Speaker 2
why we have graduate students, right? Tha, youknow, thet young people are energetic enough to address, ajest these questions. But, but, ok, so now we have some framework on the ground. You know, we'll link to the paper if people want to look it up. They're, i'll warn you ahead of time, listeners, tere a lot of equations in the paper, but that's good. It's healthy for you. I was, i was surprised to learn there's a whole book that lionel wrote about transfer antropy, tha, that people can try to learn the basics about. But let's go back then to our initial motivation for this, which was consciousness. So have we learned anything from this investigation about the claim that consciousness is emergent phenomenon?
Speaker 1
I would say not yet. Besides, besides just the conceptual clarifications, besides deflating a little bit this association that people intuitively make between consciousness and strong emergence, just by showing that there are other ways to think about emergence, i think, is a contribution. Am another way that contribution plays out is that you can also think about downward causality, or top down causality, in this framework, in a, in a metaphysically innocent way, in you don't have to think about competing causes, where you have ta actual top down causes that compete with causes at the micro level. And then you have all these problems of which which cause dominates and so on. Now i can simply say, from the perspective of an observer, are there occasions where the microscopic variable, whatever it is, helps me predict the evolution of the microscopic components better than knowing what the microscopic components are doing? And again, this is not in not introducing anything that challenges a physicalist picture where causes run all the way det but there might be systems where that's the case, and there might be systems where that's not the case. Back to the original bird flocking thing, it turns out that, certainly for the measure i was using ten years ago, that indeed, when when you have a bird flock, you do observe information flow from the flock to the individual birds in a way that you don't when they're all flying randomly around. So just having these things in inatalket helps us resist some of the otherwise unfortunate tendencies to think of consciousness as necessarily something magic. The work to be done is how much purchase empirically, and how much explanatory insight do these concepts offer in practice, when when we ash them out? And that's something that i is a story yet to be told. If there's a few, a few groups with one group doing this, there are some other groups doing this. People at the university of wisconsin, madison, and julio tinones group have other sorts of measures of emergence am but there's a lotf there's a lot of tricks iness in how you actually apply these in practice, and what assumptions you have make, and the usual stuffh doesn't make it easy. But my hope would be that if we could, as a first step, show that weakly emergent variables can be identified in conscious states that are not there in unconscious states, they canbe used to predict a levels of consciousness in people, adin maybe with better accuracy, and fidelity than other other measures of global brain dynamics. I think that would be a start. I certainly don't think it' it's it's suddenly going to be the solution to all our questions about consciousness yor not at all. It's just another way of building explanatory bridges that might carry some of the weight of this apparent mystery.