A Guide To The Fundamental Mystery Of The Mind - Erik Hoel

1. 0:00 – 5:17

   The Current State of Consciousness Research

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      Given your background, given the work that you've done, how would you describe the current status of consciousness research and the theories around it?

   2. EHErik Hoel0:09

      Well, we're at a very interesting time. Um, I believe it was just widely reported that, you know, a, a long-standing bet over whether or not consciousness would be resolved was notoriously not resolved. Um...

   3. CWChris Williamson0:20

      Who, who made the bet?

   4. EHErik Hoel0:22

      I believe it was Chalmers and Christof Koch, if I'm not mistaken. Christof Koch being a, a, a, a very famous neuroscientist in the field, and David Chalmers being a very famous philosopher in the field.

   5. CWChris Williamson0:31

      Who was, who was for which?

   6. EHErik Hoel0:33

      Oh, uh, Chalmers was of course w- was... The philosopher was against it, and the scientist was for it. Um, and, a- a- and if you, if, if, if you think about sort- sort of where we are, um, in the search for a scientific theory of consciousness, you know, it wasn't even on the table that you could do something like that, that you could look for a scientific theory of consciousness. You know, as, as, as I talk about in the book, consciousness was very explicitly split off from science early on in the beginning. I mean, particularly by Galileo, who, who basically said, you know, "Let's not worry about qualitative aspects of the world. Let's not worry about the redness of red or, or, or how a peach tastes, you know, or the sound of a trombone. Let's just focus on the quantitative aspects of the world which we can describe mathematically, and, and, and, and let's just bracket this problem aside." And, and to him, right, he, you know, h- he was a religious man, right? He, he would have said it as, you know, "It's just, it's just not science's business to go poking around in the soul. Just put it aside and let's just focus on this, this universe th- that God has created for us." And that, that strategy has actually been the fundamental strategy of science, and is one of the things that has made it so successful, and so able to sort of proceed without people, um, with- without essentially annoying philosophers coming in and saying, "Well, you're not really explaining this," right? But of course, there is a science where you do need to explain, uh, qualitative properties, and that's neuroscience. Uh, to figure out how the brain works, you need to understand how consciousness works, um, and, a- and we simply don't. And for a long time, neuroscience has been hobbled by the fact that it has been fundamentally behaviorist, and people have been incredibly scared to talk about or mention consciousness. And it really took two different men winning two different Nobel Prizes, Francis Crick, who co-discovered DNA, and, uh, Gerald Edelman, um, who, who was one of the people who really figured out how the immune system functions, and they both got their Nobel Prizes in a different field, and they looked at neuroscience and said, "There is a big unanswered scientific question here, which is how does the brain create consciousness?" And they both sort of started up their own institutes and their own, um, s- s- sort of ways to approach this problem, but, you know, ha- ha- had, had it not had the weight of two Nobel Prizes behind it, um, I don't... I, I s- think that there still wouldn't even be, um, any serious, uh, scientific attempt to understand consciousness and neuroscience, um, and, and, and I think without that, neuroscience struggles a great deal. I mean, that's, that's another thing that's, that a, a, a chunk of the book is about, is just about the... Essentially the scandal that is modern neuroscience given that the, the stream of consciousness is what your brain, um... You know, that's the main function of the brain, is generating a stream of consciousness. So imagine you're trying to figure out an organ and you're not allowed to talk about its main function.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:39

      Yeah, it would be like being a-

   8. EHErik Hoel3:40

      You're, you're sort of forced to talk around it.

   9. CWChris Williamson3:41

      Yeah, it would be like being a Formula 1 racing reporter, but all of your discussion's being about the grass on the side of the track-

   10. EHErik Hoel3:48

       (laughs) Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson3:49

       ... and th- the, the temperature of the air and the flags waving in the wind.

   12. EHErik Hoel3:54

       Exactly. And so people try to sort of skirt around it by taking aspects of how consciousness works, like attention, and saying, "Okay, well, we- we- we're allowed to talk about attention. We can focus on attention, you know, and, and, uh, and, and we can focus on memory," right? Like, we, we can do things sort of without reference to this stream of consciousness, but of course, you know, when you remember something, you're, you're conscious of it, and when you attend to something, you're conscious of it. These are all things that are taking-

   13. CWChris Williamson4:17

       It's not just something that happened. There's a phenomenological experience which is associated with it.

   14. EHErik Hoel4:23

       Exactly. And so people tried to sort of preserve the, um, non-subjectivity of s- of science and not, not let subjectivity in by, by sequestering away a lot of these mental properties and sort of then pretending that, that consciousness, uh, doesn't exist, but it, it has not... I- I'll just be very honest. I have a PhD in neuroscience. Um, it has not been very successful. I mean, I- I don't think neuroscience has, has made really, I'll say it, any significant, um, advancement since I really entered the field in terms of... Not, not in terms of everything, but in terms of understanding most of the major questions that people want to know about how the brain operates, so stuff at a very high cognitive level, how does the brain operate? Neuroscience has not made significant progress, and it's probably because you're not really even allowed in most areas of neuroscience to talk about the main function of the brain.

2. 5:17 – 8:38

   Bureaucracy in Academia

   1. EHErik Hoel5:17

   2. CWChris Williamson5:17

      What, what do you mean when you say not allowed? Is there some policeman that comes and slaps you on the back of the wrist as soon as you start typing about it? Like, what are you on about?

   3. EHErik Hoel5:26

      Well, within science there, there are all sorts of, you know, s- structures that, that, um, you know, pre- prevent somebody from, from getting too crazy. I mean, I think more fundamentally, it's just been that, uh, you know, due to legacies of things like behaviorism, uh, talking about consciousness has been considered sort of too dangerous and it's been actively discouraged, and you'll s- you can still go and find a neuroscientist and you'll, you'll ask them, you know, "What are your thoughts on consciousness?" And they'll either say, you know, "I don't have any," or they'll say, "That's... It's sort of woo."... you know, and, and then, you know, the conversation gets very strange very quickly because you say, "Well, what do you mean by that? Are you saying that we don't- we're not conscious or, or what are you saying?" And then they have to have some sort of convoluted definition where you get to keep attention and memory and all these other things but you're not allowed to talk about consciousness. But there are... It's, it's not, it's not a conspiracy to keep consciousness, um, ou-ou-ou- out of the field. It's just how the intellectual lineage of the field developed is that any real discussion of consciousness, which should be the major part of neuroscience, is kept as this very sort of minor set of now thanks to the big names of the field, not everyone in it is considered a very strange weirdo, but in 1985, right, like, like 1985, you could not just go and get a PhD like I did studying the neuroscience of consciousness. That, that, that was not a thing that could happen. In fact, my generation is the first generation to really be able to actively get into the field in order to study consciousness and then actively work on that throughout our careers rather than essentially having to become neuro-famous, you know, for some other thing and then sort of transition once no one can criticize you. And science is very conservative. Like I don't think people should be surprised. Again, it's not conspiratorial. Uh, you know, the same sort of stuff happens in theoretical physics where maybe there are some promising approaches and they're just like not favored by the field or s- or sort of viewed as, as, as, as, as crazy and so on and, um, and, and, and so it's very difficult to, to do work in it. But I think if you look at neuroscience as a whole and where it is, um, you know, it, it has sort of all sorts of, all sorts of problems that, that crop up almo- almost endlessly within it. And you have these repeating narratives and these sort of neuro myths that don't die and so on. And I think a lot of it is just that there's no big target of neuroscience, there's no big target of what to figure out, because what to figure out is how does the brain generate consciousness and only a small subfield of neuroscience even looks at that now.

   4. CWChris Williamson8:04

      Feeling the aftershock of Galileo still all of these millennia later.

   5. EHErik Hoel8:09

      Yes. Ab- absolutely. Absolutely. Um, but he would of course been, um... You know, I think it's more likely that had you inf- and, um, a philosopher named Philip Goff makes this point, uh, makes this thought experiment of like if you brought Galileo out to the modern age and you said, "Okay, we're trying to do this neuroscience of consciousness," he'd probably say, "Well, no. Stop." You know, you're, you're not supposed to do that. That's just this weird perversion of science, right? Like you, this, that's the domain of the soul. Of course you're not finding any satisfactory answers, um, you know

   6. NANarrator8:37

      It feels-

   7. EHErik Hoel8:37

      ... within the domain of the soul.

   8. CWChris Williamson8:37

      Do you know what it

3. 8:38 – 12:54

   Is Studying Consciousness Too Difficult?

   1. CWChris Williamson8:38

      feels like to me as, as you're talking about it? Obviously, all of the problems of consciousness are myriad and very difficult to try and come up with. And as you've said yourself, your entire field that you have a PhD in and have worked in for almost all your life until you just left has made basically very little progress with it. It feels a little bit like, you know, when you hear about in UFC or in boxing, there's this one fighter that no one wants to call out and all of the fighters are calling out the other ones that they know are kind of a bit shitter than this one, but there's this one guy and he's just a nightmare, he's a phenom and no one can handle him. It feels a little bit like (laughs) consciousness is the difficult fighter that no one wants to call out.

   2. EHErik Hoel9:16

      Yeah. A- absolutely and it's one reason why I don't always encourage younger people to go into the field despite the fact that it's one of the biggest open questions in science, which is that it's also probably, if not the most difficult question in science, it's one of the most difficult questions in science. Um, a-a-a-and we're still waiting on our Einstein, we're waiting on our Darwin. Um, and, and it's sort of sad because neuroscience is entering this period, particularly with AI, where, you know, people are, are able to predict various things off of brain states, right? Like you, you might think, "Well, you know, how come Erik is saying that, uh, you know, neuroscience hasn't made any progress? Didn't I just see some, something about how AIs can now read your mind off of neuroimaging or something like that," right? And the answer is is that all that stuff is statistical. So it's, it's sort of like, like first it's, it's the, the AIs are, you know, very, very good at extrapolating from minimal data. So if you actually look at what it's predicting, it's, it's actually not the same at all and it's sort of like, uh, you know, how it's able to autocomplete the next paragraph of text, right? But, um, you know, the thing is is that there is some law, there is some law of nature wherein the neural activity that your brain is undergoing now is associated with, generates, you can sort of come up with, with various relational terms here, but is related to your conscious, the conscious things that you are experiencing, right? So, you know, if you're, if you're listening to this podcast, your, your, the, the, the auditory cortex is going through, you know, various sort of stages of processing. There is some, there is somewhere there a law of nature that tells us, "Okay, what sounds are now being experienced," right? Like that, that is a question. Um, it's not just, you know, can I throw machine learning at it and sort of like get the sounds back or tell that someone is, is experiencing something. It's very similar to, to the laws of physics, right? Despite all the complexity that you... Of, of leaves falling from trees, there are natural laws behind those. And science knows most of those natural laws, particularly at the scales that are relevant. Within the brain, we don't have anything like that. Um, and, and you can... One way to tell this is that you ask neuroscience, neuroscientists to explain things and I used to do this all... I was a menace in graduate school because I would do this all the time, uh, where I would ask, you know, some prominent neuroscientist who, you know, who had, who was an expert at some highly particular field to, to, to explain that phenomenon, right? Like auditory processing or something. And then they would give their explanation and then I would ask them, "Please explain it again but don't refer to location."... right? Don't, don't just tell me where in the brain this is happening, tell me how it's happening, right? Like, like, uh, b- because what does the spatial information tell us? That it, it's over there or over there? This, this isn't... That's not real scientific understanding. That's sort of like, "Well, if I damage that part of the brain, this no longer works," right? And if you remove localization, what you'll find is that the, the... o- outside of some very early sensory processing that we know, we, we know how it works, things like edge detection, uh, in, in vision, so like... But that's very, you know, primary sensory courtesy, uh, s- sort of stuff, right? This is the shallows of the brain. Once you start moving beyond the shallows of the brain and you talk about the, the deep areas of the brain, and you get people talking about them, you'll notice, a- and, and you remove something like localization, you'll notice there's almost nothing to say.

4. 12:54 – 19:32

   The Limitations of Neuroscience

   1. EHErik Hoel12:54

      Um-

   2. CWChris Williamson12:54

      Yeah, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about back to a lot of the conversations that I've had on neuroscience with s- neuroscientists, the stuff that I've listened to or read, and an awful lot of it does, uh, sort of come in with a slam dunk in a way, which is a particular thing happens and here is the area of the brain which is activated, or you take a particular substance and this is the pattern of behavior within the brain which is turned down, and this is the pattern which is turned up, and these... It's, it's n- almost like cranial geography more than it is like an explanation of the phenomenological experience of being a human.

   3. EHErik Hoel13:31

      Right. And you could, you know, imagine that you, you sort of swapped around all those locational tags. Well, what would that change, right? You, you would say, "Oh, well, you know, the, you know, auditory processing occurs in the front, right? And then, and then other stuff occurs, you know, far in the back," right? Like, you could swap around all that stuff and, and you wouldn't feel any different about (laughs) about the system, and that's a good, um, that's a good indication that your, your explanations are n- are not very meaningful. Um, and, you know, the, the, the fundamental truth is that we don't even know... There, there is no good way to even understand how artificial neural networks function once they get past a certain size. They become mathematical black boxes. And this is a really big problem. It's a big problem for AI safety. I know you've had on guests who've talked about AI safety. That's a cause area I care, uh, quite about, but... quite a bit about. But, um, you know, one thing that makes that so difficult is that it's almost impossible to figure out what a feedforward AI, which is made of structured sets of, of effectively neurons, mathematical representations of neurons, where we can know all the connections, and we know exactly what neurons are firing and so on. We have perfect information, and we're still stumped in, uh, in a significant number of cases. Neuroscience is, is, is a thousand times harder than figuring out how some feedforward neural network, uh, uh, is. Not only is the brain much larger in terms of the parameter size, you know, probably has something like 100 trillion synapses, um, we're also... you know, it's also occluded behind an opaque wall of bone, um, and it's incredibly delicate, and it's all folded up. Um, and, and then a- a- and, and so, you know, an- another question, uh, that, that I like to ask neuroscientists (laughs) is, okay, so w- why should we feel that the brain will be so much more easier to, to figure out than, like, a relatively much smaller artificial neural network that we have p- perfect information and our access to, and we still can't figure out that? So what, why, why would you not expect that black box aspect to, to exist in the brain? Um, I n- I've never gotten, like, a, like, a good answer, uh, to something like that.

   4. CWChris Williamson15:42

      Eric, I, I, I can't imagine why you are now out of academia-

   5. EHErik Hoel15:46

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson15:47

      ... given that you've made every academic that you've worked with for the last decade's life a, a nightmare.

   7. EHErik Hoel15:53

      No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

   8. CWChris Williamson15:55

      (laughs)

   9. EHErik Hoel15:55

      I just got a lovely email from a graduate student, um, from a former graduate student, um, that was just, um... that was an absolute treat to read about how great working with me was, so ha ha.

   10. CWChris Williamson16:04

       I'm sure, I'm sure-

   11. EHErik Hoel16:05

       No, no, uh, uh, uh, I, I, I, I think, I think you're, you're, you're right in the sense of, um... in the, in the sense of, you know, y- one, one has to distinguish between being a gadfly and actually offering something positive. So the thing is, is that it's very easy to sit on your high horse and critique, critique a field like neuroscience, which is trying to understand the most complex system-

   12. CWChris Williamson16:28

       They don't know this, and they don't know this, and this is useless, and they... blah, blah, blah.

   13. EHErik Hoel16:31

       Right. And, and so what I, you know, a- also focused on, and what... point of my career was, was that, well, one, one way to understand the complexities of the brain is that probably that, that consciousness has something to do with it. So pursuing a scientific theory of consciousness should help you, uh, you know, answer these questions. Because in theory, there is some sort of natural law that relates, you know, experiences. And much of the, much of the, the, the fluff of neuroscience is just that the field is, um, in, in, um, philosophy of science terms, it's just pre-paradigmatic. So because it's pre-paradigmatic, it has all these problems, but that doesn't mean you should stop, stop working on the field. What it means is that you should work very hard to try to develop a, a n- a new paradigm. Um-

   14. CWChris Williamson17:21

       What, what's... Just for the people that don't know, what's pre-paradigmatic?

   15. EHErik Hoel17:24

       That would be that there's no overarching paradigm to explain... uh, there's no sort of, like, big theory that everyone can key off of and understand. So a great example of this would be biology before Darwin. So until you have the theory of natural selection, you do have biology, right? People are out there collecting testimonies and making scientific observations and, you know, relating the lineages of species and so on. But once you get the theory of evolution by natural selection, the whole thing clicks into place, and you're sort of able to fit everything within this, um, you know, this, this overarching structure, which I think-

   16. CWChris Williamson18:02

       Which I suppose also includes criticism.

   17. EHErik Hoel18:05

       Yes. Yes, uh, certainly. B- uh, uh, a- and- and just because you advance to one paradigm does not mean that the science is now over. In fact, what usually happens is that science advances to a paradigm, and then all sorts of errors begin to crop up in various places. Um, and- and- and Kuhn, um, Thomas Kuhn, who was one of the people who really w- w- wrote a lot about this, uh, you- these errors crop up, and once the errors reach a certain point where, like, no one can really deny them anymore, uh, finally, people are sort of s- forced to- to search for some new paradigm and, uh, and- and they get some sort of replacement. And you've seen this happen in physics, right, where it's like, you know, the- the- the early almost, um, solar system-esque models of atoms, right, that you might have seen in textbooks. Of course, that's not really what atoms look like. That's sort of an earlier more, you know, easily to understand paradigm of what atoms look like, and we went through, you know, successive, uh, paradigms. But I think within neuroscience, it's still very much waiting on its big theory. It's still very much waiting on a theory of consciousness, and that would be the thing that catapults it to being, uh, post- post-paradigmatic. And so that's where, you know, I hope that, like, the- the criticisms I'm offering forth, including s- some in this book, do have a- do have a positive purpose, right, which is to sort of reorientate people towards, um, you know, where can we actually move in order to solve some of these, uh, s- th- these sort of problems instead of just continuing down doing exactly what we're doing.

5. 19:32 – 26:36

   Intrinsic & Extrinsic Perspectives

   1. EHErik Hoel19:32

   2. CWChris Williamson19:32

      Okay, so explain to me the intrinsic and the extrinsic perspective and how those tie in and- and how they're related.

   3. EHErik Hoel19:40

      Sure, so I- if- if we- if we go back to Galileo, the intrinsic is- is what he removed, right, is what he cut out, um, and the extrinsic is, in a way, w- we're sort of more well versed in or we're more familiar with. So an engineering diagram would be extrinsic. Um, y- the- uh, the- the- the mathematics, um, you know, a physical description of some complex natural phenomenon, that would be an extrinsic description. Um, the- the circuitry of your laptop, that would be an extrinsic description. A causal model is extrinsic. Intrinsic are the subjective qualities that accompany your... or, you know, are- are basically are your conscious experience and your stream of consciousness. And neuroscience fits in this very strange, uh, position where it's trying to reconcile the- the intrinsic and the extrinsic. Um, something that is very interesting to me and- and, um, you know, I devoted, uh, again some of the book- some of the book is about this, is that if you look at the development of our civilization, you can view... uh, as in humanity as a whole, you can view... uh, you could view it as the development of these two different perspectives on the world, and- and they don't- they don't really go together, right? Um, one is- is our development of the extrinsic, right? So... and- and the separation of the two. So if you look early on, of course, people are explaining things with gods, um, you know, or magic or these other sort of much more like supernatural phenomena, and suddenly we get honed down to only really wanting to give very clear extrinsic explanations of phenomena, and the- the best example of that is in science. But meanwhile we're also beginning to understand that we also, you know, over time, over the millennia, we get much better at describing not just the extrinsic world like via science and so on, we also get better at describing the intrinsic world. So we- we get better at describing ourselves and our own emotions and our own thoughts, and we have better theory of mind, we have better, um, uh, a- ability to express our own minds and sort of the- the- the various details and... and- and- and all sort of the- the- the- the- the micro quanta of your own conscious experience. Um, we get much, much, much better at that. You know, if you go back and you l- read, um, you know, ancient Egyptian poetry or ancient Egyptian texts, what you'll find is that descriptions of mind are incredibly sparse. Uh, they... you- you really don't get very many descriptions of emotions, and the descriptions of emotions that you do get are extremely wooden. Um, it's almost as if, you know, you have literature but then you sort of don't even know how to really talk about other minds. And it's just like with science, the ability to describe mind sort of rockets forward during the, um, during the era of ancient Greece and post the Homeric era. And you see Euripides and all these playwrights become, you know, extremely, um, e- e- e- e- extremely good at describing minds, uh, in ways that we would recognize now. Um, and then funnily enough, I mean, after the- the fall of the Roman Empire, um, you know, during research for this book I was sort of going through- going through history and trying to find, uh, you know, texts through which you would... uh, would be good examples of how people talked about minds in different eras, right? And, uh, it was actually very hard to find any text at all, uh, that talks about minds post fall of the Roman Empire, like when you're in the Dark Ages. Um, and so you really sort of- you really sort of lose this ability almost outside of some, you know, uh, religious texts. You really lose this ability to really talk seriously about minds, um, uh, almost- almost as if we like reverted back to ancient Egypt, and then we, you know, develop it again just like with science, um, you know, um, dur- during the Enlightenment and so on. And- and that was a- a really sort of fascinating story that I didn't sort of expect- uh, expect a priori. Um, it really kind of fell out of- out of my research and looking at these- these twin threads and, you know, the intrinsic perspective just like- just like we di- we- we- we took the extrinsic perspectives on the world and we boiled it away to its clearest form and that's science. We took the intrinsic perspective of the world and we boiled it away to the clearest expression of it and that's literature. Um, and, and that's the... If, if you go back and you read, um, you know, um, you know, 18th century novelists, right? They, they have such facility with describing internal states, um, and that would have been completely foreign to people 2,000 years ago. Um, and it's as if they sort of developed, um, you know, a, a viewpoint, um, j- just in the same way that science was developed. Except that viewpoint is pointed towards consciousness, is to- pointed towards, um, accessing and describing our, our qualitative experiences.

   4. CWChris Williamson24:47

      Yeah. That's very interesting, that you could almost look at novels and literature as probably more... Well, almost certainly is more of a direct window into the mind than the science of the brain and the science of consciousness. You learn an awful lot more functionally, experientially about what it's like to be a human by reading fucking Wuthering Heights or something, than you do by looking at neuroscience journals.

   5. EHErik Hoel25:17

      Y- A- Absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, there, there's just no doubt that Tolstoy k- knew more about human nature than some contemporary psychologist. Even, like, an evolutionary psychologist, right? Like, you can take, you know, some sort of evolutionary psychologist, say, you know, "Explain human nature," and then Tolstoy comes in with, you know, very sort of what we would consider perhaps very strange, archaic, you know, notions of, you know, true Christianity and, and, and how human beings work. And then he somehow, you know, is able to sort of e- explain, ex- explain people just so incredibly well and has such an eye for how humans actually function. Um, a- a- a- and can write across all sorts of different, you know, d- d- divides. Um, a- and, and I do think that that's... What, what's really interesting there is that where that failure is, is in the missing sort of neuroscience of consciousness, right? If you... O- one reason for that, one reason that feels like such an obvious gap is because neuroscience is sort of continuously stuck trying to explain the, e- everything via the extrinsic perspective, um, and we never quite get what we want from the brain out of such explanations. We always feel that there's something fundamentally missing. We always feel that there's some ghost that's been left out of the machine, um, w- whenever we sort of try to give an ex- perfectly extrinsic explanation of the brain.

6. 26:36 – 32:05

   Why Descartes is Important in Studies of Consciousness

   1. EHErik Hoel26:36

   2. CWChris Williamson26:36

      How is Descartes involved or important in this story?

   3. EHErik Hoel26:41

      Well, I think, I think Descartes is, you know, deeply important whenever you talk about, um, whenever you talk about consciousness. But, but sp- specifically for this, um, you know, he actually has this really interesting interaction where this problem of how does, how does the intrinsic relate to the extrinsic? I mean, perhaps its most, its first historical formal discussion occurs in some letters that Descartes sends, uh, with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, um, who was, um, a really, really interesting woman. Um, she was a mathematician, she was a philosopher. She eventually, uh, became an abbess of a, of, of, of a, um... I think... I forget exactly in which country she was an abbess. But, but she, she lived this life that was filled with sort of political intrigue. She was a royal. And she met Descartes, and their letters are fascinating historical reading. I mean, one, because there's almost, like, this extremely romantic, uh, aspect of it. And of course, you know, that, that age was very different and how people spoke to one another was very different, but you sort of, you sort of get the sense that these are, like, two nerds, you know, communicating over emails. Um, you know, but, but they're, like, stuck, you know, in the Renaissance. Um, and, and, and, uh, and, and after Descartes died, uh, Princess Eliz- Elisabeth never married, um, and, and, and, and died a widow, and, um, she turned down an offer of marriage that was given to her, um, and, and, and she was reportedly just utterly heartbroken. But the point is that in these letters, Princess Elisabeth, um, who was a very good philosopher in her own right, makes a point to Descartes about his metaphysics, and he is one of the people who really initially pushed this ideal, idea of dualism. Um, it's almost a caricature at this point, where, you know, he's like, "The soul interacts with the body through the pineal gland." His opinions were a bit more complicated than that, but, you know, they... That's effectively how it's, how it's portrayed. And, um, you know, Princess Elisabeth has this point where she says, "Well, uh, considering that, you know, sort of physics in the world is extrinsic and the soul is intrinsic, how can one impact the other?" If there... If they really are... If you really are a dualist and you really think they're two different types of substances, how can one sort of causally control the other? That seems, that seems nonsensical. And-

   4. CWChris Williamson28:57

      That's the pillow talk that I want, by the way.

   5. EHErik Hoel28:59

      (laughs) Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson28:59

      That's, that's foreplay for me. Uh, just dismantle my life's work and, and use the word ridiculous.

   7. EHErik Hoel29:07

      (laughs) Yeah. Um, and, and, and you do sort of get the, get the sense of that, where she's, she's both complimenting him, but also, you know, clearly, clearly sort of had... Like a bulldog has, has got a hold of this coin and, and won't, won't let go until Descartes, you know, really gives her, uh, the answer she's, she's looking for. And he, he really doesn't do a good job of it, right? He, he, he... At first he sort of says, "Well, maybe this is like gravity where it's a force," right? And she immediately comes back with, "Well, if it's a force like gravity, then the mind would just be material, right? Because it would just be some physical force. So what... Again, what do you mean by saying it's two separate substances? How do they interact?" And, uh, they never really re- resolve it. Descartes sort of ducks the question and they, uh, you know, their, their correspondence continues on, on other matters, uh, for a very long time, uh, until his death. Uh, but that to me is so interesting historically because it's a point where, where some of the paradoxes around consciousness come very clearly into play. Both of them have the very strong intuition that you cannot reduce the intrinsic to the extrinsic fully.... and so they're saying, you know, there's two separate substances. And- and- and Elizabeth never, you know, questions that. She said, you know, she says the same intuitions. Um, and in the modern day, you can go to philosophy of mind and you can find all sorts of arguments that argue exactly for that, right? So- so they argue exactly, like an example would be like the zombie argument that, uh, again, the philosopher David Chalmers is very famous for sort of articulating and defending very well, um, uh, is- is an example of something where you, it primes your intuition to believe that the intrinsic and the extrinsic are really fundamentally different. But Elizabeth also notes this paradoxical aspect which is that, "Well, if they are really different, wait a minute, how could they even interact? How could our picture of the world even be sensible, right? If there really are just like two fundamentally incompatible perspectives on the world, and we don't know how to reconcile them, how does that give us a cohesive ontology? It doesn't seem to do that." And so that's really the ultimate paradox of- of consciousness which is that both that there are strong arguments and strong intuitions for why, when you're talking about consciousness, you're dealing with something that's irreducible to the material, but at the same time, it's totally unclear what the ontology of the world would even look like, uh, if it were true that consciousness was irreducible and the soul was, you know, moving around, uh, you know, the neurons and the pineal gland or whatever, right? Because presumably, we would just find the, you know, the- the force coefficient or whatever of what the soul's doing and give it some mathematical description, and then, you know, actually, wait a second, it's just this force and we'd be, you know, dismissive of it and find it, you know, very boring and non-supernatural and so on. Um, and so they- the- to- to me, they're sort of the first, like (laughs) almost like odd couple who- who- who fully recognize in their correspondence this- this paradoxical aspect of consciousness, and one of the things that makes it just so darn hard.

7. 32:05 – 39:00

   Explaining the Bicameral Mind

   1. EHErik Hoel32:05

   2. CWChris Williamson32:05

      Yeah. Is this, uh, uh, related in any way to the bicameral mind and like that perspective? That was something that I first learned about whilst watching Westworld, um, which I guess might be the same for a lot of people. Uh, but I was fascinated by that. I was really, really fascinated by this idea of the bicameral mind. And again, it seems like there's almost a splitting up of what's going on there too. How does that kind of play into this story?

   3. EHErik Hoel32:29

      Yeah. Y- you know, I- I think it was... To- to- to paraphrase Umberto Eco, you know, a book is made of other books. Um, Julian Jaynes wrote this- this classic, um, back in, I mean, 1976, called The- The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. And one of the things that's great about it is that it's a beautifully written book. It's an example of a popular science book that does not suck. Um, and it's- it's really fascinating because he proposes frankly a wild hypothesis which is that, um, you know, the, what we call modern consciousness only came about during the Ho- Homeric ages. And if you examine the characters of the Iliad, they don't really talk about minds, um, in- in the same way that we do. They talk about God's commandments and so on. And so his speculation was that es- essentially the- the- the two hemispheres of the brain were still ultimately disconnected during these times, and that they only sort of come together, and that's how you get, um, modern consciousness in modern humans. Now, that- that- that's a- that's an incredibly strong claim to make off of textual evidence, right? Because that's really all, uh, Julian Jaynes, uh, had. And- and because of that, Julian Jaynes is always considered one of the first consciousness researchers because his ultimate interest was in consciousness. Uh, but also he- he's- he was always sort of considered like it was a bit of a lark, right? Um, a- a- a beautiful book, a book that most people who get into consciousness research have read and are interested in, uh, but sort of a- sort of a crazy one. And even very early on, some initial reviews of it, you know, philosophers who are now s- uh, s- you know, still working and still very well- well- well-renowned like Ned Block wrote some reviews of it that pointed out, "Well, we don't have to have this complicated hypothesis that consciousness has changed. It's just that how people have talked about consciousness has changed." Um, and in a way, a lot of the- a lot of my book, a lot of what The World Behind the World is about is- is exploring this alternative view, and maybe a slightly more tame and sensible one, um, to the evidence that Julian Jaynes brought forth about how in the Iliad no one was talking about minds and they were talking about gods instead. And the way that I frame it is- is that, you know, ph- philosophers have these- these two different, uh, notions of consciousness. One is our phenomenal consciousness which is incredibly rich. So phenomenal consciousness includes everything it's like to be you right now. All the little details of your experience. And the other is your access consciousness, and that's all the stuff about consciousness that you can talk about, that you can express. But we all know that there's stuff within consciousness that you can't express well, right? Like you could talk about your emotions, but are you really fully capturing your emotions when you talk about them? Or are you sort of just, it's just tip of the iceberg stuff, right? And so in the- in sort of the narrative that I- that I paint is that, um, you know, a lot of the- the stuff from Julian Jaynes, um, is explained by thinking about it as, uh, the story of our ability to talk about consciousness gets richer and richer and richer, and then finally it meets or begins to approximate our actual consciousness. In other words, we start out historically. Our consciousness is very much like an iceberg, and we can only really talk about, you know, very, very, uh, you know, top of the line- top of the line stuff for it. And, you know, but once you- once you move on and once you keep going, uh, eventually you uncover more and more of the iceberg, and you get better and better at- at talking about your own consciousness. And in a way that I think historically parallels a lot of the developments of science, and sort of reaches its apotheosis in literature in the same way that the extrinsic perspective reaches its apotheosis in science.

   4. CWChris Williamson36:14

      Do you think that this is going to be a-... a, a cause of sort of not necessarily suffering, but definitely discontent among humans, the fact that the richness of our inner experience and the capacity for us to explain and tell other people about it, at the moment are doomed to be incredibly far apart.

   5. EHErik Hoel36:37

      Well, I think, I think we have it much better off than we did historically, right? I mean, I think it's very hard to express what the inner life of, you know, a Scandinavian peasant, you know, in the 1100s was. I think that that's a very difficult experience to, to express. And I don't think that they had very many good cognitive tools to express it. I think that we're, we sort of have been gifted and people don't realize that, right? It's one of the things that makes modern humans seem so much more intelligent, um, than a lot of ancient texts. If you go back and you read historic literature, one of the things that you will think is sort of like, "Why are people so seemingly dumb?" Right? Like, the average Twitter user now seems far better to express their own inner states, you know, than like the very best poets of Babylon (laughs) , right? Um, and, and, and it's that we've inherited a gift. We've inherited all sorts of cognitive tools and all sorts of, of, of language in terms of words and concepts that allow us to talk about our own inner states, and that's something that was developed. It was developed, um, a lot by writers, I think, um, and that's an argument that I make that, you know, if... That, that some of the earliest... That not just did writers get better at expressing consciousness, but they were inventing the very terminology that you need in order to talk about consciousness. And so you finally end up with, you know, people like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce who are able to, you know, discuss the incredible minutiae of consciousness and, and transform it into, you know, beautiful stream of conscious- stream of consciousness literature. And that was one... They, they... That was their project, right? It wasn't just, um, something that they... This is like their style of writing that they, you know, wanted to do. They specifically were like, "We're going to be the generation of writers who gets the best at capturing all the little details of consciousness." And, and so I think we owe a lot of our, um, language around consciousness, um, and we, and we have a debt, uh, to writers and then also to, you know, psychologists, people like Freud, although I think in some ways, the debt to him is negative. Um, th- that we have this and we're able to there- therefore sort of express ourselves, um, in ways that, that people just, just couldn't before.

8. 39:00 – 43:22

   What Would Happen if a Good Theory of Consciousness was Found?

   1. EHErik Hoel39:00

   2. CWChris Williamson39:00

      What would happen if and when a satisfactory theory of consciousness gets found?

   3. EHErik Hoel39:12

      Well, I would probably get very drunk in terms of celebration.

   4. CWChris Williamson39:19

      (laughs)

   5. EHErik Hoel39:19

      Um, so yeah, it, it, it really is something I'll be waiting for my whole life, um, and I don't know if it will come in my life. Um, I think first of all, it would be a revolution in the understanding of ourselves. We would finally know what we are. We don't, because we don't have a good theory of consciousness. So there's still this debate. What, what exactly are we? And we don't know. There's no good scientific answer to that question. There's, there's answers around that question, but there's no direct scientific theory you can point to, and that's what a theory of consciousness would give us. So first of all, there would be the change in humanity's conception of itself, and that would be, I think, as monumental as the theory of evolution by natural selection, which told us where we came from, right? And then there would be all sorts of, you know, incredible technological, uh, advancement to come out of that. I mean, the, the ability... What you could do with the theory of consciousness... I mean, first of all, you can make some of the best art that's ever been made in the history of humanity. You can make some of the best art. Um, you could do, you could do some truly incredible things. And second of all, I mean, it may turn out as, as I've talked about on other podcasts and, and, and written about, uh, that, you know, I am very worried about AI and where that's going, uh, but it might be that certain types of AI are impossible without consciousness. I think it's very... I think it, I think it's very debatable if contemporary systems are conscious. I think most people would say no. And I think, I think most of the scientific fields of consciousness research would also say no. Uh, so then the question is, well, how do you build conscious AI? Well, the only way to really do that is to know what consciousness is and how that works. So that's an example of, you know, something that could revolutionize AI, for instance. Um, so the actual... The funny thing is about this is that there's basically no funding, um, and, and, uh, both at a private level, but also at like a public level, right? If you look at like, you know, tax dollars, a huge amount of it goes to, to neuroscience via the, uh, the NSF and the NIH. Try applying for a grant to do scientific research on consciousness to one of those organizations and see how it goes. They've gotten better over the years, like I'll, I'll say that. Like they, they have gotten better. Don't take that as it's totally impossible, but it's so much easier to, you know, get rats to run a maze, and, you know, you want to look at the amygdala. You know, the chance of you getting a grant to do that is, you know, like ten times higher, right? So, um, so it's sort of astounding that there still this really big gap in our understanding of the universe. It's not like the gap of, you know, what happened before the Big Bang, or exactly how do you reconcile, you know, um, quantum physics with general relativity or something. The- These are very, very big questions and it, it's totally imaginable that the answers to them are, um...... you know, would require building, like, a super collider the size of a solar system or something, right? Uh, for consciousness, it's like, listen, th- we all do this every day. Ev- all of us, we wake up. Our brain, you know, our, th- the slow waves recede, right? You wake up from your, your dream, right? And, and, and, and, and maybe your consciousness continues from the dream, right? And then th- the consciousness as a dream gets to be your, your consciousness for the, for the day, right? You get some lucky dream that gets to exist until you, until your head hits the pillow again. But, uh, the, th- that is, that is something that's accessible and, and present, and, uh, and, and yet still remains a, a, a, a really major scientific mystery. So I think it's, I think it's just sort of an obvious missed opportunity, uh, in my- my eyes. And I think you need to galvanize people a little bit about it. I mean, that's one of the reasons I'm so critical about neuroscience in, in the book is because I wanna galvanize people to, to, to actually address this.

9. 43:22 – 57:31

   Do We Really Have Free Will?

   1. EHErik Hoel43:22

   2. CWChris Williamson43:22

      How is all of this related to free will? We've decapitated a number of people's dreams so far today. Let's go in and, and do the final one with free will.

   3. EHErik Hoel43:34

      Well, I think that there's a few different ways it's related. Uh, one is to go back to some of our earlier discussion about emergence. So, you know, if you, if you, if you pick out some popular science book that argues against free will, there's only a couple forms of arguments, um, against free will. And one of the most common ones is s- is, is basically that, you know, your, your atoms did it. Uh, whatever it is, pick whatever it is, your atoms did it. You didn't do it. Your atoms did it. Um, you sort of... we can talk about you as if y- you know, you, you s- you exist, but that language is just, uh, for convenience, really... Uh, you know, e- everything is sort of completely reducible down to your atoms. Um, and, and we don't, you know, associate, um... you know, if, if your atoms did it, you really aren't very strongly associated with your atoms, so then you didn't really do it, right? Um, and I think for one, m- the theory of causal emergence, um, sort of puts, puts that particular argument, I think, to bed very firmly. Uh-

   4. CWChris Williamson44:42

      Can you, can you explain how it does that in simple terms? Like, I'm a golden retriever.

   5. EHErik Hoel44:48

      (laughs) Um, you know, (laughs) th- there, there is, there is this notion of cognitive closure where, uh, you know, if... you, you, you really can't explain certain things to golden retrievers-

   6. CWChris Williamson44:58

      Curse of knowledge.

   7. EHErik Hoel44:59

      ... yeah. (laughs) You really can't explain certain things to golden retrievers. Uh, but, but I'll, I- I'll give it a shot. So let's look at that argument. It's saying that, well, your atoms were the cause of your actions. So your atoms following the laws of physics were the cause of you reaching your, your hand out for a handshake. Now, the question is, well, was... were they really the cause? Like did anyone check? And you m- and you might say, "Well, it should be obvious that they're the cause," right? And what our research has shown is no (laughs) . Because basically because no one thought to check. And while you can't do this with a simple... wi- with a person, right? Yeah, I can't, I can't prove this to you as a person because people are incredibly complex, and physics is very complex. I can give examples that are similar to that in very simple models, mathematical models, right? Where you have some simple description of a system, and this might be like cellular automata. It might be circuits of logic gates. But imagine a very simple description of how a system works, like X talks to Y, Y talks to Z, Z talks to A, right? And so on. And you just imagine it's very simple. What it turns out is that when you, when you look at higher scales of description... so this would be like for our bodies. This would be like instead of giving the atomic state, what if I gave you the cellular state of your body, right? So all, all your cells... you know, bi- biologists would talk about, you know, the sodium levels, and they'd talk about, you know, which ion channels are open and so on. They would give a biological description or cellular description of, of your body.

   8. CWChris Williamson46:42

      Mm-hmm.

   9. EHErik Hoel46:42

      Or you could give a description of your body up at an even higher level in terms of the musculature and the, and the bones and like all these much larger structures like organs and so on, and talk about their states, right? And these would all be wha- what this field calls macro-scale descriptions, so macro meaning bigger, right? And th- so these higher-level descriptions, the question is, well, do they have any causal influence over the future events, right? And while, again, you can't measure that out in the real world, you can create simple mathematical models where you can look at macro scales and compare them to sort of the atomic scale. And what you actually find is that pick almost any measure of causation you want, right? Because so, so there's a question of causation. People normally think of causation as this very philosophical subject. Actually, there's a whole science around causation now. There's a whole mathematics around causation now. A lot of it comes from Judea Pearl, who's a mathematician at MIT, and he won the Turing Award for this work. And so there's, there's this... there's basically the... this really recent development of our good mathematical understanding of causal models. And so you could take a system, and you can look at the causal model of all the little micro-interactions, which would be like the atomic interactions, and then I can look at all like what would be the equivalent to cellular interactions or some other higher scale of description. And what you find is that there's causal influence that's irreducible down to the microscale despite the system still being reducible. As in you could still say, you could still say pick out, um, you know, every atom that makes up, um, y- you know, your, your, your, your organs or whatever, right? Uh, you could still pick all that out, and you could still relate those. So it wouldn't be that the...... the, the macroscale is not reducible. It is reducible, but the causation involved is not. And what that means is that macros- macro-level entities can have real, irreducible, causal power in the world. And you are a macro-level entity, right? We don't think of you. This is like the, the Ship of Theseus or, or, or what have you, right? Like, you're not, uh, the same, you're not completely identical to your atomic state. You're some sort of core strain that we, that we talk about. And that thing can have real irreducible causal power simply from the fact that we know that in these simple models, you can sort of get this effect to occur, and then it's like probably very likely in these very complex real cases that it occurs.

   10. CWChris Williamson49:15

       Does it make sense to ask the question, where does this causal power come from?

   11. EHErik Hoel49:19

       Yeah, it makes a great deal of sense. It makes a great deal of sense. It makes a great deal of sense both temporally, so to ask where in time. So was it, was it something that just happened? Was it something, uh, that, that happened a while ago? Or, uh, it also makes sense to talk about in terms of the scale of the system, and that's what this research has really talked about. So you could say, okay, what was the cause of, of this? Was it the atomic state of the system or was it some macroscale state? And, uh, the answer is that in many cases most of the causal influence can come from macroscale states, and we understand exactly how that happens. And it happens due to this relatively big, non-magical, um, uh, thing called error, error correction. And it's, um, it's- it's- it's basically just that while there's noise down at the bottom... And by "noise" I don't mean like, like sonic noise. I mean like there's noise in terms of the probabilities of how things relate to one another down at the microscopic. And when you zoom out, that noise gets smaller and smaller. Well, the power of your causal influence is inversely proportional to your noise, right? So, um, what's a great, what's a good way of saying that? So it would be like, um... Let's say that I had a light switch that controlled the light bulb. If that was a very noisy causal relationship, it would be like I turn the switch and then sometimes the light turns on, but not all the time, right? And now think about the difference between that and a light switch that you can rely on, right? You turn, you flip it, and the light bulb turns on and off, right? Um, and one would be like a non-noisy deterministic system, and the other would be like a very noisy system. One has more causal influence than the other, because in one case it's like, well, I flip it, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. That's not very much causal influence. But in the other case, I flip it, it always turns the, the light on or off. Macroscales are non-noisy representations of their microscales. So what that means is that you can take a bunch of relationships that are very noisy and transform them into non-noisy, reliable causal relationships up at the macroscale. And that's where you get this extra causal influence from, which is just something called error correction from information theory. Um, and so I- I- I think it doesn't prove free will by any means, right? So it's a, a notion of free will has to be more complex than that. But it does open this door to say, well, wait a minute. Now we know that it's mathematically possible for like macroscale descriptions and higher level descriptions to matter causally. That is a necessary fact for there to be free will. Because imagine if it were w- the- the opposite, right? If we could show, well, listen, all the causal in- influence is always down at the microscale. That would imply that it really is, you know, why things happen is always just your atoms were in some particular, you know, atomic state or so on.

   12. CWChris Williamson52:12

       Interesting. I got sent through, uh, literally today out front Robert Sapolsky's new book. Have you seen what that is?

   13. EHErik Hoel52:20

       I don't know if I've seen the new one.

   14. CWChris Williamson52:21

       Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will.

   15. EHErik Hoel52:24

       Oh. Yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson52:25

       (laughs)

   17. EHErik Hoel52:26

       We would disagree. Um...

   18. CWChris Williamson52:29

       Yeah. I thought you would. I thought you would.

   19. EHErik Hoel52:31

       Well, I think I- I'll- I'll- I'll- I'll just say it, right? I mean, you t- you know, he's a primatologist, I'd... Evolutionary psychologist, right? Um, neurobiologist, um...

   20. CWChris Williamson52:41

       I think evolutionary biologist, perhaps.

   21. EHErik Hoel52:44

       Evolutionary biologist? Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson52:45

       Yeah.

   23. EHErik Hoel52:45

       So y- you know, I- I think that the probability like that when you're talking about free will, you're talking about like the, the, the mathematics of causation. Like, that, that's what you're talking about. You're- you're not w- and the relevance from, you know, oh, is it genetic determinism? It's like, forget genetic determinism. Is it just determinism from like your current brain state right now, right? Um...

   24. CWChris Williamson53:07

       Is this you, is this you slowly marking your territory here?

   25. EHErik Hoel53:11

       I, I think this is, this is me saying that when people say free will doesn't exist and they sort of start that at the, at the outset, it's generally only by having really strong metaphysical, um, and philosophical assumptions. And if you actually go and you question those assumptions in terms of their details, what you'll often find is that either they're extremely debatable, um, and this would be like logical fatalism and some of these other sort of mor- less, less direct arguments for free will, or like literally disprovable. So- so you can, you can literally disprove, uh, uh, uh, the argument. So, um, I- I- I like Sapolsky a- a- a- a great deal, uh, but- but I think that, you know, there, there's a certain, um... I- I think one, one thing that I hope my, my book makes clear is that, you know, these questions are not, uh, just- just closed. And- and that's given the very best, the very latest that we have on what would be the most relevant scientific disciplines, which is like h- how you create macroscale models, how causal modeling works, how prediction works in science using, um, you know, notions like computational irreducibility. Like, we had this, we had this revolution in the '80s that people have not caught up with, with chaos theory and computational irreducibility. Those are very relevant and have not been directly applied. Um, you know, we- we have, we've had this causal revolution. Those are, that's very relevant and has not been applied. So, I-So I think, you know, if, if I want one, people to take away one thing involving free will, it's not so much that you definitely have free will, such that, you know, if you look down at these really basic assumptions behind a lot of the, uh, you know, we obviously don't have free will or so on, what you'll find is things that are extremely debatable, especially given what science says about how, the best way to talk about how the world functions now versus, say, 1950. And I, a lot of people are using stuff from 1950 to talk about it, right? And they're, and they're like, you know, the laws of physics are working on deterministic train tracks and, you know, they have, they just have these really... or, and, you know, causation is just, uh, correlation or something, it's not like counter-factual dependency or something. Uh, so they have, they j- they basically have this sort of old stock, you know, world model, and if you look at, you know, contemporary science, you, you find a lot of complexity there and a lot of room, a lot more room, uh, than people are, are led to believe.

   26. CWChris Williamson55:38

       If a theory of consciousness was found, would that inform us at all about free will, do you think? Would it be likely to inform us about the nature of free will?

   27. EHErik Hoel55:51

       Yeah. I, I, I think it absolutely would. And, and one reason why I don't make the claim, and I don't in the book, that you absolutely do have free will, but more so that the standard arguments against it h- have been nullified in many ways by certain advancements and thought. Um, you know, is because consciousness is always the wild card, you know. A th- a theory of consciousness is always sort of the wild card. W- we don't know exactly what the ontology of the universe looks like. Without a theory of consciousness, you could always pull out some, some joker, right? Some very strange thing. Um, and, and that would completely change your conceptions. So, so with that said, then, you know, yes, absolutely. It, it could have a huge relevancy, but I'm, I'm, I'm sort of cautious. I think you can still talk about, uh, free will and intuitions around free will and arguments against free will or arguments pro-free will without necessarily relying on, on, on consciousness. I think you can talk about ca- caus- causation and prediction and what prediction really means, you know, and, and, and whether or not you really could predict, you know, someone's behavior or so on. And what I hope people take away is that, you know, science isn't finished yet. So we still have some big gaping and very personal holes, uh, left in science that, that have not been filled. And a lot of the recent developments in science have made things seem much more complex rather than less. And that includes over things like free will, that includes consciousness, that includes neuroscience. And I think that that's something that is very much the opposite of what a lot of pop sci books are out there to tell you. They're there to simplify. They're there to make the world easy. And I think ultimately, the world isn't easy.

   28. CWChris Williamson57:30

       Erik Hole, ladies and gentlemen.

10. 57:31 – 58:26

    Where to Find Erik

    1. CWChris Williamson57:31

       Erik, where should people go? I love your, uh, uh, Substack. I think it's fantastic. The Super Sensorium article that you did a little while ago was one of my favorites. You just put a new one out on the, uh, fact that we don't have a, a town square and that all social media is fundamentally just killing us. Uh, where should people go if they wanna check that out and everything else that you do?

    2. EHErik Hoel57:52

       If you type in, um, the Intrinsic Perspective Erik into Google, uh, Erik with a K, it'll find it. Or just the Intrinsic Perspective, Google will find it as well. Um, and m- my, my, my first non-fiction book, this is actually my second book, but my first non-fiction book is out July 25th. Uh, it's called The World Behind the World. You can also Google that and it will, it will come up with my name.

    3. CWChris Williamson58:13

       Erik, I appreciate you. Thank you.

    4. EHErik Hoel58:15

       Thank you. This was great.

    5. CWChris Williamson58:16

       If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe.

Episode duration: 58:26