# Transcript — tononi-iit-4-2025 Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rdn5lN1dz8w Language: en Origin: Auto-generated (YouTube) --- thank you now and thank you m Whi I must say the summer school was a wonderful surprise long and intense we faculty so to speak were exploited like crazy by the students uh with no re renumeration whatsoever but even so I say I don't know what will come out of it but it was a perfect mixture of integration and differentiation if you get my dream here okay it really was like that so I hope some of the students are here some of the projects were suggested there and came out of the spirit of the suay school will lead to not only posters but papers and above all more insights about the structure of Consciousness so as you see from my title there the C effect structure that was mentioned today IAT has always considered in the end we need to understand experience Consciousness as as structure but what kind of structure they desire critical and I want to begin by emphasizing what usually is always the problem when diding with I and trying to understand I which is the expric perspective or the extren drift of the experiencing fallacy almost all the time when I is misunderstood which will happen here too it's because we take an extrem sick approach and the most typical way of taking the extrem sick approach is is the one that we use in science is the time of Galileo in which we assume there is a world out there that's made of who knows what exactly matter charge and spin that follows the laws of physics and we have been incredibly successful in understanding and mastering that world through science including then when we come to biological organisms such that we think well conscious whatever it is if you're not one of those who deny they haveit whatever it is will have to be explained in those terms and that has led to research programs which are absolutely fine trying to look for for instance the neural correlat Consciousness what changes in the brain hoping that was really click and C notion initially for some sudden Insight that would finally reveal sort of like the dou helixs why we would be conscious and usually wasn't say but in which way why in that particular and so the idea was somehow promis or not we'll get to understand the way feels what experience is like by figuring out what's going on in the brain neural processes information processes and so on and so forth I should also add that one can take a less physical notion and more strictly mathematical notion which perhaps is more ger to this particular meeting and imagine you can dream up some kind of structure mathematical structure and then somehow you would understand that it corresponds to conscious that won't work either so the idea then is not to try to find some corate and ask how could it mysteriously give rise to experience that's usually the word that's used or generate expence and the reason and this is one standard slide I always show was already prefigured by liit in the most you know evident and explicit manner by his metaphor of the mil saying that if you go into a machine his case was a mil but obviously in our case it's a brain that's electromicroscopy as we do in the lab to look at this incredibly dense dense substrate where neurons and areir communica in all kind of complicated ways and hope that out of there we will be able to Evin perception he say life he say experience the feeling of what he's like to be and he say no no way you can do that and he was absolutely right that of course became known as the hard problem but life had it there nor to refer to something obvious and vain well known here in tokia are we going to have any sense of why experience feels the way it does not just that it is there but it is extended in space flowing in Time full of objects colors and sounds like you can see that famous intersection okay so why would it feel like that and I that's the most important thing to understand about the starting point and is usually forgotten is really based on taking phenomenology first so EX exist that's the main thing you need to realize because it exists immediately don't need to infer it you had it and it exist irrefutably as the card for instance pled out so there's no doubt when you wake up and there is something it is like to be you that that exists and from here try to infer based on the regularities of your own experience but things tend to stay similar you close your eyes you open your eyes things are still there and so on and so forth try to explain what you can experience if you do X if you do y and so on and so forth but we want to consider the physical as something that is inferred from within experience rather than what we should start from so it's an inference from within Consciousness and that's why I actually understand actually defines the physical whatever that might be purely operational things you can observe and manipulate ultimately as a conscious being so it takes the experience okay phenomenal experience which is subjective and then it tries to account for it which after all is all we have in physical meaning operational terms in terms of observations and manipulation and here I want to briefly introduce what we mean by that imagine the brain that's what we're going to stick with but of course this would apply to any substrate as substrates is a bunch of things that you can observe and manipulate period this could be neurons could be Gia could be molecules could be chips could be transistors could be anything you want as long as you can observe and manipulate that and that's indicated with a Primitives that we have as conscious beings eyes and hands okay out of that if you're good we can get a substrate model indicated there which is a basical model that can be translated also into a transition Matrix basically just a summary of observations and manipulations if I do this I see that with a certain probability and this transition per Matrix notion is captured by this idea of cause effect power so observation and manipulation simply means if I do this I see that and if I see this above chance then there is some power there there is some power to take and make a difference that's what we mean Tim by POS power now I will have to be nevertheless rather short here but I need to this morning introduce the basic I to make sense of what we're going to discuss this afternoon when we talk about the quality of experence why it feels the way it does and so the morning mostly be about fundamentals of IC and then empirical evidence that sort of supports it because like any Theory it needs to be validated and when it's validated you can use it for inferences that go beyond the theory itself so I doesn't just say experience exists that's not enough to go far but if it is right you just need five more things in a sense to go far and to account for experience all together and that is the five essential properties of experience those that are true of every possible experience which I think says are just fine every the experience is intrinsic specific unitary definite and structur and I will not discuss that in any way detail I wanted just get across the main idea so we now have to take that experience exists and its by essential properties and translate those formulate those in terms of cuse effect power observations and manipulation that is in what we call physical terms the first form this is a very good something the very first four properties translated in terms of cosic power mean that the subset of every experience must be a set of units by that I mean things that can be observed manipulated like Neons whose cause effect power the ability to take and make a difference is maximally irreducible and that leads ideally to the identification of a subset of units let's say neurons in the brain some active here in red and some inactive here in white such that they constitute a maxim irreducible sub satisfying essentially those four properties so this thing is called the main conflix and we have some suspicions about where it is located in the brain and why and once you have that you go to the last property that is that experience is structured that as we put it it is composed of phenomenal distinctions and phenomenal relations distinctions is just a quick starting point from introspection things that you experience that you could call by name for instance like you see your hands you see the book you see it color you see that it's on your body you see that it is in the bed in the room and so on these are also distinctions and then there are relations nomenal relations among these distinctions the book is in my hands my hands attached to my torso my torso is attach to the rest of my body which is lying on the bed which is in the room which is on the middle and left side the right side and go on forever if you wish all of those are properties that compose the experience that make it feel the way it feels and in terms of physical properties I says that means that once you take this main complex that you identified before based on four of the properties we can go in and look at the cause effect structure that is specified by the subsets of units in the compx all we do is we take every subset one unit at time two at a time three at the time and ask what is their cause and effect within the system and then we ask how those causes and effects overlap we call the former caal distinctions and the latter caal relations and the big claim here in the end quity has to do with no additional ingredients so once we identify a substrate that satisfies those four properties and we unfold info is C effect power purely based on those properties then the quality of any given experience will be accounted for with no additional ingredients fix is it completely okay and this is a testable proposition summarized by quality instruction the idea that once you have figured out the properties of phenomenal existence which are those fun that are true of every experience that is of phenomenal existence in general then you can absolutely account for all the accidental properties the special properties of Any Given experience like the one you're having now with no additional ingredients except for the very special way this cause effect power this cause effect structure is arranged and the quantity of Consciousness in this case is nothing but the total amount of existence if you wish within the cuse effect structure the sum of the values we call it small F that is how much it distinction exists is coal makes an inte difference and how much have relation that is overl between distinctions exist that's another small five value you sum them all up you get a big five value and that tells you in essence how big the C effect structure is it doesn't tell you which way it's right it tells you how much of it there is so let me now go through just a little bit more in detail about these things to give you a sense of how it's done all of this is going to be discussed at length in a tutorial that would be run by B Marshall and gr finle primarily in which they will run through these things give you examples and also point to a Wiki that allows you to agre to the calculations yourself so let's T just again with existence we start from there and the ation of I this is called the zero action says experience exist there is something it doesn't say anything else okay you wake up there is something don't even need to have visual experiences or t experiences or feeling a sense of sell but something is there that is the foundation of everything and when you translate which is called a postate this is the zero for this is nothing but okay we have a coal model we have a transition B Matrix and we must determine that if we have our little units but units in the brain if we do this we see that above chance there is some cause effect power that is demonstrated in the TPM as values of probility that go be on now the five essential properties the claim in short is that every experience is intrinsic that is it exist so to speak for itself it's very difficult to say these things because language is limited and I will not discuss the action me every one of them will take quite some time but people have often refer to this as saying that experience is private first or there is a first personal perspective or problematic terms because it doesn't need that perspective but is only for the experiencer is not for somebody else and how is that translated basically what you do now is you take your system of units and for instance you put a border a candidate border around it you call candidate complex in and whatever is outside is considered to be a background condition whatever is inside is your C system and now to satisfy this PO you must have cuse effect power take and make a difference within yourself so within those four units inside the blue system fixing whatever is outside the background condition and you see that representation of that for the transition probability mes the AUM of information says that experience every experience is specific meaning it is this one may sound trivial but it's inconceivable that and experience wouldn't be this one as opposed to for instance generic and underneath is something that is perhaps easier to understand but is not strictly the action every experience is this one the one you're King and by virtual being this one typically will differ from many many other ones out of a very large repat which we all know but the action is purely about the fact that it is this and the postate says very well if we have our subsrate with those four units a b c and d for instance a on and then this dndd are off it's not enough to be there like that and having cause effect power inside but it must be the case that by being in that specific State and BC of a a on and BCD off the system specifies air course on itself and an effect of itself which is also specific so it picks aular Co State and an effect state which are represented there the CA in red and the effect in Green in the GPM this is translated into the system is currently in a state that says let's put it in words I think that my CA was that state in red and I think that my effect was will be that effect in green okay whether they happen or happened or not doesn't matter it's what the system Say by maximizing is cause effect power or state according to distance that we show be unique and that is the intrinsic difference which is satisfying posit by it the next action is integration and something that has been recognized before the idea that experience is unit it is a whole and as a whole it is irreducible to separate experiences Illustrated here by saying that if I experience the visual field I experience all of it I don't experience independently the left side and the right side you may experience this the other guy may experience that but I experience what I experience as a home that's a very general statement once one understands it can that be formulated in a way that corresponds to cause effect power being IR reducible yes that's the translation of the postulate it means that in the candidate system must be a whole set of units irreducible to separate subset and how do we do that we do it by cutting within the system and eliminating the causal interactions that are possible between the parts and asking essentially how much is lost by calcula quantity integr information f that tells you precisely that how much is this a whole more than the parts you do this you get a value for that specific code effect State and then you go through all possible Cuts because by key principle in I the principle of minimal existence you cannot exist more than the least you exist so you find the weakest link essentially the minimum partition is called and then you can't be a system more than you exist across your minimum partition as Quantified by far five system by the way you take the minimum again B say principle between CA and effect and then the final action before composition is exclusion that says that experience is definite it is this so Illustrated here when I wake up and I have my visual field I have the whole visual field but have this hole I don't experience just half of it or just the top or just the bottom or just one little sector and so on I experien that with those borders for that matter I don't experience more than that whole so in essence this means every experience is definite you could call it it contains what it contains not less and not more that's again and prop is so in some sense obvious that people haven't really pointed it out but I certainly don't experience the Su total of what people in told are experiencing every one of us is limited quite an obvious thing but it's a property of existence that's always true and when it comes to the formulation of prostrate we had considered here our candidate system ABCD in that state we show that it has cross effect power it has it on itself it has it in a specific manner specific cost specific effect state it has it an integrated manner with a value of five but why that ABCD why this one as opposed to a small a wider hole or something in between and here the answer comes from another key principle of I called the maximum existence principle they say that among competing existence the one that actually exists is the one that exists the most more should be said about that but in essence it boils down to you try every candidate's subset of units in your brain in this case and you find the one for which five is Maxim the one that's maximally reducible is the one that lays claim to actual existence in this case we chose right it happens to be the system ABCD and smaller or larger systems are having a lower value of five so the one that wins is indeed ABC by the way this applies and M alluded to that in answering to a question applies not only to the set of units but also to the grain of the units themselves so the units are they neurons are they molecules are they something bigger than neurons and so on and so forth and then over what clock time interval all of that has to be answered in a principal way and IID says units are whatever from the intrinsic perspective of the system maximizes the existence of that system so you find maximal system and its own maximum intrin units at that point you would have f what in the brain or that matter in your entire body would be the subset of your Consciousness it should be a main complex that's maximally useful and then we get to the last axium which is the one that is particular relevant for today which is the action of composition that say any experience is structured and as I said before it's composed of phenomenal distinctions and phenomenal relations that B them together including color and shape color and space and so on so forth as we heard also from uh now when he was you know trying to talk about we should understand experience as some kind of periodic table how do you actually make up such a periodic table the formulation of this axum in IAT is the composition POS it and it says of course that the cause effect power must also be structured that subset of units within the system must specify cause effects and these are called causal distinctions as I say and these cause effects must overlap and if they overlap lently so if my effect is also your effect for instance my cause is your effect and we have different distinction within the system then there exists a caal relation and the existence of distinctions and relations Is meas in both PES by this quantity small five for distinction and relation which ask how IR reducible are they and so here what's demonstrated very briefly is if you take again our four units you can take for instance the distinction specifies that's word we use by Unit C off right now and you can follow those Orange Lines it says my course is unit in red and my effect is the other unit in red and that is m effect of this unit c within the system but then you can also take a higher order is called mechanism BCD for instance and you can ask what's my cause and my effect and you find it within the system in red and green respectively and then you can ask do these cause and effects overlap and when they do for instance they may overlap for unit a you have a relation and you can measure how reducible that is and as you can see there coration between causes effects causes and effects so I won't spend time otherwise we won't get there but you'll find all of this worked out in detail in the week if you do it for all subs of units you find all the distinctions how much they exist and all the relations how much this overlaps and distinction exist irreducibility and the end result is a c trctor that's is Illustrated there on the right now you saw a picture like that before and here I want to use it once to emphasize how different different this is from what we usually find in neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience and in Psychology where the basic idea and I'm representing you on the left is flat is that in experience whatever that might be is Alice seeing her house on fire and worrying about the camp that's inexperienced let's say must be some complicated result maybe it emerges from information processing so stuff gets in gets coded in various places in the brain fire house where wor about cat emotions and so on and so forth actions a text book about this whatever it's all some kind of very complicated processing that we can follow we ask what happens next why does it happen and so on it could be predictive processing instead of being you know information processing bottom up you have your predictions your top down expectations and then you correct the errors and you come to some different activity pattern that then explains the behavior that you have or it could be that Contin is some higher order looking down at what's going up again some information coding or some Global broadcasting some information gets broadcasted everywhere from some known on the top so it's shared by every unit but it's all the language which is here depicted in 2D the language of information process and especially these days of computation every piece of brain performs a computation the end result of all this is certainly not bad we do understand how the brain works and does what it does but that's precisely if it is right all we can understand we can understand why the machine presented with certain input for instance is going to produce that output or how it will perform some mental operations inside and we can predict what happens next if we have a very good model we predict exactly what happens next so you might say what El is there and the whole point of I is that what else is there is that giant wasif effect structure which is supported by a particular subate and nothing else so the sub of Consciousness is that blue part of the brain and nothing else the rest is just performing if you wish computation and functions and what truly exist is a gigantic structure which means what it means and where the meaning is actually the feing the feing is the meaning the meaning is the the feeling so it's a radically different View and it say that experience is a c effect structor is structor is quality the meaning the feeling is all there and you never find it here because this is purely extrem human Okay so that's the main claim is that the feeling or meaning of an experience in its content is accounted for by a c effect structure not V pent and you heard it fromi basically not from processes codes computations or functions so just a pointer I want to say there's only the mathematical formulation there the mature version of it for2 and the uh wikii to which I want to refer you is something where you can find these things explained in detail and also you see worked out examples and is interactive so I hope much easier to understand is such a brief presentation so now I want to use the second part of this morning briefly to go over a little bit of the evidence and the predictions that the theory makes on which we and some people in this room have been working for quite a long time to address very basic things okay which I really not even address so what determines first whether consist presentent or absence and that's very much related those four first four first postres AB compositions so not so much to the quality but the presence of a lot of Consciousness and addressing question of you know why the cortex seems to be important not other parts of the brain why does it go away and sleep and dream the sleep and general ises and so on so here again is the flavor of the answer of why the cortex or some parts of it and not other parts of the brain well because we claim in the cortex you have a neural subate neurons connected in a certain way that is appropriate for being a maximum cuse effect power and Main comp whereas other parts of the brain like the celum because of their Anatomy break down into many many entities with a trivial C struct associated with is so one giant sof supporting a giant stru in the cont because he has the right man and lots of me sub little modular things supporting many entities that count for nothing in other parts of the brain like the C and the this way of thinking allows you then to basically focus on what would be the main complex and treat the rest of the brain in essence as useful servant of the conscious being that perform useful functions like keeping things in memory like Consulting memories like carrying out actions like stringing together words and PHS and articulating speech all those things we do automatically without even thinking about it it just happens that's a Machinery that is going through input output chains processing loops and so on while the possibility of you being conscious is maintained by other very fundamental mechanism like arousal systems that allow the main complex to be corally powerful and of course trivial enabling factor of like having blood oxygen and sugar in your brain so that the neurons can have caal power to begin with okay so all of this sort of gets a natural explanation and this is what I was saying a moment ago the idea would be that some parts of the cortex because they have the right L basic they very tight ltis with a very l fan in and fan out meaning lots of incoming connections and outcoming connections that are very dense especially in superal layers among cortical neurons they can support main complex and therefore it was of extractor celum which is basically a bunch of par modules very fancy does a lot of predictive processing if you wish it's very good for that that has the wrong anatomy and it breaks down and that's just the case of a woman in China one of the few who have being describ without a cerebelum completely without a cerebelum which is clearly conscious goes through a normal life or more less is a little bit of mental orentation but you know she has kids and everything else so clearly you don't need this to be conscious if you lose the cortex you're okay now the other interesting thing sorry is that we suspect that there are even vast swaps of cerebral cortex that may not contribute to the main compx and a lot of parts of the preal cortex for instance we suspect do not have the right mat and so they would not be part of the main conflict which is largely based on posterior Central qual areas why do we say this this is not based on empirical evidence yet this can be confirmed or Not by empirical evidence we say this because this dense la which is paradigmatic of posterio Cortex seems to be missing by the way anterior cortex is largely organized and there is some finally Rec some evidence that confirms this intuition that comes mostly from neurophysiology and know functions that is that the lateral interactions the one that are critical for latis are much more local and modular in in one case it's mice and then on the right it is actually study from Japan in the Mamet monkey okay it's very very l is very modulate and there is some connectivity very unlike what happens in the largest indust so this is nice empirical study and more will have to follow but ultimately I think you know like to say Anatomy is Destiny if you're built in the right way you can support Consciousness you're not buil in the right way you may be a fancy piece of Cortex or of and you won't do anything for it you may be just a slave does the evidence support this I think so although this is still partially controversial Legion studies which are critical in this domain seem to suggest that for instance that on the JP you see a classic study from the 1930s in which preform cortex Cal Brokers area were completely eliminated by a surgeon and the guy came out that was obviously as contous before the only difference were personality differences and you know the do brick who studed him and wrote a book about him he had to actually argue at length that something had changed in that patient and that was his personality which now is very wiely recognize as kind of the frontal syndrome whereas obviously there was no doubt the was conscious so that is one case the other cases conversely if you have an oxy for instance in the back of your brain that are widespread then you never come out of an unresponsive work or syndrome of vegetated stage it's called there nearly zero okay so there is something about the back if you do it all you're gone the front much of the front and being being very crew here you can sort of do without okay obviously you do some function but you don't L Consciousness this instead is a recording study one we did in the past with Francesa and others in which we try to use what we call uh Within stay nor task part to try to avoid many of their usual confounding factors in which you basically take advantage of the fact that sleep is the only time which sometimes you're conscious and sometimes you're not sometimes you're conscious when you're dreaming and sometimes one third of the time you're not when you you know wake up the Saturday sudden say that I want and we ask what the cor of that turns out that you lose Consciousness if there are slow waves in the back this is through in nonr site where the thir the time you don't dream and in R SE which looks very different but the few times in which you don't dream you have starways in the back okay rather than in the front this is work along similar lines we're using all these paradigmatic cases in which we are there not there that's where you test any theory of God okay on ourselves this is now seizures different kind of seizures these are focal seizures sometimes there is loss of conscious sometimes not this is inra recordings now work done by and others in the lab what you can see on the left is that if you have an increase or slow activity in the front you lose responsibil but not Consciousness conversely if you have an increas in SL activity in posterior LS here BS you lose consciously not responsive so it's indication again of this double dissociation between responsiveness that seems to depend the L cortex and Consciousness aser cortex this is a study by the group of herons and MGH in which they use instead anesthesia Pro for anesthesia and you see two levels of sedation which are still conscious on the left and then unconscious and deeply unconscious so to speak or deep solution and what you can see is that you lose Consciousness with prop form here when there is an increase in slow activi basically is a more convol way of doing it in the back and then when slow activity is everywhere then you are even more deeply anesthetizing the recent followup study that confirms this okay so deeply that you cannot really be aroused etc etc but again the moment you lose Consciousness is the back and Central regions that show slow activity and a lot of neurological liness is also consistent with this if you look at those disorders which in neuros Psychology are called diagnosis in which you essentially do let say a piece of conscious some kind of content for instance you may lose the ability to experience Faces by the way you also lose the ability to recognize faces which is a function but what I'm emphasizing here is you're losing the experience of faces when you lose that it's a typically advision in proc CeX and that is true for most other agns you may have syndroms in which you get strain things like the inversion on left and right like verman syndrome or confusion between left and right or you lose the talk all these strange things that affect experience and usually in ourselves also action but first and foremost experience it AR typically in the back okay and then here is a metanalysis by Fox andit in which instead we use the third approach not Vision not recording but stimulation and in red are the areas where if you go in in patient epileptic patients and stimulate electrically the cortex you get some change in the experience and that's Prim M again in posterior regions whereas Anor regions are very usually called noneloquent okay or C meaning the sub doesn't know you're doing anything okay one last point in terms of the you know expans power here prediction Theory and that is you know a lot of the work that was done since the time that marello who is here was in nism and then pursued further by by many and the idea here is can we actually understand basically things like why do you lose Consciousness in deep nor sleep or it's dreamless it sure you you do do conscious okay and the difference is slower activity but why and so here you need a caal approach and the caal approach was the use for instance of transr magnetic stimulation with density G so we can ask how strong and differentiated are the interactions inside the cortex the brain measur crudely by this manipulation and observation approach which is caal okay and the reason we do that is because being caer it allows us to check whether the interactions of the brain are working so integration in a broad sense and then we can ask whether there is some specificity or differentiation which the proxy or information by measuring the complexity of responses and you see here the response to TMS the complexity both in space and time is high if you're awake and consious but in deep nonr Sleep especially early in the night when subject are very often unconscious this complexity goes down okay and then work by dorini and M show with int corings that this corresponds to a loss of neural activity which assumably they thought then was associated with off period which is typical of the slow waves of deep sleep and then importantly is the one that demonstrated breakdown of CA interaction with they show there using a phase walking index you can see at the bottom left there is the pH locking that lasts roughly 600 milliseconds when you're conscious so neural interaction remains sort of Cally linked for 600 milliseconds but when you are unconscious in deep Sleep the response is strong but then there is this breakdown the caal interactions so that the face walking is only to seconds then activity comes back so it's not the brain is inactive or capable of responding is just that you break down the cause of interactions and that's exactly what I prod would lead to a loss of consciousness by the way if so you should also be able to demonstrate that when you're Greening this complexity comes back even if you're not responding to the environment even if you're disconnected and that's this is just a series of responses to TMS measure the EEG you can sort of see what happened in folding a speed in deep speed and then the complexity of the trace that's a single Chace returns if you are dreaming so it goes with conscious as it should another the first experiment we did with fley and again was to look at anesthetics the one we where allow use first was mid if you lose Consciousness the complexity of the respon should go down and it does as you can easily see there you get that stereotype in this case slower response when you have lost conscience and this is slide will always show many more cases now that puts together many many of these examples in ourselves where we are clearly conscious versus clearly not and we try to measure the complexity of the interaction with this Quant was introduced by Cali and that's called perturbation complex index have been further refined but in essence it captures how complex the response is whenever you're conscious you see all the red dots there these are different subjects and different terms in the same subjects in in white you have high body and that's true whether you're awake which is obvious but also when you're dreaming and also that's a critical experment when you anesthetize say in byos of camine would make you totally unresponsible can through surgery but you are having F rinks throughout okay so these are par cases these values are also high in patient with big Visions in the cortex who however are to be conscious conversely these values are low when you lose conscience inless Le and then with various anesthetics like do prop for so this is how youate something is inspired by the theory it says when bar speaking integ information should be collapsing when you're unconscious and high when you're unconscious that's what you see and then you can use this to look at Patients which is something that you will hear you know at the ASC to look at patients and use this information to make some you know statement about is somebody there or not even if they cannot respond this is just to illustrate that you know recently we used neurop pixels recordings in mice and used wakefulness non sleep and REM sleep this is what done by shle and Rong M and and you can see these are the neural Tes I won't spend time on that that again you get a very similar results as in humans so at least on the surface it looks like when when they go in what in them is deep on them steep because they don't really have much of an intermediate state of that sort and because they small cortex their complexity goes down L comes back when they are importantly in this study we could show that what pigorini sort of hypothesize were period are indeed or period the neural stop firing during you know that time one last experiment and we'll finish you know for the morning so that is something that is currently being tested in a way in a different way by a temple on world and tried the foundation of collaboration but here's the test we did starting several years ago collecting a lot of experienced meditators taking advantage of what many different Traditions reported that can be States very difficult to reach generally of pure presence in Ence these are state in which they have vivid presence meaning Vivid Consciousness Vivid experience but so to speak of nothing I think the of nothing will turn out to be primarily of something closer to just pure space but for sure they have no thoughts they have no self and they have no perceptual objects so this is a very sort of strange state of being you're not even you but there's a lot to be like that okay and it's very deid sometimes you described as L and so this you know suggest that well what's the Neal cor first of all and you know suspicion was the nor C of that might be that there is very little activity supposed to say very much in the sub of very because usually if you see a face face areas line up and the neurons fire L we know that all the time that a good reason why that is the case and when you see a caller caller area my when you see anything else an object object area light up so whenever you are seeing some content that you typically report there is a lot of activity Z cont and so if you are experiencing no sound no thoughts and no per object that should be low activity is that true well this is interesting because IAT that doesn't require any information processing computation or anything going on here there's no computation perform nothing is happen everything potentially is quiet it says if your n substance is in good functioning order the ca interactions are intact but nobody is saying anything to anybody so to speak there are no spes thring around in the limit it will still support a big F structure and therefore be vividly cautious in a specific way and so while experiments in this case in humans can never be fin because the brain is far too complicated we spend a lot of time electing meditators here is final group that really was carefully selected from two different traditions and we compared the activity withg in the various frequency BS when they were in a state for instance of Mind wandering within meditation and they signal it coming out of it or in a state of pure presence within meditation typically at the end of a long retreat and they pushed a button when they came out before within they weren there okay but they sort of recognize that they were in that state people and so if you compare that what you see is very much in our prediction and Broadband decrease in power throughout the brain they certainly are not asleep no slow is there anything less but above all there's thecase in the cam which is the one that usually goes together with neuroactivity so while you know we're not saying there is no neur activity whatsoever and we cannot record the neurons except with the brain is to be minim the active a little bit there is certainly not some great processing or so and yet experience is very B so I want to stop here and maybe have a few questions here before in the next part this afternoon we are going to discuss what can we now say about the quality of experience quality structure why does it feel the particular way it does okay thank you yeah thanks both for the and for the um walk through some of the empirical evidence sort of got a tax based question on on the understanding IDE value I understand that once I think your phrase was candidate boundary you put a candidate boundary around something and then within that you start to do some analysis of different subsets and I follow that at least at a high level what I struggle with a bit is where does the candidate boundary come from or do you at some point consider all possible candidate as well as all possible Subs within a campus so that might be a very simple question but I would appreciate quiti that's precisely what Vision so I started with a candidate boundary which we sort of knew was in the end the right one mostly for illustrating it but as indicated believe in this figure we actually try out every possible subset or per or par and for all of them we measure five we measure how irreducible it is and given overall subate what we call Universal Subs so to speak we find that particular subset that has the maximum value of five and that is the one that we call the main complex then recursively we take everything else and we go for the next the second complex the third complex the fourth until the entire Subs essentially is piled by complexes a main one and all the smaller one in our brain we suspect of course that there is one main one which is much much bigger than anything else around it under at least under normal conditions and the rest of these manyi complexes Illustrated sometimes in these figures like they okay they would be much more than that so in thebell and inal cortex we expect that things do condense down into these smaller things that never overlap but the structures associated with them are very small compared to the gigantic structure that is supported by the same complex but the system is that you just go through every possible subset and you find the one that has maximum five that's your main complex and then you find the other complexes usually we call them ontical dust because they have little structure the thing that I mentioned but perhaps too briefly and it's Illustrated at the bottom right there and there are several papers of this incl you know Pap almost finished intrinsic units basically is there is a principle way to find not only the boundary but also the grain so why should it be neurons if it is neurons okay and why should it be let's say 30 milliseconds as opposed to something smaller or bigger than neurons something shorter or longer than 30 Mill and what of the states that matter okay how do we brain the states of the subst and it can be arit because Consciousness is never AR that's a key thing in modity that's existed it's always specific it's always Def and so and so so we need to find a self-consistent account for why the sub would be done at that grain and not only in terms of the unit themselves but also the update thank you a quick follow up on that does it mean at Le assuming we can be confident that there's nothing larger larger than a human that we're part of the cause of relationship so the whole universe would caused and connected in some way there's nothing that is more complex in a p than the ABCD theit the brain out the vast of the galaxies this bit is still the most is that a correct sentence yes let's put it like that there are two or three things to say about this so the first thing to say is that if you exist then according to it because experience is definite no subset of you exists no superet of you exist no paret of you exist therefore there is no Collective conscious in this room there's no Collective consci of the universe etc etc okay because basically consci is in existence it follows directly from that okay if one were to find that in your brain for instance there is something that is not empirical the subset of your Consciousness let's say in the or somewhere else I don't care where but it has higher F satisfying this criteria better than the on empirical subset of Consciousness then I is completely disconfirmed so if the grain is wrong it's also disconfirmed it's very strict in all this okay and of course in principle if you want to find that the five of this room is greater than the five of each and every one of us it is also disconfirmed so there are lots of things that would disconfirm we we still have some time to ask uh any questions you have to thank you foration experience last whe it is time dependent yeah yes it is time dependent though let's just since we're going to talk about time talk about time this afternoon we prefer if you want to be strict to talk about updates so this Cal model updates meaning whenever the state updates depending on the Cal interactions that's what we consider to be the basis of our Cal model okay we don't assume that there is space time in some you know typical physics sense we just assume there is a c model like TPM and its days is updated and then might update and then as demonstrated in these papers we can arly ask from the interive perspective of the system I don't know why there's a lot Echo right now is it you or me not sure from the intrinsic perspective system there's going to be an update which is typically going to be a micro update so many many many micro updates together okay at which five is maximum for that actually and so that is the intrinsic if you reach time scale okay the one in which you exist we suspect for might be around 30 milliseconds okay or something around that bot which is clearly much longer than the micro updates of the underlying you know fish atoms and so on it is going to be however discret okay just take everything else and I Thanks so much thanks for your presentation uh I have a question about how the axum of exclusion uh relates to mytical ideas about nonself so on one hand of course we' shown EG data for meditators shown how this uh P experience actually supports IIT but then on the other hand obviously I don't know I'm sure but I suspect those meditators might uh disagree with what you just said a moment ago about um if you exist no subset of you exist no superet of you exists so yeah what are your thoughts on that yes so this comes up a lot especially came up in our many interviews with this long-term meditator that come from different traditions and of course we discussed the sum school at some length also while other reports of subject who undergo that different kind of all states like 2 to5 DMT and the like okay and my general take is that it can be at first dating and seemly impossible to understand what they are trying to convey so first of all during those States they are as sales sort of BU their own report later not there the sales is not there so it's not that they are saying my state right now using introspection field like that they're not doing it you get a retrospective report very much like in dreams in which they try to characterize what they achieved before so an interesting by the way side question for Neuroscience is how can it be that you can have a state of pure Pres with presumably minimal activity in CS Etc while at the same time you have an episodic sense of what happened being recorded if you wish maybe any c so an interesting thing would be is it possible that veryable activity but Circ nevertheless so put down that there was this interesting combination of you know no activity anywhere and he felt very which sometimes so interesting science question but but it gets complicated is when they say I merge with infinity or think like that some may say that okay or there is no space and no time so very of you then if you actually insist with them and say let's just talk agree on a certain language agree on the meaning of some terms to figure out exactly what it is that you're talking about leaving side J different Traditions it very much seems like the majority of these people are talking about fast expans or which they don't see see or the Border or any sort very often lumous without any in homogen in it okay so sometimes described like a mirror or a pond that's infinitely wide and has no Reflections and so no waves and so on all these various drugs one of the things I would just add to to to the comment is a key thing about exclusion for especially in respect the visual space is we try to distinguish because language fails us all the time with disting between border and Boundary so we are using for definite for exclusion the world to indicate that it is Def which in means it has a border okay but the border is not visible from the inside as a border all we know is that it contains what he contains okay not more and not less I to say again in words but what outside the Border in visual space you don't see if you were to see visual space would extend beyond the Border okay so this is the funny thing which you know we don't feel there's a border here but actually we don't see the back that that kind of thing and this is why one has to be very careful I think in just taking the language that often comes from Traditions the feeling Bliss associated with such experiences that you know merging with infinity you know uh is special stting which you get in as if you were indeed merging with infinity whatever that is okay for sure as I said I don't think I experienced the sum total of the population of too that I think I know and everybody agrees thank you okay um I have a question I have a question on the actual composition but I remember the compos composition was the second action I 3.0 where now is the last actual 4.0 there reason why you CH yes and a lot of discussions and a lot of work and a lot of thinking behind it um and since it's 1158 I certain won't go through those discussions but it's a very important thing uh to have come up with a proper ordering of the ANS the first four and then composition as opposed to being a little bit in terms of having them not ordered properly because it does make a difference also when it comes to the reformulation in terms of alterate in essence however the idea is first you must be an entity with a border and the Grain and the state and of course intrinsic power before we can analyze what kind of entity you are okay and the simplest way to see that and one of the many examples we often use to guide our reasoning about that was if you have two very tight interconnected systems and you put a very very thin as thin as you want infinite tesma bridge between the two okay then intuitively it's clear that this is a hole this is a hole and they have very weak interaction as opposed to it's a giant anti just INF interaction and that also means that first you need to find the entities based on the post of and and then ask what are they like okay in essence this but it's something that up to you know 2.0 was sort of like this but in 3.0 we sort of put the action in order we seem to be more easy to explain for what we did I think this is the right way to do it just like I've take that opportunity uh to add a lot of work compared to 3.0 that was whom you know show has been in trying to well we knew it was essential but give a precise definition of what it takes for a relation to be a physical relation to measure it to see how strong it is and to quantify not as a distance in some space I be but as from overlap of CA effects that are Inu so these are two of the main differen we expect people so thanks for the question and it turns out no is not we can take 15 minutes more or you want to give presentation maybe we can I I think we might what do people prefer we might start because it's usful the questions when they qu St being introduced in this meeting so I'll just start it's not a natural way to end when Lunch is ready but we end anyhow then okay I mean it's natural physiologically but not conceptual that's what I mean if you also have question is yeah uh let's just see okay let's take questions now and then maybe for your is very interesting I have just one concern stupid I don't know um if I understood correctly from one we have the phenomenology and the other side we have the bra phenomenology of course property and the brain has its own properties um and if I correctly one maybe of the I that property of the phenomenology should almost match one to one the property of the brain but maybe this is not always the case for in time Perfection I can perceive the stimulus a and then the stimulus B but this doesn't necessarily mean that in the brain the stimulus I mean the neuron a that represent a activated first then the neuron I don't know if it's clear conern yes it's clear and the first thing to make here and and to fully understand here is again based on this figure so there is a correspondence which should be one to one between the property of experience and the properties of and you save the brain and no it's not the properties of the brain it is the properties of the cause effect structure that you unfold that's the word we use from parts of the brain in their current state so what we do is we take the brain which we call the subate the 2D things which is what people normally talk about that does the processing and the signaling and all those things and we ask what AR We Exist there based on what it means to exist which we know from Consciousness that's what exists in this life it's Consciousness has no SP proper and so with no additional ingredients we go in we had a perfect caal model of the brain we don't have a perfect one we know a few things like the overall anatomy of the back versus the front and the like the kind of anatomy grid life Etc and we ask what's truly there in terms of existence by unfolding its power in full that's what's there so one thing that this picture also for the rest of the audience is meant to do is sort of always trigger the thought that what is really there is not this two brain with it's Anatomy ET that is normally what we think is there physical and what is there physical in the it sense is the unfolded version of that is the cause effect structures a big one and many small ones not that we can easily say that but that we can just use what you used to call the qualos scope to go in there and just see what's throughly there right away you need to have a good claing model and then huge computational power to unfold it or use some interesting tricks to do that but I want to make sure that we get across at least that that the correspondence is not between phenomenology and the Brain it's between phenomenology and the brain unfolded and when you unfold it in terms of its full cause effect power it should break down into one big entity and many small entities and each entity will have of course because of have power on itself a specific unitary and Def way and struct that particular way that is what good be experience and so your comment about time is a good one because for instance uh at the summer school one of the proposals you should sort of say your name was preing that of asking something like that so could it be for instance some case we know that that stimula get to the brain and then you get this activated than that or this activated than that and their temporal or in clock time is one but in the you know phenomenal time is for one may be overwritten by the other that's what you were you know proposing to do maybe you will do but there are also many examples in which people would say for instance you know you get that the in the brain one stimulus gets there in the visual modality after it gets there in the auditory modality and yet they you know have the right right timing in the clock time you can get them to be experienced simultaneous so you might think I suppose that's where you're hinting at there is no correspondence with phenomenology where they are simultaneous they exist together their experience together and neurophysiology where they get there different times if IIT is right there will be a precise correspondence once you unfold the appropriate sub I I hope that sort of clarifies a little bit a key message here okay sorry I I just wanted to follow up on the first question yeah um on this little of like Universal conscious like superet thing um but from a different perspective um the the call of the question is basically the nodes of the candidate system potentially um be conscious themselves so for example if you if you if we're all neurons and we're trying to compute say we're conscious neurons and we're trying to like understand the substrate of Consciousness as neurons and we look into molecules because that's what we're consist of and we find this uh Global seemingly Global maximum of five um but then if we really extend it extend the scale that we look at to this sort of network of neurons to this brain and find this other maximum of by can these uh both Maxima be conscious or is that something that I can't um say anything about or does it is do you still consider that to be falsification of the theory no absolutely not I says there can only be there is one maximum there's a complicated issue how you deal in very small system when you might have a tie and we try to resolve ties using compl the principles of that you will find that in the appendic of it 4.0 but generally speaking there is going to be One Max at a particular grain over a particular set of ruls any other you could call them local Maxim whatever you want to call them is not going to be the absolute maximum and so it's out so anything either is any subate is either specifying and experience conscious entity and that particular instant situation as such or it is a constituent of some other entity and never both okay may can talk about later I think people want food if if we maybe we I would suggest the following because I now realize if we start I want to talk about space and I think Mato Grasso here do much of the talking there and then about time to give a sense of the structure but uh you know besides introducing the next part which is I definitely saw it from the start as an absolutely necessary task for a theory of conscience a theory of conscience to explain not just even spread of lot which is already lot but also why it is the way it is we need to explain these fundamental things of experience okay starting with space and time and by the way I'll just say that one of the funniest thing about space is that when we decid that that we should start if we want to explain the quality of Consciousness which is structure according to we should start with space the reading as much as we could on the entire you know philosophical most psychological literature and certain physiological literature we found hardly any reference to the idea that space the fact that feels extended both the visual space and the b space Etc is a quality of experience it's the hard problem so people talk about the hard problem Spain col which we heard a lot about why the hell does look like red and so on why does the sky look blue but hardly ever in the entire history it's fantastic if you think about has asked why do think feel exent and that's most of our experiences we call that the first problem of space people didn't even recognize that and it's a general rule with Consciousness you find probably because just like the action they are so inherent to existence and spatial aspect of existence is sort of pervasive okay that even in the history of philosophy human is not discussed is taken for granted okay so this is one I think one the biggest problem I have to deal with God con certainly with understanding of I because it steps back and it says what is it and how does it feel and that point if you begin to realize that asking yourself why does space feel extended is the heart problem or is an instance in fact that instance of the heart problem then you begin to perhaps see how we must go about that what it takes to explain why it feels like that and is not a magical thing it must be a physical in the sense of thing something where we can say something meaningful so I would like to make one comment uh that may connect to your presentation and uh was A's presentation which is have you ever thought of starting from the simpler part which is space rather than col in the sense that to say the obious you can easily ask people take dogs for instance and see how similar they are and our similarity typically would be SAR of location that people would J something here versus here versus there versus there versus there okay so if you get the similarity magic or the similarity Magics among all the location of all the spots okay I am pretty sure you will get between normal typical subjects a lot of Correspondence very much like in corra but somehow I want to arue it seems too trivial to even consider but it's the most basic aspect of experiences is even more basic than C I would say and so doing that would allow you to realize many things including what you saw about machines that is triggered to have a same representation of space and get chpt to give you something very very similar to what humans do but it should really to understand what it takes for us to actually experience space as opposed to just map the similarity between Del locational points okay I that's a good time to end okay thank you are you just I if you didn't register you know advance and then just came you know randomly then please not e we we we only for those people register so um we are hungry but still want to join the discussion of the evening maybe it's better to just go on get don't you know people and then else the poster is also fine to just leave it right now and during the reception you can continue to start until the with that please thank you you know so this afternoon I say we would leave it to go a little bit more in depth into the quality of experience what determines what experience feels like rather than what determines whether we are conscious or not at all starting with what P seems to be one of the most important one hunger why doesn't take to feel hunger and that leads me since we're not going to present that it's uh in preparation that least me to pointing out the notion of the periodic table that evidently was pioneered by not only now but who so before him okay and uh and of course by a few other people I like to quote you know tach and K who forced gradu students to figure out all the atomic components of experience uh with a varying literally varying results my point is that we suspect and we get that probably hopefully in the discussion that rather than the periodic table at least the way you know might initially think about it there are indeed going to be types of experience that would be understood and explained in a rather regular way and this is sort a very very initial guess at the fundamental types that this the experiences we know about and then many other kinds of experience that are going to be literally compositions of the above I say composition and not combinations because you see you always get compositions so the ones that we're going to discuss a little bit today are going to be space as you heard you know was sort of the number one we trying to address I think for good reason and then time again these are the space of experience the time of experience not the space of geometri and not the time of the clock and then in the research program partially addressed but definitely not finished is why do objects feel the way they do and specifically here the fundamental idea is that we want to explain why is it that if I look at a face I experience both the fact the idea the concept the raction the invariant of these terms that it is a face and what kind of face it is that is what kind of Contours it has what colors it has Etc all these things bound together into one experience which is very hard to disentangle introspection can only go so far depending as there are eyes and nose and mouth and hair and so on but really the experience is this extraordinary thing we believe where the general is bound with a particular at many many different levels and we don't even think about it when we look at the face we see that face with its features at its place in space and with its colors okay it's all there and it's impossible for us to see the face and not the Futures and it's impossible for us to see the features and not the face just as it is impossible for you you to hear the sound and not understand English or at least for most of you I hope so there is something that if you are the entity you are the subset you are all these things are bound together in your experience and we need to explain that the last in the research program of I are really these local qualities which is you know what could be called sensor scripture we used to say so you know in in a way small but really what we think is the case there is that these are qualities that are very hard to penetrate introspectively so to connect it little bit already today to what was saying this morning and hopefully setting it up for a discussion the very idea of a color like red or blue is that introspectively is very hard to say anything more than it's red and maybe some very good you know into spectors might say well I can I think distinguish Hue saturation and brightness within my experience but beyond that red the H red is just red okay and yes I concur completely with the approach of capturing that what seems to be an intrinsic thing the redness of red by looking how it relates to other CES and Tim to other things you know and and take advantage of category theory for characterizing similarity in the various relationships between gos and I'm using the word relationship to distinguish these extrs from the intrinsic ones that matter in I and color instead and pitch and touch and all of these things that you know are fundamental components of experience we call them local qualities local is not a good term there is a reason for it just to understand each other we think they have internal structure that however cannot be easily deected introspective so this is without re explaining the rest a little bit to get the sense of what the periodic table looks like in our mind which is that there are some broad categories of experience and then you compose them in various ways in other words you see an object with a colorate space and may be flowing in time things like that and that would be a much larger structure so this being the research program and recognizing from the start that any experience you have now or ever is usually a composition of a lot a lot of components from these different domains as a practical tool to begin the program of connecting the way it feels to the substrate by the intermediary which is the cause effect structor which is the thing the experience will be identical got to we decided quite a long time ago to start with the way space feels and as I already mentioned before the lunch break it is remarkable that people essentially haven't even ask the question what makes space extendedness being another word for it the way it does so I say this is the first problem space the second problem space is that if should take an experience like a blank screen not only does it feel extended it also has a cover typically or game so leave that aside we also have a concept of Sol which is blank or screen but first and foremost it is extended and it seems to be the simplest thing in the world it is something that in essence you can convey to other people with just two words blind screen or ner screen or something like that that is enough to tricker in other people's Consciousness something of what it is like and in that case it's pretty good we presume okay not like making sure that your red is my red that's you extended blank scen people get that and yet I says and you'll hear this now that for us to experience a black string even leaving aside his C it takes an immense and extraordinary large cause effect structure only that can account for the way it feels which at first seems very contr intuitive because indeed it seems to be the simplest thing in the world if you think that experience is just a black screen and its richness corresponds to the algorithmic complexity of its description two words it doesn't make any sense and just so we understand each other and its richness properly matter would not be that different from that of this intersection in I showed you before okay more or less the order mind will be the same and we claim we need that just to experience a blank so with this you know brief introduction I will uh this afternoon we still do like this we'll ask M grao to talk a little bit to go through this notion of understanding what it takes for us to experience space to experience it and then there will be maybe a little break or so after that we will look at how we can understand visting principle without going into any detail why time F flowing and then be done by then we'll go back a little bit to you know summarize This research program before moving into the last section when gr think was talking about some one important application of it and then we want to keep it relatively short so we can have many questions before the reception case of That's So I think it's good now if Mato comes and S of tries to tell you how we began to address this issue we work done together with Andre