David Eagleman, Neuroscientist and Author, on the Brain as a Neural Parliament, AI Hallucinations, and Rethinking Democracy with AI

00:33:25 · Dan Turchin, David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:33:25] S2: I'll use this territory for something else. I've read about studies that you've conducted where people who are deaf, maybe they have like a heightened sense of touch, and so they can learn to quote hear through like haptic feedback. That's exactly right. So what we did is [00:33:40] S0: we made a vest with vibratory motors on it that captures sound, and so for a deaf person, we're capturing sound, breaking it up into frequencies from low to high, and deaf people can learn how to understand the language of that and come to hear the world. We shrunk that down to a wristband. I actually ran a company on this for the last ten years. A wristband with vibratory motors on it, it does the same thing. It's capturing sound, turning into patterns of vibration on the wrist, and deaf people can understand the world that way. Because it doesn't matter how the information gets into the cortex, as long as it gets there, the brain will figure out what to do with it.

00:33:40 · David Eagleman, Dan TurchinPlay from here

[00:33:40] S0: we made a vest with vibratory motors on it that captures sound, and so for a deaf person, we're capturing sound, breaking it up into frequencies from low to high, and deaf people can learn how to understand the language of that and come to hear the world. We shrunk that down to a wristband. I actually ran a company on this for the last ten years. A wristband with vibratory motors on it, it does the same thing. It's capturing sound, turning into patterns of vibration on the wrist, and deaf people can understand the world that way. Because it doesn't matter how the information gets into the cortex, as long as it gets there, the brain will figure out what to do with it. [00:34:14] S2: One of the things that's fascinating to me about brain research, this applies to a lot of areas of technology, but specifically to the brain, is that no matter how much we think we know, as a community, it seems like we're well aware of how much we don't know. So maybe just as a as a thought experiment, I know I gotta get you off the hot seat, and I'm gonna restrict your time, but you gotta answer this one last important question for me. Gladly. When David and Dan are back here and it's 2036 and not 2026, what is something that will be just foundational about our understanding of the brain that today just would seem like science

00:34:51 · David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:34:51] S0: fiction? Yeah. I mean, you want the whole list of the top 10. Here's what I think. We're at the foot of the mountain in terms of understanding the brain. What's funny is we have this book in the field called Principles of Neuroscience, which is this big, thick textbook, about eight eighty pages, and it's not... I look at that, and I think that's not principles. If it were principles of neuroscience, it would be like a pamphlet. Right? But what we clearly are doing is just cord dumping all this data that we are getting, but we're not seeing the big picture yet. What I love so much about scientific revolutions is when suddenly there's a collapse of a bunch of data and we say, Oh, that's a thing. For example, imagine that you had a magical microscope that would allow you to peer into a cell, all the complexity in a cell, and then you'd say, There's no way I'm ever going to figure this out. But then Crick and Watson come along and say, Look, the important part is to keep the sequence of the base pairs, and all the rest is housekeeping. And you'd say, oh, got it. That's what we're waiting for in the brain. I don't mean we're waiting for it passively. We're actively trying to figure out such principles, and we've we've discovered a number of things, but, boy, there is so much more to be discovered. So what kind of foundational things? I mean, the big central question is consciousness. Why does it feel like something to be alive? You know, what's the difference when you are asleep and your brain is running along and doing all kinds of stuff, but then you're awake and it's running a slightly different algorithm and you're you're consciously aware? You have a impression that you are here and you see colors and you feel pain and, you know, all this stuff of being awake.

00:36:35 · Dan Turchin, David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:36:35] S2: Can science answer [00:36:36] S0: that? No. We don't know the answer to consciousness. We're totally... Not only do we not have an answer to consciousness, we don't even know really what such an answer would look like in scientific language because how do you say, look, do a, you know, a double integral on this and carry the two and do this, and that equals the beauty of a sunset or the redness of red or the feeling of a pain in your knee? Like, how do you even translate those languages into one another? So it's very difficult, this problem. You know, myself and lots of colleagues are working on this, and I've been working on this for decades, but nobody's got an answer yet.: [00:37:11] S2: Might we someday decode consciousness, like we could decode DNA? Oh, I

00:37:16 · David EaglemanPlay from here

[00:37:16] S0: certainly hope so. Yeah. Oh, I totally hope so. Otherwise otherwise, what are we doing? Yeah. So so... And by the way, I think we've got to do that in the brain before we can answer this question that everyone's asking, which is, are LLMs conscious? Because who the hell knows? I mean, everyone's coming out with their... Oh, I think LMs are conscious. No way. They're not conscious, but who knows? Right? What we need to do is understand what's happening biologically, as in, Ah, okay, you put together these recursive loops and you have this and that and the other, that equals consciousness. Once we figure that out, then we can look at the AI and say, okay. Got it. That's got it. That doesn't have it, so that should Yeah. Be Exactly. We should be able to to actually know instead of just give our impressions of whether we feel like it's conscious. Is there a two through 10? How in how in the world are there two Actually, now that's funny you would ask that because I wrote an article in Discover Magazine called 10 unsolved questions of neuroscience. Now here's the thing. I wrote that article in 2006, and nine and a half of them are still unanswered. One of the questions was why do brains sleep and dream, and I think I've answered the dreaming question now. But, otherwise, they're still totally unanswered. One of them is cautious. One of them is, you know, what is intelligence? Like, we we don't even know. Everyone's got their way of describing what intelligence is. You know, maybe it's the capacity to simulate possible futures. Maybe it's the capacity to squelch distractors. There's all kinds of ways of thinking about intelligence, but it's not like as a field we have a definition that we agree on. There's so many things. There's questions about emotions and you know, what emotions are. We often tend to think about emotions as being one end of the spectrum and reason as being the other end of the spectrum or maybe two different categories. But but it might be... Yeah. It might be that they're the same thing, reason and emotion. It's just with kind of a a wider camera lens. Meaning, if I'm, you know, trying to think of a chess move, then I'm doing something very specific. But if I'm just experiencing, like, oh, is this a good or a bad situation? Should I run or should I go towards that? Should I... You know, am I in danger or not?

00:39:39 · David Eagleman, Dan TurchinPlay from here

That's sort of a wide angle lens where I'm taking lots of data to put that together. Anyway, all these things, there's a lot of lot of unanswered questions in neuroscience. I'm so enthusiastic about AI for many reasons, but perhaps the main reason is that it's gonna help us speed up science. All the things that I and my students have been doing all the things that I and my students have been doing for decades and before me, for centuries. It just takes a long time to get progress, to figure things out, and the idea that AI is going to speed that up in a way such that when we're sitting here in 2036, say, Oh yeah, you know that list of 10 things I was talking about in 2026? They're all solved, and thanks to AI, like, that would be my dream. [00:40:25] S2: On behalf of humanity, it's so encouraging to see someone who's at the forefront of where these breakthroughs might come from be so enthusiastic. Not not about the dehumanization that's gonna take place because of AI, but because problems that have held us back as a species were right on the cusp of addressing. And I can't wait to have more versions of this conversation. And it's not gonna take, I don't think, a decade to be talking about knocking off some of the the the nine and a half remaining things from your 2006 list. [00:41:01] S0: That's right. Let's do let's do a mid a mid decade check-in on this. [00:41:06] S2: It's been such a pleasure. Likewise, Dan. Thanks. Just genuinely really enjoyed it. Where can the listeners learn more about you and some of this work that you do? [00:41:13] S0: Eagleman.com is my website.