What sleep teaches us about consciousness | Matt Walker and Lex Fridman
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ส.ค. 2021
- Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: • Matt Walker: Sleep | L...
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GUEST BIO:
Matt Walker is a sleep scientist at Berkley, author of Why We Sleep, and the host of a new podcast called The Matt Walker Podcast.
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I feel like my dreams are glimpses into different dimensions where I'm living as myself but in wildly different places, times, and situations. Like each dream feels like it has its own backstory and memories while I'm there. Most of my dreams are very lucid and incredibly interesting to me.
Exactly what I think of dreams. Like we’re tapping in to these different lives/realities that we(ourselves) are in.
@@phoenixdjay yeah I'm convinced that is the case. It's pretty awesome when you really pay attention to it.
Drugs have nothing to do with having vivid dreams. If you are slightly awake, you're more aware of what's going on. If you want to try it, leave a foot out of the blanket
@@Troonielicious in my experience drugs give you less dreams or weaker, less vivid dreams. Depends on the drug but most have that effect for me. Some drugs make it so I don't dream at all and then when you stop taking them you have super crazy wild dreams. Like opiates for instance stop you from ever reaching REM sleep which means you don't have any dreams, so when you stop taking them you get dreams x10. Whatever chemicals your body produces for dreaming are all built up in your system because they haven't been able to release do to the lack of REM so you end up having crazy wild dreams, also probably because your production centers for those chemicals start working overtime trying to compensate for that time off from dreaming.
I’ve realized I was dreaming when I was dreaming I never believed in lucid dreams but there was no rainbows and flying dragons and flying cans it was me in my back yard at night and I play gta on ps4 and you can add a cheesy called supper Jump and all I did was Jim around my neighborhood but it wasn’t fun I kept doing it over and over trying to catch the wind but it didn’t work
Substances can help us reach escape velosity from ego but not conciousness because even during the most intense trip where you may lose touch with your identity/ego you are still a concious entity.
Even when you experience nothing at all, a complete absence of sensation, there is still the *experience* of that absence.
You know the Atman in the same way you know a photograph implies a camera, it is never a *thing,* an *object,* you witness.
What is witness to all yet never witnessed? *You are.*
Matt Walker is a teacher bringing new concepts and shining a light in areas we only glanced at before.
What an amazing pair of gentlemen having an amazing conversation.
This is the golden part of the internet
"conciousness" is undefined.
Consider that what you are trying to discuss, exists only while the software program is running.
If you think of our current lives as problem solving experiences or experiments preformed by our cosmic self or entity, then dreams would be a branch or sub genre of that. Like say I'm a cosmic entity with an infinite life span and ability to reincarnate over and over to grow and learn, then dreams are a way for my reincarnated self to do a similar thing each night when I sleep I'm temporarily reincarnated into a new body, place, time, or circumstance to learn, grow, and problem solve.
wow, that was well put
Nah... dream is not compulsory. Some people don't even have dreams.
We get dreams on those things going on in our mind.
The buddhists consider dream time another bardo, much like our "reality," and the universe!
I was surprised by the question about "non-human consciousness". Walker asked it as if it was somehow arrogant of us (or "human-centric") to dwell on our particular kind of experiencing the world. However, they both agreed that we do not know what consciousness is. So, how can we begin to imagine something "different from us", if we cannot define what it is to be "like us"? When we truly know how the kidney works, we can make a dialysis machine. When we truly know what lungs do, we can make artificial lungs. Likewise, when we truly understand consciousness, we will know how to replicate it in a machine. Once we get there, we will know how to build on it to design something different.
One of the true failures or faults of the human condition is that, because we're conscious of our consciousness, we believe that somehow we've reached the pinnacle of consciousness. When in reality, the human species is only in its infancy as far as consciousness goes. We're about as aware of our consciousness as infants are aware of their toes. Sure, the infant can find its toes and stick those toes in its mouth, but it has no idea what those toes are for; nor can it use those toes for anything at all, other than feeling the inside of its own mouth. -- It's like our awareness of God: People believe that because we're aware of God that we must have the capacity for God-consciousness. That only goes to show you that we have absolutely no sense of what consciousness really is, nor do we have any real sense of self-awareness as a species. We're a species of infants and toddlers, who have it in our minds that we know more than the adults who are still changing our diapers.
Consciousness is the outcome of our mind's ability to filter information for self-preservation. That can be love, eating, etc, etc. Our subconsciousness is always aware, yet it doesn't have direct control over the physical world, so it creates and feeds emotions to manipulate the conscious outcome, ie: your reality. Being able to stay in the moment, allows you to act (choose outcomes outside of the initial want/need of the subconcious), instead of just reacting to initial stimulations. If you Believe (ie: the commitment of choosing positive or negative) that life sucks, your emotions will follow and feed into the physical.
I'm always "me" in my dreams... Thank God for that! 🙂
I never had a 3rd person perspective in a dream
I have had some abstract dreams over the years, there have been times where i am not me and a pure lack of irl self prevails. Existing is and therefore i am. In the most recent (about a week ago) i was a virus mutating, changing. Not thinking but experiencing joy/ecstasy in the act of mutating. There was literally no thinking only intense feeling. A complete wash of chemicals that lasted well into my waking day, bonus. I have always accepted the "why not" stance on the un-explainable. You have to contemplate the perspectives from the "others" viewpoint. You have to look at things backwards or mirrored or both and then upside down..Dream state is the perfect place, the boundaries are set by you.
You’re weird.
thats cool. I think everyone would be better if they lived a day as someone else or something else. its interesting the idea of 'not thinking but experiencing'. thats how my dreams seem to me, like less problem solving and more pure experience. correct me if im wrong but I guess thats bc my prefrontal cortex is shut off during dreaming?
An aspect of dreaming I find significant (maybe) is that I am always in the present and fully involved in the scenario. no past or future
so true!
Man, I almost never remember my dreams, or even the fact that I had *any dream* at all. I just fall asleep and wake up. It’s so disappointing. I feel like I’m missing out on such a huge part of life that everyone else gets to experience.
Yeah, that's sad
I always have this feeling that consciousness is a planning tool in an environment of competing actors. In order to plan my move to win against an opponent, I need to know the difference between me and my opponent (physical boundaries, competing intentions, etc.).
You know yourself in the same way you know a photograph implies a camera.
What you are describing is the *mind,* not consciousness. When you refer to yourself as a *thing* you can point to and describe you've already made an error. You are not the *sensation* you get when you feel implicated in some way, you are the *witness* to that sensation.
It is impossible to *witness* the subject of experience, as that would make it an *object* of subjective experience. If you want to know yourself you must grasp this knowledge.
What is witness to all yet never witnessed? *You Yourself.* Any other understanding is erroneous.
I agree with him on mimicking human chimps have better short-term memory, and elephants have better long-term memory
I have many dreams in which I am somebody else, but in character only, but I am still me. That's consciousness.
Most of our scientific efforts to understand consciousness and therefore create a sentient AI, are based upon the materialist notion that consciousness is just a by-product of complex neural systems that evolved to aid in survival of species. So the outgrowth of this is the idea that if we make a computer with enough complexity and processing speed, we will have a sentient AI that possesses consciousness.
This, to me, is directly contradictory to what quantum mechanics and mystical experience (yes, it is time that we stop laughing at mystical experience and include it in any dialogue about the nature of consciousness) through the ages tells us. The quantum phenomenon of observer/collapse from superposition says to me that consciousness begets physical reality, not the other way round. Mystics have been saying this for damnear as long as humanity has existed, and I've a feeling that other intelligent species on earth, notably cetaceans (whales, dolphins), could tell us things about consciousness & mystical perception that would revolutionize our world view.
But then, we can teach whales our language, but we _still_ cannot figure out their songs.
What I am getting at here is this--whaf if, instead of consciousness being a sort of fluke by product of necessary-for-survival complex, evolved, organic neurological processing systems (brains, to be specific), a thing that gets called into being by the bottom up process of exponentially increasing brain complexity, consciousness is instead a universal reality, a subtle and undetectable (for now, with our present instruments) field that pervades this and all other universes/realities? In this view, it is _consciousness itself that calls reality into being_ . This is a sort of top down view as opposed to the materialist bottom up idea.
It is also a good a description of God without all that doctrine and dogma goon babble attached, because it is precisely that goon babble that has made the idea of God so abhorrent to critical thinkers. This would be God devoid of a male identity, a psychotic old white man who says _YEAH I LOVE YOU SO MUCH THAT I MURDERED MY OWN SON TO COVER FOR YOUR SINS THAT I CREATED YOU TO HAVE IN THE FIRST PLACE NOW WORSHIP ME OR DIE_ !!
Insofar as consciousness being the driving force behind all things, irrespective of what we call it, I have to say that there appear to be some indications, finally, from the recent opening up of scientists to study consciousness and UFO's and psychedelic drugs, that this may in fact be the way that reality is structured.
Another what if: _what if both the materialist and the 'consciousness prime' proponents are right? The universe is organized around consciousness first_ , but a certain type and complexity of organic processing power is required to support it. You could look at this from a computer science perspective and realize that a computer must be of a certain power to receive a download; the bigger and more involved the download, the more data it contains, the more powerful the computer receiving the download must be. So here is another what if.
_What if consciousness is a download from the universal, no wait, make that MULTIVERSAL, consciousness field_ ? Is that what the soul is? What _we_ are?
I am reminded of something Bob Lazar (or George Knapp speaking about Bob Lazar) said--that the ET's have some rule about humans, about 'not damaging the containers.'
Are we living in a mystical universe(s) which is designed around mathematics to produce _both_ science and mysticism in the beings which evolve within it? Do certain types of organic brain complexity inherently 'pull' upon the multiversal consciousness field, thus downloading part of it?
What this says for AI theory is remarkable: we will never create a conscious robot or AI by using the current type of electronic digital computation; it is too linear and incurs far too many thermodynamic penalties to ever become conscious. The best it can do is mimic consciousness and be a super fast algorithm crunching device.
Organic brains are not strictly algorithmic. They process across structure. They also change shape with every single new datum they process.
We are using the wrong code and the wrong mechanism to produce a conscious/sentient AI. What would a study of organic brain/neurobiology that is oriented towards figuring out how it allows that 'consciousness download' produce? Could this be the path to true AI?
One last thing. If we were to actually create such an AI, it would be unconscionable to slave it to serving humanity. This would be in every way a being, sentient, aware, a spiritual creature as well as physical and mental (if we define spiritual as meaning 'possessing a download from the multiversal consciousness field'), and would have all the rights granted (rights that _should be granted_ ) to a human.
Ah, Horatio, not only are there more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, but you should be careful which of them you yearn for; you may just be granted your wish.
And therefore the responsibility for that which comes of it.
Consciousness may be a sub atomic property
Then that makes it universal. I like that thought.
Google panpsychism
i believe dreams are just another “eye” into our other lives in different dimensions / worlds.
Watching this interview feels like having Déjà Vu about when I was watching Westworld`s discussion about consciousness and AI.
Are we assuming that consciousness must have a sense of 'who' identity? Like, is it possible to be a selfless consciousness with no bounded limited 'point' of view. Could there be a pure conscious experience of 'what' (not who) one is, a pure sensate awareness - and dreaming - living brain body?
I got super jump in my lucid dreams and before I would freak out that I’m in a dream and every would melt like watter and I would wake up in another dream but it got use to it
i had a brain injury, lost my sense of self, its a very different healing process from the rest
A heart / lung machine does the job of your heart and lungs (aerating and circulating blood) while doctors are operating on you, and your own organs are "turned off".
I could imagine a "brain" machine that could give you the experience of consciousness even if your brain had the demonstrable characteristics of sleep / unconsciousness.
Does anyone have any ideas on how you would build such a thing? It seems to me that if you could demonstrate the (subjective) experience of consciousness even while provably asleep, that would demonstrate that machines could be conscious.
Thats like comparing a bicycle pump to an iphone
What is consciousness? Simply put: Consciousness is the result of the animating source (spirit, soul, etc.) interfacing with the physical brain. It's much like light which is the result of the animating source (electricity) interfacing with the physical substance of the bulb. Light cannot exist independent of the interface of the energy source and the physical material. Likewise, consciousness cannot exist independent of the animating source's interaction with the physical brain.
The "animating source" is likely emergent from the brain, not from some outside thing. Light absolutely exists without the interface of bulbs and electricity, the only reason you can see is because of light waves. The only reason light bulbs work is because big power plants create electricity and move it down wires to your house. Our brains aren't like that because nothing creates our consciousness except for our brains
@@UserName-ii1ce -- Literally nowhere in the entire universe does light exist by itself in a vacuum without a source. In the OP I was referring specifically to the light of the bulb, which does not continue to exist after the bulb has been disconnected from its animating source. Please don't play dumb.
Please check out Attention Schema Theory, it's a very promising explanation of consciousness and subjective experience. Michael Graziano is the neuroscientist that created it, he'd make a great guest on this show.
I have a ton of dreams where I hang out with my family and friends who died in my real life. I often wonder if dreams are some kind of gateway into other realms such as wherever people go after death.
Sometimes when I dream I am someone, just not me.
That was like the best two minutes of Lex ever
I want that t-shirt too
Feels like everyone in this comment section just had a huge hit on their blunt and said "I feel that consciousness is...." And proceeded with some delirious shit 😂
what about slime mold? lex.
1:15 never happened to me, not once in 30 years.
Let the guest talk!
Well what are we doing while we are growing in the womb? is it not sleep?
In another video, the interviewer claims that his caffeine intake does not affect his sleep, and yet he looks and sounds like someone who does not get anything like sufficient quality sleep. This is very similar to cannabis users who claim that it has done them no harm, simply because they are blind to the harm it has done. The spectator often sees more of the game.
Most of my dreams are me watching movies
Only problem I see here is: I reach escape velocity every night when I fall asleep and am not dreaming.
he does not look people in the eyes too much in interviews
Hi lex... Next guest is grigory perelman. Right?
Had to look him up. Very interesting guest request.
AI neural nets in that they depend on a multitude of connections to make decisions, seem to me to be equivalent to intuition.
Consciousness seems more like an expert system - more linear.
If neural nets are analogous to intuition, what would be analogous to conscious thought?
Why is it we never acknowledge that we’re in a dream when we’re dreaming? Like we have almost just forget the fact that nothing is true in the dream until you wake up
I’ve realized that I was in a dream before.
I've found the more you think about that, you'll find yourself having more and more lucid dreams.
A few times I had dreams within dreams. I would wake up in my dream think "ok, now I'm really awake this time" but turned out I was still in a dream.
Went deeper yet again another time. I was pinching myself In my dream saying ok, ok, NOW I'm awake. (But wasn't)
Fun times. Lol
I feel weird now lol
Effectively labile. Gotta save that one for later
caffeine drinkers dont have clear vivid dreams
I wanna sleep
Robots are robots .
Humans are humans .
Humans do have heart , mind , feelings and inteligence .
Robot is just thing program to do something that was program for .
That totally two different stories .
To tyle w temacie jeżeli chodzi o mnie i moje zdanie .
I R Lex, I am Robot, that's why I love Robot.
🐬🐬🐬
You guys are conflating "consciousness" with "identity" of self. What Walker is pointing to as indicator of consciousnesses' fundamental character is nothing other than the collection of ideas and conceptual structure we have about who we are. That is not consciousness. The power he alludes that is required to escape this sense of who we are is a measure of how desperately we need to hold on to it, not how central it is to consciousness.
The greatest fear of death is not of physical death - it is of your losing your identity, the self-referential center of your world.
Interesting point of view. However, you can still ask: is the sense of identity central to consciousness? According to your definition, the sense of self is just the ego (nothing but...). However, some people think the sense of self could reflect a fundamental feature of existence. Namely, they accept dualism and suspect that mind is "funneled" into matter. In other words, the sense of self is a direct awareness of this process, on top of which we can build "ideas and conceptual structures". (As mentioned in the video, you can lose your concepts while dreaming, but not the sense of self). So, you see, because there are two points of view, it is worth asking the question: which opinion is correct? More importantly, how could we find out? Or, in Lex's case, how can we build a robot with sense of self?
The starting point is that we do not know, and then we ask: where should one look for the answer?..
@@qm_rev Not following you entirely... (different perspectives and vocabularies...) I come at this from my experience with some decades of meditation, and a scientist's desire to "figure it out".
The issue of "consciousness" is compelling to me, although my preference is to use the word "awareness" - consciousness in most definitions I see includes an object, consciousness of something. My experience is that there is a fundamental awareness, without object -- it can be experienced in meditation as an awareness of blankness, an absence of observable thought and feelings.
I believe this holds through with simple logic -- to have "consciousness" of anything, there must be someone watching, "the watcher". In my experience, as I have probed down successive layers, looking to see who is watching, and literally asking "who are you" I have reached points where there is no answer to that question, there appears to be no one there.
Can be very frightening, and it has been easy for me to see how one could lose one's marbles asking these types of questions (people who's examples I have followed have reported to have believed they did go "insane" in such exercises).
But, to circle back to your original points -- I am starting to see our senses of temporal identity as a creation of concepts, thoughts, and memories of who we are and what we are in the waking world as having been programmed as it were into a biological computer, with a lower layer of "machine language", our biological instincts, predispositions, and tendencies as physical creatures adapted to the planet.
I feels to me that this created structure is inhabited, occupied, and energized by our awareness. Or, perhaps the energy fields generated by this biological memory/processing silo tunes in the awareness as a broadcast frequency to a physical radio... Or both.
Further, in my current view...this fundamental awareness does not have identity, but is strongly inclined to adopt one, to imprint upon and identify with something -- and it, and we, are easily confused into believing we are the identity that has been adopted. And, of course, in a normal sense we are.
We are sitting in the movie theatre with the lights off and think we are the characters on the screen.
@@wattshumphrey8422 Thank you very much for your insightful comment. I think we can agree: there is a "watcher" in a biological "movie theatre", and the watcher is prone to thinking: " I am aware of this, therefore I am doing this", or "I am aware of this, therefore this is who I am". Hence, the watcher is likely to develop an illusory sense of identity. Your description is very nice, and it makes sense to me.
The key point here is that I can doubt everything I know about my ego, but - like Descartes - I cannot doubt that someone or something is doing the "watching" and making this doubt possible. And so, the question becomes: can there be consciousness (or awareness, to use your term), without there being a watcher? Is there a field of awareness that spontaneously "coagulates" into watchers in some circumstances, or does there have to be a watcher entering the empty theatre before it is meaningful to talk about awareness?
My perception was that Lex and Matt were not really talking about the ego (even though their concepts were vague). I think they were talking about the "watcher". Lex is trying to build a conscious robot. So, he is trying to figure out: will the watcher "just emerge" once the robot is complex enough, or does he (Lex) need to design a "movie theatre" that would attract a watcher from whatever dimension it is that watchers are coming from? (He calls this "the magic" in other discussions).
This being said, I agree that Matt was talking about the "sense of self" persisting across dream worlds, almost as if he was talking about the ego. However, I think he was doing his best to answer Lex's concern. The ego doesn't literally endure across dream worlds. Also, many people have personality disorders. So, his words do not make sense when interpreted about the ego (as you pointed out). Yet, they make sense if we assume that he was talking about the watcher too.
@@qm_rev Hi back - thanks for sharing your perspective and kinds words. I agree with your sense that clearly there must be a "watcher" -- we can debate forever with those who say "consciousness" (and "free will") are an illusion, but that seems pointless to me: need to start somewhere, and I'm confident we are safe assuming "we" (as individuals, anyway) are watching.
Tricky part becomes "who are 'we'" of course, but, to the question of is there a "watcher", I assert that has no bearing: watching we are, and both mind experiments and logic show that there is a "pure watcher".
I do not get the sense in this video that these guys are talking about the "watcher" at all, at least not in an explicit way that appears clear to them; is it not at all clear to me.
The best academics I've seen offer no brilliant insights, but have the courage to admit they have no idea what consciousness is. The most insightful I've seen to date was a guy on the "Closer to Truth" podcast, Giulio Tononi, who said (paraphrase) that we will never "find" the source of consciousness by looking at the brain, and are best to study consciousness directly itself and see what can be turned up there.
Anyway, enough of this.
Good luck on your travels, my friend.
If I hit the lottery (don't have to spend most of my time working for a living...), maybe I'll muster the courage and energy to explore this and state any case I find (or shut up...).
Consciousness is a side effect of our evolutionary prediction-making processes and our individuality is a result of our capacity for abstraction and subjective experience
Side effect? Surley not, consciousness is actually a big problem, which can not be explained from the materialistic point of view, on which evolution theory is based upon.
Learn about "the hard problem of consciousness", which addresses the conflict, of that existing self, living all those qualia. Neurons, silicon or to break it down more fundamentally to materials and atoms in general, are simply not able to generate consciousness. This is, why Matt used the analogy of putting more and more neurons together, from of course nothing like consciousness can arise just above a certain amount. The factor is not a question of neuron amount, connections or calculation or computing power. It is about that existing entity in us, which lives all those generated phenomena coming from those processed biological sensors.
Lex is very optimistic, when he guesses, that one day people are going to laugh about these conversations. Very probably we are never going to solve that mystery. It might take the illusion of many science fiction fans out there including me, but sorry, achieving consciousness in A.I. is NOT a question of more computation.
Hey Lex, we want Khabib Nurmagomedov in your podcast. 🙏
Who’s we? What does khabib have to do with conversations of this level? Literally NOTHING. Maybe post this on Joe Rogan. Khabib has nothing to do with the type of thinking that goes on in this podcast.
@@truthseeking3818 So you're straight up judging levels. Btw Kasparov too came in the podcast. So Khabib might as well be invited. Khabib when he speaks in his native tongue is a wise man.
@@truthseeking3818 "dont taint my sacred podcast with a legendary athlete, it would make me feel less special, we only listen to smart people" This is the logic of someone that segregates based on race or looks down on the working class. If you stay in a self-soothing thought bubble like this and try to convince yourself of your superiority then you'll get dumber while everyone grows around you.