BI 237 Ehud Ahissar: Consciousness and Perceptual Dualism

[00:00:03] Speaker A: The second story I'll tell you is about how you go from whiskers to consciousness, so to speak, to mind body problem. The world is high dimensional, the brain is high dimensional, but the connection between them is a bottleneck. And we use this bottleneck to track the dynamics of perception. So what happens? You went up and up and up in the brain w ladder from the sensory organ, the brainstem, thalamus, cortex. And the next level is the ear again. The next level up is the ear again. This is the strange loop of Hofstrepper and Escher. So you get back to the same physical point, but you are more advanced in the mental domain. [00:00:54] Speaker B: This is brain inspired, powered by the transmitter. Hey, how's it going? I'm Paul. This is brain inspired. Today I have with me Ehud Ahesar. Ehud runs the Ahasar lab at the Weizmann Institute in Israel where he studies neuronal and behavioral mechanisms of perception. Ehud sees perception as a closed loop process in which organisms actively generate the sensory signals that that they interpret. Today we discuss his development of an idea that came out of that work about how this kind of processing can account for our conscious experience. It is a type of dualism Ehud calls perceptual dualism, which is different than the dualisms that you may already know. I will use his own words here to summarize it. Briefly quote. The idea is that humans inevitably experience the world through two fundamentally different modes, digital brain brain communication and analog brain world interaction. In this view, the mind and consciousness emerge as social like phenomena in the philosophical sense, grounded in brain brain communication while constrained by brain world interaction. Simple, right? It'll make more sense throughout our discussion and in a paper that I linked to in the show notes as well. But for now, take note of the term brain brain shortened as BB and the term brain world shortened as bw. Because throughout our discussion you'll often hear just BB and or BW to refer to those two distinct domains. So we discussed the ins and outs of his ideas, how he came to them via studying active sensing in rodent whisker neurophysiology, how the brain implements this dualism via nested loops of neural circuitry that oppose and interlace with each other at multiple levels. And the idea that attractors, in the dynamical sense of the term attractor may be the corresponding brain signatures of the digital phenomena that belong to the brain brain or BB mode of cognition. Like I said, he explains this in much more depth in his paper in Psychological Review, which I link to in the show notes. But those show notes are at BrainInspired Co podcast 237. Okay, hopefully that's enough of a little nugget to orient you to this otherwise vast expanse of ideas and historical context, some of which we discuss here. So hang onto your hats and refer to the manuscript when you're done. Thanks for being here. I hope you're well. Enjoy. Ehud. Ehud. You were just telling me that you've come full circle and now you're a full philosopher. Do I have that right? No, we were just, we were just kind of talking about what we're going to talk about and you were giving me a little bit of your, your background, kind of where you came from and you wanted to make a disclaimer that you're not a philosopher, is that right? [00:04:08] Speaker A: Yeah. So just to make clear that I was not trained as a philosopher nor as a social scientist, but I do borrow terms and concepts from these fields when it helps me think about perception. So this is a disclaimer. And everything I say, of course, is an hypothesis, even if I say it very strongly. You know, these are hypotheses that are, should be debated, should be questioned and hopefully tested. [00:04:36] Speaker B: I really like that disclaimer. I mean, because I sort of assume that usually and I get in trouble because people tell me I'm very opinionated and have a strong opinion about things. And to me it's. Everything's up for grabs. So everything I say is like, well, maybe exactly, but. [00:04:55] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, well, I say, all right, well [00:04:58] Speaker B: you know, it's serious when, when you're dropping Descartes and Plato and in the first few paragraphs of a manuscript. Manuscript. So, okay, so we'll get into your background a little bit, but where I, I thought we might start is just almost the conclusion or the, the super big, super high level place where you end up. And that's that you let me see, I'll make a statement and you can correct me. Okay, so one statement is that you haven't solved the mind body problem, but you've added a new kind of dualism to the mix to some previous kinds of dualisms that may help reorient to particular processes in the brain and mind. Where we should look for a solution to the mind body problem. [00:05:53] Speaker A: Yeah, this is pretty accurate and I would add to it that a dualism does solve the mind body problem. [00:06:00] Speaker B: So if you have a solution. That's right, yeah, it's a solution because [00:06:03] Speaker A: it's a, it's a dualism. So any, I think any, any Dualistic theory is a solution to the problem. Does say, you know, I don't have to explain to you how one emerges from the other because they are not reducible to each other, but you do have to explain the interaction. This is the problem for the, for the dualists. But you know, the mind world, the hard problem, for example, which is an example of how, how a materialists are attacked for explanation is. So the question is, how can you explain my subjective experience? A question that comes to a materialist is not a question to a dualist. He doesn't have to explain these things. The question is where does put the border and how these two dualistic domains interact with each other. And this we try to explain, to address. [00:06:51] Speaker B: Well, we're using the term explanation, but does it, does dualism do away with the ability to provide a scientific explanation the way we think of scientific explanations? It is an explanation, but is it scientific? [00:07:07] Speaker A: So our dualistic approach does. I think not every dualistic approach gives a scientific explanation. But okay, [00:07:18] Speaker B: we'll get more into that. So. Yeah. All right, well, I was thinking of naming this episode from Whiskers to Consciousness or something of that sort, given your background. So. All right, so I stated what we're going to like the really high level thing, but maybe just kind of quickly give us a sense of where you came from because you come from an empirical. [00:07:41] Speaker A: Yes. [00:07:42] Speaker B: Approach studying whiskers in rodents. And so tell us just how you came to this. And then we don't. You don't need to give the whole full scientific background, but just sort of the approach that you've taken. [00:07:53] Speaker A: Yeah, okay, I'll tell you, I'll tell you. Okay, the two kind of two in two episodes. So one, as I said, I'm an engineer and neuroscientist and I'm actually a converted engineer. So I started my career as an engineer and then was converted to be a basic scientist. And this was, I was an electrical engineer building computers. And I knew with my friends that the minute that we, you know, deliver the product out, it's not the best we could do. And in two years it becomes obsolete. While when you look at the brain, you know, this, this, this thing is always up to date, is always, you know, keep itself on top of things. And I was fascinated with it. And at the time that I was kind of got bored, should say from engineering and, and was excited by the brain, I decided to move, to move on and become a neuroscientist. The story is actually interesting because I was taking a management course and the management course was management by goals. You know, they taught us, take a piece of paper, write on top your goal, on, at the bottom where you are. And I went home and wrote studied by the brain, two arrows in Israel abroad and go, you know, got to the bottom of the, of the page and said to myself, okay, how do I start? And I knew nothing about science at that time. I went to the nearest hospital, looked for people who could tell me, okay, what is brain sciences? And it took me two, three days to find a guy, which is a good friend of mine until today, who opened the field for me and told me, okay, here are the labs, this is how we do it. And indeed I went in Israel and screen, you know, some, I don't know, about 10 labs, found the best place for me and started. [00:09:52] Speaker B: You would just show up and, or [00:09:54] Speaker A: you email telephones and show up and turn out. And he was, by telling me, look, every lab will love to have electric electrical engineer in the lab. Don't worry, everybody will want you. This was true. And indeed, after, you know, completing all the gaps, my PhD was on plasticity. On the topic that was fascinating me then when I opened my own lab at the Weizmann, I, I continued the plasticity as one track and the other one was perception. The two talk to each other. I, I think perception came up clearer to me. It was actually, it followed a kind of a sidekick discovery in my PhD where I followed plasticity, but found beautiful cells oscillating in the, in the cortex. It happened to be the somatosensory cortex. And for that, you know, I remember the moment that I, I drove, drove to Beersheva in my car and I, I try to understand what the heck, these oscillator neurons, how could they help figuring out the tactile structure of anything. And I remember myself, you know, palpating the dashboard. [00:11:11] Speaker B: This is why you said, you remember the drive? What year was this? [00:11:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I was driving and, you know, palpating the dashboard just to feel the texture, etc. And it came to me that, you know, this. So this was the first, my first kind of incident with active sensing, so to speak, you know, you know, when you, when you perceive something, you know yourself that it is active, it's clearer. With touch, it's less clear. With vision, we'll talk about it. But with touches, it's clear that you have to move, you have to act in order to perceive. And once I realized that, the connection with this, so you have time in your movement, right? You induce time, your speeds Actually determine the timing of the events using your finger. And this is where the cortical oscillations could came in as kind of a temporal ruler and interpret the modulations of these timings in order to decode. This was the beginning of my theoretical thinking about perception, which was active, which was borrowed from engineering. And this I took to my lab when I opened the lab to guide my research and perception. So the story that we are talking about is more the follow up of perception rather than plasticity, although it is involved but in perception. When I opened my lab and my PhD was in monkeys, behaving monkeys. When I moved to this temporal coding active sensing study, the whisker system came up as the best user friendly, you might call it system. To work on this system. It's very clearly active. You see the whiskers, the movement is very rhythmic, unlike primate movement of fingers, which is stochastic. And the system was known people, it was kind of captured scientific community of whiskers barrel cortex studying was very intensive. And so this is, this is the entry point to whisking. This is why whisking became my referred system to work on perception. [00:13:23] Speaker B: See, this is, this is great because you came in with a question, right? And you were looking for a place to how to approach that. That question and start answering it, which is yes, what you're supposed to do, but not what many people end up doing. They kind of, they grow up in a lab, quote, unquote, grow up in a lab. And that lab is asking a kind of question. And they get used to working, for example with monkeys or whatever organism they're working with. And they kind of continue on that and just kind of continue on that thing. This is kind of a beautiful way of beginning your, your trajectory there. [00:13:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I liked it. Also the fact that I come with the model, I have a starting point. So whenever I come to judge new data or look at others data, I had the summer reference to judgment. And then what is. So the, the second story I'll tell you is about how you go from whiskers to consciousness, so to speak to mind body problem. And this indeed starts. So it was all empirical part. And my empirical part was I can describe it as going basically starting to answering these questions at the high levels. You know, like everybody I thought, you know, opening textbooks that the brain wisdom starts at the cortex, at the cortical level. Okay, you must look for it at the cortex. You go to the cortex and look for it. And I couldn't find it there or to say it otherwise. I could find too many explanations to what I see in the cortex. And then I started going down to the thalamus. Things clarified better. Down to the brainstem, they clarified better. I saw that there are two pathways at least in the risking system, at least two pathways. One is more spatial, one is more temporal. But the picture was clarified only when I got to the, to the very beginning, to the very end. The sensory organ. This was the follicle of these whiskers recording for the very first receptors. Then we saw the light in the lab, so to speak, and the light was again this active sensing. So, you know, you might say, look, you forgot what you already knew. Or you know, even the taxi driver, the first one that I took, told him about this. Of course it's clear. But in science, at least in the group that we studied and, and actually in many fields up today in textbooks, perception is considered to be passive. Like you open a textbook, you ask, okay, what is perception? They say, okay, envision. It begins when something hits the retina. It ends when something pops up somewhere in the, in the, in the brain. And that's it. It's an open ended system in current textbooks. And when we got to the sensory organ, we realized that this is active. And the active sensing actually changed the whole game. The coding, neural coding at the periphery. The sensory organ is totally different if you apply passive stimulations or you let the system actively select the stimulations. [00:16:18] Speaker B: Yeah, so this is if you're, if, if the experimenter is manipulating the whisker in your case, versus if the rodent rat, I suppose in your case is actually sort of investigating things and poking its nose around while it's whisking, actually [00:16:32] Speaker A: moving the whiskers or actually if you move the whiskers. You know, relying on Newton, you might think by the third law it should be the same. But the mechanics is not the same. It's totally not the same. And the coding is totally different. This is the key, the key point there. And then once we understood the coding, we went back to the higher levels and then we realize that everything is arranged in loops. You look at the anatomy, it's simply, you open book of anatomy and you see that once the signals flow the sensory pathway, they immediately affect the motor pathway. You don't wait for the cortex to decide what's important and then feed the system. Of course cortex is involved, but it sees a higher level of, you have a sequence of loops building, stacked one above the other. Every one of them is operative. They, they are not shut down. You might think of them. It makes sense to think of them as evolved in the terms the era of evolution. Going from their inner innermost to the outermost. And the cortex comes at the end and many cortical loops, but they're all operating. So there's no open ended process here at all. [00:17:40] Speaker B: They're all operating all the time. Which, which is a very different. I don't know what textbooks say these days. I don't look at textbooks anymore. But in the old days though, right, it's very like, yeah, the light hits your retina and then it goes to the next station and gets processed there. And then it sends it to the next station and gets processed there. But what you're saying is there's this continuous dynamical loop. Loops of loops. Exactly. A structure of loops. [00:18:07] Speaker A: And it should be fully explained and fully contained at every level of evolution. You know, animals that had fewer loops, it should still be operating. And evolution does not delete anything usually. It might inhibit it sometimes, but it's not delete, it just adds on top of. So all these things should operate dynamically, as you say all the time. So this was the second inset and that and then. And we could kind of explain to ourselves at least and colleagues very well how the brain interacts with the world in this perceptual game through the whiskers and also hypothesize it for vision because there was a similarity between the two senses. But we had something missing because we knew as humans that perception involves not only this continuous dynamic interactions with the world, but it also involves concepts and ideas. So when I tell, tell you, look, there is a chair there, you change your interactive interactions with the world because you already know there is a chair. So and once you realize it's not a chair, it's a table, it also changes the dynamics. So the two things are interacting together. You have these brainworld loops that are active, but you have the ideas and that are operating. They are part of these dynamics. And then we enter to this field of, okay, let's see how these things are interacting. And this is what at the end brought us to this mind body thing here. I came for call for help from my wife Merav, also in the field, brain scientist, more from the cognitive side. And she at the time developed with Sherlocks in the theory of reversality, which says, look, many of the processes in the brain work in a reverse hierarchy manner. They start, they begin with the idea and then if you want to perceive more about this chair that you talked about, then you go down or the Processes go down to lower and lower processes. [00:20:14] Speaker B: So this is like the Bayesian brain hypothesis and predictive processing accounts and active inference, for example. [00:20:23] Speaker A: Yeah, so, so this, this exists in both, in both the brain world. So so now when we combine the two approaches, we have this kind of two. So we took the reverse hierarchy hypothesis and converted it to a loop top down loop processors. And both of them should work in a predictive manner. Also the motor, sensory motor loops. Whenever you have the, the the loop closes back to the sensory organ. It's a predictive, it has this predictive nature because the way that, let's say if you go even to the sensory organ, the way that the whisker interacts with the rose, it does it in a predictive manner. But what affects these predictions are these ideas that come from the top and says look, this is a chair versus a table. And I jump to our visual system. It affects how you operate your sensory organ in a predictive manner. And the whole idea we plotted and now this is more speculative. The next step that I'll describe is that we talk about kind of a handshake, this is how to transmit to the audio listeners, but kind of a handshake of the two hierarchies. So if the fingertip is at top of the hierarchy and the root of the hand is the bottom of the hierarchy, then you have the top down hierarchy talking handshaking with the bottom up hierarchy. And what is top in one hierarchy talks in details with the bottom of the other. IRP basically. So the two are interlaced together in a manner that, that you have at every brain station. Here you have a conversation, conversation you might say of the bottom up, which are these motors, sensory motor loops that I described before, the brain wall loops and the top down information that comes from the top. The best candidate for these are the efference copy loops. The efference copy pathways that you know, everything that comes from the top sends efference to every stations in the. [00:22:33] Speaker B: So yeah, it's just a copy of the signal being sent elsewhere. [00:22:37] Speaker A: Exactly. And this, if you plot the whole thing then you get a complementary picture of loop that was that it's surrounding the idea. So you have two, one loop surrounding the one set of loops surrounding the sensory organ at the bottom. These are the loops that I described before going through the brainstem thalamus cortical levels and another one whose originate who originates at the top and sends the loops that talks with these loops but in the reverse, in a reverse manner. It's easy to plot it's hard to talk to this. Yeah. [00:23:11] Speaker B: So these are two sort of opposing interlacing loops. And part of the trick here is reversing the idea of what we commonly think of as hierarchy is the first loop, the sensor motor loop. That's what we kind of normally think of as hierarchical. Right. So the top of that hierarchy would be the cortex, for example. [00:23:35] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:23:36] Speaker B: Middle parts would be thalamus and brainstem, things like that. But then the other loop comes top down. And the top of that loop is in the sensor motor. Like those lower brain areas. [00:23:49] Speaker A: Right, exactly, exactly. [00:23:51] Speaker B: All right. And. But in the bottom of that loop then would be where cortex, for example. [00:23:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Points. And there. So. And then here we are more vague. Okay. And it should be something that relates to language and verbal communication. And this is where we added our third partner. So this paper, Daniel Polani, because we said, look, okay, this. You can start from the top by two major ways. One is that you have this sensory experience. And very fast, you activate some concept at the top, let's say this chair. And then it starts to work backward. But you could get it from conversation with another person. And this is what we call the BB channel, the brain. Brain channel. And here I can tell you a chair. I tell you, look, there is a chair there. And you already orient your loops. And once we realized that, we said, okay, we. We have here an information communication issue. And we asked Daniel to join. And this is this. The rest is kind of the story of the triophants in information. The thing is that what we have. And here comes the duality here actually starts the dualism that we propose because we say the following thing. We say we have this brain machinery that. That interlace these two set of loops, one with the other. And this is the core of the perceptual system. It occurs with this interaction. Now, the origin of the signals of the brain world system are the senses. The information coming from the senses. The origin of the signals coming to the brain brain centers are these verbal communication from other people. Now we move to talk mostly about humans. We can take it to animals later. But now we talk about humans. Because in humans, this digital domain is very rich. [00:25:49] Speaker B: Like, well, you just used the word digital, which is. So there's a digital analog. [00:25:54] Speaker A: So now we say, okay, now we look at them and then we say, look, there's a very clear difference in. In the nature of the signals. The signals that are running and are interacting in the brain walls domain are analog, continuous, and you cannot find put borders between them. The signals that Run between brains are digital. These are words, phonemes. Every phoneme or word has a meaning as a digital meaning, separate distinct meaning. And they are also distinct in time. [00:26:25] Speaker B: So these are digital, distinct and discrete. And they're categorized. [00:26:29] Speaker A: Right? And categorized exactly. And the categorization is what eventually linked back these two domains. So the BB domain talks about the BW domain in a categorized manner. I'm saying chair. I don't give you. This is a category of things. I'm saying table. This is a category of things. And this is the only thing that we communicate between us. We don't communicate the analog signal. The reason is probably very simple. It's in reliability of information transfer. You I cannot. The example I usually give is the following. Let's say I give you this example and ask you to repeat it, or even myself to repeat the distance between my fingers. I will not be able to do it. We both will not be able to say if I repeat the same thing or not. But if I tell you, look, I showed you 3 DM, this you can remember for life, you know, this tree. And because it's digital. And, and we. And in the digital, again, we assume we have a convention between us that I never transmit to you things between these digits. So in the case of digit, I'm saying it's either three or four or two. I don't transmit to you half of things. This is a convention. I could show you a smaller finger. But we have a convention of the receiver and the sender. And based on this convention, we build our digital communication. The signals at actually that we transmit are analog. This is an analog signal. The convention, the convention is the digital. [00:28:05] Speaker B: So somehow that convention comes about. So we can only communicate digitally. Well, the signals that we use to communicate are analog and they get processed in an analog fashion through our sensor and motor loops. But the information, the meaning is always digital. It's never a continuous distribution. Because we, we have to do that if we want to agree on what we're communicating about. If we want a reliable signal. [00:28:34] Speaker A: Exactly. And then the question of emergence comes. It's an important question. We can touch on it or leave it. Because I'm working, working on it on how it. Let's get to these things. [00:28:45] Speaker B: Okay, let's get to emergence later. I mean, there are a couple things here to linger on, One of which is just so we talked about those reverse order loops, right? So when I say chair to you, your ears receive it and they process it in this analog fashion. So how do. And yet what we need is the reverse order hierarchy, where the top of the hierarchy, the bottom of the hierarchy is what we normally think of as the top of the hierarchy. Let's say the bottom is in the cortex or something. But the analog audio signal coming into and getting processed by your cochlea still has to get processed in a sensory manner. So how does the digital aspect of chair then begin? From the bottom of the hierarchy in the cortex or something. Does that make sense? [00:29:39] Speaker A: So let me see if I understood it. So we have this interaction of the two of the two processes, the top down and the bottom up. And, and the question I think that you ask is how this digital idea gets translated to an analog prediction is that. [00:30:03] Speaker B: Well, what I really want to know is. So the, so your idea is that there is like the digital processing happening in the brain still. It's just from. In a different hierarchical order. Right. So I, I, you, I send you a digital signal. My wish is to send you the number two. So I say two, and your ears have to process that. And your ears aren't processing it from digital, they're processing it from analog. So how is it magically digital? [00:30:31] Speaker A: Okay, so here we come. At the end of this discussion, we'll come to the strange loop of Hobset. Oh, I think something that reminds this. So it goes as follows. So first I would say that in the brain everything is analog, because the brain is a physical element, physical tissue. It's analog, digital. [00:30:52] Speaker B: Everything in the world is analog. [00:30:53] Speaker A: Everything in the world is analog. Exactly. Yeah. I mean in the, in the, in the, in the, in the world. Except our conventions, which is, you might say they're also in the world, but our conventions. This is the other domain. This is the spiritual domain. [00:31:07] Speaker B: This is the dualistic nature of your account. [00:31:09] Speaker A: Yeah, sorry. [00:31:11] Speaker B: So this is the dualistic nature of your account. You can have a different domain. [00:31:15] Speaker A: Exactly. We have a different domain. The different domain is a social kind, as the philosophers like to say. Social kind. And its root is in our convention. So we can ask how conventions came about. And this is a great question. It is actually, we can call it a how a hard problem by itself. This is a question. But we admitted they are there. Conventions are there between us. This is how we speak. This is how I understand each other. By conventions, by the way, electrical circuits understand each other. One transistor understands the other by convention. By our conventions, I don't know what the electrons, the transistors, but we induce conventions that it has to be either 1 or 0 in order for them to transmit. Whatever we do with that. [00:32:03] Speaker B: So computer analog value is fluctuating within. [00:32:08] Speaker A: Right. But we categorize it and assume. And computers implement our digital regime much better than us. This is why they can control one day our BB domain better than us. This is a danger. But back to the processing. So we said the brain is. So everything that happens in the brain is analog and physical. Now the question how the digital meets this. This domain. So the. I'll say the tipping point of the conversion. Okay. The whole thing of the brain is to actually to merge the two. This is what. What you ask is actually the a huge task of the brain. A major task of the brain. And something like the tipping point of this process are the attractors that we suspect. I think it's agreed upon that cortical networks show attractor like behavior which is in all the complexity of these dynamical processes. You have some dwelling points of the dynamical system. The dwelling points are dynamical state. The system prefers to be for while. Let's say in the case of the cortex usually it's 200, 300 milliseconds. The system relaxes with some state. Let's say consistent firing. You know the examples of the Jennifer Honey Stone cells or this like of cells that you see something like 200, 300 milliseconds in which the cell is kind of stationary. The statistics is stationary. And then it takes off something like this. And if you extend this then you can imagine that this can hopefully like attractors exist in this. In this network which is attractors is simply a state dynamical state stochastic state that the system prefers to be for a while there. And this is the tipping point between the digital and the analog game. Why the labeling of this atlatos either is a digital is a near. We call it a near digital if it once it's physical. But once I once we both say Jennifer let's say the assumption is that a set of attractors in my brain talks to set of attacks to your brain. They are both near the digital analog. But they are coordinated. And we educated each other or better to say we educate our kids to say this is green, this is the attractor for green. We never know what is the attractor in their brain. But we say look, whatever you experience now this is green and this is blue. This is green and this is blue. Repeat it and they. They label. We label their attractors with names. And this labeling is the digital thing. This is the conventional convention. To me the rest is. So once you tell me green or chair. Let's say. Let's get back to the chair. You tell me chair and it hits the attractors in my brain that are homolog to your attractor. When you say a chair, they activate them and there starts the top down. Get into that state. [00:35:20] Speaker B: You have to process what my point was you, you still have to process it through the ear, right through your sense organs. [00:35:27] Speaker A: So the process goes down to the ear. So the. Again, no, but, but when you say [00:35:32] Speaker B: chair before you say chair, I'm not thinking chair. I have no top down, bottom up. Whatever you say chair, it has to hit my sense organ. [00:35:40] Speaker A: Okay. If it comes as a full surprise, then it might take you to say to me, say again. If it was a full surprise, if I say something like you say now, you would say, so I said chair in Hebrew and you got the signal, but you didn't categorize it as anything. But if you expect, if you are in the midst of conversation, you already know me, you got used to my tone of voice, etc. Your loops are always working and they kind of expect, as we now learn from the LLMs, they expect what will be my next word. In high probability, you can expect, you can prepare your system and part of the preparation are these loops or part of the loops that come to the outer hair cells inner here. These are the most peripheral way in which the brain affects what you hear and model. Actually also the, you know, the, the small bones in the, in the middle ear in other enemies is also the. So you, you, you tune your system to whatever you expect you're going to hear. Part of it will be the pitch of my, of my speech, part of it will be the kind of word or spectral, you know, domain that you hear. But the ear is not enough. I mean, this is, this is the starting point. And then you have, at every level you have something of predictive T what you expect to see. And in, in a manner of comparison, you see if you are right or not. And, and here Bayesian processing. [00:37:16] Speaker B: So when I first meet you, right, And I, I have no idea that you absolutely love to talk about chairs. We start, we start talking. Are you saying that the, it's hard to say top and bottom here of the loop. Are you saying the digital beginning of the loop needs to be. How would I want that to look? Because it's in a, it's in a predictive state based on, right. You're wearing glasses. So I think, oh yeah, like you don't have perfect vision. I can kind of tell your age. You start to speak, I get a sense of your voice and your accent and where you might be from. So I start forming these expectations, but I have no idea. You love to talk about chairs, like do I need to be in a state of readiness of complete non attractor states? Right. And then as soon as you say chair, I form an attractor. This is a little detailed. I'm sorry, I'm just kind of trying to think through the. [00:38:09] Speaker A: It's a good question and I don't have a full or good answer for that. But I think it, it hits to the point of conceptions. You know, we have, in Israel at least we have a big a bad. Connotations to the term of conception because we have wrong conceptions from now and then. But I keep telling to my friends, look, we live by conceptions. We live, when we go out to the street with the car, we live by conception that everybody drives on the right side. So we have the conception of what, what we are going to hear if something comes as a full surprise. I believe you're not, maybe you're not even noticing or maybe you'll hear some noise and you say, okay, I have no idea. So you always build some concept, some conception, and you come ready for something that you're going to perceive. This is part of this active perception thing that you must be prepared all the time to what you're going to perceive. And this doesn't stop, you know, maybe when we go to sleep, probably at this time, you know, between you, when you just before you fall asleep and just when you wake up and you are totally confused, maybe this is the point without conceptions. But all the other things you already said, yeah, I'm going to see this, I'm going to my room, I'm going to see this and that and that. And they don't see, you know, it takes you time to see changes. You expect to see things. You're sure every magician knows it, you know, you're sure you see it, but you don't see it, basically. [00:39:43] Speaker B: Right, right, right, right. Yeah, that's the magic, that's the magician's trick. Okay, so I got us a little bit off track there. And then as you're talking about conception, I'm thinking about Gibson's affordances and where those sit in the digital analog. Right. So when I see a doorway, I can only see the doorway as a doorway because I've digitized it as a symbol essentially of, there's the idea of the door, but somehow I know I can pass through the door, which is the affordance. So I don't know if you want to go down that road. [00:40:15] Speaker A: But yeah, phonuses come sits very nicely. All, all ecological perception sits very nicely with this, with this scheme of active sensing and the brain world loops. But then we have all the loops so digital. So you see an opening. Let's say the example is that you can grab something, right? So you see some weird and you can drop. You plan your movement. You don't have it to be digital in order to do it. It can be solved by the lower loops already. So you, you tune and you tune it as you move, right? You have this feedback and you tune it and it's there. Part of it is digital. So part of it. If you want to, if you want to tell me, look, this, this passage is too narrow, then it must. Must go through the digital domain and [00:41:06] Speaker B: you must be too narrow or not. [00:41:07] Speaker A: Too narrow or not. Yeah, right. You must conveyed information to some other person. Then you must go to the digital domain. But when you do it yourself, you don't have to. You probably may think about it, you may think about it later. It becomes digital, you can categorize it later, but while operating on the, in the world you can, the lower loops can do it. So we said everything like I said, the tipping point, maybe other tractors levels. And this is also the, the place where I think when now we talk about consciousness again. I borrow terms that I learned. So there is the notion of netblock about access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness that people debate. And can you just describe what those are? So in the literature of consciousness, let's open one bucket here. There is a, there is a, there's a double or dual discussion there in my eyes, okay. When I come as a kind of visitor to this, to this world, most of the studies on consciousness are actually on perceptual consciousness. And the question is, are you conscious to what you saw or not? Basically this is. But when people, laymen, people talk about, think about consciousness, they also think about self consciousness. To know who is the perceiver, who am I, what makes me, etc. And what is the subjective experience in this, in this, in this game. So one attempts to make order in this. And again, I may do injustice to deeper theories of consciousness, but in my view is a kind of a layperson view in this field. So one attempt to make an order is this distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. To say, look, there are things that I can talk about, about them, I can tell you about them, I can access them in myself. So if you ask me why did you go this opening, I'll tell you, look, I figured out that this is wide enough and I went there. But there are things that I cannot tell you because. And if you ask me, okay, how what you what described to me the how it is to see green. What is it? What is it for you? What is like, what is it like for you to see green? You cannot tell me about this. And this is subjective. This is phenomenal consciousness. You know, you're familiar with, you're familiar, you have you, you know, you talk about something that happens here. This is subjective experience, but you cannot describe it to me. And in my view, this is the, the phenomenal a consciousness. So the dividing point in this scheme, in our scheme, the BWB scheme is this attractor level. So up to everything that is labeled, these attractors that I labeled, I can tell you about if you tell me okay, why you call it green. And I tell you, look, it's closer to the green than the blue. And I can talk about the label things. This is okay, I can access that everything that is below there to tell you what the processes that governed my brain when I looked at this green versus the other green. This is subjective experience that I cannot is not accessible for me. The reason. So we, we are not the only one who's saying it, but it came clear to us from this work that one of the reasons that you cannot access them by this explanation of attractor is that an attractor you can get to the same label form almost infinite trajectories, starting point and trajectories. So if you think about all the physical events that happened in the. In this brain world loops which at the end end up in one attractor of green. There are infinite number of them. And you cannot go back once you know the label. There's no information that tells you how to go back to what what led to this label. So this is lost. You have it. It's physical in your all subjective experience in in our steam is physical it because it happened in your brain. Everything the attractors and their expression and what led to them is subjective experience. But I can talk to you about the relationship between my attractors. I cannot talk to you about what led to these attack was because these are not labeled processes. [00:45:40] Speaker B: Is it entropy also? So I suppose because there's. Because of entropy, because there are an infinite number of directions, you can't un. Yeah, you can't put the shattered glass back together of your exactly. Trajectories. [00:45:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it's the same. [00:45:57] Speaker B: Okay, so maybe. Okay, so we were talking about. So you were making the distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness and that. So you're mapping access consciousness onto the attractor states that we can than share between each other. [00:46:17] Speaker A: Yes. [00:46:20] Speaker B: So. So then. Okay, so then remind me where. It's not a great question. Where then is subject is subjective experience in general like within this account. [00:46:37] Speaker A: So subjective. [00:46:38] Speaker B: To say where is it is a terrible question. [00:46:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I know, sorry, is not what is. Yeah, but we have, we have to use words in science. [00:46:46] Speaker B: I know we have to. [00:46:47] Speaker A: We are looking words. [00:46:49] Speaker B: What is subjective experience like for you? [00:46:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So subjective experience to me is everything that happens in my brain, in my body actually embodied scientists. Everything that. Because I mean the brain is not a brain in the dish. The brain is connected to the body. Especially interception. We see. So when I say in the brain, I mean the brain and all its connections to the body. So subjective experience that everything that happens to me on top of it I can report to you. And this is the access consciousness. [00:47:28] Speaker B: If I'm sitting in a state of meditation, mindfulness meditation where I'm. So the goal is to maybe focus on something but just notice when quote unquote ideas kind of float in and just watch them float out. Right. And I'm so. I'm not trying to cogitate. I'm not trying to think and move ideas around. I'm just in a state of noticing would that map on. So in a sense, you know, the goal is to kind of be as close as possible to this phenomenal consciousness, this sense of subjective being. So would that be brain world? I'm really trying to locate the subject here in your account. [00:48:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. [00:48:07] Speaker B: So in. [00:48:07] Speaker A: In meditation, which I tried not too many times, but I did try. I think we are in the. Basically we are in the BB domain because we try to shut off all the sensations. So we sit quiet and we try to ignore these pains, et cetera, et cetera and to remove them and also ignore the thoughts. We sit. Once we are thinking we are in the BB domain. Even if you are alone and forget about other people. But we are there. We are social kind. We use the. The. The. The. The items that are used in society but we use them ourselves when we think in, in, in. Now we try to avoid. So meditation is a. Is a clever game of. Try to avoid to play within this field the bb, but not to play to. To be an observer that is not affected by some of the thought something like this. So you divide yourself. This is a kind to me it looks like training, like any other training, training to use kind of hierarchical thinking within your BB domain. So you divide yourself to an independent or indifferent observer and all the rest and you train on it and you [00:49:21] Speaker B: manage to go, you're categorizing yourself in, in way. In a way again, what you're putting your, you're categorizing yourself, you're drawing a line saying yes, also yes. [00:49:32] Speaker A: Right, right. And yeah, right. And this, in this Bibi world, I think it's a huge field of hierarchies of categorization and context dependent categorization that has to be studied. I mean there are studies like inverting memory, et cetera, that begin to touch there, but these are all. So when I say BB domain it sounds like one thing, but this is a rich, huge domain. [00:49:59] Speaker B: I'm not going to go down through all my questions here, but there's the question of language. So first of all, you were working on rodents and then you kind of slipped in and then we started thinking about humans and the. [00:50:12] Speaker A: I'm also working on humans and vision in humans in virtual reality. So where I can control, you know, the world and, and monitor the eye movements. Maybe this is one more thing to mention that in all this vision of active sensing and brain world loops, there is a bottleneck that is to me, it's the best, best place to monitor experimentally. When I worked with rodents and previously with monkeys, I used to penetrate the brain and look for signals, et cetera. But as you know, this is a mess and it's a continuum and you don't know where to put the boxes, et cetera, and it's high dimensional. But there is one, if you believe in the brain world loops, there is a one point which is the lowest dimensional in the game and this is the sensory organ itself because it has several degrees of freedom to move and several viruses. And that's it. The world is high dimensional, the brain is high dimensional, but the connection between them is a bottleneck, basically. And we use this bottleneck to track the dynamics of perception. So we say if it's true that the perception works in loops, there should be the same dynamics to the entire loop. And the best place to track is by, is by following the sensory organ, either the whisker and the red or the eye movement. So we use accurate eye tracking and virtual reality in order to track this brainworld dynamics. This is what. [00:51:45] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm going to ask you a, I'm going to ask you to speculate, I suppose going away from like [00:51:52] Speaker A: the, [00:51:54] Speaker B: the sensory organs here into more. This is a question about the digit digital brain brain aspect. Because in some sense this is kind of what you can. The brain world is sort of where we live in neuroscience and it's sort of common ground for us to talk about how to, how signals get processed in, in brain areas. But then the, maybe the more difficult thing is to talk about the brain brain. And so there's this idea of that there's a convention between us that we, that we decide my green is your green. We're going to digitize green. And we both have attractor green states. One question about that is in relation to humans, I guess, versus other non linguistic animals. And this is maybe a chicken and an egg question is did we form symbols? So I took this call, this course in college about how language came about and one of the suggestions, there's lots of, you know, theories is that it's the ability to form symbols that allowed humans to then exchange those symbols. In the early days of accounting for how many goats you gave me so that I could keep track of that and give you some lamb next year or whatever. So do you think that is the digitization an ability that evolved and that gave rise to language? I mean, I know the answer is co evolution here, but was language necessary for digitization for that convention? Or how do you, how do you view that? [00:53:41] Speaker A: No, I think language is an extreme case of digitization. Right, right. Actually it's a question that I work on with the caller now with molecular biologists expert in genetics. Because the question is do we have a record evolution or one emerge from the other? This is kind of the hard problem that I mentioned before because you say okay, you have these conventions, but where did they come from? [00:54:08] Speaker B: That's really what I want to ask you. [00:54:10] Speaker A: Yes. How does a convention emerge from an analog. You have an analog dynamic system. Welcome. A convention between two items there in my intuitive bias is to say it has to be co evolution. Otherwise we have a very hard problem of creation here. How was this thing created at any point? And the co evolution has some justification that to say that you have this from the beginning that we can think of at least, yet always discrete and continuous events. So even if you talk about physics today, okay, there are these discrete events in quantum mechanics people talk about even on quantized space. So you have discrete elements there out there, at least in the way that we think about the world. And there are analog processes there, dynamical processes. And the question is, were they there from the beginning? I believe so. Which ones? [00:55:08] Speaker B: The analog ones. Were they there for the. [00:55:10] Speaker A: Both. Both discrete and continuous were there. And then the question how the discrete evolved towards a digital which a digital needs this convention. But if you had these discrete events in different places then we can think about ways that they can could, you know, build together a digital code. For example, the genetic code is a digital code, right? You have a code for specific amino acid. This is the code and it has to emerge for something and we believe that it emerged from discrete things that are there all the time and down the evolution. So you can go through the genetic code and go to a language. Language is very advanced way of digitization and our computers that we, not me, but we humanity invented are even more extreme. And the AI today is even more extreme and is more talented so to speak than us in the BB domain because it just digital, it's not confused by the other things. Remember how you know, difficult for us is to digitize things and say ah 27 -13 well I have to stop everything else and to do it. And for this chips is nothing. There's a danger there in AI. It's easy for the AI to get control on the BB domain because it is so better than us. But maybe something to be optimistic about is that it is only there. The AI today computer based AI has nothing to do with the BW world. The robotics is no way near the level of advancement of the, of the LLMs and, and the screen Screen Screen constraint AI devices. [00:57:07] Speaker B: No, but aside from like if I, if I came and murdered you that would be a brain world operation. But if I'm trying to manipulate you, I can do it through the brain. Brain. Yes way. And we're very manipulable and, and, and we sort of worship brain brain talent. Right? That's kind of what we think of as intelligence almost. [00:57:29] Speaker A: Yes, yes, Intelligence is the bb. Right. The way we humanity formalize, quantize and appreciate intelligence is, is all BB and digital ways. Of course people talk about, you know, social intelligence and this kind of other kind of mimicking artistic intelligence etc which are not the BB but the IQ test is a BB test. Yes, humanity I think humanity, I'm not expert in this but I think if you go through humanity, let's say in the last two 3000 years the BB get stronger and stronger. So let's say in every each of us has both the integration of the BB and BW domains but also the fight. So I think meditation part of it is a fight back against society to say look BB with all the Respect society gets too much of me right through the Bibi domain and let me get a part. And I think this is a kind of a fight back because the Bibi domain becomes stronger and stronger. We see it with, you know, the social groups in the digital domain and the AI, et cetera. It becomes stronger and stronger in our lives, community life compared to the bw. And people try to fight back. You know, people do this, try to straw to raise kids without screens, etc. Etc. This is attempt maybe hopeless, I don't know. But I think more hopeless because as everything at some point it will balance hopefully. But this is kind of a struggle between the power that every. The BB and the BW has in our lives, in our. [00:59:20] Speaker B: So. So we're all individuals and we have this. Oh, you'd characterize it as like an in. Well, you would say it's interaction. But you, you were talking about that interaction can become a struggle when there, when the balance is shifted too far, I suppose toward BB versus BW and perhaps vice versa. [00:59:40] Speaker A: You mean the interaction can be what Again, when the balance goes. [00:59:44] Speaker B: The interaction could be characterized as a struggle when, when the balance is off. [00:59:48] Speaker A: Right. [00:59:48] Speaker B: Like brain, you have excitation, inhibition, balance. Maybe you have BB versus BW balance in your interpersonal, subjective state of well being. [00:59:58] Speaker A: Right, yeah, yeah, this is a good point. I think. Yes. Maybe like the AI balance. Yes, I like it. Yeah, I think. Yeah. This is actually, this is what I meant with all these words. Just the balance that we have a balance. And in a kind of almost static attempt we try to, to keep this balance. But this, this goes across generation. It's not a rapid, it's very slow process. So you know, when someone raises kids and try to avoid the screens is a kind of this homostatic fight back [01:00:30] Speaker B: or feedback to keep fighting so hard. We, we fight so hard in this house to, to do that. But it's pointless. [01:00:41] Speaker A: Takes generations globally. [01:00:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe. So how do I, how do I make my daughter less BB and more bw? Just kidding. I'm not gonna come to you for, for therapeutic advice. You talk about how the digitization, the digital side of this, the symbolic side allows symbolicization, allows the generation of symbols. Something, if something is digital, it can be a symbol, maybe a symbol. Let's see if you agree with this. A symbol is a digital thing with meaning attached to it. Would that be fair? Yes. [01:01:17] Speaker A: Okay. [01:01:18] Speaker B: So digitization then allows symbolic things to happen which allows computation. Which is one of the benefits of digitizing of ideas is it allows. [01:01:33] Speaker A: There's no, analog. People talk about analog computers. I never understood what it is you have analog processes. Building is digital. This is in my opinion. [01:01:44] Speaker B: And so in our brains, we know we have spikes which we can digitalize, but we know that they are analog processes. And I guess what I want to ask you is what you think of, like, when I use the phrase I will find the computational mechanism of working memory. Am I assuming that what. But. And I relate that to like the pattern of spiking action potentials in populations of neurons or something. So sort of broadly, what. What's your take on computation terminology in reference to like brain processes? Explaining brain processes? [01:02:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the. The term computation computational is abused for many years now for marketing purposes or something like this. It's a wrong concept. I mean, the brain, if you look at it, it's an analog tissue. It does not compute. The brain does not compute. We compute. Computers compute. We can use the brain to compute. The brain does not compute and cannot compute because it's not. It doesn't have digital states or value. People use it. Now. It became kind of, you know, I think the name, it is very attractive to students. We know it right. You say, oh, computational brain science, of course, it's much better than just hardcore neurophysiology or something like this. But it is misleading. Isn't it misleading because of that? Because when you look at spikes, you want to study working memory, you look at the spikes and say, okay, where's the computation here? You're not finding. You impose on it some computation. It will never be correct. This is my take on it. [01:03:29] Speaker B: And yet it can correlate pretty well. But I think that you can squint and make a lot of different correlations. So you bring in the computation. You say, it must be doing that computation. I will fit it to that computation. Whatever it's doing, I can fit it to the computation. [01:03:43] Speaker A: We always do it. Okay, I have to admit I also force my models on the. On the tissue that I study. But then the test is by peer reviewing or by peer judgment of people and the students. I mean, actually, the commitment of students should be to listen to the lecturers or to look at the textbooks and what people tell them and to ask, is it a computation? Tell me why, in the case of computation, why this is a computation in order not to confuse ourselves. Because the term computation, as I said, confuses how we approach the system. And if I impose the model of computation, in my view, I'll never find the solution because the process is not the computation. So we have to be careful here and we have to encourage the students to ask the questions in this regard. [01:04:35] Speaker B: I mean, I 100% agree with you and I'm going down a little bit further on this road with you than I should, mainly because I'm in an active project examining the use of the term computation, for example, and what it really means in neurosciences. But on the one hand, and in discussions with people and my partner on this project, we find ourselves, well, we have to look at the literature and see what people are actually meaning when they say computation. Because in some sense it's like a filler term and it just means how it works. It doesn't mean computation. It means the way that it is. [01:05:14] Speaker A: That it. [01:05:15] Speaker B: The way the representations change over time is computation. [01:05:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:05:19] Speaker B: The trajectories in dynamical space is computation. [01:05:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. The confused quantification, a quantity study with the computational study. I think this is. [01:05:30] Speaker B: But are you okay with using the term? Like maybe. Are you okay with the term computation having changed meaning? And now we don't actually mean a Turing style algorithmic computation. We just mean like, oh, it's computing it because it hit this attractor state and then it went to the other attractor state and that's a computation. Are you okay with that? [01:05:53] Speaker A: No, no, no. I think it's a bad term because we know what computation is. We cannot change indeed the meaning of it. And we know what the brain. I mean, we know that the brain does not at least be. Both of us know, but many people know that the brain does not compute. And once we try to the term computation, even if we use the right hand, we know that one spike computes the meaning of the other spike. We confuse ourselves and the students. I don't think we should. I think we should avoid using it. This is, this. I don't, I don't see how we can recruit the term because we lose resolution. We use the same term to describe different things. Why should we do it? This is the wrong thing to do. If you focus on things, let's find the right words for these things. So. [01:06:37] Speaker B: All right, thank you. I appreciate that. And I'm cheering inside. So is AI computing? Let's talk about AI and that analog digital duality, right? [01:06:50] Speaker A: Yeah. AI does compute. And, you know, people talk. People forget that you take the perceiver. Forget about LLMs right now. But let's talk about perceiving AI is okay, those that identify dogs and, or the deep networks. And people forget that the whole process is digital from the beginning to the end. Why Is it digital? Because the frame based capture of the, of the, of the image is already digital. You digitize it to this pixels and the frame rate and it's digital input to this machine in the brain. It's not like this. In the brain we have this active sensing, let's say vision. So you move when you move. If this event based coding in the retina. Right. The cells in the retina respond only to changes and every cell responds asynchronously to the change that it confronts. And the change that it sees depends on interaction of the movement direction and speed and what is out there. So the coding is totally different than the frame based coding. The eye is not a camera and this is a big debate and many people envision, and I'm keep being surprised by this, that people work on particle processes and they don't ask themselves what is the actual input from the retina because it changed a lot. If the input is temporally based, all the processing should be different. So, so AI takes, it starts from the digital representation and goes on. And in digital case you can use the term representation. It's okay. This is what digital does, it represents one Erro. There's no representation in this sense in the analog world. So this is what we have to keep in mind that AI, all AI today is digital. For the LLMs it's a more, let's say, as I say it's more correct to do it because as we say LLM lives in the BB domain. BB is digital. For the LLMs to start digital and digitally it's okay. But for the perceiver, the perceptual, deep networks, something is missing there. It's okay. I mean they do a wonderful job with a lot of energy but wonderful job. But it's not enough brain like somewhat brain like in this connectivity scheme and learning algorithm and stochastics learning, but it's not fully brain like. And this active sensing and analog input level are still missing that. Yeah. [01:09:20] Speaker B: Is it a well sort of sub goal or. Or you just believe that AI could be improved by incorporating brain world? [01:09:26] Speaker A: I think it can be improved definitely. In power should be more power saving, sustainable. [01:09:32] Speaker B: What, what does improvement mean? Because you earlier you said well maybe it's a good thing that AI is solely bb. [01:09:39] Speaker A: Yeah, okay, okay, exactly. This was, this was my next reservation that improvement for the AI it will be better. Is it better for us? [01:09:49] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [01:09:50] Speaker A: So this is a correct question. Maybe we have to keep some regime for us to say okay, your AI is you can rule this kingdom. We have to be careful there also. But this is us, this is ours. Don't invade our regime. But from the AI perspective if it wants to be better or codes and [01:10:16] Speaker B: so, and so you, and to do that you think you would need like a timing code, like an event based input. [01:10:22] Speaker A: It should be event based temporal code. Yeah, yeah, this should be. [01:10:25] Speaker B: And LLMs are halfway there. [01:10:28] Speaker A: No, LLMs are not halfway there. LLMs do not need it basically because they live in the digital domain. I mean they digital, they talk about what they, what they do is digital from the beginning to the end. So they don't need it basically. [01:10:42] Speaker B: So do we have. [01:10:43] Speaker A: They could build better in power, they could be sustained, more sustainable. If they move to a spike based, event based mode altogether, this will be much more power saving. [01:10:54] Speaker B: But would that improve their capability? Let's say we don't care about power. Let's say we have an infinite energy source. [01:10:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So. But LLMs are not true for the receivers I'm confident that yes it would improve them but for LLMs I don't know, I have to study more. [01:11:10] Speaker B: So in your dualistic account, can you have a subjective experience if you only have BB or if you're. If you only have bb, you're not even in the physical world, you're in a spirit world, right? [01:11:24] Speaker A: Yes. You could be in simulation, you could be whatever people. Yes, you're totally spiritual and I think you know, you talk about aside here on this that all the spiritual world that we talk about that you know, literature and religion and all these spiritual domains live within the bb. They are all domains of words. They live within the Bibi domain very nicely actually you can map many, many spiritual processes to this BB domain, the digital domain, naturally tailored for it. [01:12:06] Speaker B: This is there like Platonic forms floating in there. [01:12:09] Speaker A: Platonic. Exactly. Platonic shapes and forms live there. And these are the concept that even in Platonic description it talks about it. Okay, I have this BB concept now let's see how reality fits this concept. This is exactly the BB and BW interaction. Exactly. [01:12:28] Speaker B: So. So where do those come from? [01:12:33] Speaker A: Well, these two. [01:12:34] Speaker B: But yeah, yeah, like what do you have a sense of? I mean again like the brain world, right? The sensory motor domain. That's sort of like our natural place of being able to investigate. But somehow the brain, brain, the realm of ideas, it's not in the real world in terms, it's not physical. Right. [01:12:55] Speaker A: So the physical has to do because we use it. So we are in the. We are real, I believe and our spirits or souls or minds are there A social kind. As philosophers say, we are part of society. I mean we should look at it in the terms of evolution and co evolution. And in terms of evolution, we individuals cannot be. I know that I have argument, surprisingly argument with this with experts of evolution. And I'm saying, look, we cannot be the subject of natural selection because we do not survive we individuals. It's either our genes, like the selfish genes, or the society, the community. The community survives, the genes survive. But we individuals are not. Anyway, surprisingly, some people argue against it, but I believe that society. I more believe in the society as being the major. And in society we are like ants in a community. We are, you know, peons of the society. And society gets its sharing and its power. Not because we do make a favor to each other. We say, okay, let's cooperate. We have a free choice together. We could cooperate or not. And we make, you know, decision, okay, let's cooperate. Probably not the way that I understand evolution. Probably not. If society survives, it means that every. It has a proxy in every each of us. Let's say the frontal lobe, roughly the executive system. [01:14:22] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:14:23] Speaker A: What else is a proxy of. Proxy of society? We don't do things that society does not allow us because of this proxy does not allow us. It sits here and control us. So all this BB domain is there for the survival of the society. We are kind of peons in this game. So if you look at this in this manner and then we combine to it co evolution to see how it comes from this description. Maybe we'll not answer the big question of how it all started, etc. Is it me? We can talk about the co evolution. [01:15:02] Speaker B: Yes, but we kind of have to accept it's there because it's. You observe there is an exchange of ideas and they have to. That exchange has to happen. So we can posit, we can assume. [01:15:15] Speaker A: Yes. [01:15:15] Speaker B: That there. There is because we. We see it taking place. [01:15:18] Speaker A: So yeah, yeah, it's here, it's here. Right? We know it's here. It's not physical, but it's here. This is why I became a dualist. I surprised myself, you know that a few years ago they say look, you are a dualist. By the way, comparing to the car that we talked about now I read again or thought about about his meditation of the book of the great move that he did from throwing everything that he. The meditations. What's the name of the book that Descartes. Descartes, yeah. That he threw away everything that he doubt about and remain with one thing, his soul. So Basically the cult was a monist. The great dualist ended up as a monist. Spiritual monist. [01:16:02] Speaker B: Yeah, but wasn't. But wasn't that a digital thing to do? Right. I still have a thought. He categorized it as a thought. [01:16:09] Speaker A: Yeah, but this is what he's told himself. And to the readers. Look, I removed everything that I don't trust. I remembered one thing, my thought. My thought exists. That's it. And when I do now the same trip back, I feel that I end up with two things. I have my thought, I have my subjective experience. It's not only my thoughts. I have the subjective experience. I sit here, I talk to you. I have these things. I cannot get rid of them. I cannot remain only with my thoughts. Although in meditation we try, we cannot. We have the body. [01:16:43] Speaker B: So all thoughts to you are digital, but experience is analog. [01:16:48] Speaker A: Yes, yes. [01:16:49] Speaker B: Okay. [01:16:50] Speaker A: All experience is analog and all thoughts are digital. They are not in the body. They are actually not in the body. This is the spiritual part of them. They're in our inter brain space domain. [01:17:01] Speaker B: If I'm sitting in a room, even if so you and I are not communicating, but I'm thinking about you sitting on chairs and stuff. So I'm sort of talking to myself. Would that be your account of it? Is that. That's still brain brain, but now it's my brain to my brain. Yes, because I can manipulate these symbols. [01:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Brain brain. It's use your capacity as if you talk to someone, but it happens to be yourself. But this is. [01:17:25] Speaker B: So what's the hard problem now? Because I want to know like how brain brain and how brain world interact within my own self. Because I want to know how thinking works and how experience works and how cognition works. Right. So, and so I began in the very beginning saying like your work kind of reorients the. The focus of where. Where to look for a solution doesn't necessarily solve it. So let's maybe return to that and. And talk discuss your work in relation to the Chalmers hard problem of consciousness and what. How you. Your work reframes that. [01:18:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So my imagined dialogue with Chalmers, I will happy to make it physical is the following. We actually sold resolve or suggest a solution to the meta problem of challenge. The meta problem is why do we have the hard problem to begin with? Why do we ask ourselves this question and this is the distinction that I told you between the absence and phenomena, so to speak, or between the things that the reason that we cannot get back to our from the digital domain, trace back the analog processes, the subjective Experience. This is the reason that we come up with this question. We know we talk about things, we can talk about things out there. We cannot talk about things in there, in our brain. And this raises a problem. Why can't we talk about that? And this is what we explained by this disability of going back from an attractor level to its resources. So we address the meta problem. Now the hard problem, as I said, disappears once you are a dualist. Chalmers itself does not have a hard problem. He poses it to the materialist, but he said, I solved it. I'm a dualist, so I'm okay. The hard problem in our solution move from this question of explanation, the subjective experience, to the explanation of how the digital convention emerges. This is a hard problem. And here I'm again a dualist, kind of, because I believe in co evolution. So this is a dualistic solution. [01:19:28] Speaker B: It's like a proposition of how to go about finding a solution. It's not a solution, I guess. [01:19:34] Speaker A: I mean, the half problem is not a problem to the dualists because the dualist, the materialist, the monist, has to explain how one emerges from the other. And he cannot because you say, no, they exist from the beginning. I don't have a problem. They exist. I have to show you how they evolved, but not the existence problem. [01:19:52] Speaker B: And a property dualist has to account for how the different properties arise from one. [01:19:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. When we were trying to map our perceptual dualism, then we take it on the axis from the subject to the object. Let's say Cartesian dualism is in the substance, in the object itself. He says, there are two different substances. The property dualism, take it a little bit back to the subject because they say, okay, we see different properties in this object. The predica dualism, take it even closer and says, okay, we only talk differently about these things. And we say, no, we perceive differently and we have no other choice. This is our insight that we have no other choice. Because the way we build because of this interaction of bbbw, we cannot see the world unless we see realistically in the digital and analog domain. And what we try mostly in science, but also in personal, but mostly in science, is to take the digital domain closer and closer to the physical. So we use terms and more resolution and more bits, et cetera, to get it closer and closer and closer to describe the BW better and better and better. [01:21:04] Speaker B: Oh, so there's like a limiting case [01:21:06] Speaker A: so we'll never, will never be there. We can add points to the, you know, that's a digit after the decimal point. But whenever you stop, like with, even with differential calculus, whenever you stop your approximation, you remain in a digital domain, although the gap will be small. But you never. That's the whole point. [01:21:26] Speaker B: Yeah, the whole point is to describe it in the digital domain and take the limit of the digital domain and call it analog. [01:21:32] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You call it out. [01:21:35] Speaker B: So you're. When you're driving in your car and you have an epiphany on. Yeah, let's say you're driving in your car. I'm going back to your earlier story. You're driving in your car and you have an epiphany. [01:21:47] Speaker A: Right. [01:21:49] Speaker B: It's like a creative thought. Right. Or a solution. You come up with a solution. How do my digital and analog processes, loops interact? Do I come up with a solution fully in the symbolic computational digital realm, or is there some interaction with the analog? How does that work? [01:22:12] Speaker A: That's a good. Okay, good question. A good metaphor, I would say, if I try to imagine. So I used all my BB knowledge from engineering, what I learned from neuroscience, etc. These are all terms like the phase lock loop, the oscillators, and the phase dock loop. And time. Time also is a BB item and try to match them by action. So what happens to me in the car? Indeed, I remember until today, probably it was strong because I remember my palp. So I was doing it, perceiving it, and try to describe it at the same time with words. And this was kind of an attempt to close the tool. Yes, it's a good, good example. Okay, thanks for reminding me. It was a great. You know, I also remember why I drove, where I drove and why it was so strong, the feeling there. [01:23:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I remember the whole thing. [01:23:07] Speaker A: But indeed, this interaction, it was kind of, and this is kind of a moment of insight, I think in this, in this, this terminology is when you either create a new attractor or merge several attractors to one. And this explained to me, I, I never, you know, I listened to things of Heidegger and one of the things he said, look, the, the first mission or the most important mission of humans is to give names. And at the time I said, how stupid could it be? What, what, what does it mean to give names? It's nothing. But now I realize is to create new attractors, let's say. So this is the, the, the, the mission of science in, in this manner is to give names in his language to say, okay, now I have a new attractor, let's say, let's Find a new word. Instead of the computational to describe what happens in the cortical neurons, now you will find a new attractor that, that describe something closer to reality. We have a better description. [01:24:06] Speaker B: That's the goal. That's the goal is to. But. But once you, once you give a name to something, it's really hard to bring it back out of. Yeah, that digital domain. Right? [01:24:15] Speaker A: Yeah. So yeah, yeah, look at computational example. Once it's digging, it's very hard to take it. Right. So you have to go bypass it or invent a new. A new path, a new world, a new name. Yeah. [01:24:30] Speaker B: I know that you're not a philosopher and I, I just, I have a. Maybe more than passing interest in philosophy, but. And I'm not super knowledgeable about Heidegger, but I. It's interesting that you say that he mentions that the most important thing humans do is, is name things. And you've, you know, that's like categorize things. Digitize things. [01:24:51] Speaker A: Yes. [01:24:51] Speaker B: In other words, in your language, digitize things. [01:24:53] Speaker A: What we do for a living. [01:24:55] Speaker B: So how does this jibe with. So when I think of Heidegger, I think of like his ideas about coping. Like he's all about how we're actually interacting with the world and our normal like skills. Like, you know, Hillary Putnam would always, I think, use the example of like taking a hammer and its usefulness as a hammer. Right. And coping in the world. And this is. It seems at odds with the most important thing is to name things. I'm not sure if you have thoughts on that with Heidegger. [01:25:24] Speaker A: This is another aspect of Heidegger and other philosophers of this term. Like also I think Buber and Ade Gordon that I mentioned and others that it was part, I think was part of the fight back against the control of society. You can see it very clearly in this early 20th century, society took over with all the industrial revolution, et cetera, took over very strongly on people. And this was an attempt to fight back, to say, look, nature talks to us. And Gibson's ecological A perception was kind of a fight back against the dominance of the BB domain. This is how I see today. So they got, you know, attacked by the BB domain. Everybody told them, look, this is the computation, so to speak, or this is. These are the terminology, etc. This is what happens in the brand. They say, no, no, no. Then the world is physical. We. We interact with it and, and they try to show us how they interact. And to me it looks like a fight back against it. And probably they Lost because the trend continues. But maybe we can try to take it back. [01:26:31] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Yes, let's take it back. But I mean on the other hand, it is the most beautiful thing. I mean science wouldn't work without brain brain without the digitized by brain. [01:26:40] Speaker A: Science is a brain brain science is a brain brain. [01:26:43] Speaker B: Full on brain brain. [01:26:44] Speaker A: Yeah, full on brain brain. Yes. We talk from the brain brain. [01:26:48] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean everything useful that we, that we consider being useful is brain brain and everything. Brain world is sort of something social [01:26:55] Speaker A: wise, like social wise but for ourselves. I mean this is the feeling that we have. We have, okay, we say, okay, we function beautifully as a society and we have advanced things, etc, we function and also it's convenient to our life, etc, but we miss something. I mean this is the feeling I see many people share. We miss something for ourselves and this is why we go to nature and we go to meditation and these things and we need the balance as you said. This is, this is a beautiful point. Bpbw balance as an over generation kind of homostatic process. Maybe. [01:27:31] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean I think personally I, maybe this maps onto sort of a personal, not personal struggle, but the way that I think that I think, right, because part of the problem for me with language is as soon as I say a word, whoop. It's concrete now it's digital, it's symbolic and it's static and it doesn't change. And so everything that I was thinking has come out in this particular word and now I can't take it back and I can't think anymore. Informing the word. And so in some sense I've lost some of the high dimensional brain world processing, right. And so I want to say that when I'm, when I'm sitting there and I'm kind of thinking about things or letting my mind process things, that seems like brain world to me. That seems like this undergirding processing happening. And then as soon as it comes along and oh, there's a word for that, for that, that I can't do anything, I can't do any more thinking about it. [01:28:24] Speaker A: Yeah, there are groups and I'm very good friends in a place called North Smadar, a place that they call themselves a school for one to learn themselves. And, and they deal in other groups, deal a lot with talking about the tree without the word tree. For example, this is kind of the, the slogan perceive the tree without the word tree. Whether without the term tree and you find yourself very, as you just described. Now it takes very soon that the word come in and they practice. And you can practice it. If you practice it. People report wonderful things in perception. So my friend reports, you know, when he practices it, just when he just, you know, during the practicing, he. He felt something that he never felt before. I don't remember now exactly what was it, but he remembers it until now that you change the mode that you perceive because you give more weight to the bw. You get rid of. Shut off the BB for a while. But it's very hard. As you say, you can do it for a while and probably we can practice on doing it. [01:29:25] Speaker B: I remember trying to explain to my dad what acid felt like when I was younger. So I, you know, experimented with psychoactive drugs, right? Like LSD and stuff and mushrooms. And I was. We were in. I remember we were in the. I remember this very well. We were in the car and. And he had never done anything like that. And he asked me to try to explain it to him. And. And the words that came out is, I still. It's like embarrassing because I said, okay, do you see that fence post over there as we're driving by? And he said, yeah. And I said, well, when you're in that state, it's not a fence post has. It's its own sort of thing and it doesn't have a name. And you sort of take it as its own thing and not as a fence post. So this is kind of the I vow versus I it of Boober and what you were just describing. So maybe when we take mushrooms and things like that. [01:30:19] Speaker A: Yeah, psychedelics. I did ayahuasca several times and I had a similar thing. So psychedelics. And now it's. It's very popular in attempts to treat PTSDs and. And other. Other things. The psychedelics, the possibility is that they dissolve this attractor because they were dissolved. [01:30:38] Speaker B: The attractors? [01:30:39] Speaker A: Yeah, on these serotonergic receptors. And there are some stronger ones work on the. Like the iboga. It works on several others. Neurotransmitters. The idea is probably that they dissolve this strong attractiveness of the attractor and then you get free to the interzone [01:30:58] Speaker B: between them, including an ego sense of self. Right. You could dissolve that. [01:31:02] Speaker A: Yeah, including everything. Ego is one of the attractors. Kind of. We're all in this game of this attractor and you dissolve it and then you wander around and you can never give it names. Afterwards, you try to describe to your friends what you saw. You know, you have certain words for it, but you can never fully describe. [01:31:22] Speaker B: That's why you end up saying, whoa, dude, and that's it, that's how you keep it out. Right? Okay, so two. I have. There are two frogs, both like sitting near each other and they can hear each other croaking. Right. And so in some sense they're communicating because they can transmit audio signals to each other. But do they have a subjective sense of self or how digital can they be? [01:31:49] Speaker A: So I believe every animal that lives in community, and I think, if I'm not mistaken, that all animals live in community. But maybe, I mean, they have to mate at least to keep surviving. So there's some source of community. Then they have digital messages. Usually it's very simple, like enemy versus friend. There are these communities that have signal for an enemy versus friend or they have food versus no food, or go, come here or go away. You know, very simple digital messages that they convey between themselves. It's a denovated language, but it's kind of a language because it has a limit. [01:32:31] Speaker B: And in that case the signal is always tied directly to the world issue at hand. The food, the escape, the. So it's almost like a sign. It's not a symbol, it's a digitized sign. [01:32:43] Speaker A: Yes. If I have to gamble, I think our language also evolved in this way. We first, you know, let's say we go to hunt together and we say, oh, elephant or something, you know, we point to things in order to calibrate. We didn't talk about our mental pain to each other, we talk about things outside. And then later on that same language is attempting to describe things inside and gets this barrier of getting into the subjective experience, which we don't have a way to get there basically. Not from inside, probably not from science, like using, you know, scientific tools to try to get there, probably this is also a lost game. So we cannot get. We use our language, which is oriented towards outside. You know, we have a subject, action, object. What is the. In English it will say, yeah, the basic sentence is very central. Okay, you have subject and predicate. So it's I do something to something. Okay, I see something or I hit on something. This is the language evolve and become complex, et cetera. But when you try to reflect it back to the owner of the language, then you get lost. It was not created for this, it did not evolve for this. Or we need more stage of evolution in order to. Or a different language to talk about the internal events, the subjective experiences. [01:34:09] Speaker B: So those two frogs have a sort of rudimentary form of digitization because all animals that communicate or live in some sort of social. [01:34:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I believe this is a prediction. This is actually kind of a prediction that every animal that lives in a society must have a digital form of communication. [01:34:27] Speaker B: So let's come kind of full circle here and get back. Let's end on where you're headed and how, how you're continuing to advance in terms of, I mean, are you looking at the interactions between these reversed order hierarchical loops in the brain? What's next for you? [01:34:48] Speaker A: Yeah, so, okay, so if I could do everything I want, both experimentally and, you know, lab resources, etc. I would go for this interaction of the, of the BB and the bw. [01:35:02] Speaker B: What do you look for? [01:35:05] Speaker A: Let's put it this way. So this is a big mystery, what happens there? Yeah, if I had the resources to do it, maybe then I would stop and ask, okay, what actually I ask, what is the actual question about that? Because the prediction about the BWBB story goes beyond that. I don't have to go to the brain. I can look at societies and interaction between people, et cetera, co evolution to. Actually, I think now when you pose this question is that maybe the most important, I had one, one important mission is to understand AI, understand where AI take us or when, where are we letting it to take us and where we should be limited. This is something that, you know, the regulators do not do, the society doesn't do. Egmes from here and there, raise flags, red flags to say, look, look, Hinton, raise the flags. Look, we are in a danger, but nobody pay attention. So this is one thing to put energy in and the second, maybe what you mentioned, the BWBB balance. This is very intriguing to say. Okay, now that we can quantify it, we can track it even, you know, by following the dynamics of perception in different conditions. Let's see how we make it easier instead of, you know, tedious sessions of meditations that you get a little bit. How to do it easier. I remember that Dalai Lama he addressed at some SFM meeting. He was speaking. [01:36:45] Speaker B: I remember this. If you could take a pill, he [01:36:48] Speaker A: would give me the pill. And I said, come on. Okay, maybe this, maybe this is the way to go. Not the pill, but the dynamics that can make it easier, made the meditation easier to change the balance. [01:37:02] Speaker B: Okay, all right. So we have discovered a business venture for us to collaborate on a pill for BBBW balance. That's good. Anything that we haven't covered that you wanted to discuss? [01:37:18] Speaker A: Yeah, the wonderful list. Probably we didn't cover half of it, but I think we covered many, many things. [01:37:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I was Just kind of looking at what I sent you and it really. I think we kind of. Oh, yeah, I could ask. Here. Here's what I'll ask you, if you're willing to listen to it. You do mention Hofstadter, and his idea of the strange loop is your version. Strange loops, plural, or how do you think of the strange loop with respect to your account of these hierarchical loops? [01:37:50] Speaker A: Okay. So I wrote to Hofstadter at one point and told him, look, we discovered your strange loop here. And he said, very strange email lines that you cannot read. He said, okay, I wish you. Very interesting. I wish you laugh something like this. [01:38:03] Speaker B: Oh, he didn't engage in it? [01:38:04] Speaker A: No, did not engage. [01:38:05] Speaker B: Oh, you know, by the way, he's like, super worried that AI is like, it's here. Right? And which is interesting because he was sort of a skeptic for, you know, throughout. Like, the AI is never going to get to the. To the point where we have to worry about it. And now he's like, whoa, it's here. [01:38:26] Speaker A: Yes. Okay, so maybe. So I tell you what his strange loop is. The AI do not have his strange loops, but our brains do. In the way that I started to describe before that, let's say, the process that you start to ask about how the digital information gets to the ear. So the strange loop is here. If you imagine the signals coming, and there's no beginning and no end to the story, although I start somewhere. Okay, so I started the peripheral signal. It comes to the inner ear. You have activation. You have these loops going and transforming the signals until they get an attractor of the world chair. And then these attractors feedback to the ear. This is the hypothesis. In hearing, unlike in vision and somato sensation, these loops are not well studied. And I know that many auditory experts object this view, but this is my view. The anatomy is there, and then the question is how you interpret it. So the anatomy says the signals go to the outer hair cells, and then now they control the way that you hear the next phoneme or the next word. Okay, I sat on the chair with my accent, et cetera, and immediately you have this prediction of the next one. You even have it before because your knowledge, as we said, because like LLM, we learn how to predict the next word. And now you start off. So what happens? You went up and up and up in the brain w ladder from the sensory organ, the brainstem, thalamus, cortex. And the next level is the ear again. The next level up is the ear again. This is the strange loop of Hofstetter and Escher, but it's it. So you get back to the same physical point, but you are more advanced in the mental domain because you now know no more. So you kind of. You have a spiral that goes through the physical and mental and gets the mental. Well, physical remains the same. You go. So again, against what? The same physical domain, but the mental gets more and more advanced until you understand what I said. [01:40:31] Speaker B: Okay, all right. Ehud. I really have enjoyed learning. Well, I've enjoyed our conversation after having enjoyed reading the work, and I'm glad that we connected it actually. And it helped me understand a little bit better Mike Shadlin's accounts of like, reportability and consciousness. And they are related. I'm still gonna. [01:40:54] Speaker A: They're not identical. Know exactly. What was the point? I wrote to him and never answered. They told me never answer emails. But listen, write to me. We have to know. We have to figure out this. This difference. There is a difference. [01:41:10] Speaker B: Okay, Doug. Okay, Mike, get back to Ehud. He's got. He's got ideas. [01:41:14] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:41:15] Speaker B: Okay, well, this was a lot of fun, so thanks for taking the time with me. [01:41:19] Speaker A: Thanks a lot, Paul. It was wonderful. Thanks a lot. Okay. [01:41:29] Speaker B: Brain Inspired is powered by the Transmitter, an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives written by journalists and scientists. If you value Brain Inspired, support it through Patreon. To access full length episodes, join our Discord community and even influence who I invite to the podcast. Go to BrainInspired Co to learn more. The music you hear is a little slow, jazzy blues performed by my friend Kyle Donathan. Thank you for your support. See you next time, [01:42:13] Speaker A: Sam.