This was a great explanation and overview. I haven't seen a lot on GWT otherwise, but regarding IIT, everything else was a bit meh. It's interesting that GWT is very similar to an idea I had regarding recursive reactive information networks for AI agents. I use recursive/reactive because those are specific programming terms.
I'm glad you like the talk. GWT fits nicely with AI info networks because that is how it originated. Bernard Baars (neuroscientist) was working with Stan Franklin (AI network theorist). The original global workspace program, as I understand it, was designed to distribute work assignments. One might wonder if that sort of task is really analogous to the task consciousness performs.
Great video. Thanks for doing this. My take on it, if you have a moment. Is that the hard problem of 'what it feels like to be me' is not hard at all. Let's dissect the word 'feel'. To feel something implies an emotional response to stimulus. I don't hear anyone (and I've literally watched everyone on TH-cam about consciousness), talk a out our endocrine system. What separates us from animals is language. Not feelings or conciousness. But what separates us from machines or A. I. is mortality. An A.I. Had no need for feelings as it has no need to be goal directed towards pleasure and away from pain for survival. We could absolutely program that in. Let's me elaborate on my theory which maybe combines both, the integrated work space would be the working memory enriched with emotions driven from hormonal responses to stimulus. A feed forward system, with conscious being the computer monitor, being fed the calculated output from the CPU with the long term memory being the hard drive and visual representation being the GPU, a crude by analogous view. Before I dive deep. Let me give you a thought experiment... Imagine like the Truman show. Or that black mirror episode. That an AI followed your every move, and with an Elon musk helmet on, read every thought you had in response to every stimulus you encountered during the day. Now imagine, if we built a robot, and had it follow the gps path you did and every recreated the day, and projected every thought you had, timed perfectly, so that every stimulus was responded to with the same thought, such as the moment you took a bite into an apple, and thought about that summer in the orchid, the robot would believe it was conscious. It would respond exactly as you did and would. The only difference being we are feeding the thoughts into its head. And you believe that you fed your own into your head? Yet you didn't chose your thoughts. Did you you? They appeared into your head the moment you were stimulated. How is that any different? It's not. We just want to believe it is because we aren't ready to give up freewill and us being unique.
I'm glad you like the video, and I think you're right about the importance of the endocrine system. But you're wrong that no one has connected emotions to consciousness. It's fairly recent, and more prominent in work on animal consciousness. I'd say that emotions, not mortality, is what separates us from AI, and that is a very important difference. You might be interested in the videos in my Consciousness playlist, or this talk on ChatGPT: th-cam.com/video/GH749INcJwI/w-d-xo.html
Thank you for the amazing content! Regarding the homunculus objection, I was wondering why we shouldn't consider the motor system as the audience of the theatre. I mean, the information that enters consciousness is the only information that affects or even determines our immediate next decisions and initiates movements or one thought in a chain of following thoughts. it's almost like in the process of decision-making, there must be an audience/agent that reacts to the incoming information.
I'm glad you like the video! The motor system is often an 'audience' for the theater, but it's not the only one. Sometimes a person is conscious with no plans to move at all. For GWT, the point is coordination of whatever systems are relevant to the current task, so there is no single audience. Nor need there be.
Wonderfully clear overview. I think you mentioned that the relevant concept of information in IIT is borrowed from enginerring, but if I understand correctly it is actually drawn from its application in communication theory (Shannon-Weaver) and its computational formalization by Chaitin. There is a very interesting debate by Ladyman and Ross in Everything Must Go concerning the role of information-theoretic descriptions for naturalist perspectives, and its role in fundamental physics and the special sciences.
Thanks for your comment. Yes, communication theory is probably the more appropriate field to classify Shannon information. I think of engineering due to the technology of communication out of which the theory developed. I'll look up the debate you mention, because Shannon information is problematic to naturalize, in my view. I'd be interested if others have a solution.
People may be interested in your views on Graziano's Attention Schema Theory. He claims that his theory explains why we feel consciousness. And he claims AST better explains consciousness than GWT, although he admits similarities between GWT and AST.
Maybe I'll make a video about AST one day. The problem with the theory, in my view, is that the schema is not about the world, it's about attention. That means you are representing your self when you are conscious. In contrast, my conscious experience seems to represent the world; it is not a model of myself or my sensory/attention processes. You can see some of my videos on Higher-Order Theory for reasons to think consciousness is about the world, not our own mental states.
@@pauladroege6026 I'm a researcher new to this field so I could be wrong. To my understanding, AST is saying that the brain forms a schema for everything, so it's still about the world, but consciousness only arises when the brain forms a schema of itself. Essentially you only start to have feelings when you start to construct a representation of yourself. It's like a supercomputer can simulate the universe but it does not have consciousness because it does not have a representation of self.
Could it be that the very "hardness" of the Hard Problem is in fact nothing more than how hard it seems to be to accept that there is ultimately NO reason it is like something "to be processing information in this global ignition sort of way"?
Ahh but there is a reason. None of these competing theories seems to make what seems to be an obvious point. There is a reason it is "like" something. It comes down to what it is "like." The something is the experience of pain or pleasure. This point doesn't tell us how we experience or feel pain or pleasure, but it does tell us why. Pain and pleasure is not only the fundamental impetus (equivalent of will) but the only impetus. The entire spectrum of experience is nothing more than the spectrum of pain or pleasure. Any integrated experience can be put on one and only one place along the pain pleasure scale. Pain and pleasure is necessary and sufficient to at least explain why we have qualia. One day someone will respond back about this 🙂
One day has arrived. The challenge is to say why pain and pleasure must be CONSCIOUS. An amoeba, for example, moves toward nourishment and away from toxins, but I would not say it is conscious. Aren't pleasure and pain basically conscious versions of nourishment and toxins?
I'll do some digging thanks. And I would argue that emotions are sensations to lead us towards pleasure ( food) and away from pain. For survival, and although incredibly complex and robust, that every emotion can be boiled down to having a survival benefit. I think every discussion a out the mystery of consciousness should be framed from the point of view of survival and fit for the fittest. Imagine building upon those premises with 3 billion years. There would become and has become incredibly nuancesmd ways to achieve that goal. Building and building. If a human were immortal, could never die. Never starve, never drown, never get burnt, whta purpose would emotions serve? None. So you would have to conclude that they goal direct you for survival. So mortality is what separates us when you follow it to the end
I see your point and agree that ultimately natural selection is the driver. Mortality is an essential element in selection. But mortality is only one element in selection and may not be the most important to distinguishing humans from AI.
Thanks for your reply. And probably arguing about symantics, however, you could argue that without mortality, there is no need for natural selection. If things didn't perish, then everything would be suited to any environment. It is 'survival' of the fittest. To survive means to avoid a mortal death. The driving force of natural selection is the mortality of organisms. At a quantum level that is the resisting of entropy. It's in the universes best interest to maintain its lowest energy state's by existing as complex molecules which occupy lower energy states the the combined energy states of the individual atoms. So the driver of mortality is really just entropy in a sense. And natural selection is the universes way of resisting entropy by finding the most suitable way to occupy an environment with the most complex molecules to lower its energy state.
@@ivanjackson806 great point. So as I said, the point of emotions are to lead us towards pleasure or away from pain. If someone has a persisting psychological pain that is greater than a physical pain of taking your life, then that may be why they commit suicide, because the pain would stop. The aversion to pain is greater than the desire for pleasure. Also, the dopaminergic system of the brain pertaining to pleasure and pain works to create homeostasis in conjunction with our endocrine system. When we experience pleasure, we get a relief of endorphins and opioids that feel good, and our body counter balmaces that with the pain of withdrawal. Working rhr other way, let's say I have psychological pain, and I decide to cut myself, my body would release endorphins to counteract the pain and it would feel good. It's all about bringing you back to balance. So an organism that has the ability to feel temporary physical pleasure to mitigate persisting psychological pain, would buy time that may result in a change of circumstances in which the psychological pain would fade and the organism would survive and pass on those traits and characteristics
Superb explanation. I love a person who can explain complex things in simple terms. It shows true understanding. I replied below about "why." Would love to hear your thoughts! May I ask, since this integrated conscious information is specific to novel tasks, does that mean consciousness is extra-axonal? I.e since it's novel, there are no existing cortical pathways.
The course text is Blackmore, Consciousness: A Short Introduction. You can also find good sources on the webpages of Bernard Baars and Stanislas Dehaene. Any editorial comments are my own, so the source is this very video.
Consciousness is an emergent property of every autopoietic (i.e., living, self-sustaining) system and emerges from the reduction of complexity (i.e., perception, representation) of the infinitely complex environment to the relatively few perceptions, i.e. to the model-building, that is necessary for autopoietic self-preservation and survival. These perceptions or models also include system-internal (i.e., within the body) processes, thus forming a self-representation within the representation of the environment. This is the definition of consciousness.
This is definitely one good way to think about consciousness. However it does not really tell us why there is something it is like to be such a system. In other words, it seems that a system could fit your description and still not have conscious experience, in the sense identified by the Hard Problem. GWT doesn't deal with the Hard Problem either, but it is incorrect to say it is primitive or does not consider current biology and neuroscience. In fact, GWT is one of the most empirically support consciousness theory available. So it is perhaps correct to say that it is mechanistic. Most scientists would not consider that a bad thing.
@@pauladroege6026 @pauladroege6026 I just explained the hard problem as well. Never mind if you don't understand autopoiesis, it's incredibly hard. Sorry, but judging from your rather convoluted answer it might take decades to a lifetime to get a grasp of it. It surely did for me. As George Orwell said "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." Sorry but my impression of GWT becomes ever more that of a ridiculously mechanistic Zettelkasten concept that lacks everything that molecular biology, neuroscience, systems theory and thermodynamics have put together in the last 50 years. Oh, and sociology. Luhmann.
That may be your definition of consciousness, but that doesn't in any way make it a valid definition of consciousness. One could very well view consciousness as a mechanistic property. If you're claiming that there are metaphysical aspects to consciousness, those are not supported by any hard science.
@@coloradoing9172 @coloradoing9172 1st, this is a physical/chemical and thus 'mechanistic' definition, 2nd it is not metaphysical, and 3rd it is the only scientific definition of consciousness to date that also solves the Hard Problem of consciousness.
As i understand it, areas of the brain compete for attention and consciousness, riding on the default mode network, chooses what to pay attention to according to more explicit, higher order priorities. The hard problem of consciousness does not exist. Consciousness is not well defined enough to ask questions like that and it's a scientific question anyway, not philosophy.
Hello, my name is Carlos í´m trying to write an article about theories of consciousness , i would like, get some help or guidance in that process , i will hope that maybe we can put in contact so we can speak a little about this topic.
My question is, if consciousness is as IIT says it is, and consciousness is an inherent property or trait of energy and information flow then should we not see a more even spread of consciousness in the universe as opposed to only seeing it arise in very very specific conditions like we see in humans and animals? I say this in comparison to other fundamental properties such as the 4 fundamental forces which we see literally everywhere there is matter/energy. I know they said it is dependent upon integration of information, but I still find it odd that we don't see more cases of consciousness like in plants and such.
According to IIT, consciousness is literally everywhere, including plants and this website. The light switch that carries 1 bit of information is a tiny, tiny bit conscious. This form of consciousness is, of course, vastly different from our own. But the difference is one of degree, not that there is a kind of experience that is conscious as distinct from non-conscious experience. If you find this result implausible, you are not alone.
The biggest problem with understanding consciousness through the lens of information is that external information acts entirely differently. Internally, information is an emergent property of cognitive complexity and that cannot be extended to anywhere else in the universe except another mind.
@Kaiser Basileus Newly formed opinion, consciousness is not a result of information flow, information flow is just a byproduct of all matter (all matter is energy and information flow), consciousness emerges when that information flow becomes self evidencing and aware. Thst awareness of being me in this moment is really just a result of the generative model (what we are) processing experience and feeling states across the axis of time with access to memory of past experiences and potential futures. As you said the internal introspective form of consciousness is just a small part of the larger picture of what we are, but consciousness is no longer all that much of a mystery to me.
Sorry but what's the point of this theory? I've never seen a theory that is more mechanistic and primitive. Sounds like it was from some hundred years ago, completely disregarding all findings of philosophy, biology and brain research since then.
It’s a great 👍 overview. Thank you
This was a great explanation and overview. I haven't seen a lot on GWT otherwise, but regarding IIT, everything else was a bit meh. It's interesting that GWT is very similar to an idea I had regarding recursive reactive information networks for AI agents. I use recursive/reactive because those are specific programming terms.
I'm glad you like the talk. GWT fits nicely with AI info networks because that is how it originated. Bernard Baars (neuroscientist) was working with Stan Franklin (AI network theorist). The original global workspace program, as I understand it, was designed to distribute work assignments. One might wonder if that sort of task is really analogous to the task consciousness performs.
Great video. Thanks for doing this.
My take on it, if you have a moment. Is that the hard problem of 'what it feels like to be me' is not hard at all.
Let's dissect the word 'feel'. To feel something implies an emotional response to stimulus. I don't hear anyone (and I've literally watched everyone on TH-cam about consciousness), talk a out our endocrine system. What separates us from animals is language. Not feelings or conciousness. But what separates us from machines or A. I. is mortality. An A.I. Had no need for feelings as it has no need to be goal directed towards pleasure and away from pain for survival. We could absolutely program that in.
Let's me elaborate on my theory which maybe combines both, the integrated work space would be the working memory enriched with emotions driven from hormonal responses to stimulus. A feed forward system, with conscious being the computer monitor, being fed the calculated output from the CPU with the long term memory being the hard drive and visual representation being the GPU, a crude by analogous view.
Before I dive deep. Let me give you a thought experiment... Imagine like the Truman show. Or that black mirror episode. That an AI followed your every move, and with an Elon musk helmet on, read every thought you had in response to every stimulus you encountered during the day.
Now imagine, if we built a robot, and had it follow the gps path you did and every recreated the day, and projected every thought you had, timed perfectly, so that every stimulus was responded to with the same thought, such as the moment you took a bite into an apple, and thought about that summer in the orchid, the robot would believe it was conscious. It would respond exactly as you did and would. The only difference being we are feeding the thoughts into its head. And you believe that you fed your own into your head? Yet you didn't chose your thoughts. Did you you? They appeared into your head the moment you were stimulated. How is that any different? It's not. We just want to believe it is because we aren't ready to give up freewill and us being unique.
I'm glad you like the video, and I think you're right about the importance of the endocrine system. But you're wrong that no one has connected emotions to consciousness. It's fairly recent, and more prominent in work on animal consciousness. I'd say that emotions, not mortality, is what separates us from AI, and that is a very important difference. You might be interested in the videos in my Consciousness playlist, or this talk on ChatGPT: th-cam.com/video/GH749INcJwI/w-d-xo.html
Thank you for the amazing content!
Regarding the homunculus objection, I was wondering why we shouldn't consider the motor system as the audience of the theatre. I mean, the information that enters consciousness is the only information that affects or even determines our immediate next decisions and initiates movements or one thought in a chain of following thoughts. it's almost like in the process of decision-making, there must be an audience/agent that reacts to the incoming information.
I'm glad you like the video! The motor system is often an 'audience' for the theater, but it's not the only one. Sometimes a person is conscious with no plans to move at all. For GWT, the point is coordination of whatever systems are relevant to the current task, so there is no single audience. Nor need there be.
Wonderfully clear overview. I think you mentioned that the relevant concept of information in IIT is borrowed from enginerring, but if I understand correctly it is actually drawn from its application in communication theory (Shannon-Weaver) and its computational formalization by Chaitin. There is a very interesting debate by Ladyman and Ross in Everything Must Go concerning the role of information-theoretic descriptions for naturalist perspectives, and its role in fundamental physics and the special sciences.
Thanks for your comment. Yes, communication theory is probably the more appropriate field to classify Shannon information. I think of engineering due to the technology of communication out of which the theory developed. I'll look up the debate you mention, because Shannon information is problematic to naturalize, in my view. I'd be interested if others have a solution.
People may be interested in your views on Graziano's Attention Schema Theory. He claims that his theory explains why we feel consciousness. And he claims AST better explains consciousness than GWT, although he admits similarities between GWT and AST.
Maybe I'll make a video about AST one day. The problem with the theory, in my view, is that the schema is not about the world, it's about attention. That means you are representing your self when you are conscious. In contrast, my conscious experience seems to represent the world; it is not a model of myself or my sensory/attention processes. You can see some of my videos on Higher-Order Theory for reasons to think consciousness is about the world, not our own mental states.
@@pauladroege6026 I'm a researcher new to this field so I could be wrong. To my understanding, AST is saying that the brain forms a schema for everything, so it's still about the world, but consciousness only arises when the brain forms a schema of itself. Essentially you only start to have feelings when you start to construct a representation of yourself. It's like a supercomputer can simulate the universe but it does not have consciousness because it does not have a representation of self.
Could it be that the very "hardness" of the Hard Problem is in fact nothing more than how hard it seems to be to accept that there is ultimately NO reason it is like something "to be processing information in this global ignition sort of way"?
Is this a critique of the Hard Problem or of the purported solution?
Ahh but there is a reason. None of these competing theories seems to make what seems to be an obvious point. There is a reason it is "like" something. It comes down to what it is "like." The something is the experience of pain or pleasure. This point doesn't tell us how we experience or feel pain or pleasure, but it does tell us why. Pain and pleasure is not only the fundamental impetus (equivalent of will) but the only impetus. The entire spectrum of experience is nothing more than the spectrum of pain or pleasure. Any integrated experience can be put on one and only one place along the pain pleasure scale. Pain and pleasure is necessary and sufficient to at least explain why we have qualia.
One day someone will respond back about this 🙂
One day has arrived. The challenge is to say why pain and pleasure must be CONSCIOUS. An amoeba, for example, moves toward nourishment and away from toxins, but I would not say it is conscious. Aren't pleasure and pain basically conscious versions of nourishment and toxins?
I'll do some digging thanks. And I would argue that emotions are sensations to lead us towards pleasure ( food) and away from pain. For survival, and although incredibly complex and robust, that every emotion can be boiled down to having a survival benefit. I think every discussion a out the mystery of consciousness should be framed from the point of view of survival and fit for the fittest. Imagine building upon those premises with 3 billion years. There would become and has become incredibly nuancesmd ways to achieve that goal. Building and building.
If a human were immortal, could never die. Never starve, never drown, never get burnt, whta purpose would emotions serve? None. So you would have to conclude that they goal direct you for survival. So mortality is what separates us when you follow it to the end
I see your point and agree that ultimately natural selection is the driver. Mortality is an essential element in selection. But mortality is only one element in selection and may not be the most important to distinguishing humans from AI.
Thanks for your reply. And probably arguing about symantics, however, you could argue that without mortality, there is no need for natural selection. If things didn't perish, then everything would be suited to any environment. It is 'survival' of the fittest. To survive means to avoid a mortal death. The driving force of natural selection is the mortality of organisms. At a quantum level that is the resisting of entropy. It's in the universes best interest to maintain its lowest energy state's by existing as complex molecules which occupy lower energy states the the combined energy states of the individual atoms. So the driver of mortality is really just entropy in a sense. And natural selection is the universes way of resisting entropy by finding the most suitable way to occupy an environment with the most complex molecules to lower its energy state.
. Emotions can cause a person to inflict pain on themself, even take their own life. How would that be working for survival.
Just my thoughts
@@ivanjackson806 great point. So as I said, the point of emotions are to lead us towards pleasure or away from pain. If someone has a persisting psychological pain that is greater than a physical pain of taking your life, then that may be why they commit suicide, because the pain would stop. The aversion to pain is greater than the desire for pleasure.
Also, the dopaminergic system of the brain pertaining to pleasure and pain works to create homeostasis in conjunction with our endocrine system. When we experience pleasure, we get a relief of endorphins and opioids that feel good, and our body counter balmaces that with the pain of withdrawal.
Working rhr other way, let's say I have psychological pain, and I decide to cut myself, my body would release endorphins to counteract the pain and it would feel good.
It's all about bringing you back to balance.
So an organism that has the ability to feel temporary physical pleasure to mitigate persisting psychological pain, would buy time that may result in a change of circumstances in which the psychological pain would fade and the organism would survive and pass on those traits and characteristics
Superb explanation. I love a person who can explain complex things in simple terms. It shows true understanding.
I replied below about "why." Would love to hear your thoughts! May I ask, since this integrated conscious information is specific to novel tasks, does that mean consciousness is extra-axonal? I.e since it's novel, there are no existing cortical pathways.
I'm not sure about this. You'll need an IIT neuroscientist for an answer. Sorry.
could you please attach the sources?
The course text is Blackmore, Consciousness: A Short Introduction. You can also find good sources on the webpages of Bernard Baars and Stanislas Dehaene. Any editorial comments are my own, so the source is this very video.
Consciousness is an emergent property of every autopoietic (i.e., living, self-sustaining) system and emerges from the reduction of complexity (i.e., perception, representation) of the infinitely complex environment to the relatively few perceptions, i.e. to the model-building, that is necessary for autopoietic self-preservation and survival.
These perceptions or models also include system-internal (i.e., within the body) processes, thus forming a self-representation within the representation of the environment.
This is the definition of consciousness.
This is definitely one good way to think about consciousness. However it does not really tell us why there is something it is like to be such a system. In other words, it seems that a system could fit your description and still not have conscious experience, in the sense identified by the Hard Problem. GWT doesn't deal with the Hard Problem either, but it is incorrect to say it is primitive or does not consider current biology and neuroscience. In fact, GWT is one of the most empirically support consciousness theory available. So it is perhaps correct to say that it is mechanistic. Most scientists would not consider that a bad thing.
My monkey brain intuition says you’re wrong, but i hope you have a nice day.
@@pauladroege6026 @pauladroege6026 I just explained the hard problem as well. Never mind if you don't understand autopoiesis, it's incredibly hard. Sorry, but judging from your rather convoluted answer it might take decades to a lifetime to get a grasp of it. It surely did for me. As George Orwell said "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." Sorry but my impression of GWT becomes ever more that of a ridiculously mechanistic Zettelkasten concept that lacks everything that molecular biology, neuroscience, systems theory and thermodynamics have put together in the last 50 years. Oh, and sociology. Luhmann.
That may be your definition of consciousness, but that doesn't in any way make it a valid definition of consciousness. One could very well view consciousness as a mechanistic property. If you're claiming that there are metaphysical aspects to consciousness, those are not supported by any hard science.
@@coloradoing9172 @coloradoing9172 1st, this is a physical/chemical and thus 'mechanistic' definition, 2nd it is not metaphysical, and 3rd it is the only scientific definition of consciousness to date that also solves the Hard Problem of consciousness.
whats with you audio. you should get bluetooth mic for clear sound. yes good content. thanks
As i understand it, areas of the brain compete for attention and consciousness, riding on the default mode network, chooses what to pay attention to according to more explicit, higher order priorities.
The hard problem of consciousness does not exist. Consciousness is not well defined enough to ask questions like that and it's a scientific question anyway, not philosophy.
Amazing explanation 😀
Thanks so much!
thanks for this great explanation it was useful to me with my research on conscoisness 🙂
That's great! We need lots of people working on this problem.
Hello, my name is Carlos í´m trying to write an article about theories of consciousness , i would like, get some help or guidance in that process , i will hope that maybe we can put in contact so we can speak a little about this topic.
Sure. Theories of consciousness are tricky to understand.
My question is, if consciousness is as IIT says it is, and consciousness is an inherent property or trait of energy and information flow then should we not see a more even spread of consciousness in the universe as opposed to only seeing it arise in very very specific conditions like we see in humans and animals? I say this in comparison to other fundamental properties such as the 4 fundamental forces which we see literally everywhere there is matter/energy. I know they said it is dependent upon integration of information, but I still find it odd that we don't see more cases of consciousness like in plants and such.
According to IIT, consciousness is literally everywhere, including plants and this website. The light switch that carries 1 bit of information is a tiny, tiny bit conscious. This form of consciousness is, of course, vastly different from our own. But the difference is one of degree, not that there is a kind of experience that is conscious as distinct from non-conscious experience. If you find this result implausible, you are not alone.
The biggest problem with understanding consciousness through the lens of information is that external information acts entirely differently. Internally, information is an emergent property of cognitive complexity and that cannot be extended to anywhere else in the universe except another mind.
@Kaiser Basileus Newly formed opinion, consciousness is not a result of information flow, information flow is just a byproduct of all matter (all matter is energy and information flow), consciousness emerges when that information flow becomes self evidencing and aware. Thst awareness of being me in this moment is really just a result of the generative model (what we are) processing experience and feeling states across the axis of time with access to memory of past experiences and potential futures. As you said the internal introspective form of consciousness is just a small part of the larger picture of what we are, but consciousness is no longer all that much of a mystery to me.
Sorry but what's the point of this theory? I've never seen a theory that is more mechanistic and primitive. Sounds like it was from some hundred years ago, completely disregarding all findings of philosophy, biology and brain research since then.