Consciousness, Qualia and Internal Monologues

Here's a thought experiment and hopefully don't mind bearing with me let's think about color this wall is blue and people watching with normal trichromatic vision or even red green color blindness will probably experience it as blue different languages break up the color spectrum in different ways but most of us can probably agree that this Hue is similar to the color of the sky on a sunny day and dissimilar to the color of a normal wood fire at night for example howler monkeys also have trichromatic Vision similar to most humans and even without their own words

for colors they can perceive that these two things are similar colors and that this is a quite different color an AI algorithm properly trained can do the same thing if you feed it photographs of these colors when we see a color cells in our retinas are detecting different wavelengths of light by combining information from different types of cone cell we can detect objects in front of us and learn things about them but we don't just take in the information and process it in a computery way think about the experience of seeing blue think about what

blue looks like this experience this color isn't a real property of the object it's not part of the real world it's just a tool our brain uses to represent that frequency that wavelength for us in fact if you think about it the real world doesn't really look like anything how it's seen depends on the thing that's seeing it that's a line of thinking for another video the main point is that the electromagnetic frequencies are real but what blue looks like isn't real it's just something your brain has made up all of the things that you

need color for whether that's telling whether fruit is rotten or telling objects apart or telling whether something is hot could just be done by numeric calculations in the brain which is after all just a very Advanced Computer why do we have this sensation of what blue looks like when our brain could get along just as well with calculations without giving us this made up visual sensation of what the wavelength looks like you could think of it as something extra that's layered on top of all of the calculations our brain does to work out how we

should behave and react to things on some level I think we realize that the color percepts we see are kind of arbitrary most of us have pondered on the question is my red the same as your red that's because we realize that the exact experience of red we have doesn't matter as much as the fact that we can tell the difference between red and blue if I switch the red and blue color channels over in my editing software you can still see all the same color distinctions it's just that different percepts are attached to different

wavelengths of light I could be wrong but I'd imagine that most of us have no issue with the idea that a dog or a bird has color percepts in the same way that we do of course they see slightly different Spectra of light and maybe their color percepts look a bit different there's no way of telling but we accept that their visual systems aren't just doing number calculations of has this route gone off is my baby bleeding they're actually seeing colors in much the same way we do there are YouTube videos on what colors look

like to a dog which suggests that people take for granted that dogs do see colors even if they see them a bit differently something analogous but more complicated is consciousness it's hard to describe but I describe it as the intense awareness that transcends just complex calculations and responding to stimuli it's not just self-awareness because a computer can acknowledge that it exists and that it's a computer it's not just intelligence because a computer can do very intelligent things it's something that seems almost magic this intense subjective awareness we have that we are here at least that's

what it is for me I can't prove my Consciousness is the same as yours just as I can't prove my red is the same as your red again it's clear that computers can apparently do a lot of cognitive things humans can do without apparently having this subjective consciousness it's just a matter of very complicated calculation in fact even in humans there's good evidence that decision making happens independently of Consciousness our brains do the calculations and come to decisions before our conscious minds are even told that the decision has been made all our Behavior could just

be a result of numeric calculations and yet we have this extra layer this consciousness it's a lot like color perception there's the calculations and then our seemingly kind of needless experience of the calculations so why is it that we're a lot happier saying yeah Birds experience color similarly to us then we are saying Birds experience Consciousness similarly to us this isn't cut and dry many people probably think birds are conscious like us but many think that they're probably less conscious because they're less intelligent and less self-aware some people probably think that they're not conscious at

all and that their brains are just running the numbers to determine how they behave in general we're a lot less willing to extend Consciousness to other animals than we are to extend human-like color perception to them I was talking to my girlfriend about this who's a visual neuroscientist and she suggested that it has to do with people's experience of Consciousness that it's difficult to imagine a kind of Consciousness that's different to our own she made an important point that I hadn't considered some possibly most people have verbal internal monologues there's continuous speech inside their heads

that narrates what they're doing and talks through decisions for them this didn't occur to me because I like many other people don't personally have this but I can imagine for someone with an internal monologue it's hard to separate the monologue from Consciousness in general I'm not gonna do a whole video about internal monologues because I think it's something that kind of circulates the internet every so often and there's plenty of articles on it already but the experimental research I've seen the very very small amount of experimental research I've seen on this suggests that it's more

of a kind of multi-dimensional spectrum that changes from person to person and from time to time so some people have almost constant inner speech where there's like a narrator inside their head narrating what they're thinking Some people have none but they they think in images a lot some deaf people report kind of seeing disembodied hands doing sign language in their in their mind um and other people thinking kind of abstract thoughts and I I I suppose I probably fall into that category because I don't think my thoughts are tied to any particular sensory modality um

I can I don't have a Fantasia or anything like that so I can visualize things and I can simulate speech in my mind but most of the time really I'm not unless I deliberately visualize something or I deliberately imagine someone talking um there's really no the only sensory experience I'm having is the sensory experience of what's around me I'm not I'm not hearing a voice in my head I'm not seeing anyone talking in my head and to me that's just how thought works it's something that's kind of invisible inaudible most of the time and something

that almost goes on in a black box in my head where I often don't have access to it so you know it's not frustrating because for me that's just how it is um so like for example I don't know what I'm going to say until it comes out of my mouth and I hear myself say it and that's not as disconcerting as it sounds because I know that the speech is coming from my brain and I know it's not going to say anything I disagree with um so it feels fine but yeah that's that's just

by way of an explanation um for somebody who kind of thinks differently to me and I'm always curious about how it is to have an internal monologue as well because it's like um I don't know when someone's speaking to me while I'm trying to do something I find it quite hard to focus on what I'm doing so I can't imagine kind of immutable but then also I do talk to myself when I'm walking around so I suppose maybe that serves the function that the internal monologue serves in other people um but yeah it seems to

it seems to be a very broad spectrum and um that's just my own my own personal experience of it um but but the point being that you don't have to have language to think consciously you don't have to you don't have to be able to see to think consciously obviously blind people are conscious um you know thought can happen conscious thought can happen independent of sensory modality this is something I use to remind myself that although subjective experience and introspection is useful in looking for things to study we shouldn't rely on it we need to

acknowledge that even things which are fundamental to our experience aren't fundamental to everyone's for a long time in a speech seemed to be treated as some kind of prerequisite to human conscious thought presumably by researchers who've had it in a speech themselves all I know is that I don't experience in a speech unless I deliberately try to that doesn't necessarily mean the inner speech wasn't important in the past it might be something that was instrumental in the cognitive evolution of humans but has since Diversified into a range of ways of thinking just like Latin has

Diversified into the range of modern romance languages while it's hard to describe Consciousness we can maybe describe some of its limitations that it seems to have in my subjective experience and I've had this ratified by a lecturer at University who studies Consciousness although it might not be everybody's experience we're only conscious of a very limited set of things at once we may know a lot of things we may know a load of people's birthdays under the sky is blue and that wolves are dangerous but we're not conscious of any of these things most of the

time for example I can visualize things in my mind as most but not all people can and I can see as most but not all people can when I visualize something and focus on this imaginary image I'm usually not conscious of what I'm actually seeing with my eyes in real life I can flick between the two quickly but for me it's either one or the other I can't be paying attention to both at once now cognitive processes are still going on if I'm focusing on a Daydream my visual system is still processing real visual information

and if suddenly someone started sprinting towards me or a tiger jumped out of a bush my brain would pull me out of the Daydream and make me concentrate on the real world but that processing happens in a bit of my brain I'm not conscious of while I'm focusing on the daydream so we can already see that computations about the environment can happen outside of our consciousness something I noticed which I'm happy to be corrected on is that when I'm conscious of a sensory modality like sight a very large amount of high-level processing has already been

done it's very hard for me to look at a visual scene without knowing how far away things are which things are separate objects and what those objects are information about how the scene is lit if there are any people I know in it the information coming in through my retina is just color and brightness and the retina is sensitive to some very basic things like edges piecing the information together and recognizing objects happens later on now ordinarily I can't look at a visual scene without my brain analyzing it for me I can't shift my Consciousness

to an earlier stage in the visual pathway where I haven't analyzed that information yet maybe you could do this kind of thing through meditation I don't know but it seems like my Consciousness wants to exist in a part of the brain where a lot of information has already been processed the brain has Pathways and a given bit of information gets processed in a particular order visual information may be analyzed sent to the executive function areas of the brain to decide what to do and then that decision gets sent to the motor part of the brain

that organizes it into behavior and that gets sent down motor neurons which make the muscles contract if our Consciousness can be said to exist in a particular part of the brain maybe that's a part of the brain that's fairly high level in one of these Pathways so the information we get has already been processed by the time we're conscious of it some researchers have suggested that Consciousness may have something to do with the fact that humans don't have a load of built-in instinctive Behavior like a lot of animals do we have to organize a lot

of our Behavior deliberately we can get it to the point that it's pretty much automatic but first we have to think about and develop the behavior maybe Consciousness is related to the system that organizes that new non-automatic Behavior researchers like Brian Earl have looked at the possibility that Consciousness is somehow for enacting behavior and decision making in my opinion this makes intuitive sense the decision-making and behavior organizing part of the brain has access to fully processed information like our Consciousness seems to and I and a lot of other people I've talked to experience decision making

as something that they either do consciously or something that's very close to consciousness Earl presents the idea of a hypothetical system in the brain called the frm the flexible response mechanism the frm is a cognitive machine for taking in information about the task you're meant to be doing and manipulating the information to work out how you should respond so the frm has input data a combination of all kinds of sensory information that's already been analyzed and processed and it works on that input data it manipulates the input data and turns it into output which is

presumably Behavior or something close to behavior Earl's suggestion is that Consciousness is not the frm but the input to the frm that Consciousness is pure information and not a mechanism that processes information this is a very important part of Earl's argument that I find quite convincing this is where we get into the realm of introspection and I'm very aware that these points may not apply to everyone but he argues that when we make a decision we may be aware of stages in the decision-making process popping into our Consciousness but we aren't aware of the actual

data manipulations that produce the decision we aren't aware of the actual minute information processing that leads to the decision inside our brains neurons are firing at different rates and the firing rates of those neurons ultimately determine what decision we make we don't feel this happening we don't really know exactly how the brain is coming to its decisions it's like a black box algorithm in computer science you can train an algorithm to recognize the difference between pictures of cats and pictures of ducks by giving it a load of labeled pictures of both of them from all

kinds of different angles and telling it to work out what the differences are and you can then give it an unlabeled picture of a duck and if it's been trained right it will tell you that it's a duck you know it's got the right answer but you don't know exactly how the algorithm has made the decision you don't know exactly what features it's recognized to make the duck diagnosis at least for me it's the same way with my brain I effectively send it a request and get an answer out I may be able to introspectively

think about why it might have come to that decision why it might have come to that conclusion but I can't actually see the data manipulations that it's doing Earl's article makes a point that I've noticed independently myself and that I I mentioned in the internal monologue thing I don't know what words I'm going to say until I've already said them for people within a speech the brain may send your Consciousness a simulation of what it's going to say which you experience before you actually say the words but again you don't get to see the calculations

that produce those words the feeling we get of having made a decision while it feels a lot like a conscious process of deciding it's actually just our brain telling our Consciousness that the decision has been made we don't even consciously decide what will enter our Consciousness next our brain determines that for us Earl suggests that the frm this decision-making machine works best if it's only trying to handle a small amount of information at once and that's why we only tend to pay conscious attention to one thing at once if we pay attention to one thing

at once the frm can dedicate all its resources to processing that one thing and it can probably come to a quicker decision than it would if it was trying to process a load of irrelevant information you might have noticed an issue this Theory Narrows down the kind of thing that Consciousness might be and where in our stream of neural information it might live but so far it still doesn't explain why it produces this incredible awareness we have it kind of gives you an idea of where Consciousness might be but it doesn't explain what it is

or how it's produced why couldn't this input just not be conscious just like the input to a calculator presumably isn't conscious one interesting way Earl looks at the question is to ask does Consciousness itself have any kind of survival advantage is it something that's evolved specifically for some purpose or is it an emergent property that just naturally pops up wherever you do really complex data input but which has no survival value in and of itself Earl thinks that the very complex organization of Consciousness suggests it has evolved and been subject to evolutionary pressures and that

it probably does increase our chances of surviving in the world he actually uses a similar example to what I used at the start of the video what he calls qualia which is a common idea in neuroscience and philosophy although I think it's differently defined in philosophy qualia are things that the brain uses to present information to us we don't just experience a load of numbers telling us wavelengths and frequencies we see color we hear pitch things which feel so much more intense and distinctive than just the numeric data that our sensory organs give us he

says that Consciousness is qualia it's the combination of all these intense representations that our brain gives us not just color and sound but texture what our thoughts feel like heat and cold and pain and things like that lots of bits of our brain do complex data analysis but most of these bits of our brain don't seem to be conscious and don't seem to produce qualia Earl seems very forthcoming about the fact that this is mostly based on introspection of how Consciousness feels like it works I get the impression that the article is more just a

better defining of where we might want to look for empirical evidence of Consciousness rather than some complete explanation of it because it's based on introspection by humans it's hard to tell whether other animals would have these qualia and have consciousness if this explanation of Consciousness were true it might guide our thinking a little bit it might imply that things more closely genetically related to humans are more likely to have qualia and Consciousness and subjective experience because birds have very different brain organization to mammals maybe they've solved the problem in a different way or maybe they've

convergently evolved a similar System Of Consciousness or maybe Consciousness is a much older trait and animals with more automatic behaviors just use the cognitive tool of Consciousness for something else although I think the whale describes it makes it seem pretty specialized to non-automatic behaviors thinking about qualia is a bit freaky earlier I said that the world doesn't really look like anything and that our brains make it look like something perhaps so that we can understand it better at that point in the research process for this video I was mainly thinking about color but surely it

applies to other kinds of qualia as well how we perceive things like sound and even things like distance and shape are qualier themselves but the brains of other animals and even other people might deploy these qualia in extremely different ways as long as they're internally consistent in the animal's brain it works just as well I was first introduced to this idea by Richard Dawkins book The ancestor's tale where he refers to a famous article on what it's like to be a bat which is a little exploration of animal consciousness in a kind of extension of

the thought experiment Dawkins suggested that because bats rely on hearing as their primary sense rather than sight maybe they've taken the quality that humans use for color and applied them to some other natural property like texture so maybe a bat experience is a rough texture in the same way that I experience red thinking about this leads the Mind down a little rabbit hole about qualia in general is there something about visual qualia like distance and color that you know sort of ties them together as opposed to auditory qualia like loudness and pitch I don't really

know I can't tell I've never experienced anything any other way than I do at the moment anyway for Dawkins is um suggestion well I don't think he's suggesting it as a serious empirical fact but his his thought experiment to to hold water we'd be assuming that the properties of different qualia are kind of conserved or similar from generation to generation what colors feel like to me is roughly the same as what they feel like to you and of course we can't prove this is true or false at the moment before I go any further with

the qualia thing I think it's important to say that there is within Academia a serious argument that qualia are not real or not scientifically important this argument comes from several angles and I won't be able to do them all Justice here to make my biases clear I also don't find this argument very intuitive or satisfactory which is likely to be a failure of my understanding rather than a failure of the argument so I'm sorry if I don't explain it very well and I'm sure somebody in the comments will explain it better than I can but

as I understand it our subjective experiences are impossible to make reasons scientific arguments about because only we have access to them and if we want to convey them we have to do so using language of some kind even if that's mathematical language which is clearly not good enough for describing every single aspect of our experience this is clear from the fact that I can't describe what my red looks like in a way that would make sense to someone who's never seen it before we also can't even be sure of any aspect of our experience that's

not current Daniel Dennett points out that if somebody suddenly changed our qualia for example by flipping the red and green color channels over like I did earlier in this video we wouldn't be able to know if someone had really changed our qualia or just changed our memories of what aqualia used to look like through we know our color qualia could change every time we blink and our brains could just gloss over it to me this seems not like a positive argument that qualia don't exist but an argument that we shouldn't bother trying to learn about

them and it's completely futile for us to do so the interviewer Louis goldbound once put it to Daniel Dennett when you see a blue door that information from the blue door hits your retina it gets converted into Spike trains and your neurons sequences of electrical pulses but the phenomenal experience of seeing the door is different from a load of Spike trains then it responded I'm paraphrasing but I'll put the actual quote on screen but in the end there will be a scientific story of you and your brain but your conscious subjective self will not be

a character in that story the first person story of you is extractable from all that scientific data about your brain but that's it that's all it is to clarify what I think he means and I apologize if I misrepresent it if you had absolutely every bit of possible information about someone's physical brain you would be able to say everything it is scientifically possible to say about that person and their experience and there is nothing else to it the qualia we experience are an illusion and do not exist in any scientific sense they're not real and

not worthy of scientific consideration I find this point of view genuinely staggering but not in a disparaging way it's another thing that goes to show that two humans can think about logic in two very different ways to me qualia are the only things I know are real because they're the only things I actually directly experience it might be true that they're not scientifically measurable and you could make a point that there's no point studying them scientifically but to deny their reality surprises me quite a lot having said that I'm not a philosopher and I know

philosophy is one of these fields where people outside of it pretend to have a better understanding of it than they actually do and I don't want to be one of those people so I'll stick to Neuroscience arguments here while acknowledging that my video is going to be slightly incomplete because of that is this stag beetle conscious if I asked that question specifically because I happen to have some nice footage of a stag people but the question of whether other things than humans are conscious is an interesting one for those of us who want to understand

Consciousness better different people will have different intuitions if you come from a religious background that states humans are uniquely created by a god it may seem more intuitive that Consciousness is a human thing and that other animals don't have it from my own kind of empiricist angle it would almost surprise me if humans were the only things that were conscious because human exceptionalism isn't very popular in Academia at the moment but of course academic paradigms sort of come and go so that could just be a modern artifact does it make sense to talk of animals

that are still conscious but less conscious than humans if Consciousness arises from qualia which will represent the real world outside then it follows that perceiving the outside world may be some kind of prerequisite to human-like consciousness this is quite a low bar even bacteria can react to the outside world in pretty sophisticated ways considering they don't have brains or nervous systems in fact basically anything physical can react to the world around it if you drop Rock a onto Rock B and rock B breaks in half You could argue that even that is a reaction a

response to an event a way of recording very very basic information about something that's happened could a rock be conscious just in a way that's very very broken down and simple could a rock have some kind of quality that corresponds to being hot versus being cold being broken versus not being broken could a rock in other words have a subjective experience like a human has if we accept that we don't really know what Consciousness is yet I'd argue that we have to accept yes that is possible maybe it's some property of the universe that gets

locally Amplified by brain activity this is a very old way of thinking about Consciousness called Pan psychism the idea that pretty much everything is conscious this reflects the animistic beliefs of a lot of non-western societies the idea that the world is populated by people and that only some of those people are human pan psychism might feel like some kind of woo-woo ghost nonsense but clearly conventional Neuroscience doesn't seem to be enough to explain Consciousness at the moment and a lot of scientific discoveries come from outside the box thinking some people think Consciousness is generated at

the quantum level within neurons I know next to nothing about quantum physics so I'm not the person to assess this but I think there's some risk of looking at quantum physics as this domain that isn't completely understood and thinking Consciousness is mysterious it must live there in you know in the the world of quantum physics most of this video has been fairly introspection based and it's been kind of just a sort of wandering of thoughts rather than uh um anything particularly scientific um so I'll end on something else introspection based which is a just a

kind of observation about my own Consciousness and maybe a request to anyone else who who has the same experience to maybe put it in the comments but I feel as if my own Consciousness has become less intense as I've got older I feel you know in a very real way I feel less conscious than I was when I was six or seven or eight um or even 12 or 13. and I I think this is just you know uh kind of intuition in hindsight it's not I don't know this but I think part of it

might be that my senses have dulled as I've got older so my senses of taste and smell have become much worse since I was a teenager there are certain things I can't smell at all anymore and in general my my sense of taste and smell have got worse my sense of hearing has also got worse since I was a teenager and I wonder if the direct relationship between sense and Consciousness um is you know I don't know if that's a data point that maybe contributes to the idea that there's a relationship between those two things

um I put this to a couple of friends and both of them said that um they felt a kind of a similar thing but they thought it had more to do with um the fact that they've not had as many novel experiences as adults than they did when they were children and teenagers when you're a child obviously everything is new when you're a teenager you still experience a lot of new things but as an adult even a young adult you you maybe don't necessarily experience many new things unless you seek them out and even so

a lot of the new things you do experience can be conceptualized in terms of old things that you've already experienced um you know aspects of the experience of snowboarding are similar to aspects of the experience of skateboarding for example but if you've never ridden a bike before then Knack that you know that's a very new experience um I also feel like because I'm a bit less mobile than I was as a child um I I don't do things like Crouch down and look at the ground or kind of lie in the grass and see the

grass right you know next to my eyes and feel the grass against my face as much as I used to when I was a child and maybe that factors into it as well I'm just not stimulating certain senses as much as I was back then um but yeah I spent a long time thinking has your Consciousness really dulled or um do you just think it has and I think at the moment my my thinking on this is that my Consciousness is completely subjective and I am you know my feelings and my testimony on my Consciousness

are the best evidence of it that we have um so I feel that I feel that I have become less conscious not unconscious but less conscious and it led me to wonder about the idea of a kind of philosophical zombie which is something that's been been hanging around Philosophy for a very long time which is a person which is computationally in in distinguishable from a normal human but doesn't have a subjective Consciousness somehow we don't know if this is scientifically possible because again we don't know what Consciousness is maybe a human brain just inherently produces

Consciousness and you couldn't have a human without Consciousness but yeah I certainly this I realized that might might have sounded like I was saying the older you get the more of a philosophical zombie you get I don't think that's true at all but um yeah I don't really know where I was going I suppose I just made that connection in my head um yeah I think that might have been more or less the end of what I wanted to talk about so if anyone has any other thoughts on this and I'm sure different people have

different thoughts um but very very widely feel free to comment in the um description the I'm going to leave that in because I think my I don't know it's okay to not be very good at speaking sometimes and I think I'm just gonna I'm gonna leave that in um yeah thank you very much for watching and I'll talk to you again soon