Is Everyone Conscious in the Same Way?

in the late 1870s an academic called Francis gon got interested in the phenomenon of mental imagery the fact that we can obviously see things very clearly in our visual field with our eyes uh assuming we don't have some kind of medical Vision deficiency but that we can also Imagine visual imagery in our minds albeit probably less vividly and you know at a lower resolution than we can actually see it so gon thought you know novelists and artists are always talking about this seeing something in their minds ey or visually imagining something and yet the problem

didn't seem to have been studied scientifically yet so he thought what's what's a way that I can approach this scientifically so the method he came up with was uh initially to devise a series of questions about the intensity of people's mental imagery and he thought that he would go around asking people these questions uh in in some way I'm not sure exactly whether he was going to send the survey around or something like that and see if people differed in their experience of visual imagery if I tell you to picture an apple uh or I

think the example he used was a dining table a breakfast table um how colorful is it is it intensely colorful like real visual imagery or is it kind of less colorful more gray or with indistinct color does it have visual details you know how how high resolution is it compared to your actual vision is it just hazy and murky and you can't really describe it very well or is it as clear as day as if you're actually seeing it in my own experience my visual imagery tends to be a lot lower resolution a lot murkier

a lot darker than my actual Vision if I imagine an apple um I can kind of Imagine details if I put my mind to it I can imagine a dent on the surface of the Apple I can imagine what color the apple is um and I do certainly have a visual like image of an apple in my my brain um but it's absolutely nowhere near as clear as if I was really seeing it I could never imagine an apple and project it into my actual visual field as if I was really seeing it right there

um I I gather that some people have much more Vivid mental imagery uh and some people have less Vivid mental imagery so this was what gon was trying to discover how much variance is there you know between different people's ability to visualize things so quite sensibly he decided to send his questions around to other scientists that he knew to get their perspective on the questions maybe and to see if they'd thought much about this themselves introspectively as they were scientists there was uh a better chance that they'd have some kind of scientific insight into what

was going on psychologically or neurologically so he sent the questions around to his scientist friends and he got a surprising set of responses uh it seems as though more than one of his friends responded with something like what do you want about mental imagery is just a metaphor when people talk about visualizing things in their Mind's Eye they're not really talking about projecting visual imagery into their minds they're just you know recalling details about the scene they're not actually seeing it they're not having a visual like experience the scientist that he wrote to seemed surprised

that um gon had Mis interpreted uh the metaphor of mental imagery they seemed surprised that he thought that people could actually visualize things in that way um they they considered it to be a fantasy you know being able to actually imagine something that's not there is it's not something humans are capable of doing how would that work how would it even feel how would that be different from hallucinating these questions presuppose are sent to some sort of proposition regarding the Mind's Eye and the images which it sees this points to some initial fallacy it's only

by a figure of speech that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a mental image which I can see with my mind's eye I do not see it any more than a man sees the Thousand lines of Sophocles which under due pressure he's ready to repeat the memory possesses it by the time gton published his paper in 1880 he he' worked out what was going on clearly the science stist that he' consulted had some kind of relatively unusual condition which meant that they couldn't mentally visualize things when he approached the general population of

course as as I think nobody will be surprised by they all knew exactly what he meant of course I can mentally visualize things that's just part of the experience of being human but the scientists on the other hand um had clearly never been able to mentally visualize things and while they heard um you know references to the mind eye or mental imagery as they were growing up they must have just imagined that this was some kind of metaphor um the scientists could presumably recall visual details or they could recall details of scenes which had originally

come in through the visual system but they recalled these as abstract semantic details rather than actually projecting them as an image in their Mind's Eye they remembered that there was a chair in that corner of the room and a table in that corner of the room but they couldn't see these things unless they were physically in the room looking at them um nowadays we have a better understanding of this condition uh and we call it aphantasia indeed it seems that it affects a relatively small although not absolutely tiny proportion of the population um you know

there's still a way to go with understanding exactly how mental imagery works neurologically but suffice it to say We Now understand quite well that most people can mentally visualize things some people can't do it at all and among those people who can do it there's a lot of variance in the intensity of the mental imagery I think Radio Lab recently did a very interesting podcast installment on this which I direct you know direct people to but yeah I think this this points to a very interesting case of a small group of scientists taking their own

experience of the Human Condition and assuming that it was true of everybody in a previous video about a year ago I mentioned that I don't have an internal monologue as probably most people do um I I was aware by this point that um there were a few kind of Pop articles on the internet about people who lacked internal monologues but that the phenomenon isn't very well described scientifically in fact if you look up no inner speech or no internal monologue in Google Scholar there are really barely any studies that uh that seem to cover it

so there's a lot of scope for people not believing that this is you know this is possible and indeed in the in the comments of my video where I mentioned it there were a small number of comments uh where people were just incredulous or sometimes you know fairly emphatic about about their idea that you couldn't think without an internal monolog blog there'd be no way of thinking what would thinking even look like without inner speech um and I think this is yet another one of these cases where two people can have different experiences of being

a person and they may absolutely not be able to see each other's perspectives at all the comments on my video weren't the only ones I'd ever read that um were incredulous at the idea of people not having internal monologues I've even had University lectures from guest lecturers not from actual people within the university who very heavily implied that they thought people were lying when they claimed not to have internal monologues and this obviously you know one's initial reaction to something like that is frustration and anger and then you go away and you start to think

if everybody says that it's impossible not to have an internal monologue is it possible that maybe I do have an internal monologue and I'm I'm not recognizing it as such maybe I do have one but for some reason I'm just not finding it in my head uh maybe I'm not noticing it and I asked myself some of the questions that I'd come across uh that I'd come across on Reddit in my late teens um which led me to question the the presence of an internal monologue in the first place and there were questions like what's

what's the voice of your internal monologue because sometimes I think in my own voice and sometimes it sounds like Vin Diesel or what language do you think in if you're a German speaker and you've lived in England for years do you start thinking in English rather than German and to me none of these questions made any sense at all there's no honest answer to whose voice my internal monologue is in um because it doesn't have a voice that's an acoustic property an auditory property that it doesn't make sense to ascribe to my internal monologue it

would be just as ridiculous to ask me what does my internal monologue smell like you know what does what does what does such and such a thought tastes like you know it doesn't make sense if I wanted to answer that question I'd have to just make up an answer out of nowhere so I'm I was quite satisfied after that that I actually don't have an internal monologue but the more I've thought about it the more I've realized that I talk out loud to myself an enormous amount um I probably say out loud quite a lot

of what most people people have in their internal monologues so if there is some you know if there is some principle that humans have to have their thoughts filtered through some kind of verbal medium then at least you could say that my thoughts conform to that pattern it's just that the internal monologue is external rather than internal one of the comments on my Consciousness video about a year ago was something to the effect of if you don't have an internal monologue then does that mean that when you want to go and buy some milk you

realize you have no milk in the fridge you don't hear a voice inside your head saying oh no there's no milk in the fridge I have to go and get some then in that case how do you know that you need to go and get milk and to me this is um it I you know when I first read this comment I found it very surprising that the person thinks about it that way um obviously the brain must have some kind of cognitive process underlying uh the the the internal monologue I have to go and

get milk so why why does this person not realize that there doesn't need to be that middleman the cognitive process can just straight away lead to you going to get the milk for me that's how it is I don't say out loud oh Bugger I don't have any milk and I don't think that verbally in my head I just go out and get the milk but this is sort of this is this sort of prompted me to think well you know what is my experience of intending to go and get some milk from the shop

um it's not visual I don't imagine myself going to the shop to get milk as I said it's not verbal um and I came to realize that I I don't know whether I actually am conscious of the intention to go to the shop and get some milk um I'm clearly conscious of the whole sensory experience of getting in the car and turning the car on and driving and picking up the milk and all of those things visually and and so on but I don't know if I can find any conscious property any property of my

conscious experience that that corresponds to intending to go and get the milk now you might say well that's that's insane because that suggests that you just walk out of the door with no idea where you're going get in the car with no idea where you're going drive the car to the shop with no conscious idea of where you're going and yeah I I I you know it's hard to to to think about this completely introspectively but I kind of think that's actually what I do most of my thinking goes on more or less inside a

black box unless I externally verbalize it I I used the blackbox analogy in the last video I did about internal monologues as well I said I don't know what I'm going to say before it actually comes out of my mouth and then I hear it um I don't have you know there's there's almost a black box in my head that generates the speech and then I say it and I'm not the only one who has this experience plenty of people said as much in the comments and I think there's a recording of gome Chomsky saying

the exact same thing kind ious what's conscious let's say conscious decisions and so on are deeply intermingled with unconscious mental acts so closely intermingled with them that I don't think you can extract the conscious part and have a coherent picture I made it I'm making a decision to produce a particular sentence I have no awareness of when I decided to make that decision it just happened I don't even know what sentence I'm producing till I hear it but we certainly we certainly don't most of the time experience surprise at what we say we're not interested

that oh I said that I wonder why I said that except in very rare cases so to some extent the brain must kind of smooth over the fact that we don't consciously know what we're going to say or don't consciously know what we're going to do before we say it or before we do it now I'll stop right here and say that it would be hypocritical of me not to acknowledge that some people in the comments of my last video said that they didn't experience this black box phenomenon and that they did feel very strongly

that they knew what they were going to say before it came out so I want to acknowledge those people and say that I'm only talking about the subsection of people who who do feel the blackbox phenomenon but I feel the same thing around going to get some milk I'm not conscious of the cognitive process that drives me to go and do it but I also don't feel alarmed by the fact that I'm leaving the house and I don't feel alarmed by the fact I'm getting in the car as the now sadly late Daniel dennit would

have pointed out and in fact did point out at length in his book consciousness explained the brain is capable of playing quite a lot of tricks on itself um pulling quite a lot of slate of hand or slight of hand I'm not sure how you're supposed to pronounce that word um to smooth over the inconsistencies or what would otherwise be the inconsistencies in our conscious experience so one example that's often used and that dennit uses himself is that within your visual field for the most part you probably feel unless you have a visual deficiency you

probably feel that you have a really very high definition view of basically everything that's even remotely in front of you um you feel that you can see that just as clearly as you can see that or that or that obviously you realize you're paying attention to the thing in the middle but you know you still have a high definition view of all the other things and yet if you pick up a playing card face down you hold it up here in your peripheral vision and then you slowly turn it around you probably couldn't even accurate

report whether it was a red card or a black card let alone what the actual number of card was and that's because our peripheral vision is extremely low resolution compared to what we think it is um the brain Smooths over the the the poor resolution of our peripheral vision and it's not really functionally important because if I want to know what the card is in Practical terms I can just look at it and then I will know because it'll be in the middle of my vision um there's no you know there's no real practical deficiency

here because you can just look wherever you want if you have fully functioning eyes um the the poor resolution of peripheral vision doesn't matter practically speaking and so the brain glosses it over and it makes us imagine that we can see all this stuff around the edges uh really sharply now I am not a visual neuroscientist and so I don't know whether the brain actually interpolates a load of information whether it reconstructs what the things in our peripheral vision must look like I know what that mirror looks like and so maybe my brain's just putting

a CGI mirror there or if we actually don't have that interpolation and the brain is just straightforwardly telling us that we can see what's in our peripheral vision even though we can't but either way this is a very good example of an illusion that the brain plays on it itself and I would say that the same thing is probably true when I intend to go out and buy some milk I go out and do it and all the while my brain is perhaps to talk very abstractly uh blocking or or because the activity in my

brain the cognition that's going on in my brain is all consistent and fine and unpro I'm just going to get some milk it doesn't create any kind of alarm at the fact that I'm not conscious that I'm going to get the milk and so I don't experience any conscious confusion about it after all if I did go delving around into my thoughts and tried to pull something into my Consciousness or say it or mentally visualize it I would easily be able to and so you know there's no reason to be alarmed but if I don't

pull it into my Consciousness deliberately if I don't deliberately verbalize it or mentally visualize it I'm actually not conscious that I intend to go and get some milk until after I've had the the sensory experience of doing it my thinking about Consciousness over the last few months has been dominated by the idea of coupling and decoupling the idea that certain phenomenological experiences might be tied together or might become disassociated from each other and what that actually means for uh you know for Consciousness so for example the the sensation of pain the physical sensation of pain

may become decoupled from the negative veilance that it carries if you walk into a table leg and you stub your toe this may be intensely painful there may be a sharp pain Sensation that feels like it's coming from your foot and uh you know you might have a physical reaction you might yell ow you might swear and also there's this idea this this veilance to it the fact that it's bad rather than good um but through things like meditation or taking psychoactive drugs and other kinds of things that that alter the Mind people can get

to a point where they can feel pain fully it's not numbed they're not ignoring it they're not avoiding thinking about it they feel the physical sensation but it becomes decoupled from the negative veilance so although they feel the physical sensation it it doesn't feel like it's a bad thing for many people this is difficult to imagine um your mind May immediately jump to the pain being numbed because the physical feeling of the pain is intrinsically coupled with negative veilance feeling pain is inherently bad there's no way of separating those two uh characteristics from each other

um but clearly there is for certain people in certain situations is it that the two characteristics were always separate and had only ever been experienced in tandem with each other or is it that they were actually the same phenomenological property until such a time as somebody meditated hard enough or took psychedelic drugs and then they became genuinely phenomenologically separate from each other um I think another example of this is uh taste modalities or flavor modalities or whatever the I don't know exactly what what how those words diff differ from each other technically but the idea

that taste or flavor is composed of a small number of um different components which can be combined with each other in different ways so the idea that we have the sweet the Savory the um sour whatever else for me I I could never differentiate these things very well in a lot of cases I knew very well what sweet felt like and I could identify sweet things but the rest of them were you know tricky especially sour and bitter I um I couldn't work out whether something was composed of a sour flavor with a bit of

this added and a bit of that added um each flavor felt very much like just a different different flavor alog together um so when I I was told by some friends that when you're cooking you should add a little bit of sour and a little bit of sweet and a little bit of you know to balance everything out I had to Google what things are sour because I knew basically as a rope fact that lemons and limes are sour but that's pretty much it when I read that certain yogurts are sour I I was surprised

because I couldn't think of any flavor component in common between yogurt and lemons so I talked to my friends about this and they said well that's surprising because humans should be able to differentiate these these categories from each other um and so I wonder whether if I got more into food I would learn to differentiate them and I'd start um I'd start feeling them as distinct things whenever I ate a piece of food am I actually um experiencing a a kind of reduced set of qualia compared to somebody who can differentiate these different tastes or

flavors um or is it that I'm experiencing all the same qualia as them and I just don't know I am because I I can't tell the difference this issue of coupling goes very deep uh has lots of layers and I think it it it can be used to illustrate some of the big issues with um how we try to diagnose Consciousness in in things that aren't human so the most powerful way of working out whether certain things have Consciousness or not would be to develop some kind of predictive model work out um what the correlates

of Consciousness are what things correlate with Consciousness and then if we have such a model if we have a very powerful model like that we can point to something random like a mug which we can't tell immediately whether it's conscious or not um and we could say Well it has these characteristics and it doesn't have these characteristics so on balance it's probably not conscious um the model allows us to um diagnose Consciousness in things which we don't have direct introspective access to um the complicated thing here well it's not I don't think it's complicated at

all but but but the the problematic thing here is that the only things that we have subjective access to are ourselves um so we only have one data point in effect of of of a type of thing that can be conscious um which we're certain can be conscious whatever we mean by Consciousness um so that data point is that Consciousness can be correlated with a human body in the solar system why bring the solar system into it well if we if you look at all of the things that we can be certain are conscious through

introspective you know awareness of the Consciousness they are all humans in the solar system so there's a very very strong statistical relationship there well hang on Simon that's a load of nonsense because the only reason the solar system comes into it is because all humans are in the solar system there aren't any humans outside of the solar system that doesn't mean that the solar system you know is is a a meaningful predictor of Consciousness it doesn't mean the solar system has anything to do with Consciousness well you're right I'm going to use that idea to

sort of hone in on things so let's zoom into the human body can we say that the human body is the one thing that we're certain can correl with Consciousness well that seems to be a bit um a bit too broad as well because when I look into my Consciousness introspectively I don't think that any of it is from the perspective of my skin I don't think that any of it is from the perspective of my muscles more to the point I think that if you replaced my skin and muscles with uh some kind of

mechanism some human-made mechanism that does the job job of skin and muscles but isn't the same as human skin and muscles it doesn't seem intuitive to me that my Consciousness would change or stop um so these things as far as we can work out need not be necessary pre prerequisites to Consciousness okay well what about my heart well again if you replaced my heart with some kind of metal box that does the same job as a heart I don't see why my Consciousness should significantly change or stop okay well maybe we can say that the

human central nervous system is the one thing that we're certain can be correlated with Consciousness even that seems a little bit broad there are a lot of aspects of the central nervous system that don't seem to pop up as separate elements of our subjective experience so we know that gal cells a certain type of cell um plays a very important role in the central nervous system system uh in in maintenance and things like that we don't exactly we you know we don't know the full range of things that they do but we can be fairly

confident that the central nervous system wouldn't work without them um and yet when I introspect in into my Consciousness I can't see the gal cells anywhere there's no aspect of my subjective experience that seems to be directly um correlated with the presence of the G cells and so as far as We Know at the moment we could replace the gal cells with something else that did the same job and perhaps Consciousness would still carry on we have no reason to think otherwise the same is true of other aspects of the central nervous system the you

know the the myelin sheath that that coats the axons of of neurons um this is vital for the proper function of the central nervous system but I can't see it in my Consciousness I can't tell that there are myin sheets in my central nervous system just from looking within um so you can get narrower and narrower and narrower and you eventually find that the thing which actually correlates with our conscious subjective experience at least this is what I find is the information processing happening within my neurons within my central nervous system within my brain within

my body within my you know Sol within the solar system so all of these things the the solar system the body the central nervous system the brain all of these things could be said to be um extraneous to the issue of Consciousness the only thing that we know is correlated with Consciousness is certain examples of information processing and because we only have access to human consciousness because humans are the only things that we can communicate with you know we we can't communicate with plants and ask them if they're conscious you know we're left with an

extremely impoverished sample here so for all we know maybe you do need a heart to be conscious maybe you do need a central nervous system with my and sheaths and G cells to be conscious this could turn out to be true but on the other hand maybe you just need information processing and information processing is an extremely nebulous concept you could lump almost any process in and call it information processing me hitting the wall and the wall making a sound is information processing if you look at it the right way fundamentally all of these things

are just you know physical things knocking into to each other and causing you know causing knock on effect that's what the central nervous system is doing and that's what everything's doing all the time so for all we know you know the electrochemical reactions in a plant could produce or be correlated with Consciousness um all of these things could be conscious um and it seems ridiculous to say that it seems deeply unintuitive and many philosophers and scientists will dismiss it as has nonsense just because it seems deeply unintuitive but if you actually think about it I

think it makes an enormous amount of sense when you remove all of the extraneous stuff all that we know Consciousness is really correlated with is information processing um that's that's how I see it anyway there are two broad classes of response that I feel the need to anticipate here the first one is well okay I know what you mean by Consciousness and I know what you mean about Consciousness seeming like a very different thing to just electrical processes in the brain and I understand why the hard problem of Consciousness is so hard but you know

with my own introspections about what my Consciousness feels like I just can't imagine how a plant would have anything like that I can't imagine what it would be like for the plant um you know my Consciousness is dominated by this intensely detailed visual field but the plant doesn't have an image forming retina so it can't possibly be conscious of a visual field in the same way that I am well obviously that on its own isn't a good argument because plenty of people are congenitally blind and presumably they're still conscious even though they don't have a

visual field but you know they still have other senses like hearing and they're aware of the passage of time and um what things happened later and what things happened earlier and um you know what what kinds of things would a plant be aware of based on what we know about its electrochemical nervous system well you know one thing I've said it would be aware of is being snipped if you cut off a plant's limb it you know it might have the capacity to have some kind of spatial awareness of which of its limbs had been

cut uh it would be able to feel maybe the intensity of the electrochemical response to the cut I don't know if that corresponds to how quick the cut was or how you know how blunt it was or whatever but those are things that seem to be modulated by its its nervous system so those are things that it might have some kind of conscious experience of but you know I can't imagine how it would have a conscious experience of those things that wasn't embedded in a more humanlike conscious experience of the world and obviously it doesn't

have a human like conscious experience of the world because it doesn't have all of the sensory systems that humans have so I just can't imagine it basically and what I would say to that is I would hark back to my earlier comments about um thinking without an internal monologue many of us think without an internal monologue and if you don't believe me then you know look to the much more well documented um phenomena of aphantasia and anoria often people who can't form mental imagery also can't hear things in their mind so presumably those people don't

have an internal monologue and they can still think so you know some people find it unbelievable that you could think without a verbal internal monologue and clearly people can I mean think about something like a magpie magpies don't have language as far as we can work out and yet they clearly have intentions they clearly intend to do something they they they deceive each other they um they're very socially intelligent but they can't have an internal monologue going on in some language in their brain um so so clearly cognition is possible without without some language overlay

but that that's very difficult to imagine for a lot of people so I would say that it's the same difficulty of imagination the same lack of ination that leads to someone being unable to imagine what it's like to be a conscious plant I can't imagine what it would be like to be a conscious plant in fact I struggle to imagine what it would be like to be a bat because its sensory systems are so differently organized to mine but you know I know that different organisms think and experience things differently because clearly different humans do

so I don't think that my lack lack of ability to imagine is on its own a good argument about plants capacity for Consciousness the other type of criticism I'm expecting is quite common in debates around Consciousness and that is along the lines of but Simon it seems as though you're trying to define the word Consciousness deliberately so science can't get to it you know if you just allowed Consciousness to mean neural integration or you allowed Consciousness to mean human wakefulness or you allowed Consciousness to mean subvocalization or something that we can measure then there wouldn't

be a hard problem at all um but you seem to be deliberately trying to make the definition of Consciousness something which is inaccessible to science you seem to be trying to put inaccessibility into the definition why would you do that it it's a really confusing way of arguing about something it seems though you're trying to invent this property that doesn't actually exist um and then argue about whether it exists or not what's what's the point this is really bad argumentation now this kind of criticism as I say is fairly common in arguments about Consciousness and

I think even Daniel dennit the The Illusionist himself um the man who thinks that Consciousness is is fully Just an Illusion acknowledged the existence of these criticisms and it seems as though he um he wasn't a fan of them I think at some point in Consciousness explained he says something like um I don't want to be one of those scientists or philosophers who blatantly denies the existence of things that they must know full well are real um I think this is a real almost an axiomatic difference between people who like to think about consciousness and

people who think it's all a load of nonsense the idea that if it's scientifically inaccessible why would you even think about it why would you try to you know why would you try to generate some kind of scientific explanation for it for a long time I found this perspective extremely hard to understand I can understand looking at the problem and thinking that seems so scientifically Untouchable that there's no point even bothering at this at this stage trying to answer it and I could respect that opinion I I don't think that that I could ever take

that stance myself because I think it's such an interesting question it it demands an answer but I could you know I think that's a coherent perspective to take you know the hard problem of Consciousness is so hard that I'm just going to focus on things we can we can resolve but I don't think that's the perspective of these people their perspective seems to be more one of confusion of you're just chatting a load of nonsense about something that clearly doesn't exist and I don't know why you're doing that for a long time I just took

this to be people sticking a bit too rigidly to a physicalist materialist worldview um obviously knowing that Consciousness and qualia were real because we all know that they're real but saying that because they're not externally objectively verifiable therefore you know I'm I'm going to stick so rigidly to my materialist uh perspective that I'm going to say that they're not real brackets even though they obviously are but I've come to maybe a different understanding of this now I've thought about the extent to which our experiences of thinking can be different one person can visualize things one

person can't one person has an internal monologue the other you know another person doesn't that I'm starting to wonder if maybe these people's experience of Consciousness is just so different to mine that they actually don't know what I'm talking about when I talk about qualia and Consciousness maybe they just don't know what I'm banging on about maybe that's why they they they we hit such an Impulse with the argument I'm not trying to be factious here I I genuinely believe now that perhaps there are such big differences in different people's experience of Consciousness that that

that's the source of a lot of the problems in argumentation when I look at online discussions about Consciousness I find that this consideration passes across a lot of people's minds they watch videos of Daniel dennit seemingly failing to grasp certain fairly simple questions about qualia and they ask themselves is it possible that this guy actually just doesn't experience them is it possible that there aren't qualia in dennett's brain and that's why he seems unable to give a satisfactory answer I went online and found that plenty of people have a similar experience not just when listening

to dennit but when reading online comments accusing qualia proponents of believing in magic or being pseudo scientists there's something about the criticisms that doesn't just ring Hollow but seems to miss the point of what qualia proponents are saying the Temptation is strong to respond I don't just disagree with you but I suspect you don't know what I'm talking about it's like trying to talk to someone about an elephant in an elephant enclosure and the person's responding as if they can't see the elephant in the enclosure and also don't know what an elephant is so they

assume you're talking about one of the trees I think this mental reaction at first feels wrong it feels almost as if you're entertaining the idea that somebody isn't fully sentient or something like that but I think we should dissect that feeling just because somebody isn't conscious in the same way as you doesn't mean they're not conscious at all consider how gon must have felt when he started to question whether his scientist friends might really not be able to produce mental imagery it's easy to imagine that he could have gone through a phase of thinking wait

does that mean that they're just robot men or something before eventually realizing that their reality might just be different to his I get a parallel bad reaction when I make videos about deep anthropological differences between cultures I remarked in one video that the way some members of my family including me processed death seemed perplexing or worrying to those around us and how the inverse was true as well their expectations of how we should react to death seemed alarming and strange to me when I put this in a video I got responses saying that it was

insulting or othering to suggest that some cultures don't experience certain common emotional reactions to death but I wasn't talking about Native Americans or Japanese people I was talking about myself to comment that my talk was othering is to suggest that my own experience of life isn't part of the tapest of Human Experience I can't imagine anything more othering than that having differences in experience acknowledged and explored seems to be the right way to avoid being othering or insulting so is it possible that there are people who don't have qualia as part of their experience who

are conscious in some way but not in a qualia way I think the answer is probably yes for a few reasons one many philosophers who are proponents of qu IA agree that they seem to be pretty much functionless the confusing thing about them is that the brain could work identically well if it didn't have them in I don't know if I completely agree that they're functionless for a couple of reasons but I'd invite you to compare it to the mental imagery or internal monologue things I don't feel that I miss out on much by not

having an internal monologue even though it's a functional thing you could presumably see on a brain scan I might not be consciously aware of much of what I'm thinking I might not be consciously aware that I've run out of milk but I didn't notice that until I was in my 20s and it doesn't seem to affect my ability to do things people's surprise about others having or lacking internal monologues just goes to show that these much more consequential differences in experience often go unnoticed and don't affect social interaction much at all unless people specifically start

talking about their brains if these functional differences can exist between human brains surely something is apparently ineffectual as qualia could be different more intense in some people perhaps even absent in others also I understand a lot of arguments about Consciousness being an illusion when applied to certain aspects of my Consciousness I think of it as very roughly a three tiered system with the tier relating to how confusing the phenomenon is tier one is autonomic computations like the ones that control my heartbeat I never feel even remotely conscious of this even though it's going on in

my brain and made of the same stuff as all my other brain activity tier two is things like abstract thoughts decisions and raw emotions as I go about my daily activities I feel like I'm consciously deciding to do things I feel like I'm consciously deciding to move my arm to pick up a mug or to start doing some work but if I introspect about it the decision- making doesn't feel like anything it feels like nothing at all it has no qualities whatsoever and in fact to paraphrase Chomsky I'm not conscious of the decision to pick

up the mug until I feel and see my arms start moving likewise I'm conscious of my physical reaction to an emotion and to the stimulus that caused it but on introspection the raw emotion itself feels like absolutely nothing and has no qualities whatsoever it's not just that it's Indescribable I can tell you with confidence it has no presence in my conscious experience and doesn't feel like anything the conscious experience of raw emotion for me doesn't exist on any level of reflection I'm very happy to accept that my feeling that I'm conscious of these things is

totally illusory that my brain is actually just running the numbers and tricking me into thinking I'm conscious in the same way that it tricks me into thinking I have good peripheral vision I have barely any issue with this at all I'm with you on that one there's no cartisian theater that these decisions and thoughts are happening in my brain just has to feel that it's a cohesive entity and so it tricks itself self fine then above that there's tier three qualia these are pretty much exclusively related to sensory processing and the most concrete real and

distinct things that I have ever known in my life when I was growing up I just assumed that they were properties of the world redness bless loud noise what biscuits taste like I just assumed all these things were what was going on outside my head the qualia representing a crow that's just what a crow is if I were able to jump outside my brain the crow would still look the same that's just what it looks like it was only when I started thinking about Consciousness that I realized this can't be true my brain is generating

a model of the world made of different stuff to the outside world my brain's model is made of action potentials running through neural circuits not the same stuff that's outside my head so I thought how could my brain be reconstru constructing the irreducibly complex properties of the world for me to see yes it preserves the mathematical information about why that thing is red instead of green what wavelengths it reflects Etc but how does the actual redness get from the outside world into my brain and then I realized my experience of redness isn't an actual property

of the object outside my head it's just my brain's label for that wavelength how my brain tells me that the thing is red wow I thought the most obvious striking basic thing about redness is just something that's inside my brain the Apple doesn't really look like that the more I thought about this the more it confused me wait why does the brain make it look like that that seems kind of arbitrary and then eventually how does the brain make it look like that how would the brain even do that how would it even make redness

when all it can do is fire Action potentials through neurons redness and brain activity seem to have nothing to do with each other it doesn't even seem like the kind of thing that the brain should be able to do the same goes for sound the thing I've spent my whole life thinking of as loudness isn't what loudness actually is it's just my brain's label for it how does it make loudness and red feel so categorically different to each other different from the ground up sharing no characteristics at all when they actually both just boil down

to the same kind of brain activity if this chain resonates with you if you understand my confusion you probably have a similar experience of qualia to me qualia is the name philosophers give to these properties of our experience that seem to go beyond brain activity what the loud sounds like what the red looks like but I'm more interested in if this didn't resonate with you if you don't really get what I mean if you're trying to understand what I'm talking about but it just it doesn't quite add up or just doesn't seem like much of

a mystery to you I'd love to hear your perspective on this issue in the comments and I'm not just saying that for engagement I'm genuinely interested when I talk to some people about this who are skeptical of the concept of qualia I get the impression that they think qualia are something that only happens when I look really deep into myself and think a bit too hard I start to see a flickery little ghost because of Wishful Thinking almost like if somebody started thinking too hard about the concept of a door and they started to become

convinced that alongside the physical structure of the door there needed to be this extra magic conceptual barrier that stopped people getting through the door and if you think hard enough about it you'll see what I mean and the obvious answer to that is no man there's just a door the physics of the door explain everything about it you don't need an extra thing but that's not the kind of thing that we mean when we talk about qualia it's a consuming inescapable experience qualia make up everything that I see and hear it's impossible for me to

imagine seeing hearing or tasting without qualia in the same way that somebody with an internal monologue might find it impossible to imagine thinking without one it absolutely takes a bit of Mind searching initially to recognize the qualia for what they are but that's just because I've gone my whole life assuming that that's just what the outside world looks like i' never had to think about it before I wonder if some people experience qu ier the same way that I experience tier 2 conscious experiences that they know when something's red or green but if they try

to introspect on that experience it doesn't really feel like anything and so from their perspective coming up with a name for it and treating it as a scientific entity seems kind of ridiculous obviously it's just an illusion in the same way that I find it obvious that my decision- making is Just an Illusion if that resonates with you again I would love to hear about it I don't think that what I'm saying here explains the hard problem of Consciousness at all but I think if true it would be an interesting thing to study and it

would certainly shed light on certain aspects of the debate if it turns out that a lot of the people debating don't know uh what the other people are talking about it would be fascinating to know why there are these large differences between people why some people find qualia to be an insoluble problem as I do but some people don't seem to consider this a problem at all the most frustrating thing about this topic is that I know that I can't convey how obvious qualia are to a hypothetical person who doesn't have them it's such a

hard concept to wrap your head around all of us qualia proponents insist that qualia are irreducible can't be broken down into components can't be an emergent property of quantitative information uh you know if I see a red screen the red isn't made of anything it doesn't seem to break down into any components of red it's just red but I can easily imagine someone asking but how the hell would you know that what makes you so convinced that these things are irreducible when you look at a crow it doesn't seem like it can be reduced to

a bundle of mathematical properties but any scientifically minded person knows that it can what makes qualia any different for a long time I struggled to answer this question it's a fair point why am I so convinced that the experience of redness can't be broken down into smaller components thinking about the question didn't make it go away at all but it is a fair question and then I realized that qualia are still Totally Baked into the way that I think about everything growing up learning about science and math I always had this sense that qualia I

didn't know the word then of course but I I still experienced them that qualia were the sort of real coar properties of the world around me and that when physicists described the mathematical properties of things that was just a nice model for explaining some of the very basic things about the qualia the qualia themselves were Rich complex reality and the maths was just a neat way of explaining a small percentage of the things about the qualia it was always obvious to me even as a teenager I think that you can't describe everything about the world

using maths that it hits a wall eventually because as finely as you can describe the difference between 650 nanom wavelength light and 500 nanm wavelength light it's never going to explain why one of them looks red and the other looks green the red green thing is intrinsically qualitative not quantitative there's no way that a pure quality can come from a bundle of mathematical properties this was always obvious to me as long as I thought about maths or science in that sense although I didn't recognize it at the time my thinking was fundamentally dualistic but I

just thought that was normal when people talked about dualism I thought of it as the idea that there's an Earthly realm and then a magic other realm like heaven or something which seemed ridiculous to me because I had no experience indicating that heaven or some other realm existed I didn't think of dualism as being the idea that qualities are not the same thing as the mathematical properties that underly them I just thought that that was obvious it's only while making this video that I've come to completely realize that when you strip the qualia away from

Human Experience everything else is just bundles of mathematically describable physics as far as we know the world is just a mass of information with no flavors or colors or sounds just the physical stuff that underlies flavors and colors and sounds if somebody's hypothetically never experienced qualia if they've only experienced vision and hearing the way I experienc decision- making as something that maybe kind of feels conscious but disappears on closer reflection they're not going to have any idea what a quality is other than as an emergent property of something that can be completely described mathematically the

difference in thinking would be so fundamental that a constructive conversation about the hard problem of Consciousness would be completely impossible and this is what we see in many such conversations two people talking about completely different things neither of them realizing that there's an axiomatic difference between their positions thinking about it from this angle has led me I think to better understand some of the people who critic ize the idea of qualia when I was a teenager I like many of us went through an edgy atheist phase where I'd watch all of the Richard Dawkins debates

and all that kind of stuff I'm still not religious now but I I I suppose my beliefs or my my conviction is a bit less strong um you know I realize that I'm just a human and I could be wrong about all of these things so I I don't I don't go and watch all of those things the same way that I used to but um yeah when I was about 15 or so I was I went through an edgy atheist phase and one of the arguments that I heard in these debates and also from

close friends who are devout Christians was that there's a kind of experiential um way in which we all know that God exists God reveals himself to everyone and it's up to the person to um to sort of let God in so when we were talking about creation um there'd be arguments like well just look around you look at the stars at night how on Earth can that not be evidence of God look at the trees and the grass how on Earth can you say these things aren't evidence of God the evidence is everywhere um and

these things would fail to convince me because I I just couldn't see what they meant you know I don't see the stars as evidence of God I don't see a tree as evidence of God I'm I'm I'm not trying to be factious I just genuinely don't see it that way and similar kind of argument would would factor into things like moral intuition how would you have a moral intuition it's just it just so it's so intuitively obvious that that comes from some Divine Creator it's so clear um and and I got the sense that from

these people's perspective the existence of God was so intuitively obvious in all aspects of life that the only explanation for why somebody could be an atheist is if they were actively trying to suppress their intrinsic knowledge that God existed they were actively pushing down their understanding that there was a God or they were trying to rationalize it trying to explain it as something else perhaps because they were scared of being judged or they didn't want someone to be in charge of them or something like that um but that intrinsically if they just let go if

they just let let themselves be taken by it they would be filled up with this this belief I may be misunderstanding or mischaracterizing those views but that was the impression I got and thinking about qualia which is not the same thing as religion at all I'm not about to draw I'm not about to say that qualia is evidence of God or anything like that but thinking about the idea of someone who lacks qualia I can kind of understand where these Christians were coming from I I I feel you know to me obviously qualia are there

in my experience and presumably they're there in everyone else's experience as well so the idea of someone actually not being able to grasp them or denying their existence to me just seems insane you don't have to have scientific evidence for it it's right there it's just there you know it's intuitive it's it's the most obvious thing in the world and I imagine that one of these Christians I I talked about might have the same perspective on God and um the same perspective on Divinity you don't have to have mathematical you know quantitative evidence for it

it's just obvious in everything you look at that God is real um and so you know to clarify again I'm in between these two I I believe that there a qualia in my experience but I don't believe in God so I understand the perspective of those who can't understand the qualia thing because I think it's probably similar to my perspective on um very religious people who believe that God is everywhere um I respect the experience of those religious people who believe that God is everywhere and I understand that I'll never fully grasp what it's like

for them to look at a tree and see God that's not an experience I think I'm capable of and likewise I have to accept um that that people who deny the existence of qualia perhaps because they haven't experienced them in the same way there's nothing I can say that will convince them because cuz I can't prove it you know and this is I suppose a humbling realization um because it puts me in the position of some people who I was quite frustrated with about 10 or 15 years ago um it puts me in the position

of the guy who's trying to demonstrate the existence of something which seems intrinsically unprovable to somebody who doesn't know what I'm talking about