I, V, M. The rest of the world was locked down. We decided to borrow into our own holes. And, uh, very important sounds.
Yes. Yes. But here we are back here. We are back after our briefitis and let's begin by talking a bit about what we were doing in our very brief break away from simplified.
So, hey guys, I'm Shiget. For my break away from simplified, I was while I wasn't doing some tremendous use of experiments of cooking in the kitchen. I was trying to learn Mandarin, which is going just as bad as the cooking experiments, I guess. But yes, I am trying to make some progress in learning the language of our future masters.
So, here, that's what I've been going on about. What about you guys? What do you already know? That's true.
That is true. Although, that's where I will differ and say that's not learning the language of the masters. That's just learning my language. So, yes.
So, while that's true, let's, yeah, what were you guys up to? Tony? Yeah, so interestingly enough, during our brief hiatus, enough people said hi at us. Thank you guys.
Thank you guys. But for everyone asking, everyone who was missing us, this is what you were craving for. Welcome back. Yeah, you are.
Yeah. And in the middle of the biggest pandemic we've seen, I decided to switch jobs. Oh, of course. In itself, sounds like a very privileged thing to do, but also like a very, very difficult kind of transition.
Because now, are you guys friendly with the Warren Harding error? This is something that Malcolm Gladwell brought up in Blink. No, no, no, no. Basically, like Warren Harding was like the worst president in the United States.
And the reason he became president was people thought he looks like a president. So, it's about basically how you make judgments about people when you see them. When you join a new job in the middle of a pandemic, people start judging you by the quality of your internet and your microphone. Yeah, yeah.
So, this is actually very well linked to what they call nominative determinism, which is also like, I mean, you tend to trust a professional more based on the name they have. So, if it's, I mean, India, it's taken to a scientific level almost because of the caste system. But otherwise globally, just if you have someone who is called, who's called like some guy called Tom Judge is probably going to be a pretty good lawyer. Yeah, but that's what I was saying.
Yeah, Bonsal is startup, right? Yeah, Bonsal is startup, exactly. That's the name. I think that Buddhism has something to do with the whole thing as well.
I thought a couple of my movies are in for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
One of the best, the best recent cases I was reading about of nominative determinism was the stop broking for the stock. The Ponzi scheme broke all Bernie made off with a million, with billions. Yeah. So, that was I think one of the best cases of nominative determinism.
But yes, so yes, Tony, well done on projecting this aura of professional success, whether it be true or not. Yeah. But at this point in the pandemic, we started taking the audio quality of people on the call very personally. Like the poor guy has bad network, but you're like, what is wrong with you?
No, but yeah, this is what I mean, there was here also, I mean, in Malaysia, everyone was talking about when we were just out to start our work from home. Everyone was talking about, oh, how do we do this and how do we do our meetings and then some poor people from like the outskirts of KL where just face their hands and said, what do we do if we don't have Wi-Fi? So, they were very valid questions, but then you're like, what do Wi-Fi? What do I feel bad for you?
Yeah. Yeah. So, I've been working all through June and July and we supply parts to automotive companies. So, they've been working and it's been a challenge because a lot of our, first of all, it's been much better than we thought it would be.
Like, there are orders, we have to deliver money. All that thing is going on. Well, on the flip side, about half our staff has gone back to their abilities, so that's a challenge. And so every day it's a new challenge, people, the local governments, they see, every time they see COVID numbers going up in the vicinity, they impose lockdowns and then everything becomes a problem.
People can't come to work, factories are allowed. So, we are allowed to stay open because we are classified under essential services because some of the parts that we may go into and say that. So, that's not, it's not, but there are people who make like, there's one company that makes some limitations to all day. And they are, every other day, they have been asked to close down.
So, it's complicated. So, and with all that, my two calling in life, which is simplified, sadly to go back soon. So, your love of labor has kept you away from your labor of love, which is the first one. Yes.
My God, that is only been missed already. That element. Very well played. Anyway, on that beautiful one, let's begin today's episode.
So, let's start with one of our key components of simplified our profundity of the day, a day slash week slash whatever period of time that you may choose. And we've had, I mean, I particularly found a doozy in my family WhatsApp group, which has delivered after a fairly long period of time now. I mean, particularly profound WhatsApp forward is hard to find. So, I was quite pleased to find this particular one, which goes, hence, Liski to make our rights a love letter to his girlfriend.
Dear Marie, yesterday was a good day. Our meeting was truly nice. But the chance of success of our love is 50-50 because your father is tiger. Will you give your little heart to me?
The girl replies, Poda, Krakjak. Finally, my puns have been forwarded to family WhatsApp. This is the definition of what we call pickle down humor, I guess. So, yes, I think sitting at home and pretty much just eating biscuits or something.
Pretty much just eating biscuits all day has really gotten to people's brain. And this is the outcome of that. But, yeah, I mean, good to finally, I mean, in a time where all content is just incessantly topical, it's good to find a completely non-topical timeless sort of profundity. Yeah.
And along the same lines, we're going to have a non-topical topic for today's episode, which is consciousness. Wow. It's like a bit rich that, well, three dopes like, you know, consciousness all day. Well, in case anyone forgot the Altra Crapidarianism of the same side, it is right back at you.
And, yeah, so there is this, you know, I'm sure a lot of the girls would have raised themselves for me, thinking about me talking about me inside me from within me outside me. But, yeah, that's, I promise there will be none of that. We can check out the Nithyananda channel for that. And it should be fun.
But I would totally join a religion if you started one, Narendra. I think you should start by writing a book. Oh. One of the people of the world who wrote this is a long time gripe with Narendra not writing his book, but go on, Narendra, you'll think.
Yeah. So, yeah, first of all, I am totally writing that book and I expect all of you. So I even got like my blurb in so, you know, used, so, it's important for products to be multi-use, right? So if you can make products which can be used for many things, it's very good.
So I want my book to be good for starting Bonfire. It's important. If you go to a restaurant and your table has one next shot, you have my book to put it in the very. So I'm not physically invited as well.
So I'll do a task for writing it remains, but yeah, the blurb has been done. You should have like several hundred investors at this point without the product itself. So, yes, coming to the topic which is consciousness, good starting point would be to, you know, sort of, it's notoriously difficult to describe what consciousness is first of all. So when I read about it, and let me tell you how I thought of doing a centropired on consciousness.
I was reading this very nice book called Waking Up by Sam Harris, which talks about spirituality and mindfulness and things of that. And he is an atheist, Sam Harris. And so he wants to look at spirituality as distinct from religion. So his problem with religion is religion requires you to believe in a lot of arbitrary things.
And he says, the spiritual experiences are something which are internal. So the belief or, you know, believing or not believing in religion shouldn't sort of affect your ability to have spiritual experiences. And he goes on to talk about consciousness and things of that. And he mentioned a couple of interesting things which may be pink.
So he spoke about which which I'll talk about a little later in the podcast about something called dual consciousness. So it is possible for individuals to have two conscious beings inside living inside one head or one being. So that was intriguing to me. So then I read about it.
And it sounds like the beginning of the plot of the Telugu picture of Arigid. But nothing is as awesome as the Telugu movie industry. So if that is too hard, then consciousness is something else. So then Parichatudu has to dual consciousness but Telugu movie industry itself, famously has no consciousness.
So speaking of consciousness, what is it? So it is everything that you experience. If a human is stuck in your head, for example, or you had a chocolate and that sweetness is, you know, it's on your tongue. You can remember the taste of that chocolate.
Or if you have a toothache and you're feeding that pain inside your head, that is consciousness. Or your child, you know, you really love your child in a way that you love nothing else. And okay, so Tony and I know exactly what that means and hopefully she'll get to it too soon. But it's part of the consciousness.
And the origin and the nature of these experiences, okay, they have been a mystery. So no one knows what it is or where and it's between since and across the last several thousand years from people, from people, all of us onto modern philosophers. Everyone's been going me inside me and saying, but no one's been really able to objectively define what consciousness is. So majority of scholars, they accept consciousness as a given.
So they don't want to debate the existence or otherwise of consciousness. Though there are some audience in order, there's one guy named Daniel Dennett, he's from Tufts University, and he's called one of the four cosmen of APs. So they are the other one. Saham Harris and Christo Ritza, the other is four.
He's a no conscious, nothing is your brain, just a bunch of neurons. He denies or even if it exists, he says they can't be meaningfully satisfied. He doesn't sign, so it's just a lot of nonsense. But majority of scholars, they accept consciousness as a given.
So they accept that it does exist. And they seek to understand its relationship with the objective world as described by science. So it's like you have a brain, neurons inside and you're experiencing things. So they want to know what exactly happens.
So they're not interested in philosophical discussions and consciousness, which everyone is the main side, you and side you. So they are looking for the physical foot. So they're like, what is it about a highly excitable piece of brain matter that gives eyes to consciousness? Which part is it exactly?
And once you understand that, maybe we can sort of get a better idea of what consciousness is. And so basically, we have a word for it. It's called neuronal correlates of consciousness. It's called NCC.
And what neuronal correlates of consciousness means is whenever you have some experience which you classify as a conscious experience, you want to find out what part of the brain, what part of your neurons. And they're looking for the minimal. So it is possible that if you experience something, a whole bunch of neurons will get excited. But they're looking for the minimal number of neurons, the center that gets excited no matter what conscious experience it is.
So by this definition, do animals also have consciousness? Yes. So they believe that animals have consciousness. So they're impossible to know because they can't communicate.
But definitely higher, you know, like mammals and some birds are crowed and out. They're pretty sure that crows have consciousness. So what do you have some limitations? Most animals have no capacity for unfilled meat.
They don't have capacity for future needs kind of thing. So you know, for example, after two hours, they're going to get hungry. So animals don't seem to understand that. They're not going to invest in the mutual point.
And the interesting thing is, the interesting thing is that they also want to invest in the mutual point. And they are too close to the solitivce. So I was talking about neuronal correlates of consciousness. So what these guys, what scientists are talking about is they want to find a seat of consciousness.
For example, your brain as a whole and it's also connected to the spinal cord. And if you, people who use the spinal cord have injuries somewhere in the neck and the spine cord gets damaged. And they have, you know, it doesn't, it just meet in layers. But they continue to have consciousness.
Their mind is still conscious. And there is another part of the brainfulness area, which is responsible for your balance and a lot of motor actions. And it has a really high number of neurons. So it has more neurons, I think, than the rest of the brain.
It's a small part of the brain. But it takes about the motor function. And that also, when it gets damaged, does not affect, you know, if that gets damaged, your life quality is really diminished. So you can't walk or you can do a lot of things.
But your consciousness is intact. So you can smell things, see things, feel things. Even if you're sensing or active, you can imagine things, all that is part of the consciousness. You can feel emotions.
And you can remember things. Interesting. I wonder, I mean, this is, again, very faint, hazy memory ever since when I was studying something about the brain, when I was much younger. But there was this, I forget the medical or technical name for it.
But the whole thing about how the original theory was there are centers in the brain that do specific jobs, which is true. But it's more about that the centers of the brain are a place where the job initiates. But the execution of it happens pretty much on or there is the many g's of the covering of the brain. which has a sort of a palette.
There's a palette of where all of these activities happen and different parts of the brain come together to make that any activity happen. So even though, and this is, I mean, of course, there is a lot more detail to it and also a lot of it isn't known really completely still, but the theory being that even though a part of your brain is damaged does not mean that the stuff that that part of the brain was responsible for that ability is completely gone. So what it means is that maybe your ability to initiate that particular job or your ability to kind of like do it very well or any competency is diminished, but you're still retained some amount of that ability because of that common, that neural net, so to speak, of where every part of your brain is at least responsible for some part of that one particular activity. Okay, so this is, you know, this is actually, you know, there's narrowed it down even more now.
And so I'll give you an example. So let us say you have different stimuli are presented to the right and left eye. So let us say on the left eye, you get a picture of Modi G shown to you and on the right eye, you get Raul Tan. Now you might imagine that there will be some weird, have your left eye out and say he's a real leader.
You know, you would imagine that you'll see some weird superposition of Modi G and Raul Tan. But in reality, what happens is you'll see Modi do for a few seconds and after which you disappear and Raul will appear and I can go away and Modi will appear and so on. And the two images will alternate in a never-ending dance. They gave the neuroscientist call it binocular rival.
And that's because your brain is getting an emptiness and it can't decide is it Modi G or Raul Tan. And at the same time, this will mind inside a magnetic scale, you know, one of those functional MRI machines that registers brain activity, experimenters will find that a broad set of cortical regions. So they have different cortexes and all right. So broad set of those region called the posterior heart zone.
This is acted. So this posterior heart zone is made up of three, basically three regions, three lobes. One is called a posterior, no, one is called a parietal lobe, one is called the other, one is the occipital lobe and one is the temporal lobe. So these three things, they are in small, they are somewhere in the middle of your head, and your eyes, okay, they are connected to the primary visual cortex, which is right in the front.
While your primary visual cortex is damaged, you won't see it, likely you won't see anything, you go blind. But the primary visual cortex, all it does, it is receives the images and it passes them on. It doesn't do any processing. So you don't know when you do that FMRI, the machine thing, the functional MRI thing, you will not see those neurons like that.
What you will see is neurons inside that posterior heart zone and the same thing happens for hearing that is audibly and somato sensory means you have touch the spinal pain phase and other. And all this thing, all this recognition and all the activation is happening in the posterior heart zone and that is giving rise to conscious perception, including the image of MODIGI or Rata. And that is almost certainly the seat of consciousness which is what you were saying. So this is the same.
So, Marine quick thing, I don't know if this is the same, have you seen that video where you will hear exactly what you're looking at? Basically the audio, it's on the screen that says green needle or brain stem. And the same audio when you look at that word, you either hear green needle or brain stem, whatever you're looking at. Yeah, I don't know if it's the same thing, but yeah, that's very interesting.
And you know, so even though you know what's happening, you still can't, yeah, even though you know, so that's something you're conscious and not able to process. This is slightly different, I imagine. So visual cortex, you know, so they found that they keep studying people with reading your ears and damages to different products. And so you have extensive part of your front door, and you have a tiny part of this post-reel hot zone remote and suddenly people will, you know, they'll have extensive loss of also.
And sometimes quite bizarre. So in some cases, you're just unable to recognize sort of faces, right? So you can recognize voices but not faces, things like that. So there is this very, there's this phenomenon or sort of, I think it's a disability.
It's called a gap cross syndrome. So what happens in gap cross is it's called impostor syndrome. So what happens is, so I know you and I associated your face with friendliness. So when I see your face, you know, it sort of kicks in some feelings of, you know, my one part of my brain recognizes that this is my friend.
And you know, that your feelings towards that person or with any or whatever. And when that part of the brain or that pathway is injured, you see the person, you realize that it should be a friend, but you don't get those feelings. So you control the brain controls that this is an impostor. And it's quite heartbreaking.
So there's this one case, there's a book called Phantom in the Brain Lovely book written by Indian author named D.S. Ramachandam who is a neuroscientist and UC San Diego. He wrote, he did describe this and this kid is not able to, you know, he's not able to relate to his parents. They're coming, they want to talk to him.
And he keeps screaming, they have to get out because they're impostors. Somebody's come and done plastic surgery and a different person and it's not those people. But if they call him, he knows their voices and that is fine. So I don't know how that turned out.
But as far as I remember, I think it never got solved. They're parents were never able to connect with their child at all. Wow. Yeah, I mean, on that, the thing about, especially the point that you were talking about functionality, there is that, I mean, this is based in science as well as the ongoing study of the brain.
The more they delve into it, the more they realize that the essential services of the brain, right? I mean, breathing some essential memory, some critical learned actions. It's literally like they sink through your brain. So your initial, when you form like initial knowledge or initial learnings and initial whatever learned behaviors that are formed, they kind of like stay closer to, it's called the corpus callosum, the drawing of the brain.
So yeah, the corpus callosum, that's why they stay near the surface of the brain. But the more critical often used and required to survive, the closer they move to the mode, the what is called the right brain or the more primitive part of the brain. So that is where the critical functionality is layered. So it's literally like the brain is constructed in layers where the topmost layer is the most ephemeral knowledge and the bottommost are the most critical ones, including the ones that are like the cerebellum is like effectively responsible for your brain remembering to breathe.
So it's all motor action. So that happens automatically. And that is not part of the conscious. And actually, you mentioned the corpus callosum, that's very interesting because the thing I was talking to you about, about dual consciousness, that has this interesting origin.
So in the 30s and the 40s, one German scientist proposed that people who had very, very severe epileptic seizures, so severe that it would endanger their life. Okay. So and there was really no treatment. So he proposed that the corpus callosum be cut.
Cut. Exactly. And the corpus callosum basically connects the left brain and the right brain. Left brain to the right brain.
Right. So he suggested that he cut that and he tried it and he tried it and he tried it and he tried it and he tried it and he thought it was different. So he says, you should try it and some, they got a few really desperate cases. And then they know who would have died and has had you not done any surgical interventions?
They cut open the brain, they opened the cranial cavity and they cut through the corpus callosum and put it back and to their astonishment, the patient practically became normal again. So they didn't have any problems. In fact, they actually rated better on certain corpus callosum and all. And they also reported a dramatic decrease in epileptic symptoms.
So it was like operation successful. But as they kept studying, they found that the right brain and the left brain now, no longer being connected, seem to have an independent view of things and they will communicate with each other. So they did very clever experiments in which the right brain was, so the right brain sees what the left eye, is connected to the left eye and the left brain is connected to the right eye. So they would show each eye different images and the speech center is with the left brain.
So the left brain would not talk about anything the right brain was seeing. It just wouldn't acknowledge it. But the left hand, you could trick the left hand into reaching for the objects. So they came to the conclusion that there are now, because the corpus callosum has been cut, there are two consciousnesses inside the brain.
So left brain has an independent consciousness and the right brain has an independent consciousness. And this is very controversial. And today some people say that that is the case and some people say that is not. But it is pretty bizarre that you are one person, you are one Toni, one Marine and then suddenly there are two of them.
Over and over. That's actually a super interesting thing. In fact, I remember myself reading once the phrase corpus callosum came up. I remember all of these things about the one, it's not all these odd things happening.
And you're right, I mean, with the consciousness aspect of it, we forget how, I mean, because of the fact that we are so inherently programmed to kind of think of people as individuals, right, individuals being one and singular thinking, singular, motive, singular approach, singular personality and bent of mind. Once that say corpus callosum snipped, you actually understand how the left brain and the right brain function independently. And it actually causes, there were actually examples of the right hand reaching out and doing its own thing. And the guy is sitting over there and he's like, I have no idea what my hand is doing.
And why he's doing it? Because the reason being that that part of the consciousness is working independently. And because the person was left brain dominant, he's working from the left brain and thinking from it and speaking from it. But the right brain is independently doing whatever.
So his left hand is working independently of everything else. So that actually, yeah, that actually kind of like, it reveals how little we know about consciousness and how the whole approach to itself is incorrect. And here's a very scary and fascinating thing in recent development. So maybe about 10 years old or 10, 15 year old.
So a lot of, not a lot of, but few people report that when they are sort of put under anesthesia for an operation, they're still conscious. They're not, they can actually feel they, but they can't communicate. They're unable, they paralyzed and they're not open. They're unable to, but they're feeling it.
It's called Lopden syndrome. Lopden syndrome. So there were these two scientists, they're Pronomy and Massiby. And they pioneered a technique called zap and zap.
What they do is they put a coil of wire with gendish and intense magnetic field and they send a pulse into the brain, into the skull basically. And it reduces the brief current in the neurons underneath. And this perturbation, it excites and inhibits the neurons, the thicknesses, because all neurons are connected. They are part of the cells in the connected regions.
And a chain with reverberates across the cortex. And the activity like keeps happening in many times. So it's like throwing a spoon into a pond of water and they tell the ball. And all over the head, they have a network of EEG sensors which will pick up the electrical signals.
You know, you have these, it's called the electro and cephalograms. So that you, yeah. So based on the pulse, it will tell you what region has been activated. And they mapped it on a number of conscious and unconscious people, like volunteers.
And then they sort of figure out that if you send a pulse here, if the person is conscious, then you get pulses in, say, in regions. And if the person is not conscious, you get pulse in in one other regions. So based on that, they collected a lot of data and they came up with a sort of an algorithm. So they would take a patient, they would zap him with the pulse and they would see where the, you know, where the impulses came, like, you know, where the ripples came from.
And based on that, they would decide whether the patient was conscious or not. And they did a first and experiment with minimally conscious people, 81 patients who are minimally conscious or in a very qualitative state. And in the minimally conscious ones, it showed correctly that 36 out of 38 patients were conscious. OK, it just missed that most patients are unconscious when they were actually conscious.
And of the 43 vegetative state patients in which all attempts to establish communication had failed, 34 out of 43, were labeled as unconscious, but nine or not. So nine were who all appearances brain dead, but they were actually conscious. So that's so scary, right? And if you happen to be on me, I'm only a two of us.
It's scary. So that is, you know, that is where things are right now. There is one more interesting thing that I want to add. There are two, and this is like really part of the debate.
It is fascinating to get it. So there are basically two popular theories of consciousness. The first theory is called global neuronal works space. And what it says is, when your consciousness is, when your conscious of something, many different parts of the brain have access to some information, right?
Whatever has, whatever's coming to your consciousness, many, many parts of your brain are actually. And if you act unconsciously, what you're talking about motor activities, you know, you do something without thinking. For example, if you're typing, most of us, we don't, we have sufficiently fluent typing. We just type and we don't think of where W-M-E-R-E might be or while there's a statement, it just happens in your other keyboard.
And at that time, you have little consciousness. There's no conscious, very few things. So those things you would say are not conscious. And what this theory, global neuronal works space theory argues is that consciousness arising from a particular type of information processing familiar from the early days of artificial intelligence.
You know, so what it's saying is, when, you know, when sensory information is posted to a blackboard area, a central area, and broadcast to multiple cognitive systems, that makes it conscious. So if you believe that you, what it says is computers could someday become conscious. If you hope them are bright and you're able to, you know, have multiple cognitive systems and access one thing. And, you know, so that is, that this theory says that autonomous computers, conscious computers are possible.
And the other theory is called integrated information theory, which says that it has, you know, a different starting point. So what is saying that each experience has certain essential intrinsic properties for its owner. And long story short, what it says is, you can only simulate it, but a simulation does not guarantee consciousness. So you can map out all the things that a brain is doing.
You can code a computer to do the same things. And the computer will do the same thing also, but the computer can never be conscious. Because there are a lot of undefined and very subjective feelings that are impossible to code a computer. All that.
These are the true. So one saying that consciousness is possible for computer. One saying consciousness is not possible. So you can take a peek and decide which side of the...
I'd like to frame it as not possible and not yet possible. Yeah, not possible and not possible. So this is pretty much all that I have got on this, particularly fascinating subject. And if, yeah, I mean, that's all that I'm conscious of at the moment.
Yeah, so, yeah, go ahead, Doni. No, no, go ahead. Yeah, OK. So, yeah, I mean, that was a pretty great discussion on consciousness.
And thanks for that, Naryen. Let's be conscious of time and our listeners' patience and let them go at this point. Yeah. So only the real conscious are not this.
It's not possible. Yeah. So, yeah. But then, so, yeah, on that note, Naryen, do you want to...
This one is easy to sum up, right? Stay safe, stay conscious and stay simplified. Here we go. Thanks for having me.
I know the 43 of you. See you, like. Bye. Bye, bye.