To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Mind and Brain

From Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International, it's meet your mind, a user's guide to the science of consciousness, a special series from to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming, this hour, mind and brain. The brain is made up of billions of neurons, neurons are the cells of the brain. Every neuron is connected to about 10 ,000 of its neighbors. If you were to take a very tiny chunk of brain tissue, a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, there are more connections in there than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Now the weird part is we look at this very complex machinery, you know, it's sort of has got the consistency of mashed potatoes and somehow all that wet gushy stuff is us. The idea that there is a thing inside of us that thinks and feels and decides and that each of us is that thing, Descartes thought it was the immaterial soul, but we really don't have any better idea how the brain gives rise to

consciousness than we do how the immaterial soul substance of Descartes does. What strikes me so much about the octopus brain is that three fifths of their neurons are not in the brain at all. They're in the arms. They're so different from us. They can taste with their skin. You can sever their arms and the arms will go off hunting by themselves. I mean, can you imagine that kind of diffuse consciousness? Spend a little time looking into debates over the nature of consciousness and you'll quickly come across the name of David Chalmers. He's an Australian philosopher who wrote a seminal paper in 1995 on what he called the hard problem of consciousness. Why we have subjective experience, you know, thoughts and feelings, the experience of joy or sorrow, self -awareness. Chalmers believe science will never be able to explain this, but that claim has sparked a loud and often nasty

debate among scientists and philosophers. Steve Paulson recently caught up with David Chalmers. You are widely regarded as one of the leading philosophers of the mind. Why do you keep coming back to questions about consciousness, a subject you've now been studying for decades? Well, for me, consciousness poses just about the most interesting unsolved problems in the world. I mean, I came at this from a background in science and mathematics, although physics and mathematics is still exciting today. There was a sense there were more exciting a few hundred years ago when everything was unknown. And it distracts me that the problem right now that stands out as being unknown, unsolved, there's problems of the mind. And in particular, the problem of consciousness, how is it that physical processes in a brain give you a conscious experience? It's just always fascinated me. So you're saying the science of the mind is perhaps the last great unanswered question in science, maybe in philosophy too? I mean, there's lots of small unanswered questions and even pretty big ones. But if you want to go for a place where we really don't have a clue, I think it's in the problems of the mind. Well, it's an ancient

philosophical problem. The mind -body problem, what's the relationship between mind and body? And in its contemporary guys, what's the relationship between the brain and consciousness? And we're still just coming to grips with that one. Now, if you talk to brain scientists, most will say it's just a matter of time before science unlocks the mysteries of the mind. And they usually say neuroscience is the path to do this. And this is the discipline that will crack the puzzle of consciousness. What do you think? I think it's reasonable to think that brain science and neuroscience is going to be a huge component of whatever the ultimate solution is. But I think it's also, if you talk to some of those brain scientists, maybe late at night, off the record, I think if you'll find that there's about this bigger diversity of opinion among brain scientists about the problem of consciousness as there is among philosophers. That is almost everyone will recognize that at least right now we're not even close. There's just this basic mystery. How is it that all this processing in the brain gives rise to first person subjective experience? You know, the feeling of seeing, of hearing, this inner movie that we have in our mind. So why

is this hard problem of consciousness so hard? I mean, why is it so hard for science, for neuroscience, for cognitive science to explain this subjective experience, this first person experience? One way to think about it is that science is set up from the start to be objective. We gather our data and we could all make the same measurements and that works so well in physics, biology, even some areas of the science of the mind. But consciousness by its nature is subjective. It's not something you can directly measure. I don't even know for sure, but I'm talking to you that you're conscious. I believe you are. I take you what you say is some kind of evidence for it, but I can't measure it directly. We can only get at it indirectly. So why I think about this? Science is basically all about gathering what we might call third person data, traditionally data, equally accessible to everyone. Consciousness really involves what we might think of as first person data. Are you talking about the limits of materialism? I mean, the idea that the mental is nothing more than brain mechanics. Is that part of your critique here? It is, yes.

One of the big issues in the philosophy of the mind is, is the mind just the brain? I mean, is a physical process is enough to explain what's in your mind, what's in your consciousness? And I've been somewhat reluctantly led to the conclusion that in fact, materialism doesn't have the resources to fully explain consciousness. I mean, the materialist view says basically there's a few fundamental properties in the world space and time and mass and charge and a few laws that connect them and everything can ultimately be explained in terms of that. Everything in chemistry, biology ultimately can be reduced to the properties of physics. But when it comes to consciousness, this reductionist program doesn't succeed. So my own view is we should take something like consciousness as a primitive element of the world, a fundamental property, if you like, in the way that physics takes space and time and mass and charge. Now, that's fascinating. I mean, you're suggesting that consciousness may have its own fundamental property of nature, so to speak? Basically, yes. Maybe some other

weird property, some other weird new property, proto -consciousness, which could somehow produce consciousness. We do need to expand the ontology of fundamental properties. This is my view. Physics is meant to be a theory of everything. Fundamental properties that explains everything. But if it turns out it doesn't, what we have to do as scientists is to expand our primitives. So what would that fundamental property of consciousness be? Well, at this point, we really don't know. So we're really in the realm of speculation, and I get to do this speculation because I'm a philosopher, but I can't say where we're not remotely close yet to the point where we have the details of a theory. I mean, I'll be happy if we have it in 50 years. It could be 200 years, but for a fundamental theory of consciousness, what you need is a theory that connects these fundamental physical properties, like space, time, charge, and so on, to consciousness. We don't have that theory yet, but if we did, maybe that would be a theory of consciousness. David Chalmers is a philosopher at the Australian National

University. You'll find Steve's full uncut interview with Chalmers on our website at ttbook .org slash meet your mind. David Eagleman is a Renaissance man, not only a best -selling novelist, but also a rising star in the world of neuroscience. In his book Incognito, he explores what he calls the secret lives of the brain. Why most of the real action in the brain is happening below the level of the conscious mind. And Strange Shamps talked with Eagleman about this remarkable three pounds of wet matter. Mystery number one is why we have any sort of unified sense of self at all. I'm calling this the team of rivals framework for thinking about the brain because something I've been interested in for years is how is it that you can argue with yourself and control yourself and make deals with yourself? If you're at a party and somebody offers you chocolate cake, part of you wants that chocolate cake and part of you says no, don't eat it, you're going to get fat, you can have this argument with yourself. And then

finally you might say, okay fine, I'll eat it, but only if I go to the gym tomorrow. But who exactly is talking with whom here? Isn't it all you somehow? And so this got me thinking it can only be understood in terms of competition between competing parts that all have their own goals. That team of rivals, phrase you borrowed, I assume, from a historian Doris Kern's good one who used it to describe Abraham Lincoln's cabinet and Lincoln set up his cabinet that way specifically to give him an advantage in governing. He wanted to be able to hear lots of different opinions. What's the advantage for us of having a brain that functions like a team of rivals? Well, it may be that this is the reason why humans are so much more flexibly intelligent than many other animals because having a team of rivals gives us different approaches and possibilities to try out. Can you begin to identify some of the members of that team of rivals? Are there certain people who are always sitting at that inner table?

There always seems to be a battle between what we might summarize as emotion and rationality. The ancient Greeks actually had an expression that life is as though you are a charioteer and you're trying to stay on the straight road but you have two horses, the white horse of reason and the black horse of passion and each of them is always trying to pull you off of the road in a different direction and your job as the charioteer is to hang on tight and try to keep the middle road between these and that's probably quite a good thing. We wouldn't want a society of people that are Mr. Spock because the emotional part is really important. I think at some point in your book you say the Germans have a name for it, your inner Schfinhund. Yeah, it's a true inner pig dog. Yeah, I heard that one as in Germany some years ago and I said, wait, what is it? What do you mean? Yeah, you have to overcome your inner inner Schfinhund. I don't think we have an expression like that in English but somehow the inner pig dog is this, I want it now kind of system. So it

sounds to me as though the paradigm that's emerging now is this idea of the self is really a, well, the team of rivals that you described, this construct of multiple selves, you also kind of throw out a question in the book, who deserves the credit for great ideas? We tend to think we do, if I've had a great breakthrough, it's my brain, it's my thought. And yet these are way in which maybe we don't quite deserve the credit. Yeah, that's right. The analogy that I use is that the conscious brain, the part that you think of as you is the smallest bit of what's happening in the brain. And it's as though you're a stowaway on a transatlantic steamship and you're taking credit for the journey without crediting all the massive engineering right under your feet. That's exactly the situation we're in. We say, oh, I just had an idea. But of course, it wasn't us at all. Your brain's been working on that for hours or days or weeks, consolidating

information, putting together things, trying out different combinations. And at some point, it serves it up to your conscious brain. And you say, oh, I just thought of something, but it wasn't really you at all. So there are all these functions inside my brain that are in some ways not me that are working on things without my being aware of them. And then they'll pop out with an answer. Yeah, exactly. And of course, we all learn this at some point that, you know, if you're trying really hard to remember the name of some movie or some vocabulary word in Spanish or something, the way to do it is just stop thinking about it because you can rest assured that your brain's working on it in the background. And at some point, it'll just float up to you. Was it Mozart who famously said he didn't compose his music? He just took dictation. Oh, I didn't know that one. That's a nice one. But there are many artists who come to exactly that same conclusion. In fact, even the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who came up with the equations that unified electricity and magnetism on his deathbed, he said that his famous set of equations, it wasn't really he that had discovered them. It was something within

him and William Blake and Gerta, they said sort of exactly the same thing. They said, you know, it wasn't really us. It was these things just came to us. It was Blake who said often against his will. Yeah, that's right. Something that struck me as interesting is how we think about artists who get into their unconscious brain by the help of drugs, for example. So Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan when he was on an opium high. And so the question is, who exactly do we credit Kubla Khan to? I mean, he was high as a kite when he wrote that poem. So do we say, oh, Coleridge is a genius because he wrote this. But the fact that he wouldn't have been able to, unless he took the drugs, who exactly gets the credit for it. I just think it's an interesting issue because he couldn't write those words while sober. So it's not the conscious Coleridge that we can give credit to is something deeper inside of him. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine. He

talked to the doctor, but he would fit exactly the day she moved to town. That night was when it happened. The hand print on the window will clear me. Coming up, how religion figures into the consciousness debate and the remarkable mind of the octopus for to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming. This hour, mind and brain is part of our special series, Meet Your Mind, a User's Guide to the Science of Consciousness. Brought to you by Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International. Our series Meet Your Mind, a User's

Guide to the Science of Consciousness, is supported by Promega Corporation, providing tools and technologies for research and life science and the Nor Foundation, exploring meaning and commonality of human experience. Consciousness may be the biggest mystery left in science. Think about it. The entire material world we live in seems to be explained by the laws of physics and biology, but consciousness is immaterial. A thought doesn't have mass or volume or speed. It's not made of atoms. It has no genetic structure. You can't weigh or measure a thought. You can't see one on an x -ray or catch one in a test tube. How does something as physical, as wet and gushy as the brain, produce something as insubstantial as thought? That's a mystery. And a subject of great debate among scientists and philosophers. Steve Falson explains. One of the big questions is whether consciousness can be explained by the brain. As neuroscience

marches on and figures out how the billions of neurons talk with each other, how all the neurotransmitters work, will that explain our subjective experience of consciousness? There are lots of scientists, especially neuroscience, who say yes. There are other people who say no. Actually, that subjective experience of consciousness is fundamentally beyond science. And that's really the crux of the debate here. To take one example, Marvin Minsky is a famous computer scientist at MIT for years. He's been working on artificial intelligence. And he says, basically, that the brain works like a computer. Part of the problem with the debate about consciousness is it's about language. And he says, we should get rid of the word consciousness because it tries to explain too much. I call it a suitcase word. For about 20 different kinds of mental processes. And so whenever you try to explain part of it, then you find well, you've left something out. And this makes people feel like there's a big mystery. But I think this is the case with a lot of psychological words. So you're saying that the word consciousness

basically doesn't mean anything. It just covers so much ground and so many different brain functions that it's just this vague amorphous concept. I don't think it's good enough for a scientific word. And so we have to replace it by reflection and decisions and about a dozen other things. And once you do that, the big problem goes away. And so instead of talking about the mystery of consciousness, let's talk about the 20 or 30 really important mental processes that are involved. And then, with a couple of years' work, you can make a big step towards solving each of them. And when you're all done, somebody says, well, what about consciousness? And you say, oh, that. That was what people wasted their time on in the 20th century. So Marvin Minsky says, ultimately, we'll be able to build better human brains based on computers. But of course, there are plenty of other scientists who think that's nonsense. It's very different. I mean, subjective

experience. There's nothing in science that tells you that such and such a combination of who's it gives you a subjective experience. This is Roger Penrose, a renowned British mathematician and physicist. Penrose happened to hear an interview with Marvin Minsky on the radio and became furious. He said, this is not the way the brain works. The brain is not just like a computer. And in fact, you really can't reduce the brain into the laws of physics to biology. There's something else going on here. And so he came up with an entirely different idea, different theory about consciousness. We do need a major revolution in our understanding of the physical world in order to accommodate consciousness. The most likely place, if we're not going to go outside physics altogether, is in this big unknown, namely, making sense of quantum mechanics. It's the borderline, if you like, between quantum mechanical behavior and classical behavior. So Roger Penrose has come up with this very controversial theory, which he developed

along with another scientist named Stuart Hammeroff. The idea is that consciousness has something to do with quantum physics. Quantum theory is that consciousness happens through a process of what they would call quantum computation. And they've actually isolated little microtubules, tiny protein structures inside of neurons. And they think somehow the act of consciousness is happening in there highly speculative. But then there are a lot of other people who think that is nonsense. And one example of that would be Daniel Dennett, famous materialist philosopher. I don't think consciousness is a mystery. But there are all kinds of things that I can't imagine how science will ever be able to explain. For instance, the precise nature of how we love someone else. I mean, I'm not talking about the sex drive here, but I'm talking about the mystery of love, or why we have certain kinds of dreams. And dreams, of course, are not rooted at all in the physical world. I mean, if you dissect the brain somehow and look at all the neural connections, do you think science will ever be able to explain those things? Sure. In what sense have explained?

Would you find it just unimaginable that science might in the next 15 or 20 years be able to read people's brains while they sleep and then write down what they're actually dreaming? Would you give me that kind of mind reading? I don't think I would. We can't do it yet. We can do it a little bit. I don't give you that, actually. Well, well, then hang on to your hat. That's coming. You're saying science will be able to do that without any kind of self -reporting by the dreamer. Oh, no. We'll use waking reports by dreamers, of course, to calibrate the instruments and understand how to decode the neural signals. See, that's my point. That's my point. If you don't actually ask the person what they're dreaming, will you ever be able to decipher the dreams? Well, let's build up to it then. So we ask the person what they're dreaming for a hundred nights, and we build up a nice library, and we translate the relevant brain states for that person. Then the idea that one might then be able to say a little bit later, oh, look, look, Jones is having that dream about the old car, and look, he's falling over a cliff now,

and we wake him up, and that's what he reports. If you think that's just beyond the reach of science, I think you're wrong. But that's just correlation. That's just, you know, you're just looking at what so and so has dreamed, and you're just going to match the brain imaging to some future dream that still doesn't explain how within the brain that particular kind of dream is generated. So then we have to do that too, but I think we're making good progress on that too, but we can't do that now. Might we do that in the future? Certainly. Now, I think that a lot of people find what Daniel Danert is talking about to be profoundly disturbing, and this whole idea that we are nothing but our brain chemistry. Think about the age old ideas that express the essence of what it means to be human. What our soul is, our spirit, and the idea that that is just nothing but brain chemistry, man, that really erodes people the wrong way. And think about some of the core religious ideas you can communicate with God. There is some piece of us that lives on after death. Those beliefs are founded on the idea that consciousness is not

just bound to an individual brain. So I actually think that the core debate about science and religion comes down to questions about consciousness. Consider the spiritual writer Deepak Chopra, an MD famous for his writings about mind -body healing. He's actually extremely well versed in science, and particularly of quantum physics. Now, he comes back and he says that maybe there is something about science that can explain what we would consider the soul, and he goes to quantum physics. Well, all we have to understand is what comes first? Does consciousness come first or matter comes first? The old paradigm was that consciousness is a epiphenominant of molecules. But now, you know, we know that molecules are atoms, atoms are subatomic particles, and that these subatomic particles are fluctuations of energy and information in a huge void. And the void is not emptiness. It's the womb of creation. Now, in contrast to Deepak Chopra, there are plenty of people, especially atheists who would say this is nonsense. Consciousness is

the biggest puzzle facing biology, facing neurobiology, facing evolutionary biology. It is a very, very big problem. The world's most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins. I don't know the answer. Nobody knows the answer. I think they probably one day will know the answer, but even if science doesn't know the answer, I return to the question, what on earth makes you think that religion will? We don't have an explanation. Nobody has an explanation for consciousness. That should be a spur to work harder and try to understand it, not to give up and just say, oh, well, it must be a soul. You said absolutely nothing when you said that. Now, the really interesting thing about listening to atheists on consciousness is they're actually all over the map. Sam Harris, who is a neuroscientist. He has a PhD in neuroscience. He has a very different view. It's entirely possible that there could be life after death. He is not willing to rule that out. There are good reasons to be

skeptical of the naive conception of a soul. And so the idea that the brain can die and a soul that still speaks English and recognizes granny is going to float away into the afterlife, that seems to be profoundly implausible. And yet we do not know what the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity ultimately is. And for instance, we could be living in a universe where consciousness goes all the way down to the bedrock so that there is some interior subjective dimension to an electron, say. That's interesting, though, because most evolutionary biologists, I mean, particularly thinking the secular ones would say, of course, consciousness cannot survive the brain. It will not survive death. You are not willing to make that claim. Yeah, I just don't know. If we were living in a universe where consciousness survived death, in some sense, or just transcended the brain so that single neurons were conscious, we would not expect to see it by our present techniques of neuroimaging or cellular neuroscience.

And we would never expect to see it. There are profound philosophical and epistemological problems that anyone must confront who's trying to reduce consciousness to the workings of the brain. And this discourse is in its infancy and who knows where it's going to go. So when I listen to all of these different theories, I actually find it kind of exhilarating because we don't know what consciousness is about. There are lots of different competing ideas out there. And science keeps making inroads. I mean, we keep learning more about how the brain works, but this ultimate question of who we are. That's very much up in the air whether science can explain that. And so I know some people get frustrated. Some people would say, oh, that's just an excuse to say, oh, it's just all mysterious. We'll never understand. And I think the verdict is very much out. And who knows what the coming decades in neuroscience will tell us and philosophy. Steve Paulson brought us that report. We also heard from Sam Harris, Richard

Dawkins, Deepak Chopra, Daniel Dennett, Roger Penrose, and Marvin Minsky. You want a real mystery? Try getting inside the mind of an animal. And no creature is more mysterious and amazing than the octopus. Science writers Simon Gumray discovered this herself. They're so different from us. They can taste with their skin. They have no bones. They can squeeze through a tiny opening, oozing almost like they are liquid themselves. A hundred pound giant Pacific octopus can get through and opening the size of an orange. I mean, unbelievable. But what I think is even more unbelievable is the fact that these guys have developed intelligence and emotions and personalities that are enough like ours that we can recognize them as such. So how do you approach an octopus because it doesn't seem to have any avenue to communicate? Well, I had the opportunity to meet three

octopuses because very generously the New England Aquarium has given me access to them and will open the top of the tank and let me plunge my arms into the 47 degree water and touch them and let them touch and interestingly taste me. In fact, you've written about the first encounter you had with an octopus we called Athena. Yes, and we got on absolutely great the first time we met. She looked me in the eye. I plunged my arms into the water. Her started boiling up out of the water. She immediately attached her suckers to me. Each of her eight arms has about 200 suckers and each one of those suckers can not just feel exquisitely, but they taste you. So she knows me in a way that no one else has ever known me before. That has to have been just a little bit odd, wasn't it? I mean, you knew of course what you were going into, but you know, I

wrote that it felt like the kiss of an alien. Did she like me? Well, I guess so. It's hard to imagine what she experienced, but the thing is if an octopus doesn't like you, you know about it. They show this in several ways and they're imusticable. One is they won't come near you, or it's well known that octopuses who dislike you will aim their funnel at you and shoot water at you. And they have excellent aim with their funnels. There was an octopus named Truman, who lived at the New England Aquarium. And he was a pretty easygoing octopus, but there was this one woman that he just could not stand. And she was a nice woman. She worked there all summer every time Truman saw her. He aimed his funnel and he blastered her and she was soaking wet with saltwater all the rest of the day. And interestingly, she went away to college and then came back for a visit. Meanwhile, Truman had not soaked anyone. But when he set eyes on her again, blam, he blastered again. So he remembered her and just didn't like her.

We've talked about their interaction with you. I'm curious before we come back to that, what you know about their interaction with each other. Do we know much about octopus culture, if you will, octopus society? They're not that easy to study and there's not a huge amount of money to do these studies. But what we know suggests that they're not particularly social and that their interactions tend to be kind of limited to chasing each other away, mating or eating each other. And that begs the question, what's this intelligence that they have for? Because when we look at intelligent species who we know, animals like elephants or chimpanzees or whales, and they are long -lived, highly social species, as are we. But here is an animal who doesn't live very long, alas, the giant Pacific will only live about three years. And they don't appear to be very social with other

octopuses. So what do they do with their intelligence? Interestingly, they play. And play is one of those things that we tend to associate with higher thought, right? At the New England Aquarium, my friend Wilson Manashi designed a series of locking boxes, which are plexiglass, and the octopus enjoys unlocking the different locks to get to a crab inside. Other Aquaria use those kinds of balls that you can screw them together. Sometimes you put hamsters in them so your hamster can run all over the house. And interestingly, they'll unscrew it to get to the crab inside. But just for yucks, they'll screw it back together. What about their brains? Is there similarity between their brains and ours? The difference in their brains is what excites me. I mean, their brains probably about the size of walnut, which is

as big as an African gray parrots. And you might think, oh, bird brain, but I've known an African gray parrot who could speak 100 words meaningfully as well as do math. So size doesn't really matter. But what strikes me so much about the octopus brain is that three fifths of their neurons are not in the brain at all. They're in the arms. Dr. Godfrey Smith, a professor philosophy in New York, has said it's as if each arm has a mind of its own. And octopuses can regrow their arms if through some accident an arm becomes severed. That arm will go off and search for prey on its own and find it. And then start passing the prey item back toward where the mouth ought to be, but no longer is anymore in the center of the eight arms. I mean, can you imagine that kind of diffuse consciousness? I mean, maybe it's like multiple personality. If consciousness means the self and

your neurons are more in your arms than in your head, does that mean you have multiple selves? What does that mean? But this is their reality. And animals are constantly leading us to recognize other realities that are just as real as ours. Birds and insects can see polarized light. Animals like whales and elephants can hear and for sound, which we cannot. But we know it is real. It is a real part of our world. It's one thing to know that a bird can see things we can't, that a whale can hear things we can't. Those don't seem so startling. But to see an octopus feel and interact physically in so many different ways seems more alien to us, don't you think? Yeah, it really does. And boy, have in your arms immobilized by thousands of suckers. It's just an amazing interaction. You're just not going to have that with anybody else, but an octopus. And realizing that each one of

those suckers is tasting you, experiencing you in a way that no one else ever will. Down in the deep blue sea, Henry the Octopus is a friend to you and me. Oh, the octopus we love him. Octopus, octopus, squiggling through the water. Octopus, octopus, go, go, go. Sometimes he travels with jet -like propulsion through the drink. And sometimes he finishes too fast

to use the word slink. Oh, that's my friend to come and see. An octopus is gotten with me. Oh, no, you octopus, I love you. Want to hear more about the Science of Consciousness? You'll find transcripts and lots of interviews on our website at ttbook .org slash Meet Your Mind. For to the best of our knowledge, I'm Jim Fleming. This hour, mind and brain is part of our special series Meet Your Mind, a user's guide to the Science of Consciousness brought to you by Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. Music Our series Meet Your Mind, a user's guide to the Science of Consciousness, is supported by Promega Corporation, providing tools and technologies

for research and life science and the North Foundation, exploring meaning and commonality of human experience. Back in the mid -90s, the renowned scientist Francis Crick laid out what he called the Estonishing Hypothesis. Crick had already achieved scientific immortality for his discovery with James Watson of DNA's double helix. He then turned his attention to neuroscience and stated, flatly, that everything to do with consciousness is the direct result of the brain. Here's how he described it in an interview we did with us. It says essentially that all the feelings you have and what you see and how you feel pain and what you think about yourself and your emotions and ambitions and so on, are basically the behavior of an enormous number of nerve cells in your head, faring away and interacting, and of course the molecules associated with them. Francis Crick wrote, and I'm quoting here, this hypothesis

is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called Estonishing. Crick died a few years later, but his theory about the mind is now the standard scientific view of consciousness. But that's unfortunate, says philosopher Al the Noe. He's written a book called, out of our heads, why you are not your brain and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. Noe told Steve Paulson that Crick's theory was partly what prompted him to write this book. The thing that strikes me is the appreciation of just how Estonishing it isn't. The idea that there is a thing inside of us that thinks and feels and decides and that each of us is that thing. That's not an Estonishing idea at all. That's kind of the sort of culturally shared inherited conventional wisdom. Descartes thought it was the immaterial soul that is that thing inside us and Crick thinks it's the brain or this collection of brain cells, but we really don't have any better idea how the brain gives

rise to consciousness than we do how the immaterial soul substance of Descartes does. So I don't really think there's much that speaks in favor of the idea that as Crick put it, you know, you are nothing but a collection of brain cells and associated molecules. So how would you assess the current state of scientific knowledge about what makes us conscious? It's very early days. We're sort of in the teenage years when it comes to the development of this science. And like teenagers, we've got lots of fancy toys that we like to play with, brain imaging technologies, and all sorts of high -powered laboratory techniques. But we haven't really yet found the organizing framework for understanding how the science should move forward. In a way, I think we simply made a mistake about where to look. We think that the answer to the question of what makes us conscious has to be a question about our brains. But I don't think the consciousness is something that happens in our brains. It's

something that we achieve, that we do, that we enact, it's something that depends on our brains. The brain is necessary for consciousness, but the brain is not the sort of soul -sufficient basis of consciousness. Well, this makes me think of a concert pianist who doesn't think out how to play a particular piece of music somehow. It's through the feel of the keys that the fingers know the pace and they work with the brain to generate the experience of music. That's absolutely right. So much of our actual lives, we are in the flow. We are already wrapped up in a project. If I'm a soccer player in the middle of a game, I'm not in the position of an alien from a strange land who looks at the ball and says, hmm, what is this ball and what is its function in my life? I know what to do because I'm trained because I've got habits because I'm in the flow. And that's certainly true of the concert pianist too. The concert pianist's performance would be disrupted if he or she were made to contemplate the movements of the fingers. The fingers are these kinds of transparencies through which the musician is acting on the world. All this

obviously has some profound implications for research into artificial intelligence. And as we've said, there are a lot of scientists who think that the brain basically works like a computer and therefore someday we'll be able to build a sophisticated computer that is conscious. Are you saying that will never happen? I'm not saying that actually. To make a creature with a mind, say in a laboratory, you need to give it a kind of embodied relation to the world. We need to be able to build robots that can walk around and interact with the environment and change because of those interactions. Only that will lead to consciousness. That's right. And maybe even go a step further and say that as we develop prosthetic cyborgian ways of enhancing ourselves technologically, that we will enhance or develop or at least change the character of our consciousness. So I think that much is right in this kind of science fiction fantasy. Well, while we're on the subject of science fiction, let me ask you about the movie Blade

Runner, which raises the whole question of whether the replicants, the machines, and the movie have consciousness. Is this a possible scenario? One of the things which is so beautiful about that movie, I think that movie is really a deeply philosophically engaged work of art. To really understand that movie and follow the plot and engage it, you kind of have to do some philosophy. If you remember the main character who's played by Harrison Ford, he's a sort of a kind of policeman named Deckard. His job is to track down and maybe even kill runaway sort of revolutionary replicants. And the whole movie narratively is built in the idea that we just know. We know with moral certainty that it's wrong to think that a merely mechanical or physiological test can decide the question of whether these beings have minds and consciousness or not. We just know that. And even Deckard knows that Deckard actually forms a romantic

relationship with one of them, being romantically involved with somebody's incompatible with thinking of them as just a machine. So that movie, I think, really shows us that we can't consistently take physiological criteria to be definitive of what it is to have a mind, that mind, spirit, soul, consciousness, call it what you will, are wrapped up with the kinds of ongoing, temporally extended interactions that we enjoy. Al the Noe is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. He spoke with Steve Paulson about his book, Out of Our Heds. Why are you staring at this, Sebastian? Because you're so different. You're so perfect? Yes. What generation are you? Nexus 6. Ah, I knew it, because I do genetic design work for the Toreal Corporation. There's some of me in you. Show me something. We're no computers, Sebastian, we're

physical. I think, Sebastian, therefore I am. A scene from the science fiction classic Blade Runner. You're listening to jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, one of the rising stars of the jazz world. He's released three critically acclaimed albums in the last three years. One of the remarkable things about Iyer is his background. He's Indian by Heritage, and one of his projects is to create a new kind of music, a synthesis of Western jazz and Indian music. Iyer originally intended to go into science, not music. He has a PhD in physics and a deep understanding of both math and neuroscience, all of which he uses to make jazz. For example, he's even based some of his compositions on one of mathematics'

most famous series of numbers, the Fibonacci sequence. And Strange Hams asked Iyer how he's managed to meld his science with his art. Well, what happened was after a year, I did my undergraduate in math and physics a year, and then I entered the PhD program at UC Berkeley in physics. But at the same time, I'd been playing music all along. And in fact, in college, I had started writing my own music and leading my own bands and stuff. Then when I got to the Bay Area, I was suddenly kind of immersed in a musical culture. You know, I basically apprenticed with a lot of elder musicians. And so I was doing that while I was in a PhD program in physics. But then what I ended up doing was instead of completely abandoning academia, I was able to put together my own interdisciplinary PhD program at UC Berkeley. And I ended up doing a dissertation on music perception and cognition. So the cognitive science of music.

You know, it's based on the study of the mind and the brain and everything in between. A lot of that work kind of happened in a disembodied fashion, meaning that mental processes took place somewhere besides the body, you know. So the body was this giant machine you kind of tow around to supply the energy to run the brain. Yeah, and all that really mattered was what we did with our brains. That's kind of this bias that's part of Western thought. It goes back to Descartes. Cartesian duality is called. And I can see as a musician why this would interest you because music is so physical. I mean, as you must feel that when you're making music, you're not just using your head. Well, what was important for me was thinking about rhythm, for example. Musical rhythm is essentially the rhythms of bodies in action. Do you mean like the breath? Well, breath is one inherent bodily rhythm that we have. Basically breathing, walking, and talking, all sort of take place on

slightly different timescales. You know, the breath based on corresponds to the phrase and walking basically corresponds to what we call pulse or beat. And talking corresponds to the stuff of music, the notes of music, the fine grain detail in the music. Is there a track from one of your recent CDs that you might point to to illustrate some of what you're talking about? Let me think. You know, you could listen to my version of Black and Tan Fantasy, which is a song by Duke Ellington. Basically, I'm kind of connecting with the history of stride piano. And you are responsible for multiple streams of activity. You have to, in the left hand, kind of generate a pulse in a sense of buoyancy and steadiness. And in

the right hand, often sort of cut across that and be almost more conversational. It has to almost form sentences, I guess you could say that way. So it has to add up and make sense. Getting back to that mass degree of yours, you wrote a wonderful piece for the Guardian a year or ago, how Fibonacci taught us to swing. That title was not my idea. That's great. But what you say in the piece is if I'm getting this right, you reveal that you actually use the Fibonacci sequence of numbers to structure some of your music. Yeah, but I'm not the first to do that. You know, I can point you to other people who did that bar talk most famously, culture into. So without going terribly heavily into the numbers,

how does the Fibonacci sequence relate to your music? Without going into numbers. Well, the Fibonacci sequences, you know, the famous one, one, two, three, five, eight, it's basically each, each number in the sequences, the sum of the previous two numbers, right? And then it goes on forever. It does. But what happens as you go further into forever, any pair of numbers in the sequence, if you divide one by the other, you get closer to this special ratio called the golden ratio, which is an irrational number. But it's a number that occurs all over the place in nature and in design and in architecture and in the growth of snail shells and sunflowers and all kinds of unlikely places. It basically represents growth. And it has an aesthetic beauty, doesn't it? Isn't that ratio behind a lot of things we find visually very beautiful? That claim could be made. I guess what I'm trying to do is explore that to what degree is that really true. You know, part

of what I did, particularly in that what I talk about in that article is an arrangement I did of its famous Soul Jazz song from 70s called Mystic Brew by Ronnie Foster. But it has a particular harmonic rhythm that essentially is a Fibonacci rhythm. So then I wanted to see if I could test this and kind of take it through successive pairs of Fibonacci numbers. Play the same song, but through different Fibonacci derived versions of the song. That's probably the easiest, I don't know if that makes, it probably doesn't make any sense. But the point is not for it to make sense when I explain it, because in fact the musical result is the point. It's fascinating because it sounds like you're using math to explore music. You start with math and say, well let's see what might happen if we played around with this in musical terms. I can see it working both ways, but I'm less interested in validating the sciences by making art

that's in service of the sciences. I'm more interested in the sciences kind of serving art. You know, I think that all of my heroes like Coltrane and like Thelonius Muck and Duke Ellington, they were on to all of this, all the stuff that we're talking about. They're basically on the frontiers of human perception, as far as I know, and yet they're using what they find in a creative way to make something that connects to us as humans. Jazz pianist Vijaya talked with end -stream ships. If you'd like a complete list of the music we played and also transcripts, longer uncut interviews, and our comic book on the Science of Consciousness, you'll find them all on our website at ttbook .org slash Meet Your Mind. It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming. This hour is called Mind

and Brain. It's part of our special series Meet Your Mind, a user's guide to the Science of Consciousness, brought to you by Wisconsin Public Radio. Our series was produced by Steve Paulson with the help of end -stream champs Sarah Nicks, Doug Gordon, Veronica Rickert, and Charles Monroe Kane. Our technical director is Carillo and Steve Mullin at Walk West Productions wrote the theme music. Special thanks to two of our sponsors for Meet Your Mind, Promega Corporation, providing tools and technologies for research in life science, and the newer foundation, exploring meaning and commonality of human experience.