our own personal access to the event in our own minds it's very limited and very poor we get an edited and metaphorical eyes version of what's going on in our brain so let's talk a bit about consciousness it's a subject that many of us find fascinating and another's thing is impossible to you to explain why do you think that so many people think that it's it's just intractable we can't study it I like to say it's like somebody trying to explain how a smartphone works by just looking at the screen and pressing it having no
idea about how that relates to what's going on under the hood inside inside layers and layers and layers of activity going on there and you'd never ever figure it out by just playing around with the user interface but what consciousness is is basically the brains user interface for itself it's the level of simplification that is most useful in the control of the human body in fact I've recently been putting it even more strongly and saying actually my consciousness is the way it is because it's your user interface to my mind if you want to know
about my mind ask me I can talk to you about I can describe in the irresistibly metaphorical terms I can't describe it in any other terms what's going on in my in my head and it's a very useful level of descriptions the personal level I can tell you what I'm thinking about what sensations I'm having what what reminds me of what but all of that is a fractional edited summary of every humans going on in my brain that's committing me to say those things to you in the same way that what you see on the
screen and here in the sound effects on your new smartphone is just a very carefully edited and distorted account of what's coming about inside the box so the reason it's so puzzling is that people think that they ought to be able to study it from the inside doing sort of pure phenomenology and those gives you hints very important hints but there first of all they are in some important regards illusory that's not what's really going on it seems like there's a as I put it there's a theater that you you're watching everything on the screen
no that's just not true it's not what's going on and people really don't want to believe that their knowledge of their own thinking is as impoverished as it is so how do we look behind the screen what's really going on well the same way we do for any say biological science if you want to know what's going on in your stomach you you get up to your microscopes and your FMR eyes and your and your cat scans and you do a proper job of figuring out how the parts work and how they need your mesh
what they made of and all the rest and that's it it's neuroscience so that's what you do and there's lots of experiments that you can do in fact the last 20 years has been just just a flawed and interesting research and it is clarifying gradually in some cases very dramatically what actually happens you know between you might say between your eyeball and your tongue when you look out at the world and tell people what you see what have we learned from fore brain scanning studies and that kind of research that could start what we've learned
less from the brain scanning data which we're now drowning we've got plenty of data what we need now is theories what we need is models and I think perhaps the main virtue of having all the brain scanning data is that now finally cognitive science is looking at the brain and for several decades it was considered premature to look at the brain but we'll we'll work this out a little bit like software engineer saying don't worry me about the hardware I got a software problem I'm trying to solve and that soy cognitive science was over several
decades and people doing models with scant attention to how those would be realized in the brain in the same way that software engineers can do vast schemes of software before they worry about how to get actually down to the executable code let alone what's what's happening in the individual registers they leave that to the to the hardware people well now we've seen that we have to look at the hardware and that questions of location in the hardware nobody nobody in computer science knows where in the metal box a particular thing is happening doesn't matter but
it's happening in sometimes it's happening wherever the CPU is but it's not very informative and whereas in the brain a brain is a kind of computer but it's very different from a digital computer and if we're going to get the understanding we're striving for we're going to have to learn to think about how babies six billion individual slightly different neurons no two alike how they can coordinate to to make a mind to do the computational work of the mind and there's still a lot of theoretical advances that have to come with what we're getting good
agree upon man is there in your mind a theory at the moment that that kind of stands out as the most plausible I think those yes I think that the global neuronal workspace models of which there are several and Bernie bars is the one who started it and then stand on Paris and their and their colleagues have developed it in a number of ways and it's pretty close to what I was saying in consciousness explained that with more detail and that family of models is beginning to look more and more promising and new phenomena are
being provoked by exploiting the model and that's always a good sign when you can get the brain to do something you've never seen the brain do before and the reason you got it to do that was because your model says it should be able to do that so that's that's good we're making progress I think I think that's the most promising direction so this is the idea that when there are certain units in the brain all talking together at the same time or broadcasting some information to another part of the brain that this that's what
crazy well it's it's that there is a a sort of arena of either communication and but still largely in the dark--the is one of the most important issues of all that is communication signaling isn't just sending spikes from A to B the thing B has to be able to make use of this bike so it gets from a and whether the information is being transmitted at all usable information is it's not demonstrated by by the fMRI picture yes you know that when this lights up this lights up okay you know that so this is communicating
with that but what what does this understand about what this is communicating and the very use of the word understanding is a little bit of poetic license because what you really have to do is understand that these are signals between brain parts that are sent by senders that don't really understand what the signals mean and are received and responded to by receivers that don't really know what the signals mean and yet because of the way they're coordinated you you get a comprehension you get and do these and these models or these theories kind of come
out of looking at the difference between an awake brain and an asleep brain or different kinds of modes of consciousness is that kind of the way that we will get towards understand I think the difference between being awake and being asleep is pretty well understood at the basic nervous physiological level and I don't think that there's a whole lot of more exploring there it's going to really pay off no this the sort of experimental work which we're going to have to figure out how to do we now have some wonderful new tools for doing it
is analogous to how you capture spy you know there's a you know there's a leak from the Pentagon and it's you don't know who's doing the leaking well one way to do it is to put a little bit of false information in the Pentagon in various places and different bits in different places and see what turns up on the espionage market and you don't know how I got from A to B but you know it did because you put in the you put in a you put a sort of marker on that information and you
can then trace the effect and so it's very important in this kind of research that you'll be able to do delicate causal interventions without doing brain surgery and we're just developing the tools for that now the optogenetics and other non-invasive ways of putting a signal into very localized parts of the brain or shutting down temporarily very local parts of the brain without you know without using the scalpel and that is going to revolutionize our capacity to understand how the pieces work do you think using drugs to change how the mind works is if we pull
out me for understanding consciousness well I think it is and it might be just a stunning breakthrough to to a first approximation modulation in the brain is done by neuromodulators which are drugs their their their particular molecules that are received by receptors on neurons and they're doing the basic modulation work in the brain and and the catalog of them is growing and the understanding of what kind of effects they have is growing so it's now possible to do what are basically chemical experiments on the brain and I think that's going to have a tremendous I
openin effect on just understanding how the competition's that happen in the brain how they how they get executed what when when different neural circuits compete for dominance as they do they must how do they do it they get a flood of neuromodulators to sort of fuel them in their in their activity they suppress dampen down the effects how does a focus of attention which is clearly very important how does that get moved around chemically it'll really help to know that we know something about quite a bit a lot of people know a lot more about
it than I do that's what I'm trying to catch up with them in some things I've read of you as you say that consciousness is is kind of an illusion of sorts what does this wooden allusion mean that somebody is being fooled and if so what is the thing they do ask that question no in fact that's what the illusion has tended to me in the past but we're living in a new era when at least young people are getting used to the idea of a user illusion which is what you have on your on
your laptop or on yours on your smartphone it's a brilliantly designed metaphorical representation of what's actually happening and that's what consciousness is and it's not that you're the victim of an illusion you're the beneficiary thank goodness this is if you if you didn't have it your brain wouldn't be able to control your body as deftly as it does in the same way that if you didn't have the user version on your cell phone you you couldn't do a tenth you couldn't do one percent of the things you can do on your phone you need to
have an interface that simplifies the tasks and you need to have things color-coded for instance and so that's what that's what color vision is it's color coding the world so that you can keep track of things when recognized when they're similar and tell the difference between things and that's why we have color vision and it's that's part of the user illusion as as you learn in school colored atoms aren't red or green or blue or anything like that color is a is a sort of an artifact xual property generated by the interaction between the photons
and the surfaces of objects and the visual system the other and that creates a representational system which is beautifully designed to simplify the world all those swarms of atoms are turned into colored hard surfaces soft surfaces and that's so the world we live in is in a certain sense an illusion it's what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called the manifest image as opposed to the scientific image so when people get hung up on what they call quality the quality of retinas in red you think we can just kind of ignore that oh no we don't ignore
it but me we reframe it in a way to see that the subjective response to the world is roughly what people are talking about when they're talking about qualia but they make one fundamental mistake they think that the property of being red is instantiated in their mind as opposed to represented by their mind it's strange that well let me give you an example if I tell you that Lucy wore a beautiful purple gown last night you've just learned about a beautiful purple gown Graham yeah but of course nothing purple happens the word purple happened and
the word purple caused your imagination to create a representation of a purple gown was that purple no purple it was a representation of fur but and purple if you want to see something that's really purple you go out in the world and you see a purple gown and even that purple is to say that it's purple is to say that it has a surface which reliably responds to light rays and in certain ways and affects normal human eyes that's what it is so so you're convinced then that evolution has selected for consciousness because it enables
our brains to process information in a way that you can do with the kind of unconscious computer Nature has provided all locomoting complex organisms not bacteria but but you know frogs and salamanders and reptiles and birds and mammals of us with systems that permit each species to track the things that matter to its well-being and the trackers of those properties of the world they can do their work independently of consciousness as human beings regularly understand it but some organisms don't just have the benefit of having these special purpose trackers that modulate their behavior but have
the extra loop of being able to represent the activity of the trackers themselves not of the things in the world so that you can not just notice things but notice that you're noticing them and it's that reflective loop that creates the manifest illusion of consciousness you can make a very simple device that will identify red crosses on a white background it has to have color video camera at the input end but after that there's no color involved it's just analysis with information but now if suppose you want the device to not just be able to
go into a state when it sees a red Red Cross but know that it's going into that state then you have to add some further representation and things that can use those representations so you build up representations and representation users in a sort of a great dynamic pile and that's where the consciousness comes in what's the point then in that in being able to do that kind of reflexive thinking about well it keeps you from being deceived all the time the world is cruel there's an arms race going on and you're let's just take vision
you your eyes are magnificently designed but your eyes can fool you I mean there's such things as visual illusions and you don't want to go running off a cliff because of some visual illusion so you want to be able to go into a state which says hang on this is the world the way it seems to me and as soon as you've got the capacity to check your action and not just plunge your head you've got lots of subjectivity but subjectivity that that you can attend to that you can concentrate on an earthworm has its
subjective take on the world but I'm pretty sure it can't reflect on that I don't think the earthworm is capable thinking this patch of Earth I'm burrowing into is quite the way it seems to me I wonder if I'm being fooled here earthworms are not very wily if they were be much harder for birds to pull them out of the soil so I think that reason that evolution has helped us design design our own brains through our own experience is to make us more able to fend off the various sources of misinformation that we have
to confront how many animals do you think well here I maintain an embattled outpost because I think that human consciousness is roughly is different from animal consciousness as languages from birdsong birdsong is a communicative medium that can tell lies or write poetry in birdsong it's does not have the representational power of and I don't think that any non-human non-language using species has the the sheer generative versatility of thought of representation that we human beings have and I think we routinely over endow successful clever of species with mental IDEs that we model on our own and
it's charming but there's no reason to believe it I sometimes call this the Beatrix Potter syndrome where you think of you know smart corvids and smart octopuses and smart quails and chimpanzees as basically human beings dressed up in feather suits or furry suits and their minds are very good at what they're good at but they do not have the powers of reflection that are really essential to human consciousness so you'll give me this lecture tonight about autonomy and responsibility and what are the questions in that realm that interesting that you're interested well I've written several
books about freewill and lots of articles and I'm grown so frustrated that people mean so many different things like freewill and they're incompatible with each other and people tend to be very sure that they've got the right definition of freewill in mind I'm on the edge of wanting just to throw out the concept of free will Alton and say all right do you want to say that free will doesn't exist that it's illusion is that it's an illusion in a negative sense you know it's a fantasy ordeal okay okay haven't you wait because there were
some if you think you have free will in a contra causal sense in a way where you think your decision-making is entirely insulated from the causal fabric and in which you are situated then you're wrong if that's what you think freewill is then that's an illusion yes but well I think that that's what freewill is I think the big mistake that people are making and the one I'm going to try to elucidate today is people confuse control with causation people tend to think well if the world is determined if the world is deterministic then everything
that happens is controlled by those causes no that's not what control is if the world is determined some things are controlled by other things some things are controlled by themselves and most things aren't controlled at all the leaves falling off a tree in the autumn are blown by the wind they're not controlled by the winds they're not controlled by anything that's free fall that's uncontrolled motion and if you have a drone and you turn off your console the controller then the drone becomes uncontrolled and it'll be pushed around by the wind and fall over it
falls the fact that it's still being caused to move is completely distinct from the question of whether it's being controlled control requires feedback it requires there to be an agent that can adjust the activities of the entity in question in order to can drive it into the state that you want it driven into by doing something that's control that's what that's what a puppeteer has over the puppet that's what a remote controller on your television set does it controls what channel is on that's control but but that's not just causation its causation with feedback guidance
and with an intended purpose so organisms are some of them locomoting ones are pretty much out of control they don't have much control of their or where they go plankton jellyfish but a shark on the other hand is a really autonomous controller of its own behavior and it's not being controlled by anything else it's being controlled by itself but we are the we human beings our autonomous in a very strong sense and that autonomy is our capacity for free will in the sense that we can become or not always but we can become and maintain
ourselves as moral agents set these autonomous agents that are responsible for what they do I'm gonna try to bring that out by by looking briefly things like autonomous cars and autonomous drones and the first thing you realize about an autonomous car self-driving Harris you know what make it two autonomous you know who wanted to say laughs autonomy you don't want that kind of time you want have limited autonomy you want to maintain control over the partially self controlled energy why because the tana me it's dangerous if we're autonomous agents what that means is that we're
not under the control of other agents we're under control of ourselves well how do we dare let such dangerous entities roam around in the earth we tried to give them the sort of moral education to turn them into not just self controlled agents but well self controlled agents agents that will protect their own autonomy and not be turned into puppets by other agents for instance and so free will is not part of what you're born with it's something you achieve and maintain and you're not responsible for being becoming the creature with freewill myth we can
set aside you don't have to but you can grow into free will in this sense so I'm gonna come around again to free will in the end say responsible autonomy that's free will that's that's that's what freewill ought to mean and it has nothing to do with determinism when do you think we acquired that that autonomy as as moral morally responsible beings well it's a good question and the law answers it by one or another arbitrary signpost maybe you have to be 18 years old to have an or 16 to have a driver's license how
old you have to be to vote how old you have to be to assign a legal contract to take out a loan to to travel on your own the passport some way there's all these questions about when we think that somebody is mature enough and adult enough to be granted full responsibility for their for where they go and what they do the lines have to be drawn for obvious legal reasons and they are in some sense arbitrary but some lines are better than others we can have a political argument about whether the legal age for
drinking or smoking or driving or owning a gun or any of these things whether those should be changed and we recognize that there are some would 13 year old citizen perfectly mature they would do just fine as a responsible adult that they're exceptional so they still are not granted full moral responsibility until they reach one of those thresholds and we know people who are 30 and 40 who are still basically children not capable of responsible self control not they don't respond to reasons the way they should and what are we doing then that's where all
of the moral and legal problems come at what point do we intervene and say sorry your your you're not a response so agent you don't have free will your signature on the contract doesn't count it's a it's a tough lesson for people to swallow when sometimes it has to so there's no Bell that rings there's no joint at which nature carves responsibilities that's a that's a political decision that we have to make are you worried that we will create machines that have too much I am well I'm worried mainly about our putting too much trust
in machines that don't deserve that don't deserve the authority that we grant them and this is going to happen independently of whether they're they aren't going to be moral agents they're just going to be smart tools but they're going to be such smart tools that the most responsible users of those tools will feel obliged to accede to their judgement this is already happening in medicine diagnostic machines are now better than the physicians that use them in some instances and the physicians are going to have to learn the their judgment however sage and experience is really
not up to the judgment of the machine but that doesn't mean that the machine is a moral agent it just means that the machine is a sort of an Oracle it's a box from which truth emerged with a high reliability and the agents will be responsible for making sure that machine is working properly and that they understand what the machines limits are then they moral agents can be responsible for the decisions that they make with these prosthetic devices aiming them so in the UK and some other countries recently there's been this movement led by schoolchildren
to do something about climate change and get the grown-ups to responsibly which seems quite impressive do you think that that we should be putting more Alltop more decisions more lots of other team parents and children and do you think they could give us hope that we'll do something about climate change I think we should be open-minded and listen very carefully to what the children say but I don't think we should grant them full moral adulthood yes I mean if you we did that would mean they get the vote and they pay taxes and a number
of other things that are part of being an adult and I I don't think good they're ready for that and I think they would be exploited so by all means let's allow for the very real possibility that they've got some things right and it's their future that they're talking about will be gone but they'll be still hearing they've got to deal with it but at the same time let's remember that they're children and they're not fully developed and there's plenty of scientific grounds for saying that young children are impressionable gullible easily easily misled not that
the dolts aren't fairly easily misled but there's a difference you
