 Yeah, so we'll do some cleanup some some points that we had that I'd like to talk about and then we'll briefly summarize what we Hopefully some of the lessons of the past 18 classes that we that I've talked to you about The one is a question that I thought about for a long long time and Couple of years ago Francis Crick and I had some concrete suggestions So we put these two paper and threaten the two papers on this Until the age probably of 30. I always thought a I strenuously denied I remember having debates with some friends the existence the true existence of the unconscious in the Freudian sense in a sense that that they are large parts of my brain of my mind that are inaccessible to me and that That sort of make me do things that I'm not aware of you know in the Freudian sense in a sense Not you know not sensory motor not talking language or not sort of low level vision But in that in a sense that you know important decisions why I have friends why I choose certain friends Why choose certain subjects why choose to behave in a certain way not in different ways that I just felt the notion was you know Was ridiculous that there was something in my head that I didn't know often that it was influencing my behavior But as you get older you learn and you realize that there's actually to a certain it's a very large extent That's actually true whether you like it or not that they're the two large extent your behavior is determined by by Decision rules that are inaccessible to you and so therefore the adage of Western philosophy know thyself and it's actually indeed very difficult to know Thyself and you can just strive to do that throughout your entire life But so there's a related question if you think in terms of a computational architecture You look at the computational architecture of the brain and the mind and where do you situate consciousness? You know so at the input level you have your you have your sensors You have your retina in your cochlear and then at the next stage you have sort of low level visual routines or low level You know sensory routines, you know that deal with face recognition that deal, you know with all the other you know letter Word recognition all the other things that we can do so effortlessly and so well And then so somewhere in them in the more central part and then of course on the output side You have you know the slow serve you have the output effector that just you know Make me make you move that the more complex at them somewhat high level You have things that can execute entire sequences of behavior or that can put a single behavior that can trigger entire behavior Not just a single motor action or that can trigger sort of entire sequence of behaviors like you know If you dance or climb or do anything like that But then you had then the question is we're in this processing hierarchy. Do you situate consciousness? Now certainly when I was naive I thought about it in the following way And I think most people do that if you ask and most people would assume that consciousness sort of is that the pinnacle of the Processing pyramid right if you have this processing pyramid where you start at the input and then you go to high stages And then you descend again to go to the output that most people believe that of course what I'm conscious office sort of is the most elaborate part of in elaborate in terms of information processing is the most elaborate part of my brain's the highest level of brain that I'm That this is really where consciousness resides. That's where it must have access to the highest level of information processing and I think that's wrong and Quite a number of people have developed elaborate theories based on these are called intermediate level theories of consciousness That the year is that you you do not have access that consciousness does not have access to the Outermost stages of processing Folks in the retina we talked about it many times that what's in the retina is necessary for seeing But it's not really the character of retinal firing is really very different from the character of the way I see But you also don't have access to your innermost Parts of your mind. In fact The series particular famous cognitive scientist called Jackendorf at Brandeis He argues that what you think of your thoughts that your thoughts are really unconscious And what you're seeing what you're conscious office a reflection of your office is a mapping of your thoughts into sensory dimensions into image silent speech or Into imagery so the claim is that all that what you really are aware of is almost always sensory information at your Way off either sensory information that comes from the outside or sensory information that comes from the inside so that when you close The eyes or your daydream or you're imagining things are you thinking or your reasoning the claim is it or what you're reasoning And you what you're thinking is always in pictures. It's either in so it's always in sensory quality So it's either in pictures or it's in silent speech Or maybe it's you know intactile although that's very rare But it's not but you don't really have access to to to the thoughts themselves That they are hidden from conscious from direct conscious introspection. Yeah, so this is this this Ray Jackendorf no So like he's a cognitive scientist and he has written a substantial book Which is quite well known in the cognitive science community in the cognitive community Conscious in the computational mind where he analyzes particular music and he analyzes high-level vision Not it's a low level but they at the high level but particular music and language and where he argues that this is This is what we're really aware of we are aware of a representation of the outer world So we are aware of you know representation of the visual world and of the tactile world and of the auditory world Certain aspects of the world of course We're not it's a point that can't meet you know very emphatically in the critique of pure reason We've cost never conscious of the world itself, right? We don't have direct access to the world itself We only have access to the world indirectly for our representations. So famously he called this dusting and safe It's a very famous term in philosophy the thing in itself Which is the one that dusting This thing that means the thing distinct and safe Thing in itself It means We we have we we can only up we can only observe our parents's and as they are filtered through our Categories of conceptual understanding the most important being causality and space and time So, you know, he has this elaborate argument over 600 pages very dense pose that I don't understand So I prefer to read it in modern English than in in German because it's really impenetrable but that where he does argue that that we have these categories of of of Representation and they the most important ones like a causality and time and space and everything We have to situate everything in a particular point in time And we have to situate everything in a particular point in space and everything has to have a prior call a cause These are all the phenomena all the phenomena in the world phenomena have to have these in these categories but the thing in itself The nomen are we we can never really have access and so we we can certainly appreciate that in If you look in your science because we as you know, as we said, we don't have access conscious Representation don't occur in the retina. We could click and I think they don't even current v1 But it can hire in higher parts of the brain. So for sure we don't have access to them We have only access in we have owned the only way with access to the world is through our Representations in our head. So it's really very it seems like a trivial or very deep point Depending on your point of view, but it seems to be an unavoidable conclusion that we don't have access to the things outside But was but on the other end. So what we do we have to do these correlational measurements, right? So we we look at things we touch them we feel them we smell them we have experience from them with expectation We know, you know, this is certain heaven I would be surprised of course you can fool me, you know And we have all have these very powerful expectations of the world and if they're not met and we you know We are immediately surprised that we stumble if we miscounted a step or if something is lighter or heavier than Then we thought it is and of course, that's where science comes in that's where science is You know, we measure things within you know across a spectrum We met you know, we observe and measure and correlate things and then we try to find consistency But it's so we can approximate We can approximate the nature of things to a high and hired extent But the fact is that we it's approximation and we don't have direct access to them So the I think I mean most people will accept that although some there's still these residual debates that I don't quite understand about Do we really have access? Don't we in some way have access to the thing itself is it out there the in in in my head It's just another book. I was asked to review by some Gestalt psychologists that have that that bring this argument to an incredible Arcane level and I just don't really understand what the point is. I mean clearly the world isn't inside I mean, it's not inside my head the representation of my world is inside my head But the representation of the world outside is actually outside Anyhow, I mean that seems trivial to me, but This point so this point is the in is the sort of more interesting one that and it's Difficult to it's much more difficult to establish this using rigorous at this point using Rigors sort of scientific criteria that the rep that we only have an that we don't really have access to our innermost world That there's an inner that there's an inner world. That's hidden from us By the design of our brains Just because probably because for the function of consciousness Whatever the function of consciousness is like to do planning etc. It doesn't require us to have access to these decision-making stages and and we don't have access them We only have an access to them as the output of these stages are reflected back onto the sensory surfaces back onto visual cortex back Onto auditory cortex, and that's the only thing that that's we have access to so this school of thought would either we don't that thoughts are really Really the the representations in the innermost world. We don't have access to them directly We have only access to the reflections of the thoughts as they get reflected back onto our sensory surfaces So that's the third conclusion that these are expressed solely in sensory terms that any that any That really anything you feel is that anything you in your conscious mind is always expressed in terms of sensory terms including these funny things like, you know, you know, there are all these funny things like tip of the tongue like deja vu like You know feeling of familiarity there all these these funny sort of some people call them feelings a sensation that are much that are Very little studied mainly by psychologists very difficult to study deja vu in in a monkey Although, you know why shouldn't a monkey have the same feeling that that these are also always expressed in in sensory terms I think it's most obvious in them for visual representations So this is actually the picture which I find strangely very very compelling. This is a from Jack and stuff book and I find this very well So they claim so this is the outside world everything outside in the universe outside your brain well, of course your brain I mean your your body's also a part of the outside world and Then you have these various sensory processing modalities by visual cortex auditory cortex or factory cortex, etc And then they get processed and then at some point they get representation. He's totally neutral I mean, he doesn't know anything about the brain. He doesn't say anything about the brain But you know, we'll say well this somewhere happens here, you know, you know higher I mean, I would say it's not only one other people say it's be one But somewhere here this happens somewhere in visual cortex You have you have the conscious representation that you that that actually generate the NCC that generate your conscious perception But then sort of you have this entire and it's of course this is schematized We don't know what fraction of the brain is encompassed by this the our inner thoughts our inner world Probably this includes much much of frontal globe probably most of the prefrontal cortex where we don't we don't know it This point to what extent neurons in prefrontal cortex actually directly correlate with consciousness The best explored case is a visual case and those are neurons in the high-level visual part or in the middle Temple lobe We don't know yet about prefrontal cortex But this would say their large parts of prefrontal cortex that are inaccessible to us They're very important for for for you know planning and decision-making etc But we don't really we're not really conscious of them what we're conscious of whatever rises here Whatever thought the concept of neural activity is a resume then gets reflected or partially reflected back onto this surface This inner surface a sensory surface and this is where consciousness happens So you know consciousness would be this I mean conceptually would be this this shell These this entire world outside and then this is world inside and the only thing you are I mean what your consciousness is what you are in one sense you and your person your memory and your thoughts and your selfhood Your personality sort of would be this sort of this conceptually this shelf the shell Intercalated between the inner world and the outer world Find it very very compelling a bigger pun No, he does not talk about emotion. He talks about language He talks about music both which I know nothing and he talks a little bit about vision I'll come to vision. No, I don't know. I don't know where where emotion would come in I mean, I guess what you know the claim would be emotion is also is is you know emotions are by the very nature highly Bodily-centered right, you know, you feel and you know, you suddenly you discover you're angry because you have all these bodily you have all these bodily reactions So I would certainly think of emotion as something very bodily centered Now, yeah, like I said this is so that you can discuss you can go back to You can go back to cunt And other philosophers. I was struck. I found I did some reading 10 years ago, maybe in a Freud and although a lot of what he says is Bologna He's really said he was a very he was a very smart man. No doubt about it I mentioned he was he early on he was a neuroscientist and Even later on he made some very tension observation I mean what happened to him then he started the church and he became sort of caught up as a leader of this church And there really wasn't any attempt and in his later life sort of to be a science scientist in a sense to Seriously think about how you can verify your test of falsify any first ideas, but nonetheless. He was an awful Smart man. And so these are different three different quotes from three different Of his writing in different phases if you read this what part is there left to be played in our scheme by consciousness Which was one so omnipotent and hid all else from view only that of a sense organ for the perception of Psychical qualities Perceptual qualities would say Or at 15 years later in psychoanalysis There's no choice but for us to assert that mental processes and themselves unconscious and to liken the perception of them by means of consciousness To the perception of the external world by means of sense organs But another 10 years later it dawns upon us like a new discovery that only something which has once been a perception can become conscious That anything arising from within So he puts feelings apart that seeks to become conscious must try to transform itself into external perception So again the idea that anything that has to be conscious has to map itself onto a perceptual onto a perceptual Cholio and there's a oops. There's a famous book by a by by the famous new American neuroscientist Lashley and he was working in the last century. It's Harvard. I think and then at Stanford on on Cortex and Towards the end he comes to this conclusion No activity of mind is ever conscious. This sounds like a paradox, but it is nonetheless true There are an arrangement, but there's no experience of the creation of that order I could give no numberless examples for there's no exception to the rule a couple of illustrations should suffice Look at a complicated scene Consist of a number of objects standing out against an indistinct background desks chairs faces Each consists of a number of lesser sensations combined in the object, but there's no experience of putting them together The objects immediately present when we think in words the thoughts come in grammatical form with subject verb object and modifying clauses falling into place without having the slightest perception of how the sentence structure is produced Experience clearly gives no clue as to the means by which it is organized I mean, it's a I mean, this is a Theme that ran through the lecture that most of what goes on our head Of course sort of is submental in the sense that we don't have conscious mental acts. We don't have conscious access to it Now there's a There's an interesting literature on a small literature on on creativity for the most part what at least the one I'm the aspect of literature I know is sort of Is it's sort of more or less accounts of what it what it is to be creative and how could you how could you encourage the creative act? Right and you know by now, you know by think by analogical thinking and things like that There's a very famous book in this literature written by a French mathematician Hadamard who who worked on the ill post problems and Inverse problems in the 20s 30s and 40s and 30s in the 40s during the war and after the war I think when he was here in the US in Princeton He wrote a book on Creativity and this mathematical mind or something of that nature where he wrote where he wrote to create a great extended correspondence with lots of famous scientists and mathematicians About the creative act and they he asked them to recall how they thought and and How they thought and What they thought was the origin of their creativity and what would it take to be creative? There's a very famous quote from him so and Albert Einstein was one of the Correspondents and he he wrote back so he meets this quite famous statement the words are like this now Albert Einstein The words or language his accent is at least as strong as mine if I read it on Yeah, the words or language as they have written or spoken do not seem to play any role in my mechanisms of thought The psychical entities which seem to service Service elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images Which can be voluntarily produced a combined? He was very emphatic that he knew when he thought when he did mathematics He always thought in terms of he was a He was doing geometrical Man he was essentially doing geometry very visual, you know the type of mathematics He did of course in you know Minkowski spaces and things like that was this a sort of differential geometry differential topology And of course that lent itself very well to pictorial representation It's also my experience myself or talking to other mathematicians that most of them not all but most of them at least claim that they think in images It's a long quote that goes on So it's something that you can also introspect to what extent when you think you know of anything to what extent And to what extent do you think in the really abstract quantities and even when you think about you know Playing chess which you can think is relatively abstract Well the way you know if I play chess how do you see a mental chess, you know I certainly have you know, I have a very vivid view of the board in front of me You know I have a very vivid view of the figures And and I would claim certainly this corresponds to my personal experience at most of what I do when I think about also science I always think in terms of I mean of visual quantities But something you can all do in your own life to try to introspect is it really true that you that it's all in terms of Sensory qualities and quantities or is there also something more abstract that's not sensory now springs into a to a very related point that If you look at that architecture that the one that I showed you was the various circles in the innermost the world inside sort of underneath consciousness and this diagram You really reminded of the idea of the harmonculus now the harmonculus is an old idea I think it goes back into it goes back to us total when he talked about in his book on one of his book on biology when he talks about Developmental biology, I mean what we call today developmental biology and the the you know Homunculus is the idea that inside the egg or inside the sperm There's a tiny tiny tiny man or woman that's sort of the harmonculus and that expresses itself You know And this sort of tiny man that develops into full grown man. That's sort of the idea unaligned the harmonculus Now we are there's a great movie I don't know whether any of you seen it by all it by Woody Allen everything I always wanted to know about sex but was afraid to ask you have you seen that movie and There's this great scene this petting scene You know with a boy and girl pet in the bear make out in the bank of a car and you have this control room metaphor in that In that movie so you you're putting yourself the movie maker Woody Allen puts him so puts us the audience inside of this Sort of NASA like control room Inside the person's head now we of course we all laugh thing well That's you know, that's just an analogy But it turns out that most of the time when we think it's very difficult It's very difficult to avoid sort of the fallacy of them hungalus that we say well, you know clearly this you know when we talk about That that neurons respond that you know that the brain knows well actually who knows right? I mean knowing implies there's a knowing subject so of you know And there's this entire mode of thinking about the brain that it's difficult to get away where you posit explicitly Most people more scientists don't do that But at least implicitly where you posit something that knows and so that you can call the the harmonclos Now these ideas of course routinely ridiculed by everybody I mean by everybody think seriously about science But it's a very power. It's in a very powerful because it's powerful because it's intuitive so appealing and clearly I Have the sense and I'm sure you also have the sense as a person inside is actually Christoph inside my head And he's situated right, you know if you ask people where they're situated you can do these experiments They almost always if they have normal vision they point exactly between here You know they sort of it's roughly between the ears and between them the you know at the base of the nose at the nose Between the eyes that's roughly where I am and most people will have that I Assume if you are half-blind you you might actually I don't know actually whether if people are half-blind They shift it over they still see the inside the head But we all have a feeling that I'm sitting inside my head and I'm looking out and I'm sort of in control of this And I'm making all the decisions etc. It's a very powerful illusion So it's probably I think there's probably more there's probably more to it and then then then I mean like any illusion there's probably some basis to it and It may actually be reflected in a key feature of the of the brain architecture the one that we talked about early on remember this division of the brain so this is this is This is a human brain so you're looking from top your middle view here lateral view This is the bad This is the back of the brain here and this is the first everything here You could be in front of the central sulcus here here or looking down Looking down the brain is the frontal is a frontal part of the brain the frontal lobes And of course then they are divided into at least a tripartite decisions as sometimes Forced division into motor cortex. This is the motor strip This has no layer 4 from here if you inject current here Or if you put for example one of these magnetic pulses over your head over the motor strip So if you get you know twitching depending on you know what part of the so there's a motor map The famous there's another use of homunculus It's a term that comes in this case from Penfield the surgeon because you can draw a Homunculus onto here depending on you know that different parts of this Motor cortex represent different parts of the body like you know my face might my my my my my body my my fingers etc So that's a totally different usage. And yeah, this is motor cortex This is the premotor cortex and this is a very large part of the brain and asses Maybe it might be as large as 20 percent or some 25 percent is called the prefrontal the prefrontal lobe So in some sense you could argue well all the sensory processing that we talked about really takes place with possible exception of Faction which is funny anyhow because it doesn't go through the it doesn't have a main projection for the thalamus That all the that all the sensory processing essentially for the most part takes place in the back part This is where visual cortex is this is where you know MTS posterior parietal cortex the infertile temporal cortex all the face cells All that takes place same thing for the for tactile processing same thing for auditory person Possessing Herschel Giles all of that you know here all of that takes place in the back part And you could argue that essentially what's happening you could think of in one way that this front part is looking at the back part By looking at I mean that it receives dominant driving input from that you have a feed-forward connection remember we talked about the different types of Projection system feed foreign feedback depending on a so a feed-forward Projection would originate in layer 2 or particularly a 3 and the project into layer 4 of the next area and and You have similar rules for the feedback connections and the feed-forward connection usually has a very powerful the driving ones if you look At focusing a feed-forward connection from LG and into v1 from v1 into MT They're very powerful activity in their fever feed-forward connection can always almost always drive the postsynaptic neurons So you can think of what happens here. You have projections here lots of Lots of very specific projections, right? It's not just random They're very specific that project from the back of the brain into the front of the brain in some sense I think that you can you can view that favorably as the you know There is sort of a homunculus there is this front part of the brain that observes the rest of the world through its interaction with the back of the brain in that sense In that sense you may have a Homunculus who lives somewhere in the confines of prefrontal cortex of course prefrontal cortex is a huge area in one We are only now beginning to really explore at the detail level that we're exploring the back of the brain It's looking at the posterior part of cortex It's making decisions this this homunculus or this this set of modules and it's feeding those to the motor stages either Directly through motor cortex or more indirectly so prefrontal. It's so premotor or prefrontal cortex Now the where one problem with the homunculus is that of course if it's a drill Homunculus, it's a problem of infinite regress right where you see that in the Woody Allen film Because if they're really a man inside my head, then who's you know watching sort of you know watching the TVs TV screens that make up my in my My visual world then who is you know in the Gary Larson's cartoons like that then who is a man inside the man's head right because clearly You need somebody inside the man's head to You know and of course that goes out goes on at infinite at the infinitum now Of course, there's no regress. There's no infinite regress if you assume that this entity this this fictitious entity We just call homunculus, but it doesn't have the same property as as as all as I have Clearly if it has exactly same property, then you have an infinite rest But when you say well this this property for this for example this entity is not conscious the consciousness happens or happens where the sort of the The sensory information is being relayed is being summarized and relate to this prefrontal cortex But it doesn't happen actually inside in the deeper parts of prefrontal cortex where you have all this additional processing that that Then you don't get an infinite regress for example if you assume that it only has very limited memory that you have a special module for For working memory etc. Then you don't get an infinite Infant and regress if you assume that her monkless only does certain things So in this case they are monkeys it would be an unconscious among close because as I said the unconsciousness happens sort of at the Outside and this some orders among the stars it I mean how month is just a convenient fiction that you know It's a set of modules that is involved in planning and decision-making in initiating Decisions and you don't have conscious access to them and so that's why that's why it would explain why you have for example Why why many things in your in your own life? You don't have access to them You only have access to the output of these decisions because they are the ones that are made conscious But since you don't have access to the inner parts of the amongst us itself You don't really know why you make these decisions or you can take a plausible guess at it Okay, so so I mean this of course we already this is a very crude division when I said back in front of the brain So front of the brain is a huge area right the total frontal lobes is I don't know like 40% or something of the brain So it's not going to be you know that everything here sort of you know that you have this very clean division It's going to be even parts We know for some they're parts of the frontal lobe like a frontal I feel that you can think of almost like a you know They're they're they're very closely connected to let's say area and tea and so it's I so what we really need It's only happening right now people like come Michael etc They're now doing a detailed subdivision of prefrontal cortex because you really want to make this much finer So maybe you could I maybe parts of prefrontal cortex You know maybe parts of the brain around the posterior You know the the interpretal sulcus. Maybe they they're more closely related to prefrontal cortex But has to be made much more precise This throw some new light on certain old problems as I mentioned Creativity them if you read this literature most of the literature comes to the conclusion that the creative act by itself is largely unconscious That what happens in creativity you you generate enormous amount of you know when you're thinking about any problem a scientific problem mathematical problem You know an artistic problem or you know problem in your life or whatever you what happens your brain throws up an enormous amount of Solution unconsciously and then you have some sort of entity that selects that you know So there are all sorts of things that are being generated constantly by your brain unconsciously different possibilities different solutions and Although you can also try to trigger that consciously by sort of you know learning how to make analogies Right, you know very often that's what the creative act is right You have one situation and then you have a different situation You somehow manage to make an analogy between this and this and so you can see the inside here now applies to over here So that's something you can do consciously but for the most part is an unconscious activity where you generate your brain generates Enormous amount of different solution and then you have some entity in your brain that subselects them and comes up with a Oh, this is really the interesting one and that then that's the one that sort of suddenly quote pops into your head and say Oh, I've got an idea. That's it. That's the idea. That's then finally made Conscious and there is all this literature on you know how to in I mean the best way as far as I can tell from reading this How to particular hard amount is really very insightful a point career also has has written on this the famous mathematician The one who formulated the 23 problems in mathematics in 1900 in Paris The the the best way to induce creativity is to work very hard on a particular problem You know your PhD for example anything, you know a promise at the heart of your PhD thesis work Very hard and then go away and do climbing or you know recreation or whatever do something very different Because very often what happens, you know, then you do I mean there are a few very famous example a point career Fox him has his famous example We look at the problem of foxy and equations and which he worked for many many days and you couldn't solve it and then he it goes on vacation the south of France and I see it's about to enter a tram. He has this very detailed description as he is about to enter the step on the tram He has this critical crucial inside just he says totally out of all the blue and that's very often what and What people and describe that they they engage in something very active You can't find a solution then they sleep or they do something very else and then suddenly sort of unbidden it comes into their mind But they all emphasize that it's there's really it's unconscious. It just happens I mean there's certain things you can do to make it to make it more likely to occur But the act itself seems to be largely sort of beyond the confines of consciousness So again, this you know if you are if you assume that you have all this part of the brain this unconscious Amunculus that would sort of be part of that of course It still doesn't say anything about the neural correlates. How you know how it houses actually implemented using neurons It's also of course a problem that we didn't really talk about. It's quite well-known Problem of free will and off authorship now is called as the fact that no that I have the perception that nobody I Mean I believe in fact that nobody forced me to raise my hand here But I'm totally my own author and you know doing this and doing this certain things I'm compelled to do but but but many things I claim I'm I'm I'm I the conscious me is Is the author in charge of this and now there's lots of lots of cases when you can show quite rigorously But that's cannot be the whole story that either that that is totally illusionary or at least in many cases That's illusionary the most famous one up by Ben Libet where he had people Sit down and look at a what at a clock Goes around with the point that was relatively quickly and then they were supposed to raise their finger or raise their hand Whenever they felt like it so they were on a no compunction to do anytime soon They just you sit there whenever you feel like if you do this and then people were asked to judge When they first felt where was the point on the on the clock when they first felt the urge to move They when they first at the inkling that okay now I've made this decision to lift and And then he he looked at he looked at evoked potentials He did this many times and he took brain potentials e.g. externally evoked potentials and what you see what you see developing over Frontal lobe if you'd have electrodes here. You see there's a signal that builds up is called a What was first discovered in Germany by Germans is called the Bereitschaff potential on English readiness potential And you see it builds up the remarkable thing it builds up First on both sides and then contra lateral to be so if you if you move this hand builds up at some point on the other side It's contra lateral projection, but the important thing it builds up before Up to 600 milliseconds before you felt first the urge to move according to your own judgment on the on the dial And then it was quite controversial by in the meantime I think it's well accepted people did all sorts of control experiments was controversial How accurate are people are judging but the basic story stands even today 30 years afterwards that in these in each in this Freely initiated act right where you you're not triggered by anything you in itself initiated which of course, you know most things in life aren't like that but in this case the perception of Initiation the perception of authorship comes up and let's say half a second After there's a signal in your brain already that tells me you're gonna move your hand Okay, so clearly in this case something in your brain decided 500 millisecond before You were informed about it the conscious you were informed about it that you're gonna move your hand, okay Now in a sense as scientists we have to expect this this is of course goes back to Kant who says we have to think in terms of Causality right if it's truly if you think really what does it mean to have an act that is truly That has that's that's truly free which means they're no physical preceding causes for it I that's really what it means to be to have to have to be truly free And so you know a scientist we we cannot think how that could be which of course why most scientists don't really believe in free will So you have this you have this experimental fact that that okay You I feel that I just freely initiated this but fact is 500 milliseconds before something in my brain Triggered it so what probably what happens here? I mean the simplest and most obvious explanation is that you have some algorithm in your brain Let's in your frontal part of maybe this could be in the basal ganglia that has you know Make some decision based on whatever algorithm that you know to move with your hand now And that information is then communicated to the part of the brain or you and then you This part of the brain initiates the movement But and only later is this information actually conveyed to the part of the brain that's conscious And so only later on do you do you initiate? Do you feel that you've initiated this? now of course that that raises some profound issues which which we We're not going I'd like to deal in next when I teach this class again next year, but not This year because it's real raises profound issue of personal responsibility right in sense of sense of authorship If you know I feel that I'm responsible But it's not really the conscious me but the unconscious me who does it that sort of that raises some very heavy-duty questions about Responsibility also in the legal sense and the ethical sense in the religious sense And that's a wonderful for those of you who are interested There's a fantastic book that just came out last year by a vacant at Harvard then they can I call the illusion of free will it's a very compelling book it It it collects all the evidence from I mean talks about a little bit But it also talks about the many many cases when people When you have a dissociation between motor action and volition so for example all these You know spiritual things where people move how do you call them uja boards and all these you know table-moving and all these other things What people claim that you know it's a spirit It's my dad grandmother talking to me when you can show quite objectively that it's actually they themselves move and draw these things Etc, but they all claim they don't do it of course you can all say well They're just lying, but I think there's much more to it I think they really believe that they're not doing it so you have you know you have cases of unconscious of unconscious motor output without any Without having this this this feeling of authorship Yeah, I mean I think what this sort of research once it has come to its conclusion will could really lead to Redefine and what it means to be a to be a person You know we grow with we've grown up by we am I not I I not only mean You know me and you but also sort of you know here in the world over the last several thousand years We've grown up with a one picture of man and women that we've sort of grown a custom and cherish too And that's you know present in most of it's a basis of most of our religion and the basis of most of our legal system But we're not really sure to what extent this picture is going to be sustainable over the next few hundred years Once this research has has run its course I think I meant I mentioned once before recently I had about this this next fighter plane they're building at the skunks work at the McDonald Douglas and They already know the advanced fighter planes when you do close combat Support, you know when you're flying sort of a close to Mach one just a hundred feet above the ground So no we just a human have the pilot have have enough time to react So it's all machine it's all machine done So you have this joystick and they still they're giving the pilot the illusion of control and they think it's important I actually like to find out why they think it's important But they what I heard is that they think the designs of the airplane think it's important to give this pilot this illusion of Control actually not actually giving in control not all the time, you know when you're flying high up That's one different but at this close quarters you you don't want to give the person a control So at least this case there seems to be functional reason that that that makes it valid for the person to believe that he's in control All these are these objectively not in control So the question is does that have any implication for some for similar process in our head might there also be advantages And this is what we can argues that to have this illusion of control and free will because it'll enable me to do All to go out in the world and do things because I believe they're doable But in fact it might be an illusion at least in a certain number of cases Okay, okay, that makes sense I guess that's less interesting than for us usually I don't I don't I don't work at I don't move around at 9g I mean there could be other reasons as well there could be multiple reasons Yeah, I guess that makes sense Now how could any of this be tested in there in the in the How could any of this been tested a little bit more concretely? I mean most of what I talked to you about sort of is based on introspection introspection I think is it's a good source of inspiration for experiments But of course it's no substitute for doing reduction of science because you know of all the illusions that we know We suffer from So You can think of what are these what are visual thoughts? What are thoughts in the visual domain? Now one hypothesis this goes back to a famous theoretician On in vision called David Ma who worked at MIT and died in 1981 That if you that's that sort of thoughts in the visual domain would be well one set of thoughts in the visual domain would be manipulations that involve the three-dimensional nature of The three-dimensional nature of of objects, so there's approximately some some some famous experiments done by done at Stanford by what's this guy Who? Where you supposed to take two different objects these are three-dimensional objects and you have to say whether the same or not and The objects are sort of complicated, you know complicated geometrical shapes they all consist of various squares that are that are put together and When you rotate and you can see so you have you have one object here And you have another object you let's see here And then you can see if you rotate this is actually the same object You know or it might be the mirror image or it might be different object You have to say is it the same object or not depending Is it the same object or not and here people clearly found that reaction time correlates very strongly with the angle of rotation In other words if you take two objects that that are the same But they you have in order to map one onto the other you have to transform and thrown through a solid angle Then you can plot in the very nice relationship linear relationship more or less between the angle that the the angle that Between the two objects and the reaction time in other words if the if the you know If they're almost similar you only have to transform about 20 degrees the reaction time is much faster than if they're you know If they're let's say 180 degrees apart and you have to rotate them for 180 degrees angle So this gives rise to thought well actually what you're doing you're doing the three-dimensional transformation in your head trouble is as there's almost no evidence for such neurons all The evidence we have for neurons that represent things in a very view-dependent way and so So what well you could are you okay? The the the human doesn't use the three-dimensional representation the question is whether it's actually explicit whether that representation is actually there explicit Whether you actually doing it in a conscious way or whether using two-dimensional neurons or neurons that only in court code the two-dimensional view or the view And the two-dimensional view and none not use a three-dimensional view and this is a question that can be tested So for example here you have people have looked for this is face cells We talked about them before in one of the classes. This is a guy called Dave parrot in Scotland st. Andrews needs found many cells and other people also many cells So this is in part of the superior temple sulcus close to the infotemple cortex in the in the ventral vision for perception Pathway and here you have a typical cell This is a person you rotate the person at different degrees or a model of a person and you can see this cell This is what is this 50 Hertz this cell optimally responds to this particular person viewed this sort of sideways Here you have another cell this cell responds You know for the left profile or the right profile you find this very often in fact very often These are these 180 degrees apart from each other this use. I think I showed one or two of these cells before So the the majority so here in one study. This is just typical 144 out of 150 cells so like you know 94% of the cells are so aware of this elk in other words they represented the object, but they represented in a very view dependent way In a very view dependent way, so they only recognize it from one angle or from a different angle Now this and this to certain extent reflects the character of our scene because when we see something We don't have sort of a cat cam, you know like a like a computer design Model three-dimensional model in our head that we can sort of immediately visualize it from all different angle When I look at somebody I see this person from one particular view from one particular angle However, he does he doesn't know it in his paper is sort of a little assigned He has this one figure where it's very rare in this case only six out of 150 cells that there are small number of cells that do Actually form a view independent the this cell responds selectively to this phase It doesn't respond to a bunch of other phases are roughly always at 40 Hertz You know what is it 35 40 Hertz pretty much independent of the view then remember? We talked about paperclip cells. So this is by an a logotitas So here find something similar for these are cells that were the monkey was trained over many months to recognize one paperclip So you take a bent paperclip and the monkey views it from different angles And it has to distinguish it from 50 other bent paperclip that to you me look virtually identical It's a very difficult task they use paper clips because they want to make sure it's something that the monkey isn't at all familiar with And like we can also do it, but it also requires us training So then What surprised people at the time that you would find these highly highly specific cells? So here you have a cell that responds to one just one paperclip either this angle or the angle 180 degrees Formate so again, you can see this very often you will get these mirror summit There's these things that 180 degrees apart here. It shows you 60 other paperclip So here the best response can be like 60 Hertz of you know 50 Hertz in this case Here these are other paper clips the best the best distractor paperclip flies only at 5 the cell will only fight 5 Hertz But clearly vastly prefers this paperclip or here's another one but here they recorded from 700 cells and Like I don't know 750 of these cells or 740 of these cells Well always of this view that it itself was selected was almost always selected to one particular view And that again corresponds to what what the experience is of course of of the monkey looking at them Looking at a particular paperclip since you don't see the paperclip instantaneous in all three dimensions Here's another cell however Good one tight eight out of 773 cells where off this ilk So gain a very small minority in this part of the brain worth this elk where they responded Sorry, this is a behavior. This is where the cell fired raffi at 40 Hertz To this particular paperclip independent of its independent of its of its angle And this is respond to other others very similar looking paperclip that to you and me would look the same But the monkey can discriminate in even the best distractor the cell only fires at 10 Hertz Well here, you know, it always fires between 30 and 40 Hertz So so the claim is that the vast majority of cells that you that you see that encode visual objects and 3d encode them in a scene from one particular angle or another angle and For the most part, I would suspect those are some of the subset of these neurons are going to be the ones that that that generate the conscious perception However, they also these cells here a very small set of cells here and in the previous study that seem to encode Neurons in a view invariant way that may well be possible This is not the only part in the brain where you have these very specific face cells There's also frontal part of the brain that Goldman Rakesh discovered and described Around the central the principal sulcus where you have many neurons that also encode face and face identity and It's quite it's quite part. I mean people just don't know one possibility Is that there you have many more of these neurons that code that encode new that encode the stimulus in a view independent in a view independent manner and the question is so this is something you can then test is the true that that all those neurons that that that The that the neurons that encode the object in the view independent in a view in a pen and way That those are never the nuance that you that give rise to consciousness because they would sort of be the correlates of visual thoughts on the argument that this view independent way corresponds sort of to something that that you don't that that might be important in visual Transformations that that the brain can do effortlessly, but it's not it does not correspond to the character actually of seeing when you're seeing Something you are when you're thinking about something you're always seeing it or visualizing it from a particular angle You can then rotate it in your head, but you always view it that takes time and effort You always view it from a particular angle and therefore here the prediction would be that all that these neurons and Wherever else these neurons are formed that are view independent that they do not code that The activity does not by itself with rise to conscious sensation because they don't form part of the NCC Okay, let me summarize. Let me try to summarize what we Are there questions? Do you have any questions about anything we talked about today? No Can't all be perfectly clear come on Yeah, yeah, yeah No, no the claim is so so a this is exactly what them so the monkey did the following experiment I don't have a paper clip, but they if they showed it only here's a paper clip So No, no, no, no, no, no the monkey was was given this but trust the monkey was only shown it from this angle Only this angle and then they asked well how okay? It can recognize this now very well, you know You train it for a week and it can detect this and distinguish it from similar looking paper clips But then you ask it how well it kind of generalized so now if I showed this or I showed this or Show it this so you can show there's a sharp drop off as you change the angle if its performance becomes dramatically worse Now so now what you have to do you have to train it you showed this you showed this you showed this you showed this And then the monkey gets this performance where essentially you can now recognize it from any angle that takes time That's exactly what what what would you're going through? Yes Yes, and clearly and clearly you can do that So the question is the question is and I don't know right now how to do that at a psychophysical level I only know how new at the normal level when you're when you're doing this in your head So let's say you're taking this the model, you know They it's you have a model and you're painting you're drawing her you're Sketching her and you're closing your eyes and you're turning her in your head then What are you conscious of are you are you actually conscious of the three-dimensional head? I don't think so. I mean I think what you're conscious as you're conscious Okay, now I'm looking at her from the side now. I'm looking her from the back Now I'm looking really from the back now I'm going around so I think what you conjure off is a discrete snap It's a sort of snapshot of different views. You're actually not conscious of what you know in a computer catcam system You know where we can immediately see from all sides. I mean that's that's a supposition. It might be wrong, but that's a supposition No, the angle I mean I don't know what the monkey knows about angles or rotation the monkey just gets juice when he correct When he distinguished this no, I mean that I mean that's what it comes down to so it learns to recognize this particular object I don't know and I Mean that would be very different experiment you could I guess you could test that I mean they didn't test that in this case They tested to what extent does the monkey a learn to recognize this particular paper clip I mean the monkey clearly knows for its own experience manipulating I mean at least know implicitly from its own experience manipulating You know the constant do stuff, you know, they like the manual right to do stuff In fact, you're not very careful. You know, they always fiddle around with the lock to try to get out of there So, you know clearly they know, you know, they know the concept of Manipulating objects and rotating and looking at from other sides okay, so So I hope so, I mean what I hope to have given you in this lecture is a falling over the last 18 classes is an appreciation for the fact that that what we think of sort of is very obvious Is actually not at all obvious and they're all these modules in our head. They're all these complicated modules In different brain airs different sectors of the brain that do very sophisticated things that are beyond the pale of consciousness And that what we have is think of simple and effortless is actually the huge amount of sort of highly specialized Machinery dedicated that subserves that and then I just want to transmit you as, you know, a number of specific facts about the brain And then also lastly some specific idea that that that I have I've had which may or may not be right But just to summarize some of them idea, so one of the idea I just talked about today the idea that there's a part of the brain In particularly in the front part of the brain that in some sense can be said to sort of take to analyze the sensory information Processed and that by itself is not conscious and you can think of that like an unconscious Homunculus and that part of the functionality of that of that anti of that homunculus is to do things like decision-making And that would one of the implication here that you're not conscious of your that consciousness in the processing in the Computational scheme resides somewhere between the input in the out between sort of the innermost stages in the outermost stages It's not the highest stage in terms of information processing machinery That they are highly trained sensory motor actions. I think this is really quite beyond and dispute Everybody that there's that our daily action is significant part of our daily life as we get older I think it takes up a larger and larger fraction of our life is Is by is is carried out by these very highly trained sensory motor actors? I call them zombies that bypass consciousness This of course gives rise to question why you need consciousness at all I think you need it because for all those things where you don't need whether he sense highly trained sensory motor systems aren't good enough And then it's a purely hypothesis Although most people have this that the at the neuronal level that love these feed for system because they're very fast and they're being trained That's why you train them to be very fast and effortlessly can go on without Without any substantial feedback in terms of cortical cortical feedback loop and that NCC one of its requirement is really that you Record that you require some very some feedback from higher areas feeding back down to intermediate areas Which is one reason why it takes long in order for you to be conscious of something That the right way to think about the brain is really in terms of coalition that you have that for any given Perceptors thought any given percept or in action or memory You have a coalition of neurons that represents that and that these coalitions are very very dynamic They form and reform and coalescent and form new coalition and are suppressed at the time scale of a fraction of a second so I mean faster than then then Well, I don't know faster maybe at the speed of I mean literally at the speed of thought quote I mean on the order of a fraction of a second and we don't know how large these are We don't know I mean in order for you to have any specific percept most people think you need you know gazillion of neurons You know billions of neurons. I think it might be we just don't know You know if the right to concept is present might be very small number number Let's see 10 to the 3 neurons rather than 10 to the 6 neurons Yeah, and conversely that there can be large there that that certain attention and consciousness because you're usually only conscious of one or very few things at a given point in time one or two or three things But you really have at least at the levels of representation were consciousness is which is sort of the intermediate levels You have you have a very strong competition for you cannot have more than a small number of coalitions that are success that are active at the same time They they're sort of suppressing they're suppressing each other and of course you can you can see that very well if you look at these illusions like change blindness Particularly like binocular ivory in the other by stable percepts where you never see the two percepts at one But you only you only sort of see one of the other always moving in this endless dance back and forth. I Mentioned that what is really crucial? This is a hypothesis of Francis kicking myself that you have an explicit representation in the brain that that If you represent information implicitly like in the posterior parietal cortex The or like in the retina that that information might be there I mean everything I see about the world everything I know about the world is sorry everything I see about the world is present already in the photoreceptors, right? There's no new visual information. It's being added. That's maybe a priori information in my brain But there's no new information. It's being added But it's all a spread out in a very implicit way I just there it's you're gonna have if you have this idea of depth of computation logical depth of computation if you need an Algorithm to read out my photoreceptor in order to see whether there's a face present that algorithm has to do many more computations then if you sit in in you know Infratemple cortex where you know one of the monkey cells is that monkey that one cell or maybe ten of its bodies by itself Can tell you whether or not a face is present So that's an explicit representation and since since a conscience is direct right when I see something I I I see it as a face or I see you know unless I put up agnosia Then I don't but if I see it I can see it directly as a face and therefore there has to be an explicit representation For that face and there's nothing else in the brain. It's only nuance Yeah, I briefly mentioned this that probably in this processing in this in the in the hierarchy as you have this input This net wave I call it that moves from the retina through the LGN into v1 into v2 and it you know That that and then sort of in terms of what happens consciousness I think you have to have closed this loop you have to have this feedback and that's where the highest ages probably acts This feedback first connects with the highest ages in your first conscious of things at the higher level Things like for some faces or things like a gist I mentioned you're very very As fast we can tell you only need 30 or 50 milliseconds exposure time Then you can mask an image But you already have access to gist in other words to the high-level description of the high level conscious description of the object of the senior scene That one has to really it's critical and it's going to be much more sophisticated in the fullness of time It's going to be like chemistry You know where you have ionic bonds and covalent bonds and fanavals bonds You know you've also you just don't it's not just two atoms stick together I had a very different way they can stick together and so likewise in the brain We have to think of very different types of connection at the very very least We have to think of driving connection and modulatory connections the driving connection like the feed-forward connection from v1 Into v2 into v4 etc. And then Connection that sort of feet like feedback that modulate that I Mentioned this we really didn't talk more about it Oliver sacks is going to come out with a nice piece on this In I think the York book reviews or the Yorker. I don't know what one of these were actually describes patients He just sent this to me That's why I know about where sacks described these patients that come out of that either LSD and on it on a sort of recovering from an LSD delirium or From some other disease where they can see he calls it cinematographic vision where they see things like it slowed down Like really it's like you're seeing a movie, but the movies played at two or three frames a second So apparently they don't see things continuously, but they see things like frozen Really like frames exactly like I click and I propose in terms of snapshots that so When click and I propose the possibility that and this is an old people I mean many people have said this that The evolution of the networks in the brain is of course continuous In fact, you have this continuous evolution of fine grates and voltages Etc. But that the character of perception is more discrete that you see something that it's really like frames It's really bit like a movie that you have these frames and a frame includes That's a you know a description of motion where sort of motions painted onto that frame and Sort of for whatever the duration of the frame is that's probably very flexible since we know there's no central clock like Organization present it might be 30 minutes that might be 100 milliseconds where for that time sort of you You see something with color and with motion as everything But it's it's it if you look at it actually would be static and then you see You see another sort of discrete snap Snapshot and Oliver sacks discuss this patient where that might actually be the case Where it's slowed down so much that you can directly visualize it I'm almost done And then we talked about attention and binding the fact that a marker of the facts The commonplace but none the left a marker of fact that of all the things that come into the intimized Sensorial I'm only conscious of a very small subset of them. I'm only conscious of the things I tend to I showed you all sorts of visual illusions Right the the gorilla in our midst and all sorts of other ones change blindness That's that we're large things can happen where things can take many seconds to cause a screen but you're totally over but you just don't see him and And you know the obvious reason one obvious reason is of course to in order to enable me to perform things in real time I have to sub select all the information that I can deal with there might be other reasons relating to learning That they're all these select attentional selection strategies They're probably at least two broad ones one is bottom up So in other words one is inherent in the input itself as somebody jumps up and down He's for sure gonna get my attention if something is very red among green background, etc, etc So that's bottom up saliency But of course I also have a second mechanism I'll be the slow one that selects things based on a template, you know, I'm looking for somebody I'm looking for something either, you know I'm searching for something particular and I can I can I can I can tune my My processing errors to look for something special like something moving to the right or something red And then ultimately at the neuronal level I think attention sort of it's all about a competition among new among these neuronal These coalitions and attention buys is one of the other coalition So if you have a competition and you attend to one you're gonna buy that and you're gonna suppress the other one You you will not be conscious of the associated percept the associated object And then I mentioned this and a number of times the right now the evidence is still sort of is is up in the air that That the different types. I mean what what we do know in the brain that the different types of firing So there's sort of firing where you just have a random process a person process Then sometimes you get fine that sort of an often oscillatory nature at different frequencies like six Hertz or 40 Hertz and People right now don't really know what to make of it. I just talked with somebody a couple of days ago And he said yes sure in his part of the brain there are lots of cells that have a theater as much six Hertz He has no idea why they do it, but they would they do it And then as a number of people have postulated some of the best work is here done by Laurent g Laurent Caltech Well, you have when you on spying a synchronized Well, you have two sets of new ones that seem to fire much more together than they should based on chance Where it's possible that they're that that the synchronization by itself actually expresses a relevant fact This might be one way how the brain can buy signals by enabling them to fire together because then they pack a more powerful punch If neurons are synchronized, they are more effective at it sort of at evoking at evoking a response in the next stage Now one last thing we haven't really dealt with Which is it's difficult at this stage of the game of the scientific game to deal with Cohesively, but it's it's a problem of meaning It's another it's another one of these deep problems that that I mentioned is that the very first in the class that of course different from a computer system Different from symbols on a computer. Let's say an on and off state on a transistor gate Symbols in my head have meaning. They're profoundly meaningful You know even as simple as the color blue has also has the entire rush of meaning right the blue You know, I just drove I came back from Zion National Park The weekend and I drove by in Las Vegas and they have this what's called blue man group, right? You know blue the ocean blue. I mean all sorts of things Van Gogh blue I mean they all thought there's an entire rush for even simple things as color They have association of course, you know a face or picture a scene has a vast sea web of associations and These are grounded in our experience that they're not arbitrary So again very different from a computer. They're highly structured. They're not arbitrary. They're grounded in our experience There are various sources of these meaning one is innate. It's I suspect that's the simplest meanings are innate You know when you're born already we know even in an infant. That's two days old two hours old The infant will already sort of smile at the T-scheme, you know, the infant will already smile at something that looks like a human face We I mean we know that empirically so there you can argue, you know It's extremely unlikely learned it over those two hours. That's probably innate likewise, you know You know looking for the mother's breath is you know and you know suckling or pain I suspect those are all sort of innate but then of course they get refined Then there the other sources are sort of them you can see that again with young children how they sort of you know exercise How they look at their their fingers or they look at their thumbs, you know It can sort of see that with my kids when they're lying in the crib They're sort of playing with their thumbs if they're really, you know playfully doing, you know They're saying okay, let's see what happens to remove that line and now let's see what happens and move that line You know, you know, of course, they don't do it in a conscious sense They do it unconsciously but never the end unless you build up all these expectations You build up this expectation that when I move my hand in this way that you know I get this certain sensation and it moves on my retina and if I don't have this anymore I have big big difficulty so there's this very compelling book a case story called Pride in the Daily Marathon very compelling book by somebody called Cole It's a very scary experience This is a guy 19 years old in in England. He wakes up one day and gets flu infection Okay, a few days later. He's paralyzed returned and he remains. Well, he's paralyzed It turns out what happens and then he recovers but not completely unfortunate. It turns out that the the This virus has knocked out all the proprioceptive Feedback from his body below the neck Permanently he's lost them for good. So he's no way he has no way to feel think anymore So he is none of these these signals that are always present, you know, when I move my hand He doesn't have any of that. So in terms he thought he was paralyzed in fact He was not paralyzed his motor system was fine He just had no sense body sensation anymore The only thing he had left below his neck was a sense of temperature So you could get deep pain not superficially in the deep pain and and and temperature sensitivity all the other Sensory input from his body joint was knocked out. So There by the way, it's another case story how utterly important all these unconscious, you know sensory motor systems are Because for the next half year. He was literally a heap of bones and muscles Well, he had a huge reactive depression as you can imagine, you know 19-year-old guy You know his life has changed for good for the rest of his life But then essentially he recovered he pulled out nothing he even married and he learned incredible painfully with an You know sort of super humans endurance He learned to control all of his muscle willfully and by looking at them because you know for me, you know I just you know, you know, we don't think about you just reach out and do this I just without power. He couldn't do that anymore because he had no feedback anymore You had to look at that and painfully sort of learn which muscle to move of course at first He got everything wrong and still you know people come up to him and hit him on the back He falls over flat right because he's he's you know the only way he can walk Sort of is by looking at this body And you know compelling book Of course, we also learn by taking it Information across modalities right by confirming things, you know, I can smell things I can hear things I can touch things, you know I can see things well, how do they look and then I some expectation I can pick him up and I can see on my Expectations met and of course we also for us is terrible important in other sorts of meanings abstract semantic associations, right? I know pie 3.14 1 5 9 2 7 etc I know, you know Brutus gave the last, you know stab to kill the mortal blow to Julius Caesar, etc Now the question is Meaning they're incredibly important for us a the question is why do we need this meaning and be how that implemented neuronally? Because I mean this has to be explained Of course, it has to be somewhere in the synaptic connection has to be in the connections that that sort of you know If you have a car if you have a bunch of new it's in those Clinton you want to remember I showed you the nuance that Garville Crammond recorded in a human patient response to highly selective to Clinton Well, I you know the it's in its body is code for the press Well, I don't know what a code for maybe for the presidency Maybe maybe for Bill Clinton maybe for the White House who knows but all those associations with Clinton They have to come sort of they have to be associated with that coalition of neurons that represents Clinton So some of it, of course, it's not even conscious, right? You you you have this russus rush of association, but then you actually have to think about a way What does this remind me of and only then does it pop into your mind? So all these associations are probably not directly part of the NCC because you're not directly conscious of them Because you couldn't be conscious of all those things at the same time But they have to be very close to the NCC because you because you do have this feeling this rich feeling that you have all these This meaning is just there below the surface So in fact, you could argue that one function of Consciousness of quality is to summarize all the you have this vast amount of information Right, so about numbers and about you know anything you have this vast amount of information But you don't have it read you know You cannot possibly have all of that accessible at the same time because of the well-known limitations, you know that you get an attention that's why you need attention So therefore this qualia might be a convenient way to summarize all of that so instead of having all these associations You have the qualia for it so this is the last slide of the course and This unfortunately, I don't have an answer to and it's really too bad because that's the most central question But I promised you I didn't have an answer to that. So I think I was being very honest All right, so why does it feel like anything? Why does it feel like anything? I think I know why it's private, you know Because it's ultimately it's my representation in my head which are slightly different from the representations you had You can sort of understand why red is different from blue. They have different wavelengths. They have different properties They have different association But what's really sort of at this point impossible to understand which is why charmers calls it the heart problem Is why does it feel like anything there's a wonderful quote? I mean one of the best modern books of philosophy although it doesn't really well I'm not sure how much it teaches you but it's very heroic to read if the The the the one that he wrote in the prison of war camp while while it was on the Western frontier fighting Russia And then in the prison of war camp but Ludwig Wittgenstein the young Ludwig Wittgenstein the heroic one When you know when he gave up all of his riches, etc Tractatus logico philosophical course he wrote this when he was like 26 and he You know it starts it is it has a numbering system. It's that's one the world is everything that is the case and Then he has one of this wonderful sentence in there If we develop is this mistership and and does he is which means something like not not how the world is It's mystical that sort of scientific But why the world is and the same thing with consciousness so we can understand that that that how how is the world perceived? differently that has to do with neurons and the relation of et cetera, but that that you can perceive anything at all that's really the the the mystery right now and I don't have a solution I really don't know anybody else who has a solution right now Like that some people they respond to this by saying why it's just an illusion. It doesn't actually exist Maybe they're true, but it's so compelling that I want more than just a philosophical assertion So I leave you with the thought that not how the world is as mystical than that the world is and Maybe and I hope some of you will go out and do neuroscience and Help solve of this problem. It's bugged us at least since two thousand five hundred years At least Thank you much. I hope you liked it