How Much Do We Actually Know About Consciousness? - Patrick House

... basically, we're downstream of a single cell from three billion years ago, who was too timid to die. And we've inherited all of its kind of self-consciousnesses and all of its quirks and foibles. But it's fundamentally just downstream of this one cell that couldn't give up. I think there's a lot of that that is perhaps humorous, uh, but there, most of it's a tragedy.

There's a quote that says, "Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel." What do you think that means?

Oh, I think it's exactly inverted. (laughs) Um, there's a, there's, I think there's way more tragedy when you zoom in at the, uh, uh, kind of chaos and nightmare of what's happening inside an individual single cell, um, which is kinda how I got interested in the brain. So yeah, I think that gets it exactly wrong. Who said that? Should I-

Um, I, it was-

... send an errata?

(laughs) Yeah. Yeah, well, the way that I see it as well is, I, I would agree that the people that have greater depth of insight are the ones that also have a greater capacity for suffering.

Yeah, I mean, like, I, the, the way that I see kind of the modern, uh, the modern brain and the modern, uh, uh, all of, all the kind of legacy issues we have to deal with is basically we're downstream of a single cell from three billion years ago who was too timid to die. And we've inherited all of its kind of self-consciousnesses and all of its quirks and foibles. And, you know, we're dealing with these things now, like, for example, what medicine, all of medicine and all of science, all of biological science have to deal with. But it's fundamentally just downstream of this one cell that couldn't give up. Um, and, and (laughs) I think, I think there's a lot of that that is perhaps humorous, uh, but there, most of it's a tragedy.

How-

Evolution, evolution is a long, unbroken line of most things dying off, so.

That's a good point, and for the most part as well, the ever, the more anxious, ever, the more concerned neurotic overthinking version of that usually being the adaptive one.

Yeah, well, so I've been thinking about this a little bit, uh, recently with respect to the, the, the way you just described that, the ever-anxious, overthinking, et cetera. Um, I actually believe that there's a variation in the ways that people simulate what happens in their head. So basically, if a single event happens, something happens in your world, you're at a party and, uh, conversation goes around. And you, you, let's say you miss the opportunity for a well-timed precision joke that you know when you simulate it in your head would have, would have killed, right? And then some people will not let that go, will think about that. There's a whole phrase in French, uh, staircase wit, right, which is, which is the idea that if you, if you kind of don't say something at a party, you'll figure out the exact right answer. The wittiest response will come to you on the staircase as you're leaving the party. Which fundamentally, I mean, that's, so, so you could take that as just a kind of side anecdote or maybe again one of these cute little aphorisms that, that artists and people throw around. But, but what it fundamentally means is something profound about the brain, which is that we are constantly simulating. We are constantly rehearsing in our mind, um, that which just happened, that which is about to happen in the future. And I would guess that there are some, some people, those that are perhaps neurotically inclined or anxiety inclined, those are people that rehearse and simulate more, more and more and more. So, whether or not those people end up being better at being comedians or, you know, (laughs) more likely to, to, um, kind of throw tragedy onto the world, I don't know. But I, the, I think it comes from simulation.