Ray Brassier Thanks for coming. My name is Ray Brassier and this is Thomas Metzinger. Thomas and I are going to have a conversation, principally about his work and the ramifications of his work. Thomas is a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Mainz in Germany. and he's the author of several very important and influential works in the philosophy of mind. And his work is distinctive in that he is arguably the contemporary philosopher of mind who has engaged most thoroughly and most profoundly
with contemporary neuro scientific research. So what is unique about Thomas' work is the way in which it is informed by the very latest neurobiological data. And he has, Thomas has written, has collaborated with and worked with many contemporary neuroscientists. He's the author of a book called Being No One, The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, published in 2003 by MIT Press. and more recently in 2009 he published a shorter encapsulation of his work called The Ego Tunnel,
which is a work designed or addressed to the general audience, the intelligent lay reader. It's an attempt to translate the basic ideas that inform his principal work, being no one for a non-academic audience. Now, I'm going to begin, first of all, by talking about, or asking Thomas about the concept of transparency. The title of this event, A Special Form of Darkness, actually comes from, is a quotation taken from Thomas' work. The quotation actually is that transparency is a special form of darkness.
And transparency in Thomas' work is the idea that we experience the world through various complicated representational mechanisms, but we never represent these representational mechanisms themselves. We have limited access to the machinery that conditions our subjective experience. And the simplest way to understand transparency is that if you're looking through a window, the pane of glass through which frames the optical vision, the optical image that you're contemplating,
is not itself registered as an object in the visual field. In other words, the frame, the physical frame and the medium through which this visual scene is experienced is not itself a part or a component of the visual experience. So first thing, so Thomas, I mean, is what I've said just a kind of an adequate description of the concept of transparency and what why do you think it is such a crucial idea why do you think it can it has very very kind of significant implications for understanding the way in which we
experience ourselves well this steep start with difficult philosophical concept right in the beginning. So in philosophy there are at least three technical uses of transparency and the one you have mentioned is phenomenal transparency. So the first thing to note is that this is a property of conscious states only. Unconscious states are neither transparent nor opaque, but it is not entirely true that all conscious states, all conscious experiences are transparent. If you remind me I'll give some examples of opaque conscious states later. So let's take a simple example. The idea is if you all have this conscious visual perception of this microphone here right now. There are edges, there's a
surface texture, there's a color and in your conscious mind this appears as a bound object and even if you were to believe what scientists tell us that that there are no colored objects in the world, and this is just an internal microphone model that is currently active in your visual system, in your brain, it's hard to believe it because it's so ultra-realistic. And transparency is about experiential realism. You know, if we would have a picture of the microphone, take a projector and project it to the screen there, then you could say, ah, I'll go to the screen and I look at it closely, and I'll see little pixels and things, and I realize, oh, and there's a projector.
This is constructed. There's a medium, there's a screen, there's a light beam. With conscious experience, you can't do this. You know, even if you would believe what this crazy philosopher says, that this is all just actually a reality model active in your brain right now, you can look at this microphone as hard as you want to. There are no pixels. And the empirical hypothesis is that the construction process in your brain is so fast and so reliable, optimized by millions of years of evolution, that you just get the final product, the content, a microphone in front of me. And that this is the reason that this is a transparently active neural representation in your brain right now, that it seems so real to you, that you just cannot believe all this should be, as I've sometimes called it, a form of online dreaming, right?
a form of a very complex multimodal simulation right now. Why is this interesting? The first thing is it explains why all of us are, according to their own subjective experience, naive realists. I mean it just feels real. You all, for instance, have the feeling that you're situated in this room right now, embedded, it's totally seamless and real, And in a way, we know it's not true. Could be the same in a dream. It's determined by internal factors, the neurodynamics in your brain right now. So I'll just mention two applications of this. In my own work, the most interesting general step
has been that I have applied this to the self model active in your brain right now. So I've said the human self model is also transparent which means that the system harboring it, developing it, cannot experience it as a model. And that is how the quality of being someone of selfhood emerges in an information processing system. If it operates under a transparent self model, it will so to speak be glued to the content of that self model. And for instance, as you probably all right now have the experience that you're just directly in touch with your body, that you feel your body from the inside, you're not. You're introspecting the
content of a model of your body. You could have that experience in principle as a disembodied brain in a liquid, which was perhaps appropriately stimulated or something like this. So it's a local phenomenon in the brain, but the question is, how does this super realistic experience A of not being in the brain and B, being someone emerges. And in a nutshell, my idea has been that this identification, this experience of being infinitely close to yourself, that that is because large parts of the human self model are transparent. But then, and maybe I'll leave it at that, there's a second thing, you know, transparency is not only about microphones looking ultra realistic or your arms feeling ultra realistic or the whole scene.
there are other forms of conscious experience. I'll give you an example certainty. If you shake analytical philosophers and say now what is that? What is certainty? And it will say something very boring for instance like that is knowing that you know. If you know something and you also know that you know it, that is certainty. Now we all have that. We all know the phenomenology of certainty, right? Sometimes we have these very deep intuitions and we have this direct experience of certainty. This world exists, I exist, this is an asshole. I just look into his face, transparent, right? And this experience, if it's transparent, it feels ultra real, but
it's just an appearance. So it could be that there are things about which we have this very, very deep and solid experience of certainty, beliefs or intuitions or something, and there is no certainty involved. You would need a completely independent argument to show that this is knowledge. So things could really feel like knowledge and things could feel like certainty, but they could just be transparent representations in your brain. Okay. This is, I'd like to, so I think this is, the point you just made is very important, I think, the fact that once we understand the, once we understand the kind of, the notion of
transparency, we can't invest phenomenological experience, which is to say our immediate conscious experience of reality, with the kind of cognitive authority that many philosophers want to invest with. In other words, many philosophers think that, you know, Descartes most famously thinks that, obviously you can reasonably doubt lots of things. You can doubt that the world is as it seems to be, in fact, you can entertain the hypothesis that you are in fact being systematically deceived about the nature of reality, but by an evil demon. And it's always plausible to think that you are the victim of a vast conspiracy
which is masking the true nature of reality. But what Descartes then says is that the one thing you cannot doubt that you are doubting, The experience, the subjective experience of bewilderment or of confusion is real, has a kind of an indubitable authority, which is why Descartes basically argues that you can be wrong about how things are, but you can't be wrong about how things seem to you to be. On this level, immediate conscious experience has, for Descartes, does have an epistemic authority. It means that you do know something, you know about how things seem to you.
One of the things that I think is suggested in your work is that because we're not entitled to be, because our certainty does not have, does not license cognitive certainty, it means that just because we're absolutely convinced of something, it doesn't mean that it really is, doesn't mean that we actually know about it. What you mentioned is just that second notion of transparency, epistemic transparency. I mean, a classical assumption following Descartes for many people was, I cannot be wrong about the contents of my own mind. I can be wrong about things in the world, but I can't be wrong about what is going on in my own conscious mind.
And that is one thing that I think has historically flown out of the window through 100 years of scientific neuropsychology, for instance, in the last century. We know just many cases where people are wrong about the contents of their own mind and not able to notice this fact. Could you give some examples? I think this has really helped. that you can give. Oh, well. There are different forms of so-called anosognosia where people will have a disease and not be able to experience the fact that they have a disease. For instance, they may have a hemorrhage and their whole left side of their body will be paralyzed.
And you will come and say, so they want to go home and you see, so how long have you been here? And you say, yeah, two weeks. And why do you think you've been here? People say, my left side is paralyzed. It's not paralyzed. And you can say, could you please take your left index finger and point at the doctor's nose? And the patient says, yes. And the arm, of course, doesn't move at all. And then you will say, can you see your own finger in front of the doctor's nose? And the patient will say, yes, I see it right now. Or we have all these, we have extreme, we know much better about extreme psychiatric syndromes like Cotard syndrome, for instance, which is just basically like the mirror image of Descartes. Descartes said, I am certain that I myself exist because somebody has to think or doubt.
And these Cotard patients, they have what is called a monothematic delusion. You can talk to them pretty well, you know, they're not completely crazy, but they defend the thesis that they're dead or that they're not exist. And they demand, you know, take this body, throw it away, dispose of it, get rid of it. So they have this firm, stable conviction that they do not exist. Was the first a neurologist who diagnosed this called this nihilistic delusion. And there are so many of these examples. I've seen videos where people after certain brain lesions, typically old people, cannot recognize themselves in a mirror anymore.
Mirror self-recognition, we now know. Some chimps have it, some bottlenose dolphins have it, some elephants have it. human children develop it between 18 and 25 months, the capacity to recognize themselves on videotape or in a mirror. And some human beings also lose that after brain lesions or an old age dementia. And then they have the problem that there's a stranger in the mirror. There's a strange person there always, and they complain. And I've seen this video where you stand with this patient in front of a mirror and say, so this is not you. And who's the person standing next to that person? Yeah, that's you. And now I'm holding your hand in front of the mirror. Yes, you are. Do you see this hand in the mirror?
Yeah, that's your hand. And then you touch the patient's hand and say, and whose hand is that? It's the other person's hand. And the amazing thing is that this, say, loss of self-recognition is so robust or so closed. philosophers sometimes say cognitively impenetrable. It doesn't help to argue or to explain to the patient the phenomenal experience is not me in the mirror. It stays absolutely robust. And that's transparency. That's the trouble you have when you have a transparent model of reality or if you're self and something goes wrong. then you suddenly have certainty that you do not exist,
certainty that there's a stranger in the mirror. And we better take, I think something we have also learned through science in the last century is to finally take these people seriously. Don't think they're hysteric or, you know, they're trying to catch our attention. They are having an experience which is impossible or inconceivable if we accept a kind of a standard phenomenological model. In other words, we think that the experience of reality of a well-adjusted, allegedly well-adjusted, sane, rational, responsible adult is this kind of, this model for the way in which all the possibilities of experiencing the world must be understood.
and interestingly with this example like the ones you've just given you have something that is we can't imagine what it is to experience yourself as non-existent or not to recognize yourself in a mirror that's an interesting point why can't we? I think it is because imagining I mean also very different people for instance people on spiritual paths also people interested in meditation, spiritual practice often would also be interested in actively simulating or emulating a state of no self or a non-centered awareness or something like that. Why can't you do it? Because just as you said, simulating in that case is a form of interaction.
It's not only outer action, there's also interaction like directing your attention for instance. and running a film in your mind actively, and making a plot for that film, creates this quality of agency. And there you have a self. So there are certain things you cannot actively simulate because you get this sense of inner effort. I'm doing this, I'm controlling this, and there is yourself. So in that sense, some things are inconceivable. So, following on from this, you talked about the production process that kind of undergirds conscious experience.
So, I know you've done a lot of work on this, so how much is known about the mechanics of this process? The backstage machinery that generates the phenomenal self-model and the experience of reality? The reason I want to ask you about this is because obviously the more we understand it, the more we can manipulate it. Well, first, very little. And having eminent experts in the audience, I will not dare to amateurishly explain you the mechanisms. But there is something, I mean, the first thing we have learned is that what many philosophers didn't want to believe
is that certain contents of conscious experience can in a very isolated and well-circumscribed way disappear. You can lose color vision just for one half of your visual field. You can lose the feeling of shame or guilt and just that after a certain brain lesion. We know for instance some of us strive to be moral or ethically integrated people. We're very vulnerable in this. If some physical event in our brain happens, we will never be able to do that. We will never be able to emulate the pains of others or be interested in the damage we do. For instance, we learn new things
about antisocial personality disorder. You can have people, you know, and it has been done, put people in a scanner who have been diagnosed and who are in prisons. We'll not go into any details, But the ugly truth is you find things. If you put 100 people with antisocial personality disorder in a scanner, you do find things, very localized things in part. And so for many things. We've learned a little, a blood vessel that explodes in your brain, a tumor here, and this can selectively disappear. And that can selectively disappear. And that was actually the basis for scientific
neuropsychology because if you know A, you can lose A without B and you can lose B without A, you know, these things must be two building blocks, functionally dissociable. And from this we get an idea of the architecture of the mind and we have a lot of data about what you can lose. You know, you can lose color vision or just certain kinds of smell or certain aspects of language comprehension. And other things you cannot lose in an isolated fashion. But I think there is, in the consciousness community, with which I've been very much involved during the last 15 years, there is something like a basic consensus. Of course, there's no theory. There is no consensus among philosophers.
Competitive neuroscientists push different models. But the general idea is that for every conscious content, and say like the blue cap of this bottle here or something, there is a minimally sufficient neural correlate. So there's some process in your brain, a set of properties that you cannot make smaller anymore without it disappearing, that's minimal, and sufficient, this by itself, brings about that conscious experience. Now this whole notion, people look for the neural correlate of consciousness, The whole research industry does this for about 10 years. This brings other aspects with it.
If there are, at least in some cases, locally sufficient causes in the brain, you can do all kinds of things with electrodes, with new drugs. A very general thing, I could go more into detail here, is that we will be able to technically control our conscious minds to a much greater extent in the decades to come than we could in the past. Of course, human beings have always done this, through drumming, through sacred mushrooms, through various magical herbs, through caffeine, opium, religious rituals. Human beings have always tried to engineer and manipulate their mind.
There's a long tradition of consciousness technology in the history of our species, you know. Art, for instance, right? And now the instruments will get more precise and we will probably also know what we're doing. In the past we were always testing out stuff and then suddenly we got addicted or something nasty happened, you know. Why do you think now we're in a better position to understand what we're doing. So consciousness technology seems to have existed as long as human culture civilization in some form or another. But clearly this is, you know, there's a phase transition here.
Now that we understand more about the machinery, neurological machinery that kind of generates conscious experience, we can intervene directly at the level of the brain. neurological machinery itself. Why, but what is it, now obviously we have a greater kind of scientific understanding, but in what sense are we better informed now about what kinds of conscious states are desirable or undesirable? Not at all. That's what I think, that's a completely different issue. I mean, with every science, technology follows on its heels, and the ugly thing is, I don't know how to say that in English,
it gets coupled to a capitalist logic of exploitation and marketing, right? It's never, typically the technologies are not developed in the way of how would they do us good or how would we, you know, it's under a profit or also dominance-oriented general idea where these technologies are developed and marketed. And now we have this word neurotechnology, and it's actually one of the things I do with the group, applied ethics for neurotechnology. So we have brain implants, people develop new so-called cognitive enhancers, you know. One question, just to make this concrete, people are discussing is what would happen if we had a safe way without side effects to do something like moral enhancement?
If we developed a kind of pill that wouldn't make you addicted, but which would increase altruism and pro-social behavior, or your capacity for empathy, or your capacity for insight in ethical issues. somebody I think would come and say, okay everybody who wants to act ethical at all knows that he's constantly failing and wants to improve his own ethical integrity. If new tools are available it's even an obligation to improve your own morality so to speak if new instruments come along. This could happen in the next two, three, five decades.
There are some first pilot studies to show that this can be done pharmacologically. Somebody is going to take the role of the government and say, we want pro-social behavior, don't we? We all want pro-social behavior, don't you? That's one example. But before we, maybe I'll just give you an example. I mean, so there are brain implants, there are all kinds of new, the first area in which we see it is medical neurotechnology. There are new and better ways to help people, you know, with epilepsy, serious brain damage, Parkinson, that couldn't be treated, depression. I've seen in 2006 we had these cases, for instance, you have patients who have a really severe depression that cannot be treated by anything known.
Nothing works. And then they try directly stimulating with an electrode, and they immediately report about a disappearance of the painful void, as they call it. you know, this utter emotional emptiness that hurts in two, three seconds, and even that visual details become more crisp in the room. I don't know how many people know these avatar experiments I was involved in with myself. So in 2007, some people, a Swedish scientist, Henrik Ersson and a group in Switzerland, have done these experiments where you would see an image of yourself, you were filmed from behind,
and it would be inserted in virtual reality. You would be synchronously stroked on your back and see while your own body is standing in front of you was being stroked. And for some people this generates the experience of jumping into the avatar. So the phenomenal experiences of I am this jumps there. The phenomenology of identification, you can identify with an avatar. This has been wildly over-reported in the press. I was at a press conference in London myself. I've never experienced something like that. We were hunted by the world press for four days and they all told people out of body experiences,
are hitting the lab and it's not true because in an out of body experience you really see from an elevated perspective. In these experiments you don't see out of the eyes of the avatar. Everybody thinks now video games are going to be really cool and addictive. Now this is it, we're gonna go in through the screen which is totally false. This effect is very weak, it doesn't work for everybody, It just works in a passive condition. But now, there is another project now. I'll just give you one example where this may go and where this may affect society. It's called the Vera Group. Scientists from different countries, I'm in that group too.
And they want to build, it's called virtual embodiment and robotic re-embodiment. The idea is to enter with your sense of self, either an avatar in a virtual environment or robot, while it senses and moves. My official position is this will never work for various reasons, but I'm also impressed with what these kids are doing in only two years. So 10 days ago I was at the Weizmann Institute in Tel Aviv and therefore the first time people in a scanner can control an avatar directly with the fMRI signal in a scanner. This is something called a motor imagery brain computer interface.
So what you do is you imagine you do a movement with your right hand and then directly the computer takes that signal from the scanner, wirelessly a robot will move or an avatar in a virtual scene will move to the right. You imagine I move my left hand and the avatar will turn left and you imagine I shuffle my feet and the thing moves forward. Of course, it's much more complex than that, but what we have now is, for instance, one video I saw already a couple of months ago is you sit there with glasses on, and just with your thoughts, so to speak, by moving the self-model in your own brain, you control this little humanoid robot,
it's about that high, and you make it walk. And this robot has camera eyes, and you've got these glasses on, and you see through the robot's eyes while you control it just by imagining body motions of yourself. So this is already a sense of active embodiment. But then the funny thing is, you know, the subject made the robot turn around and looked at himself. So where is yourself? I mean, where is it in that moment, you tell me? And so what I saw last week in Israel is that they did this from Israel to France. So somebody lies in a scanner and a robot is in France in a lab, it goes through the internet,
and they can just see with the eyes of a robot in France and just control it, just lying in a scanner in Israel, so to speak, by their thoughts alone. Maybe this never goes anywhere. I still think there are major technical obstacles for fully embodying the sense of self in second bodies, third bodies, or something like that. But I may be wrong. Maybe in 30 years all these smart people have overcome these obstacles. Are these obstacles, I mean, are they simply empirical obstacles or like technological obstacles or using fundamentals? I think there's a principled problem. The human self model, the self model that is active in your brain right now,
but you think you are, you the system as a whole who confuses itself with the model in its own brain, right? In our case, this is anchored in gut feelings, in interoception, in proprioception, in this massive feedback from your body. And how would one cut that connection to transpose it into a robot or into an avatar? So far these avatars, they will soon give haptic feedback. You get suits and vibrators and things that you actually feel you touch something when you act in the virtual world. But how are you going to get this whole inner world of feelings? How should any avatar feed that back to you?
So I think this will not work. We will always be strangely disembodied in these virtual worlds. But I may just be wrong. I'm just a stupid philosopher. And there are all these smart young neuroscientists and programmers. Now that's an example. Imagine in 30 years that would work. Merging virtual reality technology with neurotechnology. What would that do to our culture, to our societies? What would it do to people who still want to believe in an immortal soul. You've mentioned something very important.
You said that, for instance, some of the basic norms, the ethical and moral norms that we prize and we try to inculcate in others, especially in children. So for instance, empathy, responsibility, et cetera, et cetera. Now, one upshot of what you've just said is that if a brain lesion can morally incapacitate someone, if someone is simply incapable of responding in what we consider to be the appropriate ethical way, simply because of a neurological deficit, this, I mean, is this, you know,
the famous, you know, most philosophers have said you can never, there's a kind of a divide between the is and the all, between reality and the norms in terms of which we judge things to be either good or bad. And if it turns out that our evaluations of our basic fundamental moral categories are simply a function of having the relevant neurological functioning and organization, does this mean that any, you know, the attempt to give morality or ethics some kind of, the word the philosopher usually uses, transcendental, some kind of status that is irreducible to the physical and biological domain. Does this completely destroy this kind of...
Well, I have so much to say to this that I don't know where to start, actually. I mean, a simple thing that has become very clear is moral behavior has not always been here on this planet. but there have been millions of years where there was no moral behavior. Second, many animals have moral behavior too. For instance, monkeys, you know, if you offer them a bad deal, if you see the other guy gets a raisin and I just get a piece of cucumber, they throw the cucumber at the experimenter's head, which is irrational, self-damaging behavior. It would be, in an evolutionary setting, better to keep that and eat it. So we have developed strategies where some animals represent the interests of the whole group,
and they punish, I guess, perpetrators is the English word, or free riders. That's not human. We have a long history of the evolution of moral behavior, group cohesion, and in us, it has taken a completely different dimension. But there are many aspects to this. One aspect is we know there's an evolution of morality. we know there's a big difference between saying it is simply some neural da-da-da, or to say there is also a neural description, or that there are neural conditions to make moral behavior possible. That's an important distinction. A human being can be described on many levels of description at the same time,
And I think many descriptions as a person, or subpersonally, brain, they can all be true at the same time. So we should be very careful with this nothing but reflex. You know, this is often a mistake. But still, if what the example you brought is true, there's also an ugly mirror image. You know, if I can lose my capacity for perspective taking, for empathy, for pro-social behavior, for altruism, by microscopic events in my brain, it could also be that saints, or people who are very good at this, or people who have founded religions,
were not in any interesting sense responsible for that, for what they did. Because, you know, I've recently, somebody has calculated that there were about 106 billion, billion? In British English, it's also billions, right? Yes. 1,000 millions, right? Or is it only American? American, yes. A billion is a million million. No, 1,000 millions. For Americans, it's 1,000. Okay, for Americans, we are 7 billion people now. And about 106 billion human beings have lived on this planet. And you know, there have been people who were 2 meters 40 tall and people had that size. people who are enormously fat athletes, super intelligent people. It's only natural that in these billions of people
that some have emerged with brains just by chance perhaps who are so enormously empathic or full of loving kindness, whatever, pro-social, that they just look like saints to everybody else, divine. And this is not my position, but there is, for instance, a temporal lobe epilepsy theory of religious experiences. There are some ultra reductionist people who say that those people who founded religions because they had visions of God were actually a specific kind of epileptics. I think this is scientifically false, but you see where it could go. You could find the neural correlates not only of this turquoise here,
but also the neural correlates of religious ecstasy, for instance. So why, given that you don't accept nothing but reductionism, you don't accept, or what Dennett sometimes calls greedy reductionism, why not? Why is, do you think it would be a mistake to infer from the identification of neural correlates for empathy, responsibility, et cetera, et cetera, the claim that these ethical norms are nothing but kind of physical states? Why is that identification illegitimate? I think, okay, there will be a story about how moral behavior emerged. I think it doesn't say anything about ethics in the first place.
There will also be a story about how religious behavior evolved. There are first good ideas. People are working on it. I think it doesn't speak to the question if God exists or not. It just speaks to the question why so many people believe in God. So I think these are distinct questions, but I'll tell you about a conflict I have, for instance. I have very strong ethical intuitions. For instance, I think we must think about what valuable states of consciousness are. We shouldn't only think like in the tradition we did, what is a good action? but now that we will be able to manipulate, amplify, inhibit our conscious experience to better and better degrees technologically,
we should also have something like a normative psychology. We should think about, nobody can help us, in what states of mind do we want to live? What states of consciousness do we want to show our children? What states of consciousness is it ethical to inflict upon animals? What states of consciousness would we eventually like to die in? I don't know if anybody has thought about that, but what state of consciousness would you like to die in? Maybe neuroscience can help you when you've made a decision. You know, all these questions. So on the one hand, I think we should think hard about an ethics for consciousness. It's necessary in this historical transition. On the other hand, as a philosopher, my official position is normative sentences have no truth values.
So what does that mean? It means a truth value of one means a sentence is true, a truth value of zero means a sentence is false. Some sentences have no truth values. For instance, sentences in literature, in poems, they are not true or false. Sentences like, you should not kill, or you should think about what a good state of consciousness is, might also be sentences of this kind which there is no knowledge in them because the world is just silent. We kind of ask the world what is a good action and the world stays quiet. I mean in a nutshell there could be no ethical facts in reality that make sentences like you should not kill true or false. This seems likely to me on
philosophical grounds it's called non-cognitivism. I hate it. I'm a philosopher who hates a lot of his own official positions. But if that were ultimately true, right? That there is, strictly speaking, nothing like ethical knowledge in an interesting sense that we cannot know what a good action is. Why should we? But if we can't, given the logic of your own account, if it's a mistake, you said no one can help us when it comes to constructing norms or deciding what's right or wrong. If, I completely agree with you, it's a mistake to think we can read norms off nature. the world is silent, the world doesn't tell us what to do or not to do, then isn't it a mistake to claim that moral judgments are devoid of truth value
simply because the world is silent? You're looking in the wrong place. The world is not the place to look for the truth or falsity of those normative claims. Where should I look? Well, the claim would be that there are, perhaps truth is not always about correspondence. There are alternative accounts of truth, which is to say that you can be justified in claiming that something is true. and the justification for that claim is about the internal consistency of a set of beliefs or thoughts. So this is what's called coherentism in philosophy
but the claim is that when thinking and I want to ask you about the distinction between thinking or rationality and consciousness. Now, I think it's absolutely imperative to distinguish thinking from consciousness. I think that consciousness is a natural phenomenon. I don't think that thinking is a natural phenomenon. The ability to deploy concepts rationally is not a supernatural phenomenon either, but it emerges on a different level. Now, is it possible... first of all, do you accept some version of that distinction, or do you think it is untenable? And secondly, if you don't believe, if you don't accept any such distinction,
then in many ways, like given that, you know, if you're kind of a really thoroughgoing kind of naturalist, but the claim is that ultimately you become, you know, evolution doesn't care, evolution will simply kind of inculcate whatever kind of is, you know, amplifies adaptation. In other words, whether it's chimpanzees or bonobos or humans, what is, you know, whatever is, evolution will simply select for those, you know, characteristics which are kind of beneficial. But then it's a mistake to try to kind of write, you know, Surely, the consequence of that move is to say, just forget about right and wrong altogether. It's just about survival, adaptation, reproduction.
And then some kind of thoroughgoing nihilism would follow, that there's no right or wrong. It's all an illusion. All there is is reproduction, survival, adaptation. and if it so happened that you know cruelty, ruthlessness or scrupulousness are maximally adaptive then we should who are we to tell evolution what's desirable or undesirable? Well I think that I really agree on this distinction between intentional content and phenomenal content although they overlap. Consciousness and thinking is not the same thing. One difference for instance is that we know that conscious experience is a
locally determined phenomenon in the brain. To have visual experiences you do not need eyes. You all have visual experiences at night when you're dreaming, when your eyes are shut. So this in some ways is a local phenomenon. I'm quite convinced that almost all forms of thinking are things that are distributed processes that we do together. We are thinking together right now. The conscious reality models are all in our brains right now, but what really connects us, or maybe it's just like a distributed process running on us, maybe there is no ownership for thoughts. I think this is also one of the reasons why Descartes was wrong.
It's just not true if you take your phenomenology seriously that there is an I think. Thoughts are there. That's the phenomenological truth if you look closely. They are like moving clouds in the sky. So I think human intelligence, rational thought is almost always an extended process, a social process, an intersubjective process. Of course we can simulate that internally. Sometimes we can sit in our armchair in our room at home and then I think, yeah, but then Ray said that. So I simulate a social situation. So I think rationality is probably to a large extent
something above brains. It's a group phenomenon, just as is science and philosophy. There is something like a history of theories. It is something no animal has created before us. We have a history of thought, a history of theories. We're all connected to each other through books, the internet, and it's actually a conversation that runs over centuries. It's a completely new phenomenon. And that conversation can come to conclusions and find out things. Like most of your conscious experience is transparent. And by the way, the paradigm example for me in normal states for a conscious experience that is not transparent is the experience of thinking.
When you think thoughts, the experience is one of operating with mental representations, as philosophers say, that might be true or false. This transparent microphone model, it's not true or false. It's just bloody real, you know. My body, the contents of my body image, that is always real. I have no doubts. There's this certainty about it. You know, this rational thought is something that just came very recently in evolution. It is so slow that we can introspect the construction process. And that is how we suddenly realize this is something that is happening in me. Something that creates a media. There might be a crack in the window or spots on the window.
It might be false, you know. And that is also what enabled us human beings to distance ourselves. I think many animals probably just have a fully transparent model of reality, which means in a certain sense they are caught. They may have rich, dense experience, maybe richer than us in smell or body perception, also in anger and rage and pain, but they cannot distance themselves because this process of representing while you know that you are representing hasn't yet started. It's not running on these animals. And in us, go to Edinburgh, go to Andy Clark, active externalism is a current philosophical term for it, right?
there are a lot of very good English philosophers working in this domain of distributed cognition. I remember when 11 years ago, I came to San Diego for the first time, for a year as a German philosopher. And the first person I met was this PhD student in the philosophy department, Deborah, and said, so what are you working on? And she said, I just came back from Nigeria. I've been living in tents for nine months. Is it for philosophy PhD? Yeah, I was observing and filming chimps, troops of chimpanzees in the jungle. And what are you writing your thesis on? Distributed social cognition.
And that's when I first realized, ah, philosophy is a bit different here, you know, than in old fashioned Germany. You know, that was a baffling experience for a young philosopher to go to observe chimpanzees for months to write about that process. So I'm getting sidetracked here. You better ask me a question. I want to come back to this issue about, I think I'll ask one final question and then I think I'll invite anyone to kind of, if you want to ask us a question, but about the distinction between transparency and opacity, which you just explained, emphasized, which in a way distinguishes thinking from mere consciousness. In other words, the capacity to represent your own representation,
to be able to have that kind of reflexive distance, so that your representation of the world is not simply a transparent vehicle, but something that is itself represented. So it's precisely this distancing, this kind of distancing, which I think makes thinking in a philosophical sense possible. And I want to ask you then, why is transparency, if transparency is a special form of darkness, then consciousness itself, or brute consciousness, is darkness. Animals live in darkness. precisely because they were completely transparent. In a certain sense, especially the
transparent self model, the transparent conscious self model is one of the nastiest inventions of Mother Nature because it forces an organism to how to say in English, to irrevocably appropriate their own pains and needs and fears and whatever impulses. They cannot distance themselves from it. We cannot. for many of these internal states. Because they're transparent, they're not just hunger or jealousy or horniness. They are my horniness, my hunger, my jealousy, and they are real. If anything is real, it's pain, for instance. I mean, that is real.
That's fully transparent, that's owned, and it's not easy. I guess no philosopher has managed to distance himself from its own pain. So it glues animals to the logic of survival in a very nasty way by creating not only joy and pleasure and reward, but also suffering. And maybe it's an evolutionary accident that something like us appeared for various reasons, because some of us at least behave strangely And now instead of trying to have children, try to understand the process as a whole, which that wasn't meant to happen, you know, and write books and things. So, or you know, shave their head and become monks
and don't have children anymore. No animal does something like this. So I think one thing many people, a fact that many of us repress is that the evolution of consciousness on this planet. One way to look at it is also to see, look at it as an expanding ocean of suffering and confusion and deepening, and that's not funny if you look at it. You know, many things just happened which are actually not funny. Like the evolution of predators. Why should animals evolve who have an absolutely, like all of us, transparent urge to survive,
And the only way to do this is like philosopher Schopenhauer said to become the living grave of hundreds of other sentient beings. That's not nice. You know, some of these naturalists have a tendency to glorify the process of evolution. And I really respect Richard Dawkins and there's a big truth in the greatest show on earth. But that show really has two sides. And something I find really interesting also for philosophers in that respect is the conscious self model was many of us think it got ever better and better and better in evolution. We knew our bodies better. We introspected more brain states. But it can actually be shown that there was also an evolution of self-deception.
That is to have self models with false content is really adequate. I mean, I'll give you some simple examples. Like, you can show that all parents directly, not cognitively, directly perceive their own children as more pretty and intelligent as everybody else. If there was a famous study in the 70s, if you ask American college professors if they think they're about average or over average, 96% of them have the firm conviction that they are over average in their achievements. They all know it cannot be true, it's unlikely. And if you, there's research starting on this, you know,
it starts with threatening behaviors in animals. It's good if you want to, you know, pick a fight with somebody or impress somebody to enter a delusionary state for a certain time where you actually believe that you're stronger than this guy yourself. so you don't give off any subliminal cues. If you're a politician and your job is to lie to thousands of people all of the time, and you know all these people have developed cheater detector models, they look at your body language at every move you make, what kind of a guy it is. The solution to this is to develop a delusional self model to at least in the moments when you publicly appear
and speak to actually believe it. Because then nobody can detect the cheating or the deliberate lying. So there's a new, Robert Rivers is the important author in this, there's a new scientific approach developing showing that self-deception is not only something to protect yourself, denial from things you don't want to know, past failures, but it's actually a strategy of aggression. To become momentarily deluded and, I mean the statistically strongest effect if you look for human catastrophes is overconfident males. You can show if you analyze wars,
you can always show that with every single war, after only a few days there is surprise that this takes so long. Because everybody before generals, experts, thought, you know, piece of cake that's going to be fast. They are weak. And it is typically, you know, overconfident males that also cause major historical catastrophes. But, you know, many people have beliefs that we know that are false. For instance, that children make you happy. It's not true. You know, I mean, if you put buzzers to people's arms and just let them report, How do you feel now? Happy or unhappy? And you do it with people who don't have children. It's very clear parents are more often unhappy and stressed. If you
do interviews with them there's this robust self-description that their life has become much become much more meaningful and happy since they have children. It's clear that these forms of delusion would have been evolutionarily successful. These people were our ancestors. People who became monks and didn't have children, they were not our ancestors. You got the general idea. Just one final question. Given the pressures on us to deceive, the pressures on self-deception, given how useful and how advantageous self-deception How do we measure, is it possible that, you know, someone like, I know Scott Baker, whose work you know, has written about the blind brain theory of consciousness.
He takes the stance that we are systematically deluded about ourselves and about the world we inhabit. And that our predicament is truly desperate because everything we confidently believe about ourselves and the world we inhabit is almost certainly a kind of false, basically. The problem is how do we measure, how is it possible to measure the discrepancy between the world as it really is and the world as we misperceive it in order to reproduce better, to adapt better, to do things?
First of all, he can say something like that. He can write books like that. We can do science about this. And there's an enormous knowledge about the different, do you say biases in English? Biases, yes. Biases. I mean, we know the statistics. That's well-researched human beings have. And it looks like either we delete an information, if it was painful or something, it destroys our self-image, or we keep it unconscious and we use the conscious self model for action control, but in a crisis, suddenly that unconscious knowledge pops up. And they are very simple. I mean, there's fancy stuff in science, but a simple procedure is, in Germany we have these recycling bags, different colors, yellow and blue.
And yellow is general package and recyclable plastic. and people throw in an average about 30% of things in that don't belong in there and they know it. You know, my wife, for instance, does this. Totally impenetrable. You know, you want to get rid of something and it's not the blue bag, it's not the black bag, it gets on your nerves, it's not on the compost boot. So the yellow bag always gets everything. So if you ask people to estimate how many percent of false drops they do, you get a ridiculously, and you know you've measured it, the person throws 30% of wrong items in there. You get ridiculous answers like no or 5%.
But it's very easy to get a very exact judgment. You give them the same questionnaire and say, what do you think, how many percent of missed droppings does your neighbor do? and then it's absolutely accurate and there is no information about what the neighbor does there's no information in the brain the only source of information is what I do and what I constantly repress that's an accurate way of getting out what people do okay I think we should shall we answer I think we should open this up okay Pete we've got quite a close here First of all, that was fantastic.
and I just want to push a direction that Ray was coming in was to do with normative standards and how we relate this sort of neuroscientific understanding of cognition to normative standards and it's particularly interesting insofar as so much of the neuroscience literature is concerned with pathology which is an intrinsically normative notion and these pathologies are understood in functional terms so we have some kind of functional model of how a system is supposed to work and we derive certain kinds of normative conclusions
about what kinds of conscious states are good and what kind of conscious states are bad what I'm interested in is the point you got to towards the end where you said, well, yes, thinking and consciousness are different. Thinking is some kind of socially distributed activity. And what I'm interested in is whether or not you would agree with the idea that if thinking itself has a functional description, which is distinct from the sort of functional description which neuroscientists work with in understanding consciousness, whether or not that functional description is sufficient to derive the sort of normative claims about what conscious states are good or bad that you're after.
Certainly not. Certainly not. There's a naturalist fallacy, but one thing I think one has to say, I mean, thought is a very general folk psychological term. Of course, there is, for instance, a little bit of conscious cognition. Sometimes we experience ourselves as thinking most of what cognitive scientists would vaguely call cognition is unconscious. I mean, most of the computational load, the enormous efficiency we have is completely unconscious. One thing we've learned is to do a little math, you know, that's not difficult. but to catch a ball in different lighting conditions, that is computationally demanding. That is millions of years old.
That's transparent. We just do it. But that is bodily intelligence. The little calculation. It was easy to build a computer that beats the world's chess champion. What we don't have is a computer that can take the pieces themselves and move them. An embodied agent that could do that. So we may have a very distorted image of what the actual, where the density of the intelligence, the compressed intelligence actually is. It may be in our body and not in that little bit of cognition, but I don't want to evade your question. I mean, that something is as it is, for instance, functioning in our minds or in human societies. I mean, nothing normative can be derived from that.
Of course not. Also, one thing which is very, very hard to understand for almost everybody is evolution is a process that had no direction and no goal. So the bodies, the genome, everything we have right now are results of a process that pursued no goal, that had no direction. And just one sentence, recently I talked to Michael Tomasello, who's a famous monkey researcher in Leipzig, who investigates the transition from biological to cultural evolution. And I just asked him, do you think that cultural innovations, you know, in monkeys and human beings and the whole history of culture, that that is a goal-directed process? Or is it also driven by chance events
and self-organization? is of course it has no direction. Cultural evolution has no direction too. I mean, this is hard to digest, right? If I'm permitted a response, and a very quick follow-up. I mean, my suggestion wasn't that somehow by moving to the level of social evolution, all the problems are solved. My query was rather about whether or not there's something analogous to the abstract functional description of, say, computation Turing came up with for rationality. So if rationality is a social protocol, we're running on TCPIP, it doesn't matter how it's in one that way. If it could be described in an analogous fashion,
a totally non-empirical fashion, would that be a legitimate place from which to draw normative distinctions? No, I don't think so, but But I would say the answer to your first question, philosophers have done this. There is logic, there's argumentation theory, there's critical thinking. All the fallacies are known. Rationality is an optimization process with empirical data. We could formalize what rationality is, but why should anybody act rational? Why would that be good? Should we not rather alleviate human suffering, minimize the conscious suffering in all sentience beings? Why should we do that? Should we not increase the suffering
in as many beings as possible? I think to give a rational argument, to derive from a rational calculus that we should be nice will be difficult. People have tried. Very final point though is that the question is how do we define nice? And it might be that nice is actually part of the functional calculus itself. Uh-huh. So it might be that there's such a thing as collective rationality, which is part of the protocol. So justice might be part of the protocol. If we add an assumption we set as values of what we know that almost all members of that collective would agree to, then you can do a lot, you know, like minimize suffering.
Almost everybody would agree to that. If you can set that, then you can do a lot from there. Any other? Do you have a question on there? I'll get it. So I have a question about your thoughts. First of all, thanks a lot. It was very informative and entertaining. I have a question, your thoughts about that what we can do in neuroscience is we can measure modules, and processes in the brain. Basically, we measure the hardware. But what is the evolution and development of ideas having an influence to our consciousness? So do you, for example, Richard Dawkins brought that forward
with the meme theory. Do you think it's possible that over time, with the evolution of ideas, we actually change sort of how we perceive the world and how our consciousness works? Or is the hardware completely determining our consciousness? Well, the problem, I mean, meme theory has a good and also to me very sexy intuition behind it. But the thing is we do not know what the smallest unit of cultural information transmission actually is, where its boundaries are, and we don't know the transmission mechanism. So right now it's all metaphorical. We don't have a good theory about memetic evolution. But on the other hand, it's pretty obvious, I think. I mean, the computations going on in our brains are the results of millions of years of adaptation and evolution.
But one thing that is very, very specific about humans is that the environments we adapt to also with our brains are increasingly self-constructed environments. environments, for instance medial environments, large societies like they've never existed before, theories and arguments. For instance, we have to emotionally somehow adapt to the knowledge that we are mortal. That's a problem we have. Probably no other animal has that. We have in our emotional self-model, we have this strong imperative, you must not die under no circumstances. And in our cognitive self model, if we're intellectually honest,
it very clearly looks like it's going to happen. And this is itself, at least I maintain that, a pressure on us to which we have to adapt. For instance, by developing a delusional system. So human beings have externalized cave paintings, the content of their minds, art, books, and then our evolution is a very different kind of evolution because we've created a cognitive niche for ourselves. And of course this has all kinds of effects directly back onto our brains. If you get internet addicted, if you get acquired attention deficit disorder, this is a medial environment, it immediately changes your brain. The German government has
now defined diagnostic criteria for internet addiction, for instance, and it turns out 540,000 citizens have that. In South Korea, 260,000 children have been diagnosed with internet addiction. That's something you can measure in a brain. That has something to do with attentional mechanisms and so forth. So culture, I hope this goes to your question, culture definitely changes our brains in many ways. And in most of these ways, I think we're not even aware how it does that. I always give this example. The last time, I don't know if anybody ever had a lucid dream, I became aware that I'm dreaming in a dream.
was when, you know, in dreams the visual scenes always change so abruptly. And the dynamics with which the visual scene change was exactly the way with which when I click on another website, my screen, you know, it takes a few milliseconds, how a new screen comes in. And I thought, wait a minute, you're not surfing. And that's when I became aware that I was dreaming. and it shows you that just working with the internet changes your dream life already the visual phenomenology of your dreams so I think there are a lot of things going on all the time again that's very interesting
I don't want to ask too many questions apart from this idea of distributed thought that we started talking about is incredibly interesting. And I've always thought, you know, The Matrix is an awful movie for hundreds of reasons, but one of the worst things about it is it claims that these machines are using human beings for energy when really they should be using them for processing. You know, they should be distributing the management of the world across these computational devices. And it's that analogy that is going on, you know, the idea of distributed processing, the guy talking about TCP IP, these sort of different levels. Fiction always gets there first, and there's, I don't know if you know the movies, Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson, these sorts of cyberpunk novels of the 80s, where they create the idea of this disease
that runs at these different cognitive levels. So there's sort of diseases which are both a genetic disease and a code disease that can be transmitted by sexual activity and by sort of low-level programming by people who not only do they have this thing where this lucid dreaming thing you're talking about where there's a screen wipe, but all they have to do is stare at a certain sort of image and it reprograms their brain and causes them to have long-term seizures. And I'm wondering at what level you think we're going to be using neuroscience to reconfigure things in the future, whether it's going to be right down to this genetic, sub-genetic level, or whether it's going to be back to maybe a more psychoanalytic thing where we're talking about manipulating spatial representations
and ideas of psychological objects. Which one do you think is going to be more rewarding in the future? Well, I don't know. Our future is absolutely open. Our history has... We have a bad track record. And in dealing with... This is a major historical transition and we haven't yet understood what exactly this transition actually consists in. But, I mean, just one thing, I think neuroscience should, for instance, be applied in early education, even in preschool education, because knowledge about the brain tells us what the formative phases for certain achievements you develop are in the brain, and when, say, a human infant needs what, and what stimulation,
and I don't know what security, what emotional security. We should bring this knowledge into the schools and a very important thing in that context is we need something, a tradition or a discipline like media hygiene. We have to very early on to understand that for instance attention is a limited resource. You only have so much attention per day. If you will, a computational resource, evolution has put into human brains. You needed to properly listen to somebody. You needed to be able to walk in the forest by yourself and enjoy it. You needed to make love, else everything gets strange. And we have to also realize
that there is an industry attacking us from the outside. The advertisement industry and the entertainment industry who are trying to rob us with all new tricks of this precious finite resource. And I think one way to use neuroscience would be to somehow teach ourselves and our children that there is something there that you can lose. You know, if you, I don't know, if you're online for more than 90 minutes or on more than three channels simultaneously. And that there is something you can sustain, something you can stabilize, something that has to do with the quality of life. And that there are people who try to take it away from you with tricks. And if we don't get intelligent about this very fast, you know,
like protecting ourselves against the new cognitive niche we've created for ourselves, the media jungle that grows around us, then we may have problems. You know, we may have, I mean, an obvious fact is I'll just tell you a fact. I'm a professor of philosophy. Once a week, I give this 90-minute pretty old-fashioned frontal lecture with PowerPoint. The lectures I could give five years ago, I have no chance of getting through with them anymore now, five years later. The kids that come from high school, they just can't. I never finish a single one of my philosophy lectures now in mind that I could finish five years ago.
years ago. I mean apart from the fact that everybody is you know on their mobile phones and surfing during the teaching session is totally distracted and split. Apart from that they just don't take it. The only chance you have is to add more visuals and more motion and with a discipline like philosophy it's very difficult. So you could have you know a cultural change you know reading books disappearing slowly from culture without anybody really realizing that it creeps upon us from behind. You know, I think we should put extra, you know, extra effort into observing this and neuroscience can help because neuroscience can describe things like acquired attention deficit disorder
in a very precise way. And I think that's where neuroscience should, for instance, be applied to. It's one example. Okay, well, I think it's... We're done? Yeah, there's one phone. There's one thing I didn't really understand. You said that there was more connection with virtual reality. Yeah, so there's been more connection with virtual reality and neurology, that that might change perceptions of the immortal soul? I was wondering if you could elaborate on that. Well, right. So I think I don't want to intrude on, hurt anybody emotionally or so,
but if one sees what neuroscience and modern philosophy does, it just is very, very obvious by now, more obvious than it has ever been in the past, That there is no empirical evidence and no rational argument to support the notion of a soul or a self as substance, something that could exist independently of the brain. The number of philosophers who still believe in something like that is minimal. I don't know how many neuroscientists still believe in this. Nobody in the expert world actually believes in this anymore. but 80% of mankind on this planet, 7 billion people, are firmly grounded in metaphysical worldviews and images of man.
And I think one big conflict that is there on local levels but also on a global level is, for a certain time it was like that in your private life you could believe whatever you wanted to believe. You could be a Christian or a Hindu and that was your private life and nobody laughed about you. But if today, for instance, you would still maintain that the sun revolves around the earth, people would laugh at you, you know, and there would be pressure on you, social pressure, emotional pressure, and that may change, you know, as more and more people through science journalism, through school education, learn about the alternative explanations we have for the evolution of self-consciousness
or the evolution of religious faith even. This puts pressure on a large part of humanity. I think a large number of human beings are just not ready for this new, I call it the naturalistic turn in the image of man. And there are several factors that make this more critical. One is that most of the people who are firmly grounded in metaphysical images of man and the world and are ready to die for it, are in the poor and underdeveloped countries and their population numbers are growing. And that knowledge, the information that there maybe is no such thing as an immortal self comes from exactly those countries
who have attacked, colonized, and exploited them in the past with shrinking populations. So also on a global level, there is, so to speak, the seed for a major unrest. I don't know how one would call this. It's an understatement. Yeah, okay. Let us end on an understatement. Okay, well, I think, yep, I think we should have a break now. Thanks very much, thanks. Thank you.