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Aman Chopra: Folks, welcome back to another episode of the I AM GPH podcast. Have you ever heard about this term called consciousness, or have you even wondered about how someone operates in the world of philosophy, psychology, and bioethics altogether? Our guest, today's Claudia Passos-Ferreira, who is an assistant professor of Bioethics here at NYU GPH. Dr. Passos has earned her MA and PhD in the program of Human Sciences and Health Sciences and Public Health from the Rio de Janeiro State University. And now she's here to talk to us today about the work she's doing in infant consciousness and her entire GPH career. Dr. Passos, welcome to the "I AM GPH" podcast.
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Thanks so much for having me.
Aman Chopra: If I met you in the elevator right now in the building or even somewhere else in New York and asked you, oh, hi, I'm Aman, this is your name, what work do you do? What's that on-minute elevator pitch you would give me about infant consciousness and the work you've spent your pretty much a lot of your life doing right now?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: They have many behaviors and activities and actions they perform that they seem conscious. So, usually parents deal with infants, as if they think their babies are conscious, but actually we don't know any, we don't understand very much of what's going on in their minds and whether some actions they are performed consciously or unconsciously. So, my work is trying to understand how babies come to as when they come to life at birth, when they are born, if they're conscious or not. I'm also interested what's going on in the womb, but I'm currently focused a lot in the first month of life. So, you see a newborn and the moments the newborn have their eyes open, are they actually looking at you? Are they having an experience of your face or just seeing you? They are having a conscious experience. So, what is consciousness? Consciousness is this inner movie in your mind that you have now, and I have now when I'm speaking to you, okay? Together with feelings, emotions, perception, I'm hearing some background noise. You're hearing my voice and there are some inner feelings you are having. So, this is our conscious mind and I'm curious if babies have this type of feelings we have, this type of mind we have. So, this is a short answer for, a one-minute answer for my work. I'm trying to understand if they have this or not, and how can we measure, what type of evidence we can have that could tell us if they're conscious or not. So, I can ask you now, if you're hearing my voice, if you see my face, and what kind of thoughts you are having, maybe you are already think about the next question you ask me, but I cannot ask this to babies. They don't have what we call verbal reports. They cannot tell us what's going on in their mind. And with animals and adults that have little communicative ability, we can train them to give what we call behavior responses. So, we can train an animal to push a button, we can train a monkey to push a button, if they see something in a screen. But I cannot train babies, little babies, they still don't have motor control and motor abilities enough to be trained. And the range of behaviors of motor control they have is very limited. So, the traditional way you can assess consciousness in others does not work for babies. So, you need to have further evidence to distinguish when they are having a conscious experience and when they're having a unconscious experiences. And moreover, the more profound question, if they're conscious at all at birth?
Aman Chopra: What is the importance of this work? So, how has this niche of babies and consciousness of babies come up? How have you identified that this is something that's important? And where did all of that come from for you?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: I was trained as a clinical psychologist. I get a BA in Psychology and I did three years of specialization. And one of my specialization was in children, adolescent mental health. So, I did a clinical work with children with psychiatric disorders, developmental disorders. So, I was very interested in how our minds develop. okay, from birth to maturity. And, but in the beginning of my work, I was much more interested in what we call self-consciousness. So, all kinds of representations we have about ourselves. So, for instance, one classic example of self-consciousness is when you recognize your image in the mirror, so you know that yourself, although you know that that representation you see in the mirror is a representation of how people looks like, what they see when they look at you. But how this emerge during development when babies start to recognize theirselves in the mirror? So, I was interested in this type of representation of ourselves. And during this work of self-consciousness, I was trying to understand, so how self-consciousness emerged, and self-consciousness emerged from a conscious mind. And there are not too much work on infant consciousness, so something that is more primitive, more primary, okay. so, our conscious mind. So, I start to work on infant conscious actually to fill this research gap that didn't have too much work doing in this area, okay? And just to give an idea how we understood little this area for many, for a century, we used to perform a surgery in infants without an aesthetics because we thought they didn't feel pain. So, pain is a classic type of conscious experience, when you undergo something that causes you pain, you have a reaction of a negative feeling that goes together with your attempt to avoid that stimulus. So, this is a conscious pain. And for centuries, we thought infants didn't have this type of experience in early stages. We thought that they would born with a kind of minimal type of conscious experience. And then with development, they will expand their conscious experience. But actually now we know that their minds and their conscious experience is much more complex than we thought before. But this was this lack, this gap in the literature too, and lack of knowledge was what interested me in the beginning to try to understand a little bit more about the early stages of life.
Aman Chopra: Was there a pivotal moment in your life or a moment that you had where you got fascinated by consciousness? Is it the philosopher in you? How did this whole consciousness theme come in your world?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: So, I was very interested in unconscious processes and conscious processes. So, how we can have some parts of our minds that we don't know there are unconscious and it's causing lots of symptoms. So, I was trained in psychoanalysis. So, this idea that there is a unconscious conflict that might cause your behavior always fascinated me. And as a clinical psychologist, I talk a lot with people trying to understand what's going on in their minds. So, this was maybe my first, um, my first, how can I say my first interest on consciousness for see before I become very interested in infant consciousness.
Aman Chopra: What kind of findings have come out of this, this research that you have done so far?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Yeah, so in my study on self-consciousness, I was very interested in how we develop as a moral creature, as a moral agent. So, there are some types of emotions like guilt, shame, that is very related to the specific type of conscious experience we have. So, we are moral agents, we act in the world. And if you cause something bad to others, usually the way we assess that I did something that was wrong to you, one way to assess is come from my feelings that I feel also remorse or I feel guilty of causing some pain or some suffering to others. So, I was interested in when this type of feeling emerges, when we start seeing ourselves as a moral agents, and reasoning with our moral feelings. So, empathy was part of my work. How empathy and how our empathic abilities were parts of our moral development. And to understand feelings and emotions, you have to understand how you develop as a conscious creature. Nowadays, we also call this how you develop as a sentient creature. Sentient in the sense we have a kind of a valence experience. Some things feels bad to you and feels good to you. So, there is some pleasant and unpleasant valence on our experiences. And morality also is related to this. If I do something wrong or something good for you, usually I'm always increase your pleasure, or decrease, or causes suffering, and decrease your pleasure cause some sort of displeasure. So, I was interested in those issues, and, and I wanted to tell a story from how we develop as a conscious creatures to the development of morality.
Aman Chopra: Well, are these the things that are coming up in infants these days?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: So, there are many studies about moral development, how we, about our empathic abilities, and how our emotions, the role of our emotions in moral development. And some studies related to how we develop our introspective abilities, how we start thinking about ourselves. So, when your mind wandering, when you entertain some thoughts and thinking about, I dunno, imagine you are reflecting about what happened to you last night. You have some sort of introspective experience. Or imagine you're reflecting about something you did in the past that you thought was not okay with a friend, and you are revisiting and imagine your options or ways you could react to that friend. This is a kind of introspective ability that goes together with emotions, but also goes together with some moral reflection we have. And I was interesting in those issues and how this could connect. So, how we could develop as a conscious creatures that acquire some self-conscious processes, introspection, and then morality. So, for this we have to, if you think that those abilities require some sort of conscious experiences, you have to reply to the first question. Are they conscious? Are infant conscious? Or when consciousness emerged during development? So, we haven't been, we haven't been tried to understand a lot about animal consciousness. So, we call this the distribution question, how consciousness is distributed among different creatures. So, are fish conscious, are insect conscious, are dog conscious, are... We can ask these questions for many creatures in evolution. In our case, we know we are conscious because we are adults and we know we have conscious experiences. So, the question is, when consciousness emerged during development, are we conscious at birth? Do we need some type of cognitive development for consciousness to emerge? So, maybe around six months or maybe we need other types of higher, other capacities, higher cognitive capacities for consciousness to emerge. So, maybe around one year. So, there are huge disagreements in the literature from when consciousness emerge in humans. So, if you read a paper nowadays with fears of consciousness, there are authors claiming that consciousness emerge in the late stage of pregnancy, and authors claiming consciousness emerged after 1-year-old. So, there are this disagreement, and I think evidence study develop ways to measure consciousness, and to detect consciousness in infants can solve this problem.
Aman Chopra: There's no answer yet.
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Uh, there are, what can I say, so in the last five years when I start studying this problem, there are less answers. There are more theories trying to come with an explanation and some hypothesis, but very speculative, okay. Nowadays I think we have better responses and better way to assess infants, better way to assess their brains. Okay, so, in the five years we developed a lot of ways to measure infant brains. We didn't have this in the past. We have a ways to reproduce, to replicate some type of evidence we had in adults and infants, but we didn't have, the technology was not as developed to get a real picture of what's going on in their brains. And in the, as I said before, in the last five years, they developed lots of way to measure. And we have a more reliable evidence that favors the view that consciousness emerged earlier in development. Because we have this divide in the field just in short chance for this is we have a sort of divide. Some theories postulate that we need high order capacities for consciousness.
Aman Chopra: What does high order capacity mean?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Cognitive capacities that might develop later in development. For instance, this consciousness requires some capacities related to language, capacity to entertain thoughts, to have thinking, and to have concepts in your mind. So, this capacity emerged a little bit later in development, different from our perceptual capacities that are there in the beginning. So, babies are capable to see, to hear, to have tactile response, but their capacity to reasoning through language comes later in development, okay. So, one question is, do we need this for consciousness to enter into the picture. So, this is a requirement for consciousness. So, do we need this kind of higher cognitive thinking capacity for consciousness, or not? Or consciousness can be very basic and just the sensorial consciousness. So, some philosophers think that consciousness is more sensorial, and is there since the beginning, okay. And other philosophers, we claim that to be conscious of a stimulus, you need to have a thought about that stimulus. You need to represent that stimulus, sorry. And to represent that stimulus, you need this kind of higher cognitive capacity that might emerge after, in the end of one year of life, okay? So, there is this divide in the field between early onset and late onset of consciousness. And I think nowadays we have in, we have like good evidence that favors the early onset view. The question is not settled completely. We still need more development in the field, but I think there is some progress in the last five years, at least. When I started this, there was no, those cool experiments that I have been writing about, they weren't there when I started doing my work on infant consciousness.
Aman Chopra: I wanna go back to the start 'cause when looking you up, you did numerous degrees in Brazil, and to all the way till the end of your PhD. What was that journey in Brazil that made you decide that, okay, I want to leave and I wanna come to New York, or any place in the US for that matter? What brought you to GPH when you had everything based over there for yourself at the time?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Yes, good question. So, I start my career as a clinical psychologist and did some specialization in the area. Then I get a MA and a PhD in Public Health. After the PhD in Public Health, I got a postdoc position, work on ethics and biotechnology in the departmental philosophy. And from that first job I had, I got a second PhD in philosophy.
Aman Chopra: Oh.
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Okay. And was in the middle of my second PhD in Philosophy that I applied for a fellowship to write my thesis at Columbia University working with Professor Chris Peacock on self-consciousness. So, my work was still at that point, this was, I dunno, when I applied 2013, 2014, was still interested in self-consciousness, interested in the development of consciousness. So, consciousness was already there, but my work was still focusing a lot on self-consciousness. And when I start writing about self-consciousness that I thought, okay, I need to get more, need to understand better when babies become conscious. So, during this PhD, my partner who is Australian, he decided to move to New York definitely because he was already part-time here. So, it has this personal motivation to try to find if my academic, if I could find an academic environment here for me. So, I applied for this position at, applied for a fellowship at Columbia University. So, this was, I came here 2015. Then I finished my PhD in Philosophy. I was already working a lot on infant consciousness. And at the same time, around the same time, the Center for Bioethics, that was originally at the Faculty of Arts and Science was moving to Public Health. So, I thought was really an interesting and a combination for me having a center for bioethics, one of my degrees in philosophy, and my degree in public health together in the same place. So, I thought it was really a very good opportunity for me to go back to put those pieces together, the public health aspect connected to mental health, my work on bioethics and my work on infant consciousness. So, I started, um, first teaching a course at the center as a visitor, a course on Research Ethics. And then I started a visiting assistant professor, I think 2018. And then 2020 I started my current tenure track position at the Center for Bioethics. This is, okay, this is what I thought my work could be in GPH, but also New York and NYU. It's a very rich, and vibrant space for if you work on unconsciousness and bioethics, okay. So there are-
Aman Chopra: What about it makes it rich and vibrant? So, what about New York and being here, kind of you, you said that you finally found things merging that your multiple identities that you had, and this came together, and it could flourish over here for you. So, what is that, what are those spaces for you here, the opportunities that you got that made you decide that, okay, I'm gonna stay here.
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Being in a place where you are, you can think about your specific issue, infant consciousness together with the more broader issues. Okay, so together with public health, and, so put the philosophy and the public health together. Second, being in New York, so New York and NYU we have, there are many people here working in areas that are important for my field. So, I have many philosophers in the New York area work on consciousness. So, it's a hub of consciousness, New York, okay, so, not just NYU, but Columbia, CUNY, and the places around New York, Princeton, Rutgers, there are many people work on this area. Bioethics also it's flourishing in New York. We have many people working. The other piece in this puzzle is neuroscience. So, NYU and New York, there are many people work on neuroscience and work on human developments, developmental psychology and consciousness, okay? And the other piece is technology that we still didn't talk about this. And my work is more and more connected to ethics of AI, and I connect infant consciousness with AI. There are bridges to connect those two topics, I can say a little bit more. And NYU and New York also become a very important hub for technology AI issues related to thinking and consciousness in those systems, in artificial systems, and also environmental ethics and animal ethics. Also are areas where you are interested in consciousness and sentience. And infant consciousness use a lot of methodology that comes from animal consciousness studies.
Aman Chopra: You mentioned the word sentient a few times. Can you elaborate on that word?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: So, one way to think about consciousness is to make a sort of a distinction between sentience that is consciousness related to your sensorial capacities, or related to what we call valence, positive and negative states. And consciousness related to cognition, to cognitive capacities, okay? So, if you go very down evolution and you try to think if an octopus is conscious, you think about what we call sentience, okay? If they have positive and negative valence, okay?
Aman Chopra: Okay, the valence-
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: If it feels bad or feels good for the creature.
Aman Chopra: Valence is like the type of emotion?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Another way to say valence is, so if you think about affect, affective consciousness. So, how we can describe this, is because some things feel for us. So, on top of being here, I have feelings about being in this place here. Okay? I can feel comfortable, I can feel uncomfortable. I can feel as a good and pleasant conversation, or as a stressful, and, and intense conversation. There are feelings we have that go together with our experiences. So, effective is this type of feelings we have. So, one way to put this is what you call valence. You have negative and positive feelings. Is true that is, as humans, our valence are much more complex. For pleasure and positive feelings, you have several ways to describe this. And for negative feelings also have several ways to experience something that is negative. But imagine a very simple creature that just react to pain, have some feelings of pain, okay? So, if you feel pain is negative, you want to avoid, if something gives you comfort or food, you might feel good, you might feel positive, and you attracted to that, that stimulus that are given to you. So, sentience cover this notion that if a creature has sentience, is a conscious creature, but might have this basic feelings, okay? Another idea is whether there are some connections between intelligence and cognition and consciousness, okay? So, this could be a sort of cognitive consciousness, put in a simple way.
Aman Chopra: I'm sure a prospective student right now is really inspired and excited. You found your hub over here. You found connections in worlds that, you know, there's these multiple parts of you, and GPH kind of culminates into different diverse group of people coming into one area. So, if there's this prospective student that's listening to you right now that is inspired, what would you tell them about bioethics and getting into the world of bioethics right now?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: I think it's an exciting moment for bioethics, first because all the public health problems we had in the past, COVID was a good, not good in the sense of experience, but it's a good example of how bioethics can work in the field of public health. There are many ethical issues. You have to decide from prioritization of vaccines and treatment, to social isolation, how you justify constraints in your autonomy for the public, for the common good, for the public good. So, there are many bioethicists they were required to apply their knowledge in this case. So, I think it's just, it's a good way to think, a good combination in bioethics and public health. Other areas are reproductive ethics, issues about abortion is very relevant and bioethics think about this, and is also a very relevant field for health and public health. You can think about addiction and other issues that require some ethical reflection from bioethicist. And there are many issues that require us to think about new policies. For instance, in my field, infant consciousness, we care a lot about pain management for applications of anesthetics and ethical care. So, how we should treat infants in a intensive unit, if they're conscious of all the stimuli they have around them, okay? So, think about those public policies that require bioethicists to reflect about them, okay? And this, we need a new generation for reflecting about this. So, this is one area. The other area that connects a lot with my range of interest nowadays is technology, okay? So, how we should, what are our concerns in develop some specific type of technology, given the way AI, and, all the tech, the technology related to machine learning systems might affect us, is affecting us nowadays, what might affect us in the future. So, policies around fairness, accountability, issues related to privacy, the impact of the technology in kids. I wrote about this too with my, with professor Matthew Liao, that is the director of the Center for Bioethics. So, issues about privacy and how we should develop a policy to prevent either violations of a private for children and teenagers, but also issues related to the impact of technology and their mental health, okay.
Aman Chopra: There's a lot going on here and there's like endless options frankly, with the way you're describing it.
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Yeah.
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: So, if I think about options for a student that pursue a career in bioethics, so just to give you a flavor of what our students are pursuing as a career nowadays. So, a student that come to bioethics, they can go to the medical school. We have a part of our students that go to medical school. Usually we have a 100% approval for students that go to medical school. It's a good opportunity for clinical ethics. Think about at ethical issues that emerge between the physician and the patient is students that don't want to go to the law school to think about policy. So, some of our students, they want to pursue a law degree, and our bioethics course gives them at least training in critical thinking and writing skills that will be very useful for their law degree. Also, is students that want to go to public health, have a public health career or career with public policy, okay? So, the bioethics give them this critical thinking training and writing skills, but also give them some solid basis for think about what are the ethical issues that involve a public policy, okay? We also have an option to go to a tech ethics career. The industry really needs some new minds to think about those new issues that the technology, the emergent technology is bringing to the field. And then they will need students that have their degrees in bioethics. So, I think bioethics can be a career path for tech ethics for instance.
Aman Chopra: For that person that's listening that wants to either got into NYU right now, is thinking about applying to NYU. What about NYU, the classroom experience or the whole time of being here is important, or essential in the world of bioethics. What can someone expect when they come here, when it comes to the department of Bioethics?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Yeah, so, they will be, first, they will be very welcome and they will find, I think it's a very vibrant and inspiring environment, okay. So, the students will. First our courses. So, all this options I said about career options, we have courses that cover those options. I teach research ethics. I just designed the course on Ethics of Privacy related to tech ethics. We have courses of reproductive ethics, clinical ethics, neuroethics, that is the field that discuss ethical issues related to neuroscience, and to the mind and to consciousness. I also teach neuroethics for the undergraduate students. We also have courses related to justice and healthcare. So, think about justice in the health system, and the core courses that is, we have classic issues on bioethics. We have one core course that the students will have a solid training on the classic readings, but also contemporary readings in bioethics. They will study moral theories that will help them to reasoning through the ethical theories that inform on the field. So, this is the type of courses they will... They also have the practicum. There is a practicum component in our degree. So, the students will have an opportunity to apply all the things they are learning in class in the practicum experience. And we understand practicum in a very broad way. Some students for instance, I have a student in the past she got her practicum at the World Health Organization, at United Nations. I have one student working for, as a bioethicist in what they call ethics responsibility. But he's doing also ethics of AI. One of our students, when he finished his degrees, he went to work as a bioethicist in a responsible AI group at Google. So, the practicum open some doors for you in different areas. You can have an experience shadowing a doctor. So, you can have also this clinical ethics experience. I have one student, she did her practicum in IRB. That is an, it goes for institution review boards that reviews at research protocols. The part of the ethical issues and the research protocols. So, the practicum, you can also do your practicum in environmental organization that you are discussing some ethical issues. I have one of my students, he's doing his practical now in the botanical garden, so, he can have different options that the practicum is an exercise of how you can in the future apply found applications of what you learned in the classroom, but also is an expansion of your network.
Aman Chopra: Yeah.
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Okay? That said, we also have talks, lectures, events. We pair with NYU, different departments in NYU, promoting types of events that the students can join. So, we have annual philosophical bioethics workshop at the center organized. I'm organizing next February an Infant Consciousness conference with the five main neuroscientists in the field, nowadays. Will be here in New York. Is an exciting event. If those that listen the podcast want to come to the event, they're very welcome. Is open to the NYU community. And we also have mentoring and advising for our students. So, the students come to class. They will interact over their course, they will be exposed to all those type of courses. We have new courses in the spring related to tech ethics that we just designed. And we also have courses with more core issues in bioethics, like life and death, end of life issues, discussing more we, traditional issues in bioethics that never dies. It's the issues that are always there.
Aman Chopra: Yeah. By the way, for those of you listening to this podcast, this is recorded in November, 2024. So, if you hear that the event is in February and you're listening in 2025, the event's probably over, but I think I'll attend that event as well.
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Okay.
Aman Chopra: Dr. Passos, the NYU seems like the one-stop shop for all of this when you describe it, and lots of stuff going on beyond even interacting with you over here for the people that come to visit the program. I'm curious for, this is my final question for you. For the person that's unsure about bioethics and has an interest after listening to this episode, how can that person get involved in bioethics and start learning more or get involved, get their feet wet in that?
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Yeah, okay, there are many things you can do to expand your knowledge. So, one, so we have, so, first for my own topic, just read my papers. I have some and so there are some more technical papers that might be more challenging. But I have some pieces in the media that I think are more accessible, that describe how I understand infant consciousness, and how I apply, how I assess philosophically the evidence, the neuro evidence for the early emergence of consciousness in babies. But it can also come to our talks, come to our events. I think is a good way to have an entry in bioethics. Anyone that wants to talk with our team, our faculty, everyone probably will be open to receive the students. There are some readings available in our website, our publications, I think is also a good entering. I think there are couple of, um, short, I think this podcast will be also a good one, but a couple of videos that might be a good answer in bioethics. But I would suggest just come to us, we have an info session for students that are planning to apply to the program. Usually we have two info sessions, one in December, and one in the fall, and another one in the spring. There is a good way like have an idea of what the program offers. And yeah, the students also have the option to sit in one of our courses, and see how it goes, as one way also to come and see one class, and have a flavor of what would be studied in Bioethics. We also have a minor in Bioethics for the undergraduate students. That could be an excellent option.
Aman Chopra: Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira, thank you for sharing all your insights. This was very, very insightful.
Dr. Claudia Passos-Ferreira: Yeah, thank you very much.
Aman Chopra: Folks, we'll put all the papers and the bio of Dr. Passos in the description. We hope you enjoyed the episode. Put some comments down below, and we'll see you in the next one, take care.