Clickbait, consciousness science, and responsible journalism

Hello and welcome. It's July 26th, 2023. We're here in Active Inference Livestream 49.1 with Megan Peters and Nora Bradford. So thank you both for joining. We're looking forward to a presentation followed by a discussion on clickbait, consciousness science, and responsible journalism. So Megan, to you. Thank you. And thanks so much, Daniel, for having us. We're really happy to be here and to chat about this. So I'll talk for a little over 10 minutes and then we'll hopefully have a nice discussion here. So yeah, we're really happy to be here because I think that this is a really topical, really, yeah, very topical thing for us to be talking about right now. It's very in the media. It's really in response to the way the media has been covering consciousness science just in the past few weeks. So here we go. I'll have a few things to share with you. Okay, so since we're talking about consciousness science, let's start with a provocative question. So you are conscious. How is this possible? How is it possible that your brain creates the conscious experience of you? And so this is a captivating and it's a stimulating, kind of crazy question. It's a really huge question. It borders on the religious and spiritual in many ways. It borders on the cutting edge of physics in many ways. And so the study of this question and the field of consciousness science more generally, it's really straddling the border between the natural sciences and philosophy and spirituality in a way that a lot of other domains maybe don't need to do. And so as a result, this field of consciousness science, it really captures the hearts and minds and sometimes pretty wild imaginations of all sorts of folks, as I said, from psychologists and biologists and neuroscientists all the way to computer scientists and engineers, to religious and spiritual leaders, basically anybody who wonders about our origins or place in the universe, why that we know that we are here, why there is something that it is like to be us. They are the people who are interested in this question. And that's probably a lot of people who are listening and watching right now. So it's actually really quite easy, I think, to get swept up in the sensational nature of this question. And consciousness science is a really big deal. It touches on so many aspects of our everyday experience. And so this kind of leads us to another version of this question, which is, is this even really science? Is this something that can be even studied scientifically or does it transcend beyond scientific inquiry? Do consciousness scientists do something that can be characterized really as science? Or maybe they're studying something that's a little bit more on the border, like, I don't know, telepathy or panpsychism, like maybe rocks and trees are also conscious. Wouldn't that be crazy? Or maybe the vibrations of the universe mean that the universe is conscious. So it kind of quickly starts to feel a little fuzzy, a little less scientific. And that's what I want to talk about today is that perception and how that is kind of exacerbated by the way that this field is portrayed in the media and maybe what we can do about it. Okay. And so all this means that the consciousness science is really difficult, not just to do scientifically, and it is really difficult, I promise you. But it's also really difficult from a social perspective. So more than for some other fields, those of us who do consciousness science and who study this scientifically, we have a really crucial and difficult responsibility, which is to accurately and precisely communicate the state of our field and its methods and its discoveries, and how it relates to other fields from physics to medicine and and beyond. And it's in fact, so difficult that our field has actually written a number of papers about just how difficult it is. So this is a fairly recent paper, TSP, including many others. And this is just from a few years ago. And these papers, and this…