Patrick House: Neuroscience and Understanding Consciousness

Ben Yeoh Chats

Patrick House is a neuroscientist and writer. His research focused on the neuroscience of free will and in particular how mind-control parasites altered a rat’s behaviour.

We once had a long chat on the rainy streets of Glasgow. This chat – which I may not fully recall – involved speaking on what consciousness is, and touched on his work on mind-control bugs.

He’s written a collection of essays: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness

“Consider different translations of a poem: Each has something relevant to say, but none can entirely capture the essence. House repeatedly returns to a case in which a woman was undergoing brain surgery to address epilepsy. At one point, the surgeons touched a part of the brain that made her laugh. Did this indicate that emotional responses are simply an aspect of the physical matter inside our skulls?”

We had a long chat on this. I asked him:

Do you dream in colour ?

Whether lucid dreaming is real?

What he meant by: "If I were asked to create, from scratch and under duress, a universal mechanism for passing consciousness from parent to child, I would probably come up with something a bit like grafting a plant." ?

Memory in childhood

What he finds the most terrifying result in neuroscience

What translating poetry has in common with understanding consciousness

Whether animals have consciousness

What he thinks of AI and why he no longer plays Go

Patrick asks me if I would write a play only for robots.

We end on Patrick’s advice:

“My suggestion is to have phenomenological date night with whoever you're interested in the world and ask what their dreams are really like and if it's in images or what inside of their head is really like and see if you get anything, see if you solve any conflict.”

It was lovely long form chat about consciousness and the mind.

Transcript/Video here: www.thendobetter.com/arts/2023/3/27/patrick-house-neuroscience-understanding-consciouness-podcast