The Core of Consciousness (Antonio Damasio, MD, PhD)

0:00Lemonado. Hi, it's Elise Luna and host of Pulling the Thread. Today I'm talking to neuroscientists, professor, and author Antonio DiMosio. This episode is brought to you by IQBAR, our exclusive snack bar sponsor. IQBARs are better for you, clean plant protein bars packed with fiber and brain boosting nutrients with zero added sugar. You no longer have to choose between healthy or delicious snacks. I love these IQBARs. They're made with real ingredients and the primary one is almonds. The sampler pack is great if you want to try a variety of flavors. And right now, IQBAR is offering our special podcast listeners 20% off all IQBAR products plus get free shipping. To get your 20% off, text PTT to 64000. Text PTT to 64000. That's PTT to 64000.

1:02Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. That smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Hi, it's Elise Loonon, host of Pulling the Thread. On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we're here. My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.

2:07Here is today's guest, neuroscientist Antonio DiMasio and how feeling is the primary tool that we have to help us regulate life. But you enter the world of consciousness not through high cognitive exploits, but rather the very simple avenue of feeling. Antonio DiMasio is a neuroscientist, a professor and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. He has received many honors throughout his career in his written several books that I have. Right here on my shelf, including Descartes' Error, The Feeling of What Happens and the Strange Order of Things. I'm quite obsessed with his new book, which is called Natural Intelligence and the Logic of Consciousness. In it, he presents a really beautiful explanation of consciousness and how it is run by the body by a certain kind of sensation that tells us what it's like to be alive, how our life is going, and what we need to do about it. I'm going to let him explain it to you because it's really quite profound coming from him.

3:12Today, we also talk about the role that the sublime, spirituality, and awe play in our lives, along with broader implications of Antonio's findings for the way we understand AI and ourselves. And, at the end of our conversation, I'm going to share a passage from his book that I particularly loved. Let's begin. So, thank you for joining me. It's interesting I was thinking back. I've been doing this for a long time, not as long as you have been studying consciousness and homeostatic feelings and the mind-body connection. But I don't want to say that I've shied away from conversations about consciousness. I have just taken the hard problem of consciousness to literally. And I guess what I want to start with is that when I read natural intelligence and I have many of your books, I'm looking at the feeling of what happens right now, that you boil

4:17it down to something quite simple, right? That maybe seems obvious? Well, it's not exactly obvious. I think I've tried to, I like boil it down. I think I boil it down to something understandable and something that connects with our lives without using strange language that most people will not use. It's really about experience and this discovery of our own existence and the discovery of a world that exists around us. It's that simple. And I think that most definitions of consciousness have been far more cumbersome and have been tied too much to the process itself, the possible biological process. And I did not want to do that. I do have a very elaborate process to achieve consciousness and I actually think I'm right.

5:19And I think we have the data to show it. We have the experiments and just to be a little bit immodest, I think I've solved the problem. Was it hard? Yes, it was hard. But you have that experience because you're like me in the world of intellect. It's very often things are there in front of us, but we don't see them because we are occupied with technicalities that have to do with our methods or have to do with the history of the problem and those things impede the way. But I think that actually beginning with the title of this book, I think there's a lot of clarity in my mind. And I think it was very important to have in the title the notion of natural intelligence for the very good reason that people cannot stop talking about the other kind, the artificial one, and to connect that natural intelligence to the rise of consciousness. And what I'm trying to do is actually pointing out is that this does not start at the top.

6:20It starts in a very humble way. One of my great influences in my career was Francis Crick. And I was not my wife and I were very close to Francis and we loved him. But he was sort of, he was not diametrically opposed to our way of thinking, but almost because he was a man very concerned with the biological detail, but also very concerned with the glories of existence and the fact that if we were conscious of something, it had to be an incredibly complex and an incredibly high-up process. You know, it would be an honor for biology to finally achieve this crowning moment in discovering our own existence. And this is just wrong. This is exactly the opposite of what it is. So, but you know, somebody like Francis was wrong in a very noble way, in a very intelligent

7:24way. So we have to go through the trouble of un-mounting that construction and say, look, this is actually something so important for living creatures that it's unlikely that it would start at the end of evolution. It would start at the highest points in the nervous system. This is really about how life is organized, how life is lived. And so the beginning of consciousness for me is very simple, is very humble and it is actually at the level of a simple body with simple life regulation and with the instrument of that life regulation, which is on myostatic feelings. Yeah. I want to get into exactly what that means because it's so subtle, it's so beautiful and it's so profound. And let me just tell you my understanding and also how I came into it as a member of the public, right? It's always been presented to us and you write about this directly as this cognitive

8:28concern. Does the brain generate the world or is the brain a filter for the world itself? And it's a little, I don't know if you would say this, but self-obsessed or self-aggrandizing, right? That were this supercomputer that's able to create reality and then somehow all be engaged in the same reality, et cetera. And I'm very interested in the conversation and I was reading your book closely looking for a clue as to what you might think in terms of if we were filtering, what is the quote unquote this? What is that, right? What is it that's the source of all life? I don't know that we get there in this book, but that's one of the things that I think is so consuming for so many of us. But your point is because materialist science is so cognitive, so interested in sort of understanding, taking things down to their parts, looking at it through sort of a mechanical lens that we strip out the body, we strip out the feeling, everything else is to be

9:34controlled and to be manipulated by this mega mind, right? And your point is actually, friends, it might be the opposite. It's the opposite, exactly. No, it's really about the entire thing is about life. It would be strange if it wouldn't be. And about natural occurrences that lead to life and just make any difference if it's life in us, multicellular complex creatures, or very simple creatures that are small but provided they have a brain. So you see that the real cracks of the matter is that there are many living things that cannot get to feelings. For example, plants are very beautiful, you know, the locust and you have the marvel of the green world. And they have a complex life, they have to regulate life, but they regulate life without knowing that they're regulating life. They're rowing, they're sprouting leaves, they're creating flowers, they're doing all

10:34that, but they don't know. And they don't know because they don't have a nervous system. The regulation is very complex, but it's achieved quote unquote, naturally. There's no organization in those organisms that has a mechanism that controls the process. Now in creatures like us, ending many simple creatures, like a rabbit, for example, a fish, we have the complexity of the natural world, but inside there's this device that developed over evolution that actually can represent the organism and can control the organism in a very simple way. Why did you have that device, which is really the nervous system? Then you have a possibility of entering into world of consciousness, but you enter the world of consciousness not through high cognitive exploits, but rather the very simple avenue

11:40of feeling. And the avenue of feeling, you know, the name is a little bit opaque, opaque because it's used in so many different ways. And of course, we constantly talk about emotions and feelings as if they were the same thing, which they're not. And we talk about feelings in relation to our sentimental life and to the way we transact connections with other people. But really feeling is a regulator, is an instrument to help us regulate life. And that's why what feelings represent for us primarily is states of life. These give us well-being or malaise. Feelings give us hunger and thirst and pain and well-being. These are all indicators of the state of life. And they're all describing whether the organism is going in the right direction, which is compatible with survival, or if the organism is at risk for something.

12:46That's why I like to call feelings sentinels. When you have hunger or thirst, you have a signal that you should do something about it or else it's not going to be so well. If you don't drink and if you don't eat, you're going to be progressively less well. And of course, if you're famine for several days, you're going to die. So these are warning signs, they're sentinels, telling you that something is not the way it should be. Pain is even worse. Pain is telling you that already something is going wrong in your organism and you better do something about it. On the other hand, well-being is telling you things are fine. Proceed. Enjoy your life. No risk for the moment. So that's the very interesting nature of feeling. And feeling is really the core of consciousness and is giving you information about what it is like to be alive and how your life is going and what you need to do about it.

13:50So it's not about finding out, for example, if certain kinds of equations are right or wrong. It's not about finding out the fine details of physics or mathematics. It's really very humble and very much related to life. It's really about life. That's the critical thing. And if people understand that from the book and I hope the message is clear, then they will have made progress. And it's so, again, so subtle, so obvious, but our world is so loud that your point is if we just dial it down to these homeostatic feelings, these gentle, internal, this guidance system that prompts us to take action to endure, that is it. It is the nervous system and you locate it in the brainstem, sort of where what gets turned off when we go unconscious or sedated or die. And that is consciousness. Consciously, exactly what is being generated at that brainstem level.

14:54And it's interesting because the design of the machine is actually brilliant. If you take ourselves clearly the most complex organisms in nature, it's quite spectacular because you can trace where the information comes from. The information comes from all over the body. So your limbs, your skin, your entrails, we have all of these nerve fibers. Some of them very thin. You know, there's something that if you cut yourself, you will not see them. They're microscopic. But they're everywhere. So what it means is that you have probes for the state of your flesh, everywhere in your body, everywhere in your flesh, there's some emissary from the nervous system that is there probing for the state you're in. And that all then goes into the spinal cord and ascends in the spinal cord towards the brainstem.

15:54And nature has been so worried about this that nature invented yet another route, which is actually called the vagus nerve, which I'm sure you have heard of. So the vagus nerve is a supple, man-tory system, only more refined. And guess what? It goes everywhere in the body. So you have the first system which we share with many other simple creatures. And we have this system which only appears in more complex creatures that is called the vagus. It's called vagus because it goes everywhere. So somebody that was studying this, I would vague. It's everywhere. You don't know where it comes from. It comes from everywhere. And that goes into a nucleus in the brainstem and it delivers another wave of constant, continuous information. It's really quite amazing because of course it's not as complicated as the cerebral cortex, but it is pretty complicated because it's a probe system that is all over the body and that is bringing news to those teeny nuclei in the back of the brainstem of the

17:01state in which the body is in. It's absolutely remarkable. So not as complex as the cerebral cortex, it doesn't allow you to resolve quadratic equations, but it's everywhere and it gives precious information. And then you go into a more complex level, which includes the hypothalamus and then the thalamus. And then eventually you come into the cerebral cortex. And what it does is then it allows a qualification, sort of a ranking in terms of life of what is happening in our cognition. And in our cognition, the system is completely different. Our cognition includes systems like the five senses. So right now both of us are using sight and I using hearing primarily, you can't hear anything else, but that gives us incredibly sophisticated details. I can see the details of your face. When you speak, I can hear all the acoustic intonations.

18:02So there's the auditory nerves are bringing into the auditory cortex, are bringing information about the sound of your voice. You're getting the sound of my voice. I'm getting the picture of your face. You're getting that picture. That is an incredibly complex construction. And that's in cortex. The brainstem is not helping you. So you have these two worlds, the world of your body that comes into the brainstem and then is dumped into the cortex as a secondary step. And the world of the outside around us that comes through our senses and that evolve much later in evolution and is giving us pictures and sounds and touches and smells and tastes. And that's very complex. But you cannot do anything with that cognitive system unless the system that is running the body is telling you things are okay, proceed. Because if things are not okay, you get unconscious.

19:04And you get unconscious, not from losing sight or hearing. You get unconscious if the control of your life is shot. And if you, for example, if you have a stroke in the brainstem area, then what is going to happen is that those areas where all the information from the body comes, where the vagus and the spinal cord information drawing, those areas are destroyed. Nothing can happen. You're going to turn off the lights in the several cortex. There's no up there to maintain the life and your consciousness is gone. And then you're in the coma. Right. An easy metaphor would be that this, the consciousness, the brainstem is generating. Maybe this is a bad example because it's cognitive, but words. And then you write about all these different minds. The perceptual mind is turning it into sentences and paragraphs and books. But if the words go out, nothing else can exist. Yeah. The whole thing collapses. Yeah. Exactly. So it's really a disseparation of the world of vigilance of our body, which is concerned

20:08with life and maintenance of life, which we're not very conscious of. Ironically, right? Exactly. It's interesting. It's very paradoxical. We are conscious of it because we are conscious of life, but we are not conscious of that machinery that is running life. Right. We're not telling our heart to be. We're not insisting that we. Yeah. You can only control it indirectly. You cannot tell your heart, go slower or go faster. You cannot tell if you have an arrhythmia, you're not going to say, okay, let's put this heart in proper step. You can't do that. Right. But at the same time, it shows how nature, and this is actually from a point of view of engineering, it is very logical. Nature was first preoccupied with a shuring life. So if you don't maintain life, who cares about what's going to happen in several contexts? It's not going to work anyway. So nature is a tremendous logic to it. That's the logic of consciousness in this case.

21:08And let's take care of life first through the avenue of feeling. And then let's worry about how we perceive the world and how we can make sense of that world. But if the world feeling is not operating, then your life is cooked. You don't have it. And there's no point in being a great writer or philosopher or scientist. For a while now, I've been re-examining the stories I tell myself around money. Some of them are pretty funny. Some of them are hard to drop. But I would say I've never had a clearer picture of my finances than I do right now, and I find that to be really helpful. I've been using the Personal Finance app, Monarch, to get a clear picture of every aspect of our finances in one place. I cannot overstate how soothing this is to me. Monarch tracks everything, accounts, investments, savings, schools, and spending. So you don't have to manually aggregate things, and you can make truly informed decisions

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25:13But I feel like this is, again, I'm going to go with subtle, but stunning way of understanding a lot of our concern and complex around AI because AI is entirely cognitive. It is not concerned about maintaining life, right? Exactly. It doesn't have anybody and doesn't have a life. It's very interesting. I'm now getting daily correspondence from people that say exactly what you say. And I say, oh, thank God we have this possibility of understanding these different worlds. And the people who are very often say, what do you mean AI is not living? What do you mean AI is not conscious? Of course it's conscious. They say, okay, show me how it can be conscious. And it's actually something, as you know I discuss in the book. And I want you to call the attention to that big drama because right now our life is being actually governed in many, many ways by AI and the possibilities that it's going to be even more so in the future.

26:15And it's very interesting, but it is, you know, artificial intelligence is a creation of natural intelligence. It's a creation of natural intelligence that is running a bit of mock and that has huge risks in terms of our life, in terms of our status of social beings. I think we're running through major dangers right now in terms of AI. But people need to be aware of that and they need to respect what they have to begin with that allow them to invent what should be a tool to serve our needs and purposes and it's becoming something autonomous. And you know, there are many beautiful symbolic, beautiful should be in quotes, but AI in a sense of not promoting or being concerned with the maintenance of life. You can think about data farms, you can think about the energy it requires to sustain itself as directly at odds with the maintenance or sustainability of life.

27:18It's a real conundrum that yeah, is an existential threat. But I think this small distinction, what's also so amazing is it goes back to this core consciousness problem. We can marvel at the cognitive power of AI. We can be sort of, oh my god, we're so amazed. It's almost like the same issue being amazed by ourselves, right? Without acknowledging how fundamentally incredible it is and how far outside of our powers it is to generate actual life and consciousness. Yeah, exactly. It really is taking one of the, if we divide our world in these two sides, the cognitive and the feeling side, the one that leads to consciousness and it's concerned with life, AI is only one of these worlds. AI is this thing that we invented and that deals fundamentally with cognition because

28:20everything that has to do with feelings is a representational aspect that has not have to do with the core issue because it does not have a body, it does not have life, it does not have concerns. Feeling is really about the concern with the state of your life and with the possibility of survival. That's it. And AI is not concerned with that. I mean, unless you take an axe and destroy the computer, the AI life is going to continue because it's life in quotes. It's not really living. There are no problems that it's solving in relation to its body. There's nobody to be maintained, to be sustained. And that's something people need to understand. People need to admire this amazing organism that we have. And the fact that we have this duality, the fact that we are able to do both the feeling side that gives us consciousness and then this cognitive side that becomes conscious

29:21by company. In other words, because our cognition is happening in an organism that is conscious, then our cognition is conscious because our organism is a feeling organism that has a sense of itself. But the cognition by itself is neither conscious nor not conscious. Consciousness is the word that I'm saying and all the words that a computer can produce. That's not conscious. But what is conscious is our body. And consciousness is about the life in that body at that moment that there's a very, very different proposition. And of course, this is also quite different. The philosophy of this problem has been very different over the years because plenty of remarkable philosophers. And once again, very intelligent, very creative people didn't get the right picture. And they didn't get the right picture because the biological picture was not rich enough. So when you talk about hard problem of consciousness and when you think about the first wave of philosophers

30:27that we're talking about consciousness, they didn't have access to the knowledge we have today about how our biology is put together. So that's one possible reason why they didn't get it right. And not accusing anybody of not getting it right. I'm actually justifying the ways in which people did not get it right. I didn't get it right at the beginning either. So it takes time and it takes facts. One thing is to discuss philosophical positions, which you can argue and counter argue with knowledge and with the intelligence of the argument. Another is to discuss science and the conditions and the which we operate as human beings. That requires biology, that requires a variety of sciences linked to it. So if we didn't have biology and neurobiology and a variety of sciences in the world, in the world of emotion and feeling and cognition, we would not have been able to put together

31:31what I think is a more plausible picture of reality. Do you feel to the whole, the emergence of AI? I mean, I know it's been theoretically kicking around behind walls for many decades, but it's emergence into culture. And suddenly the framing of this as if this isn't this, what is this? What is artificial versus natural intelligence that suddenly one that has provided a more appropriate frame for understanding the sort of quote unquote problem, but for the general public too, to understand this as a duality. And in some ways to understand what's at stake. And I would hope make us fall in love. I see this in small ways and I'm curious how optimistic you feel, but people are, feels like they're starting to fall in love with life or with being human or wanting to hear it from a human rather than being dazzled by a supercomputer.

32:37But are you optimistic? What do you see? How do you see us creating homeostasis in the collective? Right? How do you see that regulation happening? You know, I think that quite frankly depends on the days. You know, it depends on what state I'm in after finishing the New York Times and your good days and bad days, mostly bad days. I think that I think you're right. I think people have fallen in love with AI and they have fallen in love in the air for different reasons. One, because you know, it does astonishing things. Perfect. Increases connectivity and it speeds up certain processes. And so you have to have some respect for the intelligence with which those machines operate. Then they also fall in love because there's a lot of profit to be made. A lot of the success of AI comes from the huge transactions that are being made into all the AI of computers and of the things that computers permit financially.

33:40And that's, you know, they're good and bad things there because clearly an employment is one of the things that AI is going to generate at high scale. But there are things that you can fall in love with and admire because they are really quite smart. You know, the way you can correct a text, for example, with AI, which I mean fear of even looking at because I'm both admiring of the corrections that the program can do, but offended by the way that they're making corrections. They shouldn't be, they shouldn't be trespassing in my world. So I think that at the same time people still respect life or at these people that are not billionaires do. And I think that they're going to be more and more mesmerized by how we are able to create and run life and find value in knowledge about biology. I think one, you know, I would say that actually some aspects in my book are very practical

34:44because it gives you a way into understanding what you are organically speaking. And that should help run life in a better way. And in an admiring way because it's really quite remarkable what biology achieves. It's amazing. I'm glad you admire it. Yeah, no, I certainly do. I think we all can get into that space of awe, right? Like I just fall asleep and I wake up and my heart keeps me alive. And I mean, it is a miracle. Like me, I know many of you are deeply interested in trying to make sense of human nature. Why do we do the things we do and feel the way we feel? While very different from pulling the thread, I was recently introduced to a podcast world that is exploring these same questions from a new angle. The ADHD channel for women is a podcast channel from understood.org, a nonprofit helping millions of people navigate neurodivergence. For far too long, women with ADHD have been overlooked.

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37:50Do you think biology is the source of life and that we're just these incredible, not machines, but these incredible creatures that have become more evolved over time? Do you have a spiritual perspective? Yes, spiritual, yeah, I think the word spiritual is fine. Provided, or spiritual does not imply that you have some control over the results of spirituality. In other words, I'm admiring and in awe of biology. I think there's an element of the sublime in the study, the things we do with the biology we own. For example, when you write great poetry or great theatre, or when you create astounding music, that's a way of coming from the spiritual aspects of biology

38:52and making the material into something that is very beautiful and useful for the continuation of our lives. And felt, yeah. Oh, yeah, and of course, it's very much felt that's the beauty to take music, you know. You can, with immense varieties of composition, you can achieve states of pleasure and sublimity. It doesn't make any difference if you get it out of Bach or out of Bartok or Prokofiev. And performers, the great performers, are the ones that capture that and that find a way of getting into what I was just thinking. When I said performance, I thought of two very different pianists. One is Martha Argrich, we probably know, who is a great expert on Prokofiev and Bartok, for example. And another is Maria Gron Peter, who is an amazing Bozartian. She's probably the greatest pianist in the repertoire of Mozart and Argrich,

39:56the greatest pianist in the repertoire of the 20th century composers. But those people, with what they do at the piano, are able to conjure up all sorts of marvellous worlds and to elevate us and remove us from the dirt and the stupid stuff and elevate us to a position which is really a spiritual position. What I'm not expecting is that spiritual position to do something for me and I'm not going to ask that spiritual power to resolve my problems, to resolve the pain I have in my neck. It will be good. Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. I think that, and I'm using science sort of in quotes, but I think it's refusal or it's desire to cognitize the sublime is sort of the nut of the problem

40:57when so many people are like, but I have this feeling of this responsive universe of synchronicity of meaning, of aliveness that you're trying to explain through measures to stop taking the magic out of life, right? Right. You shouldn't take the magic out, but you're using words and intelligent sentences to explain things that are in fact deep in our biology. So, that's the strategy. And when you think about sublime feelings, that's it. You're having something that comes straight of our biology in interaction with our knowledge of the world and that is giving us this elevated states. It's not the good feeling you have when you have a nice cappuccino, it's something much more complex and more elevated. That is related to the world that you can describe cognitively in great detail. That's also wonderful. You have

42:00this constant dialogue. You describe the world in fine detail, scientifically, for example. You describe the geography, you describe all that. That's very cognitive, and factual. And yet, at the same time, you're going to have from appreciating that world, you're going to have feelings that are extremely refined and sublime, and that are coming out of a different compartment of your body, which has to do with the compartment that runs your life. So, you have to have this complexity. And I think one of the things that you're making a remarkable contribution is that people need to understand that being very complex and detailed in the description of the world through our cognition does not deny the importance of this other world, which is the world that runs our life, over which our control is much more indirect. Life is life, and life runs by itself, and you need to learn the language of that

43:06feeling system and what it's telling you. And the best way to start is by very simple things, like when we started our conversation, things like hunger and thirst and pain and well-being and malaise, because they're giving us the orientation as to what we can do in our life. We just need to listen to it and to respect that world. And I think that what science is doing is just partitioning and getting into more and more detail into these big compartments. But I think it's actually quite beautiful when we now can have this world of the feeling mind and the world of the factual cognitive mind. It enriches us, it allows us to participate better in that process. Yeah. And to recognize that humans and other creatures are this incredible symbiosis or the marriage between these two faculties, and we live in a world that's been very consumed only by the cognitive and disparages, diminishes, dominates the feeling nature,

44:13right? The base reality of life. And instead, it's a little bit like playing a game of bridge where it's like, no, Trump card. This is what's impossible to generate. We don't have the power to generate this. We can just marvel at it, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I remember when I started my career and I started like everybody else in my field, I started very cognitive. And it's interesting because it didn't sound right. And actually one of my early mentors was a neuroscientist who was a mathematician actually. And it was, believe it or not, one of my first papers was on Boolean algebra. And I was going through there and said, this doesn't make any sense. What about the other stuff? What about the stuff that we marvel at when we go? You know, I was doing Boolean algebra, but I also was writing movie criticism. And what I got from good movies was they had nothing to do with the Boolean algebra

45:16and sort of little by little or maybe not so little by little, I became very enamored with things that I have to do with feelings and emotions. And when I first started talking about it, people say, oh, women stuff. Yeah. Girl stuff is interesting. But it was as if you had to have a world that was the male world. And you had to have another world, which is the female world, where you could be concerned with feelings, you know. And all of these light things that were definitely not to be taken into account, if you're going to do philosophy or if you're going to do science, you know, keep to the serious things. And I think that's faded away. I think it's still there, but it's not as pronounced as it was if you go back a few decades. So when you look forward and you say, okay, I've solved this. And I don't know how monumental. I mean, I know there's all this pitter-patter about this quote unquote hard problem. So I don't know what this does in your world.

46:21But if you were to say, okay, this becomes the model through which we analyze these problems and think about life, what do you think the implications are? What do you think changes? Well, I was just thinking of the workplace. And there are consequences. When you understand the life process that way, their implications for how you treat people, how you relate to people, that's something like very practical on the day to day. I think it has implications for the science itself and for the technology. I think right now, the work, the ideas that I've in this book are helpful to deal with the AI problems and the several problems. There is a sort of reminder that the world as presented by initiatives is not a complete world. And that what I would like to see is the recognition that that's a world that is very respectable, but that's a world

47:25that was created by our intelligence. It's to respect natural intelligence and the processes that are related to the natural intelligence that include not only the cognitive world, but the feeling world, and to recognize that the origin is in that complex natural intelligence. And that the independence of AI is very relative. It's a descendant of our natural intelligence. That's what I want people to realize that this is not just the world of AI and the world of natural intelligence is not equal to the world of AI. So as a precedence, natural intelligence comes first. Natural intelligence is linked to life, is linked to our biology, and it allows us to create the best philosophy, the best science, the best music, the best arts. That's the important thing I want people to understand. When we think about, obviously we have

48:29woefully few regulations on technology in that entire sector. Is there a version where our understanding of consciousness, and maybe this already exists, and I'm sure that this has been considered, but where the maintenance of life and the biosphere, upon which really AI is dependent, right, is engineered into AI itself so that it understands how to regulate itself by helping us regulate the biosphere. Yeah, you're quite right. It's happening. For example, in my lab, we have one graduate student who is French Canadian, very bright guy, who is working with me and with one of the great masters of the world of AI, who is at deep mind. And what we're trying to do is incorporating knowledge from biology in the world of AI.

49:31So, for example, we are right now modeling what information from the vagus nerve that collects information from all over the body can do to an AI system. So the idea of combining these worlds is there in a very practical way, and people who are very intelligent and capable and open to new ideas are trying to do that. But of course, you have worlds of people, you know, that people that want to devise the system and make a buck quickly with that, and this actually does not make you have any buck so far, maybe it will one day. Well, what is the point of all this money if there's nothing left to spend it on, right? Exactly. What a delightful person, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. And even just a moment, to marvel at how remarkable we really are, I'm going to

50:38read you one part from natural intelligence, which again, it's under 200 pages. It's really written for people like you and me to be able to parse and understand. He writes, homostatic feelings are predictably complex and quite bizarre as well, one part originating in the body and another part in the nervous system. Importantly, homostatic feelings can be felt by the subject that they themselves help create. Let us pause and contemplate quietly and intently this extraordinary fact. Homostatic feelings are felt by the subject that operates within the living organism responsible for generating those same feelings. This is the ultimate physiological slide of hand. Homostatic feelings cannot, and I just, I think this is so obvious when stated but remarkable. Homostatic feelings cannot be observed by those of us studying the operations of living

51:43organisms because they are internal phenomena, perceivable only by the mind of the unique organism in which they in here. Still, although we are unable to observe the homostatic feelings of others, we can well imagine them by reference to the comparable phenomena that we experience inside ourselves. This is the magic, guys. This is, it is incredible actually, and something to really marvel at. Alright, thanks for nerding out. I will see you next time. If you got something out of today's episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That's how we've grown this thing. It's so helpful. Thank you. If you want more in this world, please sign up for my newsletter at my website, alise-lunan.com, ELIS-E-L-O-E-H-N-E-N.com, or consider picking up copies of my book,

52:50Honor Best Behavior, or its workbook companion choosing wholeness over goodness. Thanks again, friends. You On any journey using Uber, it helps to know you're getting into the right car. Pin verification adds an extra step to make sure your ride is your ride. Before the trip begins, your app gives you a unique pin. Just tell it to your driver, and they'll enter it in their app before the ride can start. Hey, what's your pin? Mm-hmm. 2538. That way you know you're in the right car taking the right trip, and your driver knows you're the right passenger. Make sure your ride is your ride, with pin verification from Uber. One more way Uber is putting safety at every turn. Learn more on the Uber app. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. No two football players are exactly alike, and the same is true off the field. That's why State Farm gifts to

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