A short transcript excerpt of a YouTube interview (Lex Fridman with John Hopfield) discussing the nature and role of consciousness. Hopfield summarizes views that consciousness may be a post-hoc narrative or ‘icing’ over nonconscious computations (citing Marvin Minsky and Nicholas Chater), illustrates memory/narrative construction with the John Dean/Watergate example, and expresses skepticism about finding a physics-level ‘entry point’ to consciousness while noting neurobiology and collective dynamics as promising perspectives. The exchange also touches on free will and whether neurobiology can be captured by classical equations.
Chapters
Let alone consciousness. Oh, because that's all.
Let alone consciousness.
Yes, yes, because that's tied up in there, too. You can't just put that on another shelf.
Every once in a while. I got interested in consciousness and then I go and I've done that for years, and ask one of my betters, as it were, their view on consciousness. There's been interesting collecting them.
What. What is consciousness? Let's. Let's try to take a brief step into that room.
Well, I asked Marvin Minsky, you want consciousness? And Marvin said, consciousness is basically overrated. It may be an epiphenomenon after all. All the things your brain does, but which are actually hard computations you do nonconsciously. And there's so much evidence that even the things, the simple things you do, you can make decisions. You can make committed decisions about them. The neurobiologist can say he's now committed. He's going to move the hand left before you know it.
So his view that consciousness is not. That's just a little icing on the cake. The real cake is in the subconscious.
Yeah, yeah, Subconscious. Non conscious.
Non conscious. That's the better word.
Sorry, it's only that Freud captured the other word.
Yeah, it's. That's a confusing word. Subconscious.
Nicholas Chater wrote an interesting book. I think the title of it is the Mind is Flat. Flat. And in a neural net sense, it might be flat as something which is a very broad neural net without really layers in depth, whereas a deep brain would be many layers and not so broad in the same sense that if you push Minsky hard enough, he would probably have said, consciousness is your effort to explain to yourself that which you have already done.
Yeah. It's the weaving of the narrative around the things that already been computed for you.
That's right. And so much of what we do for our memories of events, for example, if there's some traumatic event you witness, you will have a few facts about it correctly done. If somebody asks you about it, you will weave a narrative which is actually much more rich in detail than that, based on some anchor points you have of correct things and pulling together general knowledge on the other. But you will have a narrative. And once you generate that narrative, you are very likely to repeat that narrative and claim that all the things you have in it are actually the correct things. There was a marvelous example of that in the Watergate impeachment era of John Dean. John Dean, you're too young to know, had been the personal lawyer of Nixon. And so John Dean was involved in the COVID up. And John Dean ultimately realized the only way to keep himself out of jail for a long time was actually to tell some of the truths about Nixon. And John Dean was a tremendous witness. He would remember these conversations in great detail and very convincing detail. And long afterward, some of the tapes, the secret tapes from which Dean was recalling these conversations were published. And one found out that John Dean had a good but not exceptional memory. What he had was an ability to paint vividly and in some sense accurately the tone of what was going on.
By the way, that's a beautiful description of consciousness. Do you in like where, where do you stand in your today? So perhaps this changes day to day, but where do you stand on the importance of consciousness in our whole big mess of cognition? Is it just a little narrative maker or is it actually fundamental to intelligence?
That's a very hard one. When I asked Francis Crick about consciousness, he launched forward in a long monologue about Wendell and the peas.
Yeah.
And how Mendel knew that there was something and how biologists understood that there was something in inheritance which was just very, very different. And the, the fact that inherited traits didn't just wash out into a gray, but were this or this and propagated that, that was absolutely fundamental to biology. And it took generations of biologists to understand that there was genetics. And it took another generation or two to understand that genetics came from DNA. But very shortly after Mendel thinking biologists did realize that there was a deep problem about inheritance. And Francis would have liked to have said, and that's why I'm working on consciousness. But of course he didn't have any smoking gun in the sense of Mendel. And that's the weakness of his position. If you read his, his book on which he wrote with Koch, I think.
Yeah, Kristoff Koch.
Yeah. I find it unconvincing for this for smoking gun reason. So I've gone on and collecting views without actually having taken a very strong one myself because I haven't seen the entry point, not seeing the smoking gun. From the point of view of physics, I don't see the entry point. Whereas in neurobiology, once I understood the idea of a collective, an evolution of dynamics which could be described as a collective phenomenon, I thought, ah, there's a point where what I know about physics is so different from any neurobiologist that I have something I might be able to contribute.
And right now there's no way to grasp at consciousness from a physics perspective.
From my point of view, that's correct. And of course people, physicists, like everybody else, think very muddily about things. You ask the close to your related question about free will. Do you believe you have free will? Physicists will give an offhand answer and then backtrack, backtrack, backtrack, where they realize that the answer they gave must fundamentally contradict the laws of physics.
Answering questions of free will and consciousness naturally lead to contradictions from a physics perspective, because it eventually ends up with quantum mechanics. And then you get into that whole mess of trying to understand how much from a physics perspective, how much is determined already predetermined, how much is already deterministic about our universe. There's lots of different.
And if you don't push quite that far, you can say essentially all of neurobiology which is relevant can be captured by classical equations of motion.
Right?
Because in my view of the mysteries of the brain are not the mysteries of quantum mechanics. For the mysteries of what can happen when you have a dynamical system driven system with 10 to the 14 parts, that that complexity is something which is the physical. Complex systems is at least as badly understood as the physics of phase coherence in quantum mechanics.
