Patrick House is a neuroscientist and writer. His research focused on the neuroscience of free will and  in particular how mind-control parasites altered a rat’s behaviour.

We once had a long chat on the rainy streets of Glasgow. This chat – which I may not fully recall – involved speaking on what consciousness is, and touched on his work on mind-control bugs.

He’s written a collection of essays: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness on what we really don’t understand about consciousness.

“Consider different translations of a poem: Each has something relevant to say, but none can entirely capture the essence. House repeatedly returns to a case in which a woman was undergoing brain surgery to address epilepsy. At one point, the surgeons touched a part of the brain that made her laugh. Did this indicate that emotional responses are simply an aspect of the physical matter inside our skulls?” (Short Kirkus Review)

We had a long chat on this. I asked him:

About dreaming in colour 

Whether lucid dreaming is real?

What he meant by: "If I were asked to create, from scratch and under duress, a universal mechanism for passing consciousness from parent to child, I would probably come up with something a bit like grafting a plant." ?

Memory in childhood

What he finds the most terrifying result in neuroscience

What translating poetry has in common with understanding consciousness 

Whether animals have consciousness 

What he thinks of AI and why he no longer plays Go

Patrick asks me if I would write a play only for robots.

We end on Patrick’s advice:

“My suggestion is to have phenomenological date night with whoever you're interested in the world and ask what their dreams are really like and if it's in images or what inside of their head is really like and see if you get anything, see if you solve any conflict.”

It was lovely long form chat about consciousness and the mind.

Listen below (or wherever you listen to pods) or on video (above or on YouTube) and the transcript is below.

PODCAST INFO

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• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Transcript (only lightly edited)

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Patrick House. In alphabetical order, Patrick is a neuroscientist and a writer. His recent book is Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness, which is a fascinating look at what we don't understand and may never understand about consciousness. So, Patrick, welcome.

Patrick

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Ben (00:26):

We met in Glasgow a while ago. I recall a stimulating conversation on a windy night on a street corner, and I recall our chat with happiness and satisfaction although I do not remember the exact details. What do you think that it means that I recall our chat with happiness and it was a kind of experience, but I don't really remember any of it?

Patrick (00:51):

I love that. Just straight to meta right away, I love it. So one thing it means is-- I mean, there's this truism, right? There's this kind of aphorism that people often remember the way someone makes you feel, but not what they've said. So you're kind of asking like, "What is that about? Is there really physiology there? Is there a real true reason for that?" I think there's this funny thing where there's a different way in which memories get tagged. And so when I say tagged, I mean like-- A very simple way you might think about this would be like-- I don't know if you have a Mac, I think Windows allows you to do this too. You can kind of color code your folders.

You can add little like silly arbitrary colored labels to things; post-it notes are good at this. Anyone who's read a book, you see these academic books and they're full of these tiny, thin little-- especially if they're in law school or medical school they're studying these-- tiny, thin little color coded tabs. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say memory scientists and memory neuroscientists are desperately trying to figure out for at least the last a hundred years how the brain figures out how to color code, how to code its experiences between lived experiences. So let's just think about, for example, the kinds of categories of things that you might wish to remember. 

So for example, you might wish to remember something that happened to you. You might wish to remember a story that was told to you by a friend, but it was something that happened to that friend. You might wish to remember a piece of fiction you saw in a movie theater. You might wish to remember a piece of non-fiction, a documentary you saw in a movie theater. You might wish to remember a dream. You might wish to remember the difference between the dream and you recalling the dream. You might wish to remember when you tell a story about something that happened to you in your childhood and your sister or brother then says, "Actually, that happened to me." And then you have to update your memory to be like, "Oh, shoot, did I misremember that autobiographical moment and did it actually happen to someone else?"

Paul Bloom; he's a researcher, cognitive scientist at Yale. He told me the story once-- I was interviewing him-- about how he went back to his high school reunion and he told a story about jumping off of a cliff to one of his friends that he hadn't seen in 40 years. And the friend just kind of stood there silently shocked and responded, "That happened to me. That didn't happen to you." But he credited it to his friend being such a good storyteller that when you're listening to him telling the story about jumping off a cliff it's like you're there. So with respect to our moment in Glasgow, it's this funny thing where some part of your brain is remembering everything that has ever happened to you. When I say that-- so I actually say that in the book. And what I mean by that is even if you're anesthetized, your body is still experiencing things and there's a kind of physical memory that comes along with that. Every single day that you wake up and you're slightly better at a thing you did yesterday, that means that your brain has physically reconfigured itself somehow to be better at the thing.

That doesn't mean it necessarily can remember the thing better. It means that the motor skill, the tactile skill-- Let's say it's just like making bread at home. You're better at it as you do it, as you experience it more and more. And you might not be able to say exactly why. You cannot necessarily replay in your head every single time you try to make bread and every single time you succeeded or fail. But still you get better at it. So what that means is that the brain is really, truly paying attention to everything that has ever happened to you. It comes up with this coded and abstract version of learning and experience, but fundamentally, nothing is going to waste; no experience is going to waste. So I would say in actual direct answer to your question, it didn't really matter the exact content that you can't recall it word for word. I can't recall it either word for word.

But there's a lot going on in any different social interaction. And really what you were probably doing is thinking of some sort of social judgment of like, "Do I...?" We were meeting hundreds of people at this conference and it's like, "Do I or do I not wish to remember this moment as positive or negative and therefore just more likely to engage in conversation with that person in the future?” So it's still social learning in a way. You might not have invited me onto this to share this moment with you if you didn't remember like, "Gosh, I remember something interesting from that moment, but I don't remember what."

Ben (06:07):

Yeah, exactly.

Patrick (06:08):

And here we are.

Ben (06:09):

And here we are. Actually, and that recalls me that because I'm pretty sure my parents give me anecdotes of-- and all parents do this-- of when you were two or three or one or four or five. And I think that I create the memory based on their storytelling and not my actual recall of when I was two, three, four, or five because I actually think particularly at two, your recall is pretty fuzzy. But who knows? Maybe I had that recall and the stories that I hear later sharpen out that part of the brain or that part of recall. So I think that's really true.

Patrick (06:48):

Just to that, there's a lovely study, ironically-- I hope I remember it correctly. But there's a lovely study about memory in kids where I think like three to five, they had language, but they still were learning some rules. Three to six years old range where they had two sets go to the zoo with the parents. In one set they had instructed their parents to always talk and always describe, "Say that that's a leopard. Leopard comes from Africa, comes from here." So the parent was always talking. Then they had the other group, the parent was explicitly told to say nothing and the kid had to keep talking. The kid had to be like, "Leopard, yellow, spot," whatever language it was able to. The parents just sat there and let the kid tell the story.

Then they weeks later asked the kids in a laboratory room, "What was the zoo like? Tell me about the zoo. Remember you went to the zoo a couple weeks ago. Tell me how that was." And the kids where their parents told the story just kind of retold the parents' version of the story. They kind of remembered what was said and just retold it. There was a lot of similarity between their retelling and what the parents had said versus the kids that were allowed to do the speaking freeform. They told it from their point of view and it was from their perspective rather than from the parents. So there's a very interesting way in which storytelling... Storytelling is like the heartbeat of culture, but there's a sense in which it's impinging on your own experience. If someone else is trying to tell you the story of theirs as you're trying to experience something, there's a sense in which it overwrites your own abilities.

Ben (08:42)

Yeah. That's really fascinating. We're definitely going to come to storytelling and dreams. But riffing on our first question then, it does lead me to think, "What does it mean to be if I say that I am very sad or I am happy?" I just wonder how are we interpreting that and how do I think like, "Oh, I was happy about that" conversation. What does that really mean, do you think?

Patrick (09:10):

So it's this funny thing in science sometimes like... The single document that has set science the most behind I think is the thesaurus. A bunch of people thought I was going to say something different. It's the thesaurus, and the reason is because it tricks us into thinking things are opposites. It tricks us into thinking that sad is the opposite of happy, that hate is the opposite of love. But it's not. So there's this great study on an fMRI study where they were brain imaging people on hate; they wanted the emotion of hate. And the question is, "How do you get someone to feel hate wrapped in a sarcophagus fMRI tube? How do you induce hate in them?" And so they had to ask them before the study, "Who are some people that you hate?" Like 90% of the people would choose an ex-lover or a former spouse or a bully who turned on them or something where... What it turns out to be is actually someone they used to love. That's how to create some of the strongest kinds of hate that we have. So this idea that they're the opposite is not quite as clean and simple.

The idea that happy and sad are in opposition or in direct opposition is also not quite as simple. The thesaurus has ruined things. So for example-- I don't give too much credit to etymology. But the etymology for sad is sat, which is the same root as satisfied. So to be sad is to be satisfied, right? It's this interesting twist I think on the concept which is like you'd think of satisfaction as the ultimate form of joy. But actually for some kind of person, for someone who maybe likes stimulation or excitement or likes new things, to be satisfied-- Purgatory is supposed to be the worst form of hell. Or like in Dante's little setup, I think he at one point describes purgatory as the worst kind of punishment. It's not even the ninth level or whatever when you're frozen solid. So I think of the little people wandering around purgatory as immensely satisfied, but they have nothing to do and it's the worst.

Even in my personal research, my PhD research, we had to deal with it. It was all on this kind of, "How to make mice love cats or how to make mice attracted to cats?" It was this whole mind control parasite thing. We could go into it if you'd like. But basically, one of the things we had to truly confront was, "Is attraction to something the opposite of being afraid in a mouse?" So when we see a mouse run towards a cat, is it running towards the cat because it now has gained an attraction to the cat, it has now gained an affiliation, it has now gained a desire to go that way? Or if you eliminate fear, is there just a basic sense in which you explore? We can't ask the mouse and so we spent years on this philosophical question like, "What is the opposite of fear? If you eliminate fear, what do you get?" And so this idea that you have a pleasant memory of that time on the Scottish corner, it could just be that you felt comfortable or like there was no... It was a lovely weekend. We were meeting lots of people and maybe you just had a cessation of all unpleasant feelings and your memory is kind of warmingly remembering it.

Ben (13:21):

I can definitely see that. And this idea of being satisfied is the hell for a headiness. Then also the absence of things; negative art, liminal, all of that type of thing. You could see that the kind of trite aphorism of bravery not necessarily being the absence of fear. What are these things when you take away the negative, what do you get? But I do recall something about our conversation which you alluded to because you spoke to me on cats and more specifically about how parasites can change the behavior of host rats. And this was specifically on that is actually relatively rare in mammals. You see it in other things. That these rats suddenly who are generally fearful of cats, or let's say they seem to avoid cats or avoid cat odors now run toward cat odors because of that. I guess that's the kind of a root cause of where you explore a lot of these consciousness and things like that. So I don't know. What's most misunderstood about rats and cats and odor and mind control and how does that lead us into consciousness?

Patrick (14:28):

It's funny because I now imagine myself hearing... So back to the first question, I'm now reliving this thing that I lived and I was supposed to have experience but kind of through your eyes of it. And now I'm imagining myself as some sort of Pied Piper. But instead of with trails of rats behind me, I just have trails of stories about my PhD which was about rats behind me. I'm still singing the same kind of egoistic song though. So I did my PhD in neuroscience at Stanford University under Robert Sapolsky. The thing we were just kind of interested in is we had heard rumors-- Well, there were scientific papers published on this. But when I say rumors, what I mean very specifically is like as a scientist, you wait until something is confirmed at multiple labs across the world and there's lots and lots and lots of pieces of evidence all pointing at something like, "Oh, you know what? That might be a fact."

So there had been this preliminary evidence; that's the scientific definition of rumor. There's preliminary evidence and very strong evidence-- There's a wonderful scientist out of Oxford, John Webster; had discovered this fascinating phenomenon, which is that rats that were infected with this parasite seemed to be more likely to be in areas that had cats and cat urine and the smell of cats. So just straight up as a biologist even if you knew nothing else, you would find this interesting because trying to overwrite a very natural rodent fear. So rodents are extraordinarily afraid of cats. They have an innate fear of the smell of a cat, of any feline urine and any feline presence. They've been having this kind of predation prey war for hundreds of thousands; millions of years.

So a mouse or rat born generations removed from ever experiencing a cat will still be afraid of a cat and they'll run away. So just as a straight scientist, the thing you're interested in there is, "What is the mechanism by which they overwrite that fear behavior in the brain?" Because there are parasites in the brain. So that's an interesting clue that maybe it's doing something to the areas it kind of infects. The reason that it's interesting is because we humans, we do good work, but we don't really know what happens when someone is afraid. We don't really know what happens in the brain when someone is happy or sad or afraid or not afraid or love or hates someone. We have a bunch of metaphors and guesses and some good data, but we don't really know.

And this idea that this tiny single cell maybe knew more than we did. Maybe this tiny little parasite was able to go to the right spot and flip the right switch. That's fascinating because then we can learn more about fear and we can learn more about why a vast majority of anxiety and PTSD and various human ailments and conditions can be attributed to chronic fear. And if maybe this parasite is good at lessening the fear in rodents, maybe it can give us a clue into a trigger in a human. Then we can dial that down from 11 to like a six. So anyway, it also turned out that the parasite can only sexually reproduce in cats. It's lifecycle for some arbitrary evolutionary reason can only complete itself; sexually reproduce in a cat.

So the really compelling thing that John Webster kind of threw out into the world was, "Hey guys, hey everybody, look at this. What if this parasite is intentionally manipulating the mouse and the rat so that it's more likely to get eaten by a cat so that the parasite can finish its life cycle?" And now this is kind of a thing that people have heard of. HBO's Prestige Sunday night drama, The Last of Us is about mind control parasites. This has been a trope in science fiction for a very long time. Resident Evil; the video game and movie. The premise of that is some mind control gone awry. So my PhD work was in fact kind of giving it to mice and testing where it went in their brain and the first possible mechanistic explanation for how this parasite is manipulating this behavior.

It turned out to be a really cool little-- Again, I'm going to use 'rumor' also to describe my own work because as a scientist you want to be good like that; consistent. So there's a rumor. So there's preliminary evidence that-- Basically I found that if you take a male rat and expose it to a female rat you can trace what that pathway looks like in the brain. We're speaking a little bit after Valentine's Day. It's in the air, right? It's like a love circuit. Like it's literally if there's an estrous female rat (so that rat is in heat)-- we don't know that word in human land because for some reason, we are the only mammals that do not have seasonal mating. It's fascinating.

There's a few domesticated animals where it's been domesticated out of them. But if someone's trying to ask any question about what makes humans special, one of the weirdest things is that we do not have seasonal mating. We're the only mammal that does not. Anyway, there's this thing you do if you expose a male rat to a female rat and you can look in their brain, then you can expose a male rat to a cat and look in their brain. Both of these behaviors basically start with a smell and then they end with an extraordinarily rapid behavior. The preliminary evidence that we found is that when you look at an infected animal, infected rodent that has this parasite, it looks like the other pathway is also active. The one that's supposed to be for the female, the one that's supposed to be loved, the one that's supposed to be for sexual attraction appears to be more active in the infected animals. 

So the idea is maybe that's why we're seeing that behavior. The parasite gets into the brain, mucks with things, and then the rat or mouse smells a cat. But really it's tricked into thinking that maybe there's a female rat on the other side of the cat. That really got me started on questioning like, "What is...?" To me, this is the heart of free will. This is the heart of preferences. Why do you like the things that you say you like? Can you be tricked into liking things that you're not supposed to like? These little rats are being tricked into liking this cat which then eats it. 

I ended up from that kind of getting really interested in fraudulent emotions or fraudulent ways of thinking about things because I feel like the rodent has been tricked. It's attraction to the cat is a fraud. I kind of took that into a bunch of different things. I think the concept of elegance is a fraud. I think are the stories we tell ourselves about why we do things, it's mostly a fraud. So I wrote this book, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness specifically because I found a moment that I think someone was behaving fraudulently and I wanted to focus on that moment in the same way I would focus on the moment of a mouse behaving fraudulently at one moment.

Ben (22:28):

I'm glad you say that because that is my reading of your work as well. I would express it as the parasite is tricking the rat somehow or tricking the mind of the rat or maybe tricking the brain of the rat. It seems to be that humans, our mind tricks ourselves. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that our brain tricks our mind or something like that over and over again. Although I think in some respects, I think fraudulent is right, although sometimes I think of it as more of a myth. So we create our own myths and that's why it's stories. Because yes, sometimes it is fraudulent, but sometimes it's kind of almost mythical. It's neutral. You could take it for ill or you could take it for bad because we've just created this myth. And some of these myths are very human. Like I've already said in some ways, law is a myth, money is a myth, religion is a myth in the sense that they are only powerful because other humans believe them to be powerful. They're like systematic mind tricks in that sense. Not to do them down because they're kind of our reality of that.

Is that a kind of incorrect interpretation of how some of your chapters are? They're all sort of different, but they all seem to be various versions of tricks. My overall conclusion was that you are arguing in some sense that we really don't understand how consciousness is, how it's come about or what it might be. And further, I think you made that argument and the analogy I guess is with the translation, the Elliot Weinberger piece, that the limits of language or the limits of our own seeing insider might mean that we never know, or that it's impossible or that at least the limits of language are there. So passing that comment out is, is it all about mind tricking ourselves and is that the right message to take about how we may not understand what consciousness is?

Patrick (24:25):

Yeah, I couldn't be too direct in the way that I kind of framed or introduced the book. But fundamentally, I'm like a mind control parasite guy. I think I say that in the book but I don't really say what I mean by that. What I do mean by that is that I ask one level deeper or I'm interested in one level deeper than what the brain purports to tell you is true or the brain purports to tell you is happening because there's a lot of evidence that the mind is tricking us. It might actually be in order to create consciousness, consciousness itself must be fraudulent, must be a simplified version of what's going on. You might not be able to ever separate them. So maybe this is a good time to actually tell the story a little bit because people might be like, "What the hell is... What does Elliot Weinberger have to do with anything? What kind of brain is lying to itself and what are we talking about here?"

So I actually got asked to give... In San Francisco there's a California Academy of Sciences. I'm glad I gave that whole preamble about cats and rats because it's relevant now. One year on Halloween they were like, "Hey, you studied this wild wacky Halloween thing, scary zombie thing. Would you give a talk on Halloween about monsters? That's the theme, monsters." And I was like, "Absolutely. Sure, I'll give that talk." And then I said, "But can I talk about whatever I want?" And they said yes. I made a switch to them. I did not talk about mind control parasites at all. I talked about the study that this paper, that my book is about because I find it the most terrifying paper in all of neuroscience. This whole zombie mind control stuff is nothing.

The most terrifying result in all of neuroscience is the paper, which is the seed root of the book that I wrote. So it's in the mid-nineties there's this teenage girl-- I call her Anna in the book. But it's like that initial thing. She's AK in the paper, but I give her a name and she has epilepsy. So she goes into the hospital-- this took place in Los Angeles. She went into the hospital and the neurosurgeon was like, "Okay, this is great, but we can't find the spot of your epilepsy. We don't know where it starts." It was bad enough that no drugs were working, nothing was working and she needed to fix it because it was getting very dangerous. So the surgeon said, "Look, the best thing we can do here is we drill holes in your skull and we implant electrodes. Those electrodes are kind of like seismic monitoring stations so they will be able to detect wherever the seizure happens because you have 19 of them or 12 or whatever. We'll be able to know instantly if you have a seizure while we are watching. We'll be able to know exactly where it started from and then we can go in and we can take out--" literally they would have to take out a piece of her brain. "Take out the tiniest piece of the brain possible, a few neurons maybe, probably a few hundred thousand. But the rounding error. And then the seizures will stop. If you take out the source, the seizures will stop."

So the thing is when you do this, you can implant the electrodes into the spots in the brain and then the person-- You can't tell them when to have a seizure. It's a random event-- or it's not random, but it's a hard to predict event. So you just kind of have to sit there waiting and it sometimes takes weeks. So they're laying in the hospital bed and they're awake and they're asleep and they're awake and they're asleep. There's no pain because the brain doesn't feel pain. So they're just sitting there talking. The surgeon personally told me that whenever this happens, he sees this as like neurosciences Large Hadron Collider. Every patient he gets where he's able to have them awake and conscious with these electrodes in their brain, and you're just waiting and listening. But you can say, "Hey, while we're here, do you mind if we do a few very easy experiments on you?” These electrodes can both listen and they can also stimulate.

So stimulate is just they shoot out electrical current and they can actually stimulate the part of the brain that they're in. So this girl had an electrode in the part of her brain called the supplementary motor area. It's just kind of a thing that induces a bunch of motion, movements. They pushed the little button-- I actually watched the video. He's pushing a button and kind of turning a dial like this is spinal tap. He turns it a little bit and she just kind of has this feeling of mirth or a little bit of smiley. He turns it up and up and up and up and eventually he turns it up to 11, figuratively. And she cannot stop laughing. She's almost convulsing. She can't speak. She's just laughing hysterically. Everyone in the room starts to laugh. You as you're watching the video, you can't help but laugh. She's not just laughing. It's like she's heard the funniest thing she's ever heard in her entire life. Her whole body is connected to like a braided hair of these electrodes coming out of her head. It's connected to multimillion dollar scary machines. She's just throwing herself around the bed and she can't stop laughing.

So the surgeons are like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's too much. Hold on. Let's dial it back down." And they start to do an experiment on this where they actually don't tell her when they turn the dial on and they have her do various things. They have her read some books, they have her look at pictures, they tell her some stories, they have her tell stories, and then they'll secretly turn the dial on and off. It turns out that when she doesn't know that they've turned the dial on and she laughed, they then ask her, "Why did you laugh?" This is the question. I don't know with inflation what it is, but this is the 64,000 dollar question. "Why did she laugh?" This is like with the mouse and the rats. Like, "Why are you attracted to the cat? Why do you do anything you do? Why are you sad? Why are you happy? Why, why, why?” Asked her why, she laugh and she says, "Oh, because the picture of the horse is funny. Oh, because I'm holding a fork. Aren't forks funny? Because the doctor just told a joke. Oh, because you guys are just so funny standing there;" all these different reasons.

Her brain immediately came up with a reason. Her brain never once said, "I don't know." Even though it was electrically stimulated by the surgeon, her brain never once said, "Actually that doesn't make sense that I laughed. According to the deterministic laws of the universe, I should not have laughed there because nothing in front of me is funny." She laughed and then came up with the explanation after the fact. And each one was kind of plausible. The doctor did not tell a joke. They were not funny. The fork is not funny. But there were things in the room. They were reasonable answers. They weren't off the wall answers. So I find that that's the fraud; that's fraudulent. You can argue it, but fundamentally that's a fraudulent explanation. That's called confabulation in the psychological literature.

The part that I found so interesting-- So first there's that which is the mind control part. I don't care if it's a tiny parasite or an electrode. If someone is behaving in a way that is abnormal and they don't understand why and they lie about why or confabulate why, that's fascinating to me because that's the heart of will. But then there's something really, really interesting that happens. This is almost an extremely long answer to your very first question because alongside the laughter, she also said she felt joy and mirth. It wasn't just the laughter, it was the subjective emotion of joy came with it. So that means a few really deep things because it means that you can have a fraudulent laugh but maybe still get the benefits from it. Or the laughing itself is the subjective experience, is the emotion perhaps. We don't know. This is more raising questions than answering them. And so to me, that single study is everything. I agree with the surgeon; that is neuroscience’s Large Hadron Collider. That's our Hindi boson moment. That's our tiny little fleeting blip of anomaly that we can infer the beginning of the universe probably. We don't get many of those. In neuroscience, stuff is hard. We don't even know what anything is. We've never cured a single anything.

That's kind of why I got interested. And so the book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness is telling that moment, telling that story nineteen different ways as if you believed in a current modern theory. The reason Elliot Weinberger came up is because the book, the title-- and the concept I stole. That's fine, we can do that. I stole the idea from Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which is a book by Elliot Weinberger, edited by Elliot Weinberger, which are just nineteen different translations of a single four line poem; Deer Park by the Chinese poet, Wang Wei. I've loved that book. Someone gave it to me as an undergraduate and I just have loved that book. It's short, it' just 19 different poems. That's it; the translation. You just see so much beauty in the fact that none of the translations say the same thing. The Chinese character, the written characters, the written diagrams have different-- You can have sometimes the opposite meaning with the same one. And so different poets have taken that to be different things. I just think there's no better way to describe the difficulty of studying consciousness than that tiny book of poems, The Nineteen Ways of looking at Wang Wei because it's like you think you can understand your mind maybe as best you can, but you're going to have trouble understanding someone else's mind. It's a translation problem.

Ben (35:15):

Yeah. I have so much to say about that. That's utterly fascinating. So I read that book of poems also when I was 20 and it was very influential in me in the sense that multiple meanings-- you have an ideogram which means both blue and green or can mean both happy and sad at the same time. So impossible to actually translate in language, but yes. And then that leads me to three other on the fly observations or thoughts. So maybe you can comment on that. There is a practice within acting or theater work which I do which comes down to two phrases. One is inside out acting and outside in acting. So inside out is these actors who do these character things then they think, "Oh, how he's going to think about when he goes to buy a milk. And if I think like this, this is what you're going to do." So this characterization, there's a certain class of actor who does that from character and then they create these great characters from thinking about these questions.

Then there's a whole school of things which is outside in though, which is if I dress like this type of person I think should be. So if I dress like a clown, I become a clown. And actually there's a whole school of thought where you see that and you see it and from the outside, it is exactly like that. You can actually get to brilliant characterization from both sets of techniques to this end thing which the audience or person can see. I thought there was a lot of analogies on that when I was hearing what you say, even in the creative process. It also led me to remember-- I probably misremember ironies of one neuroscience experiment. Maybe I was told this kind of like, "It's the neuroscientist guide to dating," which I don't really advise or suggest. But the experiment was really around the fact that if you went out on a date and you did something which was kind of moderately arousing or exciting like going on a fairground ride or something like that on your date, you would do it and then you would say, "These feelings that I felt or whatever I was thinking was because of the fairground ride." And because it was very close, you interpreted in that and you didn't necessarily really transfer it or think about it in terms of the person you were with.

But if you somehow managed to set up the meeting so that you had done something or either party had done something moderately arousing or exciting, so they were kind of in a more aroused brain state or more aroused physiological state which they kind of measured, but it was long enough that you kind of forgot or your brain didn't causally say, "Oh, it's because of the fairground ride which happened a little while ago." What seems to happen is that when you go on the date, you attribute your better state to use your word fraudulently to the other person and you're much more likely to have a happy and successful date and go on something. But it wasn't necessarily anything to do with the person. I can't remember how they controlled it and stuff. In your language, this is only preliminary evidence of something.

But the story told seemed quite convincing that you were misrepresenting or fraudulently or just associating these kind of states or brain states. And when the brain couldn't immediately link it to the probably causal physiological state, it linked it to, "Well the only other thing around here is this person. So it must be that I really like this person and therefore that is love." Therefore I thought it was the neuroscientist guide to love. It kind of seems like these are all good examples of what you write about in the book and the impossibility maybe of understanding inside someone else's mind. And then the impossibility or the way that we think of the world is maybe a purposeful fraud.

Patrick (39:07):

Yeah, I was imagining if I wrote the sequel, Another Neuroscientist Guide to Love and I would just say like, "Well it's just a mind control fraud. This isn't real." So to that point though there's-- I actually forgot. I was trying to think of the term. I think it's like Alsace-Lorraine. Is that a food dish? Is that a culinary dish?

Ben (39:34):

I think that's close to it. Yeah.

Patrick (39:36):

There's some phenomenon in psychology. This is like one-on-one Wikipedia entry. I just don't remember. Where basically a psychologist went out for dinner with his wife-- I'm kind of enjoying intentionally misremembering some of these things because I don't know if it was his wife, I have no idea. I'm just adding for the flourish-- Where a psychologist goes out and he goes to dinner and then the opera, and then he got food poisoning from the dinner. I think it was Alsace-Lorraine; I don't know what that is. But if that was the dish and then he gets sick and he realizes, what's so interesting is exactly to the heart of your question. Like, "Do we kind of randomly or fleetingly associate a feeling with anything that happens around it?" Or does the brain kind of parcel out, can it carve out different experiences and be like, "Well, one is more likely to cause the other, one is more likely to be associated."

So his profound observation was that he got nauseous and food poisoning and he did not attribute it to the opera. He could still go to opera, but he could never have Alsace-Lorraine, the meal again. And what was so interesting is that it actually makes more sense that the thing closer to it would have-- The opera was after dinner. Why did the opera not create the conditioning? So now this is no longer a rumor, this is no longer preliminary evidence. A huge body of work has established that nausea and food-based stimuli are more likely to be linked. So what you eat as mammals, we're much more likely to link a bad feeling to what you eat than a bad feeling to a random experience; than a person made you feel. So that you're a little more accurate in your learning about the world. The next time you don't want to eat that food. Next time you don't want to eat the poisoned apple on the tree.

Whereas social observations and social interactions kind of fit in a different category. So you might, for example, if you feel deep dread in anxiety or feel like you got picked on or something, you would not associate that with the food. You would remember that and associate that with the person you interacted with outside the opera or something like that. So our brain is not just a dumb association machine. We do have these kind of fascinating built in rules which we don't have access to. That's the thing. What you said earlier about law and economics and various different things is just kind of myths we're telling ourselves. We don't have the source code to our behavior. We don't know what all the rules are. We don't have our constitution. We don't have our amendments. If you were to describe a modern human, modern homo sapiens in terms of legal documents, our constitution was written 3.5 billion years ago by a single cell and we've just been amending it. It's just a series of amendments. But we still have that same goddamn founding document. There's still some originalists out there that insist we have all the problems that that single cell had.

Ben (43:03):

Certainly the problems that the rat has.

Patrick (43:05):

Yeah. We've inherited all of the legacy issues. Look at the side effects of any-- Walk into a pharmacy or Apothecary-- I'm in Europe, so Apothecary, and you just look at the list of side effects. That's your data, right? That's your data. That biology is messy is all hell. Everything we have has just a litany of side effects. There's no good clean way of interacting with a biological system because it's like-- Imagine a Lego set. Imagine if in 1960 Lego stopped making new pieces and there were just 20 pieces and everything you had to build from then on was just based on those 20 original pieces. That's kind of what we are. We're just the amino acid version of that.

People get astounded. They're like, "Oh my god! Did you know the stomach has serotonin receptors? So that must mean it can think or your gut has a brain." It's like, "No it doesn't.” It's just like there's a few Lego pieces and your big toe has neurons. It doesn't mean it's goddamn sentient; it's just a big toe. Then cockroaches have octopamine which is a very close analog to dopamine. They use it to spring their legs when they're jumping. That doesn't mean that they are addicted to slot machines like we are when we need our dopamine. I find a lot of the analogy can get twisted and the similarity that a lot of biological systems have, people give a lot of meaning and weight to that; like our stomach has serotonin just because our brain also has serotonin. But it's not that the stomach is interesting, it's that the brain is more like the stomach than the stomach is like the brain.

Ben (45:05):

Yeah. And like you said, the brain doesn't have pain receptors. Does that mean we don't actually feel pain? Not so. It's all of that. 

Patrick (45:18):

Comedy's all about timing. It'll be less relevant if I come back with this later. I get so annoyed when people talk about the gut being a thinking thing. They say, "Never trust your gut to do anything except dissolve something quickly." That's precisely what you should. It all happens. Everything that you've ever done and paid attention to-- Like gut feeling if you get into the elevator and someone's creeping you out, that's happening with your cerebellum which is in the back bottom part of your brain, above your spinal cord. It contains like 50 billion neurons. It's one of the most evolutionarily beautiful conserved mammalian structures. It's metabolically expensive. It's hugely interesting. It has kept track of everything that has ever happened to you and it gives you like a slight little warning sensation in your gut. That doesn't mean your gut is doing the thinking, it's your cerebellum. Trust your cerebellum. But it's less catchy to say trust your cerebellum.

Ben (46:14):

There you go. And I can tell you I am laughing because I believe that to be true and also because it's got good comic timing because it has come off another rift that we were talking about. But deconstructing it like that doesn't make it seem actually that funny, and it is. We're now laughing together without any little stimulating things. I have one experiment that I was going to run by you before because I do want to also think about time and sleep dreams and actually also AI and open AI and maybe poetry, if we get to it. But there was one kind of on the neuroscience thing. I'm not sure they can repeat it now, maybe they can. So it was more with monkeys. Long story short, they got monkeys addicted to a very hard drug. I think it was maybe heroin or cocaine. And they learned that if you press pedal lever number one, you got the cocaine and so they got addicted and this is pretty much all they could do.

But then they were also taught separately that lever number two will shut off access to lever number one. So they learned both of these things and then they ran the experiment. What ended up happening is that the monkeys would press lever number one because they were addicted to wanting the cocaine, but they would also press lever number two because they wanted to shut it off. To me, this kind of embodied-- and I'm being really intrigued by this result. And people have got different things. I think it has been replicated to some extent and now there's a little bit more ethical concerns because it was a little bit of time ago. But that there are different systems or these different buckets in the brain which sort of, I guess know or act differently in terms of how they learn and they remember. They are at odds with one another. What do you think of this?

Patrick (48:14):

So I'm not familiar with the study. Back to that point where I said the source is the least scientific document in the world. Why do you say they're opposite?

Ben (48:28):

Well, I guess they're not. Opposite is probably the wrong word. As in one seems to try and cancel out the other in that sense that they're opposite.

Patrick (48:37):

But it's still possible they're maximizing for some sort of joy or they're...

Ben (48:42):

Quite completely. Oh yeah. Well, I think welfare is ...

Patrick (48:44):

In combination they could be, yeah.

Ben (48:47):

Yeah. If you think about it in terms of welfare and trying to maybe more objective, this is what you'd want to do. This is where the analogy is because if you can do so, there's obvious-- Okay, I'm going to make up the story. But the story would be they realize that the cocaine is not good for them and they have another mechanism over the long term of shutting that off. But they're also trained there's a very difficult impulse to fight against. So you can't help but have one impulse, one learned mechanism. You could call it almost associative which is so strongly learned that it's a habit which is really hard to break, but they have something more instrumental or longer term or something other where they realize if they can shut off that mechanism, it will be really good for them.

So there's all of this thing about orbitofrontal or prefrontal context and long-term thinking. This is the part which if you blow it out, you find it's really hard to make those longer term thinking decisions or maybe more complex attention type thinking even though we have these shorter term, more associative and these other things. I was just thinking. It's like, "Well, the brain has learnt certain things which seem to be the nausea and food things and it's got these other mechanisms to try and think about some of these other aspects." But you could definitely. The story I think we weave is that actually we are trying to maximize long-term welfare and these are two mechanisms you can more broadly see. I think that is one of the explanations for it.

Patrick (50:15):

Well, I mean maybe the monkey is trying to write a book. While I was writing this book my levers were different. So I have this thing. I have this time safe at home and when I want to write, I set it usually for 12 or 24 hours depending on how much I can tell I want to hit lever number one which is the internet, which is my phone and the internet. I'll take it and I'll take my phone and I'll take the power cord to my internet router and I'll put them in a time safe for 12 or 24 hours and I'll print out all the things I want to read first. It was one of the most effective tools I had for actually getting a book fully written.

I would love to hope and believe that I could intrinsically just say, "Don't use your phone, don't check your text, don't go on the internet." But I can't. I need a structural hurdle-- and not just a hurdle. I need a structural wall. My behavior, if I had like a CCTV camera around that time safe I would sometimes pace it. I would pace it in circles waiting and I would think like, "All right, well, how strong is it really? I could probably break it if I dropped it from a really high..." You know how Eagles break turtle shells. They pick them up really high and drop them on rock. I'm like, "I could probably break this safe."

Somewhat annoyingly, the information for how to break the safe is probably on the internet. I couldn't find it. But what am I doing there? Fundamentally, what am I doing there? I'm pushing both levers. I'm creating the external structure to deny myself but also allowing myself the pleasure. I don't get rid of my phone. I allow it to be in my life and control other parts of my life. So to the point that I made about the trickiness of describing things as what appear to be simple opposites, is like I'm doing it because I'm still maximizing for something else. So what appears to be anti-lever one behavior is really just I want to enjoy lever one more in the future.

So I have this thing where I have smoked tobacco and cigarettes. Kind of started in grad school and occasionally, I will still smoke a cigarette. But I don't want to. I gave myself 100 more in my life. I only have a hundred more and I keep track of each one. I don't know when it'll happen and I think I have like 79 left. Each one, I enjoy now. Instead of thinking about it like a terrible thing, I've given myself a finite amount. So I've created the lever two structure and I've been kind of like, "I just want to slowly taper off over the course of my life and then once I get to zero, I'll never have another one." So to me it's kind of-- It's like I'm a pianist hitting both of the levers at the same time.

I'm like, "I want everything. I want both things. How dare you try to take my addiction away from me and how dare you try to take my lack of addiction away from me?” I'm trying desperately to maintain control as if I'm on a crashing plane and the flight control is the voice in my ear saying, "You can have a hundred more. That'll be fine." So addiction is hard. Addiction is a complicated, weird thing. I'm maximizing by virtue of retaining an intrinsic reward and requiring the-- or kind of creating the outside structure which hinders that; that's lever two. This is my interpretation. But I'm allowing myself to not neither be controlled by it, nor lose the joy that I do associate with it.

Ben (54:39):

Yeah. That resonates a lot with me. I switch off the Wi-Fi when I try and do writing as well. And yeah, addiction is complicated and we have all of those mechanisms. There's also when you get addicted-- I think I'll pivot away from this. But you can get addicted and have it resonate with place. So this is the interesting things where if you take lots of morphine-- So if you're end of life in a hospice and you're having to escalate the dose and then you change rooms, you can actually lower your dose because you build up tolerance or actually you can also have it the other way or sensitivity and it can be linked to place and time and feeling and emotion and things like that. 

So maybe the last one directly on consciousness although I suspect everything is connected, is you wrote-- I'm going to quote your own words at you now. "If I were asked to create from scratch an under duress, a universal mechanism for passing consciousness from parent to child, I would probably come up with something a bit like grafting a plant." I realize your whole book is sort of thinking about this. But I've been dwelling on that sentence quite a lot. So I'd be interested in how you would say, "Why is it like grafting a plant?"

Patrick (56:08):

Yeah. Very intentionally the first word of the book is, 'If." I'm not kidding. I was like, "That's going to be the first word of the book." In part because I think a large part of what consciousness is, the way that we get to it is through counterfactual imagining of things. It's so funny because I like... So I write for New Yorker and various different popular science places; Pop Psych 101, Journalism 101. It's now considered a truism that you're not allowed to start an article with a thought experiment because nobody likes to be challenged in the beginning. I've been told this over and over and over. Part of it was like my rebellious response to that to be like, "Oh yeah, here's your thought experiment." But it's also because the human mind is just a nested series of Russian thought experiments. It's a bunch of counterfactual if statements.

But it's mostly the fact that-- Neuroscientists as a field, we ask extremely difficult questions about certain kinds of learning and how information gets maximization of entropy within the brain, how information travels from one region to another and all these fancy questions. But some of the basic questions are still shockingly profoundly unanswered. And not because the answer is interesting, but literally the very fact that it could be a question is interesting. So for example, every night we shut off the hell is that, and then a tiny, smaller, forgetful version of us which doesn't really have a body and can kind of float and has very strange thoughts-- Or do they have thoughts? Does your dream self have an inner monologue? I'm not even sure.

Then we just kind of wake up again the next day. It's extraordinarily strange because it's a control condition for consciousness. What it means is that in order to feel like it is like to be something that is conscious, you don't need to be behaving at all. You can be completely shut down and some weird amalgamation of some half or part of your brain can conjure its own version which has a full enrich experience with your friends in it. Where the hell do they come? Your friends are just in it and they have voices that are not your voice? Are you kidding me? We can reproduce these things just through activity alone. So that is still a mystery to me.

Number two, we can just make new ones? We can just without knowing how or why, two people can get together and 10 months later a new one is made? This is profoundly strange. This is bizarre in a way that I feel like we just take for granted. I was thinking, “I'm 39. My more stable friends have started to have babies.” It's just every single time completely and utterly mysterious and profound to me that consciousness kind of-- if you think about consciousness as the thing-- So I sometimes think that consciousness itself is potentially subject to natural selection and evolution. Not just the being that we are, the body that we are, but actually the mind itself might be changed through the process of generational transfer which means that it needs a mechanism by which it goes from one generation to the other.

I don't know if you recognize the cadence of my tone here, but this is also how I talk about cats. I say the parasite has to get from one cat to another cat and it uses the mouse as an intermediate host. So the consciousness version of that is consciousness has to get from one mind to another mind, and it uses a speck and a single cell to get from one host to the next host. How does it go through a single cell? I don't get it. I don't even remotely get it. How do we make a new one? Because it means that it just grows from its own rules. For me, the only thing that makes sense would be you have consciousness in one creature. 

And then when I say it's a bit like grafting a plant, what I mean by that opening sentence is like-- Well, obviously you go in and you scoop out a piece and you go and you put it in your backyard and you grow it. But you need that original seed. How else could you do it without a seed? But consciousness doesn't have a fucking seed. Excuse my... I don't know where it comes from; not French. Consciousness doesn't have a seed. It just can regrow? I'm just continually profoundly bothered by that.

Ben (01:01:30):

I never heard that. That's really fascinating that actually the mind or consciousness is selective. And having heard that for the first time, I was speaking to someone who thinks about what they call cognitive economics and this why we dream, why we have fantasies. His idea is that the projection of the future self is a very valuable incentive. That's why we can sit and have a daydream and find that really pleasurable. Well, what happened? Nothing happened. It was all in all in our mind. Why did that come about? But combining that thought or that idea with the idea that whatever that is coming about consciousness, then maybe there's also trying to self-select or evolution to make sure it keeps going on which does raise the question, "How on earth did it come about in the first place?" So that's question or thought number one. Thought number two, perhaps a tiny bit easier but completely unknowable is, "Why then do you think we dream at all?"

So my son says he lucid dreams and I think I believe him. But who knows? Who knows what goes on in other people's dreams? So whatever is lucid dreaming. I have all of these questions about, "Do you smell in dream? Do you have colors in dream? Do you think in images and words? Do you hear music?” All of which is like all higgledy piggledy depending on who you ask and where you ask them, which is infinitely fascinating. But yeah, so maybe why do you think?

Patrick (01:03:03):

Even that simple sentence like, "Oh, well, I have these questions. Do you smell in dreams? Are they in color?" People have different answers. Why is it the case that there isn't just one kind of human brain? Why is everybody goddamn different? Why do some people dream in color and some people don't? Why do some people have mental images on the inside of their head and some people don't? There's no explanation, there's no theory of consciousness out there that even remotely begins to address the variation. So I think about it when I say consciousness itself might have variation through natural selection. What did Darwin do? Darwin just went around and looked at some finch beaks-- I'm simplifying things-- Went around and looked at some finch beaks and was like, "Oh, variation. This is interesting." And there was a theory of geology at the time which allowed to play tectonics. Then through observation of difference alone, a theory popped out.

We don't even have anything close to a catalog of human conscious variation, but in speaking to people, it seems to be extraordinarily variant. And just something as simple as dreaming, some people don't dream in color. Ask them, just ask your partner. Some people have never had that kind of phenomenological date with their partner where they ask them like, "What is it like on the inside of your head?" You might find that the person you've been sleeping next to for the last 50 years doesn't dream in color and every time you've talked about things, you are completely and utterly talking past each other.

So it's funny you say your son has spoken about lucid dreaming, but then you kind of believe him. I didn't believe in lucid dreaming for a very long time in the same way, I don't really understand hypnosis. I don't really believe that. How's that possible? I just kind of didn't. I thought it was one of those things that people were maybe confabulating or in their storytelling, they're getting it interestingly wrong or. It could be easily be they're having a normal dream, but when they remember it, it feels like they have agency; all kinds of things. The brain is a fraudulent liar; you can't always trust it.

But there was an absolutely insane study recently which completely and utterly changed my mind and I now believe it to be a thing. I now believe it to be true. The study was a sleep lab out of University of Wisconsin-Madison, Giulio Tononi. He's a sleep researcher and a brilliant consciousness scholar. But he had this study where-- So during REM sleep (stage of sleep where the eyes are moving around, rapid eye movement), you can actually shine an infrared light and look through the eyelid and see the eyes moving. You can do this and it kind of seems to track with what people report from their dreams. So for example, you can wake someone up really quickly if their eyes are looking back and forth really rapidly. They wake them up-- this is in the case reports, this is no literature. And then you say, "What was happening? Right now what was just happening?" They'll be like, "Oh, I was at a tennis match watching a tennis match." The eyes track with the kind of behavior of the dream.

The interesting question would be, "Okay, all these jokesters which say they can lucid dream, let's catch them in their lie. Let's tell them in this world, in the real world. Let's say, "All right, when you lucid dream, I want you to do this for me. Move your eyes up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, and then I'll know you're lucid dreaming. And then do me a favor. Count to 10. Just count to 10 in your lucid dream, and then do it again. Up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right." It's kind of like a konami code. I don't know if you remember this from like Nintendo; a little code you enter. And people could do it in their lucid dream. When they stated they could lucid dream, they did it. And then they counted to 10. There was some variation. It wasn't perfectly 10, but we're not perfect. If I asked you to count to 10 right now, you'd be off a little bit. It's absolutely insane. They were able to communicate up to the sleep researchers in the sky using just their eye movements. So sometimes when I'm having a bad day or something, I'll be like, "I'll just move my eyes up down, up, down, left, front, left, right just in case there's another level" because maybe there's another level.

Ben (01:07:35):

It's a secret code. I haven't quite got the combination right. But if I get it right, is a good day, it's going to come.

Patrick (01:07:40):

Yeah. Well, I just want the sleep researchers in the other one sky to know that I'm paying attention. To me that's profound evidence that it's real.

Ben (01:07:55):

I suspect it's sort of real. It wouldn't be a hundred percent, but like you say, maybe don't trust the brain. It seems to be never trust the brain in any event. Because I do sometimes, and a lot of people I've asked to report it, have that falling through the air sensation and then waking up thing, and then you wake up when your hot things and you say, "Oh my, I was falling." And then you wake up because it was that. It's often on the verge of when you go to sleep you have this. From time to time-- maybe it's no more than two or three times a year or once a year or something it happens and it feels really real. And I feel that that falling and it thinks, and it seems to me that's not too far away from a lucid dream although a little bit different.

Maybe think about sleep and dreaming and whether it's conserved and that thing on consciousness. Do you think dolphins have consciousness and what is going on when dolphins sleep then? I mean, it seems most mammals do some form of sleeping; at least what it seems to be when you do electrical brain and maybe half the brain is only sleeping and maybe only sleeping for 15 seconds, blah, blah, blah. So it's slightly disputed whether all mammals sleep, but a big bunch of them do. What's going on when they sleep? Are they dreaming? Do they have consciousness?

Patrick (01:09:09):

I think they obviously have consciousness. I think they definitely do. I think the way to know-- and this is extremely scientific, is you take a pair of snorkel goggles and you go down to Belize and you jump off a boat, and then the dolphins will just... Like, it's just obvious. That's the best I have. They're just looking at you and they're smart as hell and they know exactly what's happening.

Ben (01:09:39):

I had the same looking into the eyes of an orangutan. It wasn't dolphins.

Patrick (01:09:46):

Yeah, it's just kind of obvious. So I'm here in Vienna, Austria right now, and I got invited to witness or to go to-- They have a Kea cognition lab. So Kea is a New Zealand bird which just got the honorific of the world's smartest bird. I think it stole it from a crow or something; the New Caledonian crow. Anyway, stole it. I walked into the pen. They have a cage out of the Austrian, gorgeous, and there's like 30 of them. I got the same feeling I did when I was underwater playing with dolphins. There was a sublime intelligence in their movements, in their mannerisms. The human brain is really good at theory of mind. We jump into other people's minds. Adult imagination is-- People say kids are creative you should embrace your inner childhood. Kids are idiots. They're not creative. They're just randomly seeing imaginary friends and things.

We use our imagination as adults like experts to infer at a dinner party what everyone is thinking and what they might want. That is our imagination. That is way better than anything kids can do. And we use it to infer other minds. I say that only to say we're tuned to this. It can go wrong when everyone thinks these language robots are sentient, which they're not, obviously; that's a mistake. But I have never felt more uncanny intelligence than when surrounded by a pod of dolphins in the water or in this bird lab here in Austria last week. It felt like I was in a room of toddlers. They were so obviously curious and smart and intelligent, it was wild. I had never felt that feeling before.

Ben (01:11:53):

Definitively consciousness. Therefore I think if we believe that, I'm going to say I think they dream and I think they dream in their sleep. Whatever dreams are.

Patrick (01:12:06):

Well, I think the burden of proof. So there's a funny thing also in science where sometimes... You know in like law, you have evidentiary standards and then once someone's convicted, there's a burden to undo or there's all kinds of burdens of proof that you kind of layer top each other. For some reason, the burden of proof seems to have fallen on people to argue that animals are conscious. I wish to flip that burden of proof and say like, "No, actually. You have to prove to me they're not because there's so much reason to believe that they are. I can almost just sit back and wait for someone to prove to me they're not. I don't know how to wrap my mind around it.

Ben (01:12:51):

I think that's real. Thinking about you on Theory of Mind, I was just observing that maybe adults do it because they're really just trying to get really good at flirting. So that's why we have to pass...

Patrick (01:13:02):

To pass their consciousness from one host to another through a single cell.

Ben (01:13:04):

Yeah, exactly. So that's why we really, really need to know that well. And then thinking about animals and... It just seemed they probably do consciousness and dreaming. And therefore maybe because you have worked-- I think you were a contractor with open AI writing some stuff for them while they were blind and maybe around the time of GPT-2 two and now we're at three, three and a half and we're going to go 4, 5, 6. I recently heard an argument from I think Tyler Cowen, but I have heard it from other people that essentially these AI bots or language things-- So a lot of people are fearing this kind of rogue AI from a rogue consciousness. And the argument kind of goes if we don't really know where consciousness has come from and stuff.

But if you look at all of its evolutionary things, and we have it in animals and stuff, it just seems to be in a completely world removed. So at least how we are thinking of consciousness is not going to occur through AI or language bots. There might be other things that they're very clever at doing and tasks and stuff that. But at least on the question of consciousness and therefore potentially on the question of rogue AI or some people call it AI Alignment or the singularity and the science fiction or whatever it is, is just really, really farfetched. There might be other things you're worried about like nuclear weapons can be really dangerous just in the hands of humans. You don't need to give it into the hands of rogue bots which might be that.

But with all of our discussion and things like that, it seems to me that maybe-- I'm not very certain, but it does seem to me that consciousness won't come from that sort of software-led thing. Or is that just not right. What's your experience of seeing an inside glimpse into language bots, how they are, how they develop and your experience with open AI?

Patrick (01:15:01):

Is it possible that on the street corner in Glasgow I was telling a story about how I haven't played a game of go since AlphaGo because it sapped all the joy out of the experience? I'm getting Deja Vu.

Ben (01:15:18):

I think maybe. I'm getting a little bit of this. I definitely feel we talked about games and chess and how chess was bounded and is all go and Backgammon and the differences between Pico and all of that. So I think we did. We must have talked about getting that because this is it. I hadn't remembered that until now and now we have resurrected it from our consciousness.

Patrick (01:15:39):

Yeah, because I played Go. So the board game Go, I had been playing that almost every day in my adult life on average of once per day. And when DeepMind made AlphaGo and they beat it, there was a really interesting response. I had a really interesting response which is like, I just stopped playing. I didn't care anymore. They had sapped away one of my great and favorite hobbies. The funny thing is like, "Well, why would I stop?" It was because knowing that a robot could do it in a non-conscious way, in a non-intelligent way, ruined the game for me. It ruined the beauty of it. It ruined what I had held to be like an aesthetic.

I used to think that there was a part of Go that required aesthetic understanding of the pieces and the moves and the positions in the same way that a ballet dancer... To me, it was as much of an affront as like... To enjoy ballet, to enjoy opera, to enjoy art, I feel like you have to have an aesthetic sense. You have to be able to listen and watch and things like that. I thought that was true for Go also, I thought you had to be good at it. I thought you had to have an aesthetic sense. And then when they were like, "No, we can be the best professional in the world," something got ruined. And so my great fear is not AGI taking all our jobs or anything. My great fear is AI ruining all of our hobbies. Now that ChatGPT can write well-- I'm a writer now. I've moved out of my life from neuroscientists to-- I'm still thinking about consciousness, but more as a philosopher. And if ChatGPT can write philosophy and consciousness and fiction, now I'm like, "Goddamn it, get out of my hobbies. What am I going to do? What do I have left?" I have nothing left.

Ben (01:17:52):

I think you're going to be okay for two reasons. We have no evidence behind them whatsoever. So the first reason is I felt similarly the first time I picked up a digital camera, I had done a lot of photography in 1919; the late 1990s. I spent hundreds of hours in the dark room, analog, all of that. The first time I picked up a digital camera, I don't think I took another image for months. Maybe even I suspect years. And I've never used the camera thing on my phone for quite some time; for unbelievably a long amount of time where people's like, "Why did I dislike this digital thing?" It's not this analog thing I grew up with. But over time I have come to appreciate a different facet of it.

And within creative arts, my explanation for this is number two. So now I do take some image, although actually it's not the same as my work in the nineties. I think of myself much more of a theater writer and things like that than a visual artist. But I think there is a share of art or writing, which is the share that you have in the reader or the person who's seeing your work. You really definitely see this in theater arts because most theater arts is not complete unless you have an audience. There's sort of some exceptions but without an audience, you can't actually make theater because the audience completes it for you. Maybe this is like one of those weird koans or stuff. But if you perform in front of nothing that is not actually mostly considered theater, right? I don't know what you did. You were in a rehearsal, you did something else. It's only complete when you have an audience.

And you can then see, "Oh, that's true." In some ways a piece of art is only complete when you have a viewer. Writing is only complete when you have a reader. And you look at art for instance, cave art from thousands of years ago where going back to consciousness of things, we must have really no idea. We cannot substantiate anything at all what those people and cultures were doing when they were making what we now consider art. Maybe they didn't even consider it art or whatever it is. But we can look at those and we can create all of these myths-- maybe they're tricks-- around what it means to us today, what it might have meant for them then. All of the pleasure from photography, from Go, from whatever it is, we can recreate it if we trick our minds-- Maybe don't trick our minds because all our minds tricks to it.

So I think where you have generative art, generative writing and the like, there will be some stuff which at a surface level will meet the surface needs of what we want creatively or whatever it means to be human and consciousness. But this element which is the receiver's end are part of consciousness or brain which is that will is inherent in this part of creativity. Now, we can change our minds about it. So if Go no longer has joy for you, you have pricked your mind both ways into thinking that. But actually it's on your receiving end and so you can trick your mind differently in the same way that we can look at this art. Artists play with this going back to Duchamp's urinal toilet and saying, "Okay, we'll put it, and then this is art." So what it is, is a function of where we are. But that is why at least in in this aspect of it, I am maybe not as fearful as AI as some of my other creative friends. And they flip flop because of the power of the receiving angle. So that's my information.

Patrick (01:21:46):

Let's focus on the theater side for a small moment. I once interviewed a woman who was making robotic ballet dancers. So I was researching the concept of elegance for another project and there was something about ballet. When people say things are elegant they often use as their canonical example, ballet dancers. So I found it really interesting to ask, "If someone's making robotic ballet dancers, could they be elegant?" And the woman's answer was, "Well, it's trivially easy to make a robot who can stand on point for as long as you want it to. You just design it to stand on point." When the Bolshoi opening and happens and someone stands on point for some amount of time and they get 23 curtain calls and a standing ovation, why do we give it to the person and not the robot in that condition? Why would people not necessarily applaud to the robots version of performance but they would to the human? And I feel there's something about the pain that is required. The known pain outside of the constraint of the human body and the assumed amount of practice it takes. They knew it took decades. They knew this person has been devoting their entire life to doing this thing, which is totally unnatural, which is outside the normal bounds of human mobility.

But if you make the robot do it and it's designed to do it, it's designed to mimic human aesthetic peak. It's designed to mimic human peak performance. But in an aesthetic way and it's trivial easy, you're not going to applaud it. So what I was thinking about is the kind of idea of a robotic actor. So I've been kind of nominally on book tour and in one, I give a lecture and an actress was in the audience at one of the New York events. She came up to me and it was about laughter. So I was telling the story of the book about how to laugh and how this is a fraudulent laugh. And she's like, "You know what's really funny? As an actor I'm professionally trained to laugh; to fake laughing, to laugh on command, on cue."

Her thought, which I had found extraordinarily beautiful was that-- So she had two points. One, that maybe the robot the best they will ever do. Let's say that they can become ballet dancer, let's say that they can show emotion, let's say that they can speak as if they have interiority and consciousness and everything. Fundamentally all they will ever be doing is acting. Their ceiling is acting because they're still always imitating, they're still always not feeling the thing. It's a performance rather than the thing in and of itself. I don't really know what to make of that. I still ponder it every single day. I'm trying to think about it. I found it really beautiful.

But the other thing she said was that when she remembers an acting laugh-- So she goes back in her memory, the theme of this conversation. And then she remembers joy even though it was a fake laugh, even though it was an acting laugh. Maybe to be good at acting is too be able to fake it so severely that in your memory you can't tell the difference between a real one and a made up one or a professionally done one. So how does that work? You're a theatre writer, how does that work with respect to emotions and your memory of emotions on the stage versus in real life? Do people remember emotions differently? Would you perform a play for only robots? Would you write a play if only robots were in the audience?

Ben (01:25:53):

Okay, so several observations on that. So one on the laugh and emotion. So some actors will use sad thoughts from their life and also physical manifestations of how we often feel sad. So the breathing and things to trigger crying on command; the same for laughter. So they're drawing on lived experience to recreate another experience and that's a very common technique. So we talk about outside in and insight out. It does live as a sort of truth in them. So I do think it's not the actual experience of it as on their time, but it's like a form of dream or where it is, it's a recreation of that, which leads me into the second observation about the power of human performance, particularly live performance.

There's a phrase that some of us use within theater arts called shared experience. This is the concept that when humans can feel-- call it theory of mind or whatever it is-- that we can think in someone else's shoes or go through someone else's experience, or even when you're with other audience that you might be going through the same experience as the human next to you, that becomes extraordinarily powerful within our minds. We fool ourselves to think, or maybe we do that in the most powerful experiences, we are actually all in that moment sharing exactly the same thing or maybe almost exactly the same thing, or we're going through a similar emotion or we've culturally relearn to that. So when the ballet dancer makes that leap, there is a combined intake of breath, or you also see it in a combined silence.

How is it a thousand people are silence in this moment waiting for that cut to drop or waiting for that character, that actor to say something? It's because we are got a combined experience. Maybe that's where group hysteria comes from. Maybe that's where crowd and mob behavior also comes from and it's an emergent behavior of that. But I think you can see-- I expect this has been studied. I've not read the studies on it. But that I think is certainly true. My then personal observation is one of the reasons why live performance or theater can both reach heights more powerful than cinema, but tends to also be more painful than cinema is because you have that shared experience with live actors in front of you as well as a live audience. And then on top of that, you know there is this possibility that something will go wrong, that it's valuable, that it's human. That something will happen, it'll be off script or it'll be a moment or there's something different about this, which of course the robot never has. And so you lose that aspect of it.

But it's also why the shared experience part-- and I'm sure you've done it and some of us have done it. When you sit through for whatever reason, a performance, maybe it's a standup act; it is just not funny for whatever reason, or the performance is just painful because it's not a good story or it's a story you heard a thousand times. The pain of seeing a bad performance is so painful and that's why people actually put off a theater. You can ask them why. It's like, "Oh, I went to this bad piece again and I can never do that again." Because that shared experience-- the actor knows it's bad, you know it's bad, everyone knows it's bad. Why are we sitting here having this shared experience about this? Oh no, we can never do it again which is a little bit more diffuse in cinema. So although you can do bad tv, it's not as painful.

Bad theater is like one of the most painful experiences ever. But it's the same for the shared experience on the way up. And that is actually why also robots I think are never going to be as satisfying, even all the technicality. And then the other last aspect is, is because of the embodied meaning of that. So the embodied meaning of that particular passage or that particular jump or that particular music, we have given it a cumulative humanity reason. And in that shared moment with a shared culture or a background, we can probably all be ascribing a similar meaning at that point in time. And robots do not come with that or as least of yet and I don't think they will with that accumulated meaning of it.

So going back to the cave art, there is an accumulated meaning on that because we sense a shared humanity which we do not at least as yet share with robots. We might get there if we have some sort of hybrid AI and we start to evolve ourselves. So we have maybe more robotic components, we might feel that. But I don't think it is of the moment. So shared experience, accumulated embodied measurement and knowledge and of that. So I would probably never write for a robotic audience. There might be something kind of meta about it. So you might write it because other humans would be interested in what it is that we would observe when actors observe looking at the robots. But there's actually the human element, not really the robot element.

Patrick (01:31:07):

Even if they laugh at the right times and they nodded at the right times and they looked at their phone at the right time when they were bored.

Ben (01:31:14):

Because there would be no mistakes. It's the wrong way around. You might make a mistake, but the audience is not ever going to make a mistake. I mean, never say no. If you want to give me a million dollars I'll do it for you. I've got other incentives.

Patrick (01:31:30):

That was fascinating what you just said. So the audience is capable of making mistakes also in their perception of...? So that's part of the shared humanity or the shared risk?

Ben (01:31:43):

Yeah. So that's the joke because it's like, "Oh my god, the audience laughed in the wrong place." And then you realize, "Well actually no, it isn't in the wrong place. Maybe it's the right place. Oh my god, I haven't interpreted my own piece of writing correctly because I thought this bit was really funny and nobody laughs and I thought this bit was really rubbish and I was going to cut it. But it actually is really brilliant." And so that then has this whole line of things that the writer doesn't necessarily know the beauty of their own piece, who owns that piece and stuff. And so why is it that you write the line and you thought everyone is going to find this so funny and no one did? And then, "This is really not a good line." And then they do. So obviously who is correct? The audience is not wrong in that sense because the audience is having this experience. Although you then get some interesting conflicts. Conflicts is too strong a word. Well, you can sometimes see that some part of the audience is thinking one thing, one part of the audience is thinking another thing. So this is where some people laugh and some people don't.

So you don't always have that shared experience. It's a mixed shared experience which is kind of interesting as well. And audience members pick that up. So we know it's like, "Oh, you laughed at that. I know why you thought that was funny, but really that isn't funny and that's why I'm not laughing." You can see that dynamic going round. I mean, it's much more obvious when you have these cues like laughter or silence and stuff. And so you see this is why the standup comic process is often you do small gigs and you test out your material because you don't actually really know what's going to be funny or what's going to work until you find it in a live audience and then so you play with that so it becomes a working piece of R&D. Because the audience is giving you this feedback of like, "Well, I thought that joke was really funny, but only two people laugh so obviously not. Either they're wrong or I'm wrong."

Patrick (01:33:24):

I would expect a professional comedian-- It's true. They do workshop; the workshop with the material. But then I'm trying to think of writers. So I would expect a professional comedian to have an internal module or a self which was a listener of comedy. I would expect a music composer to have an internal ability to imagine what it would be like to listen to this. I would expect a writer to have an inner reader; to be able to listen or read or find funny their own work. And what you're kind of saying is no matter how good you are at coming up with an internal version of it, a fake listener, a fake reader, a fake audience member, it's still not good enough.

Ben (01:34:14):

Correct.

Patrick (01:34:15):

It's still not the same thing as having actual people. There's a limit to what you can imagine.

Ben (01:34:19):

Yeah. That would be my assertion and I really believe that to be true. Now, the better you are or the more practiced you are, you can get that maybe 90% there on your first go say. But even there, what I think you normally do is you draft and redraft. So you drafted it and redraft it in your imaginary audience or whatever you've done. You've done it so many times and you're doing it so quickly you're just getting up the curb. But even then, I think all of the professional creators will tell you, you test it in front of an audience and what you expect is not necessarily how it goes. And this is it. Even authors think about it as their own work. They go, "You know what? I think book number three is really by far my best work. But no one really thinks that. They think it's book number five. What do they know? Book number five, I dashed it off in an hour and it's just not there." You see that. So this is the audience share and the reader share, and it's to do with culture and time and place and comedy which might work in one city, might also work in another city. Really good comedians can bend to that as well. Really good writers can do that and all of that. But that is it. There are some of it I think it's a cousin thinking to what is consciousness or what is shared consciousness? "Are there emergent properties of the crowd?" I think there are some evidence of that. Or is it just all social learning? Some of that is social learning, but who's doing the social learning while it seems to be our brains? So I do think there is all on some of that.

Patrick (01:35:54):

I just came up with a new fear. Now I have my greatest fear for the encroachment of the robot. I've been writing popular non-fiction for 15 years and I've worked with a ton of editors. And I've also in science, you work with editors. I feel like I have an internal-- I have to what you said to your point gained an ability through all this exposure. I have a little internal way of reading my own work. After I type it, I can then say, "Okay, what would the editor do here?" And then I have through experience a kind of ability to see the page from the editor's point of view and be like, "All right, David, take this paragraph and put it at the front." And this has made me a better writer easily." I've incorporated the skillsets of-- It's kind of like in basketball you steal some moves from people around you and now you've gained a larger skillset of moves you can do. They used it against you and then you take it and now you can use it.

Now here's my fear. Robot editors, if you work with them for long enough-- Let's say they get good. Let's say that they get as good at writing as they're go where you still write and you still try to go along with them, but you use them as a tool. People use chess robots to train, people use go robots to train now because they're better and you learn from them and you learn new techniques and you learn new ways of approaching it. Now, let's take that and put it into writing. Imagine a robotic editor who every time I write something, the robot editor would be like, "Well, I think you should-- This is a nice beat. Let's stretch it out a bit and put..." They do story editing. And then I slowly start to use this over the course of a decade. And then even worse than Battlestar Galactica, even worse than some sort of hybrid machine parts. I now every time I write think, "What would the robot editor think?" And then that just becomes assimilated into the kind of writer that I am and you cannot remove it. It just becomes part of me to mentally imagine what would the robot do here? And then it's over. Then humanity's just over. That's my new fear

Ben (01:38:22):

I think there's a kernel of truth to that. And I think the AI could well end up training the human to some extent with that. My distant analogy to that is dogs train humans pretty well. We think humans train dogs, but you could think actually the dog has been really successful in training the human. It sits and we give it treats because it does these things. There's even a more distant thing. If you think about domesticated wheat and you think of it from the wheat's point of view, it's far more successful depending on what you think it. Does wheat even have a consciousness? Probably. I don't think so. But wheat domesticated humans, humans did not domesticate wheat and now wheat is the predominant plant wherever. So I do think there is this interaction with everything that we interact. We train it, it does train us. So I think that is true.

But I think this fear of the taking over, I don't think necessarily that is necessarily true. There's also perhaps your aim. Maybe if you're going to rewrite the thing which is the New York Times opinion piece or that long form bit in the Atlantic, which is the kind of thing that this Atlantic audience wants to read, there might be a touch of that where the AI has figured out that sort of audience or things for that. For something that's just a little bit more rote and stuff which what we think of as a bit of creative perhaps comes a touch more rote. But there actually is still a huge bunch of things where I don't think it will be able to do that. Again, I've already said because of the reader's half and the audience's half.

And then there might be things which are just really quirky. So I think one of the greatest American poets is a poet called Charles Reznikoff. One of his greatest pieces of work; he has two really big pieces. One is called testimony which is based on court testimonies based on Holocaust and the other on trials in the 1800s often to do with slavery. He makes poems out of those. I think probably only a few thousand people have ever read his work and will probably maybe ever read his work. But it's extremely powerful in a second order effects on what it is. And although this is a more personal view, there is a lot of other people who think he is probably one of the greatest American poets of the last hundred years. And I think that power of writing where it doesn't necessarily have to appeal to 5 billion people like K-Pop might do, will also still be really powerful. But it might not be the metric of either money or how many people read you, but that's always been the case within art and a different strand of that. Okay. So maybe last couple of questions would be current projects that you're working on. I get the impression that sleep and dreaming is important.

Patrick (01:41:13):

Yeah. I'm in Vienna to kind of try to come up with a next book or think a little bit more about sleep and dreams. Again, what I said a bit earlier, I get mystified very easily I guess maybe. I think the appropriate response to learning about the human brain is awe and nothing else. So I generally find myself with these moments of awe. I'm trying to figure out what the purpose of dreaming is. So that's kind of why I came to Vienna. Like, "Why do we need the conscious part of the dream when we go to sleep?" If it's for something, if it's for good, if it's for learning, if it's for-- there's all kinds of theories about why we do.

None of the theories really allows for, or none of the theories that I know of really explain why it is the case that we have to be conscious for little bits and pieces of it. Why couldn't that exact same kind of surrealist nonsense happen and we just aren't aware of it? Why? So I'm here for that. I'm trying to figure that out as I deal with my own kind of insomnia. It's pretty meta. I came here because it's cold and I sleep better in the cold. I sleep best when I'm frigid. I think I’m meant to be a hibernating bear and I'm just deprived of years and years of hibernation.

Ben (01:42:44);

Go cold, go north. Yeah.

Patrick (01:42:46):

So basically I'm entering into torpor as I think about dreams as I try desperately to have them.

Ben (01:42:54):

Go into hibernation, great. And then the last question is-- I guess I often ask this. Do you have any advice for others; life advice or thoughts? Or in reflecting on this conversation, I might turn that around on, what are the questions that you think people in this area who might be interested-- What are the questions do you think they should work on? So one of the questions obviously is why we dream, what is consciousness? But any advice for those thinking about writing or neuroscience or what do you think are the most important questions we might be working on or should work on?

Patrick (01:43:36):

There's a tricky thing with neuro... Paul Bloom, I mentioned him earlier; Yale professor studies cognitive science in kids; he's a psychologist. So he had a bunch of kids and he studies cognition and psychology in kids and someone asked him, "Given everything you know, you're a professor at Yale, you've been doing this for decades about child rearing and psychology. How did that change how you raised your kids?" And he said, "Not at all." I think I'm remembering this right. But he's like, "Maybe I have some better understanding of how to triage what is factual and what is not." But fundamentally, nothing he knows changed how he raised his kids even though he studies the thing.

To me, this is like a sad reflection on how useful neuroscience is, which is not at all. There's a bunch of theories and there's books and there are all the kinds of genres and sections in the bookstore. Anything that actually worked had to do with like someone changing their diet or various forms of proxy therapy. That's basically all that works. It's the most useful interventions neuroscience has ever come up with it. We didn't even come up with them. So I do think there's one way to be useful as a neuroscientist which is to ask your partner; romantic, otherwise, friends, people that you surround yourself with at any given time-- Take an entire evening, have phenomenological date night where you actually ask them what it's like on the inside of their head. "Do they dream in color? Do they..." Ask them to imagine a sunset and describe it when they close their eyes.

There's some people that are aphantasia and have zero mental imagery on the inside of their head. There's some people that are hyperphantagic that when they close their eyes, they effectively see a sunset with just as much richness as if their eyes were open and actually seeing the sunset. Those two people can be married for 40 years and they talk about, "Oh, do you want to go see the sunset?" Or they'll say, "Hey, can we go out?" Let's imagine this hypothetical married couple and one of them is hyperphantagic and one of them is aphantagic. The aphantagic one who cannot conjure the image of a sunset, cannot conjure in his or her mind the beauty of art or anything because it's blank in there asks their partner, "Hey, the sun is about to set. Could we go up to the back porch and watch it?" And the partner who's hyperphantagic who can just close their eyes and see the sunset goes, "I'm kind of tired. Let's not do that."

And let's say there's animosity that then builds right in their relationship because of this. Because there seems to be this mismatch in interest and, "Why doesn't he ever go outside and watch the sunset with me? It's so beautiful. "Fundamentally, those people need to have a conversation where they realize that the person who can't see gets infinite joy out of witnessing the thing. It's the thing itself. And that the person who can close their eyes and imagine it vividly can get infinite joy sitting on a couch with their eyes closed, doing nothing. So what appears to be laziness might be something different and what appears to be a mismatch in interpersonal preference might just be about a phenomenological difference on the inside of their head. If the person suddenly knew that their partner was aphantagic and that their partner couldn't see anything and they need to experience the thing to experience it-- they can't close their eyes and imagine it. They would say, "Oh my God, of course we can go watch the sunset every goddamn night. I didn't know you can't watch the sunset in your head." To me it's a movie that just plays and it's like an HD movie.

So I would guess that a huge percentage of interpersonal-- the things we ascribe to personality differences or liking certain people or liking certain things or motivation to do things. I would guess that a large part of it is just differences in what's happening on the inside of your head. Language is very difficult. Maybe my new career is phenomenological relationship counselor where I just charge people. I do marital counseling, but I only talk about... I do like visual imagery questionnaires and something like that. My suggestion is to have phenomenological date night with whoever you're interested in the world and ask what their dreams are really like and if it's in images or what inside of their head is really like and see if you get anything, see if you solve any conflict.

Ben (01:48:37):

That seems to be really great advice. I've heard you because you had this story of someone who didn't see images and wanted to see your image all the time because they couldn't imagine you. I think that's really true. And that recalls, I had a maths teacher in high school who discovered late on that they really believe they have their red-green vision. Red-green cones are reversed because most people find the greens of forests really relaxing and he finds the greens of forest really angry. He really reckons that the colors are reversed. And actually he's now evidence for this which is the way we've learned about it. You have this in color blindness and things. This is literally what you thought was red and I thought was red is not red for you because actually your physical cones in your eyes are actually different. It happens in a small percentage, but actually a much larger percentage than you might have thought. So that sounds like really good advice to me. Actually ask the other person what they think and maybe what's going inside their brain is not what you think it is.

Patrick (01:49:45):

"Why the hell did you get me green roses for Valentine's Day?"

Ben (01:49:50):

Yeah, exactly. Well on that note, the book is “Nineteen Ways of Looking At Consciousness.” Patrick, thank you very much.

Patrick (01:49:59):

Of course. Thank you.