0:00 The brain clearly is able to receive and emit electromagnetic fields when you have perturbations of Earth's magnetic field. We tend to see more psychiatric hospital admissions during those periods. Second, people who are in the hospital who have epilepsy who are being monitored, those individuals tend to have more seizures during periods of increased geomagnetic activity. There's something here that's happening. Dr. Nicholas Rouleau is a neuroscientist and bioengineer at Wilfrid Laurier University, who is doing exciting research on the relationship between electromagnetic fields and living systems. There's an information source that isn't Rouleau is a
0:50 close collaborator of Michael Levin, whose lab work on bioelectricity suggests a platonic realm of form that shapes life at the cellular level. Rouleau is researching this hypothesis at the level of brains. You've done experiments where you shield off brains, right? From electromagnetic fields to see what happens. People do have odd experiences in Faraday cages. This can range from feeling really, really calm to, you know, having the odd experience of like feeling uneasy and things like this. And that's just from being in the chamber. Look at what, how the brain functions. If it's a productive organ, it cannot. have the survival of consciousness. If it is a transmissive organ, that opens up the possibility that it could exist after death. In an award-winning essay,
1:40 Brouillot argues how his research on electromagnetism points to the plausibility of William James' theory that our brain filters consciousness. Ironically, I think that the ancient view of death is more accurate than the modern medical view. The modern medical view is that there's a moment of death. there is no moment of death. A very warm welcome at the Ascensia Foundation's YouTube channel. I'm sitting down here with Dr. Nick Rouleau. Nick, very warm welcome to the Nellis. I'm super glad you could be here and join us. Thanks for having me. Welcome. And we will shed lights today on an old philosophical idea, or at least a hundred year old idea that our brain filters consciousness.
2:27 It doesn't produce it, also known as the transmissive theory of consciousness proposed once by William James. I think you are in the position to tell us more about this idea and how it connects with cutting edge neuroscience. So I'm thrilled, really thrilled to talk with you about that. Can we? Yeah, okay. Before we go, just give you a brief introduction to our audience. You are a neuroscientist, bioengineer, and assistant professor of health sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. And you're a young professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University, where you collaborate with Michael Levin, who we've also featured on our channel. And together, you guys are exploring absolutely fascinating stuff when it comes to mind and mind beyond brains. So that's awesome. My first
3:13 question to you, Nick, the idea of our brains filtering consciousness instead of producing it, proposed by William James, was always a philosophical idea, and it was a great explanatory model for near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences. People could say, okay, check, our brain does not produce the consciousness, and there's consciousness beyond brains. But it remained sort of a philosophical idea related to psi phenomena. You now bring the idea back to sort of the lab, and to hardcore neuroscience, to the level of Petri Dish. And my question is, if William James sat at this table, what would you say to him? I mean, I have the mechanism, or what would you say to William James? Because it's awesome what you're
3:59 working on. Oh, yeah, that's a great question. I would probably say that... I think you are onto something. There clearly is something to transmission in the biological context. But I would say that unlike the way that he originally characterized the problem and the problem of survival of consciousness after bodily death, Productive function and transmissive function are not mutually exclusive. You can really have a brain that functions like the classic neurobiological model that we currently subscribe to in the field of neuroscience. And you can also have transmissive functions overlaid on top of that. And I would point out that over 100 years now of research looking at the
4:46 effects of electromagnetic fields on brains and brain tissues, reveals a very interesting experimental framework for validating his transmissive theory. What, in your opinion, is sort of the strongest sort of empirical findings that are in line with saying our brain is transmissive and it doesn't produce consciousness? I think that the point that I would emphasize is that the brain is clearly is able to receive and emit electromagnetic fields and electromagnetic energies in the form of light. And that this
5:33 direct ability for it to transduce these energies in its environment into thoughts, behaviors, and the sequelae of human experience, I think that is probably the best indicator that there's something going on there in terms of transmission, mostly because if it were productive, it would be something that you would expect the system to internally generate. You would expect, perhaps, sensory systems to inform the brain and have a sort of secondary system informing the brain about the environment. What we're seeing is evidence indicating that the brain is actually directly picking up these electromagnetic fields and light signals from the environment. And so there's something here that isn't quite captured by the traditional neurobiological model. And I think it's
6:23 worth continuing to explore because it's by no means something that's set in stone. I think it's fascinating because the story people know is, of course, very gene-centric, focusing on just molecular mechanisms in our brain. We of course know it has to do with electricity of neurons firing, but then it's very much the direct electricity sort of on a neuronal level or the gap junctions, but sort of this whole view that electromagnetic fields influence our brain is new to me when I read your work. And it's also tricky because it opens up like this immense possibility of what could be the case then because electromagnetic fields are all around us right now. So to just bring it back to, as I'm sitting right here right now to our audience,
7:11 could you just explain sort of this influence of magnetic fields on my brain and how exactly do they influence my brain and what do we know empirically? Sure. I think the easiest way to digest this is actually to start with non-human animals first. It's always easier to imagine that, species and systems other than ourselves are influenced by environmental variables. And so we've known for a very long time that insects and birds, for example, fish, are highly responsive to electromagnetic environmental energies. And what I mean by that is, for example, if you look at how birds navigate in 3D space, even at night when they're not getting visual feedback, they navigate
8:00 according to Earth's magnetic field. And when Earth's magnetic field is perturbed, for example, when the sun gives off coronal mass ejections, people may have experienced this directly visually by looking at, for example, the aurora borealis. When you see the aurora borealis, what you're looking at is basically particles from the sun have move towards the Earth and are trapped in Earth's magnetic field around the poles. That dancing light that you see is a visual indication that Earth's magnetic field is being perturbed. For the birds, what that means is their internal compasses that allow them to navigate in 3D space have been completely disturbed, jammed, and they're unable to navigate using those same systems. The same thing for bumblebees and other kinds of insects.
8:51 Swarming behavior changes in insects. Fish won't navigate the same way. Now if you move to humans, you'll find that there's all sorts of interesting phenomena that have been reported over the past 100 years that are relevant to Earth's magnetic field for humans. So for example, when you have perturbations of Earth's magnetic field, humans We tend to see more psychiatric hospital admissions during those periods, first of all. Second, among inpatients with epilepsy, people who are in the hospital who have epilepsy who are being monitored, those individuals tend to have more seizures during periods of increased geomagnetic activity. And so there clearly is an effect on the brain
9:39 of humans as well as other species in terms of when Earth's magnetic field is perturbed. But it turns out there's also effects on these brains when Earth's magnetic field is quiet. And we could talk about those if you like. But I always like pointing to these perturbational moments because what it gives you is an experimental tool to look at quiet periods versus non-quiet periods or stormy periods and really distinguish you know, differences in behavior. And from the behavioral and cognitive sciences perspective, that's the relevant level of analysis. You know, is the animal changing the way that it navigates in the world based upon these environmental perturbations? Yeah. So you say it's a perturbation, for instance, like if something happens in the electromagnetic field of the earth. So the
10:26 first question I have, like a bit skeptic. So these are statistically significant results, sort of, and it's replicated. And we know this is sort of, we can put the papers down in our description and this is like hardcore science. Definitely. Yeah. And it's been replicated multiple times in the laboratory, but also just in naturalistic settings. So for example, the study that I cited about increased rates of epilepsy or epileptic seizures among those with epilepsy, that was replicated in the early 20th century. And then in the later 20th century, you saw totally different data sets being used, but a replication of the phenomenon. And that is correlative data. So you're really looking at whether geomagnetic activity is perturbed or not, and you can't control that. The sun controls that,
11:13 right? But you can see frequencies go up and down. And then if you go to the laboratory, you realize that you can actually... perturb the temporal lobes with electromagnetic fields by directly applying electromagnetic fields to the brain you can change brain activity and so it's an independent verification that the mechanism is valid very interesting and maybe good i think to go back a couple steps in the beginning of your career because you work with dr michael persinger who's famous for the neuroscientist famous for inventing the god helmet right and that was all about electromagnetic stimulation of our brain would which would induce like mystical type experiences. Could you tell us a bit about his work, how it influenced you and about the God Helmer? Yeah, sure.
12:01 Working with Dr. Persinger was like a dream come true in grad school because he was very open to whatever it is that we wanted to study. He's a very open-minded person, but he always emphasized that measurement was very important and quantification was very important. So if you couldn't measure it, if you couldn't count it or it wasn't subject to inter-observer agreement where we could both point to something and agree, you know, there it is, then it wasn't really within the purview of science. And so he had an open mind and he studied all sorts of interesting things like mystical experiences and paranormal phenomenon, things like this, but always from the perspective of we are talking about physical systems, we're talking about things that we can measure, and we have to take an empirical approach. So in that setting, we could ask all sorts of
12:48 interesting questions. And in the context of him having invented this helmet that really displays the importance of how natural electromagnetic fields can affect the brain, but now in the laboratory context, it was really interesting to take that idea and bring it to the next logical step, which is, well, what is happening to the brain tissues themselves? Is there something about brain tissue that has receptive qualities that allow it to pick up these electromagnetic fields? Is this an ion channel phenomenon or is this something happening at a different level of analysis? And so we started asking questions, you know, based upon what William James was proposing. And we investigated the claim that
13:39 the brain has transmissive properties, but we did it in a really in a novel way. Because traditionally in the neurobiological canon, everything that the brain does is really a product of what the brain is generating in and of itself. Yeah, like this real bottom-up sort of approach. Exactly, right? And it's just a shuffling of chemicals and electrical potentials. That view is really something that is bound to life and living systems. And as long as you have a living system, whatever experiment that you run to try to look for something that isn't based upon that, isn't based upon the productive capacity for the cells to generate these experiences and
14:26 behaviors, you're always going to have a confounding variable. You're always going to have something that's going to prevent you from drawing conclusions. And so what you want to do is you want to ideally take away the life variable in this analysis. so we used post-mortem brain tissues. These were human brain tissues that had been fixed upon death in formaldehyde-based solutions. And the idea was those brain tissues, which by the way, when you look at them under the microscope, they have all the preserved brain structure that you'd expect in a living brain. So if you You open up the brain, you slice it, look at it under the microscope, you can still see all the cells there. They're all organized in the same way. They're all oriented where they ought to be. All the dendrites and all the
15:15 very fine filaments are all oriented exactly where they were upon death, but the physiology is gone. They don't metabolize anymore. They don't metabolize. They don't generate action potentials. They don't do any of the things that you'd expect living tissue to do. So what you're left with is a material. And the idea is if you run current through this material, electrical current, or if you expose this material to an electromagnetic field, how does the tissue process that signal? And it really is a kind of material sciences question. And what we found was when you did that, this was the subject of my doctoral thesis under Dr. Persinger, when you have these tissues exposed to electromagnetic fields in the laboratory that you can control, and you're probing the different areas
16:01 of the brain and looking at microvolt fluctuations in those tissues, just how voltage is going up and down, what you find is that the electromagnetic fields that you use are differentially filtered by different areas of the brain. And so it's not acting as this big homogenous blob. The different areas are still doing different things, much in the same way that you would expect a functional brain to have regional specificity in terms of its function. But this had nothing to do with the living system. It's just a material. So I thought that was interesting. And the thing that really made it for me, the thing that was really sort of the nail in the coffin for me was... If you do the same thing that the researchers had done previously, which was to look at geomagnetic activity and to see how patients
16:50 were responding and look at seizure activity and how that coincides with perturbations of the geomagnetic field, if you did that with the post-mortem brain tissues and you just looked at all your experiments that you performed over the past couple years, and just retrospectively went and saw, because people record these things, you look at what the geomagnetic activity was like on the days that you were doing the recordings, and you just look at the baseline activity of the tissues, what you find is that the frequencies on the spectrograms, when you actually break down all the different oscillations that are in the voltage fluctuations of the tissue, when you break that down into a spectrum, the spectra are totally different on days of increased geomagnetic activity versus quiet
17:35 days. And they're within the frequency range that you would expect given that specific area of the brain and what you would expect if it was alive. Yeah. And so, and we know in living persons, because you earlier described sort of these studies that those effects would be, it would correlate for, what did you say? What exactly do we know it correlates with? Like big changes in earth magnetic field. Are you talking about the, like, how Earth's magnetic field is related to people's conscious experiences? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah, we know from many studies that, for example, the dreaming state is clearly affected by geomagnetic activity. So not only does the amount of REM
18:25 that you experience, rapid eye movement associated with dreaming, not only does that amount of REM sleep change as a function of geomagnetic conditions, but it also changes based upon your orientation of the way that you sleep, which is related to how the flux lines interact with your body. Also, people will have really interesting kinds of dreams during periods of geomagnetic disturbance, either really quiet periods or really disturbed periods. Those dreams include premonitions. This is the experience of the future before it happens, right? So whether or not you think people are
19:10 actually glimpsing the future, the fact that the next day they report having had a premonition-type experience and those types of experiences, which just empirically exist, people report these things, those types of experiences are happening and they're coinciding with these periods of geomagnetic change, that gives you an indication that there's something here that's happening. And then what you ought to do is go to the laboratory and actually test the hypothesis by simulating geomagnetic conditions or shielding it in the laboratory context. Yes, it's so fascinating. Maybe good also to bring in sort of your work with Michael Levin. We featured him on our channel. And to just tell us a bit more on sort of that... the importance and the paradigm
19:56 shifting in sort of biology, but also which is influencing neurosciences, of course, of bioelectricity. His work and how that relates to your lab work. Yeah, Mike and I do all sorts of interesting work together. We're primarily interested in minimal cognition and mindedness in systems, ranging from cells, tissues, organisms, and non-organisms, materials, all sorts of systems that we wouldn't conventionally assume have minds. And we take the approach that's quite similar. We think that biophysics matters, and so bioelectricity is part of that spectrum of signals that we think are important. You know, some of the work that we've
20:45 done in the past has been look at theories of consciousness and how they can be applied to find minds in the world that we're unaware of. And we also do some work on minimal cognition, trying to build minimally cognitive systems in a dish by combining different kinds of cells and materials to create systems that can learn, solve problems, and do all the things that organisms do, but these are basically creations of our own mind. They're designed biological systems. Yeah, I had this question like a while back ago when you said doing that research on post-mortem tissue didn't at some point that
21:32 create a sense of eeriness, like what am I doing here? Because if you make the conjecture, let's say this is, I'm just, this is hypothesizing, but just entertaining the idea, right? That, If that involves consciousness and consciousness remains after death, what you are doing, you might be influencing a conscious state of a deceased person there. You know, it's something that we actually did talk about, Dr. Persig and I. So, you know, whether or not we can't know because we don't yet have a measure of consciousness that's direct. We can't know the contents of consciousness without asking people or inferring it on the basis of their behaviors. And so we don't know, but you're right. It's important to think about these things and not just
22:19 go headfirst into scientific projects without ethical considerations. Yeah, we did consider the possibility that as we inject current into these tissues or as we expose them to electromagnetic fields in the lab, if indeed that is a cause of conscious experience or even a modulator of conscious experience, perhaps these specimens could be glimpsing small percepts, just moments of conscious experience that would flicker on and off. And I think that upon reflection, thinking about how this stuff works really in the end, I think you probably do need some productive element to this. And I think that the transmissive model is important, but
23:09 it plays well with the productive model. And having a system that's really modified by these formaldehyde solutions and You know, chemically it's been modified, so all the proteins are sticking together in these various ways. We have changed the material. The material is no longer what it was when it was alive. So the fact that we still see these interesting phenomena when you, you know, expose them to these fields is great, but I'm not sure that we're fully capturing exactly what's happening when the tissue is alive and under normal physiological conditions. You probably need something a lot more like a living brain or something that has the same conditions as a living brain or analogous
23:58 conditions to really give rise to these cognitive experiences. But it's interesting that it did cross your mind and you did have these discussions because it's sort of just a thought I have and then I'd like to move on to your work with Michael Levin is that sort of under a materialist metaphysics ethically you don't have any problem because we say when Upon clinical death, there is no consciousness. So you can do whatever. If the person agreed, the deceased one, his body is up for science to do these experiments. And under idealism, you'd say, okay, wait. Caution, be cautious here. But I'd like to go into that in depth when we talk about your essay on all of this. Bringing it back sort of to your work with Michael Levin, what I found fascinating when I interviewed him is that he sort of has this idea of even a platonic realm of form because he says
24:45 like, how does my hand know When do the cells know that the hand, the organ is complete? They don't know. We don't know from the genome, they don't. So how do they know that? And his work points to the fact that bioelectricity is involved and you can even sort of tell organisms what to do. And then if you combine that with your work on electromagnetism, it seems to suggest that there is this realm, this field where the forms are stored. So first, I'd like to hear your thoughts there on, do you think forms are stored in that realm? And secondly, even more, open hypothesis, is consciousness stored there? Because that does seem for me like a next step even, because then we need to talk about your definition of consciousness and how you, your view on the hard problem. But that's, if we, I'd love to go in detail with you into
25:32 all of this, but maybe first to start with, are forms stored in that field? It's a great question. And, you know, the question, I think that the, we have to look at how often this This idea has been brought up throughout history. So we have Plato, of course, but then we have people like Harold Saxton Burr in the late 19th century and early 20th century really describing what he called a blueprint for immortality, talking about how bioelectricity could... explain so many of the phenomena that we see and that were really not attributed to, you know, electrical phenomena and talking about how like forms really do or are informed by the voltage distributions across
26:19 tissues. Like he, he was quite, He was going around measuring the voltage of abdomens, looking for signs of pregnancy, for example. And he was able to predict when someone was pregnant based upon voltage distributions and things like this. And notice that there were voltage changes when you had regenerating tissues and so on. And these things have been validated now at the molecular level. And then you have people like Rupert Sheldrake, who has the idea of the morphogenetic field. Morphogenetic field, you know, I'm not sure that that is the electromagnetic field, but what he's describing is a space where the forms of objects of living matter are contained. And as cells grow and participate in forming
27:07 these things we called organisms, they're drawing information from this morphogenetic field. And their genes are being activated by information that isn't genetic fundamentally. And now we have Mike doing this great work at the frontier of bioelectricity and developmental biology, where he's finding that if you cut off a limb or if you damage tissue, you find this incredible instructive ability for cells participating in this electrical communication to order the tissues into a state of repair. We know that if you disrupt the electrical signals between cells, their gap junctions, for example, you can
27:57 have a completely healthy tissue, which shows no sign of genetic mutations, become cancerous. They start developing tumors simply by changing the electrical connections between the cells. If you then reestablish the electrical connections between the cells, now they're no longer tumors. They normalize. So the bioelectric viewpoint is that the information isn't completely stored in the genetic material. There's an information source that isn't genetic. It can be the way that the cells are connected electrically, like the network structure. And bioelectromagnetism and these transmissive view and so on simply place
28:43 that instructive information outside of the system itself. We make the argument that there are forces around us that shape biological systems. It should be relatively unsurprising that systems, when you shield them from an electromagnetic environment, for example, morphogenesis changes. So we have some, you know, there's experiments that show that if you take worms or tadpoles and other kinds of organisms, rodents, and place them in environments that are shielded from electromagnetic fields, external electromagnetic fields, their bodies don't develop in the same way. That's fascinating. Yeah, they just undergo different morphological development. So yes, there may be
29:28 information stored in the environment around us. What's the exact mechanism? We don't know. But it needs this sort of base maker that's in the field to do what it does. It's so fascinating. It's so fascinating. And this brings us maybe interesting link to consciousness because by the way, if the park also, how you and Michael Lavin sort of proposed that sort of minds are more, widespread than we think, right? Because we're so focused on nervous systems and brains, whereas this whole view puts also mind, so to speak, on a cellular level, which would sort of opens a whole area. But before going there, just park that idea. It's a big thing to park. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe just let's go there. But I wanted to talk conscious because you said shielding off shows us how that morphogenesis is sort
30:17 of altered. If you wanna sort of find out what this has to do with consciousness, you've done experiments where you shield off brains, right? From electromagnetic fields to see what happens. I think it's copper shielding experiment. Can you tell us about that work and what that tells us about consciousness? Yeah. Yeah. We, so what we did, this was during my, my PhD, we had people sit and with a cap over their head that was copper based. the copper-based cap was grounded so that basically it acted as like a local Faraday cage. Faraday cage just blocks out external electromagnetic fields. And what we noticed is that when measuring their brain waves with EEG, their brain waves changed depending upon whether they were wearing the
31:05 cap or not. Okay, that was an okay experiment, but Joseph Kirschvink did a much better experiment that was reported in 2019, where he had people sit in a Faraday cage. And in the Faraday cage, he measured brain activity. And they noticed that alpha waves changed based upon whether the person was in the Faraday cage or not. And they were also able to simulate geomagnetic fields in the cage and notice how alpha, which is approximately 10 hertz, oscillations in the brain that you see usually when people close their eyes. You can see these oscillations on EEG. Those oscillations were changing based upon whether the person was shielded or not. And his experiment was much better done. I'm happy to admit
31:56 that. Very generous of you, but yeah. And he really is the expert on like electromagnetic biology. But did he investigate? What do people report? Yeah, I don't remember from the paper if people's experiences were noted. So that would have been something fascinating to see. But I can tell you that having spent time in Dr. Persinger's lab, where all of our EEG experiments were performed in a Faraday cage, people do have odd experiences in Faraday cages. This can range from feeling really, really calm to having... the odd experience of like feeling uneasy and things like this. And that's just from
32:43 being in the chamber and, and the, the experiment that you may be running may be totally related. It may be just be like, you know, something psychophysical where you're flashing lights at someone and seeing how they react, but people just being in the Faraday cage, they do feel different. Um, it should be systematically tested. Yeah, you need to placebo control, of course, then to know for sure. But I'm super curious because it would inform us on how this relates to consciousness. Back to the question I parked, right? Because the minds being more sort of widespread than we think. You have a paper with Michael Levin where you even say that we might even be noticing 1% of all the minds that there are, namely sort of the brain or brain-focused, nervous-focused view of looking at consciousness, which was to me like, whoa,
33:29 if this is true, that's just like, extraordinary idea, right? That 99%, we're missing out on 99% of brains, sorry, minds, minds. Could you please explain your work and this view you have with Michael Levin? Sure, yeah. Well, we originally explored the idea that mind is multiply realizable, that you can realize a mind using different substrates and different mechanisms. And, you know, when I say mind, I mean more than just consciousness. I just mean the whole category of cognition. Generally in psychology, you can think of things as being either cognitive or behavioral. Cognitive are things that are associated with internal states, experiences, thoughts, and
34:15 feelings. Behavioral is all the stuff that you can observe. And what we were really interested in was whether a mind could be realized by different kinds of systems. And And if you start with something like learning, we already accept that learning is something that can be implemented by machines. We explicitly call it learning, machine learning. And even though it's implemented by different hardware, and there may be different algorithms fundamentally that are achieving the learning, we know that learning is something that is completely substrate independent. Different organisms can do it. Plants can do it just as well as mammals. Single cells can do it. Machines can do it. Materials can do it. We know that you can condition iron bars. We know that different kinds of silver nanowire
35:03 networks, if you run electrical current through them, they rearrange themselves into precise networks that are highly efficient. And you might say, well, what does that have anything to do with learning? The point is you have to have operational definitions for these things. And that's a kind of behaviorist approach. If you have an operational definition, which in the case of learning might be something like outputs that are contingent upon a history of inputs. Does your next move change based upon what happened before? That speaks to learning. It speaks to memory, which are of course related. And if you start with something like that, you realize, well, at least that property of minds is substrate independent. Then you get to things like decision-making, attention, problem-solving, all
35:49 these easy problems, right? And you can find similar analogies in the world. And then you get to consciousness, and it's kind of almost a dead end because we're limited by the ways that we measure consciousness. We don't have a direct measure. We only have indirect measures. And then we have theories of consciousness, which Mike and I argue are really our tools to escape what we call mind blindness. We are blind to what might be many, many minds in the world, whether they be conscious or not. We are blind to them precisely because we don't have good models of how minds work. And I think a great example for this that really hits home is plants. Plants are incredibly intelligent systems.
36:40 They don't share our nervous systems. They don't have the same cells. You know, they use these vascular networks, although they do use certain kinds of chemicals that are similar to our brains, like the most common neurotransmitter in the brain that's excitatory is called glutamate. Plants use glutamate as well for signaling, so there's some commonality there. But plants have totally different structures, and yet they can achieve all sorts of interesting functions. They can anticipate where the sun will be the night before the sun sun rises. At night, they can turn their leaves toward where the sun will rise the next day. They can engage in game theoretic decision making, which takes into consideration their neighbors in terms of kin versus non-kin. Is that plant like me? Does it share my genes or not? Should I compete for resources with it or not? It does
37:30 all sorts of intelligent things. In fact, when you look at plants on cameras that change the time scale, right? What you find is this incredibly dynamic thing that's happening with plants. They're orienting their leaves, they're moving around and swaying. If you saw those same kinds of behaviors in real time, you might be tempted to say that that thing is alive and animate and thinking. But because it's happening at a totally different time scale, we just don't consider that. And that speaks to our mind blindness. Our intuitions are grounded in We need something that looks kind of like an ape that moves around and speaks and has facial expressions and can respond to a name. We have something like this that
38:16 defines our intuitions about what has minds, but we think it goes so much deeper. There are better ways to identify minds in the world. Really cool explanation. I like the fact that plants are playing game theoretic. Yeah. Did you know that it brings to mind that, I think it was Terence McKenna who said, like, animals are an invention of plants to carry them around. I like that one. They rule the planet in a sense. The same could be said, I did a documentary on bacteria and of course fungi. We see such levels of intelligence there. But if indeed you and Michael Levin are right that we are blind to minds there, what's the best way out of that mind blindness? Well, we need good theories of consciousness.
39:02 And we argue that we need theories of consciousness that are generalizable and universalizable, that don't rely on neural substrates. Because if you only rely on neural substrates, and if you only rely on neural correlates of consciousness, you will be limited to neural systems. And it's not obvious from the existing theories of consciousness, which, by the way, are mostly agnostic about the substrates that can implement minds. it's not obvious that these things can't occur in systems that don't have brains. And so if we develop theories of consciousness and bolster them in ways that allow us to make predictions, maybe at first they seem like bold
39:48 predictions, but to make predictions about where minds may exist, then we can go in and try to test them. And often that means either changing our time scale or spatial scale to try to investigate whether a mind is there. But also it might mean trying to interface minds, putative minds, minds that may exist or not. You're actually testing that hypothesis. Interface them with embodiments that are more intuitive to us. For example, if a plant is suspected of having a mind, it's very difficult to determine whether it does. And so what you can do is you can hook it up to a computer interface and give it feedback. And using those feedback loops, you can allow it to
40:34 respond dynamically to whatever problem space you give it. And when you do that with systems, whether it's cells in a dish or organisms, mushrooms, things like this, you notice that there's a lot of dynamic stuff that's happening there. And you wouldn't notice it unless you embodied the system. You give it a way to interact with the world beyond its what it has available to it. Wow. This also makes me think of that would be a way the next generation of analog computing in a sense. Yep. Do you envision that, like plant-based computing? It could be possible. I mean, biological computers, what you're describing is a biocomputer. And currently, there are a few people who are working on creating biocomputers. We just saw
41:21 the emergence of the first biocomputing company in the last year. And they're starting with brain cells, of course, because where else would you start? But yeah, you could do it with mushrooms and with plants and so on. I mean, there may be limitations in terms of processing speed and bandwidth, and those things need to be considered. But yes, you can use biological tissues as ways to do computing. But to be fair, you can also use water as a way to do computation as well. There's a lot of ways to use materials to compute, um, and living systems can be used as well. And, and, and to bring this back to your lab work, you work at the sole lab. Just let me get the sort
42:07 of the abbreviation, right. Um, I've never written it down. Maybe I can ask you, what does it stand for the soul lab and what's your work about? It's called the self-organizing units lab. Check. Sorry. No, no worries. Soul is, you know, a cheeky nod to the soul. Right. And I think the point there in naming it soul was, you know, for a long time we placed consciousness and all these cognitive faculties into a black box. with things like the soul and What I like about self organizing systems and the kind of work that we're doing with closed-loop feedback is that you can really Start to open up the box and look at all these things that you know were traditionally called soul
42:57 or or the the new ma or you know, there's all sorts of words for what people have called Basically the person their existence their being But now we're looking at it from the perspective of autopoiesis, self-organizing systems and things like this. And can you tell us about one of those self-organizing systems or where you see sort of mind on a smallest scale in a pet tradition in your lab? Sort of what would that be? Is that like single cell of a collection of cells that starts performing what you would call mind? Yeah, the kind of work that we do in my lab involves brain cells. So I think that I could talk about that, but I think it goes a little bit deeper. I think you can get minds with different kinds of cognitive faculties at the single cell level. Single cells are clearly
43:45 able to learn. They seem to be able to problem solve. And one thing that Mike Levin really touches on, I think he emphasizes, is we can't just consider cognitive behavioral space or traditional 3D space as being the place where mind is happening. We also have to think about things like transcriptional space and anatomical morpho space, different kinds of spaces where a system is confronted with problems and is solving those problems using its cognitive resources. And those cognitive resources for us at the human level means our brains and our bodies and so on. at the level of the individual cell might mean certain kinds of sub-cellular organelles and different kinds of things like that. But in the lab, in my lab, we
44:36 investigate brain cells as the minimal cognitive unit, and we try to build them up using bioengineering techniques into different kinds of shapes and structures to see what are the basic building blocks of a cognitive system. If I change the shape of the tissue, does that change its cognitive capacity? If I give it these additional resources, does that change the cognitive capacity? If I change the density of the cells or if I arrange them vertically or add more layers and so on? We're using bioengineering to really reinvent brain tissue and do what Valentino Breitenberg, famous neuroscientist and cyberneticist called it the the law of uphill analysis and downhill invention. And the idea is that you can
45:25 spend lots and lots of your time investigating cognitive systems and trying to tease apart the Gordian knot of the brain by really just running tons of experiments. Or alternatively, you can do this inventive process, a different approach to science, where you build things up from the ground up and you look at how functions are gained as you add elements to the system. So that's kind of the approach that we take. And what we've noticed is, you know, embodiment is really important. It's really important for the system to get some kind of feedback from its environment. And I generally do not think that an unembodied system, a system that is only self-referencing, that can only connect with itself and not with the external environment, those systems are very
46:11 unlikely to be conscious. Yeah, then a question would be, of course, what embodiment is, right? For instance, would LLMs, if they are connected to just devices worldwide with sensors, would that count as embodiment, for instance? That's a great question. I think it's an open question. Because LLMs clearly are intelligent systems. You can embody them. And they are embodied to an extent. You can see that in the form of a computer monitor. Computer monitor is the way that they output to us. keyboard is another form of embodiment for an LLM because that's where we give it feedback and the feedback is then fed back into the system and so on. So it is embodied and we are the interface with the external world. And, you know, that is a minimal form of
47:01 embodiment, but is it enough and is the feedback sufficient to really have the system adaptively respond or is it beholden to the training that was already performed a priori and we're just we're communicating with a ghost basically. That's difficult to know. Maybe mind is only possible at the training stage and then afterwards you just don't get anything. And the architecture probably matters. The hardware that it's running on probably matters. There's a lot of elements here that matter but The embodiment of LLMs is a kind of open question right now. So you're saying embodiment is key and I can get that because it's just our own experience of the world has so much to do with our own embodiment and we're
47:46 learning more and more about that. But the embodiment of, and we were talking LLM, but also on a cellular level or larger skills in ourself is so alien to us. It's just very hard to imagine that and it can't report to us. So would you say that on all these levels of embodiment, phenomenal consciousness can also be present but not reporting? To clarify my idea, I mean, being a single cell, I do have some sense of what I like and don't like. Bacteria will move away in certain cases, depending on what bacterium it is, from acid. Seward's oxygen or, you know, or sugars.
48:33 And it could very well be that it has some sense of, ah, this is nice. Sort of phenomenal sense, like between that. This is nice and this is not, but like on a very different level than ours. Do you suggest that on all these levels, phenomenal consciousness could be present? Different levels of embodiment? Yeah, I think it can be. I think that one way to explore this is to look at case studies in humans that clearly have phenomenal experience, but can't move their bodies like in locked in syndrome. You know, in locked in syndrome, you have a case where this is a person who cannot move their bodies, but, but they, they have a body, um, and they are having experiences. And as long as you give them the tools to report those experiences, like either measuring their brain waves
49:22 or measuring very slight changes in muscles around the eyes, um, you can get very sophisticated reports about the inner lives of these people. And so the idea is to embody systems that have minds, but don't have bodies with which to express them or don't have the tools to translate those signs of mind into things that we can interpret. That's what embodiment is all about in the experimental context. When it comes to single cells, cells are, You know, you can think of a cell as having many ways to interact with its environment. It has a cytoskeleton that allows it to move around and change its shape. Cells can also excrete things
50:09 into the environment, like they can, you know, They can engage in paracrine signaling where they send chemicals to influence their neighbors and so on. They can tug and pull on their extracellular matrix. There's all sorts of things that cells do to interact with their environments. The question is, is there an experience in there that gets expressed as some behavioral correlate at the level of the cell? We don't know. This is where theories of consciousness need to come into play. Yeah. Movement seems to be really important for this stuff on two fronts. It's important because it allows you to interact with an environment physically, but the other thing is it is the really the only thing that we know of that gets at phenomenal consciousness
50:59 indirectly. Not directly, but indirectly. And if you think of really any kind of state of mind, if you think of consciousness sure, but if you think of memories, for example, or attention, any kind of cognitive faculty, the only way that we know that those inner lives exist in animals is through their behaviors. When you ask a person, what are you experiencing? What you get is a verbal response. The verbal response is a motor effect that that's ultimately a behavior that's occurring that is observable. Even if I couldn't hear it, I could measure the oscillations of your voice box,
51:46 and I could basically get an idea of what it is that you're experiencing from that. In the same way, we need to think about what are the limitations of the system. I think that basically we have this fundamental roadblock, which is behavior, and If you can't see it, if you can't point to it, if you can't count it, then even if there is a mind, we can't detect it. And so the idea of embodiment is to just give the system some physical way of interacting with the world in a way that we can see and interpret and interact with it. Yeah. But still, I'd say the trap here of behaviorism is that the simulated behavior
52:35 is not the real thing. I mean, if we would sort of apply sort of the Turing test way of thinking on consciousness, we know the LLMs we work with will report sort of, they'll pass the Turing test on consciousness if that's our test. But we also know, I mean, every engineer know their program to do that. And it is a simulation of consciousness. It is not consciousness itself. So how do we get out of that trap? And this of course is related to what you're saying and we need a sort of proper theory of consciousness. What are the theories of consciousness that you like that sort of can get us out of this sort of to just know how we can see if it's the real thing, if it's truly conscious beyond sort of just functional, this computational functionalist idea or just these
53:20 behavioralistic ideas? Yeah, I think that the, you know, two of the theories that I'm partial to and apply in my own research and I think kind of get us a little bit beyond behavior are integrated information theory and active inference and the model of the free energy principle. I think that in both of these cases, you have something that can be applied universally. It doesn't have to be a brain. It doesn't have to be a body in the traditional sense. It can just be a system that is a loop or some sort of feedback mechanism. And you can point to it and you can find elements based upon the theory that either indicate whether the system is likely to have
54:06 a mind or not. In these cases, we're talking about consciousness, but yeah, you can tell something about the system without it directly interacting with the world in a physical way. I think that's interesting. Unfortunately, I think that we often smuggle in a whole bunch of assumptions and observations into these things that don't get mentioned. And so then it often seems like the theory is doing a lot of work that it isn't. Let me give you an example of this. So, you know, one thing that we've done in neurobiology is you measure a whole bunch of people using fMRIs and you ask them about their experiences. And then you correlate those experiences with what's happening on the brain scan.
54:54 And then after, you know, after thousands of these scans, you can scan someone's brain, and then you can tell them about their experiences. So that's called reverse inference. And I think we forget when we do that, that in order to actually tell anything about the person's experience, we had to first collect all the data to make the association between the brain areas that were activated and the experiences. If we had just started by measuring brain activations, which are just signals, we still would have no idea. You'd never get there. You'd never get there. And so the cool ability to predict whether someone's having an experience or not is scaffolded to all the stuff that happened beforehand where you asked people what they were experiencing. Unfortunately, I think that that is a bottleneck that
55:43 we can't fully overcome. Because even if you take like IIT, for example, and you look at you know, causal structure and how that's related to this metric of phi. I think that's interesting, but we wouldn't know that that metric was important in the first place if we had not already validated it against systems that we already knew were conscious. So if we didn't already do the work of asking humans and also inferring from animals, you know, conscious systems, and then applying the Phi metric, we wouldn't know that that metric was related in any way to phenomenal experience or what we assume is phenomenal experience. So I think a lot of these theories, even though they are universalizable and
56:31 I find compelling, I think these are interesting theories with predictive validity. We, we forget that there's a whole bunch of stuff that happened ahead of time where we really did just have to ask people what they thought, which is a William James thing, by the way. It's just introspection. Yeah. In a sense, we cannot get beyond it, right? It's sort of, it points for me, but now we're entering more into philosophy, but we're in physics. I quote this too often in conversation, but just like sort of the John Wheeler participancy we're in, right? We have to participate in reality. So we have to perform measurements which sort of, we're influencing the system, this third person perspective is just not, it won't cut it anymore, right? If you wanna get there. And so this to me is sort of in that same area,
57:18 right? We need these first person reports still in consciousness research. Getting back to sort of, you've written a beautiful essay which sort of many of the ideas discussed so far in this conversation are sort of put together and you basically make a big case for consciousness beyond death. You won a prize with it, the Bigelow Essay Award. Could you briefly unpack what that essay was about? And I think it's just awesome to touch upon all the philosophical implications of it. Sure. Yeah, it was a global competition, an essay competition that was open to anyone who had any kind of prior background in consciousness research
58:03 associated with death and dying. And because of what I had done during my PhD, it was a good fit. And so I started writing this essay. And the question that was placed to all of us was, what is the best scientific evidence for the continuation of consciousness beyond bodily death? And my answer to that question is the same as William James. I don't think that things like mediumship, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, I don't think that stuff is the best scientific evidence for the continuation of consciousness after bodily death. Some of those things may be relevant, but I still think that William James was correct in differentiating productive consciousness or productive function rather from
58:53 transmissive function and noting that if the brain is a productive organ and all of its functions are simply a product of what cells are doing at the micro level, which is our current understanding of neurobiology, you know, the canonical sense, if that's the case, then consciousness cannot survive death. But if it's a transmissive model, if in fact brains have some kind of transmissive function, then that would place some part of the mind or some proto mind signal outside of the brain. And only when it interacts with the brain, do you get something like consciousness, something like mind, In that kind of model of brain activity, you actually have the
59:39 possibility that consciousness could survive bodily death because even when the brain decayed and even when it was no longer there, the signal that once interacted with it is. And in the same way that when you unplug a radio or if you smash a radio, the signals in the electromagnetic environment that transmit the radio waves that contain the information of the music that you would listen on the radio, even though the radio is smashed and you can't actually transmit the information anymore. If you were to reassemble the radio, it would seem as though you were reassembling the music. It would seem as though you were reassembling the thing that was creating the music. But in fact, all you were doing is reassembling the receiver Interesting, yeah. I think these intermediary states are so interesting. So in your post-mortem tissue research, for
1:00:27 instance, normally upon clinical death, we assume phenomenal consciousness ends, right? If this is so, could it be that sort of that radio has sort of intermediary states, like a battery running low, but still, whereas we say, okay, now it's over, there still is experience, and it might even, how long could it sort of still sort of filter out consciousness. And I asked this question also from like spiritual traditions that hint at this, for instance, the Tibetan book of the dead, the Bardo total, which is sort of like an ancient tradition that just accurately from first person experiences describes these intermediary states. What are your thoughts here? Because this is really exciting stuff to me. And then of course, also beyond these states when, when say my brain has fully sort of decomposed,
1:01:16 um, Is there any form of what it is like to be that state then? You get what I'm hinting at? I do. It's just like an open territory, but happy to explore with you. Yeah. Ironically, I think that the ancient view of death is more accurate than the modern medical view. The modern medical view is that there's a moment of death. There is no moment of death. It's clearly not the case that when the heart stops, you are dead because you can... artificially replace the heart and have the body live completely fine. You can replace much of the body and have the brain continue to function. When the brain dies, that's when you start to lose functions. But what does
1:02:01 brain death look like? Well, it certainly doesn't happen in a moment. It happens over the course of minutes to hours. And I think that that is interesting because it leaves open for the possibility of transition states. You can tell that transition states are in fact occurring because when people come back, so to speak, which is just to say that their brain is now able to not only function, but also that their body can now report what the brain is doing. they report all sorts of interesting experiences. Those experiences, the near-death experiences, are highly conserved. You see them across the world. You see them in all cultures. They're very similar, right? Things like the light at the end of the tunnel. These kinds of experiences
1:02:50 are artifacts of a dying brain and are really indicative of the fact that there are transition states. The brain is continuing to function. The cells are actually communicating with each other. for minutes and hours after the person has been declared clinically dead on the basis of some metric. The current metric for brain death is something like less than two microvolts per second, something like that. Basically, really low amplitude brain activity for some period of time. But the thing about EEG, which is the tool that you're using to measure this is that in order for you to pick up any kind of electric fields over the surface of the scalp, you're dealing with
1:03:39 highly synchronous brain activity. So as soon as those neurons are no longer synchronized and they're firing randomly, that doesn't mean they're dead, they're clearly alive. But because they're no longer firing synchronously, we attribute that to death. That's a person who has died, but the tissue is still alive. And if you were to measure very deep into the brain versus the outside, You would find that the inside dies later than the outside. So it's dying in stages and that will code the experience that's possible. How do we know that people don't have experiences tens of minutes to hours after they're supposedly dead? Well, we don't know because they don't have a body to report it. They could be experiencing all sorts of interesting things, but they don't have a body to report it. And it turns out that the longer you are, so to
1:04:26 speak, clinically dead, the less likely you are to regain consciousness. Regain consciousness as defined by you speak, you can respond to stimuli, you respond to your name, and so on. It just makes you think that we have to be much more cautious there as long as we don't know exactly what's going on. In the filter hypothesis, say, okay, say now the brain is totally dead. So the radio is totally broken. So only what we're left with is the signal out there in the sky. It clearly is not music. It needs the radio to sort of play me the song, right? But is it something to be like that, you think? Now we're entering, of course, metaphysics and philosophy. But what are your thoughts here? It's a great question. It's hard to know. I think that you...
1:05:16 potentially design experiments to get reports of what that signal is like in a different embodiment. What that would look like, I think that's difficult to say right now. But no, I think like William James, I think that it doesn't make much sense to think about what music is Exists in the room before the air is sifted by the pipe organ the the pipe organ is creating the vibrations of air that are to us perceived as sound before the pipe organ has transmitted that that That air in the form of vibration Before that happens it doesn't make much sense
1:06:02 to ask. Where is the music stored? It is, you know one answer would be well, it's stored as an unpatterned series of air molecules in the room that are moving around according to Brownian motion and, you know, thermal cycles or whatever, you know, you could, you could, you could have a description like this that might make sort of sense, but asking where consciousness is stored before it interacts with the brain, I think doesn't make much sense in the transmissive model. I think it's, it's fascinating because I opened also by saying that, um, the whole transmissive theory of consciousness has been mainly sort of people always thought that NDEs, out-of-body experiments were sort of our sort of evidence for it. And you and your essay say
1:06:51 that you don't regard that as strong evidence, but you do see sort of your work on electromagnetic fields as the better sort of explanation for it. I'm just curious how exactly, because I still am not totally convinced that that is per se a better explanation or why so. I think so. I'd like to preface this answer
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