 All right, hello everyone, welcome to Acton Flab guest stream number 16.1 with Mark Somes. It's January 22nd, 2022. It's gonna be an awesome discussion. We really appreciate everyone taking the time out to participate in the live stream and in the discussion. We're going to have some intermittent presentation intervals by Professor Somes and also a period for discussion alternating with that. So we'll each just introduce ourselves and then pass it directly to the presentation section. So I'm Daniel, I'm a researcher in California and I'll pass to Dave. I'm Dave, I'm a software developer and student of psychology. I live 200 kilometers north of Manila, Stephen. Hello, I'm Stephen, I'm based in Toronto, Canada and I'm doing a practice-based PhD around social topographies and how people engage in community development and I'll pass it over to Mark now. Welcome. Thanks very much. So what I propose to do is in a moment I'll share my screen and you'll see my slides. I'm going to start with the summary slide of all the points that I propose to cover and then I'll take them one by one, each of those points and at the end of each of them I'll stop and see if anyone wants to comment or ask a question and then we slowly plow through it like that. We've got two hours, so it should be okay but if worse comes to worst and we don't get to the end of the list of topics we will arrange a follow-up meeting to conclude them. So I'm very glad to be here, thanks for inviting me and I'm really looking forward to this discussion. Here come my slides. On the screen is the title of my book and here is the promised summary of what I'm going to cover. As I said, I'll cover each of these points in turn and then we'll have questions and comments in between and if we don't get to the end, that's fine. Let's rather give each one of the topics the time that it needs. So I start with the assertion that affect is the foundational form of consciousness and that affect is intrinsically conscious. I then move to make the point that that claim that affect is intrinsically conscious. In other words, that you can't have a feeling that you don't feel, that this is not based on semantic arguments but rather on empirical evidence and I will summarize the evidence. I'll then make the point that affect is not synonymous with interceptive inference which is widely believed these days and I'll tell you why that matters when I get there. And then I'll move on to making the point that all of this casts new light on the hard problem, particularly if affect is not just an interceptive form of perception because there are lots of problems about perception that have got us into this hard problem in the first place. I'll argue that affect rather than being interceptive inference that it's an extended form of homeostasis. I'll tell you what I mean by that when we get there. And I'll make the point that complex organisms like ourselves require multiple homeostats and that these are to be treated as categorical variables which matters and that these variables must be prioritized. One can't meet all one's needs simultaneously. I'll then, this is a large point. This one is a large point, the empirical evidence about affect and this one is another large point. The mechanism of perceptual and cognitive consciousness is precision modulation of allostatic prediction errors. That's a big claim and so we must spend some time on it. I'll then talk about the nature of the predictive hierarchy. I seem to see it a little differently from most people. So I want to set out my stall on that score and explain why I think the predictive hierarchy is arranged concentrically and that this, as one moves toward the periphery of the hierarchy, there's progressively increasing tolerance of uncertainty. And then lastly, I'll say a word or two about why I think that consciousness can be artificially engineered. So even if we don't get to the end of all of these topics, one way or another, even if we're the second meeting, those are the topics we will cover and we'll see how far we get tonight and at least you know what the overall, when I say tonight, I'm in Berlin. I know it's morning for some of you but at least you get the overall picture from that slide. So let's start with, the effect is the foundational form of consciousness and it's intrinsically conscious. The discoverer of the unconscious, I quote him because Freud more than anybody wanted us to realize just how much of mental life is unconscious. Even Freud said that it is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it. That is that it should become known to consciousness. Thus the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings, and affects are concerned. It's quite a startling statement from, as I said, the discoverer of the unconscious to say that the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings, and affects are concerned. Now, I know this is a controversial issue and that there are all sorts of ways in which people want to argue that there are such things as unconscious emotions and whatnot. And this has partly to do with the fact that different people mean different things by these words, emotions, affects, and so on. And there are also all kinds of methodological operationalizations of these things. I won't go into all of that. I'm happy to, if any of you want to discuss it. But I've emphasized the word feelings to make clear that if anyone wants to argue that they think that the word emotion can apply to unconscious processes or affects can apply to unconscious processes, that's fine by me. But the word feelings, I don't see how you can ever argue that feelings can be unconscious. It just doesn't make any sense that a feeling could exist without being felt. If it were not felt, it would not be a feeling. And so I'm going to focus everything that I'm going to say on this process, this thing, this mental state called feelings. And I'm arguing that feelings are the foundational form of consciousness and that these, this form of consciousness is intrinsically conscious. So that's sort of a dogmatic statement. I'm not sure if anyone wants to discuss that. Perhaps you want to hold your horses, but that's the end of my first point. So anyone who wants to interrupt here, go ahead. Otherwise I'll move on. Thanks for the digestible claim-based format. My question would be, what else has been posited in your view as a foundational form of consciousness? So what are the counterfactuals for that first claim? What other horses are in the race? The reason I focus on aphid, well, I shouldn't say the reason I focus on aphid because that's not quite what you're asking. You're asking, what are the other horses in the race? So let me say that the whole search for a neural correlate of consciousness, which is in a way where the trouble began with Francis Crick, it was focused on visual perception. And there are good reasons to focus on visual perception, mainly because if you take a look at your, you'll excuse the pun, take a look at your consciousness right now, it's probably dominated by visual perception. Visual qualia predominate in our consciousness. And a very large part of our cortex is given over to visual processing. And everybody's always believed that cortex is where it's at when it comes to consciousness. And we also understand a very great deal about visual cortical mechanisms and visual mechanisms altogether. So that was a perfectly reasonable place to start. So that's the other main horse that's in the race, but vision was thought to be a good model example, not because it is the totality of consciousness, but because it was assumed that if we can crack the problem of how visual consciousness arises, then we can generalize our conclusions to other forms. And I'm going to argue that there's something profoundly different about visual consciousness and affective consciousness. And moreover, that there's something profoundly different about cortical consciousness and the brainstem mechanisms, which is where affective consciousness arises. And I know that I'm saying that boldly now, and I'm about to argue that point in the second of the bullet points on the screen, affective consciousness is not a cortical form of consciousness. It's a brainstem form. And that the cortical form of consciousness is contingent upon the brainstem form. And this is one of the main reasons, apart from evolutionary reasons, which sort of interdigitate with and flow from that, from that anatomical localization. Why I think that affect is the foundational form. So it's really vision that I'm using as my kind of foil to answer the question simply. Steven. One question with feelings is, would you say that feelings are integrated with proprioception in the sense that they are felt sense of where the body is as well. So it brings it into kind of an action-orientated domain or is it enough to have sort of a sense of how things are going? Sort of an overview of just an emotional state. And then what are those two connecting some way? As I'm going to argue when I get to my third point, I don't think that affect is synonymous with interceptive inference altogether, interceptive perception altogether. And I don't know, some people would class proprioception with interception. Some people would not, some people would say it's a sort of a hybrid between inter-acceptive and extra-ceptive perception. But to the extent that by the word proprioception, you're referring to a form of perception, I would disagree with that because I don't think that affect is a form of perception. I think that proprioception follows, if by proprioception you mean what neurologists normally mean by that word, it's part of the broader category of somatic sensation. And therefore it does not qualify, I think as affective because as I say, I'm going to argue that affect is not a form of perception. I draw a distinction as I think it's perfectly fine to draw a distinction between extra-ceptive bodily sensations and inter-acceptive bodily sensations. But I think that the inter-acceptive type is nothing other than perception and not intrinsically different. So even if you think of proprioception as straddling those two domains, I still think that it's a modality of perception and suffers from all the same problems as vision for that reason. I see we have a comment in the chat line, I'm not sure how are we going to deal with that if one of you's- Yeah, I'll read this. It was a question in the live chat from Ingrid. They wrote, what differentiates affect from feeling from your perspective? Is affect conscious or pre-conscious? Thank you. You know, this is a perennial problem. We don't all mean the same thing by these terms. So that's why I've focused on the word feeling because there can be little doubt what feeling denotes. It denotes something you feel. In other words, something that you are necessarily aware of. If you were not aware of it, it wouldn't be called a feeling because you wouldn't feel it. Affects and emotions denote many different things to different people. So when you ask me, is affect pre-conscious or conscious and so on, it depends what you mean by affect. To my mind, and I can only say, just make clear how I use these words, I use the word feeling to denote the subjective experience of affect. Affect is a kind of abstract term for a function that we feel, but that doesn't mean that you all have to use the word in the same way. And it's precisely in order to not get lost in this kind of semantic tangle that I'm focusing on the word feeling. And I'll make clear in the very point that I'm moving to next, what I mean by feeling in terms of it's physiological and anatomical and other objective instantiations. Excellent. Steven, you have your hand up. Probably just to... Or is that your previous hand? So just go to the second point. Okay, very good. So the second point is, as you saw, we've just been talking about the meaning of the words and I've staked my claim for the word feeling to make clear that that's what I mean when I say that affect is intrinsically conscious. I mean that it is necessarily felt. I'm also saying it's the foundational form of consciousness. That doesn't flow from the word, except perhaps from the word in the sense that the way that Nagel and Chalmers define consciousness and many people seem to have sort of agreed with this way of defining it, that there is something it is like to be conscious, that this something it is likeness, it seems to be more or less the same thing as feeling. It seems to mean the same thing, but feeling in a rather broader sense of the word than affective feeling. So I want to be clear now why other than those linguistic or semantic points, why I'm making this claim about feeling. It's not by any means based in the semantics that you have to feel a feeling. I want to be clear why I think that this is the foundational form of consciousness. We've all known since 1948 when there was this big surprise that Mugun and Maruzzi found that all consciousness is contingent upon what we subsequently called reticular activating arousal. In other words, upon the something that's contributed by these core brainstem structures which after Mugun and Maruzzi's work came to be known as the reticular activating system. I want to be clear. I'm not only talking about the reticular activating system but also about the peri-acteductal grade which is not technically part of the reticular activating system but it is part of the brain structures which seem to be fundamental to the generating of consciousness. What Mugun and Maruzzi showed among other things was that if you make a small lesion above the reticular activating system thereby severing it, disconnecting it from the forebrain and from the cortex in particular, then consciousness is obliterated entirely. Portical consciousness is 100% dependent upon brainstem arousal. That was a shock and a shock that I don't think we have fully come to terms with even all these years later. It should have led us to realize that we've been looking in the wrong place for the neural correlates of consciousness if we're looking to cortex because it's plain even from just that study performed in 1948 that cortical consciousness is derived from elsewhere. Cortical consciousness cannot occur in the absence of reticular activating arousal. But the way that Mugun and Maruzzi fudged it was to say, and everyone more or less in their wake has said the same that it turns out there are two kinds of consciousness. There's the brainstem kind which we call wakefulness or the level of consciousness. And then there's the cortical kind which we call awareness or the phenomenal contents of consciousness. So this distinction between a quantitative level contributed by the brainstem and qualitative contents contributed by the cortex is the way in which we saved the cortical theory of consciousness following Mugun and Maruzzi's seminal observations. In case you're wondering what this refers to, it refers to a more recent study by Fisher and colleagues which showed that the smallest lesion necessary to produce coma in human beings is a two cubic millimeter lesion. In other words, a lesion the size of a match head in the para-braquial complex. So there's no doubt on the basis of Mugun and Maruzzi studies all those years ago and on the basis of these much more recent observations that consciousness cannot exist without whatever it is that this part of the brain contributes. This primitive brainstem core. But this idea that it's merely a level or a quantitative dimension of consciousness is what I think is unsustainable. And I'm going to very quickly because I'm sure many of you have heard me talking about this before. I mean they're very quickly with through the evidence for why this notion that the brainstem contributes only a quantitative level a sort of a wakeful prerequisite for consciousness rather than a quality and the content. But I want to, before I do that to just give you a clear picture of what is meant by this distinction. The distinction is analogous to the difference between a television set and its power supply. The idea that the cortex is responsible for the contents and qualities of consciousness for phenomenal consciousness, the real stuff, the real quail of consciousness where the thing that all the arguments are about. It's that this is like the television set. And it has to be plugged in, of course. You can't, the television set can't do its television thing unless it's powered up. But to claim therefore that the real source of television and all that that word represents is the power supply, the electrical source in the wall is ludicrous. And that's pretty much how we've all seen until very recently, how we've all seen what the brainstem contributes to consciousness. So nobody's doubting that it's necessary that it's prerequisite that without it you can't have cortical consciousness, but it's been reduced to a mere power supply, something which is not actually consciousness itself in the sense that we're all arguing about. So why do I think that that's not correct? Well, I'll start with the most dramatic evidence which is patients who have no cortex. If the theory that the cortex is necessary for the contents and qualities of consciousness, then patients without cortex should be in a coma or at the very least if we claim that the brainstem produces nothing other than the sort of background level, then patients with no cortex should have some kind of blank wakefulness. I suppose the closest natural kind of thing that tallies with blank wakefulness is the vegetative state, which is also called non-responsive wakefulness. In other words, there's wakefulness without anybody being there, without it there being anything it is like for the organism that has blank wakefulness due to the absence of cortex. But when you look at cases who have no cortex and here's the scan of a girl with hydranine cephaly born with no cortex and you examine the girl herself, you see that she's not only conscious, in other words, not in a coma. She's conscious in the sense that she wakes up in the morning, goes to sleep at night, but more interestingly, she is responsive. Remember my definition or the definition of the vegetative state, the state of blank wakefulness. It is non-responsive wakefulness and clearly this girl is not non-responsive. Here she's responding to the placement of her baby brother on her lap and she responds emotionally in a way that any kid, any little girl, you place a baby on her lap, she'll most will express pleasure. Most kids like their little baby siblings being placed on their laps. And it's not just her, it's most of these kids. If they're raised in something other than a state of complete deprivation like Romanian orphans who fall into what might look like a vegetative state although their cortex is entirely intact, if you actually raise these kids in reasonably humane conditions, they are conscious and responsive, affectively responsive. That's the main point that I'm making. These children with absolutely no cortex, their consciousness has a quality and the content, that quality we call affect. It feels like something to be these kids. And the content is not monotonous affect. It's all kinds of affect. Here's a summary slide extracting what Bjorn Merco who studied many, many, many of these kids, what he said about them. They show all of these different emotions. And most importantly of all, they show them in situationly appropriate ways. In other words, they respond with laughter if they tickled. They respond with arched backs and protests if something that they want is denied them. They respond with a startle if there's a sudden unexpected noise and so on. So the evidence is that these kids are not only conscious in the sense of being awake which is interesting in itself. In fact, I can't imagine what a state of blank wake fullness might be like. But you have it, the concept derived from Mabun and Merutz's work is that there is such a theoretical fiction as blank wakefulness. But these kids are not blank. These kids are emotionally responsive in exactly the way that you would expect if they had consciousness at least in the form of affect. So I'm arguing that with no cortex at all, these kids display the content and qualitative conscious contents and qualities in the form of affects. Now, of course, the big methodological problem is that how do you know what it's like to be these kids? How do you know if there's anything it's like to be these kids? They can't tell us anything about what it's like to be them. So all you can do in this situation is look at other lines of evidence. If we can find multiple converging lines of evidence, converging on the conclusion that the brainstem is where the affects are actually generated, then we can do no better. We can do no more. We can do nothing other than that in science. So I want to show you now what happens if we look at cases who can speak, who've lost great swathes of cortex, they can't have lost all of the cortex because otherwise they wouldn't be able to speak to us. So I'm wanting to show you examples of cases who have lost great swathes of cortex. And the cortex in question is the cortex that has been most closely identified with sentient being, with the subjective presence of a mind, of a conscious mind. The first example is of prefrontal cortex. I think that it's fair to say that the mainstream view is that where all of this information processing comes together and is received by a sentient subject of the mind. The mainstream view is that would be in the prefrontal cortex. Now there are a few patients there. It's rare to have a patient with absolutely no prefrontal cortex. But here's one example. Now I'm just giving you examples in this presentation. I'm speaking about individual cases. Those individual hydranincephalic kids that you just saw, they are representative of the class of patient that I'm talking about. Here's a patient of my own who has no prefrontal cortex but happily has a sliver of language cortex. And so he's able to tell us what it's like to be him. I asked him if he was conscious of his thoughts and he said, yes, of course I am. And I explained to him that according to classical theory he shouldn't be. So in order to confirm that he's conscious of his thoughts, I asked him if he would be willing to solve a problem that would require him to consciously picture a situation in his mind. And he agreed to do that. So I said, I want him to picture in his mind. I want him to imagine that he has two dogs and one chicken which he then says, okay, he'll do. And then I ask him, do you see them in your mind's eye? And he says, yes, he does. I then ask him to count the legs. You know, this is not an everyday task, it's something that's unexpected. So there he has these two dogs in his mind's eye and a chicken and he has to count the legs. And of course the answer is 10. I ask him, how many legs do you see? And he says to my great disappointment, he says eight. I say eight and he says, yes, the dogs at the chicken which I think is enough evidence for me that this chap is there, you know, that there's somebody at home who's looking at these dogs and the chicken and imagining perhaps concretely, you know, that the dogs actually at the chicken or perhaps he's pulling a fast one. He's making a joke. And in fact, the making of pure old jokes is a very common feature of patients with the frontal nerve syndrome. And this is linked traditionally with the commonplace observation that these patients are emotionally disinhibited. And why I draw your attention to that is that if it were true that the cortex and the prefrontal cortex in particular is where affects are generated, then how come if you have an absence of prefrontal cortex not only is affect preserved, but affect is excessive. There's more affect than normal. There's too much affect. This is entirely incompatible with the idea disposed by many respectable neuroscientists. Joseph Leduc, for example, who's a great authority on affect. Joseph Leduc says that of course, the amygdala and other subcortical machinery for anxiety doesn't actually generate any feeling at all that the feeling of anxiety is read out to use his term labeled by the prefrontal cortex. And that's when it actually turns into a conscious experience. So I say again, if that were true, then how come not only my patient, this one making this joke to us, but all frontal nerve patients, the less frontal cortex they have, the more affect they have. So the less capacity they have to read out and label their feelings, somehow it seems as if they're beset by more feeling rather than less. Since I'm talking about feelings, the other major candidate, the other major cortical candidate as being the seat of the sentient self is the insular. But Craig claims that the insular, or perhaps even just the anterior third of it, is where the sentient subject comes into being. And he links this particularly with affect. He says that this is the part of the cortex which registers the state of the own body. How do you feel now is registered by this part of the cortex? And it's on this basis that he claims that this is where the sentient subject comes into being. So again, just one case, like Demazio who had absolutely no insular, biologically obliterated, and he interviewed in much the same way as I interviewed my patient with no frontal cortex. And Demazio asks him if he has a sense of self and he says yes he does and I won't go through all of this, all of which is Demazio trying to ascertain whether or not that this person is conscious and in particular whether or not he possesses selfhood. Does he even understand what selfhood is? And eventually Demazio says, what if I were to tell you that I know you better than you know yourself? Patient says, I would think you're wrong. Demazio says, what if I were to tell you that you're aware that I'm aware? Patient says, I'd say you're right. Demazio says, you're aware that I'm aware. Patient says, I'm aware that you're aware that I'm aware. Please note all these references to I. There is a sentient subject speaking to us here with absolutely no insular cortex. So I think the claim on the basis of the hydrant and cephalic children, the claim that the cortex is the seat of consciousness and of feeling in particular has to be dismissed. But they can't speak. So we look at the other major candidates who can speak, patients with no prefrontal cortex, they are conscious, there's a sentient subject there and they feel like something they tell us and they show us and likewise patients with no insular cortex. Of course the claim can be made. Well, in these cases, their consciousness arises from the remnants of the cortex, the remainder of the cortex, the cortex that is not removed. Bear in mind the ones who have no cortex, you know, who clearly show behavioral displays of affect, every prediction that you might make from the hypothesis that it feels like something to be these kids is confirmed by their behavior, by their responses to affective stimuli. And in that case, we say, well, we don't know cause they can't speak. So then we use these other cases with no prefrontal cortex, no insular cortex who can speak. And then we say, well, it must be the other bits of the cortex that are generating the consciousness. It seems like a losing wicket to me, but let's look at other evidence than lesion evidence. Remember, we're looking for converging lines of evidence, converging on the conclusion that the feelings are generated in the brainstem, in the brainstem. And so here we look at the case of a patient in an entirely different method is used, that is deep brain stimulation of a part of the reticular activation system, in this case, the substantia nigra. The surgeon was aiming for the subthalamic nucleus, but the electrode went into the substantia nigra. And when he stimulated it, the patient fell into a profound depression within five seconds. Again, I'm not going to read all of this to you. It will take more time than is necessary. If you read it yourself, you'll see this patient within five seconds fell into a profound depression. She has no psychiatric history, never been depressed before, never had a diagnosis of any kind, let alone a diagnosis of major depression. And here within five seconds, you can generate, produce, cause a suicidal depressive state, which within 30 seconds of switching off the stimulator, 90 seconds I mean, after the stimulation will stop, the depression stops. Very interestingly, she agreed, or very bravely, she agreed to have the stimulator switched on off either in the subthalamic nucleus or in the substantia nigra of the reticular activating system, where she was blind as to where the stimulation was being applied. And every time it was applied in the reticular activating system, she fell into this severe depressive state again. So this is, you know, this is what you would expect. This is the prediction from the hypothesis that affects are actually generated in the brain stem the prediction would be if you stimulate these reticular activating new PI, you will generate affects. And that's exactly what you do. This is also why I mentioned the periaqueductal gray earlier. Because if you stimulate reticular activating new PI, you generate intense affects, but the same applies to periaqueductal gray. In fact, the greatest intensity and range of affects anywhere in the brain can be elicited from deep brain stimulation of the periaqueductal gray. Brain stimulation of the cortical mantle produces very little, if any, affect. Another method, positron emission tomography. So another study of demasias, patients in states of anger, sadness, happiness and fear, you see where the brain, the major brain activity is in all of these affective states. The major activity is sub cortical. It's in the brain stem. It's not cortical. So again, this is exactly what you would predict if the affect is actually being generated by the brain stem, not being read out by the cortex, but generated by the brain stem. And then there's also the matter of the neurotransmitters that psychopharmacologists tinker with. The mainstream psychiatric medications modulate neurotransmitters that are sourced in the reticular activating system. We don't normally think of it that way, but it is simply the case that serotonin, which we increase with antidepressants, is sourced in the reticular activating system. Dopamine, which we block with antipsychotics, is sourced in the reticular activating system, noradrenaline, which is blocked in many anti-anxiety drugs, is sourced in the reticular activating system. If the reticular activating system was just the power source that I referred to in my analogy about the television set, then it should only interest anesthetists. You shouldn't be able to change the channel, alter the programming of the television set by pulling out the plug or by attenuating the power supply. You might expect the screen to sort of go blank or just flicker, but not to have whole new programs with new contents and new qualities. And so this is my argument, that the idea that feeling states, affective feeling states of the kind that those children display of the kind that these patients describe of the kind that psychiatrists are directly trying to manipulate are generated by upper brain stem structures. They're not generated by cortex. You don't need to have cortex in order to have these states. And yet we all know and agree, we all agree that cortical consciousness is contingent upon reticular activating arousal. If we now are forced to accept that reticular activating arousal is not contentless, is not a mere quantity, is not just a level, but rather has content and quality that we call affect, then we have to accept that affect is a prerequisite for all other forms of consciousness. And it's on this basis, not on semantic one, that I'm claiming that affect is the foundational form of consciousness. It also makes good evolutionary sense that this ancient structure rather than the cortical mantle which evolves only with mammals, that the ability to register your own subjective state, how you're doing affectively in terms of hunger and thirst and sleepiness and too hotness and whatnot, that this should not require such a late evolution redevelopment, but that's another point. I'm just wanting to slot in there that I also mean it in the evolutionary sense when I say that affect is the foundational form of consciousness, I don't only mean it in the functional sense. Now, I'll pause there because that's a big claim and a very controversial claim. In fact, I must tell you, I'm still slightly dismayed that it remains controversial. I've been really surprised by the degree of pushback that I get when I argue. And it's, I'm not the only one who argues it, I'm not the first one to argue it. But Demazio argues it, Panksepp was the first to argue it, Merke argues it, and here I come a good few years on and argue the same thing, citing all of the severance and wow, people just don't want to accept it. So let's hear what you have to say, Steven. Yeah, yeah, I'll read a question from the chat first and then we'll go to Steven. So Jonathan in the chat wrote, I can imagine a modern large language model, the likes of GPT-3 creating such conversations without apparently having a mind's eye. While I agree it is good evidence, I think we are seeing machine learning systems having similar conversations. So you've presented case studies that are the tip of the iceberg of broader populations and analyses. How do we think about our evaluation of conversational dialogue in questions about necessity and sufficiency here? Yeah, you see, this is kind of a relative of the philosophical zombie argument. The problem with this sort of thing is that in fact, the same applies to you and me. I can't know for sure that Daniel is conscious, that Steven is conscious, that David is conscious, or that the person who asked that question is conscious. The point you've just made really does apply in exactly the same way. There's no greater reason to believe that it applies to the patients that I've just presented to you than that it applies to you and me because you too could be a philosophical zombie. In other words, you too could look as if you have internal states, say that you have internal states, but actually there's nobody there. I can never disprove that. That is a metaphysical problem. That's not a scientific problem. The scientific method requires that your hypothesis has to be consistent with all the known facts. And then you have to make falsifiable predictions from that hypothesis. And if your predictions are not falsified, then they are upheld unless and until some evidence is found which positively, this is what positivism is all about, which positively falsifies it. So I'm saying these kids look as if they're conscious. They behave as if they're conscious. Now, it's true that they might not be and Steven might not be and Daniel might not be and David might not be, but my hypothesis is that they are. So what do I do? I say, well, if Daniel feels pain like I do, then when I stick a pin in his hand, he's going to go out and withdraw his hand and avoid me in future. And that's a confirmation of my prediction. The same applies with these kids, but that's just one source of evidence. As I said, you don't accept just one. You then say, okay, well, what about this line of evidence? What about that? And I've given you five lines of evidence here in which in every instance, the prediction from the hypothesis that these people are conscious and that the consciousness is generated in the brain stem and that it has an affective quality. Every single line of evidence, the prediction is confirmed. What you would expect would happen if that were true is what happens. So, I'm afraid you can do no more than that in science. And it's a curious fact that we raise the bar of evidence when it comes to the problem of consciousness. I think we must be very careful not to require any different sort of evidence in the case of consciousness than we require for any other matter in science. And in this case, in any other biological function. You know, it's, if you start with the assumption that consciousness is something special that the ordinary rules of science don't apply to, then you're gonna have a self-fulfilling prophecy. So yes, it's possible that these kids and those patients are not there, that they're lying to me. It's a little bit of a curious thing that somebody without a sense of self wants to pretend that they've got one. I think you're on a kind of slippery slope to irrationality, but I can't prevent you from holding that view. It's just not consistent with any of the evidence I'm afraid. Thank you, Mark, Stephen. Yeah, I was wondering how much you think the challenge with uptake is because people are sort of stuck in the idea that knowledge and information is a signal coming in. And meaning, it's all about meaning and the ability to communicate meaning as opposed to engaging in meaningful action and skillful, inactive processes of the voice twitching, the voice box twitching and enabling words to be in the space around us in some sort of way. And whether that issue is kind of a deeper, ingrained challenge to overcome. Well, I completely agree with that. I think that that is the A fundamental source of the problem because our common sense tells us our consciousness is extraceptive. As I said earlier, our conscious experience is dominated by visual qualia and where do they come from? From things like waves impinging on my retina from outside and I'm seeing things out there. And so consciousness seems to be so obviously derived from something out there. And this was at the heart of the experiments that Magun and Marutsi did. And Magun and Marutsi weren't expecting to find what they found. They were expecting that a cat deprived of any extraceptive stimuli will fall asleep if not fall into a coma. And it was therefore a great surprise to find that that's not what happens, that the consciousness is generated endogenously, it comes from deep within the brain, doesn't flow in with sensory stimuli. And when they lesion that core brainstem structure, the lights went out and they couldn't make sense of it. And they came up with this theory which as I've shown to anyone who's willing to look at the evidence and draw the conclusions that the way that they framed it is wrong. It doesn't explain what they saw. What they saw was that consciousness is endogenously generated. And where does the notion come from this common sense notion that it flows in from outside? It comes not only from our own everyday experience but also from the British empiricist philosophers who probably themselves derived it from common sense. That the mind literally, the mind as a whole is derived from sensory experience that leaves impressions, leaves memory images impressed upon our cortex which are then associated with each other. And this according to British empiricist philosophy which underpinned the whole of 19th century and early 20th century neurology and neuropsychology, it's all predicated on that idea. So I think it's deeply ingrained within ourselves and within our science and within public perception generally that consciousness comes from outside. And you're speaking about some further ramifications of that and therefore sources of resistance against the alternative view. But all the evidence suggests that consciousness is endogenous. Consciousness is generated from within. And I mean, you saw, I'm sorry, I don't know who the person was who made the comment about how do we know that this is not just some sort of programs spewing out language. I have nothing against you, I don't know who you are. I just hear that all the time. And I find it, frankly, I find it astonishing that you present all of this evidence and then still people say, well, how do you know that these patients are really conscious? And this demonstrates the extent of the prejudice that has come with that historical with that legacy that I've mentioned. So, yeah, I completely agree with you. Thank you. Steven with the raised hands, then Dave with the raised hand, we'll go with the raised hands. Okay, thanks. Yeah, so sort of following on from that. Yeah, I totally agree. And actually, I think the work with Christopher Christon and active vision is quite helpful because the idea that we're reaching out and feeling the world. And I think actually, I was looking back before 300, 400 years ago, if you went back in time, people actually almost had that as an intuition of looking out in the world. But once we discovered the retina and then photography, we kind of re-imagined. So one question I've got is regarding cerebral palsy. I work a lot with communities with complex disability or non-verbal and their premotor cortex is often damaged. In the 1970s, it was thought medically, if you couldn't speak, you couldn't think. So that was where they were then. If you couldn't communicate words. And then once they started using symbols, bliss symbolics and the ability to, then they suddenly discovered that all these clients who had a non-verbal actually could form complete sentences because they had a way to act in the world and interact in the world and develop language syntax and all of that. So I'm just thinking whether you've had a lot of, whether any of this works been tied in with clients with cerebral palsy. Not only with cerebral palsy, but with all sorts of neurological conditions. If I can just sort of piggyback on what you've said about cerebral palsy, the whole trend within clinical neurology, has been us realizing that patients who we thought were not conscious actually are conscious. And the whole sort of tenor of the research that's been done in recent decades. I mean, locked-in syndrome, of course, is the extreme example. But I don't only mean locked-in syndrome. I mean, all of these states of reduced and obtunded and clouded consciousness and so on. Minimally conscious states, so-called vegetative states and so on. We're finding more and more patients who actually, who we thought were not conscious with increasing technology, we find that they are. With improvements in our methods, we find that they are. So it's a sort of an odd, it's an odd contradiction with the sorts of philosophical skepticism and doubt that one confronts from people is saying, well, you know, how do we know they're conscious, they're behaving as if they're conscious, but maybe they're not. In fact, what we've been finding in clinical neurology is patients who behaving as if they're not conscious. And then when we use the proper tools, we find that they actually are. So your comment about cerebral palsy that can be multiplied, the observations that you refer to, consciousness using reportability as a criterion, the capacity to declare your conscious states has really, it's not just led to methodological and epistemological problems. It's really led to gross clinical errors. It's ethical problems. I feel we need a lot more than mere philosophical skepticism before we can take seriously in neurology, which after all is a branch of medicine, before we can take seriously the possibility that these kids and these patients, look as if they're conscious, behave as if they're conscious, say that they're conscious, and we say, well, we can't be sure. I mean, think about the implications. Thanks, Mark. Dave, with a question. Yes, two, I'd like to say two things. To what you were just talking about, the difficulty of telling whether people who seem to be locked in or comatose are conscious, there have been some people who initially got their experience in working with the diet. They just wanted people who were dying to not be alone. And they spent a lot of time as typically as volunteers sitting with folks who seem to be comatose, who seem to be completely unresponsive. And they found that events that unroll very, very slowly in the patient's room seem to elicit a response. And they got in high speed cameras and would record what the patient is doing. And that's a study that's also been done with infants that infants seem to act extremely fast. And that if you speed up those images, you can actually see a child respond if you seem to be just kind of lying there. They found with the comatose that it seemed they can carry out conversations. And it actually did resemble conversations, taking a person through childhood scenes, for instance, and watching them respond. And they'd nod or they'd shake or they'd grin. You mentioned some kid that used to bully you over a period of minutes, maybe saying it over and over or speaking very slowly. And you'd get this very slow, but eventually a full grin that a nurse would say, oh, that's just a grimace. Let me check her diaper. And the other thing is a much bigger picture question. Who actually is hyper alert? Getting out of professional settings or ideological settings. You walk around, you see someone who's just, you got to be really careful with them. They will just startle. You have to be really careful what you say. You don't bring up unpleasant topics. You never imply that they've done something wrong. Who are these? For the most part, these hyper alert individuals are children of alcoholics who as small children had to be the responsible person. They had to keep daddy from hurting mommy even. And I wonder how was Niels Bohr raised? Was he hyper alert? Is that why he became so amazingly oppressive? As nice as he might've been, nonetheless unremittingly insistent that only he was correct. So in that big picture thing, are the folks who want to insist that you absolutely positively are controlled only from the outside? Were they the people who as children were never able to emit? They always had to react. They always had to be really, really careful because the environment really is something that will come in and get you. Well, about your second comment, I will just say, please note how affective all of this stuff is that you're talking about. I think that we really underestimate the importance of affect in terms of the whole gamut of phenomena that we call consciousness. But to your first point, I want to make clear that I am, I mean, I agree with what you're saying about the inference of consciousness in these patients. But I want to make clear that I'm making actually a quite a, in light of or notwithstanding all of this other evidence and all of these other very interesting clinical phenomena, all of which point in the direction of, we've underestimated the presence of consciousness, that we've been relying on very poor criteria in terms of reportability and so on, that really we need more sophisticated methods and the more we use more sophisticated methods, the more we find evidence that there is, in fact, somebody there. I agree with all of that, but I'm making a very, very limited claim. I'm saying, I'm not saying these kids are like you and me. I'm not saying they have a full reach in a mental life. I'm saying only that there is something it is like to be them. And in light of all the evidence in their cases, plus all the other evidence that I've cited or using all these different methods, all I'm saying is that that's something it is likeness that these kids possess, it feels like something. They have feelings, that's all I'm saying. So it's all very interesting, all these other things about how all these other capacities have been missed by us in relation to all of these other neurological conditions. But in these cases, which have no cortex whatsoever, they have only, some of them have basal ganglia and other subcortical forebrain nuclei. Some of them don't, but even in cases you have no forebrain, only a brain stem, they display effects. And so I'm saying that the brain stem prerequisite form of consciousness does have a quality and a content. Therefore feels like something, there is something it is like to be these kids and that quality and content is affected. That's all I'm claiming, that the foundational form of consciousness is affect and it's generated in the brain stem. So it's actually, I think, a rather modest claim in light of all the evidence. It's quite a conservative claim. It's a sort of a deflation reclaim, but so much flows from just that. And I'll just say once more, I find it very hard to understand. I mean, I can understand it psychodynamically or politically or what, you know, I mean, people's whole careers, I mean, generations of careers have been built on the assumption, you know, that cortex and consciousness are intrinsically bound up with each other, which, you know, so the people have a hell of a lot to lose and many of us with egg on our faces and I freely admit that I too believed that the cortex was the organ of consciousness. This is what I took in like Mother's milk when I trained and I believed that for many, many years after I trained, you know, so it's, you know, I'm not exempted from that, but gosh, we've got to look at the evidence. It's wrong. We made a mistake, you know, that doesn't mean the cortex does nothing. It doesn't mean it doesn't contribute anything to consciousness. It's just not the source of consciousness. The cortex is elaborates this very raw primary elemental feeling that is generated in the brainstem. And all we need to do is accept that and then we'll make huge progress in consciousness science. The fallacy that the cortex is the source of consciousness is really a serious impediment to us at this point in the history of our field. I think it's you next, Daniel. Yes, it is indeed a theme of the discussion that ambiguous evidence are continually interpreted and reinterpreted in light of our inherited or our previously structured priors. And that's true in the active vision example. It's also true in the scientific example where our inherited priors about scientific models influence how new evidence is not just perceived but funded and carried out. And it made me think about when people activate a gene or remove one gene and make claims of function might be an analogous to the brain but removing or having one node in a complex network showing that there is a single point of failure or gain of function does not entail that as a generating mechanism, which is just an example of an explanation that retains an alternative perspective. And so I think it's interesting on multiple levels as we kind of apply this idea of updating and learning and structural learning on our theories about ostensibly the part of the body that does this function as opposed to one's hand which is important and has nerves in it but doesn't do this kind of engagement. Thanks very much. So I agree, that's an everyday observation that we are reluctant to accept prediction errors. We cling to our priors, especially our most deeply consolidated priors. And we see this in everyday life. Nobody likes to find they were wrong that they have to change their mind, that they have to accept evidence for review other than the one that they had always held. And this applies even to us scientists. I mean, who in their graduate studies when they were doing their first research didn't hope that their hypothesis was right. And then when the evidence came in and they found, oh dear, I haven't found what I expected to find, it's not welcome. So what I'm referring to, based on what you've just said, I know this is not quite what you were saying, I'm sort of elaborating what you were saying, is that we don't recognize sufficiently the affective dimension in our resistance to prediction errors. We all know about priors and posteriors and how this all works mechanistically. But just from the sort of anecdotes that I've mentioned, I'm trying to get us to recognize that there is an affective dimension to that. And when we get to this point about the concentric predictive hierarchy, I'll come back to that. But I think it's an interesting and important observation that as you traverse the hierarchy and get to what, in my way of thinking about it as a concentric hierarchy to get deeper into the hierarchy in the traditional way we speak of going higher in the hierarchy. But as we go deeper, further from the sensory motor periphery, so we come upon priors which are more and more difficult to update. And I say again, there's a feeling that goes with that which is I don't care what you tell me, I'm not gonna believe you. Thank you, Mark. Steven, with a question. Yeah, I know you're gonna come back to the cognitive consciousness but just something around terminology. We've been doing work around a non-tology working group at the active inference lab actually trying to understand how to think about the language. And you mentioned it could be affect is generated in the brainstem. And then, and that's when something's like something, that's what it's like. But I'm also wondering how you take in the dynamic with the body and environment going down. I don't know if that's seen as another manifestation because obviously the brainstem, it makes sense because it's more integrated with the rest of the body's not of a system, it's less distant from it. But I'm wondering whether the term generated within is more to do with when it's connected to the rest of the brain. And when it goes down, it's actually more distributed in a mind, body, environment dynamic. I would have nothing against, I mean, that way of thinking is, I'm very sympathetic with it. I'm not a narrow localizationist. I'm very happy to recognize it comes naturally to me to think about functional systems which are distributed and dynamic. And in fact, the reticular activating system is probably the most deeply interconnected with everything else in the brain system that there is. It has tentacles everywhere. And not only, although it's called the ascending reticular activating system, it descends also. It modulates the whole nervous system in very important ways that that will come to you because this whole thing of precision modulation is at the heart of my way of understanding consciousness. So the main thing that I'm wanting to say is I agree with you that this is a deeply interconnected system which functions by modulating other systems. And I would be very happy if we had to leave it there and say, well, you can't quite say that affect is generated in the reticular activating system because it's really modulating these other systems. My reluctance, however, in this case to accept that is twofold. The one is that that's the kind of thing that people like Joe Lidoo are saying. They're saying, yeah, this is all unconscious until it is labeled by or read art in cortex. You're not talking about cortex, so that's, but the principle remains, that I don't want to concede the point that it only becomes conscious once it modulates something else and that that's really where the contents and qualities are. That's a sort of theoretical reluctance on my part. You can see why, but more importantly, more telling me is the evidence. When you look at these kids, they have no cortex. So their effects can't be modulating. It can't be the result of something that the brainstem is doing to cortex because there ain't no cortex. And yet, there's all the evidence that they have affects. And so I think as much as surprising as it may be, it's not consistent with our normal way of thinking about cortex. And it's also not something that I'm wedded to, the idea that anything is generated in anything. But the evidence suggests that certainly the modulatory influence that the reticular activating system has over the cortex, true as it is, important as it is, fundamental as it is to how that system works, that the effects are not a product of the modulation of cortex. The effects are generated in the subcortical structures. And if you just take a step back, the implication of that is that, well, maybe there are effects in vertebrates who don't have cortex. In other words, maybe effects are not the exclusive preserve of mammals. And actually, that seems pretty likely. It seems pretty not likely that non mammalian vertebrates have affects. And again, when you start looking at the evidence, it's pretty not good that they do. So I'm happy to accept everything that you're saying about, let us not forget that this is a system which is deeply interconnected with other systems that its primary function is to modulate other systems. But all I'm saying is that when it comes to cortex, it's not that the effects themselves are not generated by the modulating of cortex. That doesn't mean that there's a disembodied brain or a disembodied reticular activating system, but you can have a decorticated reticular activating system. And it can generate effects nonetheless. Thank you, Mark. Dave, do you want to? Thanks. Okay, so one thought. I see that the comments in the chat line have they been dealt with. Can I move on? Yes. Let's try to get to at least one other of these important points. Oh, well, this is a brief point. The reason I'm making this point about affect not being synonymous with interceptive inference is because those few people working within the active inference framework who are not corticocentric and happily they're increasing. There's people who worked within this framework, they had no reason to question all of the mainstream assumptions of cognitive neuroscience as far as cortex is concerned. But slowly it's become apparent that affect is an important topic that we're not only talking about perception and action and cognition, we're talking also about affective processes and about body regulating processes and so on. In fact, the whole of self-organization has to do with the regulation of the own body and the whole notion of self-evidencing systems and so on. So this is happily slowly coming and increasingly coming into the mainstream of the people working within the sort of active inference framework. But the dominant view within that school of thought is that affect is to the internal body what perception is to the external world. In other words, extraception is perceptual inference regarding things going on outside of me and affect is perceptual inference about things going on inside of me. And that's, if that were so, that would be nice and simple, but I don't see it that way. So, and perhaps the outstanding proponent of the view that affect is interceptive inference is a nil set. And he's just brought out a really very good book. I have it right here. Yeah, it is. Being you, which is predicated on that view. So, because I agree with him about so many things, I think that it's easy for people to conflate our views and to imagine that what I'm saying is the same as what he's saying on the score. So I want to make clear that I'm not saying the same as what he's saying on the score. Now, why do I think that affect is not the same as perception but rather interceptive perception? Well, first of all, because there are many interceptive perceptual states which are not affective. So, you can perceive your heart rate, the beating of your heart. You can perceive your respiration rate or the inspiring and expiring of air from your lungs. You can perceive gurgling in your tummy, which is an unequivocally visceral state. And all of these things, you can perceive them indifferently. You can perceive them without any affective valence or quality at all. So, if affect were somnolimus with interceptive inference, then why are these common and garden examples of interception not affective? And then secondly, if affects were interceptive perception, how come so many affects are generated by extra-septive events where there doesn't seem to be a nuclear interceptive driving force? So, for example, pain, which is a fairly simple example of an affect. You stick a pin in my finger, it comes from the outside and it penetrates the nosy septas in my extra-septive nervous system. And I feel this intense affect called pain. So, that's extra-seption and yet it's affective. The same applies to surprise, to fright. You get a shock. Well, in fact, electric shock is another one. But these are, but I mean just fright, something unexpected happens outside of you and you startle and there's an affect that goes with that, a particular type. Disgust is another one. You imbibe something that tastes or smells bad and you wretched up with this terrible feeling of disgust and then they're more, and they're not purely entirely non-bodily affective states like missing somebody, missing your brother. It's clearly affective and there's nothing bodily about it. And nothing intraceptive about it when I say nothing bodily. I mean particularly, it's not about the state of your intraceptive visceral processes. So, I'm saying there are intraceptive visceral processes which we perceive which are not affective and there are affective processes, affective states that we experience which are not intraceptive. So, I don't think that we can say that affect is intraceptive influence, that it's the same as external perception except it's directed toward the state, the internal state of the own body. I think that it's something else. And I don't say this to be difficult. I'm actually quite concerned that those few of us within the active influence framework who are recognizing the importance of affect can't agree on this point because they're few enough of us who recognize the importance of affect. So, I'm just wanting to make clear why I think that it's not merely a kind of mirror image reflection of extraceptive influence. And then I want to add one last point which is that when you read, I mean, everything that I'm going to go on to argue about why extraceptive perception. Remember what I said at the very beginning about cortical vision having been the model example of where we will find the neural correlative consciousness which has led us down this blind alley and caught us into such a mess that it has to do largely as I'm going to argue later with the fact that cortical processes and perceptual processes are not intrinsically conscious things. You can perceive the world through all your extraceptive modalities vision included at the cortical level too, you can perceive the world without perceiving it consciously. In other words, extraceptive inference, perceptual inference is not an intrinsically conscious process. There's nothing about extraceptive inference or perceptual inference that requires consciousness to for us to understand the mechanisms at work. And so if interceptive inference is just the same thing applied to the interior of the organism, it suffers all the same problems that it's not clear why it becomes conscious. And I said that's going to be my last point on the score, but in fact, I realized there's one more that I want to make which is that the vast, vast, vast majority of our interceptive processes are unconscious. I mean, even more so than our extraceptive processes, most of our regulation of our visceral bodily economy happens autonomically, we know nothing about it. So it would be again a very curious place to find the essential mechanism of consciousness and in this case of affect. If the majority of the mechanisms of this kind, in fact, do not operate consciously and if it suffers the very same problems as our extraceptive using vision as a model example, using any form of perception, I think as a model example of consciousness is to make a mistake because consciousness is not an afferent process. Consciousness is an endogenous process. It's something generated not from within the guts, but from within the core of the brain. And that's where we're going next. So I'll stop there for any comments on that point before I move to the next one. Great presentation, important distinctions and points. So indeed we'll take a breath and I think we can head on to the next one. Okay, thanks. So now I've told you in relation to the point I've just made, I think that the hard problem of consciousness has arisen in large part from the example that we've used of consciousness, starting with Crick who has to be credited with bringing consciousness into center stage. So I'm not bashing Crick and I also have said already, I think it's perfectly reasonable that he started where he did. It's clear why he started with visual perception as his example, where we should look for the neural correlate of visual consciousness and then distinguish unconscious vision from conscious vision and then there we have it. Then we have the neural correlate and then we can generalize from there. I'm saying that it turns out that it was an unfortunate place to start and it links with what I was saying earlier. That's also why I'm saying, I don't want us to make the same mistake, just turning it inwards and saying we're dealing with perceptual processes. So let me say why all of this casts new light on the hard problem. Yeah, so yeah, as Charmers, the person who formulated the hard problem in the very paper that he formulated it and he says, what makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this note that even when we've explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience, they may still remain a further unanswered question. Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open. Why doesn't all this information processing go on in the dark, free of any inner field? So this is a core aspect of Charmers' hard problem. He's saying that our normal way of going about doing cognitive neuroscience, where we take a mental phenomenon and we say, okay, let's see which part of the brain needs to be damaged in order to disrupt this mental state. And then let's start piecing together what this part of the brain does and how it works. And next thing we end up with a wonderfully complicated map of all of the mechanisms that work in this case, using the standard example, visual perception. Charmers' point is that you can do this, this is the standard approach in cognitive neuroscience, but it doesn't tell you why there is something it is like to see. So you can, the famous knowledge argument with Mary, the visual neuroscientist, she knows everything that there is to know about the functional mechanisms of visual perception, but she knows nothing about what it's like to see. In the example that Jackson, or the story as Jackson told us, she's never seen color. But I like to extend and simplify his arguments and just say she was born blind. She knows everything there is to know about the functional mechanisms of vision, but she's never experienced vision. And if one day she is blessed with the gift of sight, she will learn something utterly new about vision, namely what it is like to see what redness is like, what blueness is like, and so on. And this is their argument. The argument is that the normal way we proceed in cognitive neuroscience, namely to dissect the function and in this way to explain the mental thing that we're trying to explain works very well for all of these mental functions, but it doesn't work very well. It doesn't work at all for consciousness. Consciousness defined as what it is like to perform these functions. So they're claiming charmers is, and Nagel and others of that ilk, that somehow the consciousness is in a different realm from every other mental function. Because when you've explained all the functional mechanisms, you still are left with this epistemic gap between that explanation of the function and the qualitative experiential phenomenal feel of seeing. And so I'm saying that the problem is that they're using perception as an example. Perception is not an intrinsically conscious function. And indeed cortical perception is not intrinsically conscious. That it is demonstrably the case that the cortex can perform uniquely cortical perceptual operations, like actually recognizing color. You can recognize color unconsciously. You can recognize faces unconsciously. You can read words unconsciously. So if the cortex can do all of this perceptual and cognitive gymnastics without consciousness, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say, oh, why doesn't all this information processing go on in the dark without any inner field? Because that kind of information processing can go on in the dark without any inner field. Perceptual inference is not intrinsically conscious. So this statement of charmers is really a strong statement where he says there is no cognitive function such that we can say in advance that explanation of that function will automatically explain experience. This is what he says on the basis of everything that I've just told you, that this is where he's led. He's saying that explaining the function can never explain experience. If that's the case, we're in big trouble because consciousness is somehow going to have to be dealt with in a different way from everything else in science. But if you change that word cognitive to affective, what charmers have said this, there is no affective function such that we can say in advance that explanation of that function will automatically explain experience. I'm saying of course there is the function of feeling. I am saying in advance that explanation of the function of feeling will automatically explain why it feels like something because that is the function of feeling. The function of feeling is for the organism to feel it, to feel its own state. So I'm saying had we begun there, had we begun our quest for the neural correlate of consciousness with this model example, had we begun by asking why and how does it come about that feelings are experienced, I think that we would have had a much less hard time of it than we have had with starting with visual information processing. The mechanism of vision, the mechanism even of cortical vision is not intrinsically conscious. It does not automatically explain experience because it does not automatically have to be experienced. But the mechanism of feeling, you cannot explain how feeling works, why feeling exists, what it's there for. If you have a functional account of feeling, it would have to account for why it feels like something, in other words, why it's experienced. So I think that what I said in my earlier point that these facts cast new light on the hard problem. This is the new light that it casts. I just have also on the screen this slide, this famous review paper by Kilstrom, which summarizes all the experimental evidence for the conclusion that we were led to actually a good four decades ago already, that perception without awareness of what is perceived is perfectly commonplace. And learning without awareness of what is learned is perfectly commonplace. Cognitive and perceptual functions performed by the cortex are not intrinsically conscious processes. So this question of charmers is why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? Why doesn't all this information processing go on in the dark? That perplexity is not difficult to understand in light of those facts. But I don't think that this question has anything like the same gravity when you apply it to the kinds of mechanisms that give rise to feeling. I'm saying in short, that if Mary was an affective neuroscientist rather than a cognitive neuroscientist or a visual neuroscientist, she could not know everything that there is to know about the functional mechanisms underpinning feeling without expecting that it will generate something that is experienced without the mechanism necessarily accounting for why it is experienced. And this is why I think shifting our focus from cortex to brainstem and from perception to affect has big implications for our ability to finally come to grips with this hard problem of consciousness. I'll pause there again, thank you. Thank you, Mark. I'll read a comment in the chat and then you can respond, then Stephen. So Dean writes, prearousal plus awareness, minimum of two, not as brain geography or territory establishment effort, rather a dance in an evolving relationship as we might see in an agent dancing with the environment. Whereas the territorial view might examine control, brainstem of the cortex or vice versa, one in an controlling relationship through a mechanical lens, this relationship of arousal and awareness could be choreographed, but not choreographed mechanized but not necessarily choreographed. Not sure what that part meant. Are feelings a residue of arousal plus awareness revealed? We accept the signals like we dance out a path generated. Look, I think that this is similar to the point that we were discussing earlier, about generated in the upper brainstem as opposed to the upper brainstem modulating other structures, whether they be above or below the brainstem in the nervous system. I said then, I'm very happy to think of it as a dance as something choreographed where it's not a matter of who's master and who's servant. When it comes to the relationship between affective arousal and cortical representation, I think that there's some instances where affective arousal just absolutely brushes aside any amount of decision-making and thought processing and conversely, the opposite happens too, that there clearly are ways in which one can, in a top-down way, modulate affect dramatically. And I don't only mean regulate your emotions. I mean, if you look at some of these examples of these Buddhist monks who are able to really massively control autonomic functions and the affects that normally would go with not breathing or walking on painful surfaces and so on, those affects seem to be overridden. So nothing against the idea of there being a choreography between brainstem and cortex. But I've already said why I think that in this instance, the affects do not require the cortex to be actually qualified for the name affect that they actually are felt without cortex. I've already said why, what the evidence is, both in terms of studies of non-geronar studies using the various methods that I mentioned. The most traumatic being, as I said, cases where there is no cortex and yet there's evidence that there's plenty of affect there. But also the evolutionary implications of that, which is that we don't have to wait for the appearance of cortex and the mammalian series for the dawn of consciousness. That if affect is generated in the subcortical structures, then affect does not require cortex and affect can be attributed to other vertebrates. And not only vertebrates, by the way, there also is good evidence that some invertebrates are conscious. The octopus is the famous, the most famous example. But I think that there's a further problem in this comment, which has to do with the word awareness. You speak of arousal and awareness and you seem to attribute arousal to particular activating system, which I'm happy with, and awareness to cortex, which I'm not so happy with if you mean that you cannot be aware of arousal without cortex. So I think this word awareness, it's like all the other words I mentioned at the beginning and like emotion and affect and so on. And I said, I want to use the word feeling to make clear what I'm talking about because these words mean different things to different people. The word awareness means different things to different people. And to many people, it seems to mean something like reflective awareness. In other words, being aware of what you're aware of or access consciousness as Ned Block calls it. That there's this sort of phenomenal consciousness, which is some kind of like a raw consciousness. And then there's a subject that accesses this information. It's like the global workspace theory works that I mean it's pretty similar sort of idea. If we're going to reserve the word awareness for that higher order thought or reflective consciousness or access consciousness, then it means that we can't attribute awareness to raw fields. And that's an odd use of the word awareness to me. To me, how can you feel pain without being aware of it? And pain, you don't need to have any kind of reflective cognition about it. You don't need to have any explanatory labeling or anything. It's just like, shit, that's sore and you pull away even if you don't have language, even if you're not human, even if you're not a mammal, even if you're another kind of creature. So I arousal for me implies awareness in the way I use the word. But if we're going to use awareness for that higher order type of consciousness, then I would just want to remind you that there are other types of consciousness that don't possess that kind of awareness, which nevertheless have something it is likeness. And the core of that quality is feeling, that something it is likeness is feeling. Thank you, Mark. Steven? Yes, thank you. So I was wondering if we think of consciousness as a kind of an integration of our action expectations of what's happening. And those expectations then will, and Casper Hess talks about this with his work with active inference, is how those expectations were weren't met and be effective. So I was wondering within that kind of, that prediction process, when someone gets a question right, say a mathematician, when they get it right, they get a feeling that it's right. It's like they get a felt sense. And you could ask someone what's that feeling like? And they can sort of bring out a metaphor landscape that relates to that, like it can actually have a structure. And there's a similar thing with pain as well. Pain has to be expressed as a metaphor. You have to say it's like a stabbing, or it's a throbbing, or it's always some kind of dynamical kind of metaphorical embodiment. So I'm just curious as these, this embodiment, this meeting in this brain stem, how you see that in terms of, if that's congruent with you, and whether this is then sort of a re-imagining, consciousness is like a re-imagining of these expectations. And it could go up or down in terms of how that is being kind of realized. So I'd like to separate out two different aspects of what you're saying. The first has to do with metaphor. And I think that that may be true of being able to report or declare your conscious states in language, that somehow or other you have to symbolize because language is just that. It's a symbolic representation of the thing itself. So as long as you use the word expressing it, yes, you can't express in words and emotion without using some sort of metaphor, some sort of symbolic system in order to be able to communicate it to others. That they can of course be the direct behavioral affective display expressing of the emotions in Darwin's sense of the use of that term, which we then, as symbolic species, we use that symbolically too. But I don't think that the raw feeling itself has to be re-represented in any way. I think it can just be the raw feeling without it being represented in any language in the broader sense of the word. And so I don't think that metaphor is a necessary component of the core feature of feeling. Then the other thing you were saying, which had to do with surprise, if I understood you correctly. At times in my own thinking about this, there were times when I was keen on thinking about affect or linking affect more with error signals than with inferences themselves. And that was, I was thinking along those lines because so many people within the active inference framework were speaking about perception. You know, this famous phrase, controlled hallucination, that perception is fantasy, that it is the upshot of the predictive process. And what worried me about that is the very thing I've been banging on about all along, which is that perception is not intrinsically conscious. And so this business of inferring the source of your sensory signals doesn't explain why there's something it is like to infer the source of your, the cause of your sensory signals. And so from that sort of point of view, I found myself thinking, well, it's not so much that, I mean, imagine if what you perceive is just what you predict, that would be bloody dangerous. So the controlled aspect seemed to me to be the more important aspect. It's the constraint on what you predict that seems to be more the upshot of what we call perception as opposed to hallucination. And so I wanted to place the emphasis more on the error side of things than on the prediction side of things. But subsequently, I have changed my mind on that score which will become clearer when I get down here, where is it when I get down here, which we obviously not going to get to today, but I'm very much looking forward to us having a second meeting where we can get there. For me, it's got everything to do with the modulation of confidence in the prediction versus the error signal or the error signal that is connected with that particular prediction. And I will just say it now because we're not going to get to it in this meeting, that the petty formulation of the way that I see it is that it is good when things turn out as expected and it is bad when uncertainty prevails. And I mean here goodness and badness in the evaluative sense of the word that is linked to the primary value system of all living things, which is that it is bad to die and it is good to survive. And if things are turning out as expected, in other words, you have a prediction which actually cuts it that that is good from the viewpoint of the organism and that if things are not turning out as expected and uncertainty is prevailing, that is bad. That means this is likely to end in tears. And so what was it, the choreography that somebody with the dance that somebody else was talking about earlier? And I think that the crucial thing here is the palpating of the precision, the modulating of the precision in the predictions over the error signals and that that is at the heart of what affects all about. And I'm only saying that now in advance because I know we're not going to get there in this meeting because we've only got seven minutes to go. But I'm going to try if I may, unless there any further questions and comments, are there any further questions and comments? No. Here are some future comments. So then if there are still something, I think what we should do is I'll take, I'll take whatever comments remain or questions and then we'll start next time with this point because I don't think I can squeeze it in to, I don't think I should even try to squeeze it into to too short a time period. So. Totally agree. Yeah. That was my comment was, we will have a last few minutes to really just appreciate you coming on for the 16.1 and we'll find a time to do 16.2 when we will condense and sort of reflect on what has already transpired and look forward to these next points. I think it was really great to walk through it this way. So Stephen or Dave, do you have any last thoughts? Otherwise Mark, please have a last thought. So Dave first, then optionally Stephen and then Mark. Yeah. In addition to Professor Seth, whose book we already have, who else can we check with as people doing AI without the, the, the construction? With, without which you mean with, you mean who else is working on affective processes that have been within this? Exactly. I'm not. So two people who come to mind immediately is Manos Sakiris, Manos Sakiris and Katerina Fotopoulou. Katerina Fotopoulou, they, they both great. And, and also both of them are very good speakers. So, so if you, if you're wanting to invite them onto this seminar, what live stream series, I think that they would be, they would do well. Awesome. Thank you very much, Stephen. Yeah, just to say thanks very much. And yeah, we, we've been reading some of the work of Ryan Smith and Casper Hiss. So. Oh, well, Ryan Smith also, Ryan and, and Maxwell Ramstead. They're also working on affect. They both, they, I should have mentioned them. Ryan Smith and, and Maxwell Ramstead. Sorry that they're doing some fabulous work. I really loved their recent paper on folk psychology. It was just brilliant. Excellent. Oh, thanks. Well, we'll be connecting those dots up. I'm sure next time as well. Thank you. Okay. Well. Are you closing thoughts? Yes, sir. Yeah. Just, just to say that I appreciate having the, I mean, it's not every day that you have two hours with, with, with excellent minds to be able to talk about only half of what you wanted to talk about. So it's been very kind of you to, to give me this, this, this latitude. And I think that these issues, you know, and I'm also particularly pleased that you're going to be in one way or another recording. And I don't just mean video recording, but also turning into some sort of written form of what we're talking about. Because as I hope you can see from what I've said, just in half of what I wanted to go through, these really are pretty basic issues for, for consciousness science and for the science of the mind and for, and, and, and by implication for what we can do within this active inference framework in tackling these really, I don't mean to be hyperbolic when I say these profound and ancient problems. I think that we have real prospects of being able to make significant progress on, on, on, on these fronts. And so it deserves is the point I'm making. It deserves the time that, that we are giving it. And I'm grateful to you for, for recognizing that. Well said. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks very much. See you everybody next time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers for now.