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from
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/stories/s1183559.htm
Don your helmets psychonauts! Over the next 2 weeks, The Nature of
Consciousness debate from the Australian Science Festival. Join UK psychologist
and writer Susan Blackmore, astrophysicist Paul Davies, and philosopher David
Chalmers. Are you conscious now? How do you know? Could it all be a grand
illusion? We know it more intimately than any other experience. Yet it remains
one of the greatest mysteries of science. From animal minds to artificial
intelligence, altered states to the depths of coma - the conundrum of
consciousness has everyone stumped.
Transcript
Relevant links and references at the end of the transcript
Natasha Mitchell: And hello again, welcome to the program. Let’s start this week
with a question that sounds simple but you’ll find surprisingly difficult to get
a grip on. Are you conscious now?
Well yes, it feels like you’re conscious but how do you know for sure?
We know it more intimately than any other experience and yet consciousness
remains one of those great mysteries. Will science ever be able to explain that
feeling from the inside of being an “I” or a “Me”?
Do cats and dogs have that feeling too? And what about machines – are they about
to?
Well over the next two weeks an opportunity to join All in the Mind’s Nature of
Consciousness debate at the Australian Science Festival where 800 other curious
souls turned up last week to be part of the live audience.
My guests UK psychologist, writer and broadcaster with the multicoloured locks
as you’ll hear Dr Sue Blackmore, author of the controversial book “The Meme
Machine” and now another marvellous tome, The Nature of Consciousness – An
Introduction.
Professor of Philosophy David Chalmers has just landed back in Australia to take
up a Federation Fellowship at the Australian National University after heading
up the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona for some
years. And he’s author of the “Conscious Mind – In Search of a Fundamental
Theory.”
And astrophysicist Paul Davies, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the
Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University who’s of course
internationally renowned for his immensely popular books like “God and the New
Physics” and “How to Build a Time Machine” amongst many others.
Natasha Mitchell: I just want to kick off for a question for you all because I
gather Sue Blackmore’s taken to asking herself am I conscious now? Every day,
every waking moment so I want to ask all of you are you conscious now? Paul.
Paul Davies: Most of the time, if you mean now, now yes because I’m thinking
about it but of course the story I like to tell is that when my children were
very small I used to read them bedtime stories and it was a really boring
experience and so I’d sit by the bed and I’d think about a physics problem
typically. And then I would find I’d get to the end of this story and I’d read
it out all the right way, made the jokes in the right way, the right tone of
voice, the children were perfectly satisfied but none of it sort of entered the
consciousness.
Prof Paul Davies
Photo: Giulio Saggin
Natasha Mitchell: Your consciousness?
Paul Davies: My consciousness that’s right.
Natasha Mitchell: What an appalling father you are.
Paul Davies: Well what it means is that you can read from a book and sound like
it’s travelling through the mind on the way to the mouth but I can tell you it
wasn’t in that case. So we can do all sorts of things apparently intelligently
without actually being conscious of what we’re doing. So I’m very well aware of
the fact that we have to keep doing this reality check.
Natasha Mitchell: Ok, I’m glad you’re conscious, so Dave, what about you.
David Chalmers: I just need to take one look at Sue’s hair and there’s no doubt
about it, blue, pink, yellow one of the finest conscious experiences that one
could have. No zombie could have an experience like that, it fills my visual
field with delightful qualia as we say, all kinds of shades of conscious
experience – so thumbs up, yes.
Natasha Mitchell: You’re conscious, two of my panellists are conscious but Sue
Blackmore are you conscious now and why the hell do you ask that question of
yourself daily?
Susan Blackmore: I don’t know but that’s how I find it being. I’m obsessed with
this question. It’s such a weird question – are you conscious now? See if you
can stay conscious until I stop speaking. Are you still?
Because what happens is every time you ask the question the answer is always
yes. But if you practiced doing it again and again and again you start to get
this kind of weird feeling that hang on a minute, before I ask the question I’m
not sure.
The process of asking the question am I conscious now is kind of like waking up.
So that is the answer to your question that asking it a lot is a way of kind of
waking up in your life instead of being in a daze. It’s very similar to the
Buddhist practice of mindfulness which is just like be here, be here now.
But I’m using it not kind of to get enlightened or something but I have an
intellectual curiosity to find out. And well, you try it yourselves and see what
happens.
Natasha Mitchell: I mean take Paul’s point that we obviously…
Susan Blackmore: What about hair?
Natasha Mitchell: Yes, we obviously have parallel streams of consciousness
happening all the time. I mean we talk about being unconscious for example, are
we really? When we’re unconscious are we really unconscious?
Susan Blackmore: I think one of the real traps that we’ve got into with the
science of consciousness is thinking that there’s one kind of consciousness
stream going on. That I’m having that one.
Natasha Mitchell: It’s happening now.
Susan Blackmore: That I’m in there and I’m having this constant stream and all
the rest is unconscious so you can interpret Paul’s story that way and I think
many people would that his consciousness was doing the physics stuff and there
was this unconscious stream.
That lands you in a really difficult scientific problem. Actually I think it’s
an impossible scientific problem, which is explaining why some of the neurones
are the conscious ones and the rest are not. This is what Francis Crick wants to
understand: What makes these ones the conscious ones and the others not?
I think that problem is so bad that perhaps it isn’t like that at all. Perhaps
they’re all in some sense conscious or perhaps there isn’t any such thing as
conscious and we shouldn’t think of it that way. I don’t know what we should do
with the problem but it’s a really difficult problem.
Natasha Mitchell: And we’re going to solve it here tonight – no.
Susan Blackmore: If we do that I shall go home with orange hair.
Natasha Mitchell: Paul Davies, philosophers have thought about this notion that
we have a mind that might be some how distinct from our brain and we can debate
that tonight for centuries. Why do you think science has been a relative
latecomer to this discussion about consciousness? Is it too nebulas?
Paul Davies: I’m a physicist by profession and so I like
to think of things very simply and there’s a real problem, the mind/body problem
and it’s really two problems and let me illustrate it as follows. I’m going to
do a little experiment here. I’m thinking to myself I’d like to raise my arm,
goodness me did you see that? There it happened, it happened the arm went up.
Well now how can thoughts do that, how come a thought move an arm? Mind moving
matter. Now to a physicist that looks really, really peculiar cause I know all
about forces and there aren’t any mental forces written down in the text books,
there’s no room from what we understand of the physical forces, no room for
extra mental forces to do something like that.
Now we may not fully understand physical causation so it’s just possible we’ve
overlooked the possibility that thoughts can move objects. Of course we can
trace this all the way back to some small little triggering event in my brain
but nevertheless at some stage you would have to say that the thought is making
an atom move to a position that it would otherwise not have moved to. That seems
deeply mysterious to a physicist.
Now let me come to number two – so I’ve got here a watch and in the old days you
had to wind the watches up but these days they have a little battery inside
that’ll process it, there’s some electrical circuitry so patterns of electric
current going around in there. Now my watch isn’t conscious I contend, some
people may take issue with that.
Natasha Mitchell: Well the pan psychics would think it was conscious.
Paul Davies: Right yeah but I’m saying that the watch isn’t conscious. Now up
here there are little electrical patterns swirling around and this is conscious
and so what I’d to ask as a physicist is a very simple question what does it
take, why is it that these little electrical patterns have thoughts attached and
these electrical patterns don’t. Tell me what it takes to get a thought from an
electrical pattern?
It seems very, very peculiar so I don’t think we’re even at first base on this
from the point of view of physics. So the reason that physicists would come into
this very late on is because it looked so damned hard it’s really almost
impossible to know where to begin.
Natasha Mitchell: And you’ve got some interesting ideas about complexity and
emergence.
Paul Davies: I have, I have but let the others have a go at this first.
Natasha Mitchell: Dave Chalmers I mean you’ve headed up the Centre for
Consciousness studies which means you’ve spent a lot of time in deep
introspection I gather. People say that consciousness is one of the last
surviving mysteries for science. Where’s the mystery for you?
David Chalmers: Consciousness is all about explaining the first person
experience of the mind. And the thing about traditional approaches to science
over the last 100 years is that they’ve taken a third person perspective on the
universe, tried to understand the universe from an objective point of view.
Which has been tremendously successful, and when it comes to explaining
consciousness the question is why is it that there’s extraordinarily complex
system with all of its extraordinarily complex functions should have a
subjective experience.
Now for a long time science just stayed away from this question, the idea was
physics had to be objective, consciousness is subjective therefore science
couldn’t touch consciousness. Gradually people over the last ten or twenty years
have started coming back to consciousness, still a lot of the focus as been on
how is it that we as conscious systems can do all the amazing things that we do,
that we can act in the ways that we can act, that we can integrate all this
information about the world? This is getting us a long way but in a sense that’s
only getting at what you might you call some of the peripheral questions of
consciousness what we call the easy problems of consciousness.
The really tricky question is why is it that all that all that processing in a
brain should be accompanied by first person subjective experience? And this is
the question which I think a lot of people think is going to require some kind
of reconception either of the way we think about the physical universe or of the
way we think about consciousness itself or both.
Natasha Mitchell: So in a sense we still haven’t really nutted out how to
explain that feeling of what it feels like. Sue what’s your take on this, what
you’ve called David the hard problem of consciousness, that inner feeling of
what is feels like?
Dr Susan Blackmore
Photo: Giulio Saggin
Susan Blackmore: I completely agree with Dave the way he sets it up and my own
answer as I was trying to imply there was that I think the problem lies not with
our physics it’s not that we’ve got to overthrow you know invent spirits or
souls or because I spent half my life thinking that was the way, you know we
need a new kind of understanding of realms beyond. I just don’t think that’s so,
I think we need to start with our own experience and see that we get into all
sorts of traps.
For example, we have this powerful sense of free will which Paul was talking
about, the feeling that my thoughts move my arms. I think that’s an illusion. We
need to understand why and how the illusion comes about. I have this powerful
feeling a lot of the time that I’m somehow inside my head looking out, that’s
part of the problem Dave’s saying it’s so difficult to explain how a physical
brain can give rise to that.
Well it’s an illusion I would say, an illusion in the sense that it’s not the
way the seems. So my best guess is that we need to start by working on our own
ideas of consciousness, working with our own experience, throw out the illusions
and really start again thinking about the problem. Cause if it winds up like
with Dave’s hard problem we’re in deep trouble, we’re never going to solve it.
Natasha Mitchell: Well some people have called that a horns woggle problem in
that it’s just the distraction, we really need to look in the brain and we’ll
find consciousness there. It’s just there in the buzzing blooming confusion of
our neurones.
David Chalmers: If would be awfully nice if it worked that way and for a long
time I mean it seemed to me this was the way it simply had to be. I mean I grew
up from the perspective of science saying standard third person science is going
to end up pretty well explaining everything. Look it worked for take the Francis
Crick approach it worked from the gene, it worked for biology, surely
consciousness is just around the corner. Well people for a long time have
thought it’s just around the corner and it’s just around the corner but the
problem keeps coming, it just comes back and strikes you in the face.
Natasha Mitchell: But they’re doing a lot of good work though getting in and
digging into the brain and trying to measure the conscious experience.
David Chalmers: We are learning a fantastic amount about consciousness from the
current science. But what’s interesting is all of the level correlation. OK, you
stimulate a certain area of the brain and you find out you’d have a certain kind
of conscious experience that goes along with it. But as scientists, correlation
isn’t good enough for us. We need explanation, why is it that when you do this
to the brain you get this feeling and that’s what we want to get beyond.
Susan Blackmore: I really think this whole thrust at the moment in consciousness
studies to look for the neural correlates of consciousness is setting the
problem up the wrong way. It’s saying there are two kinds of things of the sort
of explanation we need is a dualistic explanation, here is the brain and it
somehow gives rise to consciousness. I think that’s wrong and somehow we’ve got
to dismantle that.
Natasha Mitchell: OK, so ask yourself again are you conscious now? Just thought
I’d check in on that one again. On ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind you’ve
joined the packed house at the Nature of Consciousness Debate from the
Australian Science Festival at the Australian National University in Canberra.
I’m Natasha Mitchell with guests UK psychologist Dr Sue Blackmore, philosopher
Professor David Chalmers and astrophysicist Professor Paul Davies.
Paul, what do you make of this? I mean if we consider that the consciousness is
something other than the brain are we at risk of what the pan-psychic people say
that well this is conscious and this is conscious and this is conscious, and my
chair is conscious. Do you think that consciousness is well and truly seated in
the brain and the body.
Paul Davies: First of all yes, I think it is something which emerges from a
system as complex as the brain so I think that complexity is part of this, but
as I said earlier to a physicist the question we’d really like answered is ‘what
does it take to have some sort of activity, and I guess it’s going to be
electrical, electro chemical activity, what does it take for that to have
thoughts attached?’ Or dare we use the word ‘qualia.’
Natasha Mitchell: You’re going to have to explain that.
Paul Davies: The important point is we’ve been dodging around this word but
we’ve got to confront it now. This inner life that we have, this sense of the
first person that David was talking about, when we look out at the world we have
experiences.
So if I look at the red T shirts that these people in the front are wearing
that’s a very different experience for me subjectively as say the feel of water
running through my hand or the sound of middle C in music, or for that matter
the colour green. You know these are all to me definite experiences.
Now philosophers use the term qualia, what we mean by that is it’s that inner
sense that actual experience, subjective experience that you have. And that’s
something that you can only get at personally from the inside.
Now if you look at somebody else they can act and behave just like a human being
as if they were conscious, as if they were experiencing such qualia but we can’t
know that without putting ourselves into their minds and seeing the world
through their eyes.
Natasha Mitchell: Well David’s contemplated that we’re all zombies for that very
reason.
Paul Davies: That’s right.
Natasha Mitchell: Everyone’s a zombie but ourselves.
David Chalmers: I look at you, I look at you, I look at you, I know that I’m
conscious, I don’t know that you’re conscious, I presume that you’re conscious.
It’s a very natural assumption but no measurement I can make on you, will prove
to me that you’re conscious.
Paul Davies: Well this is the real the fundamental difficulty about what David
has called the hard problem. I think it’s a really, really useful demarcation
and if science pretends to give an account of everything in the universe and not
fence off that whole area of consciousness it’s got to come to grips with that.
The difficulty is what equations would you write down, how would you do, how
would you come to grips with that because you open up the brain and what do you
see? You see things like atoms and electrons and so on you don’t see red, and
green – how are we every going to get grips with that?
So it looks like that the hard problem is really so hard that it may simply lie
outside the scope of the scientific method. And that’s a great shame because I
would love to bring consciousness within that. I’m not quite sure what your
original question was?
Natasha Mitchell: Sue does it lie outside of the scope.
Paul Davies: Right well she may be a zombie.
Natasha Mitchell: The domain of the brain.
Paul Davies: I’m perfectly willing when people…
Sue Blackmore: There were two different ways of thinking about what it means to
say you’re a zombie. The original idea, the philosophers idea is of somebody who
looks like me, acts like me in every way, you wouldn’t be able to tell that it
was all dark inside. That’s the sort of idea of the philosopher’s zombie, there
could be two Sues and one would be conscious and the other wouldn’t.
If you start thinking that way you’re immediately getting into a bizarre idea
that consciousness is a sort of optional extra that is kind of put in. Then you
can’t explain anything, then you’re doomed.
The alternative you is that anything that could do all these things that could
act this way and speak this way and you know sit here like this thing is doing
would have to be conscious because consciousness is not a mysterious extra it’s
just an inevitable consequence of an organism that behaves this way.
And I think that’s where we’re going to end up at the moment we can’t see how
we’re going to end up there but we’re going to end up there and it won’t seem
mysterious anymore. Anything like the problem of life doesn’t seem mysterious;
we don’t go around looking for an extra life force that’s in living things and
not dead ones. It’s going to be like that, only we can’t see how.
Prof David Chalmers
Photo: Giulio Saggin
Paul Davies: But, but if I can read a book to the children and none of it
travels through the conscious mind why can’t I do all of this, why isn’t my
delivery now purely programmed
Sue Blackmore: Because you’re supposing that there’s a separate conscious mind.
Paul Davies: I can stop at the traffic light OK because I don’t need to see the
redness of red because the wave length can correlate with the appropriate
responses and so on, I don’t need to have that inner experience. So what’s it
for? I have it so, something’s left out of your account.
Sue Blackmore: Right the unconscious driving phenomenon is a really good one.
Hands up who’s had the experience where you drive along on a familiar route and
you get there and you go oh, I haven’t been conscious for the last ten minutes
I’ve been driving. Yeah, look at all those hundreds of hands going up.
Now it’s really spooky isn’t it, you get there and you think oh, who’s been
driving? And the kind of idea is that there was a conscious mind that was
listening to the radio or whatever it was doing listening to some music or
something and somehow the unconscious mind has taken over. Now if you’re going
to say that you’ve got a real mystery, you’ve got to explain you know where’s
this sort of special do dah that’s making one half conscious and the other
automaton not.
But a radically different way of interpreting it which comes largely from the
philosopher Dan Dennet but I’ve been working on similar ideas, really deciding
which bit was conscious is something you do after the fact. There was not fact
of the matter whether you were conscious of driving or whether you were
conscious of the radio. There was no matter of the fact, no real answer was he
conscious of the story or conscious of the problem. There were two parallel
streams going on but at the end when you arrive in the car park you go oh, I was
only conscious of this one.
Paul Davies: But that’s the point you see I don’t need to have the experience of
the red traffic light and very often I don’t because it’s the unconscious bit of
me.
Sue Blackmore: But you’re doing it again!
Paul Davies: But from time to time I can stop and say in order to make this
point of this talk this evening I will concentrate on that traffic light, look
yes, it is red and it seems very red to me, the redness of red is a real
experience.
Susan Blackmore: What it comes down to I think is something like this. When you
look at those red shirts over there you’re going oh, I’m having this ineffable
weird experience of redness that can’t be explained. Now what I’ve tried to do
for years and years and years is to stare into the face of experiences like that
and go well am I really?
The more you stare the more it seems to kind of disintegrate and you can’t find
a me or a now or a redness or anything else and I think somehow we have to get
through that sort of illusion.
Paul Davies: It doesn’t make it unreal in the first place, it just means you’ve
found a way of subjugating that reality.
Susan Blackmore: Maybe, or maybe I’m conning myself cause the problem’s so
difficult that I’m trying to get out of it.
Natasha Mitchell: Yeah, you haven’t got out of the problem yet and you have some
sense that consciousness may in fact be like a fundamental property of nature
like time, like space, like gravity. How so?
David Chalmers: Well what we do in science always where we find correlations we
look for the underlying laws and the underlying principles so if it turns out
brain process here, consciousness here, then we’ll set out a principle – such
and such a brain area, such and such a kind of consciousness.
What we do as scientists is we systematise those principles until it gets to the
point you know when the physicists dream a set of laws that are so simple you
can write them on the front of your T shirt. I mean I think something like this
is what’s going to go on in the case of consciousness – we’ll get down to
simpler and simpler and more and more systematisations of the correlation
between physical processes and consciousness. But at some level there there’s
going to be something left that’s route.
Natasha Mitchell: Look I think it’s time to come to the audience for questions,
cause it’s a packed house and I’m sure you’re all splitting at the seams and if
you could direct your questions to each of our panellists Dave, Sue or Paul
thank you.
Question: Sometimes when I’m say comforting a child or something like that I’m
not necessarily thinking about anything very much and yet I’m very much aware
and very much conscious, probably on reflection later I realise that. Would you
say that part of the problem with consciousness and our study of it is the fact
that we are seeing and hearing and touching beings and so we confuse our
experience of consciousness with consciousness itself.
Susan Blackmore: Well I don’t believe in consciousness itself so I’m just going
to say no, but that’s cheating.
David Chalmers: Even somebody who believes in consciousness I mean quite
robustly is going to have to accept we can make mistakes about consciousness.
Here’s an example. It seems to most of us that we have a very rich experience of
a detailed visual field like a picture, in full detail out to its edges. Now
from what we know about the brain and about visual processing it just can’t work
that way, there’s much more detail in the centre than at the edges and
furthermore it seems that even quite big things it turns out you can miss and
maybe you’re not conscious of at all.
This may be an artefact of the fact that the kind of consciousness we have the
best knowledge of is just consciousness within attention but what’s the nature
of consciousness outside attention in the background of our visual field. Very,
very hard to know because how do you find out?
Well you can introspect, I can attend to consciousness outside my visual field
but as soon as I do I’ve changed the phenomena, I’ve turned it into
consciousness within attention. This has led some people to speculate that in
fact there’s never any consciousness outside what you attend to. It’s just like
the refrigerator light phenomenon, as soon as you open up the fridge door the
light goes on so of course the light’s on all the time right?
No, as soon as you attend to your consciousness the consciousness is right there
and of course this is a wait for somebody like Sue to come along and say in fact
all there are a mistaken higher order, beliefs about consciousness. But you
don’t have to go that far to say there really is a pretty important distinction
there.
Natasha Mitchell: Let’s come to another question.
Question: Hi, how are you doing. Just first of all about theories of collective
consciousness through evolution or any other means. I’m just wanting your
opinions on that.
Natasha Mitchell: Jung’s collective conscious – is there room for science to
look at that?
Susan Blackmore: Depends what you mean. If you interpret the collective
unconscious or collective consciousness to mean something like because we all
share biological things in common and we’re all similar we will have things in
common and we’ll behave in ways that we relate to each other. Fine, no problem.
If you think of it as some kind of you know extended field beyond that connects
us all, I personally think it’s a load of tosh. I spent, I mean I started out
not thinking that, I had this extraordinary out of body experience 30 years ago
now, more – 35 years ago, my God. My conclusion at the time was wow, this proves
there’s you know realms beyond and I set out to be a parapsychologist and I
studied those things. And the evidence doesn’t stack up that way, there isn’t
any good evidence for telepathy, you know it just doesn’t seem that way.
But you might be kind of hinting at something else, is it possible to radically
transform one’s consciousness in such a way that instead of feeling like a
little me tucked in here and a world out there it feels as though it’s all just
one and everything is connected. That I think is possible, not because there’s
something beyond…
Natasha Mitchell: Drugs.
Susan Blackmore: Yes, yes drugs, or long practice at meditation or luck or who
knows. Because actually there is only one universe as far as we know it, it is
all interconnected so it’s a different way of perceiving it rather than having
to invent you know some you know change all of science and there’s new fields.
It’s just a shift of perspective on what we already know, that I would say is
possible, but not the rest.
Natasha Mitchell: Another question thanks.
Question: Yeah there are various theories that consciousness can arise in
complex systems like societies and the internet and perhaps even the planet or
universe as a whole. I was wondering what the panel thinks about this.
David Chalmers: Well I guess the choices are there’s either collective
consciousness or there’s collective unconsciousness right. It’s got to be one or
the other.
Natasha Mitchell: It’s called apathy.
David Chalmers: Either the internet is conscious or it’s not, so it looks like
one of these strange and bizarre ideas has to be correct. Now I guess you know
the intuitively more plausible and more conservative ideas in fact there’s
extraordinarily complex properties of the internet. Extraordinarily interesting
collective emergent properties of the internet that don’t however give you
consciousness.
On the other hand I don’t think it’s something that we should rule out that you
could get complex systems with people as components that could eventually become
connected in a sufficiently intricate way. There could be a conscious being that
results. After all you connect our neurons in a sufficiently complex and
intricate way and you get consciousness.
Paul Davies: I think a great example is the ant colony because it’s quite clear
that the colony as a whole has I’m not sure we would say intellectual
capabilities but certainly has properties and behaviour which are not present in
the individual ants. It’s not inconceivable as you said that sufficiently the
large number of human beings interconnected in this efficiently complex way
would trigger that next level. And maybe it’s happened, no neurone in my brain
I’m sure is aware that there’s a Paul Davies here. I think.
Susan Blackmore: I think one of the reasons that it’s important for us to study
consciousness and ask these questions is because we’re watching helplessly the
emergence of this extraordinary thing – the internet. I mean a lot of people
seem to have this illusion that we created it for ourselves for our fun and
pleasure and that we’re somehow in charge of it but no way, it’s gone way beyond
that. Even if you bombed half the world there’s enough computers around it’ll
keep going, it’s a self organising system.
Now I’ve been interested in memes as some of you will know, infections ideas,
self copying ideas and that’s what we’ve got out there, a massive system which
is built up with ideas being copied endlessly around the place and more and more
machinery to do it.
Now these self organising principles in this system may give rise to kind of
clumps of ideas, clumps of information that are going around and protecting
themselves just like us here. They won’t be confined within a skull, they’re
confined to groups of computers or even distributed groups out there but some of
the same properties may arise. That is illusions of self, the idea of self
protection and so on. I think it’s very interesting and open and we need to
think hard about it.
Natasha Mitchell: Yes, we need to indeed. It sounds something like the idea of
the global brain that writer Howard Bloom talks about. And next week our debate
continues from the Australian Science Festival with my guest of zombies UK
psychologist and author Dr Sue Blackmore, astrophysicist Professor Paul Davies
from Macquarie University and philosopher Professor David Chalmers now at the
Australian National University. You’ll find plenty of extra info, the audio and
later in the week a transcript on our website which of course is at abc.net.au/rn
and just head to All in the Mind under the list of programs.
Thanks today to David Bates, Michelle Goldsworthy and Jenny Parsonage for their
sound engineering talents and Jo Savill at the festival. And until the next
metaphysical instalment cheers from me Natasha Mitchell – stay conscious now.
Guests on this program:
Dr Susan Blackmore
Psychologist, author and broadcaster
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/
Professor Paul Davies
Professor of Natural Philosophy
Australian Centre for Astrobiology
Macquarie University
http://aca.mq.edu.au/PaulDavies/pdavies.html
Professor David Chalmers
Professor of Philosophy
Federation fellow, Australian National University (as of August 2004)
(formerly Head of the Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona).
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