David Eagleman
speaker
1,631 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 20 Mar
David Eagleman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
You've got a completely different set of experiences of your brain, my brain, everyone's brain. We're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world. Something we might get into later that I'm very interested in, and I know you are too, is this collection of neural networks or personalities that we have inside.
And Nietzsche's view on this was that they each have their own truth. They're each perceiving. Yeah, we could talk about that right away. Okay, okay. So I know you and I are both fans of Nietzsche.
Exactly. Okay, so let's unpack that. So it's, you know, you've got all these neural networks that have different drives and want different things. And what Nietzsche meant by that, just for the listener, of course, is that each of those drives puts together a story or its truth about why it's seeing the world that way.
So the information that you would go out into the world to seek, the mission that you run, depends on who's ascendant at that moment. That's for sure. Okay, fine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. By which I mean, you've got all these, you know, all these, let's call them personalities under the hood. You know, it's interesting because I think I, maybe I dial it back one step from personality. You've got different neural networks that want different things and we can measure these. Just give an example, which is,
You know, when you're making a financial decision about what you're going to buy, you have certain networks that care about valuation. They care about the price point. And they're thinking, okay, how much is that worth? How much is that worth? Why? So on. You have completely separate networks in front of the lobe that care about the price. predicted emotional experience.
Let's say you're looking at two restaurants that you're trying to choose between. So you're making a simulation of what you see. Oh, that's going to be delicious and good. That one's not going to be so good. You've got other networks that care about the social context. As in, what do my friends think of this? Is this cool or not so cool? All these things, you've got this and more.
They're all battling it out under the hood. Yeah. And they're all trying to steer the ship of state. And when you make a decision... it's because of the vote of the neural parliament. So what's interesting, I do want to get at this because
Your view of a collection of personalities where one of them is dominant and my view of a team of rivals is slightly different in this way, which is that, you know, there's this battle going on and you reach these sort of consensus things, just like in a parliament where different groups will collaborate and coordinate and say, okay, look, you know, two out of three think this and so we're going to go for that restaurant.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
Almost.
Yeah, great. I mean, the thing is, when you look across the animal kingdom, you find these rivaling networks everywhere. So just as an example, you take a mouse, you put it in a maze, and you put cheese at the end, and you can put a little harness on the mouse and measure how much he's pulling towards the cheese.
Then what you can do is switch it where instead of a piece of cheese, you have an electrical shock at the end. and you can put the harness on and measure how hard he pulls away from the electrical shock.
Now what you do is you put a piece of cheese and an electrical shock at the end of the thing, and the poor little mouse gets stuck halfway and turns and turns and turns at exactly the place where the two vectors cancel out, which is to say he's running both networks. He gets the cheese and avoids the shock, and he gets stuck there in the middle. You see this across animals.
The approach avoidance conflict. Yeah, exactly. It's the conflict part. Okay, take another example. The stickleback is a bird that will attack things that are red. And if you give it something, what's that? Fish. Oh, fish, right. Yeah. No, wait. Stickleback? Stickleback gull. Wait, what's the? Oh, it's a bird. It's a gull? It's a bird, yeah. Okay, because there's a stickleback fish too. Okay.
Yeah, this is a bird. I'm 99% sure I got the name right. Stickleback gull. Okay, okay. Okay, it'll attack things that are red. It will sit on anything that's egg-shaped. It'll sit on it. So if you put a red dot on an egg, it'll both sit on it and attack it at the same time. Okay, what these represent are rivaling networks, right?
Okay, here's where I think the role of consciousness is, is in mediating this. And this is what we've gotten better and better at. And so when we have rivaling networks in a novel context... Well, that would be a novel context, right?
And now here's the thing, rats and cats have cortex, but what we have that they are not so good at is the ability to mediate well, such that we don't get stuck in the middle of the maze, but we can make a decision about, we can actually weigh in and say, okay, you know what? I'm not going to get stuck with these two networks. I'm going to decide on something.
This is what I think consciousness is about. It's the higher level abstraction that allows you to say, okay, look, This isn't something that's automated. This is, you know, this is a new situation I'm in. I don't know what to do here. And then the CEO, you know, gets called up. And yeah, there's like a large, you take a large company, the CEO can't possibly know what's happening in the company.
There's, you know, 100,000 employees, right? Yeah. The CEO's job fundamentally is to wait for the phone to ring and say, hey, there's trouble here. There's something going on that we don't know what to do. The CEO makes a decision. And also, of course, to do future planning. Yes. Consciousness is essentially about that.
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