Oded Balaban

Oded Balaban — University of Haifa — balaban@research.haifa.ac.il

A friendly critique of the channel Ciclos del Tiempo

(“El Misterio de la Conciencia: La Explicación Completa” [The Mystery of Consciousness: The Complete Explanation], Ciclos del Tiempo channel, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/reel/1157716113259337)

I recently criticized a video that promised consciousness was going to change the whole of physics, and that looked for its address first in the neurons, then in the microtubules, then in the collapse of the wave function. The one I am discussing now, from a channel called Ciclos del Tiempo, takes up the same matter and is almost its opposite. Toward the end, the narrator warns that the observer who creates reality, and the mind that runs on quantum energy, have no experimental support whatever, and he describes all of it as physics vocabulary mixed with a wish that the universe revolve around oneself.

The video separates with care what has been demonstrated, what enjoys consensus and what is pure speculation. It dismantles the myth of Benjamin Libet. It reports that the most serious test ever mounted to settle the dispute between the two great rival theories of consciousness ended with no winner, and it reports this even though the theory that came off worse was the one it seems to prefer itself. It gives the defense of the theories it attacks, not only the attack. And faced with the hardest case, that of a patient who had gone months without responding to anything and of whom nobody knew whether there was still someone inside, it says that the data are not enough to know what was going through her head, and that it is not going to invent it.

The Libet myth that the video defuses deserves a note. In the nineteen eighties Benjamin Libet measured that the brain begins preparing to move the wrist about half a second before one feels the urge to move it, and from there came the headline that we decide without noticing and that free will is therefore a mirage. The conclusion fails on two counts. Aaron Schurger showed in 2012 that this prior activity may be an artifact of averaging noise rather than an order issued in advance; and, before any data at all, to time an urge to move the wrist, a gesture that decides nothing, is not to time a decision. Wanting to marry, or to vote for someone, does not happen at a point on the clock; one wants, and the reasons, if they come, come afterward. That the brain should already be running before the act is over scandalizes only someone who was expecting a soul to move the neurons first. The myth needs the dualism it prides itself on refuting.

I checked the facts one by one and they hold. The wager, the rubber hand experiment, the split-brain patient, blindsight, the study of patients with no apparent response, the statements about animals. There is no catching it out on the side of error.

And that is exactly why it is worth arguing with. Refuting a charlatan teaches nothing, because the charlatan loses on his ornaments and one is left with the impression that the ornaments were the problem. The prudent version commits the same error as the mystical one.

My objection fits in a single line. The video expels the subject in its first half and needs him again in the second, without noticing. Everything that follows is the detail of that operation.

Elisabeth of Bohemia’s question, without Elisabeth

The video begins where one ought to begin. René Descartes publishes the Meditations in 1641, splits the world into two classes of things, those that take up space and do not think and the one that thinks and takes up no space, and since he at once needs them to touch somewhere, he picks the pineal gland. In 1643 Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia writes to him and puts the question he could not answer: how does something without a body push a body. The video tells this well and says, rightly, that a hole was left there.

It then offers the following as a historical gain. We used to ask where the soul is; today we ask how a physical system can feel itself. And it adds that the second question is stranger and, for the first time, open to experiment.

The second question is not new. It is Elisabeth’s with one substance crossed out. She asked how the unextended moves the extended; the video asks how the extended feels. In both cases it is taken for granted that there are two orders of things and that to explain is to find the mechanism connecting them. Erasing one of the two terms does not dissolve the problem, it leaves the hole without the thing that used to cover it.

Descartes at least had the decency to point at a place and to be wrong in a way that could be checked. Today’s account keeps the question and suppresses the place, which is no progress but the same debt with fewer guarantees. The gland has not disappeared from the story. It has been left without an address.

The homunculus comes back in through the window

The video demolishes the little man inside very well. If there is someone in the head watching a screen, what does he watch with, and the chain never ends. Correct, and well explained. The conclusion it draws is that there is no place where everything comes together and someone looks, but many processes at once and a system that assembles an orderly story about all of them. The self, it says, is not a spectator but the story.

Three paragraphs earlier it had explained its thesis with the image of a phone screen, where one touches an icon and believes one is running the program. Conscious experience, it says, might be the interface the brain builds for us.

For whom, if it has just proved that there is nobody? An interface without a user is not an interface, but mere wiring. The same happens with Michael Gazzaniga’s interpreter, that system which manufactures on the spot an explanation of what one has done: an interpreter interprets for someone. And the same with the punch line, because a story without a reader is not a story, but mere ink, the liquid that makes Mont Blanc, Parker and Tintenkuli work, those pens made for driving into the wooden floors of schools.

The little man was fired in one paragraph and rehired in the next in a different uniform. This is no slip of the pen. It is what happens when the subject is denied and goes on being needed so that the words of the explanation may keep some content. Model, interface, story, prediction, representation: every one of those notions is relative to someone for whom it is what it is. Suppress that someone and the nouns stay while the meaning leaves.

A prediction that nothing corrects

The centerpiece of the explanation is the idea Anil Seth calls controlled hallucination. Perception would not be a mirror of the world but a prediction the brain makes without pause and corrects with the information coming from the senses. One does not see what is there, one sees one’s brain’s best hypothesis about what is there.

One would have to ask what corrects it. If what is there is never reached, nothing can correct the hypothesis, because correcting demands contact with that against which one corrects. To know that the portrait resembles the sitter one has to have seen the sitter. A theory of perception that denies access cannot explain the one mechanism it depends on.

And in passing it rebuilds the Cartesian theater it came to demolish. If what I see is a model my brain shows me, I am shut inside the model and the world has been left on the other side, out of reach. It is the problem of the external world of the Meditations, now with neurons and with a better press.

The way out does not lie in improving the model. It lies in noticing that consciousness is always consciousness of something, a relation and not a picture someone inspects from within. Seeing is not comparing a painting with an original one has never seen. It is my dealing with the thing, and that dealing can fail, and when it fails the thing itself corrects it.

The experiments say the opposite of what they are made to say

The rubber hand experiment of Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen is presented like this: the hand was not yours, you knew it, and even so the brain decided that it was. It is worth looking at who it was that knew. The illusion is reported by a subject who does not fall for it. If the self were manufactured by the apparatus, nobody would be left to notice the discrepancy between what he knows and what he feels.

Wilder Penfield’s case is stronger still, and the video itself points to it as the detail that changes everything. In the operating room in Montreal, with the skull open and the patient awake, the electrode moved the patient’s hand and the patient did not say that he had moved it. He said the surgeon had moved it for him. He told his own action apart from one produced from outside, and told it apart perfectly.

The video reads that as showing that the feeling of being the author lives somewhere in the brain and that something manufactures it. What the experiment exhibits is a subject who gets it right. If the self were a tale told by the interpreter, Penfield’s patient would have said that he moved the hand himself. He said he did not, and he was right. The one who corrects the error is precisely the one who, on the thesis, does not exist.

With the split brain something similar happens, and worse. The hemisphere that speaks invents without blinking a reason for what the left hand did, and the reason is coherent and false. The video generalizes: we would all do something of the sort. But let us notice how we know that the patient is confabulating. We know it because the experimenter knows what each hemisphere saw and can compare. Detecting a confabulation presupposes a criterion of getting it right. If all our explanations were confabulation, so would be the one asserting that they all are, and the thesis eats itself before dessert.

Blindsight proves that experience was never a function

Lawrence Weiskrantz described patients who guess far above chance about things they swear they cannot see, and he called it blindsight. The case the video recounts is that of the man known as T. N., who after two strokes lost completely the areas of the cortex that process vision and walked down a corridor full of obstacles without touching a single one, seeing, by his own account, absolutely nothing.

The video concludes that seeing and feeling that one sees are two different things, and that there is an enormous amount of processing with nobody inside noticing it. But let us consider what that means for the underlying question. The function was carried out in full and there was no experience. One might say that what was missing was another function, that of noticing, and that experience lives there. But noticing was, in the earlier cases, what the one who corrected the error was doing, and that one was not another line in the list. He was the one reading it. Experience, then, was not a line missing from the inventory of functions. It was never a line on that list.

David Chalmers is right, and he is right for a reason the video cannot state without coming apart. The hard problem does not consist in some ingredient being missing that will one day turn up in the inventory. It consists in physics having been built four centuries ago to keep what can be weighed and counted, while the one who weighs and counts does not figure on its own list. To be astonished at not finding experience in there is to be astonished at not finding the fish in a net woven so that the fish would swim straight through.

The tie that does not call for better experiments

The most valuable part of the video is its least known episode. The defenders of the two great theories, global workspace and integrated information, did something almost without precedent: they sat down together and agreed in writing, before seeing a single piece of data, which result would confirm each theory and which would refute it. An independent team ran the experiments. Neither of the two came out clean.

The usual reading is that refinement is lacking. There is another. Both theories were looking for a place and a signature, an area in front or an area behind, a wave of activity with a certain shape. An empty result is exactly what one should expect when one is looking for the address of something that has no address. The experiment did not fail. It answered that the question was badly put, which is the one answer no protocol registers in advance.

The irony is supplied by the video itself. Christof Koch bet in 1998 that in twenty-five years we would know how neurons produce consciousness, and the theory he hoped to win with is one of the two that came out wounded. He paid with a case of wine and proposed another twenty-five-year bet. It falls due in 2048. Such perseverance!

The tie was followed, as was to be expected, by the quarrel. In those same days one hundred and twenty-four researchers signed an open letter calling integrated information theory a pseudoscience. The video, and this does it credit, gives the reply as well, that a theory can be wrong without being a pseudoscience, and that confusing the two is trading an argument for an accusation.

The only test that worked

In 2006 Adrian Owen put into a scanner a twenty-three-year-old woman who had gone five months without responding to anything and asked her, aloud, to imagine playing tennis. The supplementary motor area lit up, the same one that lights up in healthy volunteers. He then asked her to imagine walking through the rooms of her house, and a different area lit up, again the same one as in the healthy. In 2024 an international study of two hundred and forty-one patients with no apparent response found that about one in four showed something similar.

Let us stop at what it was that proved there was someone there. It was not that an area lit up, because areas light up on their own all the time. It was that she obeyed. Two different orders, two different answers, correct, on request and repeated. The scanner only said where to look. The proof was the answer to someone addressing her.

In the one truly conclusive case in the whole video, the criterion that worked was not a substrate, nor a number measuring integration, nor a neural signature. It was the second person. Someone answered when she was spoken to.

And there the theoretical half of the video pulls the floor out from under its moral half. The video holds, rightly, that if there are conscious people without anyone knowing it, the decisions about their care change. That conclusion requires that in the scanner there be someone who can be harmed. If the self were a story the brain tells itself, there would be nobody to harm, and the medical consequence would be left without a subject to protect. What the video asserts at the end needs what it denied at the beginning.

I will add something that tells against my own position, because leaving it out would be cheating. I hold elsewhere that the mark of the subject is the initiative of asking, the act of someone who lacks something and for whom something is at stake. Owen’s patient does not ask. She answers. My criterion is more demanding than the one medicine uses to decide that there is somebody at home, and medicine cannot afford to wait for the patient to frame a question. That refutes nothing, but it marks how far each thing reaches, and I would rather say it myself before it is said to me.

The flame

The video closes by saying that one is real as a flame is real, not as a thing but as something that happens, an occurrence, an event.

The metaphor turns over in his hand. A flame is a physical process that nobody needs to be. It is described entirely from outside, in oxygen and temperature, and no remainder is left over to explain. If the self were like a flame, no question would remain, and the video had said one line earlier that the question is still open. To explain the self it chose precisely an example of the very thing it had just granted it cannot explain.

The last line is more revealing still: not bad, it says, for something that does not even know what it is. Whoever does not know something is someone. Flames are ignorant of nothing.

The question of how a physical system feels itself will go on without an answer for as long as it is put that way, because it asks for the postal address of a relation. It is the old error of looking for the image inside the mirror: one turns it around and finds glass and silvering, never the room. My cat sometimes goes to look behind the mirror.

The video ends by asking the viewer to look at his hands. It is good advice, and the only one in the whole hour that calls for no theory at all. To look at your hands you have to be someone.

Bibliography

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Botvinick, Matthew, and Jonathan Cohen. 1998. “Rubber Hands ‘Feel’ Touch That Eyes See.” Nature 391: 756.

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Ciclos del Tiempo. n.d. “El Misterio de la Conciencia: La Explicación Completa (Nadie Sabe Por Qué Sientes Algo)” [The mystery of consciousness: the complete explanation (nobody knows why you feel anything)]. Facebook. In Spanish. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1157716113259337

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