then there are two different kinds of views of Consciousness that I keep hearing about and they seem to be contradictory on the one hand we know there's this binding problem where we have Vision sight smell touch but we see everything as a unified whole and some would claim that Consciousness therefore is a Unity others would say that that's a fiction even an illusion because all it is are these different components that we artificially Clump together same facts radically different interpretation of what Consciousness is how do you say it well it's difficult because nobody really knows
what Consciousness is in with an operational definition that we can use to test the ideas but there does seem to be a difference let's say between a digital camera and your eyes so that's that's one place you could start I think we can all agree that a digital camera isn't conscious and you probably are now what is the difference between those two systems so the digital camera has pixels and each pixel records a color and an intensity and together when you put them together you see a picture but the camera doesn't put them together there's
no relation between the different pixels in the camera or in the in the in the way the image is stored in your brain though you interpret an image from this so to you it's not just colors and intensities but but you see a connection between the colors and intensities and you you maybe you're hearing what's going on in the scene you're smelling what's going on you're integrating all the information so the the most interesting approach that I see to Consciousness today is this approach through integrated information where Consciousness seems to have to do with not
just having information different parts of a system but the connection between those parts the idea that the information that the system has is greater than the sum of the parts and of course our brains are extremely highly interconnected so that that does seem to match the physical structure of the brain and the Consciousness that arises from that whereas the pixels are just sitting there well you could maybe grow the analogy between the camera and nris because our eyes themselves are not conscious but pick up the electromagnetic information to pass on yeah well if you if
you cut the picture in half where you end up is two half is too half you actually have have the same thing nothing changes because uh the pixels don't know about each other so if you cut a picture in half you have the same same information but there are people with uh who are called split brain patients who've had their corpus callosum cut that separates the right and the left hemisphere of the brain and they do that sometimes as a treatment for severe epilepsy and when that happens the right side of the brain and the
left side of the brain can't communicate and it's very interesting that when that happens the people they seem normal when you talk to them but if you investigate further it seems almost as if they have two consciousnesses two personalities and Christoph Cochin one of his books writes about a particular case that's kind of sad where a woman was being interviewed and she was asked how many seizures she had had in the past week and she was asked to raise her hand to tell and one hand went up and said two and the other hand went
up and said four and then one hand started to put the other hand down the hand started fighting with each other and the two halves of her brain were fighting so as opposed to the camera with where nothing really happens when you divide the the image in half in your brain if you cut it in half you get two different two new brains so that is a characteristic of Consciousness the integration seems to be very key you mentioned that Consciousness is more than the sum of its parts uh how so because some disagree with that
some say that that seeming feeling that it's more than the sum of the parts is the Grand Illusion well what I really said was that that the information is more than the sum of its parts now I don't know how to save Consciousness is more there are there is a one mathematical Theory out now uh uh Julio tanoni's theory that that that seeks to quantify Consciousness but I don't think we really know yet how to quantify Consciousness in the sense that we could say this is more conscious than that I mean we have a feeling
for it you could say my dog you might feel your dog has a certain level of Consciousness and you might feel that you have a higher level of Consciousness but I'm not sure what that really means so as a scientist I'm a little bit I hesitant to talk about what is more or less in Consciousness well well push yourself on that uh you you you know can you speculate I mean they're two radically different positions one is that we the the unity of Consciousness and the feeling that it is more than the sum of its
parts uh is is an illusion that if you took off took away each of the parts you'd have literally nothing left everything would disappear because the way your brain works is not linear so when you talk about cutting something in half you're you're doing more than separating the components of substrate but but you're breaking a lot of interconnections so I think that I mean to comment on that I guess I'd have to know more about exactly how they're defining the breaking it up so you you have two two issues one is the so-called binding problem
how you get all these different uh inputs that we have into one into one unified concept I see your black T-shirt uh I know it's a t-shirt I know it's black I know it has some different ridges in it I know it's part of it's covering a person a friend of mine I mean a lot of things are involved in that and it's just one image that I have so that's the question is how do how do all those things get bound together that's that that's one and the other hand and that we know for
sure the question the question is is that is is that binding some grander thing in Consciousness or is it just the component parts that are coming together because to me it seems like some something grander that's the natural feeling about it what does that mean something grander well it means that Consciousness is uh has an independent existence of itself it doesn't have to be spooky but it just has some some independent fundamentally a different thing about it other than just the sum of the inputs well when you say there's something grander than what's there I
mean if I if I had an identical physical system that is my brain and I put it in the identical State I believe it would be identical to my mind and it would have the same thoughts that I'm having so I don't think there's anything outside of of the physical system that that is involved in Consciousness yeah so that if you were able to duplicate all of your mental process or all the physical processes of your brain in in another medium that that would have the same same in internal not just Behavior but internal uh
subjective uh feelings and whatever that means yes I do I mean because it would have the same physical state and I think that Consciousness arises from a physical state you know the history of science we've had a lot of mysteries it used to be the eclipses were a mystery and we thought that wolves jumping across the sky we're Chasing the Sun and the Moon and that caused eclipses and we always look for these something outside to explain things we didn't understand and we've always been able to knock that down with science and so we now
understand and there's no sign that anything outside of physical laws are is needed to explain anything that we've ever come across those physical laws the laws we know today do you think well there are laws that we don't know today that that are important in the universe but in your mind it seems to be that your mind is a a pretty ordinary classical system not even a a Quantum system just it runs by the usual laws it's just extremely complicated I mean your brain has 100 billion neurons and and that's roughly the order of magnitude
of the Stars in our galaxy but they're each is connected to ten one thousand to ten thousand others which the Stars aren't so we can study the stars and learn a lot about them and understand them and we're not making much progress on the brain or its progress is very slow right so the brain is much more complicated than your brain is much more complicated than the universe so it's hard to um in the physical Universe of stars so it's it's hard to understand but I I do believe that it's governed by the state by
the physical properties of the system and the state of the system at any given time and if I could reproduce my system and the and the neural net and the interconnections and including how they work in say in the Silicon system then that would be me
