 So we're here to talk about your brand new book being you, I'm learning a ton about consciousness and you've been researching this stuff for a while. So real quick, I guess a great place to start and this might take up the whole hour but how do you define what is consciousness in the simplest form? You're right, it might take up the whole hour so let's make sure it doesn't. Hardly because we don't need a complete exhaustive definition that everyone agrees on. Definitions often, they come along with the science so they come after it. They don't sort of have to always be the starting point but we need to know what we're talking about, right? We need to not be talking about different things. So for me, consciousness is very simply any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. It is in the words of the philosopher Thomas Nagel for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism. There's something that's like to be me, something it's like to be you but nothing it's like to be a table or a chair or a laptop computing. That's what consciousness is, it's just the space in which experiences occur. So here's one of the reasons I was dying to talk with you. So as I read, I try to read on every single subject I can, I know that there's like, I think everything's important, right? And I've been reading about consciousness and a little bit we'll talk about the self and everything, I first started getting interested when I got into meditation and mindfulness and learning about like Buddhist philosophy and stuff. But when it comes to consciousness and I hope this doesn't like, you know, downplay the work but like I'm trying to understand, right? Like the importance behind the research, right? Like you've been studying this stuff for years. So like off the top of my head, I think of like, okay, the future of like artificial intelligence, right? But you know, when it comes to our human experience, where does this interact with kind of like mainstream stuff that affects our daily lives? Or is it like more like psychology or, you know what I mean? Like I guess what's the end goal for studying all this stuff? It's a really good question. There's a temptation to think that consciousness research is a bit of a idle luxury, right? It's sitting in an armchair pondering one of the great mysteries of the universe and that's all very well, but what's the point? Yeah. I think that would be a mistake. I mean, it is that, but there are also many practical important reasons to gain a better understanding of consciousness. And these go from things we are all familiar with. How does anesthesia work? How do we measure anesthetic depth in the hospital? How can we better understand psychiatric conditions? Psychiatric condition, whether it's depression or psychosis, is really a disturbance in conscious experience, the way we experience the world or the self. And in psychiatry, we just don't have a very good grasp on the detailed mechanisms that give rise to psychiatric symptoms. So there's a whole, and there's more. I mean, there's many swathes of medicine that could really benefit from a focused understanding of the mechanisms that shape conscious experiences. Beyond that, you mentioned machine learning and AI. And I think that's also hugely important. And here, it's not about building a conscious machine. Actually, I think that would be a very bad thing to do. You asked ethically, we don't wanna do that. I mean, you don't wanna massively increase the potential of suffering in the universe. And many things that we and other animals seem to be able to do in virtue of being conscious. It allows us to behave very flexibly in the world to integrate a lot of information from different sorts of perception in one place, in one experience. So there are ways, and this is something I have been working on, there are ways we can improve machine learning, improve AI, improve technology by leveraging a deeper understanding of what consciousness brings to the table for us. But finally, there is this personal level thing. We're all curious about who we are and what does it mean to be me? How do I navigate all the challenges of being a human and being someone who is also ultimately aware that life comes to an end and that our existence is circumscribed in time? And here, an understanding of consciousness meshes very well with, as you said, things like meditation, other forms of developing an understanding that who we are is not sort of essence of me perched inside the skull that's separate from the world. But it's always changing. It's a persisting construction. It doesn't devalue it. I think a scientific understanding of consciousness enriches the experience of being a self because we take it less for granted, but we can also understand more about how it develops, how it changes and how ultimately it will dissolve. Yeah, well, hey, you just sold me, especially because my background, like, you know, I'm really into mental health. I started out like just studying psychology and stuff like that. And you know, like, I'm like, oh, okay, that makes sense. Yeah, and you mentioned, you know, anesthesia and stuff, and you talk about that in the book. And I've started to become really interested in that stuff about, you know, when you're under, like, you know, when you're getting a medical procedure or you discuss like our dream states and that kind of consciousness that comes in now, are we conscious or not? But when you mentioned that, I was thinking too, does your work, and this is actually part of your book I was just reading and thinking about, like, does your work ever cross over into, I guess like medical ethics, right? Because all over the world, depending on the country you're in, there's a lot of ethical questions about people in commas and life support. And I think a lot of it boils down to consciousness or even right now in the States, there's that huge, you know, controversy going on in Texas about the abortion laws and they're trying to, you know, get rid of it and stuff. So I'm like, huh, like, how much of this is, does your work ever get involved in ethics? Are you ever asked to like, you know, present your research and what your thoughts are on that? Occasionally, yeah. I think it's a little indirect. The work that I do in my lab is not directly on when consciousness emerges in the lifespan or on whether people in the vegetative states conscious or not after severe brain damage, but generally as a field, you're absolutely right. That there are very, very important points of ethical relevance that people like me and others are increasingly asked to speak about. So medical ethics, for instance, in terms of caring for people after severe brain injury, that's a big one, right? You have people who might suffer a severe brain trauma and they would often receive a diagnosis of the vegetative state sometimes. And that typically is taken to mean that they go through sleep wake cycles, but there's no consciousness there. There's nothing going on on the inside. There's nothing it is like to be then. And of course, if you think there's no consciousness happening, then the way you interact with that person, the treatment that you might provide, how you look at them at the time is going to be very different. And in one of the, I think the clearest examples of the relevance of consciousness science, there are now new methods available for diagnosing whether consciousness remains on the inside even if it's not observable on the outside. And that changes the game for diagnosis, for prognosis, for treatment, for establishing even basic channels of communication. And this is work led by people like my colleague, Adrian Owen and Stephen Lorries and their colleagues. Has been a lot of ethical interest in how medical practice changes because of these insights from consciousness science. But there are other areas where it also is developing importance in the law. So we have this basic idea in the law that to be guilty, you have to have had both means and motivation. And there are already cases where people have done horrendous things, but it's later than found that they had a brain tumor or something like that. They had some condition where the argument could be raised and was raised. Well, look, it wasn't them. It was the tumor that caused them to behave in a particular way. So we shouldn't hold them responsible. And this is the area of neuro law, right? And the problem is that as you go deeper into it and have a deeper understanding of how we, without brain tumors, in the normal case, generate voluntary actions, do what we want to do, you could say that we're basically all brain tumors all the way down. And should any of us ultimately be held responsible for anything? Because after all, we didn't choose to have the brains that we have. We just do what we can with them. So the really interesting areas of ethics then, the final area that I have spoken at at a panel of the National Academies last year is this emerging neuro technology called brain organoids. So these are part of medical science as well, really. But these are laboratory-grown brain-like structures that researchers can grow in. Petri dishes at massive scale that have brain-like features. They're not mini brains, but they have brain-like features. And they can be very useful for understanding all sorts of neurological disorders and conditions. The challenge is, of course, these are little things that look a bit like brains. Could they be conscious? This is a, unlike a computer, which is made out of silicon, these brain organoids are made out of actual neurons. In fact, human neurons, they're made from human embryonic stem cell. So there's a massive, for me, ethical issue here. Even though the organoids, we have a very simple at the moment. Now, the trajectory of this technology is going nuts. And we have to worry a little bit about the possibility of industrial-scale generation of little mini brains that might have conscious experiences. Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. That's another brand that I've gotten really curious about. It's just the philosophy and ethical angles. And recently, I spoke with Kate Darling and she wrote a book about robot ethics. And I've been reading about that. But also, it's funny that you brought up the law and ethics, because a few things. One of them, I was literally just reading that part in your book. There was, there's a story of a man, I've heard it, you know, in some other books where he had a tumor which caused him to, you know, be attracted to children. And I think if it's the same guy we're talking about, they removed the tumor and then he started having the behaviors again. They checked in, saw it was, the tumor was back. And recently I spoke with, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work of Red Caruso, but he looks at Free Will and yeah, he was just on two. And you're talking about Free Will in the book. I'm like, I wanna get a nil and Greg Caruso together to talk about this. So I don't know, I don't know if like, if you have a stance on that, but like, what are your thoughts around this idea of Free Will and consciousness, especially like if we talk about psychiatric disorders, right? Like one of the things which I don't even have time to get into is the controversy around like multiple personality disorder. And the more I learned about consciousness, I'm like, I'm even more skeptical of that disorder. But you know what I mean? There's a lot of defenses that are trying to be used. So what are your thoughts around it? Or are there issues like of people trying to use that as an excuse because even the testing for seeing, you know, like how would we know? How would we even test for that if the person wasn't the right state of mind and all that kind of stuff. So I'm curious your thoughts. Yeah, I think, and well, I mean, it's massively challenging. And the problem is that the whole legal framework is kind of based on an obvious misunderstanding of the way brains and people work. You know, there is no separation of voluntary action from the way brains are wired up and the way, you know, they're interfaced with bodies. And of course that's a product of all sorts of things on your environment, of your development, of your genetics, of your recent experiences and so on. So there's just an incoherence at the center of all this, which does make it very interesting because it's not that neuroscience is gonna provide answers that will replace law, not at all. I mean, law serves a purpose. We just have to figure out how to bring the goals of legal frameworks together in a sensible and rational way with findings from neuroscience. So you do get people who want to lurch the extremes and say, no, we shouldn't hold anybody responsible for their actions because nobody chose to have the brains that they have. So it's sort of incoherent. But of course, it's not all about a visual retribution. It can be about protection of the rest of society. And it can also, there's also rehabilitative justice. So there are parts of the justice system which I think are very, very compatible. But exactly how you bring it together is really, really, really tricky. I mean, my own view is that there is a point in normal human development where the brain develops a competence to control. So there's a sort of, it may not be a sharp threshold, but there's a point that in normal human development, we reach just as we reach points of competence with language and with other relatively advanced faculties where we act according to reasons that are generally embedded into our culture and society. And we sort of know when we're violating those. So we have that competence to control. I think at that point, it does become reasonable to hold people responsible for their actions. But if they lose that competence to control, whether it's because of the brain tumor or whether it's because they grew up in an environment that was extremely challenging, then it becomes less reasonable to hold them responsible for their actions. Yeah, and it's interesting. Just with what we've talked about thus far, like what is consciousness and medical aspects and legal aspects, before we hopped on, I was telling you like, something I try to do with this podcast is bridge that gap and get people interested in. And this is why I love talking about this, because in a democratic society, we vote for laws and we vote for all these things. And I think this helps give us a broader view. And I think your book is very well-written and accessible for even people like me, who's not like somebody who's like reading about consciousness all the time. But I think we should all be aware of this stuff. So we can kind of sit back and go, huh, maybe it helps us make better decisions so we can cooperate as a society, because especially here in the United States, like all the incarceration rates are out of control, right? And I was having a talk with somebody the other day, like you mentioned, like, you know, from a legal point of view, the brain is just connected to your choices and that's it, you know what I mean? And, you know, there's nothing that requires judges or jurors to understand this stuff when they're making these decisions. And I think that's really interesting because there's guys like you who are dedicating your lives to studying this stuff and they don't even take that into account. And, you know, I'm curious if you can kind of break down just a few things, like you're part of, it's the Sackler Research Center, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are some of the things that you guys are researching and working on over there? What we do at the Center and what I do with my colleagues and collaborators and other places as well is, I prefer to think about consciousness as a series of related issues and challenges, rather than one big scary mystery, like you can think of consciousness like there's this massive thing we don't understand. How does it happen? How do brains generate it or why is it identical with certain aspects of brain activity? If you think of it as one big scary mystery, you end up looking for one single Eureka solution that's like, ah, that's not, no, I get it. And that may be the way it goes, that may be how things pan out. But there's another way in which apparently mysterious phenomena can be approached, which is to address that big mystery, a little indirectly, try and take it my surprise from the side. And you do that by thinking, okay, what do we, what do we want to explain when we say we want a science of consciousness? And there are a number of different aspects. You can think of conscious level, there's difference between being awake and aware and losing consciousness in dreamless sleep or in anesthesia, especially in anesthesia or in some of these conditions like the vegetative state, the coma that we talked about a minute ago. So that's sort of conscious level. How can we understand the sufficient mechanisms in the brain for being conscious at all? And can we indeed measure levels of consciousness? That's one thing we work on. And then another whole area is conscious content. When we are conscious, we are conscious of things. There's a world of peers, a world of objects and people in places and colors and shapes and so on. And how the brain constructs a conscious scene from what are essentially colorless, soundless, shapeless sensory inputs. They're just electrical impulses that the brain swims in. How it conjures a determinate, precise, beautiful, rich, technicolor, multimodal perceptual world from that, that's another fascinating challenge. And then finally, and this is where the book, the book actually goes through these different areas. We start with level and content and finally we land on self, because for most of us and also for me, understanding consciousness gains its greatest personal significance when we think about what it means to be a conscious self, what does it mean to experience being me? Is the self some sort of essence of personality that is there hidden away in the head somewhere? No, it's something else in the way I think of it, many others too, is that the self is just another thing that arises in experience. It's another collection of perceptions. And understanding how that happens is super important for some of these applications like psychiatry, but it's also the area that is most personally relevant. We all want to understand who we are and what it means to be a person in the world. Yeah, yeah, and that brings up a question I have. So now that I think about it here, you can kind of go through this. I'm like, maybe I don't read a ton of books on consciousness because it messes with my brain. All right. So like you mentioned too, the book kind of breaks it down into different categories and everything. And one thing I'm very fascinated with is like perception and how our brains kind of shape our reality. And I don't have it in my notes. I can't find it in my notes, but you have a word for it, kind of like how our brains perceive and it constructs the world. But yeah, I'm curious for you and maybe you can give me some advice. Like, you do this all day, every day. You just have to like mess with your head, right? Because it was like that thought experiment where it's like, how do you know you're not just a brain floating in a vat and just, you know, and I just, I just watched The Matrix with my son the other day. Introduced to the vat and still, you know, and I'm reading your book and I'm like, how does a meal like not go crazy? Just like, hey, is anything real? So yeah, it's good. I mean, it does. Of course, what I don't have the control experiment where there's another version of me that didn't do, you know, didn't do this and did something else. So I don't know if I would be less crazy or more crazy if I'd done something else. But I don't think it's made me go, I mean, I think actually it's enriched my everyday life. We tend to walk around the world in this state of what I might call naive realist. Like you open your eyes and you think, okay, that the car over there is red. It really is red. That redness really exists out there in the world. Yeah. And of course, that's not true. And it's not only in my work but not in your neuroscience. And this is a very old insight goes to physics, philosophy, lots of ways. You know, we'll tell us that even art history. Suzanne said color is where the brain and the universe meet. Stuff exists in the world. I'm not saying that nothing exists and it's all just made up and we used to bring, you know, our mind's inventive objective reality. No, there is a real world out there but the way the world appears to us in our experience is always a construction. I call it a controlled hallucination. And the control, yeah, but critically, the control is equally important to the hallucination part there. I'm not saying that everything is made up. No, the hallucination aspect is simply to say that all our perceptual experiences are constructions of a sort. They're all generated by the brain but they are in a normal case anyway, reined in controlled by the sensory data in ways that are useful for our prospects of staying alive. So we don't jump out in front of the moving bus. That would be a bad idea. There is really something there. It's gonna hurt. But when we typically use the word hallucination, we can think of that equally as uncontrolled perception so that our brain's estimates about what's going on in the world lose their grip on reality and then, and usually we notice that because we start disagreeing. I would say like, I don't see a car or a person and somebody else might say, oh, I do and then one of us is wrong. And one of us has perceptual inferences that have lost grip on what's actually going on out there. But sorry, to get back to your point, understanding perceptual experience as a construction I think is a very useful way of just accounting for how we exist in the world. It means that in a way it's a little bit like meditation which allows us to understand better that other people might not only understand things differently but also experience things differently. We can come to a greater recognition that all of us have different internal worlds. That can be very useful. And then of course the understanding of the self as a perception too, I think is enormously helpful in everyday life. We again, similar to what meditation can do too, we recognize that the self is just an evolving set of perceptions as an essential impermanence to it. Doesn't make it less meaningful at all. It just makes it more grounded in the world, in the body, in our social, cultural and natural environments. And for me that's a very enriching perspective. Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's funny listening to you explain that because I live in that place most of the time. So I think I just need to remind myself but kind of like you said, like it's helped give me a lot of empathy, right? Understanding that I perceive the world in a certain way. So I'm a recovering drug addict. The way I perceive the world 10 years ago in my addiction, much different than now. And as I've grown and matured and worked on my mental health, the way I perceive things is different. And just at the very basic level, for example, like I don't perceive the way someone's talking to me as them being mean to me or something like that. But anyways, it helps me do a perspective swamp with somebody else and that's the little empathy, especially in this polarized world that we live in, I could be like, maybe they're just kind of perceiving this situation. I can have these kind of conversations and hopefully chill out. So I think that's why I'll practice snapping back and not having this existential crisis. And of course you don't need neuroscience to get to those realizations, right? But I think the story that I tell in the book and that is emerging more generally is very much aligned with that. It's another avenue. And the more that perspectives align, the more convincing the whole becomes. Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of perception, and I just mentioned my former addiction, I never messed with hallucinations. So, or like, ah, hallucinogens rather. But you talk a little bit about that in the book as well. So can you, can you help like break it down for me? How, you talk about LSD specifically, how does LSD affect consciousness? Is it like, the way I understand, like is it unlocking more parts of the brain? Are new chemicals released that help us access stuff? And yeah, can you simplify that for me a little? So I better understand how that works. I wish I could give you a simple answer. I think it's not really known. I mean, this is why it's interesting and exciting. And of course, research into psychedelic drugs has been off the table for a long time. It's been out illegal to do research. But recently it's become possible in a few places. And I think this is a great thing, both for medical reasons. There's a lot of interesting clinical benefits that might be gained for treating things like post-traumatic stress disorder, certain cases of depression as well. Certain things, even addiction actually. Some of the earliest clinical applications of psychedelics were in addiction. But from another perspective of just understanding, shedding light on consciousness, they're also extremely powerful because you have a situation where you give somebody a pharmaceutical substance. We know exactly what it is and we know a great deal as a community, we know a great deal about the immediate effects of the psychedelic. So we know that it binds to a very specific kind of cell or part of a cell in the brain. It binds to the so-called serotonin 2A receptor, which is like a little socket that you find on the surface of neurons. So we know that it does that and we know where these receptors are in the brain, they're not everywhere, but they're in many places. So that's one level. And then at the other end of the scale, there are these dramatic and pervasive changes in conscious experience. Things are different. There are visual hallucinations, perceptual hallucinations. There's often a sense of ego dissolution where the boundary between the self and the world becomes less well-defined or perhaps even absent. There's lots of emotional fluidity. There are all sorts of things that happen. And so they all are traceable to this compound. You take it, stuff happens, when it's worn off, things are back to normal. And it's filling in the gap in the middle, which is the work that remains to be done. Our group and some other groups have been finding some of the pieces of that puzzle, but it's certainly not complete. One idea, so one of the things we found is that different parts of the brain speak to each other less in the psychedelic state. So there's less information flow between different brain regions. Over time, there's more diversity in brain activity. If you like, the brain is a little more random. And so that's it. So one of my questions was going to be, is it illegal for you guys to study it too? Like the psychedelics sounds like it is. And like you mentioned, so I'm big into mental health and stuff like that. And I've seen it. I've seen just so many good reports. So I worked at a mental health and addiction treatment center. And a lot of our clients, some of them would go down to Mexico and do like ayahuasca or some kind of hallucinogen. They'd have this experience and it would help. But like you mentioned like PTSD and we have so many people coming back from war and all these other things. And so from my understanding about the history of drug policy, I just know about the United States. And I know about a lot of like the propaganda. And you know, we made even marijuana illegal, even though alcohol is far more dangerous. It's all bonkers. But I'm curious for drug policy, I'm somewhat familiar with the changes being made in the United States. I know there's a few different exemptions, but I'm curious, you know, where you're at and the research you're doing, like how you said there's a few places and stuff like, are you able to go through a process or like submit like a proposal to use, you know, these drugs in certain quantities to test it? You know, how's it, how's that over there? It's much the same as in the U.S. We, and would you write that things are changing in the U.S. and it's complicated because things change on a statewide basis there and it's hard to keep track of. Some places are very liberal with respect to these regulations, others are much less so. But there's a broad alignment that it is possible to put a proposal through to do a research project or a clinical research project, but it's still very, very, very difficult. Now, I think it should be quite difficult. I mean, these are powerful substances. I don't think it should be completely regulated and easy. And at the moment, we're still at the stage where in my group, in Sarsix, certainly in my group, we don't have an active program where we administer psychedelics. So we collaborate with other groups who've already done the hard work of getting the ethical permissions and we just sort of work with them on, okay, what data can we analyze in interesting ways and perhaps what new experiments can we do? So it's still very focused to a few places. I think that's changing, but I do think it should be a slow process. And the same goes for the medical application. There's a huge excitement about the potential medical benefits and I think this is largely warranted. There's a lot of good stuff that can be done because you mentioned at the start of this sidebar on to psychedelics about addiction and of course, one of the things about psychedelics is they are not addictive. They just aren't and they're sometimes being described as anti-addictive, but unlike the opiates and other drugs, they're just not addictive. They also don't seem to be physiologically toxic. Like it's very hard to overdose on a classical psychedelic to poison yourself, but they are psychologically extremely powerful. So of course there's still, a lot of caution has to be taken and one of the problems that I see a bit in the hype surrounding psychedelics in the medical sphere is that they're not a panacea, right? You can't just expect to take a psychedelic or go on an ayahuasca retreat and everything's fine, you're okay. No, it doesn't work like that. I think psychedelics open a space where other sorts of change can happen. So I think the most promising approach and this is the approach argued for by many of the, my colleagues and people who's writing I admire, people like Michael Pollan and so on that, something like psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. You know, you still do the hard work of psychotherapy, it's not a replacement and I'm slightly concerned that there's a commercialization and a boosterism surrounding psychedelics, especially in the Bay Area and parts of the US that might undermine a more cautious approach to really understanding how best to leverage the potential of psychedelics without everything going crazy again and the whole thing being shut down, which is a worry, these are powerful drug. Yeah, I'm so glad you said that, and you and I are, we're on the same page, right? Like that's, you know, like I, you know, I'm here in Nevada and we actually legalized, you know, marijuana and stuff like that, but you know, even though I'm 1,000% absent just from everything, just, you know, because that's what I do, like I am very pro using this stuff because the research backs it, right? And but like you said, there's this issue where some people sell it as this, just fix all, but like you said, like I'm for this method of, you know, like one of the things they talk about is just getting someone to a place where they can do therapy, you know what I mean? Getting someone to a place where therapy is effective because some people are very resistant, they're traumatized and all that stuff. So yeah, that's kind of what I'm hoping for, but like you mentioned, there are some places that are a little too liberal with this and they're like, here, let's just sell mushrooms in the grocery store, you know, whatever. But yeah, there are definitely ways that we can do this. So, you know, again, this is one of the reasons I keep an eye on policies and see who's voting what ways and you know, when it looks at politicians because you guys are being held up in your work and your research because of all these kind of roadblocks. So hopefully there's people over there too kind of working on this. And I mean, a plug there, it's like it's one thing to evaluate the, just think about what the best trajectory for the medical use should be and how that should be regulated. But also to inform that debate, we also need a basic understanding of the question you asked, like, how do the psychedelics work? How do they affect conscious experts? Why do they work the way they do? And these basic science questions also need addressing and there needs to be support for that too. Because unless we understand that, it's all a little improvised how we decide the applications. Yeah, yeah. And speaking of psychedelics, since I got you here, and you know, I've had plenty of authors on here debunking conspiracy theories and stuff like that. So based on what you know about psychedelics and how they affect the brain, like there's all this talk, especially on social media, they like pull up these old CIA studies and stuff about mind control. Could someone like you give someone LSD and just control their mind? Is anything that you've seen just kind of make sleep with agents and stuff like that? No, no, nothing suggests to me that that, I mean, I know that there are these things, I forget there was a beautiful Netflix, I mean, it's the MKUltra project that keeps getting described in these terms. Yeah, I'm sure you can mess with people's minds for sure, but you know, no. I mean, the signature effect of a psychedelic is people's behavior becomes much less controlled altogether and their perceptions become less controlled. Now, I think there's a lot of potential, but I don't think anybody is slipping psychedelics into the water supply in order to control our behavior. Doesn't make sense. Yeah, it's really like, just like with my real basic knowledge, I see this stuff pop up on social media, my girlfriend was sending TikToks, just getting hundreds of thousands of views into like, because we have the Freedom of Information Act and we're like, see, they use LSD, like they experimented with it, but there's nothing, no documentation of this actually working. Oh no, but you know, one of the questions that I've always had when it comes to just consciousness, neuroscience and all that like, and maybe it's because I just assumed we're in 2021 and our technology should be amazing, but I'm trying to understand, like what are your main challenges with like pinning this down? Like you talked about your research and kind of, you know, it's not just like not looking at the big thing, but kind of looking at these side doors and everything like that. And I'm just curious, so like from my understanding, the brain, you know, it's a lot of different systems and things like that interacting. Is that the main challenge? Or you know, like what, why haven't we figured it out by now, you know? I think there are three main challenges, right? Let's take them in order. So the first challenge is like a deeply philosophical, metaphysical challenge almost. It's like, what is it we're trying to explain? And this is back to the sense of mystery. Are we looking for some sort of magic dust or special source in the same way that at one time people look for the spark of life and there isn't a spark of life, but life can be a property of certain organizations of physics and chemistry. So there's a deep obstacle and just basically what do we think we're looking for? And so again, I don't tend to look for this solution to this single big mystery, but try to understand the different aspects of consciousness. And that way this big mystery might dissolve entirely. It might not, but with certainly the most productive approach. That's one issue being stuck on a wrong problem. The next issue is also a little bit meta and it's very problematic, but one of the challenges of consciousness, actually one of the things that encourages this view that there's this big mystery that might be beyond science as we know it is just the fact that conscious experiences are intrinsically private subjected. You have yours, I have mine. We cannot, I cannot put a conscious experience, I can't put your conscious experience on a table so that a whole bunch of people can look at it and agree about what it is, right? Only you have direct access. In fact, that's a really complicated thing to say because who is the you? When I say only you have direct access to your experience, the experience of being you is part of that experience. So it's actually quite a poor way of putting it, but the point remains that conscious experience does exist intrinsically, subjectively they can't be objectively shared in the same way that other things in science can be. This is a big problem, but it doesn't mean that a science of consciousness is impossible. It just means the relevant data are harder to get. You know, we have to be more subtle and indirect about knowing what you're conscious of, what your conscious experiences are like, and then we can map those to mechanisms, things happening in the brains and bodies using sort of normal science. So that's a challenge that does make consciousness research harder because of its intrinsic subjectivity. The third obstacle is much more technological, I think, that as you said, the brain is composed of lots of different parts. They speak to each other in very, very complex ways. We have, I think, really out-of-date impoverished metaphors for the brain as a physical object. It's not a telephone exchange. It's not a computer. It's definitely not a computer. Maybe it's something more like the internet, who knows? But we don't have a really good, powerful metaphor, and we don't have the imaging methods that allow us to record from many, many, many neurons all at the same time in knowing where they are and at really high time resolution. We have imaging methods that can do some of these things, but not others, but we don't have something like a... Astronomy was just catapulted into brilliance by telescopes and by different iterations of telescopes. We don't have that. We can't see everything that's going on in the brain in the detail that we'd like to. Ooh, yeah, yeah. So I guess my question is like, are there people working on this? I'm curious. I know technology keeps advancing. Is this something like, if I froze you for 100 years, do you think we'd be closer? Is there anybody that's kind of like, oh, yeah, Edway? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the... I probably just fueled the view that I find frustrating, but I do find it frustrating when people say, and often people in my field will say, we still know nothing about the brain basis of consciousness, we've learned nothing over the last 20 or 30 years. I can say I've been in this for, well, over 20 years now, there's a lot more that we know now than we knew then. It's not, I mean, I certainly know a lot more, but then I knew I was just starting out. But I think overall, a lot more is understood now about the brain in general and about the brain in relationship to consciousness specifically. There's been an awful lot of progress. Sometimes it's hard to recognize that because from within, progress always seems slow. We always want it. It was saying, God, it's really been 20 years. Surely we should have understood the mystery by now. And I think that becomes, that comes from just the fact that life is short. I want to be around when it's all solved. And I don't want to leave it to future generations. Come on, let's bring it on. Let's do it now. And so that's, and from the outside, maybe it seems slow because there's still this idea that the science of consciousness is going to solve this single big mystery. And it hasn't done that yet. So if it hasn't done that, it hasn't done anything. But if you look at actually what's happened, for theories now, which make different predictions, which actually have explanatory power for different aspects of consciousness, we have a much better understanding of what happens in anesthesia and sleep and coma and psychiatric disorders. We have much better technologies and methods for looking inside the brain and new ones are emerging too. So I'm excited about the future of consciousness science. I don't like to put a timeline on when things will be figured out because not only because we don't know how quickly discoveries will be made or how rapidly technologies will advance, but also, and for me, this is essential and interesting, the questions change too. In 5,800 years, it's not that we will have different answers to the same questions. Progress will be reflected into the extent to which our questions have also changed. And that's something that's very, very hard to predict. Yeah, yeah, no, you put it perfectly right there. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know and you start having to do questions and all that, but yeah, I only have a couple more questions for you now. So in this kind of conversation, something I do a lot is I stare at my cats and I wonder about consciousness, right? You were talking about Thomas Magel, a little bit earlier, and something that's always coming up in philosophy, but it's like, yeah, you know, what's it like to be a bat, right? So I'm curious with these technological advances, do we have any information about like, so consciousness, it's what's it like to be something? Does my cat have some kind of any experience? Does it know, right? Because I look at, for example, I look at my cats, these things, they sleep like 20 hours a day, right? And sometimes they're just sitting there and they're just staring at a wall. And I'm like, is anything happening? Like at all, you know, the three visual effects you'd say, so I don't know, like help me out here as a cat over. Yeah, and the one, this is, it's a good place to go actually, because it brings us a little bit back to where we started about a definition of consciousness. Start with this very basic definition of consciousness as any kind of subjective experience whatsoever, then it's easy to think that it might be unfolding in different ways, quite widely across different species in the animal kingdom. And we have a tendency as humans to ascribe ourselves an importance of centrality in the universe that we might not really deserve. And we can think of the history of science as a successive dethronement of our species from the center of things. We're not at the center of the universe. Copernicus pointed that out. And then Darwin comes around and tells us that we're, we're not different fundamentally from other animals. We will have common ancestors. And so the last aspect where we think we're special maybe in our conscious minds, in our rational conscious minds, maybe that's completely different, but turns out my argument would be, well, no, that's just gonna be a similar thing. There are distinctive things about human consciousness for sure, but it's not that we are at the center and everything else is fundamentally different. So consciousness is not the same thing as intelligence. It's not the same thing as what technically we call reflective self-awareness, which just means that I'm not only conscious, I know that I'm conscious. I know who I am that is having these conscious experiences. There's this stage in human development where infants are able to recognize that a mirror image is an image of them. That means they have a concept of themselves as an individual separate from others in the world or other things in the world. And that's well and good. And it's certainly an essential part of human awareness, but it's not necessary for consciousness. Like nobody says that infants before passing that test at the age of 18 months that they're unconscious. No, of course they're not. Nobody treats a six-month-old baby as if it's completely unconscious. No, you care about babies of that age, right? They cry, you feel that they're in pain or suffering somehow. So consciousness in other animals does not require an explicit sense of self and very few other animals can pass the mirror test, for example, nor does it require some threshold of intelligence. There might be some overall threshold. So it's a very open, interesting question. Where does consciousness gray out as you get towards incremental simplicity? I don't think a single cellular organism, a paramecium, is conscious. But what about a honeybee? What about a fish? Cat simple. Your cat is a mammal. All mammals share the same basic blueprint of how the brain is constructed. You find that the same structures that we know are implicated in consciousness in humans in a cat brain. A couple of theoretical perspectives might disagree with that a little bit. But broadly, at least I am confident that cats have conscious experiences. But what it is like to be a cat, of course, it's very, very hard to say. We can understand a bit about it, but we could never experience the catness of being a cat. Yeah, see, that's the stuff that keeps me up at night, or I'll just sit there staring at my cat like, but I have one final question for you. And it's just like, there's so many things going on in the world, like we're worried about climate change and nuclear bombs, and America's falling apart every five minutes. And then all of a sudden creeps in, always the conversation about robots taking over the world, all right? So I think there's a good place to have the final question. We've been talking about all the difficulties with study and consciousness and all these other things. And I know a little bit more about neuroscience and all these other things. And so here's my opinion, like we are so, we're nowhere near robots, just overtaking humanity. And I'm curious from your research, when you're at what you've seen, people are working on, like is Elon Musk gonna create these like, cause like some people like, oh my God, like you listen like Sam Harris or Elon Musk or some of these people, they are losing their minds. Are you, what are your thoughts? Well, yeah, I think Elon Musk and Sam Harris have different fears about this, right? So there's the Terminator hypothesis that will sort of literally be enslaved by evil robots who for some reason intend to do as lots of harm. Yeah. There are, I think, really substantive worries about the progress of AI. And these are probably things that Sam Harris and I would align a bit on. And they don't take the sci-fi Terminator form at all. It's much more that AI is accelerating rapidly and it's incredibly socially and economically disruptive. Certain jobs will just disappear just as in the Industrial Revolution, certain jobs disappear and never came back. Yeah, other jobs were created, but they weren't jobs that could be done by the people who lost their jobs in the Cottonville and so on, right? Or the steel mills. AI is automating many, many things. It's gonna be massively disruptive. This is a clear and present problem and it needs to be separated from this, I think, very, very vague and sci-fi narrative driven Terminator idea. I don't think we're close to robots taking over the world, but I do think we're close to a large socioeconomic disruption. The other part of this, and actually this is very, because we kind of track through the book too, because we talk about consciousness in humans and free will and then animals and eventually the prospect of machine consciousness. Because it's perfectly possible for AI to have all these disruptive influences without any consciousness going on at all. So we may build powerful robots or sophisticated AI systems that just have no experience back to the Thomas Nagel definition. And there's nothing it is like to be my iPhone. At least I don't think there is. At what point will there be something it is like to be an iPhone? And here, I think there's just a humility we need to bring to the table. One of the big open questions in consciousness is, does the material matter? Is this question of substrate dependency that comes up in philosophy like human in biology, animals, animal brains are made of neurons and we're carbon-based systems. Is there a good reason why only carbon-based systems can be conscious or could a silicon system also be conscious? I don't know the answer to that. I think so, but I'm very uncomfortable with a strong assumption either way. And I'm especially uncomfortable with a strong assumption that a computer, if you program it right, the lights come on and it's sentient, it's aware. That's based on a whole bunch of assumptions like the brain is some kind of computer. There's one, but it's the more fundamental assumption is that the substrate really doesn't matter. And we know for some things that's true, like a computer can play chess and it really plays chess. It's not just pretending, it's actually playing chess, but a computer simulation of a weather system, it's wet and windy inside a computer that's simulating a hurricane. So the question is, is consciousness more like chess where if you simulate it on a computer, it actually gives rise to that thing or is it something that's more like the weather that, yeah, you can simulate a brain on a computer, but it will only ever be a simulation. It won't be the thing itself and maybe you need, in this case, life to breathe fire into the equations to actually make it like something to be that system. My intuition that we experience world and experience that world with you and because of our living bodies, and that back to our earlier conversation is one of the reasons I find this personal relevance in understanding consciousness, it connects it instead of thinking of some kind of advanced software program that might replace me and take over the world. No, consciousness turns out to be much more intimately connected with my nature as a living creature and then by extension with the rest of the natural world around me. And that's a very rewarding perspective where we see ourselves more part of and not apart from the rest of nature. Yeah, no, yeah, absolutely. Okay, cool. Yeah, and that makes sense to just the disruption of like where we're going with artificial intelligence or more of like an economic type level, but not an apocalyptic type level, so yeah, so yeah. And that's kind of the angle I keep an eye on and just with laws and everything. Like I'm always curious. I'm like, hey, they keep talking about how we're getting closer to self-driving cars, but we haven't really put any laws into place and stuff. So it's really interesting, but yeah. Yeah, but there's actually one of my colleagues in France, somebody I look up to a lot, there's a German philosopher, Thomas Metzger. He's making a very strong case as part of the European, European Commission over here in Europe is some ways quite forethinking about regulatory frameworks and so on. And so Thomas Metzger along with others is trying to get out there the idea that we should proactively regulate against people even trying to build conscious machines. It's very hard to know how you would do that, what that would mean in practice, but I do think it's valuable to have that as part of the debate. You know, it's always better to be proactive and preemptive in these kinds of things rather than looking back and thinking, oh, what have we just done? And how do we then contain the unintended consequences of that technology? Oh yeah, so social media is a prime example of that. They're just like, hey, hey, people are connected, but is that just real quick question, I'm gonna let you go, but what he's doing is that kind of like, like, is CRISPR ever used as like an example? Because that was something that was just like, kind of starting like, hey, look, you can alter DNA. Is that kind of relevant to what he's working on? Like, is that an example? I mean, if you zoom out far enough, yeah, I think it's part of the picture because things like CRISPR, what you're looking here is the sorts of how you change a whole human species. You're altering the germline, you're altering the channels of inheritance. That's massive. It's not just, it's a very powerful tool, but it potentially has existential consequences for the species, so it shares that. And in the same, it's a different kind of technology. I mean, nobody knows back to our previous point, nobody knows whether it's possible to build a conscious machine or even if it is what it would take to do so. So it's a non-existing technology, whereas CRISPR is an existing technology. But the consequences of developing such a technology either on purpose or inadvertently, yeah, carry the same sorts of existential threats. In this case, not necessarily to us, but if we introduce machines that have the potential for suffering, that is bad news. And that's something we need to think about before we actually do it. But it's very, very challenging because CRISPR exists, we know what it can do, we know what it can't do. When it comes to building a conscious machine, we are trying to think about these issues pretty much in the dark. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting stuff. And another reason we need to be thinking about this as a society, but yeah, thank you so much for your time, sending me a copy of the book to check out. I love it, and like I said, I appreciate that it's accessible to a guy like me. So for everybody listening, a couple of questions, is the book is out, but is it out internationally? And where's the best place for people to follow you, your work, or even, I don't know if you guys publish your research and people can kind of keep up to date with it. So thanks for asking. The book is out in the UK, but it's not yet out in the US. It's out on October the 19th. It's been unfortunately delayed one week, so you might see misaligned dates, but the 19th, I'm told, is a firm date for the release of the book in the US and Canada. And to find out more about what I'm doing, there's lots of other stuff, lots of papers and other podcasts, less good podcasts in the conversation with you. The best thing to do is to follow me on Twitter at Anil K Seth, or visit my webpage, which is AnilSeth.com. Cool, beautiful, awesome. So yeah, the 19th is right around the corner, so everybody will be having access to it. So yeah, again, Neil, thank you so much for your time, and yeah, we will do this again sometime. Thank you, Chris, a real pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.