I really cannot think of a better interviewer...? Not only teasing out all the most important questions from the interviewee, but always contributing to the topic in hand and taking the interview to another level. Just brilliant. Thanks for sharing.
Funnysterste Witty comment, so thumbs up, but a bit harsh...I hardly think Raymond Tallis could realistically be considered an 'intellectual lightweight'?
You cannot disagree with an idea without saying clearly the reason why you disagree. I think we are our brains. What we need to upload is not the information, but rather the instructions to exactly replicate our brains, which is also a kind of information. The disagreement was more semantic than essential.
What makes humans "human" is deeply rooted in our biology. The way our minds work is so deeply intertwined with the way our bodies work and the way we evolved as biological organisms.
The problem I have with all of this is where would you put an input and output to download the information needed to produce consciousness in a machine ? To me, even if it where possible, it would still be just a copy of a person and not the real person itself.
Tallis does not seem to be a materialist. But uploading to a different medium seems complicated even if you are and requires a reproduction of brain (and body) hardware to run/"decode" its software. Discussing a sufficiently 1:1 copy in the exact same medium might be more natural. If you teleported someone, would a copy emerge at the other end? What if you didn't disassemble the original? If you teleported yourself, i.e. your matter and its states, would you experience self at the other end(s) or at the source - and why? What if you gradually reduced the teleportation distance to infinitesimal distances? Aren't we then in fact "teleported" through space at each point in time, would it not imply that we are copies all the time and that the continuity of our short term memory maintains coherent experience of consciousness?
If there is something like a soul in a dualistic way, which seems plausible again (long time not), than this whole idea of uploading your consciousness is impossible. Maybe you want to interview Tom Campbell? I would like to see how he stands against your questions.
Let's assume that neuroscience has definitively proven that consciousness, and every other function of the brain that contributes to person hood, is reducible to information processing. Let's also assume that technology is at a point where the mind can be virtually recreated on a nonbiological substrate. How could we ever know whether the subject simply died in the transformation process, and the virtual copy began its existance? Of course the copy would say that the process was a success, but how would it know?
One of the best engagements I have ever seen on Closer to Truth! Transhumanists assume that the mind is the brain, and from this the whole of their endeavour and project follow. I agree entirely with Tallis's views, but equally Tallis himself, if not mistaken, would never accept that he is a dualist. Pay though close attention to Tallis's objections here, and dualism (ultimately irreducibility of consciousness to matter) is, in all but Tallis himself overtly accepting this, what Tallis subscribes to. That is because inescapably, the question of consciousness finally comes down to whether it is or it is not material.
there is no you, and there is no me! There are just phenomena appearing. The sight of a computer screen, a fleeting thought, the smell of a room, a sense of being a separate self looking out of your eyes, a sense that time is real... al just phenomena arising out of nothing, for no reason, for no observer. To be clear: the sense that you are an observer "receiving" reality is itself just another phenomena, like the chair, or the apple, or a thought.
I think Kuhn sees consciousness as a single thing in the brain that emerges out of it and propels our experience through time. Tallis is saying no consciousness flashes in and out of existence randomly throughout the brain and at and given time we do not know where it is except for our subjective experience saying ... here I am.
What a great talk... love hearing the two points of view. Ultimately for me it boils down to; If the brain is a physical biological machine then anything that it has and is should be replicable by the physical world. If it’s not then ... the question is from where is the ‘not’ coming from and how is it interacting with the physical world??
Interesting, but ultimately useless in that we have no idea (none whatsoever) as to what consciousness itself actually is. Personally, I believe in the soul (For a number of good reasons) which is immaterial and therefore negates the whole concept.
@@Random-rs9bl Why would he need to answer that? Did he make the claim that the immaterial aspects of our mental life are independent of the material ones? More importantly does any notable defender of dualism make that claim?
"Uploading" is bullshit. Robert isn't listening to Mr. Tallis. Tallis says he doesn't believe conscoiusness or mind is essentially made up of information, but Robert goes on and on about the same thing. BTW, Robert says "a person's memories can be captured," How exactly can that be done? Captured where and how does one verify the guy's memories are there in fact?
Raymond Tallis makes points that badly need to be heard in the great roaring ocean of scientism. In particular, comes this fact: physicalists will often use such words as 'information', 'encoded', and 'emerge', but while (if they are to remain consistent with their physicalism) they are only entitled to use them in a very thinned-out sense (as Shannon & Weaver did with 'information') which cannot deliver a mind, they often want to retain many of the goods of the mind that only a much broader sense of those words can purchase. They want to _explain_ the conscious mind as we understand it. The conscious mind is not just a thing, or a state of a thing, or a process going on in a thing (such as could - in principle at least - be downloaded). This is a major category error. It is essentially something already joined to its environment, history, relationships and body. One cannot understand the mind _in absentia_ from all this. Memory, for instance, is not just apprehending (somehow) a present internal state, it is for the mind already to be in intrinsic (if not flawless) relationship with its past. Thus, downloading the brain's 'information' (which must be understood in the thinned out sense) would be insufficient for the continued life of the existing mind. One would have also to download the whole of reality together with the mind's existing relationships with that reality - or rather, one would have to _replicate_ all that is there already. Understood in the richer sense of 'information' that _can_ (in part, at least) be used to construct a mind, alas, is just the kind of understanding that cannot be expressed in terms used to describe physical things and processes. The hidden question here, of course, is whether one can buy into mind (in the proper full sense of the word) and still remain a materialist. Tallis tends, if rather deftly, just to hop over this question. The eliminative materialists (so called) have the right idea, I fancy - just 'nuke' to obliteration such things as consciousness, freedom and self on the grounds ta they cannot be fitted into the conceptual framework to which the physicalist is entitled. There's only one crucial trick about pulling off that one - living life while simultaneously deluding oneself that one really means it. Any takers? The whole notion of downloading immortality falls because of all this, and it falls not merely into impossibility but into utter incoherence.
You're making the false assumption that uploading necessarily refers to reproducing a disembodied environmentless mind in software. In reality the kind of uploading that researchers in neuro-physics of consciousness actually talk about is replacing brains by use of behaviorally bio-identical synthetic neurons, whether that is parts of brains in the near term (ie Cortical prosthesis) or whole brains in the long term. You'll still get to continue living in your body and in this same physical world post "upload." Software minds are much more speculative and far off even if they aren't impossible. But nobody in industry, academia, or private research is even looking into or talking about software consciousness seriously when nanoscale functionally bio-identical memristor cortical neurons already exist. (Read the study published in Nature titled "Biologically plausible and scalable VO2 active memristor neurons" for more information on what researchers are actually taking seriously.)
@@markschmidty You make an essential point. The kind of embodiment and placing in which the download was implemented would be crucial to the question of whether the resulting entity (RE) had a mind. However, RE would not be a human being. RE would not have the same physiological needs as me. Its capacities and potentialities could be somewhat different to mine. As a result RE's psychology would be different. In view of this, I think it would be presumptive to say that RE would be ME, going on living. What would live would be RE, equipped with my memories. Good for RE (maybe) but bad news for me. Theo.
@@theophilus749A shift in psychology as a result of being imortal is sure to happen. But that doesn't make a replcation any less you than the person you are now is to the psychologically and physiologicalcally different prepubescent child you were thousands(?) of nights of unconscious sleep and tens(?) of complete replacements of every atom in your body ago.
@@theophilus749 Human is just another a sound we make with our mouths that we use to refers to a category invented by the mind. They will for sure be different but some people will likely still put them in the human category. Personally I think we'll all have brains augmented by machine consciousness implants long before then anyway. So the category of "human" is likely to broaden in a gradual way which will eventually include humans whose embodiment is entirely non-biological.
@@theophilus749 An iPhone has more in common with a laptop with Skype than it does with anything called a phone 40 years ago. Categories change over time to include oddities that people of the past never dreamed they would.
Interesting conversation, two brains, minds, debating what they are... and whether uploading themselves onto a computer chip or whatever, is possible..... This is deeper than quantum mechanics and or understanding the Higgs boson particle..... We need Neil DeGrasse Tyson in on this one... Neil is one smart Dude.
You can have a snapshot of a flying cannonball and if you have all necessary data, you can determine where the cannonball was shot from and where it will land. The idea is, that you can do exactly the same with a snapshot of a brain... it is just much more complicated. Maybe it is too complicated to be ever achieved, but in principle everything is physics.
Funnysterste This is where the disagreement is. You're making the assumption that consciousness is reducible to physics. The non-materialist philosophers such as the one in this video would argue that you're trying to compare two qualitatively different things. There's no actual reason to assume the mind is reducible to mere physics and there are many reasons as to why it is not.
@@Funnysterste I'm not sure what you're asking. Do you mean, what is the mind reducible to, if not physics? If so, my answer is: nothing. The mind is the mind. It cannot be reduced to anything physical. Similarly, the same can be said for abstract objects or universals. Mathematical values like numbers cannot be reduced to physics. The concept of triangularity also cannot be reduced. However, the mind is unique in that it depends on the physical. Tallis said it best in the video: "The brain is necessary for the mind, but it isn't sufficient."
@@Funnysterste "Does your mind emerge from your brain?" This is a highly controversial question. We first have to ask ourselves what we mean by 'emerge.' And that creates even more difficult questions. So rather than go down that road I'll just be honest and say I really don't know. I have some conjectures, but they're only that. What I am confident of is that both dualism and strict materialism are false based solely on principle, not evidence (for which there can be none, due to the qualitative divide between the immaterial mind and the material brain). But where does emergence fall within the dualist/materialist spectrum? That's really difficult to say. "Is your brain a physical thing?" Yes, of course. But again, this only shows that there is a significant interaction between the physical and the mental. The fact that the brain is physical in no way implies that the physical *causes* the mental. "Is the concept of triangularity in your brain?" Absolutely not. No amount of digging around in a mushy brain are you going to find 'the concept of triangularity' or 'redness' or 'blueness' or any other purely mental experience. These things can only exist in the mind and the fact that we can see neural correlation with mental states such as these again only shows interaction and dependency, but *not* causal explanation.
Think about it: Robert says Mr. Tallis believes "all this" is generated by physical mechanisms, therefore it is ultimately capturable. Tallis never says that, and he clarifies. Is Robert trying to learn something, or is he trying to push his own opinion forward? I get the sense that Robert leans towards the position of a materialistic explanation for consciousness, and considering how hard the so called "Hard Problem" is, isn't it just too soon to try and pick parties?
It's quite simple, actually: The mere knowledge of not being in a biological body, regardless of what that means, is enough to sabotage the notion that the entire human being, and not a robot, is there in the machine / computer. To put it clearly - the original body has certain knowledge that it is not uploaded - the uploaded version of me, will not have that knowledge - hence, they are not identical. That's all we need to debunk the notion of equivalence.
Is this a similar problem as the following one: if we replicate the full DNA profile of an ancient animal from it's frozen state, then shall we be able to re-create this animal? The answer is no, because we don't have the decoding mechanism which is in the mother's body.
Funny how they wen't all this time talking about consciousness and decoding/encoding information without mentioning the sensory apparatus and the activity taking place in this domain.
First of all Raymond Tallis suggests that the mind is constantly changing which it is and you can only get a snapshot and then later on He suggests the word representation is anthropomorphic and then claims his recollection are memory of tens time is accurate how could that be if the mind is constantly changing
Uploading” may be difficult to achieve, because the process may prove that it cannot be continuous (from organic to silicon) and we may end up with two selves (one in the hard drive and one in the brain). But maybe the right question is: Is it theoretically possible to connect the brain to a computer? And when connected can we move our awareness into cyberspace?
The moment of recognising a pattern.. an EUREKA moment of insight is consciousness. So if patterns are to be discovered or recognised you need consciousness. So are patterns an objective or subjective thing?!
Joseph Logsdon I can’t make an argument against a tautology. The claim that “[a clone] wouldn’t be you” appears to just be true by definition. What do you actually mean by it? Does it have any consequences?
Seems that writer of the TV series "Westworld" agrees with R. Taiĺs. On the other hand, Elves from my psychedelics' experiences precisely explained these questions to me many times, but it's beyond possible for me to explain it in English and common state of mind. Last evening, Venus was just about to dive behind the hill and it was so bright I thought for a second that Betelgeuse went off 😳 🤣.
But Raymond's in a lot of trouble. What now? Are all processes and statuses also physical in the brain? Or if they are not, then say how they can interact with the physical structure of the neurons.
The real test would be to ask someone who has already had their mind copied and "uploaded" if they believe they would continue to exist if they shoot themselves in the head. Or like the transporters in Star Trek: If someone is told that they have been "transported" and they (an exact "clone") are alive and well at the other end, but the system malfunctioned and didn't (yet) destroy the original, would they agree that they will continue to exist after they (the original) are physically destroyed?
Some things are not meant to be and this appears to be one of them. There is the joke about the brain transplant bank... whereby there were to brains available, one Jewish and one Irish. The Jewish brain was very reasonably priced... whereas the Irish brain was terribly expensive... simply because it was virtually unused. An Irishman would likely tell it as a polish joke.
Minds with tensed time? Come on! The history of the brain exists in the instant you observe it. The history of a table, maybe a little scratched and a little faded, is the table I observe right now no matter when the scratch or the fading of the paint first occurred. A very anthropomorphic approach to a human brain from a neuroscientist. I bet he is religious. The next thing he is going to say is that we have souls and when we die we go to paradise
Listening to philosophers like him (he's also a doctor) is a waste of time to me. They always want to take an engineering problem (which is crazy complicated) and turn it into a mystical, woo-woo, spiritual thing. It's not (again imo). Downloading a mind is just scanning every atom and then storing all that information on a computer. You're not playing god or saying your consciousness isn't complete unless you can scan the entire universe for entangled particles of your thinking. I'm gonna watch someone who is a physicist and doesn't make it a nutty discussion and understand you're just making a digital copy of yourself. If we humans don't blow ourselves up first, making copies of yourself will happen - in America, China, India... somewhere.
Tallis is stuck vomiting repetitive phrases about time and information, he doesn't seem to engage with realistic or nuanced models of mind-uploading .... And 11:11 "the brain is not a sufficient condition" he gives it away: he's believes in something outside of the brain, maybe a soul! Good luck defending that to a scientist
I think that the interviewer completely failed to understand what the interviewee was saying-he made perfect sense to me. Seems like the interviewer just wants to believe in human immortality
Raymond's central point is very murky. He argues that the central in principle problem is that you cannot simply copy a brain A in state S at t1, and expect the copy B, to have all the information that A has accrued over time. This is seems false. If brain B is in exactly the same state as brain A was at t1, then how could brain A have any more information than brain B? Think like this: If the back-up of your files in the cloud, is updated, then it has all the information that you have in your laptop, regardless of the copy in the cloud being a "snapshot" of something that took time and process to create on your laptop. - The only way to make Raymond's point is if you already think that we are essentially non-physical beings. (Even supervenience property dualism would not be dualist enough.) So, in some sense, rather than make that central point, he should just come out at as a Cartesian dualist. Not that there is anything wrong about that (as Seinfeld would say), besides having to deal with the problem of mind-body interaction.
These guys have never heard the voice of God ( invisible consciousness ) with a voice that can speak directly into the individual consciousness ( created man ). Without hearing God's voice, it's impossible for liars like the people in these video's to tell you how we're created within God. Man and God are the same thing and don't need bodies to experience visible worlds. You will learn that in the next generation of the programmed simulation.
@DigitalDanA liar is a conscious being who has no idea how life began and then tries to explain it. In other words, all the inhabitants on Earth who believe they are real objects made out of real material things are liars. We only exist as thoughts converted into what appears to be real bodies and the world's they're involved in. thanks
@DigitalDan It's impossible for me, the Creator, to lie but the visible human typing this sentence will perish like all the other inhabitants on this visible planet which is also created from thoughts.
@DigitalDanThe world that you observe forms in your mind according to how you were programmed by the Creator, the consciousness where all thoughts began.
@DigitalDan I know exactly who I am (consciousness called God) and how my body is visibly formed for me to observe. We don't need a body to see other images. Just ask those people who have a near death experience.
@DigitalDan I am an individual created consciousness within the total consciousness called our Creator. You do not know the Creator but you will hear it's voice in the next generation of the many worlds we will experience. The voice will be each individual created consciousness' teacher of the new language we will all understand. We will never be confused about who we are and how we're created in the next generation.
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I really cannot think of a better interviewer...? Not only teasing out all the most important questions from the interviewee, but always contributing to the topic in hand and taking the interview to another level. Just brilliant. Thanks for sharing.
I have the feeling, the interviewee learned a big deal about the topic during this interview.
Funnysterste Witty comment, so thumbs up, but a bit harsh...I hardly think Raymond Tallis could realistically be considered an 'intellectual lightweight'?
But why so few views.. so frustraiting to see with such tallent he has.
I totally agree!!
I think this was my favorite CTT clip ever (and I've watched a lot). Brilliant conversation. These two are amazing together.
great interaction isnt it
You cannot disagree with an idea without saying clearly the reason why you disagree. I think we are our brains. What we need to upload is not the information, but rather the instructions to exactly replicate our brains, which is also a kind of information. The disagreement was more semantic than essential.
What makes humans "human" is deeply rooted in our biology. The way our minds work is so deeply intertwined with the way our bodies work and the way we evolved as biological organisms.
The problem I have with all of this is where would you put an input and output to download the information needed to produce consciousness in a machine ?
To me, even if it where possible, it would still be just a copy of a person and not the real person itself.
Thats a real paradox which even the transhumanists admit would be difficult to solve
Define a real person....LOL
Tallis does not seem to be a materialist. But uploading to a different medium seems complicated even if you are and requires a reproduction of brain (and body) hardware to run/"decode" its software. Discussing a sufficiently 1:1 copy in the exact same medium might be more natural. If you teleported someone, would a copy emerge at the other end? What if you didn't disassemble the original? If you teleported yourself, i.e. your matter and its states, would you experience self at the other end(s) or at the source - and why? What if you gradually reduced the teleportation distance to infinitesimal distances? Aren't we then in fact "teleported" through space at each point in time, would it not imply that we are copies all the time and that the continuity of our short term memory maintains coherent experience of consciousness?
Yes
Mark Twain is still alive and well, although I never personally knew him.
Very nice conversation
If there is something like a soul in a dualistic way, which seems plausible again (long time not), than this whole idea of uploading your consciousness is impossible. Maybe you want to interview Tom Campbell? I would like to see how he stands against your questions.
Haha! Funny how we're all into the same stuff! 😂
Good interview....Good logic!!......I believe Raymond is right
Let's assume that neuroscience has definitively proven that consciousness, and every other function of the brain that contributes to person hood, is reducible to information processing. Let's also assume that technology is at a point where the mind can be virtually recreated on a nonbiological substrate.
How could we ever know whether the subject simply died in the transformation process, and the virtual copy began its existance? Of course the copy would say that the process was a success, but how would it know?
One of the best engagements I have ever seen on Closer to Truth!
Transhumanists assume that the mind is the brain, and from this the whole of their endeavour and project follow. I agree entirely with Tallis's views, but equally Tallis himself, if not mistaken, would never accept that he is a dualist. Pay though close attention to Tallis's objections here, and dualism (ultimately irreducibility of consciousness to matter) is, in all but Tallis himself overtly accepting this, what Tallis subscribes to. That is because inescapably, the question of consciousness finally comes down to whether it is or it is not material.
there is no consciousness, there are just phenomna arising from nothing for no reason
@@leonwillett4645 of course, it's not really yourself who's saying that.. it's the phenomena
right! :) @@ktheodor3968
@@leonwillett4645 what is? the phenomenon (i.e., you) or me?
there is no you, and there is no me! There are just phenomena appearing. The sight of a computer screen, a fleeting thought, the smell of a room, a sense of being a separate self looking out of your eyes, a sense that time is real... al just phenomena arising out of nothing, for no reason, for no observer. To be clear: the sense that you are an observer "receiving" reality is itself just another phenomena, like the chair, or the apple, or a thought.
I think Kuhn sees consciousness as a single thing in the brain that emerges out of it and propels our experience through time. Tallis is saying no consciousness flashes in and out of existence randomly throughout the brain and at and given time we do not know where it is except for our subjective experience saying ... here I am.
What a great talk... love hearing the two points of view.
Ultimately for me it boils down to;
If the brain is a physical biological machine then anything that it has and is should be replicable by the physical world.
If it’s not then ... the question is from where is the ‘not’ coming from and how is it interacting with the physical world??
Correct, but we are probably a biological machine so the interviewed guy is wrong
Interesting, but ultimately useless in that we have no idea (none whatsoever) as to what consciousness itself actually is.
Personally, I believe in the soul (For a number of good reasons) which is immaterial and therefore negates the whole concept.
@Lightbringer hahaha good one...he will never answer that...
@@Random-rs9bl Why would he need to answer that? Did he make the claim that the immaterial aspects of our mental life are independent of the material ones? More importantly does any notable defender of dualism make that claim?
"Uploading" is bullshit. Robert isn't listening to Mr. Tallis. Tallis says he doesn't believe conscoiusness or mind is essentially made up of information, but Robert goes on and on about the same thing. BTW, Robert says "a person's memories can be captured," How exactly can that be done? Captured where and how does one verify the guy's memories are there in fact?
Raymond Tallis makes points that badly need to be heard in the great roaring ocean of scientism. In particular, comes this fact: physicalists will often use such words as 'information', 'encoded', and 'emerge', but while (if they are to remain consistent with their physicalism) they are only entitled to use them in a very thinned-out sense (as Shannon & Weaver did with 'information') which cannot deliver a mind, they often want to retain many of the goods of the mind that only a much broader sense of those words can purchase. They want to _explain_ the conscious mind as we understand it. The conscious mind is not just a thing, or a state of a thing, or a process going on in a thing (such as could - in principle at least - be downloaded). This is a major category error. It is essentially something already joined to its environment, history, relationships and body. One cannot understand the mind _in absentia_ from all this. Memory, for instance, is not just apprehending (somehow) a present internal state, it is for the mind already to be in intrinsic (if not flawless) relationship with its past.
Thus, downloading the brain's 'information' (which must be understood in the thinned out sense) would be insufficient for the continued life of the existing mind. One would have also to download the whole of reality together with the mind's existing relationships with that reality - or rather, one would have to _replicate_ all that is there already. Understood in the richer sense of 'information' that _can_ (in part, at least) be used to construct a mind, alas, is just the kind of understanding that cannot be expressed in terms used to describe physical things and processes.
The hidden question here, of course, is whether one can buy into mind (in the proper full sense of the word) and still remain a materialist. Tallis tends, if rather deftly, just to hop over this question. The eliminative materialists (so called) have the right idea, I fancy - just 'nuke' to obliteration such things as consciousness, freedom and self on the grounds ta they cannot be fitted into the conceptual framework to which the physicalist is entitled. There's only one crucial trick about pulling off that one - living life while simultaneously deluding oneself that one really means it. Any takers?
The whole notion of downloading immortality falls because of all this, and it falls not merely into impossibility but into utter incoherence.
You're making the false assumption that uploading necessarily refers to reproducing a disembodied environmentless mind in software. In reality the kind of uploading that researchers in neuro-physics of consciousness actually talk about is replacing brains by use of behaviorally bio-identical synthetic neurons, whether that is parts of brains in the near term (ie Cortical prosthesis) or whole brains in the long term. You'll still get to continue living in your body and in this same physical world post "upload."
Software minds are much more speculative and far off even if they aren't impossible. But nobody in industry, academia, or private research is even looking into or talking about software consciousness seriously when nanoscale functionally bio-identical memristor cortical neurons already exist. (Read the study published in Nature titled "Biologically plausible and scalable VO2 active memristor neurons" for more information on what researchers are actually taking seriously.)
@@markschmidty
You make an essential point. The kind of embodiment and placing in which the download was implemented would be crucial to the question of whether the resulting entity (RE) had a mind.
However, RE would not be a human being. RE would not have the same physiological needs as me. Its capacities and potentialities could be somewhat different to mine. As a result RE's psychology would be different.
In view of this, I think it would be presumptive to say that RE would be ME, going on living. What would live would be RE, equipped with my memories. Good for RE (maybe) but bad news for me. Theo.
@@theophilus749A shift in psychology as a result of being imortal is sure to happen. But that doesn't make a replcation any less you than the person you are now is to the psychologically and physiologicalcally different prepubescent child you were thousands(?) of nights of unconscious sleep and tens(?) of complete replacements of every atom in your body ago.
@@theophilus749 Human is just another a sound we make with our mouths that we use to refers to a category invented by the mind. They will for sure be different but some people will likely still put them in the human category.
Personally I think we'll all have brains augmented by machine consciousness implants long before then anyway. So the category of "human" is likely to broaden in a gradual way which will eventually include humans whose embodiment is entirely non-biological.
@@theophilus749 An iPhone has more in common with a laptop with Skype than it does with anything called a phone 40 years ago. Categories change over time to include oddities that people of the past never dreamed they would.
Interesting conversation, two brains, minds, debating what they are... and whether uploading themselves onto a computer chip or whatever, is possible..... This is deeper than quantum mechanics and or understanding the Higgs boson particle..... We need Neil DeGrasse Tyson in on this one... Neil is one smart Dude.
You can have a snapshot of a flying cannonball and if you have all necessary data, you can determine where the cannonball was shot from and where it will land. The idea is, that you can do exactly the same with a snapshot of a brain... it is just much more complicated. Maybe it is too complicated to be ever achieved, but in principle everything is physics.
Funnysterste This is where the disagreement is. You're making the assumption that consciousness is reducible to physics. The non-materialist philosophers such as the one in this video would argue that you're trying to compare two qualitatively different things. There's no actual reason to assume the mind is reducible to mere physics and there are many reasons as to why it is not.
@@jrodtriathlete Ok, if you can not reduce the mind to its physics, then what else is there that is not physics? Can you name it?
@@Funnysterste I'm not sure what you're asking. Do you mean, what is the mind reducible to, if not physics? If so, my answer is: nothing. The mind is the mind. It cannot be reduced to anything physical. Similarly, the same can be said for abstract objects or universals. Mathematical values like numbers cannot be reduced to physics. The concept of triangularity also cannot be reduced.
However, the mind is unique in that it depends on the physical. Tallis said it best in the video: "The brain is necessary for the mind, but it isn't sufficient."
@@jrodtriathlete Does your mind emerge from your brain? Is your brain a physical thing? Is the concept of triangularity in your brain?
@@Funnysterste "Does your mind emerge from your brain?" This is a highly controversial question. We first have to ask ourselves what we mean by 'emerge.' And that creates even more difficult questions. So rather than go down that road I'll just be honest and say I really don't know. I have some conjectures, but they're only that. What I am confident of is that both dualism and strict materialism are false based solely on principle, not evidence (for which there can be none, due to the qualitative divide between the immaterial mind and the material brain). But where does emergence fall within the dualist/materialist spectrum? That's really difficult to say.
"Is your brain a physical thing?" Yes, of course. But again, this only shows that there is a significant interaction between the physical and the mental. The fact that the brain is physical in no way implies that the physical *causes* the mental.
"Is the concept of triangularity in your brain?" Absolutely not. No amount of digging around in a mushy brain are you going to find 'the concept of triangularity' or 'redness' or 'blueness' or any other purely mental experience. These things can only exist in the mind and the fact that we can see neural correlation with mental states such as these again only shows interaction and dependency, but *not* causal explanation.
A topic that Lawrence knows vastly more about than his interviewees.
Uploading your first person consciousness would only be a copy of you, it wouldn't be "you," any.more than an.identical twin would be "you."
please talk with bernardo kastrup on the same topic and you will get fascinating answers
Or first class lies.
I agree... Very well put...
I wonder...what Dean Radin would say.
That was fantastic, well done both..
Every Alice needs her Bob.
Was waiting for someone to throw the first 👊 "you think your better than me" 😆
Think about it: Robert says Mr. Tallis believes "all this" is generated by physical mechanisms, therefore it is ultimately capturable. Tallis never says that, and he clarifies. Is Robert trying to learn something, or is he trying to push his own opinion forward?
I get the sense that Robert leans towards the position of a materialistic explanation for consciousness, and considering how hard the so called "Hard Problem" is, isn't it just too soon to try and pick parties?
Perpetual virtual torture..
Forced existence...
It's quite simple, actually: The mere knowledge of not being in a biological body, regardless of what that means, is enough to sabotage the notion that the entire human being, and not a robot, is there in the machine / computer. To put it clearly - the original body has certain knowledge that it is not uploaded - the uploaded version of me, will not have that knowledge - hence, they are not identical. That's all we need to debunk the notion of equivalence.
Is this a similar problem as the following one: if we replicate the full DNA profile of an ancient animal from it's frozen state, then shall we be able to re-create this animal? The answer is no, because we don't have the decoding mechanism which is in the mother's body.
Funny how they wen't all this time talking about consciousness and decoding/encoding information without mentioning the sensory apparatus and the activity taking place in this domain.
First of all Raymond Tallis suggests that the mind is constantly changing which it is and you can only get a snapshot and then later on He suggests the word representation is anthropomorphic and then claims his recollection are memory of tens time is accurate how could that be if the mind is constantly changing
Hahaha ikr
Please interview with Tom Chambell
Uploading” may be difficult to achieve, because the process may prove that it cannot be continuous (from organic to silicon) and we may end up with two selves (one in the hard drive and one in the brain). But maybe the right question is: Is it theoretically possible to connect the brain to a computer? And when connected can we move our awareness into cyberspace?
The moment of recognising a pattern.. an EUREKA moment of insight is consciousness.
So if patterns are to be discovered or recognised you need consciousness. So are patterns an objective or subjective thing?!
beautiful question.
But computers can also find patterns...are you implying they are also conscious, if so then consciousness can be captured eventually...
Nice paradox to finish with:
“Mind is intrinsically extended”
The "No-cloning theorem" may also support Raymond Tallis claims
True unfortunately he does not argument well his position
Please get Michael Graziano on here again! I can’t wait for his new book, “Rethinking Consciousness”.
Conscious awareness would have to duplicate sense memory and have peripherals to duplicate our sensory awareness - making more.
Nothing is predetermined in pure consciousness.
I agree with the guest that this is never gonna happen or better yet be successful
Bravo...
I don’t believe you can attain digital immortality. Your computerized identity would be a clone of you, but it would not be you.
Joseph Logsdon The typo in your first sentence poses a far more interesting question than your trivial definition in the second.
Murlur Everyone makes typos, even people without arguments, such as yourself.
If it's a perfect clone, how to tell the difference?
I like the Ship of Theseus thought experiment
Joseph Logsdon I can’t make an argument against a tautology. The claim that “[a clone] wouldn’t be you” appears to just be true by definition. What do you actually mean by it? Does it have any consequences?
@@Jopie65 how do you know your identical twin is not you?
why wouldn't they talk about the bodies and, say, embodied memories of an emotion..
Mr. Tallis should read the Dust Theory for some new ideas, but I applaud him for standing his ground. ;-)
But he's crushing Kuhn.
@@ConservativeAnthem nope
@@Random-rs9bl Expound.
Seems that writer of the TV series "Westworld" agrees with R. Taiĺs.
On the other hand, Elves from my psychedelics' experiences precisely explained these questions to me many times, but it's beyond possible for me to explain it in English and common state of mind.
Last evening, Venus was just about to dive behind the hill and it was so bright I thought for a second that Betelgeuse went off 😳 🤣.
But Raymond's in a lot of trouble.
What now? Are all processes and
statuses also physical in the brain?
Or if they are not, then say how they
can interact with the physical
structure of the neurons.
The real test would be to ask someone who has already had their mind copied and "uploaded" if they believe they would continue to exist if they shoot themselves in the head. Or like the transporters in Star Trek: If someone is told that they have been "transported" and they (an exact "clone") are alive and well at the other end, but the system malfunctioned and didn't (yet) destroy the original, would they agree that they will continue to exist after they (the original) are physically destroyed?
Some things are not meant to be and this appears to be one of them. There is the joke about the brain transplant bank... whereby there were to brains available, one Jewish and one Irish. The Jewish brain was very reasonably priced... whereas the Irish brain was terribly expensive... simply because it was virtually unused. An Irishman would likely tell it as a polish joke.
Interesting view that's all.I can't see the point of this discussion.
What about a virtual hell
The constant knocking is so distracting and annoying! Why dont they fix it...
So, Mr. Tallis has beaten the hell out of my mind.. I mean... Yeah.. he already knows what I mean... Lol
this dude is such a buzzkill
Who ever is banging in the background needs punishment
Minds with tensed time? Come on! The history of the brain exists in the instant you observe it. The history of a table, maybe a little scratched and a little faded, is the table I observe right now no matter when the scratch or the fading of the paint first occurred. A very anthropomorphic approach to a human brain from a neuroscientist. I bet he is religious. The next thing he is going to say is that we have souls and when we die we go to paradise
I agree...he is just doing mental gymnastics for no reason.....what a twat lol
Freeze the brain? lol
"If it's not physical then how is it interacting with us? " Wow. Lawrence destroyed him.
OMG, this guy just doesn't listen or is unwilling to consider any other ideas that are not his
Listening to philosophers like him (he's also a doctor) is a waste of time to me. They always want to take an engineering problem (which is crazy complicated) and turn it into a mystical, woo-woo, spiritual thing. It's not (again imo). Downloading a mind is just scanning every atom and then storing all that information on a computer. You're not playing god or saying your consciousness isn't complete unless you can scan the entire universe for entangled particles of your thinking. I'm gonna watch someone who is a physicist and doesn't make it a nutty discussion and understand you're just making a digital copy of yourself.
If we humans don't blow ourselves up first, making copies of yourself will happen - in America, China, India... somewhere.
Tallis is stuck vomiting repetitive phrases about time and information, he doesn't seem to engage with realistic or nuanced models of mind-uploading .... And 11:11 "the brain is not a sufficient condition" he gives it away: he's believes in something outside of the brain, maybe a soul! Good luck defending that to a scientist
maybe he means the whole body could possibly be sufficient?
I think that the interviewer completely failed to understand what the interviewee was saying-he made perfect sense to me. Seems like the interviewer just wants to believe in human immortality
I think they're both wrong
Raymond's central point is very murky. He argues that the central in principle problem is that you cannot simply copy a brain A in state S at t1, and expect the copy B, to have all the information that A has accrued over time. This is seems false. If brain B is in exactly the same state as brain A was at t1, then how could brain A have any more information than brain B? Think like this: If the back-up of your files in the cloud, is updated, then it has all the information that you have in your laptop, regardless of the copy in the cloud being a "snapshot" of something that took time and process to create on your laptop. - The only way to make Raymond's point is if you already think that we are essentially non-physical beings. (Even supervenience property dualism would not be dualist enough.) So, in some sense, rather than make that central point, he should just come out at as a Cartesian dualist. Not that there is anything wrong about that (as Seinfeld would say), besides having to deal with the problem of mind-body interaction.
For goodness sake get that irritating Mrs Overall and her mop out of the room!
More "deep" but stupid questions from Robert Lawrence Kuhn!!!
Don’t ever disparage the Kuhnster!
@@youguy9550 Except when he asks stupid questions!
These guys have never heard the voice of God ( invisible consciousness ) with a voice that can speak directly into the individual consciousness ( created man ). Without hearing God's voice, it's impossible for liars like the people in these video's to tell you how we're created within God. Man and God are the same thing and don't need bodies to experience visible worlds. You will learn that in the next generation of the programmed simulation.
@DigitalDanA liar is a conscious being who has no idea how life began and then tries to explain it. In other words, all the inhabitants on Earth who believe they are real objects made out of real material things are liars. We only exist as thoughts converted into what appears to be real bodies and the world's they're involved in. thanks
@DigitalDan It's impossible for me, the Creator, to lie but the visible human typing this sentence will perish like all the other inhabitants on this visible planet which is also created from thoughts.
@DigitalDanThe world that you observe forms in your mind according to how you were programmed by the Creator, the consciousness where all thoughts began.
@DigitalDan I know exactly who I am (consciousness called God) and how my body is visibly formed for me to observe. We don't need a body to see other images. Just ask those people who have a near death experience.
@DigitalDan I am an individual created consciousness within the total consciousness called our Creator. You do not know the Creator but you will hear it's voice in the next generation of the many worlds we will experience. The voice will be each individual created consciousness' teacher of the new language we will all understand. We will never be confused about who we are and how we're created in the next generation.