BI 128 Hakwan Lau: In Consciousness We Trust

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community.

Hakwan and I discuss many of the topics in his new book, In Consciousness we Trust: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. Hakwan describes his perceptual reality monitoring theory of consciousness, which suggests consciousness may act as a systems check between our sensory perceptions and higher cognitive functions. We also discuss his latest thoughts on mental quality space and how it relates to perceptual reality monitoring. Among many other topics, we chat about the many confounds and challenges to empirically studying consciousness, a topic featured heavily in the first half of his book. Hakwan was on a previous episode with Steve Fleming, BI 099 Hakwan Lau and Steve Fleming: Neuro-AI Consciousness.

Hakwan's lab: Consciousness and Metacognition Lab.Twitter: @hakwanlau.Book:In Consciousness we Trust: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience.

0:00 - Intro
4:37 - In Consciousness We Trust
12:19 - Too many consciousness theories?
19:26 - Philosophy and neuroscience of consciousness
29:00 - Local vs. global theories
31:20 - Perceptual reality monitoring and GANs
42:43 - Functions of consciousness
47:17 - Mental quality space
56:44 - Cognitive maps
1:06:28 - Performance capacity confounds
1:12:28 - Blindsight
1:19:11 - Philosophy vs. empirical work