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15: Consciousness
516 Plays7 years ago
What does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to make a mistake? These are questions which we are not going to attempt to answer, but they are essential to the topic of study of today’s episode: consciousness. Conscious is the nebulous thing that lends a certain air of importance to experience, but as we’ve seen from 500 centuries of fascination with this topic, it is difficult to describe in languages which we’re used to. But with the advent of neuroscience and psychology, we seem to be closer than ever to revealing aspects of consciousness that we’ve never beheld. So what does it mean to feel? What are qualia? And how do we know that we ourselves are conscious?
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Transcript
Opening and Episode's Theme
00:00:00
Speaker
What does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to make a mistake? These are questions which we are not going to attempt to answer, but they are essential to the study of today's episode.
Consciousness and Its Challenges
00:00:11
Speaker
Consciousness Consciousness is the nebulous thing that lends a certain air of importance to experience.
00:00:17
Speaker
But as we've seen from 500 centuries of fascination with this topic, it is difficult to describe in languages which we're used to. But with the advent of neuroscience and psychology, we seem to be closer than ever to revealing aspects of consciousness that we've never beheld.
Exploring Qualia and Self-Awareness
00:00:33
Speaker
So what does it mean to feel? What are qualia? And how do we know that we ourselves are conscious? All of this and more on this episode of Breaking Math. Episode 15, Consciousness, Part 1.
00:00:53
Speaker
I'm Jonathan. And I'm Gabriel. And today we're covering something kind of far away, it seems like at first from math, consciousness.
Mathematical Descriptions of Consciousness
00:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, this topic has been studied, actually this has been talked about, oh goodness, for centuries and centuries, and this may be thought of as a more philosophical problem. However, it is our belief that everything in the universe can be described mathematically. Now, how we go about describing consciousness mathematically, I think it may be more correct to say we describe elements of consciousness mathematically, and then how those elements are brought together,
00:01:31
Speaker
Well, we believe is open for discussion and we won't have answers to all of the parts of that question, but it's a very noble task, we believe. As far as we could tell, there is no answer to what some people call the hard problem of consciousness, which we won't really touch on until
00:01:50
Speaker
We do a sequel to this episode. That's right. That's right. We that's right We have multiple episodes planned when we're going to talk about both consciousness as well as mathematical Models of human consciousness and you're right you can do any kind of literature search on the harder problem of consciousness describing What is it that causes us to you know feel alive feel?
00:02:11
Speaker
feel what it means to be a living human being who is self-aware as well as aware of one's surroundings. But nonetheless, we will still be discussing a lot about what makes up consciousness. And just like philosophy is kind of a component of math, I'm sure some of the philosophers would be mad at me for saying that, but what I mean is that math has made itself out of philosophy
00:02:35
Speaker
So his conscience is made out of different aspects of math, and these are aspects which we've covered on this show so far, actually. That's fascinating. I love the idea. And again, I'm going to agree with you early. I'm going to agree with your statement earlier that there are some philosophers who will say, no, philosophy did not come from math. Rather, mathematics is the empirical branch of philosophy, but that's not here nor there.
00:02:58
Speaker
the idea that everything is mathematics and that, you know, everything that we see is emergent from math, even consciousness is a quite profound idea. And I love that idea. Now, as Jonathan was alluding to earlier, here on the Breaking Math podcast, for a very long time, we have been talking about a very broad range of topics, you know, all different things that involve math, including mathematics and elitism.
Information Theory and Consciousness
00:03:25
Speaker
What are some of the other topics, Jonathan?
00:03:26
Speaker
We've done information theory, chaos, computation, algorithms. What else have we done? Oh gosh, we've done physics, language. We've done the mathematics of human language. We've done neural networks and various parts of other episodes have all led up to this point and what comes after will only benefit from it.
00:03:46
Speaker
So we're going to go a little bit into each thing that we've talked about on the podcast, what it has to do with consciousness, and move on. So I think we're going to start with information theory. Yes. If we recall, for those of you who have listened to our episodes in sequence, the third episode of Breaking Math was called Too Much Information, and it was all about
00:04:08
Speaker
Shannon's information theory, which is an extremely important topic in electrical engineering and basically in the digital age, which has been essentially over the last hundred years. So what are some of the more important points in the information theory episode?
00:04:29
Speaker
I think one of the main points is that everything really is made out of information. I mean, physics can be said that's a little bit more controversial, but for example, language. You have a certain amount of bits per word, a bit being a yes or no decision. So for example, most words contain like maybe two or three bits of information.
00:04:53
Speaker
Meaning that if I go say a random word it takes two or three guesses if I only tell you yes or no What that word is going to be if you knew the words that came before and you knew the language that I'm speaking
00:05:04
Speaker
And actually we do sort of see parts of bits. Um, like, uh, you know, when we're talking about how much information there is in a word, for example, on average, there are parts of bits. So just like that indivisible thing, there are ways of dividing it that are not, that are unintuitive. And I would suggest, especially for this episode, what do you think this is one of the most important ones to go back to?
00:05:28
Speaker
Yeah, oh my gosh, yes, yes. I would say that in our discussion of consciousness, I think the crux of it or one of the cruxes essentially is understanding information theory and understanding how information can be represented as a bit or as Jonathan said, on average, even a fraction of a bit.
00:05:50
Speaker
Also, we're going to talk about a little bit of physics. Mostly our discussion of physics is going to be limited to the nervous system, which we did talk about in a recent episode, episode 14 actually, because the nervous system is designed to predict physical phenomena.
Sensory Illusions and Brain Software
00:06:08
Speaker
One of the other episodes we have, or arguably a couple of our episodes, are about the hardware aspect of computation. Episode four, which came right after Too Much Information, is called Digital Evolution, and of course that was all about the evolution of computing hardware.
00:06:28
Speaker
Now, all of our senses which contribute, which give information to our brain, which then processes and we experience consciousness as a form of the processing of information, all of our senses are in a sense, computation hardware. You know, we've got our eyes, our ears, our sense of touch, smell and taste.
00:06:50
Speaker
All of those are hardware that take in information. So that was a very, very relevant episode, and we can certainly use the aspects of that episode when we're talking about the brain and the nervous system and how information is taken in.
00:07:05
Speaker
And we're going to talk a little bit about the software aspect of the brain, which is pretty much the most we're going to go into that is about illusion and how illusion exists in every single sensory input.
00:07:20
Speaker
Right, right. We had a few episodes that touched on software. You know, obviously, as you said earlier, our last episode on neural networks. What are some of the other episodes? Oh, the hacking culture one. Yes, yes. Culture of hacking, which absolutely, you know, you can hack your brain, as you said, or you've got an optical illusion. But also we had an episode on evolutionary algorithms. We may go into that a little bit as well.
00:07:45
Speaker
And as we said, we're not going to be focusing on the hard problem of human consciousness. So, I mean, we will touch a little bit on what it means later, but for right now, we're going to be talking about the building blocks of consciousness, which are far more varied and complex than you might think. At first, this was not going to be a whole episode. It started out as like an introduction, didn't it?
00:08:11
Speaker
You know what? I think so. I think so. This emerged from some discussions on a lot of things, which kind of evolved into what we have now. So without further ado, consciousness.
Information Content in Senses
00:08:25
Speaker
On consciousness, part one, we will be focusing on the senses and how the senses take in information. What will we be discussing on this episode in particular?
00:08:37
Speaker
We'll be discussing the mathematical representation of various senses. That's to say how you could represent them mathematically and manipulate them from that. What is a sense? Because that is something that is not as well defined as you might think. We can blame Aristotle once again.
00:08:58
Speaker
the information content of various senses, including light, and even the information content of consciousness itself. Right. Now, we very frequently bring up information, and in fact, there's actually one other element that I want to bring up if this is a good time. And the other element is dimensionality. This is something that we've touched on a little bit. We had a mini-sode, we talked about a hypercube with more than three dimensions, but how does dimensionality relate to information theory and the senses?
00:09:27
Speaker
I mean, each sense has a different amount of dimensions. For example, the sense of sight, you have these three-dimensional samples, it's kind of like a three-dimensional hyperplane going through six-dimensional space.
00:09:43
Speaker
You have hearing, which is just a two dimensional sheet that's being pulled through time. You have touch, which is very much like sight because you have, you know, you have heat. You have the sense of pressure. You have the sense of like an edge. You have all the different things.
00:10:03
Speaker
So, so when we use that word dimension and we say that a sense is multi-dimensional, is it almost like saying it is a category of information? Like you had said slight earlier, I think, and you said the site has three, three dimensions. Um, so I know that we have, uh, uh, you know, a, a spectrum, a given spectrum. And I think that we've got cones, which are receptors in our eyes and they are, uh, there's three categories of cones and they each have their own spectrum.
00:10:30
Speaker
Is that right? So essentially a dimension is very much a category, is that right? Yes, and it's more than a category, it's a degree of freedom because there's also the up-down is one dimension, left-right is another dimension, and time is a third dimension.
00:10:50
Speaker
So that's kind of what the three-dimensional sheet is. And then when you add in the red, green, and blue, and that's how we know that we have three extra dimensions for the samples themselves is because we can make any color or pretend to make any color. We'll go into this using just combinations of red, green, and blue light.
00:11:11
Speaker
Okay, okay, fascinating. That makes a lot of sense, especially when you say that, you know, on one hand, it's we'll say a category or rather, you know, a red cone or a green cone or a blue cone. Did I say that right? Oh, yeah. Okay. And on the other hand, you also have, you know, the sense of up and down or, you know, left and right. So that's what we mean when we talk about dimensions. And of course, you know, all of our senses are multi dimensional, some more than others.
00:11:38
Speaker
And some have partial dimensions, but we'll get into that in just a little bit. The first sense that we will be discussing is the sense of sight. There is a lot that we have learned about sight in recent years. For human beings, we are able to see frequencies with wavelengths between approximately 400 and 700 nanometers.
00:12:00
Speaker
The eye has two types of cells, cone cells and rod cells. Rod cells have a peak sensitivity of 498 nanometers or a bluish green. The sense of sight is a very thorough sense indeed. There are some 125 million sensory cells in the eye.
00:12:21
Speaker
all working tirelessly transmitting information. However, of the billions of bits per second generated on the retina, only some four kilobytes pass through all layers of the visual cortex per second. This is the equivalent of distilling the last paragraph you're listening to right now from 400 average length books. So that's a lot of information to digest. I think one thing that we should talk about is that
00:12:50
Speaker
The amount of neurons does not correspond necessarily to how much information we get from things. For example, only 6 million of those cells are color cells. I'm sorry, you said the amount of neurons? Did you mean to say the amount of cells? Well, neurons are cells, but what I meant was sensory neurons. Oh, touche. I see. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think you make a very good point.
00:13:13
Speaker
One way I think we could look at what site is mathematically is looking at how we represent it on computers or in film. In film, like the film that you might have grown up with if you're of a certain age, you have these little blotches on film, these little pixels. And now we actually call them pixels and they're squares. And that's what makes up visual information.
00:13:42
Speaker
Yeah, so also obviously on an old sheet of film, you know, say from an older movie like The Wizard of Oz, when you actually take a picture, it's obviously the cells on that film are sensitive to the same frequencies that our eyes are, or at least they overlap, and they're able to form a picture.
00:14:02
Speaker
And so basically you have all these little samples that can approximate it. And what's remarkable about it, not necessarily special, but definitely remarkable, is that the more of these that you have, the better you can approximate something visually.
00:14:20
Speaker
One example that I like to think of is seeing the tip of a mountain. A mountain could really be very, very tall. It would be a really weird mountain, but really, really tall and really, really thin. And you could not see the top, but because you have so many samples coming into your eye, you can see the top. You see the highest point to most mountains.
00:14:42
Speaker
Interesting, interesting. Wow. Yeah, the sense of sight is simply remarkable. In fact, ever since I was very young, I was just, I would oftentimes think about how amazing it is to be conscious of sight. That's just not something that we have the power to describe to someone. You know, like I've often thought, what is it like to describe seeing things just from, you know, just
00:15:04
Speaker
subjectively, and how would you describe that to someone who, for instance, had never experienced sight? It's just phenomenal. And of course, the way I'm describing it is the experience of it versus the way Jonathan is describing it, in terms of what actually is seen. But just the information processing is just remarkable.
00:15:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I definitely have an emotional detachment, as most people do, to sight. My first word was actually loose, the Spanish word for light. Oh, wow. And one thing that I used to think about as a little kid is everybody is blind past the edge of their sight. Nobody can really see where their sight ends, but there is a finite field of view.
00:15:45
Speaker
So that's one of those weird things about consciousness just right off the bat that I think sight kind of tells us. I'm actually really happy you mentioned that, Jonathan. Did you know that I actually had some of their thoughts as well? In fact, I remember sitting in my station wagon, you know, in the backseat of my station wagon with my little brother, who at the time was around six or so.
00:16:05
Speaker
I remember talking to my brother and I thought, what does it look like looking at the back of your head? Well, you don't see color and you don't see blackness. It's nothing. You just don't see. So it's kind of cool that I'm talking to you now and you had mentioned this as well. The idea of not seeing, it's like asking, what did you experience before you were alive? Well, it wasn't blackness. It was just nothingness. It's trippy.
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah, I feel it has a similar quality to ask somebody, what does it feel like to fall asleep? It's a certain nobody knows, but you know what it isn't, kind of. We don't know what it is.
00:16:47
Speaker
So essentially, the whole idea of this whole story is the finiteness of sight. As amazing and as seemingly miraculous as sight is, it's measurable and it's a limiting thing. Speaking of limiting information, as you said earlier, a lot of information goes into our eye, but it doesn't all make it through the eye. Can we talk a little bit about that?
00:17:13
Speaker
Sure, there's a whole study of what happens to the information on the way through the cortex, and it's called gestalt theory.
Gestalt Theory and Brain Processing
00:17:21
Speaker
Gestalt theory is all about what happens to information, what we extract from it. And one of the first, and we're not gonna go over all of gestalt because there's entire academies dedicated to gestalt theory, but one thing that we're gonna talk about, and we're gonna talk a few about these, is a proximity.
00:17:41
Speaker
If two objects are in close proximity, we sort of generalize them, and that's where some of the information goes, especially if there's two apples on a tree. All you remember about those two apples is that there were two of them. If they look close enough, you don't remember, you don't have to store them separately. You can generalize. Okay, so let me make sure I'm hearing you right. So again, this is not including paying very, very close attention, which then is going to change the information processing.
00:18:11
Speaker
But if you just look in a passing glance, it's possible that your brain will trick you into seeing the same apple duplicated. Is that right? More or less? Well, a little bit. But even if you pay really close attention, if there's your brain is going to take it's going to take any similarities and use that to compress information.
00:18:30
Speaker
Oh, wow. That's fascinating. So, you know, we talk about information or we talk about compression of information, which we've mentioned before, you know, and our brain absolutely does that evolutionarily. We have learned to do that. That's amazing.
00:18:44
Speaker
Yeah, and then we also, and what we just covered is proximity and similarity. But there's another one that is a little bit less obvious, it's called closure. So let's say I have like a bunch of leaves and they're in front of a ball. Your brain is gonna complete the ball. It's gonna assume that the ball, it's not gonna assume that the ball stops or the leaves stops because it sees that those are in the foreground. Okay, now I'm assuming that this requires prior knowledge, of course, about balls.
00:19:12
Speaker
Oh yeah, all of gestalt makes assumptions. For example, if we see the two apples from one side, it assumes that they're about the same on the other side too. There's a lot of assumptions being made. But this is one that requires a lot of assumptions. If you've ever seen a bar of soap with text carved out of it, you've experienced closure with respect to gestalt.
00:19:40
Speaker
You know what they say about assuming, don't you, Jonathan? And to think our brain does it all the time. It's not very nice of it. No, no, no. The brain shouldn't judge. But of course, we'd be much slower at processing information if we didn't. In fact, you could make the argument that it would be impossible
00:19:59
Speaker
to process any information if we made no assumptions. Okay, so perhaps we shouldn't tell that to some crowd of protesters. I don't know. Anyways, I'm moving off topic here. So the thing is about closure is that because we can make these assumptions, we don't have to store, in the example that we gave, there's proximity, there's all these leaves that are in front of this ball,
00:20:27
Speaker
Similarity the leaves look similar. So we'd kind of clump them together and then closure so we have this ball behind the leaves and then we Sort of fill in the gaps with our own mind. Okay, so so I'll ask you this so so obviously when you look at that picture with the ball and the leaves in front of it so all of that information goes into your eye and
00:20:48
Speaker
And then your brain, of course, will fill in the gaps based on memories. And of course, part of that is based on how information is stored and how it's compared to stuff that you already know and what you're already familiar with, right?
00:20:59
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like it's it's it's like if you've ever looked through a pair of binoculars and you've seen somebody run towards you, they look like they're running in place. And it looks like that because your brain is being given a novel way of interpreting information and it doesn't know what to do with it. Wow. So you can kind of trick your brain on that one. Fascinating.
00:21:23
Speaker
Now, one other thing I want to ask you specifically is quantitatively, you know, again, your eyes take in a lot of information, but not all of it makes it through it, you know, just in terms of bits themselves. The previous analogy we used was reducing, gosh, how many books was it? Like 400 books to the one paragraph that you heard.
00:21:45
Speaker
Right. Right. So a lot of that I don't want to say is thrown away. Well, I guess throwing away information is probably an accurate way of explaining it because your brain essentially is it your brain or is it your eye that makes the judgment and doesn't pass on information? Both. Your eye gets rid of about ninety nine point nine percent of it.
00:22:04
Speaker
Oh, wow. And how does that work? Well, that works. The way that works is it's basically bundling everything to go through the optic nerve. It finds little patterns and things just enough in it, but it transmits just enough information for us to be able to do things like
00:22:25
Speaker
I mean, it's remarkable how much like if I told you to look at a pixel on your phone, you could do that. So that's the thing that really makes this not throwing away information is the idea of focus.
00:22:44
Speaker
So focus is what limits our amount of information, really. And if we had all the information, there's no sense of, there's no sense at least the way that we evolved to really store all of that.
00:23:01
Speaker
How would you capture movement? I suppose that would be capturing or rather becoming aware of change, you know? Well, movement, I mean, all that is is a pattern over time. Yeah, you're right. And if you have multiple patterns over space and over time, you have the gestalt concept of common fate. So if you see a lake, you see all this water moving towards the same place.
00:23:28
Speaker
you assume that all that water has something in common because it has a common fate. Okay, wow, wow. So another really trippy concept, and this just blew my mind a lot younger, is the idea of frame rates, and the idea that the information that's coming into your eyes, it's not continuous. You do have a frame rate, isn't that right? There isn't a frame rate like there is in cameras, for example.
00:23:50
Speaker
Or like a flipbook, right? Like you don't have, you know, like I've heard human sight as described as being approximately able to decipher roughly 24 frames per second. But that's a gross approximation in terms of how it works, right? Yeah, it's probably, I mean, just noticing that the difference is between, you know, 60 FPS and 30 FPS TV is probably close to 30 or something like that.
00:24:12
Speaker
but there is a certain maximum rate that we can notice change at, which is slightly different. The difference is, it's like the difference between, if you've ever played with a slinky and you moved it up and down very quickly, the bottom doesn't move that much. So it's a difference between that and blinking your eyes and looking at your hand moving up and down,
00:24:40
Speaker
and opening your eyes every single time is in the same place. So that's a frame rate versus the way that we sort of interpret vision. So we do do it kind of continuously, but there is a sort of maximum virtual frame rate. So yes and no. Wow. Again, this is all comes down to this whole philosophical idea that there are things that can be in front of you that you can't see. It's an interesting reality of the world that we live in.
00:25:06
Speaker
Then, of course, you have these aggregate senses that come from a sight. For example, one that I like to talk about is expression. If you look at all the dimensions in expression, there's basically one dimension for every muscle in the face.
00:25:24
Speaker
Um, so like, for example, if I smile, I can look, there's so many different expressions I could communicate with different types of smiles. I could be somebody who's trying to get something over on somebody. I could be genuine. I can be mischievous. There's so many, and all of these things are a very high dimensional derived sense. And we'll get to derive senses a little bit later too.
00:25:48
Speaker
One other thing that I want to go and point out here is we talk about vision and we talk about the spectrum that we see, which is approximately between 400 and 700 nanometers. However, there are other animals and there are other creatures in the animal kingdom that see very differently than us. Jonathan, you want to talk a little bit about that? Sure. Bees, for example, see flowers much more differently than we do. They see them with a target shape.
00:26:13
Speaker
Um, because it's a very simple shape for visa C amongst all the complexity of the shape of a flower. And it's designed to see that because the, it's advantageous for the B to do that because the B gets pollen and then the.
00:26:29
Speaker
Flower gets pollinated. Yeah, it's fascinating now. It's I'm sorry I was aware that bees can see a different spectrum then we can see if I'm not mistaken they can see into the ultraviolet spectrum, isn't that right? Yeah, they see ultraviolet. Um, then you have snakes, for example, who could see infrared. Oh, wow So they could see mice and things like that in in what we call the dark everything glows to them
00:26:52
Speaker
Okay, now of course we've expanded our own site somewhat through applications like military night vision goggles and things like that which were kind of similar I think but not quite the same.
00:27:02
Speaker
You can see, if you want right now, you can see a color that does not exist. And I'm not just talking about yellow or purple, which don't exist. And for the reason why yellow doesn't exist is because yellow is just a combination of yellow and red. So most yellows are say it again. Yellow. Yellow is just mostly a combination of red and green. I'm sorry. And so a lot of yellow isn't actual pure yellow. So yellow a lot of times is fake.
00:27:29
Speaker
it's worth pointing out i'm so sorry it's worth pointing out that the that when you combine light that when you combine a color of light it's different than when you combine paint colors it's called additive versus subtractive color and you could check that out on um other things it's it's a very interesting topic that we unfortunately don't have time to go into that's correct but basically every time you see yellow on tv it's not really yellow then you have purple which never existed
00:27:55
Speaker
because purple is not an actual hue because purple is a combination of red and blue is different than violet. Um, and so that's a color that doesn't exist at all. But if you want to see a color that extremely doesn't exist, uh, just gets red, get a red sheet of paper and a blue sheet of paper, put one in front of each eye and you'll see this weird shimmery reddish blue that does not exist, but it's a completely new color.
00:28:23
Speaker
Oh wow, I want to see that. Wow, that's insane. So how is it a new color, but purple is not a new color?
00:28:32
Speaker
Well, it's just as, it's just as purple. It's just as colory as, I mean, most people would say that purple is a color. So I'm using colloquial versus, um, like scientific. This is where we're getting into some confusing terminology. Okay. Wow. Wow. That's fascinating. For you, the listeners of breaking math podcast, audible is offering a free audio book download with a free 30 day free trial to give you the opportunity to check out their service.
00:29:00
Speaker
My recommendation for today is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, written by Robert A. Heinlein. It's an awesome book. It's a science fiction novel about a revolt from the moon colony against the Earth, where the moon is a penal colony. It has to do a lot with artificial intelligence. There's some light trends human themes. It's very interesting.
00:29:27
Speaker
And for me, my story that I'd like to recommend for Audible is called A Quantum Story by Jim Baggett. A Quantum Story is a review of what we know about modern physics. That is to say, quantum mechanics. And it goes from the very dawn of quantum mechanics with max Planck and the Planck length all the way through things like quantum loop gravity and ideas and string theory. It's a fascinating read and it's a
00:29:55
Speaker
big, great, big, thick read. But having it read to you in Audible would be a very nice and a very enriching experience. Don't you think, Jonathan? Oh, yeah, definitely. I have a lot of notes on this book. Quick story. I actually gave it to Jonathan and I called it the Steak Challenge to finish it because it's a very, very thick book, but it's a great book.
00:30:21
Speaker
And so to download your free audiobook today, go to audibletrial.com slash breakingmath. Again, that's audibletrial.com slash breakingmath for your free audiobook. And now, back to the show.
Sound and Communication
00:30:35
Speaker
Sound is similar to sight in many ways. It responds to frequency information. It gives us information about the shapes of the world around us and is used, arguably a lot in humans, for interspecies communication.
00:30:49
Speaker
yet there's something fundamentally different about sound. Sound is, if you include time, two-dimensional, while sight is a three-dimensional sheet traveling through six dimensions. So what does this fundamental distinction, if anything, mean?
00:31:08
Speaker
So what's the fundamental unit of sound and why is it appropriate that we're talking about sound? So for sound, of course, the fundamental unit I would say would be frequency or pitch as it's often referred to.
00:31:26
Speaker
Yeah, and yeah, I was thinking we should have started with sound because we're on a podcast. But I think that one of the reasons why we didn't is because our primary human sense is vision. But here we are talking about sound.
00:31:42
Speaker
So, and again, you said a lot of interesting points there. I like how we specifically are going to contrast the information that we get from sound with the information that we get from sight. And again, once again, we are describing the mathematics of sound and fundamentally how we get information from sound.
00:32:05
Speaker
So obviously frequency is the amount of wavelengths per unit of time and that has a lot to do with what we hear. Now we hear a spectrum of sound and there's a lot of animals that they can hear things outside of our spectrum of sound.
00:32:23
Speaker
Yeah, our spectrum goes from about 20 vibrations per second to 20,000 vibrations per second. And actually, we can hear sound through our bones if we're underwater. Interesting fact. Wow, that is fascinating.
00:32:39
Speaker
So now, when we talk about sight and sound and how that interacts specifically with the nervous system, it's going to be a little different. So in sound, we've got a set of bones in both ears that essentially vibrates when it comes into contact with vibrating air molecules. And that's why we hear sound differently at different elevations where the air is thicker or thinner.
00:33:07
Speaker
Well yeah, and not only that, you have all these little, you have basically, it's like a little spiral, and the spiral you, every time that the air compresses, the spiral compresses and decompresses, and then you have these little hairs on the spiral that literally vibrate at the frequency that you're hearing of that.
00:33:28
Speaker
So the stuff that gets directly input into your brain is not the pressure of the space around you, but rather a processed version of it, the frequency. Wow, that's fascinating. I actually had no idea about that.
00:33:42
Speaker
Yeah. And these things are not, I mean, you could say that they are nerves. So you could say that they are part of that, but, uh, see, this is where we get into what is a processed, um, sense and what is a direct sense. There's no clear line. Interesting. Now you, you, you said something earlier and I'm actually very curious about this. You, you said that, that sound is two dimensional. Can you, um, elaborate on that a little bit?
00:34:09
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So at any given time, you hear a bunch of pitches. So you hear a chord like this one right here.
00:34:22
Speaker
Or you could hear two people talking, like me and Gabriel counting to 10. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. We kind of almost harmonized there, but then I think you got off there, Jonathan. And so that's why we have different pitches that you hear at any given time. So that's like, you can think of those pitches being in a column.
00:34:47
Speaker
So when you hear, or like on a piano roll, a piano roll is a two-dimensional sheet of paper, and if you had a piano with enough keys, you could play any sound. Okay, okay, I get it. So again, I'm thinking about the two-dimensional aspect of it. I know that one way of differentiating sound is pitch, and then what's the other?
00:35:11
Speaker
volume. So that's another aspect of it. So any sound can really be represented as a black and white picture. Interesting, interesting.
00:35:27
Speaker
Okay, so obviously um, I don't know and you know i'm i'm curious uh evolutionary speaking What probably came first sight or sound and i'm not really sure on that one actually, you know what? I think that um God that's uh difficult to because with sight you have to have um stuff that's that corresponds to uh to photons, um, but with uh
00:35:53
Speaker
I mean, all hearing is, is a very gussied up version of touch.
00:36:00
Speaker
You know what, actually, I think it's a really good way of putting it. And you know, we talked about the hardware of sound, about the, I believe the bone, it's called the cochlear part of the ear. We didn't even talk at all about the nervous system aspect of sound because our brain certainly processes sound as well. Oh yeah, and much less is known about the nervous system of sound. But we do know about what happens because of it.
00:36:23
Speaker
Most of the nervous system of sound gets processed as language and things like that. It's fascinating.
00:36:31
Speaker
You know actually just last week I was even thinking that you know in my mind I can hear my wife's voice and it's fascinating that memory can be stored that way because you know obviously I don't hear anything you know like there's no sound yet I still have that memory I think that's fascinating in fact I can even have an internal monologue and it's not in any voice whatsoever yet I am clearly or to myself I absolutely am having that
00:36:55
Speaker
monologue, but I don't have any way of explaining it, because it's not a sound, but it certainly is happening. I just find that fascinating. It's sort of a sense of language. And the sense of language comes out when you think about the cocktail party effect. And what that is, is it's basically, I'm going to say some words, and Gabriel's going to say some words,
00:37:16
Speaker
and you try to pick out some words that he's saying and some words that I'm saying. There's also a whole lot of things that I like to talk about here. The first type of metal is copper. People watching these are a lot of people. Copper is a disgusting metal. Who's engaged in this conversation? So yeah, if you listen to that craziness, that's the cocktail party effect. And the cocktail party effect really is more about hearing your own name, but it's related to this effect.
00:37:43
Speaker
Oh, that's fascinating. So when you hear your own name, obviously that has less to do with the sense of sound and rather that's the processing of sound because, oh, something's familiar. I heard that, right?
00:37:51
Speaker
Yeah, and then when you're hearing me and Gabriel speaking at the same time, you know my voice, you know Gabriel's voice, and you know what two voices sound like at the same time. So you were able to pick our voices apart using transforms. I believe that this is actually a process in the interior olive, which is a part of the brain that has to do with synchronizing things.
00:38:14
Speaker
And that's binaural beats. Binaural beats have a lot of properties that may or may not exist. For example, helping with studying. There's a lot of woo surrounding it. Well, actually, this is the first time I've heard of binaural beats. Oh, what it is is you have, let's say, 400 hertz in one ear and just a little bit more than 400 in the other ear.
00:38:37
Speaker
What you'll hear is you'll hear a sort of beat frequency between them. I've heard that now when my wife and I were part of Rumble, actually the local improv choir group, when everyone would sing together, we would hear beats. Is that the same thing?
00:38:54
Speaker
Those are just, that's just the beat frequency. These are binaural beats that are created only in the brain. So in your left ear you hear one frequency, in your right ear you hear the other frequency, but together you hear a sort of binaural beat. And we'll play an example of that right now. And so yeah, those were binaural beats.
00:39:24
Speaker
Interesting. And that's one illusion that you do with sound. And why do you think, why do you suppose it's important that we keep talking about illusion with every sense? Oh, right. Yeah, because we talk about optical illusions, or I'm sorry, not just optical, but information illusions in general, because the brain takes in information and sometimes it makes up information.
00:39:48
Speaker
And that making up information is an essential part of consciousness. You'll go more into that thesis in the second episode. And so, for example, you might think something might be impossible to hear, like a tone that is constantly rising or falling. But when such tone exists, it's called a shepherd tone. And we will play a little bit of that right now. Oh, this is a fascinating one. It's one of my favorite ones. So how about we just play it until it reaches its peak?
00:40:18
Speaker
you
00:40:47
Speaker
So as you could probably guess, it has no end. Yes, yes. I love that tone. I love it. And there's actually a really simple reason why the shepherd tone can exist. And let's see if you can get it. We are not going to tell you. But I'll tell you that it's related to the to the appearance of if you've ever seen a like a twisted object rotating like a barber's pole. It's it's related to that.
00:41:17
Speaker
The smell of rain. The smell of beer. The smell of dirt. The smell of blood. The smell of cooking. You had a memory associated with everything we just mentioned. Why is that? Part of it is physiological. Our hippocampus, responsible for helping form memories, is almost directly connected to the part of the body responsible for sensing aromatic, usually volatile, chemicals.
00:41:44
Speaker
So, yeah, as Gabriel mentioned, there's a almost direct link between memory and smell. Andy Warhol used to use it actually for indexing his life. He would have a different aroma associated with every year of his life. He would wear that aroma for that year and then move on. I had no idea that is fascinating. Is there any record of what effect that that actually had on his recollection?
Scent, Memory, and Proprioception
00:42:11
Speaker
I'm not sure if there was anywhere or I almost called him Andy Weirdhall but yeah he was a weird guy and one thing that we were going to talk a little bit on this episode but we decided not to for brevity was
00:42:27
Speaker
good versus bad versions of the sense. Oh, no, this is a very relevant topic because obviously, yeah, there are aromas that are pleasing and aromas that are, the term I use is putrid or disgusting aromas. And then to show you the nature of aroma and how it differs from the other senses, there are illusory aromas. For example, think of the smell of vomit.
00:42:56
Speaker
Now, think of the smell of Parmesan cheese. They're the exact same volatile chemical that's been proven. Oh my gosh. Or at least demonstrated. Yeah, that's amazing. So there's more to it than simply the, like, in other words, this is to show that there is no such thing as a good smell or a bad smell. It's based on what it's relative to.
00:43:17
Speaker
Yeah. And so, I mean, if you have a good memory of eating some Parmesan cheese on some pasta versus having, I mean, I don't think anybody has a pleasant memory associated with vomit.
00:43:29
Speaker
You know, and actually, I'm curious here because now I know that things like rotten eggs and sulfur, in my opinion, are pretty putrid and are pretty nasty. And other hideous smells as well. You know, one could name a number of things. So I don't know that, you know, I think some things may be more hard-coded to be volatile, isn't that right?
00:43:53
Speaker
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, just like there are certain tones, like babies crying, that are always gonna sound like, always gonna evoke certain emotions, like wanting to get rid of the crying.
00:44:09
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. So then in a way, I may have to contradict myself there for a bit. So obviously, in the vomit versus Parmesan cheese example, that shows two of the same smells that can either be good or bad. But then other smells, like I think there are some
00:44:24
Speaker
horrible smells that I've smelled in my day in the medical field when I was an EMT and elsewhere that are certainly bad and that are probably pretty hard-coded. It's interesting that most people, there's something about the vomit versus Parmesan cheese thing that is so, one is excretory, the other one is the opposite of excretory. It's a really interesting thing that shows the type of sense that scent is. Interesting.
00:44:54
Speaker
I have a question about this sense of smell. This is one that I know almost the least about. I know that there are ways of describing things like what we feel, like if something is sharp or soft or rough. Are there fundamental categories of smell? Are there primary colors? Are there primary smells?
00:45:20
Speaker
There's not primary smells, but there are categories of smell, and they're not in typical parlance, which is also something that's different about them. We have a few written down here. There's citrusy smells. Everybody knows what that is. Floral, herbaceous, acamporaceous, woody, earthy, which includes some very terrible smells.
00:45:43
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of different ways of categorizing them, but there's no primary colors of smells. There's no way of taking a smell and then making it using other smells in ways that don't take human intuition. Interesting, interesting. So I'm curious then, who created these categories of smell? Is it just tradition or has this been identified by people studying senses?
00:46:10
Speaker
Oh, I think it's a long tradition that has to do with perfumery. Perfumery used to be a big thing. Smell is probably one of the things that we have the least grasp on. Yes. And we came up with photography first, then we came out with record players. We're just now getting to tricking the sense of human touch with those buttons that aren't really buttons that you have on phones now.
00:46:35
Speaker
Oh, okay, okay, I see. Oh, so are you saying, Jonathan, that we are on our way toward smell-o-vision? Smell-o-vision, coming in 2030. I'm not necessarily sure that would be a good thing. And one interesting thing about scent is how incredibly, even in humans who don't have good scent, or a good sense of smell, rather, or a good scent,
00:46:58
Speaker
is how good it is. There's this one monk who was trying to see how big atoms were. So using burning incense, he waited until he could get the tiniest whiff of incense. And he was only offered by a few orders of magnitude as to what the size of an atom was.
00:47:16
Speaker
Oh wow, I had no idea. When did that happen? It was actually in the dark ages. Oh, fascinating. Just from incense, that's actually fascinating. You know what I wonder? I wonder if evolutionary speaking, I wonder if smell may have evolved before sight. This is me just taking a stab at the dark. I really have no idea. If one of our listeners can correct me, you should write to me at Breaking Mouth Podcast.
00:47:40
Speaker
at gmail.com, but I was thinking that maybe the relation between memory and smell is because smell is much older perhaps? That might be the case, but also it might be the case that smell is just a, I mean smell if you really think about it is just a much more fancy version of taste.
00:47:58
Speaker
I mean, in the sense that they're both ways of detecting types of chemicals. And so, I mean, does a paramecium smell something when they detect something in the area? Or at what point do you call it smell? Does it have to be in the air? There's so many questions about this.
00:48:20
Speaker
And the last thing I wanted to talk about a little bit is just a sense that I haven't really seen described in many places, but a sense that I think is definitely a derived sense, in the same way that proprioception is a sense, proprioception being the sense of where you are, which is an example of a sense that is one point in space, but in dozens of dimensions. Basically, every joint is another dimension.
00:48:50
Speaker
Is a sense of creature when you look at a rabbit you could tell it's alive Versus a rock in the rock looks dead. Yeah, of course. There are some fish that looking off a lot like rocks. I
00:49:03
Speaker
Yeah, but then they move and then they seem alive. Interesting, interesting, yeah. And then you have trees, which only seem alive because we see contrast between big and small trees. Interesting, interesting, yeah. Now, yeah, I've got to say, Jonathan, you are actually the first person who's ever brought this up. I'm wondering if this is something that you have come up with or have you read about this anywhere?
00:49:27
Speaker
I'm sure I haven't come up with it, but I mean, I'm sure that somebody else has also come up with it, but I know I haven't read it anywhere. Yeah. I want to hear a little bit more about your idea here. Oh, yeah. I do have an idea of how a sense of creature is related or is advantageous evolutionarily. And that's in the sense of cuteness, basically, what we decide to take care of.
00:49:55
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah, cuteness is a fascinating thing. Oh, this is something that I feel so ill-equipped to describe. I mean, I certainly, we can identify when something is cute, but why, why is there cuteness? What role does that have in evolution? Yeah. And also, I mean, people keep rabbits as pets, but most of the animals that we keep were predators. Um, we somehow think that predators are cute and when they describe, and when they do
00:50:23
Speaker
predatory behavior, like practice stalking those, that's when we take care of them the most. So there's something about that. And it's a very interesting and very complicated, developed and metasensory sense. Um, and I only bring this up to show what, to show something that's like the boundary of what a sense is and what just being learned is because in humans might not binocular vision is learned.
00:50:52
Speaker
for example. Yeah, this is fascinating. Actually, I want to talk about something that Jonathan and I were talking about before this episode started. And that was when things are really, really cute, like babies or animals, you have this desire to either pull on them or to eat them up. I've heard a parent say to a child, oh, I'm just going to eat you up, and then teasingly pretend to take a bite out of their child. But I'll clearly ingest.
00:51:20
Speaker
Why are those two related? That's a really fascinating question. Yeah, I've heard some theories that say that it's basically our sense of competition with another predatory species, but that's being stopped by our sense of cuteness. But we still have the residual desire to squeeze something to death or to bite it to death. We're a violent species. Yeah, we are certainly a mysterious species. That's for sure. That's for sure.
00:51:49
Speaker
But one thing that seems alive, and some people think that our concept of a soul in a lot of religions may have taken form from this, is fire and smoke, which are highly dynamic systems and seem to be alive. And that's an example of a creature-sense illusion.
00:52:12
Speaker
Interesting, this is something I've never even thought of before. The idea of fire being alive. Now that I'm thinking about it, you think of any of the ways you can characterize life. I don't know, it's something that can grow, that eats. All of these are things that you can use to describe fire. It can be predatory, obviously, and it can die out when it runs out of oxygen. Wow, you're tripping me out here, Jonathan, when you think about is fire alive? How would you answer that question?
00:52:41
Speaker
I'd say that one of the things that makes it maybe not as alive is that it doesn't really combine traits or evolve very much. Although you could say that it evolves as it goes from when you start burning copper and you get a green flame.
00:53:03
Speaker
It's one of those things where you can even view life itself as a type of fire. Interesting. Now, one other thing I think of is just purely from information.
Philosophy of Perception and Technology
00:53:12
Speaker
So obviously fire is a way of quickly creating disinformation. So could it be that other forms of life maybe first organize information before disorganizing it?
00:53:24
Speaker
That could be. I mean, I do feel like treating fire as being alive is somehow getting into Aristotelian theory, but it is a question that I would like you to think about. There's a terminology here that I'd like to introduce, and this is actually very, very much related to senses, as well as, you know, one subjective view of the world. The term is unwelt, and that is a term that is used to describe the world as someone knows it.
00:53:52
Speaker
which for us as a human species is based on what we are used to, based on what we've seen and what we've experienced, but it's not necessarily the world as it really, really is. Would you say that's a pretty good description of Unwelt? I mean, yeah, I think that Unwelt kind of assumes that there is a world as it really exists in certain sense, but I think that's a good definition as any.
00:54:16
Speaker
Is it possible to change one's unwilt? That is to say, is it possible to expand upon the senses that we as species have and experience the world differently through our senses? And the answer that I have is, I think so.
00:54:37
Speaker
There's actually a researcher, and his name is Dr. David Eagleman, and he's made many publications. He's appeared on TED talks, he's been written about in a lot of journals, and he is trying to do just that. He has this device that he is creating, and it is called a versatile extrasensory transducer.
00:54:59
Speaker
Or the acronym vest and it is it is exactly that it is a vest that you wear And it has very very small motors all throughout it and the the motors can change both their pitch Actually, I think the motors can only change their pitch, but it's different motors with different pitches So you have a few you know degrees of freedom there
00:55:21
Speaker
The idea with a vibrating vest, why would he want to create a vibrating vest? Well, you can actually link up the vibrating vest to a number of things including, for instance, a drone.
00:55:37
Speaker
and you can have it so that the altitude of the drone or perhaps the yaw of the drone or the position will correspond to a vibration somewhere on the vest of some strength and of some pitch. That way if you're a pilot and if you're controlling this drone,
00:55:56
Speaker
After you learn the language of the vibrations, you can feel, quote unquote, you can sort of feel the exact position of it while it's flying in space. You know, is that a good way of explaining it?
00:56:11
Speaker
Yeah, I would compare it a lot to those colorblind glasses that have come out recently that you put them on and they accentuate the amount of difference between the cones that are very close together or even to reading systems for blind people that use electrodes on the tongue.
00:56:34
Speaker
Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So now, arguably, I would not say, for instance, that he's creating a whole new sense altogether at all, in fact, because clearly all he's using is the sense of touch, which already exists. But the fact that he's mapping, you know, specific frequencies and specific places to something else, like in this case, position of a drone that's flying around and altitude, that is still a very, very useful thing that hasn't been done before.
00:57:00
Speaker
Yeah, and you really could say that he's creating a new derived sense, however. Because, I mean, even humans, like we mentioned before, are not born with a sense of binocular vision.
00:57:12
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating that binocular vision is in fact a learned trait. That just blows my mind. And you can do things like install electrodes in the brains of monkeys that allow them to control arms that allow them to grab fruit. This is fascinating. I didn't believe this when I first read this. So essentially what we're saying is you just install this arm and it's installed through the spine. Is that correct?
00:57:42
Speaker
uh, some, somewhere, uh, I don't remember if it's, it's the spine or part of the brain. Okay. So when I heard this, I at first didn't believe it. And I'm gonna tell you why it was very hard for me to believe. I guess I assumed somewhere that inside of a monkey brain or inside of our brain, there's probably already a map that exists of the body that, that it's in.
00:58:01
Speaker
And I thought, well, if you add a mechanical limb, there's no map for that mechanical limb. It doesn't exist. So it wouldn't be compatible, but that's not the case. And of course, you need a certain complexity of nervous system to do this. You can do this with the nematode, for example. There are certain nematodes that only have the exact same amount of neurons per nematode.
00:58:25
Speaker
Interesting, interesting. So what we're saying then is that the brain and the nervous system essentially have a very, has a great ability to learn and to adapt.
00:58:37
Speaker
Yes, and that is where consciousness, if it has a source, can be said to come from. The world is a complex place with intermingling ecosystems that have developed life that has evolved to react and turn, and we are no exception.
00:58:58
Speaker
But what happens when these senses are processed in a way that could be seen as inharmonious with their niche? Stay tuned for Consciousness, Episode 2. I'm Jonathan. And I'm Gabriel. And this has been Breaking Math.
00:59:11
Speaker
Breaking Math is brought to you by Audible, and we are part of Blank for Non-Blank. Any last words? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, we actually did a minisode on Blank for Non-Blank. It's a phenomenal collective. Essentially, it's a whole lot of podcasters who want to bring a subject matter to the masses. And of course, there's Let's Talk Talk, which is one of the two linguistics podcasts. There is the, what's the other linguistics one?
00:59:43
Speaker
There's Words for Granted, and there's Mad Scientist Podcast, Folktale Project, and a few others. Yeah, go check it out. And if you would like to support us for as little as the price of a sandwich, you can get advanced content. And actually, we are going to be lowering our price for advanced content and for a shout out to $1.
01:00:08
Speaker
So if you take advantage of that now, even before we put up the changes. Yeah, absolutely. And until next time, go send some stuff.