https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bD6Szbf1cHo
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 phenomenal like consciousness within the scientific world view. 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. Welcome again, Greg. It’s great to have you here. Perhaps you could introduce yourself again just so people know who you are and why our work seems to repeatedly and creatively and constructively keep converging. Absolutely. Yes, I see so much relevance in what you do, John. So yes, I’m a professor of psychology at James Madison University. I’m a clinical psychologist by training, but really interested in building a more unified meta-psychology that organizes the science of human psychology in relationship to psychotherapy and the overlaps with your integrative vision for human cognitive science are quite striking. Yeah, very much. I agree with that. And so Greg has been sort of, I don’t know what is it, shadowing, kibitzing, looking over my shoulder or some recent stuff I was doing. Stalking you? On consciousness. That material is not going to be made public, but I am in process of turning it in to YouTube content. But what Greg has been looking into was some of the recent work I’ve been doing on addressing what’s called the hard problem of consciousness. And I break it up into a bunch of problems, a function problem, a nature problem, things like that. We can get into that in more detail. And then I also make an argument that if you address those two questions, the function of the nature question, you start to see some very deep connections between consciousness and fluid intelligence, sort of fluid general intelligence under the auspices of ideas around relevance realization. And then I have a sense that that is connected to how people are engaged in extended mind practices. And so that’s sort of the beehive or ball of wax that we’re going to try and at least… Or Frankenstein Man Beast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Greg is referring to the fact that in one of the emails, in one of the things he saw… In a course, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I refer to the theory that I worked out with Anderson Todd and Richard Wu and… There’s one of the… Marksman. Oh, James Marksman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I called the huge paper that we put together to try and integrate it all together, a Frankensteinian Man Beast of a manuscript. So maybe we can try to play with that a little bit too. So there’s a lot here on the table. And sorry for those of you who are watching. This is initially a little bit vague. What we’re trying to do is you can see… And I welcome it from Greg. I mean, this is a very serious and central topic in human and the understanding of human ontology. But Greg and I are both playful about it, not because we don’t take it seriously and we’re not trying to do our best about it. But everybody has to come to this topic with a large grain of humility. Because this is the holy grail of cognitive science. And I think it’s a Schopenhauer call it the world knot. And it’s an important place within Greg’s overarching meta-cyclical technology. So I appreciate that there’s the playfulness here. And so we’re going to try and do some serious play about this topic. Greg, how would you like to start about that? So, well, first off, like you, although you’re more immediately entangled in sort of the phenomenological consciousness and realizing relevance, relationship to intelligence. But what that is doing for me, and that’s what I hope our conversation will unfold, is filling in a wide variety of different details around the structure, sort of this macro level structure system that I’ve been constructing. So for me, what my pitch is to scholars, you talked about sort of Schopenhauer world knot, what my pitch is, is that modernist natural empirical science, the language game of it, the grammar of it, had what I call the enlightenment gap in it. And it didn’t give us the right grammar for talking about mind and relationship to matter. It also didn’t clarify what scientific knowledge was relative to social pragmatic knowledge. And both of those are really complicated, and they’re both connected to why I think the modernist paradigm of understanding across a whole host of different issues actually needs an upgrade. We needed enlightenment 2.0 that enables us to see consilience from physics to sociology, which of course is what the large macro model that I built called the tree of knowledge is all about. And it’s about, I hone in for me on what I call the problem of psychology, which is that it has this identity of being defined as the science of behavior and mental processes in all of the textbooks. But the concepts of behavior and mental processes then immediately are defined in different ways depending on which language game or paradigm you then adopt. Now there’s no consensus on what is meant by behavior and mental processes. And so the science of psychology actually just translates really into applying empirical methodology to whatever the hell it is that people decide is behavior and mental process depending on their tradition. So I believe though that the tree of knowledge sets the stage to solve the problem of psychology. And what I mean by that, it affords us a descriptive metaphysical system to upgrade the modernist language game so that we can now talk coherently about behavior and mental processes. So why don’t you take us through, I mean it’s a big project. It’s a big project. It’s a big project. Absolutely. Maybe zero in on sort of a couple of key bridging, right? Yeah, so sometimes it helps to show some diagrams. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen and show a diagram real fast. Okay, so let me actually, I’ll first just really quickly show people the this. So this is our tree of knowledge system. Okay, you able to see that? Nothing so far. Okay, maybe I didn’t confirm that I needed to share. Sorry about that. There it is. Yeah, okay. You see it now? It’s coming up. Okay, now it’s up, Greg. Okay, so here’s the tree of knowledge system. Okay, and the key insight from the tree of knowledge system, it’s consistent with lots of approaches. The most probably major approach is called big history. So that’s this macro view that goes from the big bang all the way to the present on the dimension of time and complexity, which goes from matter to life to mind to culture. The tree of knowledge got a couple of really unique features to it. Perhaps the most salient and important for our purposes is the fact that it sees emergent planes of existence or dimensions of complexity, and that they emerge as a function of novel information processing and communication feedback systems. Right. Okay, so you get cells communicate and they’re storing and processing genetic information, speaking loosely here. Okay, then you get animals, they’re processing information and communicating with each other. That is this concept called mind, and I’ll be more, we’ll get into what I mean by mind. And then ultimately you get humans processing symbolic information, engage in person to person communication to create this culture person plane of existence. So Greg, at the bottom of each one of these, there’s where it intersects with the open plane from the one below it. There’s a small circle like justification systems theory, exactly investment theory. So I take it that these theories perform important epistemological and ontological bridging functions. That’s exactly right. They’re called joint points. Exactly. And so at the very base go all the way back, you have quantum mechanics and general relativity. For understanding the gravitational force, that is conceptualized as a joint point between energy and the pure energy singularity, the emergence of matter. Okay. And then if you could unify that, that’d be the ultimate theory of material everything, but I’m quick to point out it’s not necessarily a theory of all things. The evolutionary synthesis is genetics and natural selection, which I also believe needs to be fused with modern understanding of cell behavior as complex adaptive systems. But that would then give a rise to that. Yes. And behavioral investment theory is a framework for understanding the nervous system as an investment value system that tracks salience and relevance in an environment to expend energy. And then justification systems is about how the human self-consciousness system emerged. Okay. Right. And you and I have talked about the justification system. So what I want to do then now is just go into, all right, with that as a basic background, I want to walk you through where I am and get to a point where I’m going to argue that your, what I think about consciousness is a subset of mental processes. Specifically what I will call mind two relative to mind one and mind three. Okay. Okay. So the background now, the first point you mentioned, you drew your attention to behavioral investment theory. Behavioral investment theory gives rise to a neurocognitive functionalist view of mental behavior, which in many ways should be pretty commonsensical. Basically it says what is the nervous system? It’s an information processing cybernetic control system. Okay. That’s regulating the complex adaptive behaviors of the animal as a whole. Okay. Okay. And what it says is that there’s a layering of these information processing mechanisms over time. And ultimately what you have here then in the left side of the diagram is a neurocognitive functionalist architecture of the human mind that combines the evolution of the nervous system across four layers, one of which is reactive and the emergence of, you know, core instincts that are pretty constrained, triggered by particular stimuli that are particular, create illicit reactions. And then the learnings, habituation, sensitization, you get modal patterns of activity in animals, but not a huge amount of flexibility. Okay. This would have been actually the state of animals right before the Cambrian explosion, according to this frame. Okay. Which is a, that’s a, when really then animals become a much more diversified about 550 million years ago. Yeah. I heard that they are one of the, one of the current theories is the driver of that complexification was the evolution of eyesight. Yes. Yes. Okay. And, and actually what I believe is actually happening, there’s a eyesight site actually then gets hooked into motor control and you get an integrated sensory motor control system. And another then driver goes from the associative reflexive reactive kind of systems into a much more operant online consequential learning system. Right, right, right. So it gets, it becomes much more predictive in its functionality. Exactly. And, and much more regulatory. And this gives rise to what I call the second layer here, which is the operant experiential layer. Okay. Whereby you have perceptual holes, tracking approach states relative to avoidance states, and then emotion, you get the emergence of emotion as an emoting energizing system. Okay. That’s basically trying to regulate the discrepancy of the appraisal relative to where you want to be motivationally. Right. Okay. Okay. So that’s an operant experiential and that’s exploding in terms of the Cambrian expel, you know, period. And you see com animals with complex active bodies. Then you get the emergence of increasingly more sophisticated cortical systems that allow for imaginative thought to make predictions via simulation of possibilities. So they’re not nearly as anchored to the stimulus regulatory consequential system, but in fact can project themselves over time based on, you know, predictive models. Okay. The, there’s an online Bayesian system and now there becomes a Bayesian system that’s predicting possible outcomes and starting to simulate consequences down various behavioral investment pathways. Right. Okay. And, and that’s, that brings us through the bird and mammalian cortical lines at various levels of sophistication with a lot of species specific architecture, but this is the basic gestalt. Okay. Okay. And then you get with humans, you get a, an interpreter symbolic information processor that emerges into the language acquisition device. Okay. So this gives rise to a four layered view of reactivity, operant experiential, imaginative thinking, and linguistic narration. Right. Right. And this is also organized in relationship to what we know about memory in terms of this right here is your sort of sensory memory function. Okay. You have a working memory system of about, you know, 10 to 20, 30 seconds and the badly phenomenological and sketch pad loops. Right. Okay. I know we’re using a lot of technical language here. We can stop it any time. And then you have a long-term memory storage system. So procedural point of view, episodic memory and semantic memory that organizes. Okay. And this is then your neurocognitive functionalist view. But it’s basically anchored to thinking about the mind and relate by neurocognitive functions. I mean, you can just basically say there’s input, there’s functional relationship between output. We can assess these from a third person perspective. Okay. Okay. And it’s being mediated presumably all by brain function. We can talk about brain that relation. Here we have the model then. So that’s a neurocognitive model. This is a model of conscious experience. Now we’re getting into then the first person phenomenological model. We’ve talked about this model before. We have a first person experiential, a private narrator, and a public self with three kinds of filtration between these. Okay. So that’s a background. Now I want to get into the real clear descriptive metaphysical mind and I’ll then come back ultimately and delineate mind two, which is going to be this space right in here, the experiential and narrator, but gives rise to that perspectival point of view. Okay. Yeah. Very nice. Very nicely presented. So now we come back to my concern ultimately and we have what I believe is this big problem with psychology. One of the core problems that really define psychology is its history and subject matter is what is the relationship between consciousness and behavior. Okay. A lot of reasons for why this is complicated, but one of them is an epistemological reason, which is consciousness is available through the first person interior perspective, what Ken Wilber calls the interior perspective. Okay. And behavior is available through the exterior or general third-person view and amenable to observation measurement and the epistemology of modern natural science. Okay. So that’s one of the big problems and this is why I’m so excited is I think you and I together can hone in on the functionalist and metaphysical descriptions of consciousness in relationship to a big picture behavior and put stuff together in a way that really tightens the relations between the concepts and gives rise to a picture of the whole. That’s a very awesome proposal. Okay. Keep going please. Okay. And what we’re trying to do in delineating you were very, you know, when you talked earlier like, hey, are there all these different things? There’s an issue of this really is a body, physical and living, behavioral, brain, cognitive, computational, consciousness, phenomenological, and self and self-consciousness problem. That’s why just to give you an idea how thorny this thing is, right? It’s got all these different elements. Okay. Well said. Well said. So then what we’re trying to do is now try to figure out the interrelations between all these parts and what my system orients me to is actually dividing up mental processes into three different domains based on their ontological reference and our epistemological consideration. Okay. Okay. So we have these two epistemological considerations. Behavioral investment theory gives rise to conception mind one, which basically is an exterior view of animals engaging in functional awareness and response. Okay. So if I see my dog barking at a cat, we can say he’s exhibiting from a third-person perspective. That’s a functional awareness. I don’t know how conscious his consciousness. I don’t know what it’s like to be him, but I can see obviously there’s a stimulus. He’s responding to it in a functional way. Right. Okay. And so we can then define those overt mental behaviors in the traditional behavioral ethology or behavioral science way. And because I’m proposing like you and others at a broad level that nervous system is a information processing system. So there are neurocognitive processes that are mediating and regulating, coordinating, we can use whatever term, those behavior of the animal as a whole. Okay. Okay. We then get into the sticky issue of mind two, which is this first-person witnessing function, but which we, you and I, obviously based on what we can dialogue with each other, know to be then our first-person experience of subjective being. This is going to connect to consciousness and that, the interior epistemology. And then finally as humans, we have self-conscious justification. Which has private, I can talk to myself privately or I can engage in public justification. That’s right. Okay. So now if we look at it here, we have an external view. This is sort of in pinkish because we have to, we can see the brain, we can see its activity and then we infer functionally the information relations. Yeah. Okay. We have mind two being basically all first-person and then we have this interesting relationship between mind three as both being private, but also public. So the, just to ask a couple of mapping questions. It sounds like we could talk very effectively because we do in artificial intelligence, right? At level mind one, we talk about intelligence there. And then mind two seems to be what, and you have it labeled that way. You sort of the domain of consciousness. And then, and I like the way that you’re keeping these distinct and then mind three, sort of the locus of this is self-consciousness, but the self-consciousness has both how I’m conscious to myself and then how I’m conscious of myself and presentation to others. Is that, is that a fair way? Very excellent. Excellent. Okay. And because I pay a lot of attention like Marshall McLuhan to the medium of the information processing system, the nature of language, unlike the nature of phenomenology, the nature of language is that it’s transparent to the skin. I just talk. I can’t tell, I can’t, you can’t experience what redness is like to me, but I can share what I can tell you what redness is like to me in the exact same medium. And there, and I mean, and there’s, there’s the, you know, going back to Wittgenstein, the very powerful set of arguments around the idea, but there’s no such thing as a private language. That language is, that language is constituted by, by being shared with others. It’s an inner subjective phenomenon. So here you have a text that identifies these actually three different domains of mind one as having different epistemological and ontological considerations. So mind one is generally exterior. Okay. Mind two, interior and mind three actually is intersubjective and constituted in the inner subjective culture, person, plane of existence. Right. Right. Okay. And by the way, you’re often talking about the relationship between persons hood, self-consciousness, culture, socialization in your dialogue. And I totally agree with that. That’s that that’s the emergence into a culture, person, plane of existence. Right. So yeah, so yeah, I would put the ontology of personhood where you had sort of mind three. This also, this also brings up the fact that what’s suggested by this, the diagram, the one on the right, is that there’s a lot of confused talk about consciousness because its relationship to the domain of intelligence below it and the domain of self-conscious personhood above it is they’re often not adequately distinguished from each other. They’re often conflated together in a confused and confusing fashion. Which gives rise to huge amounts of equivocation and accidental bullshit gets tied into the conversation. Yeah, very much, very much. Right. Okay. So here’s the last thing for right now. I’ll just show you. Okay. So now here’s just a clear representation of the map. So we can now have a vocabulary to hone in on and then I’ll hand it over to you and hear you riff off of Sim and I’m super excited about your adverbial and adjectival quality and I got all sorts of interesting things. So, but just so now, so I want to hand this lexicon back to you. So we have an overt behavior, watching somebody do something from an exterior perspective, watching my dog bark, mind one B. Okay. And then we have mind one A, which refers to the information instantiated in the nervous system that’s created in a hierarchical regulation system, perhaps a simulated, you know, scale invariant multi-layered modeling system. Okay. But into then that somehow gives rise to, and this is now we can talk about the ontology of this, that first person witnessing that we can identify as mind two. There is the narrator of mind three. You talk about how Renee Day talked about how the subjective mind touches itself. Yeah. And for me, this is where the self-conscious access to the phenomenology happens in the strange loops of narrative and experience. Yeah. Okay. And then this is what we would share, like as if we take a transcript of this exchange into mind three B. So the tree of the updated tripartite model, by the way, provides lots of articulations about the dynamic relations between these domains. Okay. And your model provides the architecture for understanding, and this is what I didn’t have at all, but the hierarchical layering across the domains to give rise to the interface between the emergence of the witnessing function, the emergence of perspectival and participatory knowing, and all of that intricacy. So that’s what I want to then hand back over to you and say, I see you building a model basically of mind one A and of mind two, consistent with mind three, and articulating the functional and metaphysical elements that really fill in. That’s exactly right. That’s the project that I’m interested in. Yeah. That’s, oh, wow. Nice slides. I don’t have anything like that to put into the discussion, but wow. So that’s very helpful, and I will try as much as I can to use your helpful vocabulary, and where I refer to my own, we can negotiate the mapping, although you’ve already indicated some of it. So the place where that gets, well, we’ve already said there’s a place where a lot of confusion comes in. There’s a lot of equivocation. To give one clear example for people watching, people will equivocate between a mind, what you call mind one, a third-person perspective sense of information that is completely measurable, and it’s just a probabilistic relationship between events that rules out alternatives, reduces uncertainty, completely cybernetic account, what I call technical information or key information, and then information in the sense of semantic, having an idea. So if you take a look at that, for example, a newspaper, most people would, if I asked what’s the information and the idea, they would think of the semantic information, the set of ideas they could call, but the technical amount of information is much more comprehensive. That is how each little mark of black on the paper has a probabilistic relationship for the kind of mark that is going to come next to it, and right, etc., etc., and then that amount of information. And so what people often do without realizing it is they talk about, well, there’s information flowing in the nervous system, and then it flows into working memory, and that, you know, and what’s the problem? It’s just all information flow, and what they’re doing is equivocating between two different meanings of information. In fact, there’s a lot of work being done. I think you said, I sent you the one article where people are trying to do the very hard mathematical and theoretical work, philosophically challenging work, bridging between those two senses of information. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, I’ll throw a third out there that I think is important to differentiate, okay? So, so, and the theoretic one has its roots largely in, just for people, if you’re going to track it, look up Claude Shannon, and his, he’s a Newton of theoretic information, basically. He’s unbelievably influential. And then the semantic one’s a lot fuzzier. I mean, semiotics and other kinds of notions, but it’s, that’s a fuzzy one, but it’s, the other thing, if you, there’s a little book called A Little Book on Information and What It Means. I don’t remember the author, sorry, forgive me, but it starts off with the basic, the information processing schematic, which I think is another thing that people mean, which is basically you have a translator, okay, an input function translator, and then you have a recursive processing loop, which usually has some sort of memory storage function, okay, that then creates, you know, computational processes, and then an output function, okay, that then regulates. So you have, this is what I call the information processing schematic, okay, in which then adds to another intuition notion about information relative to the semantic and theoretic. So what’s that notion, do you think? Well, I just think that that’s what people sort of, oh, oh, here’s, like, when you talk about, oh, I’m processing information, or that person, they’ll have a notion of that schematic, okay, not necessarily to, and to differentiate. And in fact, the article that you sent me, see, they actually go all the way down into physical, they actually try to create a gestalt of a semantic theoretic conception all the way down to atoms, to scale, okay, but at the end of it, you’ll notice, because I have this categorical system there, yeah, but at Matter, they don’t have an information processing system. They actually say that. So it’s like, yeah, you need all three, actually, what I think, you know, when we jump up to life, it is an information processing complex adaptive system that’s predict, utilizing informational forms to predict particular outcomes across scale, and then somehow has a semantic system. I get that. So there’s, that’s good. So, so in addition to the technical sense of information, the information theoretic sense, the Shannon sense, and then in addition to the semantic sense, that’s being really argued about a lot now between representational and inactive accounts of cognition, you’re proposing, and other people are, I think, Brightfist is doing this, and I think the work I’m doing, you’re proposing this intermediate, we might call it a functionalist account, right, in the way that technical information is being used within intelligence, which is, so we could put it here. I’ll try. We’ve got sort of, you know, in just in the physical environment, there’s technical information, and then, as you said, there’s some functionalist configuration that’s, that turns it into information processing that is in some sense, you know, intelligent, there’s some functional ability there, and then, and then beyond that, there is the sense of information not as just intelligent behavior, information processing, not just intelligent behavior, but there is a further sense, which is this sense, as I knew you were right to say, that it’s very nebulous, but this, that’s the sense that bears intentionality, you know, that I have thought about things, yep, I can refer to things, etc., and that kind of information. So that’s, and sorry, we’re burdening the audience, but what we’re trying to point out is, and we’re negotiating between us here, is the ways in which when you eat, when you start to talk about this stuff, you have to slow down and take very great care, because the potential for equivocation between all these levels, ontological levels, and between the various epistemological methodologies is, like, the chances that you’re going to run an equivocation are almost overwhelming if you don’t slow down and make distinctions go carefully. This is why I, and I think Greg will share this with me, I am very critical of a lot of popular discussion about consciousness and how it can’t be reduced to physicalism and things like this, and I’m not trying to voice my view on Greg or anything, but I think he would share with me, a lot of this that goes on in the public domain, it is, it, I understand that it’s often done with good intention and a good faith, but the conclusions that people draw are seriously undermined by the fact that they’re almost always being caught up in major equivocations without realizing it, that undermine the plausibility of the claims that are being made. So would you agree with that, Greg? I applaud it. I mean, you know, my hook in and trying to get people’s attention is that is so true on the whole concept of psychology, you know, and cognitive science deals with this, that’s why you’re, you know, you open it up, you know, cognitive and behavior and consciousness is like the, sort of the holy grail of this equivocation. Yeah, very much. So 100% agree. Right, so that’s why this is a hard thing to do. And I’m just going to forewarn, you know, Greg and I are going to have several conversations on this. This is not going to be something that’s going to come to closure in, you know, the hour and 15 minutes we have together now. We have planned to have sort of a series of conversations where we go through this complexity with the care that we at least we hope that I’ve just said is needed for this topic. I would be so bold as to say that if you watch a video that claims to give you grand conclusions about consciousness and or personhood, and it’s like only 30 minutes longer or less, then chances are it’s wrong. And again, not to be arrogant or elitist. It’s not about our expertise. It’s about the difficulty of the problem that is being addressed. And it has to be very seriously appreciated by people because on one hand, it is one of the most important questions and it has ethical and existential and religious and spiritual import. That’s one of the reasons why Greg and I are so interested in it. And I get we all should be thinking about it. But the fact that we all should be thinking about it doesn’t mean that we can just sort of think about it without taking great care to first of all, really formulate the problem really, really well. Some of you know in other arguments I make in my work, problem formulation is more than half of problem solving. And if you just if your problem formulation is largely transparent to you, and you just leap into the problem, and you’re going to you’re going to it’s a nightmare. So what I’d like to do is to start that and you know Greg and I probably have about a half an hour. And like I said, we’re going to keep doing this. But I’d like to start with first of all, you know, getting clearer about the problem. And so one of the ways there’s two aspects to this. So Greg, I’m going to talk for a bit. Yes, this is what it go. Okay, there’s two aspects to this. Getting clear about the problem. There’s what and this is a method that’s familiar to those of you who see an awakening from the meaning crisis. There’s a historical aspect that needs to be understood very seriously. And I’ll just do a gist of that here. And there’s also a structural aspect of the problem. The gist of the historical problem is to understand why we got why the Cartesian solution became sort of the fundamental grammar for how we talk about all of this stuff and why it’s not. And here’s the point that people don’t get that that grammar is deeply, deeply interwoven with the scientific worldview. So trying to solve the problem, right, it gets you immediately enmeshed with the fundamental way in which the scientific worldview is constituted. This is why it’s a hard problem. So you’ve got to you’ve got to be really, really careful about your attempting to solve the problem without talking about its bearing on your understanding of the scientific worldview. So that’s a historical thing. Can I just add something to that? Please, Greg, please interrupt. In other words, you’ve been socialized with a grammar that probably isn’t up to the task. Yes, yes, very much, very much. That’s a good way of putting it. I hadn’t thought of the sociocultural aspect. That’s a good way of putting it. The structural part of the problem is that there’s actually two problems. And we’ve tended, unlike Descartes, who kept the two problems together, we’ve tended to separate these two problems often apart. So what are those two problems? One is the function problem. What does consciousness do? And this is this turned out to be actually a very, very difficult problem, because it doesn’t, here’s to make it problematic for you. It doesn’t look like you need consciousness. You can do so many complex, intelligent, sophisticated things, like you are understanding my language right now. Trying to get computers to that is very hard. That’s a really complex task. All of that is happening below your consciousness. All that happens is you get these sounds, and then you get in consciousness ideas. But how those sounds get converted into all of that processing, massively complex, very intelligent, is going on unconsciously. So why is it that we have consciousness when we can do so much deeply sophisticated, deeply intelligent behavior without consciousness? So that’s the function problem. I’m not giving any kind of answer here. I’m just laying out the problem. No, it’s crucially clear, though. Right. And then there is what I call the nature or the generation problem. This is the problem which Greg has already pointed to with his mouth so elegantly. This is the problem of how does something like consciousness emerge within an otherwise physical world? Now, putting it that way is simplistic, and I’m doing it that way to problematize it, because there is the intervening important variable of life, and both Greg and I think there’s something like a deep continuity hypothesis between mind and life and life and self-organizing matter. We’ll come back to that. But just to put it out as a problem, it’s like, how does consciousness, which seems to not have any of the central properties of matter, how does it emerge from the material realm? Now, one sort of common answer to that is, well, it doesn’t. There’s two separate substances. The problem with that is that is not a solution to the nature problem precisely because you get what is called the mind-brain or the mind-body problem, which is if they are two substances that share no properties in common, right, so matter takes up space, right, it has physical energy, it has electromagnetism to it, it has resistance and inertia, blah blah blah blah, and consciousness doesn’t seem to have any of those properties, and consciousness seems to have intentionality and subjectivity and a qualitative feel to it, and matter has none of those meaningful attributes. How do they causally interact? There’s nothing in terms of which matter has to sort of contact or radiate or generate a field. How does it interact with mind that has no material properties? And how does mind that has no material properties, how does my mind lead to the moving of my body? And don’t say, well, the information in your mind gets the information in your nervous system because your nervous system because that’s just the equivocation. That’s just the equivocation. So most people think that Descartes’ solution, which was to say, well, there’s a separation of mind and body, while it is actually a very plausible solution in his historical context, it’s ultimately not a viable solution precisely because the mind-body problem turns out to be a devastating problem and you can’t leave it unresolved. It’s metaphysically unworkable. Unworkable. And it’s also ethically and existentially unworkable. Well, there’s… Yeah. Because if I don’t have an answer about how mind and body interact, I can’t get any evidence about your mind from your body. Right? That’s interesting. Yeah. I can’t pick up on other minds. And that, of course, has huge… I mean, that had ethical consequences. Descartes felt no compunction and Descartes was not an evil, twisted man, but Descartes had no compunction with doing vivisection on live animals, dogs, because he said, that’s just movement of a body, like a bell ringing, right? Because there’s no… I can’t get from their bodies to any evidence that they have anything like consciousness. Right. So there’s all kinds of consequences there. Absolutely. So here’s the thing that we have to do. We have these sort of three… We might think of it as a triangle of problems that need to be addressed. One is we need an account of what this consciousness do, and then an account of what consciousness is, not in the sense of it’s a phenomenological description. That’s not irrelevant, but what consciousness is in the sense of how does it fit into this worldview? Right? A nature or generation problem. And we have to remember that we can’t answer that question from some ahistorical, godlike perspective, because we are a mesh in a cultural, cognitive grammar that has us thinking about this and biasing us and talking about this in certain ways that you could make a good case are plausibly preventing us from framing the question, the problem in the right way. I think that all I’ve argued and Greg has seen these arguments that what makes this very challenging for us, but is a responsibility that you can’t avoid, is that all three of these problems have to be approached in an integrated manner. That if you try and address the function problem without addressing the structure problem or the history problem or any one of those, if you try to answer one of these in isolation, the other two undermine you in a very, very significant and powerful way. What I’ve been trying to do in my work is come up with an approach that will allow us to begin to frame how to answer those three in the integrated, but also very challenging manner that is needed. So that was a long setup, but I’ll turn it back to you, Greg. Well, I mean, it’s just a very important part of the context. You know, I did a 10 problems, as you know, because we did the 11th problem. The first thing I said was the problem of language games is a nightmare here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that’s a short way of saying why that preamble and contextual element is absolutely essential to enter into the arena of this conversation. Yeah, I think so. So one of the things I might want to propose we do is we might want to like have like maybe we meet next time, we could go a little, we could zero in on maybe the historical context and why the Cartesian framework beat out the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic. And what does that mean for how we how we tend to think about this? And then maybe take a look at some of the most powerful versions out there right now that attempt to address the hard problem and how they’re often a structural solution or a functional solution. And so we could sort of we could dedicate time to each one of these and I’m sure in detail. How does that sound to you as a proposal? Hey, that sounds certainly certainly good to me. It sets up the whole you know the context of the framing so you have to you know to enable that so absolutely. So just to foreshadow because I don’t go ahead I’m not going to get into too much today because I don’t want to overburden this by making it too long. One of the things that I’m going to try and argue is that if we get a if we try and use the method of cognitive science which is the design stance which has deep analogs to the historical schema that Greg presented to you like if we if we move sort of evolutionary history but not in a like not just sort of in a historical representation but if we tried to design a system to make it intelligent what would we do and what would be the steps of design? And what I’m going to argue is that as we design intelligence we start to find important features about consciousness at least the functionality of consciousness that start to emerge and we start to see that that well that’s what I’m going to argue at least. We start to see that the intuition that we all carry that we attribute consciousness normally where we attribute intelligence and vice versa probably has a theoretical relevance. There is in fact probably a deep connection between fluid intelligence and the functionality of consciousness and then the next argument we’ll build on that is so as I build intelligence I get the functionality of consciousness and then as I build the functionality of consciousness I start to get some of the phenomenology of consciousness. Right. And that’s and that’s that has to do with stuff that Greg both likes the adverbial qualia versus adjectival qualia and the participatory and perspectival learning but stuff I think he also wants to challenge me on which is ultimately but yes but it’s still the hard problem and I get that and that’s well we’re breaking the problem up. John okay so it’s crumbling in some ways there are a couple of key points you know the the adjective I think we both agree the actual emergence of experience and what is it constituted by the neuro-electro binding problem field you know whatever that we have a lot of there’s hand waving that emerges there is there is and so yeah and full disclosure I’m neither one of us claim I in particular I’m not claiming any sort of exhaustive condition no right but the the the the question is whether or not we can make such progress on not only formulating the problem but starting to generate some insightful response to that problem formulation so that we get a plausible sense that this goes from being something that is ripping our ontology apart to a difficult problem that will be situated within a new revised ontology exactly yeah and and that’s what’s okay so this is what’s so exciting for me okay so when I’m learning your system you know yes you left what I what I always thought of is the hard problem you left it but you circled it in its shrunk yeah yeah yeah and that and that caused light bulbs in my head and that’s why I stalk you okay so okay so and the light bulbs you can you say a little bit give me at least a little tea at least for me this is super exciting you differentiate adjectival qualia okay from this adverbial qualia the here-ness and now-ness you know and and and there’s evidence for it from the eastern tradition and and how that all works can you you do you want to give a teaser on that or do you want to build up to that well I do want to build up to that I because I do think that’s I mean that the distinction between that and then the distinction between the qualia and subjectivity understood in terms of you know the participatory knowing of and through respectable knowing those are sort of the big conclusions and that I that I want to build towards and I want to show how they come out of you know attempt via relevance realization theory to build an account of general fluid intelligence and how we get a lot of the phenomenology along and Greg is right I I don’t claim to have fully solved the hard problem because I don’t have an account of what I call adjectival quality I like the blueness of blue and we’ll get we’ll get to that as we get into these discussions but and thank you for saying that Greg because that means a lot to me that you know the the the hard problem is sent to has at least been shrunk um and because the issue of at least one meaning of subjectivity and important aspect of the phenomenology of consciousness which is Greg said is this adverbial sense of the here-ness and now-ness and togetherness of our conscious experience I think that’s where the nature of consciousness and the function of consciousness can be given an integrated account yep and so um uh this is a long journey that we’re going to be Greg and I are going to be taking together we’re going to be going back or and as you can see you know we’re sort of zooming in and out uh we’re zooming in on the phenomena and then via Greg’s excellent work we zoom out to yes but what does this mean right in terms of the overall metaphysical position place of psychology etc and then we zoom back in and you know Greg has also done a lot of work with all of the problems so all right there’s a lot here and it is very promissory I know but what what we’re promising you is we’re going to we’re doing this in really good faith and we we both think I believe that a kind of a dialogical format is the better way of trying to present this information than just a straight monologue so I’m going to in the spirit of dialogue I’m going to turn it back over to Greg and what he would like to say right now well I mean you know this is yeah exactly this is a this is a journey I want to echo a couple of points um and that is what exactly are we talking about is super crucial you know and what what are our shared reference points and to be very clear to ensure that we’re not equivocating and overlooking that because that happens all the time so that’s one key point the second key point that you were you made around equivocation and sort of the grammar of our realities that we inherit through the modernist language systems the society kind of bakes in a dualism a Cartesian dualism okay science has a physicalism and you and I will talk some about physicalism versus naturalism I look forward to that and and and why I hesitate to use physicalism sometimes as a word but but at an ontology level you and I are exactly the same place so that’s a that’s a but it shows language game issues that are problematic okay and I’ll come back to my point about what I really believe this is an enlightenment gap dynamic I believe that the the collapse of psychology so you know my point is physics energy matter their interactions yes quantum mechanics general relativity blew up some really interesting questions but that system at a basic consensual definitional level remains okay you go into chemistry and although there’s debate about exactly what life is you know is the coronavirus alive as it sits there on the table generally not but sort of right but nonetheless everyone can circle a bacteria is alive a tree is alive we know what life is relative okay but what is mind what is behavior there’s no consensus there’s no okay so that’s crucial to the enlightenment gap I agree you know so I mean the there’s sort of a semi-technical name for this problem in the literature it’s called the mark of the mental or the criterion of the cognitive alliteration right and we struggle you know mental causation and the philosophical issues but here’s what I want to make because actually this links us back to this whole series on dia logos okay and dialectics all right and the kairos of our moment so I’ll sort of just sort of echo and so that while we’re on this journey it’s very academic journey all right you know I’m a psychotherapist here in the midst of the meaning crisis we’re seeing the connections between our knowledge systems philosophy and where the world is I believe that the meaning-making crisis what does it mean to be human the way in which modern science could not navigate this language game okay and how what does it mean if I love my spouse okay and who am I and what does my life matter about how we talk about those things is is central to how we live okay and we have an impoverished grammar in relationship to that and I believe crucially that the 21st century’s crises that we see pertains to that impoverished grammar okay so if we can navigate the grammar and maybe not solve the hard problem but if we hone it in and then actually have a definitional language and scientific empirical systems that fill that in put it on top of biology okay the potential that that plays a crucial role in addressing the meaning crisis writ large and ushering in a sort of enlightenment 2.0 vision I think is very very real I mean I think it’s very plausible I agree and I think that was very eloquently and elegantly stated so yeah I agree I mean Greg and I are academics and we would be working on this regardless probably in one sense but both of us are much more concerned with the relevance that this has to well the meaning crisis and and and it’s Greg said the fact that we just don’t we can’t situate ourselves as he said well how do I situate the fact that I love my partner into the worldview that is supposed to be the ultimate authoritative worldview of this culture and the answer right now is you can’t you just can’t and we both think that that doesn’t just sit out there like some intellectual problem it’s like you know it it permeates you and your cognition and your attitudes and your self-interpretation and your self-model in powerful ways that affect your relationships to yourself to each other the world and often cause distress suffering and conflict in a way that could be significantly ameliorated and so that’s why we also well I know because I talked to Greg and he shares this with me that there’s an important existential ethical and I ultimately and we’ll get to this at some point spiritual very much spiritual implication of all of this that needs to be taken very seriously and I would also make the reverse argument that if you do have serious serious spiritual ethical existential concerns that if you really want to wrestle with them you are going to bump up into this problem that Greg and I are centering on and you don’t have to solve it but you do have to acknowledge it and it bears some responsibility to it if because if you leave this unchanged it will swallow up your attempts to deal with the spiritual ethical and existential issues to a very significant degree so there’s two ways in which this what we’re doing here should be in some sense relevant to everybody I mean that sounds grandiose but I think it’s actually the case completely agree friend I mean this is it’s it’s at the center or it’s one of the center points and a nexus of understanding whose absence is I believe deeply relevant to the 21st century meaning crisis and and and and if the puzzle pieces can be juxtaposed especially then bridge two practices of dialectic and the dialogos and all of that that’s that’s the restructuring to build common ground in a new ethos yeah I agree I agree so that’s exactly right Greg is involved in Christopher Massie Prieto and I are putting together an anthology inner and outer dialogues about this whole idea about dialectic and dialogos and the and what Greg is putting his finger on here is exactly right that taking sort of this what you might call philosophical scientific endeavor around this world not problem of mind and consciousness and then transforming in partnership because it can only be done in partnership with others transforming our cognitive cultural language and thought so that we can garner and appropriate whatever insights we have from tackling this difficult problem back into how we live our lives and how we make meaning together but yet that’s yeah that that is a crucial thing we need to be doing and again Greg is also involved in that project he’s contributing to that anthology as well so I think Greg this is a good place to end our our session today because I think we’ve got good formulation Greg and I are probably going to meet every couple of weeks and go through like this step by step by step and then unpack it for people and so I think we’ll also make a bit more effort on both of our parts to answer respectful questions that come up in the comment section I’m not obligating myself or Greg to respond to trolls or people who simply want to tell us that they have the answer but people who want to participate with humor and humility and insight and good good faith questioning we’ll make an effort to be more interactive also well I’m going to make an effort I think Greg would too absolutely again this is a the shared conversation when done in good faith and clarity about the nature of the arena we’re in will only enrich the process great okay so Greg we’ll be meeting again in a couple of weeks and what I’m proposing we do there is we zero in and we isolate it at least initially we can’t keep it isolated for the argument I gave but we zero in on sort of the historical framework and really why are we in this mess around consciousness and then and then and then we’ll just keep going through it step by step how’s that perfect perfect thanks so much friend yeah thank you so much thank you for those excellent diagram you guys should know going forward Greg will always often have nice diagrams and I won’t because he’s much better at this than I am but thank you very much and we’ll we’ll talk soon okay fantastic thank you