A Guide To The Fundamental Mystery Of The Mind - Erik Hoel
Chris Williamson (host), Erik Hoel (guest), Narrator
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Chris Williamson and Erik Hoel, A Guide To The Fundamental Mystery Of The Mind - Erik Hoel explores erik Hoel on consciousness, neuroscience’s failures, and free will’s future Erik Hoel argues that mainstream neuroscience has largely failed to explain consciousness because it inherited a behaviorist, Galilean taboo against subjective experience and still mostly avoids its “main function”: the stream of consciousness. He contrasts extrinsic, quantitative descriptions (the domain of science) with intrinsic, qualitative experience (the domain of literature), claiming our civilization has separately refined both and now struggles to reconcile them. Hoel situates current consciousness science as pre‑paradigmatic, akin to biology before Darwin, awaiting a unifying theory that would explain how brain activity gives rise to experience. He also introduces his work on causal emergence, contending that higher-level entities (like persons) can have genuine causal power, challenging simplistic arguments against free will and suggesting that a future theory of consciousness could transform both self-understanding and AI.
Erik Hoel on consciousness, neuroscience’s failures, and free will’s future
Erik Hoel argues that mainstream neuroscience has largely failed to explain consciousness because it inherited a behaviorist, Galilean taboo against subjective experience and still mostly avoids its “main function”: the stream of consciousness. He contrasts extrinsic, quantitative descriptions (the domain of science) with intrinsic, qualitative experience (the domain of literature), claiming our civilization has separately refined both and now struggles to reconcile them. Hoel situates current consciousness science as pre‑paradigmatic, akin to biology before Darwin, awaiting a unifying theory that would explain how brain activity gives rise to experience. He also introduces his work on causal emergence, contending that higher-level entities (like persons) can have genuine causal power, challenging simplistic arguments against free will and suggesting that a future theory of consciousness could transform both self-understanding and AI.
Key Takeaways
Neuroscience has sidelined consciousness and stalled on big questions.
Because consciousness was historically bracketed out of science and behaviorism discouraged subjective talk, most of neuroscience still focuses on localization and behavior rather than explaining how brain activity produces experience, leaving core cognitive questions largely unresolved.
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A true science of consciousness would be a new paradigm for neuroscience.
Hoel frames current neuroscience as pre-paradigmatic, like biology before Darwin; a robust theory of consciousness could organize disparate findings into a coherent framework and give the field a clear central target.
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Extrinsic science and intrinsic literature are complementary but unreconciled views of reality.
He distinguishes extrinsic, mathematical/causal descriptions from intrinsic, first-person experience and argues that science perfected the former while literature refined the latter, yet we lack a theory that unites these perspectives in a single ontology.
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Our ability to describe inner life is historically recent and culturally constructed.
Using examples from ancient Egyptian texts, Greek drama, and modern novels, Hoel claims that humans gradually developed richer language and cognitive tools for talking about minds, culminating in stream-of-consciousness literature that captures fine-grained phenomenology.
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Higher-level entities can have real causal power (causal emergence).
Hoel’s work on causal emergence shows in formal models that macro-level descriptions can wield more reliable causal influence than micro-level (atomic) descriptions, undermining the claim that “only atoms really cause anything” and opening conceptual space for non-reductive accounts of agency.
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Standard popular arguments against free will rest on outdated assumptions.
He argues that many deterministic critiques of free will rely on old views of physics and causation, ignoring modern work on causality, chaos, and computational irreducibility; while not proving free will, this significantly weakens the confidence of hard determinist claims.
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A theory of consciousness would revolutionize self-understanding and AI.
Hoel believes a successful theory would reshape how humanity conceives itself (on par with Darwin), enable radically new forms of art, and might be necessary to build genuinely conscious AI—yet such research is chronically underfunded compared to conventional neuroscience.
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Notable Quotes
“Imagine you're trying to figure out an organ and you're not allowed to talk about its main function.”
— Erik Hoel
“Neuroscience is still very much waiting on its big theory. It’s still very much waiting on a theory of consciousness.”
— Erik Hoel
“We took the intrinsic perspective of the world and we boiled it away to the clearest expression of it and that’s literature.”
— Erik Hoel
“There’s just no doubt that Tolstoy knew more about human nature than some contemporary psychologist.”
— Erik Hoel
“Science isn’t finished yet. We still have some big gaping and very personal holes left in science that have not been filled.”
— Erik Hoel
Questions Answered in This Episode
If a unifying theory of consciousness emerged, how might it concretely change clinical neuroscience, psychiatry, or everyday mental health practice?
Erik Hoel argues that mainstream neuroscience has largely failed to explain consciousness because it inherited a behaviorist, Galilean taboo against subjective experience and still mostly avoids its “main function”: the stream of consciousness. ...
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Could literature and the arts play a direct methodological role in consciousness science rather than merely serving as metaphors or examples?
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How far can causal emergence be pushed—are there limits beyond which macro-level causation breaks down or becomes negligible?
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What ethical and societal implications would follow if we developed a reliable test for consciousness in AI systems?
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Given entrenched funding patterns and academic conservatism, what realistic paths exist for young researchers who want to work directly on consciousness rather than traditional neuroscience topics?
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Transcript Preview
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?
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...
Who, who made the bet?
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.
Who was, who was for which?
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.
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