How Does The Human Mind Work? - Paul Bloom

... it's not what we think it is. And sometimes when people tell me, you know, "Oh, psychology is just common sense. Tell me something I didn't know." Well, I- I got a list and memory is one thing on the list, where a lot of people think what happens in memory, it's like you hold up your iPhone and it's just recording the world. And also it stays in this hard drive, and then later on through hypnosis or a kind therapist, it could all come out. It's just there. And this is total nonsense.

What do we actually know about human consciousness? Do we know why it evolved or what its function is?

No. We don't know, uh, we don't know why we're conscious as opposed to zombies that are fully functional. We don't know, um, how the brain gives rise to consciousness. We know it is the brain. I mean, the best science tells us that, that, uh, conscious emerges from our very physical brain, but one of the great puzzles in psychology is how does a three-pound piece of meat, bloody meat, gives rise to, you know, love and hate and the feeling of, uh, of a first kiss and slamming your hand in a car door and being on a podcast. Um, there's a lot we do know about consciousness. We know, um, we know how, how it, uh, we know how it works in attention and perception. We, we, we have theories of differences in conscious experience. But the big questions at this point elude us.

I've heard that one potential explanation for the reason that consciousness comes about is that it's kind of a byproduct of us being able to have quite a complex theory of mind, of other people, that when you have a large social group and I need to be able to predict what Paul thinks-

Yeah.

... about me thinking about that person and what they think about him thinking about me, uh, that you end up having a lot of layers of abstraction, and that basically consciousness is potentially kind of like a side effect, like how a lightbulb gives off light but it also gives off heat.

Okay.

That all of the fancy mental imagery that we get is just kind of, uh, dressing on the side of that.

I think it's, it's possible. One issue here is there's two senses of consciousness at least, but two as any people talk about. One is sort of what science, science call access consciousness, which is idea of information being available to us. You can mull it over, you can analyze that, and I think that's really necessary for, for high-level reasoning, for language use, for making sense of, of, um, of what other people are doing. So I'm not right now directly conscious of my blood pressure and heart rate. This is unconscious, this is fine, but I'm conscious that I'm talking to you and I know you, we met before. And the fact that I'm conscious of it means I could talk about it, I could reason about it, and we have good theories of that. The more mysterious thing is what's called phenomenological consciousness, the feel. And some philosophers think you could have one without the other, like we could have, we got to be fully reasoning... And maybe AIs are like this, or will be like this, where they have, or where they're able to reason and make arguments and have a- and, and, and, and understand other people, other... in people. But, um, but the feel of it, the feel of being a person right now, the feel as you're sitting there, the, of, of the seat against your behind, the feeling of i- headphones in your ears. Where does that come from? And that's kind of a m- a mystery. And it may be epiphenomenal of something else, but then you have to explain why is it epiphenomenal of that?