Meet Dawid Potgieter: Researching consciousness to treat pain and mental health

When South Africans go out into the world, we like to hang on to them and remind ourselves that we come from the same soil. Elon Musk is probably the best example of this, but there are many others. In the sports world; typical South African surnames pop up in many other countries like the Labuschagne brother; Marnus plays cricket for Australia and who can miss the name Lappies Labuschagne who was in Japan's very successful Rugby World Cup campaign, a team the Springbok's had to beat on the way to lifting the trophy. There is also CJ Stander who is a loose forward for Ireland. There are many South Africans who were capped in other countries including Kepler Wessels, Alan Lamb and Andrew Strauss to add to a long list. In the Bahamas, Saffer Dawid Potgieter is leading a new multi-million dollar funding initiative by the Templeton World Charity Foundation to try to find out one of the fundamental aspects of existence, our consciousness; a concept that science has not been able to explain. The aim of the research project is, as Dr Potgieter explained, is not only to find an explanation or a theory, but it is to determine whether machines could be conscious and to try find better answers to treating pain or mental health problems. – Linda van Tilburg

The foundation was founded by Sir John Templeton who lived in the Bahamas for 40 years. He was a very successful investor and when he died, he took some of his money into an endowment for the foundation. We're interested in science research, the kind of research that public funding can't normally support. So, most government funding goes towards curing cancer or heart disease, or something that's an imminent danger.

But there are other really big questions like: What is consciousness? What does it mean to be conscious as opposed to not be conscious? How do things become conscious? You know those questions related to things like: Could machines be conscious? What animals are conscious and so on. Also, a lot of mental health problems or other health problems like pain, are problems of consciousness; the problems of the subjective experience that we have and it's really difficult to imagine that we can solve those problems without understanding consciousness.

It's not something that we think we'll do very soon but someone has to do it and so we are trying to support research in that area, so that hopefully one day we can understand it well. Then we have a much better chance of solving some of these big problems like mental health or knowing whether computers might be conscious.

With artificial intelligence, that's probably what's eventually going to happen; if you get machines to do all the jobs; if they have some form of consciousness; you probably have to treat them better?

Possibly. I mean intelligence and consciousness are two separate things and people often confuse them. People often think that something that gets very intelligent will necessarily also be conscious. We do think that's true, but we don't know why things are conscious. People have good guesses. There are good theories about it but there isn't a complete consensus about it. But you are right in that; once something is conscious; once it has subjective experience; one could argue that it is the bearer of moral rights and duties and that we have a duty to treat it well and that could be a very important issue.

Other things like; there's a difference between a computer that just does things and a computer that could get very angry. Feelings like anger are subjective feelings. That's not just a calculation and it's a very powerful motivator. So, there could be a robot that gets angry or vindictive. It's important to know that that might be the case because then you know whether you're in danger or not.

Well exactly. So, if there's artificial intelligence and they realise that humans are the problem, they might want to eliminate us.

Exactly. But there is also a side to this where; if one really understands what is necessary for consciousness; one might be able to come up with simple rules that everyone can follow to ensure that no robots will ever be conscious and that we can eliminate all of these possible problems. So, there is a possibility here that if one understands these things well; you could just prevent any of these problems from ever taking place.

So, you are running this grand competition to determine where consciousness really comes from. Tell us about that.

There are lots of theories of consciousness and lots of people already have ideas of where they think consciousness comes from. The problem is that these theories contradict each other and it's very difficult to figure out whether any of them are right or wrong; depending on who you speak to. Some people will say, this one is definitely right or that one is definitely right.

But if you speak to enough people you realise that there is no clear answer. And so; as a funder we don't want to just fund all of them on our radar. We have at least twelve different big ideas that would claim to be scientific theories of consciousness. There's no point giving money to all of them because they won't make much progress. So, we've come up with the process that we call structured adversarial collaboration.

It's not new, it is a couple of big words but it's something that's been done quite a lot where two scientists with opposing views work together to design an experiment to prove one of them wrong. And often when I tell people that, they think, surely scientists do that all the time, but they don't.

It has been done before. It's more popular in psychology and physics but there are fields where people just haven't done this. And there's a good reason for this being quite rare. It's extremely difficult to do. So, we have encouraged people to do that sort of thing. And we've now managed to set up a few experiments in the hope that they will give results. It will kill off at least one theory of consciousness. And if we have a number of those; we could kill off a number of theories of consciousness so that the other remaining theories would have more legitimacy and we'd get more support. So, it's just a way of accelerating the pace of the research.

Tell us a bit about your background. Why this interest in consciousness?

Well I'm interested in doing good things. Generally, it's not just consciousness that I'm interested in. I'm interested in science. I've studied biochemistry at Oxford and then did a PHD in neuroscience. So, I am a great optimist about using scientific research to make the world a better place. And as I mentioned earlier; consciousness is one of those areas that is undervalued; it doesn't get as much attention as it maybe should.

And so, I'm very glad to have the opportunity to actually try and make a difference.

What would you say to people who argue that there are more pressing problems in the world that you should research; why this higher order kind of research?

There are some big challenges in the world like pain, for example, the opioid crisis in the US. People are suffering from opioid addiction; people are dying from it. It's extremely expensive; millions or billions of dollars go in every year to try reduce pain and manage pain. And the problem is we don't actually know what pain is. There's no completely accepted and satisfying definition for pain that really tells you what happens at a biological level. And that makes it very difficult to treat it.

A lot of treatments that we have for pain tend to be decades old. They have awful side effects because you're not necessarily just treating pain but messing with all sorts of other things in the body, stopping things from working as well as they should. Certainly, some people would argue that with pain being a kind of conscious experience; we might benefit a lot from understanding the nature of consciousness; understanding the nature of subjective experience so that you can target that specifically.

And of course, if we can do that, you know, it would save billions of dollars. Millions of people will be much better off and will get treatment in a way that's not dangerous to them. So, I think that's a problem that's worth working on. But because it's not something where there's a solution that would easily be found. It's not something that gets very much attention and that's why we thought we would tackle it.

What is quite interesting is when you go into a hospital; they show you emojis, little smiley faces to determine your level of pain, up to a sad really grimacing face. So, it is difficult to determine the level of pain. And there are placebos, which would tell you that there's something else happening in the brain?

Yes, there are different ways of talking about it. You can talk about it in a strictly biological sense. You can talk about it in terms of chemical reactions. You can talk about it in a psychological sense or how a person is feeling. All of those are useful and all of those are sort of right but none of them give you the big picture. And of course, when it comes to medical treatment, people try to be objective so that they can measure exactly whether something works or not and measure exactly whether something is safe or dangerous. But you're right that there are lots of unexplained things and that just makes it difficult to find treatments that will be safe and useful for everybody.