Professor John Searle : Consciousness as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 พ.ค. 2014
- Professor John Searle (Willis S and Marion Slusser Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language, University of California, Berkeley) gave a public lecture as part of the CRASSH Mellon CDI Visiting Professor programme.
I highly appreciated what prof. John said in his interesting lecture in the philosophy of consciousness. I am a former lecturer in the department of philosophy Basrah University in Iraq.Thank you Prof.John again.
For me, in between many, greatest virtue of Searle is that he can verbalize, clearly, directly, exactly, shortly, what he wants to say. Simple as it is, and frequent, we all know that is something we all lack, and long for, as well as most philosophers.
Fantastic lecture. Ideally, TH-cam should get filled up with stuff like this.
Wow! All the Searle lectures available on TH-cam. What a dream! Thank you for posting this!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I'm so damn grateful that got to do a semester at Cal in one of Searles classes. I would've taken more if I had had the opportunity.
Thank you very much for this interesting lecture in the philosophy of consciousness. I highly appreciated that.
I like this guy because implicitly he states, tectonic plates exist even if we don't experience them. Also that other people exist is implicit in his thought. That is very advanced.
Does anyone know some good schools that are doing research in consciousness? I am a prospective PhD student in Psychology and want to study neuroscience/consciousness while integrating psychology and "spirituality," with the science! Thank you in advance!!
He seems quite knowledgeable this man, John Searle.
Look at Tim Crane going out slowly from his sit at 44:50. It was funny the face he made when he was going out. And Searle's comment afterwards was simply hilarious, rs!
What does Mr. Searle have to say about the claims of Eden Alexander about consciousness?
Whenever I listen to Searle I can't help get the feeling that he is trying to gently insert a subject/object quality to consciousness experience itself---that there is an implicit "I" which he is suggesting, if not mentioning directly, that "feels what it is like to be in any particular state", rather than suggesting that consciousness is simply the feeling. Even though he notes that consciousness is ontologically/epistemically subjective, he continues to use language that suggests an experience/experiencer dichotomy within that subjective state. I'll admit that this is likely an artifact of language but by his own definition this is not possible to assert, as well as a problem that leads to all sorts of recursion issues ("How do I know that I know that I know?", etc.).
Your confusion is a common one, largely grammatical: ask instead, how do you know that you know WHAT you know, silly.
Patrick Kennedy I think you restated my point (although maybe you were trying to make some other point about epistemology?). My point is that there is likely no functional distinction between the "thing that says I AM" and what "it" knows. Its "knowing/thinking" is its "I-ness" and visa versa. . . . Like you said, it is largely grammatical, but injecting a standard subject/object model of language is a major stumbling block in any discussion of consciousness.
Certainly - which is exactly what Searle is militating against: the discussion of consciousness without distinguishing objective/subjective along epistemic & ontological lines.
@chriscroz, Hume talked about "bundles of perceptions" without any experiencer. But I think this is complete nonsense. The Buddhists make the same mistake. Why do I bundle my feelings into one unit, and yours into a separate unit, if there are no "entities" that are experiencing consciousness? What distinguishes your "seeing" from my "seeing"... is it all just seeing without someone that sees?
Searle is a master. Thank you.
I like this guy.. He's funny and he makes some great points.. My only issue is that he keeps saying that consciousness is caused by neurobiological processes in the brain, and even says it's a fact, but in another part of his talk he admits that we don't really know how that process works, which is to say that it's not a proven fact. It might be a fact. But I think we need to be very careful not to call something a fact until it's actually proven. He does talk about correlates, which suggest that consciousness may be caused by the brain, but that only gives us a very good hypothesis... not a proven fact. The jury is still out on this one.
Searle makes an important distinction between a philosophy of mind and a science of mind. Philosophically it is a fact that mind is wholly caused by neurobiological processes. There is no other plausible explanation and there has not been for some time (since philosophers abandoned Descartes). However, although this gives science a focus and direction, it doesn't mean that we have a full scientific explanation of how neurobiological processes produce consciousness. It does mean that, unless we are religious, we are no longer looking for the processes that produce consciousness anywhere else than the brain.
It is most likely that there are levels of interdependent processes that are at play here rather than one phenomenon & in other talks he gives credence to this idea but accedes it’s the purview of cognitive science & further work. He is, however, critical of CogSci, so doesn’t go as deep as he could.
Is it a must for conscious being to experience qualia?
I am not God but from tiny height of my knowledge i would say : when consciousness is present, there is creation of a simulated modele of the external world, and this mental creation is perceived by your consciousness throught QUALIAS ( which are internal sensations developped throught evolution of life since the beginning). The qualia RED quite recent and only used in humans, primates, & birds. Cats & cows have no idea of the sensation of perceiving what we call the red colour. What is fascinating is to know that this palette of colour QUALIAS, is your heritage of the all evolution of nervous systems & brains. Exception of pathological defects, every human can experience the unique sensation of BLUE , and noboby will never be able to explain it to someone who never got this treasure by birth. Your qualia of BLUE, is the same as mine, but can not be describe, meaning that you must be human to know that sensation. An additional observation that i made (about the homonculus, kind of miniature human that could live inside the brain watching the outside reality projected on a scream/ idea that brings othing new). If you try to explore how this mental simulation can be seen by our core mind ( the point where we have the sensation to be), you have to bring a radical new idea spoken by the philosopher ALAN WATTS in this maner : " contrary to the evidence, the physical body is surrounded by our soul" So everything presented in your mind, is constitutive of your soul, in which your mind creates a center to which you identify yourself. It is an illusion, & you are much larger than what we have learn to believe.
If the state of consciousness is analogous to the state of liquidity of water, could the consciousness exist in other states, as water does in gas or solid?
Something just doesn't fit well with Searle's explanation of the MB problem. On one hand, he advocates that computational mind cannot have a true understanding of anything. On the other hand he says that mind/consciousness is generated by a person's neurology. While this is a causally sufficient case, I don't understand why does it imply, according to him, that consciousness is a function of the brain. If it is, then it well should be equivalent to the computational mind, hence, no brain can ever have a true understanding of anything. My take on this is that while neural correlates are correlations, they cannot be in principle, explanations regarding the phenomenological property of consciousness. There is nothing about consciousness that screams neural correlates, except brain imaging. Experience has content that is only accessible to one observer. Till people acknowledge that, the problem will remain intractable.
Abhishek shah It took me so long to grasp this sentiment. Examining consciousness as neurobiological activity is just insufficient. That doesn’t mean it’s ‘wrong’, because it’s not wrong. Brain activity and fMRI scans are very helpful in developing our understanding of human consciousness, but thoughts and emotions (examples of mental phenomena which are involved in the experience of consciousness) are NOT brain activity. Thoughts and emotions INVOLVE brain activity - but they are not brain activity itself. They are the EXPERIENCE of the actual phenomena; occurring both ‘to’ AND ‘with’ us. Our brain is absolutely involved in that, but it is not just that.
Consciousness isn’t a ‘state’. It isn’t just ‘awareness’, as a non-human animal experiences. Consciousness is uniquely human.
Consciousness is something like a psychological dynamic involving the creation of order from disorder. It’s an interaction between the conscious experience of a subject (you) and the unconscious experience of that subject’s mental activity (your unconscious mind). It’s a process of transforming that which is typically experienced, psychologically speaking, in the low-level, unconscious mind (that which is disordered) into executive-level, conscious mental activity (that which is ordered).
Embodying that psychologically transformative process with our actual behavior, in congruence with the mental activity, is a vital part of increasing awareness of the experience that is the ‘creation’ of consciousness. Storytelling is the behavior we embody when talking about consciousness because the ability to speak is causally related to the existence of consciousness (more specifically human consciousness; which is to say, again, that other animals do not experience consciousness because they only experience a ‘state’ of conscious awareness. They do not interact with the psychological process that entails the unconscious-to-conscious dynamic).
This sentiment is grounded in the psychophysiological evolution of the brain across the past 5 or so million years, too. The neurobiological development of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in particular, across roughly 3 million years, has occurred alongside this unconscious primate-to-potentially-conscious-human transformation. Our brain evolved and developed, in part, TO speak symbolically-driven language and express the experience of consciousness. This even matches up with Searle’s definition of consciousness as interactive low-level mental phenomena.
Storytelling and narrative are a uniquely human ability, used for thousands of years to describe the process that is the creation consciousness. Storytelling is a high-level ordering process of mental activity behaviorally embodied and expressed by the subject. Storytelling involves a dynamic between executive function-level mental processes (cognition) and lower-level mental processes (emotion/instinctual motivations and drives). Storytelling is what allows us to connect epistemology and ontology, and then interact with/experience the result which is the experience of human consciousness. There is always a story being told, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. Uniting with that is consciousness.
@@Chadthefatherbear
I'm not very good with English, so I'm using the Google translator (to make it easier to write).
I believe that you have not had a correct understanding of what is advocated by Searle. In simple terms, we can say that there are at least two suitable descriptions for natural phenomena. On the one hand, we can describe their qualities, insofar as they are presented, phenomenologically, to us; And we can describe its causality, in the sense of a scientific explanation of the phenomenon. Thus, we can explain that liquidity is the property of being malleable, detached, flowing, etc ... And we can explain that liquidity is the state of great molecular agitation, where there is no very strong connection between molecules. Note how, in both cases, we provide a reasonable explanation for liquidity. In both cases, we speak in different terms, but we describe the same phenomenon.
The same reasoning applies to digestion, when pumping from a heart, and of course, consciousness itself. Of course, as we can know, there is a fundamental difference between consciousness and these other processes, and it is this difference that causes all the uproar about the possibility of a causal description of consciousness (does not mean reduction). It is that consciousness is given to us entirely in terms of the first person, and is not external to us, or its components can be explained (since we can only explain, introspectively, elements that are in our consciousness, we cannot resort to that either, and further reasoning is needed). Considering that this first person perspective is in place, we can only describe it, as its qualities are presented, in terms of first person. First-person terms are for obvious reasons, incompatible with third-person terms, and end up, for that reason, making our view of the possibility of a causal description difficult. But that is the only point, it does not make sense to abandon all scientific reasoning around consciousness, simply because we cannot infer, from the scientific description, and from the third person, the qualitative properties of consciousness.
And about your argument about computationalism, I think you didn't understand it well either. He never opposed the possibility of creating a conscious computer, he just opposed doing this, in a way that is exclusively opposed to the way in which consciousness occurs. What AI's do is to simulate, on top of hardware, consciousness. What consciousness does is to be the hardware. I don't want to make any further considerations on that yet, as they would be very extensive. But I think it is enough.
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Eu não sou muito bom com o inglês, então estou utilizando o tradutor do Google (para facilitar a escrita).
Eu acredito que vocês não tenham tido uma correta compreensão do que é defendido por Searle. Em termos simples, podemos dizer que existem pelo menos duas descrições adequadas para os fenômenos naturais. De um lado, podemos descrever suas qualidades, na medida em que se apresentam, fenomenologicamente, a nós; E podemos descrever sua causalidade, no sentido de uma explicação científica do fenômeno. Assim, podemos explicar que liquidez é a propriedade de ser maleavel, desprendido, de escoar, etc... E podemos explicar que liquidez é o estado de grande agitação molecular, onde não existe uma conexão muito forte entre as moléculas. Note como, em ambos os casos, fornecemos uma explicação razoável para a liquidez. Em ambos os casos, falamos em termos distintos, mas descrevemos o mesmo fenômeno.
O mesmo raciocínio se aplica a digestão, ao bombear de um coração, e é claro, a consciência ela própria. Naturalmente, como podemos saber, existe uma diferença fundamental entre a consciência e esses outros processos, e é essa diferença que causa todo o alvoroço sobre a possibilidade de uma descrição causal da consciência (não significa redução). É que a consciência nos é dada inteiramente em termos de primeira pessoa, e não se externa a nós, ou podem ser seus componentes explicados (dado que apenas podemos explicar, introspectivamente, elementos que estão à nossa consciência, também não podemos recorrer a isso, e um raciocínio ulterior é necessário). Considerando que essa perspectiva de primeira pessoa está posta, só podemos descrevê-la, do modo como se apresentam suas qualidades, em termos de primeira pessoa. Termos de primeira pessoa são por razões óbvias, incompatíveis com termos de terceira pessoa, e acabam, por essa razão, dificultando nosso ver sobre a possibilidade de uma descrição causal. Mas esse é o único ponto, não faz sentido abandonar todo o raciocínio científico em torno da conscência, simplesmente porque não podemos inferir, partindo da descrição científica, e de terceira pessoa, as propriedades qualitativas da consciência.
E sobre seu argumento sobre o computacionalismo, acho que você não compreendeu bem também. Ele nunca se opôs a possibilidade de criarmos um computador consciente, apenas se opôs a fazermos isso, de um modo exclusivamente oposto à forma como a consciência se dá. O que AI's fazem, é simular, em cima de um hardware, a consciência. O que a consciência faz, já é ser o hardware. Não quero fazer maiores considerações sobre isso ainda, já que seriam muito extensas. Mas creio ser o bastante.
9:23
But medical treatments rely on a physical basis that is correlated with the feeling of pain. If I am receiving medical treatment for the pain in my finger, they are not treating the pain itself, they are treating the fact I hit it with a hammer or whatever, and how that affected by finger. The treatment relies on an ontologically objective basis, and it is always assumed that any ontologically subjective state is the product of one or more ontologically objective cases. It cannot be compared to studies on consciousness as Mr. Searle suuggests, because consciousness is ontologically subjective and doesn't point to an ontologically objective reality that can be determined with precision - meaning that while the origin of pain can be pointed at with a finger, consciousness is not as much a consequence of such and such neurons firing, but an emergent property of the neural network as a whole.
This is again a problem in terminology and the meanings of the words you are using. If in fact they treat you with morphine, for example, they are treating the pain and not the fact that you hit the finger with a hammer. If they give some anti-inflammatory they are treating the result of flesh being struck and also the resulting pain. It is an ontologically objective fact that you are experiencing ontologicallly subjective pain. You are demonstrating and expressing that which we understand to constitute that a person is in pain. I do not believe that Mr. Searle suggests that "because consciousness is ontolgically subjective that this in any way means it does not point to (or relate to) an ontolgically obejctive reality..." Those are different usages of the term "ontology" or "ontologically".
I don't get how he's concluding the mind is not a computer program. It seems like the "computation is just a description of nature" point seems discredited by the earlier point he makes, that a lower level of description doesn't discredit a higher level (the neurology doesn't discredit the mind as a cause). I could imagine he would say that the mind definitely exists (i think therefore thought) unlike the computer program, but a program is at least as good a 'higher level description' of what is going on in the brain as the other example he gives of 2 levels of description, the car ignition vs the chemical reactions causing the car to ignite.
“That’s the whole problem with science - you’ve got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder” - Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes, the 6-year old philosopher…
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries” - Robert Jastrow, God And The Astronomers
0:03 im sorry, did he say his name is son goku?
💀💀💀😂
Up to a certain period in the world's history language has never permitted for itself as a structure to make possible a certain type of sentence. Such types of sentences make almost impossible for anyone to understand consciousness, and in fact even truly be conscious. The problems caused as a consequence of, are infinite, some of the most important ones regard to what is understood as empathy and apathy. Before such a certain period in history language would have never allowed for such types of sentences to be formulated and a as consequence make any sense.
The type of sentence is this.....
Take any possible reference of an extreme negative which operates as a structure of many parts.... Then anyone being themselves as a structure which operates of many parts states and says this....
The X specific extreme negative highlighted as such which operates of many parts, (needs) to be destroyed now.
It is unbelievably scary how much this type of sentence highlights the language problem, which impedes anyone understanding consciousness and within many cases even be conscious. Such a problem, the language problem has implications to the incalculable level, especially in regards to science, specifically to engineering and architecture.
Before the ability to construct such sentences and understand them grammatically, language would have never allowed even the remote possibility of such sentences existing.
I truly stumbled upon it as a clear example when someone intentionally used a terrorist organisation as an X example of an extreme highlighted negative.
A clue rests upon this...
It might be useful to test underground train and tube drivers, during and after work in order to understand more the hallucination problem in regards to philosophy, science, and computer software, I would say read c.s carol instead but that is bit to much for most, although no one believes it to be so.
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Mir
April 4/2024
Here are some question to think about:
- Can you achieve objectivity without subjectivity?
- If a robot or a computer is able to observe some system and collect data then make an opinion and a theory about that system. Will that opinion be considered objective or subjective?
- Can a blind person ever understand the concept of colour?
Good question, about the blind. For most people, trying to figure out how a blind man think is as abstract as trying to understand an extra terrestrial entity visiting on it's flying saucer.
A great thinker like Searle can not be trapped with absurd ideas. He don't pretend to known everything about consciousness, but he clearly show what we known for sure it is not.
To resume in one phrase : All our mental activities are located in our brain. It is a waste of time to try to understand how past philosophers defined "soul" for example. Up to 50 years ago, it was impossible to understand how a small mass of fat (the brain) could perform any useful function.
The hearth, which could be suspected to act as a blood pump, was also the best candidate for the unknown location of feeling. When afraid, that pump was known to increase speed. The Europeans languages all use the word "hearth" in expressions related to strong emotions, perpetuating the misconceptions of the past.
Back to the blinds : how do they see the world? They have no problem to use the expression "I see" when you describe them something. It doesn't matter if the conversation was an actual description of how something looks like for us who can see. If I describe the way IRS is unfair by applying arbitrary penalty with amount that exceed many times the amount of tax claimed, a friend can still say "I see" to acknowledge that he/she follow the logic of the story.
Brief, a blind man can use any common expression and apply the same meaning as anybody else in a normal conversation.
What about color? A blind man can remember the name of any color and use these names in any conversation. If I tell my blind friend "I got my green card", he will congratulate me, knowing that I wanted it for a long time. It doesn't matter if the real card is really green. My blind friend may tell another friend that : "the French guy, gay boy, got his green card".
Brief, the brain of blind people can process every concepts that non blind people do. If you get a chance to share some time with a blind man, you will discover many example of what is common in our "human nature".
To answer your other questions:
No, a robot which analyse a situation and reach a conclusion is as subjective as a human performing the same mental operation. Objectivity is a goal to reach for some strange people. For ordinary people, subjectivity is much more meaningful.
When two adolescent girl ask each other "what should I feel"? They want to known how everybody perceive them.
If you would own a robot which can analyze precisely "who they are" and offer these girl a free consultation, they would pay no attention to such creepy machine. They don't want a scientific investigation about them self. They want a human, subjective point of view, telling them their position in the hierarchy.
I described how a good friend of me, a blind man, used language exactly like anybody. But, to answer more precisely to the question "can he understand the concept of color"?
The answer is yes, he understand the concept exactly like any other children or adult in the community where he lives.
But, is that community really understand color ? Who understand the concept of frequency? Who is aware that the vibration rate of the blue color is exactly one octave above the red color? Our visual system cover a single octave for the wavelength of color but the auditive system cover 3 order of magnitude, from 20 Hz to 20 khz, which is 10 octaves.
I worked for a laser company, so got exposed to concepts about color which never cross the mind of most people. So, I may ask "Does people who can see understand the concept of color"?
Consciousness is a bifurcation between the physical and mental/extra-physical phenomena. It is not causally closed to the biological dimension. Consciousness is part of the necessary features for us to function cognizantly.
Discovery on “Limitations of the infinite Human Mind”
Theorem 1 (Alethic): Mind has a certain constant set of capacity at one given point.
Theorem 2 (Alethic): Mind is like a muscle, the ability to grow and stay stagnant as well as diminished.
Axiom (Alethic, Temporal, and Epistemic): Mind is infinitely capable of thinking all possible and impossible things (in terms of logic, ideas, etc) at any moment.
Theorem 3 (Alesthic): Mind is exhaustive and needs to replenish due to the fact that brain needs supply of oxygen, water, and food.
Theorem 4 (Alesthic): Mind can be filled with stuff, and not capable for any further “development” at one given point.
Notice the claim: "Mind is exhaustive and needs to replenish due to the fact that brain needs supply of oxygen, water, and food."
I have put forward a point regarding mind as a complementary entity to the brain, and it is a misnomer and miscategorization to give an account of the action that only the neuro-biological brain state is at work when both the mental state (ontological subjectivity) and the epistemically objective description of the neuro-biological state are simultaneously inclusive.
This kind of Cartesian Dualism is explicitly rejected by most philosophers and scientists. There is no bifurcation. As Searle says, the dichotomy implied by the descriptions of phenomena as "mental" and "physical" is a false dichotomy. There is one kind of phenomena, but many kinds of knowing.
For all his beautiful delivery he doesn't note that that the important science he promotes is increasingly showing that the physical brain changes often occur before we are consciously aware of our having made a decision to move our arm. That means something! He also constantly uses 'existence' ontologically ambiguously himself. For anything to move matter it requires information - structured energy - which implies mass. Outside of relativistic physics, the mass/matter must exist, as in really. So where is our consciousness mass? You can't just pick and choose what science you appeal to.
Mass is not a concept that applies to a representation encoded by a process.
The concept of mass is relevant only to the substrate of a process.
Consciousness has to be non material and free of determinism with free will as the divine part of Descartes' dualism. The other part of Descartes' dualism is the material world or nature that provides the material framework or material experience for the divine consciousness or souls. But conscious entities or souls are not separate on terms of material bodies or material humans as humans believe other humans.
And as Descartes stated, nature or the physical world will unfold in a simple manner that can be simply quantitatively and mathematically modeled in a deterministic way if divine forces do not intervene as the QM pure conscious observer which collapses the superposition world of multiple possible states to one.
26:10 "You can make epistemic objective claims about observer relative phenomena, even though the phenomena has an element of ontological subjectivity " - I disagree I say you are making epistemic objective claims about an observer's report on his experience of relative phenomena ... not of the relative phenomena itself. ...the relative phenomena itself is not accessible to the person making the epistemic objective claim. Suggesting he does have access, is to smuggle in his own ontological subjective experience with the phenomena into his epistemic claim.
Thus you cannot distinguish between a conscious agent's report on his experience of relative phenomena and that of a philosophical zombie's, and neither that of an AI. This gives me no reason to believe a human' and a potential advanced AI 's consciousness has to be of a different class.
It’s true, Thanks
Dear professor Searle, I want to bring a small correction. Consciousness is a dynamic process. It is not equivalent to a state a matter like H2O being liquid when the motion of molecule is set to a very narrow range of 273 to 373 Kelvin.
Even if you don't say anything like that, I will add that consciousness is not "Energy" like many new age people say, before jumping to dream about the pseudo-science of UFOs and magic crystals.
Consciousness is the effect of exchanging information between different parts of the brain. It is the song of millions of neurons firing together. An printed picture on a desk is a dead memory. The live stream of a camera in the baby room is a dynamic process. It is live as long as the stream of binary bit or analog wave keep moving from the camera to the monitor. When you remove electricity or cut the wire or destroy the antenna, the monitor revert to it's natural state of showing nothing live, just dead random noise or a meaningless blue screen.
If we would keep the H2O molecules for comparing to consciousness, we would need to look at the Bellagio fountain in Las Vegas, for example, where the liquid is dancing in suggestive way.
Actually, there is no agreed upon theory of what consciousness is: plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
Plus, I take you aren't that familiar with representational theories of consciousness? plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-representational/
consciousness the result of synaptic activity, all neurobiologists agree on this
Could you provide a source then, please?
any neurobiology textbook? lmao
Though I doubt a philosophy student can process neurobiology textbooks
The computer analogy for how the mind works is not telling us what the mind is, but it gives us an understanding of what the mind does. It's a metaphor. The neural network is a good analogy for the underlying structure of the universe.
39:25 "If you could find the point, where the brain makes up its mind - I speak metaphorically here..." Well, maybe its not so metaphorically after all, maybe thats just it.
"Consciousness does exist and reflects by means of behaviour that's reflects human psychology in different reflux actions it's act as computer program that's unconsciously leads by brain 🧠 description " Shan Xehra
For the same reasons there is no science of ethics, of law/justice, of story telling, raising children, mentoring, teaching, discourse, logic, etc.. there is no science of consciousness. Science is a 3rd person perspective of the world while consciousness is a 1st person perspective. It would be a paradox to explain a first person experience, in 3rd person. That would be telling you that you are in pain regardless of your experience of being in pain or not. I do not have the authority nor the experience of your experience to say you are in pain. It's absurd. In the same way, it is absurd to let a 3rd person perspective explain a phenomenon it has no access to. All science is doing is playing ping pong with an invisible player (the influence/reaction consciousness has in contact with the world).
11.15......Great.....so pain behaviour can be faked therefore the pain isn't the same as the behaviour. But try feeling pain without the changed brain state! You can't, and that is a real difficulty for his argument that our consciousness has primary executive control. In fact, you can manipulate brain states using drugs or electricity and get all manner of weird effects on conscious experience that cannot be experienced independently of the external physical change. He needs to give an account of how that works.
How to investigate a computer program? You only have a stethoscope. You listen to the bits. How will you ever know the pleasure you might get when receiving your salary.
What does Searle mean when he says that Descartes 'told us' about the soul? Everyone else says Descartes put us on a new footing, and took the soul out of the psuki, out of the pathe, out of what governs but is not identical to the concept of, eg, man. Searle means that is the crowning moment of that tradition?
He sounds and seems incompetent; when compared to serious thinkers, there seems to be no comparison.
The history is that with Descartes the human being is though as an accident of a Cartesian material world. Ergo, at best as emergence or in Comte as a function, but often simply as nothing, since there is no transcendence....
Searle reads Descartes as adopting dualism in order to synthesize two competing views. The body is a manifestation of a mechanistic view of the world. The body is a mechanism, within the universal mechanism. However Descartes said the mind is a manifestation of the *soul*. This allowed Descartes to keep the door open to God in an otherwise mechanistic universe.
As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says
"In the Treatise of man, Descartes did not describe man, but a kind of conceptual models of man, namely creatures, created by God, which consist of two ingredients, a body and a soul. “These men will be composed, as we are, of a soul and a body."
and
"Descartes' ontological (or a priori) argument is both one of the most fascinating and poorly understood aspects of his philosophy. Fascination with the argument stems from the effort to prove God's existence from simple but powerful premises."
See also:, Descartes. The passions of the soul (1649).
Searle is one of the only modern thinkers worth listening to. He is perhaps the greatest thinker of the 20th Century, at least in the English speaking world.
@@jayarava
I'd like to be knowledgeable on philosophy.
@@jayarava Thank You
Jayarava Attwood Searle is not even close to being the only philosopher of the modern world worth listening to.
Seems wrong already by 9:00. The claim isn't that there can be no science of consciousness, the claim is that it is possible that there cannot be a *complete* (as in complete explanation) empirical science of consciousness. Correlations require correlates (from the work of Peter Sjöstedt-H), so how can you get all correlates sufficiently clear from subjective states, such that these can be correlated to physical processes? [Edit] He skirts around correlates later (while claiming this will be "the answer"), showing how they can *aid* in the understanding consciousness, but this approach also reveals that some kinds of consciousness will forever be outside of these correlations: th-cam.com/video/oZ3Z-Y99wW0/w-d-xo.html No FULL scientific explanation of consciousness will ever be possible, apparently, using this method.
That said, lot of other great points here.
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
*The 'Problem of Consciousness' is a fallacy. All contradictions and incompatibilities arise from the denial of 'Consciousness' as a separate Entity.*
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Stu Mas Quite the contrary. Consider the following inconsistency: if consciousness is a seperate entity, as you put it, why is it that destruction of particular parts of the physical brain inexorably results in a corresponding loss in a certain quality of consciousness? It is very easy to merely state a problem as being seperate from others because then you do not have to worry about unification between disciplines.
substantive choice for God's federal hegemony of free will kingdom
Just to play the devil advocate: Is it possible to not be sure if we are conscious? Did I dream about my friend having a car accident or is it real, somebody told me while I was still asleep? I will not be sure until I talk to that friend or somebody close to him/her and confirm that he/she is at the hospital or say no, it never occurred.
I find a lot of intellectual confusion in this talk!!!
Schoolboy error in definition....'until you become unconscious'
Be careful and listen to his arguments very attentively. This man makes several logical fallacies, i.e @ the 17 min mark when he uses the physiological description of consciousness as a "different level of understanding" to describing consciousness as a simple intention/action sequence in the brain. The problem with this is, you assume the "intention" of raising your arms can be reduced to physiological processes, an inference that is faulty because scientifically has no basis. Yes there are parts of the brain the fire before you move but to say that is equal to intention is to suggest, conscious intention is the same as the neurological process that occur, which is entirely unproven. The other problem you have is that conscious states do not always produce the same neurological firings, and this is evident from scientific literature.
There were more logical fallacies that I don't feel the need to explain but one which is quite disturbing is the comparison to water. I mean really? There is absolutely no element of consciousness even the least bit in water as resides in each one of us. Stop playing games. It's silly
He doesn't know how to pronounce VanGogh! (i.e. like an American)
+SteveRunciman No he pronounces it much more like the correct Dutch way: 'gock' not 'go'
what can possibly teach and KNOW Searle and the like about consciousness as opposed to a meager tibetan monk or a taoist from the deep plains of Mongolia??? He is a well fed bourgeois professor, who by the way became famous because he is an american, hell yes I agree to that but that he or anyone like he knows one shit about the problem of consciousness I am sorry I can't buy this rubbish.
The Naked Brain
I agree. He at least knows the game is up for academia on scientific materialism and he wants to protect their empty resume on consciousness.
This is one of the dumbest comments I've seen in a long time. You have to be a daoist monk in Tibet to know about consciousness? Yeah, stick with that buddy. Have fun "learning about consciousness".
Why your explanation
too long didn't watch;
If consciousness is a biological phenomenon - then who cares?
Well presumably the billions of people who experience it every single day and have done for their entire lives. You people are so dogmatic
This man talks about a laymans definition of consciousness. This is way beyond his understanding. He´s probably too old a researcher in this field. Consciousness is probably an illusion that the mind constructs. Consciousness is as best described as awareness on an multidimensional way witch means that is a universe of it´s own. Consciousness is like a friend out there parrallell to me.