 Yeah, the goal here is to describe a theoretical framework that predicts how one might be able to bridge the explanatory gap and get beyond this and do this experimentally so, so you can prove to everyone what you've done. Some of the things that's causing lack of consensus in this field, as people pointing out qualitative questions like what is it like to be a bat, David Chalmers refers to the hard problem and what did Mary learn? If you're familiar with the Frank Jackson's Mary story, this is basically a brilliant scientist that's raised in a black and white environment and she has scientific observation hardware and she learns everything about red and she can predict when people are experiencing red, she can engineer redness and swap it with greenness, she can turn it on her own head and discover that she hasn't, herself has never experienced a redness experience. And then for the first time, she walks out of the environment into a room and sees a red rose for the first time, she says, whoa, now I know what red is really like and so one theory predicts she did learn something new and the other theory predicts, no, there isn't anything, she already knew everything about redness, but the problem with that is it's just a philosophy because there's no way to test it, there's no way to prove to everyone which one is right. So the goal here is to show a way to prove which one's right and if it is, which way is it? So the talk is about detecting qualia. Qualia is the plural term for the singular quali, so if you have a red quali that's just the singular of qualia and of course the word red does not have that quality there and the red square there does, so you need a functional mapping mechanism to get from the red to the redness experience itself. The word red does not have it itself and we call that zombie information because it's some representation that can be interpreted as if it was this, but it's not that itself and so you have to, the input to the translation function has to be in zombie knowledge and the output is the redness, the experience of redness and that qualitative there and so there's a difference between, and so this here has the redness quality but the word red does not, this, the word red is just a representation and so that's detectable qualia is that redness and how do you detect that and the word red is a representation of qualia where if you have a mapping function you can get one from one to the other and when you think about when you're aware of that redness there you're aware of it and there's something going on in your brain that is aware of us and that's the initial cause of you reporting that is red, I am aware of redness and so that is by definition a detection process your consciousness is detecting that redness quality and the prediction is that you can discover that process and reproduce it and whether you think this redness quality is some kind of quantum effect whether it's panpsychism whether it's some more accurate description whatever you think it is you still have to have that mapping and the important part to discovering and detecting what that is and proving to everyone that it's which one of those theories is the right one is getting that mapping right and so you have to remember there are multiple parts of the perception of that there's the initial cause of red if you're looking at a strawberry it's reflecting 650 nanometer light that is the property that the strawberry has that is detectable when light reflects off of it then there's the light itself that represents that but it's very different it has a different set of fundamental properties that it has so you have to interpret it back to get to the surface of the strawberry the properties of the right strawberry and that's what our retina does it interprets that and then it goes through a whole bunch of neural processing and the end result of that neural processing is our knowledge of the strawberry so you have the final result of the perception process of the knowledge and the testable prediction is that that redness quality experience is a property of that knowledge it's a quality of that knowledge and so we need to look into our brain and detect that and and so there's the causal red the zombie red or all the intermediate representations that don't have redness but you can interpret them as if they did then the final result is your knowledge which has the redness quality and this is what we want to detect is that final knowledge and how do you tell if this is redness or is that greenness and what's the difference and so what we want to do is find the necessary and sufficient set of detectable properties whatever those are whether functional material whatever and be able to detect if someone has those qualities in their mind or if they have a greenness quality in their mind and for someone to experience redness so if you know that you can map the two together and you can reliably see when you see this set of properties you know that person is experiencing red when you see a different set of properties you know reliably he's predicting he's experiencing green and so Daniel Dennett and a lot of the other people like to point out the fact oh you're predicting there's redness in all that gray matter and obviously there's no redness in there so how does that disconnect and why is that a valid argument but the point is is again it's a quala interpretation it's the interpretation if you get the interpretation wrong then it's going to look like gray matter but is that a false interpretation when you're looking at a rainbow does the really the colors of the rainbow exist in there but you're just misinterpreting it to be gray matter and to better understand this we wanted to describe a simplistic theory and the purpose of this simplistic theory is a simplistic world which if scientists were in this simple world how would they bridge this gap and discover what redness really was and qualitative information was and so in the simplistic world just think of it as it's not real but it's just the simplistic world to understand the qualitative gap and how you get around it and the prediction is that the real theory that will predict the real world and what real qualities are is just a variation on that simple theory that gets across the gap and so in this world there are neural transmitters there's only three color properties and there's three different neural transmitters in this world there's glutamate and that represents the redness quality so when you're aware of this you're looking at that red there your brain is firing and dumping glutamate in its neural transmitters and that is what has that redness property that's the the necessary and sufficient properties of that redness is the glutamate and glycine is a different neural transmitter and in this world it's the glycine that has the greenness experience that's responsible for your greenness and aspartate has the white experience but in case you're noticing a problem here when you take that glutamate when you experience the red it's dumping glutamate and you take all that glutamate out of your mind put in a pile there it's reflecting white light and so your knowledge is representing that pile of whiteness with aspartate down here and can you see there's a mistranslation there so you're missing so in other words you're thinking it's a white when it's really redness and the middle one's glycine it just happens to reflect green light and so you make that connection there but it's just a coincidence in the bottom one aspartate it's a chemically active substance that can combine easily with other things in particular form you get aspartam which is sold in the form of neutrosuite and there's another mismatch there because when you taste neutrosuite you represent that with a sweetness quality that is the same at least similar to the sweetness quality that represent our knowledge of sugar with so again all those are just mistranslations and the one that happens to be right just happened to be a coincidence and so and neuroscientists today are starting to get to the fundamental part of being able to detect conscious knowledge and so can i get this video to play is that possible yeah you can see so so basically what they do is they have they put people subjects in fmri and this fmri detects what's going on in the brain it detects their knowledge and so it produces zombie information of what they're detecting and and and so the problem is is so you have this black and white zombie information and you have to produce a color image of of so this is the movie the subject scene and this is what the fmrs detect fmri is detecting in the brain so you have zombie information describing what's in the brain and you have to map that to the colors that are on this and so i contacted uh jack galant who was doing this research and well how do you do that in the first words out of his mouth oh we just false colored it they took the actual color image map from this video and mapped and used that for their translation mechanism to get from the zombie information to the color so those colors there are artificially covered from the source and so to fully understand that problem let's take a similar experiment and move into the three color world so this fmri here is a little more advanced in this world here the fmri does more than just detect the amount of blood or amount of oxygen that's being metabolized this can actually detect the glutamate and the glycine and since it is glutamate that has redness you can see the redness in the brain is made of glutamate and you can see the leaves are made of glycine and the fmri is detecting that strawberry is made of glutamate knowledge and the leaves are made of glycine knowledge and so you come down here to the and so they come up with their translation mechanism and where they get the translation information is from the source of the and so you map glutamate to red glycine to green and that produces what the the movies that we're seeing of the knowledge and if these translation mechanisms here in the brains are the same then it's a coincidence and you have communicated that yes those two people have the same thing but the theory predicts that you can invert someone's translation mechanism which produces this and this can either the prediction is that you can engineer this inside the brain or you can do that as easily as some just putting on red green inverting glasses so someone's just like we're looking at the same strawberry here but one the strawberry's red represented with redness and the other one the same strawberry is represented with greenness so if you didn't know whether that person has inverting glasses or not if you were just had a machine to look into that how would you know if they had to inverted quality or not and so the problem is is when it's inverted if you have this where you get the information from the red you get a mistranslation the glycine is mapping to red and the glutamate is mapping to green and it produces the same six of and so you fail to detect the qualitative difference and that is the essence of the um should i take questions after uh-huh uh-huh yeah yeah and then they have different mapping mechanisms functioning in the brain because one produces knowledge that has inverted from the normal person their knowledge of the strawberries more green and the knowledge of leaves are made out of redness and so yeah that's the difference and in that case you use glom's method and you get this mistranslation from one to the other and so it makes you blind to the qualitative nature that makes you think that that's just gray matter in the brain and you miss the qualitative properties that are in the brain so how do you get this translation right the way you get it right is instead of taking it from there you have to take the from the two sources of the mapping translation and you have to have a double interpretation so so here you have to have the first translation has to match the translation in the first that you're observing and you also have to have some information about the observer's translation so you can get that correctly too and then if you throw that double inversion there and then you invert the quality what you've done is you've inverted this and if this gets inverted then you have to inverse this too and if you invert these two to match each other then the communication takes place and you have effectively f'd the ineffable detected that that person has inverted quality from yourself in a scientific demonstrable provable way so um that's the important thing is getting it from there and the trick to bridging the qualitative gap is just getting that translation right so um time is three minutes so so basically f-ing the ineffable there's different forms of f-ing the ineffable there's the weak form which is what we just described where you get the mapping translations right and you reproduce the same whatever is responsible for redness in both brains whether it's inverted or not then a stronger one is required if there's a new quality that you've never experienced before some people think about the song i've never seen blue like that before or some people are tetrachromats rather than just trichromats like most of us and they have a fourth primary color that they represent the visual knowledge with what is that color like and then so you have to augment their brain both their detection and awareness system and then put whatever's responsible for it into that detection system so that you can throw the switch and you for the first time oh that's what that new quality is like wow now i understand what it's like and so that's a stronger form because it can communicate to you f to you what new experiences or the elemental qualities that you've never experienced before and the strongest form so if you have knowledge of the strawberry in your left hemisphere and knowledge of the leaf in your right hemisphere redness and greenness somehow the corpus colossum connects those together and binds them together so you wear both of them at the same time you can say well that greenness is way different than that redness and i know that but the strongest form is that you can do that between brains if you have a direct connection that's doing whatever the corpus colossum does to connect that together and that's the strongest form of effing the ineffable and so so when you think about joseph smith multiple times talked about all spirit is matter and and and it says that in the scriptures and when i was growing up i kind of thought oh that matters just some magical undetectable spiritual stuff in some other world and you can't approach it it's not approachable via science but when i started to do the survey project and figure out what everyone's scientific consensus was when you think about qualia qualia or if can be defined as spiritual properties there's elemental qualia is an elemental redness and uh elemental redness qualia and then there's composite qualia which is all the other information bound into that and with that there's the warmth the taste of the strawberry the anticipation of what's going to taste like your knowledge of yourself perceiving that redness all that's additional information that can be bound together but the prediction is that you can reduce that into elemental qualia is that which can be effed to each other's brains and that our consciousness is a bound together painting of all of that stuff when we're of our and so our knowledge is a built together painting and and so the prediction is that all of consciousness and all spirituality is just composite qualia and can be reduced to the lowest level elemental level and that that can be effed and shared with at least in the these three different ways and and that yeah and that will be literally piercing the veil of perception and discovering the spiritual world and discovering the spirit world in our mind because the prediction is that we have a model of this world spiritual model of this world which is our knowledge of the world and at the center of that there's our body and at the center of that body inside of my head is my knowledge of myself all that other knowledge has a referent in reality i can i can see there's a real referent out there and i have knowledge that represents that but the spirit the knowledge of my spirit inside my head inside the knowledge of my head looking out my knowledge of my eyes doesn't have a referent in reality but just because it doesn't have a reference in reality. It doesn't mean it's not real. But at one level that could be a theoretical scientific description of what the spirit is, and along with that is a testable description that allows science to be able to discover what it is and what it is like. So 12 seconds left for questions.