 questions related to the nature of the mind. She needed to gain a deeper understanding of neuroscience. Since the foundations of this field were most frequently taught in medical school, she arranged to take courses attended by medical students at the University of Manitoba, even while fulfilling her obligations as professor of philosophy. As she wrote, and I quote, beginning with a cautious paddling at the available edges of neuroscience, I quickly found myself venturing further and further from shore, and finally setting full sail. Professor Churchman spent the academic year 1982-83 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, during which she finished major portions of her foundational book, Neural Philosophy, or the Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. In 1984, she became a professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. Since 1989, she has also been adjunct professor at the Salk Institute, where her collaboration with Terry Sinovsky led to the book The Computational Brain. Professors of Churchman has received many awards and honors, including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Research Fellowship. In addition to Neural Philosophy, her academic pursuits include environmental ethics. This relates to her interest in canoeing in the wilderness, exemplified by a 12-day trip she and her husband took with a group of students this past summer down the Firth River into the Beaufort Sea in the northern part of Yukon Territory. It is my great honor and privilege to present Patricia Churchman, who will speak on prospects for a neurobiology of consciousness. May I, as the other speakers did before me, say what a great pleasure it is to be here and how very much I've enjoyed myself so far. Our ancient ancestors in Greece in the good century BC raised a whole range of very fundamental questions. They wanted to know such things as, what is the nature of fire? What is the nature of the heavens, and what does that think that is the sun, and why does it move? They wanted to understand what the difference was between living things and non-living things. They also raised a whole range of questions about ourselves. They wanted to understand as much as possible what was to perceive, to learn, to remember, to reason, and to have self-control. Three of Western civilization. Part of what we see is the sort of hiving off of those questions into the domain of science as theory developed and as experiments were devised and designed to test theory. And so we see with Galileo the real beginnings of a scientific astronomy. And as David Cuba pointed out, Galileo saw with the shock that there wasn't a crystal sphere, that it wasn't a literal sort of dish that was over the planet. That rather there was empty space going on and on. Chemistry hived off as we began to understand the fundamental principles of elements. Physics hived off. Mathematics, I guess from the beginning, had separated itself as an independent discipline. What is very exciting, I think, about the time that we live in right now is that the ancient questions about ourselves, about what it is to think and reason and to have a will, are questions that, like the questions before them, are moving from the domain of sheer speculation from the domain of wonderment and puzzlement and into the domain of science. And the sciences that are relevant, of course, are psychology and neuroscience. Perhaps the most fundamental question that we need to re-raise before we proceed is the question of the relation between the mind and the brain. David Hubel already, I think, set the stage for me very beautifully by raising this question and saying that, at this time in our period of science, most people think that there is just the brain and what the mind is is the brain's activity. Traditionally, of course, there have been two very different answers to the question, are mental states and fact states of the brain? Physicalists, such as David Hubel and as myself, have been inclined to say, yes, probably. Mental states are nothing other than states of the brain. Dualists, however, have been inclined to think that there may be two very fundamentally different kinds of substances, the brain on the one hand and the soul or the spirit or the mind on the other. Oops, sorry, let's go back. Descartes, of course, is associated traditionally with dualism, confiding the soul as a non-physical substance in which inheres the thinking and the feeling. When one has a pain or when one thinks a thought on Descartes' view, it was the non-physical soul that had that thought or feeling. Sherrington, 20th century neuroscientist, also held the kind of dualism. And he said that our being should consist of two fundamental elements, offers no greater improbability than that it should rest on one only. In this century, however, largely because of the developments in science in general, much of the thinking has moved towards physicalism, towards the idea that there is just the physical brain and the mind somehow emerges as a kind of important activity out of the brain itself. Nevertheless, it's important to realize that physicalists had this idea from a long way back. And so we see Hippocrates in the 5th century BC making the claim that, in his view, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and so forth arise from the brain. In our own time, Francis Craig in particular has called this idea an astonishing hypothesis. And of course, it is in a way astonishing that out of three pounds of meat can come such things as seeing blue, smelling a rose, and feeling pain. And thus he says, you, your joys, your sorrows, your memories, your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. I do apologize for the misspelling of the will. It should, of course, have two Ls, as one of my graduates is, actually, with Sherrington, that it is no more improbable that there should be two fundamentally different kinds of substance than that there should be just one. And in our own time, that there is just the brain, mainly, I think, for two reasons. One has to do with mind-brain dependencies of the kind, for example, that have been described by Antonio DiMazio, but also by Oliver Sacks, and by many neurologists throughout the history of neuroscience. We know that when particular areas of the brain are damaged, then there is a particular loss of function. It is also, in its way, really remarkable that you can go to the dentist and he will put in a local anesthetic whose only task is to block impulses from one neuron to the next. And if he doesn't do it, you may feel extraordinary pain. And if he does do it, the pain is blocked. It's those kinds of dependencies between changes in the brain and changes in mental state that have convinced many people that, at bottom, astonishing though it may seem, there is nothing other than the physical brain. The other major consideration, of course, for a physicalist has been biological evolution, or that I can actually handle two slotting projectors. And it appears remarkable as it is, especially in its linguistic capacities and its tool-making capacities and so forth, nonetheless evolved from the brains of other hominids, whose brains, in turn, evolve from other organisms, other mammals. And so it seems that there is not a sudden radical change in our brain and in the way we are and in our kind of behavior, but rather that there is a development, an evolution that we can chart in biology. It seems, in fact, the more we look at closely the behavior of our closest relatives, in this case, the chimpanzee, that many of the behavior patterns we see, many of the developmental stages that we see chimpanzees going through as they go from infancy to maturity, are in important and salient respects very like our own. And that suggests that our cognitive capacities, like their cognitive capacities, are a function of the physical brain itself. Now, even assuming that the mind is a function of the processes of the brain, nevertheless, many people have raised the following question. Can neurobiology really explain these extraordinary capacities and performances that we see in humans? And as I like to frame that question, can neurobiological facts explain psychological phenomena or will psychology reduce to neuroscience? Now, in framing the question in the second way, I am using a rather contentious word, namely reduce. And this has actually caused some of my colleagues to say that that is a rather unusable and almost dirty word, and it should be called the R word. But in fact, the notion of reduction has an esteemed place in the history of science. And for that reason, and because it is closely connected to the notion of explanation, it seems to me a very useful way to pose the question about the relations between neuroscience on the one hand and psychology on the other. So let me, first of all, say a little bit about what I think inter-theoretic reduction is. First of all, of course, I think that it has to do with the relation between theories. The phenomena out there, do whatever they do. They aren't going to be reduced or changed or whatever as a result of my doing science. But theories can change, and theories are the things that we use in order to explain our world. So when I talk about reduction, I have in mind level-to-level explanation. That is, macro theories explained in terms of the dynamics and properties and components of micro-level theories. Because the word reduction sometimes conjures up rather negative images, it's important for me to say what I don't mean by reduction. What I don't mean is that the research should be purely bottom-up, that the right kind of strategy would be first to understand everything there is to understand at the level of the neuronal membrane, and then perhaps the neuron, and then perhaps the micro-network, and so forth. That I think would be a mistake. And I've never actually managed to find a living, breathing neuroscientist who thought that was the right way to go about it. In general, the strategy seems to be multi-level, to work at as many levels simultaneously as possible, system network, micro-net, neuron, molecule. And where each of them constrains and informs one another. I also precisely do not mean by a reductive explanation that macro-properties should be abandoned or that are somehow disreputable or unworthy or unusable. There clearly are high-level phenomena, macro-level phenomena. The trick is always to get the right categorization or the right description of the macro-level phenomena. Again, as David Hubel pointed out, if we think of the sky as a kind of literal sphere or literal dome, then we're going to run into all kinds of explanatory trouble. So the trick is always going to be to get the categorization right, and sometimes that will involve rethinking the high-level categories, but it doesn't mean that high-level phenomena are themselves somehow disreputable. And finally, of course, I do think that macro-research can inform micro-research. It, neuroscience and psychology need each other. They need each other to sort of scramble up that chimney together. Without psychology, neuroscience doesn't really have the behavioral parameters to know what it is that needs explaining. But of course, without neuroscience, psychology lacks an understanding of what precisely are the mechanisms, and it also lacks the capacity to maybe bring about the change and shift in some of the macro-level categories. So the general conception that I have of co-evolution is roughly characterized here, where we have a macro and a micro-level theory interacting, sometimes informing one another, sometimes correcting one another. Sometimes it may be that there is, as suggested by the change in color, that there may be a sort of conceptual revolution where there is a Darwin, or there is an Einstein, or there is a Copernicus, and we suddenly begin to understand things in a very, very different way. That possibility that we see here is, of course, a possibility in the case in front of us, that is that we may come as a result of the co-evolution of macro and micro-level theories in psychology and neuroscience to understand things in a way which is very different from how we traditionally have. And my guess is that that's likely to be the case for something like consciousness, and as a result of work by such people as Eric Candell, we can already see that it's the case for such things as learning and memory. That's the sort of general conception then that I have of explanation and the macro-micro-level interconnections. I should also indicate, perhaps, one other thing about the co-evolution, and that is that life being what it is and science being what it is, it doesn't look as though the work is ever complete. That is, there are always more questions to be asked, and hence I left it highly interconnected at the end, but still rather open. I should perhaps also give you some examples of classic reductions in the history of science. There are two that are best known. One, of course, has to do with the reduction of temperature in the gas to mean molecular kinetic energy. It turns out that that's just what temperature actually is. And notice that the high-level property having a temperature does not disappear or become disreputable as a result of our understanding that temperature just consists in movement of molecules. Now, nevertheless, convinced though I am, or at least since I think it is highly probable, that we will achieve some sort of explanation of psychological phenomena and neurobiological terms, it's important to see that there is a very different point of view. One arising not out of the idea that there is a different kind of substance, namely a spirit or mind or a soul, but one that relies on a rather different sort of skepticism. And this is a skepticism about the possibility that something as astonishing actually as human capacities, especially the capacity to be conscious and aware, could in fact be explained in terms of assemblies of neurons and the passing of ions across membranes. Now, part of the argument here I think is quite compelling and the argument is this. Look, when we think about the components of the brain and the brain itself, what we see is tissue. And even though we don't understand everything there is to understand about neurons, what we know mostly is that they function as a result of ions passing back and forth across membranes. Now, how could you possibly get a feeling of pain or seeing blue out of meat, out of ions passing back and forth between membranes out of cells connecting to one another chemically or electrically? How could you do it? And some people have been sufficiently struck by this conundrum that they have been inclined to say it's not possible. That I can't imagine how you could get experience out of something like tissue. Now, before answering that directly I want to make a couple of points. One is to come back to the notion of recategorization. Ancient peoples categorized fire as containing the following kinds of processes. The burning of wood, what happened on the sun, what happened with lightning, what happens with fireflies. They took those all to be instances of a common kind, burning or fire. As theory develops and as we come to understand more about the nature of that fundamental process notice that something which we thought was sort of straightforward and observational namely the sun is a fire, that's a fire. That we began to change quite profoundly our conception and that it turned out that actually burning wood had more in common with rusting and metabolism than it does with what happens on the sun. That what happens on the sun is actually a matter of fusion. That what happens with lightning is not fire at all, it's a matter of incandescence. And that what happens with fireflies is none of the above but rather a matter of phosphorescence. Now one of the things then that we need to be prepared for is the possibility that with some of our conceptions we will have a recategorization not unlike what we see here. So the first sort of response or my first reflection given this argument is that well but maybe we're not looking at it in the right way. Maybe we're looking at the problem in the way the ancients looked at or not so very long ago people looked at the problem of fire. The second thing that I am moved to reflect on is this. That sometimes an argument about what we can and can't imagine as an explanation for a phenomenon depends on what we already know and sometimes it depends on what we don't know. In the second case it's a fallacy. In the first case where it depends on possession of knowledge it's quite reasonable and sometimes those two are not so very clear. Notice that if we merely lack the knowledge of the mechanisms for a phenomenon and how it works and we argue like this no one knows how to explain X in terms of Y. Therefore X cannot be explained in terms of Y that we are in a sense as Aristotle would have said arguing from ignorance. Now on the other hand if we do know quite a bit about the phenomenon in question be it X we might already know that some other theory theta successfully explains X in terms of Z. Given that knowledge and given that we know that we have a successful explanation and an explanation which attaches well and coherently to other parts of science we may say and moreover no one knows how to explain X in terms of Y and so probably X cannot be explained in terms of Y. The feeling is that if this argument that I cannot explain I cannot imagine how the explanation would go is simply an instance of arguing from the lack of knowledge then it's perhaps an argument that we don't need to take quite so seriously. And it does not appear to be an argument from possession of knowledge so far as I can tell. The other thing that is perhaps sobering when confronted by indeed the astonishing hypothesis is that things that seemed earlier in the history of science to be deep conundra that no one would ever manage to wrestle to the ground turned out to be manageable. It was said for example in fact I remember my own biology teacher saying that you could never explain the nature of what it was for a thing to be alive in terms of dead molecules. And yet that is exactly how we think the explanation goes in terms of amino acids, RNA, DNA, proteins and so forth. It had been argued that one could never know that some class of events are undetermined. And yet it turns out that that's exactly what quantum mechanics said. And yet Kant and other very very bright philosophers had said it's a conceptual absolute impossibility. It had been argued that we could never know that the universe had a beginning, that in a certain sense it made no sense, that it was illogical or incoherent. From the vantage point of hindsight, of course, we can see why people would have thought that, but we can also see why they were mistaken and so forth. Thought it was impossible that in real space, if you had genuinely parallel lines, that they should converge. And yet in real space, if for example it's a Lobachevsky in space, they may very well converge. So what we can and can't imagine, what we can and can't conceive or find logical or illogical is not independent of what we already know. Our imaginations are not an absolutely reliable guide to whether or not a certain program is likely to bear fruit. Now in addition, partly again, because the hypothesis has seemed astonishing, but also I think because we genuinely do have a long way to go in neuroscience to explain such things as the conscious awareness of pains and colors and touches, it has been suggested that perhaps what we really need is an entirely new physics. That it isn't just that we don't have enough neuroscience, but that there is something fundamentally lacking in the most fundamental way in physics. And this would be the view, for example, of Roger Penrose. There are others who also hold this view, but I think probably his is best known. That's of course my comment at the bottom that we need more neuroscience. But I want to look just a bit more closely at the Penrose idea. Now I don't have time to go into it in great detail. So I'm going to skim over it very quickly and in that sense I won't be giving you closely reasoned argument. I will sort of be giving you my own prejudice on it. But here is the view as I see it. It depends his idea that we need a new physics in order to be able to explain something like visual awareness. Depends on three very different components, each of which is in itself very, very tentative, very, very iffy. Depends on the idea that there are certain crystals which whose structure may not be explainable, except in terms of something like quantum gravity, but even quantum gravity, if we had a theory of it, might not explain it either, but it still might be explainable in terms of current physics. So that's one iffy bit. Then there's the iffy bit about the Goethe result which is essentially a complicated mathematical claim which depends on the idea that some of our mathematical knowledge is not computational. Suffice it to say that this is a very, very controversial idea and it is by no means settled either. And even if it's true, it's not clear how that connects to a story of quantum gravity. Microtubules, what about microtubules? Will they turn out to be what we thought were sort of housekeeping structures within neurons? And again, his idea is that there are certain events that happen in microtubules that are going to require an explanation in terms of quantum gravity because they are non-conputational like the result and that if those things do happen and nobody knows whether they do in microtubules and if they should be explained in terms of quantum gravity and nobody knows whether they would, then it might have something to do with consciousness. That's sort of the prejudicial, but bare-bones structure of the argument. And my graduate students have given me this caricature of the argument and many of you may recognize this from one of our local San Diegans, Dr. Seuss, and this is the Bungal Bung Bridge. And as you see, it's not impossible. I mean, I can't rule out the possibility that Penrose is right in that we will need a theory of quantum gravity which will explain something about microtubule activity that will be connected to consciousness and so on. But it seems to me that the argument does have something like that structure. My guess is that pedestrian, though it may seem to say so that really what we need is more neuroscience and of course within that I am including also psychology. We certainly need more data on mind-brain dependencies. We need to understand more about the nature of the wiring. This again is the visual system. And as David Hubel was discussing in his talk, there seems to be separate components to it. We need to understand more about the nature of those pathways, what precisely they do, who they talk to, what they connect to, and more about the pathways back to the early stages from the later stages. We need to understand, oh dear, the neurons is misspelled as well. Well, now she's really in for it. We need to understand in more detail how neurons work. It is true that we understand quite a lot about the axon and spiking. We don't in fact understand anything like as much as we need to about how signals are integrated in dendrites and there are still major surprises coming out of labs about the nature of the synapse. And in particular, though, probably the area where we understand least is how networks of neurons work. How it is that neurons are able to constitute an assembly and by virtue of the way they interact enable us to do such things as see in depth or see motion or have an in-store cell. And what we really need to understand is the way that neurons work. So it's in a sense no surprise, I think, that there is much that we don't understand yet about the nature of awareness and consciousness given that we understand almost nothing yet about the nature of neural networks. I should, of course, say that artificial neural networks can be useful as a tool, I think, in understanding real neural networks and certainly some progress has been made but it's going to be a very long haul and in addition to simply a lot of experimental work undoubtedly there's going to have to be a lot of conceptual innovation. We are going to have to look at some of these problems in a new way. We are going to have to sort of Copernicanize them, if you like, and take a very different take on them to try to understand what is really going on when the brain does whatever it is that it does. But finally, of course, we're going to need patience and perseverance. There is a kind of tendency to think, all we really need is a new physics and that will be the sort of great breakthrough that will help us explain the nature of consciousness. My own gut feeling, I guess, from Antonio DiMaggio, is that it's probably not likely to be that way, is that we are making extraordinary discoveries in neuroscience and we just have to keep at it and if we are too impatient, too early, then we may misdirect ourselves. So I do want to emphasize, then, that I think there are major, major things that we don't understand yet about how the nervous system works, such that when these things do come within our can, we are much more likely to be able to make real progress on the very difficult questions, such as how does consciousness work and what is the difference between being aware of something and being unaware of it? The major problem, and Eric Candell brought this up this morning, or at least our major problem, has to do with the nature of integration. We really profoundly don't understand how it is that out of the myriad of events happening in many different places all over the brain, we experience a sort of integrated world and we're able to move in that world in an integrated way. We don't really understand how, across space and across time, how integration is achieved. And just to sort of give you the flavor of one sort of example, in this instance, these little gray bits and those little gray bits are identical, they are exactly the same patterns. And yet it's very clear the nervous system has a kind of integration across space such that we see this as a series of capital Bs with some ink spilt on it. And that's very, very hard to come by in that case. That's the kind of problem I mean when I talk about integration across space. And integration across time, of course, has to do with such things as your ability to understand a sentence that begins at one time and then goes on and may contain pronouns referring to nouns earlier and so forth, able to keep that so that you end up with an integrated understanding of what was said. Getting timing right has sometimes seemed to me to be the most interesting and most difficult problem that there is about nervous systems. And of course, Dr. George Oppelus will be talking about those kinds of issues in the context of the motor system. We don't understand, even in the most fundamental way, how space is represented, how it is that the nervous system can tell us that one thing is below another or above another or to the side. And we don't really understand the nature of the organization yet. And I think this has been raised in both previous talks when we puzzled about the nature of whether we've got a hierarchy, whether we've got a heterarchy. I mean, what happens when all of the visual information gets to the, as it were, top of the hierarchy? Is it really like that or is it rather that there is so much information feeding back that the notion of a hierarchy is really rather inappropriate to characterize the nature of the processing in this case? Now that's a really fundamental thing not to know. Although remarkable advances have been made in the domain of learning and memory, there are still basic fundamental things that we do not understand about storage and retrieval in memory. It's also clear that although we want to experimentally tie a response to outside stimuli, it's also fascinating to realize that there are taught down that as we're kind of inside the brain influences on what we see. And this is an example of such. Notice that the middle letter here and the middle letter there are, so far as being a mere stimulus is concerned, they are identical. And yet everyone sees that as an H and that as an A. And that's of course a context effect, a talk down effect of some kind. And it may be that we need to understand the stimulus dependent effects first, but we also must understand how it is that we can have those kinds of taught down effects. And actually David Hubel had a wonderful example of complex stimulus effect this morning as well. All right. The problem of integration is also, as Eric Candell pointed out, known as the binding problem. The problem of how it is that different events, different representations processed in different parts of the brain, perhaps specialized for color, for motion, for shape can nevertheless result in my having a coherent perception of a red ball moving that way. It has been suggested that issues of awareness in visual perception in particular, but perhaps awareness in the other sensory systems also, are linked to this notion of integration. And that the integration problem and the consciousness problem may in their solutions help one another. I'm only going to mention one suggestion here. This was alluded to earlier by Antonio Demasio, where the idea is that it's not that the integration is achieved by everything coming together in one place. Certainly neuroanatomists have known for a long time that however deep and difficult the integration problem, that's not the way that it's solved. The only other parameter really that we can think of that you can use to address this problem is time. So the suggestion is that since the brain appears to be exquisitely invested in the timing game with neurons having their own intrinsic, private temporal properties, that perhaps it's synchrony of firing of cells in a variety of areas that allows for integration. Now that could only be part of the story, but it may be a very important part of the story. Rodolfo Linus thinks that in achieving this integration, there is a structure in the thalamus or a set of structures called the intralaminar nuclei that may play a very important role in achieving this synchronization over very wide areas of the brain. The conception is that integration is not simply a property of cortex, but it's a result then of interaction between thalamic structures and cortical structures as influenced by structures in the brainstem such as the locus ceruleus. Very crudely, the idea as he sees it, and I think other people have elements of this story as well, is that from the intralaminar nuclei cartooned here as this circuit, there is a set of neurons that burst at about 40 hertz and that where this circuit provides the kind of content, the specific, this is a color, this is a shape, this is a motion that way, this provides as it were the kind of framework or background or context. And that because as shown in the previous slide, the neurons from the intralaminar nuclei project very broadly over cortex and have projections back from all of those regions, that it may be well placed to coordinate this synchrony of content from the specific nuclei of the thalamus and what other neurons in other parts of the cortex are doing. It's a gas. It's a gas based on some very interesting data and it's a sufficiently rich and experimentally based gas that it makes other experiments worth doing. But it is I think just a foot in the door and it might turn out that the explanation of awareness and consciousness doesn't in the end have very much to do after all with the intralaminar nuclei. Now, the last question really that I want to deal with and again this is a traditionally very philosophical question but one which gets re-raised within the context of neuroscience now partly because of the work that the demasios do is this question. What happens to our ideas about free will and responsibility if it turns out that the mind is the brain's activity? If it turns out that the mind is a result of neurons doing one thing, doing another, then how do we think of ourselves as agents with choice, with self-control and so forth? What happens to those ideas? And I think this is a very serious and very real and very pressing question. I mean what makes neuroscience different in a certain very special way from cosmology or from chemistry is that it's about us and it's telling us things about ourselves from a perspective that's not got very much to do with introspection. And so we want to ask this question about what happens to our conception of free will. If I may back up a bit first, there are two traditions again with regard to what is meant or what the conditions would have to be in order for our humans to have genuine choice. One tradition sees it that there is a kind of organ or faculty if you like which is the will and that independent of causal determinants acts freely, acts in an uncaused way if you like is self-initiated or self-determined. And that we are free only when our will is uncaused, when our choice is uncaused. Now the other view is that that's most unlikely, that and of course it seems especially unlikely if it turns out that the mind is the brain's activities because since brain activities are all caused then the mind's activities would be caused to and so indeed would choice. Interestingly Aristotle also addressed this question and made the very astute observation that our behavior which is uncaused is usually erratic or random. That what we really need in a concept of the voluntary and a concept of free will is the idea that education matters because it causally affects us. That we want people to experience the consequences of their behavior because it changes them precisely because it has a causal effect. So Aristotle's view and Hume's view later was that we shouldn't be looking for a free will in the sense of being uncaused, rather what we should do is try to address the question of the difference between what it is to have behavior that's voluntary and involuntary within the framework of causation. And thus we have Aristotle arguing and many philosophers since saying that choice and responsibility depend not so much on the idea of uncaused mental events, sort of sheer willing, but rather on the notion of character built up by habit, by education and on the notion of practical wisdom. And the notion of practical wisdom is interestingly making a kind of revival within the domain of moral philosophy. Farley because it's clear as Antonio DiMazio pointed out this morning that one can't just have a set of well-specified rules and act on those and those alone, much more is needed in order to do reasonable and wise and non-idiotic things. The idea also that you can get along with cold, fewer logic and that what you must do is sort of destroy the emotions or prevent the emotions from having any role also I think comes out from his work and the work of other people as well as probably being mistaken. Our childhood ideal of Mr. Spock, emotionless, deliberating and coming to the right answer is of course counterbalanced by Mr. McCoy, Dr. McCoy who tends of course to show the other extreme namely heart over head and he often makes bad decisions in Star Trek also as it turns out that Mr. Spock does too. Captain Kirk is of course the Aristotelian man of practical wisdom and perhaps I should say since we're here that we should call him Captain Kirkvest because he is the man who has a kind of balance between reason and emotion and he is someone who's in the Aristotelian conception of things whose habits are such that he is disposed generally to be compassionate when it's appropriate to do so or to be courageous when it's appropriate to do so but not to be reckless, not to be foolhardy and so forth. So the idea then is not that there is a nice sharp distinction between having self control and not between actions being voluntary and not rather it is that there is a kind of a spectrum and that through habit and through somehow changing the brain circuits we are able to come to have greater self control and in this I simply wanted to indicate some aspects of the spectrum we would have something like narcolepsy on the one hand where someone as a result of an abnormality in brain chemistry suddenly will fall asleep in the middle of dinner, in the middle of a talk like right now. Our own sleep patterns are not quite as adamant as that but as all of us who suffer jet lag know the brain is quite resilient even there and so forth and then in the middle we can exercise quite a lot of self control. There's some self control for such things as canoeing, cognitive things such as believing conspiracy theories. I mean it's interesting that that does seem to be a dispositional matter over which people can have control but it's not clearly an epistemic or rationality matter versus an emotional matter. It's one of those issues where there's a bit of a blend and then finally of course at the other end it is really a matter of free choice whether or not one watches Letterman. Times of cases though that Antonio Demasio raised are very very interesting and I thought it was profoundly important that many of you raised the question about criminals and about responsibility and after all one of the major reasons we're concerned with questions about choice and responsibility has to do with the social domain because we each have the capacity to help one another enormously and to hurt one another terribly and so it matters that a portionment of praise and blame be done in a reasonable, effective, humane and fair way and that turns out to be rather complicated. It's not that there is a sort of simple test that we can apply. There isn't going to be a sort of simple brain scan that we can do and say yep, that action was voluntary and that one wasn't. We are going to have to proceed probably in much the way that we have, sort of trying out various possibilities, seeing where it leads, perhaps changing our mind, revising it and in the meantime, learning as much as we can about the conditions that result in impulsiveness and compulsiveness and unreliability and in remorselessness and in cruelty. We want to understand as much as possible the role that disease, that neurotoxins, that early fetal life and exposure to toxins such as cocaine can have and the effects of certain kinds of environments in infancy and in childhood. So I don't think that there is an easy answer there and that middle ground between where it's pretty clear that the action was involuntary and pretty clear that it's voluntary is something that we will simply have to continually reason about and emote I guess about as well. Finally, I suppose I should end just by saying and what does all of this do to our conception of ourselves? Does the possibility that we might understand the neurobiological basis of choice and decision making of consciousness and perception, does this detract from what it is to be human from the dignity of humanist? Does this mean that there will be a kind of clash between the scientific and the humanist traditions? I may just be Pollyannish or optimistic about this, but I guess I'm inclined to feel very hopeful by and large. Much that's important and good and valuable has come out of science if I may make an understatement and there is of course always the possibility for abuse. So we will as always, whether it's the discovery of fire or learning how to harness nuclear energy, we will have to be vigilant and we will have to be vigilant as knowledge accumulates about what makes us tick and how it is that decisions are made. But it may also free us in certain kinds of ways. If we could understand in more detail really what does happen to the amygdala and frontal courtesies of children who day after day watch violence and take crack, we might take a very different view of what we ought to do about such cases. I think that by and large the prospects are very exciting in just the way that it was very exciting for Galileo to see the moons of Jupiter or for us to understand where species came from and something like the same thrill and excitement attends neuroscience. So for me, it is not really a matter of a division between science and the humanities. It seems to me that there is so much beauty to be recovered and to be uncovered via science that I see it as a very special and very exciting time for the intertwining of the two. Thank you. We were by no longer either. We were by no longer be able to work with us. I think we're coming there as much as it's not clear whether it's something I won't be sure to remind you of in the center and in my personal view. So that's kind of possible. Yeah, I'm not necessarily saying that I'm actually a neuron model, but so I think it's really important that I say it. It's probably a bit of a general part of any kind of neuron model. But if you don't mind the possibility that we can change the universe, if you're going to be so big on the one hand or the range on the other hand, it's the only way that we can change the universe. So I think when people are way out of the cell that the people want, we can say that those are very many parts of what people problem a lot. But I'm not exactly what they're doing about the world. I think that that's very important. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We do, of course, want to notice that the concept as we use it often covers a whole lot of very different things. Sometimes it's used to distinguish being in coma from not being in coma. Sometimes it's used to mark the difference between being asleep and being awake or being in the dream state. Sometimes we use it mainly within the perceptual domain to demarcate being aware of sensory perceptions, smells, touches, colors, pains, and so forth. And, of course, there are really significant differences between the sensory perceptions. Sometimes we use it to categorize aspects of metacognition. So we may talk about ourselves and say that what we know that we know, I know that I don't know all the names of my second cousins, but I do know the name of my great-grandfather, something of that kind. I think that that sort of metanolage is also very different from the awareness of perceptions, which I think is different yet again from awareness of well-being, awareness of being ill, awareness of being tired, and so on. Now, since the word covers such a panoply of different phenomena, my guess is that we're using it something like the way people used to use the word fire, and that what we may want to do is, and this is sort of the Francis Crick's strategy, is to focus on one of those phenomena where we think we can both get quite a lot of psychophysical data from experimental psychology and we can get quite a lot of neurobiological data. Now, you can't really do that for something like metacognition, you can't really do that at this stage for feeling ill at ease or for feeling embarrassed, but you can do it for seeing color or for seeing shape, and you can do it for feeling a touch. So, one idea is that granting that the word consciousness is very broad and covers many different things from the point of view of making an experimental in-road, it might be a good idea to narrow down the problem. The issue of self, I think, is different yet again, and I didn't really want to talk about self-representation on this occasion, but you're absolutely right, of course, that self-representation must have some sort of important role in awareness, and in particular, there seems to be some very close association noticed by a psychologist for a long, long time, that there isn't as close association between self-representation and body representation. Now, saying there's a close association doesn't tell you a whole lot. What we would like to know in more detail is what that interconnection is, and so we can recognize that we need to understand in greater depth the idea that the brain can produce a representation of the self, and with that, of course, I'm on great agreement. It's tough to see what the experimental route is into that, except through lesion studies. And there, I think, through lesion studies, we can see that various aspects of self-representation are compromised, and you're one of the people who's done work on that and so have the demosios, and I think that's clearly very important. Now, what was the last point I also wanted to say something about? Well, yeah, I mean, as to the gooeyness and so forth of consciousness, I mean, I guess it's gooey and all that, but I think if what we want, and this is really to make the same point I wanted to make earlier, look, if we want to make an experimental attack on the question, that is, if we really want to get serious about understanding the mechanisms for these things and not knowing whether they constitute a unified natural kind or not, maybe one strategy is to say, of course it's gooey and omnipresence and time passes and so forth, but let's find an interesting experimental route in. And I think there are a couple that are really quite wonderful in vision and in this amount of sensory system, as well as within lesion studies. So I think there are real possibilities there. I would just like to add a comment. Obviously my topic today was certainly not the self and not consciousness and I didn't spend any time at all on them, but as many of you know from what we have been writing about, we think that the body and the body representations are absolutely vital. And in fact, I touched on that when I talked about emotion. It is not conceivable to talk about emotion without talking about the body and the looping of signals through the body. It is in fact what it is all about. It's about action in the body and a representation back to the brain. And it is certainly true and I entirely agree with Oliver that you cannot understand, you cannot make much sense of consciousness, in almost any sense in which you can use the word without having a sense of self, because after all the fundamental property of consciousness that we would all probably agree on in this room is subjectivity and you cannot talk about subjectivity if you don't have a self. And by the same token, it doesn't make any sense to talk about self without having the sense of the representation of the body in which that self is inhabited. And I think in fact when we talk about mind, we have to talk about mind as not just in brain, which is something we would most agree with, but as both being embodied in the organism of that particular individual. I think these are very critical issues and they have been to some extent out of the discourse on consciousness and certainly out of the discourse on the neurobiology of consciousness by and large, it's not without exceptions. Dr. Kandel? One of the things, excuse me, one of the things I like most about Pat's talk was the emphasis on patience. I think it's very important to realize that neurobiology is a fairly young science and that the mission that it's taken for itself is immense. And when you think in just the period which David Hubert and I have experienced is a period of some 30 odd, 35 years or so, it's really amazing how much progress has been made on really all aspects of neurobiology from rigorous documentation of the neuron doctrine, insight into the signaling functioning of cells, mechanisms of synaptic transmission, systems of neurons as an individual system, and the early processing of visual information. It's really an extraordinary accomplishment for really what is really two generations of scientists. To ask us at this particular point to try to understand consciousness in detailed neurobiological terms is to ask us to speculate wildly to be honest about it and I think that's essentially what we're doing. I think almost any reasonable theory about consciousness as Pat indicated is open to side attacks of various kinds. For example, Francis Crick who encouraged our current enthusiasm about consciousness has liked very much the theory that Pat presented in very nice form today and that is that there is no single place where the binding of different aspects of a percept are brought together. They're represented in different areas and we sensed, we consciously perceived that when all these areas fire in synchrony. Well let's assume there are ten areas and they all have to fire in synchrony for me to see Hannah sitting over there. Well isn't there some structure that has to know that all those ten areas are firing in synchrony? How does the brain know that this synchronous event has occurred so that I can perceive Hannah? So if you just think about any one of these problems there's a problem behind that problem. So I think one should be aware of the fact that we are an ambitious science but we're really still at a very early stage and you're putting enormous demands on us by asking us to really come up with intelligent thoughts. We can at best come up with early guesses. Okay, Dr. Hubell has a comment and then we'll proceed to ask questions. I would just like to reinforce what Eric Candel has said. This field has come an enormous distance in the last 30 years but it's hard, what is hard to convey is the depth of our ignorance about huge areas of this field. The stuff I talked about this morning about the primary visual cortex, this is the only region of the brain for which we have anything like that kind of knowledge and the rest is complete ignorance and even in this area, the primary visual cortex there are whole topics that we don't know what to make of. For example, as Pat Churchill mentioned, the function of a dendrite which is a very conspicuous part of all of these cells, we really don't have any satisfactory knowledge of what dendrites do. No one doubts that the unit of neural activity is the neuron since Cajal, that has been very clear but that doesn't say that there aren't large parts of it that we don't understand. Well now, having said that, I fail and have always failed for some time to see the necessity for wild high-flown hypotheses to explain things like consciousness which aren't very easy to get a hold of in the first place. If we knew 100 times as much as we know about the nervous system and still didn't understand consciousness, then there might be room for theories as... I would say, I can't think of a better word than ridiculous but I'm sure there is one, than Penrose's theory about quantum gravity. It's unnecessary because if we had a necessity for having something that weird to explain consciousness, that would be one thing and dragging in microtubules is just adding insult to injury. This is absurdity in the highest degree, I think, and Penrose is not an absurd person. He was the person who did the mathematical underpinning for Stephen Hawking's stuff. He is as close to a genius as you can get. That tells you something about the mind, how someone can be so marvelously tuned and come up with such ridiculousness. Another example I would say is the theories of Gerry Edelman on the same subject. I've never met anybody who could understand Gerry Edelman's writings on the subject and I've talked to many people about it and read many people. Review after reviewer of his books confess that they don't understand what he's talking about and he also is one of the most famous and prominent and best immunologists in the world. So the mind is very strange but when it comes to explaining the brain, the variety and far-flown nature of these theories it beggars the imagination. I was going to use another verb. It's not that these are necessarily wrong although I find them incomprehensible. It's that they're not necessary at this stage. There's just enough work to be done of a kind of patient, hard-slugging nature as Eric and Pat have pointed out. Well, that's another sermon for the day. I'm going to ask for some short responses to one or two questions from the audience. Anybody who feels they may have a response should let me know. I'll direct this one to Dr. Churchland first. An emergence theory of mind takes into account both mind, brain, dependencies and biological evolution yet it also insists on existence of levels of organized complexity not reducible to micro-properties as in your temperature paradigm. How do you deal with emergence theories of mind? Well, part of what I wanted to convey I guess in the talk was I'd like to see a reason why one supposes that you can't explain mental capacities, learning memory, perception, what have you, in terms of the components and the organization of the brain. It just seems to me that that's the likely way that things are going. Now, it could turn out that there are emergent properties that are irreducible in the sense that I mean that is inexplicable. I guess this is perhaps to reiterate points made on my either side and that is that it's way, way too early in the game to know what can't be explained. We really need to answer some very fundamental questions about the brain and answering those will be tremendous and exciting and so forth and we'll have to just kind of wait and see whether or not it turns out that there are that there are properties that are emergent in the sense of inexplicable but it strikes me that how could you predict that I guess at this point that they will forever be inexplicable and I don't really see this sort of theoretical advantage of assuming so at this point. It seems to me that the straightforward thing to do is to go ahead and have a bash at it. Second question. In all basic religions there is reference to something separate from the brain whether it be Zen, vital force, soul, spirit. Something that exists after brain is dead please elaborate on your theories relating to this. Well, I guess what I think will exist after my brain is dead is most of you. I'm not very hopeful or I don't think it's very probable that there is a non-physical thing that will survive the death of my brain. I think that's that and in that respect I'm probably like chimpanzees and gorillas and bears and rats and so forth but that isn't to say that there aren't things in the universe greater and more important than oneself. So if one wants to look for a larger a larger thing to take seriously and so forth then of course one can think about nature itself and the biotic community if you like and I guess that's in those moments when I'm inclined to what one might call semi-religious reflections it would be in terms of the biotic community rather than in terms of myself having a soul that goes somewhere after I die. We'll pose one more and then close this session for the afternoon. So awareness and consciousness are purely related to neuronal activity. Why aren't other creatures aware or conscious are our brains so unique among animals that humans alone have this capacity? That's a very good question and it certainly appears that our nearest neighbors such as chimpanzees and gorillas and orangs and so forth have many of the cognitive capacities that we do and almost certainly are aware. How far down the phylogenetic scale it goes is hard to say but it may well be that a rat has rather less in the way of awareness than a cat or a dog or at least it's rather different from a cat or a dog and it may be that very simple animal like a leech has none at all but until we know more about the brain mechanisms that are involved in perceptual awareness at any rate, I think it's very hard to say. So what I guess we'd like to do ultimately would be to find out in the human case what and perhaps in monkeys and chimpanzees what that comes to and then we might be in a position of discussion about awareness with regard to other species but it wouldn't surprise me if varying degrees of perceptual awareness at any rate were found in all mammals as to the rest I think it's very hard to say. Okay, thank you very much. Good days. This discussion. This race and the audience supported I was amazed at that response you handled it very well. In fact, of all the questions the idea would be probably great. Yeah. It actually would be... Oh, very good. Thank you. Okay, lovely.