https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Zpu0mQhorYM
Here’s why I want to talk to you about the brain a little bit, because if you make the radical case, let’s say that these are actually the categories of reality, and we’re going to say, well, reality is what selects for the sake of argument, then our neurological structures and our physical structures should be adapted to that reality. It’s a necessary conclusion from that. So then the question is, well, are they? And as far as I can tell, the answer to that is yes. And so we’ll go through the neuropsychological evidence quite rapidly. The first bit of evidence is that you have two hemispheres. Why? One deals with the unknown and the other deals with the known. That’s Alcon and Goldberg. That’s hypothesized completely independently of any of this underlying mythological substructure, which is a really important thing to note, because if you’re trying to determine whether or not something is true, valid, if the constructs upon which you base your thinking are valid and true, there’s rules for doing that. And one of the rules is you have to be able to detect the existence of the categories using multiple methods of… Well, using multiple methods. It’s the multi-method, multi-trait matrix, technically speaking. It was established as a technique by two psychologists named Kronbach, C-R-O-N-B-A-C-H, and Meehl, M-E-E-H-L, Paul Meehl, back in the 1950s, when psychologists were trying to figure out how do you determine if something actually has an existence, like anger or anxiety, as something that you could study scientifically. And the answer is, well, you have to be able to measure it multiple ways, and all those measurements have to read the same way. And then the question is, well, what do you mean by multiple ways? Because is sight and hearing different? Well, somewhat, and somewhat the same. But you make them as different as you can manage, let’s say. And our sensory systems are quite different. Smell, molecular signature, sound, auditory pressure. You need a gas around you or some liquid in order for that to occur. Sight uses light. We’re using different inputs that converge and allow us to say, well, if we get convergent information across these multiple measurements, then we’ll assume that the thing we’re perceiving is real. We even extend that in science, because we say, if you take your multiple measurement system and you take your multiple measurement system, and then you compare them, we’ll only allow what’s constant across both those comparisons to be real. And so that’s the multi-method, multi-trait matrix process, essentially. And my sense is that, so I think that the pattern that I’m describing to you has manifested itself evolutionarily. It manifests itself in the neurological space, and it manifests itself in the conceptual space. And the probability of all three of those things happening at the same time, without there being something valid there, is lessons with each level of interpretation you manage to stack on top of one another. So that’s the method. Well, so let’s think about the brain a little bit, and I’ll tell you a little bit about how the brain works. And a lot of the stuff I’m telling you right now is quite old, actually. Most of it was worked out in the 1980s. But it’s been remarkably stable, as far as I can tell. In some sense, we’re filling in the details. And not in every sense, but in some sense, we’re filling in the details. This is from Alexander Luria, who was perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist who ever lived. He was a Russian, worked mostly after the Second World War, mostly on people who had brain damage. And he was interested in trying to outline the overarching picture of brain function. And so he did that partly by looking at its function, but also partly by looking at its structure, trying to get both of those things working simultaneously. And so we’ll go through a brief picture of how the brain works. And so one of the ways of… So you can look at the brain from front to back, and you can divide it roughly into two sections. And one section has to do with sensory processing, and that’s roughly the back half. And one section has to do with motor output. Now, those things aren’t as clearly differentiated as you might think, because there’s very little sensation without motor output. Maybe the closest to an exception is smell, I would say, but you at least have to breathe in. You know, and when an animal is actively searching on a scent trail, it’s breathing in. So it’s using its motor output constantly to modify the sensory stream. It’s really difficult to dissociate the two. When you’re looking at something, you know, it kind of feels to you like you’re a passive recipient of sense data. But you’re no such thing. Your eyes are moving back and forth in multiple ways all the time, including the ways that you can control voluntarily. So there’s multiple involuntary systems that are moving your eyes in multiple ways. And really what you’re doing is feeling the array of the electromagnetic spectrum with your eyes. You’re feeling it, and you’re actively exploring if you’re not a passive recipient at all. So even in sensation, you can’t purely pull sensation out from motor processing and say, I’m getting untrammeled, unbiased sense data because you can’t look at something without focusing. And you can’t focus without wanting to look at something. You know, you can’t just lie there while you could with your eyes half crossed. But, you know, that’s sort of like imagine you dropped a video recorder from an airplane and it just spun around in an unfocused manner. Well, that’s the world sampled randomly. You know, what are you going to do with that? Nothing. And, you know, you’re concentrating on the auditory stream constantly and segregating out some things and suppressing others. Like if you listen in the classroom, you can hear probably four or five different types of mechanical noise going on at the same time. Most of the time in the classroom, that’s silent. You don’t hear it like you don’t hear your fridge except when it turns on or off, right? You zero that out. And so you’re very selective in your perception. So you can’t really technically separate out motor output from sensory input. And that’s really useful to know because it destroys the idea that you’re just a path, you know, that there’s a world of sensation out there that’s imprinting itself on you. And that’s how you get your information, which is really the, that’s the fundamental presupposition of the empiricists, of the raw empiricists. There’s a world of sense data out there. You sample it randomly and that’s what informs you. It’s like, yes, except that you’re always an active harvester of the information. So you can’t get rid of the interpretive structure a priori. That was a manual count, by the way, who first established that in his critique of pure reason. You can’t get away from the fact that you’re actively harvesting the data. So you can say, well, where does human structure come from? The sense data. That’s sort of the blank slate idea. It’s like, no, wrong, because a blank slate cannot process information. You’re actively engaged right at the beginning. So that’s another example of the knower and the unknown, you know, working in a cyclical manner because you interact with something. You divide it up into you and the world, roughly speaking. And I mean, you really make it that way because you build yourself out of the information. And then, of course, that makes you a more differentiated processor with a broader range of skills. Then you interact with the unknown. Again, you gather more information that differentiates the world. It makes you a more differentiated harvester. And then so it’s just continually cycling. And that consciousness, the logos, the knower is that thing that’s doing that harvesting. And you can never say it’s not there. Now, what happens is that it’s in its nascent form to begin with. Low resolution, nascent form, low resolution knower, low resolution category system, low resolution world. But that’s enough to kickstart it and to start it differentiating. And that happens as you develop as an individual, because you start out as a single-celled organism, for all intents and purposes, a very low resolution thing in a very low resolution world. And that differentiates itself across time. But exactly the same thing happened over evolutionary time. So there isn’t a time when those three elements aren’t there for all intents and purposes. They’re always there. They’re permanent. Okay, so anyways, back to the brain. Sensory unit, that’s the back half, roughly speaking. Huge chunk of that is devoted to visual processing in human beings. Right? Most animals organized around smell, not us. Somewhat, still, because smell is a very powerful evoker of memories. And it has a direct relationship with emotional systems, because you need to know if something is edible or inedible, terrible or good, very, very rapidly. But human beings are organized around vision. So we have massive amounts of our cortex devoted to differentiated visual processing. Now, the motor unit. So what you have is each of these little zones here. So for example, look at the back here. That’s the primary visual area and the secondary visual area. And then this is the primary auditory area in the middle of the brain here on the outside. And the secondary auditory area. And then this is for body representation. The primary area and the secondary area. And you can think about those areas of primary, secondary, and then tertiary. Primary does the base level processing. Tertiary expands that up into more abstract representations. Or secondary expands that up into more abstract representations. And tertiary are the areas where the senses come together. And that’s really what you seem to be most conscious of, right? It’s action in the tertiary areas, because you don’t really see the world as You can think about the auditory stream separate from the visual stream and all of that. And you can think about touch separately. But you tend to consciously experience things as a unity. As a comprehensive unity of all the senses simultaneously. So consciousness seems to occur only at the, most of the time, at the highest level of integration. And Euleria would have associated consciousness more with the tertiary areas, where the senses are talking to one another. Now, it’s more complicated than that, because there’s obviously subcortical structures all the way down to the spine that are involved heavily in what consciousness is. It’s not merely a consequence of cortical activity. We tend to think that because human beings have massively expanded cortical structures. And we think of ourselves as the most conscious creatures. And that’s reasonable, but you can take an awful lot of cortex off someone, and they’re still conscious. In fact, you can leave them with almost no brain at all, and they’re still conscious. So we really have a rough time trying to figure out what consciousness is, and how it’s related to brain structure.