How did consciousness evolve? - with Nicholas Humphrey

I was hoping Daniel wouldn't mention that because you might think you're getting secondhand, but I've been writing a lot of books over the last few years and each time I think I've got it right and then either I or someone else points out that no, you're not there yet there, well, this is my best shot at making it, um, this new line from the book, um, and uh, we'll have to see how it goes in the next year or so. I am very happy to be here almost 100 years ago my grandfather the physiologist AV Hill gave the Christmas lectures in this theater his topic was living machinery and my topic is also living machinery but while Hill was interested in living bodies as engines for doing mechanical work I am interested in living brains and input to generate conscious feelings his field was biophysics mine is psychophysics bordering on metaphysics as we will see Grandpa Hill was a scientist as down to earth as they come, he once gave me his definition of metaphysics Metaphysics said it's the art of deceiving people methodically well, was he into something we'll have to see when he was 16?

I made Sobel just to challenge Grandpa with a logical puzzle on a piece of paper. I drew a box and wrote two statements in it. A. All statements written in this box are false. Two pigs can fly well. Let's think about this. The first statement, of course, must be false because if it were true it would be contradictory, but if the second statement were also false. d are both false, which is just what the first statement claims, so the second statement cannot work nor can it be a false conclusion, in fact, pigs can fly. Grandfather stared at the box with a look of considerable annoyance and then announced that he was going. to weigh the Cursed Box for my part I could never get paradoxes like this out of my head.

I continued studying Psychology and then to investigate how the brain works it occurred to me early on that the brain is actually a bit like one of these mysterious boxes, it invents

consciousness

as it does so, it gives rise to strange and unexpected truths on the level of subjective experience facts about conscious feeling that lack this foundation in the physical activity of the brain. I'm seeing red. For example, I'm testing salt. I feel pain for the conscious subject. These are obviously true facts about being me, but how can they be? How can the water of the brain give rise to the wine of

consciousness

for which I have been trained?

Weigh this damn brain box since this afternoon. I want to tell you how it went. In 1972, the cover of New Scientist magazine featured a photo of a rhesus monkey with the headline: A blind monkey that sees everything the monkey names. Helen was part of the study led by my supervisor, my PhD supervisor, Larry Weisscrantz, in the Cambridge psychology laboratory. A few years earlier, I had surgically removed the primary visual cortex at the back of Helen's brain when I first met her, a year after the operation. It seemed like the loss of Cortex had indeed left her completely blind, but something unnerved me.

In mammals there are two main pathways from the eye to the brain, an evolutionary ancient, the descendant of the visual system used by fish, frogs and reptiles, which goes to the optic tectum in the midbrain and then there is a newer one that goes up to the bark in Helen. The upper cortical part had been removed but the old visible system was still intact. If a frog could see using only the optic tectum, why couldn't Helen? Wisecronce was aware of the conference. I took the opportunity to investigate further. I simply sat with Helen and played with her by offering her treats for any attempts to interact with me using vision to modulate.

She started responding within a few hours. I made her reach out to take it. pieces of apple from my hand within a week she was reaching out to touch a small flashing light seven years later she was running through a complex arena definitely avoiding obstacles picking up peanuts from the floor I'll show you some of this old movie that was filmed with a camera mechanical, so not very high quality, this monkey has no physical cortex. To anyone who had watched Helen in 1972 when I made that film and didn't know the story, it might have seemed like the sight of her now was quite normal.

Indeed, could she see everything, as the New Scientist cover implied? I didn't really believe it, so I found it hard to put my finger on what was wrong, but my hunch was that Helen herself still doubted she could see what it looked like. strangely unsure of herself if she was upset or scared her confidence would abandon her and she would stumble as if in the dark again the title I gave to my article within the magazine she was seeing and nothing we were on the verge of a remarkable discovery Following the search for findings with Helen, Wisecrumps now took a new approach with a human patient, DB, as he was known, had undergone surgery to remove a growth affecting the visual cortex on the left side of his brain, the operation left him blind throughout the right half's own field of vision maintained that he had had no visible consciousness in the affected area of ​​the field sages, however he now decided not to trust DB's word and, overcoming his protests, asked him to guess what he would be seeing if he could see.

To everyone's surprise, it turned out that he could guess both the location and shape of an object to which he believed he was blind. DB himself was the most surprised of all. To him, success in divination seemed quite unreasonable as far as he was concerned. He was not the source of his perceptual judgments. His sight had nothing to do with him. The sages called this ability blindsight. Our blind side is now a well-established clinical phenomenon. I hope many of you have heard of it, however, when it was first discovered it seemed In theory, it is quite surprising that a patient with Blindside has no visual sensation of light reaching their eye if they are still able to use visual information to perceive the existence of objects in the world that no one would have expected that such a dissociation between sensation and perception could exist, however, as I reflected on the implications of this for the understanding of Consciousness, I found myself wandering, perhaps The real enigma is not so much the absence of sensation in Blind Side as the presence of Sensations in normal vision.

If Blindside is meaning and nothingness, the normal place is seeing and something and surely it is the nature of this something that we have to explain why sensations normally have the mysterious feeling that they do. Why there is something like what philosophers call phenomenal experience is a subjective personal sense of interacting with the stimuli that reach our sensory organs not only in the case of vision, for Of course, but in all sensory modalities, how we experience the redness of red, the salinity of salt, the penny of pain, what does this phenomenal Extra Dimension amount to and what is it for? of this Sensations, let's be clear, have a different scope than perceptions.

Both are forms of mental representation. There are ideas generated by the brain, but they represent. It's about 30 different types of things. Perception is about what happens in the external world. The Apple is. red or the rock is hard the bird is singing by contrast the sensation is possible it is about what is happening to me and how I as a subject evaluated the pain it is in my toe and horrible the sweet taste is on my tongue and it is sickly and it is sickening that a red light is before my eyes and it is agitating me, it is as if by having Sensations we are registering the objective fact of the sensory stimulation and expressing our personal bodily opinion about it and, as I will explain shortly, I think that is just what we are doing but why do it this way what makes the subjective present created by Sensations seem so rich and deep as if we were living in a dense time what the artist Kandinsky might mean when he writes that color is an influencing power directly in the the color of the soul is a key like a keyboard the eyes are the hammers the soul is the piano with many strings why do we use the strange expression?

It's like something to experience sensations. Is it because sensations are like something you can't really be right with? In asking these questions, we are faced with what you will know as the so-called hard problem of Consciousness: how a physical brain could possibly support the additional physical properties of phenomenal experience, as the neuroscientist Christoph once read to me. It seems to be a mystery. to ask God for good for 50 years I have been looking for an answer that does not require God from the beginning. I have been suspicious of theories, among others, that attempt to identify the neural correlate of consciousness.

Many theorists continue to believe that conscious states are identical to brain states and for them the best and obvious approach will be to look for brain events that have phenomenal properties built into their physical structure. This is actually a fairly old proposal dating back to the 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica and Consciousness Shown, for example, you could read about psychonic theory. One theory read says that it holds that each atom of the physical body possesses an inherent attribute of Consciousness if each atom or in later forms of the theory, each cell of the body emanates its own Consciousness. then the self must actually consist of an amalgamation of these small units of consciousness.

Well, today, of course, the language has changed. At a recent conference on the science of Consciousness in Sicily, a month ago, participants were invited to vote which theory is the most convincing. solution to the problem of consciousness, psychonic theory, I should say, was not among the 18 theories offered, however, several of the popular theories were very close neighbors of integrated information theory, for example, postulates and this is another Crick quote from there. a complete one-to-one mapping between any experience and all its phenomenal distinctions and relations, on the one hand, and the causal structure that is identical to it and that unfolds from its physical substrate, on the other, oh wow, that It sounds like a perfect explanation if I myself believe that this and all identity theories have gotten off on the wrong foot, they were and are attempts to explain how phenomenal properties could be properties of a brain process, but I think this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is.

We are trying to explain that sensations, as I said a moment ago, are not material entities, they are ideas. Otherwise, your brain represents what is happening in your sensory organs and how you feel about it. This means that we have to explain their properties not literally as properties of brain states, but rather as properties of mental states dreamed up by the brain and once we see that this is the task, I think much of the difficulty and The mystery disappears now, since with any type of representation we can assume that the one that represents the sensations has to involve a two-stage process.

In the case of seeing red, for example, there will be a physical vehicle that carries information about how the brain evaluates the light reaching the eyes and then B the cognitive operation that interprets this as the idea of ​​phenomenal redness by analogy, consider the work literary, then in the novel Moby Dick there will be a text that carries the information about the words written by the author and then B the cognitive operation that interprets them as a story about a white man. whale, now notice that there is nothing in the physical text of Moby tick that is white or whale-like, and for the same reason I think we can assume that there will be nothing in the brain's physical response to light that is phenomenally red, yes, come on. show me this um he has first the case of the book uh here we have the written text then the reading of the text and then the interpretation interpretation of this text as the story of a white whale now the brain sees red first the brain produces the text by light redness reaching the eyes, then reading this and then interpreting it as a phenomenally red sensation, there is no actual redness in the brain, just the idea of ​​redness, so what does this mean for a genuine science of Awareness?

I think it means that The task is, our task is to discover how the brain achieves this feat of representation and the way I have approached this has been through what we can call advanced engineering, that is, I have started with the final product, um. I have started with the final product, sensations as humans experience them today, but instead of treating this as theorists normally do as something to deconstruct, I have treated it as something to invent. I've tried to come up with an evolutionary sequence that can take us. from nothing to nothing can take us from nothing to something from the blind side of our remote ancestors to the truly phenomenal place we humans enjoy today.

Now the sequence I have arrived at has several twists and turns that I simply suggest. Now when we have a feeling it's more likeWe were expressing our personal body opinion about her and I actually think that's how things started. I believe the sensations originated as active behavioral responses to stimulation reaching the surface of the body. There was something. the subject did about the stimulation long before it

evolve

d to be something the subject felt about it, so he imagines a primitive amiibo and, like an animal floating in ancient seas, things happen to it. The light falls on his body.

Pressure waves press against him. The chemicals stick. If some of these events are going to be good for the animal and others are going to be bad, if it wants to survive, it must develop the ability to separate the good from the bad and respond differently by reacting to the stimulus with a touch to it. one perhaps with a shout now I call these evaluative responses that evaluate that evaluate this input sensation that must be a word somewhere between sensation and volition to show its activity begin with the sensation they are not completely local responses they are completely local responses movements of acceptance or rejection of the stimulus organized around the stimulation site on the body surface when, for example, a red light falls on the animal the animal makes a characteristic movement of activity it moves easily when the salt arrives it makes a different type of movement moves saltily in a short time the response has come to be mediated by a central ganglion or protocerebrum now presumably sensation these responses have been designed by natural factors the selection must be adaptive and each response takes into account what type of stimulus reaches the surface of the body and what importance it has for the well-being of the animal, so even from the previous stage we could say that the animal is representing what the stimulus means, what the stimulation means.

To begin with, the responses are completely reflexive and none of this encounter, none of this meaning, of course, is taken into account. This is how we imagine, however, that as the animal's life becomes more complex, it reaches a stage where it would benefit. from retaining some type of mental representation of what is affecting you to a representation of the stimulus that can serve as a basis for planning and decision making and it turns out that there is a very clear way to achieve this to discover what I The animal just has to monitor what I'm doing about it and it can do it with the simple trick of creating a copy of the command signals for the responses, an efference copy that physiologists call a copy that can be read backwards. to recreate.

In summary, the meaning of stimulation, the animal can begin to feel the stimulus by accessing the information already implicit in its own response and I believe this is the precursor to subjective sensation, but of course, at first it will not be a sensation like we know her. I know, as we humans notice it, it will have none of that special phenomenal quality. The key to acquiring phenomenal properties lies in how sensitivity continues to

evolve

in the early days. It involves physical behavior outdoors, but there must come a time. When this overt behavior is no longer appropriate, the animal no longer wants to reflexively recoil from red light, for example, but still wants to register that the red light falls on its body and that it feels threatening, so what to do? solution is the one that natural selection hits the mark.

It is ingenious that the answers are internalized or privatized. What happens is that the command signals, instead of provoking actual motor behavior, begin to target the body's internal map with ascending organs, send token projects to the brain and in this way the sensation evolves into a sensation. virtual. body response is still an activity that can be read to provide a mental representation of the stimulation that causes it now, luckily privatization has a wonderful result to illustrate what happens, let me switch to something more like a human brain, here we are. have felt that the evaluative bodily response here the reference copy is being monitored by a proto-ego the new subject of sensation and here now they have the response is being privatized and what is the result leads to a feedback loop between the motor regions and The sensory system of the brain is a loop with the potential to sustain recursive activity going around and around catching its own tail and I think this development is changing the rules of the game in a crucial way, it means that activity can now be prolonged over time to give place to the dense moment of sensation. but more than this, activity can be channeled and stabilized to create a complex mathematical attractor state, a dynamic pattern of activity that recreates itself. such an attractor, a mathematical attractor in theory may have remarkable hyperdimensional properties, real, unreal, magical, the answer will be in the eye of the beholder small adjustments to the circuits will result in dramatic changes in the attractive form with corresponding changes in experience subjective and the result is at least along the lines that led humans to the creation of a very special being.

A sort of attractor on the subject reads as if it had the properties of the phenomenal Collier. The tractor is still a kind of sensation that originates in response to sensory stimulation and still carries information about what is happening to me, but the information now comes in a new and extraordinary package. It comes, if you will, as part of a riddle written in the brain. Arguably, the brain has, in fact, evolved to methodically trick the mind, so there we have finished the job, of course, this is just the story in Bear's scheme and there is no doubt that it is only partially correct, but I am convinced that each step is plausible as an evolutionary development and leads to a final state that, in principle, could be responsible for phenomenal Consciousness as we humans know it and as other sentient animals know it, such as those that presumably do not. exist.

However, I recognize that if this is an explanation of how a sentence evolved, how it evolved, the story is still far from complete, so we still have to explain why, what it is for, what kind of drove these evolutionary developments. and those final stages in particular, what the biological process may have been. The advantage of having the Sensations dressed in this wonderfully exotic way is phenomenal. Consciousness, in fact, for anything, there are many theorists quite willing and even happy to answer no, to quote the philosopher Jerry. that our conscious Minds can do, they could do it just as well if they weren't conscious, boy, so go on, did God bother to create Consciousness, what the hell could he have had in mind?

Well, I wouldn't dare answer in the name of God. but I will try to answer on behalf of natural selection to explain the use of phenomenal experience. I suggest that we can and should let our first personal intuitions be the guide. Who can know better than you or me what sensitivity is for, so ask yourself what for? would be missing in your life if you lacked Phenomenal Consciousness if you had sight blind touch blind ear blind blind everything I think there is an obvious and true answer and it is the one I mentioned when I talk about Blind Side is that what would be missing would be yourself, as I mentioned before , one of the most surprising facts about human people with blind sides is that they do not appropriate the ability to see that they lack visual sensations with phenomenal properties that they lack the somethingness of saying that they believe that their manifest capacity for visual perception does not have have nothing to do with them, then imagine what it would be like for you if you lacked phenomenal experience of any kind and if you believed that none of your sensory experiences were your own, you yourself would presumably disappear and, of course, I'm not the only one who says this: the Scottish philosopher David Hume had no doubt that sensations provide the basis of individuality.

He wrote for my part, when he enters more intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble. in some particular sensation or other of heat or cold light or shadow love or hate pain or pleasure when my sensations are eliminated at any time as by a deep sleep you can really say that I do not exist so eliminate the phenomenal experience and the self stops exist but for the same token, install it or reinstall it and the self returns to existence, let us think at that moment deep in the past, deep in the past, with the natural selection that first gave life to the appearances of your ancestors, Brands , and they woke up to find themselves transformed.

In self-aware sentient beings, in reality, of course, it will not have happened in an instant, but I also do not believe that a gradual process will have been necessary, since the fact is that attractors of the type we speak of as mathematical attractors have an All or Nothing character, so the phenomenalization of the Sensations could have occurred quite quickly, perhaps within a few hundred Generations. When it happened, it will certainly have been a psychological and social milestone with this wonderful new phenomenon at the center of your being, you will have begun to care about yourself in a new and deeper way, you will have come to believe like never before in your own significance. singular and it will not be just you, because you will soon recognize that other members of your species probably possess conscious beings like yours.

Until you are led to respect their individual value and also feel, therefore, I am, you feel, therefore, you also are, in fact, you will soon make a remarkable discovery: when you imagine yourself in the place of your fellow men, be their type of self, you You can model in yourself what the other feels, in short, phenomenal Consciousness will have become your ticket to have a theory of mind and live in what I have called The Society of cells, so We come to the big question: if this is this, if this. What does it say about the distribution of Consciousness in the animal kingdom?

I have shown some chimpanzees on my slide here, no one could doubt that they are sentient, but they are among the wide variety of other non-human animals alive today that species have likely crossed the line of sentience. I cannot suggest that there will be two crucial considerations. It will depend on the type of brand you have and the type of life you lead. First of all, there will be no physiological means to generate. phenomenal experience unless the animal has a brain that can harbor sensorimotor feedback loops capable of creating attractors of the type I have described, and second, there will be no evolutionary incentive for the animal to acquire these attractors unless it has a of life in which possession of a phenomenally enriched sense of self can enhance your personal and social survival, this leads me to a surprising and possibly unintended conclusion: it means that I believe sentience must be a fairly recent evolutionary innovation;

By far, most animals on Earth have neither brains nor their use. I'll be more specific. I suspect that phrase may not have come down to the evolution of warm-blooded animals, mammals and birds, about 200 million years ago. I draw the line there for two reasons, invention. The lifestyles and also in their markings, to begin with, warm-blooded animals made the animals relatively independent of environmental conditions. Cold-blooded animals not only have to stay within the relatively narrow geographical limits they have. accustomed to um and their activity levels are dictated from moment to moment by the ambient temperature when the sun sets or hides behind a cloud, the body of a cold-blooded animal, such as a lizard, cools and its muscles and nerves slow down in contrast to the heat.

Warm-blooded animals take their environment with them and can therefore be alert and active, feeding and socializing, traveling both day and night, winter and summer, high in the mountains and in the mountains. plains, now that the bodies of warm-blooded animals have become more autonomous. dependent and autonomous I imagine their sense of self did too after millions of years in which their ancestors had seen their lives limited by the ambient temperature the new ones financed themselves released them in body and mind they became increasingly autonomous agents with the freedom to go wherever they wanted when suddenly a huge restriction had been lifted in Salford, that's only half the story, because just at the moment when the hot blood was rising the animalistic feeling of having an individualized self, that was all it will have been too. having a dramatic effect on their brains, the reason is that the conduction speed of nerve cells increases with temperature.

Here's a graph showing how it changes in a human's finger, but all nerves behave this way, including brain cells. This means that there are increases in body temperature. From an average of,Say, 15 degrees Celsius in cold-blooded animals to a constant temperature of 37 degrees in mammals or 40 degrees and birds, the speed of nerve cells in the brain will have almost tripled because this will have reduced the delay in any feedback loop. will have made recurrent activation much more likely and I suggest that this might have been just what was needed to ignite those attractive states, turn up the heat and bingo, the activity takes off and the phenomenal self emerges, okay, this is all speculation. .

It's time to ask where is the evidence about the extent of sentience in the animal kingdom? It is something that is sometimes said that we should not expect there to be any evidence of sentience. Sentience is all inside and invisible to outside observers. but of course that cannot be right if sentient beings have really evolved, natural selection must have been able to recognize the affecting effects it was having at the level of behavioral effects that increased the animal's chances of survival and if natural selection was able to see those effects in the past, presumably behavioral scientists should be able to do so today, so where should we look?

I have been arguing that Phenomenal Consciousness gives an animal a competitive advantage specifically because of its psychological effects, the way it changes the way the animal thinks first about what it is to be me and, second, about what it is. is to be you in my new phrase from the book, the invention of Consciousness. I propose a variety of ways in which this will likely manifest itself in Behavior. I maintain that I ask. I should say: do animals have a robust sense of egocentrism in sensory experience, do they engage in self-pleasure activities? Sensations for the sake of feeling, do they have notions of me and you as simple ourselves?

Can they carry forward their sense of their own identity? Can you this is crucial to lend your minds to properly understand the feelings of others. There's no time to expand on this now in this talk, but to whet your appetite I'll show you some movie clips that have to do with The evidence I discuss in the book is more of a random selection I pulled from YouTube last week. You've all probably seen a lot of similar things, but I want to draw your attention to what they show, so here, to start, is a chimpanzee exploring. your body as seen in a mirror, but if you do not have a sense of self-financing of bodily sensations, yes, there are some swans who seek a Dry Rider, pure sensation seeking, that is amazing, the great object of life.

Lord Byron said that his feeling is to feel that. we exist and the swans seem to be doing the same thing, he has a dog, in fact, in something similar, okay, and I'm sure everyone repeats it over and over, here is an example of an elephant showing sympathy, showing empathy, I should say for another baby in trouble, panic, they were putting themselves in the baby's place and they knew what had to be done and he offered good measures for a child to do exactly the same thing that we sent him beings, we can only put ourselves in the place of suffering animals and here are the magpies The Wailing, a dead companion, wondering about where that self went, the fact that there was something wrong and what they recognized as wrong was this creature's self, the autonomous self no longer was there, the next one has a chimpanzee giving birth to his son, an exciting journey that I thought I would include because it is very nice that he does it because he knows that the baby finds him happy.

I protect myself in the mind of your own baby. Well, I agree, of course. that no particular example hid the deal, but I think they add up and I think the balance of evidence supports my hunch that it's only in mammals and birds that make the cut chimpanzees dogs parrots are all asserting their identity in ways well lobsters lizards and frogs don't really do it um now look closer I'm going to come back while I look closer at brigel's painting of animals waiting to be invited to abort aboard Noah's Ark I see that they are all warmer blooded, a Knowingly or not, brogal has I think I painted the realm of sentience, so I spilled the beans on this, but what about octopuses?

They are everyone's favorite candidates for a peripheral species that is sentient, but I have to say that the behavioral evidence simply disproves that octopuses are indeed very intelligent, but regardless, octopuses do not find pleasure in sensation seeking. , they do not have a strong sense of themselves as individuals, they do not attribute identity to others, and they do not care about art. I guess if prayer would do it, I guess a prayer would do it. would be wasted on octopuses, suppose we could in fact genetically engineer an octopus to have phenomenal Consciousness. I'm pretty sure that the new found individuality would make little or no difference to the survival of the octopus, so the new genes would not be maintained by selection and soon disappear so it's almost time to conclude this talk let's get back to Helen and the frogs Many years ago I wrote an article titled What the Frog's Eye and the Monkey's Brain Frogs Tell Us About Frogs I think it's time to consider what a monkey's blindsight tells us about frogs, so there we are. well, so there's Helen hunting for peanuts and here's a bullfrog hunting for ants, poor blind Helen, there's good reason to assume that despite her obvious visual competence there was nothing for her to see.

I conclude that equally there is nothing the Frog can see and, furthermore, there is probably nothing the Frog can taste, hear or feel pain, and I think the same is true for most animals on Earth, so if not They are animals, what about man-made machines? Of course, there are already machines that can see, hear and smell at their own level, but as with lobsters and frogs, it is presumably seeing blind, hearing blind, smelling blind, given the tasks of life to which non-sentient animals and machines have been designed to perform. I'm sure that phenomenal blindness doesn't leave them any worse off, since GPT still doesn't need to be centered on no more than an octopus, at least so far, because GBT doesn't need to be humanly intelligent to succeed as a natural psychologist, however you want. to be.

It would have occurred to you that this will surely change very soon, we are going to want to build robots to perform social roles with judgment and individuality could really be an important fact in its use for us, it could be crucial and to survive like the exact robots will have to survive as meaningful individuals in a world of other phenomenal selves and at that point I think it is more than likely that software engineers will try to take a leaf from Nature's book and by duplicating the brain circuits that are discovered. by then it has been discovered that they underlie phenomenal Consciousness in humans, they will in fact build sentience into a machine.

Could it be that sentience has already evolved independently in extraterrestrial beings? There is every reason to believe that just in the distant Universe many life forms with well-developed sensory organs are already competing, but I think we should assume that most of them, like here on Earth, will have remained phenomenally blind. Could it be all of them? Of course, everything is possible in an infinite universe, but that does not mean that it is sensitive like us earthlings. I know it must have evolved somewhere else, if I'm right, it was a sequence of lucky breaks that paved the way for the evolution of phenomenal Consciousness here on Earth, on Earth, it's the same local Earth conditions that would hold, perhaps the same sequence could be repeated, but outside the terrestrial environment all bets are off temporarily the chances of the sentence having evolved somewhere else in the universe may be evanescently small astronaut Frank Pullman looking out the window of Apollo 8 in 1968 he commented that the Earth was the only thing in the entire universe that had any good color, perhaps this cannot be strictly true, but it could be true that the Earth is the only place where there are beings capable of experiencing color qualia and The way we humans do it is like something like this.

See either this or this, so here's an idea to end my talk with a day perhaps very far in the future as a result of the aging of the sun, perhaps not so long as a result of natural catastrophe or human mismanagement, life on Earth will inevitably become When that day comes, sentience will probably cease to exist anywhere in the universe unless we humans decide to do something about it. Well, what could we do? I like to think that in an act of cosmic generosity our descendants will try to prevent extinction. of Phenomenal Consciousness by seeding the universe with sentient robots sending them into space to pick up where we left off.

The novelist Thomas Mann once made a great claim about human beings being part of the scheme of things that he wrote deep in my soul. I embraced this opposition that with the gods, so be it, it was man who was ultimately destined and that with him a great experiment began whose failure would be the failure of creation itself, reaching its refutation, we need not continue to man and put humans on a pedestal. Well, but I would like to make a statement related to natural selections, let it be, what was ultimately intended was a phenomenal Consciousness and with this began a great experiment whose failure would again be, in fact, the failure of creation same.

Now, I agree, of course, that the idea of ​​a biological future being claimed may not make much sense, but I imagine that Charles Darwin himself might have recognized that Phenomenal Consciousness may deserve to be called the supreme achievement, the supreme glory of the evolutionary process that began with the big bang good methodical deceived dear grandfather I feel that you are a ghost here in the theater still and I think everything is phenomenal Consciousness is such a Sublime deceived that if it ceased to exist it would certainly diminish all creation thanks to you