https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZnQBiFvjIxw
Yes. Thank you so much for being here. Your example of human relation behavior and the response to brain damage. Yes. And heaps and heaps of neuroscience all seem to suggest that we are merely, that consciousness is merely an app running on a biological machine. The thing that, without being the decider really, the thing that John Height calls the elephant and the rider. Yeah. My question is how does this grimdark materialist view of existence square with looking for meaning, imitating the divine? Well, I think the grimdark view and the biologically determinist view is just wrong, again. And so consciousness, consciousness is not merely an epithenomenon of matter and not that we know what that would mean anyways. Like what the hell does that mean? It’s something we don’t understand, matter. We might think we understand it, but all you have to do is familiarize yourself a little bit with quantum theory to understand that you don’t understand matter at all. It’s like what is that stuff? And obviously consciousness is implicit in it in some sense because here it is and we’re all conscious and we have no idea how that managed itself. And then the thing about, but more specifically I would say, you know, when Darwin wrote his great tracts on evolutionary theory, he stressed two elements of the selection process. Natural selection, fair enough, and you could make a deterministic argument for natural selection. It’s not easy because nature is really complicated and the idea that nature is selecting, that’s from a random array of potential traits, let’s say. Although I’m not convinced that that’s entirely random, by the way, but we won’t get into that. Nature selects from this random array of traits and I think that capitalization on randomness in that manner is necessary to solve the complex process, problem of perception over a very long span of time. But there’s sexual selection. Now it’s a scandal in scientific history as far as I’m concerned that for almost a hundred years after Darwin published his great works on sexual selection, biologists tended to pretty much ignore it. It’s like, yeah, no, natural selection. And that was because I think it was easier to maintain a strict determinism by concentrating on natural selection. The tricky thing about sexual selection is how is that not conscious choice? I mean, what, you don’t make a conscious choice when you select, well maybe you don’t if you’ve had enough alcohol, but I wouldn’t recommend that as a long-term mating strategy, but you tell me that the conscious choice of women specifically, it’s more complex in the case of men, because we’re an easier, what would you say? We don’t have as much at stake and so we’re not as choosy. Women are exceptionally choosy. And certainly it’s like a truism among evolutionary biologists that part of the reason that we had such rapid cortical expansion is because of sexual selection. It’s like, how is that not the action of consciousness on matter? And you might say, well, that’s only been operating since Homo sapiens because nothing was conscious before then. It’s like, you ever see that BBC clip of the pufferfish making the Mandela? Oh, well, you could look that up. This little pufferfish, he’s like this long, he’s just a pufferfish, you know. It doesn’t have any hands, which is kind of hard if you, hard problem if you want to be a sculptor. He makes this sculpture that’s like 20 feet across. He’s this big, 20 feet across at the bottom of the ocean. And it’s a perfect circle and quite complexly undulated and wavy. It’s not the sort of Mandela you would see in a great cathedral, but he’s just a fish, man. It’s not so bad, you know. And he spends like a week building this thing. And it’s so funny watching him in the film because he goes down there and he, like maybe there’s a stray piece of shell and he grabs that and he spits it out because no shells in the dam. No shells in the dam sculpture. It has to be clean. And then he pops up and he turns one eye like a bird and he looks at it and then he goes down and waves a little sand into place. He’s making these dunes that are like a foot high and there’s like 400 of them. And then you see an aerial shot of it. It’s this, really, it’s the size of this stage. And then this female pufferfish comes along and, you know, checks it out and sees if he’s got what it takes. And if he does, away they go. It’s like, it isn’t obvious to me at all that that pufferfish isn’t conscious. And I would say, say, well, you’re anthropomorphizing. It’s like, okay, let’s have that discussion. So I’m pretty familiar with the animal experimental literature. And the greatest animal experimentalists, especially those that study motivation and emotion, so they’re the ones that are delving very deep into the neurophysiological apparatus, their basically rule of thumb is you anthropomorphize except when there is a reason not to. I think we share like 85% of our genes with yeast. It’s like, rats? They’re pretty complicated. They play, they laugh. You can tickle them. They die without love. You know, pufferfish? They make sculptures. Here’s a story about spiders. This is a fun story, if you like stories about spiders. So there’s these spiders, and the female won’t mate with the male unless the male offers her a gift. And so he has to find some dead fly or something that’s particularly delicious to a female, and then wrap it really nicely in a web and present it to her. And if she likes it and it’s a good fly, then maybe she’ll date to mate with him. But the damn spiders, it’s so funny. Some of them will wrap up dirt. And present that. It’s like, they tend not to get away with it, you know, but sometimes they do, so that’s pretty funny. But what’s also funny is sometimes the female will eat the fly and leave the guy, you know, in his agitated state, let’s say. It’s like, you know, those behaviors, those are complex, man. And it isn’t obvious to me at all that consciousness doesn’t exist way down the phylogenetic chain. I mean, maybe it emerges in some form with a differentiated nervous system. We don’t know, but Franz De Waal, who’s a great privatologist, just wrote a book called, like, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? And the answer to that could well be no. I mean, octopuses, for example. Man, those things are smart, and they can do all sorts of things we can’t do. You know, they can transform the texture of their surface, as well as the color, to match an underlying rock. It’s like they’ll clamp onto a rock and then poof! They’re exactly like the rock. It’s like, that’s hard. And it’s hard to imagine how something like that is possible, even without the intermediation of something like consciousness. And I cannot see at all how you can be a biologist and believe in sexual selection and think that only random factors determine evolution. It’s like, what about mate choice? Well, yeah, no, no, no, really. What about mate choice? Really? And you might say, well, that’s not aiming at some determined end, and that’s complicated. And that’s worthy of discussion, but it’s not obvious to me at all that in the human case, it’s not aiming at some idealized end. I mean, we certainly look for something approximating an ideal in a mate. We want that, and we want to encourage it if we don’t have an idealized end. We want to encourage it if we don’t have it to begin with, unless we’re bitter and resentful and jealous. And so we are pushing towards an ideal that’s at least implicit, and it governs us at every level of our social interactions. And so I don’t think that it is a dark reduction of consciousness to an underlying, say, ultimately real material state, and that’s the final answer. I don’t think that’s true. And there’s lots of people who aren’t foolish who don’t think it’s true. It isn’t obvious to me that Roger Penrose thinks it’s true, you know, and he’s no lightweight. So he thinks consciousness is irreducible in some sense. And I think the biblical idea that consciousness calls forth shape from a material substrate is there’s something to that, and that’s certainly not an idea that’s limited in religious texts to the biblical stories in Genesis. If you look at religious texts all over the world, there’s always this insistence that there are two primal factors that work. One is the matrix out of which things emerge, and another is something that calls forth structure from that matrix. And it’s a chicken and egg problem, you know, to use a terrible cliché, but it’s an extraordinarily widespread fundamental theological idea.