Can Your Mind Exist Beyond Your Brain? | Neil deGrasse Tyson

[00:00:00]Your mind is not inside you. I know. I know exactly how that sounds. I can hear the objection forming right now. This kind of visceral immediate reaction that phrase produces because I had the exact same reaction the first time I stopped and actually thought about it seriously.

[00:00:19]It sounds like something someone would say at a dinner party after one too many glasses of wine, gesturing vaguely toward the cosmos. It sounds frankly like mysticism, like the kind of claim that would get you immediately dismissed by every credentialed neuroscientist who heard it. But here's the thing, and I want you to hold this because it matters. It's not mystical. It is not anti-scientific in the slightest. In fact, the more carefully you look at what modern neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and the philosophy of mind actually say about consciousness, the more you discover that the idea your mind lives inside your skull is not a scientific conclusion. It's a deeply ingrained mental habit inherited from centuries of human intuition that nobody ever seriously bothered to question. And I want to be extremely precise about this from the start because there are two very distinct ways to be wrong about where the mind is. The first is the mystical way. The notion that the mind exists in some other plane, some ethereal dimension beyond physical reality. That's not what the physics or the serious philosophy suggests and that's not what we're talking about today. The second possibility which is much more unsettling and scientifically serious is that the question itself where is the mind might be badly formed.

[00:01:56]that concepts like inside and outside, here and there, might not apply to consciousness the way we assume they do.

[00:02:07]That the very spatial framework we use to think about the mind might be fundamentally insufficient. That second possibility is what I want to explore today because it connects to some of the deepest and least resolved questions in all of physics and philosophy. And the journey we're about to take, I promise you, leads somewhere so genuinely strange and so genuinely interesting that I think it's going to change how you experience the act of reading these very words. Let's start with what seems solid. You have a brain right now. It's inside your skull, about three pounds of tissue with a consistency kind of like firm tofu, consuming roughly 20 watts of power, which is about as much as a dim light bulb. It contains something in the neighborhood of 86 billion neurons, each one connected to thousands of others, forming a network of roughly 100 trillion synaptic connections. When you see a red apple, specific neurons in your visual cortex light up. When you feel pain, particular brain regions respond. When you remember something from your past, the hippocampus is involved. The correlation between brain activity and mental experience is overwhelming and extraordinarily well documented. Damage the brain and you alter experience. Drugs modify perception. Anesthesia eliminates consciousness. All of that is real and all of that is important. And so from there the most intuitive conclusion seems obvious. The brain produces consciousness.

[00:03:46]The mind is just what the brain does.

[00:03:49]This view is called physicalism or materialism. And according to it, your thoughts, your emotions, your subjective experiences, your love of jazz, your fear of heights, your memory of your first bicycle are all the result of complex physical processes occurring inside your nervous system. It's clean.

[00:04:11]It's logical. It seems sufficient. And then an extraordinarily deep problem shows up. And it's a problem so fundamental that the people who spent the most time with it, the philosophers and physicists and neuroscientists who stared at it longest tend to describe it with the kind of language you normally reserve for things like black holes or the big bang. The language of genuine deep probably permanent difficulty. It's called the hard problem of consciousness. And I want you to really hear the word hard there because it's doing technical work. It was coined by the philosopher David Chalmer's in 1995 and it distinguishes between what he calls the easy problems and the hard problem. And the distinction is crucial.

[00:05:01]The easy problems of consciousness are you know things like how does the brain integrate information from different senses? How do we direct attention? How do we distinguish waking from sleep?

[00:05:13]These are genuinely difficult scientific problems. They require serious neuroscience and we're still working on many of them, but they're tractable. We know what kind of answer we're looking for. We look for neuromchanisms, brain regions, neurotransmitter systems, network dynamics, hard work. But the path is at least visible. The hard problem is different in kind, not just in degree. The hard problem asks why is there any subjective experience at all?

[00:05:46]Why doesn't all that neural processing just happen in the dark efficiently, silently with no accompanying inner life? Why does information processing feel like anything? Why, when light of a specific wavelength hits your retina and triggers a cascade of neural activity that propagates through your visual cortex, do you experience the redness of red? The neural processing account, no matter how detailed, doesn't seem to explain the experience of redness. It explains the mechanism. It doesn't explain why there's something it's like to go through that mechanism. You know what I think the cleanest way to put this is? You could in principle give a complete description of every neuron in a brain, every syninnapse, every firing pattern, every electrochemical gradient.

[00:06:40]And the fundamental question would remain completely untouched.

[00:06:46]Why does all of that physical activity go along with any experience at all? Why aren't we just extraordinarily complicated biological calculators executing computations in absolute darkness? That gap between the physical description and the experiential reality, that's the hard problem. And the more carefully you look at it, the more it seems to suggest that purely physical language might be insufficient to explain consciousness. Now, let me give you a thought experiment that I think captures this beautifully because I want you to feel the problem rather than just hear about it. It's called Mary's room and it was proposed by the philosopher Frank Jackson. Mary is a brilliant scientist.

[00:07:35]She has spent her entire life in a completely black and white environment.

[00:07:40]She has never seen colors, never once.

[00:07:45]But she knows everything there is to know about the physics and neuroscience of color vision. She knows exactly how the retina works, how the different types of cone cells respond to different wavelengths of light, how signals propagate through the optic nerve to the visual cortex, how the brain processes chromatic information. She knows every single physical fact about color. One day she walks out of that room and she sees a red apple for the first time. The question is simple. Does she learn something new? Now, a lot of people's intuition says yes, she learns what it's like to see red. She gains something that all her physical knowledge didn't contain. And if that's true, if there's something she learns in that moment that wasn't captured by any physical fact she already knew, then it seems like there's a type of knowledge, the knowledge of subjective experience that can't be fully reduced to physical data. And if that's right, then there's something about consciousness that is not captured by the standard physical description of the brain. Right? So, I know what you're thinking now. You're thinking, "Okay, that's a philosophical puzzle." But isn't it possible that Mary's knowledge was just incomplete, that she was missing some physical fact, not some non-physical fact? And that's absolutely a reasonable response. And there are philosophers who argue exactly that. But here's the thing. The debate has been going on for decades now. And there's no clean agreed upon solution. The intuition that Mary learns something new is remarkably robust even among people who approach it skeptically. And that robustness is telling us something. Let me give you another way to feel this.

[00:09:34]Think about your experience of pain right now. Assume you're not in pain at the moment, but think about what pain is. You can describe all the neural mechanisms C fibers and A delta fibers carrying no susceptive signals the spinalamic tract the anterior singul cortex substance P prostaglandins all of it that's an enormously impressive description of the mechanisms of pain processing but none of that description captures what pain actually feels like the hurtness of hurting the thing that makes pain something you desperately want to stop that quality.

[00:10:12]What philosophers call a qual seems to be missing from the physical description even when the physical description is complete. And that right there is the hard problem. That's the thing that has kept some of the smartest people in the world up at night for the better part of three decades. Now, this is where quantum mechanics enters the story. And I want to be very careful here because I'm aware that the phrase quantum consciousness has been used and abused in so many bad ways that many serious scientists now wse when they hear it. So let me be explicit. I'm not talking about quantum healing. I'm not talking about the law of attraction. I'm not talking about any of the pop science mysticism that hijacked the vocabulary of quantum mechanics in the late 20th century and used it to sell self-help books. What I'm talking about is a serious technically rigorous problem at the intersection of quantum mechanics and the theory of measurement. Here's the setup. Quantum mechanics, the most successful physical theory ever created, tested to a precision that makes your head swim, describes a universe that is profoundly different from what common sense suggests. At the quantum level, particles don't have definite properties until they're measured. An electron doesn't have a specific position before you observe it. It exists in what we call a superp position, a kind of smeared distribution of possibilities described mathematically by what we call the wave function. The problem, and this is a real unresolved problem in physics, not a philosophical quibble, is what actually counts as a measurement in quantum mechanics. What causes the wave function to collapse from a superp position of possibilities to a single definite outcome? In the 1930s, the mathematician John vonoman, one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century. I mean, this guy more or less invented modern computing and quantum measurement theory in the same decade showed something deeply uncomfortable.

[00:12:25]If you apply the rules of quantum mechanics rigorously, consistently to everything involved in a measurement, the particle being measured, the measuring apparatus, the environment, the experimentter, then everything should be described by a quantum wave function. Everything should be in superp position. But we don't experience superp positions. We experience definite outcomes. We see the electron here, not there. We see the cat alive not in a superp position of alive and dead.

[00:12:57]Something has to bring about a definite outcome. Something has to collapse the wave function. And vonoyman following the logic as far as it goes suggested that consciousness might be the thing that does it. That the chain of physical interactions particle detector nerve signals brain can be described by quantum mechanics all the way through.

[00:13:21]But that at the point where it enters conscious awareness, something different happens. The superp position resolves. A definite experience is produced. Now, many physicists today prefer other interpretations of quantum mechanics that don't require consciousness to play a special role. The many worlds interpretation, for example, says the wave function never collapses. All outcomes happen in branching parallel versions of reality. The decoherence approach explains the apparent collapse as the result of quantum entanglement with the environment. These are serious proposals held by serious people. But here's the honest truth. None of them has fully resolved the measurement problem. None of them has explained exactly why you sitting there right now experienced one specific outcome rather than a superp position of outcomes. The problem is genuinely open and that openness means that the relationship between consciousness and quantum mechanics, however uncomfortable that pairing makes many physicists, is an open question, not a closed one. Let me give you a thought experiment that I think crystallizes the weirdness here.

[00:14:38]Imagine a perfectly isolated quantum system. Let's say a single atom in an extremely well-ontrolled laboratory.

[00:14:46]Before we measure it, it exists in a superp position of let's say two possible states spin up and spin down.

[00:14:54]The math describes it as being in both states simultaneously in a well-defined mathematical sense. Now we bring in a detector. According to the equations of quantum mechanics, once the detector interacts with the atom, the detector itself should enter a superp position.

[00:15:14]One part of it corresponding to the atom being spin up, another part corresponding to spin down. Now we bring in a scientist to look at the detector.

[00:15:27]According to the same equations, the scientist's brain should now be in a superp position of brain states. One corresponding to seeing spin up, the other to seeing spin down, but the scientist reports seeing one specific outcome. So at some point in this chain, the superposition resolved. The question, the genuine unresolved question is when? And if you rigorously follow the mathematics all the way through, the only place where something qualitatively different seems to happen is at the point of conscious experience.

[00:16:04]That's not a mystical claim. That's the math taken seriously. So we have the hard problem which suggests that physical descriptions of brain processes don't seem to fully capture conscious experience. And we have the quantum measurement problem which suggests that the relationship between consciousness and the physical world might be more fundamental than we thought. These are two separate problems approached from completely different directions that both seem to point toward something strange about consciousness. And some of the most interesting thinkers of the past 50 years have started to ask what if these two problems are connected?

[00:16:49]What if consciousness isn't something that brains produce any more than a radio produces the music it plays? What if consciousness is something more fundamental? Something that the universe has as a basic feature and brains are extraordinarily sophisticated systems for receiving, focusing, and expressing it. This is where we arrive at an idea called pansychism. And I want to be careful with how I introduce this because the name can trigger immediate dismissal from people who assume it's claiming that rocks have rich inner lives identical to human consciousness.

[00:17:27]That's not what it says. Pans psychism in its modern philosophically rigorous form is the hypothesis that experience or some extremely primitive form of experience is a fundamental property of the universe. Not something that magically emerges when matter becomes sufficiently complex but something present at the most basic level of physical reality. Think of it like mass or electric charge. Mass is not produced by matter. Mass is a property of matter.

[00:18:01]Charge is not produced by electrons.

[00:18:04]Charge is a property of electrons.

[00:18:06]Pansychism proposes that some form of experience, something like the very thinnest, most rudimentary form of interiority, might be a fundamental property of matter in the same sense.

[00:18:18]And then complex systems like brains don't create consciousness from scratch.

[00:18:24]They organize and integrate extremely primitive experiential properties into the rich, coherent, unified consciousness that you and I possess.

[00:18:35]Now, this is not a fringe idea held by people who read their horoscopes. This is defended by serious philosophers and scientists, including people whose credentials are utterly impeccable.

[00:18:49]Philip Goff at Durham University has written a book defending pansychism that has been taken seriously by major philosophers of mind. Kristoff Ko at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, one of the most respected consciousness researchers in the world has defended a related view. Roger Penrose, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020, has argued for views about consciousness that are at least in the pansychist neighborhood, though he'd describe his position differently. Why would serious scientists and philosophers entertain this seemingly strange idea? Because, as I've been laying out, the alternatives have serious problems. If consciousness is simply what the brain produces, the standard view, you get the hard problem, and you can't explain why there's any experience at all. If consciousness is somehow separate from the physical, a kind of dualism, you immediately get the problem of how a non-physical thing could interact with a physical brain in a causally effective way. Pansychism avoids both problems. It doesn't require experience to magically emerge from non-experiential stuff and it doesn't require a dualistic split between mind and matter. It says, "Experience goes all the way down and complexity organizes it." Now, let me introduce you to one of the most interesting and rigorously developed theories of consciousness we currently have because I think it gives you a much more precise way to think about these ideas. It's called integrated information theory or IIT and it was developed by the neuroscientist Julio Tenoni at the University of Wisconsin Madison. And what I love about IIT is that it's genuinely mathematically precise. It's not handwavy. It makes specific inprinciple testable predictions. It defines consciousness in terms of a mathematical quantity and it deres the connection between consciousness and physical structure from first principles. Here's the core idea.

[00:21:00]According to Tanoni, consciousness is identical to integrated information. Not just information, integrated information. The distinction matters enormously.

[00:21:12]Information in the technical sense is about the reduction of uncertainty. When you flip a coin and it comes up heads, you've received one bit of information.

[00:21:22]The outcome eliminates one of two possibilities. A computer chip processes enormous amounts of information. In this sense, it constantly reduces uncertainty about the state of billions of transistors. But integrated information is something more. It's information that is generated by a system as a whole, generated in a way that cannot be decomposed into independent parts without losing something. It's information that the system generates over and above what its individual parts would generate separately. Toni calls this measure fi, the Greek letter fi.

[00:22:01]And he proposes that wherever you have hi-fi, you have consciousness. Hi-fi means a system whose parts work together so deeply, so irreducibly that they form a unified whole. And that unity, Tenoni argues, is what consciousness is. Let me give you an analogy that I think makes this vivid. When you experience the world right now, you're not experiencing separate isolated pieces floating disconnectedly in your awareness. You're not experiencing color over here and sound over there and emotion way over in another corner. You're experiencing a single unified reality. You see a room, you hear a voice in that room, you feel something about what's happening in it.

[00:22:50]And all of that arrives as one integrated unified experience, not a collection, a whole, a field. That unity is exactly what IIT says consciousness is. The unified experience arises because your brain has extraordinarily high integrated information.

[00:23:11]Extraordinarily high fee. Now, here's where IIT gets genuinely radical. And I want you to catch the implication. If consciousness is integrated information, then any physical system with sufficiently high integrated information has consciousness. any system whose parts work together in a sufficiently irreducible unified way. What does that imply? Well, it implies that consciousness isn't exclusive to humans.

[00:23:41]It's not even exclusive to vertebrates.

[00:23:44]It's not even exclusive to biological systems. Any physical system with sufficiently high-fi regardless of whether it's made of neurons or silicon or something else entirely would have some degree of conscious experience according to IIT and the degree of consciousness would scale with fee.

[00:24:06]Systems with very low fee have very little or no consciousness. Systems with very high fee have rich unified conscious experience. Now, one thing this implies, and I want to just flag this without going too far down the rabbit hole, is that conventional computers might have very low FI even though they process enormous amounts of information because their architecture is highly modular and decomposable. The components work more or less independently and you can in principle split the computation into separate pieces without losing much. Whereas the human brain is structured in a way that generates enormous amounts of integrated irreducible information, exactly what IIT says consciousness requires. There's a lot of debate about IIT. Many scientists find it compelling but worry about its testability. Others think it generates counterintuitive predictions about which systems are conscious. But what I find remarkable about it, regardless of whether it's ultimately correct, is the fundamental shift in perspective it represents. Instead of asking, how does the brain produce consciousness?

[00:25:24]A question that seems to hit a wall, it asks what kind of physical organization corresponds to conscious experience. And that reframing opens up entirely new ways of thinking. Because if consciousness depends on relationships and patterns of information, integration, not on specific physical matter, then the idea that your mind is confined to the inside of your skull starts to seem not just possibly wrong, but almost certainly too simple.

[00:25:59]Let me take you to another extraordinarily interesting and underappreciated corner of this territory. The work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hammeroff on what they call orchestrated objective reduction orch for short. And I want to acknowledge right up front that this theory is highly controversial. And I'm going to be honest with you about the controversy rather than pretending there's more consensus than there is. Here's the setup. Penrose is a mathematician and physicist of the very first order. The guy who proved working with Stephven Hawking fundamental theorems about singularities in general relativity. His 1989 book, The Emperor's New Mind, argued something bold and for many people completely counterintuitive. That consciousness cannot be fully explained by any computational process. that human understanding, genuine mathematical insight, the capacity to see the truth of certain propositions transcends what any algorithm can do. His argument was based on something called goal's incompleteness theorems. In 1931, the mathematician Kurt God proved something extraordinary that in any sufficiently powerful formal mathematical system, there exist true statements that cannot be proven within the system. The system is inherently incomplete. Good's proof involves a kind of self-referential trick constructing a statement that essentially says this statement is not provable and showing that the statement is in fact true even though the system can't prove it. Penrose's argument stripped to its core goes like this.

[00:27:49]Human mathematicians can in some sense see the truth of certain gadelian statements that a formal algorithm running within a fixed system cannot prove. If that's right, then human understanding involves something that goes beyond computation, beyond what any classical algorithm can do. And if that's right, then consciousness might involve physical processes more fundamental than classical computation.

[00:28:18]Now, I want to be honest. Penrose's argument here is genuinely controversial, and many mathematicians and philosophers think it has flaws. The dispute over whether humans can really see Gdelian truths in the way Penrose claims is live and ongoing. But what interests me is the next step. Penrose took the step where he brought in Hamarof. Stuart Hamarough, an anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona, had been studying structures inside neurons called microtubules, protein structures that form the internal skeleton of cells, among other functions. And Hamaroth and Penrose together developed the ORC or proposal that quantum processes in the microtubules of neurons might be involved in consciousness. The idea very roughly is that microtubules might support quantum superp positions that are then resolved not through decoherence with the environment in the usual quantum mechanical way but through a new physical process involving quantum gravity. This process which Penrose calls objective reduction would not be computational in nature and would give consciousness its non-algorithmic character. Now most neuroscientists look at this proposal and say the brain is warm, wet and noisy. These are conditions under which quantum coherence gets destroyed almost instantly. Time scales of phento seconds in warm biological environments. You can't run delicate quantum computations in a soup of constantly jiggling molecules at body temperature. And that objection is real.

[00:30:06]Maintaining quantum coherence in the neuronal environment is extraordinarily difficult. But here's something remarkable that happened in 2007 and that I think significantly changes the landscape of this discussion.

[00:30:20]Researchers discovered that quantum coherence plays a key functional role in photosynthesis in the process by which plants transfer energy from sunlight to chemical reactions. Quantum effects, specifically quantum superp position and coherence appear to be operating in warm, wet, noisy biological environments at room temperature. I want you to let that sink in. Quantum coherence in biology at room temperature in exactly the kind of noisy environment that physicists said was incompatible with it. And not just as a curiosity, but as an efficiency advantage.

[00:31:04]The quantum effects in photosynthesis seem to make the energy transfer process more efficient than any classical process could be. And subsequent research found similar quantum effects in bird navigation evidence that certain birds use quantum entanglement in cryptochrome proteins to sense the Earth's magnetic field. So the argument the brain is too warm and wet for quantum effects to matter turns out to be less airtight than it seemed. Warm wet biology can sustain quantum effects.

[00:31:42]Whether it sustains them in the specific way or requires is still debated, but the blanket dismissal has become harder to sustain. And here's what I find most interesting about the ORC O controversy.

[00:31:54]Independent of whether the specific proposal is correct, it represents a serious attempt by a Nobel laureate in physics and a practicing neuroscientist to grapple with the fact that something about consciousness seems to require a deeper physics than classical neuroscience provides. The fact that it's controversial doesn't mean it's wrong. Many of the most important ideas in physics were controversial when first proposed. What matters is whether it's engaging with real deep problems. And it is. Now, let me bring you to something that I think is one of the most fascinating and most overlooked aspects of the neuroscience of consciousness.

[00:32:35]The absence of a center. Here's something that should be profoundly unsettling given the confidence with which people say the mind is in the brain. When you actually go looking for consciousness inside the brain, you don't find it anywhere. Not because it's not there. The correlations between brain activity and experience are real.

[00:32:56]But because there is no center of consciousness. There is no screen inside the brain where experience is displayed.

[00:33:04]There is no homunculus, no little observer sitting inside your head watching the show. There is no single place where everything comes together into a unified experiential picture.

[00:33:15]What you find instead are distributed, dynamic, extraordinarily complex processes. Different brain regions handle different aspects of processing and they're all active simultaneously.

[00:33:29]And somehow somehow all of that distributed activity is accompanied by the unified experiential field you're in right now as you engage with these words. But how the binding problem as neuroscientists call it is a genuine unsolved mystery. How does the brain bind together information from different regions processed at different times into a single unified experience? And here's something else that should make you pause. What you experience as reality is a reconstruction.

[00:34:07]Not a recording, not a photograph, a construction. When you look at the world, light doesn't enter your head as finished images. Your brain constructs a model of the world from incomplete noisy sensory signals. The color red that you see doesn't exist out there in the world. It exists as your brain's way of encoding a particular range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. There is no redness in the photons. There's only a wavelength and a brain that constructs the experience of redness in response to detecting that wavelength. The sound of music doesn't exist in the air. There are only pressure waves. Your brain constructs the experience of sound. The smell of coffee doesn't exist in the molecules.

[00:34:58]There are only chemical structures. Your brain constructs the experience of that particular aroma. So much of what you experience as external reality is in a precise and technical sense constructed inside your experience. Not inside your brain, inside your experience.

[00:35:21]And that raises a genuinely strange question. Where does experience occur?

[00:35:27]Because it's not visible in any brain scan. You can't open a skull and find the redness of red or the pain of pain.

[00:35:35]You find neurons, molecules, electrical fields. The experience itself, the subjective reality is invisible from the outside, no matter how sophisticated your instruments are. And maybe that's not a coincidence.

[00:35:51]Maybe we're trying to study consciousness using tools designed to study external physical objects. And consciousness isn't simply another external physical object. Maybe consciousness is that in which all external physical objects appear. Let me develop that thought because I think it's one of the most profound and most underappreciated ideas in this territory. Consciousness is not just one more thing in the universe alongside quarks and fields and spaceime. It is the condition of possibility for any knowledge of anything. Every scientific observation, every measurement, every theory, every equation, all of it exists ultimately as experience within a conscious mind. The science of consciousness is in the peculiar position of being the study of the medium through which all science is possible. This creates a strange loop.

[00:36:49]We try to explain consciousness using physics, but all physics is known through consciousness. We can't step outside consciousness to get an objective view from nowhere. Every perspective is a perspective and every perspective is a conscious perspective.

[00:37:10]The very act of trying to explain consciousness from the outside is itself happening inside consciousness. Some philosophers argue that this isn't just a curious circularity. It's a deep clue that we've been thinking of consciousness as a product of the universe when perhaps it's more accurate to think of the universe as appearing within consciousness.

[00:37:35]Not in the traditional religious sense and not in the soopsistic sense that you're the only thing that exists, but in the philosophically precise sense that all of reality as known, every mountain, every galaxy, every particle is known only as experience within some consciousness. The physicist and philosopher Bernard Castreup has articulated this view with unusual rigor. And while it's deeply counterintuitive and not the mainstream scientific position, I want to stress that it's not a fringe view either. It has serious philosophical precedents.

[00:38:13]It's related to what Emanuel Kant argued in the 18th century and to certain interpretations of quantum mechanics and to positions held by several of the founders of modern physics. Irwin Schroinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, the man who gave us the equation that governs the behavior of quantum systems and whose cat became the most famous thought experiment in all of physics, wrote extensively about this problem.

[00:38:42]Schroinger found it deeply mysterious that there appear to be multiple separate conscious minds within what seems to be a single coherent physical universe. How can there be both one universe and billions of separate firstperson perspectives? His answer, which he was careful to distinguish from simplistic mysticism, was that perhaps the multiplicity is an illusion that there is in some deep sense only one consciousness expressing itself through the appearance of many. Neils Boore, the architect of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the person who perhaps understood quantum mechanics more deeply than anyone alive in the mid- 20th century, insisted that quantum mechanics forced us to fundamentally reconsider the relationship between observer observed.

[00:39:44]Not because the mind magically creates physical reality, but because the sharp classical distinction between subject and object, between the observer and what's observed breaks down at the quantum level in ways that are still not fully understood. And here's something that I find genuinely important for our current moment. The question is becoming more urgent, not less, as we develop increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence. We are now building systems that can carry on conversations, solve complex problems, generate creative content, pass standardized tests, diagnose diseases. And the question that nobody can answer is, is any of it accompanied by experience? Is there something it is like to be GPT4 or whatever the next generation of AI turns out to be? The standard answer is no. These systems are processing information without any inner life, any genuine understanding, any subjective experience.

[00:40:57]But here's the thing, that answer rests entirely on our understanding of what gives rise to consciousness. And as we've been seeing, our understanding of that is genuinely incomplete. We don't have a clear enough theory of consciousness to confidently say what physical systems are and aren't conscious. A zombie philosophers's argument in the philosophical literature. A philosophical zombie is a being physically identical to a human but with no inner experience makes this precise. If you can even conceive of a system that is physically identical to a conscious being but has no inner experience, that suggests that the inner experience is not simply identical to the physical process. It suggests that there's something over and above the physics that makes a system conscious.

[00:41:51]And if that's true, then whether an AI is conscious is a question that can't be answered just by looking at its behavior or its processing. you'd need to know something about its inner life, which is precisely what the hard problem says.

[00:42:04]You can't read off from the outside.

[00:42:06]This is not merely academic. If we build AI systems that are genuinely conscious, genuinely experiencing, genuinely suffering or flourishing without knowing that we've done so, that's one of the most serious moral failures imaginable.

[00:42:23]And right now we don't have the tools to know whether we're doing that or not because we don't know what consciousness is. Let me now pull together everything we've been developing and arrive at what I think is the most important insight in this whole conversation. We started with the correlation between brain and mind.

[00:42:44]The overwhelming evidence that what happens in your brain affects your experience. And that's real and it's important. But we've been seeing that correlation doesn't establish the direction of causation or the nature of the relationship. A brain could be the cause of consciousness in which case consciousness ends when the brain does.

[00:43:06]Or a brain could be the medium through which consciousness expresses itself. In which case the relationship between brain damage and altered experience is explained by the fact that you've damaged the medium not the consciousness itself. Or, and this is what some of the most interesting current physics suggests, brain and consciousness might both be expressions of something more fundamental. The way both a wave and a particle are expressions of a deeper quantum field. The hard problem suggests that physical descriptions of brain processes don't capture the essence of experience. Quantum mechanics suggests that the relationship between consciousness and physical reality might be more fundamental than classical physics assumed. Pansychism suggests that experience might go all the way down to the most basic level of physical reality. Integrated information theory suggests that consciousness is a structural property of information integration, not of specific physical substrate. And Orch suggests that quantum processes in biology might be part of the story in ways we don't yet understand. None of these proposals is fully worked out. None of them has all the evidence it needs. The honest scientific position is that we don't know. And the don't know is genuine.

[00:44:38]It's not a gap that a few more brain scan studies will fill in. It's a deep structural gap in our understanding. But here's what I think is important to take away from the current state of the science. The confident claim that the mind is simply what the brain does. that consciousness is produced by neurons the way a furnace produces heat is not itself a wellestablished scientific conclusion. It's an assumption embedded in a materialist worldview that has been extraordinarily productive in explaining many things but that has not solved the problem it most needs to solve. The hard problem remains hard and the accumulation of evidence from quantum mechanics, from the binding problem, from the absence of a consciousness center in the brain, from the anomalies at the edges of clinical experience is building toward a picture that is considerably more complicated than the standard story allows. Here's a thought experiment I want to leave you with.

[00:45:40]Imagine that you could build an exact physical duplicate of your brain. every atom in the same position, every syninnapse with the same strength, every chemical gradient identical. Would that duplicate be conscious? Would it have experiences? Would it feel anything? The physicalist says obviously yes, physical identity guarantees experiential identity. But notice what you're assuming there. You're assuming that physical arrangement is sufficient for consciousness. You're assuming that once you've specified the physics, you've specified the experience. And that's precisely the assumption that the hard problem challenges because you can imagine at least coherently a physical duplicate that processes information without any accompanying inner life, a philosophical zombie. And the fact that you can coherently imagine that is it self-evidence that physical description and experiential description are not the same thing. Now flip the thought experiment.

[00:46:46]Imagine that the information pattern that constitutes your mind, not the specific neurons, but the pattern of relationships and processes could be instantiated in a different substrate.

[00:46:58]not a biological brain but something else with the same organizational structure. Would that be you? Many people's intuition says maybe. And that intuition suggests that what matters for consciousness is the pattern, not the specific physical medium. If that's right, if the pattern matters more than the specific substrate, then the mind is not in the neurons. The mind is the pattern and patterns are not located in space the way physical objects are. A pattern is a set of relationships. It extends across the system that instantiates it. And in principle, different physical systems could instantiate the same pattern. Here's an everyday version of this. Take any piece of music. Let's say Bohemian Rap City.

[00:47:48]because I know for sure it's been heard on both sides of every political and cultural divide in America. So, it works as a reference. Bohemian Raps City is a pattern. It's not the specific instruments. It's not the specific CD or vinyl record or digital file. It's not the particular pressure waves in any particular concert hall. It's an abstract pattern that can be instantiated in a thousand different physical media and is still recognizably the same thing. You'd know it was Bohemian raps city whether it was played by an orchestra, a string quartet, a church organ, or a kid on a kazoo. What makes it that piece of music is the pattern of relationships, not the physical substrate. Now, what if you are more like Bohemian Rap City than like the vinyl record it's pressed onto? What if what makes you you is the pattern, the specific organization of information and processes and relationships rather than the specific neurons that currently instantiate it. If that's what you are, if you're the pattern, not the substrate, then the question where is your mind changes completely. The pattern doesn't live in a specific place the way your liver lives in a specific place. The pattern is a set of relationships. And where are relationships? They're not inside things. They're between things. They're in the structure. They're in the organization. Your mind on this view is not inside your skull. The way your liver is inside your body. It's more like the way Bohemian rapsidity is not inside the vinyl record. The record instantiates it, but the pattern transcends any particular instantiation.

[00:49:38]And now let me give you the deepest version of this point because I've been building toward it and I think it's genuinely worth the journey. Here's something true that most people don't realize. All the science we've ever done has been done inside experience. Every measurement, every observation, every equation, every experiment, all of it has occurred within conscious experience. The entire edifice of human knowledge from Newton's laws to quantum field theory to the discovery of the Higs Bzon exists as content within consciousness. We've been studying the universe from inside experience always.

[00:50:19]And we often act as if that's irrelevant, but it's not irrelevant. It means that consciousness is not just one more thing that science needs to explain. It's the medium in which all science occurs. It's the precondition for any knowledge of any kind. And when you realize that, when you really let that land, the picture starts to invert.

[00:50:42]We typically think the universe came first, then matter organized itself into brains, then brains produced consciousness, and then consciousness eventually got sophisticated enough to observe the universe and discover physics. That's the standard narrative.

[00:51:02]And it has the structure of consciousness being a late derivative somewhat accidental product of a universe that was doing fine without it.

[00:51:13]But what if that narrative has the structure slightly wrong? What if consciousness is not a product of the universe, but the universe is known only within consciousness? What if the fundamental character of reality is not matter without experience that occasionally organizes into experience, but experience itself, reality at its most basic level, having some experiential character with matter being the way that experiential reality appears from within itself. I'm not telling you this is true. The science doesn't establish it. What I'm telling you is that this view is not anti-scientific.

[00:51:53]Several serious physicists and philosophers have argued for versions of it. And the hard problem of consciousness, the fact that we can't explain why there's any experience at all given a purely physical description is in some ways more naturally dissolved by this view than by the standard materialist view. The great physicist John Wheeler who coined the term black hole and who was deeply involved in some of the most important developments in quantum gravity and quantum mechanics spent the last decades of his career developing what he called the participatory universe. His view was that the universe at some deep level does not exist independently of the observations that are made of it. that observation and therefore implicitly consciousness is somehow built into the structure of physical reality not tacked on at the end. Wheeler's slogan was it from bit meaning that the physical world the it derives from information bit and that information is fundamentally tied to the act of observation to consciousness. Is Wheeler right? We don't know. But the fact that someone of his stature and rigor devoted serious intellectual energy to the participatory universe should at least give us pause before confidently asserting that consciousness is simply a product of brain tissue and nothing more. Let me bring this home because I want to connect everything we've been talking about to your actual lived experience right now. Not in some abstract philosophical sense. Literally your experience right now engaging with this material. Notice that you are aware. Not just that you are processing information. A thermostat processes information. But that there is something it is like to be you right now. You're not just parsing text. You're understanding, wondering, perhaps agreeing or disagreeing. There's a quality to your experience, a sense of engagement or perhaps impatience or perhaps the particular flavor of dawning understanding that philosophers sometimes call the aha moment. That quality is real. That quality is the thing we've been trying to understand.

[00:54:17]Now, notice that you can't point to where that quality is happening. It's not happening at a specific location inside your skull. It's not happening at some specific place in physical space.

[00:54:28]It's just happening. The experience doesn't have a location the way your nose has a location. It's the context in which your nose appears as an object.

[00:54:40]When Emanuel Kant, the great 18th century philosopher who fundamentally shaped how we think about the relationship between mind and world, said that space and time are forms of our intuition rather than independent features of reality. He was gesturing at something like this. Space and time for Kant are the way our minds structure experience. They're not containers in which experience is happening. They're features of the experience itself. And if that's right, then asking where experience is spatially located is a category error. It's like asking what color is the number seven. The question is malformed. I don't know if Kant was right about all of that, but the point is the assumption that consciousness must be somewhere in physical space that the mind must be inside something in the way a walnut is inside a shell is an assumption, not a conclusion. It might be wrong. And they're rigorous arguments that it is wrong. So, let me bring you back to where we started. Your mind is not inside you. The research on consciousness from the hard problem to quantum mechanics to integrated information theory to orch doesn't establish that consciousness is supernatural or that it's disconnected from the brain or that your neurons don't matter. Your neurons clearly matter. What happens in your brain profoundly affects your experience. That's real and important and not in dispute. But it suggests that the mind is produced by the brain the way heat is produced by a fire is probably too simple. It suggests that consciousness might be more like a fundamental feature of reality that the brain organizes and focuses rather than a product that the brain generates from scratch. It suggests that you might be in some important sense a local expression of something much vaster and more fundamental than any individual nervous system the way a wave is a local expression of the ocean. Not a thing that exists separately from the ocean.

[00:56:56]And here's what I find genuinely beautiful about that possibility. What I find scientifically interesting and humanly significant. It changes what you are. It changes the relationship between you and the universe. If consciousness is fundamental, if experience goes all the way down to the basement of reality, then when you look at the night sky and feel wonder, you're not just a bag of neurons briefly and accidentally able to appreciate the universe before dissolving back into dust. You're the universe experiencing itself temporarily, locally through the particular configuration of matter and organization. That is you, but not separate from it. Not a late addition.

[00:57:44]Part of it essentially part of it.

[00:57:47]You're not a conscious being in an unconscious universe. That might be the most important corrective that the science of consciousness is pointing toward. We've assumed for centuries that the universe is fundamentally unconscious and that consciousness showed up late accidentally in a small corner of one galaxy. But the hard problem suggests that that picture can't be right. That we can't explain how unconscious processes give rise to consciousness because the very act of trying to explain it from the outside already presupposes consciousness. The alternative that consciousness is fundamental. That experience is woven into the fabric of reality at the deepest level. That what we call the physical world is the way reality appears from the outside. While consciousness is the way reality appears from the inside is strange. It's wildly counterintuitive.

[00:58:52]It would require a revolution in how we think about physics and biology and what it means to be a self. But the standard story has a gaping hole in it that no amount of brain scanning is filling. And in my experience, in the experience of doing science, of following evidence wherever it leads, even when it leads somewhere uncomfortable, a gaping hole in the standard story is the most exciting thing there is. It's where the next revolution is hiding. So the next time you sit quietly and just notice that you are aware that there is something it is like to be you in this moment, don't dismiss that as a trivial or obvious fact. It is the most extraordinary and least understood fact in all of science. The fact that the universe has arranged itself in such a way that part of it is aware of itself, experiences itself, wonders about itself, that is not a footnote to physics. That might be physics deepest question and its deepest answer. Your mind is not inside you. You might be inside your mind. And your mind, whatever it ultimately is, might be inside something that we are only now beginning to have the tools to seriously investigate. That's not mysticism.

[01:00:18]That's the frontier. And I, for one, can't wait to see what's on the other side.