What explanation for consciousness do think has the strongest support? Share your view in the comments. If you enjoyed this episode of Closer To Truth, please consider subscribing. You can find more episodes from Season 18 in the Season 18 playlist on our channel: bit.ly/3b7OJXq
You should have included Donald Hoffman, cognitive neuroscientist, and his theory of reality and conscious agents. You should have included Rupert Spira and his explanation of Vedic Philosophy. These materialist morons you interview are never going to get you an answer to consciousness.
The founders of the theory: Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, respectively Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) is a biological philosophy of mind that postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons, rather than the conventional view that it is a product of connections between neurons. The mechanism is held to be a quantum process called objective reduction that is orchestrated by cellular structures called microtubules. It is proposed that the theory may answer the hard problem of consciousness and provide a mechanism for free will. I find this a great challenge to consciousness question.
Physicists, as the name implies, are mired in physicalism -- the material. Idealism still seaks to explain the physical. Consciousness is all there is. The material is perception within consciousness. It is the fundamental force. Consciousness is primordial, superintendent, executive, and creative of all other forces. Until science and academia grasp this, little more will be accomplished in either of any real substance. As far as Theism, most religions say we are made in God's image. If God is consciousness, then I agree. I posit less of a deity than an ultimate consciousness. Worship not required. Understanding would be best. Human consciousness is partitioned from Primary Consciousness to create a feedback loop within an arena of choice and consequence in order to create value and truth. Truth and value lead to wisdom and compassion. Wisdom and compassion lead to the greatest appreciation of all, which we label as love, which is simply what we describe the highest state of frequency and vibration -- resonant indwelling of correspondent consciousness. I think of this as "Mentism," as in experienced mentation, or experiment. Everything we experience is consciousness, from within and without. Perception within consciousness is what we regard as life. As a metaphor, consciousness is the action state of the Zero Point Field. The Observer is the feedback mechanism.
To me Idealism, or the idea that all there is consciousness is the best explanation. Bernardo Kastrup is one of my favorite proponents of this philosophy.
@@GJ-dj4jx Bernardo Kastrup is the best our there right now on consciousness and reality. Consciousness is primordial, superintendent, executive, and creative of all other perceived forces. Consciousness is all there is as far as I'm concerned. Reality is perception within consciousness, and that's all.
This is the best episode yet - I like "Consciousness is a fundamental element of the Universe" and that our brains are connected to that element since we are in the Universe and the Universe is in us.
Consciousness and its nature was first described in the Upanishads and Vedas, the ancient texts of Hinduism, believed to be written around 3000 BC in ancient India, 1000s of years before David Chalmers ever thought about the hard problem...
Writing about doesn't make your explanation right. Hindu philosophy gets many things right, but the trend of Eastern philosophical religions toward unity consciousness and the idea of a supreme cosmic consciousness is an affront to the first creative souls, only some of whom seek to assimilate other soul's consciousness in BORG fashion. Reincarnation and karma are real, and apply to all souls, all individual consciousnesses. The pied piers that are telling you you can get to nirvana oneness, source oneness, Christ consciousness, etc. are willfully or foolishly spreading BORG lies to try to take your souls to the heaven/hell universes of dark authoritarian god souls.
Consciousness evidently exists on a spectrum or continuum, with different animal species capable of varying degrees or “levels” of conscious experience. I’m disappointed that you didn’t think evolutionary biologists were an obvious source of insight, as none are featured in your interviews.
That is a fundamental line of evidence to discovering how consciousness works since it clearly evolves, suggesting a strong biological component to it.
I disagree. Consciousness may be a product of evolution, but that does not mean evolutionary biologists can be helpful understanding it. Evolutionary biologists are helpful once a mechanism was discoveres and then shall be described in different species/ evolutionary "steps"
Quantum entanglement and quantum superposition applied to this phenomenon will eventually provide some better answers. We are just barely beginning to understand these kinds of effects in biological systems. To be sure, we will mostly only uncover greater sophistication of interrelated complexities that will be revealed by any discoveries. They will likely seem unending.
True. We won't begin to understand consciousness until our consciousness is able to perceive the luminous fibers of consciousness that unite all things in the universe. Quantum physics is showing us the way, but at present, such perception is rare and therefore regarded as too unique to qualify for serious inquiry. The greatest weakness of science is the limits it imposes on itself. You can find only what you're looking for.
Hardcore materialists such as Sean Carroll represent the perfect example of how a person can be completely oblivious of the fact that all humans (including myself) are basically sleepwalking through life. Furthermore, such a sleepwalking (somnambulistic) type of obliviousness requires that our level of consciousness be attenuated in just the right amount in order to make our strange situation* feel natural and believable to us (similar to our acceptance of the conditions taking place within the context of a vivid dream). *(As one simple example of what I mean by our “strange situation,” I am talking about the fact that here we are, magnetically adhered to the surface of a spinning orb that only takes a mere 24 hours to make one revolution, while flying laterally through space at approximately 67,000 mph, yet we are basically unaware of any movement taking place.) Consequently, this built-in attenuation of our awareness can cause extremely intelligent humans (like Carroll) to try and offer some kind of materialistic explanation for it all. However, all they are doing is demonstrating the depth and degree of their somnambulism and the extent to which the structural perfection of this vast (dream-like) illusion of objective reality has them completely under its thrall. _______
@@Gandalf98 Hi Gandalf, thanks for the kind acknowledgement and thanks for the link. I wasn’t familiar with the works of Ed Witten or Don Page, but Leonard Susskind is one of my favorites. Setting aside the unresolved measurement problem in quantum mechanics and the question of whether or not the 3-D reality of the universe will even take form without the presence of consciousness possibly playing a role in the collapse of the wavefunction,... ...the task I like to pose to anyone who puts the primacy of matter above the primacy of consciousness is to name just one material phenomenon in all of reality that would have any reason whatsoever for existing if life and consciousness did not exist. So far, pretty much everyone evades the challenge. _______
I don't know if it was proven wrong or these scientists never heard of the fact that Roger Sperry a neuroscientist who won a Nobel prize for his split-brain research where he split the brains of some patients to prevent seizures, the two halves of the brain had hardly any connections but the differences were so subtle, the interesting thing is that the patients didn't lose their consciousness or did splitting their brains effect their sense of self, so if consciousness is produced by the brain and it's a matter of complexity, how come splitting it give the same result?
I like how Sean Caroll talk about ''physical matter'' the same way a cristian talks about the Bible: ''It's all physical matter'' - ''It's all in the Bible''.
*Christian. That is a mega daft statement. E=MC2 is a simple formula describing matter. It is simple fact. There is no valid comparison here, just obstinance.
@@AdamTait-hy2qh He still talks about things he does not understand as of it's true. I don't see any E-MC2 in my experience the same way I don't see god. Although God is easier to understand hahah.
@@1tecladocasio More obstinance. I cannot believe that there are random people on the internet who actually believe they know more about a complex subject than people who study it their whole lives like Sean Caroll. Enjoy your idiocy
@@AdamTait-hy2qh reason with me. Or you can't? You are just a parrot of great scientists, believe blindly everything they say. Pray too! And don't forget to buy the Multiverse T-shirt Series hehe. ;)
@@1tecladocasio You are just another bad-faith interlocutor. Nothing new to me. You believe ancient desert myths, while ignorantly claiming it is me who blindly believes. That is called a lack of self-awareness, and a form of hypocrisy.
Thank you for posting this series I love it the low amount of views actually amazes me it addresses some of the most important questions humanity has just goes to show how dumbed down humanity has gotten
If you want to know further and if you are hungry for truth you should watch my recent videos here on my youtube channel where I talk about the most important things that people should know about. But before doing that, check this very important animation: th-cam.com/video/ELjgTs7BFC4/w-d-xo.html
A deeply y satisfying session with more Question s than Answers.. To seek Truth regarding Consciousness, I will not circle around the known Quantitative tools that define modern science but will take a journey back to our, Indian roots and the tremendous knowledge of " Vedas" and " Philosophies " of Swami Vivekananda, His guru Ramakrishna and the great saint Adi Sankara..
Fascinating stuff. I’m not intelligent nor educated enough to keep up with these guys but I am able to follow them in a very basic way. I’m also glad there was no “God talk” in these discussions and they kept it secular
How about an explanation that is neither radical nor within the sphere of our comprehension? Does anyone think it may be possible that there are things that exist and are real that we are incapable of understanding because we, ourselves, are too intrinsically limited?
Consciousness is universal, only your ego(self identity) is what seperates us... There's no feeling that you can have that I cannot have, all experiences(of consciousness) are the same ie produce the same emotional reactions which is in itself a part of consciousness. What are we doing on a day to day basis? Collecting light and sound :)
Awareness and thinking are not the same things. You can be aware of what you are thinking or not. Thinking can be explained in terms of physics. The awareness of the thinking cannot.
I love the way Lawrence just nods his head in agreement with a little smile as all of this information is thrown at him, like it’s all just simple fundamental knowledge. I’m glad he understands it so easily. I have to listen to it a couple of times and really ponder in order to grasp it. 😊
If you've only watched a few of his videos you may not pick up on it but he is extremely well versed in every subject on his show. He's very modest and for the most part gives his guests free run of the direction of conversation though so it's not always obvious. He also occasionally asks some of the more 'basic' questions for the benefit of his viewers.
I remember reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.. back in the eighties..alot in that book affected me.. but what deeply affected me was the claim that even if we one day discovered the structure of the universe it would only amount to discovering the structure of one grain of sand on a beach. Depressing.. but probably true.. also discussed in that book was the impossibility of discovering the nature of consciousness by using the human brain..as the human brain was a small part of it.. so probably an inadequate platform
For me, being myself non physicalist in terms of consciousness, this video post was not less than watching a Hollywood movie.. initially got tense by physicalist speakers,then slowly got little relieved by last two speakers and finally got thrilled by final conclusion by DR. ROBERT L. KUHN.....I watched this post 10 times...Seven times understanding , digesting & enjoying the contents and three times for enjoying the scenery /Landscape at the location with out listening the contents... of course all the speakers including Dr. Robert L Khun look like heroes/ stars of the Hollywood film.... thanks 🙏.
Disappointed that Sir Roger Penrose wasn't featured. I watched a video where he talked about consciousness and computation and he was talking about micro-tubules. It was very interesting.
blurock29 It would seem that The One Consciousness is the only absolute and essential will for life. Is it meaningful to presume sharing this? Perhaps in the sense "to have in common", but it makes better sense to accept that It has everything and everyone imo.
I often described consciousness as the phenomenon where there is an awareness of self (agent) and all other things. In Physics, we know how electricity works but not totally in its quantum mechanical level. We may label an electron as physical, and we may have a working description of what physical means, but maybe our working description about it, is something that is wrong.
There is a qualia space of inner phenomenology. [06:32] «You must be that thing, I cannot be you and you cannot be me. Being is not describing. *You cannot be what you describe but you can describe what you are.* « - Giulio Tononi, Professor in Psychiatry and Expert on Sleep
I hope everyone is enjoying this series. I find, to get he most out f the comments made by various scientists and thinkers, is to pause the video after they make a specific comment, and drink in their idea, and think deeply about it before moving forward with the video. Learn to stop, at a point in discussion to really think about what the speaker is saying. before moving on. I often watch these programs and then go back and watch them again slowly to make sure I'm understanding exactly what they are saying. It's easy to misinterpret their meaning on the first viewing. This is deep stuff, and needs to be thought through in detail. Closer to Truth is not about giving us he answers as much as making us search for the answers.
19:30 - The question for me always becomes - how is identity theory saying anything much different than Chalmers' type of dualism? To call it electrical signals is already A = B whereas a dualist or functionalist would be saying A = B and thus B = A. This seems like a topic where the biggest roadblock is politics and tribal affiliation.
6:31 *Qualia shape* “It is an exact identity-to be that shape is to have that experience, that can only be had from the inside. You must be that thing, I cannot be you and you cannot be me. Being is not describing-you cannot be what you describe but you can describe what you are.” No Subject, _Risking the Impossible:_ _”Subject_ is eternal dimension of resistance-excess toward subjectivation/interpellation […] _Subject_ is basic, constitutive void which drives subjectivization, but which cannot ultimately be filled out by it.”
if there are different levels of consciousness with us occupying the highest one, what would happen if an ape observed the double slit experiment, a dog, a fish, an insect? Would the probability wave collapse for each of them or none of them?
"Does Consciousness Require a Radical Explanation?" I do not believe that it does. For me, consciousness is super simple. I support Giulio Tononi's view.
The universe has no existence at all without the existence of some kind of consciousness. This indicates to me that consciousness is fundamental to the very existence of the universe and that consciousness was perhaps a precondition for the universe to come into existence. Certainly quantum mechanics experiments have hinted at a relationship between the observer and an event. So I guess I favour the third position.
David W look up sarvapriyananda on TH-cam of NYC Vedanta society. The teachings of the Upanishad say the same. Pure Consciousness is of the nature of sat chit Amanda or existence consciousness bliss. We are that reality. Also check out I Am That of nisargadatta.
Identity theory as "electric activity in the brain is consciousness" kind of sounds like "naïve realism." It's a bit like saying that since a combustion engine is powered by combustion, then combustion is all that there's needed to explain the movement of a car with a combustion engine, ignoring thee intricacy of all the mechanisms and thinking of how an explosion can push things away. And even that is kind of a better explanation, as at least, in the end, you have things clearly of the same nature, kinetics. Whereas "qualia" isn't "electromagnetism".
If you want to take the metaphor of analyzing an engine, in relation to movement, back to consciousness, you will have to expand the examination of consciousness to culture, education, traditions and institutons, that teach us to call ourselves "conscious". Who came up with the idea of distinguishing between "qualia" and "electromagnetism" and for what purpose? Is the lowest brick maybe not "I think therefor I am", but "I am liable to prosecution, therefor I am"
@@Gandalf98 You postulate the difference, but you can neither prove it nor even describe it in a coherent way. You postulate that this difference, that you believe to be so obvious, is somehow important, but you can not even tell why it is important. How can anyone "notice" the difference between electromagnetism and consciousness, if he can't even say how to distinguish between them?
@@stefanb6539 electromagnetism is distinct from qualia for the same reason kinetics, trigonometry, life, or soccer are. Almost completely different "realms" of phenomena, we don't naturally accidentally derive one thing from the other. One could just argue that "qualia" is combustion or gravity. Qualia being combustion incidentally could explain spontaneous combustion, when people achieve a higher level of consciousness. Hehe.
@@petitio_principii Ok, the "same" reason? What reason is that? Can you spell it out? Is the differnce between these "realms" in some way observable or measurable? Me thinks, not so, as all observations and instruments of meassurement logically derive *after* that distinction was already made. So, what are those distinct "realms", other than a convenience of description? And when it comes down to that, the question, who first introduced these distinctions, and for what reason, becomes very viable. No stone age or bronze age, or even antque or medieval, artefact points toward anyone using the concept of "consciousnes", so it's clearly a historically contingent concept. To be more precise, basically no philosopher before Descartes ever considered it to be of any special interest. So, what is it with all that "naive" insights into consciousness? Did Descartes "discover" something, that all human beings have had an immediate and direct way to observe since the dawn of ages, but yet no one else ever bothered to mention it, or is that "naivete" only a badly digested conundrum of all those philosophical musings, that influenced our culture AFTER Descartes *invented* the concept? Why do so many people hope for a "technical" solution to fix the problems, without ever bothering to go back to the guy, that produced it first and foremost? And as philosophy is about a critical view, not about blind veneration, let's dissect, WHAT problems Descartes actually wished to solve, and how much of his solutions were necessary/inevitable and how much of them were contingent on his own historical point of view.
I sort of assume that consciousness requires some energy, though I can't really prove it. If so, what's the advantage to being conscious? You can say that pain is just a bunch of nerve signals. But we can program robots to respond to stimuli and be fairly certain that no proto-consciousness arises. From an evolutionary viewpoint, it wold seem an inefficiency to carry around the extra baggage of conscious experience.
The problem with the hard problem of consciousness is that at some point there's also a hard problem of anything that would be fundamental. There would be some subatomic particle or principle that would do this and that, and interact with others in some way and not others, but you could still ask why; if there's not an infinite recursion of causality, at some point things just are the way they are, it's their fundamental nature. So it may well be that from cognitive systems with enough complexity it will just emerge this seemingly magical, seemingly non-physical property out of nowhere, and that's just what happens.
The best way to understand consciousness is to realize the mechanism of consciousness. When you realize the mechanism of consciousness, you really understand consciousness.
Are we reaching the limitations of the scientific method when addressing these questions? How would one design experiments to test a hypothesis on this level? Or, will this question remain within the realm of philosophy?
If you want to define consciousness in such a way that it is testable, you will end up testing "awakeness" or something similar. Yes, we can define awakeness. No, we cannot define anything like the "sensation of being conscious" any more than we can define the sensation of seeing the color red.
@@RalphDratman Yes, I know that anesthesiologists use a device to measure 'awakeness'. But it seems like a long way off before we can assert with confidence what our phenomenal experience really is. Some do, but I'm immediately skeptical of those claims.
@@jackbyrd381 But that is exactly my point. We can find ways to measure awakeness in many (though not all) circumstances, but "phenomenal experience" I believe to be undefinable and thus not in any danger of being "explained." Ever.
@@RalphDratman yes, phenomenal experience cannot be explained because it is fundamental :) It is without cause. It arises for no reason. It is all there is. At some point physics will have to admit that there is no physical world, just qualia.
@@leonwillett4645 I admit no such thing. There is demonstrably a physical world. "Just quail" would get us nowhere as there would be no input to the system, unless you believe other people's qualia is somehow input to yours. But that cannot be so.
Sean Carroll explains. When measured, the object and the observer are in a quantum entangled state. For the observer, the wave function of the object collapses.
If you bang on a drum, it makes a sound according to how it is tuned and how hard it is hit. If you bang an atom, the same principle is relivant. So who tuned the atom? There you go. Consciousness is independant to matter, but obviously interfaces with matter in a multispectrum energetic form. Anyone that believes consciousness is 1s and 0s and electrochemical only, they are all pedos in different forms. Most pedos are not involved in sex acts, they commit violence through spreading their ignorance to children.
The keyword is “Structure”. I call it Mental Structure (MS). MS will take you one step closer to the truth. And, MS will make your daily life has more solid structural sense, such as, mental abilities are (products) generated by the MS as well as they can be analyzed with MS. Consciousness is a product of MS and PS (physical structure) interactive causation. Mind is reducible, so consciousness is reducible. Experience is unique, but experience is reducible and can be reassembled.
18:05 It seems like consciousness could be explained by the correspondence of a human brain’s neurological network to analogous networks in reality. The idea of “information” as a network, at least in part, is a powerful idea.
The crucial point is neither experience, nor memory. Because animals also have these features. What makes consciousness distinctive is its reflexive property. That is what some philisophers call "prereflexive cogito". Human consciousness thinks about itself. İt says, "Now İ think about myself". Or like this: "Now İ think about what İ think." İn my opinion this is possible by the agency of language. Thinking about thinking is impossible without language. (Bu language İ mean an abstract language with developed grammatical structures.)
This is a great discussion. It seems Kuhn does not like the physicalists' view. Nor do I. I want to be open to the idea, but I don't know how a physical system can generate something (consciousness) that the physical system itself would then become an object of the consciousness it purports to generate. That seems to be so fantastical to me. Help me out, someone! I love these discussions!
Focus on the concept of analogy. The frequencies of the neural signals generated by the sense organs are the analogues or representations of impinging energies. Now imagine every one of the hundred billion neurons in the brain has a base discharge frequency that is derived from sense organ analogies. Think a hundred billion analogies all synaptically jostling each other in the process we call thinking. One of those analogies is what we call the self. When other analogies modulate the self, those modulations are of what the self is conscious. In a nutshell that may require a good deal of contemplation but encouragingly promises an epiphany.
Paul Donohue Thats like asking why do we live on Earth, instead of Mercury Mars or Jupiter (or trillions of other planets). And don’t tell me that those planets are inhospitable for human life, because for most of Earth’s existence, it’s been inhospitable for human life.
Bulu Okay, fair enough, but my point is, why shouldn’t your consciousness be distinct from someone else? Your fingerprints are, your DNA is, your distinctive morphology characteristics are. The Homo sapiens is a Highly Sophisticated Ultra Advanced Super Dynamic Organism. Millions of years from Australopithecine, instead of “Why is?” How about “Why not?” ?
@@readynowforever3676 good point! Honestly, I don't know what to answer. And maybe that's because this all we can say about our first persona experience: Why me? Why not me? And the thing is that this questions have not even a single clue to how get answered. Even if there is a materialistic answer, the question maintains in a different way: Why "matter"?
Bulu It reminds me, that we have so many pharmaceutical drugs, particularly psyche meds, that really work, yet we don’t know exactly how or “why” they work on the “conscious” brain/mind, despite the fact that we engineered the recipe. It is coalescing of mankind’s “materialism” with nature’s “materialism”. We’ve created all the polytheistic gods to all the monotheistic gods, and we’ve made them work in various practical/civil purpose ways, just like we’ve made the iPhone work. But I ask, about what we ask about; why is consciousness to the brain any different than strength to the muscle or vision to the eye....? As was suggested in the video, vision or what we see, is not apart of consciousness, it’s just a necessary feature. Why do I presume that? Because there people born blind, are they any less conscious? Our ability to smell, is that merely “materialism”? By the way, I’m no less mystified by our universe than any fellow human being who wanders and wonders. I am at peace however, that we may never satisfy thee most essential “why(s)”. So I thought maybe we have to change or at least bring a duality to our “consciousness” inquisitions. We may even inadvertently stumble upon some other treasures.
I sort of disagree. The Many-Worlds Interpretation comes naturally if one takes QM and time evolution by the Schrödinger equation as the base instead of a mere derived or describing device. In that setting, the collapse of the wave function appears to be completely unnatural, almost ridiculous. Quite the contrary the dynamics is governed exclusively by the Schrödinger equation, i.e. by a unitary operator (in particular norm-preserving and *invertible* ). Further, the *other worlds* do not differ in any sense from our actual world, e.g. they are physically exactly the same as our world and obey exactly the same laws. It's just that something different is *happening* there (the cat is dead there while alive in our world). In contrast, assuming consciousness to be fundamental and thus something exceeding the physical world requires adding something completely *different* for which nobody can even safely define what properties it should have, what laws it should obey etc. In addition, everything we consciously experience is related to and dependent on information we have received through our primate senses, i.e. information about our direct, purely material surroundings on this planet. There is nothing we can be conscious of that is not related to the material world around us. For example, we cannot be conscious of any color that is not in the quite arbitrary and narrow range of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation that we can perceive via our eyes. To me, this strongly points toward consciousness being a construction or emerging property of our material brain.
He is a materialist. He also believes in Einstein's theory of relativity which proves he has not done his homework since many physicists have debunked some of that theory already.
@@entropica utilizing your logic but going backwards, without consciousness there would be no such thing as color at all. In fact, a universe without consciousness wouldn't exist as we perceive it because how we perceive it is based upon our consciousness experience of it. A concious-less universe would not have any discrimination of objects and would be whatever it is fundamentally (math, particles, the quantum foam, whatever) and nothing more
@@alexgaggio2957 Sure, the objects with their colors etc. are constructed by out mind, because this reduces the amount of information to be stored in in our brain immensely. It requires much less space to describe a table by its edges and rectangular shapes and colors than to store information about every atom the table consists of, and, for our purposes (don't hit a tree when running through the jungle, find something to eat and somebody to mate with), this is completely sufficient. It's also much faster to update when new information is received via the senses. It is a bit like describing a gas by the purely statistical properties pressure and temperature instead of the location and velocity of each molecule. Of course the simplification and division into objects must be sufficiently detailed and compatible with the world, because this model is everything we know about the world, and all our planning and actions depend on it. People for which model and world are not sufficiently in sync usually end up in asylums. Taking LSD also changes the model considerably and puts it out of sync. - By the way, I would guess that the experience of redness is more or less no more than a certain neuron that is responsible for detecting red objects to fire.
Insult, great argument. Perhaps your over valuation of consciousness is due to childhood wish fantasies to be special, live forever and have a soul have blinded you.
@@tookie36 no, we have other people and various tools to verify those experiences. This “we could be heads in ajar” dodge gets us nowhere. No need to remind us, we all get the subjective experience point, we are gather data those override that factor. That’s what all of science is.
@@ihatespam2 all data is collected, appears, and is decifered within consciousness. One can ignore that but there is good reason why consciousness has been held in such high regard by many cultures for 1000s of years
It shows how simplistic ppl are that so many adore Sean Carroll when he is such a reductionist materialist. I mean he is literally saying that what part of the brain you affect defines the sensation of seeing red or and sensation of pain yet we know that that simply tells us what the consciousness does, not what consciousness is.
You say “reductionist materialist” like it’s a dirty word. And then your defense shows you don’t even understand what he said. Maybe get more facts and try to wrangle in your bias first. And where did you experience adoration of Sean? I would love to see that claim supported by evidence. Maybe your emotional reactions reveal a deep worry that you are not special and living in a world without purpose and an eternal soul, so you must banish anything which suggests otherwise rather than look at the dat with a neutral eye.
@@ihatespam2 It's amazing how on social media, no matter how none argumentive and simply observing someone make a comment, there's always a jackass getting all defensive over nothing. I simply stated that the concept of the material world being literally all there is doesn't make much sense to me. It's not about being a special and what's wrong with seeing humans as special? I don't suffer from ego but clearly you suffer from self loathing.
@@ihatespam2 Try not to explain my belief based on psychology and yours based on logic. You have reasons to believe things the way you do just like I have my own reasoning, if you like to disagree, by all mean but wtf are you getting all worked up about?
@@ihatespam2 The weird thing is that many ppl who are like you are the type of ppl that believe robots have souls but we don't. lol. This is exactly what's wrong with ppl these days. The level of self loathing towards humanity many ppl have reached.
@@ihatespam2 If you wanna believe you're nothing more than a worthless spec of material in an insignificant earth/universe, by all mean do, I won't stop you but some of us have longing for something beyond that and some of those some aren't afraid to admit that.
What Sean carrol didn’t grasp is that, talking about redness and experiencing redness aren’t the same thing. Separate. Maybe related, but, if the consciousness aspect is separate from reportability, it requires an explanation beyond a behaviourist one, which is what Sean Carrol was implying.
Max Erik Tegmark comes right up to the edge when he asked “what is IT?” As I evolved the yanassi theorem, I began to understand what the reasons for subjective learning “quirk blob” are about. Simply put, it’s first purpose is living, self survival success and procreation, survival of new life forms. It’s unknown purpose, is to return “unblobed” as a form of energy that has separated from it’s biological vehicle. I believe we go to a collective life entity, we bring the emotional energy we’ve accumulated over the years and we bring ourselves as individuals complete with all of the memories that make us who we are. We continue, connecting with others with whom there are emotional connections, in a timeless place without distance. I could continue, but i would be entering my theorem and how it works.
I’m happy that people are conscious of consciousness. Marvellous. This is for those who question the question. I’m a simple carpenter without the academic qualifications to own an IQ. Consider this. Consciousness is contained within the brain unless you are very different and thus may be explained using ‘music’. Without using impressive word magic it’s like this. Watch the drummer. The material aspect is simply understood. Look away you enter the world of the created. .you add.. personal interpretation..personal emotions. More is merely a religion that becomes or it doesn’t. More is life or it isn’t.
Perhaps, to better understand consciousness, we should start by asking the question: " What is our need to understand consciousness?". For we are consciousness, trying to understand our selves. What is this process: this drive for self-understanding? I believe we have direct access to this information and it might be a good first step in understanding the nature of consciousness.
Well , if we are Here for this lifetime , This is such a brief window to Learn what consciousness is . This could be a Dream that the Wet brain Has . You may have never lived a lifetime at all . The Wet brain has to Dream . Therefore all is Dreaming brain .
21:12 Maybe if we use the approach of identifying an observation as a transfer of information, then there might arise an emergent phenomenon of self at varying levels of (intensity of; or maybe the bitrate of?) information exchange. And, someday, maybe we will be able to identify some of these levels of self-recognition. What good it will do for us i have no idea...lol I'm sure we'll glean some useful psychological information along the way.
We have all heard windblown leaves rustle in the distance. Would anyone say that it is possible to hear a single leaf in a 2 mph breeze at 1,000 yards? No, probably not. And yet, a few hundred million leaves in a 15 mph wind can be heard from even further than 1,000 yards. In part, that's how consciousness may work.
David Wallace @17:11 spoke my mind. It’s just physical. Why do so many people think it’s mysterious? Why can the human ego not accept it’s just a brain in a bony head?
@@nicholaspullen6608 Random as opposed to "non-random" accident? Guided versus unguided "event"? I agree with you that there are no accidents in the cosmos.
Thank you for these wonderful, thought-provoking videos. This one is focused on one of man’s deepest mysteries. Consider this . . . Without the subjective, human “qualia” of consciousness, there would be no existence (or perceived existence) to anything here - the scientists, their theories or tools, this TH-cam channel, any of us posters here, humanity, history, the Big Bang theory, the Earth, the Milky Way galaxy, the Local Group or anything else in the vast expanse of the cosmic landscape. Everything is (or appears to us to be) contingent or predicated upon this thing called consciousness. Query: Is not consciousness then a universal predicate for existence as we humans in this particular local universe know and perceive it? A topic to ponder.
You are standing on a promontory observing the view. A boy sneaks up behind you. You are not conscious that he is there. You turn to look in another direction. You see the boy and become conscious of him. You were not conscious of him and then you were. Not exactly profound, is it?
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL Sir. For you, me, the boy, life and consciousness and even existence to “exist” (or even appear to) is both deeply profound and beyond miraculous. From absolute Nothing, only comes nothing. For absolute Nothing to produce Everything is supremely staggering.
@@garybala000 You go to bed and fall asleep where, between the dreams, you cease to be. What is more likely during your awakening, that body is simply changing mode of operation or that the universe is literally popping into existence? The first is entirely explicable, the second extremely outrageously not. "From absolute Nothing, only comes nothing." Is as fine an example of a self evidently true statement as we can imagine. Thus, because there is undoubt-ably something (via Descartes' cogito) we are forced to conclude, Something Has Always Existed and perhaps even that time is nothing more than delusion. (Try taking 'time' to be an immensely useful concept long ago synthesized by the ancients out of ideas of matter and motion critical to coordinated behavior and the survival of nascent civilizations. (If this idea of 'time as a concept' is new to you then dwell for a while on the fact that at the heart of every clock can be found only some matter contrived to vibrate and never some delicate antenna bending to and fro in a river of time. That river is a metaphorical construct forever frustrating all who attempt to sail it or scoop it up with the tongs of science).
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players.” As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, Shakespeare “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily merrily, Life is but a Dream.” Children’s Nursery Song
@@garybala000 I have the impression that you might not have received the meaning I was striving to convey. I put the paragraph on time in parenthesis to indicate I understood the thoughts within to be somewhat tangential to the conscious topic. The last time I sang “Row, row, row your boat", kindergarten 65 orbits ago and as you can imagine, the recollection is pretty slim, remains only the fact of singing and that I know the lyrics. Not so fuzzy is the memory from the same era of my special plastic record and the wooden stick to play it. The name of the tune was "The Muffin Man"... "Oh, do you know the muffin man..." You put the pointy end of the stick in the groove of the record and traced its spiral curve so that the disk and the stick vibrated enough to hear the music. If one moved the stick more quickly the song came out like chipmunks th-cam.com/video/-h5R9cb-r8E/w-d-xo.html , more slowly made the sound of monsters. The timing of the song was not embossed on the record but depended on the speed of the moving stick, matter and motion. Here's a world famous physicist who spends an hour explaining what I've excessively compressed. th-cam.com/video/-6rWqJhDv7M/w-d-xo.html Time was addressed because the concept of 'time' underlies the concept of 'process' which, in conjunction with the concept of 'self', lies at the core of the 'conscious' concept. In its most succinct form... I am a conscious process.
Consciousness is obviously an evolutionarily successful adaptation regardless of whether or not you’re capable of coming up with a reasonable explanation why
Agreed and an excellent attempt at explanation is presented in, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", the actual theory mentioned in the fictional story of season 1 of the 'Westworld' TV series.
Is it possible that some people have more consciousness than others? I find it difficult to understand how some people don't see the problem. The huge distinction. Maybe like some people lack visual imagery (no minds eye) , some people have dimmer consciousnesses? They feel less? This is all so strange.
Here is what I think. I think this quest for consciousnous is perhaps the final attempt of humanity to believe it is somehow special or enlightened. However, just as we had to accept we are not in the center of the universe, we will learn that our level of consciousness and self-awareness is just at a random point in the development of neural complexity. Even animals have some form of self-awareness. It is simply a matter of neural complexity to become more self-referential, self-aware, and capable of asking big questions.
Washington DC is not the center of the USA. Does that make it any less of a capital? Why do we need to live in the center of the universe? Maybe the place we have in the universe is perfect from an entirely different perspective just like Washington DC is the perfect place for a capital city based on the factors our nation's forefathers thought were important back in 1790.
@@bobblacka918 You misread me, perhaps. I meant to say that for centuries we *thought* to be in the center, and with the progress of enlightenment that notion crumbled. Today, so it seems to me, human consciousnous is the last bit still on this pedestal and I predict it's going to fall down as well.
@@bobblacka918 Because it's extremely unlikely that some creatures, built of exactly the same protons, neutrons and electrons like a table or a piece of butter, on this tiny planet orbiting a run-of-the-mill star (one of 100 billions) on the margin of a run-of-the-mill galaxy (one of 200 billions at least in this vast universe) who agree genetically to 99% with chimps so stupid they can't even make a fire are really that special. That is, I fully agree with IncompleteTheory.
@@entropica : It depends how you define "special." It's a fact that we exist. Little green men on other planets don't. That makes us pretty special. People can speculate all day long about how many billion planets there are out there that are capable of supporting life, but until they find evidence, it's just that, speculation. Some day, we might have to deal with the reality that we are alone in this vast universe. That would make us pretty special. And by the way, we also share over 98% of our DNA with watermelons. I can see it now, a billion years ago, the first watermelons evolved legs and then walked on land. Then they evolved brains and started to think. Pretty soon, they were organizing into colonies, and... well you know the rest.
Bob Blacka What I and I think IncompleteTheory also wanted to convey is that being extremely rare (because depending on so many parameters that have to fit in) - rare not just in space but also rare in time - should not be confused with being central. Something like us seems to pop up from time to time somewhere in the universe. The existence of living beings on earth is merely proving that the physical laws and physical constants as set in this universe allow for objects that far from equilibrium to emerge. If it’s possible here and now something similar will almost surely happen at some other point at some other time again. Living beings are sort of an accident this particular universe allows for, strange enough.
Why? It actually sounds unbelievably absurd to think that something existed before it and developed a “reason” to want it and then went through all this to satisfy its reason? That’s crazy. It all makes sense when there is no reason, because you have to create a reasoner etc. Occam razor bro
We are never conscious of the present moment, During the processing of a thought, the body system has already evolved a few nanoseconds. The moment we become conscious of is already in the past. Thus there can be no free will. Yet the overwhelming "feeling" is that there is a free will. Does that imply the "past" affect the future after the future has occurred? Seemed quantum fishy to me :P
So much of the debate around this seems to presume, "Consciousness really shouldn't be here. How did it come about?" We don't really do that for anything else, do we? Atoms shouldn't be here, spin shouldn't be here, charge shouldn't be here, magnetism shouldn't be here, etc. We don't know why any of it is here. Why single out consciousness as a great mystery? Everything is.
It seems fundamental, like charge, spin, etc. Tononi in giving examples of being conscious, went exclusively with vision, 'things I experience seeing." This seems a meh indication of being on the wrong track. After all, it's not "I see therefore I am" ... it's "I experience therefore I am." Going for the gimme "what I see" isn't penetrating the issue.
The problem is a consciousness is trying to define consciousness!!! Problem with that is consciousness main attribute is creation and as you search you will keep finding new things because you are telling your consciousness to find new things... so it does... you can only realize real consciousness by Observing Without your Thoughts otherwise you will keep thinking and find more and more complicated answers for it as that's what you want... also you will feel getting closer to the answer but you will never know it 🙂
I agree. I don't think consciousness can be "explained" in a set of word symbols. That is to say it cannot be explained at all. We can learn more and more about the world in terms that can be symbolically expressed, perhaps endlessly. But we will not ever corner an explanation of reality. The physicist David Bohm used logic to demonstrate that logic can never explain reality in a fundamental way. It's too much for me to go into his argument at the moment. At a certain point one becomes tired of chasing the squirrel of logic around the tree. I'm an old man, and perhaps it's too late for me to begin the meditation that aims toward wordlessness. But if I could magically go back I think that is what I would do. Kuhn's videos are bootless attempts to capture Truth and stuff it in a bag. That seems very childish to me.
@@donnievance1942 To know the truth you don't need a youthful body but a mature mind which can be silent. Meditation to know the truth is all about that 'SILENCE'. You do not need yoga or some meditation postures. All your thoughts/vibrations must come to a point like still water surface!!!
Does Consciousness Require a Radical Explanation? NO! I think consciousness will ultimately have a energetically understood relationship that can be commonly sensed and understood. Good selection of current thought leaders on the subject!
Robert Sir you being yourself a student of neuroscience what are your views on consciousness...... According to you do consciousness imply materialism or is something out of the physical realm?
What explanation for consciousness do think has the strongest support? Share your view in the comments.
If you enjoyed this episode of Closer To Truth, please consider subscribing. You can find more episodes from Season 18 in the Season 18 playlist on our channel: bit.ly/3b7OJXq
You should have included Donald Hoffman, cognitive neuroscientist, and his theory of reality and conscious agents.
You should have included Rupert Spira and his explanation of Vedic Philosophy.
These materialist morons you interview are never going to get you an answer to consciousness.
The founders of the theory: Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, respectively
Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) is a biological philosophy of mind that postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons, rather than the conventional view that it is a product of connections between neurons. The mechanism is held to be a quantum process called objective reduction that is orchestrated by cellular structures called microtubules. It is proposed that the theory may answer the hard problem of consciousness and provide a mechanism for free will. I find this a great challenge to consciousness question.
Physicists, as the name implies, are mired in physicalism -- the material. Idealism still seaks to explain the physical.
Consciousness is all there is. The material is perception within consciousness. It is the fundamental force.
Consciousness is primordial, superintendent, executive, and creative of all other forces. Until science and academia grasp this, little more will be accomplished in either of any real substance.
As far as Theism, most religions say we are made in God's image. If God is consciousness, then I agree. I posit less of a deity than an ultimate consciousness. Worship not required. Understanding would be best.
Human consciousness is partitioned from Primary Consciousness to create a feedback loop within an arena of choice and consequence in order to create value and truth. Truth and value lead to wisdom and compassion. Wisdom and compassion lead to the greatest appreciation of all, which we label as love, which is simply what we describe the highest state of frequency and vibration -- resonant indwelling of correspondent consciousness.
I think of this as "Mentism," as in experienced mentation, or experiment.
Everything we experience is consciousness, from within and without. Perception within consciousness is what we regard as life.
As a metaphor, consciousness is the action state of the Zero Point Field. The Observer is the feedback mechanism.
To me Idealism, or the idea that all there is consciousness is the best explanation. Bernardo Kastrup is one of my favorite proponents of this philosophy.
@@GJ-dj4jx Bernardo Kastrup is the best our there right now on consciousness and reality.
Consciousness is primordial, superintendent, executive, and creative of all other perceived forces.
Consciousness is all there is as far as I'm concerned.
Reality is perception within consciousness, and that's all.
I just love watching your videos. You’re like the Anthony Bourdain of physics and philosophy. Each episode is a journey.
I can't think of an episode I've enjoyed more. Thank you so much for your work!
big nose
This is the best episode yet - I like "Consciousness is a fundamental element of the Universe" and that our brains are connected to that element since we are in the Universe and the Universe is in us.
Consciousness and its nature was first described in the Upanishads and Vedas, the ancient texts of Hinduism, believed to be written around 3000 BC in ancient India, 1000s of years before David Chalmers ever thought about the hard problem...
Advaita Vedanta is quite clear on the nature of consciousness.
Writing about doesn't make your explanation right. Hindu philosophy gets many things right, but the trend of Eastern philosophical religions toward unity consciousness and the idea of a supreme cosmic consciousness is an affront to the first creative souls, only some of whom seek to assimilate other soul's consciousness in BORG fashion. Reincarnation and karma are real, and apply to all souls, all individual consciousnesses. The pied piers that are telling you you can get to nirvana oneness, source oneness, Christ consciousness, etc. are willfully or foolishly spreading BORG lies to try to take your souls to the heaven/hell universes of dark authoritarian god souls.
So that India is in back position
I lived vicariously through this episode... such a beautiful location to be in.. Banff and talking to Sean, Tegmark etc... I was so happy
So much hard work poured into these episodes. So much material to delve into! I really hope to see a documentary.
Robert Kuhn the host is just such an awesome down to earth and stable rational inquiring and wise kind of guy.. Really like him
Can’t.stand.him
I don't know how much I can thank you for sharing your curiosity. I am eternally thankful!
Max, Sean, David.... THIS is the video that got me HOOKED ON CTT. Well done, Dr Kuhn !
Dear God that was a beautiful location in Canada. My consciousness feels so, at least.
@fynes leigh so, I was trying to add a bit of levity to the debate....
jefferee2002 Consciousness has nothing to do with vision.
i think they have all lost consciousness of humour, and of the beautiful scenery.
I'd love to visit Bnaff one day
Consciousness evidently exists on a spectrum or continuum, with different animal species capable of varying degrees or “levels” of conscious experience. I’m disappointed that you didn’t think evolutionary biologists were an obvious source of insight, as none are featured in your interviews.
I agree
That is a fundamental line of evidence to discovering how consciousness works since it clearly evolves, suggesting a strong biological component to it.
I used to think the same, but that's just confusing cognition with awareness.
I disagree. Consciousness may be a product of evolution, but that does not mean evolutionary biologists can be helpful understanding it. Evolutionary biologists are helpful once a mechanism was discoveres and then shall be described in different species/ evolutionary "steps"
Millions should watch this.
This isn't keeping up with the Kardashians.
Quantum entanglement and quantum superposition applied to this phenomenon will eventually provide some better answers. We are just barely beginning to understand these kinds of effects in biological systems. To be sure, we will mostly only uncover greater sophistication of interrelated complexities that will be revealed by any discoveries. They will likely seem unending.
True. We won't begin to understand consciousness until our consciousness is able to perceive the luminous fibers of consciousness that unite all things in the universe. Quantum physics is showing us the way, but at present, such perception is rare and therefore regarded as too unique to qualify for serious inquiry. The greatest weakness of science is the limits it imposes on itself. You can find only what you're looking for.
This guy is a damn lunatick!
Hardcore materialists such as Sean Carroll represent the perfect example of how a person can be completely oblivious of the fact that all humans (including myself) are basically sleepwalking through life.
Furthermore, such a sleepwalking (somnambulistic) type of obliviousness requires that our level of consciousness be attenuated in just the right amount in order to make our strange situation* feel natural and believable to us (similar to our acceptance of the conditions taking place within the context of a vivid dream).
*(As one simple example of what I mean by our “strange situation,” I am talking about the fact that here we are, magnetically adhered to the surface of a spinning orb that only takes a mere 24 hours to make one revolution, while flying laterally through space at approximately 67,000 mph, yet we are basically unaware of any movement taking place.)
Consequently, this built-in attenuation of our awareness can cause extremely intelligent humans (like Carroll) to try and offer some kind of materialistic explanation for it all.
However, all they are doing is demonstrating the depth and degree of their somnambulism and the extent to which the structural perfection of this vast (dream-like) illusion of objective reality has them completely under its thrall.
_______
@@Gandalf98
Hi Gandalf, thanks for the kind acknowledgement and thanks for the link.
I wasn’t familiar with the works of Ed Witten or Don Page, but Leonard Susskind is one of my favorites.
Setting aside the unresolved measurement problem in quantum mechanics and the question of whether or not the 3-D reality of the universe will even take form without the presence of consciousness possibly playing a role in the collapse of the wavefunction,...
...the task I like to pose to anyone who puts the primacy of matter above the primacy of consciousness is to name just one material phenomenon in all of reality that would have any reason whatsoever for existing if life and consciousness did not exist.
So far, pretty much everyone evades the challenge.
_______
I don't know if it was proven wrong or these scientists never heard of the fact that Roger Sperry a neuroscientist who won a Nobel prize for his split-brain research where he split the brains of some patients to prevent seizures, the two halves of the brain had hardly any connections but the differences were so subtle, the interesting thing is that the patients didn't lose their consciousness or did splitting their brains effect their sense of self, so if consciousness is produced by the brain and it's a matter of complexity, how come splitting it give the same result?
موافقم!
با شما موافقم
Brain is only a capacitor or station and data or information is in the field, not in the brain.
Best on TH-cam
I like how Sean Caroll talk about ''physical matter'' the same way a cristian talks about the Bible: ''It's all physical matter'' - ''It's all in the Bible''.
*Christian. That is a mega daft statement. E=MC2 is a simple formula describing matter. It is simple fact. There is no valid comparison here, just obstinance.
@@AdamTait-hy2qh He still talks about things he does not understand as of it's true. I don't see any E-MC2 in my experience the same way I don't see god. Although God is easier to understand hahah.
@@1tecladocasio More obstinance. I cannot believe that there are random people on the internet who actually believe they know more about a complex subject than people who study it their whole lives like Sean Caroll. Enjoy your idiocy
@@AdamTait-hy2qh reason with me. Or you can't? You are just a parrot of great scientists, believe blindly everything they say. Pray too! And don't forget to buy the Multiverse T-shirt Series hehe. ;)
@@1tecladocasio You are just another bad-faith interlocutor. Nothing new to me. You believe ancient desert myths, while ignorantly claiming it is me who blindly believes. That is called a lack of self-awareness, and a form of hypocrisy.
Thank you for posting this series I love it the low amount of views actually amazes me it addresses some of the most important questions humanity has just goes to show how dumbed down humanity has gotten
If you want to know further and if you are hungry for truth you should watch my recent videos here on my youtube channel where I talk about the most important things that people should know about. But before doing that, check this very important animation: th-cam.com/video/ELjgTs7BFC4/w-d-xo.html
Thanks lot Robbert for such a radical scepticism on Consciousness..
A deeply y satisfying session with more Question s than Answers.. To seek Truth regarding Consciousness, I will not circle around the known Quantitative tools that define modern science but will take a journey back to our, Indian roots and the tremendous knowledge of " Vedas" and " Philosophies " of Swami Vivekananda, His guru Ramakrishna and the great saint Adi Sankara..
That guy has an amazing voice
Fascinating stuff. I’m not intelligent nor educated enough to keep up with these guys but I am able to follow them in a very basic way. I’m also glad there was no “God talk” in these discussions and they kept it secular
How about an explanation that is neither radical nor within the sphere of our comprehension? Does anyone think it may be possible that there are things that exist and are real that we are incapable of understanding because we, ourselves, are too intrinsically limited?
Consciousness is universal, only your ego(self identity) is what seperates us... There's no feeling that you can have that I cannot have, all experiences(of consciousness) are the same ie produce the same emotional reactions which is in itself a part of consciousness. What are we doing on a day to day basis? Collecting light and sound :)
Awareness and thinking are not the same things. You can be aware of what you are thinking or not. Thinking can be explained in terms of physics. The awareness of the thinking cannot.
意識は、知覚です。思考は、行動です。
I love the way Lawrence just nods his head in agreement with a little smile as all of this information is thrown at him, like it’s all just simple fundamental knowledge. I’m glad he understands it so easily. I have to listen to it a couple of times and really ponder in order to grasp it. 😊
If you've only watched a few of his videos you may not pick up on it but he is extremely well versed in every subject on his show. He's very modest and for the most part gives his guests free run of the direction of conversation though so it's not always obvious. He also occasionally asks some of the more 'basic' questions for the benefit of his viewers.
I remember reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.. back in the eighties..alot in that book affected me.. but what deeply affected me was the claim that even if we one day discovered the structure of the universe it would only amount to discovering the structure of one grain of sand on a beach. Depressing.. but probably true.. also discussed in that book was the impossibility of discovering the nature of consciousness by using the human brain..as the human brain was a small part of it.. so probably an inadequate platform
For me, being myself non physicalist in terms of consciousness, this video post was not less than watching a Hollywood movie.. initially got tense by physicalist speakers,then slowly got little relieved by last two speakers and finally got thrilled by final conclusion by DR. ROBERT L. KUHN.....I watched this post 10 times...Seven times understanding , digesting & enjoying the contents and three times for enjoying the scenery /Landscape at the location with out listening the contents... of course all the speakers including Dr. Robert L Khun look like heroes/ stars of the Hollywood film.... thanks 🙏.
Disappointed that Sir Roger Penrose wasn't featured. I watched a video where he talked about consciousness and computation and he was talking about micro-tubules. It was very interesting.
He was talking about some kind of resonance, which the second guy discussed. Penrose pioneered this idea.
Technically, Stuart Hameroff pioneered the idea that consciousness is embedded in micro-tubules.
Everyone think they have consciousness. The truth is that One Consciousness has everyone...
blurock29 Sharing is caring?
blurock29 It would seem that The One Consciousness is the only absolute and essential will for life. Is it meaningful to presume sharing this? Perhaps in the sense "to have in common", but it makes better sense to accept that It has everything and everyone imo.
I often described consciousness as the phenomenon where there is an awareness of self (agent) and all other things. In Physics, we know how electricity works but not totally in its quantum mechanical level. We may label an electron as physical, and we may have a working description of what physical means, but maybe our working description about it, is something that is wrong.
There is a qualia space of inner phenomenology.
[06:32] «You must be that thing, I cannot be you and you cannot be me. Being is not describing.
*You cannot be what you describe but you can describe what you are.* « - Giulio Tononi, Professor in Psychiatry and Expert on Sleep
I hope everyone is enjoying this series. I find, to get he most out f the comments made by various scientists and thinkers, is to pause the video after they make a specific comment, and drink in their idea, and think deeply about it before moving forward with the video. Learn to stop, at a point in discussion to really think about what the speaker is saying. before moving on. I often watch these programs and then go back and watch them again slowly to make sure I'm understanding exactly what they are saying. It's easy to misinterpret their meaning on the first viewing. This is deep stuff, and needs to be thought through in detail. Closer to Truth is not about giving us he answers as much as making us search for the answers.
19:30 - The question for me always becomes - how is identity theory saying anything much different than Chalmers' type of dualism? To call it electrical signals is already A = B whereas a dualist or functionalist would be saying A = B and thus B = A. This seems like a topic where the biggest roadblock is politics and tribal affiliation.
6:31 *Qualia shape* “It is an exact identity-to be that shape is to have that experience, that can only be had from the inside. You must be that thing, I cannot be you and you cannot be me. Being is not describing-you cannot be what you describe but you can describe what you are.”
No Subject, _Risking the Impossible:_
_”Subject_ is eternal dimension of resistance-excess toward subjectivation/interpellation […] _Subject_ is basic, constitutive void which drives subjectivization, but which cannot ultimately be filled out by it.”
if there are different levels of consciousness with us occupying the highest one, what would happen if an ape observed the double slit experiment, a dog, a fish, an insect? Would the probability wave collapse for each of them or none of them?
We are an ape.
And in quantum physics, being observed doesn't mean someone is looking at it.
Only certain breeds of dog observers will collapse the wave.
"Does Consciousness Require a Radical Explanation?" I do not believe that it does. For me, consciousness is super simple. I support Giulio Tononi's view.
The universe has no existence at all without the existence of some kind of consciousness. This indicates to me that consciousness is fundamental to the very existence of the universe and that consciousness was perhaps a precondition for the universe to come into existence. Certainly quantum mechanics experiments have hinted at a relationship between the observer and an event. So I guess I favour the third position.
Interesting insight, thank you.
David W look up sarvapriyananda on TH-cam of NYC Vedanta society. The teachings of the Upanishad say the same. Pure Consciousness is of the nature of sat chit Amanda or existence consciousness bliss. We are that reality. Also check out I Am That of nisargadatta.
Lets see - we don't understand quantum mechanics, and we don't understand consciousness - they must be related!
Identity theory as "electric activity in the brain is consciousness" kind of sounds like "naïve realism." It's a bit like saying that since a combustion engine is powered by combustion, then combustion is all that there's needed to explain the movement of a car with a combustion engine, ignoring thee intricacy of all the mechanisms and thinking of how an explosion can push things away. And even that is kind of a better explanation, as at least, in the end, you have things clearly of the same nature, kinetics. Whereas "qualia" isn't "electromagnetism".
If you want to take the metaphor of analyzing an engine, in relation to movement, back to consciousness, you will have to expand the examination of consciousness to culture, education, traditions and institutons, that teach us to call ourselves "conscious". Who came up with the idea of distinguishing between "qualia" and "electromagnetism" and for what purpose? Is the lowest brick maybe not "I think therefor I am", but "I am liable to prosecution, therefor I am"
@@Gandalf98 You postulate the difference, but you can neither prove it nor even describe it in a coherent way. You postulate that this difference, that you believe to be so obvious, is somehow important, but you can not even tell why it is important.
How can anyone "notice" the difference between electromagnetism and consciousness, if he can't even say how to distinguish between them?
@@stefanb6539 electromagnetism is distinct from qualia for the same reason kinetics, trigonometry, life, or soccer are. Almost completely different "realms" of phenomena, we don't naturally accidentally derive one thing from the other. One could just argue that "qualia" is combustion or gravity.
Qualia being combustion incidentally could explain spontaneous combustion, when people achieve a higher level of consciousness. Hehe.
@@petitio_principii Ok, the "same" reason? What reason is that? Can you spell it out? Is the differnce between these "realms" in some way observable or measurable? Me thinks, not so, as all observations and instruments of meassurement logically derive *after* that distinction was already made.
So, what are those distinct "realms", other than a convenience of description? And when it comes down to that, the question, who first introduced these distinctions, and for what reason, becomes very viable.
No stone age or bronze age, or even antque or medieval, artefact points toward anyone using the concept of "consciousnes", so it's clearly a historically contingent concept. To be more precise, basically no philosopher before Descartes ever considered it to be of any special interest.
So, what is it with all that "naive" insights into consciousness? Did Descartes "discover" something, that all human beings have had an immediate and direct way to observe since the dawn of ages, but yet no one else ever bothered to mention it, or is that "naivete" only a badly digested conundrum of all those philosophical musings, that influenced our culture AFTER Descartes *invented* the concept?
Why do so many people hope for a "technical" solution to fix the problems, without ever bothering to go back to the guy, that produced it first and foremost?
And as philosophy is about a critical view, not about blind veneration, let's dissect, WHAT problems Descartes actually wished to solve, and how much of his solutions were necessary/inevitable and how much of them were contingent on his own historical point of view.
Petitio Principii you are right. This is just a semantics pissing match.
I sort of assume that consciousness requires some energy, though I can't really prove it.
If so, what's the advantage to being conscious? You can say that pain is just a bunch of nerve signals. But we can program robots to respond to stimuli and be fairly certain that no proto-consciousness arises. From an evolutionary viewpoint, it wold seem an inefficiency to carry around the extra baggage of conscious experience.
To give matter meaning. Consciousness makes experience possible.
The problem with the hard problem of consciousness is that at some point there's also a hard problem of anything that would be fundamental. There would be some subatomic particle or principle that would do this and that, and interact with others in some way and not others, but you could still ask why; if there's not an infinite recursion of causality, at some point things just are the way they are, it's their fundamental nature. So it may well be that from cognitive systems with enough complexity it will just emerge this seemingly magical, seemingly non-physical property out of nowhere, and that's just what happens.
That's what laws are, so by your theory there must be a law of consciousness.
The best way to understand consciousness is to realize the mechanism of consciousness. When you realize the mechanism of consciousness, you really understand consciousness.
Are we reaching the limitations of the scientific method when addressing these questions? How would one design experiments to test a hypothesis on this level? Or, will this question remain within the realm of philosophy?
If you want to define consciousness in such a way that it is testable, you will end up testing "awakeness" or something similar. Yes, we can define awakeness. No, we cannot define anything like the "sensation of being conscious" any more than we can define the sensation of seeing the color red.
@@RalphDratman Yes, I know that anesthesiologists use a device to measure 'awakeness'. But it seems like a long way off before we can assert with confidence what our phenomenal experience really is. Some do, but I'm immediately skeptical of those claims.
@@jackbyrd381 But that is exactly my point. We can find ways to measure awakeness in many (though not all) circumstances, but "phenomenal experience" I believe to be undefinable and thus not in any danger of being "explained." Ever.
@@RalphDratman yes, phenomenal experience cannot be explained because it is fundamental :) It is without cause. It arises for no reason. It is all there is. At some point physics will have to admit that there is no physical world, just qualia.
@@leonwillett4645 I admit no such thing. There is demonstrably a physical world. "Just quail" would get us nowhere as there would be no input to the system, unless you believe other people's qualia is somehow input to yours. But that cannot be so.
Beautiful, if you go to Vieques ( Puerto Rico 🇵🇷) you really have consciousness ! Love you Rob, now even more !
Sean Carroll explains. When measured, the object and the observer are in a quantum entangled state. For the observer, the wave function of the object collapses.
Im not sure what that means. Is he using quantum entanglement as an analogy?
@@biomed007 Not analogy.
@@biomed007 This is clear when you consider the thought experiment of "Wigner's Friend."
@@biomed007 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend
A fundamental question is surely whether consciousness can evolve through natural selection or whether it exists independently.
If you bang on a drum, it makes a sound according to how it is tuned and how hard it is hit. If you bang an atom, the same principle is relivant. So who tuned the atom? There you go. Consciousness is independant to matter, but obviously interfaces with matter in a multispectrum energetic form. Anyone that believes consciousness is 1s and 0s and electrochemical only, they are all pedos in different forms. Most pedos are not involved in sex acts, they commit violence through spreading their ignorance to children.
意識メカニズムは、自然選択の産物です。
The keyword is “Structure”. I call it Mental Structure (MS). MS will take you one step closer to the truth.
And, MS will make your daily life has more solid structural sense, such as, mental abilities are (products) generated by the MS as well as they can be analyzed with MS.
Consciousness is a product of MS and PS (physical structure) interactive causation.
Mind is reducible, so consciousness is reducible.
Experience is unique, but experience is reducible and can be reassembled.
18:05 It seems like consciousness could be explained by the correspondence of a human brain’s neurological network to analogous networks in reality. The idea of “information” as a network, at least in part, is a powerful idea.
I'm in the camp of an external consciousness.
The crucial point is neither experience, nor memory. Because animals also have these features. What makes consciousness distinctive is its reflexive property. That is what some philisophers call "prereflexive cogito".
Human consciousness thinks about itself. İt says, "Now İ think about myself". Or like this: "Now İ think about what İ think."
İn my opinion this is possible by the agency of language. Thinking about thinking is impossible without language. (Bu language İ mean an abstract language with developed grammatical structures.)
This is a great discussion. It seems Kuhn does not like the physicalists' view. Nor do I. I want to be open to the idea, but I don't know how a physical system can generate something (consciousness) that the physical system itself would then become an object of the consciousness it purports to generate. That seems to be so fantastical to me. Help me out, someone! I love these discussions!
Focus on the concept of analogy.
The frequencies of the neural signals generated by the sense organs
are the analogues or representations of impinging energies.
Now imagine every one of the hundred billion neurons in the brain
has a base discharge frequency that is derived from sense organ analogies.
Think a hundred billion analogies all synaptically jostling each other
in the process we call thinking.
One of those analogies is what we call the self.
When other analogies modulate the self,
those modulations are of what the self is conscious.
In a nutshell that may require a good deal of contemplation but
encouragingly promises an epiphany.
Thank you for acknowledging that consciousness is nothing like the stars of the universe. It is non-material, or super-material.
I come to watch Closer To Truth when I get tired of being the smartest person in the room
Great work, #CloserToTruth team.
This is a billiant episode!
My question is: Why am I me? There are lots of conscious beings in the world..Why am I this one?
Paul Donohue Thats like asking why do we live on Earth, instead of Mercury Mars or Jupiter (or trillions of other planets). And don’t tell me that those planets are inhospitable for human life, because for most of Earth’s existence, it’s been inhospitable for human life.
@@readynowforever3676 oh no bro! That's another question!
Bulu Okay, fair enough, but my point is, why shouldn’t your consciousness be distinct from someone else? Your fingerprints are, your DNA is, your distinctive morphology characteristics are.
The Homo sapiens is a Highly Sophisticated Ultra Advanced Super Dynamic Organism. Millions of years from Australopithecine, instead of “Why is?” How about “Why not?” ?
@@readynowforever3676 good point!
Honestly, I don't know what to answer.
And maybe that's because this all we can say about our first persona experience:
Why me?
Why not me?
And the thing is that this questions have not even a single clue to how get answered.
Even if there is a materialistic answer, the question maintains in a different way:
Why "matter"?
Bulu It reminds me, that we have so many pharmaceutical drugs, particularly psyche meds, that really work, yet we don’t know exactly how or “why” they work on the “conscious” brain/mind, despite the fact that we engineered the recipe.
It is coalescing of mankind’s “materialism” with nature’s “materialism”. We’ve created all the polytheistic gods to all the monotheistic gods, and we’ve made them work in various practical/civil purpose ways, just like we’ve made the iPhone work.
But I ask, about what we ask about; why is consciousness to the brain any different than strength to the muscle or vision to the eye....?
As was suggested in the video, vision or what we see, is not apart of consciousness, it’s just a necessary feature. Why do I presume that? Because there people born blind, are they any less conscious?
Our ability to smell, is that merely “materialism”?
By the way, I’m no less mystified by our universe than any fellow human being who wanders and wonders. I am at peace however, that we may never satisfy thee most essential “why(s)”. So I thought maybe we have to change or at least bring a duality to our “consciousness” inquisitions.
We may even inadvertently stumble upon some other treasures.
Sean Carroll's multiverse idea is way whackier than consciousness as fundamental
I sort of disagree. The Many-Worlds Interpretation comes naturally if one takes QM and time evolution by the Schrödinger equation as the base instead of a mere derived or describing device. In that setting, the collapse of the wave function appears to be completely unnatural, almost ridiculous. Quite the contrary the dynamics is governed exclusively by the Schrödinger equation, i.e. by a unitary operator (in particular norm-preserving and *invertible* ). Further, the *other worlds* do not differ in any sense from our actual world, e.g. they are physically exactly the same as our world and obey exactly the same laws. It's just that something different is *happening* there (the cat is dead there while alive in our world). In contrast, assuming consciousness to be fundamental and thus something exceeding the physical world requires adding something completely *different* for which nobody can even safely define what properties it should have, what laws it should obey etc. In addition, everything we consciously experience is related to and dependent on information we have received through our primate senses, i.e. information about our direct, purely material surroundings on this planet. There is nothing we can be conscious of that is not related to the material world around us. For example, we cannot be conscious of any color that is not in the quite arbitrary and narrow range of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation that we can perceive via our eyes. To me, this strongly points toward consciousness being a construction or emerging property of our material brain.
He is a materialist. He also believes in Einstein's theory of relativity which proves he has not done his homework since many physicists have debunked some of that theory already.
多世界理論は、量子力学から 必然的に 導出されます。つまり、観測すると、量子もつれ状態になります。『ウィグナーの友人』の思考実験から 明らかです。
@@entropica utilizing your logic but going backwards, without consciousness there would be no such thing as color at all. In fact, a universe without consciousness wouldn't exist as we perceive it because how we perceive it is based upon our consciousness experience of it. A concious-less universe would not have any discrimination of objects and would be whatever it is fundamentally (math, particles, the quantum foam, whatever) and nothing more
@@alexgaggio2957 Sure, the objects with their colors etc. are constructed by out mind, because this reduces the amount of information to be stored in in our brain immensely. It requires much less space to describe a table by its edges and rectangular shapes and colors than to store information about every atom the table consists of, and, for our purposes (don't hit a tree when running through the jungle, find something to eat and somebody to mate with), this is completely sufficient. It's also much faster to update when new information is received via the senses. It is a bit like describing a gas by the purely statistical properties pressure and temperature instead of the location and velocity of each molecule. Of course the simplification and division into objects must be sufficiently detailed and compatible with the world, because this model is everything we know about the world, and all our planning and actions depend on it. People for which model and world are not sufficiently in sync usually end up in asylums. Taking LSD also changes the model considerably and puts it out of sync. - By the way, I would guess that the experience of redness is more or less no more than a certain neuron that is responsible for detecting red objects to fire.
people who think consciousness is not a big deal, I question whether they are conscious tbh
Insult, great argument. Perhaps your over valuation of consciousness is due to childhood wish fantasies to be special, live forever and have a soul have blinded you.
@@ihatespam2or consciousness is literally the only data we personally have to navigate this experience.
@@tookie36 no, we have other people and various tools to verify those experiences. This “we could be heads in ajar” dodge gets us nowhere.
No need to remind us, we all get the subjective experience point, we are gather data those override that factor. That’s what all of science is.
@@ihatespam2 all data is collected, appears, and is decifered within consciousness. One can ignore that but there is good reason why consciousness has been held in such high regard by many cultures for 1000s of years
So you want to demonstrate the existence of consciousness?
Its pretty easy : invent an undisputed “axiom” no.0, saying “consciousness exists.” …
Right?
Love yr summary, thank you. ❤
It shows how simplistic ppl are that so many adore Sean Carroll when he is such a reductionist materialist. I mean he is literally saying that what part of the brain you affect defines the sensation of seeing red or and sensation of pain yet we know that that simply tells us what the consciousness does, not what consciousness is.
You say “reductionist materialist” like it’s a dirty word. And then your defense shows you don’t even understand what he said. Maybe get more facts and try to wrangle in your bias first. And where did you experience adoration of Sean? I would love to see that claim supported by evidence.
Maybe your emotional reactions reveal a deep worry that you are not special and living in a world without purpose and an eternal soul, so you must banish anything which suggests otherwise rather than look at the dat with a neutral eye.
@@ihatespam2 It's amazing how on social media, no matter how none argumentive and simply observing someone make a comment, there's always a jackass getting all defensive over nothing. I simply stated that the concept of the material world being literally all there is doesn't make much sense to me. It's not about being a special and what's wrong with seeing humans as special? I don't suffer from ego but clearly you suffer from self loathing.
@@ihatespam2 Try not to explain my belief based on psychology and yours based on logic. You have reasons to believe things the way you do just like I have my own reasoning, if you like to disagree, by all mean but wtf are you getting all worked up about?
@@ihatespam2 The weird thing is that many ppl who are like you are the type of ppl that believe robots have souls but we don't. lol. This is exactly what's wrong with ppl these days. The level of self loathing towards humanity many ppl have reached.
@@ihatespam2 If you wanna believe you're nothing more than a worthless spec of material in an insignificant earth/universe, by all mean do, I won't stop you but some of us have longing for something beyond that and some of those some aren't afraid to admit that.
20:40 Yes! Consciousness it the one absolute essential!
What Sean carrol didn’t grasp is that, talking about redness and experiencing redness aren’t the same thing. Separate. Maybe related, but, if the consciousness aspect is separate from reportability, it requires an explanation beyond a behaviourist one, which is what Sean Carrol was implying.
手術されたフェレットは、聴覚野で見ます。
Chalmers, Tegmark, and even Hoffman use Tononi's theory at some level. Maybe that is the path, taking IIT with fundamental consciousness.
Give all these guys 5meo dmt then re do all these interviews;)
So so good!
Max Erik Tegmark comes right up to the edge when he asked “what is IT?” As I evolved the yanassi theorem, I began to understand what the reasons for subjective learning “quirk blob” are about. Simply put, it’s first purpose is living, self survival success and procreation, survival of new life forms. It’s unknown purpose, is to return “unblobed” as a form of energy that has separated from it’s biological vehicle. I believe we go to a collective life entity, we bring the emotional energy we’ve accumulated over the years and we bring ourselves as individuals complete with all of the memories that make us who we are. We continue, connecting with others with whom there are emotional connections, in a timeless place without distance. I could continue, but i would be entering my theorem and how it works.
I’m happy that people are conscious of consciousness. Marvellous. This is for those who question the question. I’m a simple carpenter without the academic qualifications to own an IQ. Consider this. Consciousness is contained within the brain unless you are very different and thus may be explained using ‘music’. Without using impressive word magic it’s like this. Watch the drummer. The material aspect is simply understood. Look away you enter the world of the created. .you add.. personal interpretation..personal emotions. More is merely a religion that becomes or it doesn’t. More is life or it isn’t.
Looks like a less informed wolf in sheep’s clothing has some bad mojo word magic of their own to add confusion to the subject.
I've said it before. This needs more views.
Perhaps, to better understand consciousness, we should start by asking the question: " What is our need to understand consciousness?".
For we are consciousness, trying to understand our selves.
What is this process: this drive for self-understanding?
I believe we have direct access to this information and it might be a good first step in understanding the nature of consciousness.
Well , if we are Here for this lifetime , This is such a brief window to Learn what consciousness is .
This could be a Dream that the Wet brain Has .
You may have never lived a lifetime at all . The Wet brain has to Dream .
Therefore all is Dreaming brain .
is there a relationship between conscious awareness and electromagnetic observation?
21:12 Maybe if we use the approach of identifying an observation as a transfer of information, then there might arise an emergent phenomenon of self at varying levels of (intensity of; or maybe the bitrate of?) information exchange.
And, someday, maybe we will be able to identify some of these levels of self-recognition.
What good it will do for us i have no idea...lol
I'm sure we'll glean some useful psychological information along the way.
We have all heard windblown leaves rustle in the distance. Would anyone say that it is possible to hear a single leaf in a 2 mph breeze at 1,000 yards? No, probably not. And yet, a few hundred million leaves in a 15 mph wind can be heard from even further than 1,000 yards. In part, that's how consciousness may work.
Structured informative integrated an exclusive
No radical restructuring; just a recognition that a particular functionality is "sensational".
David Wallace @17:11 spoke my mind. It’s just physical. Why do so many people think it’s mysterious? Why can the human ego not accept it’s just a brain in a bony head?
Seems the more we learn the more likely that we are not here by some random cosmic accident. There IS something more.
There is no such thing as a random cosmic accident. There are no accidents in the cosmos
@@nicholaspullen6608 Random as opposed to "non-random" accident? Guided versus unguided "event"? I agree with you that there are no accidents in the cosmos.
Thank you for these wonderful, thought-provoking videos. This one is focused on one of man’s deepest mysteries.
Consider this . . .
Without the subjective, human “qualia” of consciousness, there would be no existence (or perceived existence) to anything here - the scientists, their theories or tools, this TH-cam channel, any of us posters here, humanity, history, the Big Bang theory, the Earth, the Milky Way galaxy, the Local Group or anything else in the vast expanse of the cosmic landscape.
Everything is (or appears to us to be) contingent or predicated upon this thing called consciousness.
Query: Is not consciousness then a universal predicate for existence as we humans in this particular local universe know and perceive it? A topic to ponder.
You are standing on a promontory observing the view.
A boy sneaks up behind you.
You are not conscious that he is there.
You turn to look in another direction.
You see the boy and become conscious of him.
You were not conscious of him and then you were.
Not exactly profound, is it?
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL Sir. For you, me, the boy, life and consciousness and even existence to “exist” (or even appear to) is both deeply profound and beyond miraculous.
From absolute Nothing, only comes nothing. For absolute Nothing to produce Everything is supremely staggering.
@@garybala000
You go to bed and fall asleep where,
between the dreams, you cease to be.
What is more likely during your awakening,
that body is simply changing mode of operation
or
that the universe is literally popping into existence?
The first is entirely explicable, the second extremely outrageously not.
"From absolute Nothing, only comes nothing."
Is as fine an example of a self evidently true statement as we can imagine.
Thus, because there is undoubt-ably something (via Descartes' cogito)
we are forced to conclude,
Something Has Always Existed
and perhaps even that time is nothing more than delusion.
(Try taking 'time' to be an immensely useful concept
long ago synthesized by the ancients out of ideas of matter and motion
critical to coordinated behavior and the survival of nascent civilizations.
(If this idea of 'time as a concept' is new to you then dwell for a while on the fact that
at the heart of every clock can be found only some matter contrived to vibrate
and never some delicate antenna bending to and fro in a river of time.
That river is a metaphorical construct forever frustrating all who attempt to sail it
or scoop it up with the tongs of science).
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL
“All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players.”
As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, Shakespeare
“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily merrily, Life is but a Dream.”
Children’s Nursery Song
@@garybala000 I have the impression that you might not have received the meaning I was striving to convey.
I put the paragraph on time in parenthesis to indicate I understood the thoughts within to be somewhat tangential to the conscious topic. The last time I sang “Row, row, row your boat", kindergarten 65 orbits ago and as you can imagine, the recollection is pretty slim, remains only the fact of singing and that I know the lyrics. Not so fuzzy is the memory from the same era of my special plastic record and the wooden stick to play it. The name of the tune was "The Muffin Man"... "Oh, do you know the muffin man..."
You put the pointy end of the stick in the groove of the record and traced its spiral curve so that the disk and the stick vibrated enough to hear the music. If one moved the stick more quickly the song came out like chipmunks th-cam.com/video/-h5R9cb-r8E/w-d-xo.html , more slowly made the sound of monsters. The timing of the song was not embossed on the record but depended on the speed of the moving stick, matter and motion. Here's a world famous physicist who spends an hour explaining what I've excessively compressed. th-cam.com/video/-6rWqJhDv7M/w-d-xo.html
Time was addressed because the concept of 'time' underlies the concept of 'process' which, in conjunction with the concept of 'self', lies at the core of the 'conscious' concept. In its most succinct form...
I am a conscious process.
Consciousness is obviously an evolutionarily successful adaptation regardless of whether or not you’re capable of coming up with a reasonable explanation why
Agreed and
an excellent attempt at explanation is presented in,
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind",
the actual theory mentioned in the fictional story
of season 1 of the 'Westworld' TV series.
great job ❤🎉
Is it possible that some people have more consciousness than others? I find it difficult to understand how some people don't see the problem. The huge distinction. Maybe like some people lack visual imagery (no minds eye) , some people have dimmer consciousnesses? They feel less? This is all so strange.
Here is what I think. I think this quest for consciousnous is perhaps the final attempt of humanity to believe it is somehow special or enlightened. However, just as we had to accept we are not in the center of the universe, we will learn that our level of consciousness and self-awareness is just at a random point in the development of neural complexity. Even animals have some form of self-awareness. It is simply a matter of neural complexity to become more self-referential, self-aware, and capable of asking big questions.
Washington DC is not the center of the USA. Does that make it any less of a capital? Why do we need to live in the center of the universe? Maybe the place we have in the universe is perfect from an entirely different perspective just like Washington DC is the perfect place for a capital city based on the factors our nation's forefathers thought were important back in 1790.
@@bobblacka918 You misread me, perhaps. I meant to say that for centuries we *thought* to be in the center, and with the progress of enlightenment that notion crumbled. Today, so it seems to me, human consciousnous is the last bit still on this pedestal and I predict it's going to fall down as well.
@@bobblacka918 Because it's extremely unlikely that some creatures, built of exactly the same protons, neutrons and electrons like a table or a piece of butter, on this tiny planet orbiting a run-of-the-mill star (one of 100 billions) on the margin of a run-of-the-mill galaxy (one of 200 billions at least in this vast universe) who agree genetically to 99% with chimps so stupid they can't even make a fire are really that special. That is, I fully agree with IncompleteTheory.
@@entropica : It depends how you define "special." It's a fact that we exist. Little green men on other planets don't. That makes us pretty special. People can speculate all day long about how many billion planets there are out there that are capable of supporting life, but until they find evidence, it's just that, speculation. Some day, we might have to deal with the reality that we are alone in this vast universe. That would make us pretty special.
And by the way, we also share over 98% of our DNA with watermelons. I can see it now, a billion years ago, the first watermelons evolved legs and then walked on land. Then they evolved brains and started to think. Pretty soon, they were organizing into colonies, and... well you know the rest.
Bob Blacka What I and I think IncompleteTheory also wanted to convey is that being extremely rare (because depending on so many parameters that have to fit in) - rare not just in space but also rare in time - should not be confused with being central. Something like us seems to pop up from time to time somewhere in the universe. The existence of living beings on earth is merely proving that the physical laws and physical constants as set in this universe allow for objects that far from equilibrium to emerge. If it’s possible here and now something similar will almost surely happen at some other point at some other time again. Living beings are sort of an accident this particular universe allows for, strange enough.
Consciousness and dreams are indeed very mysterious.
To think the universe exists for no reason, seems like a larger leap of faith than the possibility it does exist for a reason
'Think' and 'faith' are opposites.
Why? It actually sounds unbelievably absurd to think that something existed before it and developed a “reason” to want it and then went through all this to satisfy its reason?
That’s crazy.
It all makes sense when there is no reason, because you have to create a reasoner etc. Occam razor bro
We are never conscious of the present moment, During the processing of a thought, the body system has already evolved a few nanoseconds. The moment we become conscious of is already in the past. Thus there can be no free will. Yet the overwhelming "feeling" is that there is a free will. Does that imply the "past" affect the future after the future has occurred? Seemed quantum fishy to me :P
Just as silence is not empty and can have all the answers in such way looking for all the answers in pure rationality is also nothing but a noise.
These are fantastic. Thanks a lot.👍☺
Consciousness is derived from reality and uses language to communicate meaning, relationships and arguments of reality.
Everything is the information and our senses . And the Shaw starts
So much of the debate around this seems to presume, "Consciousness really shouldn't be here. How did it come about?" We don't really do that for anything else, do we? Atoms shouldn't be here, spin shouldn't be here, charge shouldn't be here, magnetism shouldn't be here, etc. We don't know why any of it is here. Why single out consciousness as a great mystery? Everything is.
Woah the first guy is great
It seems fundamental, like charge, spin, etc. Tononi in giving examples of being conscious, went exclusively with vision, 'things I experience seeing." This seems a meh indication of being on the wrong track. After all, it's not "I see therefore I am" ... it's "I experience therefore I am." Going for the gimme "what I see" isn't penetrating the issue.
time as consciousness in quantum becomes mass of awareness in physical brain?
The problem is a consciousness is trying to define consciousness!!! Problem with that is consciousness main attribute is creation and as you search you will keep finding new things because you are telling your consciousness to find new things... so it does... you can only realize real consciousness by Observing Without your Thoughts otherwise you will keep thinking and find more and more complicated answers for it as that's what you want... also you will feel getting closer to the answer but you will never know it 🙂
I agree. I don't think consciousness can be "explained" in a set of word symbols. That is to say it cannot be explained at all. We can learn more and more about the world in terms that can be symbolically expressed, perhaps endlessly. But we will not ever corner an explanation of reality. The physicist David Bohm used logic to demonstrate that logic can never explain reality in a fundamental way. It's too much for me to go into his argument at the moment. At a certain point one becomes tired of chasing the squirrel of logic around the tree. I'm an old man, and perhaps it's too late for me to begin the meditation that aims toward wordlessness. But if I could magically go back I think that is what I would do. Kuhn's videos are bootless attempts to capture Truth and stuff it in a bag. That seems very childish to me.
@@donnievance1942 To know the truth you don't need a youthful body but a mature mind which can be silent. Meditation to know the truth is all about that 'SILENCE'. You do not need yoga or some meditation postures. All your thoughts/vibrations must come to a point like still water surface!!!
@@S33K3R Thanks for your comment. Who knows, maybe I'll give it try yet.
Does Consciousness Require a Radical Explanation? NO! I think consciousness will ultimately have a energetically understood relationship that can be commonly sensed and understood.
Good selection of current thought leaders on the subject!
Robert Sir you being yourself a student of neuroscience what are your views on consciousness...... According to you do consciousness imply materialism or is something out of the physical realm?
mass integrates time information for conscious awareness?