Erik Hoel05 August 2023

A Guide To The Fundamental Mystery Of The Mind - Erik Hoel - #663

1Frameworks

13Insights

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Insights & moments

The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.

Myth Buster· 1

Myth Buster32:00

The bicameral mind, reframed: consciousness didn't change, our talk about it did

Hoel discusses Julian Jaynes's wild claim that modern consciousness only emerged in Homeric times when the brain's hemispheres integrated. He favors Ned Block's tamer alternative: consciousness itself didn't change, our ability to talk about it did. The Iliad's characters obey gods' commandments because language for the inner world hadn't yet developed.

Jaynes claimed the hemispheres were disconnected until ~Homeric times
That's an enormous claim built only on textual evidence
Ned Block's alternative: only how we talk about consciousness changed
Hoel's book explores this tamer, more sensible reading

“we don't have to have this complicated hypothesis that consciousness has changed it's just that how people have talked about consciousness has changed”
Erik Hoel · 34:00

#bicameral-mind#julian-jaynes#consciousness#language

Hot Take· 3

Hot Take03:00

The scandal of modern neuroscience: forbidden to name the brain's main job

Hoel argues neuroscience has been hobbled because it was long forbidden to discuss consciousness, the brain's main output. He compares it to studying an organ while being banned from mentioning its primary function. Chris likens it to reporting on a Formula One race by only discussing the grass and the flags.

The brain's main function is generating your stream of consciousness
Behaviorism made talking about consciousness feel too dangerous
Researchers smuggle in attention and memory but avoid the C-word
It took two Nobel laureates (Crick and Edelman) to make the topic respectable

“imagine you're trying to figure out an organ and you're not allowed to talk about its main function”
Erik Hoel · 03:30

“it would be like being a Formula One racing reporter but all of your discussions being about the grass on the side of the track”
Chris Williamson · 03:30

#neuroscience#consciousness#behaviorism#academia

Hot Take36:30

The average Twitter user out-describes the best poets of Babylon

Hoel argues modern humans seem smarter than ancient ones partly because we inherited a gift: the cognitive tools, words and concepts for describing our inner states, largely invented by writers. It's not that ancient people were dumb, they lacked the language. We owe a debt to writers (and, more negatively, to Freud) for this vocabulary.

Ancient literature can read as 'dumb' because inner-state language was missing
The average modern person expresses inner states better than Babylon's best poets
This vocabulary was largely built by writers over centuries
Freud contributed too, though Hoel sees that debt as partly negative

“the average Twitter user now seems far better to express their own inner states... than like the very best Poets of Babylon”
Erik Hoel · 37:00

#language#consciousness#cognitive-tools#writing

Hot Take52:00

Where Hoel breaks with Sapolsky on free will

Reacting to Robert Sapolsky's book 'Determined,' Hoel argues that arguments against free will usually rest on strong, often outdated metaphysical assumptions, some merely debatable, some literally disprovable. He says many skeptics still reason with a 1950s world-model (deterministic train tracks, causation as correlation) that modern science on chaos, computational irreducibility and causation has left behind.

Free will is really about the mathematics of causation, not genetic determinism
Anti-free-will arguments smuggle in strong metaphysical assumptions
Some of those assumptions are debatable, others literally disprovable
Many skeptics use a 1950s deterministic world-model science has moved past
Chaos theory, computational irreducibility and the causal revolution remain unapplied

“a lot of people are using stuff from 1950 to talk about it... they basically have this sort of old stock world model”
Erik Hoel · 55:00

#free-will#sapolsky#determinism#causation#debate

Explainer· 5

Explainer00:30

Why Galileo cut consciousness out of science

Hoel traces neuroscience's blind spot to Galileo, who deliberately bracketed the qualitative side of the world (the redness of red, the taste of a peach) to focus only on what could be described mathematically. That move made science spectacularly successful, but it also exiled subjective experience from serious study.

Galileo told science to ignore qualitative properties and focus on quantitative, mathematical ones
As a religious man he saw the soul as outside science's business
Bracketing subjectivity made science powerful and fast-moving
The cost: consciousness was left with no scientific home

“let's not worry about the redness of red or how a peach tastes... let's just focus on the quantitative aspects of the world which we…”
Erik Hoel · 01:00

#consciousness#history-of-science#galileo#philosophy

Explainer17:00

Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic: still waiting for its Darwin

Hoel frames neuroscience as pre-paradigmatic, like biology before Darwin: full of observations and taxonomies but with no overarching theory to make everything click into place. He argues a theory of consciousness would be the equivalent of natural selection, catapulting the field into a mature, post-paradigmatic science.

Pre-paradigmatic = no big unifying theory everyone can key off
Biology before Darwin is the template: data without a paradigm
A theory of consciousness would be neuroscience's unifying paradigm
The field has no 'big target' because its real target is off-limits

“a great example of this would be biology before Darwin... once you get the theory of evolution by natural selection the whole thing clicks into…”
Erik Hoel · 17:30

#neuroscience#paradigm#kuhn#darwin#theory

Explainer19:30

Intrinsic vs extrinsic: the two perspectives that won't merge

Hoel distinguishes the extrinsic perspective (engineering diagrams, causal models, mathematical descriptions of a system) from the intrinsic (the subjective qualities that are your actual conscious experience). Neuroscience sits awkwardly trying to reconcile the two, and civilization as a whole can be read as the parallel development of both.

Extrinsic = causal, mathematical, third-person description (e.g. a circuit diagram)
Intrinsic = the felt, subjective quality of experience
Galileo removed the intrinsic; science kept only the extrinsic
Neuroscience is stuck trying to reconcile the two perspectives

“the intrinsic are the subjective qualities that accompany your... conscious experience... a causal model is extrinsic”
Erik Hoel · 20:00

#consciousness#philosophy-of-mind#subjectivity#hoel

Explainer34:30

Phenomenal vs access consciousness: the iceberg you can't fully describe

Hoel explains two philosophical notions of consciousness: phenomenal consciousness (the incredibly rich totality of what it's like to be you) and access consciousness (the subset you can express and talk about). Historically our access consciousness was a tiny tip of the iceberg; over time we uncovered more of it, culminating in stream-of-consciousness literature.

Phenomenal consciousness = every detail of your experience
Access consciousness = the part you can articulate
You can describe an emotion but never fully capture it, tip-of-the-iceberg
Historically we got better and better at talking about our own minds

“our consciousness is very much like an iceberg and we can only really talk about... top of the line stuff”
Erik Hoel · 35:30

#consciousness#phenomenal#access#philosophy-of-mind

Explainer45:00

Causal emergence: why 'your atoms did it' fails against free will

Hoel's theory of causal emergence attacks the common anti-free-will argument that 'your atoms did it.' Using simple mathematical models, he shows macro-scale descriptions can hold irreducible causal power because of error correction: noise shrinks as you zoom out, and causal influence is inversely proportional to noise. A reliable light switch has more causal power than a flaky one; macro scales are the reliable switch.

The 'your atoms did it' argument assumes all causation lives at the micro scale
Judea Pearl's mathematics of causation lets us actually test this
Macro-scale states can carry causal power irreducible to the atomic scale
Mechanism: error correction, noise shrinks at higher scales
Causal influence is inversely proportional to noise (the reliable-light-switch analogy)
This doesn't prove free will but dismantles a key argument against it

“macro scales are non-noisy representations of their micro scales... that's where you get this extra causal influence from which is just something called error correction”
Erik Hoel · 51:00

“macro level entities can have real irreducible causal power in the world and you are a macro level entity”
Erik Hoel · 48:30

#free-will#causal-emergence#causation#judea-pearl#emergence

Story· 1

Story28:00

Princess Elizabeth's takedown of Descartes' dualism

Hoel recounts the letters between Descartes and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, where she presses him on how an immaterial soul could causally interact with a physical body. When he reaches for a gravity-like force, she counters that this would make the mind material. Descartes never resolves it, in one of the first formal statements of the mind-body paradox.

Elizabeth of Bohemia was a mathematician and philosopher in her own right
Her challenge: two different substances can't causally interact
Descartes' 'it's like gravity' reply backfires, that would make mind material
Neither resolves it; the paradox remains central to consciousness today

“if it's a force like gravity then the mind would just be material... what do you mean by saying it's two separate substances how do…”
Erik Hoel · 29:30

#descartes#dualism#philosophy#history#mind-body

Takeaway· 3

Takeaway14:00

If we can't understand a small AI, why expect to understand the brain?

Hoel points out that even feed-forward artificial neural networks, where we have perfect information about every connection and firing, become mathematical black boxes past a certain size. The brain has ~100 trillion synapses, is hidden behind bone, delicate and folded. He has never gotten a good answer to why the brain should be easier to decode.

Small artificial networks with perfect information already stump us
The brain is far larger (~100 trillion synapses) and occluded
Black-box opacity is a serious AI-safety problem too
There's no reason to expect the brain to escape black-box behavior

“we have perfect information and we're still stumped... Neuroscience is a thousand times harder than figuring out how some feed forward neural network is”
Erik Hoel · 14:30

#ai#black-box#brain#ai-safety#neuroscience

Takeaway23:30

Literature is the intrinsic perspective perfected, as science is the extrinsic

Hoel argues humanity boiled the extrinsic perspective down to its clearest form (science) and boiled the intrinsic perspective down to its clearest form (literature). Ancient texts describe minds in sparse, wooden ways; by the era of 18th-century novelists and later Woolf and Joyce, writers had invented the very vocabulary needed to describe inner experience.

Ancient Egyptian texts describe emotion sparsely and woodenly
The ability to describe minds rocketed forward in ancient Greece, then regressed in the Dark Ages
Writers didn't just describe consciousness, they invented the terminology for it
Tolstoy arguably knew more about human nature than a modern psychologist

“we took the intrinsic perspective of the world and we boiled it away to the clearest expression of it and that's literature”
Erik Hoel · 24:00

“there's just no doubt that Tolstoy knew more about human nature than some contemporary psychologist”
Erik Hoel · 25:00

#literature#consciousness#language#history#tolstoy

Takeaway39:00

What solving consciousness would actually unlock

Hoel imagines a satisfactory theory of consciousness as monumental as natural selection: it would finally tell us what we are. Beyond a revolution in human self-conception, it could enable some of the greatest art ever made and may be the only route to building genuinely conscious AI, since you can't engineer what you can't define.

It would resolve the open question of what we fundamentally are
Impact comparable to Darwin's theory of evolution
Could enable unprecedented art and technology
May be a precondition for building conscious AI
Despite this, funding is scarce, mazes-and-amygdala grants are ~10x easier to win

“we would finally know what we are... as monumental as the theory of evolution by natural selection”
Erik Hoel · 39:30

#consciousness#ai#funding#future#theory