we are getting somewhere, the idea that the brain causes consciousness is so logically primitive. Consciousness gathers in a highly concentrated form in brains, but it flows through every particle in the universe.
I've been looking for clarification of theories of consciousness and free will for months, and this is the most rigorous, concise and consistently-thought-through I've found so far. Kudos! My one concern is Professor Tse's failure to note that there already are non-human conscious beings we "enslave" with little moral debate: dogs and other service animals. Our use of and directions to sheep dogs, attack dogs, search and rescue dogs, bomb-sniffing dogs and the like precisely mirror the Professor's "do the dishes" example of enslaving AIs.
Consider... You can be absolutely certain that you are conscious. You can be somewhat certain that I am conscious. You cannot be certain that a dog is conscious (since a dog's behavior may be entirely instinct driven). You can be certain that a single cell is *not* conscious (since a single cell's behavior is entirely reactive). If Westworld was a dramatized documentary of an actuality then you could be somewhat certain that the androids became conscious. "Are you real"? "Well if you can't tell does it matter"?
I am a physicist and I will provide solid arguments that prove that consciousness cannot be generated by the brain (in my youtube channel you can find a video with more detailed explanations). Many argue that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but it is possible to show that such hypothesis is inconsistent with our scientific knowledges. In fact, it is possible to show that all the examples of emergent properties consists of concepts used to describe how an external object appear to our conscious mind, and not how it is in itself, which means how the object is independently from our observation. In other words, emergent properties are ideas conceived to describe or classify, according to arbitrary criteria and from an arbitrary point of view, certain processes or systems. In summary, emergent properties are intrinsically subjective, since they are conceptual models based on the arbitrary choice to focus on certain aspects of a system and neglet other aspects, such as microscopic structures and processes; emergent properties consist of ideas through which we describe how the external reality appears to our conscious mind: without a conscious mind, these ideas (= emergent properties) would not exist at all. Here comes my first argument: arbitrariness, subjectivity, classifications and approximate descriptions, imply the existence of a conscious mind, which can arbitrarily choose a specific point of view and focus on certain aspects while neglecting others. It is obvious that consciousness cannot be considered an emergent property of the physical reality, because consciousenss is a preliminary necessary condition for the existence of any emergent property. We have then a logical contradiction. Nothing which presupposes the existence of consciousness can be used to try to explain the existence of consciousness. Here comes my second argument: our scientific knowledge shows that brain processes consist of sequences of ordinary elementary physical processes; since consciousness is not a property of ordinary elementary physical processes, then a succession of such processes cannot have cosciousness as a property. In fact we can break down the process and analyze it step by step, and in every step consciousness would be absent, so there would never be any consciousness during the entire sequence of elementary processes. It must be also understood that considering a group of elementary processes together as a whole is an arbitrary choice. In fact, according to the laws of physics, any number of elementary processes is totally equivalent. We could consider a group of one hundred elementary processes or ten thousand elementary processes, or any other number; this choice is arbitrary and not reducible to the laws of physics. However, consciousness is a necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrary choices; therefore consciousness cannot be a property of a sequence of elementary processes as a whole, because such sequence as a whole is only an arbitrary and abstract concept that cannot exist independently of a conscious mind. Here comes my third argument: It should also be considered that brain processes consist of billions of sequences of elementary processes that take place in different points of the brain; if we attributed to these processes the property of consciousness, we would have to associate with the brain billions of different consciousnesses, that is billions of minds and personalities, each with its own self-awareness and will; this contradicts our direct experience, that is, our awareness of being a single person who is able to control the voluntary movements of his own body with his own will. If cerebral processes are analyzed taking into account the laws of physics, these processes do not identify any unity; this missing unit is the necessarily non-physical element (precisely because it is missing in the brain), the element that interprets the brain processes and generates a unitary conscious state, that is the human mind. Here comes my forth argument: Consciousness is characterized by the fact that self-awareness is an immediate intuition that cannot be broken down or fragmented into simpler elements. This characteristic of consciousness of presenting itself as a unitary and non-decomposable state, not fragmented into billions of personalities, does not correspond to the quantum description of brain processes, which instead consist of billions of sequences of elementary incoherent quantum processes. When someone claims that consciousness is a property of the brain, they are implicitly considering the brain as a whole, an entity with its own specific properties, other than the properties of the components. From the physical point of view, the brain is not a whole, because its quantum state is not a coherent state, as in the case of entangled systems; the very fact of speaking of "brain" rather than many cells that have different quantum states, is an arbitrary choice. This is an important aspect, because, as I have said, consciousness is a necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrariness. So, if a system can be considered decomposable and considering it as a whole is an arbitrary choice, then it is inconsistent to assume that such a system can have or generate consciousness, since consciousness is a necessary precondition for the existence of any arbitrary choice. In other words, to regard consciousness as a property ofthe brain, we must first define what the brain is, and to do so we must rely only on the laws of physics, without introducing arbitrary notions extraneous to them; if this cannot be done, then it means that every property we attribute to the brain is not reducible to the laws of physics, and therefore such property would be nonphysical. Since the interactions between the quantum particles that make up the brain are ordinary interactions, it is not actually possible to define the brain based solely on the laws of physics. The only way to define the brain is to arbitrarily establish that a certain number of particles belong to it and others do not belong to it, but such arbitrariness is not admissible. In fact, the brain is not physically separated from the other organs of the body, with which it interacts, nor is it physically isolated from the external environment, just as it is not isolated from other brains, since we can communicate with other people, and to do so we use physical means, for example acoustic waves or electromagnetic waves (light). This necessary arbitrariness in defining what the brain is, is sufficient to demonstrate that consciousness is not reducible to the laws of physics. Besides, since the brain is an arbitrary concept, and consciousness is the necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrariness, consciousness cannot be a property of the brain. Based on these considerations, we can exclude that consciousness is generated by brain processes or is an emergent property of the brain. Marco Biagini
Marco Biagini's arguments are certainly thought-provoking and delve deep into the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the brain. However, there are some things to note Definition of Emergent Properties: Biagini's first argument hinges on the definition of emergent properties as being inherently subjective and arbitrary. While it's true that many emergent properties are described from a human perspective, it's debatable whether they are all inherently subjective or if they can exist objectively without human observation. Nature of Brain Processes: The second argument assumes that because individual brain processes don't exhibit consciousness, a collection of them can't either. This is akin to saying that because individual water molecules aren't wet, a collection of them (like a lake) can't be wet either. This is a debated point in philosophy and neuroscience. Unity of Consciousness: The third argument about the unity of consciousness is interesting but may not account for phenomena like split-brain patients, where the two hemispheres of the brain can exhibit seemingly separate consciousnesses. Quantum Description of Brain Processes: The fourth argument brings in quantum mechanics, which is a complex and not fully understood field. While it's true that individual quantum processes in the brain might not exhibit consciousness, it's not clear that their collective behavior can't give rise to consciousness. Arbitrariness of Defining the Brain: The argument that defining the brain is arbitrary and thus can't give rise to consciousness is a philosophical one. While it's true that where we draw the line between the brain and not-the-brain can be somewhat arbitrary, it's not clear that this arbitrariness negates the possibility of the brain generating consciousness.
@@TheYoungFactor You wrote: “ Biagini's first argument hinges on the definition of emergent properties as being inherently subjective and arbitrary. While it's true that many emergent properties are described from a human perspective, it's debatable whether they are all inherently subjective or if they can exist objectively without human observation.” You are wrong, in fact it can be easily proved that all emergent properties depend on subjectivity. The proof is the following: The concept of set refers to something that has an intrinsically conceptual and subjective nature and implies the subjective choice of determining which elements are to be included in the set; what exists objectively are only the single elements (where one person sees a set of elements, another person can only see elements that are not related to each other in their individuality). In fact, when we define a set, it is as if we were drawing an imaginary line that separates some elements from all the other elements; obviously this imaginary line does not exist either physically or objectively, independently of our mind. An emergent property is defined as a property that is possessed by a set of elements that its individual components do not possess; the above argument proves that this definition implies that all emergent properties are subjective cognitive contructs that correspond only to mind-dependent entities and therefore, mental experience cannot itself be an emergent property. You wrote;”The second argument assumes that because individual brain processes don't exhibit consciousness, a collection of them can't either. This is akin to saying that because individual water molecules aren't wet, a collection of them (like a lake) can't be wet either. “ You are wrong. In fact wetness is a typical example of emergent property, and like any emergent property, is only a subjective cognitive construct used to describe approximately the underlying physical processes. Wetness is not at all a new property compared to the physical properties explicitly described by the fundamental laws of physics, but only an abstraction that refers to several different properties, such as the property of “sticking to objects” or “covering an object”. According to the laws of physics, water is a set of quantum particles and quantum particles can move and interact with other quantum particles; this is not an emergent property, but a fundamental property of quantum particles. The property of "sticking to objects" is simply an arbitrary way of describing the fundamental property of quantum particles to bind to each other, which is due to the attractive property of the electromagnetic interaction. The electromagnetic interaction is the fundamental interaction that determines all molecular processes; it can be both attractive and repulsive, depending on the sign of the charges, and its intensity can vary from zero to infinity, depending on the distance between the charges, which is why we observe very different behaviors at the macroscopic level. The property of "covering an object" is simply an arbitrary way of describing the property of molecules to move in space and occupy different positions. By the way, geometric properties cannot be considered emergent properties since they are intrinsic properties of space itself and space is a fundamental element in the laws of physics. No new properties are involved in wetness; wetness is only an abstract and subjective concept we use to approximately describe the underlying microscopic properties and processes, which are directly and more accurately described by the fundamental laws of physics, without any addictional assumptions and without involving any emergent properties. You wrote:”The third argument about the unity of consciousness is interesting but may not account for phenomena like split-brain patients, where the two hemispheres of the brain can exhibit seemingly separate consciousnesses.” First of all, facts must be distinguished from arbitrary and erroneous interpretations of facts. The fact that people with split brains do not have adequate control of their movements is hardly surprising. The control of our voluntary movements depends on brain processes and when these processes do not occur correctly, voluntary movements also do not occur correctly. There are no two people living in the same brain at the same time because otherwise any voluntary movement would be impossible as there would be two simultaneous wills, and if one of these wills prevailed over the other, the other personality would have to see his body move continuously against his will; this is not what happens in the case of split brain patients. You wrote:” While it's true that individual quantum processes in the brain might not exhibit consciousness, it's not clear that their collective behavior can't give rise to consciousness.” My arguments prove you wrong; collective behavior is just another way expression to refer to emergent properties, and my arguments above prove that collective behavior is only a subjective cognitive contruct that refers only to mind-dependent entities, which is sufficient to prove that conscioisness cannot exist as a collective property. You wrote: “The argument that defining the brain is arbitrary and thus can't give rise to consciousness is a philosophical one. While it's true that where we draw the line between the brain and not-the-brain can be somewhat arbitrary, it's not clear that this arbitrariness negates the possibility of the brain generating consciousness.” You are wrong; arbitrariness implies consciousness and therefore any arbitrary definition refers only to a mind-dependent entity, and conscioiusness cannot exist as a property of a mind-dependent entity.
Don't say 'life' as though it were a 'something'. Instead say, 'the living process'. Don't say 'consciousness' as though it were a 'something'. Instead say, 'the being conscious process'. A self is the thought at the heart of the being conscious process. What I mean when I say, 'I am conscious' is, it is my self who is conscious. My self owns my body even though my body is the necessary substrate of my self. My self is immaterial because my self is a thought. Unlike all other thoughts the self thought is about its self (hence the name). Thoughts are immaterial because they are what the discharge timing patterns of neurons encode. Thus I am not a 'materialist' but instead I am a 'physicalist'. Physicality entails both matter and movement whereas materialism is about material existence only. (Neural discharge is entirely the *movement* of ions). (Lots of tiny related movements are what we refer to as 'process' thus 'process' is an immaterial entity in the category labelled 'abstract' where it rubs elbows with abstractions like 'pattern', 'time' and 'transportation'). We are conscious to maintain civilization and function within it. Impossible to imagine civilization if we all still ran on instinct. Civilization is what protects us from uncaring nature and is what permits us to replicate in safety so that we became eight billion, and still growing. Self evidently civilization and the being-conscious-process co-evolved. Wild dogs are not conscious but domesticated ones may be. Disney has done no favors for good thinking by anthropocentrizing every living thing. Children grow up indoctrinated by cartoons into believing that Alvin chipmunk is conscious. Not a 'hard' indoctrination but definitely floating about in the unconscious (which is of course the realm from which all conscious thoughts emerge).
I still cannot shake off Sam Harris's argument that in our own experience there is no freedom to be found in will. Even without scientifically examining the state of my brain, by paying attention to the arising of thoughts and actions, I can't claim ultimate ownership of them. They basically just appear and fade away.
Yeah that’s true but in my opinion this doesn’t take into account actual rational choices. He uses examples of making choices of what city or movie you like but I think that if there is any free will, it’d be found in choices that really matter not just what button to press or what movie first comes to mind. It’d be examining who to marry, how to treat other people, where to go to school, really weighing the cost and balances of certain choices. Most examples he gives just seem really arbitrary and random.
What about the thoughts you had while you were figuring out how to type that question out? The thoughts you are having while reading this? Do you also experience them as appearences in consciousness, or can you only experience these as if you are directly creating them? There are different types of thoughts created in your brain, some originating in the unconscious mind and transmitted to consciousness, those which we can perceive as not authoring, and some are created in our consciousness by us when we consciously engage with any appearence in consciousness.
@@PicturesJester Why would you not be the author of thoughts that came from your unconscious mind? Do you have two people living in your skull? I think people get confused on this because they are only looking at things from a first person perspective. If you look at someone else, you certainly wouldn't separate out those ideas that they seemed to come up with through conscious deliberation from those that seemed to come out of the blue, would you? If completely original songs just pop into the head of a songwriter, would you say that it wasn't his song? You are an integrated whole organism. Every output is you, whether you subjectively feel it in the moment or not. If you feel like this is unfair since you are not in control of your unconscious, you may need to reexamine your view of yourself.
@@caricue Seems to me that my unconscious is stuffed with thoughts put there by the culture in which I have long been embedded. I speak and write English because my culture did. I don't swear a lot because my parents didn't. etc...
Interesting but I don't get the 2nd order definition of consciousness. "Could have turned out otherwise" .... how could it have turned out otherwise? What would have had to been different? Neurons are made of atoms and we know how atoms behave. Is he saying the atoms could have behaved differently? Or there's something else pushing the atoms around that could have pushed them in a different way? What is free will free from? The laws of nature? "Free will" does suffer from a definition problem. Whatever people mean when they say free will they mean something determines our actions. Completely undermined actions would be chaos. Are the causes of our actions solely material or is there is something else? (Hint: there's no good reason to believe there's something else).
There is plenty of good reason to believe our actions have non-material causes, not the least of which is the fact that chains of causation always have to terminate at a sufficient cause. Take the metaphysical idea of a conditioned reality, i.e. a reality that depends on some condition(s) for its existence. If A depends on condition X for its existence, then A obtains only when condition X obtains. But at a lower level of causation, condition X is either conditioned reality, in which case X depends on another condition Y for its existence, or X is an unconditioned reality, in which case the causal chain terminates. Assuming X is conditioned, then Y must obtain for X to obtain, at which point we need to determine if Y is conditioned or unconditioned. If conditioned, Y obtains when...and so on, ad infinitum. Now, the point here is not merely to point out an infinite regress, though that is part of it. The salient point is that is a causal chain, or a metaphysical conditioned reality, that never terminates on a sufficient cause which is unconditioned--that is, a cause that does not require the fulfillment of conditions to obtain--cannot exist! When we apply to above to free will, the causes of our actions must terminate on a non-material sufficient cause in order for us to have any free agency at all.
" chains of causation always have to terminate at a sufficient cause" What can't a material thing be a sufficient cause? That argument has built into it the premises that only the thing the argument wants to support can exist without a cause. It then comes to the unsurprising conclusion that the thing in the assumption exists. Let's keep it simple and not just assume that non-material things can cause material things or that non-material things can exists without a cause. There's no reason to make those assumptions unless, of course, they are required to get to the conclusion you want.
"What can't a material thing be a sufficient cause?" Because every caused event (which is a class or subset of set of all conditioned realities) has to have an antecedent whose action or mere presence is sufficient to impel or instantiate the event in question. Since all material realities, objects, events, etc. (pick the object/event of materiality you wish) supervene other material realities, the sufficient cause of one material reality is the consequent of another material reality or its actions, which is in turn caused by another material reality, which is its sufficient cause, but which is also the consequent of another material reality, and so on, ad infinitum. The only way to break the infinite regress is to either arbitrarily chose which material reality you wish to be designated the sufficient cause of all sufficient causes, at which point you're going to have a damned hard time explaining why THAT material reality, of all material realities, is the ultimate or foundational reality (in which case, good luck), or you must conclude that the foundational reality or cause is non-material. Of the two, I submit the latter is a more defensible position than the former, since their is actual evidence (e.g. mental to physical causation) of non-material realities causing material events. I'm afraid that the idea that there is only material, that is, physical, stuff in the universe is likely the weaker hypothesis.
What evidence is there of the non-material? How does the non-material affect the material? For example is there any equation or principle that relates the non-material to material forces such as momentum or electric charge or space time or magnetism or anything ? It's one thing to wax vague and mystical it's another to say something specific and concrete, something risky that could disproved. Explanations from Naturalism (matter alone) are the stronger explanations because adding the non-material only makes the explanations more complicated without adding any explanatory power to them. Every explanatory chain must be either an infinite regress or end in an unexplained thing. That unexplained thing might as well be a material thing as a supposed non-material thing. Say material thing A was caused by material thing B which was caused by material thing C which is caused by non-material thing D isn't any better of an explanation than just stopping at C. If it's just a longer explanation you want why not just keep going D was caused by non-material thing E which was caused by .... I get the feeling such chains are motivated more by the desired conclusion (apologetics) than by careful reasoning from first principles.
"What evidence is there of the non-material? How does the non-material affect the material? For example is there any equation or principle that relates the non-material to material forces such as momentum or electric charge or space time or magnetism or anything?" You are evidence of the non-material, meaning your mind--any theory of the universe that presumes to be an explanation of all phenomenon has to incorporate an explanation of it (see Nagel, Strawson, Chalmers, et al on this). But if you don't like that, which I suspect you are not, then dark energy, which makes up roughly 70% of the "stuff" of the universe is, if it exists and by definition, non-baryonic, non-massive, and, hence, non-material. You're asking for a mathematical theory of mental to physical causation, a perspective for which I have great sympathy. But there are two things that I think are important to note: 1) it's not altogether clear that a mathematical mapping from the mental to the physical and vice versa can ever be coherent; and 2) there is no mathematical theory of physical to physical causation in the brain that would explain mind/consciousness/free will/agency--in fact, there isn't even the outline of a method to hypothesize what that would be. This is something that Tse is really bringing attention to in this talk, e.g. the experiments where the subjects report their awareness of willing to move their finger; cognitive scientists don't know nearly as much as mentality, or the brain, for that matter, as they think they do. Now, this second point is not to be dismissed lightly, in my view. Scientific naturalism trades on the outstanding success of physics, mathematics, and the technological marvels those fields have enabled to bolster its contention as the best (or the only?) coherent, dare I say, veridical, way to view/discuss reality. Still, I am very sympathetic to your point. I think there is an interesting experiment that came to light recently that may be instructive to asking the right questions here. On the matter of olfactory perception, perfumers were given a set of perfumes to sniff. The perfumes were all identical in terms of chemical composition. The only thing different was that some of them used heavy water (where the hydrogen atom has a neutron in the nucleus), while others did not. The result was that the perfumers were able to smell the difference between the heavy water and the normal water, which undercuts the prevailing biochemical model of perception, or, indeed, the brain, since water and heavy water are chemical indistinguishable. In fact, not only is the biochemical model struck down, but there is also some interesting physics here. Neutrons, from the outside (meaning: not its internal structure), do not interact electromagnetically. From current physics, we're forced to conclude that either the perfumer's olfactory sense can perceive one of the three remaining physical forces (smell via gravity, anyone?), or something else is going on here. If I were a betting man, and the choice was between our noses being able to sense masses to a sensitivity of 1.674929 x 10^-27 kg and something else, I'm going with option two. "I get the feeling such chains are motivated more by the desired conclusion (apologetics) than by careful reasoning from first principles." With respect, I think apologetics is alive and well in the scientific community as much as it is in theology, philosophy, etc. Just pay attention to the speculative word vomit from Kraus, Carroll, et al for a few minutes and see if a lot of what they say has any evidence to support it.
One of the best conversations so far. Thanks to both of the Professors!
we are getting somewhere, the idea that the brain causes consciousness is so logically primitive. Consciousness gathers in a highly concentrated form in brains, but it flows through every particle in the universe.
@@bradmodd7856 stop it. UTTER NONSENSE MYSTICISM. Why would you say such a thing- huh? Really man.
Currently reading Peter Tse's contribution in the book Neuroexistentialism and found my way here. Great stuff.
I've been looking for clarification of theories of consciousness and free will for months, and this is the most rigorous, concise and consistently-thought-through I've found so far. Kudos! My one concern is Professor Tse's failure to note that there already are non-human conscious beings we "enslave" with little moral debate: dogs and other service animals. Our use of and directions to sheep dogs, attack dogs, search and rescue dogs, bomb-sniffing dogs and the like precisely mirror the Professor's "do the dishes" example of enslaving AIs.
Dogs yearn for affection and therefore thrive upon being 'slaves' to man. Cats on the other hand...
Consider...
You can be absolutely certain that you are conscious.
You can be somewhat certain that I am conscious.
You cannot be certain that a dog is conscious
(since a dog's behavior may be entirely instinct driven).
You can be certain that a single cell is *not* conscious
(since a single cell's behavior is entirely reactive).
If Westworld was a dramatized documentary of an actuality then
you could be somewhat certain that the androids became conscious.
"Are you real"? "Well if you can't tell does it matter"?
Yes thanks to both.
Excellent discussion.
thanks! great talk
Peter needs to talk with Sam Harris and John Vervaeke. great interview!
Very interesting !
Peter
24:34 This is impossible by the conservation of quantum information in the models in which it holds.
I am a physicist and I will provide solid arguments that prove that consciousness cannot be generated by the brain (in my youtube channel you can find a video with more detailed explanations). Many argue that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but it is possible to show that such hypothesis is inconsistent with our scientific knowledges. In fact, it is possible to show that all the examples of emergent properties consists of concepts used to describe how an external object appear to our conscious mind, and not how it is in itself, which means how the object is independently from our observation. In other words, emergent properties are ideas conceived to describe or classify, according to arbitrary criteria and from an arbitrary point of view, certain processes or systems. In summary, emergent properties are intrinsically subjective, since they are conceptual models based on the arbitrary choice to focus on certain aspects of a system and neglet other aspects, such as microscopic structures and processes; emergent properties consist of ideas through which we describe how the external reality appears to our conscious mind: without a conscious mind, these ideas (= emergent properties) would not exist at all.
Here comes my first argument: arbitrariness, subjectivity, classifications and approximate descriptions, imply the existence of a conscious mind, which can arbitrarily choose a specific point of view and focus on certain aspects while neglecting others. It is obvious that consciousness cannot be considered an emergent property of the physical reality, because consciousenss is a preliminary necessary condition for the existence of any emergent property. We have then a logical contradiction. Nothing which presupposes the existence of consciousness can be used to try to explain the existence of consciousness.
Here comes my second argument: our scientific knowledge shows that brain processes consist of sequences of ordinary elementary physical processes; since consciousness is not a property of ordinary elementary physical processes, then a succession of such processes cannot have cosciousness as a property. In fact we can break down the process and analyze it step by step, and in every step consciousness would be absent, so there would never be any consciousness during the entire sequence of elementary processes. It must be also understood that considering a group of elementary processes together as a whole is an arbitrary choice. In fact, according to the laws of physics, any number of elementary processes is totally equivalent. We could consider a group of one hundred elementary processes or ten thousand elementary processes, or any other number; this choice is arbitrary and not reducible to the laws of physics. However, consciousness is a necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrary choices; therefore consciousness cannot be a property of a sequence of elementary processes as a whole, because such sequence as a whole is only an arbitrary and abstract concept that cannot exist independently of a conscious mind.
Here comes my third argument: It should also be considered that brain processes consist of billions of sequences of elementary processes that take place in different points of the brain; if we attributed to these processes the property of consciousness, we would have to associate with the brain billions of different consciousnesses, that is billions of minds and personalities, each with its own self-awareness and will; this contradicts our direct experience, that is, our awareness of being a single person who is able to control the voluntary movements of his own body with his own will. If cerebral processes are analyzed taking into account the laws of physics, these processes do not identify any unity; this missing unit is the necessarily non-physical element (precisely because it is missing in the brain), the element that interprets the brain processes and generates a unitary conscious state, that is the human mind.
Here comes my forth argument: Consciousness is characterized by the fact that self-awareness is an immediate intuition that cannot be broken down or fragmented into simpler elements. This characteristic of consciousness of presenting itself as a unitary and non-decomposable state, not fragmented into billions of personalities, does not correspond to the quantum description of brain processes, which instead consist of billions of sequences of elementary incoherent quantum processes. When someone claims that consciousness is a property of the brain, they are implicitly considering the brain as a whole, an entity with its own specific properties, other than the properties of the components. From the physical point of view, the brain is not a whole, because its quantum state is not a coherent state, as in the case of entangled systems; the very fact of speaking of "brain" rather than many cells that have different quantum states, is an arbitrary choice. This is an important aspect, because, as I have said, consciousness is a necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrariness. So, if a system can be considered decomposable and considering it as a whole is an arbitrary choice, then it is inconsistent to assume that such a system can have or generate consciousness, since consciousness is a necessary precondition for the existence of any arbitrary choice. In other words, to regard consciousness as a property ofthe brain, we must first define what the brain is, and to do so we must rely only on the laws of physics, without introducing arbitrary notions extraneous to them; if this cannot be done, then it means that every property we attribute to the brain is not reducible to the laws of physics, and therefore such property would be nonphysical. Since the interactions between the quantum particles that make up the brain are ordinary interactions, it is not actually possible to define the brain based solely on the laws of physics. The only way to define the brain is to arbitrarily establish that a certain number of particles belong to it and others do not belong to it, but such arbitrariness is not admissible. In fact, the brain is not physically separated from the other organs of the body, with which it interacts, nor is it physically isolated from the external environment, just as it is not isolated from other brains, since we can communicate with other people, and to do so we use physical means, for example acoustic waves or electromagnetic waves (light). This necessary arbitrariness in defining what the brain is, is sufficient to demonstrate that consciousness is not reducible to the laws of physics. Besides, since the brain is an arbitrary concept, and consciousness is the necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrariness, consciousness cannot be a property of the brain. Based on these considerations, we can exclude that consciousness is generated by brain processes or is an emergent property of the brain. Marco Biagini
A lot of what you are saying is contained in Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy. Will look at your channel
Marco Biagini's arguments are certainly thought-provoking and delve deep into the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the brain. However, there are some things to note
Definition of Emergent Properties: Biagini's first argument hinges on the definition of emergent properties as being inherently subjective and arbitrary. While it's true that many emergent properties are described from a human perspective, it's debatable whether they are all inherently subjective or if they can exist objectively without human observation.
Nature of Brain Processes: The second argument assumes that because individual brain processes don't exhibit consciousness, a collection of them can't either. This is akin to saying that because individual water molecules aren't wet, a collection of them (like a lake) can't be wet either. This is a debated point in philosophy and neuroscience.
Unity of Consciousness: The third argument about the unity of consciousness is interesting but may not account for phenomena like split-brain patients, where the two hemispheres of the brain can exhibit seemingly separate consciousnesses.
Quantum Description of Brain Processes: The fourth argument brings in quantum mechanics, which is a complex and not fully understood field. While it's true that individual quantum processes in the brain might not exhibit consciousness, it's not clear that their collective behavior can't give rise to consciousness.
Arbitrariness of Defining the Brain: The argument that defining the brain is arbitrary and thus can't give rise to consciousness is a philosophical one. While it's true that where we draw the line between the brain and not-the-brain can be somewhat arbitrary, it's not clear that this arbitrariness negates the possibility of the brain generating consciousness.
@@TheYoungFactor You wrote: “ Biagini's first argument hinges on the definition of emergent properties as being inherently subjective and arbitrary. While it's true that many emergent properties are described from a human perspective, it's debatable whether they are all inherently subjective or if they can exist objectively without human observation.”
You are wrong, in fact it can be easily proved that all emergent properties depend on subjectivity. The proof is the following:
The concept of set refers to something that has an intrinsically conceptual and subjective nature and implies the subjective choice of determining which elements are to be included in the set; what exists objectively are only the single elements (where one person sees a set of elements, another person can only see elements that are not related to each other in their individuality). In fact, when we define a set, it is as if we were drawing an imaginary line that separates some elements from all the other elements; obviously this imaginary line does not exist either physically or objectively, independently of our mind. An emergent property is defined as a property that is possessed by a set of elements that its individual components do not possess; the above argument proves that this definition implies that all emergent properties are subjective cognitive contructs that correspond only to mind-dependent entities and therefore, mental experience cannot itself be an emergent property.
You wrote;”The second argument assumes that because individual brain processes don't exhibit consciousness, a collection of them can't either. This is akin to saying that because individual water molecules aren't wet, a collection of them (like a lake) can't be wet either. “
You are wrong. In fact wetness is a typical example of emergent property, and like any emergent property, is only a subjective cognitive construct used to describe approximately the underlying physical processes. Wetness is not at all a new property compared to the physical properties explicitly described by the fundamental laws of physics, but only an abstraction that refers to several different properties, such as the property of “sticking to objects” or “covering an object”. According to the laws of physics, water is a set of quantum particles and quantum particles can move and interact with other quantum particles; this is not an emergent property, but a fundamental property of quantum particles. The property of "sticking to objects" is simply an arbitrary way of describing the fundamental property of quantum particles to bind to each other, which is due to the attractive property of the electromagnetic interaction. The electromagnetic interaction is the fundamental interaction that determines all molecular processes; it can be both attractive and repulsive, depending on the sign of the charges, and its intensity can vary from zero to infinity, depending on the distance between the charges, which is why we observe very different behaviors at the macroscopic level. The property of "covering an object" is simply an arbitrary way of describing the property of molecules to move in space and occupy different positions. By the way, geometric properties cannot be considered emergent properties since they are intrinsic properties of space itself and space is a fundamental element in the laws of physics. No new properties are involved in wetness; wetness is only an abstract and subjective concept we use to approximately describe the underlying microscopic properties and processes, which are directly and more accurately described by the fundamental laws of physics, without any addictional assumptions and without involving any emergent properties.
You wrote:”The third argument about the unity of consciousness is interesting but may not account for phenomena like split-brain patients, where the two hemispheres of the brain can exhibit seemingly separate consciousnesses.”
First of all, facts must be distinguished from arbitrary and erroneous interpretations of facts. The fact that people with split brains do not have adequate control of their movements is hardly surprising. The control of our voluntary movements depends on brain processes and when these processes do not occur correctly, voluntary movements also do not occur correctly. There are no two people living in the same brain at the same time because otherwise any voluntary movement would be impossible as there would be two simultaneous wills, and if one of these wills prevailed over the other, the other personality would have to see his body move continuously against his will; this is not what happens in the case of split brain patients.
You wrote:” While it's true that individual quantum processes in the brain might not exhibit consciousness, it's not clear that their collective behavior can't give rise to consciousness.”
My arguments prove you wrong; collective behavior is just another way expression to refer to emergent properties, and my arguments above prove that collective behavior is only a subjective cognitive contruct that refers only to mind-dependent entities, which is sufficient to prove that conscioisness cannot exist as a collective property.
You wrote: “The argument that defining the brain is arbitrary and thus can't give rise to consciousness is a philosophical one. While it's true that where we draw the line between the brain and not-the-brain can be somewhat arbitrary, it's not clear that this arbitrariness negates the possibility of the brain generating consciousness.”
You are wrong; arbitrariness implies consciousness and therefore any arbitrary definition refers only to a mind-dependent entity, and conscioiusness cannot exist as a property of a mind-dependent entity.
Don't say 'life' as though it were a 'something'.
Instead say, 'the living process'.
Don't say 'consciousness' as though it were a 'something'.
Instead say, 'the being conscious process'.
A self is the thought at the heart of the being conscious process.
What I mean when I say, 'I am conscious' is,
it is my self who is conscious.
My self owns my body even though my body is the necessary substrate of my self.
My self is immaterial because my self is a thought.
Unlike all other thoughts the self thought is about its self (hence the name).
Thoughts are immaterial because they are what the discharge timing patterns of neurons encode.
Thus I am not a 'materialist' but instead I am a 'physicalist'.
Physicality entails both matter and movement whereas
materialism is about material existence only.
(Neural discharge is entirely the *movement* of ions).
(Lots of tiny related movements are what we refer to as 'process'
thus 'process' is an immaterial entity in the category labelled 'abstract'
where it rubs elbows with abstractions like 'pattern', 'time' and 'transportation').
We are conscious to maintain civilization and function within it.
Impossible to imagine civilization if we all still ran on instinct.
Civilization is what protects us from uncaring nature and
is what permits us to replicate in safety so that we became eight billion,
and still growing.
Self evidently civilization and the being-conscious-process co-evolved.
Wild dogs are not conscious but domesticated ones may be.
Disney has done no favors for good thinking by anthropocentrizing every living thing.
Children grow up indoctrinated by cartoons into believing that Alvin chipmunk is conscious.
Not a 'hard' indoctrination but definitely floating about in the unconscious
(which is of course the realm from which all conscious thoughts emerge).
I still cannot shake off Sam Harris's argument that in our own experience there is no freedom to be found in will. Even without scientifically examining the state of my brain, by paying attention to the arising of thoughts and actions, I can't claim ultimate ownership of them. They basically just appear and fade away.
Yeah that’s true but in my opinion this doesn’t take into account actual rational choices. He uses examples of making choices of what city or movie you like but I think that if there is any free will, it’d be found in choices that really matter not just what button to press or what movie first comes to mind. It’d be examining who to marry, how to treat other people, where to go to school, really weighing the cost and balances of certain choices. Most examples he gives just seem really arbitrary and random.
What about the thoughts you had while you were figuring out how to type that question out? The thoughts you are having while reading this? Do you also experience them as appearences in consciousness, or can you only experience these as if you are directly creating them? There are different types of thoughts created in your brain, some originating in the unconscious mind and transmitted to consciousness, those which we can perceive as not authoring, and some are created in our consciousness by us when we consciously engage with any appearence in consciousness.
@@PicturesJester Why would you not be the author of thoughts that came from your unconscious mind? Do you have two people living in your skull? I think people get confused on this because they are only looking at things from a first person perspective. If you look at someone else, you certainly wouldn't separate out those ideas that they seemed to come up with through conscious deliberation from those that seemed to come out of the blue, would you? If completely original songs just pop into the head of a songwriter, would you say that it wasn't his song? You are an integrated whole organism. Every output is you, whether you subjectively feel it in the moment or not. If you feel like this is unfair since you are not in control of your unconscious, you may need to reexamine your view of yourself.
@@caricue I didnt say that
@@caricue
Seems to me that my unconscious is stuffed with thoughts put there by
the culture in which I have long been embedded.
I speak and write English because my culture did.
I don't swear a lot because my parents didn't.
etc...
Interesting but I don't get the 2nd order definition of consciousness. "Could have turned out otherwise" .... how could it have turned out otherwise? What would have had to been different? Neurons are made of atoms and we know how atoms behave. Is he saying the atoms could have behaved differently? Or there's something else pushing the atoms around that could have pushed them in a different way?
What is free will free from? The laws of nature?
"Free will" does suffer from a definition problem. Whatever people mean when they say free will they mean something determines our actions. Completely undermined actions would be chaos. Are the causes of our actions solely material or is there is something else? (Hint: there's no good reason to believe there's something else).
There is plenty of good reason to believe our actions have non-material causes, not the least of which is the fact that chains of causation always have to terminate at a sufficient cause. Take the metaphysical idea of a conditioned reality, i.e. a reality that depends on some condition(s) for its existence. If A depends on condition X for its existence, then A obtains only when condition X obtains. But at a lower level of causation, condition X is either conditioned reality, in which case X depends on another condition Y for its existence, or X is an unconditioned reality, in which case the causal chain terminates. Assuming X is conditioned, then Y must obtain for X to obtain, at which point we need to determine if Y is conditioned or unconditioned. If conditioned, Y obtains when...and so on, ad infinitum. Now, the point here is not merely to point out an infinite regress, though that is part of it. The salient point is that is a causal chain, or a metaphysical conditioned reality, that never terminates on a sufficient cause which is unconditioned--that is, a cause that does not require the fulfillment of conditions to obtain--cannot exist!
When we apply to above to free will, the causes of our actions must terminate on a non-material sufficient cause in order for us to have any free agency at all.
" chains of causation always have to terminate at a sufficient cause" What can't a material thing be a sufficient cause?
That argument has built into it the premises that only the thing the argument wants to support can exist without a cause. It then comes to the unsurprising conclusion that the thing in the assumption exists. Let's keep it simple and not just assume that non-material things can cause material things or that non-material things can exists without a cause. There's no reason to make those assumptions unless, of course, they are required to get to the conclusion you want.
"What can't a material thing be a sufficient cause?"
Because every caused event (which is a class or subset of set of all conditioned realities) has to have an antecedent whose action or mere presence is sufficient to impel or instantiate the event in question. Since all material realities, objects, events, etc. (pick the object/event of materiality you wish) supervene other material realities, the sufficient cause of one material reality is the consequent of another material reality or its actions, which is in turn caused by another material reality, which is its sufficient cause, but which is also the consequent of another material reality, and so on, ad infinitum. The only way to break the infinite regress is to either arbitrarily chose which material reality you wish to be designated the sufficient cause of all sufficient causes, at which point you're going to have a damned hard time explaining why THAT material reality, of all material realities, is the ultimate or foundational reality (in which case, good luck), or you must conclude that the foundational reality or cause is non-material. Of the two, I submit the latter is a more defensible position than the former, since their is actual evidence (e.g. mental to physical causation) of non-material realities causing material events.
I'm afraid that the idea that there is only material, that is, physical, stuff in the universe is likely the weaker hypothesis.
What evidence is there of the non-material? How does the non-material affect the material?
For example is there any equation or principle that relates the non-material to material forces such as momentum or electric charge or space time or magnetism or anything ? It's one thing to wax vague and mystical it's another to say something specific and concrete, something risky that could disproved.
Explanations from Naturalism (matter alone) are the stronger explanations because adding the non-material only makes the explanations more complicated without adding any explanatory power to them.
Every explanatory chain must be either an infinite regress or end in an unexplained thing. That unexplained thing might as well be a material thing as a supposed non-material thing. Say material thing A was caused by material thing B which was caused by material thing C which is caused by non-material thing D isn't any better of an explanation than just stopping at C. If it's just a longer explanation you want why not just keep going D was caused by non-material thing E which was caused by .... I get the feeling such chains are motivated more by the desired conclusion (apologetics) than by careful reasoning from first principles.
"What evidence is there of the non-material? How does the non-material affect the material?
For example is there any equation or principle that relates the non-material to material forces such as momentum or electric charge or space time or magnetism or anything?"
You are evidence of the non-material, meaning your mind--any theory of the universe that presumes to be an explanation of all phenomenon has to incorporate an explanation of it (see Nagel, Strawson, Chalmers, et al on this). But if you don't like that, which I suspect you are not, then dark energy, which makes up roughly 70% of the "stuff" of the universe is, if it exists and by definition, non-baryonic, non-massive, and, hence, non-material.
You're asking for a mathematical theory of mental to physical causation, a perspective for which I have great sympathy. But there are two things that I think are important to note: 1) it's not altogether clear that a mathematical mapping from the mental to the physical and vice versa can ever be coherent; and 2) there is no mathematical theory of physical to physical causation in the brain that would explain mind/consciousness/free will/agency--in fact, there isn't even the outline of a method to hypothesize what that would be. This is something that Tse is really bringing attention to in this talk, e.g. the experiments where the subjects report their awareness of willing to move their finger; cognitive scientists don't know nearly as much as mentality, or the brain, for that matter, as they think they do. Now, this second point is not to be dismissed lightly, in my view. Scientific naturalism trades on the outstanding success of physics, mathematics, and the technological marvels those fields have enabled to bolster its contention as the best (or the only?) coherent, dare I say, veridical, way to view/discuss reality.
Still, I am very sympathetic to your point. I think there is an interesting experiment that came to light recently that may be instructive to asking the right questions here. On the matter of olfactory perception, perfumers were given a set of perfumes to sniff. The perfumes were all identical in terms of chemical composition. The only thing different was that some of them used heavy water (where the hydrogen atom has a neutron in the nucleus), while others did not. The result was that the perfumers were able to smell the difference between the heavy water and the normal water, which undercuts the prevailing biochemical model of perception, or, indeed, the brain, since water and heavy water are chemical indistinguishable. In fact, not only is the biochemical model struck down, but there is also some interesting physics here. Neutrons, from the outside (meaning: not its internal structure), do not interact electromagnetically. From current physics, we're forced to conclude that either the perfumer's olfactory sense can perceive one of the three remaining physical forces (smell via gravity, anyone?), or something else is going on here. If I were a betting man, and the choice was between our noses being able to sense masses to a sensitivity of 1.674929 x 10^-27 kg and something else, I'm going with option two.
"I get the feeling such chains are motivated more by the desired conclusion (apologetics) than by careful reasoning from first principles."
With respect, I think apologetics is alive and well in the scientific community as much as it is in theology, philosophy, etc. Just pay attention to the speculative word vomit from Kraus, Carroll, et al for a few minutes and see if a lot of what they say has any evidence to support it.