The Research That Rethinks Neuroscience & Biology | Dr. Bernardo Kastrup

Summary

This engaging discussion delves into groundbreaking work challenging the traditional understanding of DNA and consciousness in biology and neuroscience. Dr. Bernardo Kastrup and collaborators discuss revolutionary theories by Michael Leaven and Kristoff Kau that propose life and consciousness are not simply emergent properties encoded by DNA but driven by holistic bioelectric fields and universal organizing templates. These ideas question the current paradigms, align with analytic idealism, and suggest new ways of approaching diseases such as cancer, using bioelectric fields as crucial organizing principles. Furthermore, they explore the philosophical and scientific implications of these theories, touching upon consciousness, intelligence, and the future potential of such research in creating new frameworks of understanding life, consciousness, and possibly even AI.

Highlights

• Dr. Bernardo Kastrup delves into groundbreaking ideas that challenge the traditional understanding of DNA's role in life and consciousness 🌟.
• The discussion highlights Michael Leaven and Kristoff Kau's revolutionary theories, proposing holistic views of consciousness 🌐.
• Learn how bioelectric fields could redefine how we address diseases like cancer and reshape our treatment methods 🏥.
• Engage with the philosophical implications of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and its application to consciousness studies 🧠.
• Explore how these ideas align with analytical idealism and propose a fundamental consciousness underlying the universe 🌌.

Key Takeaways

• Biology and consciousness might not solely be encoded in DNA; rather, they could depend on bioelectric fields and macro-level templates in nature 🧬.
• Michael Leaven's research suggests that memories and morphogenesis might not entirely rely on genetic encoding 🧠.
• Bioelectric fields show promise in altering cellular behavior, such as stopping cancerous growths, hinting at new medical possibilities 🌟.
• Integrated Information Theory (IIT) offers a promising model for understanding consciousness and is considered a critical development in neuroscience 💡.
• These revolutionary ideas contribute to a broader philosophical debate on consciousness and the nature of intelligence 🌌.

Overview

In this thought-provoking video, Dr. Bernardo Kastrup explores groundbreaking theories that challenge entrenched beliefs about DNA's role in life and consciousness. Collaborating with Michael Leaven and Kristoff Kau, he discusses a shift towards seeing life as driven by bioelectric fields and innate organizing templates. These theories question the notion of life and consciousness as mere emergent properties encoded in our DNA.

Michael Leaven's pioneering research suggests that the electric patterns in biological systems guide developmental processes and behaviors, bypassing traditional genetic explanations. This radical view is supported by experiments showing how altering bioelectric fields can stop cancerous cell growth, presenting new possibilities for medical interventions and treatments.

Beyond biology, the discussion delves into consciousness studies, featuring Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a leading explanation. Kastrup sees IIT as providing crucial insights into the structure and organization of consciousness. Coupled with a philosophical stance called analytic idealism, these discussions propose a universe where consciousness is a fundamental essence, sparking new dialogues in both science and philosophy.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Paradigm Shift in Biology and Neuroscience The chapter discusses a paradigm shift in the fields of biology and neuroscience, away from the traditional belief that life and consciousness are solely encoded in DNA. It emphasizes that DNA functions more as a protein factory, challenging the prior notion that understanding the components (like bricks in a factory) directly explains complex structures like buildings, or in this case, complex biological entities.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Holistic View of Life and Consciousness The chapter discusses the concept of a holistic organizing plan in living organisms, drawing parallels to the construction of Cologne's cathedral. The conversation explores groundbreaking work in biology and neuroscience, featuring insights from Bernardo Castro, Michael Leaven, and Kristoff Gau. They delve into new tools that allow observation of biological blueprints, such as the 'electric face,' which influences the development and positioning of features like eyes.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Michael Levin's Experiment with Planaria The chapter discusses a philosophical and scientific exploration led by Michael Levin and Kristoff Kau, challenging classical scientific assumptions about the emergence of life and consciousness. Instead of viewing life and consciousness as mere emergent phenomena from matter and DNA computations, they propose a holistic perspective. Their work suggests that consciousness, per the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), is a fundamental aspect that cannot be fully explained by traditional molecular biology or genetics.
• 20:00 - 25:00: Cancer and Bioelectric Fields The chapter explores the concept of consciousness and the scientific theories surrounding it, with a focus on integrated information theory (IIT) by Christoph. It highlights the view of Bernardo Cassup, who considers IIT as a potential accurate scientific explanation of consciousness. The chapter also mentions the Asencia Foundation's efforts to delve into theories related to consciousness and bioelectric fields.
• 55:00 - 60:00: Integrated Information Theory (IIT) The chapter titled "Integrated Information Theory (IIT)" discusses the philosophical implications of two theories: Michael Leven's bioelectric fields and Christoph's integrated information theory. The conversation includes insights from Bernardo Castro, the director of the Asencia Foundation. The chapter seems to imply a connection between these theories that may be complex and challenging to grasp, and it encourages the reader to explore more through previously held discussions with the theorists.
• 65:00 - 70:00: Idealism and the Nature of Consciousness The chapter discusses analytic idealism, which posits that the universe is fundamentally conscious.
• 80:00 - 85:00: AI and Consciousness This chapter discusses the unique characteristics of plenaria, a type of flat aquatic worm, focusing particularly on its nervous system and regenerative abilities. The research by Michael and his team in 2013 delves into how plenaria can regenerate both a new head and body after being sliced. This phenomenon is examined to understand the memory retention and neurological aspects in these creatures.
• 120:00 - 125:00: Bernardo Kastrup's Work on AI The chapter discusses experiments involving plenaria, a type of flatworm, and their ability to learn to navigate a maze to find food. Even after decapitation and regrowth of their head and nervous system, these plenaria seemingly retained the learned information, raising questions about memory and neural encoding.

The Research That Rethinks Neuroscience & Biology | Dr. Bernardo Kastrup Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 There is a paradigm shift happening in biology and neuroscience away from the idea that life and consciousness are somehow encoded in DNA. Our understanding of DNA is that of a protein factory. What we like to think or have liked to think so far is that if you have a brick factory, you explain Cologne's cathedral. Well, no. You have the bricks, but something has to know how to
• 00:30 - 01:00 put those bricks together in the right way. So you get Cologne's cathedral. Living organisms have a coherent associated holistic organizing plan. I sat down with Bernardo Castro to make sense of the groundbreaking work of Michael Leaven and Kristoff Gau who are revolutionizing the fields of biology and neuroscience. So we have now tools where you can literally see for example the electric face. There's prepatterent that tells you where should the eye go, how many should there be, where should
• 01:00 - 01:30 the mouth be. What's going on here is more than just DNA. It comes from an archetypal level. Classically science assumes that out of matter life and consciousness emerge. Now the work of Michael Lean and Kristoff Kau takes a more holistic view in which life and consciousness are not a simple emergent phenomenon not a computation of genes and molecules. Consciousness according to IIT ultimately is the only thing that
• 01:30 - 02:00 it's absolute existence. It's not a computation. It does not arise from mere computation being performed. Now, Bernardo Cassup thinks that Christoph's integrated information theory might be our first accurate scientific theory of consciousness. As far as we can get, I think IIT is by far the best gaming town. Welcome to the Asencia Foundation's YouTube channel, and thank you so much for watching. This video is a deep dive into two theories that might
• 02:00 - 02:30 be a bit challenging to understand. Now, what's good to know is that I have previously held two fulllength conversations with both Michael Leaven and Kristoff Kau that you can watch here. What's new in this video is that with the director of the Asencia Foundation, philosopher Bernardo Castro, I talk about the philosophical implication of Michael Leven's bioelectric fields and Christoph's integrated information theory. And as you will find out, both theories are
• 02:30 - 03:00 highly compatible with analytic idealism, the notion that our universe is fundamentally conscious. Now, without further ado, here is my conversation with Bernardo Castro. You of course connected me to Michael Leaven. Do you still remember when you came across his work and how it sort of impacted? It's been a while ago. That that was over 10 years ago. I think they
• 03:00 - 03:30 published Michael and his team published a paper in 2013 about memory in plenaria. These little flat aquatic worms that have a head with a nervous system entirely in their heads. All their neurons are in their heads. Uh but they have this peculiar property that if you slice a plenaria, even if you decapitate a plenaria, uh the head grows a new body, but the body that you sliced off grows a new head. Um, and what they did was they put a bunch of plenaria in an aquarium with a
• 03:30 - 04:00 substrate complex structure in the substrate that the plenaria needed to navigate to find food and they trained the plenaria to navigate that labyrinth so to say that maze to find food and the plenaria learned it so they could find food very quickly. Um and then they proceeded to decapitate the plenaria. So remove their neurons, the entire nervous system, waited two weeks until the plenaria grew a new head with a new nervous system clean from scratch. They
• 04:00 - 04:30 put the plenaria in the aquarium again to see if the plenaria still remembered how to navigate the maze and find food. And lo and behold, the palenaria remembered. So that um of course in science we need um experiments to be reproduced and results confirmed. But um what that experiment shows is that whatever memories are they are not encoded in the nervous system. That's not how memories work. They are not little files inside the thumb drive in
• 04:30 - 05:00 here. That's not what it is. Yeah. And the same goes for sort of the the when pleneria with two heads that he he grew. If you cut off the head again, the next generation will also grow a second head. Whereas the the alteration is not in the DNA. So yeah, you can you can alter the electrochemical environment around the living being and their more their morphological organizing principles will express themselves differently which is
• 05:00 - 05:30 mindboggling because we like to boil everything down to DNA but our understanding of DNA is that of a protein factory. Yeah. It's basically a brick factory. It's a factory that produces all the bricks you need. Yeah. And what we like to think or have liked to think so far is that if you have a brick factory, you explain Cologne's Cathedral. Well, no. You have the bricks, but something has to know how to put those bricks together in the right
• 05:30 - 06:00 way. So, you get Cologne's Cathedral. And what Michael is doing is is providing us an account with a lot of experimental evidence to back it up. Not not not strong experimental evidence only, but flabbergasting experimental evidence that takes you a back to show that what's going on here is more than just DNA. How does the cell on the tip of your thumb know to be an epithelial cell and the cell inside your head knows to be a neuro? Because they all come
• 06:00 - 06:30 from stem cells. They all came from one um zygote, one fertilized egg, right? So, how do they know what to do and how to behave and what to look like depending on where they are? That's morphagenesis. How does this form emerge? And um what it seems to suggest um is that there are macrolevel imminent organizing principles in nature that define morphagenesis. that you there may be
• 06:30 - 07:00 archetypal templates in nature if you want to call it that way that inform the form of life. In other words that in form life you know Fred Matter uses this way of using words he's great for this the founder of essential foundation Fred Matter says how do you inform life how do you bring form into life so there may be this fundamental
• 07:00 - 07:30 organizing templates that are imminent in nature imminent in life um that express themselves in the form of these fields that tell life how to structure itself. It's crazy. It's like blueprints. And of course people and he 11 himself also talks about a sort of a plat platonic realm of form, right? That's what it's sort of hinting at. Yeah, that's philosophy and he's doing science. But of course as an intelligent
• 07:30 - 08:00 critical thinking human being once he's confronted with the evidence his lab is producing of course he's trying to understand it metaphysically as well right so his scientific work is not metaphysically biased in any way but Michael as an intelligent human being trying to make sense of life the universe and everything of course he he's forced to go into those you know platonic directions to make sense of what he's seeing in front of him. You know,
• 08:00 - 08:30 Planaria with two heads and the same DNA. No, what the hell's going on? And his the power of Leav is that you shouldn't talk about philosophy in a sense because it it's just just the sheer experimental work he's doing is so mesmerizing already. Um he talks about something I think also value and he brings it up in the interview I did with him sort of that he doesn't believe in sort of these categories like he he really sees intelligence and he speaks more often about intelligence than consciousness also I'd like to see how you read his
• 08:30 - 09:00 work in that regard the difference between intelligence and conscious but he sees it as a skill right so and he's interested in how it scales up because we all originate from one one cell and we're sitting here right now and how did that scale up that intelligence and how did those cells and he calls it a mind melt so this sort of association right to a bigger organism. Yeah. Yeah. We um Michael and me we do we we do have a difference slight difference in in
• 09:00 - 09:30 emphasis. Um my impression and Michael if you're watching this forgive me if I'm misrepresenting you um but my impression is that he tends to think more bottom up. You know how how do cells as elementary building blocks come together and subsume themselves into a greater organism like a human being or a frog or even a plenaria a plenarium. Um I I tend to have a more top- down view of life. I don't see life as an
• 09:30 - 10:00 aggregate of cells. I see life all life as the original zygot the original fertilized egg that all life always was. And I see that zygote just creating internal structure in a fractal way. That zygote is a cell knows how to be a cell. So it creates internal structure by applying that cell template to itself uh until it grows into a multisellular organism. But I tend to see growth as a
• 10:00 - 10:30 form of creating internal structure in an entity that is holistic from the beginning and never ceases to be holistic. And therefore every life is a holistic system. U Michael um because what his life the way he's experimenting with things um he he takes the other perspective which is also valid. It's a matter you know how far each perspective can bring you which is how cells come together to cohhere together and form a
• 10:30 - 11:00 complex multisellular organism. uh I justify my view by saying that no organism has ever been created by pasting cells together. Every organism on the planet has always grown from a cell. Uh um but of course he has created these artificial organisms in which he has taken multiple cells together and just pasted them together and lo and behold they behave like an organism. Yeah, that's the zenob.
• 11:00 - 11:30 Xenobots there taking stem cells from a frog that he just first saw to come to a shape. He used a AI there, right? To find the right shape of the of a sort of cellular automata. Yeah, you could say. And then he used sort of these bioelectric fields to instruct it, right? Or to do a certain task like moving in a circle. And lo and behold, they do that. Yeah. And we've talked more often about sort of the origin of life and that sort of that we're far from it. But this gets like pretty close in the sense that he still
• 11:30 - 12:00 needs a stem cell, but from there on he's now able to create an organism. Yeah, it's still small. But I mean, where is this heading? And he knows how to mobilize this imminent organizing templates in nature to give a coherent form even to an aggregate of cells as if it were really a holistic living being that came from a zygote. It didn't. It's an aggregate of cells. But he can hack into these
• 12:00 - 12:30 fields, these organizing principles to bring behavioral coherence to what otherwise is an an aggregate of cells. So he's tapping into something fundamental and imminent um in nature uh which can be characterized as a realm of archetypes, you know, the basic templates of form and behavior. And if you hack into that, it takes over. Even things that are aggregates of selves, it takes them over. And then because that's how he titled the video uh a bit
• 12:30 - 13:00 sensational did he tell cancer cells to stop because in in frog he has been able to to via influencing bioelectric fields to to to stop sort of formation of cancer cells. Yeah. So he took human cancer cells. He did it even with human cells. Yeah I believe so. I believe it's a human epithelial cancer cells if I remember correctly. That's right. He injected those in a frog and then he he would managed to stop the Yeah. and and those cells had uh clear genetic defects. So the DNA was damaged. It was
• 13:00 - 13:30 really cancerous and and and um irreversibly cancerous cells. And the experiment was you put them in a frog. If you don't do anything else, they take over the frog and kill the frog. Um but in in in his case he put those damaged genetically damaged cancer cells very aggressive in a frog and he manipulated the biomectric fields in such a way that the cancer couldn't manifest itself which brings up the
• 13:30 - 14:00 possibility that has empirical substantiation. And I'll tell you what previous empirical substantiation it had that um yes you need genetic errors uh during uh uh mitosis when you copying DNA you need an error to happen in that copying mechanism but it's not enough it is the organizi the holistic organizing principle that governs the body as a whole that has to be faulty too otherwise you just get the the brick
• 14:00 - 14:30 factory not producing good brick But it doesn't take over Cologne Cathedral. You just get bad bricks and they stay where they are. So something else needs to go wrong at the holistic level. And of course that's what holistic medicine practitioners have been saying for for a long time. They just couldn't substantiate it. But u you know there is evidence for many years ago they did the autopsies in people who died in traffic accidents which give you a completely unbiased sample of the
• 14:30 - 15:00 population because everybody dies in traffic accidents young and old healthy and unhealthy you know of all ethnicities. So they did autopsies in those bodies and about 50% of people irrespective of age anything else totally unbiased about 50% of people had minor cancer tumors irrespective of age as it turns out that well it appears if you if that study is correct it appears that we all throughout our lives develop cancer but
• 15:00 - 15:30 it goes nowhere. Of course, if you do a full body scan and you find it, you would treat it. Sort of the this on this holistic level in the code, there are errors. We all get them. Yeah. And and the difference is which of these mini tumors actually develop and become problematic. Um there there is good reason for doctors to say don't do a full body scan because you always find something and if you find you treat it even if it's actually not going anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, uh, this
• 15:30 - 16:00 plays into Michael's hypothesis of the this holistic bielectric field with this imminent organizing principles, if the field is doing okay, even if you get a transcription error in your DNA and you get cancerous cells, they go nowhere because they still obey the the dant, how do I say this? Yeah, the director or what's it called in in English? Yeah, the the conductor. the conductor the conductor even if you're a defective
• 16:00 - 16:30 music player you still follow the mastro you know you'll not be able to play well but you're not going to take over the symphony you know you're not going to disrupt the whole thing um but when something at a holistic level when those organizing principles themselves are in some way disrupted or weak or whatever then you get the actual expression and um here I can say this with confidence because I discussed this with Michael before more than once. Um,
• 16:30 - 17:00 we think of this this break in the coherence of the field as a form of dissociation. It's uh when cancer cells no longer are looking at the conductor. Yeah. They start doing their own thing. Yeah. Play their own tune. Yeah. And then then you then you have real cancer because they are dissociated from the rest of the body plan. So mentally if dissonant dissonant in an orchestra. Yeah. They're playing dissonant. Yeah. And then they
• 17:00 - 17:30 disrupt the whole orchestra. Yeah. So um in the hypothesis that the body is what mental states look like. Cancer is an internal dissociation. It's when part of your mental inner life becomes dissociated from the rest of it. And when you get a dissociation you get the false sense of individual identity. Like people with dissociative identity disorder, they have these multiple personalities. One of them claims, I am a five-year-old child and I am female. The other claims that he is a 60-year-old male. Um, and
• 17:30 - 18:00 they all think they're right and they all they they all do their own thing. They don't obey the host personalities, goals, and plans anymore. They go off on their own tangents because they are dissociated. They can't reach each others in their lives anymore. They are separate. So they go off on a tangent thinking that they are the entity when cancer is when a dissociation happens. That's my hypothesis. Michael is not he will not positively state this as fact.
• 18:00 - 18:30 Uh but he's open to this hypothesis. Well, he did say that they he did say to me I think that that cells sort of forget themselves and identify with these higher goals. It's a cognitive dissonance. He will he will sort of use language like that. But basically he is saying the same same thing that those cancer cells forgot sort of the organism. They they think of themselves as a single cell again and then your next cell is an enemy now. Yeah. Well an enemy but at least you don't care about it. It's your outside. It's not sort of
• 18:30 - 19:00 Yeah. Yeah. So you you grow as a tumor because you want to extend your empire. You're not part of a bigger entity now. You're your own thing. So you do your own thing. And that's exactly what cancer does. Yeah. Michael uses the language of cognitive glue. So he speaks of these fields as the cognitive glue. It's a very idealist terminology. And um uh so um it's the cognitive glue that allows the cells to sort of cognitively understand each other and cooperate
• 19:00 - 19:30 cognitively. Um and uh when there is a cognitive dissociation when they cannot cognitively bridge that gap between themselves then on the one side of dissociation they go off on their own. They do their own thing and that's exactly what cancer tumors are. They create their own vascular system. They use as much energy as they can get from the body. They don't obey the body plan. They create their own structures. Um so it takes more than a a problem in the brick factory. uh you
• 19:30 - 20:00 need a cognitive dissociation at the level of the entire bio plan so to say and I of course at directly had sort of these exotic ideas of where that bioelectric field is then where those forms are stored and Michael Evans sort of brought me a bit down to earth there is a lot to be said already in molecular biology on sort of the the the the just the bioelect electricity that that we know right to what degree can sort of just the physics and the biology we Oh, molecular biology can
• 20:00 - 20:30 account for this and where do you think it really points to something beyond that we really don't yet understand? I don't think we will be able to ultimately account for everything in terms of measurable physical properties because I don't think the dashboard is complete. I don't think physicality tells us everything about all the causal organizing principles of the numinal world. The world as it is in itself.
• 20:30 - 21:00 It's an incomplete appearance, an incomplete image. So I don't think we can close that causally at the level of known physical stuff. But we can clearly go a long way in that direction and we may even be able to establish empirically that certain things work even if we don't understand exactly how they work. That has been the history of science by the way and the history of technology at least technologist technologists don't care about truth what they care is about what works right
• 21:00 - 21:30 so um I think we are not far okay I'll make a big statement now I think we are not far from figuring out how to cure all forms of cancer um not not cure let me rephrase it we are not far from turning every form of cancer into a chronic illness, an illness you have for the rest of your life but will not kill you. Like allergies, you know, oh darn, you have
• 21:30 - 22:00 it. Okay, you know, you do certain things every now and then like that frog that Michael gave cancer to forced the bielectric fields to maintain their coherence in the presence of cancer. The cancer didn't develop. I think the frog is still alive. It's been a couple of years. Wow. Um, so maybe you need to do maintenance. Maybe every year you need to go to the hospital so they can boost your fields. Yeah. And then I think that will happening and I think it's largely
• 22:00 - 22:30 coming from Michael's work and and the students that will become professors a few years from now. and and sort of we we we we spoke about sort of then the dissociation process which could sort of account for for the growth of cancer cells but the association sort of those cells that add up to a bigger organism how does that inform your work has it informed your work and how much are you on the similar path here as Michael I think association is the the fundamental force
• 22:30 - 23:00 in nature because no I'm an analytic idealist I reduce everything to one field of subjectivity, one mind. I think everything can be explained in terms of the patterns of excitation of this one mind, this one field of subjectivity. All of nature can be explained in terms of that. That means that ultimately everything is actually one. Yeah, it's one mind, one field of subjectivity. And you need an active process to stop that from recognizing
• 23:00 - 23:30 itself as one. Yeah. A dissociative process. It may be an actively enforced process in the case of life. It may be a spontaneous process which is what IIT predicts. Integrated information theory predicts that sometimes a unified psychic complex will integrate more information if it sheds off some parts of it. It will be a stronger complex richer by shedding off some parts of it that are not contributing much are just diluting the the the amount of
• 23:30 - 24:00 integrated information. Then you get a spontaneous form of dissociation, not an actively enforced one, but it's still something that needs to happen. Yeah. It's not the way things uh um start. It it needs to happen. Um so to me, the natural direction of things is associative because that's the fundamental nature of things. That's how things are relates to entropy, right? Because we we will die sitting here.
• 24:00 - 24:30 will associate again with a larger consciousness. Yeah. So yeah, so that that also relates to entropy. But still then to what degree does nature chooses to dissociate and how I'm not sure it chooses. I think it happens. Yeah. I know. Yeah. Of course you don't want to apply sort ofology there. You want to you Yeah. Okay. But but but still and that's so fascinating that in nature it has these clear boundaries and that's what what le what I what we what
• 24:30 - 25:00 we said earlier right it knows okay I'm going to sort of associate right until this point and then I stop and that's fascinating right it is nature telling us what is actually natural and intuitive and that contradicts our intuitions because our intuitions are born out of culture not nature. Well, culture is ultimately natural, but of course, we inject and have injected a lot of noise for the p for the past 30,000 years because we replace reality with discourse and
• 25:00 - 25:30 narratives and language. So, our natural intuitions of plausibility drift away from nature towards self-made stuff, stories. Yeah. Um, and this is nature telling us what is actually natural. What is natural is that living organism organisms have a coherent associated holistic organizing plan that is imminent in them and it's always there. It comes from an archetypal level of
• 25:30 - 26:00 nature. Under analytic idealism is just nature as it is because archetypes are mental templates of behavior. Under analytic idealism everything is mental. So of course there is this archetypal realm. It is what there is. All there is that. Yeah. So that's homecoming for you. So Michael Evansburg working and that's as no surprise for Yeah. Yeah. I get that. I get that. On sort of how Michael thinks about consciousness versus intelligence. I know he also sent me a paper on AI, his view on AI, and he
• 26:00 - 26:30 doesn't fundamentally see a difference. He sees it sort of as just an evolution and sort of how we raise our kids that that sort of you just have to tell them so much and they really have to learn. and he doesn't see a fundamental difference there between AI and and uh just the carbon based intelligence. Um and also when it comes to consciousness, I couldn't really pin him down on a definition and he more sees evolution as sort of a process to create problem
• 26:30 - 27:00 solving agents. He will use words like that like in a problem solving space, how much can an agent solve? And the higher the degree, he then says, okay, it's more intelligence and that scales up in our universe and there's no upper boundary. But consciousness, phenomenal consciousness doesn't really seem to enter his his work. He's not a philosopher. But how do you see all of this? I mean, the whole his view on intelligence and how it relates to consciousness. Yeah. Now it's tricky because I'm I I
• 27:00 - 27:30 may be privy to certain views Michael may hold which is not in his which are not in his published work and now I don't know how to distinguish them but u um I'll say this we come from the two opposite extremes of this spectrum. I come from computer engineering and computer science. He comes from biology. Yeah. But curiously, I give biology a more fundamental role than he does and he gives computers a more fundamental role
• 27:30 - 28:00 than I do, which is where we sort of cross each other, right? Uh maybe you could both of you can project sort of your your your project stuff into because you don't know it well enough. You don't know enough. Yeah. Yeah, it could be. But um I see private consciousness like human beings have like living beings have. I see that as eminently associated with biology. Um and I don't I cannot refute
• 28:00 - 28:30 that a computer may have private consciousness. But I don't think we have any good reasons to think that any more than we have good reasons to think that this glass of water has private consciousness. I don't think there is even a glass of water. It's an artificial carving out of nature that we do for convenience. Yeah. Um, so I see things more top down. It starts with one mind. That mind dissociates itself actively in the form of living beings. Um, and what the dissociation looks like is biology. It's metabolism which is different from
• 28:30 - 29:00 anything else going on in nature. There is nothing remotely like metabolism out there. And metabolism only happens in life. It's the definition of life. Um, so I see that top down. And therefore things that don't look like biology to me give me no reason to think that they have private conscious inner life of their own. I think their inner life is subsumed into the inner life of the inanimate universe as a whole. So yes, the matter in the computer is the appearance of mental states. But that doesn't mean that the computer has a
• 29:00 - 29:30 private conscious inner life of its own. It doesn't mean that the computer is the appearance of a dissociated outer. It only means that the conscious states underlying the computer are the conscious states of the inner life of the inanimate universe as a whole. Again, a top- down view. Um, I intuit it, I sense from Michael that he has a more bottomup view. It's like things can cognitively glue together things that were not born as part of the same organism. things that are fundamentally
• 29:30 - 30:00 distinct like a piece of matter here, piece of matter there, even pieces of biology, but maybe also pieces of silicon. And if you put them together in the right way, yeah, they their conscious in their life subsumes and and glues and aggregates and forms an organism top down. That's how he sees it. He also doesn't see an upper scale there in a sense because he said, "I'm open to the idea." Of course, that was sort of a speculative bid in our conversation. Or he said, "I'm open to the day of the weather being sort of conscious or as an intelligent system. I
• 30:00 - 30:30 just wouldn't have a way now to test it. So, we should just test it, you know, come up with tests to see if it can solve problems." Yeah. He doesn't give preeminence to metabolism. No. Exactly. Which is curious because he's a biologist. Yeah. He It's equally curious that I do that and I don't give preeminence to silicon. Yeah. That's interesting since despite the fact that I'm a computer engineer. Yeah, that's funny. It's real funny. But that's also nice for the two of you to meet, right? And that's you have had interesting conversations. Both of you should
• 30:30 - 31:00 continue doing so, I think. Um, yeah. I I think his profession is much more preeminent than mine. But he doesn't think so. He gives my profession the same preeminence that he gives to his. Yeah. It's curious, isn't it? It is really curious. Yeah. And he focuses he does focus very much on behavior because he focus on he focuses on sort of this problem solving of these agents and and then how it scales up and and all of that but it is very much focused and not on the inner life of what that problem solving agent experiences in doing so.
• 31:00 - 31:30 Right? So and this is maybe a nice bridge to neuroscience because uh gives an answer. Yeah. It may not be the correct answer but it gives a precise answer. It does have a measure and and a bridge I thought just a moment ago when we spoke about this is that at this table we had a wonderful conversation with Kristoff Kau um and he during our conversation um he talked about sort of this graph what we're used to evolutionally speaking that sort of on a on a yaxis say we have
• 31:30 - 32:00 consciousness and here we have intelligence and then evolutionarily speaking we're used to a line like this you know we see all organisms that are more intelligent they're more conscious and and up to us humans so we're so used to that graph and now uh and he has IoT can say something about sort of that relationship right and uh and and Michael Leaven is focuses very much on intelligence but he I think he's also makes somehow the assumption that that line goes like that whereas IoT says no we have a theory we propose a theory
• 32:00 - 32:30 that we can measure that the system might be super intelligent so might be here but it's still super low on consciousness and and k wants to make the world aware of that. Okay, guys, wake up. We're in sort of That's what's new about AI. It's not that it's becoming conscious that we are now for the first time in in in our evolution faced with entities that have a high intelligence, super high intelligence and no fire. Well, some everything has agree with this analysis of of Yeah.
• 32:30 - 33:00 Yeah. Yeah. I think I I is not a metaphysics. So, it's not explaining how consciousness arises from something unconscious. It's not even making that assumption that consciousness arises at all. Um, it's more actually in my view it's more consistent with with IIT to think of consciousness as fundamental. But what IIT gives us is the the structure and organization of conscious states. How do they come together? How they split from each other? What kind of conscious
• 33:00 - 33:30 structure uh do they do they form? Yeah. And that's based on some five simple axioms which are incredibly intuitive. at least three of them are incredibly intuitive. Um and and and there is a theoretical um there's theoretical tooling built yeah to substantiate IIT that allows us given enough measurements to calculate what that structure will look like and it's given by the amount of information that a certain configuration integrates.
• 33:30 - 34:00 Yeah. And it postulates that it will always try to integrate as much information as possible which is empirically true from an introspective perspective. We always experience unitary consciousness right we don't break apart unless we undergo dissociative identity actions that an experience is all always a whole or one experience just not twoardos it's just one correct yeah there is one thing it is like to be a IIT complex. Yeah, always one thing
• 34:00 - 34:30 and it can be richer or less rich, but it's entirely defined. Um, and by using this axom that you're always trying to maximize um integrated information that axum alone you have to believe that. Yeah. And the reason to believe that is that it seems to be like that from an introspective perspective. Right. So, but you do need a small leap of faith. That's why it's called an axion not but for people to understand that we always want to integrate or
• 34:30 - 35:00 maximize integrated information sort of for people just to understand what we're what are we really saying there what you are conscious of in yourself is always the maximum integrated information complex. Um, and evolutionarily it makes sense. You always want to have as much information as possible to to steer your life and to make your conscious choices, your deliberations, and your conscious decisions. But sometimes you integrate
• 35:00 - 35:30 more information by letting things fall off. That has to do with attention. You know, if there is music blasting, you're trying to do your tax filing. No, you integrate more information if you turn off if you turn down the music. Yeah. So our mental processes spontaneously do the same through the mechanism of attention. You sort of screen out shut off things that are actually reducing information integration because although they also have information they lead to
• 35:30 - 36:00 a dilution yeah of the information that is actually being integrated in re-entrance loops of the system. Um so if you accept that and there are very reasonable arguments to accept that but you have to accept that once you accept that everything else follows through the theoretical instrumentation built uh to substantiate IIT you can precisely calculate what will be the maximum fi and you can predict when we will spontaneously dissociate their attention
• 36:00 - 36:30 you can predict for instance non-trivial things Like there is an insight from IIT that I find in incredibly important which is there is no perception without interpretation. You never simply perceive and then interpret because the maximum five complex will be the one that integrates interpretational states with perceptual states. So this lines up with Thomas Kun there is no neutral data. Data is
• 36:30 - 37:00 always laden with interpretation and this arises naturally out of it. If you run the numbers that's what you will get. Yeah. And it could be that we have a system that sort of computationally when you look at a sort of output of its information seems to be not very intelligent but does have sort of high integration. Um perhaps a bacterium right will will already have pretty significant defi a lot more than an AI
• 37:00 - 37:30 computer. Exactly. where we see and that brings us back to that axis, right? When then you would have like a very high intelligence. So when you look at the output, you're like that thing is super intelligent. But when we when measure the integrated information, it's super low, right? Yeah. Super low. Look at your video of bacteria. And every sec that would lead to an incredibly low signal to noise ratio as we call it. Noise would be enormous and the signal very low. So to keep the signal to noise ratio high uh you want to keep things
• 37:30 - 38:00 always separated non-integrated until you actually want to integrate them in that precisely precise way you want to integrate them. And it turned out that that precise way always entails fairly low information integration because otherwise we monkeys can't design the system. It becomes too complex. We can't handle it. Yeah. uh so you always get you know a computer system a classical vanoyman machine um
• 38:00 - 38:30 with very low information integration if you calculate the fire and you want that so that's really ironical for people thinking that chat GPT might become conscious you don't want it to become become conscious because it will lose it might lose its intelligence you know you use it in a sense at least the intelligence that we can impart on it with our limited ability to design things design the the Key in design is to manage complexity through subsystems, through
• 38:30 - 39:00 subblocks and clear interfaces. It turns out that if you actually design like that, which is the only way you can have a successful design, you're always keeping five low. That's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. Just to be very clear for for people who want to understand there's a difference between our brain and complex neural networks. Um because people really think we call it neural networks. Our brain is a neural network that the two are somehow similar. We know these computers consist of gazillions of
• 39:00 - 39:30 transistors that are highly connected. So what is the difference here? Um when we say an artificial neuronet network running on a GPU graphics processing unit from Nvidia um that's a digital artificial neuronet network. Now the neuronet network part of the name refers to getting some inspiration from real biological neuronet networks. Uh but that inspiration goes through vast steps of
• 39:30 - 40:00 simplification in art in digital artificial neural networks which is what is running chat GPT today. All the AI all the agentic AI and language models that you see today are digital artificial neuronet networks. We make oversimplifying assumptions like we say uh a neuron the axon of the neuron which produces the output of the neuron or carries the output of the neuron that output is binary. It's either zero or one. The neuron is either firing or not firing. That's not how things actually
• 40:00 - 40:30 work. A neuron goes through a continuous continuous levels of of potentials and and and those potentials that are not zero or one but everything in between they have cause effectiveness as well they do something. Um another uh vast simplification we make uh is the number of neurons. Even though artificial digital artificial neuronet networks have lots of neurons and require thousands of GPUs, we are
• 40:30 - 41:00 nowhere near what's actually going on in the brain. Uh in the brain, you can have one neuron uh with, you know, tens of thousands of synapses to other neurons. Each one of them carrying an analog active potential, not a digital zero and one coming from one axon. M um and even more recently uh recently there has been evidence that a hypothesis put forward by Stuart Hamarov many years ago that um the microtubules
• 41:00 - 41:30 which are basically the skeleton of a cell even a neuron um those microtubules have a kind of a crystalline structure that can sustain u um quantum states coherent quantum states and people ignored that or poo pooed that for a long time because the brain is wet and hot and you can't preserve a coherent state uh in in an environment like that. But new evidence suggests that that's precisely what happened that the
• 41:30 - 42:00 microtubules can sustain uh coherence even over macroscopic distances encompassing many neurons. If that is so, the amount of integrated information in the brain goes well beyond synapses. Crazy. These these coherent states can can lead to cosmic levels of information integration. Something we are nowhere near to even becoming vaguely comparable
• 42:00 - 42:30 to that. So if even if that doesn't hold a digital artificial neur network is a vast simplification of you know what's happening in the brain. Yeah. And the same will go for quantum computers when we get sort of how many cubits are they now? Yeah. A few thousand. Yeah. Exactly. But then still even if if we get to that then the still then the integration between those cubits oh is
• 42:30 - 43:00 little the quantum gates only bring a few cubits together. The cubits are supposed to be completely separate in order to maintain their superposition state. They're completely isolated. That's the difficulty in creating a quantum computer. And the way they come together is through this quantum logic gates and there are only a few of them. So a quantum computer is even worse and they integrate even less stuff. Uh it's it's we are at the level of Lego. Um no we are nowhere near nowhere near even if Stuart uh Hamarov's hypothesis of
• 43:00 - 43:30 superposition states in microtubules even if that's not true the difference between biology which we modeled through what we call spiking neurom models. These are incredibly complex models of what comes through the axon of a neuron. vastly complicated models. What we are doing just says what comes out of an axum is either zero or one. This is ridiculous. This is not at all what's
• 43:30 - 44:00 actually happening. What's actually happening is vastly more complicated in terms of information integration, in terms of causal influences going back and forth, sideways, up and down. Uh we call it an artificial neuronet network because yeah, we have that structure of you know the dendrites and the axons. It's inspired in nature, but it in no way comes even close to the information integration you have in a in a biological neural network. And do you think that I is near um a a a
• 44:00 - 44:30 consciousness test? So we don't have we have the Turing test which you can already sort of debate for intelligence but for consciousness we have we have nothing right. So could it lead to sort of a consciousness test? I think within life uh it is um in it's the only game we have in town to detect for instance whether someone is in a truly vegetative coma uh or uh suffering from locked in
• 44:30 - 45:00 syndrome that the consciousness is intact but it can't control the body so the person looks like is vegetating but it's not. Yeah, I um has informed the development of technology that can tell doctors whether you are in locked in syndrome or not and and the importance of that can cannot be so by by taking a samp because measuring the just also for viewers to understand measuring the five of our brain is we're
• 45:00 - 45:30 we're that's like already impossible right okay as of yet IIT the practical limitation of IIT is that IIT is only as good as the resolution of the data you feed it. It is a model. Yeah. But you can feed it with information from different levels of granularity. You can feed it with a bold levels or deactivation. It's a bold is a proxy for brain activity. It has to do with the oxygen level. You can feed um very rough resolution functional MRI scan
• 45:30 - 46:00 information about what is more active than what. Very coarse resolution. You feed that into it, you get an answer. But the answer is just as good as the poor resolution of the data you fed it with. Or you can implant mic tiny needles inside your brain. So you can pick up the activation of a single axon which then spreads out to 10,000 synapses. But you can pick up that activation of a single axon. Very high resolution data. But how many axons can you measure that way? It's one in a
• 46:00 - 46:30 million because you can't put needles everywhere. So uh you get very very high resolution data but very poor spatial sampling. Um in the ideal world you would be able to feed IIT with with information at the lowest granularity level or the highest granularity level the smallest feature which could be even what's happening inside the microtubule. Today we can't measure that. So IIT is
• 46:30 - 47:00 just as good as how much we can measure. Yeah. So what they do in practice today to check whether somebody is vegetative or locked in syndrome instead of simply passively measuring and then this is a very smart thing that they have done Marello Julio Kristoff and they even setting up a company to commercialize this it's incredibly smart what they are doing instead of passively measuring they insert the electrodes and then they send a post to the that electrode and they
• 47:00 - 47:30 measure how the brain tissue around it respond. And by looking at that signal response with low granularity of stimula, you can have a fairly accurate representation of whether the person is conscious or not. And you can see that uh on on on the screen. Now for each electrode, you see the response. If the response is a little oscillation, that doesn't integrate much information. But if it goes like this, there's a lot of information. something
• 47:30 - 48:00 you would not sort of see in an fMRI or and different way of scanning. So it's really pretty novel way. Yeah. Yeah. An fMRI fMRI is passive. Yeah. It just measures a proxy for brain activity like the amount of oxygen going in different parts of the brain. This is active. This you're sending a pulse into the brain and checking how the brain responds and based on that response you can take that response as data run it through an IIT algorithm. the latest IIT4. Maybe there's IIT5 coming down the p the pike
• 48:00 - 48:30 and you can have a measurement of FI and you know what baseline FI is. So you can tell this person is which is much better than how we now test is like purely on behavior, right? It would be like a doctor with the what classical stuff we have pointing a light in your in your iris and sort of hitting your knee just testing reflexes and then we see that we don't see anything. conclusion, low or no conscious that only measures whether your conscious states are connected with the rest of the body. Yeah. But you could have a rich inner life with
• 48:30 - 49:00 without any of that. Yeah. And we could unplug. It could be that you're killing someone. Yeah. Exactly. So ethically this has such huge implications. It's worse than that. The worst thing is you don't unplug but you treat the person as a vegetative patient. Yeah. Can you imagine the the solitude, the boredom, the un the torture which it is? Yeah. To be left for dead and not die. Yeah. That's the importance of this work and uh the beauty of it and um you've
• 49:00 - 49:30 called sort of also in in praise of IIT that this might be the first theory of the numina. Which is quite a big thing to say Bernardo because it it puts it sort of beyond physics in a sense. I thought okay do you now are you now saying that it can break out of the dashboard of reality? You are saying that. Yeah that's what I'm saying. Explain. Yeah. So what I does as a scientific theory which has metaphysical implications they happen to be idealist
• 49:30 - 50:00 implications in my view but let's ignore that. It's a scientific theory. It was developed based on science. It so happens that it may have metaphysical implications but it was not driven by metaphysics. As a scientific theory, what IIT does is it correlates the two sides of the equation. We have we can we have inner experience through introspection. We know how it feels to be us and we have measurements of brain activity. So as you are undergoing an
• 50:00 - 50:30 experience, you can be instrumented with an EEG cap or an MEG or they can put you inside an an fMRI brain scanner. So they can measure the patterns of brain activity you have as you're experiencing something. And then they have these two sources of data. The brain scans uh functional brain scans on the one hand and on the other hand subjective reports from introspection. I am telling you what I'm experiencing. What it does is to build a a a a bridge between these
• 50:30 - 51:00 two sides is to build a bjective function that links the two. So if you have enough examples of the two sides, you can refine that bridge and come to a point where you can infer one side from the other. Of course, you have to see enough instances of both sides uh in order to refine the bridge. But once you have it, so you know how you move from one side to the other. Yeah. If one side is not available, you can infer it. So
• 51:00 - 51:30 you get to a point where I can report an experience to you and using IIT, you will be able to predict what my patterns of brain activity will be. But it's what's very important here is to see how this is different from Musk's neural link and the neurooralates that also now are able to they can also pretty accurately says but this is different, right? Well, in Neurolink, what they're trying to do is the brain control of things and and the other way around. They're trying to bridge the external world to the brain. This is different.
• 51:30 - 52:00 This is this is a a a model. This is a bridge for it's a theoretical bridge. It's not to get you to control your video game just by thinking of it. It's about being able to infer brain activity from reported experience. Yeah. And experience from brain activity. Yeah, it's to have a theoretical model that can bring you from one side to the other and to create sort of the first truly accurate map of
• 52:00 - 52:30 qualia. It it is not going to be a complete map in my view because I don't think brain activity tells you everything there is to know about your conscious inner life because I don't think the dashboard is complete. Okay. But as far as we can get, we as far as we can get, I think IIT is by far the best game in town as far as a theoretical model that allows you to reconstruct one side from the other. Yeah. Now, we do that with living humans because only with living humans do we get the reports from introspection. Your
• 52:30 - 53:00 cat's not going to report and the black hole is not going to report what it is like to be the black hole. The inanimate universe is not going to tell you what it is like to be the inanimate universe. So we are epistemically limited there. We have to stick to people. Yeah. But if you then understand that there is nothing special about people and the matter that forms our body uh than the rest of the matter that constitutes the inanimate universe. What you can do is the following. You refine the model
• 53:00 - 53:30 based on people's experiential reports and people's brain activity. You refine that model having the two sides. Once that model is refined and you nailed it, now you can start extrapolating it to things that are not people. And uh if idealism is right in the inanimate universe in and of itself numinally is constituted of mental states and physicality is just a
• 53:30 - 54:00 dashboard representation in us of those mental states. Mhm. Then I allows us to go from the dashboard to the numinal from the phenomena to the numina because that's what it does with us. In our case, the phenomena is the subject. Sorry, the phenomena is the patterns of brain activity. If if I get this. So yeah, you see because then if you have one part of the equation, you can then say this was the taste of garlic. This this this this snapshot of the
• 54:00 - 54:30 integrated information. I'll just say that for for for to just get this across like a snapshot of the system at a certain moment not its computation. So not computation forget it's a snapshot of the integrated information at a certain moment in time this was garlic and now you're saying that we could take a snapshot of the the universe we can't we can't because the universe is not going to report no but look then we can infer maybe correct we can extrapolate look in the case of people
• 54:30 - 55:00 the phenomena are the patterns of brain activity is what I can see from the outside the numinal only you have access to Yeah, but you can tell me what it is. You can tell me what it is like to be you at a certain moment in that snapshot. So for you, I have the phenomena and the numina. The numina, you tell me the phenomena I measure. Yeah. In the case of the universe, the universe is not telling me anything. I only have the phenomena. Yeah. But if I refine the model with you, Yeah. because from you I do have the numina. I can
• 55:00 - 55:30 infer the numa of the rest of the universe. Check. But then we get to sort of this question. This brings me to sort of Kau's experience on 5me DMT and DMT. He was sort of like in an onlogical shock when we spoke to him him a year ago. I think he's sort of landed again. But I mean city right here. Right there. Yeah. Right there. And asked him how if I I asked him if it could make sense of that experience. And he had a hard time of of sort of saying yes, it can because
• 55:30 - 56:00 he said I need a substrate. I had this experience of being one with the universe that's is a numinina a phenomenal experience of being one with the universe and if you now want me to sort of just if I want to make sense of that I need a substrate and I don't regard universe as a whole as a substrate what would your answer be first I'll give you my perspective as a philosopher and then I'll bridge that to to where I think Kristoff is um we spent a week together when he was sitting here
• 56:00 - 56:30 so you know more non-stop. Um, in my view, physical stuff is appearance. Yeah. So, my patterns of brain brain activity are physical and they are merely the appearance of my conscious in their life. They are what my conscious inner life looks like when observed from the outside. Yeah. And of course, appearances don't need to be complete. You have an appearance of me right now. You don't see what's under my clothes. You don't see the details of my
• 56:30 - 57:00 metabolism. You don't see what is on my back. You can infer a lot about me. If I am crying right now, you would pick it up that I am sad. The appearance does reveal important stuff about how I am feeling from within. Yeah. But not everything. So under analytic idealism, the physical world doesn't need to tell us everything there is to know about the numinal world, things as they are in themselves. Yeah. patterns of brain
• 57:00 - 57:30 activity also don't need to review everything there is to know about how the owner of the brain is feeling. Yeah. If it's more coarse grain view can also give you sort of a yeah it's more coarse grain it may not be complete and not everything there is to know about how I'm feeling may be discernible in patterns of brain activity again because unlike causes appearances don't need to be complete. If the brain is the cause of consciousness, then there cannot be anything about consciousness that you can't find back in the brain. Yeah. If
• 57:30 - 58:00 the brain is the cause, it has to be complete. But if it's a mere appearance, no appearance in the world complete, why would patterns of brain activity reveal everything there is to know about the thing they are an image of? In other words, the feelings. Um that's why um I think um psychedelic experiences which correlate with vastly reduced brain activity um you can't expect to find correlates
• 58:00 - 58:30 of the psychedelic experience in patterns of brain activity. It's a limited appearance. It's an appearance of the dissociation. And my hypothesis is that in during psychedelic experiences the dissociative boundary becomes porous and you reach beyond it and you will not find that beyond in the appearance of the dissociation. Does the fire go up? Does the integrated information go up within the brain on these substances? There is less brain activity but there
• 58:30 - 59:00 is more um syn there's more synchronization across different areas of the brain. Good. Not necessarily. You'd have to run the numbers because uh the part of the brain that has the potential for most information integration is the posterior hot zone here. Um and the default mode network where you have the reduction of brain activity. It does not map one to one onto that. It goes into the prefrontal
• 59:00 - 59:30 cortex and other areas. Um so you'd have to run the numbers. Yeah. Um but but when you say just sort of this sort of maybe might be a sort of a side side note but when you say appear appearances don't have to be complete. So it could be that the appearance of universal of of having a sense of being one with universal mind the appearance of that is someone like laying on a mat just having drank a cup of psychedelic tea. That's the appearance of it. No look your question and I don't mean this
• 59:30 - 60:00 as a as a joke. No no no I understand you. No, look your your previous question was does integrated information increase during the psychedelic state or not? And then my answer to you well we would have to run the numbers but a better question would have been could it increase enough to account for the psychedelic experience and then the answer is the categorical no you will not find enough and Kristoff knows that that's why he didn't answer your question. Um, so for me the substrate is not holy
• 60:00 - 60:30 in the sense that I don't expect it to be complete. So I I'm epistemically more I have lesser expectations epistemically of the substrate because I don't regard it as something that necessarily needs to be complete. So I'm perfectly happy regarding as entirely natural possibility that somebody's tripping to parallel dimensions and talking to
• 60:30 - 61:00 aliens and understanding the key to life, the universe and everything um with no more fight than one normally has and perhaps less because I don't expect the substrate to reveal everything there is to know about the person's inner state especially when it's a less dissociated state because brain activity is the image of the dissociative alter. Um, but now think about it from Kristoff's perspective. Yeah, he would I I don't He would see this as a copout if you say stuff like this. Yeah. Okay, I'm
• 61:00 - 61:30 a scientist. Okay, now here's the philosopher talking. So, okay, it's the philosopher talking. Well, I I can't change logic. Logic tells me that this is perfectly reasonable, right? That you don't expect an image to be complete, and I can't help it. I wish it were not the case. But through logic and and empirical experience, I cannot say otherwise. Why would the bloody image need to be complete if it is an image? Right? But now think of it from the perspective of of a scientist. A scientist unlike a philosopher deals
• 61:30 - 62:00 only with empirical data. That is the input to every scientific theory. Because a scientific theory doesn't arise out of a vacuum. A scientific theory is an attempt to account for certain observations. That's how it the whole thing starts. So for a scientist whether the image is complete or not, the image is all he has. He can't do science without the
• 62:00 - 62:30 image. And then comes Bernardo Castup and says, well, but the image is not complete. Yeah, fine. Very well, very good. But what can I do? What experiment can I run? what hypothesis can I test? Yeah. You see? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, that is a limitation of the scientific method and it's an important limitation because that's what makes the scientific method reliable. But it is a limitation of the method, not a limitation of reality. Reality is what it is regardless of the limitations of the scientific method.
• 62:30 - 63:00 You see? Yeah. And I think Chris Chris is at this point. He he knows the limits of of IIT and and I think this is exactly what puzzles him that maybe previously he had he I wouldn't say he didn't see the limits any any scientist knows that there's a difference between your model of reality and reality but you still have high hopes right and and and I think this shocked him this exper but that's my my take from but but um yeah when he says there has to be a substrate the way I hear it I don't know
• 63:00 - 63:30 whether he would agree with is I have to call him and ask maybe he'll be watching this and say burn out or damn you and then the two we need the two of you sit sit down here and fight it out but how I read him when he says um no brain never mind no substrate no mind what I hear is no substrate I can't do mind science no substrate there's nothing I can do
• 63:30 - 64:00 yeah yeah so what's the point Yeah. Yeah. And and that is correct. Yeah. That's correct. From a scientist's perspective because of the limitations. It's an epistemic conclusion that you're making there. Not. Yeah. But it's as frustrating for a scientist as an ontological conclusion. Yeah. I I can tell you an anecdote of this uh there was once I was at CERN and I was 22 23 years old you know mid to late 90s and I was very young an idealist and
• 64:00 - 64:30 and we were working to discover the Higs Bosen right build an an accelerator the large harden collider I was working in the Atlas experiment which is one of the two big experiments in the Atlas and particularly in the data acquisition part and the whole point was to measure the Higs boss. And once I was talking to my boss who was my mentor, father figure for me, a physicist called Rudy Bach who regrettably died 10 years ago. He I was
• 64:30 - 65:00 talking to him and I was saying the previous generation accelerator, the LEP, uh which is in the same tunnel as the LHC is today, um it was still on when I was there. It we had to shut it down to build the LHC. But when we were designing the LHC, the LP was still running and we know in the grape vine we heard that they had measured the Higs bosan already had been measured. So I was like Rudy why all this obsession with the Higs boson we are doing this to
• 65:00 - 65:30 to find Suzie super symmetry which was the thing that we did not have any experimental evidence for. there was something we didn't have the statistics but we had seen some events that were consistent with uh the Higs you know um you you always get something right and I thought why don't we just bite the bullet we are doing this to find susie to find super symmetry it's not for the higs bosen he looked at me very seriously and said without statistics it
• 65:30 - 66:00 does not exist which is if you don't have the empirical data then it's not there. Well, it was there. And how did they know without empirical data that it was there? That well, we had the empirical data, but we didn't have statistics. So, it could be attributed to noise or just one of those things. Who knows? But the the consensus among the physicists there was already that you guys had found the exposure. No, it was not consensus because many physicists would say you only have a discovery when you pass
• 66:00 - 66:30 three sigma which is you know three sigma but but your intuition if you would ask them all with over a glass of beer most of them would say we we found it. Yeah, there's a little bump in the energy histogram right in the energy range where we expect all that length you have to go through then and then all that hard work. Unbelievable. Yeah. Well, people like me, we did it for Suzie. We didn't we didn't do it for the Higs. The Higs was so well theoretically constructed that it's like it had to be
• 66:30 - 67:00 there, right? Yeah. Uh so the for me the whole point was there. Ah and it was a sure bet to spend all that money because you guys knew that you probably would find it. I was not a politician so I don't know maybe maybe but the point is without the daisy it doesn't exist. So philosopher Bernardo Castup can talk about the substrate being incomplete and therefore the psychedelic experience is there but it's not in the data. For a
• 67:00 - 67:30 scientist it's like Rudy looked me in the eye and said without the data it does not exist. I get it. Yeah. Unless you cross three sigma it does not exist. Yes. You have high hopes right on where I is going. Yes. Because I in my mind is the first theory of the numinal. Yeah. And foundations of physics are reaching a point where a hypothesis about what the numinal is is the only way forward. Otherwise, we
• 67:30 - 68:00 think the numinal and the physical are the same thing. Yeah. And therefore physical stuff is the only thing that can be measured. But physical stuff only appear after measurement. What do you do now? So you have to have a theory of the numinal to proceed in physics. And guess what? The only game in town in town is it's IIT. Yeah. And and both are based on information. Foundations of physics is based on information theory. IIT is based on information theory. Yeah. And at this moment in time to conclude, I
• 68:00 - 68:30 think it's the more important we started off this this talk about Chris Chris's work and uh that graft between consciousness and intelligence. When people start sort of attributing or projecting consciousness onto AI, we need a scientific theory that can help us sort of distinguish fact from fiction. That's what I find really important sort of ethically and society. That's why Kristoff is involved in our AI initiatives as well. We need a voice of reason to tell the world that uh we have no reason to think of AI as
• 68:30 - 69:00 conscious and and this to me you know me personally, you know how important this is to me. AI is a great opportunity and a great threat because if we think AI is conscious like we are then we think of ourselves as mechanisms. Yeah. Yeah. And that is a catastrophe. Yeah. Um and and all these academic discussions popping up now out of the woodwork the ethics about how to deal with AI AI. I find it insulting. Yeah. No, there's still
• 69:00 - 69:30 children starving. And you're telling me how I should ethically treat AI, a mechanism, an abacus, you know, a sophisticated abacus, but an abacus nonetheless. Uh, this pisses me off. Um, so I think, yeah, people like me and Kristoff and a few others whose names, you know, um, we need to create a beach head for ourselves in AI because that's where the metaphysical discussion is going to go. it's going to go under the umbrella of AI. Yeah. And if you don't
• 69:30 - 70:00 have a presence in in AI that forces people to listen to what you have to say, um we may go to hell in a hand basket. Thanks Bernardo for sharing this and just sort of uh we promise sort of to our viewers to to sort of or I promise it's just my my analysis that sort of in physics in biology in neuroscience we see this shift this paradigm shift happening. Now of course Chris Chris of is not he doesn't represent the whole field
• 70:00 - 70:30 of neuroscience. He's a renowned neuroscientist but it still of course is also has sort of like in the last year or two years ago became a bit more controversial. I mean how do you see the whole field of neuroscience? Would you say that still Kristoff represents sort of just a minority of the field of neuroscience? Oh no, no, I there are two uh sort of dominant theories of consciousness in neuroscience today. That's global workspace theory and IIT and uh IIT is superior um not only in
• 70:30 - 71:00 terms of how far along they are uh in instrumenting the theory you know coming up with the equations you know the precise predictions they they they are miles ahead of global workspace theory in terms of the how precisely they can predict things how well instrumented the theory is. Um there has also been a recent u adversarial collaboration in which representatives from both theories agreed beforehand on an experiment that
• 71:00 - 71:30 could distinguish the two and I won that. So if anything I is more dominant now than it has ever been. And you know a nice sign of that is that um the losers wrote a letter decrying IIT as sudo scientific. Why? Because IIIT starts from the qualities of experience that we can discern introspectively, which is incredibly natural. If you want to explain consciousness, you need to first
• 71:30 - 72:00 describe what it is that you're trying to explain. You need to start with the thing that you're trying to account for. So you account for that and not something else. But no, but according to the letter, it's pseudo science because it starts from what consciousness looks like from from introspection. I mean, it's it's crazy stuff. So when you see scientists or people who should be scientists applying a blow below the the waistline didn't predict that that that
• 72:00 - 72:30 already is a sign it's a sign of despair. A sign of despair. Exactly. Yeah. It's people who are on the losing side and they know it and and they're losing funding. Yeah. So that's just very cool to see the shift happening in biology and neuroscientist and really as my ending sort of cliffhanger because I would like to to go more in deep in depth into AI. You have been working on a new AI company um synactics of which you were CEO I should say as of right
• 72:30 - 73:00 now I am still but soon I shall not be and then you'll become fingers crossed scientific in a couple of days. Yeah. Yeah. And I know personally how much work, nightly hours apart from being director of Assencia Foundation, which is also a full-time job you've been putting into that. And just want to ask you as a person why you went to such length to to I mean you have had a rich career already in in in at ASML as an engineer. Why did you go to all this length? Well, I'll give you the the politically correct and true answers and
• 73:00 - 73:30 then I'll give you another answer. Um we the idea for synthetics came from the direction of Essentia Foundation. one of our directors called Avert. pulled me to the side one day after a board meeting and he said you know AI is exploding and all this conversation about you know is AI conscious or not and a series like black mirror portraying artificial consciousness consciousness uploading and he thought
• 73:30 - 74:00 this is how the metaphysical discussion in which we play which we were founded to influence as essential foundation this is where that metaphysical discussion is going and he looked at me and said you have always done multiple things in your if shouldn't shouldn't you shouldn't we but you start something in the area of AI and and I went ahead and did it. So synthetics is not legally related to Essential Foundation. But if you look at the people involved, there are names that are that are
• 74:00 - 74:30 related or associated with Essential Foundation, it's legally completely separate. It's not a foundation. It is a for-profit company. Without that you don't get funding. Um and the idea was if the metaphysical discussion that the sensient foundation was founded to influence if that discussion is going to move under the umbrella of AI in the cultural dialogue which is already happening you know it's AI that's leading to questions like what is mind is an AI minded what's the difference
• 74:30 - 75:00 between me and chat GPT now that's exactly the discussion we were founded to influence if that moves under AI but we don't have a foothold in AI. We are looking into AI from the outside. Then people can always say, well, what do these philosophers know about AI? They are not invoked. Computer engineering has gone far far since Bernardo got his PhD in 2001. What does Bernardo know of latest computer
• 75:00 - 75:30 engineering? He's outdated. If he says it's not conscious, we can't take seriously because he doesn't know. 20 years in technology is an eternity, right? So who cares what Fedrico Fin Bernard Castroo you know Steven who care what they say they don't know they're not involved we have to talk to the boses that are involved right so we figured fine then we get involved and we will do hardware not software hardware because hardware is what exists right software is a pattern
• 75:30 - 76:00 of information in hardware right it's it's what drives hardware but what is actually happening is always hardware only hardware states exist. Software is an abstraction that they create. Only hardware states exist. There is nothing to a computer but hardware and its states. Software is pure abstraction. It's important abstraction but it's abstraction. So he thought let's do that. Let's try to be the best AI hardware in the world. So five years from now when Christoph Bernardo Castro
• 76:00 - 76:30 Fedrico Fajin say it's not conscious. Nobody can ignore us if we are the ones behind the hardware. Okay. So, you're now all in. But look, it's not the first time I do that. I know. I got a second PhD because years ago somebody said, "Why should I listen to you?" Your PhD in computer engineering. What do you know about philosophy? It's an ad hominant attack, but I think some ad homins are valid. I am not against all ad hominins. So, I thought this is a
• 76:30 - 77:00 good ad hominant. I take it to heart. Two people said that. Why should I listen to you? You're PhD in computer engineering and you're doing philosophy now. Why should I listen to you? And I thought, okay, I spent three years writing technical papers in philosophy in main uh uh uh mainstream journals, peer-reviewed journals, and then I got my second PhD. So yeah, I have a history of going to length to make a point if I
• 77:00 - 77:30 think the criticism is valid. And I think the potential future criticism, Bernard, your PhD is from 2001. Your PhD in computer engineering, the philosophy one is 2019. Bernard, your your relevant PhD is from 25 years ago. Why should they listen to you? I take that to heart. So I will show why they should listen to me. You said you had two reasons and you just gave me the the the first reason which has to do with just be legitimate in this field of AI and
• 77:30 - 78:00 consciousness. What is the second one? Yeah, it's a lot of fun to do this. It's a whole lot of fun to do this. I feel like I'm 26 years old again in your attic at night. Yeah, because I was 26 years old when I founded my first company together with friends who are with me again with Synthetics. We founded Silicon Hive back in 2002. Um, now it it was sold to Intel many years ago. Uh, so now I am 50 and I'm doing that again with the same people. That's cool. The same partner. That's cool.
• 78:00 - 78:30 That's cool. So I feel like I'm 26 again. It's a whole lot of fun. That alone would justify it. Really cool, Bernardo. And um it it reminds me that and that's my concluding remark for this this great conversation that Christoph said here. So we need to see where the rubber meets the road. Sort of that hardware approach. So what I really hope in following syntactics a bit from the sideline of course, but I'd love to report on it once it gets relevant for Asencia is that it might indeed give us a better understanding of what AI truly
• 78:30 - 79:00 is and is not to help people sort of just sift through fact and fiction here. So thanks for sharing that and uh we'll tell you more about that when it becomes relevant. Bernardo, thanks very much for this broad rangranging discussion we've had. I'd love to do more of those sort of when I get back with new videos. And you, thanks for watching and see you on one of our next videos. Thank you so much.