Neurosurgeon and Engineer Critique a Materialist Theory of Consciousness

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today's episode comes to us from our sister podcast, Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. You can learn more about the show and access other episodes at MindMatters AI. [00:00:24] Speaker B: Welcome everybody to the Mind Matters Podcast. I am your guest host today, Pat Flynn. I am delighted to be Jo by Dr. Robert Marks and Dr. Michael Egnor. And today we are going to be discussing a recent article by the two of these gentlemen here called Computational and Neuroscientific Objections to Integrated Information Theory. It's a great article. I'm excited to discuss it with the both of you. So thank you for taking the time to be here, gentlemen. [00:00:53] Speaker C: Thank you. [00:00:54] Speaker A: Thank you, Pat. [00:00:54] Speaker B: So I want to introduce the two of you just briefly. Very impressive bios for both of you. And then I want to talk a little bit about the background of this article and then we'll dive right into the content because there's a lot of good stuff here. So. Dr. Michael Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook, has served as the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery and is an award winning brain surgeon. He was named one of New York's best doctors by the New York magazine in 2005. His book the Immortal A Neurosurgeon's Case for the Existence of Soul, co authored by Denise O', Leary, was published by Worthy on June 3, 2025. Dr. Robert J. Marks is Senior Fellow and Director of the Bradley center and is Distinguished professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University. Marx is a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and Optica. He was the former Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and is the current Editor in Chief of Bio Complexity. Marx is the author of the books Non Computable, you, what you do that Artificial intelligence never will do and the Case for Killer Robots. So very impressive bios gentlemen. Take 30 minutes just to get through all that. But yeah, very, very delighted to be here. Want to get to the action as quickly as possible. So give us a little background on this, this article. Apparently it was going to be published in one journal, Entropy. Something happened and now it's in Bio Complexity. So yeah, give us all the relevant background before we the content itself. [00:02:33] Speaker C: I can cover some of that with Michael's permission. Michael, who is renowned in his field, was given an invitation to submit a paper to a journal called Entropy and they invited him and so he decided that he wanted to write about Integrated Information Theory and contacted me. I'm a mathematical nerd. He's a neurosurgeon. And so we fit together on that. Because the Integrated Information Theory is a very heavily mathematical medical issue. It turns out that there is a bias in reference. Both Michael and I appeared in the movie Expelled. And back then it was a push, push away against Intelligent Design. Anything that was against Intelligent Design was good. Anything for Intelligent Design was bad. We have a similar issue here. There are some people that believe that we are computers made out of meat. And Integrated Information Theory is a model which assumes that we are computers made out of meat. And pushback against that is pushback, pushback against the philosophy that we are computers made out of meat. So we had one reference, and one of the reviewers, they kept saying, no, you know, I don't like this. I don't like this. One of them said, and I'm quoting, if the authors want to advance the debate, they need to edit the text to acknowledge the shortcomings of their contentions along the lines developed, yada, yada. But so the idea was, he said, we must debate ourselves. We must put in the debate. And, you know, there was no debate put into the original Integration Information theory. There was no debate put in most of the problem. Most of the papers in Entropy, we submitted a lot of the pro Integrated Information Theory references without a lot of elaboration. So we pushed back on that and I got frustrated and I wrote the. The editor in chief of Entropy, Kevin Knuth, he's a professor at the University of Albany, and suny and I said, look, we need a decision here, man. You have to decide. You don't always go on the opinion of one of the reviewers. As a former editor in chief, you can't do that because there is a stochastic element in the review. And I wrote him, and I said, I wrote you on May 12, and you haven't responded. And what I basically asked him to do is either to make a decision yes or no, and we would respect that decision. But we never got back a response at all. It just died on the vine. So with that, we decided to submit it to Bio Complexity, which is the journal that I'm the editor in chief of. And the way we do that is I give it to the managing editor, Doug Axe, who picks somebody, and I don't know who that person is, and that person coordinates the reviews, and we don't know who the reviews are from. And so it was eventually accepted and published. In Bio Complexity, which without my intervention, we try to, we try to maintain a high degree of just, you know, doing the right thing, if you will. And so that's kind of the history of the paper. And then it came out in Bio Complexity and I'm very proud of the paper. I think it's, it's a really definitive analysis and critique of integrated information theory. [00:05:52] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, you know, I just want to spend a moment on this because for people who aren't in, in the publishing world or in these circles, they might not be aware of how human it can be with these, the various biases and gatekeeping. And it's not always, you know, one particular camp, you know, it's camps, war against each other all the time. So it's kind of rushing like a roulette game with reviewers sometimes. Right. Of what you're going to get. But it is, it is frustrating when that occurs and it's not a totally uncommon thing. I'd be curious, Dr. Egnor, from, from your perspective and as, as a, you know, as a neuroscientist, what's the feel among neuroscientists generally? Do they, do they lean in a certain direction? If they lean, is it a heavy lean? Do you encounter a lot of bias against your particular positions? Are neuroscientists more open to non materialist views of the mind and so on? I'm just curious to hear your experience there before we dive in. [00:06:45] Speaker A: Well, two words come to mind on that. The first is ignorance. That is most neuroscientists haven't, haven't a clue that there's even a question, and terror. Those who do have a clue realize that their career is over with if they endorse any kind of immateriality. So it's pretty radical, actually. I went to a lecture a number of years ago here at Stony Brook by Patricia Churchland, who is an advocate of eliminated materialism, which is the viewpoint that we don't have minds at all, we are just brains and we misunderstand. And it's a pretty bizarre theory, but it's actually rather popular among materialists and among even neuroscientists who care about philosophy. So I was leaving the lecture and I was with a friend who was a neuroscientist and we were talking about it and we both agreed that it was a crazy theory. I mean, this whole idea that we don't have minds is just crazy. So I said, so where do you think the mind comes from? What's your understanding? He says, well, it comes from cortical neurons. And I said, well, how does that happen? I mean, how do you get first person experience out of third person little globs of protoplasm shapes? [00:07:56] Speaker B: Right, yeah. [00:07:57] Speaker A: And he said, well, that's a silly question. You just do. And that was his whole answer. So this is a guy who. Very good neuroscientist, at least he had the sense to realize that we do have minds, but he had never thought about exactly how that works. I never thought about all the, you know, just logical conundrums that go along with that. So there's not a lot of reflection in the neuroscience community. Most of them know nothing about philosophy of mind. It's rather primitive. [00:08:28] Speaker C: Well, Michael, one thing you mentioned to me, which always stuck with me, is most neuroscientists have never even seen a brain. [00:08:33] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. [00:08:34] Speaker C: Which is astonishing. They're experts on the brain, but they've never touched one. [00:08:38] Speaker A: Never seen a living human brain. Right, exactly. Yeah. They may have seen some in formaldehyde, in a bottle. They may have seen some animal brains. And specifically animal brains don't have intellectual will. So they're specifically the brains that are not interesting in this sense that we're talking about. It's only human brains that have the immaterial aspects. And. Yeah. And now, of course, neurosurgeons, on the other hand, don't do a lot with test tubes and microscopes, looking at intracellular organelles and things like that. So it really should be a shared experience that is that. I mean, I've done 7,000 brain operations, so I've seen people before the surgery, during the surgery, and after the surgery, and you kind of pick up things, you kind of see things that you just know are true because you've seen it a thousand times that neuroscientists never have access to. On the other hand, the neuroscientists see things that I don't have access to. They know more about the molecular biology of neurons and so on. So we should talk together. But when you try to talk together, you get censored if you're not a materialist. Yeah. [00:09:44] Speaker B: Wow. Okay, so it's bad, right? It's a short story to it, but we've known it's bad in lots of areas. Real quick, it's very interesting point you brought up about the ignorance there. Somebody can obviously be very intelligent, specialize in one area, and very ignorant in another. It sounds like they're being handed this particular narrative that if you have a certain amount of quantitative complexity you can get an entirely new category or shift in quality. And that does seem a bit magical, doesn't it? Right. If you. If you have a bunch of Lego blocks and they're purple, it doesn't matter how many LEGO blocks you have, it doesn't matter what shape you put them in. Doesn't matter if you have an infinite number, you're never going to get a yellow tower out of it. Right. And it seems like some sort of. Some sort of leap is also being made across some sort of qualitative chasm from those who thinks you can just rearrange shapes and get something that is just qualitatively, wholly other than that. [00:10:40] Speaker A: Right, yeah, it's sort of. I mean, it's been referred to sometimes as the pleonastic fallacy. The idea that you can cross a qualitative bridge by increasing quantity. It's kind of the idea, well, we can't explain how a single neuron could be conscious, but if you get a whole lot of them, yeah, that's easy. And it doesn't make any sense. It's just gibberish. [00:11:07] Speaker B: Well, you already started to answer this, but I think it would be interesting to hear a little bit more about maybe some of the other misconceptions the public has about consciousness research in general. [00:11:18] Speaker A: Yeah, there are a whole bunch of theories you can ask. The first question. Well, the first question is, what is conscious consciousness? [00:11:24] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. [00:11:25] Speaker A: And there are as many theories of what consciousness is as there are theorists, and perhaps more, because some of them have several theories, but virtually all the theories of what consciousness is, and there's one notable exception, but virtually all the theories involve some kind of cortical and subcortical processing, that consciousness is sort of neural networks and action potentials and neurotransmitters all working in tandem and in unison and all that stuff. And somehow consciousness emerges from that. And the problem with that is that there are 15,000 people in the world who have a condition called hydraencephaly and hydroencephaly. And again, this is the kind of thing that neuroscientists simply don't know about. I mentioned this to Christophe Koch, who's a very. He's one of the founders of Integrated Information Theory and a wonderful man, a gentleman, an excellent scientist, a really nice person who really is trying to figure this out. But I mentioned it to him in a discussion that's on YouTube from last year, and I mentioned to him that there's this whole category of people with hydroencephaly who don't have brain hemispheres at all. They're born. They have intrauterine strokes, and they're born without a brain cortex and without brain hemispheres. They have thalamus and they have brain stem and so on, but they don't have hemispheres and they're quite conscious. They're very disabled. It's a very like a severe form of cerebral palsy. They can't speak, they can't feed themselves and things like that. But they're just as awake as you and I are. They love their family. They don't like doctors. They wake up in the morning, they're happy. They like certain foods, they don't like other foods. They're very obviously conscious people. On YouTube, there are all sorts of videos of these kids with this condition. I've treated them. And they don't have a cortex, they don't have brain hemispheres. So every theory of consciousness that invokes the cortex and brain hemispheres and processing in those things is in the trash with just one of these kids who's conscious without brain hemispheres. There is one neuroscientist who has a very good guy named Mark Soames from South Africa, who I've also had a conversation on YouTube with Mark. Mark realizes this. Mark understands that this is a real problem. And his theory is that consciousness arises from the brainstem. And there's no question that arousal arises from brainstem. That is that if you have a particular brainstem injury, you can be in a deep coma. And so you need a brainstem that kind of works to kind of be awake and do things. But arousal is not the same thing as consciousness. For example, we are conscious of dreams when we're sleeping, and when you're sleeping, you're not really aroused. There's are people who can answer questions in the deepest levels of coma using functional MRI imaging where you can see patterns of activation in the brain, where they're actually answering the question, you can interpret the answer using functional imaging. And they are in. They're in what's called persistent vegetative state, which is actually considered deeper than coma. That it's not coma, it's deeper than that. It's just one step above brain death. And they can. Some of them can do simple math. You ask them, what's seven plus two? And when you count to nine, their brain lights up. So consciousness is not the same thing as arousal. And you can ask, what is consciousness? It's a very interesting question. [00:14:52] Speaker B: Yeah, well, maybe that should be our next question. But before we get into that, you've mentioned the fact that there's more theories out there than there are flavors of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, which is certainly true. But let's get a working understanding of integrated information theory on the table first because. Because that's obviously where your article focuses. And it would be an interesting experiment, by the way, because I'm willing to wager that if you had written essentially the same article, maybe taken a few things out of it, but critiqued it, say, from the aspect or the perspective of another sort of physicalist, I'm willing to bet you probably wouldn't have had the same sorts of issues you've run into. But, no, that's a testable hypothesis. But you can maybe run that a different day. Right. [00:15:35] Speaker A: It would have been the covers. It would have been a cover article for the journal. [00:15:39] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, almost certainly. [00:15:40] Speaker B: But. Yeah. So, Iit what does it help us understand it in a simple way for people who aren't, you know, swimming in these. In these deep waters of. Of consciousness research? [00:15:47] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, let me. Let me weigh in on that. It's. It's a mathematical argument which is based on Shannon information theory and the idea of Shannon, by the way. Claude Shannon in the late 40s wrote. Wrote a paper which has been more. More impactful than any other paper written in the 20th century. He coined the term bits, he issued in the area of digital electronics. We can use our cell phones today. They use some of the mathematics that were put forth by Claude Shannon. And he was interested in communications. And one of the things that he developed was something called mutual information. It turns out when you communicate from a point A to point B, and you compare the information in both of the areas that you would like a large mutual information, you would like the information of the received to be kind of very close to the information which was transmitted. So that was the basic idea. And Shannon developed that to the point where we can now actually communicate. When it's raining outside and we have one bar, we can still communicate with arbitrarily low error. It was an astonishing result. And his result again is used on our cell phones today. So what integrated information theory does is it looks at the mutual information between certain partitions, and we have certain partitions in sets. For example, if you have just three elements, you have A, B and C, you can partition it into three different elements. You can have A grouped with bc, you can have C grouped with ab, and you can have B grouped with ac. Each one of those, if you think of it as a communication sort of thing, you can develop the Mutual information between them. And according to integrated information theory, if we look at this, if we look at this, then the minimum mutual information is the so called tononi IIT Integrated information theory, which has units of bits. The problem is this scales incredibly, terribly. Incredibly, terribly. That's two adverbs in a row. But I think that that's okay. And if you have n different states, I gave an example of three different states. If you have n different states, it turns out that the number of subsets that you have is, okay, a little nerdy here. Roughly 2 to the N minus 1 and it out turns increases exponentially. So to give you an idea of how large a number this is, if you look at the number of atoms in the universe, that's about 10 to the 80th. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a point that this is non testable. It's kind of like string theory. It's an interesting theory, but it will be beyond testing anytime in the future. If you take 10 to the 80th, that's a big number. And that's all I'm trying to do is get a big number. This represents the number of partitions, the binary partitions of 28 different elements. So you can take the letters of the Alphabet and add two more. And then how many different ways can you partition this into two sets? Well, it turns out to be 10 to the 80th according to the tononi theory. What you have to do is you have to look at each one of these subsets and you have to compute the mutual information between each of these different subsets. And there's 10 to the 80th of them. That's never going to happen. And this is dwarfed compared to the complexity of the human brain. If you assume that there's like 86 billion neurons, then the number of partitions between the neurons is about 1, followed by 26 billion zeros. So in order to generate integrated information theory, you're going to have to look at all of these. And it's just computationally impossible to get to anything which is viable. And so that's the basic mathematics behind integrated information theory. You want to look at the minimum mutual information of all of the partitions. And that's your iit, that's your integrated information. [00:19:53] Speaker B: Okay. [00:19:54] Speaker C: And if that's big enough, then you're conscious. [00:19:58] Speaker B: Yeah, if it's high enough, then you're conscious. Great. All right, so let's circle back now to what is conscious. So I think it is important that we get a working understanding of this on the table. Understand what the target is. [00:20:09] Speaker A: Well, I think it's. First of all, it's a fundamental question because obviously you can't explain where consciousness comes from unless you know what you're talking about. And asking people to define consciousness almost invariably ends up with people defining it as some kind of arousal or some kind of self reflection. I'm conscious if I know that I exist. Or I'm conscious if I'm awake. And I can go about my daily affairs and things like that. The problem is that those are, you might say, attributes of consciousness, but they're not consciousness itself. So what is consciousness itself? I think there's a very simple answer to it that hearkens back to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. And one of the. There's so much I love about St. Thomas's work. And one of the things that has always fascinated me is that he, following Aristotle, kind of asked, what is a perception or a percept, like when you perceive something? And one of the ways of looking at what a perception is what people have called the Cartesian theater. Where you're like a little man sitting inside a movie house, inside your brain. And your brain displays your visual field on a screen and you can see it. The problem is that then the little man has to have eyes and have perception. It just becomes infinitely inexplicable. What St. Thomas argued is that perception is not that which we perceive. It is that by which we perceive. That is, what we perceive is the form of the thing itself. For example, when we'll see a tree in our backyard, what we are perceiving is not a perception of the tree. What we're perceiving is the tree with its form extracted from its matter. The matter of the tree stays with the tree. But the form is something that we can take into our senses. And the form is everything that is perceptible about it. Its color, its shape, its size, what it looks like, things like that. So then he said, the perception, perception itself is not the tree. It's the means by which we perceive the tree, the perception. And we're not aware of the perception because it's a means, it's not an end. [00:22:35] Speaker B: That's right. The. That by which. [00:22:36] Speaker A: Yeah, it's that by which. And I think you can explain consciousness by a relatively simple extension of that concept. Consciousness is that by which we perceive and understand. And the reason we can't define it is because it's not an object. It's a subject of sorts. It's the means it's not the end. And we can only see ends. We can't see means. [00:23:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, good. And I don't think that that's a huge concern. Right. Because knowing has to proceed defining anyways. Right. And at some point we get to the primitives. And I think consciousness is so deep down, so primitive that this makes sense. That's right. Yeah. [00:23:15] Speaker A: And Wittgenstein said something also that absolutely fascinates me. He was a very deep thinker. And I'm not on board with everything that Wittgenstein said and did, but he did have some profound insights. And he said that generally speaking, we don't know our own thoughts. The only thoughts we can really know are other people's thoughts. We don't know our own. And at first it sounds bizarre. I mean, how I can't know other people's thoughts in any kind of direct way. And I certainly know my own. Right. And he said, no, you don't know your own. You have your own, you experience them. But knowledge is the gathering of information. And you don't gather information about your thoughts. Your thoughts are much closer to you than that. Your thoughts aren't an object on a table that you look at. And in a way, the notion that consciousness is that by which we understand and perceive, that's another way of saying it, that we don't look at our consciousness as if it was an object that we can dissect in front of us. It's that by which we are who we are. It's our means, it's not our end. Yeah. [00:24:26] Speaker B: In a sense, the having is the knowing, right? [00:24:29] Speaker A: Yes. And he said that you can know your thoughts if you analyze them like a psychoanalyst would. You could think about them and diagram them out on a blackboard board and say, okay, well, that is knowing. But you still experience them. And other people, you know their thoughts based on their behavior, but you don't experience their thoughts. So I see consciousness as an experience in a sense. It's the means by which we know it's not that which we know. [00:24:54] Speaker C: The interesting thing about integrated information theory is it really doesn't dwell a lot on the definition of consciousness. It rather assumes emergentism. [00:25:02] Speaker A: Precisely. [00:25:03] Speaker C: Which is the idea of something becomes more and more complex. Then boom, all of a sudden, it's going to have an experience. It's going to become conscious. It's kind of like the Terminator movie. With Skynet becoming conscious, it became so complicated that, whoa, it became self aware and such. And we see this same theory being applied to artificial intelligence today, that if we get this artificial intelligence sufficiently complex that there will be an emergent consciousness. And this is, let me say, a religion. I think it's based on faith. I don't think that there's any substantive proof for that or evidence of emergentism. Certainly things become more interesting as they become more complex. But the idea that, boom, you're going to magically have a consciousness or a sentience magically appear is, I think, a matter of faith. And it's a matter of faith that, again, we're computers made out of meat, and therefore we must be able to explain it without going into anything spiritual or deeply philosophical. [00:26:07] Speaker A: Yeah. And emergentism invokes, at least implicitly, the pleonastic fallacy that you can cross a qualitative bridge by increasing quantity, which doesn't make any logical sense. The other problem with emergentism in accounting for consciousness, which I think is a fatal problem for it, is that emergentism, if you think about it, is just simply an expression of surprise. What emergentism says is just a label for a mystery. [00:26:37] Speaker B: Right? [00:26:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. If you're a chemist and you know the structure of water molecules, just knowing the structure of a water molecule, it would be. If you had never had water on your fingers and felt that. That it feels kind of slippery, you wouldn't have guessed, knowing the structure of the water molecule, that it's slippery, you're kind of surprised. So emergentism depends upon a psychological state, and therefore it can't account for the psychological state. Emergentism is a psychological phenomenon, and you can't explain the psychological phenomenon based on a psychological phenomenon. [00:27:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. I want to spend another moment on here because I think this is a fascinating subject and, you know, it's a little bit more broad than just iit, but it's obviously relevant. And to me, it always seems that with respect to emergentism, to the extent that it presupposes a sort of materialism, you run into exactly the problem that you've been talking about, that you just have to have these radical appeals to magic at the end of the day of how something so qualitatively different, just not just how it does, but even why it does. Right. So if you're a physicalist and a materialist, you know, presumably, and you're not in a limitation eliminative, say you're an epiphenomenalist, then, like, the conscious experience isn't really doing any functional work. Right. It's all the physical bits underneath that are doing the work. So like what is, what is, like what, what is the story of why it would even happen, let alone how it can happen? I think the how is a bigger explanatory issue otherwise. The way I think about it is if emergentism is true, then it's only because materialism is false. And if you have something like Aristotle's paradigm, well, there's nothing wrong with emergence there. You could have things increase to a various degree of complexity and then a new form is induced. Right. So it's not an emergentism in the sense that everything reduces to atoms in the laws that we use to configure them. But it is an emergentism that is more expansive in the sense that, yeah, like higher structures can operate once a certain degree of complexity is available, but that complexity itself is not sufficient to explain everything that's going on in the entire system. Does that make sense? I know you're a fan of this sort of high level understanding of the world and to me that actually gives a way to help make sense of emergence that materialism cannot. Right, yeah. [00:29:03] Speaker A: And Aristotle drew a very sharp distinction between substance and accident, that accidents are. Substance is sort of what something fundamentally is and persists over time. And it has attributes and things like that. And accidents are properties of the substance that can change and do things and that explains change immediately. Emergentism is trying to jump that bridge from an accident to a substance. It's trying to say that, yeah, you tack on enough stuff on it, it's like a Christmas tree. If you put enough ornaments on it, ultimately it will become a car. Well, no, it's a Christmas tree, it's not a car. And so I think that Aristotle would say that emergentism just pretends that if you have enough accidents, you become a different substance. And that's not, that's not his belief. [00:29:55] Speaker B: And that's. Yeah, that's, that's right. For, for him, a substance is something that in some way seems to have a sort of top down priority going on. Right. And you see that most especially with, with living organisms. I think there's other good examples there, but that might take us too far afield of this topic. But I think it's interesting a sense that the biggest problem I think for emergentism is just, is just the materialism that's supposed to underwrite it. But if you give up the materialism, then you have other ways of, you know, maybe be making sense of this. But all right, let's go back to IIT now. So why are people so attracted to it? You know, why has this gained so much traction? What problems is it, you know, what is it supposed to be able to solve that other materialist theories, you know, [00:30:37] Speaker A: so not to jump into it, but I think there's a simple answer why people are so attracted to it. It's because no one understands it. And so it's attractive because it's sufficiently difficult to understand that it's mysterious. And consciousness is mysterious. So that satisfies a lot of people. [00:30:55] Speaker C: I will mention too, that IIT there have been people that have pushed back against it. One of them is one of my favorite mathematicians and computer scientists, Scott Arison. He runs a great blog and I've learned a lot from him. And he actually took and he formulated a conscious grid of logic gates, in other words, put together a circuit of a bunch of logic gates that he claimed, and it is true, had a great IIT which was measured in bits. It's called a capital fee. And so he said this array of logic gates is not conscious in any degree. And he applauded Tononi, who was the origin of iit. He says he really had a lot of guts to actually put this theory out there. And he said, but the danger of sticking. This is a quote from Aronson. The danger of sticking your neck out is that you can get it cut off. IIT is not only falsifiable, but it has been falsified. In other words, Erisen actually falsified IIT with his example of these logic gates. Another thing we referenced in the paper that have been. 124 scholars agree that IIT should be labeled as pseudoscience because it isn't testable. And unfortunately, it's been attracting a lot of funding, a lot of visibility, and people are really excited about it. I think Dr. Ignore is right. A lot of people don't understand it and so they jump on the bandwagon. But some of these other people with various theories of consciousness who want funding say this is no good. We should label this as pseudoscience. And it isn't testable. It's like string theory. String theory, you have to get down to plank lengths, and that's never going to happen. So it is. It's something which is never going to be proven, as is the case of iit. [00:32:48] Speaker A: I've been long skeptical, though, of the concept of pseudoscience. Meaning that I think, unfortunately, although there are things that kind of bump up against that, yeah, you can kind of make a case for that pseudoscience is used as a way of dismissing other people's ideas without any kind of rigorous analysis. [00:33:06] Speaker C: That's true. In fact, they called Intelligent Design pseudoscience. [00:33:09] Speaker A: Intellores. We're like walking pseudoscience. Yeah, I really don't. The thing is that you can't say that something is pseudoscience and then say it's wrong. That's the problem is that if you say something pseudoscience, then you can't adjudicate whether it's right or wrong. And if you can't adjudicate whether it's right or wrong, it's not suicide. It's science. There's a lot of science out there that's simply wrong and proven wrong. And there are two ways to test something. You can test something empirically, but you can test it logically. And I think the empirical tests of IIT make it fail again. The existence of a single patient with hydroencephaly who doesn't have a cortex or a brain hemisphere, who is conscious, disproves IIT just right up front. I think, as Bob says, there are enormous logical problems with it as well. [00:34:04] Speaker B: And it sounds like Bob, what you're saying there is that it's not sufficiently discriminatory. Right. That it's identifying things that would be clearly aren't. Unless, what, somebody's going to embrace panpsychism, I guess, which is getting popular. More popular, I suppose. [00:34:18] Speaker C: Oh, gosh, that's such a ridiculous theory. But anyway, there's people that subscribe to that now, the 124 scholars that I talked about, they use the worm pseudoscience. And Michael makes a good point, is that pseudoscience is something which we have to be careful about labeling things as, because intelligent design was labeled as pseudoscience for many years. However, on the other hand, Aronson has given an example which falsifies IIT by giving the circuits and saying that, yeah, according to IIT this should be conscious. And I think that the fact that it's not testable, at least in the near future, in the next 20 decades, it's not going to be. We're not going to have the computational resources to do it, to test it, because again, I mentioned 10 to the 80th partitions were something which were characteristic of 28 different elements. And we have billions of neurons. And so certainly it's not testable at the human level or probably even at the level of a worm. [00:35:23] Speaker B: You know, Dr. Egnor, I like what you say about different ways to test things. And one way that philosophers like to test things is by either inference to the best explanation or using broad degree of expectation. And you get into certain things in your paper, I think, are really helpful here from the neuroscientific perspective that, you know, I'm not familiar with the scientific details, but for me, looking at it from the perspective, okay, let's say something like hylomorphism is a theory versus something like a reductive materialism, what sort of things would we expect to occur? Right. If you had these various conditions, and then how would that lend, you know, favor or credence to, you know, this theory versus that theory, I think, is a very helpful way to think through these things. So, for example, for the. For somebody who holds Aristotle's theory that were four matter composites such Aquinas, he thinks there's an immaterial aspect about us, namely intellect and will. But he's still very much willing to tie a lot of perceptual experiences, ideas to the physical organs. [00:36:22] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. [00:36:23] Speaker B: So for his theory, it makes a lot of sense that you knock out certain parts of the brain. You're going to knock out, you know, certain experiences for us. But then it's very interesting that you don't have what you point out in the paper, logical seizures or stuff like that. So maybe you could talk to just all that in general. We could start to look at some of these other neuroscientific issues for IIT and just. I think it's just a helpful way to frame it sometimes because, you know, a lot of times people like, well, you haven't strictly disproven. Well, maybe we haven't strictly disproven, but we've certainly lent a lot of credence to an alternative hypothesis. Right. [00:36:52] Speaker A: Well, I mean, there are two ways to disprove something. You can disprove it deductively or inductively deductively disproving something that exists in the physical world. St. Thomas would say, you can't do that deductively because deduction is independent of a physical thing. Deduction is a logical sequence. You can't prove or disprove the existence of a physical, of a thing by just deduction. Induction, you know, the recourse to the best explanation is the way science works. And going back to the 18th and 19th century, even into the early 20th century, a very popular widespread theory was phrenology. And phrenology was the viewpoint that you could infer important things about a person's character and personality based on the shape of their skull. And it seems crazy now and it seems like pseudoscience, but I emphatically believe it was not the least bit pseudoscience. And it was not quite as crazy as we think it was back in the 19th century. They didn't have MRIs and CAT scans, so there was no way to visualize the brain in living, in life. It was discovered by several neuroscientists back in the 19th century that there are regions of the brain that have specific jobs, like there's a motor cortex and there's a speech area, and they give names like Broca and Wernicke, all these great scientists who discovered this. So they were fascinated by that. They were beaten because no one before that had imagined that the brain was mapped, that the brain was like a map. And you could say, oh, goodness gracious, my ability to speak comes from this little piece of cortex that's about one inch wide. So that was kind of neat, actually. That's kind of a fascinating thing. So the phrenologists, of course, a lot of them were charlatans and crazy, but the inference that, wow, where I speak comes from here. Where I understand comes from here. And this is good neuroscience. Where I move comes from here. Where I see comes from the back of my head. So where I have thoughts about mercy must come from somewhere, too. And where I have thoughts about arithmetic must come from somewhere. And where I have thoughts about God must come from somewhere. And they figured it was a spot, that there was like a mercy spot or an arithmetic spot or something, because there were spots for other things. So the problem is they couldn't image the brain. They couldn't do a CAT scan or an mri. So where are the spots? Well, they actually knew that when the brain develops, it causes the skull to assume the shape that it has. Basically, your skull is the shape of your brain and determined largely about by brain growth. When you're an infant, your skull is soft and it molds the shape of the brain. So they figured, wow, if you're a really merciful person, then the part of your brain that controls mercy would be a spot. And that spot must be awfully big because you're awfully merciful. So we're going to look for that big bulge where that mercy area is. So they take a bunch of merciful people, measure their skulls, and wherever they tended statistically to have a bulge, to say, that's the mercy area. Now, of course, that's not true. And mercy has no area. No kind of intellectual state has an area in the brain. But that was the best they could do, and they they, they were materialist by, by and large, but it was a perfectly testable hypothesis. It was not at all pseudoscience in its own crazy way. It kind of made sense. You know, they didn't have MRIs, they had do something. They looked to shape the skull. It was, it's a very testable theory and it's wrong, but it, but it is testable. It was not pseudoscience. It was just wrong science. And, and of course a lot of people doing it were, were criminals and charlatans. That's true, but that doesn't make the theory pseudoscience. And actually phrenology always fascinated me, absolutely fascinated me in a sense that why don't we have areas for mercy and justice and kindness and nastiness and so on. The same way we have areas for my ability to move my finger. So my middle finger has a very specific area in my motor cortex that will allow me to show someone my middle finger. But my mental state that makes me want to show them the middle finger has no cortical representation. That's odd. Why is there this whole class of mental state that you can't localize, but there's another class of mental state that you can localize with sub millimeter precision? So there's this dichotomy. It shows up again and again. And you see the dichotomy in seizures. The same dichotomy that there are seizures that will cause you to have movement, that will cause you to have perceptions, that will cause you to have memories and will cause you to have emotions. But there's not a single seizure ever recorded in medical history that's caused you to have a thought of one plus one equals two or a thought of. It's nice to be kind. All those intellectual states are excluded from seizure phenomenology. Same with brain stimulation. [00:42:10] Speaker B: And that's fascinating because it cuts, you know, right along the same lines that, that Aquinas is drawing between perceptual and conceptual ideas. It's just fascinating, right? Yeah. [00:42:20] Speaker A: So Aristotle or Aquinas, were they aware of that neurological fact, would have said, duh, like, yeah, that's what I've been saying for 2,000 years, you know, and that's what made me this passionate Aristotelian. And Thomas, because I knew that fact from medical school, and then I start reading Aristotle and St. Thomas and they're telling me an explanation of my textbooks, you know, so yeah, yeah. So there's a ton of neuroscience evidence that intellect and will are not material things. Ton of it. And there's Not a single example that I know of. To the contrary. Right. [00:42:57] Speaker B: So I would. I want to explore that a bit more because I find that these considerations are very accessible. They tend to be very forceful, and they are. They are very powerful. Before we do that, Bob, are there any other computational issues that you want to get on the table with respect to IIT before we keep moving in that direction? [00:43:16] Speaker C: No, I think that I've explained at a rudimentary level the idea of IIT so I think we can go. Go ahead and beyond the mathematics. [00:43:26] Speaker B: Great. Yeah. This. So this stuff is. This is fun because this is. It's super concrete. I think people just intuitively feel the force of this. So take us down this neuroscientific rabbit hole, if you will, Dr. Egg. Nor there's lots of different things you bring up in the paper. Which ones do you find personally most convincing, most compelling? [00:43:44] Speaker A: Sure. The first thing I should point out is the irony is that the IIT theory itself is not the kind of thing that can come from the brain, which is kind of fascinating. I mean, that it's an abstract thought, it's an act of intellect that does not originate in brain tissue. Now, the proper working of the brain tissue is necessary to speak it and to write it and to see it and things like that, but the actual thought itself isn't from the brain. So it's a theory of the brain that itself cannot originate from the brain because it's abstract. The neuroscientific evidence, I think I can encapsulate it in just a minute or two. If you want to know whether a mental state comes from a brain state, and that's really the fundamental question is you can have a mental state. The mental state can be a perception or a. Or a conception. And a brain state is a particular state of the electrical depolarizations and neurotransmitters in the brain. And how can you know if the mental state comes from the brain state, if there's a causative interaction there, as opposed to just a permissive interaction and the causative interaction? I think you need three things to know if a brain state causes a mind state. Number one, there needs to be a relatively consistent correlation between the brain state and the mind state. That is, if you have a particular mind state, you want to have some evidence that there is a brain state at work there. So you can do functional MRI imaging or brain waves, and you see, gee, when I'm awake, I've got brain waves, okay? So to a rough approximation, there's a correlation between my mental state of being awake and my brain state of having brain waves. And it tends to be, if I don't have brainwaves, I'm probably not too aware of things, at least by, you know, I'm probably in a coma or dead. So correlation is the first way, but you have to do more than that because correlation is not causation. The second thing is stimulation. If you really want to say that a mind state comes from a brain state, you need to have some evidence somewhere that stimulating the brain, even if it's under only rare circumstances, can give rise to that mind state. You know, you want to be able to stimulate the brain, and you've done, you know, after a million stimulations, maybe twice you've stimulated the brain state. Okay, all right. So that would be evidence. There have been several hundred million brain stimulations over the past century that are. That neuroscience would have access to about 100 million from seizures. If you look at the phenomenology of seizures and several hundred million from surgeons poking around in people's brains, either stimulating their cortex or the deep brain, they're in. 400,000 awake brain operations done in the US alone over the past century, where the patients are awake during the brain surgery and the surgeon stimulates the brain. So several hundred million brain stimulations on the cortex of the brain or by a seizure. There's not been a single report anywhere in the medical literature of stimulating intellect. There are no brain. You can't stimulate the brain and get a patient to think about philosophy or to think about metaphysics, or to think about mathematics or logic. And Wilder, Penfield, I mean, I'm not the first person to say this. I mean, Penfield said this in the mid 20th century. He said, isn't that remarkable that there's a whole class of mental states that you can never get the brain to do. You can poke it and prod it and seize it and do all kinds of things. It will never do that. And he said, the most reasonable inference is that it doesn't come from the brain. That's why you can't stimulate it. The third thing that you need, besides correlation and stimulation, is suppression. That is, if you argue that a mind state comes from a brain state, you ought to have some evidence. Again, it can just be one in a million. Something where you can suppress that mind state by suppressing a specific brain state. And the best suppression research, I think, has been in split brain surgery. And split brain surgery is where you cut the brain hemispheres apart, something called the corpus callosum, which is a big fiber bundle to help patients who have intractable seizures. It keeps the seizures from spreading so easily. And the patients have hemispheres that are practically disconnected. Basically, 99.999925% of the connections between the two hemispheres are cut when you do the operation. And it creates two perceptual worlds. There's a right side of your world and a left side of your world that are perceived by the brain hemispheres. The right side perceived by the left hemisphere, left side perceived by the right hemisphere. And these perceptual worlds are not things that people notice in everyday life. When you cut the brain in half, they look like you and me and they feel like you and me. Patients don't feel the difference. But you do very special research, detailed research, and you can find that there are perceptual glitches, like the. The left hemisphere is the hemisphere that most people speak with. So if you present an apple to the right hemisphere using the appropriate visual field, the patient will say, I know what that is, but I don't. I can't say the word for it. But if you put a bunch of fruit on the table in front of them, they'll pick up the apple and say, this is what it is. So there are all these fascinating perceptual glitches that you get. They're really perceptual disabilities that patients with split brain have. And Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1982 or something for doing that work. But other researchers have looked at these brain lesions at this suppression and found things that are much more fascinating. Justine Surgeon was a researcher at McGill back in the 1980s who looked at the ability of patients to respond by pushing push buttons to when they see letters in their visual fields. She would say, I'm going to present to one or the other brain hemisphere the letter A. I'll give you other letters too. But when you see the letter A, I want you to push a button for me. And she'd have one button on the right hand, one button on the left hand. As it works out, if you have a split brain, your right hand can only respond to what's in the right visual field. Your left hand can only respond, respond to what's in the left visual field, the way the brain wiring works. So she would put up a letter A, say, in the right visual field, and the patient would always push the right hand button. They would never use a left hand button because the left hand didn't know the A was there. Because it couldn't see it. And the same work with the other way. And you could do this with all the letters. But then she asked something that was absolutely fascinating. It still gives me chills. She said, when you see a vowel, it doesn't matter what vowel, a vowel of any sort, push the button. So she put the same A up, and the patient would use the hands, 50, 50, half the time the right hand, half the time the left hand. The left hand, if you put it in the right visual field, has no access to the A. But if you think of it as a vowel, your left hand has just as much access as your right hand does. The difference is that the letter A is a perception. An avowal is a conception. Concepts go back and forth, just like ghosts, Back and forth, no problem. The brain hemispheres don't have to be connected to share concepts, but they do to share percepts. [00:51:14] Speaker B: Yeah. That's absolutely wild. [00:51:17] Speaker A: Yeah. And other people have looked at things. There's Alice Cronin Golov at MIT would put one picture of something in one visual field and three pictures in the other visual field. One of the three would be conceptually connected to the one. Like she put a violin up and she put an artist's palate, a toilet plunger and a stethoscope in the other visual field. The artist's palette is conceptually connected to the violin because they're both forms of art, music and art. And she would ask the person of the three pictures, which is conceptually connected to the one. In split brain patients, they always get it right, and they get it right in a second or two very easily. But no part of their brain has access to both sets of pictures. One hemisphere sees the three, the other hemisphere sees the one. But they can say, oh, yeah, the violin and the artist palette, they can conceptually connect them when there's no part of the brain that sees both. So it means that the concept is being formed by something in your mind that is not in your brain. So that evidence is very powerful. And when you look at the correlation, stimulation and suppression evidence. In neuroscience, the ability to form concepts, which is an intellectual function, is not from the brain. And the evidence is overwhelming. You have hundreds of millions of different, like, stimulations. Not a single one has ever stimulated intellect. You have probably well over many hundreds of patients with split brain surgery. Not a single one has shown any problem with concepts. It's percepts that they have problems with. So, yeah, the neuroscientific evidence is just overwhelming. [00:52:55] Speaker C: So I have a question. For you, Michael. I met a guy named David Copps who had split brain operation when he was a teenager because he was having seizures. The guy is now a world renowned entrepreneur. He heads, he's the CEO of a company called Worlds I.O. and he's also had another company which he is sold. And we spent a lot of time on a podcast we did together talking about his split brain operation. And apparently the guy is fully functioning. So I'm wondering about some of these things that you talked about. I don't know the answer to this, but does neuroplasticity kind of kick in to address these limitations which the immediate split brain operation patient has? And because this guy seems totally functional, he doesn't seem to be limited by any of the things you mentioned. [00:53:44] Speaker A: Oh yeah, these are completely functional. They're completely functional people. Once in a while, in the first year or two after split brain surgery, they'll get something called a disconnection syndrome where they'll have a limb like one arm that will kind of do things on its own a little bit. And I've seen that, but that actually goes away. That's always transient. No, these are normal people. People, perfectly normal people who have a brain injury. I mean, cut the cortisol, that's a brain injury. But you can only find it if you put them in very special experimental circumstances. So special that it took Nobel prize winning research to find it. So for all intents purposes, these are perfectly normal people, which itself is astonishing. I mean, what machine can you cut in half that works perfectly fine after you cut it in half? So in everyday life, I mean, he would, assuming his cut is complete, he would have these two perceptual worlds, but people subconsciously adjust to it. They'll move like the visual fields are not the eyes themselves. Each eye has two visual fields. So by slightly moving your head, you can move things in and out of visual fields without even being being aware of it. And people learn to adjust for perceptual things, for conceptual things. They've got nothing to. They got nothing to adjust to because concepts work independently of the brain hemispheres. [00:55:11] Speaker C: So I have a question. In artificial intelligence, we train neural networks using an algorithm called error back propagation. It's something that goes back to Hebb's law, You know, neurons that fire together, wire together. And it was discovered in 1975 as maybe one of the most prominently used algorithms in the world, because it's used in all the LLMs. So they train these neural networks using error back propagation. Would you say that there is an Analogy between error back propagation and training neural networks and the idea of neuroplasticity, which I don't understand as much. It seems that the brain can actually adapt to different situations. I noticed that I used to be addicted to smoking, but my brain was rewired that I don't even think about smoking anymore. So something's happening up there which is training, which is something like aerobic propagation. [00:56:01] Speaker A: Yes, yes, and very much so. And I think these analogies and these models of how the brain works obviously can be of great value and we can learn a lot about them. But the models only model movement, perception, memory and emotion. Very important things. But only those four. [00:56:20] Speaker C: Now you could say those, say those again. [00:56:23] Speaker A: Movement, perception, memory and emotion. [00:56:26] Speaker C: Okay. [00:56:27] Speaker A: And that, that was, that was what Penfield found when he caught, he commented that, that those the only things that he could ever elicit by stimulating the brain. And you, but you, you can elicit all kinds of remarkable things. Movement. You can. I mean, there are people who, who have partial seizures, seizures who drive their cars as the ictus of the seizure. So you're driving your car down the highway. The driving itself is the seizure. And you do it very well. You do it just fine. There are not all seizures, you do fine, but certain kinds, partial complex seizures. There are perceptions. You can see light, you can smell smells, all of which are just perceptual seizures. Memories can be very complex. You can have this temporal lobe seizure where you remember a conversation you had with your mother 50 years ago. Memories can be extremely complex. And emotions, there are seizures that cause emotions. Seizures can cause fear. A very bizarre kind of seizure is called a gelastic seizure that comes from the hypothalamus where people just think everything is funny. It's like they just laugh at everything. I think it's. [00:57:36] Speaker C: I know people that suffer from that. [00:57:38] Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah. Well I, I get that. When I, when I have to have like, when I have a surgical procedure, if they give me a little verse at iv, I think everything is funny. So, so, so, so those kinds of things are physical things. Now true, they, they, they, they, they correlate with the, with the mental state. They also in some, in some sense cause the mental state that is that in the brain you have to be very careful not to injure both hippocampi, which are parts of the temporal lobe. If you do, the person will lose the ability to form new memories. So that's very physical. I mean as a neurosurgeon I deal with physical brain all the time. You have to be Careful. But I never worry about leaving a patient unable to do long division. That's never a specific neurosurgical problem. I worry about leaving them not being able to see, not being able to remember, not being able to move, or not being. Being able to have norm. Normal emotions. So these models that you did that you. That you spoke about, those are great models of movement, perception, memory, and emotion. They're not models of intellect because intellect is something different. [00:58:46] Speaker B: So let me. Something recently came up, and it relates to this. I think it was. I think it was our friend Steven Pinker going on about anesthesia, Right. He thought it was this remarkable confirmation of physicalism and materialism because you could just turn everything off. Gosh, with anesthesia. Do you think this would have been a surprise to Aquinas or Aristotle or dualists in general? Because, I mean, it does. Like, do we need modern medicine? Wasn't like just hitting somebody with a big enough club, like. [00:59:19] Speaker A: Pretty sure that's the thing. [00:59:21] Speaker B: There's some deep link here, right? [00:59:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Is that Grok, who was, I think, a Neanderthal philosopher, realized that if he hit somebody on the head with a club, that he'll have a different mental status than before you hit him. So, I mean, Pinker's level of insight is about at that level. The problem that Pinker doesn't seem to understand is that anesthesiologists don't have a freaking clue as to how anesthesia works. Meaning that I asked one of my anesthesiology professors when I was in medical school, how does it work? Like, on a molecular basis, how's it work? And he said, I don't know. Nobody knows. And there are all kinds of theories or even, like, quantum theories of what anesthesia does. And I actually, you know, he said, and this is. I'm not an anesthesiologist. So an anesthesiologist might have a more subtle understanding of this. But he said that anesthesia is evaluated in its effectiveness by several things. It's evaluated by, can it prevent you from reacting to what's happening to you? That is, you don't want to make a surgical incision, have the patient jump off the table. Can it evaluate, or can it affect you in terms of blocking your memory so you have no memory of the surgery? And yes, and I said, yeah, but you're leaving out the unawareness part. He says, well, if you have no memory of what happened, how do you know you weren't aware? And it's true that unawareness is a much more difficult thing to Analyze. And if you block a patient's ability to respond and then block his ability to remember what happened, then how do you know he's not aware? And I know when I've had anesthesia, I wake up and I really have a feeling that I was. That I knew stuff. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I had this strong feeling like I wasn't gone. Something happened. We used to do. It's not done much anymore, something called a wake up test we would do with kids who are having scoliosis surgery. And in scoliosis surgery, the patient on the operating table is under general anesthesia. You cut their back open from stem to stern, and you put rods and screws in their spine, and you stretch their spine to make it straight. It's kind of a brutal thing. And the problem is that once in a blue moon, when you stretch the spine, you'll stretch the spinal cord in a way the spinal cord doesn't like. And you can paralyze the kid. And if you're doing it, if that's happening, you have no way of knowing it because the patient's under anesthesia. He's asleep, so he can't tell you that I can't move my legs. So you probably have a couple minutes when you stretch the spinal cord to unstretch it, if that's happening, to help the patient recover. So what we would do was a wake up test, which is we would stretch the spine and we'd ask anesthesia, wake the patient up and ask him to move his legs. So they'd wake the patient up on the operating table, filleted like a fish, and say, move your feet. Then he'd move his feet. We know his spinal cord was okay. They put him back to sleep again. It seems gruesome, but patients never remembered that at all. They didn't respond badly. It wasn't like they woke up and started screaming or something. They would just wake up and move their feet. When you asked. They were conscious, they were aware of your question, and they never remembered you're asking after surgery. So anesthesia is a weird thing. It's a very weird thing. And my understanding of it is that, number one, we don't know how it works. We don't have any freaking clue. I mean, we have some rough ideas, but we don't know why. And number two, we're not even sure that it precludes awareness. And we don't know how you could show it precludes awareness. Because again, if you erase memory and you erase the ability to respond. How do you know they didn't know? And we can measure anesthesia using brain waves. And actually, it's done now. It's. They put a strip on your forehead if you have an operation, and that measures some of your brain waves. And that helps make sure that you're kind of down there. But Pinker is just talking through his hat. I mean, he. To. For. For him to say, oh, and, well, anesthesia just proves a physical thing. Yeah. If we had a physical theory as to how it worked, that'd be awfully nice. But we don't physically know how it works. And we can't even be sure that people really aren't. Aren't aware. [01:03:46] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. So. That's. That's fascinating. I was. I've never actually been under anesthesia. I've been trying to avoid circumstances that might lead to that. You certainly got me thinking about that. But again, like, it's. It's never been in question. If there's a deep connection between our physicality and. And our mentality. Right. [01:04:04] Speaker A: Absolutely. [01:04:05] Speaker B: The question is, what is the nature of that connection? And does everything about us, particularly the intellectual aspect. Aspects, in some sense, fully inadequately reduce to the physical aspects? And there, I think, we have decisive reason to resist that. [01:04:19] Speaker A: To resist that. Now, an interesting notion is. And I think that this goes back to St. Thomas and Aristotle. But if you want to think about. Let's say you're a kid studying for a calculus exam, like the night before the exam, you can see all these different powers of the soul, both material and immaterial, at work simultaneously. And there's a seamless integration of these. For example, motor. The kid will obviously use his arms to move the textbook, turn the pages so he can study. So he needs his motor. If he's paralyzed, he can't study very well. Perception. He needs to see what's on the pages. That's important. Memory. Obviously, he has to memorize things, but memory is the retention of an image. So he may be trying to memorize various lists of equations so he can spit them out the next day on the exam. And emotion. He's got to have the right emotion, in a sense. He has to be motivated. There may be fear, maybe fascination, whatever, but he's got to have the right emotion. But at the same time, he's using intellect and will. His intellectual differs from the memory and that his intellect is an understanding of how it works. It's not just a picture. It's actually understanding what calculus is and what's being done in calculus. And will is the will to keep working, the will to say, gee, I really have to know this stuff by tomorrow, and I'm not going to give up on this. So you can see how the immaterial powers of the soul and the material powers of the soul work in tandem. If you're a blind mathematician, it's going to make it harder for you to do new mathematical discoveries. For example, Euler. Yeah, yeah. Euler was blind for part of his life, so it didn't seem to hinder him too much. But generally speaking, if you can't see something written on paper, it makes it harder to do mathematics. But the ability to see is necessary for ordinary ability to do mathematics, but not sufficient. What you need is your intellect, which is not physical. So you need physical and immaterial to do ordinary things, but they're different. [01:06:33] Speaker B: That sounds. I think it was Adler's quote, right, that. That in ordinary circumstances, we can't really think without our brains. But it's also important to understand we don't think with our brains. Right. But there are also extraordinary circumstances that even challenge the necessity part. I'm sorry, Bob, did you want to chime in with something there? [01:06:53] Speaker C: I was just thinking of one of the greatest jokes I ever heard about the mind brain problem from Emo Phillips. He was contemplating all of his organs, and then he realized that the most important organ in his body was his brain. And then he said, I realized. But then I realized who was telling me this. [01:07:08] Speaker A: Right. [01:07:09] Speaker C: Now, the reason that that's hilarious is because he recognized the difference between his mind and his brain. He had this meta ability to decide it was his brain that was telling him that. It's a wonderful joke. [01:07:24] Speaker A: Right? The brain thinks it's hot stuff. Yeah, exactly. [01:07:30] Speaker B: So there's a few other things I would like to explore with the two of you, even just briefly. AI Obviously it gets a lot of discussion on this podcast and everywhere else. [01:07:43] Speaker C: What does. [01:07:43] Speaker B: What does IIT predict about AI Is AI already conscious? Will it become conscious? And then, I mean, I think it should be pretty clear that at least given the sort of model that you're proposing, Dr. Egnor, that's probably not going to happen. But let's talk about that for a little bit, if the two of you don't mind. Yep. [01:08:02] Speaker C: Well, certainly. I think that this idea of emergent property is something which is dominant in artificial intelligence. And the idea that we are going to break through and reach the singularity is based on the assumption of emergence, that there would be something magically happens which allows AI to become creative, to understand, to feel emotions, to experience qualia. And there's always pushback, but the pushback is really kind of vacuous. One of them is that, well, yeah, AI can experience qualia because, my goodness, we can put up these artificial technical devices which grab molecules from the air and smell and stuff like that. But the difference is that AI detects this qualia, it detects pain, we feel pain, which is a big difference. And so that's never going to happen. So, yeah, AI and this idea that super intelligence is going to emerge is based off of this same assumption. And I think that integrated information theory would say, yes, it is going to become conscious if we continue to make it more and more complex. [01:09:14] Speaker B: But not yet. The proponents typically aren't saying that it's not yet. [01:09:17] Speaker C: You know, the funny thing I think was 2004 or 2014, I forget the date. But Ray Kurzweil from Google wrote a book called the Singular. And he looked at all these exponential curves going up with technology. And the problem with exponential curves, of course, is exponential things are never sustainable until somebody pointed out, well, it is sustainable if it's inflation, it keeps on going. But most technological innovation is exponential. But then it eventually levels out. We heard about this with COVID When is the curve going to level out? It was an exponential explosion. So all of this stuff is going to going to eventually level out in terms of its capability. But the interesting thing about the Ray Kurzweil is that nine years later, after his predictions didn't come through, he followed up his book. And you could, you can look at this on Amazon.com it said he wrote a book called the Singularity Is Nearer. So it didn't work for these number of years. So he says, yeah, you know, it isn't here, but just wait, we're not there yet. So maybe in 10 years he'll write another book called the Singularity is Just around the Corner. We're so, so close. And I think that that is just bogus stuff. But it's always based on this idea of emergent properties. And that's what IIT is trying to grab ahold of is the degree of emergence that occurs. And it's trying to measure it mathematically in order to give us a number which is denoted by a capital Greek letter phi. But it is going to happen. There's no evidence that it happens. [01:10:56] Speaker A: And I think, yeah, I mean, right. Emergence again is, in my view, it's a psychological phenomenon. It's an expression of surprise that you didn't think that wires could do X or something. But by its very definition, it can't explain a psychological state because it presupposes a psychological state. So it's a nonsensical idea and it definitely cannot be applied to consciousness. If you go into your doctor's office and you tell your doctor that my watch knows what time it is and my computer has an opinion about politics, my computer really, really likes topics. Trump, there's a good chance your doctor will call his friend who's a psychiatrist and say that I have somebody who's having a delusion. Unless you're, you know, Kurzweil or someone like that, in which case you get a book contract. So. So, realistically speaking, the belief that inanimate objects, no matter what that, what their complexity, are capable of first person experience, is something that belongs, in my view, in the realm of psychiatry, not, not, not in the realm of engineering. [01:12:09] Speaker B: Oftentimes difficult to differentiate what's going on between inside the walls of an asylum in a philosophy conference. That's a very good point. Right? Yeah. So let me ask you, let me ask you this. Say there was some leading proponent of IAIT, you know, sitting with you, Dr. Egnor or Dr. Marks. What would you want to ask them? What would you press them? [01:12:29] Speaker C: Well, actually, I did meet Tononi in his office on a tour that I was doing, but I wasn't really versed in IIT then. I wish I knew more about it. So I would ask him different questions here and I would ask him what evidence does he have for this emergent behavior? It's the same sort of emergence that's assumed in artificial intelligence and other places. And I maintain, I think it was Blaise Pascal said that there's a God shaped vacuum inside of everybody and so they have to have a God. And if you're an atheist, what sort of God do you believe in? I believe that a lot of this idea of emergentism and the idea that we're again, getting back to the idea that we are computers made out of meat is basically a religion and it's without substance. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't happen. The evidence for that religion doesn't exist, as far as I know. [01:13:28] Speaker B: Dr. Egnor, anything you'd want to add to that? [01:13:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with Bob. I actually had a chance to ask, in a sense, Christoph Koch, who also was one of the pioneers in IIT about this in a podcast I did with Michael Shermer's show a while back, what I asked him, was that how do you explain consciousness in people who have hydroencephaly, who don't have a brain cortex or brain hemispheres? And Koch gave me the impression, I don't want to speak for him. He gave me the impression that he didn't know about the syndrome, which is, again, one of the problems with neuroscientists not having a connection to actual clinical neurosurgery or neurology practice. I mean, these are real people and they don't deal with. With real people. So he didn't have an answer and just changed. It kind of changed the subject. So I would say that if your theory explains consciousness as a result of the complex interaction of parts of the brain, and there are people who utterly lack those parts of the brain, who are still conscious, then your theory is wrong. Just right up front. It just doesn't make any sense. [01:14:39] Speaker B: Right, yeah. Yes. A straightforward falsification, I agree. So people are interested in this. There's going to be, you know, lots of future research. What advice would the two of you give to students entering this field to help them to ask better questions, to do better research? [01:14:59] Speaker C: What field? Electrical engineering or neurosurgery? [01:15:01] Speaker B: Consciousness research generally. Right. Consciousness. I don't know about neurosurgy. I suppose you could just do a lot of neurosurgery with. Without having to think about these things. Right. I mean, like. [01:15:11] Speaker A: Right. [01:15:12] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:15:12] Speaker A: You can just. [01:15:13] Speaker B: I'm not to presume anything about your job, but I imagine that's probably the case. Right. But conscious research in particular. Right. [01:15:19] Speaker A: Yeah. The vast majority of neurosurgeons don't really think about this, although I must say, I think they're more open to this than a lot of people are just because of what they see. [01:15:27] Speaker B: Sure. [01:15:27] Speaker A: You know, you work on the brain a lot. You realize the stuff about it that's not quite a computer. There's something else going on. [01:15:33] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:15:34] Speaker A: My advice to a young person, actually, I had an opportunity to give this advice because I interact with college students and so on, people who are interested in going into neuroscience and being basic scientists in it. My advice is to keep your mind open, to not get in an ideological box, to follow the evidence and to be very circumspect about what you say and write. Because I, you know, Bob and I have day jobs and so we, you know, we do. Okay. If I were a young neuroscientist and I was saying what I'm saying now, that would be the end of my career. [01:16:12] Speaker B: Right, right, right. [01:16:14] Speaker A: The level of viciousness the level of cancellation and suppression is breathtaking. Absolutely breathtaking. They will hunt you if you say things like this. And so I tell them, keep an open, an open mind, but just be careful. If you actually want to have a career in this, which, which is a scandal. [01:16:36] Speaker B: It's a tragedy is scandal. It's smart and, you know, it'd be prudent ways. You know, I was somewhat joking earlier, but, you know, you can, you can, you can write the paper critiquing Iit in a certain way that if you're, if you're understanding of how gatekeeping works, you know, you can be effective there. It's, it's depending how, you know, how much you show of your own hand. [01:16:57] Speaker C: Right. [01:16:57] Speaker B: They can get you in trouble. Yeah. [01:16:59] Speaker A: Sometimes you can get away with all. Even then you're taking risks. Besides, you can get away with it by asking tough questions. [01:17:05] Speaker C: And I think too, both Michael and I have stature and we're going to be hard to dethrone. I think if this paper was written by students, it might impact their career. [01:17:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's, that's really good. [01:17:17] Speaker C: You got to be careful. [01:17:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, but it's, but at the same time, right, we don't want to discourage. Right. I mean, like, we want, we want to, we want to move past this sort of ideological trap that we were surely in. Right. So what's the way forward, you think? Right. [01:17:32] Speaker A: Well, there's a sorting system. I mean, if you put yourself in the position of the sensor. If I were the sensor, I'd be very happy when the people I was targeting just made themselves obvious. Okay, well, you guys don't get your PhD or you guys never see another grant again. So, yeah, you really do have to be circumspect. I've always liked the idea that you can get away with controversial things to some extent. Well, there was. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote an essay, and I'm blocking on the title of the essay, the day that he was booted out of the Soviet Union after he won the Nobel Prize. And the topic of the essay was, how do you survive in a totalitarian system? Like, how can you maintain your human dignity in a system that will crush you if you oppose the system? Well, let's face it, there's a lot of analogies here to a totalitarian system with the system of censorship that we face nowadays. And Solzhenitsyn's recommendation was that depending upon your state, do you have power? Don't you have power? At least you can do is not cooperate that is, don't be a part of the stupidity. So, you know, if you're at a neuroscience conference and people are talking about materialistic explanations for things, you don't have to be one of them advocating materialism. And another level is to start asking questions. You don't have to say that I believe in the immateriality of the intellectual will. You might ask, the question is, my goodness gracious, how do you feel about Penfield's observation that you can't stimulate abstract thought by stimulating the brain so you can make other people think about it? And Solzhenitsyn's argument was that it's very difficult to be a totalitarian. To be a totalitarian is an almost impossible job because you can't control all the people all the time. So how do you become an effective censor? And so the way to do it is to be an effective censor is to get people to censor themselves, usually out of fear. So you beat up on a small number of people and it intimidates every everybody else. So everybody's doing your work for you. You can be a little dictator, but you don't actually have to crush everybody. And so Solzhenissen is implied in his essay that if you ask enough questions and you get other people thinking, eventually there's this mass reaction where people just say, wait a minute, this is all garbage. This is all nonsense. And then you get a lot of people saying that the totalitarian has a serious problem because he can't shut you all up. And so I think that's the best strategy, is to ask tough questions like why can't you stimulate this? How is it that people can form concepts between disconnected hemispheres? It's a very interesting question. You don't have to commit yourself to an immaterial explanation. Just ask the materialists to explain themselves in public if they can't do it. [01:20:34] Speaker C: I would add that one of the things you have to do is hear the other side. And when you go to academia today, often you don't hear both sides. You hear only a single side. Michael and I just participated in a Discovery summer seminar in Colorado where Discovery Institute brings in a lot of students. And we present the other side. We present this side, for example, of intelligent design. And we present. Present the side of the sort of stuff that we're talking about here, the pushback against some of the hard materialistic stances that universities have. And I would agree with Michael, our job is not to convince these people, but to let them know that there are two sides to the flapjack, and that we want to be able to look at both sides before we make a decision. So I think Discovery Institute, which is the parent organization behind this podcast, is doing a very good job of that as best they possibly can in order to make sure that the other side gets out. [01:21:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. [01:21:34] Speaker A: There was an essay written by Vaclav Havel, who was a dissident in the Czech Republic back under communism, that is similar to Solzhenitsyn's idea, but it had an enormous impact in Eastern Europe. The essay was called, I think the Greengroce was the name of the essay. And it was an essay that. Where you imagine that, say, you're living in a communist state, where you have to agree with the party line. The party line, in case of science, is materialism. And the greengrocer is expected to put up a sign supporting Marxism or something in his shop. And Havel said, well, what if he just takes down the sign? You know, he doesn't do anything. He doesn't say anything. He just doesn't put the sign up. He said that he may be targeted by the state, but it's a subtle way of spreading the message, and maybe other people will take down their signs. And eventually, if enough people take down signs, then the whole culture changes. So I would recommend people being circumspect, not exposing yourself, because they will come for you. [01:22:43] Speaker C: Yeah, but you got to be careful. You don't want to Tiana and Square what happened in Iran the last year or two. It has. It. It has to be done. [01:22:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Where. Where. Where it all collapses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but. But then again, you, You. You kind of, you know. Right. You have to be careful not. Not to make yourself too big a target. [01:23:02] Speaker C: Exactly. [01:23:03] Speaker B: Yep. That's. That's wonderful advice. Very practical advice. I appreciate it. I appreciate that the both of you and the work you're doing. Anything else about this article that we've obviously touched on a lot, but there's so much more in there. I believe the article is open access, correct? [01:23:17] Speaker C: It is, it is. And I think we'll put a link to it in the podcast notes. So if you go to, I think biocomplexity.org, you can look at the paper [01:23:29] Speaker A: and the difficulty that Bob and I had with this article and with the reviewers, particularly one reviewer in particular, and just the abject cowardice of the. Of the journal itself is just a terrible commentary on the corruption in science and science when it comes to things like materialism and atheism, is A deeply corrupt enterprise that just uses censorship. They didn't want to put this out there and it's kind of a sad commentary. And frankly, the fact that it's published in Bio Complexity is a tribute to the integrity of the Discovery Institute and of the journal Bio Complexity. They're willing to put ideas out there and let people judge for themselves. [01:24:12] Speaker B: Yeah, great. Well, I'm going to encourage strongly that everybody heads over to that journal, reads the article. Gentlemen, before we close out here, any final thoughts, including just any future projects that people should keep an eye out for. [01:24:25] Speaker C: Michael, do you have a book coming out? [01:24:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Denise o' Leary and I wrote a book called the Immortal Mind and it's [01:24:33] Speaker C: a great book by the way. It should be on everybody's reading list. [01:24:36] Speaker A: Thank you. And we're now doing a book on near death experiences where we'll focus on the scientific evidence regarding them and on the philosophical and theological implications if they're true. So that hopefully will be out in December. [01:24:57] Speaker B: All right, going to keep an eye out for that. And how about you, Dr. Marxia? [01:25:00] Speaker C: I'm rewriting my book Non Computable, you probably with a different title, I have [01:25:04] Speaker A: to think an excellent book also as [01:25:06] Speaker C: clever as that one. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. And yeah, I need to update it because the book was written prior to the LLMs and so I want to put stuff in about the LLMs and make it as evergreen as possible. So that's going to be coming out hopefully, I don't know, in a few months. I hope to finish it off. [01:25:24] Speaker B: Excellent. Well, thank you gentlemen for the fascinating and stimulating conversation. I certainly learned a lot. For everyone listening, thank you for tuning in. Please be sure to subscribe the podcast and if you don't mind, when you have a second leave a review. Thank you guys. See you next time. [01:25:38] Speaker A: Thank you, Pat. Thank you, Bob. [01:25:39] Speaker C: Bye bye. [01:25:50] Speaker B: This has been Mind Matters News. Explore more at Mind Matters News. Mind Matters AI. [01:25:57] Speaker C: That's MindMatters. AI. [01:26:01] Speaker B: Mind Matters News is directed and edited by Austin Egbert. The opinions expressed on this program are [01:26:09] Speaker A: solely those of the speakers. [01:26:11] Speaker B: Mind Matters News is produced and copyrighted by the Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Discovery Institute. [01:26:21] Speaker C: Sam.