Considering Consciousness - Dr Heather Berlin - #146

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh yes, hello humans of Podcast Land, welcome back. My guest today is Heather Berlin. She is a cognitive neuroscientist and a psychologist. And I had one question that I wanted to ask, which was, what is consciousness? We all have a subjective experience of reality around us, but we've just got this big mess of fat and water inside of our heads that makes all the magic happen. So how does it work? In other news, this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. Surfshark VPN is a service that allows you to change your location, hide your IP address and generally become invisible online so that the nasty people on the other side can't track what you're up to. If you listened to last week's episode with Martin Schmaltz, you will know that companies track your IP address and they split test prices, increasing them for some people and decreasing them for others based on where you're browsing from. Thankfully Surfshark VPN stops this from happening. And my favorite use is so that you can access America's Netflix. All of the series, all of the movies that are only available in America, press one button, change your location and you've got access to it all. Simply head to surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom and enter the code modern wisdom at checkout for 83% off and one extra month free. That's surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom, enter the promo code modern wisdom for 83% off and an extra month for free.
Save yourself some money on Amazon, get some new stuff on your Netflix. But for now, please welcome the wise and wonderful Heather Berlin.

**Heather Berlin** (1:51)
I mean, fundamentally, the kind of driving force in my career has been trying to understand the fundamental question of how the physical brain creates our subjective awareness. So basically the neural basis of consciousness. But then I also got really interested in the neural basis of all of these unconscious processes that are motivating our behavior, because much of what we do, the decisions we make, our behaviors are being dictated by things that are happening outside of our awareness, and we're only consciously aware of a very small bit of what's actually happening. We often make up these like post-hoc explanations about why we do things, which are not necessarily the real reasons. So we have a narrative that we tell ourselves. So I'm interested in both the kind of how the physical brain creates our conscious experience or subjective states, as well as the unconscious processes that are motivating us, and explaining how we behave.

**Chris Williamson** (2:48)
Wow. So we got a lot that we can delve into today. We've had a lot of discussions recently about purpose and meaning in life and things like that. But I guess at an even more base level, the fact that we are able to be conscious, the fact that we're beings that can consider our own existence sits before all of that, right?

**Heather Berlin** (3:09)
Yeah. I mean, you know, I think it was Carl Sagan who said like we are a way for the universe, for matter to know itself, right? Because it's basically matter that's organized itself in such a way that it can have subjective states, it can try to understand itself and its place in the universe. It's pretty amazing. But it's very fundamental. I mean, when we talk about consciousness, we don't need language for it. We don't need a sense of self. It's really just pure subjective experience. So like, you know, tasting something sweet, or, you know, seeing the color red, or smelling a rose, and other animals have it. We, you know, assume they do, because they have similar heart that we have. They act as if, you know, they, for example, if you step on a cat's paw, it'll pull away and maybe yell, but it acts as if it's experiencing pain. We'll never know 100% for sure, but then again, I don't know that you're conscious, right? I mean, I assume you are, but.
So we just define it, basically consciousness is first person subjective experience. You know, I just know that I have it. And even when we do experiments, I mean, the only way to really tell is the person has to report, like, did you see it or not? You know, were you consciously aware of that stimuli or not? They have to self report. And we can make some predictions, like with babies, you know, where they look might be what they're attending to or what they're conscious of. But again, it's really this first person's subjective experience that we're trying to understand.

**Chris Williamson** (4:34)
So that's our definition of consciousness that we're working with today.