The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Nicholas Humphrey. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Nick Humphrey. Nick is emeritus professor of psychology at the London School of Economics and is a senior member of Darwin College Cambridge. Welcome, Nick.
Nicholas: Hello, good morning.
Jim: Looking forward to this conversation. Nick is the author of a long list of books on the science of consciousness and related topics, and I recently added one of them, Seeing Red, to my reading stack. Today, we’re gonna take a deep dive into his 2023 book, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness. And despite the deep dive into the topic, this is really a quite accessible volume and includes plenty of grounding in real life experiences of the author. I probably added five new ideas to ponder from reading it, so don’t be afraid to pick it up.
As regular listeners know, the science of consciousness has been a long term interest of mine. We’ve had on guests like Neil Seth, Bernard Baars, Yoshua Bengio, Antonio Damasio, Christof Koch, Emery Brown, and others. And, of course, as usual, links to those will be on our episode page at jimruttshow.com.
Since I booked this episode with Nicholas, something has occurred in my life which makes this even more central to my thinking. As some of you know, I’ve taken on a new gig as chairman of the California Institute of Machine Consciousness. This has gotten me digging back into this literature in considerable depth, which I haven’t done in a few years other than to read the occasional book for my podcast. So listeners can expect a steady stream of new episodes on this topic.
So now let’s get down to it. Before we dig into the book in detail, one of the things you get into early is you mentioned that the book is about sentience, and then you talk about it as the invention of consciousness. An obvious question comes up on your distinction between sentience and consciousness. So let’s start there.
Nicholas: I think it’s actually a very important distinction to make, especially in the context of the possibility of consciousness in machines. I think we should restrict the term sentience to what philosophers have called phenomenal consciousness. That’s the sensory consciousness, the quality of conscious experience which goes with eating, drinking, smelling, having sex, the feel of the color red, the pain of a bee sting, that sort of consciousness which is really only associated with sensation in human beings.
Now consciousness also has a wider definition. John Locke, long time ago, defined it as “consciousness is the perception of what passeth in a man’s own mind.” And I think that’s quite a good definition for cognitive science and for philosophy – the perception of what’s happening in one’s own mind. In other words, if we know that we’re having a particular mental state, we’re conscious of it. And I think that’s quite a good general definition, but it covers a lot more than we would call sentience.
We’re conscious of memories, thoughts, intentions, beliefs, etcetera, which don’t have that particular qualitative content. And if they don’t have that, they don’t matter to us in the same way. We don’t have a view about what it’s like to see that the door is shut or whatever it may be. We do have a view about what it’s like to have salt on our tongue or red light at our eyes.
And when we talk about machine consciousness, of course, that’s what we’re really thinking about. Do machines feel in that way? And, of course, when it comes to animals, that’s the major question too because it’s sentience or phenomenal consciousness which would seem to have moral weight. If an animal feels like that, then perhaps we need to care about it in a way which we should care about all sentient beings. If it’s merely cognitively conscious, well, good for it. It will be an interesting individual machine to interact with, but it’s not going to be something which we need to give rights to or think of as being in that respect like us.
Jim: Yeah. You take on Ned Block’s old distinction between access consciousness or A-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness or P-consciousness, which people still talk about a fair bit in the area of consciousness science. Give me your take on where he didn’t get it quite right.
Jim: Yeah. You take on Ned Block’s old distinction between access consciousness or A-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness or P-consciousness, which people still talk about a fair bit in the area of consciousness science. Give me your take on where he didn’t get it quite right.
Nicholas: Yeah. I think Ned really clouded the pitch, and I think it was actually my mistake to even try to continue to use his term phenomenal consciousness. But that’s been in use a long time – it goes back to the eighteenth century, so I wasn’t going to allow Ned to take it over and define it his way.
Ned Block, back twenty to thirty years ago now, drew what he thought was a crucial distinction between access consciousness, which means introspective consciousness, the mental states of which we’re aware. And he thought that sensations, phenomenal consciousness, were not accessible in that respect. It was a very strange thing to suggest because if we can’t access phenomenal consciousness, how do we know we’ve got it, and why does it matter to us?
In lots of ways, it was an incoherent distinction, but it’s permeated the field, and it’s become very annoying to others who want to talk clearly about phenomenal consciousness as a real biological phenomenon, something which really changes and matters to our lives, which we do have access to and which has these magical qualities which we need to explain from an evolutionary point of view. Or if we were thinking about machines, to explain from an engineering point of view, how could a machine come to have that sort of consciousness? If the machine had no access to it, if it was pure P-consciousness, just somewhere hidden in the depths of the machinery, but no subject there who knew it was conscious in that way, it really wouldn’t count and it really wouldn’t matter.
Ned and I’ve fallen out about that, and he won’t agree with me. I’m not gonna pretend I agree with him, but I do think maybe we need to change the terminology. That’s why sentience is, in some ways, a better word for phenomenal consciousness, except that, of course, people have used that in various ways too. The language is not clean.
Jim: It’s one of the things I have relearned as I stuck my head back into these wars over the last couple of months is, man, I recommended to the CIMC folks that one of our first projects is to create a glossary about what we mean by these various terms. Because, you know, you go to a meeting on consciousness, and you can spend the first half day just getting people’s definitions aligned.
Nicholas: Yeah. Well, you’re absolutely right, Jim. I mean, I’ve just come from a conference on AI and sentience, artificial intelligence and sentience took place in Heraklion, Crete two weeks ago. We did spend the first day trying to agree about what we were talking about, and I came from another meeting on the evolution of consciousness. My paper was the question, the evolution of what? We’ve gotta get our terms clear, and we need to know what it is we mean functionally in terms of the kind of things we could measure and test before we can begin to talk about whether or not it exists in animals or in machines.
I’ll tell you something. The field of consciousness studies has been going backwards in some respects. Twenty or thirty years ago, people were beginning to talk sensibly about it. A lot of time had been put in by philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists in asking what are meaningful questions? What can we really ask? What kinds of questions can we answer by experiments, for example? Daniel Dennett was very important in that respect. But after all that work, once the new phase of consciousness studies took off just in the last ten, fifteen years, everybody’s been getting in on the act, and they really haven’t learned the lessons which were so hard won back then. And so I think the field is a bit of a mess at the moment. It’s very hard to assess what people really mean by things.
Jim: It is very much the case. And, also, as you point out, the ideas that seemed way out there twenty or twenty-five years ago keep coming back. Right? And one of the positions we’ve chosen at CIMC is to ring-fence off an area of ideas to consider. For instance, we have chosen to rule out Penrose-Hameroff. Right? And probably more controversially, we have decided to rule off IIT, Tononi, etcetera.
Nicholas: And I’m very pleased to hear that because I think not many people have been taking that risk of going against the grain. I mean, these ideas are very popular, panpsychist ideas, whether it’s outright panpsychism of the kind you get from Philip Goff or Galen Strawson or the covert panpsychism of Tononi and Koch, which I think is equally incoherent and dangerous to scientific studies. It’s muddying the waters. Nonetheless, of course, because it’s so romantic and sometimes just because it’s so crazy, people latch onto it and love to talk about it.
I mean, there are so many bad ideas out there, and you wonder why people hold them. I think I fall back on the Roman emperor Tertullian’s adage that “I believe because it’s impossible.” It’s just because it all seems so mad and crazy. We like to say that a teacup could be conscious or the sun could be conscious. There’s a nice riff which Nietzsche put on there. He said, “I believe because I am impossible.” And I often think this applies to some of our leading consciousness experts like Christof Koch. Who’s a really smart guy.
Jim: I’ve had him on my podcast.
Nicholas: I know you only have smart guys on your podcast, but nonetheless, smart guys can get…
Jim: I’ve had him on my podcast.
Nicholas: I know you only have smart guys on your podcast, but nonetheless, smart guys can get it wrong.
Jim: Yeah, that’s interesting. Very much so. And of course, as you know, having been in this field longer than almost anybody, the domain of consciousness attracts cranks like manure attracts flies. And in fact, one of the reasons I did agree to become involved with the California Institute for Machine Consciousness is it looks like at least a possible vector to get down to something that’s actually empirically verifiable. If we can actually create a machine consciousness – of course, we have to know that we have, you know, what is the standard for that, which we still don’t have. But once we have it, the beauty of a machine consciousness is you can instrument it all to hell. You can actually look at it on a microsecond by microsecond basis and see what’s going on. So you could actually say real reproducible things about it, which are really hard to do in animal consciousness at a fine grain at least.
Nicholas: But I think you made an important point just at the beginning there when you say it attracts flies like to a field of manure. The fact that consciousness studies is so fascinating is, I think, an important clue to what we’re talking about. And in fact, I’ve argued in the past that actually one of the functions of consciousness is in a sense to make us believe that we exist outside of nature and beyond scientific explanation. Now why would that be a valuable belief to hold? Because it gives us a metaphysical importance which we couldn’t otherwise pretend to.
And then once we have that kind of self-important “look at me, look at the kind of thing which happens inside my head,” all this astonishing qualitative magic which seems to have no basis in physical reality – that gives me a sense of myself which is very important and valuable. It gives me not only a sense of my own importance, but of the importance of other beings like myself, other human beings whom I recognize to have an equal right to think of themselves as centers of this mystery.
Now I’m an evolutionist, and so you might well wonder, well, okay, if that’s if it makes humans think of themselves as so special, what’s it doing for chimpanzees or dogs or mice for that matter? That’s an important question too. And in my evolutionary story, I have to do some footwork, clever footwork around the origins of consciousness because it didn’t originally have that role. But certainly in people like ourselves, beings like ourselves, one of its functions has been to lift us above reality. Nietzsche said art exists in order to save us from materialism. I think that consciousness exists in a way to save us from a material view of what it’s like to be a human being. But that doesn’t mean that this mythology, this wonderful myth we have about what consciousness is right. It’s, of course, not right. I am as much flesh and blood as any animal, and any animal is as much material as any rock or stone. In the end, that’s where it comes from. But this wonderful myth we have about ourselves, which is generated by consciousness, it’s why we get up in the morning.
Jim: That’s very interesting, you know, is the noble lie necessary? It’s a different question, which I’ve had a couple of podcasts on recently and interestingly, there are people who say, yes, the noble lie is necessary, but we’ll leave that for another day. As I was reading the book, one of the things that came to mind is actually I went back and checked, and it’s a quote you did not use, but it’s Dobzhansky’s famous line, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” One of the things I loved about this book, and so many people in this area wave a flag at it but don’t take it seriously, is that consciousness, it’s an emergence from biology, approximately, right? It must earn its way. It’s been around for hundreds of million, a couple hundred million years at least, maybe longer. We’ll talk about that later. It had to have paid its way. Consciousness is expensive energetically. It’s probably expensive in genetic information. Almost certainly has to be in evo-devo. There’s lots and lots of biological costs, and yet not only has it persisted from deep time, but it appears to have gotten better and better over time. And there must-
Nicholas: Have been payoff at every step of the way. It’s like, you know, the problem Darwin wrote about early on was that of the really sophisticated things which we marvel at in biological nature, like, let’s say, the evolution of the human eye. You have to be able to get to an eye like that of a monkey or a cat, from a pinhole camera, which exists in the beginnings of it in a worm. So what are all the intermediate stages? At every stage, it must have worked that much better. It must have had a payoff which really made a difference to the animal’s life. So we need to see every stage of consciousness as having been adaptive in that respect.
Jim: Yeah. It’s the as you say, the chain of being has to be connected all the way back from LUCA. All the way back to our last universal common ancestor. And I just – total aside – I just every once in a while focus on this. We are every one of us the last leaf on an unbelievably unlikely chain. That our parents never failed ever all the way back for three and a half billion years to have offspring that lived. And the graph of that which could have been but wasn’t is way larger than the graph of things that are. You know, it gives you kind of a tingly feeling and a sense of responsibility.
Jim: Yeah. It’s as you say, the chain of being has to be connected all the way back from LUCA. Right? All the way back to our last universal common ancestor. And I just, total aside, I just every once in a while focus on this. We are every one of us the last leaf on an unbelievably unlikely chain. Right? That our parents never failed ever all the way back for three and a half billion years to have offspring that lived. And the graph of that which could have been but wasn’t is way larger than the graph of things that are. You know, it gives you kind of a tingly feeling and a sense of responsibility.
Nicholas: It does. It’s actually because you might think that there have been so many reasons for individuals to have given up. I mean, I’ve written, for example, about the psychology of suicide, and I write about why ending it can be so attractive for humans. You don’t have to be that much – just a little too depressed and realize you could simply opt out of it. It’s all too easy, and yet we know that none of our direct ancestors ever did that before the age of 15 or so anyway.
Jim: And, of course, it’s also interesting. This is something in my own thinking about this domain is to always think about things prehuman. The other bad attractor in consciousness studies is to over-index on the human. We have the advantage that humans have words. Right? They have introspection, which you talk about a fair bit. You know, I always test an idea. Okay. What about a chimpanzee? What about a dog? What about a white-tailed deer?
Nicholas: Yeah. It’s a good rule to have in mind, but we must be careful not to assume that it’s continuous all the way down. If we were to take a capacity like human language, for example, there really is nothing comparable to that amongst animals. And therefore, if we were talking about language, we have to realize that something happened in the history of human beings, which simply would produce a kind of phase shift in the way the mind works. And the same, I think, is to some extent true of consciousness. Maybe we’ll get on to that later on.
Jim: We’ll definitely get it. Chapter 14 is the center of the book. Or I think is it 14 or 12? Anyway, I got my notes here. And we go into that funky term that you coined, which as far as I can tell, nobody else has picked up. And we’re gonna talk about that in fair depth because the all-or-nothing attractor. I love this. Whether it’s right or not, I don’t know. But you’ve now obsessed me with this topic. So this is really cool.
Nicholas: Jim, I have to defer to you about attractors. You know an awful lot about physics and mass of attractors, which I probably don’t. So yes. Okay. We’ll get to that.
Jim: Yeah. And I do use attractor metaphorically often, so I have no problem with that at all. Maybe talk a little bit about some of your earlier experiences with phosphenes, etcetera, just as a way to start thinking.
Nicholas: In this book, it’s different from some of my other books because in order to introduce the topics, I go back to my own history of how I got into being fascinated by this subject or that. And so, yeah, I take it right back to when I was an undergraduate and was thrown in the deep end by my supervisor by being invited, the first time I met him, to stand in a bucket of saline alongside him and have electricity electric probes put directly onto my eye. And the reasoned point would be to show that you don’t have to have light to generate physical experiences. You can do it directly by electrical stimulation. It was something which amazingly had been experimented with by Newton a few hundred years earlier and back in the same part of Cambridge University where I was a student. So I became fascinated early on in sensation, in what how the particular modalities of sensation get established. What’s the difference between light and sound and smell and taste? Why can’t you move smoothly, let’s say, from light, from experiences of visual sensations to auditory ones? There seems to be a strange and interesting gulf between them. They’re all sensations. They all have that phenomenal quality, which sets them apart from other phenomena in the universe. Nonetheless, they’re each of them kind of islands of experience. So that was something I’ve thought about from the very beginning of my career as an experimental psychologist, and then I go on to discuss experiments I did with monkeys on blindsight, and then I-
Jim: Yeah. Let’s talk about that. I did not realize that you were actually the discoverer of blindsight.
Nicholas: Yeah. I discovered something which was the first example of it, which seemed absolutely clear and convincing. It wasn’t called blindsight then, because it was work I was doing on Helen, a monkey which had her visual cortex removed by my research supervisor in Cambridge. I mean, just by a bit of luck, really, I had the chance to work with this monkey who’d been blind for a year before I met her and discovered that she wasn’t as blind as anybody thought. She wasn’t even as blind as she thought, and that was always interesting because I could persuade her.
Jim: Yeah. That was the important point.
Jim: Yeah. Let’s talk about that. I did not realize that you were actually the discoverer of blindsight.
Nicholas: Yeah. I discovered something which was the first example of it, which seemed absolutely clear and convincing. It wasn’t called blindsight then, because it was work I was doing on Helen, a monkey which had her visual cortex removed by my research supervisor in Cambridge. By a bit of luck really, I had the chance to work with this monkey who’d been blind for a year before I met her and discovered that she wasn’t as blind as anybody thought. She wasn’t even as blind as she thought, and that was always interesting because I could persuade her.
Jim: Yeah. That was the important point.
Nicholas: I could persuade her that, in fact, she was able to see. And so I got to work with this one monkey for seven years, and it was quite a major experience in my life to, in a sense, be the midwife to this development of vision in a blind animal, but not ordinary vision. That was what was so remarkable. It turned out to be what we now think of as unconscious or insensate vision. Helen, this monkey, wasn’t in the visual sphere, was not sentient. She didn’t have sensations. It wasn’t like anything for her to see. And how do we know that? Because after this work, it was possible to – well, people ask new questions about human beings with the same kind of brain damage and discovered this remarkable phenomenon, which Larry Weiskrantz coined the term for. He called it blindsight, unconscious vision.
Jim: And we now know other things. For instance, our ability to react to a ball coming at our face happens faster than a signal can come up the whole perceptual stack, which typically takes eighty milliseconds or something. So there presumably are other circuits that come out of areas at the lowest level of vision that sends some form of low grade signal to some part of our cognitive processes.
Nicholas: But it’s not necessarily so low grade. I mean, it’s been shown the blindsight patient can read, for example, even while saying that there’s nothing there, not seeing anything. And the question that raises, and it’s an evolutionary question in the end, is if we can perceive, take in cognitively the information and act on it and make decisions on the basis of it about vision – it might be about touch or smell or anything else – without having any corresponding conscious sensation, then why do we have the sensation? What’s it for? What’s it doing? Why did nature indulge in this extravagance apparently of giving us not only perception, a cognitive ability, but phenomenal consciousness and the sensory quality which goes with it? So that’s what I’ve been working on. I can hardly dare say the experiments with Helen began in 1966, quite a time ago. But it set me up on a course of asking questions about consciousness, which I’ve stuck to more or less ever since. I’ve made some diversions, but that’s been my love, my interest in answering the question of what are sensations for?
Jim: And how do sensations fit into the broader architecture? Just as a little aside, it seems like you had a quite rich personal relationship with Helen.
Nicholas: Yeah. I worked with her over seven years. She started in Cambridge with me. I then moved to Oxford. She came to Oxford with me, then back to the Animal Behavior Lab in Cambridge. And all the time, what was peculiar about this relationship was that she was developing an ability which astonished her, apparently, and astonished everyone else around us. Nobody believed that Helen could see in that way, and it seemed to just go against everything we knew about the physiology of the brain. So that was very important because personally – I mean, she became in a way – I wouldn’t say a pet animal, it’s not the right word to use about a monkey. She was nothing like a dog. But nonetheless, we knew each other pretty well, and I would take her for walks around the fields at Madingley, and those were in the days when we were still allowed to do that. Today, you wouldn’t be allowed to take a monkey out on a lead anymore. But anyway, we worked together, and literally by taking her for walks, by encouraging her to do things, climbing a tree or whatever it might be, it was through that experience that she slowly recovered her ability to see. And that’s actually a very important lesson for science. You don’t find things out if you stay just within the confines of a lab. You need to bring animals into the environment to which they are adapted, and then they’ll begin to show you what they can really do.
Jim: I will say Helen was lucky to have you as her experimenter.
Jim: I will say Helen was lucky to have you as her experimenter.
Nicholas: She was lucky, but not forever, I should say. If I hadn’t stepped in, she would probably have been, as the experimenters use the term, “sacrificed.” People wanted to see her brain and see what had become of it after the brain lesion. She had at least seven years more with me because we put that off. Not forever in the end. In the end, Harry Weiskrantz – it was his monkey, he’d operated on it – he wanted to do the histology and get the brain anatomy. And so I went away, and he and his colleague came over and dispatched the animal, and that was it. It was a very sad event for me.
People do bring up how could I have been involved in work which involved firstly making a monkey blind, even if I showed that she could, in fact, recover a good deal of sight. It’s a tricky question. I wouldn’t do it again, I don’t think. And in fact, that kind of experimental work on blindness in monkeys would not be allowed in the United Kingdom or the United States.
Jim: It’s a sign of our moral progress – we still have further to go, but we are treating our close evolutionary relatives a lot better than we were fifty years ago.
Nicholas: Yeah. It’s not true all over the world. I mean, what do we say about that? The fact is that in Japan, they are doing similar experiments. In China, they are doing them now. Everybody is very interested in the results from a scientific point of view, and yet we wouldn’t do them in our own labs anymore. We could talk about that.
Jim: Interesting and difficult question. Yeah. Let’s move on to the result which I was not aware of, which I found very interesting, and that’s the work on color preferences in monkeys.
Nicholas: Well, okay. This follows on almost directly after I decided, six or so years after I began research, that I’d had enough of working on monkeys with brain damage. I did some other work in relation to the stuff with Helen too. I made single cell recordings from monkeys’ brains and so on. I wanted out from that, and so I decided to do research on what monkeys would like to have happen to them. Not what we were imposing on them, not when they became the subject of our experiments, but when, in a sense, they were allowed to experiment with the world and discover it for themselves.
And so I decided to look into aesthetic preferences in monkeys. Just, given the chance, what would they like to look at or listen to or smell or whatever it may be? It was very ambitious. I mean, of course, I thought of this as possibly providing a basis for evolution of artistry and all the things which we think of as so important for humans. It was much too ambitious. The monkeys I worked with showed no signs of aesthetic sensitivity at all. Try as I might, I couldn’t get them to take an interest in art or music or any higher levels of visible patterning which we would call beautiful.
But they did show strong feelings about elementary aspects of sensation. And in particular – I think no one had thought of it before, certainly no one noticed it – they showed astonishingly strong feelings about colors, much stronger than we humans do. It followed the spectrum, basically. They really hated red light, and they loved the blue end of the spectrum. All the colors fell in between. So that a monkey would become seriously upset if it was confined to a room which was colored red. Its hair would stand on end. It would start urinating. It would get upset and fidgety and so on. Put it in a blue room, and it would calm down.
So I spent some years trying to find out what was going on here. What’s the basis for this preference? Why, from an evolutionary point of view, might it have arisen in monkeys, which are not distant relations of ourselves? And is there any evidence of a similar reaction in human beings even if it’s not as strong? It turns out that there is. Some conditions can hugely exaggerate people’s feelings about colors, and they follow then very much the pattern of the monkeys, and they get very upset by red light, and they feel calmed.
Jim: Now a final aside before we get into the theory part, and that is your experience with gorillas, and you were then leading to a hypothesis around social intelligence as one of the things that our good friend evolution has used to ratchet up our sentience.
Jim: Now a final aside before we get into the theory part, and that is your experience with gorillas, and you were then leading to a hypothesis around social intelligence as one of the things that our good friend evolution has used to ratchet up our sentience.
Nicholas: Well, that was another lucky break, I think. I was very lucky early in my research career. I came from Oxford to the Cambridge Madingley department of animal behavior. That was a research place which studied animals in nature, animal behavior in the wild. We had a lot of field researchers coming in and out of it. Jane Goodall was a student there and other famous primatologists, among whom was the great Dian Fossey.
Dian Fossey was a student of Robert Hinde in my department, and I met her when she came back to write up her PhD, which had been based on research in the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda. She was in the lab in a very gloomy state sitting at a desk late at night trying to finish this dreadful PhD, which of course, was not her cup of tea at all. She liked being out in the field. I got to know her quite well, and out of that came an invitation to go and visit.
As it happened, I had a break in what I was doing, and so I was able to go out and visit Dian Fossey in Camp Karisoke, her center in Virunga Volcanoes, and spent three months there. I didn’t really have a project when I went out there, but I soon developed one. When I needed some funding to send me out to Africa with her, it turned out that there was a project which I could take on without much experience. There were a group of dead gorillas in the camp. They’d been killed by poachers. The skeletons were lying around in bags, the bodies were in bags, and nobody had got around to doing any anatomical observations on them.
Mountain gorillas are quite rare, and it’s very important to do proper measurements of their skulls and bones. So I got a grant from the Royal Society to pay my way in order to go and make measurements of the skulls of these gorillas. In the first days and weeks I was there, I spent a rather surprising time boiling up gorilla bodies and carcasses in a big cauldron and stripping the flesh from their bones and using my calipers and making all these detailed measurements.
How could I not be impressed by what was in front of me? These animals had huge skulls, really colossal skulls, bigger than human beings’ skulls. And, of course, that meant that they had rather large brains, not as big as human brains as it happens, but nonetheless, very much bigger than the brain of a monkey. I did those measurements and wrote them up. I published a paper in Nature quite quickly.
But what it set me up for was to ask new questions once I got into the forest and could observe the animals in the wild. What struck me immediately about mountain gorillas is that there was nothing for them to do. Life was amazingly easy for them. They have no enemies to speak of except human poachers, and they could escape or get out of the way of those. There are no other predators. Food was abundant. Life was apparently easy and comfortable, and all they did was lie around, as I thought, chewing away on the vegetation and burping and enjoying life in the sun.
What do you need a big brain for that? You could do that with an ant’s brain, and yet these gorillas have huge, powerful organs in their heads. Brains are, of course, for thinking, and therefore, they’re the basis for intelligence. So there must be something going on in gorillas’ lives which was requiring intelligence of a high order, which I simply wasn’t picking up.
Then it dawned on me – well, firstly, it dawned on me to think what if I was in their place, what would I be thinking about? As any young lecturer out of his university, of course, what I thought about was all my friends and my girlfriends and my relationships and all the problems they’d been causing me, and the things which were going on still in Cambridge while I was sitting in the jungle.
And then I looked at the gorillas again, and I saw that exactly the same seemed to be happening for them. This life of theirs was nothing like so simple as I thought it seemed to be. Looking closely, I saw that there were endless disputes going on, endless fights over dominance, jealousies, rivalries, squabbles about access to food, and later on about access to mates.
I realized that in order to maintain what seems a simple existence, they have to be doing something quite extraordinary. They have to be psychologists. They have to understand and be able to relate to other animals like themselves in a complex social group just as we humans have to do. And out of that came a new idea, which was that it was actually social life which had driven the evolution of the brains of the higher apes like us and like chimpanzees and gorillas.
Nobody had thought of it that way before. Nobody had put social and intelligence together. Social psychology was a kind of poor country cousin of experimental psychology and really rather uninteresting and absurd – nobody in their right mind studied social psychology. And yet everybody studied intelligence. How could they relate to each other? And then I saw that, actually, it’s a social world where intelligence really comes into its own. That’s what we need our brains for. That’s where all the things which we pride ourselves on in relation to mathematics and science and exploration and decision making and imagination, it’s where they really come into their own. It’s when we’re dealing with other people.
And so I coined the term natural psychology. I said that humans and gorillas too have had to evolve to be natural psychologists. But how do they do it? They don’t do it just by being clever. Psychology is a very difficult subject to do as we are all increasingly discovering in the experimental field. Predicting the behavior of another human being is probably predicting the behavior of the most complex thing in the universe, and gorillas and chimpanzees aren’t far behind.
How do we do it? Well, I thought, rather the way I do it is that I imagine what it would be like if I was in the place of whoever it is that I’m trying to predict. And then how do I do that? And why can I do that? It’s because I know what it’s like to be me, and I know what it’s like to be me because I have a particular kind of consciousness. I have all these experiences running through my head within the framework of a mental model, which I call my mind, and I can project that onto other creatures like myself. And so I began to see theory of mind as being the most important aspect of the way the mind works. It’s that we have our mind in order to understand the mind of others like ourselves. So that gave me quite a new take on consciousness and even on the things which fascinated me from the start about things like experience of colors and pains and emotions and time.
Jim: Yeah. It’s interesting, of course, that this social ratchet appeared again probably with the evolution of human language. Robin Dunbar and his work on gossip as a reasonable contender for the ratchet up, or, you know, my favorite alternative one is seduction. Right? So we know that anything that’s sexually selected can ramp very quickly – peacocks’ tails, etcetera. And so, who knows? Maybe 17-year-old guys and 16-year-old girls were the real inventors of language as they sparred with each other on who was gonna get to mate with who.
Nicholas: Yeah. Well, Geoffrey Miller made precisely that suggestion in his book, The Mating Mind.
Jim: Yeah. That reminds me. Have to have Geoffrey on. I’ve emailed him back and forth a few times, but I have to close him out. You mentioned theory of mind. The mirror test, which some people argue is a good measure of theories of mind. Do gorillas pass the mirror test? I don’t recall.
Nicholas: They don’t, which is a bit of a puzzle. The mirror test is a very ingenious idea, and when Gordon Gallup invented it, I think everybody was bowled over by the fact that not only chimpanzees could pass it – this is the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror, which we shouldn’t have been surprised about, really – but what’s more that dogs couldn’t, for example, and Rhesus monkeys couldn’t.
So it seemed to be drawing a rather sharp line between the sense of self which exists for higher primates like the apes, and that which we’ve assumed is also present, but not to that degree in other animals. And obviously, it’s clearly related to social life again. The ability to recognize oneself in the mirror is very similar to the ability to recognize someone else as being like oneself.
It’s not turned out to be an entirely reliable test. It seems there are reasons why some animals which we expect to pass it really don’t. And perhaps it’s also a test which other animals can cheat on without really having a sense of self. But nonetheless, it was a very important new tool in the armory of developmental psychology to see at what point humans and animals begin to recognize themselves in mirrors because that suggests they have a sense of being themselves, a conscious existing being.
Jim: And if gorillas don’t pass the test, and then your hypothesis about social intelligence is correct and that it’s based on theory of mind, then there must be some theory of mind process that doesn’t manifest in the mirror test.
Nicholas: Yeah. And I think it’s to do with that mirrors are very strange objects in a way. I mean, we take them for granted in our environment, but you look at yourself and you say, yeah, that’s me. But it’s not me, of course. What happens is it’s an illusion. And to get to the idea that what’s present when you look in the mirror is you is in fact a kind of bizarre paradox. And I think that some animals simply get hung up on that. They’re actually in some sense too sophisticated. They realize perfectly well, okay, there’s something out there in the mirror which has some curious resemblances to me, but of course, it can’t be me. But now what to do with that idea next? And so you have to suspend disbelief in order to pass the mirror test.
Jim: That’s funny. Dogs generally ignore themselves in the mirror. Had one dachshund, famously dumb, you know, not smart dog at all, but he’d bark at himself in the mirror because he thought it was another dog.
Nicholas: Dogs are very interesting. There are real breed differences in dogs. It’s well known that collies pass, for example, poodles do. I don’t know what your dumb dog was, but other dogs like Labradors seem never to get it.
Jim: Yeah. Our labs totally ignored the mirror, but they didn’t attack the mirror either. The dachshund attacked the mirror, thought it was another dog. I think the labs just say, I don’t know what the hell that is, I’m just not interested in it. Interesting. Well, one other question that brought up, I was reading the gorilla chapter, which is, what about orangutans? Right? They do indeed live an essentially nonsocial life, and yet they have cognitive power and brain body ratios, you know, I think higher than gorillas, lower than chimps.
Nicholas: Dogs are very interesting. There are real breed differences in dogs. It’s well known that collies pass, for example, poodles do. I don’t know what your dumb dog was, but other dogs like Labradors seem never to get it.
Jim: Yeah. Our labs totally ignored the mirror, but they didn’t attack the mirror either. The dachshund attacked the mirror, thought it was another dog. The labs just say, I don’t know what the hell that is, I’m just not interested in it. Interesting. Well, one other question that came up – I was reading the gorilla chapter – what about orangutans? They do indeed live an essentially nonsocial life, and yet they have cognitive power and brain-body ratios, I think higher than gorillas, lower than chimps.
Nicholas: And they pass the mirror test. Yeah. I think orangutans are a very interesting and I suspect a very special case. My hypothesis about orangutans is that what we’re seeing is an aberration. They weren’t always like that. I suspect that they probably got to the islands where they now live from the mainland on boats taken by human beings. They’d been adopted as pets or whatever it is and taken across there. So they effectively were orphans. They didn’t have the social life that their cousins and ancestors on the mainland had had, where I suspect they had a much more complex and interesting society.
They, in a sense, once they got to Borneo or wherever it was, began to behave rather like what people find happens later to a monkey if you bring it up without a mother. They become isolated, unable to relate to others, unable to be good mothers to their own children, and so on. And so I think that, like Harlow’s motherless mothers, the infants which reached the islands basically had got off on a very bad trajectory and all orangutans maybe have inherited that absence and that strange kind of isolation as a result. It’s only a hypothesis, but it’s actually taken seriously by some anthropologists. It is such a puzzle, and there’s also reason to believe orangutans did live on the mainland in China before they went out to these isolated islands and then went extinct on the mainland. So we just don’t know what their life was like on the mainland.
Jim: Really, you could look at whether there was a keyhole effect on the genetics of the island orangs, and if it corresponded to say 40,000 years ago, that might be reasonable hypothesis that supports a bit of evidence. That’s totally off the subject. This is something that was raised in my mind as reading things. Now let’s dig back into the real theory aspects here, and that is the key distinction that you start to make around chapter 10 on the distinctions between sensation and perception. You can take as much time as you want to lay that picture out.
Jim: Really, you could look at whether there was a keyhole effect on the genetics of the island orangs, and if it corresponded to say 40,000 years ago, that might be reasonable hypothesis that supports a bit of evidence. That’s totally off the subject. This is something that was raised in my mind as reading things. Now let’s dig back into the real theory aspects here, and that is the key distinction that you start to make around chapter 10 on the distinctions between sensation and perception. You can take as much time as you want to lay that picture out.
Nicholas: Well, the best way of explaining that – and it’s the reason I didn’t do it this way in the book – is to take the case of blindsight. Blindsight is a case of perception in the absence of sensation. What the cases of blindsight do is basically drive a wedge between these two concepts. We have to recognize that they can be dissociated. You can have perception and perceptual consciousness without sensory consciousness.
And as I said, for me, the central question became: why in that case do we have sensory consciousness, phenomenal experience? In the book, I take that as the question to pursue – how could this strange phenomenon have come into being, this way of representing what’s happening at my sense organs?
When I say perception and sensation, let me say this again, are both representations. When I look at a red tomato, for example, I have a sensation of redness, which is a sensation representing what the light coming from the tomato to my eyes is like – how is it affecting me? I also perceive the tomato as having the color red, being the same color as a pillar box or whatever. It might be a physical description of it, which is basically a description of its objective properties. Perception is a representation of what’s out there in the world. Sensation is a representation of what’s happening to me and how this object is interacting with me.
On the basis of that, I then go back to sensation and ask how did it begin and what kind of history could we reinvent speculatively to get from very early evidence of animals reacting in a feeling, in a value-assessing way to stimuli impacting their bodies? What did it mean for them? How do we get from that all the way up to the kinds of experiences which we now have and value so much in interacting with the sensory world?
I spin a long story there, but it’s based all along in what I think makes sense, and we can guess how it would have occurred in evolution. Starting with animals’ simple, affective responses to stimuli, how those became how the animal came to read what was happening to it by asking, what am I doing about it? The trick about representing sensations is not true of perception. The way about sensations is if you want to know what you feel about pain, you look at how you’re responding to it. You’re making a motor response to your body surface, or you’re reacting with a wriggle of avoidance or whatever it may be. You’re withdrawing. You’re making an affective response, and you know what you’re responding to by what you’re doing about it.
So sensation began as a process of response, as something we do rather than something we feel. But we came to feel it by monitoring what we ourselves were doing about it. And so I build up from that to ask, well, once you get that as the basis for representing what’s going on, what would we expect to happen next? And I trace a story by which I show that the initial responses we were making to light, sounds, colors, and so on could have become internalized.
They became internalized because the animal in the past who’d been making these responses was becoming more sophisticated. It was growing up and evolving in other ways. It didn’t want to go on making the primitive responses that its ancestors had done, let’s say, to red light or to being touched on the skin. And yet, it still wanted to represent what was happening to it. And so the response became internalized.
Now this is tricky to explain without having a picture to point to, but what I do in the book is show how once you’ve taken that step to internalizing the response, you get a feedback loop which can quickly become something of great significance in terms of the design of the brain because feedback loops can begin to have very surprising properties.
What I was looking for precisely was a surprising property. What could be the basis for qualia or phenomenal experience? How could it have acquired its magical mysterious properties? Its strange kind of temporal thickness, the fact that it seems unlike anything else in the world, the fact that we have qualitative distinct modalities to it and so on. And I saw in these feedback loops a route to that because feedback loops can generate attractor states.
They can catch their own tail and become a stable state with some very complex properties. Mathematicians have talked about how attractors generated by delay differential equations, which are easily mimicked and simulated in the brain, can have an astonishing range of dimensions to them. Not just three-dimensional forms of activity – they can have potentially infinite number of dimensions.
Now that was what I was looking for in a way. I wanted something in the brain which could explain the mysteries of consciousness, and so I wanted something which has the potential for mystery. And these feedback loops with the attractor states which might go with them seem to me a very promising area to look into.
Now at that point, my theorizing begins to lose touch with anything which we could call reality because we don’t know what’s going on in the brain. Who really knows about what’s going on in the brain, and we’ve yet to see these attractor states in all their glory actually occurring in the brain of a living human or a living animal for that matter. But nonetheless, what I do is write a so-called “just-so story,” but it’s a proof in principle of how you could, by simple steps in evolution, get from an early response, a wriggle of acceptance or rejection of a stimulus right the way through to what’s going on when we look at the blue sky or taste a lemon.
Jim: We’ll dig into this soon. I’ve got a whole section on this in my notes. But before we do that…
Nicholas: The great thing, Jim, is that we have all this time. I love it when we can say we’ll dig into this.
Jim: Yeah. That’s why I do what I do. Right? I can find nothing more annoying than twenty-five minute podcasts on important books. Don’t like it. Let somebody else do that. So before we hop into this core idea of the book, I want to talk a little bit about distinctions around sentience and perception and around theories of phenomenal properties. You know, for instance, there’s the illusionism idea. Maybe touch a little bit on how you would distinguish your ideas around sensation in particular versus illusionism. It’s very important, I think.
Nicholas: Well, let’s start with realism. There’s an awful lot of philosophers and neuroscientists who believe that the qualities of phenomenal experience are real in the sense that there really is something in the brain which has the quality of phenomenal redness or phenomenal pain or whatever it is. It goes back to the old idea of an identity between brain states and conscious experience. I think this is a very misleading idea – the idea that there is a neural correlate of consciousness which actually maps on directly to the conscious experience.
Jim: Well, Kant pretty much kicked that one down the road long time ago, right?
Nicholas: It was. It may have been kicked down the road, but it’s still a very popular idea in neuroscience, this identity theory. It’s fundamentally mistaken because what we should be talking about is representation – how does the brain represent a phenomenon, not how it can actually instantiate it.
That brings us on to, if it’s representing something, representing the redness of red or the sweetness of honey or whatever it is, does that mean that what it represents has real existence? Some time ago, I thought that maybe we should just accept that it doesn’t. I used the analogy of looking at an impossible triangle, which we represent as having qualities which it really doesn’t have. It’s an illusion. Richard Gregory invented one which he made out of wood – look at it from the right point of view, and you can’t disabuse yourself of the fact that you’re looking at a real object which nonetheless has impossible spatial features to it.
That seemed to be an interesting analogy. I thought, well, what if these circuits in the brain generate something like impossible objects, which we then misread as having qualities which they really don’t have? I was working with Dan Dennett. Dan took up the idea in a big way. He’d already been talking about the illusion of consciousness, and he thought this was a very nice way to talk about qualia and phenomenal experience. It’s generated a big new side branch of philosophy of mind, which is called illusionism. Keith Frankish has been particularly important in developing it.
I lost faith in it myself. The problem about calling phenomenal experience an illusion is that it implies, at least in the ordinary use of language, that it’s a mistake – that we’re seeing something which is actually invalid, just as when we look at the impossible triangle and think it’s something which it isn’t. Yet I don’t think phenomenal experience should be described like that. I think phenomenal experience is the way we feel about these things happening to our body, and those feelings have a status, even a metaphysical status, which is perfectly real.
We should respect it as having an ontology of its own, which we should not try and dismiss as being an illusion, partly because other people will misunderstand us and think we’re saying consciousness doesn’t exist or something like that, which is a criticism continually leveled against people like Dan Dennett. People ridiculed Dan Dennett’s wonderful book “Consciousness Explained” as being “consciousness explained away.” Well, that’s not what Dan was doing. He was not intending to do that. He knows consciousness is as commanding as this and is the most significant aspect of human life.
Nonetheless, he wanted to use the language of illusionism, and so I’ve now tried to pull back from that. But I continue to use language something like it. I think a much better analogy than a visual illusion or an illusory object is art. I think consciousness is like a work of art. And I talk not about illusionism, but about surrealism. In some sense, phenomenal experience is even more real than the original thing it’s representing. I wrote a paper called “Redder than Red.” The analogy I was drawing was with Picasso’s sculpture of a goat, which he said, “Look at this goat. It’s goatier than a real goat, isn’t it?” And we all know what he means.
I think that when we sense red and have phenomenal experience of red, our redness is redder than real red in a way. So I’m putting a positive spin on these experiences, which I think we should not be shy of reintroducing. The idea of consciousness as art is something which we don’t have to feel worried about or think that we’re dismissing or explaining away. No. We’re putting it on a pedestal in a way which says just how astonishing the human brain is in some sense reinventing a new dimension of experience, in the form of everyday conscious experience.
Jim: Yeah. I think you make a huge distinction here, which I agree with, so therefore, it must be right. Right? Which is that things like sensation and perception and ego, anything you might wanna call conscious contents or unconscious contents are as real as a rock. And I call this emergent naturalism, essentially. The mistake that people make, and I think this is a relatively simple error that if people would correct, they’d be as smart as you and I about this topic, which is things don’t have to be static things. My coffee cup is a static thing. Right? Dynamical patterns are as real as the coffee cup. And what is the things going on in our body, neuronal body chemical system? It’s a very complex dance of dynamics, but it is not a random dance. It’s driven by homeostasis. It’s driven by attractor states. We’re gonna talk about in a minute. And these patterns are every bit as real and as manifestations of the evolution of the universe as my coffee cup is. And not seeing that is what I would describe as the root of the error of people who say things like consciousness or the perception of red or the sensation of red, to use your language, is not real, very real, and has consequences, has causality. Right?
Nicholas: Nice way to put it, Jim. But nonetheless, be careful because soon otherwise, you’ll find you get adopted by the philosophical realists who in a kind of Cartesian way think there’s a world of experience, a kind of dualist world, which corresponds to the physical world alongside it. It’s not that. This is part of the physical world.
Jim: This is materialist emergence. I am absolutely an anti-Platonian Platonian, so they will never suck me into idealism ever. It just ain’t happening nor dualism. Right? So don’t worry about me falling into those two bad attractors. Naturalist emergence is, it explains it all. It’s all you need to know, people. All the rest is just working out the problem. Right? Obviously, not quite true. Alright. Now let’s get to, for me at least, was the meat of the book, which is your concept of Ipsundrum. How do you pronounce that?
Nicholas: It’s probably not a great word. I got stuck with it. I talked about the real impossible triangle, which was an object made by Richard Gregory, a great British psychologist. He made it out of wood, and it’s a clever construction. I’m sure you’ve seen it, which if you look at it just from the right point of view, seems to have these impossible qualities. It’s not like the impossible triangle drawn on paper, which of course is clearly an illusion. This object is out there in space and appears to have these special characteristics.
Talking to Gregory, I said your object needs a name. It’s a wonderful thing that we can’t just let it float away without christening it. So why don’t we call it the Gregundrum, which was meant to be an amalgam of Gregory and conundrum. That’s the name I gave, and he adopted it for this object. So we have something like a Gregundrum in our brain, but it’s not made by Richard Gregory. It’s made by us. Ipsos, Ipsi, myself. So I said, let’s call the thing that I create in my brain an Ipsundrum, a conundrum created by myself. I wanted a name for it because I think it’s a real thing. Just as you were saying, it’s a pattern, but it’s a real pattern. Maybe what I’ve later called a mathematical object rather than a physical object as such. Nonetheless, let’s give it a name, and I call it the Ipsundrum. Words matter I know, and maybe it hasn’t been widely taken up, but then most of my ideas in this area haven’t. So there we are. That’s how I pronounce it.
Jim: Okay. Yeah. Cool. I would just gently suggest that rather than making a distinction between a physical object and a mathematical object, I’d call it a dynamical object. Because it’s not mathematical. Mathematical is how we describe it. The thing itself is a series of feedback loops and signals and adaptations and adaptations within adaptations, and its essence is its dynamical systems attribute, not its mathematical attribute.
Just see if that works for you in the future. I think it will. I think it exactly says what you’re trying to say. So now you actually back to our earlier talk about we don’t understand any of this. We don’t think of it in terms of evolution. You lay out a quite nice step by step evolutionary narrative to get to Ipsundrum. So could you tell us that story to the degree you can?
Nicholas: Jim, I’m not sure it’s gonna work without the slides I need. I’ve begun to sketch it out already, how to begin with a simple reaction, which then you monitor in order to discover what you yourself feel about something. First, you respond, and then you ask, what did I do? And now through that, you learn what it was that you were responding to. I build it up by a certain thing. It gets privatized. It gets to be from feedback loops, and so on. I really think this is probably something people should either look at in one of the videos in which I demonstrate this in sort of gorgeous Technicolor moving around on the screen. And there’s pictures in the book, which I think help explain it. Just yesterday, I got sent an e-version of the Russian edition of my book Sentience, and they have replaced all the figures in it with completely absurd drawings, which they thought represented what I meant to say. So I’ve been trying to get this Russian edition withdrawn.
Jim: Okay. If you could send me a link in the email to what you think is the best video representation of the evolution of absurdum, I’ll put that as a quite salient link on our episode page for people to check out. So let’s move on to what I thought caused my eyebrows to actually go up, and that is your claim that this is approximately an all or nothing phenomenon.
Nicholas: Yeah. Okay. Again, it’s something which, I’m out on a limb there. Even my closest colleagues like Dan Dennett argue for continuity. He thinks that phenomenal consciousness sentience exists in all possible degrees from hemi, demi, semi bits of consciousness right the way up to what we ourselves experience.
Well, my starting point is to say, well, that’s not what it’s like for me. For me, it’s an all or nothing phenomenon. When I go to sleep, it cuts off completely. And when I recover consciousness again, it comes back all of a piece. I don’t go through stages of hemi, semi, demi consciousness. I mean, a bit of confusion maybe, but colors and lights and sounds and fields are all there with their qualities pretty much all at once.
And if that can happen in my own life, and as it presumably happened in the history of my body, as I developed from being a fetus to being a conscious being, I think this thing switched on somewhere. And the kind of model I’ve got would make sense of that because these feedback loops do have all or none properties. You know, feedback loops either are active or cut out. We’re all familiar with that kind of thing in annoying demonstrations like when you move a microphone too close to a loudspeaker and suddenly it takes off, and you can’t shut the stupid thing off until you actually cut the circuit, and then suddenly it disappears again. But it’s all or nothing.
I think that’s likely to have been the way in which it evolved. These loops developed pretty quickly over the course of evolution given certain circumstances which we may talk about, like evolution of warm-bloodedness. But something happened which made them suddenly fire up and become a dominant feature of our brain. And so I think that in thinking about animals, and of course thinking about machines too, we should expect that this kind of consciousness will again be all or nothing.
I don’t think it goes down in smaller and smaller degrees right through the animal kingdom, nor is it already present in the kind of primitive machines which we’re dealing with. We’re not there yet, and the machines and most animals never got there. This is, of course, in some sense, thoroughly anti-Darwinian. Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man that psychology will be put on a new foundation – the gradual emergence of psychological factors from primitive beginnings with complete continuity. Well, I don’t think we’ve got other parallels. Something like language doesn’t seem to have taken that course. It’s pretty much an all or nothing phenomenon, and it emerges as an all or nothing phenomenon in human development. I think that we should be looking at animals and not asking, you know, can we see glimmers of earlier stages of consciousness there of this kind of consciousness? Because it won’t be there. And it would have acquired a specific brain circuitry, which had this essentially inbuilt switch.
Jim: Yeah. That’s a very interesting idea. And as I mentioned in the preshow, it is unfortunately captured by my brain, or maybe fortunately, as something to really seriously think about, particularly in our work about machine consciousness – is something like this of the essence. I haven’t gotten to the point where I say yes, but I haven’t gotten to the point where I say no. So thank you very much for that contribution to the thinking about it.
Nicholas: Don’t tell Karl Friston.
Jim: Oh, no. I know. In fact, I will. I’m gonna actually ask him. I’m gonna have him on one of these days, and I’m gonna ask him specifically. And of course, he’s gonna say, nope. It’s free energy from top to bottom. I have my own doubts about that, by the way, which is that, if you think about emergence and systems, seldom do you see emergences that penetrate layers. Right? For instance, the emergences that occur within the neuronal range do not penetrate down into the intercellular range in cells other than the neurons. Right? So they operate at a higher level of emergence in terms of nutrition or respiration or gases or something. But the probability that there’s one principle to rule them all from layer to layer through emergent layers seems to me rather unlikely.
Nicholas: Although there are very clever people like Mike Levin, whom I think you’ve interviewed, who actually argue convincingly that there could be that kind of continuity.
Jim: And again, I haven’t had him on yet, but I will soon. And again, I will certainly have that discussion on whether his evo-devo signaling arguments actually do explain it all. I have my doubts. I believe that you have to take emergence seriously and that there are emergent layers and things happen that are not fully isolated, but that we have to think about in new ways. But anyway, that’s neither here nor – maybe it actually is sort of relevant. Where do you come down on that in terms of thinking about whether absurdum – how the fuck do you pronounce that? Anyway, whether that is to what degree is it a phenomenon of the realm of body neuronal systems versus a manifestation of some greater single theory that explains it all?
Jim: Of continuity. And I haven’t had him on yet, but I will soon. And I will certainly have that discussion on whether his evo-devo signaling arguments actually do explain it all. I have my doubts. I believe that you have to take emergence seriously and that there are emergent layers and things happen that are not fully isolated, but that we have to think about in new ways. But anyway, that’s neither here nor – maybe it actually is sort of relevant. Where do you come down on that in terms of thinking about consciousness? To what degree is it a phenomenon of the realm of body neuronal systems versus a manifestation of some greater single theory that explains it all?
Nicholas: Well, I think it’s an emergent event unknown in the history of the universe before that. So it’s something very special. And as we said earlier, what an extraordinary series of events brought us here. I think it was an extraordinary series of events, and it probably wouldn’t go the same way if it was repeated. I don’t think we can count on phenomenal consciousness with these special circuits arising anywhere else in nature. And you know, in an infinite universe, you might want to say, well, of course, anything can arise in an infinite universe. And technically, that’s true. And yet I’d put my money on the possibility that phenomenal consciousness as it’s evolved here on Earth doesn’t exist anywhere else, which gives us an awful responsibility.
Jim: I talk about that quite a bit. The Fermi paradox is one of the things I talk about probably the most. You’ve already beat me to it. I often will ask scientific guests – alright, give me your take on the Fermi paradox, and your answer is probably ain’t none. First, I reject infinite universes on principle that I find infinities unaesthetic. The problem with an infinite universe is there’s an infinite number of you and I having this exact same discussion inside of a Boltzmann brain, with mild variations and an infinite number of each of those – no infinities, please. The universe is at least causally finite. And whether there are other causally finite universes out there that aren’t connected to ours, I don’t know or care. Well, actually I care, but I don’t know. So I assume a causally finite universe basically within our light cones. So I don’t have to worry about Boltzmann brains or crazy stuff like that. This issue of the importance of the possible uniqueness of phenomenal consciousness and sentience together is something I talk about a lot, and it’s something that just tortures me. And as I talk about the future of humanity over the next ten thousand years, assuming we exist for ten thousand years – seems like a questionable bet on some days, not on others. That’s the key question. If it turns out that the workings through the Drake equation produced tens of thousands of technological civilizations in the galaxy or even a hundred, then our level of responsibility to bring the universe to life seems less. We can take higher risks. But if it turns out that after ten thousand years of exploration sending probes out to numerous stars, gigantic sensors in space, the answer is it’s all dead matter, people. Then we have a very different responsibility to the universe, at least so I would argue, which is to preserve this thing. First life and then phenomenal consciousness, and then general intelligence. Holy shit.
Nicholas: But I wouldn’t try to cut the cake quite like that because I suspect life exists many places in the universe. I think inevitably it wants to. And intelligence will almost certainly exist in many places, and cognitive consciousness probably will too. It’s this very peculiar development, which may have been just a one-off, but nonetheless is at the center and the most valuable thing in our own lives, which is phenomenal experience. That, I think, we can’t count on having been replicated. But the universe could – doesn’t, in some sense, need it. All sorts of technical civilizations could evolve without it. They might have some serious failings in this area, which I’ve mentioned already, which is theory of mind. That is an area which I think that possibly we would have – we can steal a march on anything which isn’t phenomenally conscious. They’d have to have workarounds. AI will have to have workarounds in order to develop theory of mind, but there may be some workarounds which are possible.
Jim: May actually have theory of mind, right?
Nicholas: It might have theory of mind if it was sentient. But it might have theory of mind using an alternative route. I think it’s not – it could be done. It’s not the way nature did it.
Jim: May actually have theory of mind, right?
Nicholas: It might have theory of mind if it was sentient. Yeah. But it might have theory of mind using an alternative route. I think it’s not the way nature did it.
Jim: Well, push back a little bit on your speculation. I’ve done a shitload of thinking and reading about the Fermi Paradox. I’m not sure about how common life is. Some of my friend Stuart Kauffman would say it’s everywhere at the bacterial level or something close to that. I don’t know. Very hard to get across the bridge of DNA even with all the error checking machinery to avoid the error catastrophe in evolution. The mathematics of evolution don’t work unless you have fidelity of copying above x. And how do you evolve the fidelity of copying above x without it? Goddamn hard question. But maybe you get to that one. So then you get bacteria. And then what about the crazy thing that went from the prokaryotic to the eukaryotic? How did that happen? As far as we know, it only happened once. And even if you got bacteria, what’s the chance of making a leap like that to get something interesting? Then we have numerous kinds of multicellularity, but only one that led to anything that could even be arguably sentient, and that is whatever happened right before the Cambrian explosion where cells organized in a specific way and then neurons, which appear to have evolved just prior to that, became central to the behavior of these characters called animals at an ever-ratcheting scale. What the hell was the chances of that happening?
Nicholas: Well, I like that. I mean, worrying as it is, I also think it’s glorious to think that what we’ve got is unparalleled in the rest of the universe. It does, as you say, give us a big responsibility. When I say life is prevalent in the universe, I don’t mean that prevalent. I don’t think it’s going to be present in the solar system. We’re not gonna find it on Mars or any evidence of it because of the kind of reasons you’re talking about. And anyway, it would be at such a low level, it wouldn’t pass all these other tests which you mentioned.
Jim: Although on the other hand, I try to maintain radical agnosticism about all this. We’ll get some data soon from Mars and from Enceladus and Io and a few of these other ones. For instance, if we find something that is analogous to Earth life in Enceladus in the undersea, under-ice sea heated by gravitational tidal waves inside of the moon of Saturn, that will tell us something very different. Stuart was right – you throw the chemicals together, you get life every fucking time. I would put a bet down against it, but for this moment, we’re close enough to knowing that I’ll just suspend my opinion until we get the evidence one way or the other. Within a hundred years, we’ll know the answer to that one. We’re rapidly gaining power to understand exoatmospheres, and lots of arguments about that. Some of those may give reasonably conclusive evidence that there is life or not life of anything like ours based on our increasing ability to examine exoplanet atmospheres. So, again, agnosticism, ten thousand years worth of agnosticism. We’ll get data every year.
Nicholas: Yeah. And the thing is in the areas you’re talking about, at least you can agree to differ on them, and you don’t all hate each other. Humans can be close friends. The interesting thing about the consciousness side is that everybody hates everybody else. Because there are some real disagreements, and I think you were hinting at some of those earlier on. You know, panpsychism and Dan’s kind of materialism are just not compatible. And Dan would go so far as to say that there are other bad ideas that are actually morally repugnant because they mislead people. They’re badly argued. They make believe in a way which is totally correctable, and yet people won’t see it.
So in my book, I do take on something like integrated information theory, which has been described recently by a whole group of other scientists as pseudoscience. I don’t quite use that word, but I do make fun of it as a really empty theory. And yet, it’s making the running. I mean, what’s astonishing is I don’t understand the history of science at the moment. Bad ideas bubble to the surface and stay there. And I used to argue with Dan Dennett. You know, I’d say, “Dan, look. We’ve got a problem here. I don’t think we’re winning this argument at the moment. We ought to be, but for some reason or other, we simply just haven’t got the zeitgeist, and it’s slipping away from us.” And I just had an argument – there’s a memorial event for Dan Dennett being organized at Tufts University. Who is speaking now? Well, Dave Chalmers and Tononi are both represented. And I said, “Look, but they were Dan’s intellectual foes.”
Jim: You put a generator on his coffin. See how much electricity you can generate as it spins.
Nicholas: If he’s listening in, he’s gonna hate it. So, you know, I think it’s not fair to have people knocking a man when he’s down.
Jim: You put a generator on his coffin. See how much electricity you can generate as it spins.
Nicholas: If he’s listening in, he’s gonna hate it. So, you know, I think it’s not fair to have people knocking a man when he’s down too.
Jim: Yeah. It is interesting that this domain attracts crazy ideas. I will say when I first stumbled upon IIT, I don’t know, 2014 something like that, I go, holy shit. And then I spent some time thinking about it, and I read some of the works of people who had refuted it very easily in the first form. And I came away with still the same view I’ve had about it ever since, which is I suspect anything that is actually conscious will have a high phi, but things that have high phi are by no means conscious.
Nicholas: Yeah. Which makes it basically a useless theory.
Jim: Yeah. There are, maybe a side check on something like machine consciousness. Can you approximate phi for this machine and say that it is high? That doesn’t say it is conscious, but if you calculated phi and it wasn’t high, you do need high phi. Then it’s not conscious. So I do think it’s not entirely useless. But the claim that your thermostat has one bit of consciousness strikes me as entirely ridiculous.
Nicholas: But I suppose to each his own. Long, long time ago, I promised myself I would solve the problem of consciousness before I died. I’m not unhappy with where I’ve got to, but neither would Christof Koch be. He’s gonna die happy with what I think of as his silly theory, and I can die happy with my own. Lucky there’s room for all of us.
Jim: And as long as we don’t, as you say, have to… anyway, we’ll leave the fighting aside. A couple of things we have to move quickly here. We’re getting late in our time. We had so much fun talking about so many cool things. I’ve got a new idea for me and then one that is going to plague me for a while is qualophilia. This is really quite an interesting idea and part of your thought about how do we know if we’re talking about this thing that you call sentience and including the distinction between consciousness. So talk a little bit about what is qualophilia, and how would one think about noticing its existence?
Jim: And as long as we don’t, as you say, have to fight – anyway, we’ll leave the fighting aside. We have to move quickly here. We’re getting late in our time. We had so much fun talking about so many cool things. I’ve got a new idea for me that is going to plague me for a while – qualophilia. This is really quite an interesting idea and part of your thought about how do we know if we’re talking about this thing that you call sentience, including the distinction between consciousness. So talk a little bit about what is qualophilia, and how would one think about noticing its existence?
Nicholas: Well, qualia and philia – I’m just combining the word love and qualia. Qualia are states of phenomenal experience, and philia means the urge to guard and fill the world with them and experience them. Why would that be something we’d expect? Because in my theory of what the function of qualia and neuronal consciousness is, which is to build up a sense of self, I call it the phenomenal self, that’s something which every animal has to work at. We aren’t born with a ready-made phenomenal self, all full of this mystery and these experiences which make us think of ourselves and other people as being so significant.
We need from the moment we’re born to charge it up, to fill the batteries. And that means from the moment we enter the world, we are going to be out seeking experience for its own sake. Not necessarily seeking experience because it’s useful to us, because it can help us with hunting and gathering or whatever it may be, seeking it in order to fill out the sense of what it’s like to be a human being because we need to know that in order to know what it’s like to be other people in all their huge variety with all their unlikely experiences.
And so I think built into animals like ourselves, conscious animals like ourselves, is a very strong drive to discover and enrich experience, to just live it up and feel whatever’s out there, to feel all the possible ways of being a human being. And so then I say, well, it’s not difficult to see evidence of that in human beings. We only have to look at little children and their exploratory games and everything they get into and see how this develops in adults too. We never let go of this drive to learn more about what it’s like to be us.
Could we see something similar in animals? And if we did, would that be good evidence that they have gone the same route, that they too have a phenomenal self in waiting which they have to fill out through direct experience? In the book I suggest a whole lot of possible areas we might look for evidence of animals seeking sensations for sensations’ sake, not for practical, functional reasons, but simply because of the glories of experiencing and filling out this inner sense of self.
I’m fairly clinical about it. I think we can do this, and it doesn’t on the whole necessarily give the answers we want. If you look at an octopus, for example, we don’t see octopuses enjoying experience for its own sake. They don’t play in the ways which we see a bird or a mouse or, of course, a puppy dog doing. They don’t go out and just simply revel in experience. And perhaps the reason they don’t do that is because they don’t care what it’s like to be themselves because they never think about what it’s like to be another octopus. Octopuses don’t apparently have theory of mind, and they don’t have it because they don’t need it. Octopuses’ social life is really pretty basic. It’s odd they don’t need to have a theory of mind and that kind of social intelligence. And I think they don’t have it, and part of that is not being phenomenally conscious.
So, yeah, we can test the octopus to see if they show what I call qualophilia. People like Nicky Clayton are actually doing just that. They don’t entirely agree with me about what they find. Lars Chittka has argued that he can see evidence of bumblebees playing for the sake of playing, just rolling balls around because of the thrill of the experience. Again, I’m not convinced by the evidence, but at least it’s a good place to look, and I think that it is something we can, in principle, investigate. So in the book, I discuss all these fascinating questions, like, do animals like music? Answer is not very much.
Jim: Yeah. It seems like there is this line between humans and everybody else. I mean, there had to be another emergence probably around language or Terrence Deacon’s theories around symbols, which then concatenated into language, etcetera.
Nicholas: I should just say since we’re on behavior and music and things, there’s one thing which a lot of animals do do, and they masturbate. And that’s an interesting example, sensation for sensation’s sake. But, again, how far does that go? All mammals do it. Not so much invertebrates do.
Jim: The whole thing I skipped was the bodily perception versus the phenomenal mind, which is interesting, but only so much you can do in ninety minutes. We’ve done quite a lot here. One final question I have for you before we leave – in the league table of who has sentience and who doesn’t, you basically say mammals and birds. My first question thinking from an evolutionary lens is, wait a minute. Birds and mammals are related, but way back two hundred million years before the dinosaurs. Right? And to amphibians and then earliest proto reptiles. So just hypothesizing, do you think birds and mammals evolved sentience independently, or was there a proto sentience in pre reptiles or amphibians that then just evolved in different directions but parallel evolution across the two chains?
Jim: Yeah. The whole thing I skipped was the bodily perception versus the phenomenal mind, which is interesting, but only so much you can do in ninety minutes. We’ve done quite a lot here. One final question I have for you before we leave – in the league table of who has sentience and who doesn’t, you basically say mammals and birds. My first question that seems obvious to me thinking from an evolutionary lens is, wait a minute. Birds and mammals are related, but way back two hundred million years before the dinosaurs, right? And to amphibians and then earliest proto reptiles. So just hypothesizing, do you think birds and mammals evolved sentience independently, or was there a proto sentience in pre-reptiles or amphibians that then just evolved in different directions but parallel evolution across the two chains?
Nicholas: Obviously, a very interesting question. Were dinosaurs sentient? I think that it may have been in a primitive ancestor of both mammals and birds. I suspect that just in terms of the engineering of the brain which was required, that it depended on evolving homeothermy or warm-bloodedness because that changed an awful lot of what was going on in brains. And something which people don’t take on board that they should have done is that when you move from having a regular temperature of, let’s say, 12 degrees centigrade to having 37, 38, 40 in birds, the speed of conduction of nerve cells dramatically increases, increases by about four times.
Now that’s a rather big thing in the evolution and development of brain. I mean, brain size matters, but within the brain, how fast these neurons are working probably matters just as much. So something almost certainly changed of great importance when mammals and birds became, or their ancestors became, warm blooded. And I look at what was going on in the lives of these animals and say, well, yes. Something also was happening there because what warm-bloodedness does is to release you from the constraints of the physical environment, and that could have given animals at that point a new sense of their own self importance because they became autonomous in ways which had never been before. Able to move around the earth and be active day and night almost without limit, not completely without limit, that gives you psychologically a new sense of self. And just at that point, if the brain was changing, it could have been then that the phenomenal self kicked in – the sense of myself as something also outside of nature, which has this kind of spiritual quality. So just as we took to the air in real life, I think our brains were taking to the air like an angel.
Jim: That’s a very interesting point. If you found this at all interesting, go read this book. I mean, this is a really good book. I gotta tell you. “Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness” by Nicholas Humphrey. And I wanna thank you Nick for a truly interesting conversation here today.
Nicholas: Jim, it’s been a real privilege to talk to you.
Jim: It’s been great fun.