The Source of Consciousness - with Mark Solms

Thank you so much Lisa and thank you all for being here, I was going to say it tonight, but I realize it's not necessarily a night for all of you, so as you just heard, I'm publishing a book, in fact it's coming out today in the United Kingdom in a couple of weeks in the United States with the same title as my talk the hidden spring a journey to the

source

of

consciousness

I hope that when I am finished in an hour what I am going to present to you you will do it I understand why the book has this title, the book is, of course, about

consciousness

and I am quoting here what physicist paul davies recently wrote about consciousness, but you could have found hundreds of scientists saying basically the same thing davey says among the many puzzling properties of life: The phenomenon of consciousness stands out as especially surprising: its origin is possibly the most difficult problem facing science today and the only one that remains almost impenetrable even after two and a half millennia of deliberation.

Consciousness is the number one problem in the science of existence. Still, our topic tonight. is not small, it is widely considered the number one problem in science today, so my book is about this problem, but this is a lecture and of course I cannot begin to cover all the complexities that require a book extensive. treatment, so what I'm going to say tonight is kind of stripping things down to their essence. I'm going to simplify and I'm going to simplify by focusing on a single thread, although it's kind of a running red thread. Throughout the book, part of the argument, and I'll make it, right at the beginning, is that we've made very little progress in terms of solving the problem that Paul Davies identifies here because we've been looking in the wrong place.

I have been searching for the explanation of how and why consciousness arises in the cerebral cortex, the long-assumed seat of consciousness, and I am going to argue that we should look elsewhere, we should look in a much more primitive structure, the brain. in particular the reticular activating system in the nucleus of the brain stem and not in these higher cognitive functions that are carried out by the cortex and in particular by the human cortex, but rather in much more basic functions of the type that are carried out in the brain . They come specifically from raw feelings.

I'm going to argue that raw feelings are the fundamental form of consciousness, in all sorts of ways, and that if we shift our attention from higher cognition to lower feelings, so to speak, the hard problem becomes less difficult to solve. escape the risk of too abstract ideas, I thought I'd tell my story through a series of cases, um, some clinical case stories, I've lined up six for you and I hope I can get through all six because uh, like I said, I only have an hour , uh, so hopefully we'll get through them all, but at least it will give you an idea of ​​the lived experience of patients with disorders of consciousness who have been of great help to me over the years in terms of my efforts to unravel this problem. , uh, but let's start in the obvious place, I'm going to read you now, David Chalmers' formulation of the heart problem in a 1995 article, he coined that term and this is what he wrote.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience, but the puzzling question of how these systems or subjects of experience can be is why when our cognitive systems engage in the processing of visual and auditory information do we have visual or auditory experience, the quality of deep blue the feeling of metal tea how can we explain that there is something that looks like an image or experience an emotion? It is widely accepted that experience arises from a physical basis, but we do not have a good explanation of how and why it arises now. way Chalmers formulated the hard problem, but of course, this is not a new problem, as Davey said, it is something we have been thinking about for millennia, but in particular I have emphasized this phrase, something that is to be able to establish a link with other.

The philosopher Tom Nagle, who wrote in 1974, an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism, something that is to the organism and later in the article, the same article he wrote if we recognize that an physical organism The theory of mind must account for the subjective nature of experience. We must admit that no conception currently available gives us a clue as to how this could be done, so my aim this afternoon in this short talk is to give you a clue as to how this could be done.

I told you I'm going to um, well let me first of all, I'm sorry, I see what I have on the screen, here it is, I want you to succinctly state the biggest problem possible what this problem is, uh, that's what I'm getting at. and you. I can think as I go whether or not I'm answering this question. This is the difficult problem. Why and how does it mean something to be an organism? Something that is for the body. Now what I started to say is that I told you so. I'm going to approach this through a series of cases so as not to get too lost in abstractions here is our first case this is the case he is actually my brother this photograph was taken when he was two and a half years old just under three years old and I, As you can see, I was a baby, we were born in a small town and, for all sorts of reasons, we were quite isolated, so we were best friends, we got along very well one day four and a few years after this photograph was taken, my Parents were sailing on a yacht and my brother climbed onto the roof of the clubhouse while I was wading in the waters of the lake below and he tripped, fell three stories and landed. he fell on his head onto the cobblestones below and fractured his skull and suffered an intracerebral hemorrhage.

He was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Cape Town called Khrutoski to the neurosurgery department where, but not entirely coincidentally, where he works today. That kind of bleeding. It is a life-threatening emergency, but fortunately in my brother's case, the bleeding stopped and the hemorrhage, the hematoma reabsorbed and he survived and a few weeks later he was flown back home. He looked exactly the same as before. before, apart from the fact that he had to wear a helmet to protect his fractured skull, but even though the appearance was the same, he wasn't the same as a person, he was completely different and, to me, you can imagine him as a four and a. half a year how strange uh this this is lee looks like lee but it's not lee um of course it was a terrible tragedy for him and for my family, for me personally, it was extremely upsetting, especially for those along the way. that I just described um, I couldn't understand the fact that he had changed so much and in this way I was faced, I think a little earlier than most of us, with this fact that we ourselves are our subjective selves.

Our personalities, our minds in some ways are also just a bodily organ and if that organ is damaged, then we are, we are, we have changed and by implication what happened to my brother could have happened to me, uh, could have happened to him. passed to anyone. Of us, if our brain were damaged in the same way as his, the hematoma is reabsorbed but leaves damage and there are also things called external cuts because of the type of injury he had, if this happened to any of us, I wouldn't do it. we would do. To be ourselves we would be someone else and by further implication you know that when our brain dies we literally disappear so this is the seriousness of the problem we are that we are talking about.

Obviously he didn't go at the age of four. I don't decide, well, to solve this problem I'd better become a neuroscientist, but I have no doubt that those early childhood experiences are what prompted me to study neuroscience and in particular to become interested in that branch of neuroscience that In other words we call neuropsychology. How mental functions relate to brain functions When I went to university, which was to study this, in the early 1980s, however, I was quickly disabused of the idea that studying neuropsychology would provide the answers I was looking for about How mental functions are related to brain functions.

This thing happened that Davis was talking about, that Chalmers was talking about how it happens that, how can it be possible for a physical organ to be me? How am I produced by these through these physiological processes in these anatomical structures, but the This is not what I was taught, what I was taught was how the cortex works and I emphasize the cortex here because in the 1980s neuropsychology was basically the study of higher cortical functions and neurologists study the functions of the brainstem that have to do with the body. Cortical functions have to do with the mind and I was taught how visual information is processed in this part of the cortex and some metasensory processes here and auditory processes there, but when I asked my teachers where all this information is, they know where I am. .

In the processing of all this information, where is the subject that receives the visual, auditory, somatosensory information and all that? My teachers kindly advised me not to ask questions like that, those are not proper scientific questions and they are bad. for your career, but I wasn't studying this because I was interested in building a career and I really needed to understand how this works, so when they taught me, as I'm showing on the slide on the screen right now, how to process information visual occurs in the visual cortex, you know, and how incredibly elaborate all of these different component processes are.

How do we go from, you know, the initial image in v1 to these various processing streams by which it goes into one of them you know you recognize color and motion and faces and another if you're a human being you're able to recognize letters and words and reading you know all these things and how ultimately all this visual information is encoded in the hippocampus, uh, in long-term memory, all of these functional mechanisms were incredibly interesting, but the question that had the problem for me It was: you know? Visual information processing of this type can be done with your mobile phone and in fact what I have on the screen Now is not that different from a circuit diagram, you know, which describes the type of information processing that it does your mobile phone.

Your mobile phone can recognize faces, as you may have noticed when you are taking a photo. the way it examines stored images, classifies them, these are faces, these are places, etc., exactly the same type of thing, um, as I was taught about how our brain works, but the sentient subject that receives this information is the fact that. it's like seeing isn't a respectable question it wasn't addressed at all back then i read this book by oliver sax called a leg to stand on it was before he became so famous with his book um the man who mistook his wife for a hat in this book a leg to stand on in 1984 he wrote neuropsychology as classical neurology claims to be completely objective and its great power its advances come precisely from this, but a living creature and especially a human being is the first and last active subject not it is an object it is precisely the subject the living eye that is being excluded neuropsychology is admirable but excludes the psyche it excludes the active living eye that experiences so the phrase neuropsychology is admirable but excludes the psyche exactly captured my dismay and frustration with my field as This is how things were in the 1980s and I think this has a lot to do with why David Chalmers formulated the hard problem the way he did.

Now I'll read you another passage from his book in which he clarifies that this difficult problem revolves around the question of the function, uh, the function of a visual experience, for example, let me read it to you. Easy problems are easy precisely because they refer to the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. To explain a cognitive function, we only need to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well suited for this type of explanation and are therefore well suited to the easy problems of consciousness; On the other hand, the difficult problem is difficult precisely because it is not a problem about the realization of the function. functions the problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained what makes the difficult problem difficult and almost unique is that it goes beyond the problems about the performance of the functions to see this note that even when we have explained The performance of all cognitive and behavioral functions close to experience may remain an unanswered question: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?

A simple explanation of the functions leaves open the question of why all this information processing is not carried out in the dark free of any internal feelings um just to make clear the seriousness of the problem that Chalmers isidentifying here I want to tell you briefly about what another philosopher said on this point this was Frank Jackson in his famous argument from knowledge uh the the the The story revolves around a visual neuroscientist named Mary and I am going to tell the story in a simplified form in for the sake of time. Mary knows everything there is to know about the functional mechanisms of vision, but she is blind, so she knows exactly how light works.

The waves are transduced by the photosensitive rods and cones of the retina and are transmitted to the lateral geniculate body and from there to the visual cortex and how all those processing streams that I showed you in the previous slide, later, in specialized modules process that information. Exactly what those neurons do Exactly what the functional mechanisms of the different processing streams are Despite all that, she knows nothing about what it is to see and then, thank God, one day she is given the gift of sight and, For the first time in his life, he really experiences that deep blue that Chalmers talked about. quality of visual experience redness blue movement shape contour and so on and Jackson's point is that at that moment she learned something completely new about vision, something that was not predicted, not explained at all by her functional understanding of the mechanisms physical means by which visual information is processed. and the point is that because those mechanisms can be understood absolutely without there being any need to understand what the visual experience is like, but also no bridge, there is no bridge that predicts that they will have to be a visual experience and, then, this Something Again, this new qualitative experience, something that Mary becomes familiar with, is not contained within knowledge at all, which is why it is called the argument from the knowledge that she had about the functional mechanisms of vision and the alarming conclusion that people like What Jackson and Nagle and the Chalmers arrive at is that the conscious experience of something real that looks like seeing exists in some kind of parallel universe in some other dimension, somewhere other than the physical universe, in which causal mechanisms explain how one thing produces another.

This is what Chalmers is talking about when he says why the performance of these functions is accompanied by experience. Why doesn't all this information processing take place in the dark, free of any internal feelings? Explanations of information processing Mechanistic functionalists explain visual processing in the cortex and I'm using vision as my model example because that's what we do in cognitive neuroscience when it comes to trying to understand the mechanisms of consciousness, there is where we have been looking, under the assumption that if we can, if we can isolate the mechanism of visual consciousness, then we can generalize from there to other forms of consciousness and explain consciousness as a whole.

Chalmers' point is that Mary, who knew everything there was to know about the functional mechanisms of visual information processing, knew nothing at all about what it looks like to be a completely different order of things, so what? How are we going to make sense of this? In the 1990s, John Kilstrom was able to write an article with this title. It is a review of the literature on the visual unconscious and other perceptual and cognitive cortical mechanisms the title says it all perception without awareness of what is perceived learning without awareness of what is learned literature the research literature reviewed in this article shows in few words that can be perceived visually and in other ways you can process this type of information without knowing that you are doing it, you don't seem to have to know that you are doing it, so the cortex and the brain as a whole can process visual stimuli and other perceptual stimuli and act on those stimuli without any awareness that you have done so, the same applies to learning: you can learn things and remember them, and they will influence what you do in the future without having any knowledge that you have learned those things and that you are remembering all the things.

From this you can automatically segue into paraphrasing Chalmers in the dark, just to give you an idea of ​​the types of evidence Killstrom relied on in writing this review article and reaching the conclusions somewhat alluded to in In title of one study, research participants are shown through a paradigm called an instrument called a tichistascope that displays visual information so briefly for so few milliseconds that you don't even know you've seen anything, much less what you're seeing. I have seen in this experiment the participants were shown two faces, face a under which the word rapist was written and face b under which the word philanthropist was written.

Now remember that they didn't know they had seen anything, much less that they had seen anything. After having seen a face and read a word after the scopic phase of the experiment, they are shown those same two photographs in a superliminal way and they are asked which of the two faces they prefer, which of the two people they prefer and with a very high of statistical significance research participants choose face b when asked why they choose this face instead of the other one, they say I don't know because of course they don't consciously know why they do it, so they say that it's just not intuition or my intuition, I just prefer this guy, we know why they did it, they did it because of the words associated with those faces and that's precisely the point that this type of cognitive process is a higher visual cortex because let me be Of course, recognizing faces is a unique cortical function and, in fact, reading with comprehension is an exclusively human cortical function, so these types of functions can be performed perfectly without consciousness and this is the essence, so to speak, of what it says Chalmers says, "You know these, these things." can continue in the dark and that begs the question Thomas asks: why doesn't he? why do we have to be aware of these things? and the tentative conclusion I now want to state is that it is because they don't.

Visual cortical processes and all cortical and cognitive processes are not intrinsically conscious, as Killstrom's review shows, so it is not surprising that if we have focused our research efforts on trying to understand the brain basis of consciousness, the physical mechanisms of consciousness observing the functions. that they are not inherently intrinsically conscious that they can function just as well without consciousness then we are looking in the wrong place if you remember my introductory comments this is the red thread that will run through what I am going to tell you tonight, let's move on to my next case.

I told them that when I was a student and they taught me how these different flows of information coming from our sensory organs and projected into our cortex produce visual consciousness, auditory consciousness, etc., and I asked my teachers, but where am I? Do you know where the guy who gets all this information is in the 1990s, 10 years after I asked that dumb question that was considered dumb? It's a naïve question, but many of the most naïve questions are some of the most important questions in the Neuropsychology of the 1990s was asking those questions itself and the answers it came to was that you know visual, auditory, and somatosensory information. , the kind of raw phenomenal consciousness is not the main thing about subjectivity, it is where everything comes together, that question I would ask.

I asked where everything comes together and one of the main answers was that everything comes together here in the prefrontal lobes, so, for example, Bernard Bars um and Stanislav uh uh Kahan were saying that there is a global workspace, a kind of integration of all these different information flows here and this is where the theme of the mind is that it reminds of consciousness as the global workspace in the sense of not only information processing flows coming from our final sensory organs, but rather from the subject of the mind that receives them, so I will remember that I am only giving you an impressionistic account in this brief lecture.

I'm going to ask you as scientists or people who understand science if there is a theoretical claim that this is this part of the brain. consciousness is generated in the sense of a subjective and sensitive being of the mind, so if this part of the brain is damaged, then that function should be lost, so someone who does not have a prefrontal cortex should not have subjectivity in the sense that we are talking here. no person who receives all this information and knows that this is my vision. I am a sentient being, the kind of agent or self, the active self, that Oliver Sacks was talking about damage to this part of the brain, complete damage to this part of the brain.

The brain should completely eliminate what we're looking for, so now I'll briefly describe a patient of mine who I call patient w um, who due to a complex pathology basically a subarachnoid hemorrhage in the anterior communicating artery that he needed. He had surgery and the operation didn't go so well and then there was sepsis and then it wasn't recognized early enough, etc., basically, after a series of operations, he ended up like this, without any prefrontal lobe, so there are the prefrontal nerves. He doesn't have any, um, here you see it again, but fortunately he has a small piece of cortex here, language cortex, that allows him to describe his experience, so I explained to patient W that, according to my colleagues, he should lack a self that should be lacking. this general sense of sentient being that receives this perceptual information and knows that I am the one who sees these things that I should be missing, I asked him what is missing, he said no, not at all, so I said well, then be patient, I'm going to ask you a series of questions through which I can illustrate prove to my colleagues uh that they are wrong, I said, are you aware of your thoughts? he said yes of course I am, I told him to confirm that I am going to ask you to solve a problem that will require you to consciously imagine a situation in your mind he says okay I say imagine you have two dogs and a chicken he says okay I said do you see them in your mind he says yes so I said now tell him?

How many legs do you see in total? You understand that if he is there looking at this visual information that he has conjured up in his mind, he should be able to count two dogs, four plus four, a chicken, two turtles, ten, and that would show that there is someone there looking at the visual information so you can imagine my disappointment when I tell him now tell me how many legs do you see in total and he said eight and I said eight and then he said yes, the dogs in the chicken now That's not the best joke in the world, but it shows that there is someone at home, Mr. .W was there thinking, looking at this information, and I was even able to take this additional humorous step of imagining the dog's head looking at the chicken.

The idea that, as the sentient being of the mind resides in the prefrontal cortex, I do not believe it and, of course, it is not based only on this case. I'm using it to illustrate a point from the other major theory in cognitive neuroscience about where the theme of the mind exists in the cortex is associated with Bud Craig's name and he identifies the insula as the critical part of the cortex the insula is not like the prefrontal cortex where all the different information processing streams from the various sensors converge that lead to your ability to make decisions about what you are going to do about it, but rather it is where the internal visceral information of the vegetative body is transmitted to the cortex and integrates with this extraceptive information, it is a very conventional current. theory that this is where the self resides in the cortex so let's see what happens if this part of the cortex is damaged like it was in this patient a patient b a patient of demarcius like I did with my patient w demarzio interviews his patient and asks him if he has a self because the prediction that emerges from Craig's theory is that he should lack such a thing, Demarzia says, do you have this?

This is a dialogue, a conversation that has not been published but an article has been published about this case. Do you have it? a sense of self says de marzio the patient says yes, I do what if I told you that you're not here now? The patient says he would say you have gone blind and deaf demarcia says do you think other people can control your thoughts? He says no and why do you think that's not possible he says you control your own mind hopefully Marzia said what if I told you that your mind was someone else's mind? patience is, when was the transplant, I mean the brain transplant?

I ask you, what would happen if I told you that I know you better than you know yourself? The patient says I would think you are wrong de Marzia says what if I told you that you are aware that I am aware he says I would say that you are right demarzia you are aware that I am aware patient I am aware that you are aware that I am aware please note all these references to i this is precisely what is supposed to be missing in such patients clearly the sentient being of the mind is not in the prefrontal cortex nor the insular cortex but in thesePatients have some bark left, what about a patient who has absolutely no bark?

What would happen if the bark were removed as a whole? remove the sentient subjectivity that we are trying to explain with our cortical theory of consciousness, well here is a three year old patient, this one with absolutely no cortex, this is a condition called hydranencephaly where the patient is born with a brainstem and a cerebellum hanging from the back of the brainstem but without any forebrain she is conscious yes, she is here she is awake she goes to sleep at night she wakes up in the morning clearly she is conscious but it is much more important to look at this this is her reaction when they place her little brother on her lap, she responds emotionally to this experience, so it is not just that she is awake, it is not some kind of blank wakefulness, but rather a reactive mind with feelings and content, it cannot possibly be a representational cognition of the type that performs the cortex because it does not have any cortex, it only has a brainstem and yet it is conscious and its consciousness has a particular quality and has nothing to do with what flows from the outside consciously becauseRemember that the brainstem she just processes sensory information unconsciously, this has to do with her subjective response to that information, even though she has no cognitive idea what that information is about, it's a pure feeling and it's not just her, most of these kids are. so she has another patient tell me that this patient is not conscious uh and that there is no one at home uh beyond

mark

er wrote a review article on these patients that studied many of them and I'm not going to read you this long quote but you can see the words that I have emphasized in yellow, have a wide range of emotions uh and most importantly of all those emotional responses are appropriate to the situation, in other words, that the patient shows laughter or irritability uh or or fear in response to stimuli that would evoke those same kinds of feelings in you and me, so this is important proof that the cortical theory is wrong: the parts of the cortex that are supposed to be the centers of consciousness, the integration centers where a self arises sensitive even just this, the little evidence that I have given you tonight shows that this is not the case and even in patients where there is absolutely no cortex there is evidence that there is consciousness Consciousness not of the cognitive type that we have been in focusing on our attempts to solve the difficult problem, but rather a consciousness of a much more rudimentary kind, basic raw feelings of the kind that clothes these two girls and other children like them with the same condition and able to express, but for Of course, you know, how do we know?

How do we know what it is like to be a child? Is there anything it feels like to be a child? These are just behaviors we can't be sure about. What what what they're experiencing, but let's slow down. Even though I'm anxious about the time, I keep looking to my left, which is where my watch is, and I see that I am, that I must. speed up, but let's make sure I'm getting this really essential point across. You can remove the cortex, the supposed seat of consciousness in its entirety, and I say remove, of course, in these children it is not experimentally removed in experimental animals. is removed and we find exactly the same thing: they are conscious, they are awake, and they show a full range of appropriate emotional and situational responses in contrast to the evidence of injury.

Now we look at the brain stem if there is damage to these structures. these little structures in the primitive brainstem called the reticular activating system so the lights go out so the lights don't go out uh if there's no cortex but if there are small lesions in the reticular activating system of the brainstem as small as two cubic millimeters Fischer and his colleagues recently published a paper in which they studied numerous patients with brain stem strokes and showed that a two cubic millimeter lesion in the parabrachial region is all that is needed to completely erase consciousness, So what that shows is that cortical consciousness depends on brainstem consciousness, what is generated here in the reticular activating system is a prerequisite for cortical consciousness, and what's more, remember that cortical consciousness it is not always present; in other words, the cortex is capable of processing information without consciousness, so what makes it conscious is the activation by this reticular activation system that is not controversial what I just told you uh, we are arguing that we are looking in the wrong place, you know, this is not intrinsically conscious, this is the basis of consciousness, why not?

We look there and I have shown you in those hydrogen brain girls that people who only have one brain stem have consciousness of a particular type and that is affective consciousness, so isn't this an intrinsic prerequisite for all the others? forms of consciousness, that is not the place we should look if we are trying to find out what the functional mechanism of consciousness is, so let me now go to my case five and the reason I am doing this is because I am very aware of that in the case of these children without bark one cannot be sure that they have consciousness because they cannot speak.

The only function that is certainly cortical is language and my patient was able to describe her mental states. Because they had a portion of frontal cortex that allows us to produce language, those children didn't have it, so we don't know, they can't tell us what they're experiencing, just like our dogs and cats can't tell us. What they are experiencing, we feel they are aware of, they respond emotionally, we have relationships with them, but we can't be sure, so in science, in such a situation, what we have to do is rely on multiple lines of converging evidence.

I have to make predictions about the hypothesis that the brain system produces awareness of the injury. Studies suggest that's where consciousness comes from and I say it's consciousness of a particular type, you feel your affective consciousness and then you use another method, for example. deep brain stimulation, if we stimulate those structures, those deep brainstem structures in patients who have intact cortex and can tell us what they experience, we would predict that they would experience intense affects and that's exactly what happens if you stimulate the substance, um, that is which one. It is a part of the midbrain's reticular activating system.

This is what happens in a 65-year-old patient with Parkinson's disease, which is why they placed the stimulator in her brain. But a patient who had never had any psychiatric pathology in her life in five seconds. When the stimulator was turned on, it had actually gone deeper than the intended site, the intended site was not in the brainstem, it was a few millimeters too deep in the reticular activating nucleus that I mentioned, and she, within five seconds, falls into a depression. I'm falling in my head I don't want to live anymore to see anything hear nothing feel anything when they ask her if she's in pain she says no, I'm fed up with life, I've had enough, I don't want to live anymore I'm disgusted with life, everything is Useless, I always feel useless.

I am afraid in this world. Keep this in mind. I do not want to live anymore. A suicidal depression. When they ask why she is so sad, she says I'm tired. I want to hide in a corner. I'm crying for myself, of course, I'm hopeless, why do I bother you? After stimulation, within 90 seconds, the depression disappears. The patient, very bravely or generously, agreed to do a double-blind test after that, where Blanche encouraged. the upper structure that I had aimed at or in the reticulated structure that I had accidentally hit and without the patient knowing where I was stimulating and every time I stimulated in the reticulated nucleus she fell into this deep despair, so this is a second Line of Evidence: You can actually stimulate intense emotions by stimulating those deep brainstem structures.

Here is a third line of evidence. Functional images. Images of pets. In this case, these are normal subjects with intense emotional states. They feel intensely sad, angry, happy, or fearful. shows in which part of the brain the activity that generates this mental state is located and in all these cases it is in the brain stem sadness anger happiness fear look at what happens in the cortex almost nothing, so it is also absolutely clear with this method that the affects They are generated in the brain stem. A final line of evidence is psychopharmacology. Psychiatrists modify the neuromodulatory chemicals that originate in these same brainstem nuclei, so antidepressants increase serotonin, which is obtained in the reef nuclei of the reticular activating system.

Antipsychotics. block dopamine that originates in the ventral tegmental area of ​​the reticular activating system, some anxiolytics block norepinephrine that originates in the locus ceruleus complex of the reticular activating system if all this system did was wake you up or produce some kind of a kind of background level of consciousness, which is the standard view of what this part of the brain is doing and that's why when you suffer an injury that goes into a coma, anesthetists might be interested in these brain structures and these and these brain chemicals, but not feelings Psychiatrists are medical psychiatrists who treat emotional disorders.

Clearly, these neuromodulatory modulators coming from the reticular activating system have something fundamental to do with feelings, so let me summarize, I'll tell you about another one of these. neuromodulators in a few minutes if I get that far, but let me summarize what I'm saying, what I'm saying is that the evidence is very strong that the

source

of consciousness remember the subtitle of my book is this spring hidden deep in the trunk brain reticular or structures that are a prerequisite for consciousness to occur. Think of the forebrain or the cortex as a kind of television set and think of this as the power source and standard vision is, of course, you know.

Consciousness happens in the cortex like streaming a TV show happens on the TV, it has to have a power source, it has to be plugged into the wall, but that doesn't mean the source of the TV is the power source. But as you've just seen, if you play with its power supply, change the program, change the actual content of the television, it's not just a power supply, it's literally the source of consciousness and because it's a prerequisite for these cortical forms of consciousness, the cortex is not conscious unless awakened by the brainstem and because, as I have shown you, the brainstem does not generate an energy source but rather consciousness with a content and a particular quality, a particular sensation, something particular, which is a similarity that signifies. the fundamental elementary basic form of consciousness is feeling and feeling is a prerequisite for all other forms of consciousness sigmund freud, the discoverer of the unconscious, even freud, who was the person who taught us that most of our cognition is unconscious, which we rediscovered 100 years later in cognitive science that most of our cognition is unconscious even he said that surely it is of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it that it should be known by consciousness therefore the The possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded to the extent that emotions, feelings and affections are now related.

I have emphasized the word feelings because the words affection and emotion mean different things to different people. Some people claim that you can have unconscious emotions. They don't agree with Freud, so I want to be clear. that I'm talking about this feeling, you can't have a feeling that you don't feel and this is not just a linguistic point, you know, since I just showed you the mechanisms of the brain stem that generate raw feelings, generate consciousness itself, but I say again , what I call feeling cannot be anything other than feeling, if you don't feel it, it is not a feeling and what I am saying therefore is that, unlike the cortex, whose processes are the processing of information. not intrinsically conscious, shouldn't we look at the brainstem? whose processes are intrinsically conscious, in fact, they are the source of all consciousness, if we want to understand the function of consciousness, then surely we need to understand the function of feeling.

David Chalmers once again says, "This is not to say that experience doesn't have a function, maybe it ends up playing an important cognitive role, etc., and he ends by saying that there is no cognitive function such that we can say in advance that explanation of that". The feature will automatically explain the experience. Here you can see a reiteration of what I told you before, but keep in mindNote that it is the word cognitive. If you change the word cognitive to affective, does it do it? I mean, would I ever have said this? There is no affective function such that we can say in advance that the explanation of that function will automatically explain the experience.

I'm saying upfront that an explanation of the function of feeling will automatically explain why it feels like something because that's the function of feeling, I hope you know. I can see why this is an important red thread in the plot of my book. If we want to understand consciousness, we should focus on its most basic form, the form that is intrinsically conscious, that is, feeling, because feeling must be felt, unlike vision, unlike vision. Hearing, unlike memory, unlike all forms of cognition, are for the most part unconscious, but feelings are always conscious and are a prerequisite for higher forms of consciousness, so if we understand the function of feeling, then we understand the function of consciousness, that is where You should look, I repeat, there is a good chance that if you can explain the function of feeling then you will know why you feel it, so what is the function of feeling?

Well, it's an extended form of homeostasis, like many of you. Maybe you know that it is the basic mechanism that keeps us alive, living organisms unlike inorganic matter, don't they dissipate? They do not know. If the ambient temperature is 10 degrees then we become 10 degrees ourselves if we did we would die so we cannot dissipate we cannot become equal to our environment we cannot afford to obey the second law of thermodynamics which states that in any natural process entropy will always increase homeostasis resists entropy we say no, I can't match, I have to maintain a particular temperature range, I have to stay between 36 and a half and 37.5 degrees Celsius and if I deviate from that it's a problem , it is a job demand and I have to do a job to get it. back to the temperature range that is viable for life and I talk about temperature range here, this applies to a wide range of physiological parameters, so you need to know the glucose levels in the blood, the oxygen levels in the blood and the hydration levels, sodium levels, etc., that it should have. stay inside otherwise you die and you notice the word prediction here there are algorithms built into our brains that say you know if you're getting too hot that's the problem so you have to do something and what you have to do with the algorithm says, well , a sweat that will cool you, a pants that will cool you, that is the work you have to do to get back to your viable range, that is how homeostasis works and I said that feeling is an extended form of homeostasis and that extended form is that when you deviate from your expected states from your viable states you feel bad, the value system that underpins all life is that it is bad to die and good to survive, so if you are moving in the direction of death, uh of a state physiological that is incompatible with life feels bad and that is the function of displeasure is the meaning of unpleasant feelings means this is bad for me and, conversely, doing the work that brings you back to your viable state it feels pleasurable and that's how you know you're going in the right direction.

Why is this important? I told you that here you have to have predictions, algorithms built into the system that tell the system what to do. You know, demand for work. I know what I have to do, I have to paint, go sweat, that is the work that brings me back to the required temperature range, but the enormous adaptive advantage that feeling provides is that if you are in a situation for which you do not have a default temperature. prediction for which there is no phenotypic algorithm built into your brain, then the feeling tells you here and now whether you are going in the right or wrong direction, let me give you an example.

Being in respiratory control is an automatic process that you don't need to be aware of your need for oxygen to breathe, it just happens automatically, but if you're in a burning building and carbon dioxide is filling the air and then all of a sudden, respiratory control becomes conscious and you feel this work demand in the form of an extremely unpleasant mental state called shortness of breath or suffocation alarm. You are now in a situation that you have never been in before and that you cannot predict. you've never been in the burning building let alone this particular one and you can't predict what to do so that's the state of uncertainty without predetermined predictions and the way you solve that problem is by feeling your so if I go this way and my shortness of breath gets worse, that's bad, it feels bad, that means it's bad if I go the other way and my shortness of breath reduces, that's good, that means I should go that way so that oxygenation in the air it feels like there is no predetermined solution to this particular problem, you feel your way through it, so the feeling tells you how you are doing within this basic biological framework of values, a scale of values, which is that it's good to survive and It's bad to die and you feel which increases and decreases your chances, your probabilistic chances of surviving by feeling the feelings, which allows you to make decisions and this too, I can't emphasize enough.

Options must be based on a value system. Something has to be better. and something has to be worse, otherwise you have no basis for making a decision and feelings provide the value system that allows choice in novel and unpredictable situations, so you decide which path to take based on how it makes you feel. good and what you feel bad, without any cognitive knowledge. knowledge in that you know what drives cognition and you feel your way to your cognition so that what you're perceiving and what you're thinking about has a feeling-driven color that determines the choices you make, that's the uh function of the feeling, that is what the feeling adds to the basic automated homeostasis.

Now I have just identified one of the two most essential properties of affect, which is valence, it feels good or it feels bad, but I must add that each also has a categorical quality. affection feels so, hunger for air feels different from drowsiness, feels different from the need to urinate, feels different from fear, feels different from separation anxiety, yes feels different from thirst, each one of these has a flavor, a categorical quality of its own because you need to know what. the need is not being met or is not being met, so the color coding or the flavor of the qualification of these different affective needs, um, is why consciousness has quality, so consciousness in its basic form It is inherently evaluative and it is inherently qualitative and it does something that it does.

It does, it allows you to survive in unforeseen situations, which is a huge adaptive advantage over creatures that don't have this ability, so come on, I realize I really have to finish earlier than I would have liked, but here we go. arriving. The fact of the matter is that this is the function of feeling, so remember the question I was asking why and how there is something that is like being an organism something that is like a strange organism well, the feeling of affection explains why it is something because it has to feel like something, the feeling, the quality and the category of it is its very essence.

What it does is bring to the consciousness of the organism how the organism is performing in terms of its literal ex literally potential. exist to continue to exist its most basic design principle, the design principle that embodies homeostasis and this extended form of homeostasis that brings to the level of consciousness by the organism its state while navigating uncertain environments is the function of consciousness in its more basic way and going back to Chalmers' claim that if you explain function you don't explain why it feels like something I'm saying doesn't apply in the case of affect and that affect is generated in the brainstem, which is The Source of All Consciousness All consciousness is contingent or dependent on brainstem consciousness.

Now I'm going to end here, so this time for the questions I just want to let you know that in my book I will continue to build on the work I did with Carl. I hasten to explain how this mechanism works mechanistically. Homeostasis is not complicated, it can be reduced to laws and if affective feeling is an extended form of homeostasis, it can also be reduced to laws and these laws are explained in the book and Explain how feeling governs, uh, uh, how it works voluntary action and learning from experience in the brain. I was going to tell you about this last case, but I don't have time, so I'll skim and tell you to read my book.

Please, this is a complicated topic, I cannot, I cannot begin to do it justice, in a short talk like this, so why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? Why not all this processing of information continues in the darkness free of any inner feelings, I hope you can see why I believe that when it comes to feelings, they cannot continue in the darkness, they cannot continue without any inner feelings, they are very functional. A very causal contribution within the physical economy, the bodily economy of the living organism, is feeling, and, and, and feeling is what has the functional causal consequences that Chalmers felt was so lacking when it comes to. to perception and cognition, although he did not realize that his argument applied only to perception and cognition.

Sorry, I had to rush at the end and I want to remind you for that reason that I said only at the beginning. I was going to give you a clue, please read my book The Hidden Spring published today in Great Britain and in a couple of weeks in the United States. Thank you so much. I look forward to your questions.