Speak further on the relationship of false consciousness to consciousness. You alluded to that. I wonder if you could speak briefly on the qualifying word quasi when you corrected yourself from saying evolutionary processes in the brain to cause the evolutionary process is in the brain. There is a lovely book by Peter Godfrey smith, darwinian populations and Natural Selection. That is the title, where he introduces some elegant diagrams which let you see in addition to the pure cases of Natural Selection, the sort of parade cases of Natural Selection, there are lots of processes which are like Natural Selection in one or two or three features but are not classic cases. The development of the nervous system in the individual brain is very much a matter of generation, lots of extra neurons which compete and only some of them get to survive and populate the region and the rest are absorbed and lead to another generation. The very building of a brain is the clause i evolutionary process. Once you built a brain, the learning in the brain is another clause i evolutionary process. There has been no dearth of theories of evolution in the brain hypotheses over the last 50 years or so. I think it is fair to say it is the only non miraculous, non question begging model we have of how a nervous system can start in one state and improve itself through learning from taking in information from the worlds. Unless it has got a miraculously demon in third it will have to do it via clause i evolutionary process. There is no shortage of candidates processes for reshaping the structure, functional structure of parts of the brain where there is a generation of diversity and some sort of systematic selection which leads to a higher than chance probability of getting things better. It is a constant self improving phenomena in. The relationship of self consciousness to consciousness . Oh good. I would like Stanislas Dehaene to weigh in. In the book i am talking consciousness is about. How we have one minute so the last question and we have to be brief. What do you think in terms of consciousness . Does it originate in the brain or filter into the brain . Coming in from some extra oil source, whatever that may be . When people say they meditate a collective consciousness . Many different thoughts about what might be out there but i wonder if you think consciousness originates in the brain or comes in from an external source, whatever that may be . I would challenge the image that you are suggesting. I dont think consciousness is like a substance which comes from outside in or is generated inside. Consciousness isnt that kind of thing at all. Consciousness is a huge set of emotional and cognitive competences that information two ways, influenced by external stimuli, external input, and stan is very good on this, a lot of it is indicted nestle driven. Theres a lot of internal spontaneous generation of activity without which we wouldnt be able to do half of what we do. I was going to point to the enormous research which is exploding, showing that the brain is spontaneously activated. Even if you why and think you are resting, it is too brief to describe continuous waves of activity that correspond to the flow of thoughts, my wondering of what currently occurs in your mind so theres one way to understand we are not just automatons submitted to the external world, we spontaneously carry ourselves, the subjective and we project on to the outside world. And not only comes from the brain but even in the absence of external stimuli the brain is able to carry out a lot of subjective projections. We are out of time. I like to thank Daniel Dennett and Stanislas Dehaene. Keep up the work. Thank you. As we said earlier they will both be at Gordon Chapel with their books and we could talk a little bit more. Thank you. Is there a Nonfiction Author or book you would like to see featured on booktv . Send an email to booktv cspan. Org. Tweet us on booktv and post on eyewall facebook. Com booktv. Coming up in how to speak money author John Manchester talks about the words many people use and what they mean by some. During this event at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco mr. Manchester is in conversation with Michael Lewis whose book liars focal was released this year in celebration of the 25anniversary of its publication. This is just over an hour. Good evening and welcome to todays meeting of the Commonwealth Club of california, a place where you are in the know. Find us on the internet at commonwealthclub. Org or download our iphone and android apps for its programming Schedule Information and hot gas past programs lose time dr. Ruth shapiro of the Commonwealth Clubs board of governors and your chair for tonights program. Notice my pleasure to introduce tonights Program FeaturingJohn Lanchester, new yorker contributor and author of the new book how to speak money what the money money peopleand what it really means. John will be in conversation with Michael Lewis, author of a number of books that involve liars poker. Let me give you background about each of them. John lanchester is the author of the debt to pleasure, mr. Phillips, as a memoir, family romance. He is a contributing editor at the london review of books and his work has appeared in the new york times, the observer and Daily Telegraph among others. Has won numerous prices, he was awarded the 2008 foster award by the American Academy of arts and whethers. As someone who has lived in hong kong and london i can attest to his remarkable ability to capture the underlying sentiment in tension, reading stories of people and place. His new novel capital proves his remarkable talents. It is no wonder the times of the u. K wrote capital is brimming with perception, human empathy and relish. He will be charting tonight with Michael Lewis. Michael lewis is an american Nonfiction Author and financial journalist. His work has covered decades of endemic corruption since liars poker, commemorating its 20 fifth anniversary which transformed him, disillusioned bond salesman to the best selling literary icon he is today. Of personal knows i must take a few seconds to thank mr. Lewis for helping me with some terrific family bonding. Over the summer my family and i went on a road trip during which we listened to his book boomerang on tape. Is amazingly witty, insightful and terrifying in terms of our ability to be in profound denial and allowed my family and i to have a wonderful dinner time conversations. Thank you very much. You are about to experience an engage in dialogue between two distinguished authors whose work combines a sophisticated understanding of capital and the foibles of humanity. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome John Lanchester and Michael Lewis noon a little background on us because i know John Lanchester from his riding but we also met on the other side of the atlantic a couple times in the past year. I am he says how to speak money comes from one of the greatest leaders of the financial crisis and unlike most blurbs this is true, it was written in a review of his novel capitalist. I first encountered johns work in the london review of books to which i subscribe and i was shocked at what came off the page. Not even an englishman could explain to me how the American Financial system had screwed up the worlds. I found so unlikely that i assumed it was the pseudonym. I didnt believe he existed at first but we had mutual friends and this man began to read all his books and he is a really gifted liar. Not a lot of people feel that way. And he is a real talent and he is more a writer than a writer about money. He has drifted into this subject and done wonderful things with it. His novel capital is an example of that. It is the kind of this is not exactly a fair description but he does what bonfire of the vanities did for new york in 1987 and it attempts to describe the way money has overrun london in a way i have never seen anybody do. He wrote a book about the financial crisis called iou which is an excellent description of what happened and his latest book how to speak money what the money money peopleand what it really means is a dictionary of financial terms, lets talk to him. What is the purpose of the book . I learned money from the outside. I wanted to write about want noon today. It seemed to me it was completely reshaped by money. I grew up in hong kong, and in the 70s. It seemed like an incredibly great place, very provincial compared to hong kong. Everything about it was great. The buildings were gray, the people were gray, the sky was gray, the food was incredibly gray. The food had that capillary of grain this and no one could think that diversity, energy, this would have it it and it changed on the order of the change, revolutionary award. Thinking about the drivers of that, seems to me one of the main ones was china, london, new york for being the capital of Global Finance 0 learning more about it, and this was the very powerful source, the process of learning more about its started with fists embarrassingly simple thing, literally not knowing what words meant. And an embarrassing extent. Your father was the banker. The Old Fashioned to more. A sleepy Colonial Institution called hong kong and shanghai bank. At that point, 200 biggest bank in asia. It was the biggest bank in the world. And you lend money at 6 and on the golf course. And you dont accidentally blow up the world. When you were a kid blowing up did you have a sense what he did for a living . No, he didnt talk about it much. He didnt like talking about money. He occasionally talked about he would point to one of the areas that has been on tv, pointing to a shoe factory and saying he had given when he was a local Branch Manager the initial loan to start the business. A lot of people feel put off, they feel kind of never get their head around it. They feel it is over but because it is very different, you could see the needs of people who run the bank and i remember him one day coming back and saying i forget who the head of it was but just board the british bankers in the middle east. They were just people making decisions all i thought there has to be permission to understand it. When does this happen to you . When did you start taking interest in the world of money . About 2005. I have written about companies that were interested in the ideas that there were Untold Stories in the world of business. There was a booster kind of business and then there were anti capitalist critics who thought everything about everything to do with people making money was completely terrible and there was a gap in the middle. It got more interesting. One of the things, i dont know if you are unique in england but close. Combination of literary ability and willingness to try to help the reader understand things, what i wonder is when you first started doing this, your ambition was to write novels. Did you feel like you were slumming it . No. I think tom wolfe said an interesting thing, most novelists over the ages think that 90 of the interests is what they write, has to do with the subject. When you are 25, your amazing sentences and gradually realize it is about the world. That gradually happened to me and i got more interested in the things that felt underdescribed. Theres a whole industry dedicated to writing about this stuff. Why did you feel it was a literary opportunity . There is a weird gap when you have a scandalous story. You run the scandalous story and they say what do we do next week . The answer comes out know, next week we name the guilty plea. The person to blame is henry james. Nineteenth century fiction is about the world, and george eliot wrote about the world in front of them. And reporter introduced a kind of crack in the novel because he makes it into capital a art and literature and only certain things are worthy of serious literary attention. And if the ambassadors were the guy, family fortune derived from ordinary everyday years. Never told you what the thing is. It is 800 pages long. There is a consensus in henry jamess scholarship has to do with toilets. There would be a whole novel about the toilet, how the factory works and industrial relations in the factory and how it got sold and harlequin cornered the toilet market and james wont go there and the odd thing, the english language literature tradition, if the subject is inherently interesting some how you getliterary points. It is certainly true. It is the case. Who helped you . Where did you come from . You sound like tom wolfe. The essay he wrote in harpers about where the novel went wrong and explaining why the bonfire of the vanities was such a big success. I disagree with that component, but there is a sense in which literary if you look at the kind of big forms to do with music, drama painting and all of that theyll take a turn away from the audience, take a turn towards the abstract and only one of the intakes the turn away is the novel because you cannot have an abstract novel. You can have an abject piece of music, abstract sculpture but you cant have an abstract novel because it has a builtin relationship with the world and the audience and even a very negative novel is not something in love with the worlds. It is inherently populist. It has that connection and the reason music turns away and never comes back is because the novel has the put it another way. The novel is the only literary form that is younger than the book. Everything in poetry, history, drama, encyclopedia, is older than the book. The novel is a young the form and because it is younger than the book the audience is built in. You can have the novel without an audience and the fact the fair is this eager public wanting to know about the world round and how life works that it keeps this kind of threat of connection with the audience in the novel. You feel rebellion against the literary status quo when he stumbled into money in 2005 and your willing to talk to bankers about it. At that point, i since you had some animosity of was going on in london. Was not adjusted passive interest you have in all this plea i started thinking there was going to be a crash. It was a kind of like describing thinking that it would be a dramatic irony in the classic sense, that the audience knows something the people on stage dont. We had our flies and done, that would be a dramatic irony. Immediate daytime tv current and the audience would know. I am describing this and florists and philosophy instructors and basements being dug up and things like that, they knew the crash was coming so i was really interested when this crash did come and it turned out to be something bigger and scarier than i anticipated. I was flat wrong because although the crash did come it was going to be a bubble bursting in the London Property market. The only classic that has gone uninterrupted. I moved to london in 1983 and i saw the transformation and i was part of it and when i worked in this city for solomon brothers poland and i went to was actively hostile to the markets. Was an uncommercial plays, the last place on earth you would think American Investment bank would find a natural home and i mention when i got there i had a Grocery Store i went to and the Grocery Store sold these little biscuits, nothing was edible. Here it was incredible. A friend from new york said whenever you walk by an english family shot you want to walk in and strangles the air. I went in to buy some, and the lady who owned a the shop, i said when the biscuits are there, we use the stock number, and you use to buy stocks. That was really the kind of sensitivity, too much trouble to make money and the idea is that this crowd would roll into the place and transformed the city but at the time it would seem preposterous. You watch that, it bothers you, one way or another it bothers you. I feel the impact of the change in terms of the street, you could see the texture of life in the streets change because of the pressure, obviously it got more expensive, theres more work done in the house but one of the things that was interesting was there would be a house people lived in for 30 or 40 years and when it sold to the people in finance, they will flip the house every 18 months. There was something striking about this, particularly feted him interactions and suddenly it was like one of them dropped out, you never knew them again and the other thing, it was like a work of feminist sciencefiction because the men you never saw an adult man in the daytime continuing to reproduce. They love the children into these suvs and that was one of the germs of the book, the sense of the texture of wife in an ordinary street, being rearranged by these forces. Did you blame us for it . Did you think was an americanization of english life . I grew up in hong kong. I see it as a reverse takeover. Hong kong at that point was the most hyper capitalist society in the world so hong kong taking over the rest of the planet. That is funny. From my point of view it looks like americans over rending london and the american way of list. It works for American Investment banks. They would say things they would never say in Polite Company in england to ingratiate themselves with Investment Bankers and get jobs at morgan sacks. It change that kind of culture. They are hypereducated elite kids who dont quite know what to do so with their lives will do the thing they perceive as having the most prestige and money. It has gotten in that sort of oxford way, being Prime Minister o