Consciousness is an Explanation of What Already Has Been Computed (John Hopfield) | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 | >>LT: Let alone consciousness.
00:00:03.760 | >>JB: Oh, let alone consciousness, yes, yes.
00:00:08.560 | >>LT: Because that's tied up in there too. You can't just put that on another shelf.
00:00:12.800 | >>JB: Every once in a while I get interested in consciousness, and then I go and I've done
00:00:19.600 | that for years, and ask one of my bettors, as it were, their view on consciousness. It's
00:00:27.120 | been interesting collecting them.
00:00:28.560 | >>LT: What is consciousness? Let's try to take a brief step into that room.
00:00:35.600 | >>JB: Well, I asked Marvin Minsky, did you go into consciousness? And Marvin said,
00:00:42.400 | "Consciousness is basically overrated. It may be an epiphenomenon. After all,
00:00:51.920 | all the things your brain does, which are actually hard computations, you do non-consciously.
00:00:59.280 | And there's so much evidence that even the simple things you do,
00:01:07.280 | you can make committed decisions about them. The neurobiologist can say,
00:01:15.200 | "He's now committed. He's going to move the hand left before you know it."
00:01:21.760 | >>LT: So, his view that consciousness is not, that's just like little icing on the cake.
00:01:27.200 | The real cake is in the subconscious.
00:01:28.960 | >>JB: Yeah, yeah. Subconscious, non-conscious.
00:01:32.720 | >>LT: Non-conscious, what's the better word, sir?
00:01:34.480 | >>JB: It's only that Freud captured the other word.
00:01:37.360 | >>LT: Yeah, it's a confusing word, subconscious.
00:01:40.640 | >>JB: Nicholas Chater wrote an interesting book, I think the title of it is "The Mind is Flat."
00:01:48.080 | And flat in a neural net sense, might be flat is something which is a very broad neural net
00:02:01.200 | without really any layers in depth, or the deep brain would be many layers and not so broad.
00:02:07.200 | In the same sense that if you push Minsky hard enough, he would probably have said,
00:02:15.680 | "Consciousness is your effort to explain to yourself that which you have already done."
00:02:22.080 | >>LT: Yeah, it's the weaving of the narrative around the things that have already been computed
00:02:30.240 | for you.
00:02:30.560 | >>JB: That's right. And so much of what we do for our memories of events, for example,
00:02:39.920 | if there's some traumatic event you witness, you will have a few facts about it correctly done.
00:02:46.400 | If somebody asks you about it, you will weave a narrative which is actually much more rich
00:02:52.960 | in detail than that, based on some anchor points you have of correct things, and pulling together
00:03:00.400 | general knowledge on the other, but you will have a narrative. And once you generate that narrative,
00:03:06.160 | you are very likely to repeat that narrative and claim that all the things you have in it
00:03:10.800 | are actually the correct things. There was a marvelous example of that in the
00:03:15.120 | Watergate/impeachment era of John Dean. John Dean, you're too young to know,
00:03:27.760 | had been the personal lawyer of Nixon. And so John Dean was involved in the cover-up, and
00:03:36.960 | John Dean ultimately realized the only way to keep himself out of jail for a long time
00:03:43.440 | was actually to tell some of the truths about Nixon. And John Dean was a tremendous witness.
00:03:48.960 | He would remember these conversations in great detail, and very convincing detail.
00:03:57.200 | And long afterward, some of the tapes, the secret tapes as it were, from which
00:04:04.800 | Gene was recalling these conversations, were published. And one found out that John Dean had
00:04:12.720 | a good but not exceptional memory. What he had was an ability to paint vividly,
00:04:18.480 | and in some sense accurately, the tone of what was going on.
00:04:24.720 | By the way, that's a beautiful description of consciousness.
00:04:27.360 | Do you, like where do you stand in your, today?
00:04:38.960 | So perhaps this changes day to day, but where do you stand on the importance of consciousness
00:04:45.600 | in our whole big mess of cognition? Is it just a little narrative maker,
00:04:52.560 | or is it actually fundamental to intelligence?
00:04:56.480 | That's a very hard one. When I asked Francis Crick about consciousness,
00:05:06.400 | he launched forward in a long monologue about Mendel and the peas.
00:05:14.080 | And how Mendel knew that there was something, and how biologists understood that there was
00:05:19.040 | something in inheritance, which was just very, very different. And the fact that inherited
00:05:27.040 | traits didn't just wash out into a gray, but were this or this, and propagated.
00:05:34.400 | That was absolutely fundamental to biology. And it took generations of biologists to understand
00:05:42.240 | that there was genetics, and it took another generation or two to understand that genetics
00:05:47.920 | came from DNA. But very shortly after Mendel,
00:05:54.080 | thinking biologists did realize that there was a deep problem about inheritance.
00:05:58.560 | And Francis would have liked to have said, "And that's why I'm working on consciousness."
00:06:09.360 | But of course, he didn't have any smoking gun in the sense of Mendel.
00:06:13.040 | And that's the weakness of his position. If you read his book, which he wrote with Koch,
00:06:23.200 | I think.
00:06:24.000 | Yeah, Christoph Koch, yeah.
00:06:25.120 | I find it unconvincing for the smoking gun reason.
00:06:35.360 | So I've gone on collecting views without actually having taken a very strong one myself,
00:06:39.840 | because I haven't seen the entry point. Not seeing the smoking gun
00:06:44.560 | from the point of view of physics, I don't see the entry point.
00:06:48.000 | Whereas in neurobiology, once I understood the idea of a collective evolution of dynamics,
00:06:55.920 | which could be described as a collective phenomenon, I thought, "Ah, there's a point
00:07:02.560 | where what I know about physics is so different from any neurobiologist that I have something
00:07:07.600 | that I might be able to contribute."
00:07:08.960 | And right now, there's no way to grasp at consciousness from a physics perspective.
00:07:15.520 | From my point of view, that's correct. And of course, people,
00:07:20.160 | physicists like everybody else, think very muddily about things. You ask
00:07:27.600 | the closely related question about free will. Do you believe you have free will?
00:07:33.040 | Physicists will give an offhand answer, and then backtrack, backtrack, backtrack,
00:07:40.400 | where they realize that the answer they gave must fundamentally contradict the laws of physics.
00:07:45.200 | Naturally, answering questions of free will and consciousness naturally lead to contradictions
00:07:50.640 | from a physics perspective, because it eventually ends up with quantum mechanics, and then you
00:07:56.720 | get into that whole mess of trying to understand how much, from a physics perspective,
00:08:03.840 | how much is determined, already predetermined, how much is already deterministic about our universe.
00:08:10.160 | There's lots of different—
00:08:11.360 | And if you don't push quite that far, you can say,
00:08:14.240 | essentially all of neurobiology, which is relevant, can be captured by classical equations of motion.
00:08:24.080 | Because in my view of the mysteries of the brain are not the mysteries of quantum mechanics,
00:08:29.440 | but the mysteries of what can happen when you have a dynamical system,
00:08:34.320 | driven system, with 10 to the 14 parts. That that complexity is something which is—
00:08:42.560 | that the physics of complex systems is at least as badly understood
00:08:49.360 | as the physics of phase coherence in quantum mechanics.
00:08:53.680 | Thanks.
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