135. Paul Thagard | How Brains Build Consciousness

Can brains build consciousness? In this interview, Paul Thagard argues that they can, and explains his approach.My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestPaul Thagard is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science. His work focuses on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine.Check out his book, "Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness"!https://academic.oup.com/book/60618https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FHQJ3KCS/2. Book SummaryPaul Thagard’s Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness develops a neuroscientifically grounded, mechanism-based theory meant to explain not just “ordinary” perception, sensation, emotion, and thought, but also the especially puzzling, highly structured forms of experience that show up in dreaming, humour, and music. The core proposal is the “NBC” theory: conscious experience arises from interactions among Neural representation, Binding, Coherence, and Competition—where coherence is understood as constraint satisfaction and competition governs which representations win out for attention and interpretation.After laying out NBC and illustrating it with simpler cases (e.g., how brains build perceptual and bodily experiences and integrate them into unified “compound” consciousness), Thagard uses it to explain three marquee domains. Dreaming is treated as a product of the same mechanisms, aiming to explain why dreams are common, emotionally charged, continuous with daily life yet sometimes bizarre, and still feel intensely “what-it’s-like” (his term “zing”) even when they don’t make ordinary sense. Humour is explained via a characteristic dual shift: incoming words/images trigger an initial interpretation and emotional response, then a change prompts a second interpretation and response, and recognizing that shift yields surprise and laughter. Musical experience is explained as the brain binding basic note-representations into higher-order structures like melody, rhythm, and harmony, then binding these with other modalities (movement, words, visuals, emotion), with competition helping music “break through” into conscious attention.The later chapters broaden the same framework to other conscious domains (e.g., religion, morality, sports performance, romance, and the effects of drugs), and argue that any full theory must handle time consciousness: the brain represents time using “time cells,” binds these into larger “memory units,” and uses coherence and competition to produce an experienced sense of duration and temporal flow. Thagard also evaluates animal consciousness and asks about machine consciousness, arguing that current large language models (including ChatGPT) can be impressive without having felt perceptions, sensations, or emotions, partly because they lack the kind of world- and body-involving understanding central to his story. Finally, he connects the theory to a broader mind–body view he calls “coherent materialism” (or “cohmaterialism”), on which genuinely minded systems are rare because they require tightly coupled hardware/software that coherently satisfies constraints of time, space, energy, and history.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:51 - Overview of book04:57 - Qualia08:12 - Illusionism11:53 - Neural representation14:58 - Representation18:14 - Binding22:40 - Coherence26:58 - Emotions28:49 - Competition31:18 - Getting consciousness38:13 - Emergence40:27 - Additional mechanisms42:50 - Correlates vs. identity48:00 - Explanatory breadth50:53 - Dreams55:59 - Global workspace theory58:27 - Other approaches1:01:46 - Animal consciousness1:05:41 - Vagueness1:08:37 - Functionalism and AI1:16:14 - Coherent materialism1:18:37 - Thought experiments1:22:30 - Mary's room1:25:22 - Future research1:27:57 - Value of philosophy1:30:01 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe