In my last post, I shared my reflections on Erik Hoel’s wonderful book on the science of consciousness, The World Behind the World. As a follow up, he was kind enough to answer my questions over email about both his book and his very exciting career. Erik was a professor at Tuft’s University until 2023, when he left academia to work full time on his Substack newsletter, The Intrinsic Perspective. He holds a doctorate in neuroscience, which he earned working under Giulio Tononi on the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He wears many hats as a writer: popular non-fiction (The World Behind the World), essayist (The Intrinsic Perspective), and novelist (The Revelations, published in 2021).
“I think there’s been too much focus on technological progress as the driver of human civilization and not enough on the cognitive tools”
Joel: The beginning of your book introduces the intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives in the context of Julian Jaynes’s work. Do you think the seemingly impoverished accounts of subjective experience by ancient people, noted in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, are really telling us how ancient people thought about consciousness per se, or the development of selfhood? For example, if ancient people interpreted their thoughts as the gods speaking to them, could this suggest that they had not yet developed the sort of selfhood that we take for granted today?
Erik: They were people steeped in myth and metaphor. Religion for them was like science is for us – it was the way the world works. So I think they still had selves, in the modern sense, but their reality model was so different it looks as if they themselves were different. Additionally, and I try to stress this point in the book, we have all sorts of cognitive abstract tools that they didn’t. These are things that took a long time to develop, and include the ability to even talk about selves in detail, describe consciousness in detail, and so on, things I group under “the intrinsic perspective.” Even a teenager can now do stream of consciousness writing without having read Joyce – they’ve absorbed the ability by osmosis. But that had to be invented. I think there’s been too much focus on technological progress as the driver of human civilization and not enough on the cognitive tools, like the ability to describe consciousness, better narrative abilities, clearer causal reasoning, even empiricism itself.
featuring Stella Dorrestein from an earlier blog post.
“I don’t know if emptiness or non-self is really anything fundamental to human nature”
Joel: Your writing on the intrinsic perspective strongly emphasizes the literary development of the novel, and literary techniques like stream of consciousness, as central to this perspective’s development in Western culture. How do you perceive the novel’s role in exploring subjective experiences in comparison to more formal introspective practices like meditation? Do you practice meditation?
Erik: I don’t practice meditation. But I’m familiar with it – regularly in my childhood actual Buddhist monks would stay at our house. My mother would host them to teach classes at her bookstore, or build sand mandalas. Perhaps seeing that these were people, up close, made the mysticism of the whole thing a lot less attractive.
Joel: Are there aspects of subjective experiences which are rarely introspected upon in novels? For instance, one might not learn about the optic blindspot from reading fiction, much less deeper aspects of experience that are fundamental in the Buddhist tradition, such as emptiness or non-self.
Erik: I don’t know if emptiness or non-self is really anything fundamental to human nature, given the scope of human civilization. I think you can get to such states, with practice, but there’s a reason it takes practice.
Joel: In your work, you discuss the prospect of adding selfhood as an axiom to IIT (the integrated information theory of consciousness developed by Giulio Tononi). How do you perceive schools of Buddhism or Advaita, which are centered on concepts of non-self or non-duality?
Erik: I think these are of phenomenological interest, but again, does a meditator experiencing some hard-to-reach state of consciousness tell us anything of deep scientific interest about consciousness? Honestly, probably not. I’m actually bearish on any approaches to consciousness like that, instead of reflecting on normal, untrained phenomenology, so much as such a thing exists (the latter is what IIT does).
Joel: Paraphrasing Theodosius Dobzhansky, you’ve written that nothing in the brain makes sense except in light of consciousness. Is this true for all disciplines in neuroscience? For instance, do neuroscientists studying motor disorders like Parkinson’s disease need the intrinsic perspective?
Erik: I think it’s a problem of scale. If Parkinson’s really is just a problem with dopaminergic neurons totally localized to the substantia nigra, then no, you don’t need a theory of consciousness. But I’m pretty clear that a lot of molecular neurobiology can proceed apace without a theory, and if Parkinson’s can be explained entirely that way, then it falls under that umbrella. It’s cognitive neuroscience that is in trouble without a theory of consciousness.
“I think [my] book is sort of fundamentally complete in that it really doesn’t focus much on the news of the day.”
Joel: You’ve written about the stagnation of progress in neuroscience due to its preparadigmatic immaturity. If we had a comprehensive theory of consciousness tomorrow, what is the first practical breakthrough you would anticipate?
Erik: There wouldn’t just be one first one, there would be a Cambrian explosion. I would expect to basically throw out the textbooks and write new ones, and that would start happening immediately. But from a very practical perspective probably the first main effect would be to resolve longstanding debates about AI consciousness, either how to build it or why it’s impossible and to what degree current systems count, which has significant practical implications for basically everyone given how integrated the technology already is becoming with search, operating systems, etc.
Joel: How far can the NCC (neural correlates of consciousness) approach take us toward practical advances without a guiding theory of consciousness? For example, there’s great interest now in developing non-hallucinogenic psychedelic drugs. Do you think this effort can succeed without a theory driven approach?
Erik: We’ve identified plenty of drugs that work on the brain prior to a theory of consciousness, but it’s mostly either (a) luck, or (b) simply variations on what we know works already, which was originally a consequence of luck. So it could very well work. Personally, I doubt that the antidepressant effects can be simulated without the experience, however.
Joel: You’ve had a lot of news to reflect on in your Substack newsletter for the past year. Shortly before your book came out last year, LLMs like ChatGPT exploded onto the scene; then, shortly after the book’s release, a letter attacking IIT as pseudoscience was posted on PsyArXiv. Is there anything new you wish you could have included in your book? If so, how might it have covered these topics?
Erik: I think the book is sort of fundamentally complete in that it really doesn’t focus much on the news of the day. That’s both an advantage of books and a disadvantage. I probably wouldn’t write a book about AI, since it’s changing so fast there’s no point. At least, right now.
Joel: What’s next for your career? Are you working on a new book?
Erik: I do have plans for more books, and I’m doing some private research on the side about consciousness and emergence. But what’s immediately next is just a bunch of essays and ideas planned for my newsletter.
“I’m very excited for the next generation of consciousness researchers”
Joel: If you could invite any living author or scientist to write a foreword to the next edition of The World Behind the World, whom would you invite and why?
Erik: There are a number of people, from Anil Seth to David Chalmers to Giulio Tononi (my PhD mentor) that I think are still doing really interesting work. But I sort of know most of their opinions, so what they’d say wouldn’t surprise me. I’m very excited for the next generation of consciousness researchers, so perhaps someone whose name I don’t currently know, but will in the future.
Photo by Joel Frohlich, featuring Stella Dorrestein.
Joel: What sort of reception has The World Behind the World received since it came out last year? Are you pleased with how it’s been received? How has it been received in academia? Has anyone tried to pull you back into the ivory tower?
Erik: I don’t keep track of the reception of anything I do, on any sort of level. I retweet what I get tagged in, just because that’s what you’re supposed to do, it’s what the person expects, and it’s a strategy on social media about which I don’t have to put much thought in. But I learned long ago that actually tracking down anything else is just a path to pain. All you can do is just put things out in the world and hope people like them or that they have some influence, but you can’t think about it too long. As for myself, no one has tried to pull me back into academia, even though Tufts University still brags about me on Twitter and refers to me “Tufts’ Erik Hoel” and so on. I left for a number of reasons, some more personal than others, but one of the more practical ones was that I was afraid it would be a continuing struggle to get grants for my research. Several months after I left, I heard from a grant source that I had gotten something like a half-million-dollar grant from an application they had had languishing for years. But of course, they now wouldn’t award it. So I feel I have unfinished business in academia, and would like to return at some point to in a research position, while continuing to write. I do miss working with PhD students on new projects; I think I ran an inventive and interesting lab. If some institution reached out with an offer of an affiliation for a research professorship, I wouldn’t say no.