Lynne Malcolm: What is consciousness? It may be one of hardest questions you could ask. For thousands of years it's been in the realm of philosophy and deep contemplation. Now the scientific study of consciousness is a dynamic new field.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm.

Today, we contemplate this big question with a neuroscientist:

Olivia Carter: So I guess my real interest is really understanding the role of the brain in consciousness. The easy problem is really what is it that's changing, and we will talk about a brain but you might argue that there'd be some other system, it doesn't have to be a brain, that allows an experience to happen.

Lynne Malcolm: A philosopher:

David Chalmers: For me the hard problem of consciousness is how is it that all this physical processing in the brain should somehow give rise to conscious experience? Why doesn't it all go on in the dark without any consciousness? Why aren't we just giant robots or what philosophers sometimes call zombies?

Lynne Malcolm: And a Buddhist scholar:

Alan Wallace: Mindbody problem is a mindbody problem for us, yes, but not for the Buddhists. If you want to solve the mindbody problem, do what scientists have done in every other field; carefully observe the mind, carefully observed the body, and the brain in particular, and then carefully observe the interaction. We in the modern West have not done that. We keep on following the same limited route of let's just focus on brain behaviour and first-person reports of more.

Lynne Malcolm: Earlier this year, the Australian Institute for Contemplative Practice held a public forum on the nature of consciousness in Canberra. And today, some highlights from that discussion. Their aim is to have an open-minded and collaborative dialogue.

The first speaker was Professor David Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University and New York University. He works in the philosophy of mind, and in cognitive science.

David Chalmers: Okay, so I see consciousness as one of the fundamental data of our existence, it's just a manifest fact that where consciousness is possibly the most familiar thing in the world to most of us. At the same time it's one of the things that is really the hardest to explain, so we are not going to have a complete theory of the universe or of ourselves without a theory of consciousness. But still right now we are not at the point where we can remotely integrate it into our theories of the universe. So this is for me what makes it such a fascinating problem I think for any scientist, for any philosopher, for anyone who is contemplating the human mind or the world, and I think we're at a very interesting point right now in 2017 where the field is becoming mature and there is a developed science and philosophy of consciousness, but still that moment you just step back and say, wow, this is really puzzling and something we are just beginning to come to grips with.

What is consciousness? For me it's in the subjective experience of the mind and the world, and the essential part is the subjectivity, the way it is feeling like something from the inside, there is something that's like to be me, the conscious being, I presume there is something that's like to be you, and we could argue over whether there is something that's like, for example, to be a bee. If there is, then the bee is conscious. If there is not, then the bee is not conscious.

People like to use metaphors to describe consciousness. There is any number of metaphors out there. William James and many others have talked about this stream of consciousness, consciousness as a kind of a stream or a river. People have also talked about consciousness as a theatre or the stage, the part that's under the spotlight. The metaphors gradually get updated over time. I'm rather fond of the idea of consciousness as an inner movie, projected onto the screen of consciousness. Many people in the 20th century like to think about consciousness as a kind of current databank for a computer. But I've never actually heard anyone talking about the website of consciousness or the Facebook feed of consciousness. But someone did say to me they thought their consciousness was rather like a Twitter feed. Maybe for kids these days it's like the Snapchat of consciousness, I don't know.

But the one I am rather fond of that is tied to a technology that's quite big in 2017 is the idea of consciousness as a kind of virtual reality. Virtual reality is really the devices for replicating many of the ways that the world affects our consciousness—perceptually, auditorily and so on—but not with the usual kinds of physical causes. And what this in effect does is help put the focus on the subjective experiential parts of reality. Our consciousness as a virtual reality has visual parts, there's the images, seeing you right now. It has auditory parts, I can hear my voice. It has tactile parts, I can experience my body, it has various bodily parts, a little bit of hunger, it has emotions, you know, feeling good about how the panel is going so far, it has memories, it has a stream of conscious thinking. So it's actually richer than any virtual reality you'll get in 2017, which are mostly stuck on the vision and the audition.

But think of it as an extremely rich, multidimensional virtual reality. And the key is that you are there at the centre experiencing it directly. Each of the aspects of this virtual reality, what makes them conscious is that they feel like something from the inside. If there's something going on inside the virtual reality device that never bubbles up and affects you, it never seems like anything to you, it never affects what you're like, then we say that's unconscious. And sure, it seems that most of what goes on in the brain is unconscious because there's so much capacity in the brain and relatively little of it makes it to consciousness. So much of the brain is unconscious, but this part which is just tremendously important to us is what's on the surface of consciousness.

For me, there's any number of questions you can raise about consciousness but for me the big one has always been how can you explain it? Why does it exist and how can we give some kind of scientific theory of it. Absolutely it's got something to do with the brain. At least in humans you need a brain to be conscious, and activity in the brain is going to lead to consciousness. Change the activity in the brain and you will typically change the state of consciousness.

There's any number of correlations between the brain and consciousness, but nothing about that yet yields an explanation. So for me the hard problem of consciousness is how is it that all this physical processing in the brain should somehow give rise to conscious experience. Why doesn't it all go on in the dark without any consciousness? Why aren't we just giant robots or what philosophers sometimes call zombies, doing all this processing, behaving, walking, talking, but with the lights off inside, with nothing going on. I don't know, maybe that's how it is for some people but I suspect not. Anyway, it's certainly not how it is for me.

For me there is actually conscious experience here and I suspect very strongly that for all of you, you are undergoing something like the same thing. But how can we explain that fact, how can we give an account of that in terms of the physical processes of the brain?

Lynne Malcolm: David Chalmers speaking at a forum on the nature of consciousness, organised by The Contemplary. David Chalmers is well known for using the phrase 'the hard problem' to describe the mystery of consciousness.

Olivia Carter is a neuroscientist. She's Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne and was executive director of the International Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness. She explains the current state of play of the neuroscience of consciousness.

Olivia Carter: So within the biology, if we say it's something about a brain, what is it about the human brain that allows consciousness? It's not inherent in the biological structure, it's something about the way this brain is working. I would say that that generally falls into three main categories, what's special within the human brain, and some would say it's a certain type of neuron.

We know with really impressive detail the different classes of neurons throughout the brain, and if you don't know too much about neuroanatomy, if you think about the brain as a fist, and we have the cortex around the outside of the brain. The cortex itself is this layer, imagine it's about a centimetre thick, it's probably not quite that thick, but as it goes around there are different layers of different types of neurons.

So it's even clear that neurons are feeding in and feeding out of certain areas of the brain, neurons coming out from layer 5, they go in through layer 4. So there's a lot of specificity. It used to be that they thought there were 10 different types of neurons, but now they've got in and looked and it's closer to 30,000 to 50,000 types of different neurons can be identified.

And some would argue that it's certain types…I mean, in the past people talked about pyramidal cells, the really big ones. If you ever hear about experiments where they stick electrodes into people, if any of you are familiar with Christof Koch's work with the Jennifer Aniston neurons and the Halle Berry neurons where they basically show that these particular types of neurons, they have found a Bill Clinton neuron, and it will fire every time it sees a picture of Bill Clinton or hears the name 'Bill Clinton'. So it's not just an image sensitivity, it seems to be sensitive to concepts.

So whenever you hear about studies that have shown a neuron that fires to X, they're talking about the pyramidal neurons. So it could be that they happen to be the special ones or it could be that they are just the biggest and they are the thing you hear the loudest. It's still unclear, absolutely unclear. There seems to be these pyramidal neurons are very important in information coding in the brain, I guess you'd say.

One thing that these particular neurons are important for, one reason they're a candidate for being very important in consciousness, is that they project back into the middle of the brain. Inside the middle of this cortex is a large structure called the thalamus, often considered a relay station. So we know, for example, for decades and decades we have known that some parts of the brain are more specialised to language and some to vision, and if you knock this part out you can't see or if you knock…you know. But for the language part to know what to talk about, it has to have access to the vision part. And memory, if you are doing some sort of mathematics, the brain has to communicate with each other. And it's quite clear, one thing that we do know is that information comes from the cortex and it gets fed back into the thalamus and shot back out again. So you've got these loops.

One big theory of consciousness is that basically it's this reverberation, is that magically consciousness happens when…these theories don't necessarily say it has to be the pyramidal neurons but they will say if information is coming in through the thalamus, and you will hear about these cortical thalamic loops, and you get these reverberations, these types of things are well established.

What is totally unclear is whether the firing of that neuron, allowing it to be accessible to other parts, is what is required…that is consciousness. So some people would say it's that that is conscious. If you push them and said…the sorts of questions are why, that certainly doesn't answer the hard problem and I completely agree. And at this point it is also not an answer to the easy problem because it's absolutely not completely established. It seems to be that the sorts of things, like visual perception and emotional processing, that these types of loops do exist and they seem to be important in working memory, whether or not you need working memory as a component of consciousness, and such is not clear either.

And I guess one third step within the brain side of things is that maybe it's not about exactly the type of neurons, it's maybe not exactly about, well, it's when these different areas are connecting and talking to each other. But it's when the relevant population of neurons is firing in synchrony at just the right frequency. So maybe that's the critical thing, when the firing is at just the right frequency, that's what consciousness is.

One thing that is sort of interesting is that…most people have their different pet theories, but it's also the case that there is a lot of overlap in those theories. As I said, the pyramidal neurons, they feed back into the thalamus, that's the main thing they do. When you've got the cortical neurons and the thalamic neurons all firing together, they tend to fire in synchrony. So there is an interesting…people don't actually talk about it all that often because people, scientists often want their territory, but the general consistent story that comes up seems to be when…or if you are slipping into coma or out of anaesthesia, this type of synchrony and this large brain coordination and the thalamus…if you have a stroke in the thalamus, you're in a coma. If there is no activity in the thalamus, you are not conscious. That has been established.

So there's more and more I guess a little bit of convergence, but it's extremely unsatisfying if you are interested in…it's interesting if you are interested in how the brain works, but if you want to understand what is actually critical to consciousness, you are left with pretty much what I said. There's a lot of complex stuff happening in the brain. It seems to be coordinated, one component of those things may or may not be the critical step to consciousness, or maybe it's the three things all together.

Lynne Malcolm: Associate Professor Olivia Carter form the University of Melbourne. She's speaking at a recent public discussion on the Nature of Consciousness run by not-for-profit organisation, The Contemplary.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm.

Philosopher David Chalmers suggests that the objective scientific methods being used in neuroscience to understand consciousness may eventually solve what he refers to as 'the easy problem'. He admits though that probably whoever solves this so-called 'easy problem' would be up for a Nobel Prize.

However the 'hard problem' is to capture the subjective experience of consciousness, and he says objective scientific methods won't do it.

David Chalmers: There is a systematic kind of gap here between what you are going to get from neuroscience and what you are going to get for understanding consciousness. It's not just an accident, it is not just where we happen to be in 2017, that a purely neurobiological theory gives you a gap to consciousness. My view is it's principled but any physical theory is ultimately going to be a matter of objective structure and objective dynamics, great for explaining behaviour but will leave a gap to consciousness.

So one question then is where do you leave it? Do you say, okay then, science isn't up to the job and we need something else to approach consciousness. That's not actually my view at all, I'm a very big fan of the science of consciousness, I helped to found the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness that Olivia has also been very closely involved in. I think the science of consciousness has actually been making amazing progress in the last few years.

I think we just need to make a distinction between…let's call it reductionist science and non-reductionist science. Some people out there want to explain consciousness wholly in terms of the brain, wholly in terms of physical mechanisms. I think ultimately we can reduce it to a brain process in the same way that we roughly reduced the gene to molecular processes involving DNA and many processes in life to processes in molecular biology and biochemistry, and that doesn't seem to leave any remaining gap in the way that consciousness does. Many people think eventually we will get rid of that gap for consciousness. I'm a fan of people trying to do that but I happen to believe it's not going to work, and that's going to fail for systematic reasons. That doesn't mean you don't have to do science. Not everything in science is reductionistic.

For example, physics is in a certain sense not reductionistic. It doesn't try to explain space or time or mass in terms of something more basic, it just takes them as what they are, primitives in the universe, acknowledges their existence, tries to characterise their structure and give a theory of the fundamental laws that govern them. My view is something like this is what we have to do for consciousness, as philosophers and ultimately as scientists; acknowledge its existence, try to reduce it to something else if you like, maybe that's not going to work, nonetheless you can then continue to do science with it by taking consciousness as a given, as a primitive feature in your theories, try to characterise its structure and then try to connect it to everything else in the world, for example, the structures in the brain or, more fundamentally, to certain basic structures in physical theory.

So then on this view we take consciousness as a fundamental property and we try to articulate the fundamental laws that govern it and connect it to processes in the brain. We are certainly not there yet. I mean, 20 years ago I wrote a book, The Conscious Mind, for which the subtitle was In Search of a Fundamental Theory. We're looking for a fundamental theory of consciousness, the fundamental laws governing consciousness.

And in 2017, well, we've made quite a lot of progress on the science and on correlations between brain and consciousness. Only relatively limited progress on the path towards a fundamental theory of consciousness. Still, there are some ideas which are out there, and I think the science is actually gradually moving in that direction. If you look around at the science of consciousness right now, it's really night and day compared to 25 years ago. There is a very, very thriving area of neuroscientists and psychologists, as well as philosophers and computer scientists, physicians and so on taking consciousness very seriously. I'd say it has taken a certain form.

One of the things that is distinctive about the science of consciousness is that it takes subjective data seriously. People like to think of science as being all about the objective world, it's all about objective measurements, and therefore consciousness is going to be hard to integrate into science because it's essentially subjective. And for a long time that view held sway in the 20th century with behaviourism and later at least the early stirrings of cognitive science took the view you've got to treat the human brain completely objectively, and so there was no room for consciousness. I think the recent science of consciousness that Olivia was characterising really well is distinctive in that it takes subjective data seriously. It says there are data about conscious experience that each of us has as human beings. I can do an experiment on my own consciousness by seeing, you know, am I conscious of a certain stimulus, the red splotch of colour from the clock, for example, I'm conscious about in my visual field, I'm not conscious of certain other things.

With subjects in psychology experiments we ask them to report what they are conscious of, and we use that as data. We trust their verbal report. Someone says 'I'm conscious of that stimulus, I'm not conscious of that,' and unless there is some reason to believe otherwise, we take them at their word and we treat that as subjective data, and that's a way to try and bring subjectivity back within science, maybe in a fairly limited way for now via these verbal reports. But once you do that, once you've got the subjective first-person data of consciousness, as something science can deal with, then you can connect it to the third-person data, measuring the brain, measuring behaviour, and try to come up with a science of consciousness that puts those two things into coordination. I think that's a lot of what is going on right now in the science of consciousness, trying at the same time study the objective structure of the brain and behaviour and the subjective structure of consciousness and build bridges between them.

Lynne Malcolm: Professor David Chalmers from ANU and New York University.

The third speaker at this forum on the 'nature of consciousness' is Dr Alan Wallace. He's one of the most prolific writers on Tibetan Buddhism in the west. He continually endeavours to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices with a western scientific study of the mind.

Alan Wallace: What might Buddhism have to contribute here? Buddhism as a religion? I doubt it. Buddhism as a philosophy? Interesting conversation. But Buddhism as a science, because bear in mind Buddhism does not originate from the Eurocentric matrix where we have nice neat categories of religion, science and philosophy, Buddhism is outside the grid. If we ask is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the answer is yes. It's a place called Asia, which widely gets ignored. In 25 years we've made so much progress. By who? Us. But what about people who have been studying it 100 times that long?

Mindbody problem is a mindbody problem for us, yes, but not for the Buddhists. If you want to solve the mindbody problem, do what scientists have done in every other field; carefully observe the mind, carefully observe the body, the brain in particular, and then carefully observe the interaction. We in the modern West have not done that. We keep on following the same limited route of let's just focus on brain and behaviour and first-person reports more. If you look carefully you will find within Buddhism elements that really to my mind have a strong flavour of science. They are empirical, they are critical, they are rigorous and they lead to replicable shifts in perception, in attention, in mindfulness. And we find also, thanks to neuroscientists, they have impact on the brain that are replicable.

So, here's the method. How can we introduce a truly scientific first-person mode of observation and not simply first-person report of somebody else's experience? Methods have been developed, they've been practised for hundreds and hundreds of years. Here it is in a synopsis, and then I'll close.

Quiet your mind. Rest in meta-awareness. The awareness you have of being aware, why not linger there to observe the mind but from a vantage point of stillness, an inner stillness. And then direct your awareness not to the field that scientists have been covering so well, observing the physical, the objective and quantifiable, how about observing the subjective, the qualitative and the nonphysical? Like, what's more nonphysical than your love for your children really? Your experience of love, your experience of anger, observe from stillness the movements of the mind. The rising of recollections, of thoughts, of images. Develop the ability, which can be quite superb, of lucid dreaming, the perfect laboratory for understanding the mind, exploring the mind, because the whole laboratory is mind-made and does not have any physical aspects to it at all. A dreamscape is totally nonphysical and does not follow the laws of physics.

Develop this inner stillness and clarity, and from that stillness observe the movements of the mind, without identifying with them, without getting caught up in them, without liking and disliking them, develop an internal objectivity that you are not caught up in cognitive fusion, fused with every desire, emotion and so forth, but observing them from stillness, observing them arise and pass. And then do that for 40,000 hours.

So cultivate that. What happens? Put it this way, what do they say happens? And that I can tell you, as a Buddhist scholar, this is what they say happens. First of all you are able to distinguish between the stillness of your awareness and movements of your mind, you are not caught up and carried away by every doggone thing that comes to mind. First step.

Secondly, you are able to simultaneously be aware of the stillness of your awareness and the movements of the mind. And you observe them discerningly but not with like, dislike and so forth. And then you go deeper into that, it becomes more and more effortless, and now we fast-forward, time-lapse photography. What happens? As you are developing Samadhi, this total unification of the flow of awareness? You take all that flow, that stream of consciousness and you channel it all into one domain, it all flows into the mental. You lose any sense of being embodied because your awareness is simply withdrawn from the somatic field.

Wide awake, no zombies here, no trance, no weirdo stuff, it's just that you are extremely focused. Do that again another 10,000, 20,000 hours and then you'll find over time gradually and not homogenously, the sheer content, the volume, the amplitude of activities of the blind subside. And in that field it becomes reduced to a kind of vacuity, a sheer empty space, very much as if you were brilliantly lucid, in a state of deep dreamless sleep, and radiantly awake, aware of virtually nothing. The culmination of meta-awareness, the awareness of awareness, but now instead of like a 100-watt bulb that you have ordinarily, this is a 1,000-watt bulb.

And you come now to an unmediated experience of the very nature of consciousness. You've tapped into a dimension of consciousness that is unknown in modern Eurocentric civilisation because we have not been looking. This is a dimension of consciousness that is unelaborated, simple, fundamental. In the Buddhist view, this is common to insects and mammals and reptiles and amphibians. You've explored the nature of consciousness the good old-fashioned way. If you want to understand something, look at it carefully.

Presenting in this way, this is an invitation for dialogue because with the kind of background I have, I have only everything to learn from Olivia and nothing to add about what the brain is doing in all of this. And David, with all of his background in analytical philosophy and all these branches of philosophy, I would just sit for 10 years and listen to him. But this is not the kind of training I have. But this also, this is something that we don't have in the modern west, is a time for unification, for collaboration, for recognising complementarity. And if there eventually becomes a team, a very interdisciplinary cross-cultural team of people that solve the problem, they, like those who are working on the genome project, they will all collectively take a bow and not one person saying 'I did it, I did it'. Thank you very much for your attention.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Alan Wallace, Buddhist practitioner and writer.

Thanks to the Institute for Contemplative Practice for the recording of their recent panel 'The Big Question: The Nature of Consciousness'.

Head to the All in the Mind website for more information about The Contemplary and the speakers you've heard today.

Our sound engineer today is Isabella Tropiano. I'm Lynne Malcolm.

Thanks for joining me. Bye for now.