0:00 You can take apart a pocket watch down to its tiniest brass gear, but you won't find a single second of time ticking inside those cogs.0:10 Aye, you'll just find a pile of scrap and a spring that's lost its temper, love.0:16 That's right.0:17 And in episode twenty-nine we asked what it means for something to be true, wrestling with whether truth is built out of facts or something we make up; now this week, we're up against something that makes truth look like child's play.0:34 We're asking what consciousness actually is.0:37 Now, I know how that sounds, but hang on.0:40 I can track eighty loaded coal cars rolling through the Clinchfield loop, count every wheel, but the feeling of watching that dusk settle over the ridge...0:52 well, where does that live?0:54 Well, that's the whole riddle, isn't it Earl?0:57 The scientists will tell you it's all just grey meat and little electrical sparks.1:04 Materialism, they call it.1:05 Like your brain is just a kettle boiling on the stove, and your thoughts are just the steam coming out the spout.1:14 Mm-hmm.1:14 But here's the catch with that: steam doesn't know it's hot.1:19 A kettle doesn't sit on the iron range wondering about its grandmother.1:24 You can map out every solitary neuron firing in a skull, count all eighty-six billion of them, and you still haven't explained why the color red feels like anything at all.1:37 Ooh, now that's what that philosopher fellow called the hard problem, wasn't it?1:43 David Chalmers, back in nineteen ninety-five.1:46 He said you can explain all the wiring you like, but subjective experience is a totally different beast.1:54 It's like describing the chemistry of a Yorkshire brew without ever letting someone have a sip.2:01 Swear on my tackle box, that is the honest truth.2:05 Old René Descartes thought we were split right down the middle — dualism, he called it.2:12 Mind in one bucket, matter in the other, shaking hands in some little gland in the skull.2:18 But how does a thought, which has no weight and takes up no space, pull the lever on a physical muscle?2:26 It sounds like magic when you put it like that, chuck.2:30 Like a ghost hauling on ropes.2:32 It does.2:33 And so — and so the real puzzle is why we expect the gears to produce the daylight.2:39 You know, some folks have gone completely the other way with it now.2:44 Panpsychism, they call it.2:46 They reckon consciousness isn't summat the brain invents at all.2:51 They say it's baked into everything, right down to the little atoms, like mass or electric charge.2:58 Whoo, boy.2:59 Now you stay with me here.3:01 If an electron has a microscopic speck of awareness, what happens when you glue a trillion of them together?3:09 You don't just get a louder electron, do you?3:12 You somehow get...3:14 us, sitting on a porch fretting about mortgage payments.3:18 You get my cat Barnaby staring at a blank skirting board for three hours, more like!3:24 But then you've got that newer theory — integrated information theory, Giulio Tononi's lot.3:31 They measure it with a Greek letter, Phi.3:34 They say if a system weaves its information together tight enough, the experience just lights up on its own.3:42 But see, that's where I keep stubbing my toe, Bridget.3:46 Does complexity reaaally explain the feeling?3:49 A computer network can sort a billion freight bills before breakfast, but does it ever feel the cold wind coming down the tracks?3:59 I don't think it does.4:01 That's the part that keeps me awake when the house goes quiet, Earl.4:06 If it's just wiring, then maybe we're all just clever clocks pretending we're alive inside.4:13 But if it's NOT just wiring, science doesn't have a net big enough to catch it yet.4:19 It makes you wonder what kind of world we're choosing when we treat our own minds like simple engines to be tuned up.4:28 We want a tidy blueprint, but every time we look inside, we're using the very mystery we're trying to solve.4:36 Well.4:36 That is about the size of it.4:38 Right then, love.4:39 Snuggle down and let the cogs rest for the night.4:43 Night night, sleep tight, chuck.
