I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host Mo Gaudet. This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps

some nuggets of wisdom along the way.

This is your invitation to slow down with us.

Welcome to slow more. But that drives me to go a layer deeper and I think some people will probably switch off and leave us now.

But what you're saying here is that we, again, what you led me to think about here is all of this is observed,

interacted with, engaged with through those eyes and that brain, but even those

are icons, even those don't really exist in reality. The brain itself is just an icon. I'm a

cognitive neuroscientist. I spent a lot of time studying the brain. It's a

valuable thing to study and for everyday neuroscience I will talk about brain

activity causing my behavior and causing my conscious experiences.

It's perfectly harmless for everyday neuroscience.

Just like it's harmless when you're playing Grand Theft Auto

to think that the steering wheel literally

causes your car to turn.

If you're playing the game, it's perfectly harmless

to believe it. If you're a software engineer that wants to do the next install of the software for that game and upgrade it, that illusion, that fiction is no longer harmless. If you really believe that the steering wheel

and Grand Theft Thought it was the final reality,

you don't understand what you need to understand

to upgrade the software.

And so when we're understanding consciousness

in its relationship to the brain, the fiction that

brains exist when they're not observed has to go.

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