https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Q-qvcHLtyc8
Welcome to Untangling the World Nod of Consciousness, wrestling with the hard problems of mind and meaning in the modern scientific age. My name is John Vervecky. I’m a cognitive psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Throughout the entire series, I will be joined in dialogue by my good friend and colleague, Greg Enriquez, from James Madison University in the United States. Throughout, we are going to wrestle with the hard problems of how we can give an account of a phenomenon like consciousness within the scientific worldview, how we can wrestle with that problem in conjunction with the problem that Greg calls the problem of psychology that is pervasive throughout psychology, which is that psychology has no unified descriptive metaphysics by which it talks about mind and or behavior. Throughout this, we will be talking about some of the most important philosophical, cognitive scientific, and neuroscientific accounts of consciousness. So I hope you’ll join us throughout. Thank you, John. Great to be here. So Greg, I wanted to follow up on some of the points we had gotten to last time. We’ve been talking a lot about aspectualization and things like that, and just prospectable knowing. And what I thought we’d do is do a case study that will help to make these ideas more concrete and understandable, but it will also give me more information by which I can advance the argument and make proposals about the nature of consciousness. Amen. That sounds good. Yep. Okay, so I’m gonna do something I don’t normally like to do, especially when we’re in dialogue like this, but I am gonna sort of share my screen because I got some slides, because I’m riffing off of a talk I’ve given in two separate occasions, keep modifying it, of course. And I wanna sort of run this with you and run through it with you. Well, since I often share slides, John, then it would be, this is a good thing. This balances us out. Okay, so that’s fine for you. Okay, so what I wanna talk about is, oh, I wanna start with an acknowledgement right from the beginning. Why it’s called Seeing into Being on Mars and Beyond, it’s about how NASA scientists on Earth use the rovers on Mars in order to do field work. Yeah. Right. And it’s gonna turn out that this is a very powerful case study that will help us to get a lot more understanding about perspectival knowing and then another kind of knowing that I think we’ve alluded to a couple of times, participatory knowing, and then bring that more directly into the discussion of consciousness. I do wanna begin with an acknowledgement that a lot of this work has been done and continues to be done with another good friend of mine, Dan Schiaffi, who’s at the University of California at Long Beach. And so we are doing this ongoing work. So I owe a lot to Dan in this argument. I’m not gonna keep referencing him, so I wanna give a global thing right up front right from the beginning. Great. All right, so the rovers on Mars are a really exemplary study a lot of the four E themes that we’ve been talking about, embodiment, embedded, enacted, extended. And the main problem I wanna address, at least initially in what we’re going through here, has to do with how the scientists using only very limited visual information, nevertheless get something that’s crucial to the phenomenology of consciousness. They get a sense of presence. They get a sense of being on Mars, not just looking at pictures that refer to Mars, but the sense of being on Mars. And that’s important because we’ve already been talking about that. We’ve been talking about this demonstrative indexicality of consciousness, the sense of, that sense of here now togetherness. This right, this here now togetherness, that sense of presence. And this gives us a really wonderful case study for investigating that sense of presence, trying to tease it out more and learn more about consciousness in the process. That’s a part of what I wanna do here. And so I’m gonna go through something which is a little bit along the way. I wanna show how the generation of theory, propositional knowing depends on procedural abilities with the skills of what are called field work. That in turn depends on situational awareness, which is the primary thing that is generated by perspectival knowing. And then I wanna show how that is ultimately dependent on something deeper. So seeing as if you’re on Mars, depends on seeing as if you’re the rover. There’s a process of identification that takes place between the scientist and the rover that is actually necessary in the presence of presence. And that’s gonna help me articulate a bit more about what this participatory knowing is. Now, why is that relevant? It’s relevant right after that because consciousness has this weird feature about it that you know it in, you not only know consciousness prospectively, what it’s like to be here now, here now togetherness, right? We’ve talked about that, the adverbial qualia. You know you’re conscious by being conscious. You know you’re conscious by being conscious. This is the core of participatory knowing. It’s knowing by being. And what’s interesting about these scientists is that they take on the role of, obviously not in a literal sense, but in a very symbolic, inactive sense, they take on the role of being the rover and that actually affords them the necessary situational awareness. So I wanna try and go through with this one step at a time. Okay, so let’s be clear about a couple things. Right, so we’re getting the rover send back batch pictures, you know, and they’re in black and white. There is no joystick control. There is no joystick control because of the time delay between Earth and Mars. There’s no joystick control. What happens is, you know, you get batches of pictures and then you send in a whole bunch of commands and then it’s a batch of commands is sent back out. And so, and there’s terrific time delay. So there’s huge displacements in time and space and type of environment between the scientists and the rover. Right. Yeah, it’s the scientists on Earth, right, who are using the visual information from the rover to correct, you know, to direct and correct the rover. What I mean by that is don’t think that, the rover obviously has some AI, but don’t think that the rover’s AI is sufficient enough that it’s sort of moving itself around and doing any work in an autonomous fashion. That’s not the case. The scientists are the ones doing the science through the rover on Mars. Okay, so this is a clear case of examining what’s called extended cognition. Extended cognition is the idea that a lot of our cognition doesn’t take place in our head. It takes place through machines, through tools, through other people, through distributing. It’s a clear case of extended cognition. However, so while it picks up on that theme of extended cognition, it seems to deeply challenge the other E’s. I mean, the scientists are not embodied, right? The body, the rover body is on Mars. They’re not embedded on Mars. And they’re obviously not enacting on Mars. They’re on Earth typing code into a computer. Okay, so there’s all those problems. Now, given that most of the E’s are missing, the embodiment and the embeddedness, right, and the enacted aspects, one might suspect that people have a very distance displaced alienated experience of Mars through this medium. But that’s not actually the case. And this is the intriguing thing. What is the case is that scientists regularly and reliably report that they feel like they’re on Mars. They sense being on Mars, the way you right now sense that you’re in that room you’re in, and I sense that I’m in the room I’m in. They have that sense of presence that we’ve been talking about, which is really weird if you think about it. They know what it’s like to be a rover? So it’s very, very odd. So they, and they report that they’re seeing as the rover. They’re seeing as if they’re the rover. So John, and just in terms of, so they are, they get these batch photos, right? And obviously these are scientists that are very familiar with the machinery of the rover, right? In terms of, or not, I guess that’s a question that I would have in relationship. Yeah, varying degrees, varying degrees. So they basically have sort of this dynamically restructuring small world network way in which they organize themselves. And they have various degrees of expertise. And there are people who are more specialized in sort of managing and moving the rover. And then there’s people who are more like geologists. And then there’s people who are more like meteorologists, things like that. So in a collective sense, yes, there’s definitely the. Gotcha. Okay, now what’s interesting is the scientists who are in the group, because they often have to hire new people, et cetera. There’s attrition, new problems come up, et cetera. They report that they look for people who can have that experience, who can sense, have that sense of presence, sense of being on Mars. Because the scientists report that that ability to generate that experience is actually predictive of the people who are able to do good work with the rover. Okay. Do good work, do good field work on Mars. So it’s not just some sort of weird thing that sort of jangles over there. It’s actually a highly prized experience that is predictive, according to the scientists at least, of good work. Okay. All right. Okay. So given how disrupted the 4E features are, how is it the scientists can nevertheless acquire the phenomenological markers of embeddedness in action, right? And even as we’ll see later, embodiment. How do they do that? And of course, all along, why are we doing this? Because we’re trying to understand this sense of presence and we’re trying to understand that because it has a lot to do with the perspectival knowing that is at the core of consciousness. Okay, so far? Yep, totally. Great. Okay, so what’s fortunate about this, and Dan and I, you know, we’re lucky because we live in the age of virtual reality, video games, et cetera. And so there’s quite a bit of research on sense of presence in video games. What are the features of a video game that make people have that sense of being in the game? And that correspondingly, and this is important, that it’s more real to them. There’s a deep connection between sense of presence and sense of realness. And this is because, and the reason why the people are doing this research is this is a highly sought after feature of, for example, of a video game. So we have two video games, and this one reliably generates sense of presence, and this one doesn’t. This one will be preferred and will have much greater chance of markets instead over this. So there’s something normative, there’s something inherently valued, probably an evolutionary marker of some kind. Sense of presence seems to be something the organisms seek out in an important way. We’ll try and cover that off. Now, why is that important? Well, if we can figure out how sense of presence is adapted, and sense of presence is a way of, is a case where we can get into the guts of perspectival knowing, and if perspectival knowing is central to consciousness, this will give us a powerful way of getting at some of the functionality of consciousness. Is consciousness involves perspectival knowing, which generates sense of presence, and we know what the functionality of sense of presence is, we can start to answer the function question. And of course, what’s interesting about sense of presence is it’s not just a functional thing, it’s deeply phenomenological. It has a lot to do with the feel of being conscious. And so we’re getting what we’ve talked about doing. We’re getting a case study, right, where we can deeply look at the function question and the nature question together. Okay. Okay. Now, I’m not gonna try and give an exhaustive definition of sense of presence, but that’s the whole thing. But there’s a couple of key points that need to be made clear. As I said, the sense of presence is the sense of being there. That indexical sense of here now-ness and togetherness, things with the adverbial qualia. So it’s the sense of presence is that the adverbial qualia are happening. Just, I mean, that’s a clear and easy way of putting it. So, as I mentioned, it has a lot to do with the sense of realness and that it’s normative and it’s valuable. Okay. Now, so given the VR research, virtual reality research, what are the things that tend to generate this sense of presence? And why does it have this normative value for us? Why is it functional for us? Why do we value it? Why do we seek it out? Why do we have even aesthetic approval for it? Okay. So a powerful intuition people have is that what creates sense of presence is verisimilitude. So how realistic, and this is because of the sense of realness, you can understand the intuition. Like how realistic the game is is what actually is conducive to sense of presence. But it turns out that’s not the case. It turns out that you can have, you know, video games that are quite realistic and you don’t get a sense of presence. And you can have video other video games like Tetris, that generate a tremendous sense of presence. Even I was a Tetris addict. Right. Did you dream in Tetris? Yeah, I mean, when I was into it, you know, I pushed the limit on that thing. I was definitely into that game. I was the boxes, John. I was the boxes. Well, there you go. So the interesting thing about it then is that you get pretty like on both, you know, so I could show it’s not sufficient, neither is it necessary. And so I’m not saying that verisimilitude can’t contribute. What I’ve given you though, is an argument that it can’t be essential to the sense of presence. Actually, this is really interesting because I did, I felt the shapes of the blocks. You know, I can say, I don’t know, I’m really not really, I can easily access that I felt the shapes of the blocks and the structure. I felt the speed, I felt the flow. That’s interesting. Yeah, good. Well, thank you that further corroborating evidence, which is helpful and wonderful. Okay, so, one of the interesting ideas is then to try and, so what we’ve done is we’ve problematized this, right? And so it’s not verisimilitude, but what is it? So one of my former students, Gary Ovehanneson in 2019, argued that what is predictive of the sense of presence is to get into the flow state. So if you’re in the flow state, that’s what predicts the sense of presence. And this is of course very plausible because when people are in the flow state, they state that they’re at one with the environment, the environment is super salient, there’s an ongoing sense of discovery, right? So it’s a very plausible hypothesis because it’s very plausible, for example, that you could have a realistic game that doesn’t get you into the flow state, and therefore you don’t get a sense of presence, but you could be in Tetris and get into the flow state, et cetera. Okay, so this is, I think, I think this is a very plausible account for video games. However, the problem is flow is not gonna be the answer for the situation we’re studying because what you need for flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, all the replicated work, what I need for flow is three conditions, error has to matter. Well, moving the rovers around, error matters. So that’s definitely there, right? If I screw up, that’s it, the rovers done, kaput. So that’s there. But the two other things I need for flow is I need clear signal and I need tightly coupled feedback. But you know what the scientists don’t have? They don’t have tightly coupled feedback because they don’t have joystick control like in a video game. They don’t, and they don’t get clear signal. They spend hours arguing over these deeply ambiguous pictures that come back from Mars. So they don’t have clear signal. They don’t have tightly coupled feedback. So it looks like this proposal that seems to be very plausible for getting sense of presence in video games is not gonna work for the scientists on Mars. But what I can, what I can argue is maybe flow contains within it a more basic phenomena that can be nevertheless the case on Mars. Hmm. All right, so maybe flow contains within it a more basic phenomena. So maybe flow is a species of a more generic process and that generic process might be sufficient for explaining the sense of presence. Okay. Okay, so this is the process that is coming up a lot in 4-A Cognitive Science, the idea of optimal grip. Now clearly what’s happening in the flow state is a state of enhanced optimal grip. So what’s optimal grip? This is the idea, and we’ve talked about this before. Yeah. Right, the idea that, right, I’m constantly trading off between features and gestalt, between familiar and unfamiliar, between the foreground and the background, and I’m constantly toggling between all these trade-off relationships to get the overall optimal set of features and properties that will enable me to deal with the tasks that are at hand. I’m getting an optimal grip on the situation. Now flow is a species of optimal grip, but there are many instances, for example, I think I have a pretty good optimal grip on your face right now, but I’m not sort of in the flow state. Right. So what I wanna propose to you is the flow state is sort of like where you’ve got insights that are creating new instances of optimal grip, but it’s actually the optimal grip that is generating the sense of presence. Okay, so let me just summarize. So we have, we can create an aspectualizing form, right, around the entity and system that we’re in, and we’re gonna basically now pull that aspectualizing form and then start to engage a process with it, you know, in a particular way that generates a dynamic, engaging feedback in a way that allows for, say, a flow of energy or whatever kind of, you know, kind of dynamic in a particular investment path, I might say. Yeah, that’s well put. Yes, I think that’s actually very well put. So the idea here is the scientists are able to, nevertheless, in this very thin information channel, use it with some cultivated expertise to get the optimal grip that starts to make Mars, opens up affordances of intelligibility for them from Mars. I think that’s very much in concert with what you just said, is that? It’s 100%, yeah, absolutely. Okay, great. All right, so I’ve said, you know, what optimal grip is. I’ve given some components of it, Gestalt, and we’ve talked about this before already when we’ve been talking about consciousness. So let’s just keep going. And so here’s the idea. I thought this was, because we talked about aspectuality and centrality and temporality before. And so this is the idea is that you’re doing, the optimal grip is toggling things, so things that are aspectualized, they are relevant to you, and they are temporally irrelevant. So you get optimal grip that is giving you a salience landscaping, moving between aspectuality, centrality, and temporality. And when that salience landscape lures you into the affordances in the environment, you feel a sense of presence. You feel a sense of presence. Right. All right. So I wanna call this optimal grip sizing up salience landscaping that affords situational awareness, because that’s what it is, right? That’s what situational awareness is. It’s the salience landscape that lures you in to the affordances in the environment. I wanna call that whole thing something we’ve already been talking about before, perspectival knowing. Right. That’s what perspectival knowing is. It’s knowing what it’s like to be here now through, in both senses of the word, my current state of mind. Okay? Yep. So again, deeply part of that aspect of consciousness made famous by Nagel, knowing what it’s like to be. Mm-hmm. Okay. Now, my point- Paul, go ahead, go ahead. No, I was just gonna offer just sort of an angle on this. So I’ve been researching the evolution of animal consciousness. Right. A really interesting 2017 book, I think it was on the evolution of animal conscious or whatever, it was talking about a plane of intersection between interoceptive awareness, like what the body is telling, extraoceptive awareness, and pleasure, pain, affectivity. So just in relationship to what is this optimal grip doing, bringing in information in a gestalt, understanding where the body wants to go, finding the affordances and the potential costs is a nice intersection, I think, that then corresponds to, potentially sets the stage for this field of perspectival knowing. I think that’s exactly right. I know the book you’re talking about. I have it, and I can’t remember the authors as well right now, so we’re both getting old, I guess. So, okay, so the main claim I’ve now argued to is that the sense of presence is a phenomenological feel of and marker for perspectival knowing. Sense of presence is the phenomenological feel of perspectival knowing. Okay, so how do scientists generate this perspectival knowing? How do they see as if they’re the rover? And part of the argument I’m gonna make is they see as if they’re the rover by being the rover, in a very important way. All right, so Vertesi in her excellent book, Seeing Like a Rover, talks about this. So it’s an extended ethnography. She was an anthropologist, she went there, she’s had, there’s other ethnographies that corroborate. We’re here with this, this is a work that writes so extended ethnography. And she talks about this process, and it’s very interesting, what she calls drawing ads. So the drawing ads, so it’s based on, well, it’s based on aspectualization, because it’s based on Wittgenstein’s notion of seeing ads. Remember your example of you see the picture as a duck, or you see it as a rabbit, right? So it’s aspectualization, that’s exactly what she’s talking about, right? So what happens is the scientists get these pictures, right, these photos, and what they do is they mark them up. They put color on them, they put lines on them, they put arrows on them, they do all this stuff to manipulate the salience. So, and she calls this drawing ads, and she’s actually playing on the word, because she means drawing ads in the sense of drawing, but also drawing out. Drawing out, yeah. Yeah, right, so that you can see it ads. And the idea is you get this black and white picture, you don’t know what it is, and you do all this stuff that is actually not verisimilitude, you’re putting colors on it and all this, right? You’re drawing on it, in a sense of precision, you’re distorting the picture, but you distort it in a way so that it aspectualizes, and you can see it ads, you go, oh, that’s a depression there, right? The photography go, oh, oh, I see, right? And there’s a texture gradient there, things have rolled down that hill. They look for that pop out kind of effect. Right. But then by putting that angle on it, they pull various aspects of the salience landscape together. Right, exactly, so what they’re doing is they’re doing this deliberate salience manipulation, so they’re deliberately doing salience landscaping, externally on the pictures, in order to aspectualize that information. And then what that does is that makes it available for problem solvers. Okay, so they’re doing all of this, and when they start to do that, right, they start to get a bit of what we’re talking about here. But seeing as if you’re being on Mars really depends on more than just this drawing as, so one half of the answer is the drawing as, and it fits right into this analysis beautifully that we’ve been making together about consciousness and perspectival knowing and salience landscape and aspectualization and all of that stuff, right, great. But there’s more to it. Okay, so I talked about the drawing as, we don’t need to go through every single slide in detail here. It’s up there if people wanna look at it. For Tessie, so we’ve got the drawing as process, and then for Tessie talks about this other set of practices people, the scientists do. So first of all, they anthropomorphize the rover. They don’t say the rover needs to go there, they’ll say, I need to go there, or we need to go there, or I need to move my arm, which means that one of the rover’s tools, right, and they’ll talk about the rover falling asleep and waking up and they don’t want it to die, right? So they anthropomorphize, they do this, you know, symbolic identification process, but they do more than just anthropomorphize. They also, and this is a term I think coined by Tessie, they technomorphize themselves. They technomorphize themselves. So here’s the sense of presence. Talking about, I’m trying to call it the second sense of presence, because this is a sense of presence that’s actually being used by the scientists rather than just one making us feel wonderful about Mars. Okay, so that’s just why the slide has that title. Okay, so here’s the scientist, and notice what the scientist, this is technomorphizing. So the scientist, she’s trying to figure out, right, how to adjust the rover. And so she puts her phone down in front and says, you know, the phone is a rock, and then, you know, these are my cameras, and she’s on like a wheelchair, and she starts to turn her body and then swivel and move, and this is what she’s doing. This is what I need to do. And she’s using the I language. This is what I need to do in order to, right, get this needed information from the rover. So there’s this loop that’s being created. There’s this, right, anthropomorphizing from human to rover, but also technomorphizing from rover to human. So there’s this reciprocal shaping of identity. You’re humanizing the rover, but you’re also mechanizing, but that’s even a verb, right, the human beings, the scientists. And so what you’re doing is you’re doing this reciprocal shaping of identities. So I just want, I want to read this out. I won’t, I’m not usually gonna read from the, but just because the wording here is a little bit careful. And there’s a couple more things I’m gonna have to read. I have to read them for the explicit reason that I’m quoting, I’m literally quoting the scientists, okay? So I know reading is a little bit rude. I apologize. I will keep it to a minimum here. We’ll keep it to a minimum. But there’s an inactive integration of knowing oneself through the rover and knowing the rover through oneself so that one is simultaneously knowing oneself, knowing the rover and knowing through the rover. All of those things are happening at the same time, which of course is very similar to how you know your body, right? You know yourself by knowing your body, you know yourself by as having a body, but you also know yourself through the body. You know the world through the body. So they’re doing something that is structurally analogous to embodiment, really powerful way. Now, this mutual shaping is very analogous to how evolution in niche construction mutually shapes an organism and its environment or how culture mutually shapes, its participants in the environment. And what does this mutual shaping do? Will it generates affordances? So here’s a classic example. Here’s this cup. Okay, so because of evolution, here’s an affordance. It’s graspable. We’ve talked about something like that before. So biologically, because of niche construction, I can grasp it because my hand is evolved to fit certain shapes in the environment and there’s niche construction. Culturally, it’s a tool, it’s a cup. And I’ve been shaped to be a drinker. And then of course I have my ongoing situational awareness that I can actually use it. So there’s biological affordances. There are cultural affordances. And then there’s my direct awareness of how I can use those affordances to get a drink right here, right now. So I wanna call that process by which agent and environment are co-shaped, agent and arena, so that affordances are generated between them. I wanna call that participatory knowing. It’s a knowing by being. It’s a knowing by being a particular kind of agent and being in a particular kind of arena. It’s a knowing by being. It’s a knowing by being. Right, so what we’re saying is the agent has a sense of what kind of agent it is in the arena that it is. Yes. All right, I mean, that sounded maybe, I was being redundant there to just emphasize the dynamic relation. No, I think that was helpful. I think that what you just did wasn’t, might’ve been syntactically redundant, but I don’t think it was semantically redundant. I think it’s important. Okay, so here’s one of these quotes I’m gonna read. And again, because I want to show you the phenomenology. I wanna make it clear to people that I’m not attributing things to the scientists. Okay, so this is a quote from that woman who you saw the drawing of, right? Who was put the rock down in front. She says, my body, by the way, is always the rover. This is a hard-nosed scientist on NASA. My body, by the way, is always the rover. So right here, touches chest, is the front of the rover. My magnets are right here, touches the base of her neck. And my shoulders are the front of the solar panel. And that means she moves forward and splays her arms up to other size, the rest of it. So I have all kinds of things. Antenna sticking up over here, just as her back laughs. But when I’m taking a picture of something in the atmosphere, then it helps me to kind of look up, sits up and looks straighter. Being the rover, and this is the front of me, touches the chest, and then I put my head up, puts head up and looks back and forth, whatever, to whichever vector I’m looking at. So you see what, like she’s completely identifying with the rover in an embodied, enacted way. So another scientist had this to say, because I wanna talk about what this sense of identification does. Some other phenomenological markers. So another scientist said, I was working in the garden one day, and all of a sudden, I don’t know what’s going on with my right wrist, I cannot move it. Out of nowhere, I get here to the planning meeting, and Spirit, that’s one of the rovers, has its right front wheel stuck. Things like that, you know. I am totally connected to Spirit. No pun intended there, but maybe a little bit of a pun. Right, like you see what’s going on here? The phenomenology borders on being magical, such that the identification is such that, right, these weird synchronicities become super salient to the scientists. Another scientist said something similar to say, interestingly, I screwed up my shoulder and needed surgery right about the time that Opportunity’s IDD arm started having problems with a stiff shoulder joint, and I broke my toe right before Spirit’s wheel broke. So I’m just saying, maybe it’s kind of sympathetic. I don’t know. Ha ha ha. I mean, I don’t think there’s any magic involved or anything, but maybe it’s some kind of subconscious thing. I don’t know. Try to show you how deep this participatory knowing is. It’s deep, it’s very profound, and it’s technologically very, very present to the scientists. So notice we’ve got two things going on here. We’ve got a coordinated manipulation of perspectival knowing through the drawing as, and a manipulation of participatory knowing through this anthropomorphic, technomorphic looping. And then when you do that, you get the sense of presence. You get the sense of being on Mars. You get a sense of being the rover on Mars. And that sense is functional because it allows you to do the best field work through the rovers on Mars. Of course, all of this is being done implicitly and tacitly. None of the scientists, they discovered this for themselves. They didn’t go to, wow, how to improve field work on Mars. Do this or do that. They have implicitly and tacitly figured this all out in a collective fashion. Yes, they’ve drawn on their intuitive tendency for participatory knowledge to embody this. Exactly, exactly. So, let’s zero in on that connection now between the situational awareness that is given to me by a sense of presence. So what am I proposing? I’m proposing that participatory knowing generates affordances and that perspectival knowing turns those affordances into salient affordances and salient affordances within salience landscaping is what we mean by situational awareness. Situational awareness is the state you need to have in order to acquire and apply skills. Situational awareness is the state you need to have in order to acquire and apply skills. So the procedural ability, knowing how to do something is dependent on the perspectival, like knowing what it’s like to be, which is of course also dependent and interrelated with knowing how to, no, not, sorry, knowing by being the rover. That’s what I wanted to say. Right. Okay, so now I wanna zero in on an important feature of skills, so this will seem like a digression for a bit. So we’ve got this argument built up here, over here about perspectival knowing, participatory knowing, situational awareness, generating affordances, making them salient, et cetera. That’s all here, so that’s how to hold that. The bridge of course is to acquiring and applying skills, but I wanna note something very important about skills. Now this goes to the work of the neuroscientist, Reid Montague, he sounds like a Shakespearean figure, right, Reid Montague. Who do we need now? We need Reid Montague, right? And so he wrote a really interesting book a while ago, not that long ago, I think it was 2010, I’m not sure, I’d have to check. It had a really provocative title, it said Your Brain is Almost Perfect, which is a really interesting title for a book. Of course you’re gonna pick that book up, right? So anyways, he first of all poses a problem and it’s at the core of skills. Okay, so if I’m gonna engage in skillful behavior, of course I want to be as efficient as I possibly can. Because if you and I are in a Darwinian competition and I can use some skill more efficiently than you, I’m gonna outcompete you, right? So let’s say that’s relatively non-controversial. Okay, so how do I make my skills more efficient? Well, one of the things you do, of course think about how much you have to coordinate in order to, right? You just feel you have to coordinate different things together. Or let’s say you, let’s even use an analogy, you’re trying to get a bunch of people to work together, well, you have to coordinate their behavior. Well, how do you coordinate their behavior? Well, they have to communicate with each other, right? And there has to be communication between the parts of my hand, et cetera, via the brain, et cetera. So the idea is, okay, I increase the efficiency of a skill by increasing the internal communication because that reduces me working at cross purposes, working in internal conflict, et cetera. So I can increase coordination, right? And that’s by increased communication. Okay. But Babanikou says, but wait, there’s a problem. The problem with that is, right, what efficiency does, efficiency is not only improve the product, efficiency is also reduce the cost, right? And he says, the problem with, right, as you increase communication, right, is the cost of your processing goes up and it goes up in a nonlinear fashion. And that’s why you can get the effect of all the people in the room talking, there’s so much cacophony and noise, right? And trying to get that, right? So the metabolic cost goes up very rapidly. So the brain seems like, he says, it looks like the brain’s caught in a dilemma. It needs to increase efficiency by increasing communication and it needs to increase efficiency by reducing communication, by reducing communications. Oh. Okay, so there’s all these important trade-off relationships. Okay, so Montague says, proposes that the brain actually has a really powerful way of solving this problem. Now in order to explain it, I’m gonna use his analogy. Okay. And the analogy is of an old married couple that they’re happily married. Some people stay married so that they can torture each other. I understand that. So we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about people that have been together a long time and they want to be together. And they have that almost telepathy. They seem to be able to communicate a lot with very little. I had a beloved aunt and uncle that had exactly that kind of relationship. I think everybody knows what I’m talking about. Well, they don’t actually have telepathy. So Montague says, well, what do they have? Is let’s say, I’ll just use his model. It tends to be, it’s a model based on a straight marriage, but that’s not relevant. But I’m gonna use it because it’s easier for me to do the reference. Sure. I can just talk about the man and the woman. It just makes it faster and easier. Nothing else is implied by using those terms about marriage or anything like that. So the woman has internalized a model of the man and the man has internalized a model of the woman. There’s what’s called mutual modeling. They mutually model each other so that the woman can actually have her behavior coordinated with the man without them having to talk to each other because she just consults her model and he just consults his model. So you have the, right? You have, what you seem to be getting with this is the benefits of increased communication without actually communicating and thereby keeping the cost of communication down. So Montague sort of leaves it at that, right? And I wanna do a couple of things to try and enforce it. He just makes the claim that there’s all kinds of evidence that the brain is doing this. And at a neuroscientific level, you know, I’m sure he’s right. I’m not gonna challenge it, but I wanna bring up sort of evidence that has a more phenomenological feel to it. Okay. Okay, so one is synesthesia. So synesthesia is the fact that you get human beings in which the information from one sense modality seems to pass to the other. Like people say, I can taste shapes. Right. That’s a classic example. And what that means is that you’ve got sort of the tactile layer of the brain or at least one plausible explanation and the taste area of the brain are actually deeply mutually modeling each other. You can get actually acquired synesthesia, two famous examples. And think of how this is gonna, ha, right? Okay, so you have Bat Boy. And think about Thomas Nagel’s, what it’s like to be a bat. Okay, so the Bat Boy, there’s now I think 128 cases of this. So it’s not some weird loopy single case, right? He was blind and he taught himself like a bat. He taught himself echolocation. He taught himself to make noises and use the sound. And he reports having something like visual experience, but also not like visual experience. And he says it’s sort of out here about this big. So he is using sound to do something like seeing. We also know, and this is reported by Walsh and others, and it’s something I can say too as well. Long-term meditators tend to get acquired synesthesia. They tend to start to get synesthetic drift between the various sense modalities. Why? Because they’re spending a lot of time, right? Basically trying to get, they’re spending a lot of time doing this mutual modeling. I’m gonna, that’s what you’re doing when you’re sort of inside that inner space. So you say, well, so what? Well, I wanna point out to you very quickly how synesthetic everybody is. So what I’m gonna do is I’m going to, I’m gonna show a picture, okay? And what I want everybody to do is as rapidly as possible, I’m gonna show a picture. I want you to point to the picture that is Uba and the picture that’s Kiki, okay? Nope. Go. So overwhelmingly, beyond 95% concordance, people point to the right picture as Buba, even though I said Buba first, and the left picture is Kiki. And you go, well, so what? That’s synesthesia. What the heck is the connection between Buba and that picture? And people will say things, well, Buba is kind of round, and so is the picture. And you go, what do you mean Buba’s round? Although say, Kiki is sharp, and that’s sharp. And you go, what? What are you talking about? Okay, so all of this is evidence that various parts of the brain are mutually modeling each other. The visual cortex and the auditory cortex are mutually modeling each other all the time. And that makes sense in terms of the coordination you would need for skill performance. Is that okay so far? Yes. Notice how much this mutual model, like think about the bat points, seeing how the mutual modeling is actually affording aspectualization and all kinds of interesting things. Okay. So some of the work I’m doing with Anderson Todd and Richard Wu and Effie Ungun and others, we’re working on this model of consciousness. We try to, we revise Montague’s idea a little bit because if my aunt and my uncle never spoke again, their models would eventually drift apart. Sure, models would eventually drift apart. So periodically, they do have to come together, talk to each other, and do any corrections to distortions that have come into the model. Right. I guess you get that at times in couples therapy where people have to come in and really get back in tune with each other. Yeah. Now, you can actually see human beings shifting between these two modes. So let’s take it that I have my modules, right? And when I’m task focused, they’re just working. They’re focused on the world. And one area of my brain is relying on its model of another area and vice versa so that they can be highly coordinated together. But then there must be a period where they have to stop doing that and go back and talk to each other and make sure that they are properly modeling each other so that the integration isn’t infected with distortion. Well, what would that look like? Well, that would look like what happens to human beings. They cycle between being task focused and mind wandering. So you’re focused and then your mind goes off. And in that, you get the default mode network is highly engaged and what’s it doing there? It’s very self-referential. It deals with information that’s self-relevant. And what do we know from the work of Sealy and Humphreys that self-relevant information is the glue. It’s how you glue things together. Well, what does that mean practically? It means that I make sure that my models are properly tracking each other so that they can properly coordinate behavior. So you actually cycle in this way all the time. It’s indicative of something like this mutual modeling centrally going on in your cognition at many levels. Of course, you can’t just have mutual model of everything because that would be combinatorially explosive. Come back to that issue later. So what I wanna propose to you is that skills require recursive mutual modeling. So why recursive? Well, different parts of my finger have to be mutually modeled, my little finger. Then there has to be mutual modeling between my fingers and then between my fingers and my palm, between my fingers and my palm and my thumb and between my hand and my wrist, and then my hand and my wrist and my elbow, et cetera. That’s what I mean by recursive mutual modeling. Is that okay? Would that be also sort of then nested hierarchy of modeling? Like the birds are embedded. Totally, totally, very much. And I know what you can do with that. So I’m sure you’re gonna do interesting stuff with it. So ultimately there must be mutual. And so now what I wanna do is say, okay, so we’ve got the notion of mutual modeling central to skills. We have the notion of recursive between layers of mutual modeling centered to skills. We know that skills, their acquisition and their application is ultimately dependent on perspectival knowing and that the perspectival knowing is ultimately dependent on the participatory knowing. Here’s what I wanna suggest to you that that is a meta kind of coordination that’s needed. Such that I wanna propose to you that there must be mutual modeling between participatory and perspectival knowing. Participatory knowing is generating affordances that are potentially relevant to perspectival knowing. And perspectival knowing is selecting which affordances to make salient within situational awareness. Participatory knowing and perspectival knowing have to be mutually modeling each other. And they would go through cycles where, right, they’re more independently operating and then cycles where they’re more talking to each other to coordinate their modeling of each other. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I’m arguing that that would be a requirement for any acquisition and application of any skill. Hmm, okay. So to put it in more of a slogan, so don’t forget everything I’ve said and just remember the slogan, for mnemonic purposes, mutual modeling in the coordination not only within but between kinds of knowing. This now gives me a hypothesis or a proposal. Consciousness as the mutual modeling between kinds of knowing. It’s the mutual modeling between participatory knowing and perspectival knowing. Okay. The participatory knowing of and through perspectival knowing and the perspectival knowing of and through participatory knowing. So what you’ve got here is, right, the perspectival knowing is on the left and the participatory is on the right. The perspectival knowing is giving me aspectuality, centrality, temporality. It’s giving me the adverbial qualia. It’s giving me that demonstrative indexicality, you know, the this, here, nowness, togetherness of consciousness. The participatory knowing is giving me affordance generation, the co-shaping and fitting of the agent of arena and it’s creating that inactive co-variation between me and the environment. You see what I’m doing? I’m bringing back the pieces of Descartes. The participatory knowing is creating these really, really affording co-variations and then the perspectival knowing is turning those co-variations into something that is ready for skill acquisition. Analogous to how Descartes proposed, right, that consciousness turned the co-variations into representations available for reason. What I’m proposing is, but the perspectival knowing with it, right, takes the co-variations, the affordances from participatory knowing and converts them into not what is ready for reason, but what is ready for action, what is ready for skill acquisition and skill application. All right. That’s the argument. That’s the argument I wanted to make. And so, what, I mean, there’s a lot of work we still need to do. We need to go in and take this way of thinking, right, and all the machinery we’ve worked and put it into deep discussion with some of the best models we have of the function nature of consciousness. But what I’m gonna argue throughout is that there’s a deep convergence about what the function of consciousness is. It’s this higher order recursive relevance realization that allows us to aspectualize things so that we can engage in agent arena fitted action for the world. That’s a lot of what the consensus is about what consciousness, how it functions. And what I’ve tried to show you is, if you accept that functionality, it gives you so much of the phenomenology. It gives you adverbial qualia. It gives you the sense of fittedness. It gives you the sense of what it’s like to be here now. It gives you the participatory knowing of consciousness. You know you’re conscious by being conscious, et cetera. Right, right. So let me see if I can piece this together a little bit in terms of just the frame of the perspectival into the participatory and the dynamic interrelationship between the two. Great, I’m gonna stop sharing now so that we can have a more direct thing. So let me share with you sort of a less developed model, but one that I found very useful in the clinic room. To see if this tracks some with some of the sort of what I would call intuitive, meaning non-self-conscious, but therefore I think participatory, dynamic relations that people would have in their sequences of engagement. And so I developed the thing called the PME relation, where P stands for perception. And that’s gonna head into perspectival knowing. M stands for motivation, which has two different states of approach and avoidance. And then E stands for emotion, which is to energize motive in a particular, and are, you know, so what we see a lot of, for example, is individuals perceiving a particular event, referencing it in relationship to their goals, getting emotion, and then responding accordingly as they try to regulate the costs and benefits or stressors and affordances in a dynamic iterative pattern. So when I hear your participatory knowing and think about the grip of the agent arena relation, and I think about the components of that as to how the system is perceiving where it is, thinking about where it’s trying to go, enacting particular affordances to extract those patterns of investments, I see, I hear a lot of similarity in that dynamic relation. So let me ask questions to make sure I’m seeing the same connections that you are. So I expect that when you are working with people in a therapeutic context, when you say perception, you don’t mean like just literal perception, you mean something like how they’ve aspectualized, what aspect of the thing, how they’re determining how it’s salient and relevant to them, right? And then, of course, so that’s a respectable knowing, so I agree with you there, are we in sync? We’re in sync there. And then, of course, but that’s, right, that is grounded in ultimately the sense of identity that they’re assuming in connection with it, how they’re, right, the agent arena participation and the affordances that are available, but also the affordances that become unavailable in a particular, so there could be ways, I’m thinking also of your sort of filters, there could be ways in which people, Greg, I’m not as well versed as you, so I’m gonna probably use this in the wrong way, so be charitable with me, but there’s ways in which people could repress, they could repress at a participatory level because they could refuse to bend on an identity and therefore not have access to affordances, they could also repress at a prospectival level because they could be fixated on a one aspect and not be able to pick up alternative aspects, is that, is that? 100%, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So we can put this, let’s put this in sort of a, so here, let’s see if this flies, okay, in terms of the kind of both the models that people have, so the prospectival then will dump into their both identity and memory structures, so they’ll pull on that kind of narrative, there’s also if we get into the person level self-conscious justification, all right, but this may, maybe just because this resonates with me as a high school kid, I always liked this example, when I was, so he was like, he helped me see this dynamic relation as follows, so let’s say you’re in a, you know, at a place and you see an attractive person over, Right, right, right, right. And so now all of a sudden you see the person, all right, and then that, you’ll have a perceptual gestalt, okay, then if it’s an attractive person, all right, and your motivational approach state, okay, is to enact that, then you wanna reduce the discrepancy between where you are and say in this case as a heterosexual guy where she is. Right, right, right. Okay, so I might then activate my past scripts, okay, say procedural participatory scripts of the ways in which that dance might go, okay, one of the things then that I guess what I’m suggesting is that I’d like to think a little bit more about how motivation and emotion play in this participatory dance. Yes, very much, very much. So I’ll finish this little narrative because it was cute for me in that, so according to him, and I think there is good research for this, although it is complicated, our approach motivations operate on a slightly different timeframe than our avoidance motivation, okay, so what he said, what he said he did, and I had had a reflection on this as well, is that far away from the room when you see the attractive woman, your approach motivation sees the possibility of success and the stressors of getting rejected are lesser, but as you move closer and closer, the time pass cross, so the threat of getting rejected then meets you halfway across the room, which is why you get halfway over there, stop and turn back and head back to your bar stool without asking her out, and I had a ability to empathize with that particular sequence, right, and so what I’m saying is that, the, to me, as we lay down this participatory dance, the dynamic relations, interpsychically, between our perceptions, our motivations, and our emotions, with the affordances and costs are engaged in that, that’s how I talk about sort of a behavioral investment flow. So great, so let’s pick up on two sides of this, I’m gonna quote Reed Montague again, what’s the difference between us and computers, right, well, we don’t care about the information we’re processing, we care about it, and that’s, right, that’s the fundamental, right, affective commitment of limited times and resources that’s at the core of relevance realization, and why do we care about information processing? Because we are auto poetic, we are, we have to take care of ourselves because we’re always making ourselves, so I think, so if we remember that this, I’m proposing that this machinery is ultimately all running on the relevance realization machinery. Secondly, notice how you had different components and how, right, so you can even see that cycle I was talking about, right, they’re sort of operating independently, right, the approach module and the avoid module, and they’re probably, they have, they’ve got sort of mutual modeling going on, and then it flips, but in between, there’s probably a moment where they’re checking in with each other, right, that moment of indecision, right, well, right, right, and so you can see the mutual modeling function, and so you can see the mutual modeling function, and you can see the salience landscaping interacting directly in the example you just gave, directly in the example you just gave, and so it’s gonna be inherently motivational, it’s going to be, and therefore, it’s also gonna be inherently aspectual, it’s gonna be centralized, it’s gonna be temporal, it’s gonna have temporality to it, but there’s gonna be all that, what’s it like to be here you now, but it’s also, it’s gonna be relying on a mutual modeling between all that perspectival knowing and your sense of who and what you are and what the arena is, the agent arena, what are the affordances here? Because you will, of course, if not just your perspective, it’s the actual affordances that are available to you, so if you’re at a bar, it’s much more likely to hit on a woman than if you’re at a funeral, right, and things like that. Just because the opportunities aren’t there for you, right? In the same way. So I think, again, we can use this theoretical machinery we’ve been developing to talk about all of these examples and to cover off a lot of the features that are phenomenologically present. Amen. Yeah, yeah, that’s certainly what seems so exciting about it. Yeah, so I think that, you know, what I’m trying to add to, what do I wanna call it, the literature on consciousness? With your help. You know, these notions of adverbial qualia, salience, landscaping, optimal gripping, perspectival knowing, situational awareness, and participatory knowing, and the mutual modeling between perspectival and participatory knowing. And that’s a lot of new machinery that we can use. What’s interesting about this machinery is I’m proposing it simultaneously allows us to talk about the function of consciousness and the phenomenology of consciousness, and start to bridge between the function problem and the generation problem. Right, well, and for me, where I come at this, cause I sort of, as we talked about before, I’m very frustrated with psychology, behavior, mental process, right? And then it’s like actually mental process, there’s a neurocognitive functional view of mental behavior, and then there is this perspectival mind to consciousness deal, and there is this narrating piece, right? But now what we can do, at least what I feel, is I can now take mind too, with all of these new conceptual tools, right? And create such a much more nuanced relationship to mind one, the interface between the various domains, right? And set up a nice, cool little system, and then we’ll talk more about how mind three, once all the stuff is ready for reason, loops back and creates an identity, a self-conscious identity, explicit recursive function on top of all this. But it really generates, like Jonathan Haidt, talks about the elephant and the rider, but this is like, well, what is the machinery of that elephant, right? What’s really driving that elephant’s passive affordance? And how does it dictate what, it’s relevant realization processes, and then at what level of, what are the dynamics of that? And that to me, what this is, is like, oh, there’s so much richer vocabulary for all of that. Well, that’s what’s exciting for me in the confluence between my work and your work, because you keep making the case to me, in a convincing manner, by the way, that at least this, sorry, sorry, turn it the other way around. This work can at least contribute to enhancing and enriching the descriptive metaphysics that you see that is missing and generating what you call the problem in psychology. And I agree with you that these problems, the hard problem of consciousness and that maybe we could also call it the hard problem of psychology, right? They have to be addressed in an integrated fashion. And if you feel, right, and you keep making these connections to argue for it, so if you are concluding more than just feeling, that this argument also in a coordinated fashion can help to advance the overcoming of the hard problem of psychology, then that’s fantastic. That’s just excellent. It’s totally fantastic. Here, I’ll give, actually, I just got this book. It’s a good book. It’s by Bruce Goldstein. It’s called The Mind. I’ve read it. But what it is, if you lead it through our lens, I would argue, is it’s just basically mind one. It’s the neurocognitive functional view of mind one. It gives a chapter on the curiosities of consciousness. And then it ends with, well, it’s a hard problem and science doesn’t really look at it. And then the rest of the book is on the hidden mind, which is basically the underlying information processing and computation of neurocognition. And then it’s like, okay, it’s all the backstage machinery. But it basically, and it emphasizes prediction and how it pulls out particular relevance. So it’s a brilliant neuro, or I think a well-done, up-to-date neurocognitive analysis. But if you were to read that, it’s like, well, but then you have this whole part of you that actually sees the world. Yeah, right. And not to mention a whole other part of you that actually talks about the world. Exactly. Talks about the people about the world that is completely dependent upon because it’s intersubjective. So you get this picture of the mind. And this is, I think, the same thing that behaviorists did. Well, to get to the physical, because they’re embedded in a physicality reductionist view. And because of the epistemology of science, it claps with one hand when we get into interior epistemological consciousness. And it doesn’t need to, but that’s essentially, it’s like, well, we can’t speculate on unscientific things. It’s like, no, we actually have introspective awareness. There’s a lot of different ways to angle this. And the scientific exterior epistemology is important in many ways, but that shouldn’t. There are ways to integrate what we can know from a first person perspective. So to me, yeah, this is so much of an opportunity to enrich in the picture. And of course, if we think about the larger scheme of the meaning crisis and how to help people live their lives and what I do in psychotherapy, I mean, it’s like, obviously we’re gonna deal with subjectivity in the real world. Yeah, I was gonna say that book on the mind leaves you with a picture of the mind that is completely existentially irrelevant. It leaves out the first person perspective and it leaves out what you call mind three, which is your personhood, right? And that, I mean, this sounds like Whitehead, but that can’t be an adequate account. In fact, it seems to leave out most of what we consider existentially, morally, politically, legally important about, well, I was gonna say having a mind, but a better way of being a mind. Of being a mind, exactly. And if we just knew, okay, yes, here’s mind one. And then like I talk a little bit in my book, we can talk about mind one A and mind one B, that’s the transition into behavior. And we can give good examples of that, like Stephen Hawking, so it’s the motor neuron disorder and boom, that system. But if we have the right vocabulary, then we can read that, help people position it and get all the good knowledge, but not think that’s the whole picture. That to me is what’s so frustrating about our fragmented psychology. And yeah, if we can help bring psychology and cognitive science together and say, actually, yeah, we have the edges of this problem relatively well defined in a conciliant, coherent way, I think the utility of that is enormous. Yeah, I think so too. And I think what you said about, this is a view of consciousness that has the potential to help ameliorate the meaning crisis. I, yeah, to me, that’s, that for me would be at the ultimate value of what we’re trying to do here. Well, obviously to, if that’s the beauty of your phraseology is like, well, we need to realize what’s relevant. Yeah, right. Well, that was the argument I wanted to make today. And I’m sorry, it was a little bit more monologic, but you were there, it was helpful. And like I said, I don’t intend to do this again, but there was things I wanted to sort of show. I thought it was. This part needed to be sort of, it was a lot that needed to be laid out in very linear fashion. I think we’ve made the jump from perspectival into participatory. I think the optimal grip is clear. I think, you know, this was a key element and the whole Rover thing is such a cool story anyway. So I enjoyed hearing that deeply and it’s, you know, it’s impactful in terms of, oh yeah, I do, that was Tetris. Yeah. So I propose that we’ll start turning towards some of the existing theories about consciousness and putting what we’ve built together into a deep dialogue, hopefully mutually transformative with those existing theories. So if I wanted to, as always, thank you, my friend. Thank you. It’s always fun. It’s always a lot of fun. And I really appreciate that. And so I want to thank everybody who’s watching and I look forward to meeting with you again, Greg. And I look forward to interacting with people who are watching this series. Amen. Great job. See you next time.