 Okay, so it doesn't say it on my slide, but my name's Jeff Beck, if you didn't hear in the first time. And I farm and think about consciousness apparently. So, I've sort of outlined what my thought process going to a presentation I'm working on. So, how do we encode meaning in our brain? I mean, that's a big question. A lot of people don't have good answers for mostly, but just the words, dual aspect, monogas, or a high level of instruction that we've made that most people aren't familiar with, but we might be more in the future. It's built with language, which is an object system, which is not the continuum for which we arise. It's an abstract, and it's a discrete version of reality. It's not what's really real. It's a level removed from what's real, essentially, through language. And we have experiences that are very hard to put into words sometimes, and all of consciousness is mostly outside of words. And we have our language, and a lot of people who do philosophy and like to talk a lot, use lots of words. And I sort of zone out a lot of times when I hear lots of words, because it all starts to sound the same after a while. What's the reality underneath those words? And so, the words do have meaning that we construct from our context of a continuum of experience. That's my study going on, but that makes any sense, hopefully. So, my background and why I'm interested in this, and why I'm interested in transhumanism, stems from... I worked as a research engineer for Conoco doing colslary and horizontal drilling, and whatever they brought to us that nobody else could figure out, they'd have us brainstorm about, is there some way to deal with this problem? It's outside the box, basically, nobody's been able to figure out yet. It was really quite a bit of fun, because the world is trying to deal with things other people consider to be impossible. So, I sort of got fixated in my 20s on really liking impossible problems. So, that's why I like this one so well. And I got really interested, we were building pilot plants that had feedback loops and different kinds of control systems to make them run on autopilot. And I got really interested in how you set up self-regulating systems and I was putting it together on a daily basis at work, and some of them worked on air, because some of our work was in the refinery, so everything had to be explosive proof. So, for safety considerations, you can do this with air or hydraulics or digital computers, or a lot friendlier, other than the electrical part. But if you're doing a coal mine underground and two percent methane to figure out some way to do it, it doesn't involve electricity, it's better. Anyway, and the thing that really got me interested in consciousness was I was just walking along one day and all of a sudden, in one wave form, whatever, it was different. I did a master's degree in System Dynamics and Controls, so I learned how to do abstractions of control systems pretty thoroughly. I mean, it really got my attention, because all of a sudden, for some reason, everything was different. And I couldn't explain it. The best I could, I came across an explanation called non-duality, which sort of looks like that. It gets tangled up with lots of words from our language system, mysticism. There's lots of Eastern religions have ideas of hemorrhagism. They don't talk about it a lot from what I've ever encountered in my life, but surely Joseph Smith knew it well, because otherwise he wouldn't have had the experiences and the motivation to do what he did. But it's a different mentality of consciousness that would somehow take place. What the heck is this? Because for me, it wasn't. There were things that were creatures, there were things that happened at that moment, and then lots of other stuff that I've noticed. Now, this is different, this is different, this is different from what it was before. So it really got me curious about, with science, we should be able to make up better stories than we made up 2,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago. I mean, the history of these kinds of experiences go back through shamanic traditions, I mean, our whole society has been organized by something coming forth into our consciousness, it's driving evolution and our social systems, but I don't think it's accidental. But for most people who experience it, it's very accidental. But that doesn't mean there isn't something that could be more thoroughly understood. Because whenever you start to talk about what is consciousness, people have really hard time defining that. And as a controls engineer, I would have felt that it has a particular place in a dynamic system. And so, what that experience did, it really got me interested in consciousness and I've kind of covered a lot of this territory. What I was involved in leading up to that, triggering that, was trying to understand individuation processes, was trying to understand inhibitory and drive systems that enter into consciousness and tweak consciousness and steer us one way or another. Because obviously, within consciousness, we have likes, dislikes, and they're all subjective things. There are some logical people out there who are subjective, but for the most part, the objective stuff is created by the left brain to make up a good story about what the right brain wants to do, it has nothing to do with logic and the normal logic pathways, what we consider logic. And so, I did a lot of reading for a couple of years. This was in the context of the end of 2008 through 2009, 2010 when the economy was in the toilet. Lots of people were bummed out, there was lots of... I mean, I just have a hard time focusing on the farm work because what's the point if it's not going to make any money anyway. The changes that take place in those experiences really tear down your drive system. Most people are driven by fear, shame, guilt, stuff like that. It's the wolf at the back. Sunny W is keeping you going forward and getting out of bed in the morning. And so, if all of a sudden, three days after that experience, I realized I really wasn't afraid of dying anymore. I mean, I could just drive into that problem right now. That would be bliss. So, that was part of what happened. I mean, it just characterized as ego death. And so, if I'm not afraid of dying anymore, what can the wolves do to me by having this meal, you know? So what's the point? Anything. I mean, I have a hard time looking at a particular thing because there was a motivation that came with that experience, which was basically understanding what those inhibitory forces were doing to people to cause pain and suffering. And some of them is good for socialization probably, but a lot of it is unnecessary. And just basically experiencing a new motivational structure that had to do with what can we do to alleviate suffering and basically bring about a different kind of society ordered in a different way than the one I had grown up in. I kind of grew up with the attitude towards the world and what have I done to deserve to be born into this place, you know? It must have been really bad. So, if you, from that motivational shift that kept me going, I really was just eating everything up went through lots of different books. I mean, basically psychology, philosophy, physics, and religion are all tangled up in one kind of a knot that are all interconnected with each other. And that we, it's a wiring Christmas life, that is not partly how we untangle it and understand it, whether you say, no, this is outside of our ability to deal with it. And in that, in reading that material, I wanted to just, a person that I've been interacting with online before I had that sudden change was somebody who had been involved with the man who wrote the book on synchronicity, plus this was the first I'd ever met, but they were online from a support group. She recommended, did I agree, she said she had an experience like this through a Sufi tradition when she was like 18 and so she could relate to what I was explaining to her because I asked her, can you suddenly be bipolar, you know, or something extreme like that. And she said, well, this other thing. Anyway, she recommended I read Carl Jung and his ideas on individuation, which I did. And I had to stop after a while because I started having like all these number synchronicity jumping out at me and I had some really strange dreams tied in with 555 on the clock when I woke up. They were like archetypal. One was about self-acceptance. Another one was about basically the creation of the universe from God's perspective, which was, at that point I said, who makes up these stories and I've got to stop reading Carl Jung for a while because this is bizarre and I don't believe in this stuff. I'm pretty materialistic. Carl Jung talks a lot about the collective unconscious and archetypal things and he definitely convinced me. One point, I think that simple example was at one point I was dealing with facing surgery for prostate cancer and that was kind of stressed about it and trying to be everything done for that and kind of that, but I had to just, I think 333 came into my dream when I was asleep to the point where it started me awake and then I turned over and I looked at the clock and it was 333 on my digital clock. You know, I've got a really good internal clock and that's pretty strange synchronicity. So somehow we have to be able to integrate that kind of weird experience with a normal materialist perspective of the world and it's kept me motivated to keep pushing that way because I think there's something better that we can do and it falls into the realm of transhumanism. One of the people I got into trying to understand was Alan Turing and his work with decidability and computing machinery and universal computing machinery because I know he was interested in consciousness and the more I tried to understand where he was coming from the more I really got interested in the notion of could there be a conscious machinery though? What's the essential requirements for even basic consciousness? Not just this weird stuff. I was trying to figure out the underlying what is consciousness. I've been to, since about 2012 where I'd go into science of consciousness down in Tucson and I'd been to, there's something called science and non-duality where it's safe to talk about weird stuff like this and not get locked up in the funny farm. Words, all sorts of other people who've had some more experiences and actually just talking to people in my own family that say, yeah, something weird happened to your cousin and he was trying to give all of this stuff away and said that sounds a lot like this kind of experience because what you lose your sense of self that everything just belongs to everybody it's a communal kind of consciousness and you're looking out for the collective and there's, I can tell, it's a fairly natural evolution of consciousness towards, through an individuation path Carl Rogers and others have reported that it was just a natural stage of development that if you get to a certain point you don't have a shift like that where you just naturally shifted to a kind of consciousness that's more concerned with the collective and the individual self. If you look at it from an evolutionary point of view as we passed child, humans live past child there's quite a bit by now so that was the purpose of those people and the rendering but hopefully they're the ones who've evolved to the point where they can give guidance to give the people and be selfless in that giving and they can do a better job if they want to but the individuation of developing a strong sense of self is really important for a robust, distributed system where there's lots of individuals it needs to be a good horizontal foundation of strong individuals to create the kind of society that we want to move towards for a free society that needs a foundation of the American dream if they still matter. So, two years ago I was preparing for a talk down in San Diego, San Jose I came across the idea of dual aspect monism which put it to words something that I sort of been trying to figure out how to express and if you look at the scientists measure brain waves and what's going on in the brain with electrical signals specifically or there's chemical neurotransmitters involved in the process but the question comes up of causality what's the so are those brain waves in any way driven by consciousness or are they producing consciousness or what's the causality which is there was one primary and the other one secondary or most physical the people who are into the materialist perspective tend to take electrical activity as consciousness and a lot of the theories are based on interpreting that that integrated information theory is based on that which is one of the more well proven approaches to detecting whether it's like walking in cases consciousness or not they can tell by now pretty well if that's true if people give them people the ability to communicate by using that technology if you were locked in or you can't move anything or communicating anything whatsoever you're just there in the vegetative state or are they and so in taking the point of view that we are partly matter and there's this other thing that we all experience called consciousness that nobody has a really good concept to have it there aren't very many really good explanations out there that are generally accepted as to how this works and it ends up being a kind of complementarity if you look at it from dual aspect modism there's consciousness and processes that we feel experientially and then there's these electrical neurotransmitter signals in the brain or the nerve path firing and somehow they are different manifestations of something that's unitary at some deeper level which may or may not be possible just whether it's possible or not to get to that level there might be something that we can do to move forward with that assumption so that concerns the consciousness meeting state they have a taxonomy that they use and there's about ten pretty well accepted caps in the consciousness debate usually like global workspace theory by regard to ours integrated information theory or the two main ones I paid attention to this next meeting is coming up they're going to have a whole subsection on dual aspect modism which is why I came to this meeting in Switzerland it seems like a good idea to talk about this more because I haven't seen that as a separate item when I've gone to the meetings of the past the first meeting I went to I went and they asked me why I was going I said because I was a conscious robust from the future trying to convince me to invent them I decided I should go along with their plans and that was partly joking partly serious but at that point in time the taxonomy had no place for machine consciousness the last one the last couple they've held actually have machine consciousness as a significant part of the program so we've come that far since 2012 people you know, well anyway I haven't been impressed with the stuff that they've covered so far it's not that it's we've had some pretty good quantum mechanical presentations about it and the one theory of consciousness that the organizers of the scientific consciousness put forward is the work or idea that this has to be some sort of objective reduction of a quantum process is what defines consciousness and I tend to agree with that to some extent it's not very popular lots of people like Max Teckmark had it like Max wants to have this other particle that comes along with the rest of the matter you have to first purchase this into the system works for Max, it doesn't work for me but whatever it may how we objectify things determines what we find and so it's important to take lots of different perspectives into view and if they're very well thought out there's probably truth in each one of them and the tangled knots that's going on is the way I look at it so I really don't like discounting any perspective from one point of view that's probably correct as a controls engineer I have to ask myself why is there consciousness I mean I was thinking about this all the time I was doing grad school so where does consciousness fit in the machine because I kind of view this as a machine a lot of us most of what goes on in our bodies is pretty mechanistic and doesn't report any consciousness whatsoever there's a really amazingly complex hindrance system that's all about feedback and most of us really don't have a clue what's going on down there the autonomic nervous system I think played a big role in the shift that I experienced and it's like something so primitive that has always override whatever consciousness was supposed to be there I mean it can make you just pass out it's freeze, play down, whatever it's got the override button you can just shut everything down so you're not finding this game anymore and how do you try to override the override button so I guess the question comes in what exactly is consciousness how does it come into the system how does it interact it obviously controls the evolution of the neural system and the brain from what I see especially experiencing that subjective shift I mean I was conditioned in a certain fair sharing guilt environment up to a certain point and that shut off was really good and then I felt because of my nature being fairly parallel processor, parallel worker, that then I felt oh yeah this feels just good to think of all that pain and suffering everybody's feeling it isn't me now and it's all that justified why are people killing themselves why are people using pain I mean the epidemic of people trying to numb themselves to this pain is caused by these systems and if we could understand how the material side of the system connects with the conscious experience it would give us some pretty powerful tools like yes is how we could take control better of that dynamic pain control and if we understood it better we might not be so judgmental and harmful to other people in our society and realize they're just doing what they were reacting to the world in ways mostly outside their control you get into debates about free will accountability and it all gets tangled up in should we be shaming and harming people for being how they were born and raised to be even though it doesn't conform with our picture of how we think they might should be and you can take that to extremes and usually you get to the point where everybody agrees we don't want those kind of people in our society because they're harming other people but within certain limits I think it's really important to accept diversity which is the system if you look at nature nature loves diversity and we as humans trying to build efficient systems like monocultures and everything they're uniformed it's more efficient and fast it gives you reliable you don't have to worry about getting water and you're taking it to gas station maybe people don't like those random quality control issues so they want uniformity and people and minds and perspectives and it can be very harmful to the society so the reason I really am enthused about dual aspect monism is because it gives me a way to start dissecting down into the deeper levels of the problem and one thing that I didn't have a clue about going in when I went to start going into science and consciousness was meetings had to do with quality their traumas are looking strung out and weird and it's famous for having this hard problem of consciousness which I'm not saying that dual aspect monism will necessarily answer the hard question of consciousness but it might be possible to make some headway to go through that framework so from the perspective of a conscious agent navigating the world when I'm here and I'm seeing images of feeling internal and I hear my own voice in my head I feel my body all of that has to be somehow interfaced from a physical thing into my conscious experience or it's not conscious so everything I've got in my conscious history recall everything is somehow been converted from something physical into something that's not that can be called a quality of space I mean it and maybe you have to maybe there's a periodic chart that defines all the different versions of quality I don't know I just know that whatever I have experienced has been stored in my memories was experienced through this other language that came I assume genetically encoded into my body that maps the physical into the subjective and from a scientific perspective if you start with that assumption from that point of view then there really should be a way to map something in our some level in our body whether it's a subatomic atomic or it's a quantum process whether it's a molecular scale thing I've got that on the next slide which I call this is like there's a reduction to this process which is a scientific reduction but your typical science processes are figured into small parts and see how they fit together to make the whole but mostly it's about tearing things into little tiny pieces not hoising into little tiny pieces if you can just get down to the basic fundamentalist little piece of the atom you would understand everything which is where the everything people like to go but there's got to be some level where there is a correlation between what we have as a subjective experience and what is going on in the physical version of the body and it's like the ultimate puzzle at this point as far as I'm concerned to figure out what's the right level to find that correlation with modern improving scientific methods it seems like there's significant potential to actually break that puzzle and figure out what is that's what I want to push in this discussion that's coming up this summer is we really should be looking at how we can solve that reduction of this puzzle where's the correlation between the subjective and what's going on at some level whether it's network or molecular molecular seems like the most probable level to find an answer to it that's the level where before you get DNA encoding and transmission and it seems pretty likely that at the very least it can be stored at that level even if it requires more something to do with protein structures or it could be in the topological you might have to solve the problem in the network or the topological space or I'm not saying that that would solve the hard problem of consciousness because you still wouldn't know where the quality or coming from you would just have a correlation between these are the subjective experiences and these are the physical traits in the body that are triggering those experiences and it still wouldn't tell you where the yellow came from or red came from and that gets into and I don't think you would solve metaphysics with scientific analysis but aside from that there's another what I would say hard problem and that is there's a integration scientific how is it that our brains put together this coherent consistent story moment by moment and how consistent is it really let's just say we don't it's not consistent but anyway there's the people from the transhumanist movement that talk about mind uploading mapping the connecto the presentation is on I really have a hard time taking that series because I don't think it solves the problem of what's consciousness it could very easily have something to do with how it's assembled and how things synchronize across the brain to create the whole experience experiences of unified experience that seems like a pretty likely level to find answers to that problem there's really two separate problems one is the reduction of these quality of coming from and how do they assemble into the big picture metaphysics so like I said already I don't really think that anything here is going to solve the metaphysical aspects of the problem because I have ideas about where that might lie I know Julio Priscove gave a presentation at a conference and they're talking about the caution record that's pretty well by it there's got to be something like that going on there's some collective non-local aspects and whenever you figure out if that gets explored further it almost seems like that's where there has to be some collective ground and it also sort of begs the question of where it is conscious and from a mathematical point of view I would have to say it's in the null space in this space they're just a pretty vague thing to say it's where it turns into religion pretty fast what is the space that consciousness occupies is a really just one consciousness that leads to ground for all of this and the quality I rise from that ground is something that I don't know if we'll ever know the answer to I was agnostic pretty thoroughly before and I'm still pretty agnostic but some things are I mean sometimes we might know but not on this level of existence sometime in the future I don't have any predictive beliefs on self surviving the resurrection on all of that I don't have any beliefs on that I do have strong beliefs that if we understand ourselves better through whatever efforts we make towards taking our personal evolution and collective evolution we can create a better social world for all of us to live in and there are other ideas on how things might work that's off like a PDA some people think that physical should be primaries mental should be primary and I guess my dual aspect model is a pretty well-folded neutral model so as a controls engineer if my consciousness isn't just a joke and I can really think that my head should be over here and it goes over there there's got to be two-way communication between the physical and the mental so that means some other more fundamental place where that connections we know that we're not conscious of but it has an effect both on the physical and on the mental can you walk through each of the words in that dual aspect of monism in relation to that third substance I don't see the connection between those in this we're just trying to say that Cartesian duality the idea was there's the physical and that's one thing and there's the mental and that's another thing and they're just separate there's the man and the machine and that sort of just leads to the notions like there's just soul that migrates off someplace else when you die one is around the world without a body it's like the two are separate it's just individual you can have you can have a physical body that's functional by itself soul-less zombies and you can have just ghosts walking around with no body but they're still intact functioning thinking creatures physicalism I mean it's sort of like the Max Ted Mark you've done you've done a few things is that consciousness is just a joke you can show the decisions are made in the brain 30 seconds before the person is aware of them it's been improved in the web so the consciousness is just a big joke we're conscious but we don't really do anything in consciousness so they don't feel pain and joy and I think we might be sooters and we don't really make because we might play unconscious processes meaning the physical decides and then the mind thinks that it decided there's another mind that decides so like in some of the tests they've done basically like a silent mind within your mind that makes the decisions on your behalf so whether it's the material or idealism still needs to be accepted would that be correlated with the third substance though is that what's the third substance because that sounds like it could be if you were talking about the physical and then there's another mind yeah there's kind of a continuum of physicalism towards idealism most people end up like to talk about it they end up on one extreme and the other where they simply deny the existence of the other so physicalism goes even beyond like all caps matter is bigger than mind, it says mind isn't a thing you don't think therefore you're not there just isn't a mind your conscious experience doesn't exist you say what does that even mean I don't really read if you don't have a copy though Daniel Bennett's more interesting than some of Tom's characteriles and then idealism is there just isn't physical stuff, there is just mind so the neutral mind is entering a really interesting realm of how does none of this exist there's some deep eye of Chopra comes and there's some people who believe very strongly one way on the other side that basically we're just avatars in a game there and it's all a little this physical realm of illusion and there isn't really anything physical is all just destructive it's all just a totally construct in an artificial environment some boys all too but if it's all an illusion though can I just pick a different illusion though can I just choose that it's not a illusion if it's all a illusion can we if you only work reading the illusion we're just not giving those in a sitar some of the stuff I've read I've gone pretty far off there's Alejandro Gordorowski wrote some stuff about about shaman treatments in Mexico if you are raised in the right environment and believe hard enough you can do all these weird things with Defi with our logical western minds he doesn't understand it but he's saying enough to think that there might be something real going on they have to keep an open mind in that direction with respect to his perspective I see even just like the placebo effect placebo effect is your mind having a physical effect on your body and so there is there's something there there's something going on and so my feeling is the highest solution is going to be an integration of both sides and is that why it's called dual aspect because you've got both sides and you've got to respect both sides but it's like the wave particle duality problem if you look at it one way you see a particle another way you see a wave but there's only one thing there how does that exactly work and so it's sort of that same idea put into the mind body problem there's this complementary you've got to respect the physical process and you've got to respect the subjective processes so how do you integrate from that and I don't know if I'd answer your question I think I mean it explains why it's called dual aspect monism but then I guess the second question is how does that definition correlate with third substance so they're saying I mean in this case they're saying there's a those are both aspects of something more primary which is a third it's a hypothetical third substance that we don't understand it's both conscious and material it's a proto-conscious proto-physical something would that be like a rock, paper, scissors type thing where they all interact with another or like I am above you know that's a little kind of dog you believe in fair enough you know it's in the metaphysical realm anyway well I mean physics is trying to deal with this 15 significant interpretations of quantum mechanics and they're all trying to explore the white particle to solve the problem so I don't know that it'll be any easier it's like matter of a worry find spiritualized so so you know in one of my physics classes there was an interesting there was an interesting moment where we were discussing the size of an electron or something and eventually it landed on this point where the the physics professor said you know in this context we get to the point of you have to start saying what do you mean by size because we're not actually talking about physical particles and are we talking about their interactional cross-section with other particles it's terrible you do this statistical game and it turns out that the output of it is a distance and say cool that's the diameter maybe radius let's say radius of the electron but it's just that's what happens to fall out of your equation describing behavior but it's not a radius emphatically it can't be it's so weird we'll have someone else notice how weird that was oh yeah it's just the fact that a number falls out when you do your division you say oh the unit that's left over is a length let's call it a radius and where I get to in all of this trying to make heads or tails out of it is so when you get into that paradoxical situation where you've got two things that seem to be impossible there's like it doesn't seem like it's possible it's just a paradox you've got it's a particle and it's a wave at the same time somehow depending on how you look at it and one of those archetypal dreams I had after I came back from one of these meetings was I woke up I woke up in this paradox I woke up before I woke up I became semi-conscious you might have to call it listen dreaming but there was this thing I was noticing where there was this like stretchy elastic thing that looked like a wave on one side and there was this focal point on the other side and I it took effort to stretch them apart because I felt like I was waking up when I was stretching them apart and so I noticed that I backed up and closed back together and I did that like three or four times feeling this tension that took to stretch it apart and pull it back together and then I pulled it apart and went through that and woke up and stood up it was awake so I went from like a dreaming state to a awake state going through basically going through the wave particle duality paradox to be conscious and that's a pretty good metaphor for what I consider the fundamental requirement for consciousness which is both a focal point and the background within which that focal point occurs and that's what I play around with these kind of pictures the idea that there's two basic aspects to all of reality whether it be physical, mental mathematical that all end up spanning the space where there's this indeterminate the uncomputable part the material machines can handle computable functions which all end up on one side of this and with the advent of graphical processors we're getting a lot more capacity on the parallel side of this diagram what I'm left failing is when we figure out what consciousness is in between those two opposed to each other would give us the right mental situation to be able to handle what we have to handle in consciousness which is undecidable, irreducible possibilities and is that the dual aspect? this is dual and non-dual in one system and so there's a unity at one point and I'm saying that this fits into the dual aspect more than the way I look at it you've got to have the two sides and you've got to have the unity to get consciousness in the system you've got to have the two sides and you've got to have the overlap between them to create the place diagram between the two what do you say there's a Venn diagram of the two and consciousness is where they overlap so one of the last things I guess the last one in Tucson I think well anyway the last one in Tucson Roger Pendros was having this brainstorm this is what it really is and he was saying that what he's trying to say with the OR idea is that basically there's a branching of possibilities with a single outcome well there's a branching of possibilities within this space that until the point where they're decided is what you would handle as a quantum process it's like it would take a quantum computer to do it and then at some point this collapses and then you're there's only one outcome on the collapse of all the possibilities and but then if you look back on that process the time when it would say that you decided back before the branching occurred which maybe it's 30 seconds I don't know maybe you can actually hold it up for 30 seconds before it can collapses to a decision and at which point it's going to look like you decided back at the branching point just based on his version of quantum how he understands quantum mechanics was what he was trying to say about it so there's a possibility space that gets reduced to a decision and then it looks like you decided back when the possibility space were populated but that's Roger has lots of ideas that aren't necessarily all I thought through but that's just something I don't have a really good idea what goes in here somewhere in there you've got to find some quality to figure out you've got to figure out some way that it connects with conscious experience and there's a lot of the molecular structures that we find in neurotransmitters actually have recursive they have ring structures and they have linear tails on them and so they actually fall on both sides of this which means they're spanning this space and we're talking about all the all the neurotransmitters fall into that category so it may be that somehow they bring quality into the picture or at least motivate consciousness whenever taking place in this but it's that third substance that's the background inside here that's creating the consciousness it's correlating conscious choices with physical actions and physical action or physical processes with conscious experiences and you're pointing from the non-goal so this boundary represents the boundary of consciousness there's things that fall outside that in the serial processing or anything that can be done with the turing machines over here outside consciousness in this perspective anything that's known as a graphical massively parallel system outside consciousness on this side you've got to have some overlap behind these to get consciousness in this perspective and that's just mostly based on the considerations that were worked through and decided to build it by Alan Turing and others Church and missing this Austrian guy but that makes sense let's just like build it something I'm kind of I think that something like Catholic I'm sorry I'm sorry to hear what you said I think something like Catholic could explain this more I'm more into the brainbow than dualism or something like that somewhere the colors have to come from experience and it's not just black and white part of the reason I got interest part of the reason I went down this whole rabbit hole was trying to understand black and white thinking for instance which is very highly highly automated thinking for coming from Galilean structures of modern complex thinking so very little consciousness involved and very poor decision making and it's a factor in our modern society because it's more higher media there's lots of different sources for this but there's lots of control of populations and fear of tactics trying to keep people in the agitate think box trying to keep people in the agitated fearful anxious state it seems to me really close to that lizard brain threshold and they don't develop critical thinking skills properly when they're in that highly activated sympathetic state it empowers development and once you get past early childhood it's really hard to it has to be plastic it doesn't happen in the military anymore so just what is what is black and white thinking not being able to see the creator it's got to be this or it's got to be that it's got to be this concrete story about this is the plan of salvation this and this and this and this and then you got it you don't have to worry about anything else fear is taking care of, shame is taking care of all of that rigid rules a lot of people are happy with that because they have a hard time looking into the uncertainty of the gray areas okay and part of what we need is to understand and understand the conscious processes how we're being affected and manipulated and impaired by things that are accepted as all right in our society everything that comes out of Madison Avenue is hacking the system advertising in general is hacking your system for their benefit no, your benefit my soul is being your benefit somehow but they also implant lots of images of what you should be to be a happy person lots of things that bypass what we consider free will and judgment if you just like this you'll be happy so so I don't like you're saying I don't understand much of this stuff what is there hope that we can objectively understand consciousness and if so how does that come about is it more precise tools or some of it I mean really we're trying to do things with primitive instruments we're getting better and better but if things are happier than what we're living in the instrumentation to study things that than what we love inside the living brain that's kind of tricky they've done quite a bit of work on doing things with animals that wouldn't be and on a surgery that can have something most of the technology that's being used we've talked about artificial limbs giving sensory perception from an artificial limb and motor control with an artificial limb they're basically using whatever creates consciousness in our brain as a hack they're hacking some of the unconscious parts to give that enterprise and still they're still using they're still dependent on whatever integrates and interprets in our brain they're using the primary system and just doing some high bones it's very similar to how we do use tools in general our brain is naturally sewed up it's like it's a universal adaptive control it just automatically learns what we attach it to without any further instruction or similar to what we're doing with artificial intelligence where they're basically teaching themselves how to play games but in lots of practice our brain just does that naturally as soon as the gene approaches to do that it's in the network have you ever tried that with an animal? with what? an artificial limb with an animal this is where we find out the bizarre universal internal system so they might be restraining monkey which is a lot nicer than most of the things we do unfortunately and they this is the mean thing they implant an electrode just smack around where the arm is on the bit of the brain that encodes motor output at the brain level which seems to be pretty highly intentional like that rather than actual this muscle do that they just drop an electrode no finesse beyond are we pretty sure that if we zap here it's arm aloof? okay put it here they just record and then they randomly wire those electrodes they put a 30 or 40 into a robotic arm and the robotic arm is in the same room as the monkey and it's able to reach a bowl of peanuts and the monkey's mouth and you give it on the order of hours of practice and it's able to get the arm to not fluidly or really really nicely there's a lot of excess movement which is really interesting it's not very very prudent but it can feed itself it's not really it's insane you just punk it down in the sort of appropriate area and I imagine if you implanted it somewhere else that's associated with output at all you can do the same thing yeah it's fine but yeah it just learns how to use another arm yeah it's not part of its body plan it's not getting the normal feedback that it's inspecting but there's something with it and you can train with on the order of 10 seconds of training you can train a program to read what the brain is doing and a person can think about moving a cursor across a screen and we can decode what that means in electrical signals and make the cursor do that and again you get a lot of extra movement you can't really focus on a spot but yeah the brain can just use full output with hardly any training at all it's like telekinetic, right? almost now we just need a wifi so you don't have to drill into my brain that's what I'm working on in my lab, yeah they've been doing some new things with the last meeting I went they've been demoing some system where you can do an EEG from your sitting in the chair without actually having to have a headset on and the technology they're using for things like that or as they evolve might get pretty interesting you call it consciousness and so would you say that is consciousness and if it is then isn't it consciousness the whole way down evolutionary chain where's the line where we would say it's not consciousness a monkey can do it can a rat do it can a plant do it absolutely those plants can get my heart attack, they can hear themselves full time consciousness a full time could be consciousness could be I'm not saying what kind of experience that would be for a full time but it could be I'm going to stop the recording at this point discussion thanks Jack so much thank you