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Unknown A
And you talked as well in the book about the diverse range of. I don't know, I think you used the word personality as well. Theerse.
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Unknown B
I called it a team of rivals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By which I mean you've got all these, all these, let's call them personalities under the hood. You know, it's interesting because I think maybe I dial it back one step from personal. You've got different neural networks that want different things, and we can measure these. Just give an example, which is, you know, when you're making a financial decision about what you're gonna buy, you have certain networks that care about valuation, they care about the price point, and they're thinking about, okay, how much is that worth? How much is that worth? Why so on. You have completely separate networks in frontal lobe that care about the predicted emotional experience from, you know, let's say you're looking at two restaurants that you're trying to choose between. So, you know, you're making a simulation of what you think, oh, that's gonna be delicious and good.
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Unknown B
That one's not gonna be so good. You've got other networks that care about the social context. As in, what do my friends think of this? Is this cool or not so cool? All these things. You've got this and more. They're all battling it out under the hood and they're all trying to steer the ship of state. And when you make a decision, it'because it's because of the vote of the neural parliament. So what's interesting, I do want toa get at this because your view of a collection of personalities is where one of them is dominant. And my view of a team rivals slightly different in this way, which is that there's this battle going on and you reach these sort of consensus things, just like in a parliament where different groups will collaborate and coordinate. Say, okay, like two out of three think this. And so we're gonna go for that restaurant.
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Unknown A
Well, that would be calculated. My suspicions are enough of those rivals aggregate together, they can inhibit everything else.
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Unknown B
That's exactly right.
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Unknown A
So they'll join forces and then their rivals will sink into silence because they've gripp the. They likely grip the neuropharmacological circuits that can inhibit the rivals.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I think that's good.
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Unknown A
Now, some of that would be calculated unconsciously, right?
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Unknown B
Almost.
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Unknown A
But then could maybe we could hash this out a little bit. So imagine it's something like this. So you're making a decision. A lot of these you make pretty quickly. And so what I would presume that would mean is that the rival systems that are doing the computations already have a behavioral pathway specified in practice that's in keeping with their aim. So nothing new has to be instantiated. But imagine that there are situations where a novel situation arises and rivals emerge, but there isn't a clear pathway, even if one system obtains dominance. I suspect that's when you have to become conscious and you have to think. Because one of the mysteries in your book, and it's a mystery period, is given that we can compute so much unconsciously and given how narrow the focus of consciousness is and even how limited its ability to control, let's say, what's it good for at all?
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Unknown A
Now, we do know where we do tend to become conscious, at least in sometimes, of things that are novel. So novelty seems to have something to do with it. But. So I'm curious about what you think about that.
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Unknown B
Yeah, great. I mean, the thing is, when you look across the animal kingdom, you find these rivaling networks everywhere. So just as an example, you. You take a mouse, you put it in a maze, and you put cheese at the end, and you can put a little harness on the mouse and measure how much he's pulling towards Chee. Then what you can do is switch it where instead of a piece of cheese, you have an electrical shock at the end, and you can put the harness on and measure how hard he pulls away from the electrical shock. Okay, now what you do is you put a piece of cheese and an electrical shock at the end of the thing, and the poor little mouse gets stuck halfway and turns and turns and turns at exactly the place where the two vectors cancel out, which is to say he's running both networks.
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Unknown B
You get the cheese and avoid the shock, and he gets stuck there in the middle. You see this across animals, the Stroch avoidance conflict. Yeah, exactly, the conflict part. Okay, you take another example. The stickleback is a bird that will attack things that are red. And if you get something, what's that? Fish. Oh, fish, right. Yeah. No, no, wait.
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Unknown A
Stickleback.
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Unknown B
Stickleback gull. Wait, what's the. Oh, o.
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Unknown A
It's a gull.
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Unknown B
It's a bird.
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Unknown A
Yeah, okayus. There's. Okay, there's a stickleback fish, too. Okay.
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Unknown B
Yeah, this is a bird. I'm 99% sure I got the name right. Okay. It'll attack things in are red. It will sit on anything that's egg shaped. It'll sit on it. So if you put a red dot on an egg, it'll both sit on it. And attack it at the same time. Okay. What these represent are rivaling networks. Okay, here's what I think the role of consciousness is, is in mediating this. That's what we've gotten better and better at. And so when we have rivaling networks in a novel context.
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Unknown A
Well, that would be a novel context, right, where you have a system that's automated, another system that's automated, but the conjunction produces a paradox. Okay, we can think of the. Okay, so we can think of the reason for the emergence of the cortex in that regard, because. So I read a series of brilliant papers on hypothalamic cats, right? So these are cats whose entire cortex is decerbrate cats. Their entire cortex has been taken out in most of the limbic system. And these are mostly female cats for various reasons. Female cats are more functional with only a hypothalamus, as it turns out. And if you keep them in a simple environment like a cage, they can pretty much do what cats do. Now they're hyper exploratory, which is pretty damn weird for an animal with almost no brain. Cause that's not what you predict.
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Unknown B
And by the way, they can also walk on a treadmill. Right?
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Unknown A
Right, right. They can mate, they can eat, they regulate their temperature, they can defend themselves. Okay, so now imagine this. So now you have all these automated systems that you described, but they can produce conflicts, and they can produce conflicts in the moment, and they can produce conflicts across time, and they can produce social conflicts. Okay? So now you need another part of the brain that emerges, as you said, to mediate those conflicts. And that's what the cortex does. And that's. So that would imply that some of that lengthy socialization that you described, actually what that socialization is, at least in part, is the environment specific means in which those conflicts that will arise in consequence of built in motivation will be mediated. Right? So. Right.
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Unknown B
And now here's the thing. Rats and cats have cortex, but what we have that they are not so good at is the ability to mediate well, such that we don't get stuck in the middle of the maze, but we can make a decision about. We can actually weigh in and say, okay, you know what, I'm not going to get stuck with these two networks. I'm going to decide on something. This is what I think consciousness is about. It's the higher level abstraction that allows you to say, okay, look, this isn't something that's automated. This is a new situation I'm in. I don't know what to do here. And then The CEO gets called up and yeah, there'like a large, you take a large company, the CEO can't possibly know what's happening in the company. There's 100,000 employees.
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Unknown A
Right.
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Unknown B
The CEO's job fundamentally is to wait for the phone to ring and say, hey, there's trouble here. There's something, something going on that we don't know what to do. The CEO makes a decision and also, of course, to do future planning.
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Unknown A
Yes, yes.
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Unknown B
Consciousness is essentially about that.
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Unknown C
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Unknown A
Yes, that's also a conflict mediation process, future planning Y so that the pet present doesn't interfere with the future.
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Unknown B
Yeah, that's right.
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Unknown A
That's right.
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Unknown B
And so I think what, what I suggested in incognito is that maybe we can look at the way that animals resolve conflict or don't like the poor rat that gets stuck in the middle. And we can use that as at least a rough metric for the degree of consciousness that an animal has, because the assertion there is that, you know, consciousness allows you to mediate these things and figure out a path forward there would you?
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Unknown A
Okay, so a couple of things. So you could imagine a mechanism that would allow that to, to. Okay, so here's two potential mechanisms. So like system A has a goal and system B has a goal and now they're locked together. Okay. So now you need a superordinate goal that's higher than both of those that can be used as a reference point to rectify the conflict. Right. You can imagine changeains of those superordinate goals. Right. So we get stuck in a conflict here, we're going to do this, we get stuck in a conflict here, we're going toa do this and so forth, like ad infinitum. Okay. So the cortex is going to produce those melding goals. Then that might be something like sequencing. I'm hungry and tired. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna eat now and then sleep, or I'm gonna sleep now and eat.
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Unknown A
And that way the conflict between those two things is reconciled in a higher order frame that would take the future into account. Yeah, right. And so, but then the physiolo, maybe the physiological mechanism is that, you know, so let's say you could turn left in the maze, or you could turn right in the maze and you're spinning because you're in this conflict. The mechanism for resolution could be that the inhibitory capacity of the free cortex, so it's not bound by any given motivational state, is shifted in favor of one of the systems. Right. So because focus of attention seems like that if I'm. So if I'm angry, for example, and I really focus my attention, well, I could inhibit the rage or replace it with something, but I could also amplify it. Like there does seem to be a voluntary attention seems to be something like the capacity to amplify it.
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Unknown A
You'd think that would be something like the turning of spare multi purpose neural tissue to one side of a particular operation.