[00:00:08] Host Create clip I was wondering whether we could discuss a bit about your idea. That perception is not like a window, but instead it's more like a three D desktop. Um, does that mean that there is nothing outside then the mind? Or does it just mean that we get we perceive something in an indirect way?

[00:00:29] Host Create clip Right. So most of my colleagues in cognitive neuroscience I believe that our senses were shaped by natural selection, that we evolved and that the selection pressures are such that those creatures that saw the world more accurately had a competitive advantage or those who saw less accurately, and so they were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for the accurate perceptions. And so the result is after thousands of generations where the offspring of those who saw the world more accurately and so we can be pretty confident that when I see tables and chairs and the sun and the moon and so forth that I'm seeing reality as it is, no one believes we see all of reality. Of course, we only see the parts that we need to see, but the parts that we do see we're seeing truthfully And so I've looked at that from the point of view of the mathematics of evolution, evolutionary game theory, and we can actually run simulations to see what happens, and we can prove therms. And we've done both. And the bottom line is that the probability, if our senses evolved, were shaped by natural selection. The probability that we see reality as it is zero and that that means not simply that I know I don't quite see the shape of a chair correctly, or I don't quite see the colors correctly. It's much deeper than that. The problem is that the very language of space and time and physical objects is the wrong language. To describe objective reality you could not frame a true description of the world in that language is not possible. So it's not that we get it off a little bit. Here. There is that this whole thing is just the wrong framework for describing reality, so that seems so counterintuitive and so out there that I think metaphor is needed to help understand how it might be working in the metaphor I like is the user interface on the desktop interface on your computer if you're writing an email and the icon for that email is blue and rectangular and in the middle of your screen, does that mean that the email itself the files in your computer is blue rectangular and in the middle of the computer? Of course, not anybody who thought that misunderstands the point of the desktop interface is not there to show you the truth. In this metaphor, the truth be the circuits and the voltages and magnetic fields, all that complexity. Most of us don't want to know about that. That's really nasty. If you had to toggle voltages to craft an email, your friends wouldn't hear from you, it's just too hard. So what evolution has done for us is its evolved us sensory systems touch, smell, sight, sound.

[00:03:16] Host Create clip Hearing all of this, all these sensory interfaces as a user interface that the purpose is to hide reality completely to hide. Really, just like your desktop interface on your computer is there to hide the circuits. You don't want to know about the circuits, and yet it allows you to control the circuits right by using icons and dragging them and clicking and so forth. You could control the reality without knowing anything at all about it, and that's what evolution did. Three dimensional space is your desktop. It's a three dimensional desktop, not just a two dimensional desktop. And the icons are three dimensional, not just flat what we call physical objects. So tables and chairs and spoons and forks. These are icons that evolution has shaped to tell us about fitness payoffs and how to get them. So it's all about fitness. Even space itself is about fitness. The distance between me and an apple 10 meters away versus 10 miles away is telling me that it will cost me fewer calories to get the apple 10 meters away. It cost me a lot of calories to get the apple 10 miles away. Probably I should go for the apple that's 10 meters away. So even space itself is representing fitness payoffs and fitness costs.

[00:04:30] Host Create clip And so so. Evolution, in short, has shaped us with the user interface that hides reality on purpose or, you know, purposes in quotes, that evolution is just a process. But but the effect of the part of the process is really to hide reality, so that so that you're not distracted by it, and you can control reality without actually knowing what it is. So now the question that you asked, what is that reality? And I read the right answer is, I don't know, right? If the very predicates, the language of our perceptions, according to our one of our best, there is no evolution by natural selection. If the vory language of our perceptions is the wrong language to describe reality, then it's a tough problem. Like what I'm doing is a scientist is I'm suggesting that well, I'm trying to understand a specific scientific problem which is for me is called the heart problem of consciousness. And I'm trying to think of a theory of reality that will allow me to solve this hard problem of consciousness. The problem is this.

[00:05:40] Host Create clip We have a lot of interesting data that gives us correlations between certain kinds of brain activity and certain conscious experiences that we have. So, for example, we know that if if I take a powerful magnet called transmit transcranial magnetic stimulator and touch it to part of the skull is just next to an area called before defy, inhibit my neural activity in that area immediately. All color will drain from the left part of my visual world. I'll just see shades of great. We'll still see color in the right part of the visual world, but not in the left. Then you turn off the magnet and color comes flowing back in. So there's this very interesting correlation between interference with neural activity and in the cup right hemisphere and loss of certain kind of conscious experience in the left visual world. We can do that with motion. If I put this stimulator over an area called the Five, I can turn off my ability to experience motion in the left visual field. And it turns out that in the science of cognitive neuroscience, we've discovered scores, maybe hundreds of these kinds of correlations. So correlations are the raw data.

[00:06:55] Host Create clip This brain activity is correlated with that conscious experience and, of course, correlations air. Not a theory. Rooster crows are correlated with sunrises, but that's not a theory. For example, does a Rooster crow caws a sunrise? Well, no, that's way would tend to think it might go the other way, but but it's hard to go from correlations to a genuine theory of what's causing, you might say, Well, so, for example, we know that brain activity that we can measure with E e g electroencephalogram. We can predict your choices that you'll make in certain cases, your free will choices, Um, seven seconds before you can tell me what you're going to choose. So here again, brain activity is cleanly correlated with your experience seven seconds later of a choice that you're making. So here again, we have this correlation. In this case, you might say, Well, okay, here. Clearly the theory is the brain activity came first. The experience of feeling like you had a free will choice came a few seconds later, so clearly the brain activity had to cause it, and that's too quick.

[00:08:09] Host Create clip Another example, counter example is, if you look at a train station, a bunch of people assemble at the train station. A few minutes later, the train appears. Did the people coming to the train station caused the train to appear? No, they didn't. So even though the correlation is tight every time a group of people appears, a train appears a few minutes later is not the case that the people appearing caused the train to appear. There's some third entity, namely a train schedule, as coordinating broke both. So we have to be very, very careful when we have correlations. That's not the same thing as a theory. And then the final example is, you might say, Well, look, when you actually take that magnet and stimulate area before or inhibited, you're intervening, and by intervening, we can actually figure out what's causing what. So you turn off before color goes away. Surely that shows that the four causes the color experience, and that's also too fast. If I'm in a virtual reality game like Grand Theft Auto and I've got a steering wheel, I can say, Look, I can intervene. I can turn the steering wheel to the left that will make the car turn to the left. Therefore the steering wheel Israel. And it really does have an effect on a real car. No, it's not.

[00:09:25] Host Create clip There's again a hidden reality of dials and resistors. All the circuits that's mediating this it only we only have the fiction of intervening in a fiction of causalities. So the problem we have in the heart problem of consciousness is this. Scientists have gotten dozens, maybe hundreds of these tight correlations. We do not have a theory. We cannot explain why neural activity is correlated with conscious experiences. In particular, we cannot for a single contact spirits like, say, by conscious experience. I mean something really simple. Like having a headache experiencing color, the taste of vanilla. The theories that air proposed are basically only believed by the graduate students of the professor. He proposes them, and no theory that's been proposed can even predict or specify the conditions for a single experience like the taste of annoying. So if you think that neural activity causes the taste of vanilla, precisely what neural activity is causing the taste of vanilla and how does it do it? No one has any idea. Or if they say that neural activity is identical to the taste of vanilla, then is a scientist I want to say, OK, tell me with mathematical precision, what exactly is theme at the neural activity that's identical to vanilla? And why is it identical? I mean, anybody can say anything.

[00:10:56] Host Create clip I can say the moon is identical to blue cheese on just stipulated. Presumably you need to give me some reason why I should believe in the identity so they can't specify the identity and much less say why the identity should be plausible. So that's the problem we've got. It's It's a really deep, open, scientific problem, and it's very personal. We all have conscious experiences. We would like to understand what we also we also have brains. We'd like to understand what's happening here. What? Why why are these correlations there? And so the theory of evolution that I mentioned that says we don't see reality as it is has a really strange consequence. It means that when I see a physical object like an apple, effectively, I'm creating that apple as a data structure in my interface, much like I'm in a virtual reality and I have a headset on, and every time I turn over here, I will see something I'm rendering that in real time. I see an apple is I go over here, I'm no longer rendering you. The apple is gone, but as soon as I turn over there, I will again create a three dimensional apple.

[00:12:07] Host Create clip So I'm saying this doesn't just happen in virtual reality happens in everyday life. I look over here I see an apple. I'm literally creating that data structure because now I'm effectively an apple is a description of fitness payoffs and how to get them. It's all about fitness. That's the key thing. Evolution is all about fitness, but that means that the objects don't exist as pre existing things. Want to see an apple. We like to think, Well, that's because there really is an apple. And I'm saying, No, no, there's some other reality out there. But just like the blue icon on your desktop doesn't really resemble the true file. The apple does not resemble anything. An objective reality. It's an abstract data structure that's just telling you how to act to get fitness payoffs. Here's the kicker. When you look inside your brain inside your schooling, you see a brain that's also just a data structure that you're creating neurons or just data structures. They don't exist. And this is the weird stuff.

[00:13:00] Host Create clip I don't have a brain when no one looks and some my colleagues would say, Yeah, I agree with that. You have a rank, but but they have the point of this is that that we create any physical object that we see in the moment that we see it and so neurons don't exist when they're not perceived. Therefore, neurons could not be the source of our conscious experiences. In fact, space time itself is just your data structure. So the idea that space time exists and has existed for 14 billion years as a pre existing stage on which the drama of life plays out is also deeply wrong. Space time itself is just a data structure that would create. So what is reality is long answer to your question, but the answer is, I don't know. But I'm trying to come up with the reality that would allow me to solve this heart problem of consciousness. So if the brain is just a symbol that we create when we look and I'm trying to understand how consciousness is related to it, if I start with during which consciousness is fundamental and I have to do it scientifically, say what do I mean precisely by consciousness with mathematical precision? And I have this theory that called conscious agents, which conscious agents interact. It's like a the proposal is that reality is a vast social network.

[00:14:18] Host Create clip It's a heat like a Twitter verse or Facebook is a big social network of conscious agents. That's the reality. They're not in space and time there. They're just consciousness is interacting with each other as they interact, they are passing experiences back and forth. And there is an infinite twitterverse. Unfinished set of consciousness is out there in this in this big social universe, Social Social network, university and any single conscious agent in that network would be overwhelmed trying to understand all of it. Like if you were trying to understand Twitter. There's tens of millions, hundreds of millions of users, billions of tweets. How are you going to try to understand what's going on in the twitterverse? Well, you can't, but what you can do is you can use visualization tools. Suppose I have a visualization tool that compresses it all, shows you what's trending in this city and was trending over there. So you compress it all down, maybe into something that you could see through a headset so that you can Actually, here's the twitterverse And in London, here's the twitterverse and Edinburgh and so forth. And here's what's what's going on. Here's what's trending then you could sort of visualize it.

[00:15:26] Host Create clip That's what evolution did for us. The reality is this big bass social network of interacting conscious agents. Each individual agent would be overwhelmed because it's infinite social network. And so what we call the physical world just is our visualization tool. That's what we have, So we've mistaken. So this is all a big visualization tool. Space time and physical objects are the way we visualize our interaction with this fast university social network in the universe. I'll give you one concrete example to really bring it home. When you look at your face in the mirror, all you see literally is skin hair. A nice, but what you know first hand that you don't see in the mirror is the whole universe of your conscious experiences, your hopes, your desires, your aspirations, your headache, the sound of music that you're hearing right now. Your love of music, all the stuff that's you. That's Zoey. Almost infinitely complicated universe. A conscious experiences. All we can see is this. And compared to the best universe of our conscious experience, this is extremely simple. If I smile, you can guess that I'm happy.

[00:16:43] Host Create clip I'm feeling some conscious experience. But a smile does not resemble happiness. It's just it signifies it, and so do you. Think about it this way. Your face, my face, the face that you're creating when you look at me, is your portal. Into my conscious experience is the face that I see when I look at you is my portal into your conscious experience. It's a portal, but it's very, very small portal. Most of you is left out. You can't see it in the mirror. I can't see it from outside. When I look at my cat, the portal is even worse. I mean, I can figure out. Maybe the cat likes this kind of food and doesn't like that likes it when I pet. But now I've petted it too much. No, I need to stop when I look at an ant interface is really giving up. I have no insight into the conscious agents in this vast network that I'm interacting with, and when I get to what I call a rock, my interface has given up. But it has to give up.

[00:17:37] Host Create clip I have a finite interface. I'm dealing with an infinite social network off course. The interface that's his purpose is to throw most of information away, to simplify things and allow me to negotiate with this universe of interacting conscious agents without getting overwhelmed. And so, of course, at some point it's not gonna look conscious anymore. It all my interface is giving up. What we've done is we've mistaken, unnecessary limitation of our interface, as if we've taken it to be an insight into the fundamental, fundamental nature of reality. We've assumed it. Reality fundamentally, is unconscious because of the simplest level. Our interface is necessarily unconscious. So physical ism is a very simple mistake. This assumption of space, time and matter are fundamental is a simple mistake. We've mistaken a limit of our interface as an insight into objective reality, but it's a way we can break out of it. It's it's It's a natural mistake we

[00:18:36] Host Create clip could break out. Okay, say, where do you stand in relation to pants? Hikers? And then, if we if we ended on physical, is he? That's the obvious kind of opposite theory. T physical is

[00:18:51] Host Create clip so so pant Pant Psych is, um it is an interesting theory. There are couple versions of it, and when I talk to different pans. Cyclists, they will say No, that's not my version. So I'll talk about two different versions of it. That way, in one version is more duelist. So on Electron really exists, and it really does have physical properties, whether or not it's observed, like position, momentum and spin. But in addition, it has a unit of consciousness, and when electron and proton get together, then somehow the unit of consciousness from the electron and the unit of Conscience from the Proton have to interact to create the consciousness of you know, of the to put there, coming together right into hydrogen. So that's that's one theory. It's duelist. And most scientists don't like do a little right, So so most scientists would just not even go there. It may, you know, it's not that it's wrong. It's just that we try to come up with a simple story. So another version of pants like, isn't it? Some people talk about it in some sense, is what you would just say. Well, what I was already saying that the fundamental nature of reality just is consciousness. Um, and some pants like us that I've talked with well will say When I talk about all these conscious agents, the word agent makes it sound like there's all these Selves and personalities and so forth. And and I'm not trying to imply that. I'm just saying that there are these elementary purse Evers that can have experiences and take simple actions in the mathematical model. I don't assume that there's a self I don't assume intelligence, problem solving, creativity and memory, even.

[00:20:33] Host Create clip But what I can show mathematically liken from the network of these simple, conscious agents. Aiken build networks that simulate Selves that simulate intelligence that have memories and so forth, so so that that version. If that's what people mean by pan Sikhism, then then it's equivalent what I'm saying. But I like to just call my theory conscious realism because I want to be very, very clear that I'm saying that consciousness is fundamental and I'm proposing I mean, I don't know what the truth is. I'm just a scientist. I'm just proposing a bold hypothesis, that consciousness, the consciousness is fundamental, and it's really now if it's false, it's false, we'll find out. But the idea of science is to be precise and bold so that we can precisely find out where we're wrong. So I'm making a precise and bold hypothesis, and it's mathematically precise. I published it so any scientists and go out there and say This is what's wrong with the mathematics But that's the whole goal. Of course, I'm probably wrong. I don't think any scientific theory of read so far is correct, including general relativity and quantum field theory and so forth. They're brilliant. They're wonderful tools. We should study them. They're the best we've got so far, and they're almost surely deeply wrong.

[00:21:48] Host Create clip And so the same is true of my theory. I won't say it's brilliant. Ball say it's probably deeply wrong, at least his precise.

[00:21:54] Host Create clip What does it mean that consciousness is really as real as what

[00:21:59] Host Create clip that's? That's a great question in This brings up a really important aspect about scientific theories, aspect of scientific theories that really bothers me in science. We cannot explain everything we always in our theories. We have to say, Please grant me these two or three assumptions. We want them as few as possible, but those assumptions are just given. The theory does not explain them. They're like miracles with respect to the theory and the scientists and says, If you will grant me thes assumptions, then I can build this really powerful theory. So, for example, grant me space time and quantum fields. If you'll grant me that, then I can then show you how your chemistry and biology and psychology and so forth might arise from that. And so point. Any scientific theory is you have to say, I'm proposing These things are fundamental in universe. How did they get there? I don't know. I really don't know. Just please grant me that. In that sense, they're riel with respect to the three D's of the fundamental assumptions about quote unquote reality that the scientific theory is making. So it's in that sense, I'm saying, for sake of argument, Please grant me that conscious experience is like the taste of vanilla having a headache, that thes air, the fundamental furniture of the universe, not space, time and Adams and quirks and so forth thes raw experiences as as experiences are the fundamental aspect of reality. So for my theory, those are the miracles.

[00:23:36] Host Create clip Those are the miracles. And then if you grant me that, then I will show how we can create space, time and physical objects as a user interface to this most vast social network of these conscious experiences that are having these experiences where the experiences themselves are taken for granted. But the dynamics about the experiences now is where we do our science, where we can actually have an explanation.

[00:23:59] Host Create clip How did you get to these ideas? And did you ever believe in the mainstream ideas about reality and consciousness?

[00:24:07] Host Create clip I absolutely believe the mainstream ideas, and I still remember it was 1986 when I was working on a mathematical model of perception with a couple of colleagues, Bruce Bennett, and checked on for cash, and we'd work out a mathematical model of I wasn't really working on the consciousness thing, per se I was working on. Just how can we get a general theory about what it means when we're perceiving? And it was looking at the mathematics that I suddenly realized that it was suggesting to me that we might not necessarily have to see reality as it is, and that was so stunning. I had to sit down, but it took me, um, another 20 years before I decided to actually pursue that using evolutionary Game three begin to say OK, is it really true? If our senses evolved and we're shaped by natural selection, can I settle this issue? Would natural selection actually favor perceptions that show us the truth? Not all the truth, but some of the truth. War will natural selection actually, Dr Truth, to complete extinction.

[00:25:13] Host Create clip And then it was stunning to me. I was surprised how the math came out when it actually said for very deep principle reasons that natural selection would drive any true perceptions to complete extinction. So so it's been It's not just been an intellectual odyssey has been an emotional odyssey. This is upsetting. That's actually upsetting to realized that something I deeply believed all my life is just fundamentally wrong. And so I can understand why people might hear this and go that this is just too crazy.

[00:25:44] Host Create clip Does it change the way you experience day of experience? Life on a day to day basis?

[00:25:50] Host Create clip Very, very slowly. It's been slowly changing, I think, and there may be good reason evolutionarily mean evolution. There's no selection pressures for us to know that we don't see the truth. If you're If you have a user interface and it's working to keep you alive long enough to reproduce is doing what it needs to do. There's no selection pressures to also tell you. Oh, by the way, this is just a game you're not. You're not seeing the truth. This is just the user interface, and so we deeply believe it. We, in fact, we believe that because we have to take our perceptions seriously, right that we should therefore also take him literally mean one. Objection people give to me is to say, You know, Don, if you're if you think that that train coming down the tracks at 200 miles an hour is just a Nikon in your interface, why don't you just hop in front of it and after you're dead and this silly theory with you will know that that train was riel? It's not just a Nikon, and it really can kill, and I wouldn't jump in front of the train for the same reason I wouldn't drag my blue icon to the trash can icon carelessly. Not because I take the icon literally. The file is not blue rectangular, but I do take the icon seriously. If I drag it to the trash can, I could lose my work. Maybe I've written a book and it's taken me a couple years. I could lose all that work, so I better take the icon seriously. But that does not entitle me to take it literally. And so that's part of human nature. We were inclined to this illogical assumption because we have to take all of our perceptions seriously.

[00:27:20] Host Create clip We're entitled to take to take them literally the reason we have to take them seriously. His evolution shaped them to keep us alive. So if you see a cliff, don't step off. If you see a snake, don't grab it unless you know what you're doing. If you see a train, don't jump in front. You have to take it seriously, but that does not logically entitle us to take it literally. So as a result, it's not a surprise that even after I've sort of intellectually begin to realize that that's what evolution has done. This is Justin. Interface is not the truth. When I'm not putting on my rational head and thinking about it, I'm just living in everyday life. This is this is the truth, and that's the way it feels. It's been many, many years. I'm slowly starting to have a different set of feelings like, Oh, this is a headset. I'm now rendering that chair. I'm now rendering that light. It's but it's very, very slow for it Mean usually fall back into the normal. I'm just immersed in the truth, But virtual reality is actually helpful to actually spend time in a virtual reality world, which you realize, Oh yeah, I'm rendering a full three d world Now I just deleted that whole three d world. I'm not rendering it anymore. Oh wow. That's maybe what's also happening in everyday life. The headset when I take off a virtual reality headset, there's another headset that I've always had on that I didn't know, and it's what I called reality. But it's just another virtual world that evolution programmed into us.

[00:28:50] Host Create clip And so But I will say I would say, maybe 98% in this is the truth and 2% of the time now. So it's, you know, after years, so it doesn't go away easily.

[00:29:04] Host Create clip And does that affect the way you interact with other people? Does it kind of, um does it challenge the way you see you, you communicate with people. What does it mean for our relationships to think that actually what we see isn't what there is. Is it harder to trust another person? If you think that this is all a mirage and it's just a Nikon on my desktop,

[00:29:30] Host Create clip well, I think that it gives me a deeper respect for how much more complicated people are than what we can literally see. You know, the example I gave of. You're seeing your face in the mirror and realizing that the range of a inferences I could make about what you're feeling and thinking based on your expressions in your body language is really a small fraction of who you really are and all the richness so I can just see small nuances of a smile. But there are many, many nuances of feeling happy and bliss that are completely lost on me that I know exist personally, but I don't know which one you're having. And so one thing I think it does is it makes me I really appreciate that. Um, I shouldn't assume I know what you're really feeling. I should really be careful to engage Maur and two Thio. You talk more so it gives you that kind of perspective. Evolutionary psychology also will. Some work by income of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology also makes me be very, very careful way know that there's certain split brain patients. They had epilepsy, um, and that wasn't curable by available drugs. And so they did a surgeon where they cut the brain in half so that the right hemisphere was separated from the Left Hemisphere and the right hemisphere went into an epileptic seizure. Maybe the left wouldn't go into it, and it worked. Clinically. It was very, very helpful.

[00:31:00] Host Create clip But what we found was we literally cut consciousness in half with a knife. The right hemisphere ends up having you can show in experiments. You can give it a completely separate content of consciousness. It could be aware of. For example, the word key. Where is the Left Hemisphere is aware of the word ring, and nobody is aware of the phrase key ring or or the two together, and we find that the personalities are different. The right hemisphere often has a different personality than the left, and that the left one person, for example, that V. S. Roma Condron study The Left Hemisphere believed in God the right hemisphere was an atheist. Very, very big difference in personalities. And the Left Hemisphere, as it turns out, likes to make up stories. It's a confabulation or a Steve Pinker puts it, a bologna generator. And the right hemisphere in many people tends to be a little more in tune with reality and also a little bit less happy, so so that that kind of knowledge also affects my social relations. It affects my relationship with myself.

[00:32:03] Host Create clip I don't believe most of what I used to think were my true motivations for why and be having the why do. Much of that is probably just baloney that I'm making up to make myself seem rational and reasonable and a good, nice guy. But then most everybody else is doing the same thing. We're really hiding our true motives. And so that's why it's is sort of difficult and personal relationships, not like we're consciously being disingenuous. It's an automatic self promotion mechanism that's built into us, and so these kinds of insight that we get from the science, not just from my theory, but from cognitive neuroscience and split brain operations and so forth really do begin to affect how I understand people. But but not to say that I end up with a negative view of people. I think it's just healthier to understand ingrate, greater depth, the complexity of people. I think that it I shouldn't take us much for granted as I used to and shouldn't make us many assumptions about people and why they're behaving as I used to.

[00:33:08] Host Create clip So people now seem even more riel t you.

[00:33:14] Host Create clip That's right. I'm proposing that your consciousness is a fundamental reality in this vast social network of conscious agents. And one thing that comes out in the math is in my theory is that when two conscious agents interact, they create a new single conscious agent and this so you can have very, very simple agents that have very, very simple, like only two experiences and maybe to actions that you can take. I call them one bit agents, but when two of these one bit agents interact, you get a two bit agent that has maybe four possibilities, and by the time you get to me, I don't know how many billions or trillions or who knows how many. But then I think about my two hemispheres. There's evidence that when the corpus closer was cut, they have separate consciousnesses, was potentially separate contents and separate personalities and even separate religious beliefs. But when they're connected with the corpus close, Um, there's what I call me. There seems to be a single, unified person. And so that's another interesting thing that comes out of this. Is trying to understand this theory opens up the idea that you're riel and that you're also too conscious agents, not just one contrast agent. You're too, and the three says you're a whole infinite lattice all the way down to these simple one bit agents going all the way up to the two hemispheres and finally to the one agent that's you. And then the theory leaves open the possibility that just in interacting with other conscious agents, other agents are being formed.

[00:34:45] Host Create clip But apparently I don't experience that, and it's an interesting thing to look at in the mathematical theory. How much kind of agent know about the agents that are emerging from its experiences or interactions. Other agents there is some miracle data on this Michael Gazzaniga, working with the split brain patients asked, were talked with a guy with several of them. They had the split brain operation? He asked the person. Does it fill any difference now with the split brain operation than it did before? And 11 video I've seen, the person said. Absolutely not. It feels just the same as it was before. And what we know is that that's the Left Hemisphere talking. Only the Left Hemisphere can talk the right hemisphere. Can't talk about it, understands language. We know the Left Hemisphere is a fabulous. So when I saw that I was going okay, well, maybe the Left Hemisphere is just saying, you know, nothing to see here is trying to make everything papered over. But the right hemisphere typically is not as much of a confabulation. Alaska's Annika a few weeks ago. What about the right time is when you ask the right hemisphere? Does it also say that there's no difference? And he said, read my book and he pointed me. He gave me, actually offered me a pdf so very, very kindly. I looked in his book and the answer is yes. The right hemisphere also says that it doesn't notice the difference. That's stunning data that some of the most important data that I've ever seen from the split brain stuff It's saying that the two hemispheres there are 43 billion neurons in the cortex of the right to hear miss 43 billion on the left and the right of us were saying when I got cut off from those 43 billion other neurons, I don't notice a difference.

[00:36:28] Host Create clip That is a stunning bit of data to come, you know, to use and trying to frame with theory of conscious. When two consciousnesses interact, how do you create a new consciousness and how much to the lower level consciousness actually know about the higher level consciousness? Maybe almost nothing, maybe nothing in which, in which case, that's a stunning. So you can see the possibilities that this whole framework opens up when we take consciousness is fundamental and start looking at the neuroscience data. In this new way, it's giving us insights into how we might want to constrain our theories of how consciousness works and

[00:37:06] Host Create clip what happens when

[00:37:06] Host Create clip consciousnesses interact. It's a completely new way of

[00:37:08] Host Create clip thinking. So does this mean that the two parts of our brain interact a lot more than we think? What does it mean? That they are both quite autonomous and they they replicate, they mirror each other

[00:37:25] Host Create clip like we're just talking here, You know, I have a feeling I'm just one person. I don't have the feeling like to really separate individuals that are negotiating, and and one is an atheist and one's a believer. And once happy, I mean, sometimes you might feel a little struggle, do I? Do I want a party tonight or do we wanna study their little? And maybe you get little hints of some kind of. But most time we feel like we're just a single, unified thing and that we have clear evidence that there's too, so so I don't know what to say. It it seems like it it, you know, we're both that were that you are one, but that the one that's talking to you right now is not aware of the two separate consciousness is, and those airplane not aware of the consciousness is underneath them. When I teach a psychology class, I teach introduction to psychology for a freshman at the university. I'll tell them at some point during the course that 99% of all mental processes there unconscious the way that's normally interpreted as to say that brain Israel Most brain processes don't give rise to consciousness. The ones that give rise to consciousness are really just a tiny fraction less than 1%.

[00:38:37] Host Create clip I'm turning it around the other way. I'm saying It's consciousness all the way down this this whole vast social network, unconscious agents. But my interface has to simplify things, so I only can see my whole network in terms of what I call my body high levels. I view it in terms of what I call my psychology and my moods further on down. I call it my neuroscience, my chemistry, my, my biology, my physics. But those are all my interface just getting Maur and Maur giving up, trying to represent what's going on in this vast social network. So all I can do is see myself through my interface description, and what I see is a body which is hiding this vast network of conscious agents, which is all coordinating together to create the single consciousness that's talking to you so that you can see it's a completely different picture of what it means to be a human being, and it gives a new sense to what it means to be embodied, mean, embodied. Cognition is, I think, important. But this gives a new sense that even our embodiment itself is a picture that we come up

[00:39:42] Host Create clip with. Thank you very much. My pleasure for more debates. Talks on interviews subscribe today to the Institute of Arts and Ideas II DV.