Keith Duggar: evaluation

Transcript context

…Could we press on the consciousness a bit because the account that you just gave is a beautiful account of agency, and it's it's very plausible. So as you increase this reflexive layering, this recursion, you get these multiple paths into the future, and you become the cause of your own actions. So you become more of an agent. So it's almost an account of strengths of agency with with more and more layers. But in the abstract of this paper, we were quite struck with the language that convolve consciousness with agency. And intuitively, I feel that that, phenomenal experience is is quite orthogonal to to agencies. So why were they kind of convolved together? I'm desperately trying to remember how I referred to consciousness. You've got to be very careful when using that word depending on who you're talking to. Yes. The c word. The c word. Oh, naughty. So, yeah, and I think, you know, people like Neil Seth make a very similar point quite earnestly, you know, that intelligence and and consciousness are completely orthogonal, that you're making agency and consciousness are completely orthogonal, and I would agree entirely. You know, consciousness is not implied by being agentic, having agency. Would first of all well there are many stories you can tell here. And my mind goes to the people who might be watching this to make sure I don't offend anybody by not mentioning it. Yeah, from the point of view of the free energy principle, the way that you'd look at consciousness is in terms of a dual aspect monism which you get for free from the treatment of the density dynamics in exactly the way we were talking about before. You know so now my internal say brain states have athermodynamics they have that can be written in terms of information geometry that itself is just predicated on conditional probability distributions. But they also have an information geometry that inherits from the fact that my internal brain states represent the outside world including my own actions. So there's both an information geometry and by implication a thermodynamics of my brain activity which supervenes on exactly the same substrate as does the information geometry, which is representational, is the inference, the basic mechanics side of things. So that gives you license to talk about a sort of dual aspect monism. But what is it? What does it really mean to be conscious? Some people might believe that it's just having a posterior belief, having a Bayesian belief, which is literally just a conditional probability distribution that is encoded or parameterized by some physical state of being, and in this instance, under the free energy principle, it's the internal states of being. Other people say, Well, no, just being able to read a thermostat, for example, as having posterior beliefs about the temperature of its external world does not license you to ascribe consciousness to this thing. So the next step would be, oh, it has to be ignited in some way, has to be realized, it has to be emergent. And I'm sort of paraphrasing Jakob Howie here and to a certain extent Mark Soames. So they emphasize now it is when these beliefs become sufficiently precise in a dynamical way that they are realized and influence other aspects of belief updating in a hierarchical or distributed system. So Mark Zones would call this felt uncertainty. So he would emphasise that the feeling part of consciousness just is is mediated by the representations not of the content but of the precision or uncertainty or the confidence with which these beliefs are currently in operation. And he will bring to the table all sorts of very compelling neurobiological ot of the content but of the precision or uncertainty or the confidence with which these beliefs are currently in operation. And he will bring to the table all sorts of very compelling neurobiological evidence as to why this is, how you can switch off consciousness literally by, I think he says it's a 3 millimeter cube part of the brainstem that is the cells of origin, that these ascending systems that encode and represent, I repeat, not the content, but the confidence or the uncertainty or the precision of these conditional probability distributions. Jakob would, I think, say, well, to be aware is to equip all those messages that are providing evidence for your current explanation with precision, which has these physiological and bioelectric mechanisms behind it. Other people go further, people in the world of phenomenology of the kind that Thomas Metzinger pursues would say that it would be necessary to have control over the precision and furthermore to be aware that you are rendering that which was once transparent opaque, you actually have to recognize that you're attending. So again, not only do you have this very simple recursion of self modeling in terms of planning as inference, but now you've got this hierarchical recursion where you're now recognizing that you're attending to something. And then to be if you're somebody like Lars Sunved Smith, you'd say, Well, to actually be self conscious, I now have to recognize that I was recognizing, that I was attending to something. And you get layer upon layer upon layer. To join the dots with Chris Fields, who has brought to the table the inner screen hypothesis. Have you come across this yet? No. No. Tell us about that. Oh, well, strictly speaking, you should get Chris to tell you about that. But I'll give you a quick preamble. Chris Fields is the theoretician who has formulated the quantum, quantum information theoretic version of the free energy principle. So for him, the Markov Blanket separates self from non self becomes a holographic screen upon which classical information is to which it is written and from which it is read by some internal bulk and some external bulk. And in the sense that strange loops and strange recursions are only allowable when you have this hierarchical structure on the inside. You've now got lots of inner holographic screens, inner Markov blankets. I mean, Markov blankets, you know, in their pragmatic sense, just define things like hierarchies, for example, and, you know, they define the architecture of any network, factor graph, or computer. And when you've got lots of them, you've effectively got lots of inner screens. So the idea, well, my reading of that idea is that there is 1 irreducible in a screen. So there's 1 in a screen that within it has no other screens. And this is an interesting screen, Markov Blanket, from the classical perspective, because the only way that the internal states of this irreducible Markov blanket can know themselves is by acting on the exterior, which of course the exterior is the rest of your brain. So you've this metacognitive, self recursive aspect to this inner screen hypothesis. And that…

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