god i love hearing from experts like this that do not speak in exaggerations, are extremely clear, and admit when they are unsure of something or if other competing theories exist
Same. It tells me that they're probably more or less right and those other theories are probably more or less wrong. If you understand something, explain it very well, but still reject it because of better alternatives that tells me you're smart and considerate. Unfortunately, this is a very rare talent among religious folks.
The thing I appreciate about you is that I, in large part, feel represented by you. So when you invite these great guests, it’s like I get a chance to watch them interact with my questions and ideas.
@@annikinstarkiller600 not everyone can support content creators on patreon, and that's okay. When I was in undergrad I made less than 20k a year in the US. I made less than 35k a year in grad school too. No way did I have the disposable income necessary to support content creators then.
Dr. Anil Seth certainly is a very intelligent, insightful, and productive individual. However, I fear the last point of the conversation went astray. Just because it took so long to us humans to evolve muscles the way they are today, does not mean we could not replicate the effects and functions of muscles with silicon and metal. I believe AI has a very good opportunity of being allowed quaila-experiences and even surpass humanity in terms of “consciousness level” as it already has in information processing speed.
@@letsomethingshine I'm of the view that if we take our bodies and our conscious experience to all be purely physical things, then it stands to reason that given enough time we should be able to replicate those things exactly using different materials. If people pose some barrier for why we will only ever have soft AI, you'd need to account for what this barrier is.
@@letsomethingshine I agree with you completely. I'd argue that currently the only thing holding AI back is the architecture it is built on. When people are critical of the ability of current AI, it's important to remember that current AI is built on general use computer architecture, which causes it to be exponentially less efficient than the human brain (it uses an enormous amount of power to maintain it's neural networks). And because of this the neural networks are entirely implemented in code. Currently there are companies working on architectures specifically geared towards AI neural networks, as well as companies working on bringing back analog computing in the form of analog microchips. As of right now the limitations of existing hardware, which again is general use and not even remotely optimized for AI, we can't get much further than we currently are. The second we create new architecture to optimize AI, we are going to see a boom that no one is ready for. And when AI does reach a level of consciousness on par with our own, we likely won't even realize it, and no doubt people will try to fight back against the idea with the same shallow arguments that "machines can't become conscious".
There is something alluring in a well made logical disections of modes of thinking. Like a podcast about the body made by the members of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp ;)
Strong atheist here. Dr. Anil Seth started so well explaining what consciousness is and why it’s so bizarre. Then I got REALLY frustrated when he made that so common, but so obviously misguided comparison with life: "oh, we also thought life had to be immaterial, elan vital, etc." As if it wasn’t FULLY OBVIOUS that the only reason we thought that, was precisely because of consciousness. The intuition behind elan vital is THE EXACT SAME INTUITION behind the seemingly immateriality of consciousness. There’s no separated “life intuition” that got “solved” by a materialistic explanation - rather, the elan vital intuition (pretty much an intuition about anima, spirit, that is, the consciousness whose intentionality animates the body; the biblical “breath of life”) got put aside and recast as just the consciousness problem. Edit: that said, all that follows is pretty awesome!
I studied neuroscience at Sussex and unfortunately didn't get taught by Anil Seth (I focused more on cell signalling, disease, anatomy etc.) but my friends who had him said his lectures were fascinating and were always excited for his classes. Feel like I missed an opportunity so this podcast is greatly appreciated.
maybe you can throw light (!) on a question that's bugged me, signals (colour, taste, smell) get sent to the brain by ionising chemicals (chlorine, potassium, sodium i believe) which makes for an electrical signal, but how does the actual data, the colour information, what form does that take? with a computer it would be binary data, but presumably the brain uses signal strength? wavelength? amplitude? i've asked this many times but never got an answer....??
@@HarryNicNicholas You’re testing my memory! Been a long time since I did senses and vision was the most complex/unique for me. I’m far from an expert (plus I think visual processing is far from fully understood anyway) so forgive any potential errors or oversimplicity. There are many competing theories in exactly how this is done, but I believe the following is a somewhat accurate representation. The short version: the retina has a corresponding ‘map’ in the visual cortex, where each cortex cell is activated by its respective photoreceptor. The colour wavelengths are differentiated as they activate multiple photoreceptors forming a specific pattern of activation, and this information is transmitted to the visual cortex via electrical impulses, corresponding to the spatial arrangement of light on the retina. This is how the brain interprets different wavelengths of light. Long version: Multiple cones in the retina (the photoreceptors that detect colour) are activated by different wavelengths of light, and it’s that relative activation that creates a topographic impression of the light (individual cones don’t actually detect colour, it’s dependent on which ones are activated relative to one another to generate that information). Cone activation ultimately generates an electrical charge (vision is slightly different from other sense receptors in the way it does this, but not super relevant) and the electrical charge (via some processing along the way) makes its way to the visual cortex in the back of the brain, where it activates its corresponding neuron in a topographic map of the cortex. Think of it like keys on a piano - if you want to create an emotional sound, you wouldn’t play one note, you’d play a chord (comprised of multiple notes). An individual key can’t express sadness for instance, but multiple played together can. Similarly, colour information can’t be processed unless multiple cones are activated and the way the activation of cones is mapped across the retina reflects the wavelength of light (red has the longest wavelength, and so will activate more cones in a different relative pattern than violet, for instance). Very simplistically, each cone has its own neural ‘pathway’ to the visual cortex, the same way each piano key activates a specific hammer that strikes a specific string. So while it isn’t the keys themselves that create the sound, they interpret the input (the shape of the hand pressing on them) and their activation of a specific combination of keys produces a corresponding 'mapped' reaction inside the piano that ‘interprets’ the input to produce the specific sound that can only be produced by that specific input. Replace the shape of the hand with wavelengths of light, the hammer with an electrical impulse, and the piano strings with neurons in the visual cortex and it’s a roughly comparable analogy to how the brain interprets colour.
@@MichaelLeightonsKarlyPilkboys sorry, i'm not being clear, i understand the mechanics of vision, it's how the actual DATA gets moved around, like i say in a computer it's an electrical signal in the form of binary, in the brain it's an electrical signal in the form of _____________ fill in the blank... see my other comment here about objects and light having no instrinsic colour.
@@HarryNicNicholas Oh I see, do you mean in terms of how the action potential works? In a sense it's binary as there is either an action potential or there isn't. Sodium and potassium move down their electrochemical gradient across the cell membrane to depolarize the cell (although it's hyperpolarization in photoreceptors) to trigger an action potential, and it's essentially an 'on' signal or no signal. In that sense the data is communicated in a binary fashion, rather than through strength of signal (a cell is either depolarized/hyperpolarized or it's not)
Psychedelics have a great potential. The first time I tried them they saved me from committing suicide. They also greatly improved my depression and social anxiety, and made me more conscious, and aware, of what’s going on both within and around me on a daily basis.
glad you made it, but i took a fair amount of LSD, speed and dope in my teens (i'm an artist) and i never hallucinated anything that didn't have some basis in reality - like i never thought i could fly - i hoped it might improve my art but i was actually worse on drugs. i have friends who've been doing drugs for 50 years and i have as much, if not more, fun with them sober as they seem to....
Maybe you projected it to save you from harming yourself. Maybe taking it was your last throw of the dice. It's hope that saved you. Never give up on hope, used as a hammer and instrument with which one makes oneself a new pair of wings.
Psychedelics have a bad name amongst some, but have been proven to be clinically useful in carefully controlled settings, with follow up talking exploration a week or so and a month or so later. It can jolt the brain out of an unhelpful rut.
@user-ud5vh3ov1kset and setting. Practice harm reduction techniques. Get a test kit to make sure you have what you think you have. Subjectively speaking here, be mindful and be with people you feel safe with; trippin with strangers can go a multitude of ways.
This was one of my favourite guests so far. Thank you for a wonderful episode. Also I can only recommend taking part in the Perception Census. Learn about yourself AND help science, what could be cooler?
For a sound engineer by profession, the green needle/brainstorm illusion seems to me the case of shifting focus between so-called overtones, undertones, while being led by dominant frequencies. Possibly a related phenomena is the Shepard tone, if anyone's familiar with it. Within a single sound, you have an entire spectrum of frequencies present. Some dominant, some quieter. If a sound contains frequencies all playing "the same amount", it's starts to sound like a random (white) noise. If you play a same note on two different instruments, you can recognize their different timbres. How? The dominant frequency (the note being played) is the same for both after all. It's (mostly) the overtones and undertones (frequencies below and above the dominant, which play more quietly) that make it so you can differentiate between a violin or a piano. My thinking is, in the illusion, dominant frequencies contributing to both words are strongly represented. They compete for the dominant frequency positions. They're "sticking out" with their higher amplitudes. What does the heavy lifting, I think, are the overtones and undertones. There you'll find most or the information contributing to the words. Notice how "brainstorm" sounds darker, lower pitched, where as "green needle" is whistling high up. Most of the word brainstorm's is at the bottom of the spectrum, needle the opposite. And our brain is, at one given time, either focusing mostly at the bottom, or mostly at the top. In a same way you shift focus on a bass guitar part in a song one second, and then shift focus on a high pitch flute solo later. Of course frequency content alone doesn't "create words". There's a coincidental alignment of information in the time axis as well. This is due to the sound content shape or "envelope", the rate of energy change at a given frequency. This makes transients, the beginning of words, of syllables, for how long they sustain and how quickly they fade out.
Hey Alex, this was an excellent episode, and I listened to it during work. Not sure how much you read your comments but you've said that you've been struggling with mental health issues lately. I'm not sure how far back these episodes are recorded but I hope you are doing well.
LLMs already have sensory input data. It's limited, but it's there. It's the text or voice interface that we use to interact with it. It understands that sensory input and responds to it.
The conclusion I draw from this great talk: Throughout history we tend to think of ourselves as our own creations. Think of Decartes and the mechanistic conception of living organisms.
1:16:22 When you have a bad trip there’s tons of things you can do, environmentally(like changing where you are, or moving to a location you prefer/is calmer) you can do something that you find fun , like drawing, taking a walk, dancing, ect And to the talking point specifically yah you can (and I have) cuz like you mentioned its often based on your idea of what the moment will bring that it reflects So anything that can change those ideas of the moment/self can change the type and sometimes focus of your trip The reflections are done by the unconscious, the observation and actions being done/emotions felt are done by the conscious, so if you find why your sad or whatever and change that belief the trip flips
42:00 when it was first popular I only saw the dress in white and gold, but after a bit of working on it (I have no idea how I did it) I was able to just switch between the two. And now when you showed it I was able to switch back and forth between the two color schemes
This is fascinating to look at through a philosophical and scientific way. I remember very clearly, when my father was teaching me art as a kid (He has his degree in art) He always told me, "Paint what you see, not what you think you see." And I was able to look at a leaf, and a leaf is green, but it's not really. It's a huge variety of reds, blues, yellows, whites, greys in such a complex detail, that it just seemed impossible to me to actually be able to achieve it. It blows my mind, the level of understanding and talent that artists have.
i've been in graphics since the seventies and my advice is always "just make marks" get what's inside out, it doesn't matter if it's not photographic, art is about imagination, not realism.
@HarryNicholas Depends on the style. My favorite 'classic' artists are like Van Gogh, I love impressionist. But, people who are able to recreate 3d images on paper and make it so you can't really tell the real object from the fake, it's still art. And a style of art that blows my mind, even if I don't find it personally as enrapturing as impressionistic art.
1:36:39 The misconception is that the Turing test is a test of consciousness. It's not, it's a test if mechanisms can fool us into thinking the other is a person. Consciousness-mimicry is an ethical question in the sense that we have do confront a discrepancy of our feelings and moral feelings with a less tangible reality.
1:20:26 I completely agree here. I used psychedelics a lot when I was young (and still do, though mostly just microdosing and not really intense trips anymore) and it's so beautiful and so hard to grasp with words at the same time. It's a magical feeling to have and unless you've expierenced it you really could never understand to what extent it can change your perception of the world. Psychedelics took me from a dark place (admittedly) and helped me see rhe light in the world, I wish I could thank them because it truly did help me. I was an addict for a long time, depressed and other issues; and that's all I knew. These helped me open my mind up and I think he best way I can describe how they affect me is they "make me feel like a kid again" as in, it makes me want to color and run and dance and play and just be happy, it brings back that old childlike instinct and enjoyment for a while, and I think it truly can be very helpful for people who have seen a lot. I hope one day we have better research and doctors that can use these psychedelic tools more frequently, rather than these addiction rattled pill bottles we have to take every day.
Psilocybin became legal in Australia to be prescribed to mental health patients with certain conditions (like depression), by a psychologist, in February this year 😊 But I think it's only allowed to be used if the majority of all other medications haven't worked. Still, it's a start.
@CassandraEvergreen good luck! I'd also look into ketamine treatments. While they are expensive, I personally find them to be way more helpful depression and anxiety. One session and was good all year
A very interesting chat. I wanted to write about consciousness and AI, when you both touched on my thoughts right at the end (starting at about 37 minutes). I would, or could add to it, but I expect you'll go more in depth into it sometime. Thanks for the work. And thank the internet for making these things more or less free.
I didn't have hope from healing from 3 decades of PTSD until a therapist introduced me to psychedelics. One time I was at CSI Con and I told Richard Dawkins about how you can see 4D space inside your head with psychedelics. I asked, if we evolved to see in 3D, how is it possible to see in 4D, and he said "That's a really good question, I'll have to think about that."
Every conversation I see about objective vs. subjective reality is only about the most basic level of “is there a table there? Is your green the same as my green?” The more important and more frustrating conversation needed is for events and social perception, e.g., eyewitness testimony, or moments where there’s not just two people at a table but two people walking down a busy sidewalk whose sensory fields are crowded and the ability to capture the totality is limited. THEN, the differences become more pronounced and we learn the subjective experience is not at all a reliable record of the truth.
Consciousness doesn't seem mysterious to me. My intuition is that we like to think we're "special" and therefore resistant to materialist reduction, but that consciousness is really just a consistent feedback loop between whatever parts of the brain have been activated. Hence different "states" of consciousness. I personally think that Alex's "where is a triangle if you cut open the brain" is a quite silly question. In a computer, the properties of a triangle would be stored in binary code, embedded in the tiny chip components, and if you cut open the computer saying, "oh this must be magic because I don't see a triangle" is obviously silly. All one has to know about the brain is that it can store information by electical/chemical means, and that the information is encoded and stored in one part of the brain and interpreted by another. I don't understand why this "where is the triangle" point keeps. getting. brought. up.
But none of that explains the subjective experience of "being aware" or that it "is like something" to be conscious. There is a feedback loop between my furnace, a thermostat in my house, and the air temperature in the house. None of that implies that "it is subjectively like something" to be the heating system in my house. Furthermore, nothing is fundamentally changed by adding complexity to the system-- even adding an AI component to the system, even if it might be able to produce speech. None of that makes it "like something to be me, the heating system" --even if it is capable of making a statement to the contrary. It has sensors; it has a decision-making apparatus, it takes actions, but there is no reason to suppose that it has consciousness as a system. Ditto for any robot, no matter how complex, smart, or flexible it may be in its potential action modes. It's still just a bunch of junk, doing junk-- even if it has stored the contents of a dictionary and the rules of grammar and can produce speech appropriate to any given situation via feedback loops. Just how do feedback loops equal subjective conscious experience?
@@HarryNicNicholas Talking about stuff and doing stuff are not mutually exclusive activities. Do you understand the concept of a podcast? Additionally, is talking about stuff not an activity?
I think that it is true that we can't experience the outside world 100% like it objectively is, but I think we aren't so far off that it doesn't make a huge difference and is therefore neglectable.
The world is neither just outside nor just inside... it's actually far different from any way we currently think about things normally. These kinds of conversations are definitely heading in the right direction and I love it. Anil Seth is a great guest. I'm happy for you Alex and that these podcasts are becoming so successful.
I was following Lisa Feldman's work on the internet just recently and one of the comments suggested everyone to look up Anil Seth, if there is trouble understanding the brain prediction theory. I quickly searched to see if there is any good interview of him and vola, the Cosmic Skeptic himself has got me covered. What makes it even more funny is that I actually got notified of your upload, but ignored it as I didn't know this dude at the time. Life is full of surprises.
This was amazing not only am i artist that loves illusion i have epilepsy and for my chosen degree work i went deep into , vibrations, illusions, biology and neurology . i ended up doing my paper on How vibration influences human vibration in relation to visual arts. I came across alot of great research and some topics mensioned in this discussion. It is hard trying to explain consciousness and perception and i have a view that many do not get as i have experienced many of these things physically and through research . Also experienced the feeling of pure hapiness he got from the drug just before i had a seizure before. I was the perfect subject for learning more but i didnt want to be a lab rat so i learnt and researched myself. I attempted to use my MRI scan and put it through a 3d printer to get a model of my own brain. The printer was overbooked but so thankful another person did it a year later in another university not connected but now this technology is used and can change peoples lives .I was told many times why study art when i should study neurology as i was pasionate but i wanted to do both. I was naturally talented and see art as expression hense my artist name lol. Thnx guys this cheered my day up.
What type of epilepsy do you have, if you don't mind? And if they found a cure, like a real cure for it, not just drugs to manage the symptoms, would you take it? I'm asking because I've come across people suffering from epilepsy, sometimes quite a severe form of it, but at the same time it's become part of them...their identity I guess, that they've answered; no, they wouldn't take the cure. Must mention those were very rare cases, however frequent enough to at least become noticeable. Another caveat is, this was my experience so it is anecdotal.
@@alexlarsen6413 thank you for your comment. You are right there is no cure . My little brother had the most severe type of childhood epilepsy (think it begins with an L) he was not supposed to live past 9 and had more than 10 seizures in one day. Spent my childhood watching him in hospitals. He is now 32 and grown out of it. I was diagnosed when 19 I grew into it , luckily wasn't same type mine is rare as I have few different types of seizures and even professionals don't know really depends on individual case. Long story short i found out I was born with a dint in my head when I was born and due to this I am almost blind in one eye and always had migraines. I never responded to meds either . The answer to your question is , although it is difficult to live in this world with the disabilities not to mention the stress , I am really lucky I only have a couple a month and I have an amazing son . I wouldn't change my experience and understanding as the way my brain works is part of who I am if that makes sense. The way I think and do things is my identity in a sense I am an artist because I have perspectives to show people it makes me unique I wouldn't take the cure I av asked myself this question few times in past 10 years. It's like the butterfly effect concept. also feel the same when I lost my mother at 13 that moment was important to direct my life in so many decisions I made next . It's hard to imagine life without when you just live with what your given. Thank you for your message really appreciate your comment it made me think . I focus on quality of life ATM there are many pros and cons to everything but you learn to live with what you have. I have healthier lifestyle as I have no choice e.g drink water, sleep exercise but the fact I have a guideline is actually helpful . The thing that throws me off the most is wondering if people would treat you differently if you didn't have epilepsy . Also interesting I look as though I workout and live extremely healthy so it's hard for people to get I have epilepsy as they don't see my seizures or mental problems. There is so much stigma with epilepsy I am not photosensitive but sun can trigger me but ppl don't really know much about it. Plus don't like to say sometimes . Some strangers don't know anything so I appreciate that I am healthy enough to advocate and help others who suffered a lot like my lil bro who had to learn to walk n talk again . So I must remain humble everyone has struggles. I can hope I will grow out of it but not sure. They still think me n my bros are connected so either it's, genetic connection, I have migralepsy as my migraines always been bad and triggered into seizures while growing or it's not epileptic and my brain neurons are messed up from trauma of abuse or losing a parent young. My body seizures when it's protecting itself subconsciously which is why sum can be triggered by PTSD it's a form of self defence. I saw this in research just a memory can do this but hard to prove so here I am 15 years later and they refuse to aknowledge that being drugged up doesn't work for everyone . I constantly have to show I am taking precautions as I live more natural but it's worth it. Every scan n test comes back clear so far they can't pick up what's happening unless I have a seizure during and then I'd be moving to much hense how important 3d printing is to the neurology field. If they don't know I don't am just an interesting case to them . All I can do is try live as best I can. I have tried over 25 different meds n treatments I have accepted some just have epilepsy for different reasons and it isn't a burden always. I wouldn't change me maybe my answer would be different if I was severe like my brothers but I am fortunate tbh. Also in a sense I think my epilepsy is more of a mechanism keeping my body alive but short circuits like electrics when it's going through too much . Hope this message answers your question. Sorry for long winded message . Hope you have a blessed day .p.s as much as antidotal is not evidence alone which frustrated me in my degree in most cases it is important to collect data from those who have experience so your view is way more valuable than you think just meeting someone who lives with similar things can change others lives so I appreciate your opinion its totally validated and needed in health
Brilliant podcast. I’ve been a fan of Alex for a few years. My worldview is completely different. I’m Christian and an MA theology student and theologically it takes my mind to passages like Mark 11:24 where belief and expectation play a huge role in prayer. Furthermore, other passages that speak of not doubting are scattered everywhere and hold a real sense of expectancy. Great convo. This is just great food for thought. Thanks dude. Gonna be chewing on this one for a while
@@HarryNicNicholas we just don’t know for sure. There’s an early tradition that the gospel was attributed to him. This is slight evidence at the most. It does give food for thought however. But we just don’t know. That’s my perspective.
@@HarryNicNicholas but one thing I will comment on. It’s easy to say that we don’t have a clear witness but we have many witnesses and some within a very comfortable window gap. And something convinced these guys that it was important enough to write about. I’m not making any claims but that has to be considered
I'm one of those people who had the colors of the dress flipped during few days of looking at it. Originally I saw it as white/gold and I my perception of it was really strong since I actually got mad at people because I thought they were trolling me. Later I learned more about the dressgate and the colors kinda blurred out/faded and before I knew it - It really was blue and black and now I can't go back. I'm first to admit - that was a weird experience to have.
Damn, that whole debate was ending friendships. 😂 I remember too well, and I too was on the "white and gold" side.. except my visual perception never changed even after finding out its actual color.
It just depends on the brightness of the display you are watching on. The colors are actually blue and dark brown based on the color data in the image file.
The brainstorm toy pulses color 3 times to the rythym of the syllables in "green needle" maybe that visual cue reinforces the perception of those words when you expect them
"Being You" is one of my favorite recent books, super excited to see this on my feed!!! I hope you ask his opinion on the Hameroff-Penrose Orch OR stuff, I don't recall that in the book.
@@woodygilson3465 Oh I found it, actually stunned I didn't hear about this before, thanks. I feel it's worth noting, its not over for Orch OR, just specific details. Here's a direct quote: "Actually, the real work is just at the beginning." she says. In fact, Penrose's original collapse model, unlike Diósi's, did not predict spontaneous radiation, so has not been ruled out. The new paper also briefly discusses how a gravity-related collapse model might realistically be modified. "Such a revised model, which we are working on within the FQXi financed project, could leave the door open for Orch OR theory"
Just the fact that we can visualize ourselves doing something specific on a specific date in very specific ways is crazy. We are definitly some kind of prediction machines.
I was under the impression that we have good reason to believe that more bottom up sensory data was being factored into our model of reality, when we are on psychedelics. This concept perfectly maps onto my personal experiences, insofar as when I look at a sunset on acid (early trip, or post peak, so not when having a full blown “what/where/who am I?”, moment) I can see the green, I can see much more of the reality of the scene, the kind of reality that artists need to include in order to create a convincing depiction. When I’m sober, using what Dr. Seth refers to as the controlled hallucination, it’s just… “orangey” with some read and purples perhaps, but this sober representation of the sunset feels very much like a optimal, practical depiction, rather than a more lossless, and “accurate” depiction of the actual wavelengths. I believe this also applies to many of our other sensory experiences when on acid. Now obviously your top down processing is also running in overdrive when on acid, but I feel this accounts for the pink elephants and bioluminescent jellyfish Angels, as opposed to things like the richer pallet of colours and more pronounced distinctions between light and shadow.
Here's another illusion that shows something similar: If you have an animation of tv noise, with enough patterns in it, if you repeatedly tell yourself a shape such as "triangle" you'll see that you begin perceiving a triangle in the animation. The lesson learned from this experience is that our brains comprehend words without our permission, therefore we should be mindful of what we say to eachother.
I can switch between blue/black and white/gold on the dress. Cover up the bottom of the image, and the white/gold becomes a plausible interpretation, then slowly reveal the bottom and let that perception remain. Do the opposite for blue/black where covering the top allows you to interpret the bottom as blue/black. Do it a few times and you can flip between them at will. But no matter how hard I try, I absolutely *cannot* hear "green needle". Even with the pitch shifting that people do, my brain just hears brainstorm at the original pitch. I also have a video on my channel about the differences between deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning!
1:06:10 "What is this self? Where is it"? Again, theoretically speaking, the self is the thought to which the word "I" is referring when my self asserts... I am conscious.
I think the last point of the conversation went astray. Just because it took so long to us humans to evolve muscles the way they are today, does not mean we could not replicate the effects and functions of muscles with silicon and metal. I believe AI has a very good opportunity of being allowed quaila-experiences and even surpass humanity in terms of “consciousness level” as it already has in information processing.
We can replicate the movements of muscles with silicon and metal but those machines don't have a pulse. They don't have a pulse because how they produce movement is very different from how a muscle produces movement. The properties of any system depends on it's material components. Just because a system does one thing similar to another system doesn't mean that all the other properties of the two systems are the same. If semiconductors could have experiences they would probably be very different from the experiences we have. They might even be so different that they aren't even experiences.
Well the point was not that we can't develop artificial muscles, but that the training time would be too long. The current models are trained for a year at "the speed of electricity" on pre recorded data. But to learn in the real world the model must experience the world with its sensors, take an action like taking a step with its artificial muscels, and see the results of this action. This online learning can't be done that fast and the human brain comes "pretrained" with this kind of training from millions of years of evolution.
We are WAY far away from AI. It cannot be reproduced with digital systems and cpus. It requires quantum computation, so we won’t have AGI until quantum computers. Each neuron is a quantum computer.
@@Aweal7 bro its alwaya a trip for me because i KNOW its a lighting thing i KNOW why its happening i KNOW what color it should be and veery time my brain just chooses whcihever one it feels like that day 🤣🤣
Just beginning but ill bet this isnt answered (hope to be proven wrong); i dont see why "it feels something to see the color red=there must be more going on than simply "a state your brain is in". What's the basis for this assertion i keep hearing?
I completely agree, the color red seems to just be a certain pattern of neurons firing in a way specific to whatever person is experiencing it, red doesn't exist beyond that and I don't see why Alex uses this example to mean much
2:53 theres no such thing as a "dreamless sleep" you always dream, but sometimes you don't remember any of them. It feels like you wake up from no dreams the same way blackouts you wake up with no memory
Wrong. You have confused the scientific findings of the fact that we typically dream in every sleep episode with the idea that we're always dreaming during those episodes. Research has shown that dreaming is correlated with certain physical symptoms, like rapid eye motion, and that these symptoms occur only during parts of the sleep cycle. There is no evidence whatever that the non-symptom portions of the cycle entail dreaming. Furthermore, we can have sleep episodes in which we go immediately into deep phase sleep, in which there are no dreams. Not only do the subjects not report dreams when they wake up normally from such episodes, but they do not report dreams when they are awakened during the middle of cycle. If you are awakened during a dream, you will remember that you were just dreaming. Even if you can't remember the dream in detail, you will remember vague impressions of it. What I'm saying here is supported by electromagnetic studies of the brain during sleep. Dreams are accompanied by characteristic electrical wave patterns. Not all phases of sleep show these patterns. Sleep is a cyclical phenomenon. Some parts of the cycle do not include dreams. And some episodes of sleep do not include dreams at all, although the typical sleep episode does include periods of dreaming. Severe physical exhaustion tends to lead to sleep episodes in which there is a lesser prevalence of dreams than in more typical sleep episodes. The fact that we typically forget most of our dreams is not an indication that we're always dreaming during sleep but just forget the dreams.
I distinctly recall a signal processing professor in a college class 20 or so years ago explaining that a picture can turn out dark even though there seemed to be plenty of light when you took it because the camera actually captures the true light levels while your brain is fiddling with the dials to improve your vision in the poor light conditions.
I still only ever hear Green Needle no matter how hard I try to hear Brain Storm. I’m convinced that this is a global gaslighting conspiracy and I’m the only one not in on the joke.
@@johnpeace1149 brain storm has two syllables and there are clearly 3 in the audio I have tried my hardest to hear only brain or storm and I hear neither.
I literally just have to say the word in my head just before it plays and I will 100% of the time hear the word I’m expecting. It’s so strange because it sounds like the words should have different syllables and lengths.
Great conversation! It would be very nice to see Bernardo Kastrup on this podcast, he has interesting views on consciousness and solid arguments to back it up
when i first saw the dress picture, i saw it as white and gold. then i saw the articles talking about the phenomenon showing that the dress is actually blue and black. for a while, i was able to see both, but now i can ONLY see it blue and black.
The dress is blue and dark brown. I sampled the color values from the image back when this meme was first spreading. People that see white and gold have their brightness settings turned up too high. It’s a function if your device’s display settings, not some sort of brain strangeness.
Sorry, dude this experiment has been done in face to face, real life situations in which the physical medium has been colored paper with no electronics involved. Try not to post BS straight out of your head. You had no way on earth of knowing whose brightness settings were turned up too high in the first place. You're not really a parsimonious thinker, are you?
@@donnievance1942 you are really struggling, aren't you? You think brightness settings matter? The color detail is in the file itself. Your brightness settings have no effect, and neither does some supposed experiment with physical paper. Again, the color data is in the image itself that was being shared, so the exact color has been known the whole time. Try not to speak so confidently when you literally have no idea of the subject matter.
Objects perceived as 'orange' often comprise a wide range of non-orange colours (red, yellow, a variety of browns, even white and black) while true/solid orange is quite narrowly defined. I have analyzed photos of oranges and orange cloth where only a small minority of pixels were actually orange. And yet combining them makes a whole that is clearly 'orange'. Although I am not an artist myself, I believe artists routinely 'see colours for what they are'. ETA: In this way, in the original photo of 'The Dress' it's shades of blue and shades of brown, and not either 'blue and black' or 'white and gold'.
Psychedelics are great, one time I was trippin on too much acid and I was staring at a fire pit and the fire pit turned into a mini world with little people and buildings, that was 2 years ago and it's such an experience to remember. would love to try out the psilocybin mushrooms next, just don't know where to get them, so hard to come by
@cosmicskeptic About the "prediction of the microphone". Not exactly, but in a sense, partially yes. When you buy a new pair of shoes or a car or when you are looking to buy one and have researched about them, have you ever realized that "many" people use them or they are "everywhere"? That's your mind "predicting" you will find THAT SPECIFIC pair of shoes or car (color, shape, size, etc.) It's not really a prediction, but an expectation that your pattern matching abilities are imposing a FILTER onto your perceptual inputs. Some other people call this EXPERIENCE "to manifest", not really causing the world to change, but really causing a state of mind with focused alertness to catch the first opportunity for "the desired thing or event". This capacity was evolved for hunting prey. Total focus on a set of patterns that the prey fits in. This capacity is an energy saving strategy of the brain and computers don't need it, UNLESS maximum speed becomes essential, like in war counter-missile drones, or maybe energy is limited in exploration robots.
I remember reading a theory that monet had cataracts which affected his vision and color perception. So he wasn't painting his 'feelings' or impression of the scene, but he was painting what he actually saw, it's just that his vision was messed up!
The problem with AI, and the way computers are thought about is infected by the Cartesian duality, that mind/computations are separate from material. The brain isn't just in the head, it's the spine, the rest of the nervous system (including the senses, especially proprioception and skin as a close cousin of the nerves) and body. It involves systems or ecological thinking rather than reductionist approaches.
I don't think Anil Seth disagrees with you, but to further elaborate on your position, do you believe if it was the case that we constructed a system that perfectly mirrored 1:1 the inputs and outputs of the entire nervous system (and its integration with other systems) we would produce a conscious subject?
Very Interesting, I did modules on sensory systems and perception as part of my degree. Some of what is described here we were told is termed Colour Constancy and light constancy which was developed (selected) to detect objects and colours in different light conditions including things like dusk etc. If I remember correctly the colour was needed as a means to detect ripeness of food and differentiate possible poisonous berries. From what we were taught the senses and the brain use something like a differential system where it processes cone information from adjacent visual fields and do something equivalent to dividing one by the other and the resulting output would determine the colour perception (eg 1/2 is the same colour as 4/8), this is simplified however unless you program an AI to do similar operations it may have very different perceptions.
I think what can be added here is that coquincidental choas/probability experienced in life that makes me speculate about a higher power is actually probably most likely complex intricut nature or quantum principles which we have learned to adapt with bc we need our environment to exist.
Alao we would have to train ai to interpret sensory data but we will have technology that will be able to measure our sensory data so then we can just make more advanced robots but yes eventually like 50 years from now we maybe have robot people 😂
I had to look up the picture of that dress again. I still see it as white and gold and have a really hard time understanding how it could be blue and black. It's so fascinating that people's perception of it differs so much.
1:11:50 "What are psychedelics doing"? If thoughts are representations maintained in coded form as neural discharge timing patterns and those timing patterns are entirely the consequence of synaptic activity then when a psychedelic changes the behavior of all brain synapses thereby changing the timing patterns that maintain representations then all representations participating in the being conscious process will give being conscious some quite peculiar content, theoretically speaking.
In regards to Nagel and the way philosophers speak about experience, I think people let language wrap them up in circles. We don't experience redness, we experience a red object (accurately or not). Saying we experience redness is like saying we experience experience... which is just a spiraling self-referential chasm. After all, what is redness? It's our experience of red. If we dispense with that, so many or the allegedly impenetrable problems of consciousness go away. The question "what's it like to be a bat?" becomes a request for metaphor as opposed to a request for some actual data.
god i love hearing from experts like this that do not speak in exaggerations, are extremely clear, and admit when they are unsure of something or if other competing theories exist
Same. It tells me that they're probably more or less right and those other theories are probably more or less wrong. If you understand something, explain it very well, but still reject it because of better alternatives that tells me you're smart and considerate. Unfortunately, this is a very rare talent among religious folks.
You should apply for a University course ;)
Spark the blunt boys, This is gunna be a mad one.
K for me
Well both actually….
@@IceValley388 switch to shrooms man it will save your life
@@MrAdamo maybe not! I took shrooms and died…
@@JL4YT and your still here! what an experience that must have been
The thing I appreciate about you is that I, in large part, feel represented by you. So when you invite these great guests, it’s like I get a chance to watch them interact with my questions and ideas.
Hope you're supporting on Patreon too
@@annikinstarkiller600 assuming they have a job other than student :p
Yes exactly! I have so many questions that I haven't even thought of asking and these podcasts really make me think!
@@annikinstarkiller600 not everyone can support content creators on patreon, and that's okay. When I was in undergrad I made less than 20k a year in the US. I made less than 35k a year in grad school too. No way did I have the disposable income necessary to support content creators then.
This might be one of the best episodes to date, how wonderful seeing Alex reach this much notoriety!
Dr. Anil Seth certainly is a very intelligent, insightful, and productive individual. However, I fear the last point of the conversation went astray. Just because it took so long to us humans to evolve muscles the way they are today, does not mean we could not replicate the effects and functions of muscles with silicon and metal. I believe AI has a very good opportunity of being allowed quaila-experiences and even surpass humanity in terms of “consciousness level” as it already has in information processing speed.
@@letsomethingshine I'm of the view that if we take our bodies and our conscious experience to all be purely physical things, then it stands to reason that given enough time we should be able to replicate those things exactly using different materials.
If people pose some barrier for why we will only ever have soft AI, you'd need to account for what this barrier is.
@@letsomethingshine I agree with you completely. I'd argue that currently the only thing holding AI back is the architecture it is built on. When people are critical of the ability of current AI, it's important to remember that current AI is built on general use computer architecture, which causes it to be exponentially less efficient than the human brain (it uses an enormous amount of power to maintain it's neural networks). And because of this the neural networks are entirely implemented in code. Currently there are companies working on architectures specifically geared towards AI neural networks, as well as companies working on bringing back analog computing in the form of analog microchips. As of right now the limitations of existing hardware, which again is general use and not even remotely optimized for AI, we can't get much further than we currently are. The second we create new architecture to optimize AI, we are going to see a boom that no one is ready for. And when AI does reach a level of consciousness on par with our own, we likely won't even realize it, and no doubt people will try to fight back against the idea with the same shallow arguments that "machines can't become conscious".
There is something alluring in a well made logical disections of modes of thinking. Like a podcast about the body made by the members of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp ;)
Strong atheist here. Dr. Anil Seth started so well explaining what consciousness is and why it’s so bizarre.
Then I got REALLY frustrated when he made that so common, but so obviously misguided comparison with life: "oh, we also thought life had to be immaterial, elan vital, etc." As if it wasn’t FULLY OBVIOUS that the only reason we thought that, was precisely because of consciousness. The intuition behind elan vital is THE EXACT SAME INTUITION behind the seemingly immateriality of consciousness. There’s no separated “life intuition” that got “solved” by a materialistic explanation - rather, the elan vital intuition (pretty much an intuition about anima, spirit, that is, the consciousness whose intentionality animates the body; the biblical “breath of life”) got put aside and recast as just the consciousness problem.
Edit: that said, all that follows is pretty awesome!
I studied neuroscience at Sussex and unfortunately didn't get taught by Anil Seth (I focused more on cell signalling, disease, anatomy etc.) but my friends who had him said his lectures were fascinating and were always excited for his classes. Feel like I missed an opportunity so this podcast is greatly appreciated.
maybe you can throw light (!) on a question that's bugged me, signals (colour, taste, smell) get sent to the brain by ionising chemicals (chlorine, potassium, sodium i believe) which makes for an electrical signal, but how does the actual data, the colour information, what form does that take? with a computer it would be binary data, but presumably the brain uses signal strength? wavelength? amplitude? i've asked this many times but never got an answer....??
@@HarryNicNicholas You’re testing my memory! Been a long time since I did senses and vision was the most complex/unique for me. I’m far from an expert (plus I think visual processing is far from fully understood anyway) so forgive any potential errors or oversimplicity. There are many competing theories in exactly how this is done, but I believe the following is a somewhat accurate representation.
The short version:
the retina has a corresponding ‘map’ in the visual cortex, where each cortex cell is activated by its respective photoreceptor. The colour wavelengths are differentiated as they activate multiple photoreceptors forming a specific pattern of activation, and this information is transmitted to the visual cortex via electrical impulses, corresponding to the spatial arrangement of light on the retina. This is how the brain interprets different wavelengths of light.
Long version:
Multiple cones in the retina (the photoreceptors that detect colour) are activated by different wavelengths of light, and it’s that relative activation that creates a topographic impression of the light (individual cones don’t actually detect colour, it’s dependent on which ones are activated relative to one another to generate that information).
Cone activation ultimately generates an electrical charge (vision is slightly different from other sense receptors in the way it does this, but not super relevant) and the electrical charge (via some processing along the way) makes its way to the visual cortex in the back of the brain, where it activates its corresponding neuron in a topographic map of the cortex.
Think of it like keys on a piano - if you want to create an emotional sound, you wouldn’t play one note, you’d play a chord (comprised of multiple notes). An individual key can’t express sadness for instance, but multiple played together can.
Similarly, colour information can’t be processed unless multiple cones are activated and the way the activation of cones is mapped across the retina reflects the wavelength of light (red has the longest wavelength, and so will activate more cones in a different relative pattern than violet, for instance).
Very simplistically, each cone has its own neural ‘pathway’ to the visual cortex, the same way each piano key activates a specific hammer that strikes a specific string. So while it isn’t the keys themselves that create the sound, they interpret the input (the shape of the hand pressing on them) and their activation of a specific combination of keys produces a corresponding 'mapped' reaction inside the piano that ‘interprets’ the input to produce the specific sound that can only be produced by that specific input.
Replace the shape of the hand with wavelengths of light, the hammer with an electrical impulse, and the piano strings with neurons in the visual cortex and it’s a roughly comparable analogy to how the brain interprets colour.
@@MichaelLeightonsKarlyPilkboys sorry, i'm not being clear, i understand the mechanics of vision, it's how the actual DATA gets moved around, like i say in a computer it's an electrical signal in the form of binary, in the brain it's an electrical signal in the form of _____________ fill in the blank... see my other comment here about objects and light having no instrinsic colour.
@@HarryNicNicholas Oh I see, do you mean in terms of how the action potential works? In a sense it's binary as there is either an action potential or there isn't. Sodium and potassium move down their electrochemical gradient across the cell membrane to depolarize the cell (although it's hyperpolarization in photoreceptors) to trigger an action potential, and it's essentially an 'on' signal or no signal. In that sense the data is communicated in a binary fashion, rather than through strength of signal (a cell is either depolarized/hyperpolarized or it's not)
Psychedelics have a great potential. The first time I tried them they saved me from committing suicide. They also greatly improved my depression and social anxiety, and made me more conscious, and aware, of what’s going on both within and around me on a daily basis.
glad you made it, but i took a fair amount of LSD, speed and dope in my teens (i'm an artist) and i never hallucinated anything that didn't have some basis in reality - like i never thought i could fly - i hoped it might improve my art but i was actually worse on drugs. i have friends who've been doing drugs for 50 years and i have as much, if not more, fun with them sober as they seem to....
@@HarryNicNicholas "dope" do you mean heroin?
Maybe you projected it to save you from harming yourself. Maybe taking it was your last throw of the dice. It's hope that saved you. Never give up on hope, used as a hammer and instrument with which one makes oneself a new pair of wings.
Psychedelics have a bad name amongst some, but have been proven to be clinically useful in carefully controlled settings, with follow up talking exploration a week or so and a month or so later. It can jolt the brain out of an unhelpful rut.
@user-ud5vh3ov1kset and setting. Practice harm reduction techniques. Get a test kit to make sure you have what you think you have. Subjectively speaking here, be mindful and be with people you feel safe with; trippin with strangers can go a multitude of ways.
“Thank you so much for being here” after the episode with Roger Penrose makes me smile every time!
This was one of my favourite guests so far. Thank you for a wonderful episode.
Also I can only recommend taking part in the Perception Census. Learn about yourself AND help science, what could be cooler?
For a sound engineer by profession, the green needle/brainstorm illusion seems to me the case of shifting focus between so-called overtones, undertones, while being led by dominant frequencies.
Possibly a related phenomena is the Shepard tone, if anyone's familiar with it.
Within a single sound, you have an entire spectrum of frequencies present. Some dominant, some quieter. If a sound contains frequencies all playing "the same amount", it's starts to sound like a random (white) noise.
If you play a same note on two different instruments, you can recognize their different timbres. How? The dominant frequency (the note being played) is the same for both after all. It's (mostly) the overtones and undertones (frequencies below and above the dominant, which play more quietly) that make it so you can differentiate between a violin or a piano.
My thinking is, in the illusion, dominant frequencies contributing to both words are strongly represented. They compete for the dominant frequency positions. They're "sticking out" with their higher amplitudes.
What does the heavy lifting, I think, are the overtones and undertones. There you'll find most or the information contributing to the words.
Notice how "brainstorm" sounds darker, lower pitched, where as "green needle" is whistling high up. Most of the word brainstorm's is at the bottom of the spectrum, needle the opposite. And our brain is, at one given time, either focusing mostly at the bottom, or mostly at the top. In a same way you shift focus on a bass guitar part in a song one second, and then shift focus on a high pitch flute solo later.
Of course frequency content alone doesn't "create words". There's a coincidental alignment of information in the time axis as well. This is due to the sound content shape or "envelope", the rate of energy change at a given frequency. This makes transients, the beginning of words, of syllables, for how long they sustain and how quickly they fade out.
That audio curiosity was way more impressive to me than most of the visual illusions were.
Hey Alex, this was an excellent episode, and I listened to it during work. Not sure how much you read your comments but you've said that you've been struggling with mental health issues lately. I'm not sure how far back these episodes are recorded but I hope you are doing well.
As a musician and visual artist with synaesthesia this was fascinating. I loved this episode!
I was very pleasantly surprised you managed to snag Anil Seth for this one, I've been a fan of his for a long while now.
I was familiar with Anil Seth's ideas. It was fun to watch Alex interact with these ideas. Excellent episode.
This is probably one of the best episodes of the podcast
LLMs already have sensory input data. It's limited, but it's there. It's the text or voice interface that we use to interact with it. It understands that sensory input and responds to it.
Yess! Being You is one of my favourite books, great conversation lads!
Oh man this is going to be one of those episodes I watch 20 times
I cant believe i just found this. I just finished this joint.
The conclusion I draw from this great talk:
Throughout history we tend to think of ourselves as our own creations. Think of Decartes and the mechanistic conception of living organisms.
A wonderful conversation!
@19:48 “…our minds aren’t just making sh-stuff up”😂
That took me off my chair😹.
Lovely stuff! Very exciting episode.
Finally went with the name change. Nice Alex! Keep up the good work as always.
1:16:22 When you have a bad trip there’s tons of things you can do, environmentally(like changing where you are, or moving to a location you prefer/is calmer) you can do something that you find fun , like drawing, taking a walk, dancing, ect
And to the talking point specifically yah you can (and I have) cuz like you mentioned its often based on your idea of what the moment will bring that it reflects
So anything that can change those ideas of the moment/self can change the type and sometimes focus of your trip
The reflections are done by the unconscious, the observation and actions being done/emotions felt are done by the conscious, so if you find why your sad or whatever and change that belief the trip flips
Stunning! This guy is a genius!
I could’ve listened to that for 8 hours..
Brilliant, really enjoyed this conversation
Awesome, love Anil Seth
42:00 when it was first popular I only saw the dress in white and gold, but after a bit of working on it (I have no idea how I did it) I was able to just switch between the two.
And now when you showed it I was able to switch back and forth between the two color schemes
@16:19 they don't see a cup. They have to learn to see first. Which was discovered in adults that had curable blindness. Seeing is a learned ability
This is fascinating to look at through a philosophical and scientific way. I remember very clearly, when my father was teaching me art as a kid (He has his degree in art) He always told me, "Paint what you see, not what you think you see." And I was able to look at a leaf, and a leaf is green, but it's not really. It's a huge variety of reds, blues, yellows, whites, greys in such a complex detail, that it just seemed impossible to me to actually be able to achieve it. It blows my mind, the level of understanding and talent that artists have.
i've been in graphics since the seventies and my advice is always "just make marks" get what's inside out, it doesn't matter if it's not photographic, art is about imagination, not realism.
@HarryNicholas Depends on the style. My favorite 'classic' artists are like Van Gogh, I love impressionist. But, people who are able to recreate 3d images on paper and make it so you can't really tell the real object from the fake, it's still art. And a style of art that blows my mind, even if I don't find it personally as enrapturing as impressionistic art.
Wow, I like this new channel name and picture🔥!
I read the title, watched the intro, and thought, "Yes, yes, YES!" This is going to be a good episode.
1:36:39 The misconception is that the Turing test is a test of consciousness. It's not, it's a test if mechanisms can fool us into thinking the other is a person.
Consciousness-mimicry is an ethical question in the sense that we have do confront a discrepancy of our feelings and moral feelings with a less tangible reality.
1:20:26 I completely agree here. I used psychedelics a lot when I was young (and still do, though mostly just microdosing and not really intense trips anymore) and it's so beautiful and so hard to grasp with words at the same time. It's a magical feeling to have and unless you've expierenced it you really could never understand to what extent it can change your perception of the world. Psychedelics took me from a dark place (admittedly) and helped me see rhe light in the world, I wish I could thank them because it truly did help me. I was an addict for a long time, depressed and other issues; and that's all I knew. These helped me open my mind up and I think he best way I can describe how they affect me is they "make me feel like a kid again" as in, it makes me want to color and run and dance and play and just be happy, it brings back that old childlike instinct and enjoyment for a while, and I think it truly can be very helpful for people who have seen a lot. I hope one day we have better research and doctors that can use these psychedelic tools more frequently, rather than these addiction rattled pill bottles we have to take every day.
Psilocybin became legal in Australia to be prescribed to mental health patients with certain conditions (like depression), by a psychologist, in February this year 😊 But I think it's only allowed to be used if the majority of all other medications haven't worked. Still, it's a start.
@CassandraEvergreen good luck! I'd also look into ketamine treatments. While they are expensive, I personally find them to be way more helpful depression and anxiety. One session and was good all year
@@whenimmanicimgodly4228 Thanks for the suggestion 🙂
This was exactly what I wanted, thanks!!
You finally changed your channel's name! Congrats!
Gonna miss Cosmic skeptic but alas, it's time for Alex to join the big leagues
A very interesting chat. I wanted to write about consciousness and AI, when you both touched on my thoughts right at the end (starting at about 37 minutes). I would, or could add to it, but I expect you'll go more in depth into it sometime.
Thanks for the work. And thank the internet for making these things more or less free.
Fascinating episode, thanks.
Didn’t expect to see you here!!
18:25 28:55 30:53 37:00 49:03 52:28
16:41 I don't know why but that thought freaks me out for some reason.
I didn't have hope from healing from 3 decades of PTSD until a therapist introduced me to psychedelics.
One time I was at CSI Con and I told Richard Dawkins about how you can see 4D space inside your head with psychedelics. I asked, if we evolved to see in 3D, how is it possible to see in 4D, and he said "That's a really good question, I'll have to think about that."
Are you sure Dawkins wasn't just being polite? 4D vision with psychedelics? 🤨🤔🤨 (I'm sceptical)
Just smoke dmt and you will no longer be skeptical. Perfectly safe, and actually healthy for your psyche.
The best podcast i can recall in the history of podcasts
Thank you for this interview!
Excellent thanks
I researched in a mix of CS and Neurology for a long time, until sickness took me. This talk reignites my interest for the subject
Every conversation I see about objective vs. subjective reality is only about the most basic level of “is there a table there? Is your green the same as my green?”
The more important and more frustrating conversation needed is for events and social perception, e.g., eyewitness testimony, or moments where there’s not just two people at a table but two people walking down a busy sidewalk whose sensory fields are crowded and the ability to capture the totality is limited. THEN, the differences become more pronounced and we learn the subjective experience is not at all a reliable record of the truth.
Consciousness doesn't seem mysterious to me. My intuition is that we like to think we're "special" and therefore resistant to materialist reduction, but that consciousness is really just a consistent feedback loop between whatever parts of the brain have been activated. Hence different "states" of consciousness.
I personally think that Alex's "where is a triangle if you cut open the brain" is a quite silly question. In a computer, the properties of a triangle would be stored in binary code, embedded in the tiny chip components, and if you cut open the computer saying, "oh this must be magic because I don't see a triangle" is obviously silly. All one has to know about the brain is that it can store information by electical/chemical means, and that the information is encoded and stored in one part of the brain and interpreted by another. I don't understand why this "where is the triangle" point keeps. getting. brought. up.
But none of that explains the subjective experience of "being aware" or that it "is like something" to be conscious. There is a feedback loop between my furnace, a thermostat in my house, and the air temperature in the house. None of that implies that "it is subjectively like something" to be the heating system in my house. Furthermore, nothing is fundamentally changed by adding complexity to the system-- even adding an AI component to the system, even if it might be able to produce speech. None of that makes it "like something to be me, the heating system" --even if it is capable of making a statement to the contrary. It has sensors; it has a decision-making apparatus, it takes actions, but there is no reason to suppose that it has consciousness as a system. Ditto for any robot, no matter how complex, smart, or flexible it may be in its potential action modes. It's still just a bunch of junk, doing junk-- even if it has stored the contents of a dictionary and the rules of grammar and can produce speech appropriate to any given situation via feedback loops. Just how do feedback loops equal subjective conscious experience?
I want to be like Alex O’Connor when I grow up. 🙏🏽❤️
I have well grown up, and no where near. God dam it!
i'd rather be me, i'm not only more handsome but i don't talk about stuff, i do stuff.
@@tonyburton419 i have a youtube channel of my own. and i'm a sculptor.
@@HarryNicNicholas That then is skilled and creative "stuff".
@@HarryNicNicholas Talking about stuff and doing stuff are not mutually exclusive activities. Do you understand the concept of a podcast? Additionally, is talking about stuff not an activity?
Awesome, I really like Anil Seth and his approach to researching aspects of conciousness
holy shit balls - two of my fave people speaking about an amazing topic!! LETS GO
Great episode. More conversations and more people on the show like this, please
I approve of this talk.
I think that it is true that we can't experience the outside world 100% like it objectively is, but I think we aren't so far off that it doesn't make a huge difference and is therefore neglectable.
negligible
@ you're right! Thank you, that's the word I was looking for
The world is neither just outside nor just inside... it's actually far different from any way we currently think about things normally. These kinds of conversations are definitely heading in the right direction and I love it. Anil Seth is a great guest. I'm happy for you Alex and that these podcasts are becoming so successful.
Here we go!
I was following Lisa Feldman's work on the internet just recently and one of the comments suggested everyone to look up Anil Seth, if there is trouble understanding the brain prediction theory. I quickly searched to see if there is any good interview of him and vola, the Cosmic Skeptic himself has got me covered. What makes it even more funny is that I actually got notified of your upload, but ignored it as I didn't know this dude at the time. Life is full of surprises.
This was amazing not only am i artist that loves illusion i have epilepsy and for my chosen degree work i went deep into , vibrations, illusions, biology and neurology
. i ended up doing my paper on How vibration influences human vibration in relation to visual arts. I came across alot of great research and some topics mensioned in this discussion. It is hard trying to explain consciousness and perception and i have a view that many do not get as i have experienced many of these things physically and through research . Also experienced the feeling of pure hapiness he got from the drug just before i had a seizure before. I was the perfect subject for learning more but i didnt want to be a lab rat so i learnt and researched myself. I attempted to use my MRI scan and put it through a 3d printer to get a model of my own brain. The printer was overbooked but so thankful another person did it a year later in another university not connected but now this technology is used and can change peoples lives .I was told many times why study art when i should study neurology as i was pasionate but i wanted to do both. I was naturally talented and see art as expression hense my artist name lol. Thnx guys this cheered my day up.
What type of epilepsy do you have, if you don't mind?
And if they found a cure, like a real cure for it, not just drugs to manage the symptoms, would you take it? I'm asking because I've come across people suffering from epilepsy, sometimes quite a severe form of it, but at the same time it's become part of them...their identity I guess, that they've answered; no, they wouldn't take the cure.
Must mention those were very rare cases, however frequent enough to at least become noticeable.
Another caveat is, this was my experience so it is anecdotal.
@@alexlarsen6413 thank you for your comment. You are right there is no cure . My little brother had the most severe type of childhood epilepsy (think it begins with an L) he was not supposed to live past 9 and had more than 10 seizures in one day. Spent my childhood watching him in hospitals. He is now 32 and grown out of it. I was diagnosed when 19 I grew into it , luckily wasn't same type mine is rare as I have few different types of seizures and even professionals don't know really depends on individual case. Long story short i found out I was born with a dint in my head when I was born and due to this I am almost blind in one eye and always had migraines. I never responded to meds either . The answer to your question is , although it is difficult to live in this world with the disabilities not to mention the stress , I am really lucky I only have a couple a month and I have an amazing son . I wouldn't change my experience and understanding as the way my brain works is part of who I am if that makes sense. The way I think and do things is my identity in a sense
I am an artist because I have perspectives to show people it makes me unique I wouldn't take the cure I av asked myself this question few times in past 10 years. It's like the butterfly effect concept. also feel the same when I lost my mother at 13 that moment was important to direct my life in so many decisions I made next . It's hard to imagine life without when you just live with what your given. Thank you for your message really appreciate your comment it made me think . I focus on quality of life ATM there are many pros and cons to everything but you learn to live with what you have. I have healthier lifestyle as I have no choice e.g drink water, sleep exercise but the fact I have a guideline is actually helpful . The thing that throws me off the most is wondering if people would treat you differently if you didn't have epilepsy . Also interesting I look as though I workout and live extremely healthy so it's hard for people to get I have epilepsy as they don't see my seizures or mental problems. There is so much stigma with epilepsy I am not photosensitive but sun can trigger me but ppl don't really know much about it. Plus don't like to say sometimes . Some strangers don't know anything so I appreciate that I am healthy enough to advocate and help others who suffered a lot like my lil bro who had to learn to walk n talk again . So I must remain humble everyone has struggles. I can hope I will grow out of it but not sure. They still think me n my bros are connected so either it's, genetic connection, I have migralepsy as my migraines always been bad and triggered into seizures while growing or it's not epileptic and my brain neurons are messed up from trauma of abuse or losing a parent young. My body seizures when it's protecting itself subconsciously which is why sum can be triggered by PTSD it's a form of self defence. I saw this in research just a memory can do this but hard to prove so here I am 15 years later and they refuse to aknowledge that being drugged up doesn't work for everyone . I constantly have to show I am taking precautions as I live more natural but it's worth it. Every scan n test comes back clear so far they can't pick up what's happening unless I have a seizure during and then I'd be moving to much hense how important 3d printing is to the neurology field. If they don't know I don't am just an interesting case to them . All I can do is try live as best I can. I have tried over 25 different meds n treatments I have accepted some just have epilepsy for different reasons and it isn't a burden always. I wouldn't change me maybe my answer would be different if I was severe like my brothers but I am fortunate tbh. Also in a sense I think my epilepsy is more of a mechanism keeping my body alive but short circuits like electrics when it's going through too much . Hope this message answers your question. Sorry for long winded message . Hope you have a blessed day .p.s as much as antidotal is not evidence alone which frustrated me in my degree in most cases it is important to collect data from those who have experience so your view is way more valuable than you think just meeting someone who lives with similar things can change others lives so I appreciate your opinion its totally validated and needed in health
@@xpressivebex7162 Thank you very much for such ample and sincere reply!
Wishing you all the best!
Brilliant podcast. I’ve been a fan of Alex for a few years. My worldview is completely different. I’m Christian and an MA theology student and theologically it takes my mind to passages like Mark 11:24 where belief and expectation play a huge role in prayer. Furthermore, other passages that speak of not doubting are scattered everywhere and hold a real sense of expectancy. Great convo. This is just great food for thought. Thanks dude. Gonna be chewing on this one for a while
any idea who wrote marK?
@@HarryNicNicholas we just don’t know for sure. There’s an early tradition that the gospel was attributed to him. This is slight evidence at the most. It does give food for thought however. But we just don’t know. That’s my perspective.
@@HarryNicNicholas but one thing I will comment on. It’s easy to say that we don’t have a clear witness but we have many witnesses and some within a very comfortable window gap. And something convinced these guys that it was important enough to write about. I’m not making any claims but that has to be considered
I'm one of those people who had the colors of the dress flipped during few days of looking at it. Originally I saw it as white/gold and I my perception of it was really strong since I actually got mad at people because I thought they were trolling me. Later I learned more about the dressgate and the colors kinda blurred out/faded and before I knew it - It really was blue and black and now I can't go back. I'm first to admit - that was a weird experience to have.
Damn, that whole debate was ending friendships. 😂 I remember too well, and I too was on the "white and gold" side.. except my visual perception never changed even after finding out its actual color.
It just depends on the brightness of the display you are watching on. The colors are actually blue and dark brown based on the color data in the image file.
The brainstorm toy pulses color 3 times to the rythym of the syllables in "green needle" maybe that visual cue reinforces the perception of those words when you expect them
"Being You" is one of my favorite recent books, super excited to see this on my feed!!! I hope you ask his opinion on the Hameroff-Penrose Orch OR stuff, I don't recall that in the book.
Orch OR has been recently falsified. Well, I say "recently." It's been some months ago.
@@woodygilson3465 Mind giving a citation? I'd imagine a "falsification" of the theory would be impossible given our current observational technology.
@@woodygilson3465 Oh I found it, actually stunned I didn't hear about this before, thanks. I feel it's worth noting, its not over for Orch OR, just specific details. Here's a direct quote:
"Actually, the real work is just at the beginning." she says. In fact, Penrose's original collapse model, unlike Diósi's, did not predict spontaneous radiation, so has not been ruled out. The new paper also briefly discusses how a gravity-related collapse model might realistically be modified. "Such a revised model, which we are working on within the FQXi financed project, could leave the door open for Orch OR theory"
@@virno69420 Ah, cool. Thanks for passing that on.
Just the fact that we can visualize ourselves doing something specific on a specific date in very specific ways is crazy. We are definitly some kind of prediction machines.
I was under the impression that we have good reason to believe that more bottom up sensory data was being factored into our model of reality, when we are on psychedelics.
This concept perfectly maps onto my personal experiences, insofar as when I look at a sunset on acid (early trip, or post peak, so not when having a full blown “what/where/who am I?”, moment) I can see the green, I can see much more of the reality of the scene, the kind of reality that artists need to include in order to create a convincing depiction. When I’m sober, using what Dr. Seth refers to as the controlled hallucination, it’s just… “orangey” with some read and purples perhaps, but this sober representation of the sunset feels very much like a optimal, practical depiction, rather than a more lossless, and “accurate” depiction of the actual wavelengths. I believe this also applies to many of our other sensory experiences when on acid.
Now obviously your top down processing is also running in overdrive when on acid, but I feel this accounts for the pink elephants and bioluminescent jellyfish Angels, as opposed to things like the richer pallet of colours and more pronounced distinctions between light and shadow.
47:40 I fail to hear the brainstorm, I can only hear green needle :(
Here's another illusion that shows something similar:
If you have an animation of tv noise, with enough patterns in it, if you repeatedly tell yourself a shape such as "triangle" you'll see that you begin perceiving a triangle in the animation.
The lesson learned from this experience is that our brains comprehend words without our permission, therefore we should be mindful of what we say to eachother.
You can also listen and swap half way through, you can hear "Green Storm" too.
I can switch between blue/black and white/gold on the dress. Cover up the bottom of the image, and the white/gold becomes a plausible interpretation, then slowly reveal the bottom and let that perception remain. Do the opposite for blue/black where covering the top allows you to interpret the bottom as blue/black. Do it a few times and you can flip between them at will. But no matter how hard I try, I absolutely *cannot* hear "green needle". Even with the pitch shifting that people do, my brain just hears brainstorm at the original pitch. I also have a video on my channel about the differences between deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning!
47:35 I changed my expectations mid-illusion and heard, 'Green storm' 😂
Maybe Elon did the same and heard “brain needle”.
Me too 😂
Lol I heard brain needle
1:06:10 "What is this self? Where is it"?
Again, theoretically speaking,
the self is the thought to which the word "I" is referring when my self asserts...
I am conscious.
I think the last point of the conversation went astray. Just because it took so long to us humans to evolve muscles the way they are today, does not mean we could not replicate the effects and functions of muscles with silicon and metal. I believe AI has a very good opportunity of being allowed quaila-experiences and even surpass humanity in terms of “consciousness level” as it already has in information processing.
We can replicate the movements of muscles with silicon and metal but those machines don't have a pulse. They don't have a pulse because how they produce movement is very different from how a muscle produces movement. The properties of any system depends on it's material components. Just because a system does one thing similar to another system doesn't mean that all the other properties of the two systems are the same. If semiconductors could have experiences they would probably be very different from the experiences we have. They might even be so different that they aren't even experiences.
Well the point was not that we can't develop artificial muscles, but that the training time would be too long. The current models are trained for a year at "the speed of electricity" on pre recorded data. But to learn in the real world the model must experience the world with its sensors, take an action like taking a step with its artificial muscels, and see the results of this action. This online learning can't be done that fast and the human brain comes "pretrained" with this kind of training from millions of years of evolution.
We are WAY far away from AI. It cannot be reproduced with digital systems and cpus. It requires quantum computation, so we won’t have AGI until quantum computers. Each neuron is a quantum computer.
40:42 I see both blue and black and gold and white depending on the day
I found another one thank you! I see black and blue most of the time but occasionally I have seen white and gold
@@Aweal7 bro its alwaya a trip for me because i KNOW its a lighting thing i KNOW why its happening i KNOW what color it should be and veery time my brain just chooses whcihever one it feels like that day 🤣🤣
Yeah this episode is my favourite episode so far!
Great video. Amazing. Thanks Alex O'Connor
Just beginning but ill bet this isnt answered (hope to be proven wrong); i dont see why "it feels something to see the color red=there must be more going on than simply "a state your brain is in". What's the basis for this assertion i keep hearing?
I completely agree, the color red seems to just be a certain pattern of neurons firing in a way specific to whatever person is experiencing it, red doesn't exist beyond that and I don't see why Alex uses this example to mean much
Regarding the brain storm/green needle toy. You can also do brain needle and green storm.
Excellent convo thank you!
2:53 theres no such thing as a "dreamless sleep" you always dream, but sometimes you don't remember any of them.
It feels like you wake up from no dreams the same way blackouts you wake up with no memory
Wrong. You have confused the scientific findings of the fact that we typically dream in every sleep episode with the idea that we're always dreaming during those episodes. Research has shown that dreaming is correlated with certain physical symptoms, like rapid eye motion, and that these symptoms occur only during parts of the sleep cycle. There is no evidence whatever that the non-symptom portions of the cycle entail dreaming.
Furthermore, we can have sleep episodes in which we go immediately into deep phase sleep, in which there are no dreams. Not only do the subjects not report dreams when they wake up normally from such episodes, but they do not report dreams when they are awakened during the middle of cycle. If you are awakened during a dream, you will remember that you were just dreaming. Even if you can't remember the dream in detail, you will remember vague impressions of it.
What I'm saying here is supported by electromagnetic studies of the brain during sleep. Dreams are accompanied by characteristic electrical wave patterns. Not all phases of sleep show these patterns. Sleep is a cyclical phenomenon. Some parts of the cycle do not include dreams. And some episodes of sleep do not include dreams at all, although the typical sleep episode does include periods of dreaming.
Severe physical exhaustion tends to lead to sleep episodes in which there is a lesser prevalence of dreams than in more typical sleep episodes. The fact that we typically forget most of our dreams is not an indication that we're always dreaming during sleep but just forget the dreams.
@donnievance1942 i didnt vonfuse those at all;
Weed just doesnt impede your dreams.
I distinctly recall a signal processing professor in a college class 20 or so years ago explaining that a picture can turn out dark even though there seemed to be plenty of light when you took it because the camera actually captures the true light levels while your brain is fiddling with the dials to improve your vision in the poor light conditions.
23:47 what’s happening on Left side of speaker ?
To aid one of my existential crisis (death), i was looking for videos about mind uploading, cyborgs, consciousness and this video was right on time!
I still only ever hear Green Needle no matter how hard I try to hear Brain Storm. I’m convinced that this is a global gaslighting conspiracy and I’m the only one not in on the joke.
I heard brain storm the 1st and 2nd time. Then I tried to hear green needle the 3rd time and did.
@@johnpeace1149 brain storm has two syllables and there are clearly 3 in the audio I have tried my hardest to hear only brain or storm and I hear neither.
I heard Brainstorm, Green needle, Brainstorm.
Perfectly in line with what I wanted to hear.
I literally just have to say the word in my head just before it plays and I will 100% of the time hear the word I’m expecting. It’s so strange because it sounds like the words should have different syllables and lengths.
I have the same sentiment about gaslighting but I hear the second one if I say it in my head first. So there…(!)😂
Great conversation! It would be very nice to see Bernardo Kastrup on this podcast, he has interesting views on consciousness and solid arguments to back it up
Agree 👍
when i first saw the dress picture, i saw it as white and gold. then i saw the articles talking about the phenomenon showing that the dress is actually blue and black. for a while, i was able to see both, but now i can ONLY see it blue and black.
Several ancient civilisations associated thought with the heart. The Qur'an constantly talks about those who have hearts to think/ponder
So what? Where’s any proof outside of conjecture & ‘feeling’ & poetic speech?
The dress is blue and dark brown. I sampled the color values from the image back when this meme was first spreading. People that see white and gold have their brightness settings turned up too high. It’s a function if your device’s display settings, not some sort of brain strangeness.
Sorry, dude this experiment has been done in face to face, real life situations in which the physical medium has been colored paper with no electronics involved. Try not to post BS straight out of your head. You had no way on earth of knowing whose brightness settings were turned up too high in the first place. You're not really a parsimonious thinker, are you?
@@donnievance1942 you are really struggling, aren't you? You think brightness settings matter? The color detail is in the file itself. Your brightness settings have no effect, and neither does some supposed experiment with physical paper.
Again, the color data is in the image itself that was being shared, so the exact color has been known the whole time.
Try not to speak so confidently when you literally have no idea of the subject matter.
Objects perceived as 'orange' often comprise a wide range of non-orange colours (red, yellow, a variety of browns, even white and black) while true/solid orange is quite narrowly defined. I have analyzed photos of oranges and orange cloth where only a small minority of pixels were actually orange. And yet combining them makes a whole that is clearly 'orange'. Although I am not an artist myself, I believe artists routinely 'see colours for what they are'.
ETA: In this way, in the original photo of 'The Dress' it's shades of blue and shades of brown, and not either 'blue and black' or 'white and gold'.
Psychedelics are great, one time I was trippin on too much acid and I was staring at a fire pit and the fire pit turned into a mini world with little people and buildings, that was 2 years ago and it's such an experience to remember. would love to try out the psilocybin mushrooms next, just don't know where to get them, so hard to come by
[Jon_spore]
Ships psychedelics
@@sarahh321 where to search?? Is it IG?
Psychedelics drugs should be used
When people are in their right state of mind, alot of people abuse them..
@@Jerryberger9235 yeah, He has variety of stuffs like mushrooms, Isd, DMT even the chocolate bars
@@sarahh321 Thanks, I’ll get some right away
@cosmicskeptic About the "prediction of the microphone".
Not exactly, but in a sense, partially yes. When you buy a new pair of shoes or a car or when you are looking to buy one and have researched about them, have you ever realized that "many" people use them or they are "everywhere"? That's your mind "predicting" you will find THAT SPECIFIC pair of shoes or car (color, shape, size, etc.) It's not really a prediction, but an expectation that your pattern matching abilities are imposing a FILTER onto your perceptual inputs.
Some other people call this EXPERIENCE "to manifest", not really causing the world to change, but really causing a state of mind with focused alertness to catch the first opportunity for "the desired thing or event".
This capacity was evolved for hunting prey. Total focus on a set of patterns that the prey fits in.
This capacity is an energy saving strategy of the brain and computers don't need it, UNLESS maximum speed becomes essential, like in war counter-missile drones, or maybe energy is limited in exploration robots.
I would love to see anil seth and donnald hoffman have a conversation
I remember reading a theory that monet had cataracts which affected his vision and color perception. So he wasn't painting his 'feelings' or impression of the scene, but he was painting what he actually saw, it's just that his vision was messed up!
The problem with AI, and the way computers are thought about is infected by the Cartesian duality, that mind/computations are separate from material. The brain isn't just in the head, it's the spine, the rest of the nervous system (including the senses, especially proprioception and skin as a close cousin of the nerves) and body. It involves systems or ecological thinking rather than reductionist approaches.
I don't think Anil Seth disagrees with you, but to further elaborate on your position, do you believe if it was the case that we constructed a system that perfectly mirrored 1:1 the inputs and outputs of the entire nervous system (and its integration with other systems) we would produce a conscious subject?
Very Interesting, I did modules on sensory systems and perception as part of my degree. Some of what is described here we were told is termed Colour Constancy and light constancy which was developed (selected) to detect objects and colours in different light conditions including things like dusk etc. If I remember correctly the colour was needed as a means to detect ripeness of food and differentiate possible poisonous berries.
From what we were taught the senses and the brain use something like a differential system where it processes cone information from adjacent visual fields and do something equivalent to dividing one by the other and the resulting output would determine the colour perception (eg 1/2 is the same colour as 4/8), this is simplified however unless you program an AI to do similar operations it may have very different perceptions.
But it only demonstrates the correlation to the mental perception. It doesn't show us how the material brain creates the mind itself.
I think what can be added here is that coquincidental choas/probability experienced in life that makes me speculate about a higher power is actually probably most likely complex intricut nature or quantum principles which we have learned to adapt with bc we need our environment to exist.
Alao we would have to train ai to interpret sensory data but we will have technology that will be able to measure our sensory data so then we can just make more advanced robots but yes eventually like 50 years from now we maybe have robot people 😂
I had to look up the picture of that dress again. I still see it as white and gold and have a really hard time understanding how it could be blue and black. It's so fascinating that people's perception of it differs so much.
It would be great if you could get: Andy Clark (UK), Thomas Metzinger (Germany), Giulio Tononi (USA), Bernard Baars (USA)
1:11:50 "What are psychedelics doing"?
If thoughts are representations maintained in coded form
as neural discharge timing patterns and
those timing patterns are entirely the consequence of synaptic activity then
when a psychedelic changes the behavior of all brain synapses thereby
changing the timing patterns that maintain representations
then all representations participating in the being conscious process
will give being conscious some quite peculiar content,
theoretically speaking.
In regards to Nagel and the way philosophers speak about experience, I think people let language wrap them up in circles. We don't experience redness, we experience a red object (accurately or not). Saying we experience redness is like saying we experience experience... which is just a spiraling self-referential chasm. After all, what is redness? It's our experience of red. If we dispense with that, so many or the allegedly impenetrable problems of consciousness go away. The question "what's it like to be a bat?" becomes a request for metaphor as opposed to a request for some actual data.
Very good discussion Alex
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