Transcription
Consciousness [music] is the one thing in this universe that actually can't be an illusion, right? I mean, even if we're in the matrix, if this is just a simulation, if we're confused about everything, if our physics is fake physics cuz we're not in touch with the base layer of reality, [music] if this is all a dream, you know, if you're the only person who exists and we're all in your dream, no matter how confused you could be about the nature of reality, [music] one thing you can't be confused about is that something seems to be happening. And that seeming is the fact of consciousness.
Should we give up the idea of distinct selves as simply incoherence?
>> Well, first let me say it's a pleasure to almost be there with you. Sounds like I'm escaping the sweltering heat, but um it's an honor to be invited. Thank you. Um well there there's one sense of the term self and it's I believe it's the most common one and it's it's the sense that we feel subjectively most of us most of the time which I think is genuinely an illusion and leads to other illusions cognitive and and and moral. It's the it's the other side of the coin of the sense of free will that that uh puzzles so many people. Um so you know I would ask you to just notice this feeling in yourself if you have it and if you're like 99% of people you will you'll get this sense that you feel that there is a subject a kind of unchanging point from which you notice experience which is which doesn't leave you merely identical to experience rather you feel like you're appropriating your experience. You're having an experience. There's a there's there's a place from which you can aim your attention at the various objects of experience and and most of if not all of your experience has this subject object character where you're you're the subject noticing sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and moods. Um and that subject is an illusion and we we can know that really from two sides. First of all, from from the third person side, neurologically it makes no sense. There's no there's no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. Um, but more importantly, I think from the first person side, subjectively as a matter of direct experience, you can look for this sense of self, you can look for the eye in the middle of experience and fail to find it in a way that is conclusive. And and this this effort goes by, you know, many modes and many names. I mean this is something that meditation in various practices directly targets people using psychedelics have had this experience but there's there's a vast testimony to the um the perturbability of and and the transency of this sense of self and I would actually say that most people even if they're not meditating or or taking psychedelics they're continually losing this sense of self without noticing it which is to say you you can lose yourself in your work you lose yourself in a in athletic performance. You can lose yourself just in in this in an outgoing act of attention where you you actually the clear sense of self becomes kind of retrospective when you when you when you take stock of yourself you you then notice it. But it I it is it is um continually interrupted I would say. Uh but to interrupt it consciously as an act of contemplation is very different because then you can then you can actually be free of it more or less whenever you whenever you remember to pay attention and that's a that's a very different movement through life.
Let's bring Roger in here. Roger, does this idea of distinct selves make sense or is it an incoherent notion? And just to bring in Sam's point from the get-go there as well, does it make sense to have an illusory self or is that illusion of every instance of the thing which uh which which we typically take to be the
>> I mean I regard the question of self as all tied up intimately with the issue of consciousness >> and if you weren't conscious there concept would even wouldn't even be discussed. But um there are I remember reading long time ago now um examples of a patient who had um serious epilepsy or something and the opera they performed an operation which seemed to me pretty extreme of dividing the brain into two separate halves. I don't know how separate it was too. There's no doubt it was the cerebrum and not the cerebellum but still and this person almost considered herself or maybe people considered that that that they became two separate people in a sense so that it did seem to be tied up with the very way the brain is organized and that with this split brain person they could do one thing with one hand and the other side wouldn't know what was going on. It struck me as rather well the whole thing is rather awful. But apart from that um in does the presumably single self that this person had previously what does happen to that when it becomes does it become two selves later on? I have no idea. So I'm just filled with lots of question marks when I think about this problem. The question of consciousness is bad enough. Um it seems that if these person with a split brain in this experiment or this I don't think it was an experiment. I'm not sure. It's supposed to be a treatment.
>> Um if this person was considered to have two selves at that stage um well raises a difficult question as to what you mean by the the self and consciousness and presumably the memories of the past were shared by the people if I can use that term. I'm not sure. I don't know that the descriptions I read of this situation was were detailed enough for me to form a real view about it. But it did seem to me that has bearing on this question and uh it's one of the few experiments which I know of. I don't as I say not even an experiment as far as I know treatment I guess it was that I know of which uh have some bearing on the question. Of course you could imagine somebody to be unconscious. Could one side of the brain be unconscious as the Well, then you have to ask a dolphin I suppose because the dolphins go to sleep one side and the other side separately and to a dolphin that must be strange effect. I mean are they still awake all the time but yet being in sense having a different self? I have no idea. I'm just raising these points. Uh sort of scientific issues which might have relevance to the general question.
Can I can I ask you this just before we bring in Sophie? So you raised the split brain case as a problem of split someone's brain either both sides are them, neither side of the brain is them or one or the other is them. And that seems like a a big philosophical problem if your view is that ourselves are identical to our consciousness. But I just want to ask you this before we bring Sophie in. Is do you take the self to be identical to our stream of consciousness or is it more of our capacity to be conscious which were identical to?
>> I see what you mean. Does one sew all the conscious experiences up together >> and make one thing out of it all? >> I think one does. But to what extent is this a feature of memory? because the memory transcends this and you remember events which took place when before you went to sleep or something but then when you are asleep you're still to some degree conscious if you're dreaming >> and I suddenly experience I'm not somebody who has a what they call vivid what's the there's a term people use to dream >> a lucid dreaming >> lucid that's right now the only one experience of that nature which I remember is in my dream I was walking around in New York and I was getting turning the wrong way and turning around get completely and utterly lost and I didn't know what to do. So I went into this store. It's a store cuz it was America into the store and I decided well look if this is a dream I can walk on the ceiling. So what I did is walk on the ceiling. So I said yeah it's a dream. Could I wake up? No. I had a lot of trouble. [laughter] I don't know the releance of relevance of this.
>> Maybe it wasn't a dream. Maybe you're in New York [laughter] and there's some pretty crazy CCTV footage out there of you >> walk on the ceiling. >> You can speculate about these things. I think I was dreaming to be walking on the ceiling. [laughter] >> I wouldn't put it past you, Roger. You We have laws against that in America. [laughter]
>> Uh Sophie, is this idea of multiple self, distinct selves within one body an incoherent notion? I mean, I think it's something that definitely requires as as both Sam and Professor Penrose have already said that you you've got to have some definition of exactly what you mean by that. So, do we mean conscious awareness, a sense of being the subject of your experiences or do we mean something that's like a a sense of yourself [snorts] as a coherent person with sense of identity around that? You know, these we need to define that. And in the introduction, we were going across several different levels of analysis. So I think it is worth trying to get into that in more detail. I think it's also worth bearing in mind that you've got that 86 billion brain cells and you were born with almost all of them. So over the course of every 10 years or so, you get a completely new body except for the hair cells in your ears, the lens cells in your crystalline lens in your eyes, your um egg cells if you're female, and your neurons. Everything else is renewed. everything else is changing. So if you look at a photograph of yourself as a baby, none of that person is there anymore except for primarily your eyes, your ears, and your brain. And of course, that's one of the reasons why you would have, you know, if you lose your bra aspects of brain function, it will have tremendous impact on how you're able to actually function. But of course, it's also there because that is where your your memories are stored. They're not being renewed. They are stored within that system, stored in a very clever way. And your the purpose I suppose of us many ideas of what we mean by a sense of self or kind of a subjective experience of the world is arising from the function of that network. And anything that changes in your brain, anything you learn, anything that you remember from today is going to be because that network has remodeled and changed. The brain cells are talking to each other slightly differently. And that's how we encode information. There isn't anything else. That is the sum total. is an enormous structure, but that's that is that's what you've got to learn with and to be you. I think the only other thing I'd be interested in thinking about is selves or a self sense of self in terms of your interactions with other people because we're social primates. Our lives have meaning largely in the interactions we have with others. That requires you not only to have a sense of the idea of other people's sense of selves and how they could be thinking and could be thinking differently from you about things but also arguably you need to have a model of how they're seeing you. What is their model of you as a self? So the kind of the social elements of this and of and the big changes I'm a very different person if I've been talking on the phone to my mom than I am if I've interacting with the police. You know, there's many different aspects of my behavior in place. And I got run over by somebody on a um a lime bike a couple of weeks ago.
>> I ran over somebody on a line bike.
>> I don't think it was you. I think you'd remember cuz I discovered that in my fight orflight response leans heavily on fight. I was very very cross and I couldn't understand. I could not understand why the woman kept asking if I was okay.
>> Why you this stupid question, you absolute idiot. you haven't realized how stupid you've been. And I just hang on, hang on. Okay, she's just run me over with her bike. She's probably worried that she's hurt me physically. And I just, it took me minutes to get to that. So, you know, within milliseconds, you can be pro prompted into a place. I'm not normally that unpleasant. um [laughter] the normally running into me on a bike to will take you there but it's um that was a very you know I was just propelled into a completely different state of awareness fully driven by emotion which is of course a huge element of what we have seen which affects everything that everyone's talked about so far
>> well it's interesting the main question we've asked there is whether it's coherence to our distinct selves but you've all seem to set out your stall in regards to what it is to be a self to begin with and if I'm getting this right Sam thinks that selves are losery. Roger thinks that selves are constituted by consciousness and you seem to be saying that it's your brain, the contents of your brain and what other people see you as as well. So Sam, if the self's illusory, how do you make sense of conscious experiences and the contents of those experiences? Like where where is that conscious experience happening if not mine and myself now and yours and and yourself now? Where is this this theater of experience on your view?
>> Well, we should distinguish consciousness from the self. In my view, consciousness is the one thing in this universe that actually can't be an illusion, right? Right? I mean, even if we're in the matrix, if this is just a simulation, if we're confused about everything, if our physics is fake physics cuz we're not in touch with the base layer of reality, if this is all a dream, you know, if you're the only person who exists and we're all in your dream, no matter how confused you could be about the nature of reality, one thing you can't be confused about is that something seems to be happening. And that seeming is the fact of consciousness. So I I'm I'm quite um convinced that consciousness as a concept and as a as a starting point just epistemologically to know anything is foundational. But that doesn't answer the question how to how it relates to the physics of things. Right? So I think the the jury is still out on just how to how to solve the the so-called mind body problem. uh which is to relate the the the fact that there's something that it's like to be us with the fact that that much of what's going on in the universe at least from the outside appears not to be conscious or not to be a basis for consciousness and and there are many different views that that people I'm sure have heard about uh you know idealism physicalism pansychism etc. Um I think you can table all of that all the metaphysics there and talk about the nature of experience however and come to realize that this uh notion of a center in the middle of consciousness that is unchanging this feeling of eye this feeling that it's that I'm behind my face that I'm a subject up in the head uh in some sense riding around in my body as a kind of passenger that that really is the default sense that I most people are referring to when they're talking about a self. They they don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they feel like they're in their in relationship to their body. If you have a terrible pain in your knee, you very likely feel like you're up in your head in some basic sense now resisting this pain, right? And this the pain is down there and you wish you wish it would go away. You know, everyone starts there. If if if you really try to interrogate this contemplatively, if you if you learn to meditate or you you have some other mode of introspection, you do start as this sense of being a subject in the head that is now trying to to figure out what's real about this sense of self. Um it is that sense that is elucery and it's it's that sense to connect with what Roger said about the split brain procedure. It's that sense that I think very clearly can be divided. I think when you when you cut the corpus colossum which is the the series of of white matter tracks that that connect the two hemispheres of the brain that occasionally get get severed in in a surgery to mitigate grandmal seizures. Um when you cut the cut all of those fibers you are you were certainly dividing the access that each half of the brain has to certain phenomenal states. You know the sights, sounds, sensations and also motor control. And you do almost certainly produce two separate fields of experience which are not no longer integrated. And if if um and so as a matter of consciousness those are now separate, you know, conscious access to contents. But I would say as a matter of of a felt sense that there's a subject too. I think I think the question is probably open whether or not both hemispheres of the brain would form that to precisely the same degree. But um you know there's it was clear in for from some of the that fascinating research that they're almost different people in the in the two hemispheres. I mean they have different beliefs. They have different desires. They can fight they can get into a tug of war over objects with you know the right and left hand.
>> You know one one subject was embracing his wife while the other sub while the other with with one hand and trying to strangle her with another. Uh in any case, yeah, I think uh the sense that there's nothing lost at the level of consciousness really if you lose the sense of self except you lose the sense of self. And that that should give you some indication that it is a it is itself an object of consciousness. It is a it is an appearance of some kind. Otherwise, you could never feel that it could change or be lost.
Yeah, that's uh Roger, when you set out your your stall, you sort of gave your view, but also laid your own trap and said, "Here's my position, but here's the problem with my position." Have you got any uh intuitions on how it might be solved? It seems like more of a problem in terms of the self for your view than it does for for Sam's. I guess the question as you raised it was not just the question of consciousness but why one identifies the consciousness as a continuous thing which goes from early one's early childhood and remains the same thing in a certain sense until death which is the sort of a rational sort of view or is there a sense in which it starts all over again each time you wake up or whatever it is have a start having a dream or something I suppose And to identify it with the earlier ones is is a feature of memory.
>> Now is it only memory? I suppose that's your question. Or is there in sense some entity which continues right through >> and then if someone under goes one of these split brain poor poor person operations to what happens to that train of experience? Do they I don't know the I mean I'm just it's a long-winded saying don't know I think
>> but Sophie you think memor is important here John Lock's example of the maybe he's got the first uh body swap tale got lots in in Hollywood now but the cobbler and the prince is locked. So, the cobbler wakes up in the prince's body. The prince wakes up in the cobbler's body. And it's because they have the same memories and the stream of consciousness that Roger's talking about that Loach thinks they're the same person despite having a completely different physical vessel which they occupy. Would you would you see yourself in part of that tradition that Loach was defending?
>> I mean, yes. In that if you had a brain transplant, you would it would be a body swap. It would be your brain is you. That's the sort of where we're fairly confident you can have a heart transplant and you're not a different person. Um there are some really interesting points around memory. I was talking to Tom Manley my partner from Cambridge University and he's um we were talking about Clive Wearing earlier who is somebody who had a really horrible case of herpes and keilitis which is very very destructive of neural tissue. Different kinds of brain damage causes different kinds of damage. You intensity of damage and herpes really does it just destroys brain tissue. Do not catch it. Um and he how don't you catch it?
>> Well, unfortunately most of us have got herpes. It's g cold sor. So we're we're kind of um
>> and it's he's left and he's still alive. He was a musician. He worked at the BBC and he is left densely densely amnestic. He cannot form new memories. He has barely any access to old memories to the extent to which his conscious awareness is that he is continuously just waking up from a coma. Every other person with amnesia, you can give them a diary and they can write things down in their diary and they will make some use of that. He comes to across his diary and goes, "Someone's been writing in this." Crosses it out and then writes in, "I'm awake for the first time." Few seconds pass, he'll go, "Someone's been writing in my diary." Crosses it out. So he has it's desperate. It's horrible horrible situation. The weird thing is he knows who he is.
>> He knows he he knows his name. He knows his wife. He can learn procedural things like where cups go in a cupboard. The sort of you know sensory motor stuff you don't need to have a a more detailed analysis maybe to learn maybe resting on different brain systems that he and he when he engages with music he is completely totally engaged. He can bring he can conduct music without flaw knows what he's doing. Outside of those few things, he really is absolutely all at sea except he knows himself.
>> So there is some interesting kind of maybe that's what you're seeing of the self when you've taken away all possibility of memory helping you is a sense of who you are but nothing else until other things like your wife turning up or someone plays music that gives you something to hold on to. So, so memory isn't necessary for for being a self.
>> It's not maybe not necessary for being a self, but it maybe is necessary for being able to re situate that self into something that's meaningful and which calms you because he also has desperate problems with emotion regulation. Terri. He's very frightened and upset by what's happened. And your memories help you do that. If I go to sleep and I wake up the next day and everything about me is familiar, then memory is helping me not panic. If I woke up somewhere new and I didn't know where I was, I would be frightened. So memory is really important in helping us understand and that's the world around us. And of course, it's really help that's really important for being able to just regulate our moods within that.
>> Well, let me push you on this and get some more of your thoughts on it. You gave the example earlier of, you know, you're a different person when you speak to your mother than when you do to the police. And that seems
>> I'm not always talking to the police. I'm just an example. Just an example. And the the thought there is right we have different we all know we have different aspects of our personality but we still think it's the same me the same entity which was there 10 years ago 10 minutes ago 10 seconds ago it's the same me throughout time there so I wonder what you think more particularly about whether or not we could have multiple of those entities which are me throughout time in one brain. So for example, you get people with uh like schizophrenia who feel like they've got multiple inner voices in their heads. People with cot syndrome who feel as if they're dead or they're having the thoughts of someone who's passed away and they don't feel like those thoughts are their thoughts but someone who's deceased like are those
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