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8 . You Are Not An Algorithm, Or Consciousness vs Computationalism
106 Plays11 months ago
Talking about consciousness baby! In this one I cover some stuff:
- What is the hard problem?
- What are some weak ass common responses to the hard problem, focussing specifically on the computational theory of mind (CTM).
- Implications of CTM.
- Criticisms of CTM
- What else might be going on?
- And why the real winning move is not to play.
ENJOYEEEEEE
Links to save you the trouble of googling
- Computational Theory of Mind
- Nick Bostrom: Simulation hypothesis
- How to be an ok Person "The Simulations" (contains some duplication with this ep)
- Black Mirror Christmas Special
- Greg Egan (sci fi novels exploring implications of CTM): Diaspora, and Permutation City (there are more, but these ones stood out)
- Musks (inane) video game argument
- Movies: The Matrix, Tron, Her
- CGP grey on the Transporter problem
- John Searle: Chinese Room Argument (note, this is slightly different from the argument I describe in the episode, here for historical reference)
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Transcript
Introduction and Disclaimers
00:00:00
Speaker
OK, preamble time. This one, it's a dense one. It's somewhat dense. I hope you're going to enjoy it. It's a subject that I think is very interesting, very close to my heart. And you know, for the most part, it hangs out on the explaining mind side of the street. So for some of you, that might be a turnoff. Give it a try. And if it's not working for you, then I'll see you next time. A couple of kind of clarifications at the beginning here, um things that were hard to fix in the edit. So for the first one, I talk about the Chinese Room Argument a lot in this podcast, but I'm not actually talking about the Chinese Room Argument. I keep referring to it as the Chinese Room Argument because my Chinese Room Argument is better than John Sell's Chinese Room Argument. So let's think of the Chinese Room Argument. We'll get to it in the conversation. John Sell has one version of it. That's not actually what I'm talking about. I always forget that I massively upgraded or I replaced his argument with a different argument, which is a better argument. But I still call it the Chinese room argument because it is related to John Sells' argument. So every time I say the Chinese room argument in this recording, I'm not really talking about the Chinese room argument. I'm talking about Robbie's Chinese room argument, which doesn't have anything to do with Chinese. Okay.
00:01:12
Speaker
ah The other big correction I want to make, which is just kind of embarrassing, is I talk about an episode of the TV show Black Mirror briefly, and I keep referring to the show as Dark Mirror. And as I was saying it, I was feeling like that doesn't sound right, but I couldn't load up the real name. And then if while editing, I was like, it's not called Dark Mirror. It's called Black Mirror. So anyway, when I say Dark Mirror, I obviously mean
Substack Promotion and Episode Focus
00:01:34
Speaker
Black Mirror. Okay. That is all of the clarifications. One more thing I want to say. before we get to the content is there is now a Saina Miraculous substack that you can subscribe to for free to get updates of episodes as well as ah articles I started writing there. And you can subscribe monthly for a very reasonable dollar amount to become a ah paid supporter of this podcast. This has never happened before. This is the first time in the history of the universe that you are able to do this.
00:02:05
Speaker
and those that subscribe will be rewarded. the specific details of the rewards. I'm still ironing out. So this is a leap of faith on your part. The very least there is going to be some extra audio content. I'm going to start out doing short commentaries on the episodes. So you can kind of hear my kind of digestion after the fact of ah the interviews that I do. I'm not going to do that with the solo episodes because it's really makes sense. But when I do an interview, there'll be a kind of debrief that that you'll get to tune into and we'll take it from there at some point when there is a large enough cohort.
00:02:38
Speaker
of ah paid subscribers, I'm gonna start doing monthly Zoom calls where people can connect and we'll do some connection games and communication stuff and it's gonna be super fun and it's interactive so you'll get to meet like-minded folks. That's coming down the the line once it feels like there are enough subscribers to be able to kind of successfully do that. So that's my pitch, even if you don't want any of that stuff, but you just feel like the free content is of value to you and you want to encourage me to keep doing it. This is a really great way to encourage me to keep doing it. So please consider subscribing. Okay. On to today's episode.
00:03:34
Speaker
Hello. Good morning. It is morning for me. What time it is for you is your business. Uh, I am daunted by my task today. Uh, so yeah, I, this is something I've wanted to do for a long time. And it's, it's a lot and it's not going to be comprehensive. And so I'm just going to surrender to that. So the subject of today's episode is consciousness. So if you cast your mind back to the first episode of this podcast, of course you've listened to the episode is called science, God, sex, art, magic. And in that I kind of lay out the program for the, for the whole project and a big distinction that I bring up there is the idea of the, uh, explaining mind and the enchanted mind.
00:04:31
Speaker
So today is going to be a much more in the territory of the explaining mind, but it's the explaining mind looking at the source of enchantment a little bit.
The Structure and Hard Problem of Consciousness
00:04:43
Speaker
So, you know, there are different ways we can do that. We can have the enchanted mind, you know, sprinkling pixie dust on on an explanation ah or on the explaining mind. We can have the explaining mind thinking about explanations. We can have the enchanted mind off in its own world being enchanted. This is kind of the explaining mind looking at the source of enchantment.
00:05:03
Speaker
And that source is consciousness. So we're going to be talking about consciousness. We're going to be talking about the, let me just tell you, okay, I'll give you, I have a structure. I have such a structure for it today. So I'm going to start by briefly explaining what the hard problem is. A problem is ah an idea in the philosophy of mind. And, uh, and then I'm going to talk about what the kind of the, the standard, thinking about that is in the scientific world. And then I'm going to give some critiques of that standard understanding. Then I'm going to gesture ah vaguely towards my own explanation where I think the standard explanation gets something wrong and what a future explanation will look like. I'm going to gesture towards an explanation. And then we're going to go beyond explanation.
00:05:59
Speaker
Okay, so that's the program for today. This is something I've been thinking about for a long time and it's very interesting to me. It feels very central for me, for my understanding of the world. And I also think it's kind of central to questions about what is happening here in life and and what it means to be human and really the limitations of a mode of thinking that we have come to Imagine as limitless. This is the explaining mind. All right. That's the program for today. Let's dive in. So what is the hard problem? This is, this whole conversation is about the hard problem. So the hard problem is called the hard problem of consciousness. This idea was brought forth by David traumas, who is a philosopher. He's still alive. Um, which is wild that the guy that came up with this idea is still alive.
00:06:59
Speaker
Because it seems like a really central idea that somebody should have thought of a lot longer ago than that. Anyway, so here's the here's the idea. So it's the hard problem is distinguished from
Challenges and Critiques of Consciousness Theories
00:07:10
Speaker
from the easy problems. And so the easy problems are. And again, the easy problems of consciousness. The easy problems are questions like, how does our brain ah make sense out of images that the eyes provide to it? So our eyes capture light and they send the patterns of light that they capture to our brain. And then somewhere in there, our brain turns that, those patterns of light ah into a ah model of the world.
00:07:41
Speaker
right That's a that's a ah problem of consciousness and a problem of kind of philosophy of mind and of neuroscience. It's not really a problem of philosophy of mind so much as it is a problem of neuroscience. It's called an easy problem of consciousness, even though in relative terms it's very, very hard. It's not solved. um there' There's some understanding of it, but it's not solved. That's just an example. Another one would be ah Language how do we you know how do we turn ah sound into. Language and meaning and understanding stuff like that right you know how does our brain.
00:08:20
Speaker
coordinate if you see a ball coming towards you and you can coordinate moving your muscles in this incredibly sophisticated fluid way in real time kind of instantaneously in order to reach out your hand and catch the ball for some people. Some people have a harder of time with that, whatever. ah But there's all kinds of like motor, you know, physical tasks that we do every day, driving a car, right? Anything that you do with your body requires an enormous amount of of coordination, like walking. Walking is a very, very complicated thing to do. And we do it effortlessly. How do we do that? How do we, how does our brain consume inputs and turn those into outputs to control our muscles in such a way that we perform these tasks?
00:09:04
Speaker
And so these are in Chalmers view, these were are all easy problems, even though none of them are easy compared to, you know, doing the dishes or even like, even like some gnarly calculus, you know, integral that you have to calculate that would be like really, really hard. Still very easy compared to these, quote, easy problems. So they're not easy and in any normal sense of the word. What does he mean by easy? What he means is we can easily imagine what an explanation for these phenomena will look like.
00:09:42
Speaker
So they're easy in the sense that we understand what the program is going to be to to come to that ah explanation. We need to understand more the information processing that's happening in the brain. And once we understand that well enough, ah so the the explanation will just be, here's how the brain does the information processing task, which translates these inputs into these outputs.
00:10:11
Speaker
And so we already know what that's going to look like. It's going to look like some math and it's going to look like tracing patterns of flows of information through different parts of the brain, through different kinds of structures, through different cells, stuff like that. This is why they're called the easy problem. Now the hard problem is in trauma's view, and I agree with him, a lot of people do distinct from those. The hard problem is. How do we get conscious experience, like the the fact of there being something it is like to have a brain, to have a human brain that's alive and part of a human body? How do we get from there being a brain as part of a body, a human brain,
00:11:07
Speaker
to there being an experience of having a brain. That there is this thing which is it is like something to have a human brain that's living in ah in a human body. It's like something. And presumably it's like something to have a dog brain living in a dog body, right? It's like something. We don't typically think that it's like something to be a rock or it's like something to be ah a wave or it's like something to be even maybe a plant, although you can go back and forth.
00:11:48
Speaker
Spoiler alert, I actually think that we might be wrong about that. But anyway, we don't typically think about that, but it's like something to be us, right? Right now you are sitting, or you're driving, or you're walking, you're doing dishes, whatever you're doing, and you're listening to my voice and it it's not a blank void. that is receiving inputs and then producing outputs. There's this thing in the center of your experience, or the center of what's happening, which is you are experiencing the sound of my voice right and whatever else you're experiencing. And so that question, how does the that phenomena arise out of ah this particular configuration of cells
00:12:39
Speaker
and and matter, right? And patents of electricity and patents of chemicals. How does that give rise to this phenomena of it being like something and of there being experiences? And I'm going to throw in this technical philosophical term here, ah which some of you already loaded up, qualia. So qualia The idea of qualia is it's ah it is what it's like to experience a particular thing. So if you look at somebody's red t-shirt, there's the redness of the t-shirt, which is to do with the physical composition and the way that it interacts with
00:13:23
Speaker
light. And then there's your experience of its redness, which is something that happens inside your subjective world. And that experience of the redness is called is ah is a qualia. Maybe it's a qualium. I'm not sure. And then a qualia is the proal plural. It sounds like a plural. Anyway. Aqualia are the what it is likeness of the different things. So when you get in a shower and you turn into cold because you're trying to do a good job of being a like a healthy human being and doing cold showers and there's like a chill that runs across your body, right? Like that's qua that's a qualia, the sound of a bird. I don't know if you can hear this like a cricket chirping or something outside my window. The experience of having that sound is a quality. Okay. So the hard problem
00:14:08
Speaker
you might say is why are there qualia? And you can't just explain this in terms of inputs, information processing, and outputs. Because if you just talk about inputs, information processing, and outputs, you can talk about all of that without ever invoking the idea of qualia. So when you're catching that ball, you could just say,
00:14:38
Speaker
Well, the eyes take in this information about the ball, and then they create a model internally. Something like that is happening, a three-dimensional model of the world. and then And then from that model, they do some kind of quick ah calculus to to figure out where the ball is going to be X seconds from now and some calculus about how long it's going to take their hand to get to a particular point. And then they produce the output of moving the hand to the right spot at the right time. And that is all information processing. We can just understand all of that in terms of input, a function, right? In mathematics, you call that a function. There are some inputs and there are some outputs. And we can just write down a function.
00:15:21
Speaker
that would produce that. Now it's going to be an extraordinarily complicated function. That's fine. there is not It is not at all obvious that there is an equivalent where we could just write down a function, a procedure for turning a certain set of inputs into a certain set of outputs. that would somehow give rise to its being like something to be. And so that's the hard problem. Another way of saying this is, it's hard to imagine an explanation. I think that's an interesting way to say it, given the context of the explaining mind and the enchanted mind. It's hard to imagine an explanation for consciousness.
00:16:11
Speaker
So the first move in response to this is a kind of the refusal of the call. And there are people that say, there's no hard problem here. You're just, you're lacking imagination. That's or so are are you're just confused. They say there's no hard problem here. So I just want to stop by addressing that a little bit. Now, there's a very famous philosopher, Dan Dannett. Dan Dannett just died. He has a book called Consciousness Explained, which I, to my shame, have not read.
00:16:43
Speaker
So I'm just going to out myself here. I was tempted for a second to pretend that I had read it just because it's kind of terrible that I'm talking about this subject without having read it because it's got foundational text in the field. And I need to read it because here's my next
Computational Theory and Simulation Hypothesis
00:16:59
Speaker
confession. I feel so turned off by his approach that I just have not really felt the need to read it. But that is not kind of a very intellectually honest way of going about life. So I will read it. This is my commitment to you, dear listener. I will read it and I'll report back if it changed my mind about any of the stuff. But the reason that I was so turned off by Dennis book is because based on conversations I've had about it, ah based on reading about the book and other people's responses to it, it seems to me that he is in the camp of saying there's no real problem here.
00:17:33
Speaker
that the problem is an illusion. And I think he's probably the person that has said it best. And so it's worth to really understand this refusal. It definitely behooves me too to to read that book and really deeply understand his argument for why he kind of refuses the idea of the hard problem. But I've, you know, I've heard him talk and I've heard other people talk about it and nothing has been close to convincing. It has all seemed completely insane to me. And actually, and it's terrible to pathologize people that you disagree with. And I'm not going to pathologize everybody I disagree with in this conversation, but I think that that perspective, as far as I can tell, it feels kind of like a profound dissociation.
00:18:15
Speaker
And the reason I say that is partly, and so now I'll do my story, I was in that camp and I was in the, and we'll get to the computational theory of mind. ah in a little while, but I was in this camp as a teenager and as a young man of not recognizing the hard problem. And then at some point, and I was on a train, I remember being on a train when this happened. It's funny, I have a lot of, I'm just realizing, is that yeah, that I have a lot of kind of major awakening moment stories that happened on public transit. I'm just realizing in this moment. And I think it's just because, well, that was a time when I was just kind of sitting and not doing anything and kind of staring out the window. Anyway, I was on a train and train, I think was, it was going between London and Hull or Hull in London, uh, between where I was, uh, studying at university and my mom's house. And, and it suddenly occurred to me. The hard problem, like I suddenly recognized the hot problem that there was no explanation that would be satisfying for this phenomenon.
00:19:21
Speaker
So anyway, uh, and what that felt like, you know, that sounds kind of philosophical, but it actually had a, I would not have used these words at that time, but looking back, I can kind of recognize, Oh, there was a spiritual component to it, which was I suddenly became aware of a dimension of being. The experiential realm is the kind of ah subjective. conscious being realm, the now, was what Eckhart Tolle would call it, I suddenly became aware of that dimension of being for the first time. Like I became aware that I was having experiences. And so for me, that was a ah kind of profound association into my experience from what had previously been
00:20:11
Speaker
dissociated right for the first like 20 some years of my life, this is always my early 20s at this point. And so I can't help but feel when I hear the people saying there's no problem here, that they have not yet had that associative experience and that there's a profound association. Now that's not maybe very fair, maybe they have and they have something, there's something more sophisticated in there, some realization I haven't had that they have had, right? Like that's possible. So it's always dodgy territory to pathologize or claim that your intellectual opponents have ah somehow been developmentally limited in a way that you're not. And ah that is sometimes true. So it's complicated territory. Anyway, I'll move past that. so that's So that's one layer, just the refusal that there is a hard problem.
00:21:04
Speaker
And then it feels related to me, the standard explanation in some ways kind of feels like that. But here's the standard explanation, I would say. And in like and it's hard to quantify this. and I don't know that this is the standard explanation amongst philosophers of mind, but the kind of amongst other you know people that have thought about this somewhat, and especially in the kind of technical, engineering, rational, scientific world. So this is what I mean by the standard explanation is the folks that are doing science and doing technology and doing kind of the rationalists, I would say in general, their response to the hard problem is the following and it's called the computational theory of mind.
00:21:54
Speaker
the the
00:22:41
Speaker
Okay, so the computational theory of mind is this. It's the idea that what produces mind And by mind, I mean subjectivity. I mean ah not only subjectivity, but including this dimension that the heart problem covers of it being like something of quality of experience. Okay. So what produces mind is computations. So it doesn't matter that your brain happens to be made out of meat. It's made out of a certain kind of meat, certain kind of cells, and that meat has electricity running through it and has neurotransmitters and and has a particular kind of network configuration, like a particular network structure. Those things are incidental. They support the particular kind of computations that you need to do, but what's important is doing those computations.
00:23:40
Speaker
And so this is that that idea is substrate independence. So substrate independence is an idea that's part of the computational theory of mind, which says it doesn't matter what stuff your the the thing that's doing the computations is about. What matters is that you're doing the right computations. And if you do the right computations, you will get a mind. okay So you're gonna I like to put you in two camps. I'm putting you in two camps. There are gonna be people who hear that and say, yes, of course, that makes total sense to me, how else could it be? And there are going to be people who say, what an insane idea. Of course, it matters that you have a brain, something like that. or Why would computations be enough? so for that So for the former camp, please forgive me, I'm gonna steel man this idea for the latter camp. So if you are in the camp of saying, I don't really understand how that could be,
00:24:35
Speaker
I'm going to give you the justification. I'm going to explain why the computational theory of mind is very compelling. So here is why. Imagine that you. could write a computer program which was a perfect simulation of a brain, perfect to the level that mattered. And we're going to say that there's some level of detail which is sufficient for you to simulate a brain such that, given a particular kind of set of inputs, that brain will produce a certain set of outputs.
00:25:12
Speaker
that are ah the same as the outputs that the real brain would give given the same inputs, right? So you got to imagine here a brain as this kind of like self-contained little unit, which is attached to the body by a finite number of inputs and outputs. And so the inputs are going to be all of the nerve cells that are coming into the brain. from the and the signals that are coming in to bring from the different senses, from the eyes, from the skin and the proprioceptive senses and the ears and the taste and all of that, right? All of those are the inputs. So there's a lot of inputs, but there's a finite number. And they're going into this thing, which is the brain. And then the brain is producing outputs and it produces outputs in the form of signals to um muscles. Let's just make it simple like that. It also does some things with glands and hormones and stuff like that. But for the purposes of this,
00:26:04
Speaker
Let's make it simple and we'll just say that the brain is outputting, um, instructions to muscles. Okay. So we're imagining a brain like that, which seems reasonable. Like that is kind of how the brain seems to work in the physical world. So what if we could simulate that in a computer? So we simulate a brain at a level of detail that given we simulate a real
Critiques and Re-examination of Computationalism
00:26:30
Speaker
particular brain. So let's say your brain. Okay. So we take your brain and we put it into this computer. We simulate it. And so we, we, we map your brain and we create a simulation of it. That's running inside of a computer, very big, powerful, sophisticated computer such that if we show that simulated brain using simulated nerve inputs, right? With still all simulated, right? We show it a picture of a cute kitten.
00:27:03
Speaker
And then if we show you the picture of the cute kitten, your response is to go, ah, and tick tilt your head to the left. Ah, okay. Those are, that's muscles, right? There's muscles that are moving your voice box. There's muscles that are moving your mouth. There's muscles that are moving your, your head, your neck and your head. So that's your output from the input of the cute picture of the kitten. Okay. So then we show the simulated brain, a simulated cute picture of a kitten. And it produces simulated output of saying, move these particular muscles in such a way that were those muscles attached to a body, they're not. It's just, they're going into some, uh, log that's recording all of the output, but were they attached to a body, what that would, that body would do is tilt its head to the left and say, Oh, okay. Just exactly. It's producing exactly the same outputs as your brain is producing.
00:28:00
Speaker
Now, why do we think we can do that? Well, in theory, your brain is just particles. It's just atoms that are combined into molecules with electricity running through it that are ah producing other kinds of molecules. And all of that, in theory, is just boils down to physics. And we can do simulations of physics. And we actually understand. and This is a little bit contentious, but people claim that we understand the physics of what's going on in the brain well enough that there's no new physics that's going to come and change how brains work.
00:28:42
Speaker
Now, it's a little bit controversial, but someone like Sean Carroll, who's a kind of physicist and and popularizer of physics, makes that claim pretty strongly that there there will be some new physics, but it's not going to change our understanding of the way brains work in principle. Now, in practice, this is going to be an incredibly challenging task to actually do a physics simulation that, well, we can't do that right now. Our computers are not powerful enough. Our understanding of physics is not good enough to be able to do that. But in theory, it is. And so this is one of the jumps of the computational theory of mind is to say, you know, we we understand the kinds of things that the atoms in brains are doing. And so we could just extrapolate that to say, if we had a powerful enough computer, we could simulate it.
00:29:35
Speaker
And then it would have to produce the same outputs because it's determined by physics. Physics says that these particles, given you know these inputs, the inputs would be in the form of electricity and neurotransmitters, I guess, or maybe just electricity it through the nerve signals, that then we could simulate how all those particles would react. And part of their reaction would be emitting some kind of electrical and and hormonal signals, which would then move the muscles of the body. right So that's the the baseline is that the brain is simulatable in principle. Well, if the brain is simulatable in principle and you gave it the simulation of the brain, the inputs of saying to the brain, are you conscious? Its outputs are going to be, well, yes, I am. Yeah, I'm having an experience. I just saw a picture of a cute kitten.
00:30:23
Speaker
You know, the specific what the brain is experiencing is kind of strange, but say you plugged some, you plugged a video camera into it so that it, and and ah microphones into it so that it was kind of having some sense of a room that it was in, right? Something like that. And so if you asked it, you know, through the audio, through these microphones, you could just have a conversation with it. and say we had a way of translating its output. So it has inputs through the through the microphone, and it has a speaker. And we have a way of simulating a voice box and a mouth enough that when it gives outputs to its simulated voice box and mouth, we can translate it that into simulated airwaves, which we can then play through a real speaker, and we would actually hero voice. OK.
00:31:06
Speaker
And whether the voice sounded like you, remember this is your brain, whether the voice sounded like you or not would depend on how well we simulated the voice box, but that doesn't really matter. It would still be a voice. And so we could have a conversation with this simulated brain and we could say, are you conscious? are you is it Is it like something to be you right now? And the brain would say yes. How do we know it would say yes? Well, because it's a perfect simulation of your brain. And if we asked your brain, what is it like to be right now? Some things would happen in your brain, right? Particles would move around. Electricity would move around. And it would produce the movement of your muscles to make the sound. Yes, I am conscious. And that exact same thing would happen in the simulated brain.
00:31:54
Speaker
And so given that there are two possibilities. One, you are not lying and the simulated brain is lying. Well, that's weird because the same processes that produce the you saying, yes, I am conscious are the exact same processes that would cause the simulated brain to say, yes, I am conscious. in one time they're happening in a real meat brain and the other they're happening in a simulated brain, but the the sequence of events would be the same. And so it's strange to say that the meat brain version of is telling the truth, but the simulated brain is lying.
00:32:35
Speaker
The other possibility, so so we kind of reject that possibility. Again, here's where I'm steel manning the computational theory of minds. The computational theory of mind would say, well, that doesn't make sense. So the other possibility is that the simulated brain is conscious. And the reason that it's saying, yes, I am conscious in response to that answer is the same reason that you are, which is that it's true. So then we have to look at, well, what is this simulation? The simulation seems to be producing a conscious mind that is having an experience that it is like something to be, that has qualia, exactly like a brain. Well, it's a computer simulation. What is a computer simulation? A computer simulation is just a bunch of computations. That's all that's ever happening in a computer. All a computer is ever doing is taking in some inputs,
00:33:30
Speaker
and adding together and multiplying and dividing, just doing arithmetic basically with different numbers and then putting out some outputs. That's it. It's just doing arithmetic. And so the computational theory of mind says we can simulate a brain and we can't imagine why we couldn't simulate a brain in theory, in principle, and then that brain would produce outputs that are commensurate with the idea that it's conscious, that simulated brain, while then the only source of that consciousness that we can find must be the computations. That's the thing that's the same.
00:34:13
Speaker
between the simulated brain and the meat brain. And it's not the computations which simulate the brain. It's the kind of epiphenomenal computations. It's the computations that having simulated the brain, the simulated brain is doing its own computations, which the meat brain is also doing, right? The meat brain is not doing the computations which simulate a brain because it doesn't need to because its substrate is physical. the The computational brain is doing simulations of a meat brain, and then the simulated meat brain is doing another layer of computations, which is the computations that the theory of mind, computational theory of mind says produce mind. Hoo boy.
00:34:51
Speaker
Okay. I think that's the densest thing we're going to do today. I hope that that makes sense. Uh, for some people I was going too slow because they already understand this idea. For other people, this might be a really novel idea. So I wanted to go slow enough to really, uh, hammer it home. If you're lost about any of this, you you can reach me a pod of lions dot.com. There's a contact form there. Please feel free to reach out with questions. If there are questions, I will do a follow-up where I answer the questions. Okay. So that's the justification for the computational theory of mind. It's very compelling. It's pretty airtight. We'll get into the critiques. But now I want to jump into the implications. So some of the implications of the computational theory of mind, i.e. the implications that a mind can be generated through computation alone.
00:35:39
Speaker
So one of them is the simulation hypothesis. Now you may have come across this. I'm not going to go into super deep into this. This is an idea from an English philosopher, Nick Bostrom, pretty sure he's English, um who I'm not going to go into the whole arguments. There there is a an episode of how to be an okay person, which addresses this. ah It's called the simulations. I believe it's episode number four. If you Google how to be an okay person, simulations, anything like that, you should find it. You go into more detail there. But so I'm not going to explain the structure of the simulation hypothesis, but the, but you've all come across it because everybody's talking about it these days is the idea that we might be living in a simulation. And in fact, Bostrom's argument is based on certain premises.
00:36:26
Speaker
we are overwhelmingly likely to be living in ah in a simulation. That's the Bostrom simulation hypothesis is stronger than just we might be. It's we are overwhelmingly likely to be almost to be living in a simulation. And he has a couple of kind of premises. He has a couple of things that he assumes in order to make that argument. One of the premises is the computational theory of mind. So an implication of the computational theory of mind is the simulation hypothesis, i.e. that we are overwhelmingly likely to be living in simulation. Now, there are a couple other assumptions in there, so it doesn't follow directly, but it's required. In order to have the simulation hypothesis, you first have to have the computational theory of mind. Another implication is the techno rapture.
00:37:11
Speaker
Okay, so this is the idea that we will at some point be able to upload our minds and our consciousness into computers and live forever in a computer simulated paradise. Never have to get sick or die. do whatever we want, have no physical limitations, and our consciousness will survive until the underlying computer simulation crashes. Okay, so this is different than the simulation hypothesis, which is that we already are living in a simulation. The techno rapture is that we will be able to upload ourselves consciously choose to move into a simulation and that that will be really good. Typically, most people that are into the idea of the techno rapture or uploading consciousness think of it as good.
00:37:56
Speaker
There are some people that go doc with it ah the Christmas there's an episode of doc mirror the Christmas episode of doc mirror ah Which is probably my favorite episode of doc mirror and they explore some of the darker sides of this idea Greg Egan is a science fiction writer who explores um Computational theory of mind and the implications of that in great detail. He's super fun. I was a huge fan of his um when I was younger and And um yeah, he kind of, Greg Egan, he plays with these ideas. There's a novel called Permutation City, which is a good place to go to kind of dig into some of the implications of this stuff. Okay. It's possible to think about the intelligence explosion, the fear of the intelligence explosion as being ah an implication of the computational theory of mind. Without the computational theory of mind,
00:38:48
Speaker
you could still have an intelligence explosion if you say that intelligence does not require consciousness. If you think of the intelligence explosion as requiring consciousness, then you need the computational theory of mind. Okay, so those are some of the implications. I'm now gonna do a couple of critiques. So there are some assumptions that we are not 100% airtight. One assumption is that there's some level of physics that would be sufficiently detailed to simulate the mind such that it would produce
00:39:22
Speaker
the same outputs given the same inputs as the real mind. So that there's some flaw on how much detail we have to have in order for this to work. It's possible that there is no flaw. It's possible, and seems pretty plausible, and I'm kind of jumping ahead here to me, that you require the entire universe. everything in order to simulate a mind, that it's not separable and at every level of detail.
Alternative Theories: Panpsychism and Eastern Approaches
00:39:47
Speaker
So that's ah an assumption that not necessarily borne out. The other assumption, which kind of begs the question a little bit, this is almost an argument from incredulity, which is a kind of logical fallacy that computational theory of mind makes, which is good because later I'm going to make my own argument from incredulity. So it's good that
00:40:06
Speaker
they did it first because otherwise my argument for incredulity would be not admissible. But we're in the land of arguments for incredulity, which actually supports my point, which I'll get to later. So the argument for incredulity and computational theory of mind is, of course, if we simulated the mind perfectly, it would produce the same outputs given the same inputs as the physical brain. How could it be otherwise? Well, that begs the question, right? It begs the whole question to say, well, it couldn't be otherwise. I feel incredulous about that. Kind of says, I'm already assuming the computational theory of mind, right? So there's a little bit of question begging there or argument from incredulity, and it's still very convincing. I still find it a compelling argument. So coming next, we're going to do a couple of more in-depth critiques.
00:41:16
Speaker
Okay, so I'm going to start off with a simpler one, and this one is recovering some of the ground from the... how to be an okay person episode, the simulations, but that's okay. Most of you haven't listened to that. And also this is fun because this is kind of like easing our way into some counter examples. And it's dunking on Elon Musk, which was fun, you know, 10 years ago when I did it in that how to be an okay person episode. And it's even more fun now to dunk on Elon Musk because some of his ridiculousness has become more apparent. So, you know, the Elon Musk argument, this is, this is the Elon Musk argument for the simulation hypothesis went like this.
00:41:48
Speaker
Beyond Nick Bostrom like I think he was you know kind of pointing at Nick Bostrom But he also said just look at how good computer graphics have gotten in 30 years, you know ah Which is about the time frame When he was making this comment now, we would say 40 years like it's wild to me that it was ten years ago But I think it was so look at how great computer graphics have gotten in the last let's just say 40 years, you know and They've become incredible, incredibly vivid, incredibly convincing. Well, imagine another hundred years. How much better are they going to get? We will definitely get to a point where they are indistinguishable from reality. So why do we think that we're not already in such a world? Okay. So the problem with that argument is it confuses a simulated world, the computer game,
00:42:44
Speaker
that is inhabited by actual people, the players, versus a simulated mind. So the thing about the computer game, however good the graphics get on the computer game, the reason that there's someone there experiencing the game is because there's a physical human being that's interacting with the game. But the simulation hypothesis, if we're living in a simulation, then based on Bostrom's argument, for the reason that Bostrom says we probably are living in a simulation is not that we're physical bodies somewhere.
00:43:21
Speaker
experiencing a simulation as if it were a video game. I'm not going to go into why, but just that's the way the argument works. So look, go read the argument or listen to the simulations. I do go into more detail there, but the argument depends on the minds being simulated minds as well. Having a real experience. Well, those are just completely distinct things. So to give you a couple of pop c culture references. So the matrix is a really great example. It actually has both kinds in here, but we're just going to focus on the first kind. really great example of a simulated world with a physical mind, right? In the matrix, what's happening is there's this simulated world, the matrix, and within it, there are all these human beings living their lives. The human beings are not really living in that world. The actual physical bodies of the human beings are are in these kind of gross pink vats, right?
00:44:09
Speaker
and they're plugged into the matrix and being fed this simulated world. But that's one kind of possibility, and that's the computer game possibility. Bostrom's argument doesn't work but for the simulation hypothesis in that possibility because you still have to grow all the people and that takes a finite amount of time, blah, blah, blah. You can't just pump out vast numbers of simulated minds instantaneously, which is what you need for the Bostrom argument. So the other possibility is something like, it's unfortunate because the other side of things doesn't have quite such good examples, ah and just they're not as iconic as the Matrix, but Tron from the 80s, and I haven't seen the new ones, but I assume the same thing. In there, he goes into this computer world, and there are computer programs that are sentient.
00:44:52
Speaker
Okay, so they are minds which arise from within the computations that don't have a physical instantiation. Her, the Joaquin Phoenix scholarly handsome movie from a few years ago, Spike Jones, I think, about a guy falling in love with his phone, which was credo for prescient, nailed it on that one. Her, the operating system that he's falls in love with is a computational mind. Another example would be free guy. which is a Ryan Reynolds movie from a couple of years ago where free guy, it's about an NPC, like just a computer character in a video game that achieves sentience. So those are some examples, right? Those examples support the simulation hypothesis, but the Musk argument that while computer games are getting really good. So once they get even better, like who's to say, doesn't support it. Okay. That's just me.
00:45:41
Speaker
still being annoyed with that argument 10 years later. Okay, so next, some more sub substantive counter examples. Here's a counter example for the techno rapture. The idea that even if computationalism were true, I'm going to I'm saving the best for last. Okay. But even if computationalism were true, the techno rapture doesn't do what you think it does. So what the proponents of the techno rapture say is that if we can live long enough to where we get to a place where technology can simulate brains, then we can upload our consciousness into a machine and live forever in a simulated paradise. This doesn't do what you think that it does because even if your simulated mind
00:46:25
Speaker
were uploaded to this machine and were conscious and were having an experience of living in this simulated paradise, it wouldn't be your mind. It would be a copy of your mind and you would still die. So you would go to some room and you would plug in the electrodes and you would do whatever the scan and all of that. And then, you know, you'd be like, okay, I'm uploading my consciousness to the to the cloud today. And you would do all of this, and then after that procedure, they would take that data, they would create the simulated mind, plug the simulated you into the simulated paradise. That simulated you would be like, woo-hoo, this is so fun. And they would be having this great time in this experience, you know, in this paradise they would go do, they would fly, or they would like become Cthulhu or whatever, just crazy stuff that you could do in that world. And you would be still sat there in the clinic with the electrodes on your brain going, okay, cool.
00:47:24
Speaker
And then you would live the rest of your life and then at some point you would die and you would not ever experience that techno-paradise. um There's a related idea here, the transporter problem. So the transporter problem comes from Derek Poffitt. Another philosopher, very strange character. I've heard some strange stories about him. I think he was a psychologically unusual person, but you know, I think maybe a lot of philosophers are but even amongst philosophers. I think he was unusual, but also very brilliant, um very influential. And he, so he has this thing that transports a problem and I'm just going to do, I don't know exactly where
00:48:02
Speaker
Exactly the details of his argument and it's all kind of jumbled up, but I'll just make my version of the transporter problem This this comes from direct profit, but I might be kind of remixing it a little bit, but it doesn't matter because the argument is clear Okay, so the idea of the transporter problem is is Star Trek You know TV show a series of movies you've probably come across it you there are these transports and so what happens with the transporter is you get into the transporter and it scans your whole body including your brain and the exact configuration of your brain and and turns that into data, like creates data which represents your whole body. And then it beams that information at light speed somewhere else where new atoms are configured to produce a copy of your body, including your brain, which is identical to the copy that was left on the way you beamed from. You've all seen this, it's the thing where they go, beam me up, Scotty. They turn into kind of like a cloud of like,
00:48:59
Speaker
glittering light, and then they reappear in a new cloud of glittering light somewhere else. So the idea there is kind of related to this computational theory of mind. It's the idea that what you are, and this is a little different because this is kind of about identity, but this is an argument against the techno rapture to do with identity, a little different than computationalism, but close enough. So the idea here is that you are this particular configuration of mine under mind at a particular time. and so if we Disassemble that in one place and reassemble it somewhere else. You will appear somewhere else. Okay, but notice this. You don't have to disassemble the first person. You don't have to disassemble the person that's leaving, right?
00:49:48
Speaker
There's nothing in that process that says you have to disassemble them. You're taking this scan, so you take this scan, and then you beam the scan to another place, and then they assemble a new you using that scan data. Well, they don't have to dissemble the original view there, so you could be left stood on the transporter platform having just been scanned, now knowing that there's a another version of you on Mars having experience. And meanwhile, that version of you on Mars will have the experience of appearing on Mars with all the memories of you. So they will feel that they just stepped onto a transporter on Earth and then appeared on Mars, but they didn't. They were actually configured from matter right then. But meanwhile, you're still on Earth,
00:50:30
Speaker
saying, okay, well now there's another copy of me on Mars and I'm gonna go about my business, okay? So what must be happening in the transporter situation is that they, at the same time that they're making a new scan of you to send to Mars, they also destroy the existing version of you. And so this is there's all these memes about how the transporter is a motor machine, and that there's the Star Trek is this horrifying, you know, like, holocaust of of people that every episode you watch, like, all of the characters get murdered multiple times. Because imagine this scenario, you get in, you know, you stand on the transporter machine,
00:51:12
Speaker
It does the scan, but it messes up and the part where it disassembles you just screws up and it doesn't disassemble you. And then it sends your copy over it it sends the data over to Mars and you're left standing in the transporter room and the technician says, oh, I'm so sorry. We messed that up. you are We didn't disassemble you yet. Give me a minute. I'm going to fix this and then we'll disassemble you. But you're already on Mars, so don't worry about that. You're stood there in this transporter room with this guy saying, I'm not going to disassemble you. you knowing which of the copies that you are, you're not gonna wanna be disassembled. Okay, so that tells you that you didn't really ever wanna be disassembled and that this is an illusion.
00:51:52
Speaker
And there's a movie which I cannot, it would spoil the movie. There's a movie which is about this, if you know, you know, really good movie. ah One of his best, I think, up there, um which I can't tell you because it would be a spoiler, but once you've seen the movie, you know, you know. Anyway, that plays very much with this idea of the transporter problem. So the transporter problem reveals this flaw in the idea of the technorapture. So the technorapture is not going to save you from dying. That's that's the point of this. OK, now we get to the final critique. And this is this is both my favorite. And also, it's the argument by incredulity critique, but it's just the mirror image of the argument from incredulity that I've already pointed out on the other side. OK, so this is the Chinese room. And so again, I'm going to remix this a little bit. So this argument comes from a philosopher called John Sell, which, in his version, is a little different than this.
00:52:41
Speaker
He makes it one layer more abstract in a way that I don't think helps. And I think maybe made more sense when he was making the argument and people were less familiar with computers, but I think people are more familiar with computers now. And so you can make a more direct version of this argument. Anyway, that's a footnote for people that know the original Chinese room arguments. This is not the original Chinese room argument, but here's how it goes. So if the mind is computational, as in all you need to produce a mind is to do the correct computation. So we have this computer program, right? We have this computer program, which is the simulated mind of you, dear listener. We have this scan of your brain and we write an algorithm which takes as data, the scan of the brain, and then takes inputs, produces outputs. Okay. So we have this algorithm. That's all a computation algorithm. Kind of the same thing. It's a procedure for doing a sequence of computations. Okay. And that's all a computer program is. So we're back to this idea of the simulated mind in a computer program.
00:53:42
Speaker
which is the foundation of computational theory of mind, is that that thing would have a mind. Well, what is that thing? Well, a computer program is a sequence of instructions of computations. It's just saying do this computation, then do that computation, then do this computation. If this computation comes out higher than this number, then go to that computation, otherwise to this rate. It's just a sequence of instructions. That's all a computer program is. Okay, the Chinese room argument says, well, we could take that computer program, which is simulating that mind, and we could write down the instructions. And we could put those instructions in a room with a guy, just a human guy, could be a woman, no problem. And so there's this there this guy in the room and so he gets fed little bits of paper, which are the inputs that are coming into this brain.
00:54:37
Speaker
and there those those inputs will just be numbers. And then his job is to do the calculations that the instructions tell him to do, write down what the outputs will be, and then hand them back out of the door. Okay, so he has like a little slot, right? People are handing him and and he's got to dictate the timing of this. So basically, and so this is where we're going to get into the scales. So maybe every like microsecond of brain time of simulated time, he says, okay, give me the inputs for this microsecond. And so he gets given some inputs and then he does the calculation and then he provides the outputs for that microsecond. He says, okay, I'm ready for the inputs for the next microsecond.
00:55:22
Speaker
And meanwhile, he has this gargantuan instruction book, which is how to go from the inputs and the state. So the brain is also in a state to new outputs in a new state, right? So the brain is changing a state through all of this. And it's also taking an input and putting out outputs. And so he has this very big piece of paper where he has recorded the brain state. Now the piece of paper would be a normal, it would be just unbelievably enormous but this is what the computational theory of mind is saying this would work he has this huge stack of empty notebooks that he writes the state in and then he has this huge instruction manual which is what to do given a particular state in a particular set of inputs how to calculate what the next state in the next set of outputs will be he's doing all of that he's doing all these calculations this is happening
00:56:12
Speaker
So far out of real time, it probably takes months to calculate a single microsecond. That's a guess, I don't know, but ballpark. So a single microsecond. So a microsecond is a millionth of a second. So every millionth of a second of simulated time takes months of this guy doing math time. And we're assuming he's really diligent and he doesn't make mistakes. Maybe he has to do his work twice. And then if there's any differences, he has to do it a third time to try and figure out to get it right. Anyway, he doesn't make mistakes. This process, according to the computational theory of mind, is producing a mind. This process of this man sitting in a room
00:56:52
Speaker
just doing computations is producing a mind. It is like something to be the computations this man is doing according to the computational theory of mind. So this is my argument for incredulity. I don't think it's like something to be those computations and the idea that computations like a computation is is kind of a tautological mathematical thing. It's not, nothing's happening when you're doing it. When you say two plus two, when you say I'm gonna add two plus two,
00:57:24
Speaker
There's the things that you're doing to add two and two in your own world, but that's not the computation. That's the the physics and the and the and the biology that you require to do the computation. But the computation is this completely abstract platonic thing, which is two plus two. And so to say that computations, which are abstract, they're platonic, they're timeless. right They exist at all times. They're eternal. To say that computations can produce a mind, when a mind is something which exists inside of time and space that has like ah ah beginning in a middle it has a before and an after, it feels like a category error to me. It feels like so clearly not possible.
00:58:14
Speaker
So this is my Chinese room argument for incredulity for the computational theory of mind. Okay, but before we get too pleased with ourselves, just you have to remember that if you did this guy in a room experiment and you asked the question to the brain that's being simulated in this very elaborate process, you asked it, are you conscious? It would say, yes, I am. Just exactly if I asked you, are you conscious? You would say, yes, I am. Are you having an experience right now? It would say, yes, I am.
00:58:57
Speaker
And it would say, you know, it's experience, if you were able to have a conversation with it would be depend on what the inputs were, right? But it would have memories of having been sat in the room where the brain was scanned. That would kind of be the last memories from a few seconds ago. And then there'd be some new memories, including a disembodied voice asking, are you conscious or something like that, depending on what the specific inputs are. But I just did some math. Uh, In order to do this, say that every microsecond took three months. Just made that up, but it seems plausible to me to run this simulation, including all the error checking you have to do. You'd have to probably run it twice for every microsecond. If the conversation, are you conscious? Yes, I am. It takes about three seconds.
00:59:48
Speaker
For the guy in the room, ah the people in the room, the generations in the room to actually do the calculations for that would take 750,000 years. So that's about 25,000 generations of people in that room. working that process, writing everything down in order to create the exchange. Are you conscious? Yes, I am. Which with an experiencer behind it, right? Obviously you can do that faster if you have a simpler algorithm, but with the experiencer behind it, with the simulated brain behind it. Now the argument that time scale doesn't really matter whether it was obviously, it was always going to be slower. I think that the slowness is a problem. I don't think that the argument of like it would take generations to do it.
01:00:40
Speaker
is a worse problem than just that it would be slower in the first place. But I just just think that's a fun fact. Okay.
01:01:25
Speaker
So now I'm going to gesture towards different explanation.
01:01:31
Speaker
So there is an idea in philosophy of mind called panpsychism. And the idea of panpsychism is that consciousness is a property of all matter, that it is not specific to brain. And the reason that we think of consciousness as being associated with brains is because brains are the conscious things that have enough sophistication, enough degrees of freedom, and are attached to these bodies, which allow us to see the consciousness doing things.
01:02:12
Speaker
you know In the last episode, I talked about surfaces are where the light is, and so that's where you see things. And so you miss the things that are happening in the depths because you can't see them. And so this would be an example of that, where while we can see things that talk and walk or that eat or that have agency, and so we it's easy for us to see the consciousness there. And Psychism suggests that actually consciousness permeates all of physical reality. And so in that case, it is not computational. It's not the computations that produce the consciousness. Computations can belong where they probably live, which is in this platonic world of eternal tautology. And the consciousness
01:03:03
Speaker
exists in the world of physical matter. Ken Wilbur, I would call a panpsychist, a big fan of Ken Wilbur, he talks about every physical thing has an internal correlate. So he actually says, there are four quadrants, we haven't talked about the quadrants yet on this podcast, you either know them or you don't. But he says, every occasion tetra arises in all four quadrants and what that means is, amongst other things, is that everything that happens, there's a physical component to it, and there's also an experienced component to it, a qualic component to it, or ah you know what we would call a consciousness component. So he calls it objective and subjective. And that's easiest to see in a brain, but he would say the same thing about a rock. And pan psychists all panpsychists would say, yes, there's consciousness in a rock. Now, people would say, what, the rock has just sat there? like
01:03:57
Speaker
bought out of its little brain or its little absence of a brain, bought out of its little mind, ah not doing anything, not able to move. Isn't that like horrific? So I think we have to be a little more sophisticated than that. Another argument would be, well, if consciousness is comes out of stuff, physical stuff, if all physical stuff has consciousness in it, well, then why not you know, the computer that's simulating the brain, that's physical stuff. Why isn't that conscious in exactly the same way as the mind is conscious, okay? The paper that the guy in the Chinese room is writing on, well, that's physical stuff, so why isn't that conscious? Here's why. I think it's gonna be something like this. That the specific configurations of matter are able to condense and amplify the ambient consciousness of reality to depths that
01:04:49
Speaker
allow experience to emerge. So like this is kind of proto consciousness, which is saturates reality. And then you need these specific configurations of matter, which condense this consciousness into a form where it has enough depth to be kind of recognizably conscious the way that we typically mean it. And so this is where again, I use this less time, but I think this is a really great line. I use it a lot. This is again attributed to Ibn Arabi, although there's some question about that. This might be kind of ah a more modern thing. Not sure I couldn't track this down. I tried to track it down. Could not. If anyone has the original source of this.
01:05:32
Speaker
by Ibn Arabi in the original language. I assume Arabic, maybe Persian, I don't know. I would love for it to be pointed to the original source. I could not find it online, but here's the quote. God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, sturs in the animal, and awakens in man. So that's this increasing depth, right? And we can see when you look at an ant, an ant has a more consciousness than a rock, it seems like. ah more consciousness than a blade of grass, but less consciousness than a mouse. And it seems like a mouse has less consciousness than a whale. And then when where we get to comparing a whale and a human being, people are going to fight about that. There are a people are going to say the whales.
01:06:17
Speaker
have more depth than us. For me, I don't know how I would answer that question, but there's this kind of the spectrum. This is another Ken line, the spectrum of consciousness, but it's produced by these specific configurations of matter. But it's also, I think what's crucial is that it is embedded in time and space. I think that consciousness requires time and space. It requires you to be happening somewhere at some time. And the consciousness is the inside feeling of something happening. This intuition was kind of provoked by the Chinese room. Like, well, why don't I like the Chinese room? Well, because when and where is any of that happening? The mind isn't happening anywhere or any when. The Chinese room
01:07:13
Speaker
The guy in the room doing the calculations is happening at a where and when, but the mind isn't happening there or then. And so either minds are these kind of weird, eternal things that are outside of time and space, or there's something else going on here. And I don't think that minds are weird, eternal things that are outside of time space and space. Now, whether consciousness per se is a weird, eternal thing outside of time and space, that's a different question. But minds, like individual minds are embedded in time and space. So I think your location and your progress through time and space
01:07:46
Speaker
are crucial to having it be that there is something it is like to be you. It is only like something to be things that exist in time and space. Beyond that, the details, I don't know. So that's a gesture towards an explanation. Finally, finally today, I want to step beyond an explanation a little bit because I don't think you know, we we might get something that says, oh yeah, these configurations of of physical stuff seem to generate consciousness in a way that these other configurations don't. We're already kind of there, but we might get way more detailed about that. And I think that it's ultimately, it's not going to be satisfying as an answer to the question, where does consciousness come from?
01:08:40
Speaker
Because consciousness is and one of the foundational mysteries. It's unanswerable. And it's like a blind spot in the eye, right? This is an Alan Watson analogy and it's great. You know, you have this optic blind spot because your optic nerve, you know, the back of your eye, your retina is this wall of nerves that collect the light, uh, that's kind of comes into your eye. But that information has to get to your brain. So there's a place where there are no nerves collecting the light where the optic nerve attaches to the retina and then goes into the brain at that point where it attaches, you don't collect any light there. And so.
01:09:20
Speaker
There's this blind spot. You can't see it. Most of the time there are tricks. Google it. There are tricks for how to be able to see your own blind spot. Most of the time you can't see it because our brains have just deleted it basically. Just say, well we don't need to worry about that blind spot. But in order for the eye to see, there has to be something it can't see. And I think in order for consciousness to be, There has to be this this kind of, there's this blank spot, right? And there are these foundational mysteries. To my mind, there are three foundational mysteries. So there's, why is there something rather than nothing? Why are things made of? Right deep down, right? And you might say, well, physics knows the answer to that. It's particles. It's all these particles.
01:10:00
Speaker
And it's like, right, but what are the particles made of? And physics at some point just says, because it's this is like a kid saying, why, why, why? But that sounds obnoxious. But in this case, it's profound. like there There is something that everything is made of, but what is that thing? Well, there isn't an answer to that question. There isn't an answer to the question, why is there something rather than nothing? And there isn't an answer to the question, why is it possible for it to be like something to be? So I think ultimately there isn't going to be an answer to that question. And so now I want to get into this idea of the Western versus the Eastern approach to consciousness. And so the Western approach is what we've been kind of digging into, which is this like philosophical
01:10:43
Speaker
And, you know, whatever, like, Western and Eastern are very, very loose labels here, right? But I, you know, that I think there's some justification for using them, but also hold it very lightly. Of course, there are people in the Eastern half of the globe who are thinking in these terms, and there are people in the Western half of the globe that are thinking in terms of charm, i'm going to phrase this East in a minute, but historically, there's a reason to use those times. Anyway, so the Western approach is this kind of analytical, reductionist, explanatory, trying to come to a foundational explanation by breaking something down into its component parts and seeing how each of them work. Super powerful, amazing, done all kinds of really cool stuff. And then applied to consciousness, I don't think it's ever going to give us a satisfying answer. But the Eastern approach to consciousness is different. The Eastern approach, which is also kind of the enchanted mind approach, is immersion, embodiment.
01:11:37
Speaker
It's paying attention to the thing itself. It's phenomenological. So instead of trying to explain consciousness, it's trying to inhabit it and be in contact with it and notice it. and allow it to permeate. So I'm gonna just invite you, if you're not driving, just to try this out right now. You're probably doing your driving, but I'm just worried. It's to notice, if you haven't been already, to notice that it's like something to be you right now.
01:12:12
Speaker
and that that is extraordinary and inexplicable. And it's this central mystery of being. It's a central mystery of your life, which is with you for every moment that you're aware. Only times it's not with you, and there's some conversation about this, but let's say if you're in deep dreamless sleep, perhaps it's not with you, although some people would say it still is. is this experience of it's like something to be you. It's with you at every moment. And yet it is this like profound mystery, both from a kind of scientific, like philosophical, it's a mystery, but also in your experience, it's a mystery.
01:13:00
Speaker
And so this is more the Eastern of the enchanted approach. is just to notice that and include them. And I think what that does is very exciting. It's interesting. It's powerful. It's transformative. It's worth turning towards, right? It kind of reminds me, this is different, but like, you know, for For years, people were like, oh, the placebo effect, right? Like there's, you know, the placebo effect. Well, we're trying to figure out these drugs and then we're, you know, some, but we have to like control for the placebo effect. And so we have to like this annoying artifact that's like making it hard for us to figure out what our drugs do. And then at some point people started to go, well, hang on.
01:13:44
Speaker
If the placebo effect is helping people get better, maybe we should think more about that. Like maybe actually we don't need to, you know, it's a different, it's like a little shift. I don't think it's exactly the same, but it's kind of a knowledge. Anyway, here you are having it be like something to be you for every moment of your life. And that's it. I think it's wonderful. I think that that's that's something that's worth paying attention to. You can pay attention to both sides. this This is not a, this is not a division, but it's just a reminder. And what this side has is it, in order to do this side, you do have to temporarily let go of the search for an explanation. This is not an explaining mind thing. This is, so in order to do this, you have to say, I don't know.
01:14:31
Speaker
And I'm not trying to know, I'm not trying to figure out how this works. I'm just being in relationship with it as it arises right now, which just all by itself without understanding or explanation can be an incredibly rewarding experience. Okay. Thank you for staying with me for all of that. Oh my God. Good job. You feel like I said, mostly what I wanted to say. I feel pretty, um, spent and my throat is sore. Thanks for listening. I hope this was edifying in some way, stimulating, interesting.
01:15:10
Speaker
So if you want to reach me, you can reach me on partoflions.com. There's a contact form there. I read all of those and I will respond probably for this one, if there's enough questions or challenges. So if you have anything that's not clear, please ask for clarification. If there's any challenges, any differences of opinion, please send them in. Depending on ah what happens, I may do a follow-up episode where I respond to some of that stuff, but I would love to hear from you. And in the meantime, thanks so much for listening and be well. you