'Hey Bill Nye, Does Consciousness Transcend the Brain?'| Big Think

Hey Bill Nye, Does Consciousness Transcend the Brain?'

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American neuroscientist Dean Buonomano believes that your brain might be processing the world around you in a totally different manner than how you think you’re perceiving it.
We’d like to believe that our brains take in information on a first-come first-serve basis, but in actuality our brains are operating more like a cross between a tour guide and an overworked line cook at a busy diner. The tour guide tells you what’s going on while the line cook side gets everything ready behind the scenes. Together, this creates a conscious reality that Buonomano describes as a "a narrative created for our viewing pleasure by our unconscious brain."
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DEAN BUONOMANO:

Dean Buonomano was among the first neuroscientists to begin to ask how the human brain encodes time. It’s not an easy concept to grasp, Buonomano says, and for that reason many researchers overlook it. “The first field of modern science was probably geometry, which was formalized by Euclid around 300 B.C.,” says the researcher, “What’s amazing about geometry is that there is absolutely no time involved; it’s the study of things that never change. And there’s a reason why it is one of the first science fields. Science is much easier if you can ignore time.”

Buonomano was in grad school when he became enamored of the question of how we navigate through time. As a graduate student at the University of Texas (UT) Health Science Center at Houston, Buonomano collaborated with Michael Mauk after he heard Mauk’s lecture on his studies of the neural circuits in the cerebellum. Mauk and Buonomano modeled the way the cerebellum’s circuits could respond to stimuli and showed that this type of neuronal network can differentiate between time intervals that differ by just tens of milliseconds. Such networks also have the ability to tune the timing of their responses, the two found. “My collaboration with him was absolutely formative for me,” says Buonomano. “Mauk had this very influential notion that time is encoded in the changing patterns of neuronal activity.”

Today, Buonomano’s laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, uses computational modeling, in vitro electrophysiology, and human psychophysics experiments to explore how neurons and the brain as a whole perceive and respond to time. Here, Buonomano describes how he performed his first experiments on his little sister, bathed mice with antidandruff shampoo, and hypothesized that timing is so integral to brain function that all of our brain’s circuits keep tabs on the clock. 

In his new book, Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell, and perceive, time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables “mental time travel”—simulations of future and past events. These functions are essential not only to our daily lives but to the evolution of the human race: without the ability to anticipate the future, mankind would never have crafted tools or invented agriculture. The brain was designed to navigate our continuously changing world by predicting what will happen and when.
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TRANSCRIPT:

DEAN BUONOMANO: So consciousness is one of the deepest mysteries that we have ever attempted to resolve. And part of the problem with studying consciousness is that it’s very difficult to measure. But we do have some insights, and for one in the context of how the brain tells time, there’s evidence that consciousness is not really what it seems to be.

So what I mean by that is we feel our subjective experiences unfolding in the world around us in sort of this linear narrative, in which B follows A and in which C follows B and D follows C, in which things are happening in a linear progression.

But in reality it seems that our subjective experiences, our conscious narrative might not be that linear. So there’s a number of experiences or experiments that suggest that the brain processes information in sort of a discontinuous and discrete manner. So it’s not that I’m conscious of everything happening in a nice linear progression. It seems to be in some cases that what happens after interferes or modulates what our conscious experience of those things that c...

[zenitpro]

"If it turns out that I'm wrong, that'll be very exciting.". This is how a true scientist thinks. Thanks for your words, Bill. You're a great guy.

[krisc]

Everyone that claims that subjective consciousness is an end product that arises from basically dead matter, should realize that their claim is far more miraculous than a nondualistic point of view, where consciousness is fundamental.

[BitAntre]

Just a thought, completely hypothetical, but if the brain worked like an antenna or anchor for consciousness, couldn't that decaying intellect and function be the physical receptor wearing down and weakening. Just food for thought.

[absorbcreate]

An exact copy of Bill's brain (atom for atom) would also contain all the neurophysiological wiring necessary to contain all his memories.

[zorawar]

Bill's answer is internally inconsistent: 1. The entirety of the human consciousness and cognitive ability is contained within the physical brain. 2. an exact atom-for-atom copy of a brain would have different consciousness and cognitive abilities (i.e memories).
Memories are stored in the cellular configuration of the brain, which is a much higher order than the atomic level, so clearly an atom-for-atom copy would share the exact same memories.

[chrisrea]

"if this turns out to be wrong, that would be exciting"
I think this is a key difference in the way of thinking between the two sides he mentioned.

[fatstar]

would the copied brain not have the memory of having the experience so there would be no difference?

[chrisbacos]

What I really like about Bill Nye's answer is he did not criticize spirituality like so many academics do.

[taragnor]

Truth be told, we know so little about how life and the brain work, it's hard to say anything definitively. I mean for all we know the brain may well just be a receiver that interacts with something else. The idea that mental state degrades with a bad brain doesn't necessarily disprove that. I mean if your cell phone is degrading, then it will have glitches and problems connecting to the internet, but the fact that your cell phone is defective doesn't mean the internet is defective.

[busheybushdawg]

I love his last few sentences - "if I turn out or be wrong then great - that will be exciting. That's an excellent question". A Quintessential scientist - you would never hear a theologian say that! but maybe a zen monk

[dianatroelljordan]

Saying that an aged brain is proof is a poor argument. If you damage a radio or it eventually rusts due to age, soundwaves will come through poorly...static...The brain is just complicated matter, but allows the conscience to filter through. A damaged brain or aged brain will have trouble filtering the conscience in a clear way but it's still there. Anyway I'm a nurse, and this has been my experience.

[jamesmackay]

so your consciousness does not transcend your physical brain, but your memories and experiences do?

[josephmenard]

There is a serious lack of mystics in this comment section. I believe there's no way consciousness can be copied just from physical representation because there is nothing in the physical make up of the brain that is directly responsible for consciousness. In my experience, consciousness is what connects everything in the universe. We are all a part of one conscious being, a being that is a representation of the continual cycle that we call life. When we connect to this being it allows us to shed ourselves of ego and become people who work with a higher purpose that is to improve the lives of everything around us.

[markbossman]

Wait why not... If we made an exact copy of your brain atom for atom then how could you not expect that it retains and holds your memory/experiences?

[lunaalice]

It's a bit like this scenario: in the future they invent a teleportation device, but it works by destroying the info on one end and rebuilding an exact copy the other end (probably something very few people would feel comfortable using). If the device malfunctioned and didn't destroy the info at one end but DID make an exact copy at the other end, then there would be two identical brains. So it would definitely be you, but also definitely not you.

[donakavite]

_"because of experiences ive had with people as they grow old"_

When my tv gets old, one day it's going to be unable to capture and reproduce the signal on the screen.

[danodden]

I wish we just had a definite explanation for how consciousness works. It haunts me that we don't.

[DanielRenardAnimation]

A bit unrelated, but the part about the Zoo and the animals having their own thoughts and understanding of the experiences they have, made me think about a very old story that was in the news here, that had people riled up for a while. In a slaughter house, a group of pigs were being hoarded into a room _(of course, for slaughter), _ but at the same time, a rack with freshly slaughtered pigs, cleaved in half and hanging upside down on meat hooks, rolled on by, leaving the room. Most people think, that animals don't really "think" nor have any abstract thought, so one would expect the group of pigs, not to have any kind of response or reaction to a rack of their dead colleagues, parents, siblings, whatever... BUT, the pigs stopped. They stopped and they cried in fear, scared to move any further, because they knew very well that it was their own kind, freshly killed and understood in an instant what lied in store for them, in just a few moments from then.
I'm... yet, not a vegetarian, but a scene like that could've easily converted me. Consciousness and awareness isn't something unique and exclusive to us.

[iphonewsom]

It's so great that he is very transparent with his answer and opinion. I like that he not too rigid in his thinking and is able to say when he honestly doesn't know something

[JohnAudioTech]

To me, it goes a bit deeper. We each experience this world through our own senses. If I were to be replicated from a perfect atom by atom copy, this copy would contain the same memories, behaviors, ect. It essentially would be me. Would this second me gain its own consciousness and start being its own individual from that point or would part of my conscious be attached this new me? It falls back to the question of what consciousness is and how it relates to our physical bodies.