Nick Lane

Well, not as we understand consciousness.

But the way we would understand consciousness is really about neural nets and nervous system and all the complexity of human consciousness.

That's what we primarily think about.

But there's a deep problem which goes back, I mean, it's the mind-body problem, but it was framed by David Chalmers as the hard problem of consciousness, which boils down as my understanding of this is more or less we don't know what a feeling is in physical terms.

So you can understand the information processing of a neural network, but what actually if you feel miserable and you feel pain?

Or you feel love or whatever it may be.

What actually is that in the chemistry of a system?

And I suppose the problem is that you have all of these neural nets firing and some of them are conscious.

We're aware of what we're thinking about.

And others which seem to have all the same properties in terms of their neurons.

They have synapses.

They have neurotransmitters.

They depolarize.

They pass on an action potential.

But we're not conscious of it.

It's non-conscious information processing.

So there's this question, okay, so if anesthetics affect things that don't have neural nets and feelings are something that we can't define in terms of a neural net, could it be that feelings are somehow linked more broadly to life?

So why would they be?

So again, the way I think about this is as an evolutionary biologist.

So the first question is, would we think that feelings are real?