Episode 176: Split-Brains and the (Dis)Unity of Consciousness

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] Money just perverts everything. At this point I could stand to be a little perverted. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, Barack Obama said that woke people confuse trashing someone on Twitter with real social activism and change.

[00:01:24] How does it feel to be called out by a former president? I didn't know he said this shows you how much I don't read political stuff. I had no idea he said that. But I am so inactive on Twitter, you're the one who says things on Twitter.

[00:01:41] I do nothing. I retweet you. You SJWs, you think if you call out Dave Chappelle or Kevin Hart, like you've done your job, you've changed the world. We've talked about it, I hate the word woke anyway.

[00:02:03] But the people who are in real danger are the people who are swinging into anti-woke like our dear friends at the two psychologists for beers parties who are just getting themselves in trouble. Wait, what happened?

[00:02:17] I think someone called them out on their show notes where they included the word tits in the introduction. I mean, in the show notes, which was just a reference to a conversation that they had with the woman on the show.

[00:02:38] But I guess I do see it like you can listen to them every once in a while. I like their podcast. You can just see the seeds of a future turn, just that radicalized anti-PC, anti-woke free speech, Christina Hoff Summer's kind of turn. Oh yeah, they're there.

[00:03:04] You think they're already there? Well, I don't know. Anyway, so today we're going to talk about our Patreon listener selected. Episode topic, split brain patients. And we're going to talk about the experiments and then the new experiments, challenging the various different things. It's fascinating.

[00:03:24] The whole subject there is it's really cool. And it actually connects, I think a little to the naïve piece we did last time. What is it like to be a bad? Yeah, it connects to just in general discussions we've had about the self and the narrative

[00:03:42] self and like, yeah. And I actually in the show notes, I'm going to say it now just so people actually go to show notes. It's basically like a bibliography I've put in. Like I feel like the references of a research article.

[00:03:56] Along with a bunch of just gratuitous tits. But before that. Yes. I didn't realize that was a cue. We're like the left brain and the right brain. That's that's actually not a bad metaphor. We are one self. We're like those mirror twins.

[00:04:20] There was I sent you this piece. Actually, I heard this guy interviewed on the Robert Wright podcast. It was, you know, meaning of life or blogging heads or both. Or I don't totally get how that works.

[00:04:34] But it was the Robert Wright podcast had this guy pressed in green on and they were talking about his paper that he was published in our kindness. What's the journal anyway? It's an article that he published and then also did a kind of popularized

[00:04:56] version of it in The New York Times and the Sunday review entitled, Are we living in a computer simulation? Let's not find out. Experimental findings will either be boring or extremely dangerous. I guess should I try to just summarize the general idea here? Yeah, go for it.

[00:05:17] So Nick Bostrom, I'm sure we've mentioned this on the podcast before, but he's come up with an argument that and it gets framed in a bunch of different ways. But the basic idea is if we assume that human beings will eventually

[00:05:34] develop the computational power to simulate human consciousness. And if they then develop the desire, if we don't already have it to simulate the lives of their ancestors and various different parts of the world. If if that's true, then it's overwhelmingly likely that we are in a simulation

[00:06:01] that this all this has happened before. And right now we are in one of those simulations, assuming that this is possible and assuming that if it was possible, we would want to create simulations like what if Donald Trump won the election in 2016?

[00:06:19] Well, you know, what if the US had won World War Two? Countless variations of human history. They'll just be interested in and seeing that. Well, the chances that we're in the original, the like base reality according to Bostrom is very, very low because there's going to be

[00:06:41] so many hundreds of billions, probably more. There's a lot of like there's a lot of math here, but but so many more simulations than there will be realities, well, there'll be one reality. And so the chance that we're living in the reality is very low.

[00:06:57] So that's just the the the background. Apparently physicists now are able to potentially run studies or do a test or something that will help to determine whether or not we are living in a computer simulation. I don't know how this is work. This would work.

[00:07:24] It has something to do with little glitches in simulations. And we could test to see if those glitches are in our universe. But Preston Green's point, he's a philosopher, is that look, think about what we're doing here.

[00:07:41] Either on the one hand, we won't find out anything, which won't prove that we're not in a simulation and will just prove that we don't have the technology to to discover it yet. We still absolutely could be in a simulation or we will discover we're

[00:07:58] in a simulation and maybe that will make the simulators decide to turn us off because their experiment is now corrupted. And so there's no point in running us anymore. And so the entire universe, as we know it, will be destroyed.

[00:08:17] Either way, we shouldn't do this like there's no upside really. The success of the experiment could very well lead to the annihilation of all life as we know it. Right. This is like there's so many assumptions here. Honestly, I'm a little surprised in your time.

[00:08:44] Your times published this like, OK, so so the original reality are like some social psychologists who don't want you to find out like that you're in the experiment because it would ruin it and they would like turn off the simulation. I just I don't find that compelling.

[00:09:03] Like, you know, they're going to. You don't think they'll turn it off? No, like why? Like you're running say you're running a bunch of simulations. And if it's anything analogous to the way we run simulations now on on whatever outcomes we're trying to model, we're running thousands

[00:09:20] upon thousands of simulations with, you know, trying to figure out if if there is a pattern that emerges. Probably they're not paying attention to any individual one. But if anything like it might like you're running say you're running

[00:09:33] a bunch of simulations and in one of them people became aware that they were in a simulation like that just seems like it would be interesting. Like if I'm taking like if I'm really, you know, taking his his assumptions seriously, like that would be like, oh, cool.

[00:09:49] Well, listen to happen now. Not to not to mention like the people like Bostrom already believe that we're in a simulation and so they're act they might be acting as if we're in a simulation and convincing the world. Like, you know, I don't know that the physicists conducting

[00:10:05] experiments would be the the the thing that, you know, I don't know. Yeah, I see what you're saying. So I think those are two separate points. I'm going to try to defend this guy because he sounded like a very nice guy talking to Bob Wright. Yeah.

[00:10:22] Regarding your first point that they would find that interesting, I think the idea is, well, if they were going to find that interesting, they they've already found out what happens when people find out they're in a simulation, probably, right?

[00:10:42] Like whatever you can you can learn from that is something they've probably already learned. What they haven't learned is, you know, what happens if Donald Trump is elected president in 2016 or what? You know, so maybe that's one defense of that. And regarding your other point that why now?

[00:11:02] Why just because because what will the experiment experimental finding really prove? It'll prove, oh, here's something that might lend weight to this hypothesis. But they're not going to definitively prove that they're not going to find

[00:11:18] like little ones and zeros in the universe or in the atom or something. There is I so I'm not smart enough to understand this. But recently, so I looked this up. I'll put this in show notes as well. I forgot to send it to you.

[00:11:31] But there was a paper published in 2017 that by physicists that argued based on the math of these particular quantum effects that they were studying, that I'll just tell you the conclusion. And I don't know that I can put together how they came to this conclusion.

[00:11:55] But but they're convinced that mathematically, that it is actually impossible that we're living in a simulation. And so their argument is based on the complexity of these really small phenomenon that it would require to model it. It would require more computing power that is present in the universe.

[00:12:15] So there, their argument is a mathematical one. It's not even a probabilistic one. So I don't know what to make of it. But I want to believe that they have proven mathematically that we're not. Wait a minute. Hold on.

[00:12:30] You're on record on this podcast as saying that you think this is an empty claim that we are in a simulation, that it is not that there's no content to the claim that we are living in a simulation. Yeah, that that that there is. Yeah, that there is.

[00:12:50] I think it was when we were discussing, you know, what if a demon was creating all of this as an illusion? All of the right, like that this table is solid to me, that my actions have an effect on you.

[00:13:05] All of that stuff, like all of that layer of reality is it doesn't really matter if it's being represented in a computer or if it's being represented, however it is being represented now, right? Like the, you know, you could call this universe and all of its laws

[00:13:20] of physics as essentially some sort of computation that's going on. Whether it is being represented on some, you know, some other beings graphics card or or not. I don't think has any implications. I think it's actually indistinguishable. Like, you know, what is like, how is this universe represented?

[00:13:44] The only thing that matters is the belief that there's a layer of reality that could impose itself on us, right? So I guess the fear that they might unplug this would, right? Like that could be a genuine fear.

[00:14:00] So like I buy that that might be a genuine fear that they're going to unplug, they're going to unplug us. But I don't. The point, but the paper that I was quoting here, it's just trying to prove that this is in fact not a simulation.

[00:14:19] And, you know, I still think I still stick to my guns that it doesn't matter. So then because the reason I asked is because you said I like to think that they that they've proven it like you care, but really, you might not care.

[00:14:35] I guess. But here's here's one little wrinkle. It might be that the things they're trying to test don't require that everyone be conscious, all human beings be conscious or that all these parts of the world are are present.

[00:14:50] And so it could be that a lot of our interactions, those are not with other conscious beings, but are just part of the simulation. If we are among the chosen who are granted consciousness, that would be like a substantive difference with how we understand the world.

[00:15:09] Like the Rick and Morty episode where everybody's. I'm sure there's a Rick and Morty episode. Wait, didn't we watch that one together? Didn't we do that for a picture? Yeah, we did. But yeah, that one it was like everyone was on the same level or not.

[00:15:25] No, I guess no, no, the aliens were running it and and all the other people were actually really dumb because they were like all of their computing power was right. That's what it was.

[00:15:36] And so the way that they got out of it was like to crash the computer. Yeah. And I suppose like I could like I still think like there are other ways in which this problem presents itself like like you know,

[00:15:48] if you're if you endorse solipsism of some sort or you're just a skeptic about whether or not everybody else has the same thoughts and feelings as you. If you truly think epistemically, like it's completely like I don't

[00:16:02] I really genuinely probably don't know whether you, Tamler, are are a fully conscious being. That's just what someone who wasn't a fully conscious being would say. Right. Like shift. There is nothing to distinguish the behavior of any human being from, you know,

[00:16:20] like it's not like I think it just wouldn't. It just doesn't matter. Right. Like if you cry out in pain when I hit you, I like I suppose you could be a complete computer simulation without consciousness.

[00:16:35] But I, you know, I think it's actually a big part of me agrees with you that this is not a pseudo problem because there are all these wrinkles like, you know, it does seem a little different if we are like

[00:16:47] reality TV for some other like group of people that are living outside reality as we understand it. But at some level, it really doesn't matter if basic the, you know, the basic reality is quarks or bits. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

[00:17:08] It's like we don't understand how that would be true either way. Right. I think that's right. Yeah. I think the only, I think the only thing is the belief that there is sort of another layer of reality that can impose itself on us. Maybe that's a little daunting.

[00:17:24] And you get that if you believe in the supernatural order of things already. There was another thing that I kept thinking about when, when, when thinking about this pretty good problem. And that is that like there is a rise in

[00:17:40] both this simulation talk and like alternate reality talk. And I feel, I can't help but feel like there are sociological reasons why, why of there's a lot of sci fi about alternate realities, you know, us being one of just many, many, many universes,

[00:18:01] one of many sets of simulations. I feel like there is just some enemy in society that's making us like gravitate to some of these. Totally. Right. Yes, I completely agree. There's some sort of the same kind of like dirt,

[00:18:17] dirt, I am like social isolation leads to more thought experiments you know, like the fact that we're all, you know, living in the matrix or in some computer program or I wonder if you could do some way of not demonstrating that scientifically, but, you know,

[00:18:37] do some sort of analysis of those. Like I wonder like when Descartes comes up with his thought experiment, like what are the conditions then and what, you know? Yeah, no, that would be that is super interesting. It's it's hard to know whether an idea gains traction,

[00:18:56] you know, for dumb reasons or for the deep reasons that that we're proposing. But but it just it's it's hard. Like what I want to know is is it is it comforting to think that we're one of many realities or is it or is it distressing?

[00:19:12] Like I feel like it is scratching an itch for some people to believe this. Yeah. But I don't know what exactly it's doing because, yeah. Like why does Bostrom want to believe this, you know? Robin Hansen, the economist. He's sometimes on Tyler Cowan's podcast.

[00:19:31] That's Robin Hansen said maybe we would if we found out we were living in a simulation, we would give less to charity and we would put less into retirement because I guess if you don't really think Ethiopia is there and you could take that

[00:19:48] two ways like is Ethiopia not there because they haven't they've only programmed Houston really and that's all they're looking at. Or is it not really there in the sense that not all of us aren't really here.

[00:20:03] But I think the idea is one way or another, it's not really there. And so we shouldn't give money to starving kids and like us. What is that? Right. You know, like us in 40 years is first of all, this could just be

[00:20:22] like a two day experiment number one. And so maybe they want to test what's happened today. Right. So just masturbate as many times. That's the only solution. I think that it is if not being here is taken to mean

[00:20:46] well, Ethiopia doesn't really exist in the same way that I don't really exist. Then I still think that that's completely cruel. Like the fact that you can feel pain in this, whether or not it's a simulation and that other people are reacting in a similar way.

[00:21:04] Like I think that it would be cruel to think, well, nothing really exists because I don't think that it would comfort you at all to be punched in the face to believe that you don't really exist, you know, that you're just being simulated.

[00:21:17] I think it would be cruel. But if Ethiopia doesn't exist in the sense that you are the only consciousness and you are being like it's only rendered in 3D when you go to Ethiopia. Like it's being created for you.

[00:21:30] Then yeah, then it's some version of solipsism and then why care? Or you could believe everybody is a robot. I don't think that the simulation stuff is adding anything new to those kinds of like thought experiments.

[00:21:46] But I think it's crazy to think that if we were being represented as ones and zeros instead of as whatever, you know, the quantum packets that this would make any difference. Right? Like it's... I agree. It's... I like this idea you have about anime leading to this

[00:22:06] and why that would be comforting in an increasingly socially isolated world. Maybe it's that this kind of... You have some alternate explanation for the social isolation that you feel that it's just like a natural part of existence.

[00:22:24] Yeah, and that maybe there are other versions of the world that aren't as shitty. I mean, of the, you know, of existence that aren't as shitty. But it just does strike me as, you know, like from from the Ted Chiang

[00:22:40] stories that we're reading to Mr. Robot, to one of my favorite TV shows, Counterpart. Like there's so much talk of this and I feel like, yeah, the belief that this is just one of the possible... You know, this is a tweak where Donald Trump won or whatever.

[00:22:58] Or this is a tweak that somehow that thinking of the counterfactuals is giving us something like, well, you know, I don't know, maybe it makes people feel less alone in the universe. Or it kind of justifies the feeling of aloneness that they might already have, like or something.

[00:23:19] I don't know. It's probably a combination of so many different factors. It's like physics, E-Monus. Right. Well, one of the things that Robert Wright asked, Preston Green is, is all this simulation talk just religion for atheists? Yeah.

[00:23:37] It, you know, make maybe this is just the way for certain people who to satisfy a spiritual need that they're no longer getting that they used to get. Peeling away the layers of reality to find the true, like the true metaphysical

[00:23:55] like layer is, yeah, it seems as if it's all you can talk about gods and demons or you can talk about about a master race simulating us on a computer. It does, it does feel like the same thing, just like a more plausible version of God. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:11] And is it that much more plausible? You know, in the end, right? We still don't know why we're here. So like, yeah. Yeah. You know what? And plus, if you believe that we're in a simulation, this might be a simulation in which a God does exist.

[00:24:26] So you got to just part of their experiment is like, OK, we're going to create one universe in which God exists and people believe in him and one in which he doesn't exist, but people believe it. We're alone just for the record, I just you think we're alone.

[00:24:43] I put money on that we're alone. If the day that we create a plausible simulation is the day, you know, where where actual creatures are living out their lives. That's the day we'll all suspect that we might be in this. I mean, here's the thing.

[00:24:59] We don't understand consciousness. So I don't get why people think we will be able to simulate it. Like, we're not close to understanding it. Like, there's so much about it that we don't understand that to to assume that we're just going to be able to simulate it is.

[00:25:16] I don't know. Like, I think Bostrom understands this. But I think like he kind of says that almost dismissively, it does strike me as why should we think that we are we will be able to do that?

[00:25:29] Is when it's like we have like a middle of 10 million years or whatever, you know? But I you know, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, that's that's right. Those those those arguments always turn on like, you know, in in an infinite on an infinite scale, right?

[00:25:45] Everything that could happen will happen. But I was mugging. Yeah, exactly. I guess you could just you could be some sort of functionalist and say, so long as we put information together in the same configuration as brains are put together, then it will emerge consciously.

[00:26:01] Like, we don't have to know how to make it. All we have to do is know how to copy. But from my perspective, if I don't if I don't believe that functionalism is true or that can explain consciousness, then there's no reason

[00:26:18] for me to think that I am a simulation. My epistemic position. Yeah. It's hard to shake my like firm belief. This can't be as good, but you know, they could have fucking programmed that into me. I don't know.

[00:26:32] I don't know. So believe what you want, but don't not give to charity. That's fucked up. All right. Well, we will be back. I have to simulate taking a piss right now. No, you don't need to take a piss because we're just in a simulation.

[00:26:46] You can just piss your pants. You're not really pissing. Who cares? That's not really piss in your real pants. It's just ones and zeros. All right, we'll be right back. Tamler, I'm currently in New York City

[00:27:03] and it's officially the start of the holiday season because I can see all the Christmas lights are already up and Santa's on the corner. What do you like to do during the holidays? Well, you know, since I'm Jewish, I participate in the annual war on Christmas.

[00:27:20] So I like to call Christmas trees holiday trees. I like to correct people if they say Merry Christmas. I'll say, excuse me, it's happy holidays. That's probably my favorite thing to do. And we're really gearing it up.

[00:27:34] I kind of even doubt there will be a Christmas this this year. But that's my favorite thing. But my second favorite thing to do is it is the time of year to donate money traditionally where people start to think about others less fortunate than ourselves and

[00:27:57] Givewell is a place that I turn to and I will continue to turn to now every year. Giving is hard because when you donate, it's hard to know what a charity can actually accomplish with your money. It could be if you want to help children, for example,

[00:28:19] you found two trustworthy organizations, but they're running different programs and one is more effective than the other. One could save a child's life for every $300,000 donated while the other can save a child's life for every $3,000 donated. And if you could tell the difference, donating one would be 100 times

[00:28:39] more effective at saving children's lives than the other. And that's what Givewell does. They spend 20,000 hours each year researching which charities can do the most with your money. And then they recommend a short list of the best charities they found

[00:28:58] and they share them with donors like you are listeners. The recommended charities work to prevent children from dying of cheaply prevented diseases and help people in dire poverty. They treat intestinal parasites for less than a dollar,

[00:29:13] provide malaria treatment for less than $10, save a life for a few thousand dollars. If you are a first time donor to Givewell, this is your lucky day and the lucky day for the people you could be helping. If you go to Givewell.org slash Very Bad Wizards,

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[00:30:09] And if you're not a first time donor, obviously it is still the best bang for your charity buck. Thanks to Givewell for sponsoring this episode.

[00:31:28] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the show where we like to take a moment to thank all of our listeners for all of their support. We really appreciate it. We look forward to opening each and every email and reading it from you guys

[00:31:44] and tweets and messages and complaints and arguments. All of that stuff is really what keeps us going. We really appreciate it. If you do want to get in touch with us, you can and please do. You can email us verybadwizards at gmail.com.

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[00:32:41] So it matters for my self esteem. And you know what else matters is if you play us on Spotify, I think. Download us on Spotify, subscribe on Spotify. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, thank you, everybody, for all your interactions and your messages and your moral support

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[00:33:12] or you can become one of our beloved patrons. And we appreciate them so much. They have given us our topic for today. They've given us so many topics and they support us by giving a small amount, in some cases, a medium sized amount for each episode.

[00:33:32] And that keeps the lights on and we're just everyone is so generous and we really appreciate it. And we try to do something in return. We tried to reciprocate by putting up some bonus episodes every so often and what we're committing right now, right? To a bonus episode.

[00:33:51] So I put up a poll for our next bonus episode and bonus episodes are available for our two dollar or more supporters. If it's one dollar or more, you get four volumes of Dave's beats and access to ad free versions of our episodes.

[00:34:10] So anyway, I put up a poll saying what would you like the topic of the next bonus episode? And we've thrown a few out lately. One is top five Deadwood characters. One is another is the latest Mr. Robot episodes and then the other one was Dark,

[00:34:24] the Netflix show German sci fi, mind fuck, dark time travel. Just a crazy awesome show. And I'm really surprised about this. I already told you the results, but I think you were surprised too. Yeah. Dark just kicked the shit out of the other two.

[00:34:43] So I'm looking at the results right now. Latest Mr. Robot episodes got 56 votes. Top five Deadwood characters got 65 votes and Dark got 150 votes. So almost three times as much as the others. That's I wouldn't have thought that. So I think that they're trying to get a say

[00:35:04] to be a little more pro German. I don't know if you can be more pro German than Pizarro, but. But I could certainly be more pro German. So we will do this. I have seen it. You still have to see the second half of the second season.

[00:35:22] That's right. I have already like drawn out a Jonas's timeline like eight taped together pieces of construction paper with my daughter. So you have a ways to go. But two weeks from today's, I wonder where two weeks. That's what I'm committing to. All right.

[00:35:42] So we will do that. And then we will also do top five Deadwood characters we've promised. And I think there is passion for that too. Yeah. And and as I think I teased probably six months ago, the itch for the itch for Star Trek is strong with me.

[00:36:02] And I found a like minded podcaster in Barry Lam, who makes High Fination and we have committed to recording an episode on bonus episode for our Patreon listeners on a specific Star Trek, the next generation episode that I will leave unannounced because it's that exciting.

[00:36:22] Wow. I'm shitting my pants just in anticipation. But I'm going to start a whole podcast with Barry Lam about. So yes, not really. Shit, one's in zero. Just a bunch of ones and zero just came out of my pants. Yeah. Quishing around, you know, but it's fine.

[00:36:40] It's not real. All right. So so thank you to everybody. Thank you. Yeah, let's talk about split brains. So there are there's as as Tamar said in the beginning of this episode, there's I feel like there's just two sides to this. There is one, the empirical side,

[00:36:57] which is understanding what split brain patients are and what they say about how the brain works and what the empirical findings are. And then there is the part that's the philosophical implications about what it means to be conscious or what what a self is.

[00:37:13] And I think that that at least to introduce this, I'll talk about the empirical side first because there's some debate there. But but even with a debate, the findings are fucking fascinating. And it's something I get to talk about

[00:37:28] to to my class and intro psych, but not all that much. Right. Just put it out there and it always gets, I think it is a kind of a mind fuck for the students or two minds fuck. The gist of these empirical findings

[00:37:48] are come from trying to solve a problem. The problem was that people with severe forms of epilepsy that were untreatable by drugs. Neuroscientists and neurologists realized and brain surgeons realized that there was a possibility of stopping seizures, which is essentially an electrical storm that spreads across the brain.

[00:38:15] That there was at least one way to stop the spread of the of the seizures. And that would be to cut the corpus callosum, which is a bundle of nerves that connects the left and the right hemisphere together. And what this effectively would do for these patients

[00:38:33] would be to stop the the seizure from spreading from one hemisphere to the other and so minimize the the the suffering of these poor epileptic patients. Well, they so they did this operation, severed the corpus callosum and I think years went by. No nobody really thought anything weird

[00:39:00] was going on with these patients because they were behaving normally. Like that is they didn't have any novel deficits that were obvious, at least at first glance. But what after a few years, what they started realizing was and this came from experiments with animals as well,

[00:39:17] that realizing that there in fact were deficits, you just had to have the right measures. You had to have the right techniques to discover exactly what was going on in the brain now that the corpus callosum was cut. So this came in the form of experiments

[00:39:34] where you could present information only to one hemisphere of the brain. And usually this at least the canonical set of experiments is presenting visual information to only one side of the brain. And I think this is this is the part that always at least confuses

[00:39:53] the students when I bring it up stuff that's in your right visual hemisphere, right? Stuff that is presented on the right side of, you know, if you were to take all of your angles that you can see with with all of your vision and just bisect that stuff

[00:40:10] that's on the right gets directed through your optical nerves into the opposite side of your brain. And stuffing your left visual hemisphere gets directed into the right hemisphere. So here's what researchers discovered they could do. They could present some visual stimuli only on one side of the brain

[00:40:35] by flashing it really quickly on one side. So what they discovered was the information as it was getting into the left side of the hemisphere could be processed in a different way than stuff that was getting on the right hemisphere. So usually in normal people,

[00:40:53] the ability, your linguistic abilities reside in the left hemisphere as a general rough generalization. So if you present something to the right visual field and you're a split brain patient, you can say what you saw.

[00:41:09] So you present a tree and you say, oh yeah, I saw a tree. If you present it on the other side so that that visual information is getting onto the right hemisphere, you can't say what you saw. In fact, those patients will say they saw nothing.

[00:41:26] But if you use other assessments, right? If you have them point to a series of pictures, they can point to what they saw. They just can't verbalize it. Or they can lift it up if it's an egg. Or they can lift up an egg. Right.

[00:41:41] And so what you have is a sub-participant, essentially denying that they saw something but nonetheless being able to use that information with, right, in some other way. In some of the patients actually, their left and your right hemisphere even can seem to be fighting

[00:42:08] when you present information to one hemisphere and something else to the other hemisphere and you say, okay, now pick up the object that you saw. The two hands might actually be picking up the two different objects and sort of fighting about it.

[00:42:24] In fact, this would happen in some patients in normal everyday life. Their left hand and their right hand would actually fight with each other. So I don't think you've said that each hemisphere also says a sign to one hand or the other. Yeah, that's right.

[00:42:39] So your left hemisphere controls your right hand and your right hemisphere controls your left hand. It gets a little complicated because both of your hemispheres can control both of your arms. And in fact, there are some senses, right? Like auditory stimuli are processed

[00:42:56] on both sides of the brain. They're not lateralized in the same way. And through the years we've discovered this other kinds of lateralization. So the left hemisphere, I already mentioned it does linguistic processing. The right hemisphere seems to more holistic. It can process images more holistically

[00:43:20] whereas the left is more analytic in its processing. Yeah, I saw so you sent me something, I think. It was like this Alan Alda interviewing Michael Kazanaga and they used these paintings that were faces made of fruit and vegetables

[00:43:39] and they would flash it to both sides and one side would. So if it was the, I think it's the left brain that would not see faces. It would just- Right, the right side seems specialized to see faces, especially faces of strangers. And the left side sees,

[00:43:58] it's more likely to see parts rather than holes. So if you ask the person, they would say I saw potatoes and cucumbers or whatever. And if you signaled to the right side to say whether it was a face or a vegetable,

[00:44:14] they would indicate that it saw a face. They wouldn't be able to say it, but they would somehow either draw it or point to a face rather than a vegetable. It's also important to say that over time some of these effects go away. So there is some adaptability,

[00:44:35] that there's brain plasticity, right? There is a way, it's likely the case that one hemisphere is taking over some of the abilities that generally would only reside in the other hemisphere. And so over time, even language for instance, can actually start being used

[00:44:55] by some patients in the right hemisphere. One last thing just in your summary, there's this idea of confabulation that the left hemisphere, the left part of your brain is in charge of creating a narrative that makes sense of what it is that you're doing.

[00:45:14] Sometimes you'll be right about that, but sometimes you will just make it up. You'll make up something that seems plausible. Kazanaga did these cool experiments where he would flash something to the right hemisphere, ask the person to hold up something,

[00:45:34] say an egg or hold up what you saw. Now the left brain doesn't think that it saw anything. The right brain holds up an egg and then Kazanaga would say, why are you holding up an egg? And they would say, like, oh, I had it for breakfast

[00:45:50] or I said I had eggs for breakfast, I guess that's why. And they would believe it. And Kazanaga says that never, ever is it the case that the left hemisphere doesn't come up with some reason. Like it's just 100% that the left hemisphere will offer up an explanation,

[00:46:08] even though it has zero idea given the nature of the studies and the nature of the surgery. It has zero idea, it will always try to come up with a story. And so he refers to the left hemisphere as the interpreter.

[00:46:22] The implication is that perhaps the left hemisphere is just constantly doing this. It's just that we don't notice it. I have a question about that though. After a certain point, don't these patients start to figure out that if they're asked why they're holding an egg,

[00:46:41] it's a good chance that it's because it got flashed to their right hemisphere? I mean, they don't keep them ignorant of the experiments and what their purpose is because they were working with these patients for like 20 years or 10 years or whatever, right? Yeah.

[00:46:58] I am assuming from what I read, I didn't read in any of the papers an explicit saying that they never start inferring that. And it seems as if they're always confabulating, you would think. You would think. But even in that video, which we'll put a link to

[00:47:15] that Alan Alda, Scientific American Mind, that patient who says that he's been doing these studies with Kazanaga forever, doesn't seem to have any access to this. It's almost like when you're embarrassed at something you did and you're trying to explain why you did it, right?

[00:47:33] Like it seems like somebody with dementia, some people, when you ask them what's going on, they want to come up with a story because just because, right? It seems if that's what's going on. And it's interesting that they know

[00:47:48] that they're there to test for these kinds of things. And that they, I mean, if this is true, that they would still do it. By the way, one of the cool things is that Kazanaga video is that guy can draw with both hands independently. That's crazy.

[00:48:03] Which we can't do. Which we can't, yeah, we can't do. So like, there's actually, there's deficits, but then there's like also superpowers that you get from it. Because. Achievement unlocked. Because they're not connecting. So then the interpretation that Kazanaga favors is that we have at least two consciousnesses

[00:48:27] in our bodies and the left brain, then at least in these split brain patients, they have two consciousnesses. And under the right controlled conditions, you can see that. You can see that the left brain cannot have any idea what the right brain is up to.

[00:48:48] And if confronted with that will make up a story. Now I guess in everyday life, the reason nobody picks up on this is because they're constantly darting their eyes around and they're constantly. And so the left brain is able to see what the right brain is seeing.

[00:49:07] And yeah. That's right. There's actually a number of things which we'll talk about. I'll talk about it more in a second. There are a number of ways that these patients actually do transmit information between left and right that does not rely on those bundle of nerves,

[00:49:24] that bundle of nerves. Kazanaga does. It's weird because in the empirical articles that I was reading, he doesn't seem to make such a strong claim about consciousness. In fact, he seems pretty straightforwardly. Well, here are just the facts of the matter.

[00:49:45] Like this is the kind of information that crosses and this is the kind that doesn't seem to cross. But then in his textbook and stuff, he at least seems to endorse this dual consciousness. And I think it's important to point out

[00:49:58] that one of the reasons that you can say it's dual consciousness is the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere are in a lot of ways completely redundant. That is, you can do... It's in some ways just a mirror image. It's like the bodies, you know,

[00:50:15] this bilateral symmetry in our bodies is just sort of... In the brain it's just a way of having two different hemispheres that can do the same thing. So for instance, my niece had like crazy brain tumors and was causing severe seizures to the point

[00:50:34] that they had to not just cut her corpus callosum. They removed an entire hemisphere of her brain. She had a full hemispherectomy when she was like school age, like seven or eight. And yeah, it's amazing now. She graduated from college.

[00:50:51] It's amazing to see how much she can do. Like it's not even immediately obvious. What you can tell after a while is that she has a little bit less control of one side of her body. But she acquired language. She actually lost... Which hemisphere did they take out?

[00:51:14] They took out her right hemisphere, if I'm recalling correctly. So I talked to her once as a teenager and I was asking her about this and I was saying like they took out half of your brain, right?

[00:51:28] And she was telling me about the stuff that she had like, she lost a lot. She had to go back to like first grade basically and relearn everything. But she was able to relearn it. And part of this is that when you're that young,

[00:51:40] the plasticity is just greater. It's even greater. Yeah, like if they removed half of our brain now it would be screwed. But I was like, did you lose any memories? And she was like, yeah, at first I didn't remember who my sister was,

[00:51:52] but it strangely like it came back to her. So what do we make of this? Let me, because I find this fascinating and if there's all sorts of implications that I don't understand, we can talk about the implications for free will. We can talk about the implications

[00:52:11] for personal identity. But let me just play a little bit of a skeptic about how interesting this is. Yeah. We all are familiar with feeling torn about something, feeling conflicted. We'll literally say I'm of two minds. Why would it be that surprising

[00:52:32] that there are dedicated parts of our brain that might be pushing us to do one thing, another part that might be pushing us to do another thing or understanding things in different ways? And why isn't this exactly what I would expect, I guess is what I'm saying.

[00:52:51] You know what? I'm not prepared to defend the interestingness because I was thinking the exact same thing as I was reading this all, basically all day today. There is a really interesting empirical question here about what's going on with the different hemispheres, how much communication is possible

[00:53:16] without that bundle of nerves, all of that stuff. But as far as the implications to consciousness, suppose that you have a metaphysical view that there is one self, and that self, unless you're a crazy dualist, that self is your brain. Like that is, and you have this unity,

[00:53:36] you know that even under conflict, you are the one having conflict. That's weird. What's the you there? But yeah. Yeah. I think that maybe if you have this sort ontological, you really believe that the self, and we should talk about it,

[00:53:54] I think Dennett makes this point very well. You could have the belief that your self is your whole brain and that when you split the brains into two, now you have metaphysically and ontologically, you have two individuals whereas before you had one.

[00:54:11] I think that is the thing that people find interesting here is that somehow cutting the communication channels between the two, onto like, it's just magically, yeah, like magically makes two people. It would be like you've made a copy. So let's think about when we're experiencing conflict,

[00:54:35] there is a sense even when we're like, do I have another drink? Do I grade this paper? There is this other self that has to decide, this higher self that has to decide between these two options. And while it totally makes sense

[00:54:53] that we have different parts of us pulling us in different directions, there's still someone that's being pulled in both directions and we identify ourself with that someone. And so the idea that there, all of a sudden, can be two different someones

[00:55:14] that aren't able to be unified by this one one is the thing that is so striking and counterintuitive based on our understanding of ourself. Yeah, it's almost like you cut a worm in half and both sides regrow and all of a sudden you have two worms

[00:55:32] whereas you only had one. Like I think that's metaphorically, like, you know, or taking out one hemisphere and putting it in another body. Phenomenologically, you always feel like you are a singular entity now. But isn't that the idea that this is a left brain feeling?

[00:55:51] Because there's plenty of times where I'll find myself, you know, walking into a room and not knowing why I walked there, right? Like so it could be that that feeling of unification is one part of me. But then there's all this other stuff that I do

[00:56:08] without being consciously aware of it or being able to vocalize why I'm doing it or that's habitual, that's for all sorts of things. This is a big part of any person's life, maybe mine more so. Maybe that feeling of unification

[00:56:26] is just this one center which is in charge of making sense of what it is that I'm doing. But if you told me that there are all these other parts that are governed by other things, you know, emotions I might not be aware of,

[00:56:42] habits and stuff like that, that just is consistent with my experience. Did you happen to watch that CGP gray video? I sent you a link, but it's just like a little animated description of this. Yeah, the way that he says it is, like you might be right,

[00:57:03] you're exactly right that this is, you know, your left hemisphere is in charge of explaining all this stuff. But it's genuinely fine. It's obvious to you that you might have motivations that you're not aware of or whatever. And the way that he describes the problem is that

[00:57:23] maybe there is a, like the fact that your right hemisphere is incapable of talking means that it is, it's just been a silent partner to your left hemisphere this whole time and your left hemisphere is sort of the bully self that's constantly- I got,

[00:57:41] and it's just like an oppressed, like a wife in the 16th century or so. Right, or in the 50s. So, but I think this, I didn't see this talked about too much. I don't know if you did, but the fact that even the split brain patients

[00:58:00] don't have a disunity, a sense of like a phenomenological disjoint, it's only under these very, very specifically constrained experiments that you can show like the right hand, you know, the right hand is touching something in the left and they can't describe it. If you wanna, like empirically,

[00:58:21] that's super interesting, right? Like the, but if you wanna make a, an argument about consciousness, it doesn't seem as if this is the right kind of empirical information. Like these people do not have like a split sense of self, like multiple personality disorders is much more interesting.

[00:58:38] If that's what you wanna argue, I think. Yeah, right. Maybe what Gazanago would say or, I have no idea actually how he would interpret that question or how he would answer it, but we don't really, even though they say they don't report any disunity,

[00:58:57] I mean, that's maybe what you would expect the left brain to do to talk about it. Like if that's true, then it would be different. In other words, to use the Nagel terminology, what it's like to be them in everyday life

[00:59:14] is different from what it's like to be us. We might not be able to access that difference because they still will report and, It's true and we wouldn't really know. I think that, you know, you were bringing up the possibility that, right?

[00:59:31] Like so the brain has specialized areas and they are, you know, one part of your brain is going to be able to do something that the other part of your brain can't. That's that much as obvious. I think it really does boil down to the fact

[00:59:45] that the hemispheres in general are capable of all of the other stuff, right? That like you can have a full self in one hemisphere with all of the skills and abilities, except for a few choice ones that you could demonstrate.

[01:00:02] That seems to be, to me, the most compelling source of that maybe we are two rather than one. Well and the fact that one controls language and that's where I think the bully intuition comes in is that the right can be silently screaming that they don't want something

[01:00:21] but like the left hemisphere is the one that gets to talk. Right. And it could, I mean, it could be that when, so suppose that you could just, you know, meld two people together magically, I think they would become a new person

[01:00:42] and that person would be like, you know, through some just sci-fi like transport error, like they get melded, that new person would be a brand new person. Then splitting them back, it would be, you know, you'd be like, yeah, that was two people.

[01:00:57] For a while there it became one and now it's back to being two. I think that maybe that can get me the intuition that the two hemispheres when they're connected are actually a singular unitary individual and when you split them, you have created two out of one.

[01:01:18] I don't think that that means that we without the split brain are actually secretly two. I think it's just better described in the trivial way that you were saying that like, yeah, there's specialized shit on one side. Let's take a break and then we'll talk about

[01:01:37] the Dennett article and I also want to talk about the challenge to Gazanago's studies too. So we'll be right back. Hey Dave, you know, I'm getting interested in psychology, the methods of psychology, how it works. But you know, I'm a philosopher

[01:01:58] so right now all I'm doing is following a bunch of psychologists on Twitter, listening to the Black Goat podcast and even two psychologists for beers. But I don't think that's quite enough for me to really get a good introduction to what psychology is all about.

[01:02:17] Is there any other way I could perhaps do this? You are in so much luck, Tamler. But by the way, I'm proud of you and your quest for knowledge. I'm gonna talk to the folks at outlier.org and maybe they can hook you up

[01:02:30] because outlier.org is an online education service that's different from the others. This was founded by the co-founder of Masterclass and they've developed what I think is the world's best line university level courses and it's taught by some of the most celebrated educators

[01:02:45] in the world like our very own Paul Bloom special friend to Very Bad Wizards. They have engaging videos, they're beautifully filmed, they really are different than that sort of crappy one-camera watcher professor walker on the stage kind of course. They give credits that are transferable

[01:03:04] from a top university so when you send your transcript they don't have to ask what outlier.org is and it's only $400 per course. Compare that to the thousands of dollars you would pay at a brick and mortar university for the same class.

[01:03:19] To be honest, I mean I'm a little biased because I was part of this but it's probably not as good as what you would get from outlier.org and I gotta say you're getting interested in psychology. I'm interested in calculus and that's the one other course

[01:03:36] that they're starting with. There's intro psych and there's intro calculus and I just wanna give a little shout out to the calculus professors on this course which are just amazing. There's a woman named Hannah Fry who is a staple of one of my favorite YouTube channels

[01:03:53] Numberphile and she is one of the co-instructors of this course and I just wanna learn from her all day long. Maybe it is just my science envy or I wanna add some real, real rigorous science to my psychology but I think I'm gonna take that.

[01:04:12] So scientists have math envy and philosophers have science envy. It's just it keeps rolling down. That's right, social scientists have real science envy even physicists have math envy and then we go all the way back to religion. Hopefully they'll add that. It's a big circle, yeah.

[01:04:29] Businesses have religion envy. That's right. So learn at your own pace and schedule. There's an online interactive textbook. There's free tutoring and study groups. Again, 400 bucks for university credit course. Spring enrollment is just opened. There are limited spots but register now to start the course in January 2020.

[01:04:51] Sign up and in the spot that asks you how you heard about liar.org put very bad wizards. So once again go to outlier.org. Sign up for January 2020 classes intro to psych or intro to calculus and if they ask when they ask

[01:05:04] how you heard about them save very bad wizards. Thanks to outlier.org for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizard. Okay, so now let's talk a little bit about the empirical challenge. So actually one of our listeners sent us this paper, right? Is it Patreon?

[01:05:21] Yeah, on Patreon and I hadn't come across it and this is a paper from 2017 which we'll also put a link to in the show notes that challenges the empirical claim that there is actually that much separation of the two hemispheres going on

[01:05:40] and this comes from a set of experiments essentially showing that two patients with split brains showed substantial amounts of abilities that would traditionally be ascribed to only one side of the brain but in both sides. So this was a set of experiments where they would actually use

[01:06:05] the traditional visual field method of presenting information but what they seem to show is that it's not the case that they cannot, for instance, recognize something with their right hemisphere when it's only presented into their left hemisphere. So that they're arguing that there's a lot of

[01:06:27] that in fact there's quite a lot of cross communication. So this is both a challenge to the empirical claims that were made by Spearing-Zenekin and most people since then and may have implications at least they believe for theories of consciousness

[01:06:41] where this turns out not to be a problem. This turns out not to be the problem that we thought it was because... Yeah, it turns out to be in some ways a deeper problem. But I think some people have interpreted this to support some kind of more mysterious

[01:06:56] if not dualistic or at least non-material theory of consciousness because if you flash something to just the right hemisphere and the left and the person is able to articulate what they saw then somehow that information has been transmitted without going through the normal communication channels

[01:07:20] between the two hemispheres because that's been cut. That's right. So there is evidence that there is a minimal amount of communication in sub-cortical structures but the amount that seems possible just physiologically is very little. It doesn't seem as if you could get that much information across the two.

[01:07:43] So it seems a bit mysterious how this information is making its way from one side of the brain to another. Now, let me describe what Gazaniga thinks which I think is a plausible, a very plausible interpretation. In Gazaniga's paper he says that the interpretation of the data

[01:08:05] that these authors are making is actually mistaken because they're underestimating the amount of communication that comes from what they call cross-queuing. So cross-queuing is the communication that can occur outside of the brain. So there is information that these patients are giving themselves through other means.

[01:08:36] So they explain all of the crazy ways that they've actually observed that communication can happen not in the brain but in things like the hands. So you might make a facial response and the facial nerves actually because they're connected in the face

[01:09:01] even though you're making a facial response to only one side of the visual field is transmitting only to one part of the hemisphere and your face responds, that's giving you information about what you saw because your nerves are on both sides of your face

[01:09:18] or they talk about cases in which because pain isn't lateralized. If your left hand is holding something but you can't describe it because it's information that's going into your right hemisphere, the patients will poke themselves with the tip of the pencil. That pain will actually go,

[01:09:40] that information will go into the other hemisphere because it's not lateralized and they'll infer that it's a pencil because so they've effectively communicated and what I think the really cool way that Gazaniga describes this is he says, think about, so this is Lucas Volts and Michael Gazaniga.

[01:10:00] He says, think about conjoined twins. So he talks about the case of these twins that have two heads, right? Two brains, they're two different people but they have only two arms and two legs. They're surprisingly coordinated even though the twin on the left side

[01:10:22] is controlling the left leg and the left arm and the twin on the right side is controlling the right. There is for sure no cross brain information going on there because they're two brains that are completely controlling it. They are surprisingly coordinated. They can even learn,

[01:10:41] they can do super complex like sports, right? Coordinate their bodies and they point out that this is solely because they have learned to really pay attention to all of the cues from the body on the other side. Not because there's cross brain information

[01:10:59] but because of their skill essentially in observing what the other twin is going to do with that part of their body. He says, these patients are doing the same thing and that's why over time you can see them improving in their skills. Yeah, so this is interesting.

[01:11:17] And something sort of heartwarming about like it's like the two sides of the brain started to work together. They're not fighting anymore. They're working together to solve the problem and that's the idea. Now they can't communicate in the normal way

[01:11:30] and so they come up with other ways to communicate like stabbing yourself with a pencil or doing in a way that allows, I guess the idea is this would then allow the left brain to be able to articulate what's going on

[01:11:48] or maybe there's some analog also for the right brain. So the right brain, if it sees something instead of is now trying to help the left brain describe it through these other. It's hard to sort of figure out to what extent. So the way this is sometimes described

[01:12:08] is on the Gazanaga side there's two consciousnesses communicating with each other. And in the, I don't know if you said the name of the lead author of this study, it's Ya'ir Pinto. In his view, it's just a single consciousness

[01:12:26] that has a certain deficit that it's making up for. But it's not two different consciousnesses residing in the same person. I think that Gazanaga in his sober moments like in this paper there is no real discussion of the two consciousnesses.

[01:12:42] He is just trying to say that the empirical data from the Pinto studies is easily explained by this off-boarding cross communication that was underestimated. So this is in some ways just sort of a boring empirical argument where Pinto, and he has a co-author I think,

[01:13:04] is saying we did these studies right. We flashed in a very brief time we flashed something into the left hemisphere. And Gazanaga is saying, no, you think you did it right. You think you did it right, but what you didn't realize is that eye movements

[01:13:23] can occur after that can reliably give information to the other side of the brain. If it is going on between the communication as intra-brain or whatever, like there is a question of how that's happening, right? And that's where I think it's like, well, wait.

[01:13:45] So what are you saying is happening? In terms of the consciousness, like what this would say about consciousness, it strikes me as irrelevant in some sense, whether it's happening through cross-queuing or through the subcortical connection. As long as they're able to communicate then it really doesn't matter, right?

[01:14:11] I think that's right. I mean, it might like, you know, I suppose that knowing that it's happening in the brain seems like a more, at first it seems like a more natural way, but like metaphorically because you and I communicating and coordinating our behavior seems like it really,

[01:14:36] the way in which we're doing it by communicating this way, seems like it leaves a lot of room for the possibility that you are a different conscious entity than me, but if we were somehow joined neurologically that seems less likely that we're actually two different consciousnesses.

[01:14:53] But I think that that's just a mistake. Yeah, I think that's just a mistake of understanding. Like, you know. I mean, this is where the Nagel thing is interesting. Like your example of the conjoined twins, you're right that there's no way their brains could be communicating,

[01:15:10] but in terms of whether they have single consciousness or double consciousness or how to make sense of that, that might be like according to Nagel just unanswerable. So there's a way in which they're going to show evidence of being more split,

[01:15:27] but we have no idea if there is something that it's like to be both of them at the same time, you know, like people will say this about entire communities or this is like Hofstedler, right? Like the Douglas Hofsteder stuff. Hofsteder. Yeah. Hofsteder, yeah.

[01:15:46] Consciousness emerging of all these kind of individual entities doing their own things. And that's ultimately what we think the brain is, you know, maybe it's happening within our skulls, but it's still all these things going on that create some sort of singular sense of self for us.

[01:16:09] But how it does that, I mean, that's the big mystery. Yeah, and it seems as if what's happening in the split brain patients is a lot of the gaps that are left in the intra brain communication are just being picked up by these other things.

[01:16:27] And in order to continue that feeling of a unitary self, and I think that like there's something deeply right about the claim that this sense of self is clearly, there's not a place in the brain where the self resides.

[01:16:49] Like this is clearly a bunch of entities that are, my brain is a bunch of entities that are working in coordination. And the fact that I feel unitary isn't a natural result of some mental illness metaphysical category that emerges when these things are combined just right,

[01:17:08] but rather like what else am I gonna feel? Like I'm in this in the physical boundaries of this one. It's like an anthropic principle but for like consciousness, right? If we're feeling this sense of self, then it's all these different things are working together to make that happen.

[01:17:26] It's got it. Yeah, and it's like, you know, when I wake up in the bed tomorrow, like a lot of people have emailed and tweeted about this just because of the Star Trek transporter thing and whether there's, you know,

[01:17:39] but they'll say, well, look, when you go to sleep and you wake up the next morning, like who's to say that you are the same person? And I like, yeah, absolutely. The only person to say that it's the same person is that I am the one talking.

[01:17:53] Like that's, like that's, it seems as if, yeah, like deeply you could say, well, I am nothing but a bunch of things unified and I completely agree. But then let me ask this and then maybe we should go to the Danut piece

[01:18:12] which I think this is all leading up to, but do you think the Siamese or not the Siamese, the conjoined twins might have this unitary sense of consciousness, at least at times when they're coordinating really well. Is there this entity that's created

[01:18:34] or is there something that it's like that's not two different people kind of, that it's not like if you and me, God forbid, we're like attached and we'd all, and what that would be. Like Centipede style? Yeah, like human Centipede. You know, I couldn't help but think

[01:18:51] but like the left hemisphere is the Dom and the right is the sub. No, but like based on what you're saying that shouldn't be surprising. It should seem counterintuitive because there are two heads and we normally assume one head, one consciousness but it shouldn't be that surprising

[01:19:11] based on the fact that we don't get how like all these weird different things going on in our brain produces that single sense of self. So why should two heads and but just, you know the same number of arms and feet

[01:19:26] and all of that and all connected in various ways. Why should it be surprising if that created a single consciousness? Yeah, so I suspect the answer is something like, like if I had to put money on it, I would think that it's something like

[01:19:43] but some blurred something between being two different people and being the same person. And that just turns on the amount of like cross communication that they're having. Like they have to coordinate so intimately that there must be something that it's like to be them.

[01:20:02] But given everything we know about how the brain works and that there are two and they talk to each other and they can express different interests even that it's fair to say that like they are two selves but I think that just even the thought

[01:20:17] that there must be an answer that's either one or two is the wrong way to think about it. Cause it must really be something that it's like to be them that's different than what's like to be us. And different than it's like to be either one

[01:20:32] of the ones if you ask them. By the way, did we ever talk about there are interesting like questions given the nature of our categories. I read a philosophical paper. I don't remember if you and I talked about it

[01:20:46] if you sent it to me or somebody sent it to both of us about consent in cases of these conjoined twins. Oh yeah, lungs. Yeah, it's raining about. It's pretty fucked up cause it was about sexual consent specifically where if they share one set of sexual organs

[01:21:04] and essentially one body, two arms, two legs that whether it's morally permissible for one of them to agree to sex in the other one. So it's more than it is to have sex with them. Is it consensual when you have sex when one of them says yes

[01:21:23] or do both of them need to say yes? And what's scary about that? So let's say, I mean intuitively no if one of them's like no, no, no I don't like then let's say it's wrong but what if that's just our right brain?

[01:21:37] A lot of that, you know, like please. Every time I jerk off, I feel like the right brain is the sub saying no, but I can just get off on it. My right brain is the one that's doing it.

[01:21:53] Like so all of a sudden I'll find myself just jerking off and then my left brain will be like, oh it's cause I want it to. But is it because you're only doing it with your left hand? I think so yeah. Is your right hand slapping it away?

[01:22:09] Well let's take a break and then let's talk about this then at center of narrative gravity thing. We're gonna take one final break to talk about HelloFresh. HelloFresh is America's number one meal kit. Get easy seasonal recipes and pre-measured ingredients delivered right to your door.

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[01:23:28] Like where you just pour hot water into it? Exactly, exactly. You know sometimes I get creative you know put a little bit of canned corn in there but now HelloFresh we're both vegetarian actually so we get the vegetarian meals

[01:23:42] and I'm actually learning a lot about how to cook and what to cook. So even if I don't get a HelloFresh recipe that night like I've gotten some new ideas but I gotta say the zucchini and tomato flatbreads

[01:23:53] that we made I never thought I would like as bread with zucchini on top but that shit was so good. It was zucchini, tomato, lemon, ricotta, basil, honey and cheese on a flatbread and it's actually really quick. It was one of the quicker ones

[01:24:08] because I know they say 30 minutes but sometimes it could take me a little longer but this one was actually quick. I like the honey. I like the little drizzled honey on the low. Oh my God, it's cheating because it's just adding sugar to a meal. That's not cheating.

[01:24:22] But it's so good. Yeah, no I agree. Like that was the thing. So one of our favorite of the recipes was the pasta parmesan with zucchini, Tuscan herbs and marinara sauce and just baking the pasta like that is not something that we did

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[01:25:22] Thank you to HelloFresh for sponsoring this episode. All right welcome back. We're gonna conclude this discussion by talking about, I guess this is an article in edited volumes. See edited volumes aren't there. The self as a center of narrative gravity

[01:25:44] and he just asks this question what is a self? He answers the self is a useful fiction, something we create to make sense of our experience and what's really I think it's so deceptively simple but he gives us example of the center of gravity of an object.

[01:26:08] So if you talk about a center of a gravity it's not something that actually exists. It doesn't have a mass. And so like if you talk about a lamp and why doesn't tip over the center of gravity is low but there's nothing that that reduces to

[01:26:26] it is a theorists fiction that is informative. It actually if you say why doesn't the lamp tip over and you say the center of gravity is low that is an explanation that's different than like it's nailed to the table or it's supported by wires

[01:26:45] he says but it's not something that is reducible in the way that other parts of the lamp might be reducible to atoms and various other things. So he says that this is a nice analogy to think of the self as a theorists fiction.

[01:27:04] To tell a story, to give some sort of continuity to our behavior and our thoughts and our feelings we posit this thing called the self. It's not something that actually exists in a way that like you can reduce it to neurons

[01:27:22] or to cells and molecules but it is something that does have some sort of explanatory power and in roughly the same way as the center of gravity has some power and it will shift depending on the context. I love this analogy. And when you say it's not real

[01:27:41] like I understand what you're saying and Dennett is saying that too but I think the power of the analogy is that the center of gravity is real in some deep sense. It exists in some deep sense. It just doesn't exist in the way

[01:27:55] that atoms and molecules exist as you were saying. So what this analogy provides you with is a nice way of saying well like look if you think that you're gonna dig into the brain and find the self then you've misunderstood

[01:28:09] what we mean by a self in the same way that if you want to find where the atoms that contain the center of gravity are you've misunderstood what a center of gravity is. So it actually is a thing that works

[01:28:22] in these causal explanations just as everything else does. You're not by calling it a fiction you're not saying it is just like a an illusion or you're stupid to believe it. It is just a different category of thing. And I find that like a super compelling way

[01:28:40] of describing this. And there are certain things, there are certain questions that we'll have indeterminate answers. So he uses here the analogy of a fictional character. You have this fictional character named Ishmael that refers to something real. It is a character in Melville's Moby Dick

[01:28:59] and you can ask a lot of questions about Ishmael that will have answers because there are answers in the book but there are certain questions that you can ask about his history or certain emotions that he might have that are just indeterminate. There's no answer to those questions

[01:29:20] because the creator of this fictional character didn't say it. So it's not that there's the fact that there's certain questions you can ask about it that are indeterminate doesn't mean that the character doesn't exist in a real sense. It just means that their existence

[01:29:40] is different than our existence. And so the self's existence here would be different than the existence of a hand and there are questions that you can ask about the self that we just, we can't answer in principle but that doesn't mean that it's not doing any work.

[01:30:01] It's not doing any explanatory work. So then he goes on to develop this analogy and says take a character like you're talking about Updike and his character Rabbit that appears in three different books. You could ask Updike, you could say, well, tell me this about Rabbit

[01:30:22] and maybe if he's working on a new book about Rabbit he starts coming up with maybe a story that is going to add a bunch of additional information about Rabbit. So he is the author is coming up with this stuff. That's essentially what we're doing

[01:30:41] when we are talking about ourselves. We are working through this construct, we are building this and this is where the split brain stuff comes in. We are interpreting our own actions by creating this fictional self and sort of describing all of these things about us.

[01:31:03] And then he launches into what many of our listeners have asked us to talk about. The Julian Jane's book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which that essentially is an explanation of the emergence of the self as coming from the explicit interpreting

[01:31:23] and explaining of our own actions and sort of talking to ourselves and how over historical time we would have come to believe that this was us. Yeah, a real thing. And I guess if this is like a left brain thing to do there's a little evidence

[01:31:43] like in the cases where it confabulates. The idea is that it's just our sense of self is this massive accumulation of narrative explanations that are that try to make sense to us. My one question about this is

[01:31:58] it's one thing when we're doing this to other people, I guess who is this person when we're doing it when we're trying to make sense of our own behavior to ourselves, who is this person that we're making sense of our behavior too?

[01:32:16] If our sense of self is trying to make sense is the idea that it's always social and then out of the social interactions emerges a singular sense of self that will exist outside of social conditions. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:32:39] There is this sort of presumption that somebody needs their behavior explained to make sense of it. That's why, you know, this is a cool idea. I don't know how you would ever claim to have evidence one way or another about it

[01:32:55] but when he's talking about the Julian Jane's book he tells the story like, okay, so we're talking here about consciousness and the sense of self but he wants to describe the emergence of consciousness from being something with little to no consciousness

[01:33:15] or sense of self into this thing where we said. So he tells this account of first language being merely expressive in the same way that a bee doing a little dance is expressive. Like it just sort of becomes this adaptation

[01:33:35] where if you need help and you grunt out and somebody comes to help you, you sort of soon realize that one way and this is over evolutionary time obviously not an individual person discovering it in their lifetime but you come to realize

[01:33:51] that this expressive function of calling out is one that is adaptive. And then after a while you start just like analogous to the split brain patients saying things, you're essentially when you're saying things out loud and then you're hearing that you're saying things out loud

[01:34:14] that this is where that sense of self emerges. So I think what he said, I don't know if this is answering what you're asking but he's saying that out of nothingness comes a notion of self merely through this off-boarding like this linguistic process of talking to yourself

[01:34:32] and you start saying, well, like who is doing the talking and you just start integrating that into your own consciousness. He actually thinks, Julian Jaynes actually thinks, I don't remember if Jens is this, that early on we didn't have this attribution

[01:34:48] of all of these thoughts of being unitary to the self. So actually that's why people thought that God's in spirits existed because they might have a thought they didn't attribute to themselves or they thought it must be something else talking to them. Yeah, and there's an interesting question

[01:35:05] about how much language contributes just the actual structure of language that has I as a subject. There is something a little mysterious about this idea where you hear yourself speaking out loud and you start to wonder who is that thing? Well, who's the you there?

[01:35:22] But again, this could be just a problem of our language. I like this idea and maybe this is, I just like things, I like when people call things category mistakes. Paragraph where he says the chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography

[01:35:44] of a single body is oneself. And if you wanna know what the self really is, you're making a category mistake. After all, when a human being's behavioral control system becomes seriously impaired, it can turn out that the best hermeneutical story we can tell about that individual

[01:36:02] says that there is more than one character inhabiting that body. This is quite possible in the view of the self that I've been presenting. It does not require any fancy metaphysical miracles. So the idea is in most people, this idea of one's continuous self,

[01:36:22] unified self makes total sense. It's the best way of making sense for other people. Like it's a little more complicated when you're talking about for that person, but for other people, it's the best way of understanding that person as a single self. But if certain things start happening,

[01:36:41] multiple personality disorder or split brain under certain very controlled conditions, that might not be the best story. To that useful fiction kind of breaks down. And at that point, maybe a different story is better or maybe it's just indeterminate. If you're asking what the truth really is,

[01:37:03] you're making a mistake on par with asking like, was Moriarty really the second cousin of Sherlock Holmes? Right. It's not hard for me. I think I used to have more resistance to some sort of or acceptance that the self is sort of a fictional continuity.

[01:37:25] But I really don't anymore because it's just as real as anything else is Dan argues. And I think that, I don't know if you have this intuition, Tamler, but when I think about, imagine that you encountered a 10 year old Tamler and you had a conversation with him.

[01:37:45] There's a real sense in which I think, well yeah, it's almost silly to think that this is the same person as me. Like I have absolutely no problem saying, the only thing I have in common with 10 year old David is the physical continuity of our bodies.

[01:38:00] Like not anything about like my personality or even my identity, my beliefs. There's so much different there that if that mind existed in a separable body, I would have no problem saying that's a completely different person. It's just that it doesn't make sense

[01:38:18] to talk about that way about ourselves. I mean, right. I think when we say I'm the same person as I was when I was 10, we sort of know what we're saying there. We don't think that there's some continuous... I used to think that.

[01:38:34] I think I used to actually think that. That there was like a metaphysically, like this is the same consciousness. There is a sense in which we feel like, you know, I'm getting close to 50, right? Like I'm in my late 40s. We'll leave it at that.

[01:38:53] And like there's a sense in which... It's 51 close to 50. There's a sense in which like I feel the same as I did it. There's the spark that's the same in me that was in my 30s. And like if I look at old videotapes of myself, like it totally...

[01:39:13] But again, this is not when I'm 10. This is when I'm 35 or whatever. There is a sense that I still... And sometimes I think I still feel the same even if like I can't play like basketball anymore without being like wrecked physically. Yeah.

[01:39:32] Or I feel different, but the eye is the same. It's a very... That's so weird. Yeah, a very strong, you know, and the closer I am to me present day that the more I feel that way. I think that... And I don't remember if we've talked about

[01:39:52] Parfit's view of this. But I think that he is taking the fictional part so seriously as to want to say that normatively we should dismiss the fiction. He's like denying the center of gravity. That's right. Right? Like I think that Dennett is building a good case

[01:40:14] about why it doesn't follow from all of the things that we're saying about the discontinuity that you should therefore reject any notion of self as illusory or you're being a fool to believe that you're the same person you were yesterday. It's like saying,

[01:40:30] Sherlock Holmes don't even talk about Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes doesn't exist. It's just a bunch of words. Yeah, exactly. It's just ones and zeros. He ends with this David Hume quote, which is like, you know, it kind of in some ways just summarizes everything,

[01:40:49] but I think it also raises a couple of questions. Maybe we can conclude by talking about this. So here's the famous David Hume quote from Treatise on Human Nature. For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception

[01:41:06] or other or heat or cold or light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception. If anyone upon serious and unprejudiced reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself,

[01:41:24] I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is that he may be in the right as well as I and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may perhaps perceive something simple and continued which he calls himself,

[01:41:38] though I am certain there is no such principle in me. Now here, I think he's saying something more radical. Like I think Dennett concludes this as a sort of support for his view, but I think what David Hume is noting that he doesn't, when he really examines it,

[01:41:57] even see the fictional continuous self here. And this is something that I think is very common in meditation. When you're talking about insight meditation, when you actually start to look for a self, what you realize, this is exactly what Hume is saying

[01:42:13] is there's nothing apart from what consciousness is at that very moment. There's no you that's perceiving it. We talked about this with Sam Harris when he was on last time, right? There's just that conscious experience, no experiencer that we can find. Now I think that's more radical

[01:42:36] because even the fictional self then is not apparent once we really examine what's going on in the present moment that there doesn't seem to be a unified anything. There's just this experience. Yeah, I think you're right. I think all the dentists using it as support for his proposition.

[01:42:57] I think Hume is more like the difficulties that I had with meditation and the subjective experiencer. Hume doesn't seem to have it all. And we also, this touches on the Galen Strausson article that we read a while back too where- Are they episodic ethics?

[01:43:18] Yeah, maybe some people just have less of this intuition. Maybe they just don't have this coherent sense of self over time, the narrative sense of self that I seem to have maybe. But I'm making a different point though. It's not like everybody is the same in this sense.

[01:43:39] Like you as much as you might think you have this continuous sense of self, I think David Hume would agree. I do have that except when I examine myself very carefully at a particular moment, then there's no self. There's just the experience.

[01:43:58] If I look for it, I can't find it. But even though he says like maybe somebody else is different than me on this, I think what he's saying is I don't believe you. Like I believe if you look really closely

[01:44:13] for your sense of self, you won't find it either in that moment. Yeah, I think you're right that he's making a metaphysical claim. I was sort of trying to explain why he's making this pretty good metaphysical claim. But I think you're right,

[01:44:26] he's making the strong claim that when, especially when he says like seriously, if you think that you have a self there, I can't reason with you. He's not saying there's an individual difference between us. He's saying you don't see the truth

[01:44:39] of the fact that there is no self. And I think that's the reason that I like this article by Dennett so much is that he is providing an account that doesn't deny the metaphysics so deeply of self. It's weird because I think it sounds like

[01:44:58] Hume is doing and saying the exact thing that Dennett is saying is a category mistake where if you think you're gonna find the self through just like a center of gravity, you won't find the molecules that are the center of gravity. It's weird to say that therefore,

[01:45:16] that self doesn't exist. And I think Hume might disagree with Dennett. Yeah, or maybe Dennett would accuse, although he just quotes him approvingly here, maybe he's saying what you call yourself, you're taking that to, the thing that you're looking for is the thing that isn't really the self,

[01:45:38] or at least the sense of self that we have. He's quoting Hume, he says, right before he says, as David Hume noted, no one has ever seen a self either. So he seems to be using the Hume quote as a way of saying like, well, yeah,

[01:45:54] like if you try to introspect and find that center that is yourself, that's not gonna happen, right? It's not gonna, but I think Hume used this as evidence that there isn't actually. And I guess this is why the sort of the love affair,

[01:46:10] I don't know if it's still going on between Buddhism and neuroscience and cognitive science, science of consciousness. But when I was in grad school, that was big. Oh, and Flanagan was, but I think there is this kind of way in which that understanding, the Buddhist understanding

[01:46:32] of the no self is very much in line with what's going on at this school. Yeah. And it's even, I think that the useful part is that the left hemisphere as the interpreter and explainer and the confabulator is really sort of sympathetic to this.

[01:46:48] But even the Gazanaga and the people who have used the split brain stuff to argue for two consciousnesses, that even is something that the no self view would say, well, that's, you've gone a step in the right direction. The tiny baby step in the right.

[01:47:05] Well, are they saying that there's two selves or are they saying, look, there's multiple selves? We've just been isolated. We're, we've just been able to show that there's at least two. Right, we can't cut the brain into three pieces.

[01:47:19] What we can really do is cut it into two pieces. Yeah. Yeah. All right, join us next time, join multiple us. There's at least four of us. If. Right. Even if I was just doing this myself, I would say. Join us next time. Very bad wizard.

[01:47:37] The queen in us has fallen. They know our tension to that man behind us. I'm a very good man. Thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.