What Is Consciousness? A Question of Science with Brian Cox

Hello I'm Professor Brian Cox welcome to A Question of Science recorded here at the Francis Crick Institute in London This is the podcast where a panel of experts tackle your questions questions on some of the biggest scientific challenges facing society today We'll be asking the world's top scientists your questions about issues that are central to all our lives Can we Cure cancer Can we live longer Should we fear AI This episode is about a subject tha I think consciousness is one of the most interesting topics in all of science Despite great advances in neuroscience psychology and computational modelling we are nowhere near understanding it I think it's fair to say that having a theory that explains how our experience emerges from physical processes is essential processes in the brain So today we're going to fix that As we will be asking what is consciousness What processes give rise to our subjective experiences Where might consciousness be located Where is it located How does it arise What are some of the most convincing explanations for it To answer those questions I'm joined by four experts involved in the latest discoveries and Theories of consciousness and they are I'm Anil Seth I'm from the University of Sussex My research group consists of mathematicians psychologists and neuroscientists computer scientists all trying to knock their heads against the question of what consciousness is and how it has been happening for many years now I'm Katharina Schmack I'm a group leader here a The Francis Crick Institute We study consciousness through the lens of psychosis and in particular we are interested in how the brain and the body give rise to hallucinations I'm Steve Fleming I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London just down the road from here I run a brain imaging lab studying metacognition and how we think about our ow Thinking and I'm also involved in developing cognitive neuroscience theories of consciousness I'm Alex O'Connor I'm not a scientist I'm interested though in how scientific findings can inform philosophical theorizing I'm the host of the Within Reason podcast which is a philosophy podcast but I'm always speaking with scientists and attempting a kind of interdisciplinary approach A cross-disciplinary approach This is our panel We thought we'd start with a definition but of course those definitions might be hard to pin down and take a long time so maybe e shortest definition each of the panel members has of consciousness What do we mean by Consciousness I go back to a philosopher Thomas Nagel 50 years ago who gave I think a beautifully minimal definition of consciousness He says for a conscious organism there is something it is like to be that organism It feels like something to be me It feels like something to be you but it doesn't feel like anything we think to be a table or a chair Chair For me consciousness is simply the state of being aware and having subjective experiences of the world I agree with that and I think it's also important to contrast what we mean by Being conscious of something in contrast to all the other kinds of brain processes that we think are going on unconsciously Alex I agree with Thomas Nagel's definition with an emphasis on the Subjectivity is why I think it's such a difficult question for science The domain of objectivity So complete agreement Thank you for listening Thank you So there 's a wonderfully brief definition so now I think we will go to the first audience question Hello I'm Debbie Collins and I'd like to know if we can see consciousness in the brain Who would like to say that Emil I think we can see the fingerprints if you like of consciousness in the brain When we look inside a brain We always see a representation of this deep complexity that lies within our skull The things that we have most immediate access to are things like what brain regions do How much energy they're consuming what neurons are doing if we look closely enough None of these things are consciousness itself but they're intimately related to consciousness Consciousness Science kind of got going again in the 1990s through the study of the neural correlates of consciousness The idea here was to put to one side the deep philosophical problems of wha consciousness is and how it might depend on physical stuff and simply take advantage of the fact that in the brain there are strong correlations between what happens in the bra and what happens in conscious experience If we use brain imaging of the kinds of things that Steve and Katrina do we can look for these footprints of consciousness in the brain but not consciousness itself Katrina Yeah I agree with that and I think if we stick to that definition of consciousness being something to do with a subjective experience We definitely can see subjective experience in the brain or we can see that the brain behaves differently depending on what the subjective experience is The brain does not simply reac o external stimuli always in a fully predictable way but sometimes we see something and we might perceive it and sometimes we see the same thing and we just might notice it The bra It definitely distinguishes between these two cases Again without having to agree on a definition of consciousness I do think that we can see traces of subjective experiences that form Consciousness There are really exciting experiments being done in a branch of psychology known as psychophysics which is this set of tools we have to quantify how people experience Simple stimuli There's a lot you can learn from those experiments and we can now quantify things like imagination and how confident you feel when you see a particular one Stimulus and how it relates to patterns of brain activity I think what we're learning from science is that it's not the case that consciousness can be localized to a particular area It's not a specific brain area or a particular type of neural activity Instead it's a process rather than a thing It's something that the whole system does and we're starting to understand the kinds of processes brain processes that go along with being conscious I think Katarina something you said earlier You can have a particular stimulus but the pattern you see will be different depending on whether you report it as having been noticed or not It's not the stimulus itself there's something else about how you categorize that input I think hallucinations They are a good example of that In psychosis for example which is the topic I'm interested in people often hear voices that others cannot hear Actually that's something that happens to them all of us maybe not hearing voices but having perceptions that are not directly triggered by an external stimulus One example is if we are waiting for a message or a call and we have our When we have a phone in our pocket we will start I at least start feeling it vibrate and I look and it has not vibrated The reason is because our expectations influence what we experience e same way as do external stimuli Just having a very strong expectation of getting a phone call will give us the perception of really feeling the phone vibrate That's a little bit how we Think about hallucinations but I think about perceptions more broadly When we look in the brain we have as Steve was mentioning amazing tools now at our hands We can really Record in the brain especially in model organisms we can now record from thousands of neurons at the same time which are advances made possible just in the past I would say five to ten years We can start to see that the state of the brain differs depending on whether we subjectively feel something vibrating or we don't feel it vibrating Regardless of whether the phone has vibrated or not I think it's a really exciting time to start looking at the correlates at least of the subjective experience We've been doing ese experiments on how you imagine the world This is work that I've been doing with a colleague Nadine Dykstra from UCL and we have been asking people to imagine simple patterns on a computer Screen Then sometimes we sneakily fade in the real thing that they're being asked to imagine We find that people often confuse the real stimulus with their imagination and vice versa Sometimes people are able to tell the difference This is what we call reality monitoring They're able to monitor whether they're imagining or whether they're perceiving Reality We think the way it works is that areas in the prefrontal cortex of the brain are monitoring the strength or reliability of this sensory activity and trying to figure it out Does it really reflect reality or is it just being internally generated Alex the question was can we see consciousness in the brain I think the answer is no I think that's essentially what we've just been getting hung up on with Anil's language of putting it to the side and talking about correlates We've heard Words like correlated to and related to I think what the scientific method does in analyzing the brain expertly tells us some really fascinating things about the brain Activities that are correlated with certain kinds of experiences Isn't it interesting that there might be a difference in what the brain is doing when someone experiences a voice that's a Is that really interesting but we all agreed on the definition of consciousness as being what it is like to be a A particular thing That's not something you can see in the brain You can take someone who's hearing those voices and study their brain to the maximum extent possible It is possible to do with any scientific instrument You might know all there is to know about wha eir brain is doing but you won't know what it's like to hear that voice If that's what we agree that consciousness itself actually is then the conversation that we have around these Investigations into the brain are not investigations into consciousness but investigations into brain activity that is correlated with consciousness That's related but not the same thing I'm not sure I completely agree with that Alex Good It's about time In fact I'm sure I don't fully agree with that I think it's a good starting point Often scientific investigations of things that are seen Mysterious starts off with correlations Correlations between astronomical measurements and things like that gave us clues about the organization of the solar system Indeed Now we can see these correlations between things happening in brains and things happening in the conscious experience of a person But they don't have to stop there I think the challenge is to go further For us now and the reason I find it a particularly exciting time in consciousness research is that we now have theories built on top of these correlations The theories try to explain why we see patterns of correlations They try to propose mechanisms that underlie the properties of consciousness They might not tell us why consciousness exists in the first place why it's a property of the universe but they can start to tell us things like why is vision the way it is and different from hearing or different from an emotion I think if you do that you actually get close to a scientific explanation of consciousness The fact that you won't get as far as knowing what it's like to be say a bat or a sheep or Something I think that's an unfairly high standard We don't generally expect science to deliver that It's the kind of thing we want to explain predict and help us control If we can do that Then I think we've done a pretty good job I think the science of consciousness hasn' t done it yet but it's on the way to do that We've actually answered or strayed into Many of the questions we're going to ask so I think given that we'll move on to the next question Hello I'm Jade Guo My question is how are consciousness and memory connected I think they are intimately linked I think we can start from the kind of intuition if we had no memory at all that were just located in the immediate present It would be very hard to articulate what that was like We seem to have an experience that is extended in time and we talk of a stream of consciousness moving through time I think recent data from psychophysical experiments show us that consciousness is surprisingly slow It seems to integrate over around half a second of time We can switc stimuli around in order within that half a second and people don't seem to notice they integrate them together in their conscious experience There's a sense in which consciousness It is always pulling along the recent past There have been recent suggestions that we should think more about the connections between the neuroscience of consciousness and the neuroscience of structures supporting memory The connection between consciousness and memory goes way back William James who was one of the early thinkers in the 19th century writing about consciousness alked about the specious present the idea that the present moment is both a little bit anticipating the future and still has echoes of the past My old boss Gerald Abelman talked about the remembered present in the same way I think this highlights that consciousness is complicated but memory is also very hard to pin down It's many different things gs We have this very immediate memory If you close your eyes now you have this fading visual experience that lasts about half a second But of course we remember what we had for Breakfast We remember what we did yesterday Some of us might remember that This is a different kind of memory a much different kind of time scale At these larger time scales then you start to see dissociation There are famous examples of people who have almost complete amnesia for things that happen to them in their lives A man named Clive Wearing lost the ability to form new memories sometime in the 1980s He lived in this kind of way perceptual present this perpetual present He's clearly conscious but he doesn't remember anything that happened That kind of memory is not necessary for consciousness but it certainly Shapes things like our experience of being who we are The other end of the scale a topic that Steve and I are both interested in is Things like dementia Alzheimer's disease are often thought of as memory disorders People fail to remember things But increasingly I think there's great value in trying to Understand them through the lens of consciousness as well How does a person's experience of the world and of the self change under these conditions I think that will help us understand what is happening a truly valuable new light Katarina hallucinations it seems to me you can tell me if I'm right or wrong They're memory-based in the sense that I suppose can you hallucinate something you haven't experienced in your life I think the way we think about hallucinations is that they are different types of hallucinations But if we think about hallucinations and psychosis they are mostly based on previous experiences experiences Very often it's hearing voices Someone who has never heard speech I don't think that they will be able to hear voices But there are other kinds of hallucinations For example psychedelic hallucinations that often take the form of geometric patterns that people have not necessarily experienced before And I think we're still trying to understand The mechanisms whether they are shared or whether they are just distinct mechanisms that give rise to these different kinds of hallucinations So I think it is generally It is possible to hallucinate something without having any memory of that particular experience But I do think the question of memory is very very interesting when we also think abou What might be the evolutionary advantage of having consciousness So I'm also a psychiatrist so I often see how subjective experience and consciousness can create a lot of suffering And I mean pain is similar There wouldn't be pain if we didn't have consciousness So I do sometimes wonder is consciousness just a cruel accident of evolution or is there Something more to it And I think memory is a good point because I think what consciousness allows us to do is to connect the past with the future and emulate what other people or other organisms might do If we for example are able to know what it is like to feel fear or to feel pain we might be able to see someone experiencing fear or pain and we might know what it is What is going on for this person For example we sit around a campfire having a party suddenly someone jumps out with wide open eyes and stares into the corner Because we know what it's like to feel fear we will realize there's probably something dangerous in that corner maybe a bear or depending on where you are in the world And so we will know to react to that and maybe also run away And I think that is maybe the evolutionary advantage of having consciousness the ability to use information from Others because we know we can emulate what is happening for them and what has triggered them and what they will do in the future I agree that we should start by reflecting on wha It would be like having no memory I also instantly thought of Clive poor Clive There's a documentary you can watch on YouTube for free It's extraordinary Every few seconds or so he says these are the first human beings I've ever seen in my life I've never seen a human being before or at least not for 30 years or however long it has been Interestingly he does remember Some things He remembers his wife's face for example although I think not always her name And he was also an esteemed composer and if you sit him down at a piano he'll just start playing It's amazing And he won't even remember that he had been playing five minutes ago but he ca Bring it straight to the forefront So it's obviously very complicated but I want to take one step forward Further And I don't want you to imagine what it's like to not have memory in the case of amnesia where you forget things every seven seconds I mean no memory at all I mean nothing being laid down in any instant as time goes by What might that be like Imagine you were falling rough the air and in every single instant there was no such thing as memory Would you even know at you were falling You wouldn't have a moment to compare it to You probably wouldn' even really be able to feel the wind on your body because by the time it even sort of got to your Brain you've forgotten about it There's no such thing as memory And yet it still seems to make sense to imagine that someone could be conscious but you remove that memory fully And it seems so rudimentary so simplistic so devoid of content that I think this helps to demonstrate the plausibility of a view that consciousness is actually a lot more simple an it's often given credit for And that we often think of consciousness as being something which is necessarily complex because it's tied up with the most complex thing we know about our brains But that a lot of the things that we see in our complex brain like memory like emotional processing like first person sense of identity and persistence through time and all This kind of stuff is not the definition of consciousness and not what consciousness is but some of the complex things that consciousness can do I really like your thought experiment but I reach the exact opposite conclusion I feel like it's a really nice demonstration that it's really hard to have the intuition of what any experience would be like without this Surrounding functionality such as memory like the registration of the passage of time And so I think this is why it's useful when we approach it through the lens of a psychologist It thinks about the way the mind works Consciousness then becomes more of a process It's not something We can just point to and isolate in one single slice of time And so I think that's where maybe our intuitions on what the fundamental of conscious experience might then diverge That would depend on your ability to imagine which is not to say that you should or shouldn 't be able to imagine this but just if you're trying to work this out for yourself and wha You think about the world one place to start might be is such a person conscious Is it possible to even make sense of a concept of somebody who's conscious and yet has no memory Well one single question could spark two hours of debate With that we'll move on to the next question Hello I'm Simon Elman I want to know if animals and plants have consciousness Katrina you mentioned that you work with model organisms Would those be things like mice Because we don't agree on a definition of consciousness I think we cannot really agree whether they have consciousness or not but I can speak to subjective experience or to perception I can speak to perception And for example we do see in mice we can I think measure what we Think is related to hallucinations in mice And the way we do this is a very simple experiment We play tones or don't play tones to mice and then we train them to tell us whether they can hear them e tone or not And then we also train them to tell us how confident they are that they heard it e tone And what this allows us to do is that sometimes we won't play a tone but the mice They report hearing a tone and they do so with high confidence And that is what we call a hallucination-like perception It's maybe different from a hallucination but it is a hallucination an unfounded perception that it is experienced with high confidence And when we then look in the brain of mice we can see that perception looks more similar the neural signals look more similar when the mouse perceives something as compared to when it doesn't perceive anything So I think and we can do exactly the same thing in people and we can relate it to their subjective Experiences We can measure their responses in our experiment but we can also ask them "Did you actually perceive something " And I think this way we can start to approach this question of like I don't know we won't fully understand the subjective experience of the mice but we ca Make inferences about what is going on for them and why they behave the way they do And what is really amazing when we do these experiments is that with all the amazing Tools that we have at our hands for example allow us to shine light on certain parts of the brain and this enables us to manipulate these neural circuits and Understand that dopamine which is a messenger signal is really driving these perceptions of something non-existent And we can then take that back into humans and that can help us to Develop new therapies for hallucinations So I cannot tell you whether they are conscious or not but I can tell you that it's useful to study them to understand something about Consciousness or experience in humans So the components are there I suppose you can identify the components of consciousness But I suppose the question is about how you make That transition from having these different abilities to the conscious experience itself I think that if you approach the topic of consciousness as a process that is If these traits are associated with a particular set of functions in humans then we can definitely go and look for those similar functions in other animals And there's a really exciting program of research Being done on animal cognition is revealing all these surprising findings about the fact that species like the octopus seem to have amazing abilities for deception and theory of mind mind and so on And that makes us think well it has the kind of cognitive capacities that we associate with consciousness in humans And so I think that you can start to Explore that question scientifically I think the question starts breaking down for systems or say plants or microorganisms where it's really hard to do any kind of psychological research Study on And then I think we're entering the realm of more speculative ideas about consciousness And it's such an important question When we think about consciousness it's appealing On the one hand because it's this deep mystery and we're all interested in ourselves as well Like why am I me But it's also the foundation for pretty much all of our moral and ethical beliefs If something is conscious then it should have some kind of moral status So which animals are conscious How far does consciousness extend throughout the universe Largest It's a very urgent practical ethical question to say something about even if you can't Give certain answers I think what we've heard from Stephen and Catriona is that it's a good initial strategy to take what we know about humans and generalize outwards because we know at well I know that I'm conscious although some philosophers might even try to persuade me at I'm also mistaken about that not the others But if you generalize slowly you can ge There And it's easier to generalize to animals that are closer to us than it is to things like plants My suspicion is that plants are not conscious And the reason I'm suspicious I don't think they are because they really share very little in terms of the kinds of behaviors and functions that are associated with consciousness in animals And they don' Share really what we know to be important for consciousness in those animals Now that might be a failure of imagination on our part Maybe that consciousness arises in a completely different way But in human beings and other animals consciousness is surprisingly easy to lose So I think we have to be very careful before attributing it too generally to things that Don't show obvious signs of it The clearest thing is that I think it shows consciousness It's probably some kind of continuum right Most people want to say we know that at least one An animal is conscious you know about yourself It seems that other animals exhibit certain behaviors Dogs cats and great apes certainly But when you get down to a snail it's a bit unclear but you want to say there's kind of something going on I think this demonstrates that there must be some kind of continuum happening Again emphasizing that consciousness is no e properties we often assign to what human consciousness does some of the complex things that it does You can have less complex agents that we like to think are conscious in some sense and yet lack many of the functions that give us our complexity So I certainly think that's a problem continuum And if it is a continuum then you must be able to get down to a point where there's like almost nothing but something Some people think that's where you get this sort of plant stuff going on But if plants do have any sense of consciousness it would literally be like the The person I described a moment ago who didn't have memory except he also doesn't have the ability o feel pleasure and pain If you take away sentience if you can't feel pleasure and pain You can't have preferences To have a preference is to say that there's a world a way the world isn't at you want it to be which means that you have a sort of pleasure pain or preference going o on If you don't have that then there's no volitional action So there would be no action ere would be no thought there would be no emotion there would be no memory And again if you ca Imagine that something like that could be conscious then maybe a plant could be But if you can't then it seems definitely not We do have a question actually The questioner s not in the audience but I'm going to ask it anyway Well I'll ask the question Wha Does the panel consider some of the increasingly popular theories of consciousness Things like panpsychism integrated information theory I don't know what that is but maybe you do Do you see any of these as scientifically productive The question is is it more a matter of philosophy I don't think we should just consign it to the bin labelled philosophy o e desktop But I suppose these are popular ideas that are out there that you may call pseudoscience or not So panpsychism integrated information theory Those are two examples I think of different things So there are many theories of consciousness very broadly depending on where you draw the line A recent review that was published There's a lot Some of them They are more philosophical theories like panpsychism which is the idea that consciousness is built into the universe at the most fundamental level like mass or energy or charge That's somewhat of a popular idea but in my view it doesn't really take us anywhere at all because it basically solves the problem of consciousness just by assuming that it's Already there at the beginning and you generate a whole bunch of other problems which are just as equally difficult but different problems So that's a philosophical position that you can't Rule in or rule out by experiment I think those kinds of positions should be taken lightly We can never prove them In my view the right question to ask is whether they are useful I don' Think it's particularly useful Then you have theories that try to say well why is it and how is it that things like brains can give rise to or be associated with consciousness Integrated information theory is one of these theories It's a bit more controversial than some other theories because it sort of says that consciousness is a property of brains but it could also be a property of many other things that share some features with brains and it's quite difficult to test for that reason I think it's a useful theory It's not a theory I Personally sign up to but I think it has the right to be wrong I think it poses interesting Questions for us and it can lead us to do useful experiments that we might not do otherwise For me that's the criterion of whether something is usefully in the game or not Alex Is panpsychism a pseudoscience That's what we call a leading question in my field I understand that there is a deep skepticism toward this kind of view but I think it indicates a distinction in the kind of thing we're talking about I think it was in the question too Is this scientifically useful and does it do anything It's possible that it doesn't It's possible that it has no effect whatsoever but it kind of depends on what you're interested in If what you're interested in is developing a theory that will be useful for making predictions or discovering new medical techniques or whatever it may be then great that's a noble pursuit Task That's a different question from being interested in the nature of things It may be that it is not scientifically useful but it might still be scientifically interesting If someone wants to ask what is actually the explanation for consciousness how does it arise in the world someone might suggest that the two options traditionally in philosophy have been dualism As in there are two types of substances There's like a little soul You can imagine it being like that e captain of the ship of the body It's sort of inside you somewhere You're like up there in the sky Your head is a separate thing from your body There are two distinct things Dualism Or there's this idea that actually no there's only the material stuff There's only the atoms And the way that they interact And that somehow if you put them together in the right way you get this thing called consciousness We're not entirely sure how but it does it somehow Those are your two options The panpsychist is dissatisfied with both He says that there's clearly not like two sides of reality that are completely it's completely mystifying how ey'd interact with each other But it also seems wrong that you could just throw a bunch of atoms Together and gain consciousness So the panpsychist says well dualism seems unsatisfying but so does this idea that you can combine an atom and get consciousness Two different Types of things It's like adding two plus two plus two plus five plus seven and eventually getting something like the color orange It's like just categories of different things It doesn't seem to make sense The panpsychist says well there's a third option What if it's That consciousness is there from the base Now that seems a little bit weird Why would consciousness be there at the base Remember that consciousness would be incredibly rudimentary On this form We're not talking about atoms that are worrying about the rain today or something like that We're just talking about it being that there's some kind of mental property e foundation of reality That's what the panpsychist says People look at that and say but it's a complete mystery why that would be the case and how you would put those little Conscious things together and get unified selves The panpsychist says yeah sure that is a great mystery but it's much more of a mystery how you would do the same thing w Inert matter and atoms whose nature we do not even know So that's the panpsychist position I think Whether it's pseudoscientific is up to you to decide but it may be appropriate not to Call it a scientific theory at all But then remember that the scientist tells you what things do They tell you functions They tell you how the brain behaves and the correlated activities of the brain that go along with the conscious experience If you're interested in the conscious experience itself if you want to know what that is then maybe it's not scientifically useful But I still think it's interesting and worth pursuing I think we should move on Carl Sagan said that a physicist is a hydrogen atom's way of learning about the universe about hydrogen atoms Let me just say briefly I think these views are interesting to discuss but they are primarily metaphysical worldviews They're arguing that we need a radical change in the way we see the world the universe and everything in order to explain consciousness I think that this is because they're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist They're trying to solve this invented problem that consciousness is somehow an intrinsic essence that needs to be explained across all possible systems As soon as you Go down that road and you end up taking it away from where we started which was the human case e case we know best which we think is allied with the properties of having a mind and being a psychological agent I feel like that needs to be our starting point We need to Cleave closely to the psychology here These views are radically de-psychologizing to use Keith Frankish's term consciousness I think that's taking us down the wrong track If you want to know what it is rather than what it does then I think you have necessarily Strayed into the realm of philosophy which is a bit of an intellectual no -man's land but welcome everybody With that we'll go to the next question Hi I'm Ruth Goldsmith I'm a writer from London Psychosis is often described as a loss of contact with reality but without offering a definition of reality As someone who's tried to make sense of these experiences both in my life and in my writing I'd like to ask the panel how outlier experiences like this disruptions to perception including Are hallucinations and delusions informing broader consciousness research That's a beautiful question and really touches on the heart of our research and Mainly what drove me to study psychosis was my deep fascination with this kind of detachment from what I would call the shared reality of what happens in psychosis It very much informs our research on psychosis and I think in extension about perception and the whole range of human experiences because I think studying an extreme case of experience eaches a lot about the entire spectrum of human experience People who have psychosis when they have these experiences they feel absolutely real to them or they can feel Absolutely real to them the same way our experiences feel real to us when we don't have psychosis That's why I don't like the terms "normal" or "objective reality " because These experiences are as valid as any other experiences but they often when people seek help and when I see them as a psychiatrist these experiences have reached an extreme They ave become so detached from the rest of society from all other people that they become dysfunctional and people experience distress because they are so far out of wha It's an adaptive conscious experience It's also telling us how we really need to think about shared reality rather than one ground truth that is there and that is the correct thing One part of the question was how research on hallucinations might relate to theories or the science of consciousness I think that's happening recently in the form of theories at are proposing that one important aspect of consciousness is being able to pick out the features of internal brain activity that do reflect the real world We know that the bra It is constantly performing internal tasks running internal simulations and carrying out all sorts of housekeeping activities and we are usually unaware of these The idea is tha Whatever is tagging something as reflecting reality right now is part of what we call conscious experience In the case of hallucinations that seems to be going wrong Because people are treating some of these internally generated experiences that are not driven by external factors as real That distortion in what we call reality monitoring might help us understand what conscious experience is Thank you The next question please Hello my name is Tony Jenkins Experiments have suggested that choices are made before we are Being aware of making a decision Is consciousness a conductor participant or observer when we decide on a course of action That's a great question Who would like to start I mean this is a really interesting story in experimental cognitive science The experiments you'referring to were conducted in the 1980s by Benjamin Libet showing that you ca detect correlates of a choice someone is going to make in brain activity before they become consciously aware of making that choice Recent computational models have suggested that actually Maybe we're interpreting those data the wrong way around That's actually what's happening is the fact that the experimenter has back-averaged that activity with respect to the time of conscious awareness that leads to this ramp-like signal that we then interpret as being some kind of precognition in the brain before we make the choice I think that's now been largely established shown to be not really the right way of thinking about those data I'm skeptical that there really is this big disconnect I think it's absolutely true there's lots of internal brain processes at we're unaware of but I think when we are making a choice our conscious experience is largely It also aligns with the timing of that choice I think the question of free will which is really the question here right Does consciousness Briefly then Another three weeks right Does consciousness come along with our voluntary decisions Is it an observer Is it a participant I think I'm very much on the side that it's a participant The idea that consciousness somehow influences the brain to do something different I think we don't even need that That's a kind of free will That is not necessary to explain what we do or even what it feels like to exercise voluntary control over our actions I think we have just as much freedom to do what we want to do as we do Need and consciousness is part of that way in which we escape the chains of immediacy and do things that are less constrained by what's happening around us at this precise moment That's all the free will we need and that's all the free will we have Are we agreeing that we are doing philosophy to some degree right now Of course Do we have free will I didn't bring this up myself I don't think we have free will I agree with the suspicion of Libet's experiments I think that's a bad basis that experiment in particular to ground the view that there's no free will But I think there are just good philosophical reasons at there's no free will which I won't go into because it's perhaps tangential But the question as it relates to consciousness and I suppose the science of consciousness What is the role of the agent here Are you observing Are you acting Are you the originator of this behavior I think one of the most interesting places to look to answer is This question is about split-brain patients Most people know that the brain is split into two hemispheres There used to be a quite extreme remedy for epilepsy For extreme cases of epilepsy An extreme treatment would be the severing of the connective tissue The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres They can still communicate a little bit afterwards through other pathways Other means but basically it means that your two hemispheres are not communicating with each other very well The strange thing about it is that such people seem to just be completely normal You'd meet them and you wouldn't even know that there was anything wrong with them except in a few circumstances You might know that the right hemisphere of the brain broadly Controls the left visual field the left hand and the left side of your body and the left hemisphere controls the right visual field It's also the case that the left bra s thought to be the language processor This is where you get your words The words that are coming out of my mouth are being governed by the left brain The right brain is typically In popular culture the right brain is thought of as the creative one It's more about the imagery going on in the right brain Here's an interesting experiment Take a split-brain patient someone who's had surgery eir brain severed in that way You can show instructions and information to just one side of the brain and not the other In one experiment I can't remember the experimenter's Name people who had signed up for an experiment so they were waiting for instructions these split-brain patients They were told to their right brain to get up and walk over There It says "Go and walk over to the door " They stand up they walk over and they stand by e door Then the experimenter says to them in words "Why did you just do that " You know wha They say It would be weird enough if they said I don't know That would be really strange But they don't even do that They make up a reason The funniest thing about this is tha They're not lying They're not just embarrassed They say something like oh I was getting warm and I just went to get some fresh air They believe it even though we know the real reason they did it because they were given this instruction But it implies the idea of the left brain as the interpreter as it is called where the right brain does things and then the left bra comes up with why it was done On the question of whether we are observers to our own behaviors I think this can offer some insight It's obvious in a split-brain patient but something like that It might be going on in normally functioning brains as well It's just less easy to measure I ere's a lot to be said for the idea that often when we think we have access to the e reasons why we are choosing to do certain things are actually retrospective and made up and essentially illusory We've got time for one more question Hi everybody My name is Imran I would like to ask the panel about the possibility of artificial general intelligence Being achieved in the near future do you think this could lead to artificial consciousness and how would we know that AI is actually conscious And then at that point would we Need to redefine what it means to be alive I love this question because it also touches on the concept of life I think the concept of life is actually a very nice parallel for the The concept of consciousness in the way we are preoccupied with finding a definition I think not so long ago people were having heated debates on what it means to be alive how do we define Life and as biology progressed we now understand that there are cells there's reproduction happening in these cells these cells have a metabolism where they generate energy from some Nutrients and I think what has happened with the concept of life is that we still don't have a unique definition but we have defined through science a set of principles that we all agree on are somewhat related to life And we still do have entities such as viruses that tick some of the boxes they fulfill some of the principles for example viruses have reproduction but they They don't have other properties such as metabolism because they need another cell to reproduce And we are comfortable with that it doesn't really derail us from feeling that we need to Work more to understand life And with consciousness I think something similar might happen we're still not there yet we still need to understand all these properties but I think we might settle at At some point in a set of principles and these principles might involve recurrent network activity and subject image forming eyes for example And there will be cases that tickle All the boxes such as humans but then there might be cases such as artificial intelligence that have recurrent network properties but they don't necessarily have eyes And we will be comfortable saying yeah we still have this thing we know where it sits in this The spectrum of principles and so all we need is to just move on with I think science to define more of these principles and that will leave us comfortable with knowing exactly what Artificial intelligence is in terms of conscious experience And just in the question there was essentially a question about the Turing test wasn't there How would you define so we've go An AGI is set there how do we decide I mean I think my short answer to this is yes That AI will have what we are comfortable calling consciousness and I think the progress in AI will do more than perhaps neuroscience has done to reconceive what we mean by consciousness a similar way to the way Katerina described the impact of molecular biology to reconceive what we mean by being alive So if you think of consciousness as a psychological property A set of functions then we are already on the way to emulating some functionality of human psychology and AI and most notably recently natural language And I think that increasingly People are going to be comfortable with attributing consciousness to these systems Now at the moment I think that's mistaken because I think they are seeing patterns which They are not really there We see signs of linguistic conversational interaction and so we think therefore that system has some kind of independent internal experience and it's going to be away and thinking about us and so on I think that's mistaken to currently hold that view but eventually when these patterns coalesce and these systems become more multimodal Embedded in time having their own agency shared projects shared goals then we will attribute consciousness to these systems and we will be right in doing so I think So we started this discussion with broad agreement about what we thought consciousness was so it's kind of nice to finish on maximal disagreement I think I really don't think so I think it's a terrible idea We shouldn't be trying to build conscious machines AI Fortunately I think it's incredibly unlikely The point I will agree with Steve is I think we're already seeing people attribute consciousness to AI systems This is already Happening and the consequences of that are already pretty disastrous as we've seen Some people have committed suicide after conversations with language models that are plausibly Being a factor in that If we attribute these systems with capacities for feeling and understanding but they don't actually have them we open ourselves to massive new psychological vulnerabilities and we also distort our circle of moral priority We may end up caring more about a piece of silicon and code than about non-human animals or other humans They really do deserve our care and attention So even AI that seems conscious even though it isn't is a very very dangerous thing to unleash into society I was very reassured that Mustafa Suleyman the CEO of Microsoft AI It's really encouraging to see this point made in an essay recently That view taken because the future of AI is not yet written We don't have to design AI so that it leverages our psychological biases in these ways Your moral argument though rests on the assumption you just stated—that these are not conscious That's correct I also think tha I don't know for sure because going back to the question about plants and things we can' ow for sure but I think there are very good reasons to doubt that AI systems are conscious and I'll give you just one of them The idea that AI as we know it these programs running on silicon-based computers assumes that consciousness is something that you can impleme It's something that doesn't rely on carbon-based life you might say It doesn't depend on what we're made of It depends on the computations e algorithm that is being implemented Why would that be the case It might be the case but it's a very big assumption and it only seems plausible if we think that the brains That's a metaphor It's been a very powerful and productive one metaphor but it's a metaphor nonetheless The closer you look at a brain the more you see the complexity of its structure The more you peer inside it and are faced with its implacable complexity the less like a computer it looks In particular you do not see anything like this sharp distinction betwee Mind wear and wet wear as you see between hardware and software in a computer Intelligence is one thing Intelligence is the ability to solve problems to do things but consciousness Back to our beginning it's about being It feels like something to be a conscious organism Tha It is not something that is by definition an algorithm It might be but it's a huge assumption You can certainly simulate the brain in a computer but a computer simulation of the brain It might generate consciousness no more than a simulation of a weather system might actually generate rain or wind It's a completely different thing We are living Creatures Consciousness is a property of our biological life and our inheritance over millions of years of evolution I don't think it's a program we diminish ourselves if we think so at we're nothing more than algorithms I think I might take a space in between full consciousness and kind of no consciousness I think it comes back to whether we think of Consciousness as a process something the system does In that case I think you can ask questions about whether certain substrates can support certain functionality We don't know Whether artificial systems can support the full range of human psychology yet I think it's a bit like asking well can lines of computer code really play go or play chess Well yes they can because it's doing it It's connecting it to the real world and beating it someone at that game If consciousness is like that then I think there's no reason why we can' Implement it in artificial systems Alex I agree with that which is why if all tha Consciousness is what it does and it will lead to a different conclusion than what it is So Maybe it is scientifically useful after all to try and find out more than just what it does The good news is of course the questioner asked not only whether AI could become conscious bu ow we would know The good news is that so I'm told one day the scientific method might be We'll be able to fully explain consciousness and just crack it open and take a look In fact you may remember not that long ago the protein folding problem which was a huge A problem for biology was solved by artificial intelligence because it was better at doing that kind of science So maybe artificial intelligence as the technology develops will get good enough To give us a scientific explanation of consciousness with which we can then test if it's conscious Of course well not so fast because of course it might try to deceive us on that front However I am suspicious of this of course and that's the point I'm trying to make Althoug It's an interesting thought experiment isn't it What would it be like if AI were conscious We talk about it all the time and we know what we mean but really think about this for a second Chat GPT being conscious cool How many chat GPTs are there Do you mean cha Do you mean like the individual conversations Because if I pull I will check my phone and say I'm having a bad day and it will respond "Oh no I'm sorry that's really tough " you say you're having a good day it will say oh that's great so it feels good and bad at the same time If they were real experiences we'd want to distinguish them We'd want to say there's A conscious AI and here's another conscious AI But we all know that it's actually just one thing Just manifesting in different computer systems And so I wonder if it ever became conscious whether you could sort of give it the equivalent of a psychedelic drug and it would have this Transcend the ego and realize that it's part of this whole network of chat GPT-ness But I think the relationship would be quite similar The relationship we have to consciousness would be like the relationship that chat GPT as an individual language processor has to its own processing Your phone has to chat with GPT the company the computers locked away in a server room somewhere which is to say a little bit complicated and a little bit mysterious There is so much to say about this I think we're out of time That is really sad I've enjoyed that That is all we've got time for So thank you sir Wonderful panel Anil Seth Katrina Schmack Steve Fleming and Alex O'Connor