All right, then we're going to get started. All right, so welcome to the field three. All right, so today we're going to talk about neuroscientific approaches to answering this consciousness question. So in last lecture, we talked about Thomas Nagels, what it's like to be a BAT paper. Just a very quick review. I mean, the general point he's trying to get across there is that there's a separate question that we have. We can know all the facts about BAT's brains, how they process information, all the facts about the BAT's environment. We can know all these kind of physical facts. We can know all these facts of the matter facts. But there's this leftover fact, this fact about what it is like to be the BAT. And Nagel thinks this is really important because without knowing this extra fact, we can't really know what the conscious experience of the BAT is like. And if you buy Nagel's argument, this is going to have repercussions for what kind of theory of consciousness you can provide. Because if you think that we can know all the scientific facts about BAT brains and nevertheless have this leftover question, it's going to say that scientific theories about what consciousness is, they're not going to do it. They're not going to answer our questions. So today's goal really is going to be to put on the table a scientific theory about what consciousness is. I'm not going to be advocating for it. Really, the idea is going to be we're going to look at the top-notch neuroscience of today, see what it has to say about what kind of brain state you have to be in to be conscious, what kind of functional state you have to be in to be conscious, and see if that's answering the kind of questions we've been running into. Cool, so that's the goal for today. And I guess, yeah, we'll first start off talking about the function of consciousness. So we oftentimes think about consciousness in terms of these qualitative feelings that associate mental processes. We think of them as these special feelings or sensations. But you can also take a different tack in approaching consciousness. You can say that through consciousness and only through consciousness, are we able to do many of the things that we do. Consciousness bestows upon us an ability to have executive control over our actions, to engage in certain deliberative thought processes. We can think about this in terms of an example of we can compare whether or not something is conscious in our mind is going to reflect what we're able to do about it. So maybe one example might be if I'm unconsciously tapping my foot at the cafe and the person next to me tells me to stop tapping my foot, the tapping my foot might have been unconscious the whole time. I might have just been tapping it. I might have been working on this lecture and the person next to me says, hey, stop that annoying tapping. And them saying that brings the tapping my foot to my attention and the tapping my foot ceases to be unconscious and now becomes conscious. And now I can go on and control it. I can keep tapping my foot while looking at the person saying, screw you, I can do what I want. I can stop the tapping and apologize. It allows them bringing my tapping to the level of consciousness opens up a possibility of actions that weren't there before. You might have thought that until the tapping became conscious, I wasn't able to make any kind of top down. I didn't have any top down control over my tapping. My foot was just tapping. I wasn't tapping. My foot was tapping. Or at least that's a natural way of speaking. And if you want to put pressure on this, feel free to. But that's maybe one natural example to kind of help give you this intuition that there is a function of consciousness, not just this extra special qualitative feel to it. And we can capture it further and say that conscious attention allows for top down control. It allows for planning and initiating intentional action. And this is the tack that DeHaine and Akash take in the opening of their paper. And so let's take a look at, they point to some empirical findings that say that consciousness allows for the durable and explicit information maintenance. We can keep things in mind because we're conscious of them and only because we're conscious of them. They say that consciousness allows for us to make novel combinations of operations. We can combine abilities that maybe were closed off in their own sectors of the mind before and combine them together on a single task. And consciousness also allows us to engage in intentional behavior. So you might think that until we have a conscious mind in on it, really, these are just kind of hardwired mechanisms going about their business, and we aren't really in on it. So I'm just going to walk through these points that they raised in the beginning of their paper. So DeHaine and Akash first go through this idea that consciousness allows durable and explicit information maintenance. So they write that we suggest that, in many cases, the ability to maintain representations in an active state for a durable period of time in the absence of stimulation seems to require consciousness. So the example they use is there's a classical experiment by spurling on iconic memory that demonstrates in the absence of conscious amplification the visual representation of an array of letters quickly decays to undetectable levels. So after a few seconds or less, only the letters that have been consciously attended remain accessible.  But if someone says, pay it. I'm going to flash some letters on the screen to you. Pay attention to what letters on the top right. And you're going to have to report that back to me in a minute. You'll be able to report that letter in the second case, but not in the first case a minute later. So by consciously attending to representations, it allows us to call them back up while they're being attended to, while they're being kept in local memory storage. They're basically just pointing to an experimental result that needs to be accounted for. Here's something that when we tell someone to consciously attend to something, it allows them to do something that they weren't able to do before. So again, the idea is just that consciousness gives us an ability that we didn't have before there was conscious attention there. And so basically, the idea is that when you consciously attend to a stimuli, you can hold it in focus. You can keep it before your mind's eye. It's present to you in a way that it wouldn't be if you weren't attending to it. So that's finding number one. Finding number two is that, as Dakin and Nakash write, the strategic operations which are associated with planning a novel strategy, evaluating it, controlling its execution, and correcting possible errors cannot be accomplished unconsciously. They say that such processes are always associated with a subjective feeling of mental effort, which is absent during automatized or unconscious processing. So the point here is just that you can do this test yourself. Try to come up with a plan for how you're going to trick your friend into taking you to dinner. You can't come up with a plan like that unless you engage in conscious, reflective, deliberative thought. It's not like you're going to find yourself tricking them into a scheme without conscious, reflective deliberation. There are certain kinds of novel operations that are really only conscious once we engage in a certain kind of reflective thought. And so yeah, the point is that in order to do something more than just hardwired automatic responses, it requires conscious deliberative thought. So when you're presented with a decision, you can just go with your gut. But in this case, you're just letting your automatic settings take over. So the kinds of cases we're interested in here are where you can think through a problem and come up with your own solution. And it's not predetermined by some hardwired system. So again, this is a functional characteristic of consciousness according to Dehani and Akash. The third finding they point to in the scientific literature is that a third type of mental activity that may be specifically associated with consciousness is the spontaneous generation of intentional behavior. So just the idea here being that we can engage in all sorts of unconscious behaviors. In the example when I was tapping my foot in the cafe, this is an unintentional action. I just found myself doing it. I didn't have the intention to act on it and then put the intention into action. And this is supposed to be a difference between actions that flow from conscious control and those that are flowing from some kind of subconscious control. Yeah, question? And do you think? Right. Yeah, I mean, we're going to talk a little more about what exactly this distinction between unconscious processes and conscious processes is. But to answer your question, I think that those who subscribe to this kind of framework, oh, I think this is just an empirical question really. And they would say yes. You can have, you can blur it out. A thought can come to your mind that you didn't call up from memory. So you can think of two different cases where you can say, you can ask yourself, who was the 42nd president? I believe that's Bill Clinton, is that right?  But you might think that whenever I'm working away at the cafe tapping my foot and this image of my mother screaming at me when I was younger, that is a constant thing that conscious source of anxiety for me just pops into my head. I didn't ask for this thought to come to my head. It just kind of popped in there. And I think the same kind of analysis will follow from that. There's a difference between the kinds of thoughts that are called forth by intentional control of thought processes versus the kinds of thoughts that are brought forth through unconscious processes. But we'll talk a bit more about that. I guess any other questions related to that point? Cool, I'll move on. I'll stop to take questions about these three things, one of them. Yeah, so I was talking about intentional behaviors then. So the example that DeHaine and Akash use is blind site patients. So blind site patients, I think we brought them up in class last time, but it's a little obscure. They're subjects who are partially blind. So part of their visual field is just kind of not there. They're partially blind, but they can still identify, above chance, objects in their blind spot. So the blind site person, when you probe them to guess if there's something in their blind spot, more than chance they guess correctly. To them, they subjectively experience it as just a guess. They say, I have no idea. I'm just guessing here.  So DeHaine and Akash write that these blind site patients never spontaneously initiate any visually guided behavior in their impaired field. Good performance can be elicited only by forcing them to respond to stimulation. So here they're pointing to the fact that in these blind site patients, they might have some kind of access to the information that there's an object in that part of their visual field. But that kind of knowledge is not available for intentional action. If you put a ketchup bottle in their intentional field while they're eating fries, they're not going to grab for the ketchup and put it on their fries, because that kind of thing is just not available to them. They don't see anything in that spot. If they're forced to say, is there something in your blind spot, they can do a good job with that. But they'll never produce intentional action that's produced through a kind of top-down, conscious-reflective process. They can't decide to act on something they see in their blind spot. Yeah. Yeah, actually, I'm, yeah, it's a good question. So actually, now that you mention this, I actually think that there might be some research. I'm not a blind site expert, but I think there might be actually some research where they throw something at them that's in their blind spot and they do automatically grab it. And I think the point here is still the same, because you might think that this automatic grabbing motion is just totally an unconscious process. So when if you throw your shoe at me and I duck, you can think of this as I didn't make a decision.  I should probably duck. It was just a quick automatic response that didn't really involve any kind of intentional action. But yeah, actually, this is a good question. Austin, did you know about this, whether there's? Sorry, the question was. Well, whether or not blind site patients can respond unconsciously to things that show up in their blind spot. Yeah, I'm not sure. But it's a good question. Yeah. Yeah, great. So the blind site patients are, this is unintentional behavior. And the point that Dahain and Akash want to make is that blind site patients can't respond intentionally to things that show up in their blind spot area. So blind site patients can't act intentionally on things that show up in their blind spot area. But us, who have normal vision, who don't have blind spots, those things show up in our conscious life. And we can act on those in through conscious deliberative processes. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so a lot of philosophers have kind of taken this tack. They say, basically, we can kind of imagine blind site patients who, we teach them at every point, they're like, just trust your gut. Tell me what's there. And maybe, I think actually, yeah, Neblock has this example of super blind siteers. I can't remember if Neblock originated it. But the point is that for these kinds of agents, they say that they're conceptually plausible and that you basically could have them respond to stimuli in exactly the same way we do, but they don't have any kind of conscious life associated with it. This is a highly contentious, I guess, example. So I won't go along that road. But it is an interesting question to say what exactly is missing in the blind site patient that doesn't allow them to act like we normally do? And so this is a question that I think to Cain and Mikosh take themselves to be trying to answer in the paper. So let's see what the answer is. And then maybe you can push back and see if blind siteers can actually behave in the same way we do, or was I? But, right, OK, so we have blind siteers. And from these examples, we're supposed to see that there's a real difference between those of us who have real full-blooded visual experiences and those of us who do not. So we can take, those of us who do have real, live, conscious visual experiences, we can take in those cues and produce meaningful actions based on them. Whereas the blind site patients cannot. So the hypothesis is that we have access to visual information, whereas in blind site patients, that information is kind of locked away in some inaccessible part of the brain that maybe that information can play a role whenever they're forced to make a decision, but it's not available to conscious reflection. And that's supposed to make a big difference. So I guess to wrap up these three points altogether, the point is that consciousness solves certain problems. It allows us to plan effectively. It allows us to integrate information across different modalities, the different senses. It allows for coordination of behavior. And you can contrast this with hard-wired systems that are inflexible or unable to plan for novel situations. And what we're really looking for, we're looking for the capacity for top-down control of behavior, of thought processes, of problem-solving. And this calls for a central organizer. And that's basically what the global workspace theory of consciousness is trying to give a theory of. But before I go on and I guess fill in what that theory looks like, any questions about the function of consciousness? Anyone think that these don't actually capture what's going on, or do anyone think that these, that consciousness is not necessary for intentional behavior, for novel combinations of operations or durable explicit information maintenance? Yeah. Yeah, I think this is a good question of what exactly is required for intentional behavior? I think different people are gonna respond differently. I think someone like Dehan and Akash, they're gonna wanna say that you don't need language in order to, I guess, think through these problems. You may think through it in a non-linguistic format. But I guess the idea would be that you could, maybe an example would be, I have a memory of whenever I take the right path, that always gets me eaten by a tiger or something as an animal, but I take the left path, that always leads me to food. And you can kind of have a deliberative process where you recall that memory, and that memory is then able to be connected up with your decision process in a way that's maybe language-free. But this is a good question, I guess, as we kind of go on. This kind of idea that consciousness is tied to a central organizer, a top-down planner, how much is that a specifically human capability and how much of that is a capability to describe animals? I think most of the scientists are gonna say that this is something that animals have in degrees. And I should say non-human animals, because we are animals as well. But we don't wanna be chauvinistic about this. But yeah, these non-human animals are supposed to maybe have this capacity in different flavors, but they should still be able to, other non-human animals should also be able to have some kind of deliberative thought process. But this is very contentious. Does anyone wanna make the case that animals don't have this? All right, well, unless there are any other questions, I'll move on to talk about the meat here. So we have this question about what constitutes, what is the nature of consciousness? And here's an answer to that question. And we're gonna, I guess, walk through the steps that kind of lead us to the final answer. But, you know, to hang on the cosh up front, think that they're gonna answer this question totally and fully. So they write that within this fresh perspective, firmly grounded in empirical research, the problem of consciousness no longer seems intractable. They really do think that by doing neuroscience we're going to solve the problems of consciousness and there just won't be any leftover problems. This is very much, I guess, against what Nagel is trying to do. So I'll be curious once we present this to hear what your thoughts are with, whether you're convinced by what they're trying to do. So the first step of this theory is to note that the mind is massively modular. So the idea is that the mind is comprised of a huge collection of special purpose devices which operate smoothly in their own domain.  So organizing the subsystems like vision, audition, motor control, so I'm at a sensory perception, a motion and the list can go on. But the general idea is you can think of, picture will help. You can think of, you know, the mind is this just giant compilation of these little machines that are each doing their own little jobs. And maybe inside these machines you have smaller machines and these are each taking in, I'll say this is V1, why not. They're each taking in inputs, they're communicating, well they're not communicating with one another, they're able to solve problems on their own, maybe send that output somewhere. But the thing is each one of these has their own task. So this might be the task of vision. Inside the parts of the brain that are responsible for vision, there's maybe object recognition. There's contrast detectors, there's color processing, all sorts of things and basically you can go down and down and down until you reach the most basic processes. Yeah, I think this is a debated question. I think the paradigmatic cases are gonna be cases where you have basically an area of the brain that is dedicated to a particular kind of task. So vision is the one we know most about and that's all located in the back of the brain. So you, and it follows a sort of kind of hierarchy of processing where you have systems that do, I guess low-level edge detection. The low-level edge detection goes to like shape detection and the low-level, the shape detection then goes to object recognition. And, but I'm not an expert enough on how these actually are instantiated to know whether they're locally, in general, they're gonna be pretty local. Kira? So I think the neuroscientists are gonna be, well, the scientists in general may be sloppy with the terms in a way that we wish they wouldn't be, but I think they are gonna be thinking of this in terms of the mind, or sorry, in terms of the brain and they're gonna use the brain and mind interchangeably. So, because you might think that, well look, if the vision module were in my mind, I'd be somehow like, I'd be somehow in on the object recognition task would be something like, when I'm doing math, I'm in on it, but whenever I'm trying to figure out what object is in front of me, that's not like some kind of decision process that I'm in on, that's not a part of my mind. I would say that, yeah, just be a little loose with how you're understanding mind. This is, I guess, maybe a buzzword that a lot of cognitive scientists use, talk about the modular mind, but you can think of it in terms of the brain. That's fine. Are there other hands for this? Yeah, okay, so I mean a few other things to say about this. Well yeah, so you have basically a collection of machines and I think most people, I guess, working in cognitive science are gonna wanna say that this is, I've drawn seven here, they're gonna wanna say that there are potentially thousands of little machines at work that are solving different kinds of problems. And I guess to hint at Nacosh, eventually pinpoint five subsystems that are gonna be important to conscious experience, but we'll get to that later. And I guess, one other thing I wanna, we can make sense of this in terms of brain processing, but you can also think of modules in terms of like math, so you can define a function f of x in terms of, or you can think of like the function f of x, y, so it takes two inputs, and we can just define that function as, I don't know, g of x plus four times h of y. So we have this notion of math where you can basically define high level functions in terms of like lower level functions, and you can kind of keep going down and down, you can define g of x in terms of two other functions or three functions, you can define h of x in terms of other functions, but the point being that, this is supposed to be analogous to what's going on in the brain where you have particular parts of the brain that are responsible for, that they do particular kinds of things, you have subsystems of those systems, you have subsystems of those systems, but they're each gonna be tackling a particular kind of task. Cool, okay, unless there are any other questions about that, I'll move on to dual process theory. So dual process theory posits that when an organism encounters a cognitive task, it can deploy two kinds of systems to perform that task. So these two systems are supposed to be distinct, they're functionally and evolutionarily, so what has been called system one is fast, parallel, automatic, relatively rigid and unconscious. So system one processes happened to level prior to conscious reflection. System one processes can quickly analyze inputs based on pre-established computational architecture. So the end result of this processing can be posted to an individual's consciousness, but that individual has very limited or no access to the processes that generated the output. So whenever, when I'm looking at my water bottle and I see it as a water bottle and I recognize it as a water bottle, I didn't have to go through any sort of complex process where I was like, well, it has straight edges and it's translucent and it looks like it's cylindrical and I can see there's some clear liquid inside of it. No, all of this happened at a pre-conscious level. Something in my brain had to do the processing such that I can identify it as a water bottle. And that's the kind of thing that we have in mind when we're talking about system one processes. Namely, it's these module, it's these little modules that we're talking about when we talk of system one processes. So yeah, system one processes are supposed to be distributed throughout the brain. System one, if we want to call it a single system is composed of many small, largely autonomous local modules. That deal in domain specific information handling. So they cannot be quickly altered by verbal instruction but they can and do change as a result of habituation just like or training. So as you're growing up, you can learn to train yourself to see things in particular ways. In addition to these functional features, system one is supposed to be evolutionarily older. So it represents the kind of intelligence that humans share with other animals. And these modules that comprise system one are supposed to be relatively rudimentary and develop to address very specific evolutionary needs. So perceptual modules are perhaps the best example of these modules with specific evolutionarily relevant tasks. So take our ability to recognize faces. I think this is a good example of a pretty complex system one task. So we have a dedicated face recognition module in the fusiform gyrex which has the job of analyzing certain configurations of shapes and determining whether or not there's any faceness about these shapes. So when you see something like this, your fusiform gyrex apparently is, according to neuroscientists, is going to be taking in these shapes and saying, whenever I see, I guess two roundish things with a pointy thing and a mouthy thing, that gives you a face. And this is a really, really hard computational task. I mean, we have software engineers who have spent years of their life trying to figure out how to solve this task. And it's gotten good-ish recently, but the computer's still aren't as good as we are at these kind of complex recognition tasks. But there's a specific part of the brain that is responsible for this. And moreover, you're not really in on that processing.  It's something that just comes to you automatically. It's a process that's running on its own, doesn't need your input. So that's system one processes. So system two is supposed to be slow, serial, deliberate, flexible, and conscious. So I'll explain each of those terms in turn. So it's slow and serial and deliberate since it involves conscious analysis by means of abstract categories and concepts. It's flexible in the sense that any individual may develop their own strategies about how to go about addressing certain types of information. So system two then admits of more individual differences. So when we're each solving system two problems, we'll each go about that in different ways. I think probably the best way to think over this is, you can think of the problem solved, like the problem of solving whether or not there's a face there is a problem that system one solves. A different kind of problem that system two solves is, you can think of, I don't know, an addition problem. So when you're confronted with this, you need to have a strategy that you come up with or that you've learned to figure out how to do this. And you apply it in a deliberate way. So you have to say, I hope I get this right. Yeah, so you have to get the two to seven gives you nine. The one and four give you five and then you just bring the one on down, yeah. So what I did right there was a particular process. I followed certain rules that I'd learned. I had those thoughts in a serial fashion. I first told myself, I need to look at these two numbers. I then need to use the rule of addition to get a number nine. If this was above 10, I would need to put the single digit here and carry over the one. The point is that this all has to happen in a very slow way where I follow one thought to the next. And this is something I have to learn. So these are two different kinds of problems that we solve in two different kinds of ways. So, right, okay, how much do I want? Well, I guess any general questions about system one and system two. Yeah. What do you mean by flexible? Right, okay. So flexible, you can think of, there are maybe, we can come up with, if we have maybe a certain type of problem that fits in a general category, but is maybe new or novel, when we're engaging in slow, deliberate thought, we can come up with new solutions like on the fly. So you can think of the point about flexibility as just being a point about being able to solve novel problems. So when, well, here's an example of the inflexibility of system two, or system one. So this is a famous illusion called the Mueller-Lyer lines. That's right. So the, if I do it right, you should get this, you should basically see the first figure, the figure in the top as longer than the bottom figure. Is that, that's right, right, yeah. And so this is basically a very basic feature of your visual system that you're gonna see shapes like this. The top one is longer than the bottom one, but in fact, they're the same size. That if you go and take a measuring stick, you'll notice that they're both the same length.  They're not, they are equal lines. They're not, the top one's not longer than the bottom one. Even though I tell my visual system that, my visual system doesn't care. It just is gonna churn out the same output every time. It doesn't, I can't just basically tell my system one processes to perform in a different way.  And that's, I guess, the flexibility distinction. And I guess, yeah, that reminds me, I do wanna say one thing about, one thing I mentioned was system one processes are domain-specific and system two processes are domain-general. The point here is just that, if I give the math problem to my visual system, it can't solve that. That's not a problem that it solves. It solves very particular kinds of problems. It solves visual problems. It solves problems that arise in me trying to extract information from my, from the light hitting my retina. But my domain-general processing machine, I can use that to really solve any problem you give me. Give me any kind of novel problem. You can ask me to come up with proof set that prove mathematical theorems. You can ask me to write a play. You can ask me to decide whether or not I should invest $10,000 in the fund. You can give me any problem at all and I can solve that using system two processing. But the trade-off, though, is that system two processing is a lot slower. It's a lot less efficient. So if I have a system one module that can solve this problem quickly and efficiently, I'd rather just let that thing do it. And that's the difference between system one and system two. I guess DeHanne and Akash capture this when I say that controlled processing requires an distinct functional architecture which goes beyond modularity and can establish flexible links amongst existing processors. So we talked before about the module of mind. You can think of the modules are all instantiating system one processes. But the real question is that we know that we do something else with our brain. We know that we can solve these general problems that are not confined to particular kinds of problem solving that are rigid and inflexible. What we want, we want some description of a system that solves general problems in a flexible way but maybe does it more slowly than other systems. So the answer to this question is supposed to be the global workspace. So I guess I'll quickly kind of run through some of the features of the global workspace and we'll kind of test it out as a hypothesis. Feature one of the global workspace. Besides specialized processors, so these are just coming straight from the paper. Besides specialized processes, the architecture of the human brain also comprises a distributed neural system or workspace with long distance connectivity that can potentially interconnect multiple specialized brain areas in a coordinated though variable manner. So through the workspace, modular systems that do not directly exchange information in an automatic mode can nevertheless gain access to each other's content. So if we want to amend this drawing, you have all these subsystems going about solving your problems. But when I need to solve a problem like, am I gonna go out to eat or am I gonna make dinner myself? What I get is I get a lot of subsystems giving me information across different modalities and sharing that with each other. So I need to know, to make that decision, I say, well, what am I hungry for? Am I hungry for the pasta I have or do I really want that Big Mac? Do I, you have to ask yourself, well, I would go out and drive to McDonald's, but my car doesn't have enough gas. I remember that from yesterday. So in fact, I actually should stay inside. These are calling up all sorts of different kinds of information that are relevant to a particular decision that you have to make and you wouldn't be able to do that if all these pieces of information were locked away in their individual modules. You need this global workspace that connects these different systems that allows them to share information amongst one another in a coordinated manner. And this is supposed to be established via, I guess, what they call long distance, long distance connectivity neurons. These are basically, these are working memory neurons that are localized to different modules, but when you put them all together, they form a system in which these modules can talk to one another effectively. But there are certain limitations about what kind of information these long connectivity neurons can, can, I guess, can broadcast and we'll talk a little bit more about that, but. All right, so that's the basic picture. Another key component for Dehan and Akash is that top down attentional amplification is the mechanism by which modular processes can be temporarily mobilized and made available to the global workspace and therefore to consciousness. So you can think of, if we have this central global workspace, you can think of, for various reasons, this is a bad analogy, but I'll make it anyway, that you can think of there's a spotlight of consciousness that's able to zoom in on particular information in the global workspace. It can also call forth information from particular modules. You can say, you can, attention can, you can use your powers of attention to tell the visual system, hey, give me the red stuff in the scene. This is a real problem I guess it's been well studied. But you can basically, through attention, you can say, visual system, give me all the round things that are in front of me. And the visual system can go away and basically we're sent back to the global workspace all the round things that are in the scene. And the, so attention plays a really, really crucial role in this theory and a crucial role in establishing what is and what is not conscious. So, I guess moving on, so the third feature that Dhegan and Kosh pinpoint is that, according to the workspace theory, conscious access requires temporary, a dynamic, dynamical mobilization of an active processor into a self-sustained loop of activation. So active workspace neurons send top-down amplification signals that boost the currently active processor neurons whose bottom-up signals, in turn, help maintain workspace activity. So the establishment of this closed loop requires minimal duration, thus imposing a temporal granularity to the successive neural states that form the stream of consciousness. This is basically just making the point I was making for that. You need to have information sustained in this global workspace. You need the power of attention to provide top-down amplification of signals. Attention plays a very crucial role here. So an interesting, I guess, pause that Dhegan and Kosh make is that there are really five main categories of subsystems that plug into this global workspace. So things that don't make it in, things like my blood pressure or regulating my blood pressure.  And it does that without me ever really knowing it does that. I don't ever, unlike my breathing, I can take control of my breathing. I can tell myself to breathe slowly or fast. I can never take control over my blood pressure regulation mechanisms. So there are only some parts of the brain end up reporting to this global workspace. So the five areas that Dhegan and Kosh pinpoint are perceptual circuits that inform about the state of the environment. Motor circuits that allow for preparation of controlled execution of actions. Long-term memory systems that reinstate past workspace states. Evaluation circuits that attribute valence in relation to previous experience. And lastly, attentional or top-down circuits that selectively gait the focus of interest. And they think that these five things, so perception, motor control, long-term memory, evaluation, and attention, these things explain the subjective, unitary nature of consciousness. So when we think about what kinds of things we can be conscious of, we think about memories, we think about controlling our actions, we think about the perceptual inputs we're getting, and we think about being able to control our attention within what's kind of being displayed in consciousness. So they really think that this is gonna be answering some deep questions about what is possible for us to be conscious of, what kinds of things we can be conscious of. So I mean, they're trying to do a lot with this. And I mean, they say that we believe that many of these so-called hard problems will be found to dissolve once a satisfactory framework for consciousness is achieved. So now we can really ask the question we've been meaning to ask the whole time. So there's a philosophical question here. The paper, I should note, it's not making, it's merely just assertions of fact. This is a paper that we don't want you to write this kind of paper when you write papers for us. It's just saying, there are a couple of places where it says, well, clearly certain philosophers are wrong for because they're clearly wrong. That's not an argument. But we can ask basically whether or not there are reasons to support this theory. So the question we have in mind is what is the nature of consciousness? The answer is going to be that consciousness is constituted by the broadcasting of information in a global workspace in a sufficiently configured system. So this is gonna give us real results. We can ask of the blind site patients, we can ask, well, look, is information about what is in their blind spot? Is that available to the global workspace? If it's not, then it can't be conscious. If it is available to it and it is called forth and is actively in the global workspace, then it is conscious. This is a pretty clear criterion to say, in actual cases, it can get us results. It can tell us what is in the mind and what is not in the mind. And you can do that by, well, the techniques aren't totally there yet, but you can do part of it by fMRI imaging and the like. And I guess you might be able to do it using other techniques, but that's probably the most popular these days. And I think the theory is supposed to be something like, we've been looking at different attempts to say that the mind or consciousnesses, we can think of it in terms of the kinds of reductions we do in others' kind of science. So we can say that temperature just is mean kinetic energy, or mean kinetic velocity. I should know my science better. We can just say that lightning just is electrical discharge. And consciousnesses, on this theory, we're making a similar kind of identity claim. Consciousness just is the activity that goes on in global workspace. And the global workspace can be instantiated by a brain, it can be instantiated by a computer, it can be instantiated by any system that has this kind of functional structure. And so there's gonna be some kind of just brute physical law about when I have consciousnesses of something red, you might think that, we've been talking about inverted spectrum cases. There might just be, on this theory, there might just be some kind of brute law about when a certain type of information is put to a certain type of use in a global workspace, it's gonna produce the red sensation. And I mean, that's at least the answer that it's trying to provide. Now there are, I guess, problems with this, and that's really just what I wanna address in the next section. But before I get there, do people, I guess, do we know what is being claimed? Are there any, I guess, questions about how the theory is supposed to work? I mean, I've been using a lot of new terms. Tell me what doesn't make sense. I'm sure there's something about this that doesn't make sense to someone. Yeah, so they actually addressed this, I think towards the end of the paper, but they don't wanna say that there's one localized spot. I think basically, if I understand it correctly, there are gonna be these working memory areas associated with every one of these modules, and at least the modules that work together in this global workspace, there's not gonna be some kind of central system that is always there when they're communicating, but you can think of, it's maybe like an analogy. You can think of the fact that all these works, I don't know if these different modules are talking to one another through these long distance neurons. It basically creates some kind of workspace in which they all share information. Although they do actually, I mean, maybe I'm making the case, maybe I'm making too negative a case. They do pinpoint the prefrontal cortex and the interior singular as the places where these long distance global workspace neurons have a lot of connections. So one, I guess one popular hypothesis is that executive control is a function of the prefrontal cortex and that without the prefrontal cortex, if you lop off the prefrontal cortex, or if you have a lesion of the prefrontal cortex, you no longer have the ability to engage in the kind of serial decision-making processes that are indicative of system two processes. So basically my answer to the question is that, this is very debated, but I think Dane and Akash are gonna think that they don't need to answer the question. Any other questions, yeah? Yeah, I mean, I think the idea is gonna be, you can think of the, I guess actually one person who, the person who came up with the global workspace theory originally called it the, I think I actually called it the blackboard theory of consciousness. And the idea is that you have, you can basically post different pieces of information to a blackboard. So you write on it and then you erase one bit and then you write on a new bit. And the idea is that there's gonna be basically a system which all the content of consciousness is gonna be contained in that system. So insofar as you're conscious of something, it has to be active in the global workspace. So when you're, so you can ask like, when I'm listening to a song, the feeling that the song produces in me, the beat that I hear, the, I recognize the person's voice as Paul McCartney's, all these things that I'm conscious of, they're all a part of the global workspace. And you can think of those as kind of different pieces of information that are on the blackboard. But was that the kind of question you were asking? Okay, yeah, so the, I mean the basic, the kind of problem we're trying to solve with this is, you wanna give a theory about like, what is it that makes information in the brain conscious? Cause there's information all throughout the brain doing, like, you know, there's information processing of how to regulate my blood pressure, but I'm not conscious of that. I'm also not conscious of the very complex, sophisticated computational processes that underlie edge detection and shape recognition. These are things that I'm not, they're not consciously available to me, but the things that are consciously available to me are the stuff that gets posted to the global workspace. And that's supposed to be, well, yeah, that's the theory. Yeah, Kira? Yeah, I mean, I guess it's been similar to the question before, but I think, I think to hand the Kosh kind of wiggle on this, they say the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate are the important places, but they also say that you can maybe have two systems, so you maybe have like two systems that communicate with one another, and this will create like a mini workspace. It's actually unclear. I think this is basically an area where they say that they need to do more work, but I believe the stock answer is that what they're picking out are working memory centers in each of these modules, and when those working memory centers work together, they create like a virtual workspace. So there's not, there need not be a particular part of the brain that is receiving all these signals. It can just be instantiated by all these things being connected to one another. Yeah, I think that is the, that definitely seems to be the direction that Dehan and Kosh seem to go in. That's that helpful. Yeah, you can think of it as not located in a specific area, but something that when all the pieces are working together, they create it together. Yeah. I think they're, I mean, like blood pressure. Right. So you can think of blood pressure as there's this little module over here that's working away. It doesn't broadcast that knowledge to the global workspace. It gets inputs from, I don't know, your blood. And it's outputs, and it's outputs go to control the blood. I don't know enough about it, but, sorry, we'll say that again? Right, right. So it doesn't really need, David doesn't have it with the switch. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, and I think the point that Dehan and Kosh would want to make though is that, I could have, maybe this module over here has ways of communicating to the blood pressure module. And I can send an order from the global workspace to this module that then thereby cascades and has an effect on the, so whenever I, I don't know, whenever I see a scary thing, and that scary thing goes over to this motor response module. The motor response module as part of initiating a response activates higher blood pressure, it can do that.  Yeah. You can send a message to the motor response system and then maybe the motor response system, independent of what you want, amps up the blood pressure. But at least I think that's, that's the model that they have in mind. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the, yeah, I mean, I think they're basically just, they're just doing the science and trying to figure out what actually does report there. But I think the, so you can make two, there's two answers. Well, one way of considering your question is something like, you know, what differentiates between the things that I now have control over, that I didn't have control over in the past, or also what kind of things do I, do humans have control over now that we didn't have control over in the past? And you can give both a developmental, you can give a evolutionary story about how these systems came to be hooked up in the way they did, or the way they're now hooked up. You can also provide a learning story about how we learned, like, so for instance, whenever you learn how to play the piano, when you learn how to play the piano, this is when you're playing a song for memorization, this is gonna be a system one task. It's gonna be something that you basically programmed a system one module to do on its own. But, you know, it took learning to do that.  You can say, I'm going to play this more lightly than I've been playing it, or I'm gonna actually switch this and play it an octave higher. You can make those decisions and kind of step in and take over the driver's seat where you didn't have it before. But the story about what you're conscious of now, what you could be conscious of now, and how that relates to the module that's really responsible for it is gonna be a story that you have to tell by how learning occurs in the brain, or how evolution hooked up the global workspace with the module. Yeah. Good. That is a very hard question. I actually wrote my undergrad thesis on that, so. But it's, all I'll say is, it's a very controversial question. I think basically the idea would be that you, you might be able to control your emotions in the way that you control your ability to play a masterpiece concerto on the piano.    You have to go through a training process to teach yourself how to respond, how to have different kinds of responses and let me likewise for motions. I do think that no matter what your theory is, they're gonna disallow what's called like a synchronic control of emotional response. So as you're experiencing the motion itself, you can't just tell yourself, stop feeling this emotion. It needs to be a kind of a longer process of training. David, do you have a? I think that's a great way of putting it. I think that's a great way of putting it. We can distinguish between indirect and direct control. And I think the most people, I think the standard picture is that you can't have direct control. You can have direct control over emotions. Okay, but we should probably move on because we don't have, let's see how much time. This one's at 3.30, right? Okay, cool. We should move on then. So, I mean the major, I guess the major problem with this theory is gonna be, I guess what we looked at last time with Thomas Nagel. So, I'll skip over. So the first objection, I won't go over now, but the second objection is, this is a global workspace theory. It's a good answer, but just to a question we weren't asking. You know, this is a trivially true theory if we say that, if we can show the question of what is consciousness narrowly. If we say that basically, what are the systems that underlie conscious experience? We can answer that. I mean, it seems just kind of maybe like a question of neuroscience running its course. This is maybe, you can think of this as a pretty hard problem, but in philosophy, people tend to call this the easy problem. It's easy to figure out how bits of information work in the brain. That's the easy part. The hard part is once we know all the things about that's going on in the bat's brain, how can we use that to kind of give us any kind of information about what it's actually like to be the bat? And this is supposed to be the hard question. So if we can show it kind of widely and we say what is consciousness like, including having these, what are these experiences that these things produce, this kind of third person objective account might just might not be the kind of thing that can take account for that. I guess I'll make a reply on behalf of the Hain and Akash. You might think that, they might just be on board with what Nagel's saying and say that the only question we can answer is this easy question. And it seems like we're making progress on this. It's not trivial that we've figured out that this is how information gets processed and that if we made a computer that did all this, according to this theory, it would tell us firmly, it would say that this thing has got to be conscious. And that's an answer that we weren't able to give before. And so you think of it as, it's not just an empty theory. It's gonna be giving answers to questions that we weren't able to answer before. But you can also say that there's more than one way of knowing the same thing. So if there's a red tomato in front of me, I can look at the tomato, I can see that it's red, but if I'm color blind, I can pull out my spectrometer and do a light reading on the tomato and I can find out that, oh, yeah, this tomato's red. It's giving off the right wavelengths. And you might think that, those two different methods are two ways of knowing the same fact about the tomato. You can discover the tomato's red by using your eyes. You can discover the tomato's red by reading off a number on a spectrometer. The information's being transmitted to you via two different systems. You're using your visual system to do the hard work. In the first case, you're using a spectrometer to do the hard work in the second case. But the basic fact, the fact that the tomato's red is something you can kind of get in touch with via two channels. And similarly, I think maybe what Dehan and Akash would say is that I might not be able to know I might not be able to put myself in the shoes of the bat and say that I'm conscious of the echolocation and I can know that because it feels a certain way to me right now, but if we step outside the bat, we can say, look, the echolocation information is being projected in a particular way. It's able to do particular kinds of things in the brain and we can kind of know a lot of the things that the bat knows, but via a different channel. That's, I think, the best response someone like Dehan and Akash could give. I think there's still problems with that, but I'm just making the case for them and I'm curious to see what, here are you guys thinking of it, but I guess we don't have that much time. I did wanna briefly kind of develop this point further. So next class, we're actually gonna look at someone in a block who thinks that there's a real question that still has to be answered after we give this kind of description of the functional architecture underlying consciousness. And we didn't read this paper, but in the Charmers edition, Charmers volume you guys have is a paper of blocks called Concepts of Consciousness and he talks about how we don't mean one thing when we talk about consciousness. He picks out two things, but he starts off by saying that we often mean different things by the word consciousness. So he writes that the concept of consciousness is a hybrid or better, a mongrel concept. The word consciousness connotes a number of different concepts and denotes a number of different phenomena. So when you think of consciousness, you can think of, and we associate it with a number of different concepts. We can say that consciousness is a matter of sentience, it's a matter of awareness, it's a matter of sensation, it's a matter of self-awareness, it's a matter of feeling or it's a matter of intelligence. All these things you might make a case for what we mean when we talk about consciousness. Neblok fixes on two kinds of concepts that we normally have in mind when we talk about consciousness. So he talks about phenomenal consciousness or p-consciousness, he says phenomenal consciousness is experience, what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is something it is like to be in that brain state. Here he's just basically pointing directly to what Nagel's saying. So Nagel points the what it is likeness of experience and Blok is calling that phenomenal consciousness and p-consciousness properties include the experiential properties of sensations, feelings and perceptions, but Blok also wants to include things like thoughts, wants and emotions as well. Though perhaps they have a different sort of phenomenal consciousness that's important. He also talks about access consciousness or a-consciousness and a representation is a-conscious if it is broadcast for free use in reasoning for direct rational control or action, including reporting. So paradigmatically, a-consciousness is more thought like, more cognitive, while p-consciousness is more sensational or perceptual. And I mean, one kind of basic intuition that supports this is that the conscious states associated with thought, rationality, these are like not the full-blooded consciousness states that we have in mind when we think about the kinds of things that are really puzzling. We think they're really puzzling is like there's some kind of feeling going on that's associated with the feeling of pain or some sensation that is associated with the sensation of redness. And that's kind of what's really puzzling about consciousness. Why would that even, what is that? Why is it there? And so, I'll just say right now and I think Austin will be addressing this next time, but Blok thinks that these two things become detached from one another. So you can have a state that is a-conscious that's not p-conscious. You can have a state that is p-conscious, but not a-conscious. And if that's true, then this theory, as a theory of consciousness, does not work. You would have states that are like qualia associated with them, but they're not accessible in the workspace. You would also have pieces of information that are in the workspace, which have no feeling associated with them at all. And if that's true, it would seem like this theory just isn't doing the kind of work you want it to do. And so there's a real question here, though. Can we separate the sort of functional properties of consciousness from the phenomenal properties of consciousness? If you're going with the global workspace theory, you're gonna say that you can't just because of some brute physical law. In next class, I think we're gonna look at somebody who says, no, these two things come apart, and we can talk meaningfully about this phenomenal consciousness stuff. And I think we have three minutes left, and I'll take questions for the, or do they want to have questions about the nature of the problem, why this might be unsatisfactory, or want to make the case for it?  So thank you for coming. Oh, we'll see you Thursday.


Hi everybody, it's Mayor Betsy back with you this afternoon. Thank you for joining in and watching and listening today. I know you're probably getting tired of updates, but you need to know the truth is we're monitoring this situation on a 24-7 basis, and we will be reporting to you around the clock if need be, but certainly every day between 4.30 or 6, depending on when it is. As new changes come forward, we want you to know about those because they definitely impact your life.  They're working hard on your behalf and trying to stay safe so they go home to their families also. Today I've been in contact with all of my fellow big city mayors and we've discussed the need for potentially tighter restrictions in response to the COVID-19 fight that we have. Governor Abbott made it clear yesterday that a move towards a shelter in place or something along that line would not be made at the state level, but rather it would be made at the community level with county judges and big city mayors and other mayors. Big city mayors we know to protect our communities, we must act, and we believe that a coordinated response is critical in this stage. So we're working with all of the big city mayors and the big city county judges and their attorneys and city managers to come up with a solution that will help us all. Tomorrow morning you will have a coordinated message from the big city mayors and the county judges in response to COVID-19. Because we know that urban communities are denser in population and people are at greater risk of significant spikes for the transmission in this virus, that also has the potential to overwhelm our healthcare systems. I want to once again thank everyone who has worked so hard to keep this community safe and to help us with these restrictions. You all have been amazingly good at following the guidelines that we put out over the weekend. Let me be clear, there's more to be done, but you're doing great. Please don't go to the grocery store and load up on everything. There's no need to panic shop here. And when you go to the grocery store, try to restrict it to one family member so you're not getting too much density and you can keep social distancing. Remember, we've been in contact with all our grocers here in the city of Fort Worth and they tell us they're stocking all day, every day. They have plenty of food and starting tomorrow, Albertsons, Tom Thumb and Randalls will open early with access for seniors, pregnant women and anyone who's medically compromised. Tuesday, Thursday mornings, they'll be open from 7 to 9 for those who need to be a little less contact and Whole Foods is open daily for that same group from 7 to 8 a.m. It's not a mandate that you go during that time if you're in that group, but it's a strong recommendation. You also need to know that our Fort Worth firefighters will be there to help you carry out your groceries or whatever you might need. They'll provide assistance. That's just one of the examples of how our employees are coming together to help and how our businesses have become incredibly strong and even stronger community partners during this time. On that note, I'd like for Brandon Bennett to come back. He's been with us this week and last week, most of the time, he's going to talk a little bit about working with our area of businesses. Brandon? Good afternoon. There's been a lot of conversation about what is an essential and an unessential service and this is no different than perhaps the conversations we've been having about the number of people that can gather together. You can kind of find that same logic and that is the better job that you do to isolate yourself from strangers, the better job that you do to isolate yourself from sick family members, sick coworkers, the less risk there is to you and your health and the less risk there is for transmission of this virus. And so as the mayor mentioned, City of Fort Worth working with other cities in the area and the county judge, we continue to work on declarations that limit the number of contact that folks are having, particularly right now as we move into probably one of the more significant time periods the next two to three weeks, particularly the next two weeks, that we have to make sure that we are isolating folks in such a fashion that this virus does not take a foothold like what's happened in other parts of the world. And so with the upcoming, the current declaration and the upcoming declarations, you'll continue to hear the word essential business and non-essential.  And then you think of non-essential, well, retail clothing sales would be non-essential. Entertainment venues is another one and the list is pretty lengthy on both of those. In the coming days, as early as tomorrow, I think there's going to be a lot more conversation about essential and non-essential and that the business community is going to have lots of questions. And so we set up, started at 8 o'clock this morning, a call center dedicated solely to answering these questions. And so you can go to the Fort Worth website, to our homepage and then link to the COVID-19 page. You can send your questions to COVID-19 all together at FortWorthTexas.gov or you can call<PHONE_NUMBER> and we have customer service representatives that will be there to answer your questions. I encourage you to use the website, to use the email, to use the telephone number and let us help remove some of maybe the confusion that will come with the upcoming declarations. So thank you for all that you have done and continue to do to keep our community safe. Thank you, Brandon. We know this is confusing, folks. Heck, it's even confusing for us occasionally, but we are all going to get through this together. It's a decision that we monitor day by day, hour by hour. You are, as I said earlier, providing great compliance.  FortWorth is launching a public awareness campaign. Share the message with your family. It'll be posted today on my page so you can share it. We'll get through this. FortWorth Stand Strong will do it together.


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So today I am going to tell you about our latest platform, it is called Indox with an I. I will definitely tell you more about it. So today I will introduce my team, my awesome team. Then I will tell you about the concept and the problem that we are trying to solve. I will go into the solution which is obviously the mechanics of the idea and also some use cases. So who are we? We are at us, we use blockchain technology and smart contracts to secure data and documents on the blockchain. So our primary product is digital certificates, so converting the degrees and diplomas into smart contracts. We also have a pilot going on with one of the politics in Singapore. We are going to come up soon so I can't divulge much about that. So this is my awesome team. I started this company with David more than one year ago. We have Ryan Arranger, the page of CO and a group who is in India. So we started this company with the premise of smart contracts as a service. So you must have heard about the SAS model which is software as a service. But we gave it a small spin and came up with smart contracts as a service. So to get into the platform idea itself, I want to touch a little about decentralization and why it is important. So right now, you see two kinds of models on the screen. One is a centralized model and one is a decentralized model. So internet applications can be divided into three logical layers according to their evolution. So when internet started, we had very static websites. So we had like travel blogs or any more companies. We were just putting up brochures on the internet. So the websites just had some pictures, photos and just some occupational models companies. That was web 1.0. That came about web 2.0 in the form of Facebook and all the dynamic websites. So now you could do a lot more with your internet. You could go play online, you could put up your social media profiles online, you could do online banking and all these kinds of things. But the fundamental problem with web 2.0 is that you as a user never control your data. You never own your data. All these websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, they can monetize your data and they can do anything with it. They can manipulate your data. So Facebook did some manipulation with the emotions of its users on the wall. And I think that's not what you want them to do. So why decentralization? So Vitalik Vetterich, who is the co-founder of Ethereum, he wrote a great article about the importance of decentralization. There are three important things. One is fault tolerance. What do you mean by that? Is that in a decentralized ecosystem, the entire application consists of several different components. And your application is not rely on any single component. So if any component reads accidentally, the application is advanced because you may have a lot of written answers. You have polluted resistance. And then any two players in this ecosystem, they decide to pollute together and change your data, manipulate your data. They can't do it because you need a consensus and you need a lot of people, more than 51% in case of Bitcoin, together have changed their history in that case. That closed down to attach the resistance. As in any government or any other governmental agency or spy agency, if they come to Bitcoin tomorrow and say that they want to change Bitcoin, they can't do it. Because they'll have to change 51% of the nodes all across the world. And since this network is so geographically distributed, it's quite difficult to do it. The same thing with other free-to-be networks of mesh networks like NASCAR, Bitcoins. So sometimes Bitcoins are used for illegal purpose. But the technology itself is quite revolutionary. So you can't actually shut down a Bitcoins network practically.  So this is the new stack. So all these days, from the last 10-12 years, you have had three tier architecture as in the front end, the middle end and the database. But now the stack is changing. You have web 3.0 applications where the entire stack is distributed and decentralized. So in that case, you have Ethereum which adds special computation engine. You can write smart contracts which contain your logic. And essentially they become little middle-ware players and also the database. You have IPFS which stands for Interplanetary Files System. It acts like a decentralized drop-off or a decentralized history. Where you can store your content, you can store your files and it's not on any single server. So they don't have a single corner failure. You can monetize your applications to the cryptocurrency like Bitcoins, Ethereum, and any other types of coins, hard coins, shitcoins, whatever you want to call it. But one fundamental limitation with blockchains is that they cannot speak with outside internet. So Ethereum smart contracts, they don't know what's happening with outside internet. They don't know what is the price of gold today. They don't know what is the price of a flight from Singapore to Mumbai or Singapore to New York. So if you have a smart contract, it says that if the price of gold, you know, was above X dollars, then I transfer my ether to buy it. But the smart contract doesn't know that. And you cannot, so new types of applications are enacted like Oracleize or Ogre, which is a traditional market, which can feed the data into the smart contract in a trustless manner. As in, there is no single authority which says that this is the price of gold today. You can outsource the wisdom and you can collect the smart contract. So, again, this is one more universal concept. In the last blockchain night, Professor David Lee was mentioning about ICUs and initial token sales. So, you know, all these years since Facebook started and even before that, the startups and new tech companies have relied heavily upon traditional forms of investment, like VC funding or PE funding in that case. But now, you have some new media companies where people raise funding through something like crowd sourcing. So, I still stand for initial fund offering, which is similar to an ITU. But in this case, you are pre-selling the tokens. So, suppose Microsoft is pre-selling you the tokens from an office software that can be done on this blockchain. Like a Kickstarter campaign, where suppose I am creating a new kind of bag, a new kind of remote control, I can pre-sell you these things even before I start managing it. So, that's an ICO. And even Ethereum, for that matter, Ethereum made a pre-sale in 2014 again and then resold some token sources back home. Yeah, so the problem that we are trying to solve today is loss of control, loss of ownership on your data. We want people to control their own data instead of keeping it in big data centers and data farms and manipulating it, monetizing it for their own purpose. Second thing is, because you should be able to monetize your data when you create content, when you contribute to the growth of the platform, you should be able to get money from that. According to the platform's law, the value of the subscription network is directly proportional to the number of users it has. So, if you have more than one users, the platform itself becomes more valuable and the users should get something out of that because you are getting the platform more valuable. Today, Facebook has more than one billion users and it's so valuable, but you are not getting any more. You are just getting emojis and smileys and things like that. And it's still economical. So today, although, see, I agree that your degrees are important, your credits are important, where you have more than important, but what's more important is what skills to have and what skills you can do. So, we have a really great story of Deepak, like, let us see, oh, oh. He has a degree in Charter Accounting, so he is an accountant by training. He used to work at PWC for 11 years, but he recently joined my company as a developer. So currently, he is working for RehabJS and developing the landing place for this application. Why? Because he could prove that he can code. He doesn't have a degree in computer science, but he could prove to me that he has code and he has written software in the past. That's why we hired him. That's why he has a degree in computer science. This is not a small problem. The value of the social network, as I told you, is really tremendous. LinkedIn got sold to Microsoft for almost 26 billion. Snapchat did an ICO and raised $3 billion, at a value of $24 billion, and that, in spite of having a loss-making revenue model, a loss-making revenue model, that's what we say that we want you to profit from the rate of monetization. So our solution is to give back ownership of the data to the users. And one more thing is that, on LinkedIn, whenever you put up anything, LinkedIn asks you for an endorsement. Most of the times, these endorsements are just given out because I like them also. So I can say that Ryan has really good at HTML CSS, although he doesn't know it. I just say yes, because I endorse it, because I like it. Same thing might be happening with many people. So you don't have anything to do with the value of the data, this claim or this endorsement is true. And hence, we came up with the idea of an endorse platform. In this platform, we have, we are going to do a initiative token, say, with this one. We have three kinds of tokens. Two of them will be internal tokens. They won't leave the platform. It's called a lab score and internal endorsements. Both for user journey. Suppose a new user called Alice, she joins the platform. She gets certain reputation, a minimum reputation, after she joins the platform. So this is similar to Reddit or Stack Overflow, where you start with a minimum reputation score. So now Alice can come and make a claim that she has an ingredient on the news. So on this platform, everything is in the form of a claim. So whatever you see on the platform becomes a claim. Alice claims that she has that claim. From the news, we still don't know whether she actually has a ingredient. So she puts up a blue element, like her certificate, or a link for a user's website, which has to do their entertainment. What happens is the platform will randomly choose meaning than endorsements. Who will get a request for endorsement Alice?  And one of them chooses it. So in this case, similarly, we will choose random endorsers. One of them might choose to endorse her. So next slide. So of course Bob chooses to endorse Alice. What he does is he goes to her blue element, maybe he goes to the link of her certificate, or he goes to the link of the user's website, and sees that Alice actually has an ingredient on her US. Then he can endorse Alice's claim. He has two options. He can either endorse the claim, or flag the claim. In Twitter, Bob will get an endorsement, and Alice will get an endorsement, and obviously both the reputation scores will increase. So we are doing this in order to prevent game theoretical nature of the system. We don't want endorsers to game the system. In the sense that, because Bob knows Alice, he might say that hey, she doesn't have an idea, and hence he might flag her claim, and she might lose her reputation. So we are going for the balance of probabilities. So suppose out of ten endorsers, eight of them say that hey, she has an idea, and two of them say that she doesn't have it. So we can safely assume that these two guys are lying, or they are playing malicious game, just to add things to Alice. So in that case, the malicious actors lose their reputation, and they won't earn anything. They won't earn any endorse box. So now, the box that you earn from the system, you can convert that to any offset token, like Ethereum or Bitcoin or even US dollars, and you can earn from your box, that you are collecting, to contribute to the platform. So one thing is very important, the box and the reputation score are not transparent, and you cannot buy it, you have to own it, by contributing to the platform in a good manner, not in a malicious manner, and hence it's quite important to be contributing to the platform. So we are envisioning a completely decentralized, serverless architecture, where you just have a UI and no server is satisfactory. My UI, which will be connected directly to Ethereum through local network, and it will be dealing with smart contracts, at least. Our data and content is this total IP address. So at our certificate system, which is another pilot right now, this system will be one of the features in this platform, and we will be building the deployment in this, so that it becomes really easy for everybody, and some people, to deal with this platform. So it will look pretty much similar to what you have said, but I can't be completely completed the way of doing this. There are several use cases for this, the immediate ones that spread to mind are corroding. So what happens is, right now, the important companies for your employers, they have to do a lot of background checks or background verification, they don't do with any validity or what you claim is true. So in this claim, in this endorse, although we can't see that your certificates are authentic, completely authentic, but you have a certain degree of validity in this case. You know, you can globally claim that 10 people are endorsing me, and 100 people are endorsing me, so you can believe this. So it can reduce the time for verification process as well. Advertisements. Advertisements can come on the platform. As a user, you can opt in or opt out of advertising. If you opt in, there will obviously be earning costs and converting them to tokens or dollars, but if you opt out, you won't be earning cash. It can be, it can be a good thing for the AYS case that because of logG right now, all the advertisers, you don't even know because there are ways to process it. But that's a normal procedure. People have to jump through a lot of moves and you have to have a resources like NSC or BI or something like that. Do that. I don't have resources, normal companies don't have them. So this can be a really good thing for your device salesman. As a person, we'll get a set of repetitions both. We'll see what he has, what he hasn't done, what he hasn't done and what he hasn't done. It can also be used in other cases like traditional markets, like Gnosis or Ogre, that's the end of my presentation. Please join us in this platform and be awesome.


So, you want to divorce the narcissist. Why? Isn't it fun? The ups and downs, the rollercoaster, the unfulfilled promises, the abuse? Won't you miss it? Well, probably not. Okay. Richard Grannon, the one and only, Spartan life coach, and myself, Sam Buckney, the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, you remember? We are going to be at the Burbeck Institute on the 4th of November. Don't ask me why. And we are going to be there from 12 o'clock until 6 in the evening because we have nothing better to do. If you care to join us, we are going to deliver a four-hour seminar on divorcing the narcissist or psychopath. Now, seriously, divorce is anyhow a fraught, difficult, onerous, arduous process and many other adjectives. It's emotionally harrowing. It's financially devastating. It has effects and impacts on near and dear, including your children, if you have any. So, as it is, it is a traumatic thing to go through. Actually, trauma studies have shown that divorce is the most traumatic event in a person's life.  And it's amplified, I think, for two reasons. First of all, narcissists and psychopaths have such a unique psychology, such inexplicable, incomprehensible psychodynamics that it feels like you are divorcing an alien, you're divorcing someone who is not, shall we say, fully human. And that is a very disconcerting, sometimes frightening experience because you can't predict, you can't tell what would be the next step, where is it all leading and how is it all going to end. So, this is my role in the seminar. I'm going to give you insight into how the narcissists and the psychopath views the divorce process because they don't look at it the way you look at it. They don't see it the same way. Their mind interprets everything in such a way that you have no access to. Narcissists and psychopaths have numerous cognitive deficits and cognitive biases. In other words, they're not thinking straight and they have emotional hang-ups and they have problems processing certain types of emotions such as fear, guilt, shame, rage, anger. So, it's very important to understand what's going on in the mind of your opposite number, in the mind of the person you're divorcing and while you can make safe assumptions about normal, healthy people, you can't make any assumptions, safe or not, about narcissists and psychopaths before you have delved into the mind before you took the scuba deep diving which I'm going to provide you with. So, I'm going to tell you exactly what your narcissists and psychopaths is thinking of in each and every step of this very complicated, winding way, not exactly the yellow brick road. And so, both Richard and I are going to discuss how to cope with your emotional reactions to the narcissists' emotional reactions. We're going to tell you how to defeat the narcissists. In court, it's very easy to do, by the way. You need to train your attorney, educate your attorney on how to do it, but once you've learned the basic tactics and techniques, you can defeat the narcissists in court.  We will discuss issues of custody and children. What about visitation rights? What about should they be limited or given at all? What if the narcissist soothes for custody? What techniques and tactics is going to use to make it look bad? How the system perniciously and insidiously actually collaborates with the narcissist against you? Because the narcissist is great at charming people, great at projecting an image of a great father or a wonderful husband. The narcissist is going to pathologize you, going to make you look mentally ill, and how to work with the system, how to leverage the system. So we're going to tell you what to expect in the divorce process and how to defend yourself against the narcissist, but divorce is only at this stage. What happens after the divorce?  So there's a lot of gaslighting, which uses other people to abuse you. Smear campaigns, I mean, you name it, and we're going to tell you how to handle yourself in your social milieu and your environment how to construct support networks and how to use these support networks to counter the narcissist's relentless and insistent attacks. And a small percentage of the narcissist also becomes stalkers, and a small percentage of these stalkers, the paranoid stalkers are very dangerous. You have to protect yourself, literally. And then there is emotional impact. There is emotional impact because during the divorce process usually you will not be able to obtain closure. Many of the things you thought you knew about your marriage, about your spouse, are utterly exposed as utterly wrong. The shock is huge. It's indescribable. The shock of discovering the truth about your life, what has really happened as opposed to the shared psychosis that you had with your husband. And I'm saying husband because majority of narcissists are male.  So it is this exiting the cults because what you've had was a cult. The briefing, the programming that has to be self-administered. You can obviously get help from someone like Richard, who has developed amazing techniques of coping and healing. But ultimately the bulk of the work you have to do yourself.  And very often you're misunderstood and your predicament is underestimated and mocked and poo-pooed. And so we're going to describe all this and we're going to try to lend you a helping hand. And then we're going to take a break and the second part is a dialogue between me and Richard. And I hope between Richard and me. Because the interviews, the recorded interviews I was talking 90% of the time and Richard has many fascinating things to say. He's an absolutely brilliant intelligent, super intelligent, I would say interlocutor. He's underestimating himself. He's self-effacing and self-deprecating. But I really would try to control my impulses and let him speak as well. Because he has brilliant insights and unusual ways of looking at things. So we're going to have this public dialogue in front of the live audience, you. For two hours. And if it's successful we're going to have a series of live dialogues all over the United Kingdom and maybe elsewhere. Because I think both of us have a lot to say. It doesn't necessarily mean that we are right. But at least we'll provoke you to think and to react between you and yourself and with others. We want to engender, we want to foster a conversation. So this is it. These are the two parts. You can buy tickets to the first part or ticket to the first part or a ticket to the second part. And you can buy a combined ticket. Hurry up and buy a ticket before the 15th of October because it's a very sizable discount. Like 30 or 40%. After the 15th of October the prices are much higher. And there's no reason for that. Because you know you're coming. So, you know, why wait? Jump on the bandwagon. Join us. Richard Granum, a Spartan life coach and Sam Dachman, the author of Malignan Sirflop, Massacism, Revisited. Join us for an unforgivable day. The 4th of November. A day of infamy to be remembered. Like in the future people will ask you where have you been when Richard and Sam held their first live dialogue. And you will remember. See you soon.


They're too loud, they're too loud, they're too loud. I need some right now to get better. Rise up, let's go.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we are going to discuss average and marginal revenue. First let us recall by demand function. The price per unit P can be expressed as a function of x that is P is equal to f of x. Now if r is the total revenue collected by selling x units then r is equal to P into x and the revenue function r which is equal to r of x is equal to P into x or we can also write it as x into f of x as P is equal to f of x. Now average revenue can be defined as the revenue per unit of a commodity and is denoted by a r that is average revenue is the revenue received per unit. Therefore average revenue is equal to total revenue upon number of units sold which is equal to r upon x which implies that average revenue is equal to r upon x that is P into x upon x as r is equal to P into x. Therefore we have average revenue is equal to P that is average revenue is same as the price per unit. Let us take an example the total revenue received from the sale of x units of a product is given by r of x is equal to 15x minus 0.25x square finds average revenue. Here we are given the revenue function r of x is equal to 15x minus 0.25x square that is rx is given as 15x minus 0.25x square and we know that average revenue that is a r is equal to r upon x which implies that a r is equal to 1 by x of 15x minus 0.25x square. Therefore average revenue is equal to 1 by x into 15x that is 15 minus of 1 by x into 0.25x square that is 0.25x. So average revenue is given by 15 minus 0.25x. Now we shall discuss marginal revenue. It is defined as the rate of change of total revenue with respect to the quantity sold. It is denoted by mr and mr is given by d by dx of r that is the total revenue. So mr is equal to rate of change of total revenue with respect to the quantity sold and we know that total revenue is equal to p into x. Therefore we have mr is equal to d by dx of p into x. Now applying product rule here we have p into d by dx of x that is 1 plus x into d by dx of p and we can also write it as mr is equal to taking p common from both the terms we have p into 1 plus x upon p into dp by dx. Let us take the same example. The total revenue received from the sale of x units of our product is given by r of x is equal to 15 into x minus 0.25 into x square. Find the marginal revenue. The revenue function is given as r of x is equal to 15 into x minus 0.25 into x square and we know that marginal revenue is equal to d by dx of r. Therefore we have mr is equal to d by dx of r that is 15 into x minus of 0.25 into x square which is equal to d by dx of 15x minus of d by dx of 0.25x square which is equal to d by dx of 15x that is differentiating 15x with respect to x we get 15 minus of differentiating 0.25x square with respect to x we get 0.25 into twice of x. Therefore we get 15 minus 0.5x marginal revenue mr is equal to 15 minus 0.5 into x. Now let us discuss the conditions under which a firm operates and there are two such conditions. First is pure competition. Here involves many firms in similar business activity that is production and marketing of the same product or products the market determines the price and not the producer. Here the price of a commodity is independent of the level of output x so total revenue r is given by p into x and marginal revenue mr is equal to p plus x into dp by dx and here marginal revenue mr is equal to p as p is constant therefore dp by dx is equal to 0 where p is price per unit and the second condition we harvest monopoly where there is no competition then the business is said to operate as a monopoly business Here the price of the commodity depends upon the number of items produced and sold here demand depends on price and price depends on demand here is only one seller and Note the substitute of the commodity marketed by this seller this completes our session hope you enjoyed this session