 So it's a little intimidating having to follow all the great speakers that have been up here so far But I'll do my best now. You're supposed to I took the seminars on how to speak in front of people and they tell you that You know I always have to start with humor So what I want you to do is to think of your favorite joke We are conscious and conscious of what it is first a little bit of the evidence from Neuroscience, you know how we know what the brain does and that the brain it was probably involved in consciousness and then about philosophy especially modern Deniers that the brain causes consciousness and I'm going while I'm talking about that I'm going to draw analogies to creationism because the denial of my field especially of neuroscience the denial that we are really Just those five pounds of meat inside of our skulls is a form of creationism So some little philosophical background before really very recently in modern science. We really have no idea You know what the seed of consciousness was and so the ancient philosophers really classical and medieval philosophers thought that We were really possessed by spirits that we were a physical entity in the physical world Our intellect and our consciousness were Not physical with spiritual Plato said that we are a soul imprisoned in a body There's a ton of philosophical terms that go before the word dualism I'm not going to get into substance dualism versus that kind of dude. It's crazy So I'm just gonna use a couple of basic Plato's time what they thought that the actual thinking was was spiritual that The all is the stuff that we now could really see pretty in a pretty reductionist way that the brain does was actually a spiritual thing Not not physical so calculation perception memory That's classical and up to medieval time and we get to more of the Renaissance time René Descartes You know, obviously consciousness philosopher. I think therefore I am and he he Came up with more of a consciousness dualism So not that he said okay the thinking the memory all that kind of basic stuff at your brain But your consciousness your subjective experience of existing of yourself. That's what's not physical. That's spiritual That is something separate kind of substance. It's just not matter. It's something else That kind of dualism which is the kind of dualism dualism going to be talking about Pretty much for the rest of the talk is referred to as Cartesian dualism after René Descartes So on the track, we have a guy in a row We have some Renaissance looking guy and we get to modern philosophers and we have surfer dude Talk to somebody who is a Cartesian dualist or any kind of dualist they go yeah But there's David Chalmers hard problem. You can't get around that So he separated the easy problem from the hard problem of neuroscience Which is the same thing as intellect versus consciousness the easy problems not that they're technically easy But they're conceptually easy in that yeah, you know, we can see how different parts of the brain are doing different things When you're smelling a rose that's going to the smell part of your brain and when you're seeing something That's going to the visual part of your brain and even emotions and okay Sure different parts of the brain do different stuff and we can break it down But why do we experience what the brain is doing? What is the subjective component to it? Why aren't we just what he calls zombies doing everything that we're doing but just not experiencing it? And he that that's what philosophy called quality a quality is that why is there a quality to something? Why is red red? Why do we experience it that way? What's really interesting is that? Modern Cartesian dualists have started using David Chalmers to defend their position The hard problem, but Chalmers is not a Cartesian dualist. He Completely rejects Cartesian dualism. He he calls himself a naturalistic dualist meaning that it's still the brain We just have no idea what the brain is doing in order to produce consciousness So it's still a naturalistic. It's still a problem of neuroscience. He advocates Can't reduce consciousness to brain function There's something else happening that's fundamental law of nature that we have to figure out and that that's where consciousness is I don't buy it. I don't think he's right But he is trying to figure out a naturalistic way to an explanatory model of dualism But it's really I love it when the Cartesian dualists go we have a David Chalmers thinks you're an ass I like using Randy to defend ESP Deepak Chopra Is the woo master He has sort of an Eastern philosophy of dualism he and others and he's but I think it's been most prominent in the media Absolute anti-materialist Cartesian dualist right materialism cannot explain a lot of stuff including consciousness He mixes in Eastern Businessism with that they some of the Eastern philosophers dualists call Something that substrate consciousness meaning that there's consciousness in the substrate of the universe and we are just expression of that So there's our consciousness always existed and it just manifests in this physical form They go back to the substrate after we die, but the conscious always exists and it's something non-physical or non-material and Also, for whatever reason the Eastern dualists really like to defend their flavor of woo by invoking quantum mechanics Because you know it's pretty safe for them to do that nobody understands So they can throw out those terms and easily confuse a lot of people because that's what they want to do They want to confuse people because that way they can substitute their their belief system for actual for actual science So I'm a neuroscientist, so I'm going to talk about the brain for a bit. It's actually like neuroscience That's the brain by the way So brain anatomy, which is really cool There's a lot of Independent lines of evidence that tell us that consciousness is the brain. It's what the brain does For example, brain anatomy and activity correlate with mental active your talking part of your brain is working There is no mind without the brain. I'm still waiting right for some phenomenon that is a mental phenomenon That is separate from the physical operation of the brain now Deepak Chopra says. Yeah, there's ESP reincarnation and clairvoyance But there isn't anything real, right? So give me something real that is something that we know is happening But it's not something that we can correlate with the brain doesn't it doesn't exist as far as I'm aware yet Brain development correlates with mental development immature brains result in immature, you know mental activity Also, if you damage the brain Damage the brain who damaged the mind period You know, I can in fact I could damage your mind in a very specific way by damaging a particular part of your brain I was talking to somebody just yesterday who was asking me about a relative injured their frontal lobes. I'm like, they're Disinhibited right? Yeah, they're just exactly what they are How did you know because you injured the frontal lobes and that's what gives you your inhibition the brain correlates with the mind? And it's amazing that the personality changes is the personalities the brain to as much as we don't like to really think that way It's really just the meat talking to itself Different states of consciousness correlate with different brain states now I know for a fact that everyone in this room has experienced an altered state of consciousness at some time in their life It's called dreaming Sleep itself on a stage of sleep when you're dreaming you're still you it's still your brain activity, but it's weird It's your dreaming you your brains functioning differently different bits of your brain are active when you're dreaming And some kids which are active like reality testing when you're awake are Underactive or not active when you're dreaming. So that's why stuff makes sense to you when you're dreaming But then it doesn't make sense to you when you wake up and try to remember your dream So now your reality testing module is engaged. Well, that doesn't make sense. Why did I think that made sense? Well, because you were in an altered state of consciousness and guess what you're that state correlated with a different brain state So if the lines of correlation are triangulating We turn off the brain you turn off the mind as these geologists have a lot of experience You'll turn off the brain if they were The mind does not survive the death of the brain for you to say yeah, but this is all correlation That's technically logically true, but with only one possible answer. It's still pretty good scientific evidence But we can do better than that, right? I can You know specifically turn off a piece of the brain and Turn off a mental function and we can do that now without damper permanently damaging the brain We used to do by injecting drugs in the half one side of the brain or the other we still do that But now we can do it with magnetic Magnetic ways you can induce a magnetic field which will temporarily turn off a part of your brain And guess what that part of your brain no longer functions your consciousness changes We can induce out-of-body experiences at will. Isn't that awesome? They can make you feel like you're floating outside your body just like people do when they have near-death experiences or other sort of Interpreted as paranormal experiences or sometimes using certain pharmacological agents nearly give you that experience Which is another way by by the way of changing brain function So so far the science is pretty conclusive that brain states are mental states The brain is consciousness and there's no evidence pointing the other way But despite that There are people who still deny it Here's just a little projecting a little bit into the future. We're actually engaged in reverse engineering the brain That's what we're trying to do trying to understand how the brain works, but it's kind of reverse engineering and in fact Parallel to neuroscientists figuring out what the different bits of the brain do there are computer scientists say oh, yeah, okay let's get a computer to do that and see what happens and In parallel what we're doing is reverse engineering the brain and then building computer brains at the same time We're still a long way from that But ultimately this will be the ultimate test right of the brain causes consciousness hypothesis when we turn on a hard, you know hardwired Brain a silicon or whatever we're using it in 50 years from now Whenever this is going to be when we turn it on if it's conscious or not pretty much solves the materialism debate The problem is we'll never really know right we may act in every testable way like it is consciousness But we can never be inside its subjective experience right as far as I'm concerned You could all be zombies and I would have how would I know really know if you're I say that your you know Chambers you know David Chambers like zombies But you behave in every way as if you have Quality as if you have consciousness well, that's in our falsifiable hypothesis, right? So I could never really know it's also not a useful scientific notion because it's un-falsified All right, so what is conscious? That's a big problem. I'm really simple answer to what is consciousness Here I'll give you my question on it. They're making this you know chambers may be right charmers may be right that There may be something going on that we haven't figured out yet That would not surprise me. There may be something fundamental going on that maybe is not reductionist Doesn't really reduce the neurons talking to themselves. Okay, that's fine as long as you're still talking about the brain functioning But what I think consciousness is is just the the moment-to-moment functioning of the brain. It's the brain taking in information from the outside introspective what we're talking to itself reflecting on information that it already has processing information And there's a subconscious level where lots of stuff is happening more than you realize It's amazing how much processing is constant going on Belief that needs the service of your consciousness and then some of that is presented to your consciousness Which is that part of the brain just paying attention? That's where it gets a little tricky, but that's we're sort of deconstructing that pretty well With fmri and other stuff that yet as parts of your brain that are attending to Information whether it's coming from the outside or coming from the inside and there's a limited amount of information We can attend to so we kind of select and our brain selects for us with subconscious algorithms what we attend to So that's consciousness It's moment-to-moment and the thing is we're trying to assess our consciousness with our consciousness Right, we can't step outside of it and see what's happening So that's I think why it's so hard to really feel like we understand what it is because you still get to the point Yeah, but what is it that is attending to the information in my brain states? You know what what is that? Some some people say that it's an illusion and that may be an accurate way of describing it that it's really just a Merge I think it's a merger problem. That's how I would describe it She merges from the brains every moment to moment functionality and then some people say that it's just an illusion I don't know that's a helpful term It may be ultimately accurate, but I don't think it helps us really understand what's going on So as you can just see that's not a terribly concise or satisfied and that for the paranormal lessons or or the deniers in the very same way that you know evolution is a very complex Function it takes millions of years to unravel. There's lots of different mechanisms at work There's lots of complexity in terms of how it changes over time. Yeah, you can break it down to some rules But it's just like saying it's an emergent property of the brain function Okay, you could say it's survival in the fence, but it's the same level superficial level of understanding It's really easy to misunderstand evolution It's really difficult to imagine millions of years of evolution and that opens the door for the deniers to evade That inability to really imagine what's going on This is Daniel Dennett most of you guys probably know who that is he is a philosopher and he Doesn't like David Chalmers very much. He thinks that the hard problem is not a problem he agrees with the It's an emergent property of the brain thing and he writes very very persuasively on it. He says well, you know if you take Chalmers easy problem all the things the brain does and you take them all away Chalmers says you're still left with consciousness Dennett says you're left with nothing because consciousness is all the easy problems if you add them all together in real time That's consciousness So he came out with a great analogy about a you know a hundred to 200 years ago There were vitalists who thought that there was a vital force in the life right the life force There's still people around you believe in the life force, right? We call them chiropractors or acupuncturists homeopaths, but there's there's no life force, but before you know, we really understood how life work It was really complicated. It was we knew it was different. You know a person is not a rock But you really couldn't say exactly why it wasn't a rock We didn't really understand all the processes of life that people said okay Well, there must be some life force that it happens things that are alive But the biologists over time slowly explained all the things that life does using energy reproduction Etc. So There was nothing left for vitalism to explain Dennis has the same thing is true about the heart problem once you Inventing this other thing this dualism to say this is it's like a God of the gaps argument It's doing the stuff. We can't explain yet But you know over time we're taking things off the list of things we can't explain until there's nothing left for the dualists To explain there's nothing left for this ghost in the machine to do I think I was pretty persuasive analogy or creationism They're the logic is the same the Intentional strategies are the same so creationism. I think is best understood intellectually logically as evolution denial That's the one thing that ties it together right because they don't have anything to explain. They don't have any positive claims They don't have any positive evidence All they have is just ways to deny evolution and even though there's multiple different types of creationism all the way from young earth And intelligent design never had it at the war. They all had evolution dualism is Exactly the same way in that it's neuroscience denial It's the denial of that that we are chunks of me right because that's not a very pleasing or aesthetic answer Oh, he's not as famous as Deepak Chopra the Sarada Institute is a profit and Organization for intelligent design evolution denial here They got a neurosurgeon to deny neuroscience on their block He and I have been dueling back and forth with our blocks. It's really been a lot of fun I got to tell you creationists and evolution deniers argue I'm going to go over some of the strategies that they use confusing does with how is a Classic strategy question you say is Does a separate question is how does life evolve? How does it work? We can answer the does even if we don't understand everything about the how but creationists will use our current lack of complete understanding of how And then argue that it calls into question of whether our life involved at all All right, so ignore and the dualists do the same thing. We can't explain how the brain causes consciousness We can say that there's no conscious without the brain. We don't know Exactly how to do to create confusion with that argument Correlation is not causation. I alluded to this before you could say that well you can correlate it every way But that's so much correlation. I think they kind of sound Skeptical because they're quoting a logical fallacy, so they must be right You know if the other people using a logical fallacy say, yeah, but you know We know that smoking causes cancer completely to correlation There's no one did the study where you like make people smoke and see if they can't they can't do it It's unethical but the tobacco industry used that fact to deny the correlation between smoking and lung cancer and they're still kind of softly doing it, but they Up until recently they did it hard for there's this factor X that causes both Well, that's what they're doing it correlates in every way it should correlate if the brain causes consciousness That's enough scientifically to say that it probably causes consciousness So enough correlation does add up to causation the the fallacy isn't assuming causation from correlation That's the fallacy. I'm going to quote people other than Michael eggman. They're just so great. He's so many juicy So, you know, what he's saying is you know, we have mass knowledge of neuroscience But we don't understand everything else every everything yet here. He's talking about, you know, there are specific if Materialism right if our materialist dogma is correct Then every single my new brain a mental state must correlate with a brain specifically with a brain state And what he does is very is very Devious and that he says that the correlation between Conscious states and brain states is imperfect There's a gap there in our ability to my newly described brain states. That's where dualism comes into play That's a God of the gaps argument and what all is really defined is the limits of our technology, you know It reminds me of what Dwayne Gish said in a paraphrase Dwayne Gish who was a younger creation who made a career out of debating Naive evolutionary scientists who didn't know what they were getting into and he had a good dish had a great line And I when I heard says like wow That's a good propaganda line He said that the scientists tell us that if you look at the geological record, you can't see evolution happening because it's too slow And if you look at animals that are alive today, you can't see evolution because it's too fast So no matter where you look for it, you can't see evolution. That's a great line. It's PS But for propaganda purposes, that's a great line Yeah, you're using the same thing. Well, how come when we do the seventh MRI study in the EG It doesn't correlate exactly with the these my new changes in consciousness You know because we're using a ground-based Telescope to look at the surface of Mars and you're asking why we're not seeing pedals, you know Well, it's just a limit of our instruments. It correlates to the limit of our instruments, but not beyond that But that's a gap, you know as our instruments improve and the gaps shrink it doesn't matter There'll always be gaps to fill in your particular version of Deep-packed Chopra is just amazing this guy the things he comes out with Hyperactive agency detection just kind of a funny way to say that you perceive Intention in stuff that happens, right? We all you often just say I love this race and stuff happens It's just happens, but it doesn't mean that somebody specifically wanted it to happen or caused it to happen Human beings have what's called a hyperactive agency detection We look for the agent in everything that happens even things that just happen by themselves And Deep-packed Chopra does the same thing he says that if Any examples of learning really or brain plasticity is the brain willing itself to change Or it's consciousness willing the brain to change and therefore there must be some consciousness outside the brain That can affect the brain So when you use this really ridiculous example that if you have somebody trying to learn how to walk on a Type of and they don't intend to learn how to do it They won't learn how to do it But if you intend to learn how to walk on the time when you try you practice you'll get better your brain will change You'll get better walking on the type of Think about that. Yeah, if you practice You'll get better what you're practicing, you know because the brain is plastic You don't need this external a magical consciousness affecting the brain to be intention But that's the eastern mysticism, right? That's his eastern mysticism So that's he just frames it in that way and people throw millions of dollars at him to read this crap They don't throw millions of dollars at me. I'm still trying to figure that out That's a mercy. We hear this all the time from the creationist right evolution a theory in crisis Scientists are Increasingly rejecting evolution. It's on the brink of failure. You know any day now We're going to realize that the creations were right all along Acceptance of my view was right around the corner my opponent's views are crumbling and failing They've been saying this for a hundred years, right? So the history. I think has been on our side Deepak Chopra says you know until the argument is resolved. So as if whether or not the brain causes consciousness is unresolved Not within science and we talk to neuroscience Talk to somebody else The best course for each of us is to assume that our brains can adapt freely to our vision of life meaning that You imagine it it will happen. This is the secret, right? This is just this version of the secret if you wish it to be true if you imagine It's true then matter will change your brain will change the universal change to your spiritual physical intention And I talked about impending acceptance as part of the other thing So the head Deepak Chopra just to reinforce that that the acceptance of the mind field That substrate consciousness goes to the machine whatever as a fundamental level of nature Maybe closer than we think and it will inaugurate enormous advance in human comprehension of consciousness So we're the world is just about to discover that Deepak Chopra is right I didn't even there wasn't the word paradigm in there, but you know right people throughout the world paradigm that they're full This kind of statement were in the midst of a paradigm shift from you being right to me being right Wallace I've debated him for a long time on my podcast if you want to listen to me go at him directly just download the episode This guy's a Buddhist for a Buddhist monk. So he's in the Eastern Quantum who ended the spectrum and he is my example of the other thing that they want to do And that's they want to change the nature of science, right? What Wallace says is that we need to reintroduce subjective observation as a legitimate line of evidence in science, right? Because science is too objective We need to get subjectivity back because then you can just talk to the gurus Who go into their trance and discover the truths of reality and we just listen to them and they'll tell they'll give us the answers And we did what if the substrate consciousness correct science will never be able to figure out we need to listen to these guys You know we need to listen to their meditations because that that needs to be reintroduced into science He's written books, but more than one multiple books basically saying we need to merge Eastern mysticism, which doesn't like that word, but that's what it is. Eastern mysticism with science. That's his goal What's the discovery institute all about you know, what's the wedge doctor? And it's the reintroduction of supernaturalism into science the science what if God You know proofdust into existence this materialist assumptions in the scientific method will never figure that out We have to allow for supernatural explanations in the scientific method Of course, they need to ever get it that you know, it's not a it's just not a cultural choice that we don't allow subjectivity or That we don't want supernaturalism into science science by definition Can rely on those things you can't test a supernatural hypothesis and we know that right because the intelligent Design won't even tell us anything about their intelligent designer Anything you could possibly observe right if you think the hypothesis an intelligent designer created life You know by magic Okay, well what would that life look like whatever What does it look like? That's what it looks like And there's no observation you can make that will falsify that hypothesis. So okay games over. There's no science pee on that point It's not our choice. We're not being the people is kicking them out of the sandbox, right? Like expelled would want you to believe or Ben Stein. That's not the case They said these are the rules, you know, these are the rules You can't change them because they don't work if you change the rules, but they want to change the rules They want to change the rules because under the rules that work they lose The purpose is the same the purpose is not to discover something about the world It's not to enhance our understanding Ourselves of the universe It's to provide cover. That's what it's all about the discovery institute exists to provide intellectual cover for evolution deniers but people who deny evolution for ideological reasons Dualism the former dualism that we're discussing exists to provide intellectual cover for people who want their religion whether it's Buddhism or Easter mysticism or Christian fundamentalism in the case of eggnore who want their religion to invade the halls of science So in order to accomplish that goal, they create this diversion With all these logical fallacies and that's the purpose. It's not the purpose is not to advance human knowledge or understanding It's to turn human understanding back to the Middle Ages, right to turn it to a prescientific error before we knew what the rules were Now we know what the rules are and I'm sorry But by those rules these ideas are now obsolete and they really just have to accept it and get all the It's gonna happen in a lot of cases, but but that's the way it is so from our from the point of view of skeptics, I think it's really Important to understand the actual intellectual strategies that people use to deny modern science It's one thing to say dualism religion or that's a belief system and give it the hand But you know when you really are breaking down and deconstruct it It's very empowering and you can argue against it much more effectively like if they throw David Chalmers at you Now you know what I'm saying back, but also you see the connection. You realize that Anti-science it's pretty much the same thing over and over and over again I mean these guys don't have much of an imagination You know they're throwing the same logical fallacies at us over and over it not only over time But from one topic to the next so if you really understand all the problems with dualism You'll actually be able to then apply those same intellectual tools to the vast majority of the kinds of pseudoscience And paranormal stuff that we encounter. Thanks a lot for your time