As we're all with family over the holiday weekend, here's a 2018 interview that Derek conducted with neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga after the publication of his last book, The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind. Michael revolutionized the field of neuroscience in the 1960s with his work on split-brain patients and remains a towering figure in his field.
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It costs $5 a month for access, and the support helps to keep us ad-free and editorially independent.
You can sign up at patreon.com backslash conspirituality.
Thank you.
In the book you write that consciousness is a word worn smooth by a million tongues, and there are so many different definitions of it, and I would love to just get your take on what you feel is the most succinct definition of consciousness, and as well as what an instinct is in that regard.
By calling it an instinct, I'm saying whatever it is we're talking about, it comes With us.
It's a phenomenon that we all experience, and it's constructed, obviously, by the brain.
But all the things the brain does result in something we call consciousness, just like all the parts in a pocket watch produce time.
That's what we say that thing does.
In some sense, It's gonna be a statement, a series of statements that show how all the parts are interacting to produce this fullness of what we call conscious experience.
So what that, to me, in a sense, is there's no simple word to say, well, consciousness is, I guess here's what a lot of people think.
Someday there's going to be a statement, well, consciousness is an interaction of the neurons that go between the prefrontal cortex and the nucleus, whatever, and then are energized and modulated by blah, blah, blah, right?
Yes.
And that is sort of a network idea that somehow this network adds this special dimension to our lives.
What I'm arguing in the book is that's not how to look at it.
What it is is something quite different that what we know about our human brain is that it is a collection of specialized capacities that have evolved over time and in their collective expression through time we call that consciousness.
So that makes it, when you take that framework, it makes it very difficult just to give a quick Absolutely.
I mean, you've discussed that.
It's one of the challenges of this whole field, this whole discipline, not just neuroscience, but I would argue science, is that there's so much complexity and trying to explain it in an easy-to-digest format is very challenging because you risk losing something in the process.
Right, absolutely.
Now most people, they feel as though that identity that they are one thing that, you know, it has emotional shifts and moves back and forth, but you make the argument and I've seen this argument before where we are not, you know, where the me right now sitting talking to you is different than the me that was in the car driving over here because I suffer from minor road rage driving around the streets of Los Angeles, so I tend to be much more on edge when I'm there.
But when I'm in my office, I'm much calmer, and that literally is a shift of perspective.
But this idea that we're this one continuous being persists, why do you think it's important to understand that we are constantly different beings?
Well, because we are.
I mean, we're constantly modulating our feelings about whatever it is that happens to be up, as it were.
I use the metaphor of boiling water, bubbling brooks, whatever you want to call it, that through time, the various capacities that we have are sort of up on deck.
And it's through time, as they appear in sequence, That we construct this sense of psychological unity and, quote, consciousness.
So if you think about it as a series of capacities that are expressed through time, you have a different way of looking at it than this thing that just is there, and we'll find the circuit for it, and that'll be the story.
That's just not the way to look at it.
And one of the ways that people do in the book is, If you look at the clinical neurologic ward, as it were, and look at all the disruptions of cognition and behavior and perception and memory that occur from particular lesions in the brain, no matter what kind of patient you're looking at, you never say, well, they're not conscious.
Whatever this thing is, we think that it gives feelings to our experiences, always seems to be intact.
So in some sense you can say you can't stamp it out, you can't stamp out consciousness.
So you take that and you think about it for a little bit and you say well maybe each of these specialized capacities that we have has his own enabling mechanism that at the moment it is up as it were as we're these things come in rapid sequence one after another Each system has its own enabling networks or capacities to give us that feeling about the capacity.
