#663 - Erik Hoel - A Guide To The Fundamental Mystery Of The Mind

0:00Given your background, given the work that you've done, how would you describe the current status of consciousness research and the theories around it? Well, we're at a very interesting time. I believe it was just widely reported that, you know, a longstanding bet over whether or not consciousness would be resolved was notoriously not resolved. Who made the bet? I believe it was Chambers and Christophe Cok if I'm not mistaken. who's our clock being a very famous neuroscientist in the field and then David Chomer is being a very famous philosopher in the film. Who was who was for which? Oh Chomer's was of course was the philosopher was against it and the scientist was for it and and if you if you think about sort of where we are in the search for a scientific theory of consciousness you know it wasn't even on the table that you could do something like that that you could look for a scientific theory of consciousness.

0:55As I talked about in the book, consciousness was very explicitly split off from science early on in the beginning, particularly by Galileo, who basically said, let's not worry about qualitative aspects of the world. Let's not worry about the redness of red or how a peach tastes or the sound of a trombone. Let's just focus on the quantitative aspects of the world, which we can describe mathematically. And let's just bracket this problem aside. And to him, he was a religious man, he would have said it as, you know, it's just not science is business to go poking around in the soul. Just put it aside and let's just focus on this universe that thought is created for us.

1:44And that strategy has actually been the fundamental strategy of science and is one of the things that has made it so successful and so able to sort of proceed without people without essentially annoying philosophers coming in and saying, well, you're not really explaining this right. But of course, there is a science where you do need to explain qualitative properties, and that's neuroscience, to figure out how the brain works. You need to understand how consciousness works. And we simply don't. And for a long time, neuroscience has been hobbled by the fact that it has been fundamentally behaviorist, and people have been incredibly scared to talk about mentioned consciousness.

2:27And it really took two different men winning two different Nobel prizes. Francis Crick, who co -discovered DNA, and Gerald Edelman, who was one of the people who really figured out how the immune system functions. And they both got their Nobel prizes in a different field, and they looked at neuroscience and said there is a big on -answered scientific question here, which is how does the brain create consciousness? And they both started up their own institutes and their own sort of ways to approach this problem, but had it not had the weight of two Nobel prizes behind it, I don't, I think that there still wouldn't even be any serious scientific attempt to understand consciousness and neuroscience.

3:12And I think without that, neuroscience struggles a great deal. I mean, that's another thing that's that a chunk of the book is about. is just about the essentially the scandal that is modern neuroscience given that the stream of consciousness is what your brain, you know, that's the main function of the brain is generating your stream of consciousness. So imagine you're trying to figure out an organ and you're not allowed to talk about its main function. You would be like being a formula one racing reporter but all of your discussions being about the grass on the side of the track and the temperature of the air and the flags waving in the wind.

3:53Exactly. People tried to sort of skirt around it by taking aspects of how consciousness works, like attention, and saying, okay, we're allowed to talk about attention. We can focus on attention. We can focus on memory. We can do things without reference to the stream of consciousness. But of course, when you remember something, you're conscious of it. And when you attend to something, you're conscious of it. These are all things that are thinking. Not just something that happened as a phenomenal logical experience, which is associated with it. Exactly. And so people tried to preserve the non -subjectivity of science and not let subjectivity end by sequestering away a lot of these mental properties and then pretending that consciousness doesn't exist.

4:38But it has not, I'll just be very honest, I have a PhD in neuroscience. It has not been very successful. I mean, I don't think neuroscience has made really, I'll say it, any significant advancement since I really entered the field in terms of, not in terms of everything, but in terms of understanding most of the major questions that people want to know about how the brain operate. So stuff at a very high cognitive level, how does the brain operate? Neuroscience has not made a significant progress. And it's probably because you're not really even allowed in most areas. Neuroscience, to talk about the main function of brain.

5:16What do you mean when you say not allowed? Is there some policeman that comes and slaps you on the back of the wrist as soon as you start typing about it? Like what you're on about? Well, within science, there are all sorts of, you know, structure is that, you know, prevent somebody from getting too crazy. I mean, I think more fundamentally, it's just been that, you know, due to legacies of things like behavior is, talking about consciousness has been considered sort of too dangerous and it's been actively discouraged and you'll, you can still go and find a neuroscientist and you'll ask them, you know, what are your thoughts on consciousness?

5:55and they'll either say, I don't have any, or they'll say, it's sort of woo. And then the conversation gets very strange very quickly because you say, well, what do you mean by that? You're saying that we're not conscious, or what are you saying? And then they have to have some sort of convoluted definition where you get to keep attention and memory and all these other things, but you're not allowed to talk about consciousness. But there are, it's not a conspiracy to keep consciousness out of the field. is just how the intellectual lineage of the field developed is that any real discussion of consciousness, which should be the major part of neuroscience, is kept as this very sort of minor set of now thanks to the big names of the field, not everyone is considered a very strange weirdo, but in 1985, right, like 1985, you could not just go and get a PhD like I did studying the neuroscience of consciousness.

6:55That was not a thing that could happen. In fact, my generation is the first generation to really be able to actively get into the field in order to study consciousness and then actively work on that throughout our careers, rather than essentially having to become neurofamous for some other thing and then transition once no one can criticize you. And science is very conservative. I don't think people should be surprised. Again, it's not conspiratorial. The same sort of stuff happens in theoretical physical physics where maybe there are some promising approaches and they're just like not favored by the field or sort of viewed as crazy and so on.

7:31And so it's very difficult to do work in it. But I think if you look at neuroscience as a whole and where it is, it has sort of all sorts of problems that crop up almost endlessly within it. And you have these repeating narratives and these sort of neuro myths that don't die and so on. And I think a lot of it is just that there's no big target of neuroscience. There's no big target of what to figure out because what to figure out is how to the brain generate consciousness and only a small subfield of neuroscience even looks at that now. Feeling the aftershock of Galileo still all of these millennia later.

8:08Yes, absolutely, absolutely. But he would of course have been, you know, I think it's more likely that it had you in a philosopher named So, God makes this point, makes this thought experiment of like if you brought Galileo to the modern age and you said, okay, we're trying to do this neuroscience of consciousness. You probably say, well, snow, stop. You know, you're not supposed to do that. That's this is weird perversion of science, right? Like, you, that's the domain of the soul. Of course, you're not finding any satisfactory answers. It feels like, you know what it feels like to me as you're talking about it.

8:39Obviously, all of the problems of consciousness are very difficult to try and come up with. than as you've said yourself, your entire field that you have a PhD in and have worked him for almost all your life until he just left has made basically very little progress with it. It feels a little bit like, you know, when you hear about in UFC or in boxing, there's this one fighter that no one wants to call out. And all of the fighters are calling out the other ones that they know are kind of a bit shitter than this one, but there's this one guy and he's just a nightmare. He's a phenom and no one can handle him.

9:10It feels a little bit like consciousness is the difficult fighter that no one wants to call out. Yeah, absolutely. And it's one reason why I don't always encourage younger people to go into the field, despite the fact that it's one of the biggest open questions in science, which is that it's also probably, if not the most difficult question in science, it's one of the most difficult questions in science. And we're still waiting on our Einstein. We're waiting on our Darwin. And And it's sort of sad because neuroscience is entering this period, particularly with AI, where people aren't able to predict various things off of brain states.

9:50You might think, well, Alchem, Eric is saying that neuroscience hasn't been in progress. Didn't I just see something about how AI can now read your mind off of neuroimaging or something like that? And the answer is that all that stuff is statistical. So it's sort of like first, It's the AI's are very, very good at extrapolating from minimal data. So if you actually look at what it's predicting, it's actually not the same at all. And it's sort of like how it's able to autocomplete the next paragraph of text.

10:27But the thing is, is that there is some law. There is some law of nature wherein the neural activity that your brain is undergoing now is associated with, generates, you can sort of come up with various relational terms here, but is related to your conscious, the conscious things that you are experiencing. So, if you're listening to this podcast, the auditory cortex is going through various sort of stages of processing, there is some, there is somewhere there, a lot of nature that tells us, Okay, what sounds are now being experienced? Right? Like that is a question. It's not just, you know, can I throw machine learning at it and sort of like get the sound back or tell that someone is experiencing something.

11:17It's very similar to the laws of physics, right? Despite all the complexity that you of, you know, leaves falling from trees, there are natural laws behind those. And science knows most of those natural laws, particularly at the scales that are relevant. within the brain, we don't have anything like that. And you can, one way to tell this is that you ask neuroscientists to explain things. And I used to do this all, I was a menace in graduate school, so I would do this all of time, where I would ask, you know, some prominent neuroscientist who's an expert, at some, you know, highly particular field, to explain that phenomenon, right?

11:53Like auditory processing or something. And then they would give their explanation. And I would ask them, please explain it again, but don't refer to location. right? Don't just tell me where in the brain this is happening. Tell me how it's happening, right? Like, like, because what does the spatial information tell us that it's over there or over there? This isn't, that's not real scientific understanding. That's sort of like, well, if I damage that part of the brain, this no longer works, right? And if you remove localization, what you'll find is is that outside of some very early sensory processing that we know how it works, things like edge detection in vision, but that's very primary sensory courtesy sort of stuff.

12:40This is the showers of the brain. Once you start moving down the showers of the brain and you talk about the deep areas of the brain and you get people talking about them, you'll notice and you remove something like localization. You notice there's almost nothing to say. Yeah, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about back to a lot of the conversations that I've had on neuroscience with neuroscientists, the stuff that I've listened to or read. And an awful lot of it does sort of come in with a slam dunk in a way which is a particular thing happens and here is the area of the brain which is activated or you take a particular substance and this is the pattern of behavior within the brain which is turned down and this is the pattern which is turned up and these, it's almost like cranial geography more than it is like an explanation of the phenomenological experience of being a human.

13:31Right. And you could imagine that you sort of swapped around all those locational tags. Well, what would that change? Right? You would say, oh, well, you know, the auditory processing occurs in the front, right? And then another stuff occurs, you know, far in the back, right? Like you could swap around all that stuff and you wouldn't feel any different about about the system and that's a good That's a good indication that your explanations are not very meaningful And you know the fundamental truth is that we don't even know that there is no good way to even understand how artificial Neural networks function once they get past a certain size they become mathematical black boxes and this is a really big problem It's a big problem for AI safety.

14:14I know you've had on guests who've talked about AI safety. That's a cause area I care quite about, but quite a bit about. But one thing that makes that so difficult is that it's almost impossible to figure out what a feed -forward AI, which is made of structured sets of effectively neurons, mathematical representations of neurons, where we can know all the connections. And we know exactly what neurons are firing and so on. We have perfect information and we're still stumped in a significant number of cases. Neuroscience is a thousand times harder than figuring out how some feed -forward neural network is.

14:57Not only is the brain much larger in terms of the parameter size. We probably have something like 100 trillion synapses. We're also, it's also occluded behind an opaque wall of bone and it's incredibly delicate and it's all folded up. And then, and so, you know, another question that I like about AppSniperScience is, okay, so why should we feel that the brain will be so much more easier to figure out than like a relatively much smaller artificial neural network that we have perfect information in our access to, and we still can't figure out that. So why would you not expect that black box aspect to exist in the brain?

15:38I mean, I've never gotten like a good answer to something. Eric, I can't imagine why you are now out of academia given that you've made every academic that you've worked with for the last decade life a nightmare. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I just got a lovely email from a graduate student, from a former graduate student. That was just an absolute treat to read about how great workman he was. I'm sure. I'm sure. No, no. I think you're right in the sense of, in the sense of, one has to distinguish between being a dad fly and actually offering something positive. So the thing is, is that it's very easy to sit on your high horse and critique a field like neuroscience, which is trying to understand the most complex system.

16:28They don't know this, and they don't know this, and this is useless, and blah, blah, blah. Right. And so what I also focused on, what point of my career was, was that, well, one way to understand the complexities of the brain is that probably that consciousness has something to do with it. So pursuing a scientific theory of consciousness should help you answer these questions. Because in theory, there is some sort of natural law that relates experiences. and much of the, much of the, the, the fluff of neuroscience is just that the field is in, in philosophy of science terms, it's just pre -paradigmatic.

17:08So because it's pre -paradigmatic, it has all these problems, but that doesn't mean you should stop working on the field. What it means is that you should work very hard to try to develop a, a new paradigm. What's just for the people that don't know? What's pre -paragigmatic? That would be that there's no overarching paradigm to explain. There's no sort of like big theory that everyone can key off of and understand. So a great example of this would be biology before Darwin. So until you have the theory of natural selection, you do have biology. People are out there collecting tax monies and making scientific observations and relating the lineages of species and so on.

17:48But once you get the theory of evolution by natural selection, the whole thing clicks into place. And you're sort of able to fit everything within this overarching structure. Which I suppose also includes criticism. Yes, yes, certainly. And just because you advance to one paradigm does not mean that the science is now over. In fact, what usually happens is that science advances to a paradigm. And then all sorts of errors begin to crop up in various places. And Kun, Thomas Giff was one of the people who really wrote a lot about this. These errors crop up. And once the errors reach a certain point where like no one can really deny them anymore, finally people are sort of forced to search for some new paradigm.

18:39And they get some sort of replacement. And you've seen this happen in physics, right? where it's like the early, almost solar system -esque models of atoms that you might have seen in textbooks. Of course, that's not really what atoms look like. That's an earlier, more easily to understand paradigm of what atoms look like. We went through succession of paradigms. But I think within neuroscience, it's still very much waiting on its big theory. It's still very much waiting on a theory of consciousness. and that would be the thing that catapults it to being post -paragmatic. And so that's where I hope that the criticisms that I'm offering for, including some in this book, do have a positive purpose, which is to sort of re -orientate people towards where can we actually move in order to solve some of these sort of problems, instead of just continuing down doing exactly what we're doing?

19:32Okay, so explain to me the intrinsic and the extrinsic perspective and how does Tyin and how they're related? Sure, so if we go back to Kalea, the intrinsic is what he removed, right? Is what he cut out. And the extrinsic is in a way we're sort of more well versed in or we're more familiar with. So an engineering diagram would be extrinsic. The mathematics, you know, a physical description of some complex natural phenomenon. and that would be an extrinsic description. The circuitry of your laptop, that would be an extrinsic description. A causal model is extrinsic. Intrinsic are the subjective qualities that accompany or basically are your conscious experience and your stream of consciousness.

20:23And neuroscience fits in this very strange position where it's trying to reconcile the intrinsic and the extrinsic. Something that is very interesting to me and I devoted, again, some of the book is about this, is that if you look at the development of our civilization, you can, as a humanity as a whole, you can view it as the development of these two different perspectives on the world. And they don't really go together, right? One is our development of the X -Rex, right? So, and the separation of the two. So if you look early on, of course, people are explaining things with gods, you know, or magic or these other sort of much more like supernatural phenomenon.

21:11And so we get honed down to only really wanting to give very clear, extrinsic explanations of phenomena, and the best example of that is in science. But meanwhile, we're also beginning to understand that we also, you know, over time, over the millennia, we get much better at describing not just the ectrinzoquery, like the science, so on. We also get better at describing the entrance to quarrel. So we get better at describing ourselves and our own emotions and our own thoughts. And we have better theory of mind. We have better ability to express our own minds and sort of the various details and all sort of the microquery.

21:57of your own conscious experience, we get much, much, much better at that. If you go back and you read ancient Egyptian poetry or ancient Egyptian texts, what you'll find is that descriptions of mind are incredibly sparse. They really don't get very many descriptions of emotions and the descriptions of emotions that you do get are extremely wooden. It's almost as if you have literature, but then you don't even know how to really talk about other minds. And it's just like with science, the ability to describe mine sort of rockets for during the, during the era of ancient Greece and post the Homeric era, and you see Europe at ease and all these playwrights become, you know, extremely good at describing mines in ways that we would recognize now.

22:48And then, funnily enough, I mean, after the fall of the Roman Empire, you know, during research for this book, I was sort of going through history and trying to find, you know, texts through which you would be good examples of how people talk about minds in different eras, right? And it was actually very hard to find any text at all that talks about minds post -fall of the Roman Empire, like when you're in the Dark Ages. And so you really sort of lose this ability almost outside of some religious text. You really lose this ability to really talk seriously about minds. Almost as if we reverted back to ancient Egypt and then we develop it again just like with science during the Enlightenment and so on.

23:37And that was a really sort of fascinating story that I didn't sort of expect, expect opriory. It really kind of fell out of my research and looking at these twin threads. And you know, the intrinsic perspective, just like we took the extrinsic perspectives on the world, and we boiled it away to its clearest form, and that's science. We took the intrinsic perspective of the world and we boiled it away to the clearest aggression of it and that's literature. And that's the, if you go back and you read, you know, 18th century novelist, right? They have such facility with describing internal states.

24:24And that would have been completely foreign to people 2 ,000 years ago. And it's as if they sort of developed, you know, of viewpoint. point, just in the same way that science was developed, except that viewpoint is pointed towards consciousness, is pointed towards accessing and describing our qualitative experiences. Yeah, that's very interesting that you could almost look at novels and literature as probably more, way, almost certainly is more of a direct window into the mind than the science of the brain and the science of consciousness. If you learn an awful lot more functionally, experientially about what it's like to be a human, by reading, back in, weathering heights or something, then you do by looking at neuroscience journals.

25:17Absolutely. I mean, there's just no doubt that Tolstoy knew more about human nature than some contemporary psychologist, even like an evolutionary psychologist, right? Like you can take some sort of evolutionary psychologist, saying, explain human nature and then Tolstoy comes in with very sort of what we would consider perhaps very strange or chaotic notions of true Christianity and how human beings work. And then he somehow is able to sort of explain people just so incredibly well and has such an eye for how humans actually function and can write across all sorts of different divides. And I do think that what's really interesting there is that where that failure is is in the missing sort of neuroscience unconsciousness, right?

26:04If you want one reason for that, one reason that feels like such an obvious gap is because neuroscience is sort of continuously stuck trying to explain everything via the extrinsic perspective. And we never quite get what we want from the brain out of such explanations. We always feel that there's something fundamentally missing. We always feel that there's some ghost that's been left out of the machine. Whenever we sort of try to give an ex -perfectly extrinsic explanation of the brain. How is Descartes involved or important in this story? Well, I think Descartes is deeply important whenever you talk about, whenever you talk of a cutchensis, but specifically for this, he actually has this really interesting interaction where this problem of how does the intrinsic relate to the extrinsic?

26:58I mean, perhaps it's first historical formal discussion occurs in some letters that Descartes sends with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, who was a really, really interesting woman. She was a mathematician, she was a philosopher, She eventually became an abyss of a, I think, I forget exactly in which country she was an abyss. But she lived this life that was filled with sort of political intrigue. She was a royal and she met Descartes and their letters are fascinating historical reading. I mean, one because there's almost like this extremely romantic aspect of it. And of course, that age was very different and how people spoke to one another was very different, but you sort of get the sense that these are like two nerds, you know, communicating over emails, you know, but they're like stuck, you know, in the Renaissance.

27:52And after Dicart died, Princess Elizabeth never married and died a widow and she turned down an offer of marriage. So I was giving to her and she was reportedly just utterly heartbroken. But the point is that in these letters, Princess Elizabeth, who was a very good philosopher in her own right, makes a point to Descartes about his metaphysics. And he is one of the people who really initially pushed this ideal idea of dualism. It's almost a caricature at this point where he's like the soul interacts with the body through the pineal gland. His opinions were a bit more complicated than that, but that's effectively how it's portrayed.

28:32And Princess Elizabeth has this point where she says, well, consider that sort of physics in the world is extrinsic and the soul is intrinsic. How can one impact the other? If they really are, if you really are a dualist and you really think there are two different types of substances, how can one sort of causally control the other? That seems non -sensical. That's the pillow talk that I want, by the way. That's all play for me. Just dismantle my life's work and use the word ridiculous. Yeah. And you do sort of get the sense of that, where she's both complimenting him, but also clearly sort of like a bulldog has got a hold of this point and won't let go until Descartes really gives her the answer she's looking for.

29:25And he really doesn't do a good job of it. He first sort of says, well, maybe this is like gravity where it's a force, and she immediately comes back with, well, if it's a force like gravity, then the mind would just be material, right? Because it would just be some physical force. So, again, what do you mean by saying it's two separate substances? How do they interact? And they never really resolve it. They cart sort of ducks the question and they, you know, their correspondents continues on other matters for a very long time until his death. But that, to me, is so interesting historically because it's a point where where some of the paradoxes around consciousness come very clearly into play, both of them have the very strong intuition that you cannot reduce the intrinsic to the extrinsic fully.