out. And the observer of that screen is the Core Network, which is our inner watcher.
But an inner watcher has awareness of what it is watching. I don’t feel like you’ve explained that. Saying it’s an illusion or a delusion is Dennett turf. I just don’t buy it. You have to deny awareness. When I’m (rarely) in a deep enough meditative state there is just awareness. No contents. So when your movie isn’t playing you say there’s nothing. But when my movie isn’t playing there is still awareness.
That is data, as I said, that I think you don’t include in your modeling.
The system is a loop-within-a-loop.
Inner loop: The IAN neocortex sends its code to the hippocampus, which compiles it, and sends the memory code back to the IAN, for error correction and future familiarity matching, activating the IAN into an experiencing, which we know as subjective experience.
Outer loop: The Core Network receives the hippocampal signal, plus it has afferents from all over the IAN (that's why it's in the middle of the cortex, so it has access to everything). The Core Network witnesses the Subjective Experience, and uses that witnessing to do things like think thoughts or imagine scenarios or immediately replay the scene that just happened.
The Core Network then feeds back into the hippocampus. Since the hippocampus evolved to create experience movies, and the Core Network evolved to control the hippocampus, the vmPFC uses the hippocampus as a simulator, to create language and image thought, in order to solve things 'in our head'. And of course, it drives memory recall.
And all those mental acts play out, as part of the hippocampal signal, to also be expressed on the IAN neocortex instrument, or 'screen' I should say. The reason why mental life has qualia (e.g. verbal and image thought, emotions) is because it is played out on the same loop as regular experience. Because there is a loop,
I don't see why there need to be any contents. It could very well just be the Core network, witnessing its own witnessing. I don't know much about meditation, but I don't think that data is in contradiction to my theory.
BTW, I want to be clear, I don't have a prediction about what a baby's inner life is like. Nor about HM. My model is only about what people with working hippocampi experience. That said, I do think it's safe to say that babies and HM don't have the same thing we have. Whatever they have will be missing a lot of context that we take for granted. Every moment of adult experiencing is freighted by concepts, associations which we have built up over the years. Our perception of beauty or risk or taste are all shaped by our constructed ways of experiencing. We build up our world. I think that the pre-hippocampal stage in a child's life is the beginning of the dialogue between these 3 networks (4, including limbic system, which is also part of the 'screen'). Their job, collectively is to learn to map concepts and qualia onto the real world, so that memory can be accurate and useful. Only once a world is constructed, can the memories begin to be created, somewhere between 3-5. We essentially teach ourselves (self-organizationally) to construct a model of the world, and start using that model to help learn.
So here we are in our loop! I would say that displacing the awareness to a mechanism of neural stuff is hand waving. You don’t explain how the electrical fluxes or the physiological interrelationships leap from just biosignaling to Awareness. You just say that it does.
But your data derive from hippocampal (etc) injuries, so, again: you are dealing only with neural correlates of consciousness. Mechanistically important ones! But only correlations. And if you “don’t know much about meditation”, it seems like you’re settling, satisfied with your (self) unchallenged belief that neural correlates of consciousness ARE sufficient.
The success of the Vienna Circle’s materialism to influence our culture in such a pervasive way, while generally being completely forgotten as the prime movers of this cultural bias, even as quantum physics and Godel literally demolished their program from within, on its own terms, is a minor wonder of 20th century scientific thought.
If you don’t know much about meditative insights (or other such phenomena) regarding the mind’s ability to examine itself and what minds find when they do so, don’t you have to wonder why you stopped short in developing your theory? If a liver pathology finding challenges my theory of how a disease develops, it behooves me to look for what’s missing in my theory. But when it comes to science of mind, our culture prefers to dismiss contradictory evidence as invalid and “meaningless” - literally what the VC said we should do.
They were in fact bad scientists. Why follow them? And if one says “I don’t know who they are, how could I be following them?” That’s just a quirk of celebrity. Everyone knows Einstein, but how many people know his collaborators for the mathematical expressions of General Relativity? Or the less famous founders of QM like Dirac?
There is literally no evidence to exclude the alternate understanding that your model is just a mechanism for transduction of Fundamental Awareness, not the producer of (deluded) self awareness (that has no existence without the machinery to produce it). And there is an abundance of data to suggest that there is more: but you are not admitting that it requires explanation by your model.
That’s my problem. I think your model is beautiful. But it isn’t finished. And it remains unfinished because, like most in the field of cognitive neuroscience, it refuses to encompass data which challenge its materialist bias. Which is just bad science. 🤷🏻♂️
Not that I expect to change your mind on this! Lol. But I do hope, if my book is successful, to help prune away the invasive tendrils of materialist perspectives in our culture, from the bottom up. Can’t be easily top down cuz that will require a generational shift (which has already begun).
I don't reject data from meditation studies. I've interviewed Josipovic and Jonathan Shear and I think what they have to say is interesting. It's just not a focus of mine. And I know Godel only through Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop". I know he insisted that mathematics needed to be incomplete, but I don't know what you're referring to. What is it that he's saying, which is relevant?
Regarding "awareness". In experience, we have this feeling of 'becoming aware'. And only the things within experience are reportable, and thus we say that experience = awareness. But to be clear, that's not what my model says.
'Awareness' is when the fictional character 'I' becomes aware of the detail, not when the brain becomes aware. Parts of your brain were already 'aware' of some detail, but it doesn't become reportable, until that detail enters memory, and is shared with the rest of the brain. Thus, the Libet timing results.
So, there's not a special demarcation of 'awareness'. And there's certainly not an 'I' who becomes aware. There's just what made it into memory, which is reportable. And then what is left out, which is not.
And to follow up on an earlier comment, I am absolutely NOT a Dennet-like illusionist. He says experience is an illusion; I say the opposite. Experience is the ONLY obvious thing.
But, to be clear, experience IS a simulation, including experience of the self.
It is based upon an actual organism, but the perception is (brain) self-constructed.
for example: The fact that some gay people are not out to themselves shows that self-perception is motivated, and can be divorced from the organism's reality.
for example: People who say 'um' and 'like' a lot don't experience themselves saying those words, because the self is the most fudged part of experience.
Yes, Hofstadter uses Godel to suggest a materialist hypothesis based on the strange loops idea. Interestingly (just discovered as i was writing the chapter on materialism vs. panpsychism vs. idealism), Chalmers was Hofstadter's student! For the Godel relevance you could check out Rebecca Goldstein's book "Incompleteness" - a bit flawed, but generally a good primer - in particular highlighting Godel's mathematical platonism as a driving force and how it really did undermine the VC's materialist "empiricism/mathematical formalism" restrictions. Its really as fundamental to 20th/21st century understanding of reality as QM and relativity. Also, a delightful essay in a volume entitled "When Einstein Walked With Godel" - as they were best buds in Princeton in their twilight years. I should say that not only did Hofstadter use Godel to support his materialist position, but Godel was the starting point for Penrose's panpsychist position. But for both of those, as for yours, by excluding the meditation (etc) data, you wind up with a partial explanation, I think. "Its not a focus of mine" - but how can it not be? You are interested in how experience and awareness happen - how can you exclude this data? I'm happy if you admit that its an arbitrary distinction that limits your model - but I don't see how you can claim your model is sufficient, if you don't choose to focus on the aspects of cognitive experience that don't fit the model - or don't seem to fit the model from a reasonably critical interested party (ME!) <g> even if you don't want to get into the Godelian aspects of this and your model, though, the history and person and theorems are just stunning to read about - so when you have a need for soemthing diverting on a high intellectual plane, highly recommended! (or i could send you the current unpolished sections of my book - for you i would do that - would even be helpful to me, though would otherwise choose to wait til its polished up in a few months time)
regarding your comment to my comment about Dennett - ok, i see that. cool. but i don't see how "experience" as something that it is like to have an experience can be that without an awareness that is doing the experiencing. neurons don't experience. and you're right, of course, an "I" is fictitious. but something has to be having the experience in an aware kind of way. by calling it "experience without awareness", which it seems to me you are trying to do, doesn't make any sense to me. back to the Hard Problem. experience doesn't happen without an awareness of the experience being experienced (however, synthetic and fudged the "experience" is compared to the "reality" it derives from).
I mean 'experience' as a noun, not a verb. Subjective Experience is a movie, pure and simple, but unlike a normal movie, which just has audio and video, it has all the feels, and even the perception of mind, ownership, volition, etc. But it's still a movie, about a constructed first-person perspective.
However, there is no ONE who is having the experience. There is, instead a collective, a colony of cells (i.e. the brain) which is collectively having the experience.
I liken it to North Korean State TV. The whole collective sends in reports to the central media station, which puts them together into a master news report, the new memory. That memory is broadcast all over the collective, and its unifying message helps keep them all united in one common goal.
The logic is the opposite of the Cartesian Theater. Instead of there being one self, which watches all the feeds, there is instead a unifying of the feeds, which is then reciprocally sent back to the entire collective, giving the illusion of being one coherent self. The brain is actually in a constant state of argument within itself, as different factions of neurons pull and tug on decisions that no one neuron can understand. But large scale informational structures, like theta memory episodes, can unite the collective behind a common story.