How Much Do We Actually Know About Consciousness? - Patrick House - #551

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Patrick House. He's a neuroscientist and writer whose research focuses on free will and how mind control parasites alter their host's behavior. If it wasn't for us experiencing it, the universe would give us no indication that consciousness even exists. The most fundamental part of human experience has many proposed explanations, but just how well grounded are these? And what are we missing? Expect to learn why removing parts of the brain change some aspects of the self, but not all of them. What it's like for animals who can put half of their brain to sleep at once. How the brain is intimately linked with timekeeping. Why almost all explanations of consciousness are unsatisfactory. What the future of brain research looks like. And much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Patrick House.
There's a quote that says, life is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel. What do you think that means?

**Patrick House** (1:23)
Oh, I think it's exactly inverted. There's, I think there's way more tragedy when you zoom in at the kind of chaos and nightmare of what's happening inside an individual single cell, which is kind of how I got interested in the brain. So yeah, I think that gets it exactly wrong. Who said that?

**Chris Williamson** (1:42)
Should I send an errata? Yeah. Well, the way that I see it as well is I would agree that the people that have greater depth of insight are the ones that also have a greater capacity for suffering.

**Patrick House** (1:56)
Yeah. I mean, like the way that I see kind of the modern brain and the modern, all the kind of legacy issues we have to deal with is basically we're downstream of a single cell from 3 billion years ago who was too timid to die, and we've inherited all of its kind of self-consciousness and all of its quirks and foibles. We're dealing with these things now, like, for example, what medicine, all of medicine and all of science, all of biological science have to deal with. But it's fundamentally just downstream of this one cell that couldn't give up. I think there's a lot of that that is perhaps humorous, but most of it's a tragedy.
Evolution is a long, unbroken line of most things dying off, so.

**Chris Williamson** (2:45)
That's a good point. And for the most part as well, the ever the more anxious, ever the more concerned, neurotic, overthinking version of that, usually being the adaptive one.

**Patrick House** (2:58)
Yeah, well, so I've been thinking about this a little bit recently with respect to the way you just described that, the ever anxious, overthinking, et cetera.
I actually believe that there's a variation in the ways that people simulate what happens in their head. So basically if a single event happens, something happens in your world. You're at a party and conversation goes around and you, let's say you miss the opportunity for a well-timed precision joke that you know when you simulate it in your head would have killed, right? And then some people will not let that go. We'll think about that. There's a whole phrase in French, staircase wit, right? Which is the idea that if you kind of don't say something at a party, you'll figure out the exact right answer. The wittiest response will come to you on the staircase as you're leaving the party. Which fundamentally, I mean, so you could take that as just a kind of side anecdote, or maybe again one of these cute little aphorisms that artists and people throw around. But what it fundamentally means is something profound about the brain, which is that we are constantly simulating, we are constantly rehearsing in our mind that which just happened, that which is about to happen in the future. I would guess that there are some people, those that are perhaps neurotically inclined or anxiety inclined, those are people that rehearse and simulate more and more and more. Whether or not those people end up being better at being comedians or more likely to throw a tragedy onto the world, I don't know, but I think it comes from simulation.

**Chris Williamson** (4:37)
Yes. I would be tempted to agree. I think there's an interesting difference between Daniel Kahneman and Daniel Gilbert's two views of happiness. One being based on meaning, almost like a retrospective, a happy life is one which in retrospect, you're glad you lived and the other one, Dan Gilbert's is the lying on a lilo with a cocktail in your hand, 23 hours a day for the remainder of time.