Consciousness is a mathematical pattern: Max Tegmark at TEDxCambridge 2014
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 มิ.ย. 2014
- As a physicist, Max Tegmark sees people as "food, rearranged." That makes his answer to complicated questions like "What is consciousness?" simple: It's just math. Why? Because it's the patterns, not the particles, that matter. Learn more about Max Tegmark at space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/mat... and TEDxCambridge at www.tedxcambridge.com.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.
I didn't kill that man you'r honor. I just rearranged his particles in an unfortunate pattern.
Complexology Who knows? It may be as simple as a recursive program. If a portion of our brain is destroyed, we can no longer feel a sense of purpose. And our brain is a bio-electro-machine at the micro level.
eric t But seriously. He makes a great point, in that if the mind doesn't exert force on physical particles, it shouldn't be considered to be anything more than convention. *However*, there is substantiated evidence to the contrary. Princeton's Engineering and Anomalies Research Lab, or PEAR -- now-defunct after decades of research -- ultimately concluded that the mind *does* exert statistical force upon REG's (quantum-based random event generators) and, although slight, is statistically significant. (They also concluded odds against chance for this data by a factor of one to a billion.) They concluded this suggests a definitive connection between consciousness and reality not explainable by any other natural process currently understood. Look it up -- I'm not shitting you. Princeton professors here. They've even written books about it.
wesman246 One possible explanation, the mind emanates a weak electric field, able to be picked up by the quantum field, purported at any distance according to quantum entanglement. Oh yes, there are things written by top professors that most people would shrug off as science fiction.
+Mick Mack
So basically, consciousness can arise from integrated quantum fields?
Q Who knows? I doubt we'll ever know, because we are a part of the cosmic mystery, and to solve ourselves would be like trying to look at electrons with photos. It can't be done.
I absolutely love the definition of consciousness as a "way information feels when it is being processed in certain complex ways".
+Nikolay Bobovnikov I absolutely agree with you! Наше сознание являеться всего лишь результатом воздействия скопления атомов (нашего мозга) на друг друга следуя определенным физическим законам. =)
+Nikolay Bobovnikov
"[consciousness is the] way information feels when it is being processed in certain complex ways"
Feeling is a property of consciousness. Here, consciousness is being defined by invoking a property of consciousness - 'feeling'. This is a circular definition. It is sort of like saying, "Feeling is the feeling that happens when information is processed in complex ways"
+gromby yes, it's a tautological cop out.
+gromby
I don't think you're doing justice to his definition, though. His main point is that consciousness arises from complex patterns of matter and energy. The concept of subjective experience as an emergent property of the brain molecules is more important than the quote about feelings.
+gromby
Exactly, circular definition, that is. There is an interesting idea in the Douglas Hofstadter's book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" - that consciousness arises where self reference phenomena takes place. Like, mirror can reflect other objects, but true magic happens when the mirror reflects itself :)
“Consciousness is simply the way information feels as it is being processed” - Max Tegmark
Wonderful
I know, right? smh
So what is feeling ...
it's simple man. check this out.
consciousness is just consciousnessing itself by consciounsings.
see?
The way information 'feels' to whom? Or to what? Doesn't this just require another layer of experience?
It really doesn't explain conciousness at all. The hard problem is WHY are we feeling the subjective experience of processing information, why are we not just mindless machines doing the processing?
He is somehow explaining how conciousness can co exist with the physical world, without it having to be a "paralel" reality... amazing and revealing!
Lol universe wouldn’t exist without consciousness
@@isubtothebest6020
Lol prove that.
@@isubtothebest6020 Yes, but only *for me* and that because
when I am not conscious I do not exist.
The biggest mystery of subjective concsiousness is "Does anyone but me have it" ??
+smyrnianlink I'm absolutely certain that my consciousness is not the only one . but I can't be certain that you are conscious . So I'll just accept that you are until you prove otherwise
+smyrnianlink YES, but you are linked to ALL things.. so as you grow your consciousness you realize that the true answer at a highest point of evolution is NO. The higher the frequency your consciousness, the more you can commune with other aspects and fractals of consciousness. But again. at the level the question was asked the answer is YES.
I'm not sure I have it.
Look in the mirror. What you see is an image of yourself, from a few nanoseconds ago. Now imagine a giant sci-fi mirror that is several light-years across and a few light-years away. For convenience, it's slightly curved so you can see yourself in it, except that you're looking several years into the past. Is the younger 'you' conscious? It's just a reflection, right? What if you don't recognise yourself and you think it's some other person? And what if some additional tricks or distortions, such as holograms, distract you from realising there is a mirror there at all?
Occam's razor suggests that those who physically look like us and behave like us and share our evolutionary lineage likely have analogous subjective experiences. The universe is lot of trouble to go to just to get to you in particular. ;)
Once in a dream; I was asking this old man "So the pattern of energy is matter?" After a pause he responded, "No, but the pattern of energy matters" Silly words.
Consciousness doesn't "go away" when you sleep. Deep sleep isn't the absence of consciousness, but the consciousness of absence.
How else would we know what woke us up OUT of deep sleep, unless we were conscious when we were IN deep sleep?
Pure consciousness is what witnesses our waking state, dream state, and deep-sleep state. It never goes away.
think of it as when your computer hibernates / shuts down at night and when you restart it again and it starts processing again.
@@zorashoes6482 a computer doesn't go into rem cycles and dream when it gets shut off
Dmt agrees
@@pedestrian_0 or does it...dun dun dunnnnnn
consciousness does go away in your brain when you sleep. You’re able to wake up if you hear a sound because of your subconscious.
"Consciousness is just the way information feels when it is being processed by .. particles moving in very special patterns."
The sentence I was waiting for ^
To me it's the sentence that terrifies me and takes all my motivation in life away... 😂
@@dr.tre90 Why? It means you will happen again eventually, so why not try to make the world a better place and hope that others will as well?
@@johnathanmartin1504 How does it mean I will happen again?
@@dr.tre90 For me at least, this is just such an amazing and mind blowing fact about our own existence, that I'm happy to be alive to learn about it.
@@dr.tre90 Because physical reality never does things in ones. We used to think our planet was the only one, the other planets were thought to be strange stars. Now we know there are countless other planets. We used to think our solar system was the only one, now we know there are countless others. We used to think our galaxy was the only one, now we know there are countless others. And currently, there are very good reasons to think our universe is not the only one, but that there an infinite number of parallel universes. This implies there are infinitely others with exact copies of you that will keep happening, which means your subjective experience gets repeated countless times in countless ways throughout physical reality. This actually gives the only solidly scientifically driven idea of surviving death in some sense. Because if this is true, and there are actually good scientific reasons to think so, death is only another dreamless sleep from which we keep awakening countlessly for eternity. There is no difference between the subjective experience of you right now and of other copies of you that permeate physical reality.
Max, I think you are brilliant! I'm a computer programmer. I think consciousness is an algorithm that our brains use all the time. I think it is akin to the main executive loop of a computer program. This processing loop always try's to resolve 2 main questions. 1) What is going on? 2) What should I do? This process is always repeating even while we sleep.
Anyway, nice try
@bts and iqra fan unconscious is when we sleep or we are in a coma. I want to quantify consciousness. It is very important for a project I'm working on.
Your theory doesn’t explain why there’s the sense of a perceiver that perceives all these thoughts and sensations in the first place?
@@chriscaprice GOD i tells ya!
I think you and this speaker wants to believe that consciousness is just mere patterns because you both want to escape the inescapable.
I like this guy he has a nice pattern in him
Lol 😂
This whole speech is basic alchemy.
Excellent presentation within a very short video. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts Max Tegmark.
Thanks, Rob Lowe
A bit Greg Kinnear-ish too, imo.
Yep, Kinnear is the comparison I've always made!
Don't be super intellectual Rob Lowe... be DirecTV Robe Lowe!
gotta little judd nelson in there too
particles...DID. I. STUTTER?
And funnily enough everything in the Universe is made off patterns. I totally love this! Shines more proof and that extra bit of knowledge that pushes as further and closer to being able to understand who we are and that we ain't just part of Universe, but Universe being us.
Max Tegmark: inspiring genius! Love how he explains complex topics in such an easy and effortless manner
This is the best explanation of consciousness which is nothing more than arrangement of information, particles or patterns. But we still have long way to go to actually understand the underlying principles of true consciousness and we probably never figure it out.
Well done Max. It was so good to listen to, at the end I almost clapped as well in front of my screen. Big like! But why I only noticed this video 2 years later, is beyond me.
Splendid talk! When we can consciously process 'quantumly' we will create new machines to help us see it, along with new mathematics to help us work with the quantum energy of consciousness.
I’m reading his book “Life 3.0”, intriguing concepts and views over how our future might be thanks, or because of, artificial intelligence. Just amazing!
Probably the best lecture I've ever seen him give
Amazing presentation. Really appreciate the perspective.
When you go to sleep consciousness doesn't "go away" this is shown by the fact that when you wake up you might remember some of your dreams & the fact that you was aware during that dream otherwise you couldn't forget a dream Also lucid dreaming shows that consciousness is maintained during dreaming. This is the classic mistake of confusing the contents of consciousness with consciousness itself! I would expect more from a genius of the level of Tegmark.
you have not proven consciousness does not go away when you sleep, indications are that it does. And precisely what does it mean to confuse the contents of consciousness with consciousness itself and how can you be so sure he's doing that and not you?
"I would expect more from a genius of the level of Tegmark"
I would expect no less from a TH-cam comment section.
I think there is a miss understanding. In my experience Consciousness is not awareness. They are two different things. When awake I am conscious. When dreaming I am conscious only of my mind. When in deep REM sleep I am UN conscious... but in all 3 states there is one common matrix.... AWARENESS in waking I am aware, when dreaming there is also an awareness and same in my deepest sleep there is an awareness of my condition. Not a conscious awareness. But an awareness none the less.. come to think of it when would you say I became conscious..? At moment of birth.? After 6 months..? You can not say, but one thing is for sure awareness was there before consciousness.
Moreofthesamez thank you. ;)
That was really interesting. I loved it
I also learned what to answer those who ask me "Where's your dad?"
I'm gonna tell them "his particles got rearranged"
The feeling I get from this video is that soon there will be an accurate definition of consciousness, that it will indeed be substance independent, and that this definition will be used to evaluate consciousness in various things, and to create consciousnesses using various substances.
Thank you Max Tegmark, you are being very transparent, earnest and helpful by being inspired. I hope you are correct and find success in your searches.
Intriguing talk. I think it comes back to the chicken and egg scenario. No matter how much we try to figure out consciousness, we can only do so when we're in a conscience 'awake' state - otherwise we really can't judge!
Once more I find myself wishing to sit down and really discuss these things in much deeper detail. Sharing opinions expressing thoughts!
All in all,a pleasant talk! Thank you!
I don't see how that's a chicken and egg scenario? In Max's view, the thing that came first isn't really in debate: it's particles. Really, he would say math is fundamental; particles (seem to, though it might be "illusory" in a sense) emerge from those maths; and eventually consciousness springs forth from those particles.
I think this pretty much explains what we call the soul: It is a projection of the information processing in our body. When we're awake it is how we perceive ourselves and our environment, it is our consciousness. When we are asleep this projection is our dreams. When we are in anesthesia or near-death experience, it is/might be projected as an out-of-body experience, floating above oneself body, etc. Now my question is: this logic pretty much gives answers for what happens after death: the processing of information still projects a self-aware experience, white light at the end of the tunnel, or whatever, you know what I mean. I think even after death as long as our molecules exist we might have some kind of experience of ourselves. And this is scary. What if this experience lasts until the last existing atom of our body?
what if there is not a last atom but rather as I think has been submitted that there is an endless infinite amount of this or these connected atoms. . . . . . . . .or endless hmmmmmmmm, nothings . . ./;^)
Very good talk. It's like saying the material or medium doesn't matter but how it's arrange and what it's use for that gives it conciousness.
The time is coming to understand and bring all together
👏👏👏
Ive watch this lecture like 5 times and im still learning. Amazing. Thanks TED.
I've shredded my books, trashed my DVD's, erased my mp3's and only play this lecture now on phone, tablet, laptop and 65 inch TV. Never learned more.
How do you know other arrangements of matter other than the brain don't have consciousness?
Thank you !
The very basis of his demonstation is flawed.
How do we know that fairy dust is not present in anything other than fairies? You might say "oh consciousness is not fairy dust" and yet the definition varies depending on who you ask. To say that consciousness is inherent is something that cannot be tested or falsified. Thus it cannot be the domain of science. Also by Occam's Razor adding consciousness to everything would add another layer of complexity since there would have to be something unique and unseen by science inherent in matter instead of the simple and elegant explanation that it consciousness is an emergent property of certain arrangements of matter, hence requiring nothing more than matter, that can be tested.
+Frank Sang You're running on the presupposition that the paradigm of material reductionist science is the only or at least the best way of interpreting everything. We don't even have a good definition of matter, hell everyone is still in cahoots on the definition of life.
Well that was the presupposition in the video. He is a physicist after all and physics runs on the idea that the world is built upon matter. You speak of the definition of matter but the fact of the matter is (no pun intended) is that our whole world is built upon our most current definitions. In other words Newton created his theories and with his theories we created the steam engine and we defined much of our world and verified it through evidence. Then came along relativity and we confirmed this just as thoroughly. Quantum mechanics does not disprove relativity or Newtonian mechanics but rather provides an added layer of depth. The idea that these ideas should work in conjunction quite seamlessly is the work of many a physicist. Therein lies the most compelling reason to not consider this axiomatic stance (to the extent that the ideas upon which are world are axiomatic which i would argue are second only to the axiomatic nature of pure mathematics) as less than audacious of which would be the fact that we have no more evidence for any other alternative explanation than for the idea that our world operates through a set of physical laws and physical "stuff". The existence of nonexistence of dark matter, dark energy, strange matter, or the like is not a refutation of our current conception of the world and how it operates but rather an indication as to our incompleteness of knowledge as to how it works. What is improbable is that the discovery of the exact nature of said things will disprove Einstein or Newton or the like. Hence i would posit that while there are alternative competing ideas which should be taken seriously and studied there is no alternative with the breadth of confirmation that the materialistic interpretation has. Insofar as we must remain agnostic of all things and insofar as the fact that nothing is strictly logically refutable i would accept all alternatives as equal. However insofar as we accept that there is no alternative with as much real world evidence as the material paradigm i would not accept anything as even coming close. Again leaving open the idea that said enduring paradigm could one day be overturned but as of present is the best we have in terms of completeness and in terms of it's ability to explain all aspects of the world. The idea that a definition of matter is lacking is true in the sense that our theories are far from complete but nevertheless not true in the idea that consensus is lacking within the community of physicist or in the idea that incompleteness is tantamount to inaccuracy. Also i would point out that life is a concept more contested than matter. Of course i am using matter as something overarching of the study of our universe a physical phenomenon with the ability to be tested and tried by the scientific method. Physical also should not be confined to "matter' or classical 'forces' as they are define by Newtonian principles for the latter or pre- quantum/dark phenomenon for the former. Why? Because the objective by physicists and furthermore the overarching idea is not that these theories compete with each other or disprove each other but rather that they work in conjunction and the unification is the primary objective of their work.
I commented before watching the video, it is fascinating. But the problem is not that the world is built out of matter, the problem is the paradigm of material reductionist science wherein you reduce the thing you're studying to it's constituent parts and infer function of the whole with knowledge of the way this matter which consists the whole acts, or what attributes it has. The observation of emergent properties sort of turns this paradigm on its head where you cannot fully describe the properties of something you're studying by the behaviour of its constituent matter. Water is an easy physicist example but in my field of biology, let's just say shit's to the power of n more complicated. Especially emergent phenomena like ecosystems. I'm not even insinuating there's anything more than matter that constitutes living things/the universe, I'd go for the practical approach and say that it is only matter. But again our definition of matter may be poor and also maybe studying matter "reductionistically" can't explain complex systems with layers upon layers of hierarchical structures and complexities. Physics is relatively easy to study very exactly compared to living beings. Or at least you can agree that the predictability of a physical model is immensely better than the predictability of a biological model, especially ecological models which I'd call sort of meta biological models. It's a fascinating subject but this is already a wall of text. Peace.
I find it more mind-blowing trying to grasp consciousness as being “merely” physical, as opposed to something immaterial (whatever that would be). Off course, that’s not an argument either way concerning the nature of things.
This was very inspiring and well done. Great metaphors, great examples.
At some place he sneaked in the answer. An answer. His answer.
The answer to the wrong question. This aspect of consciousness has never been a huge mystery, even though I have never heard anybody work it out as well as he did and he's great.
" Consciousness is a mathematical pattern "
If that be the case then it can be downloaded.
NOT A PHYSICIST. Layman understanding of science of physics.
Consciousness can be downloaded? Not necessarily. Can a flowing pattern be downloaded into a fixed frozen state? Is human memory actually frozen, or is it flowing information about a story that can be retold ... activity ... in real time.
More to the point about "observing" subatomic particles, mass and momentum vs position (if I have that correct) both cannot be observed precisely at the same time (using appropriate interactive physical tests).
If consciousness were frozen onto an SDcard, it would no longer be conscious, it would be a snapshot in time of information, but lacking the flows and patterns of information in process.
I don't know if I agree, but I get Max's story that raising information processing to a sufficiently fast and sufficiently complex pattern, and maybe a certain type of pattern, these multiplex patterns and flows in real time *are* the experience of consciousness.
That would make some sense then that measurable EEG waves show different patterns in unconscious states vs conscious states.
Subjectivity would then amount to a state where information processing not only simulates a conscious experience of the world and of the body, but simulates a conscious experience of not only external stimuli (including body awareness) but also a simulation that involves awareness of conscious information processing. Thinking and seeing and feeling simulating awareness (being "aware") not only of objects but simulating awareness of awareness/Thinking itself, such that the subjectiveness simulation is indistinguishable from the abstract term "reality" or "experience". Info pattern "experience" actively experiencing awareness of experience -- a very complex very fast simulation approximating real time. (Just sayin' ... we don't experience HD movies as flows of bits, we experience at a higher abstract level, story and emotion.)
That said, I don't believe it's absolute nonsense or insanity (though possibly misleading or confusing to some people) to describe this phenomenon as "miraculous", as our language-based thoughts use many adjectives and adverbs to describe other qualities of physical and non-physical phenomenon, though physics itself cannot measure "miracles". Is that fair? I'm not saying "miraculous" is like describing "wetness", I'm using "miraculous" like "pleasant" or "lovely".
That's true if you assume he meant a memory unit, but maybe it can be downloaded to a computer like a server nevertheless.
simulation theory
The quest of AI
but it cant
Physics understanding changes over time, improving iteratively.
It may well turn out, that consciousness is simply a function of space/time.
And our individual machines are immersed within it.
In this sense, we all share the same consciousness, yet retain our individuality.
This view does explain a lot.
Mick Mack perhaps, but the criticism of these are still valid. How do you explain consciousness? Im not saying that as a counter-argument, I'm simply asking for an explanation, which Max does NOT provide.
Nobody would argue that the arrangement of these mathematical patterns is what is needed for consciosness, but what exactly is it?
Max still answered nothing.
Adam Korol Agreed. Until we can measure consciousness, which I doubt will ever be done, we can only speculate. We stand a better chance of speculating in cosmology than consciousness. Although there are a handful of persons that have claimed direct experience of the source of it. I hold no hope that I'll ever be one of those persons, the odds are against me worse that winning the lottery.
+Adam Korol
_"Nobody would argue that the arrangement of these mathematical patterns is what is needed for consciosness, but what exactly is it?"_
The current research paradigm in the cognitive sciences is hat consciousness is an embodied reality model maintained by bodies for purposes of prediction to enable advanced body control that takes into account both the environment and the agent itself(As well as models of the thought processes of other agents and the like).
In a sense, this view makes us "brains in vats", except that the "vat" is our own skulls. Everything that's currently known about how the brain works fits into this paradigm and it's almost certain that we'll have a full computational theory of mind(At least on a high level) before the middle of this century.
Gnomefro Everything? How does electrical impulse creation of weak magnetic fields out side the skull fit into the vat paradigm? Also, computation is perfect for what it is perfect for... not so much for chaotic process. The brain is a constantly changing structure. How will that be accounted for? The connectome is not a static structure, unless viewing a dead brain.
It may also turn out that space/time is simply a function of consciousness, and not the other way around.
Impressive. How simply he explains consciousness is sth that emerges from the particles which form our brains. I have specially liked the analogy of waves. One of the best videos I haver ever watched.
One of the best videos YOU have watched, believable
Great speech! Great ideas conveyed too. Very well explained.
The hard problem is this, HOW does SUBJECTIVITY arise out of matter? When we study and map out the brain, or (anything for that matter) all we are really looking at is structure and the behavior of structure. But we have no idea how structure, OR the complexity of structure, OR the behavior of complex structures give rise to subjective experience.
Sure we can manipulate experiences by manipulating the structure and behavior of the brain, BUT that says NOTHING about HOW subjectivity actually arises from the brain. Unless we somehow assume that all energy has some subjective component that is simply complexified by the structure of the brain.
consciousness emerges in the brain. is similar to how waves emerge within large bodies of water. asking "how could waves come about just from physical water" may have a little bit of merit, because the wave is an abstract and emergent result of the behavior of the water and not just the water itself. but there is no reason to assume a supernatural phenomenon is happening to b produce a wave. we KNOW that it is just an emergent property of the water, as is "wetness."
the brain, while tremendously more complex, also produces emergent phenomena. and e know it is emergent of the brain. in fact, we even know that if you altar the brain in particular ways that you will altar the emergent conscious experience in the brain and achieve predictable results. we have enormous evidence that consciousness emerges from the brain and if someone posits a supernatural but if Ad Hoc then it is up to them to prove that somehow consciousness is both an emergent property of the brain AND of a supernatural soul -- which makes no sense from a logical standpoint and Infosys the question of how this stopped soul controls the brain when we know for av fact the brain follows the laws of physics and anything supernatural does not necessarily. I'm not saying that you are positing this, but it is a common theme when this subject is discussed hence why I felt the need to explain why that cannot be the case.
It would probably be more correct if you say that consciousness CORRELATES with the brain. Of course it's obvious that the brain and consciousness is connected somehow. But the question is how and what it really is. Saying that it is an emergent phenomenon doesn't help much. It's impossible to imagine how consciousness would emerge from a physiological organ made of cells and electric impulses. People circle around this problem and try to explain it away. The wave-particle analogy in water is just an analogy. You have to realize that. We are bound to end up in reducing consciousness to something that it is not when we say that it emerges from the brain.
Natural science tries to analyse physical phenomena and understand the mechanics. But how can you understand consciousness in physical terms. You can't. You will only get a better understanding of the CORRELATION to the brain. We ought to understand that consciousness is something fundamentally different from the brain-organ.
So what's this all about? We tend to forget that we are ourselves consciousness. We are trapped in our own psyche. The problem of consciousness is the problem of our own foundation. It's highly unlikely that we will ever solve it simply because we can never step out of ourselves and take an objective standpoint. There are limits to human knowledge and consciousness seems to be that limit. Maybe we can push forward a little more, like the findings in deep-psychology show. But humans will never understand everything about their existence.
tjovadevalivat Yeah, that's the way I see it. I honestly don't think consciousness can EVER be an object of it's own examination, Not because of some mystical bullshit, but because of the very nature of the situation.
Fire can't burn itself, a knife can't cut itself
your teeth can't bite themselves, and your tongue can't taste itself. In the same way, consciousness can't examine itself.
Yes, what we can do though is examine the psyche through introspection. But we will never find out what the psyche "really" is. Just as we will never know what matter "really" is. I'm tired of these "scientific" explanations of the mind that seem to assume that the mind is yet another external object, without remembering that the one who is asking these questions is himself mind or consciousness AND that consicousness is something fundamentally different from an "object" or "pattern". For me it's more rewarding to read how these things are discussed in deep-psychology, like Jungian psychology, because they admit the subjectivity involved. Books like Erich Neumann: "The origins and history of consciousness" etc.
tjovadevalivat Yes, Carl Jung and Alan Watts are some of the greatest minds in my opinion when dealing with the whole topic of consciousness.
Consciousness is a field, that has the property of self awareness. The brain is not conscious. We are the current, not the circuit. We are the observer, not the observed.
When are the mind, not the brain.
A tune on the radio is not the radio receiver, the mechanism. The signal exists whether a radio receives it or not. Consciousness exists whether there are receivers or not. :-)
You have just mae more sense in few words than a 16 minutes video :P
You need to go to TED.
I honestly find hes idea very shallow. Also if there was such special particles they would've discovered it already. Is he saying that a gellow is conscious?
Hey thanks, materialist science struggles to comprehend consciousness. Material is only 5% of existence, the rest they call dark matter. i.e 'we don't know" Manuals of consciousness, such as Kabbalah, Vedas, tell us matter condenses out of consciousness. A common concept is the three on one nature of consciousness. Rishi, devata, chandas (vedas) = knower, known, process of knowing ; mind, matter, information : father, son (matter) holy spirit. Would love to go to TED !! I am preparing and artists talk, to point out that art has fallen into an abyss, that REACTION gets headlines > crowds > revenue. I point out that only when artists are inspired by non locals aspect of mind, are they involved in CREATION. Can catch up on Facebook if you like. Alan MacDonald, Auckland, New Zealand
Alan MacDonald I'd love to hear that talk.
Reality arising from consciousness sounds interresting, as if the universe only exists when there is an observer, like a video game.
There is also another idea that, everything is actually conscious on it's own way, even a rock, the sun, the earth as a whole, the tree, your cat, you, etc..
An interesting precursor to more information to follow. 6/2019
Cymatics illustrates that sound produces a shape pattern that changes with frequency. Mathematics is an endeavor to measure it. From where does the sound come? And why are there many various forms of frequency? As marvelous as mathematics is, it is largely a means of measurement. The real question is: why is there consciousness, as opposed to how might we endeavor to measure it?
As a fan of "the spiritual path", especially of the direct path of nonduality to self-realization, I found this talk to be a delightfully simple basic scientific approach to an objective understanding of consciousness, perception, and subjective experience. I would hope that discussions of consciousness from the standpoint of science could start with such rational and intelligent beginnings. I see no need for mystery, even the mysteries of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, in serving as a basis for an intellectual understanding either of our everyday experience of consciousness or of the special and valuable state of self-realization (which was not discussed here).
Nah it’s wack , Intelligence is not consciousness. AI is nothing but mathematics is it conscious? No
@@isubtothebest6020 I'm sorry if my comment mislead you. Mathematics is a tool of the mind to make reliable inferences about numbers. Physics is a similar tool to systematically improve our understanding about how Nature works, objectively. "Objectively" means ruling out everything subjective, whether consciousness, mind, or the senses of perception.
Not one experiment in AI shows any evidence of consciousness because it is all based on objective science, not the subjective investigation of consciousness offered by the spiritual practices of nonduality and transcending. Since I teach transcending, I believe I know something about this.
In summary, I agree with your comment fully.
@@isubtothebest6020 nice try bud
@@itsbilly1792 nice argument , kiddo
the modern shame on spirituality i think is that it is directed to a conscious mind. once u go deep in meditation, i myself have “expirenced”, stages of unconsciousness. at that point u simply just are.
so when u experience the unconsciousness what really is it that u experience? what are the messages in these sort of subconscious stories?
i always think to myself, why would “nothing” want to explode into “me” having natural conscious “unconscious” experiences. why was i made for that, what is the literal meaning, for such thing to exist. to me conscious is made to understand the inner self. as u will understand the inner self, is unarguably connected to all.
Back in 1986, swami chinmayananda said' A human is matter groomed to consciousness'. I was mesmerised by this statement extrapolated from the upanishads and still am.
Many thanks to Max for this enlightening talk.
Love this approach to "the hard problem".
How about we're electrical/spiritual beings having a human experience, for without electricity you have nothing. We're all one from the same source of consciousness, which in my near death experience showed me that we are in fact only unconditional love at our BeYOUtiful core... We are love, we're created by love and always will be love, no matter what form it takes. It's the Power Of Love that binds us together!
checkout Meher Baba you might enjoy
Google "thusness six stages of awakening"
This is marvelously beautiful
atoms interacting with each other lead to emergent properties on a much higher macro level. the whole process makes sense and we understand it. Same goes for phase transitions between solids, liquids and gases. the emergence in this case makes sense.
the emergence between consciousness and atoms doesn't make sense. it's magical and impossible. Max suggests that mathematics and information processing fix this issue, but I disagree. if he attempted to show an example of the pattern of consciousness, i doubt I would be convinced.
One day I was pondering consciousness and mechanism, and though I've always believed mechanism can't produce consciousness, it really nailed it when I realized any electronic or computing system is nothing more than blinkenlights, perhaps very complex blinkenlights but still, no matter what elaborate recursive algorithms or feedback loops upon feedback loops you have, just complex blinkenlights. Blinking lights may be fun to watch, entertaining, educational, you're looking at blinkenlights right now, but... just blinkenlights. Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of electro-bio-chemical activity. We must continue to explore with more imagination, and wider not deeper
"the emergence of consciousness and atoms does not make sense" Can you explain this more?
Fascinating. I remember Prof Paul Davies explaining emergent phenomena back in the 90s.
A very enlightened way to look at the mystery of consciousness. All the parts to figure it out are already there. We just have to find the pattern
Terence McKenna about modern science: ''Give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest.''
I love how the mathematics of his consciousness forces him to style his hair and dress in such a fashion to obtain a feeling of acceptance and rewards from his peers to motivate him through a sense of feeling.
Well. I do not agree. The gentleman wears his jacket unbuttoned which can be seen as a sign of rebelliousness, dominance, or aggression. The mathematics of consciousness is an interesting theory. Would such a theory imply that we have no spirituality?🌱
Very profound and amazing. Simply an amazing way to view the world.
Good talk! He did however neglect to add the capacity to feel to his list of essentials for consciousness to arise. "How information processing feels" implies feeling. So now we have "feeling" to define, and I expect it will have to be defined as an emergent property of information processing.
So he's used an aspect of his consciousness to describe consciousness. Can consciousness describe itself? Can you bite your own teeth? How many different versions of Consciousness are there?
A beautiful perspective on this hard to tackle consciousness question. But what does this theory leave us in regards to free will? Doesn't this mean we (i.e. conscious beings) are just a consequence of the particles' arrangement and are in fact powerless in their arrangements? If so, how can we control our actions, make our neurons fire up to make a decision, make our muscles contract? I must say that, despite Mr. Tegmark's captivating enthusiasm, this rather scares me, that we're just some sort of collateral damage of information processing with the illusion of control...
Check out Sam Harris’ take on free will
Awareness and mathematical patterns cannot be separate nor can one live without the other. If there was just mathematical patterns and no awareness, there would be no consciousness. If there was just awareness and no mathematical patterns, then there would be consciousness at all. Everything including our body limbs to mountains, walls, etc, all consist of mathematical patterns. With the internal awareness, however, these consist of: love, joy, peace, passions, etc. A flow of these two complete consciousness
Having an understanding for this can bring forth an even deeper awareness to ourselves, an awareness which can complete the human, breaking every self inflicted boundary.
Amazing perspective.
Words explaining conciousness in a brilliant talk. You can't get any better than that.
the main question is still not addressed here: why am I conscious inside of my brain? why not inside of the brain of another person? Why at this time?
The key to your question is the "I". You are your brain, you are not conscious inside of it. The characteristics of of experience and what you perceive as "you" are direct results of the physical characteristics of your brain. I think that is what the speaker is getting at.
Nick Merritt I would agree with you if I were you, But no, I am imprisoned in my body, in my brain and it is a greatest mystery for me - why it is so, why all this experience and perceiveness take place in this (mine) particular brain? why not inside of another person? Do you want to say that you and me are the same, and we are just isolated to see it clear?
Stanislav, I think the idea of "you,", "I", or "mine" and the idea of indentifying "oneself" to a particular conscious experience (as opposed to a "different" one) is potentially fallacious. Instead, I would say we are just separate/non-local lifeforms that each have a brain, and it is each brain that happens to attribute/identify itself to its own experiences/memories. It's the continuity of our memories/experiences that give the illusion that "we" can "identify" ourseleves as being who we are.
To understand what I'm getting at, imagine the following:
Imagine while you're asleep we could erase all information from your brain and put "upload" my brain's information there instead. If this happened, your brain's only choice would be to analyse that information and perceive that it is in fact me. From the brain's perspective, it would think it is me and think it has ALWAYS been me. It would think that it is the "real" me and not even know there's another one.
There would be an identification process based solely off of your brain's new data. Your brain would analyse your the past memories/experiences and think "oh yes, a few days ago I went for a run." "I remember that time I went to school and X happened on the playground", etc. Your brain would have ALL of the memories/experiences that I had, so they would be continuous/coherent in the sense that your brain would have no choice but to attribute/identify itself with being the person who actually did all of the things it recalls (even though it was me).
Yes, the new "you" would realise you have the wrong body, but the new you would still think that you are this "new person" (and in fact that it has been this person since birth), instead it would just think that something very very very weird had happened.
People often say "our body is made up of completely different atoms than it was 6 months ago, therefore we aren't the same person anymore". And I would say this is true.
I could be a different person to who I was yesterday (or 6 months ago), but the fact my memories/experiences are continuous and precede/consist of everything that I was before now leaves me with no choice, the inevitable choice, of perceiving/concluding that it's still me. "I know for sure that it's me because I remember thinking/doing this X days ago - it was what I thought and remember thinking, therefore this is me and you can't say otherwise", but of course your brain would think that if all it has to go by is your past memories/experiences!
***** Thank you for a detailed opinion. Would be interesting to have once such an experiments. Then it can really shed some light onto my still opened question. I know that by now neurobiologists were able to transform a small part of a rat memory into the brain of the another rat, and by experiments they showed that recipient rat got a new to it knowledge on how to accomplish some tasks. However it is quite far from the day when humans will be able to make exactly what you suggest in your thought experiment. I doubt about it cause, I think there is some hidden to science by now mechanism of neuron network work, which seem to me to be kind of analogy of a reconstruction ray in holography. When even without any knowledge or experience, a living creature opens its eye for the very first time in its life, it already has some perception of itself as a unity, which not even "I" yet, but already something solid what makes existence of this creature and all its life experience unique and isolated. And even what I am more doubtful about your suggestion of the network transplantation, is that probably our physical brain cells network might not be that flexible to withstand this kind of an ultimate, erase-copy-past operation. I think it is could not be possible physically, cause it is too complex, and even the micro scale differences in the shapes of the brains of two persons could not let it to copy the whole memory/network without damaging some crucial knots in the memory's network hierarchy. Though I believe that, onto the chip we could once copy the whole brain map.
If you were conscious inside my brain instead of yours it wouldn't be very helpful to your body. ;) Why is one atom over here and another over there? Discreteness. Why are things discrete? Why isn't everything just the same, singular point? Ultimately this leads to the age-old existential question: "Why does anything exist at all?" That's a hard problem, perhaps even harder than the problem of consciousness. ;)
The message still resonates 4 years later...
My definition of the universe: The beautifully manifested expression of wonderful patterns.
My consciousness does not go away when I sleep.
+Gary Rector If you're not dreaming, it does, and I'd argue that dream states are not conscious in the waking sense either.
+Ted Levy
Maybe your still conscious but there is no memory of it.
That sounds a bit paradoxical (at least my conscious mind thinks so).....
+Gary Rector
How can you be sure of that?
You are less conscious and aware than your wakeful state.... He means that it's altered to a lower state.
I think I have spotted a bit of a flaw in Tegmark's thesis. More than once he he said that the consciousness pattern "feels" like consciousness. Who is doing the feeling? So in fact the homonculus has been slipped into this thesis in a sort of muted way, but it's totally in there. Then he says at one point that consciousness should not be seen as "just a pattern" because it is the most complex pattern in the universe, as if "complex" = "good". I was under the impression that "simple" = "good". We will tackle complex stuff when we have to, when there's a carrot on a stick, but it's not as if we like doing that. As of yet we don't have much in the way of cures for cancer, because, they say, cancer is so complex. Ergo I say that "complex" is not synonymous with "good", that is, not always.
Then there was the bit about freezing to death. I think we can safely assume that the entire complex pattern of the entire body is almost exactly the same after freezing to death as it was just before, and I'm not talking about body fluids, cell fluids, freezing and forming ice crystals but freezing to death that occurs before fluid crystalization.
The key here is that the freezing slowed the change in the pattern. So it seems fair to say that consciousness requires some constant change in the pattern.
Once we say that consciousness require some constant change then at best we might say there is a set of changing patterns that define consciousness, but how do we begin to define that set? Let's say humans were conscious 6000 years ago (just to pick a time in antiquity). But those humans had much less knowledge than we, and so consciousness might not require knowledge. I think consciousness does involve categorization and asking "what is this" and "I wonder if I can get this to do that?" but these three things I've mentioned, knowledge, categorization and wondering all require the homonculus to produce them and then relate them. It's pretty hard to get away from the homonculus when talking about consciousness, as we see here with Dr. Tegmark. And he did not recognize that consciousness requires some constant change, and so was able to sough it off as a pattern.
rh001YT Consciousness does not require a constantly changing pattern and I'm sure Tagmark would say as much if asked. Some people have had their brains completely flat-lined from certain drugs or freezing and then had their consciousness spontaneously restored when the chemistry or temperature was brought back to normal.
Melinda Green Hi! When the persons you refer to were "flatlined" they were unconscious because their mental patterns were not changing or hardly changing at all. Then as you way, their consciousness was restored. Yes, "consciousness restored" means patterns were changing again, constantly.
rh001YT
Yes, consciousness requires change. I was responding to the idea that we'd be dead without it. Tagmark also said that a deeply sleeping brain is constantly changing too but is not conscious, so change is necessary for consciousness but is not sufficient. His point was that both mental states are following patterns that are quite different from each other. He wants to quantify and understand them better but admits that we currently know very little about what makes a pattern conscious or not.
Melinda Green Here you and Tagmark are quibbling over the fuzzy word " conscious". I could easy say there is awake consciousness and there is sleep consciousness. In medical terms, "fully conscious" is often defined as "aware of one's surroundings" which is still a bit vague, requiring further definition, and certainly when asleep we don't think people are aware of their surroundings, however still we don't say an sleeping person is unconscious. People have exited comas, during which the doctors said the person was not aware of their surroundings, yet the patient claimed to be totally aware but unable to communicate. And there have been other variants of "coma".
It seems to me to always come down to attributes, so while Helen Keller could neither see or hear we still assume she was conscious due to other things she did. And when the decision is made to pull the plug on a patient, that typically only happens when a brain scanning machne shows no activity, so it is assumed no patterns are changing, and so the person is declared brain dead and definately not conscious.
Imagine the case of a person in a coma who does have some minimal brain activity, but that's it. Necessary, yes, but sufficient? Well to determine what is sufficient one will use an attribute list, all of which will be value judgement. Heading down the path of determining what is sufficient is a bit scary to me 'cause I know that such opens Pandora's box. It is exactly that which allowed the Nazis to terminate the mentally retarded and imbeciles, and also Jews and homosexuals. So funny that a gay man, Alan Turing, broke the Nazi's communication code!
It seems that you were right and I was wrong. I had believed that sleep was a type of unconsciousness but some quick searching shows I was in error. BTW, I think the opposite word you were looking for is "lucid".
As for pulling the plugs, you are right that it's a very difficult choice and not one with any clear guidelines. Sometimes family members will do that even when there is evidence that that they are not entirely unconscious, because they recognize that it's extremely unlikely that the person will find any pleasure in the life that is left to them. That's a loving but terrible choice to have to make, and everyone in that situation just has to muddle through as best they can, and we shouldn't blame them whichever way they choose. It is of course a great reason for everyone to leave advanced directives so that the choices are easier on their loved ones.
In my opinion, he could've summarized it in one obvious sentence: we're conscious because the patterns of our molecules are different than of a carrot. Who didn't know that?
Besides, math is the language we use to explain phenomena with including patterns (There's no non-mathematical pattern). So, consciousness can be described mathematically and it's nothing new either. I watched it to see if there are some findings of the mathematical model of consciousness. I think I had high expectations.
Currently going cold turkey from smoking and drug use, I'm so glad I saw this video. My withdrawals are literally the way the pattern has emerged and my experience is nothing more than the processing of the information as a result of this pattern.
Consciousness, awareness, intelligence, intuition etc., are the result of self-organizing property of matter. Therefore has mathematical structure.
+Naimul Haq
Consciousness is a geometric configuration of atoms that has emergent properties.
+Naimul Haq
I think laws of nature to be able to create 3D substances and their borders and appearances are mathematical. I think all that exists in (our) nature is subject to those laws.
+Billy Share NO, consciousness precedes the atoms.
thatsINpossible Any proof?
+Naimul_Haq Physical reality is a PRODUCT of conscious intention employing atom-like "thingees" to constitute & represent that physical product. However, conscious intention and desire affect physical reality all the time.. including the selection from quantum probabilities that produce the experience we have as an actualized reality every second of the day.
Human consciousness is CREATIONAL as it is original divine energy. The need for PROOF is simply a facet of the predominant belief system as we exit an age of darkness into one of much more light and knowing. The PROOF is always determined by your own beliefs.
Telekinesis is just one example of consciousness affecting atoms.. although.. as I said.. it happens all the time. I, myself, can influence the environment is simply with thought/intention.
Earth is a Virtual Reality world. Your soul is an aspect of God animating a physical vessel. When your physical vessel expires.. your awareness continues on independent of your brain. The brain is simply a mechanism allowing spirit a certain kind of experience consistent with the original intentions for this VR world.
PEACE ;)
"Consciousness is simply the way information feels"
For something to feel anything there needs be the thing that has the ability to feel in the first place. otherwise it would just be information organised in some way which still is just information.
This is the second TED talk I've watched so far purporting to define consciousness; both radically different and exclusive of the other. This question is answered by highly intelligent people in very different, mutually exclusive ways, which logically leads to the conclusion not more than one of them can be right, ergo all the others are wrong. I can't define consciousness, but I'm not sure this gentleman, or anyone else can either, hard as they try, and as fervently as they believe what they say.
A simple proof that it is not only the pattern that matters for the existance of consciousness :
*a 1:1 simulation of a human brain won't truly emerge a true consciousness*
- it would just make a really convincing show of having a consciousness so it means there is actually something beyond just that (which is the soul I believe and I'm not even a religious person).
There's a different aspect of consciousness. If a world exists but there are no conscious life forms in it who perceive the existence of the world, does the world really exist? If a part of our world is never explored by beings, does it exist, is it defined?
Some physical properties only exist when we measure them, according to Heisenberg. Consider the Schroedinger cat. The universe only exists as much as conscious life forms exist who perceive it.
Consciousness does not only exist in the physical realm, the physical world exists within consciousness. It's a dual relation.
+Rainer67059 --> " Mind is necessary for reality to undergo it`s ``FORM``ality of existing "
nickolasgaspar
I based my statement on the observation of the Mandela Effect, not on dogma.
nickolasgaspar
The Mandela Effect is something most people on earth experience. It is observable. To observe something and draw conclusions from it, develop theories to explain it is science.
Here mandelaeffect.com/many-interacting-worlds-miw is an article that links usual science with the Mandela Effect.
nickolasgaspar
Lol, you delevered a reply without a meaningful sentence.
nickolasgaspar
The "lady" gave the effect a name after discovering it together with others. It is your decision to not take her seriously. By doing so you follow no scientific principle. In that specific blog entry she reports about a work of a scientist who took some ghosts who are normally the realm of the paranormal that's scoffed by serious people into the realm of science, or to be more precise, into the realm of what Max Tegmark talks about.
Max have a very beautiful way of thinking, but it is based on a certain misconception, and it is *emergent property*.
The belief the a certain combination of attributes can create new properties that weren't there before is wrong. The "wetness" (or better say liquidity, because wetness is a conscious experience and not a property of matter) of water can be perfectly explained by the particles and forces composing it. It is the same particles and forces as in gas and solid but in different properties. So nothing new emerges in liquid. It is only the range where either the attracting or the repulsing forces have no absolute domination.
This is valid for all the, so called, examples of "emergent phenomena".
If single particles are not conscious, then no combination of them can create a new property that was not there before. I.E., conscious experience.
This is also why it is wrong to claim that the brain is conscious. It is merely a computer. It is more probable that consciousness interprets (experiences) the data processed by the brain, and not generated by it.
I explain it in detail in a video I have created on my channel called *what is consciousness*
+Lucid thinking I hate philosophers, abandon it, adopt scientific naturalism as the preferred methodology for epistemology and ontology like most scientists, and also reject the notion of the intelligibility, ideas, the abstract and so on. (math being invented and not discovered)
+12345shushi
I "hate" philosophers too. (Not really hate them but I find myself intolerant for some basic misunderstandings many philosophers hold)
I believe philosophy can get much more results if it adopts the scientific method. I don't mean they should examine the mind externally. I mean that like science cannot be based only on theories and it must gather new data using observations and experiments, also the research of the mind cannot be based on mere thinking.
We must gather new experiential data using self-experiments and introspection.
Let me give you an example. You can philosophize for thousand years if humans have free will. Instead, do an experiment. Try not using a common word for three weeks (Like the word "I" or "yes").
You will immediately get new data, that will undoubtedly show you, that you do not control shit of the words escaping your mouth.
I know, I did this experiment.
All of the insights I present in the videos on my channel are based on such experiments.
+Lucid thinking The way matter is arranged creates different properties. Electrical conductivity, liquidity, hardness, opaqueness etc. Whether saying these properties exist, but aren't manifested is pure semantics. They aren't there in certain configuration and are there in the other is all that matters. Yes, they can be explained, but I don't see how that makes a difference. There was a time we didn't know how electricity was conducted, but it didn't make electrical conduits not work. Reality is objective. We can't explain how the brain works, but it works and all we know about it suggests it's behind consciousness.
Hi +Kucas Mukas,
I agree with you in general.
At the moment, nothing in our knowledge of physics can explain the existence of the phenomenon of conscious experience. It's not just a matter of studying the brain better. The known laws of physics explain forces, movement, and positioning in space. Therefore, it can explain information processing, that is the manipulation of certain materials or energetical structures into others. But the creation of experience cannot be explained by those. At least not at the moment.
Perhaps in the future, we would find new laws of physics or new explanations that will solve the mystery.
I insist the way I represent the concept of emergent phenomena, because many do not really understand it, and use it as a magical solution to explain consciousness.
For example, "life" is represented as an emergent phenomenon of biological organic structures.
But do we really know what life is? If life is just the functions produced by these organic structures, we can say that robots and computers are alive too. Yet we do not say so. Why? since we feel there is a difference.
(Though we are unable to identify or define this difference clearly).
So it is false to claim that life, as we feel they are, is an emergent property of organic structures.
Only the functions we share with computers are emergent from the organic structure. (Like thinking, feeding, breeding, sensing etc).
But the thing which makes life, if there is such, cannot be claimed to be an emergent property of the organic structure. It may be, and may not be, and therefore, we cannot escape to the emergent phenomenon explanation.
Imagine you give a radio receiver to Issac Newton. He might argue that the music is an emergent phenomenon of the radio's components, unaware of the critical role the radio signal from the station plays.
Lucid thinking I agree with you that we can't explain consciousness. I don't think people can even agree what it is, but I don't agree with you that we can't understand it with better understanding of the brain. It may be so or it may not, but that remains to be seen. So far nothing suggests that consciousness exists outside of it.
Life doesn't seem to be an objective phenomena, so it's really not that surprising that the definition varies. Bio-chemical reactions produced by an organism would be. If you define life like that then machines aren't alive, if you define it some other way they might be. depending on the definition. Still those particular biological reactions are emergent phenomena of that particular organism. You can throw every single atom that constitute that organism in a jar and it will not reproduce them. It's nothing magical though, it's simply because they are an emergent phenomena of that particular arrangement of atoms (in conjunction with it's surroundings). You say it can't be so, but it's so common that it's undeniable. Almost everything can be arranged in a different manner to produce different chemical properties. Even atoms of one kind can be arranged so that they exhibit completely different properties.
Instead give an Ipod to Isaac Newton and he'd be correct. There is a critical difference, though. Sir Isaac could capture those radio signal with another device and reproduce the music in another device. So far it hasn't been done with the brain and there is nothing that suggests the brain works that way. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
Increíble, apoteosico, fenomenal explicación, lo entendí perfectamente , es el patrón, como esta organizado lo que da las distintas propiedades que encontramos en el mundo
I love how everybody is ignoring the fact that we do not fully understand the biochemistry of life, nor the origin of it.
Biochemistry -> Neurons -> Consciousness
I think we should focus more on tracing the origin of life to find these kind of answers.
I've always been a bit confused by the "wetness is an emergent property" example. Isn't wetness really a sensation, a byproduct of subjective experience (ironically the very thing Tegmark is attempting to explain)? It seems to me the basic facts are that you have some molecules, in this case water molecules, that are located to with degrees of proximity to each other. We sense through touch (and sight, though vision really just intimates wetness) close water molecules as ice, further apart ones as wet water, further further apart ones as gas/steam etc. Isn't the property of wetness here just a man made construct?
It's almost a Zen koan: If water is in the forest and no one is around to feel it, is it really wet?
Wil Forbis I wish to second your comment. Wetness is a human construct, though from that human construct scientists have studied wetness and attempted to give it an objective definition. However I think that objective definition has failed because not only are there natural substances that are not wetted by water, substances have been made that are completely impervious to wetting. So from the perspective of these substances water is not wet. Therefore wetness is not an emergent property, but rather, a word we use to describe how water interacts with certain substances, basically that which can wet coats the surface of that which it wets. I really question whether anything has "emergent properties" because, like in the case of H2O, it's various "states" are as you pointed out already baked into the molecule's behavior along a spectrum of heat and what we call the "states" of water is totally human-subjective. The water molecule itself is still itself whether frozen in Antartica or floating around in a steamy jungle. And that molecule in the steamy jungle may have previously been frozen in Antartica.
Once we grasp that "states" are human-subjective then if we want to say that consciousness is "emergent" we should be honest enough to say that nothing has "emerged" except insofar as we subjectively say it has. And so we have to use our consciousness to say when something is conscious, and we won't all agree on that. There is no standard outside of "consciousness" that can be used to define "consciousness", except standards arbitrarily and subjectively posed by humans. So we say that a person in a coma is "unconscious" based on certain tests. However some have come out of medically declared comatose states to say that they were fairly conscious the whole time, but unable to communicate. Unfortunately for some, the plug was pulled, due to inability to communicate, or so I suppose. And how about someone who is dead, like from a heart attack, but then they are revived? How about those people who wake up in their caskets at the funeral home?
rh001YT I think you've both missed Tagmark's point. You're completely right that wetness is only a mental concept constructed from the properties of water. That's exactly what Tagmark was saying, so you're in total agreement there. Finding ways of quantifying wetness lets us talk about it objectively. He says that consciousness exists yet one more level above concepts like wetness, and that he hopes to eventually find ways to quantify consciousness, but we're nowhere close to that yet.
Melinda Green Hi thanks for the input. But I will say this about that: The way that Tagmark used the example of "wet" was overly simplified. On the one hand one might say that "wet" is a word we give to state, on the level of skin cells, where a whole bunch of adjacent cells register that they are smothered, but only in patches here and there. For when we are swimming or in a bath we do not say that we are wet. So then perhaps when the vast majority of cells are smothered, and not just patches, then the concept of wet fades from our mind, even though we are wet technically. Wet is also value-laden, for when we wash our hands we purposely wet them and it is good. But if some unwanted liquid coated our hands then such would be bad. And then we will also say "this towel is sopping wet", which technically means the fibers are not only coated with a liquid, but hold the liquid like in little chambers. Well, I am not going to continue to discuss how we use the word "wet" but it's not simple, though Tagmark's use rather requires it to be simple. And it's particularly now simple as we can't exactly define the point where "wetness" begins - at best such could only be decided by consensus. So that path Tagmark lays out will be tainted with consensus, and humans only agree with regards to what they construe about something to be good or bad, which will differ from person to person, group to group. As for objectivity, people are not objective except in some cases, as with a judge, where one is paid to be objective, but even then we don't really believe in the sincerity of that a good deal of the time. Even in the mere suggestion or attempt to quantify "consciousness" I sense a bias - I sense it leads in a certain direction that some prefer for some reason based in their own particular vanity.
rh001YT The subjectivity of wetness was much of Tagmark's point. It's only an idea, not a physical thing. Let's try another example. Say a traffic jam. It's clear to anyone in a traffic jam that the situation is very different from the general traffic flow. We can call it good or bad but that's beside the point. We say "I hit a traffic jam at 5 PM today", but the jam is just a name for an idea of a state that we externalize, not a physical thing. What does it consist of? A bunch of other drivers. It would be more accurate to say "I participated in a traffic jam", or even "I was a traffic jam". It's a higher level concept from cars and drivers, and it can't exist without them. You can't even say when exactly it started or ended. Life and consciousness are much like this, just more complex.
Melinda Green Hi! Well I would say that the jam is a physical conglomerate, and the connotation of "jam" is already bad, and no one like a traffic slowdown/stoppage, so the choice of a bad word is appropriate. And no one would say they participated in or was a traffic jam, as such is not the case, and to say so would be less, not more accurate.
I don't agree that "traffic jam" is a higher level concept that "car" or "driver". I would say that it is a concept on about the same level as "car" but with the added negative meaning. It is on the level of "car" because it has parts(the cars) that fit together into a certain pattern, and then the pattern as a whole is given a name.
"Concept" is a somewhat fuzzy word. In it's most concrete sense it is a grouping according to chosen similar attributes. "Vehicle" is a concept that groups many different objects according to their physical attributes. We may say that in a more abstract way, we make the group vehicle according to what they do, not what they are. But that's not really abstract, it is just a choice of a different attribute. In fuzzy use, someone might say " I have a concept, like, I'll build a website wherein people can connect with their friends and share pics and stuff. In that case, all "concept" means is that the person has yet only a fuzzy, incomplete proposal of the actual construction of what they propose and whether or not it will be popular.
"Concept" is so fuzzy it is almost useless, but people use it anyway and we guess at it's meaning from context. Because it is fuzzy it is very useful for accurate communication, but can be used in somewhat deceptive ways to suggest that something is, thought it may not be.
youtube comment section...also know as armchair philosopher league.
+Mike Lord Some professionals too. Are you??
+Mike Lord Some professionals too. Are you??
I'm a professional...sound engineer. High fives for real careers.
+Mike Lord Oh my!
TH-cam and Facebook have exponentially increased the number of subject-matter experts in the world. We don't need to invest more in education in the U.S., just ensure everyone knows how to post comments semi-anonymously from an early age.
For the sake of argument let's accept it's nothing but emergent patterns but these patterns are useful actionable information i.e knowledge where they came from with matter/energy and where they are
going are the more relevant and important questions for us.
I like how he’s animated and passionate. Too many ted talk speakers are so blah latley . I guess not everyone is a teacher at heart. So how are the conscious particles arranged during dreams and does that make dreaming real in the sense that we actually experienced things in dreams with people. Also is this why writing things down on paper is so powerful. Let me use a few different types of pens and papers 😍😃
"consciousness is the way information processing feels like....."; what the heck feel is at first place???
+mrigendra kumar prajapati That's the challenge he offers; for one to account for unique objective features of the "feel like" category of patterns. In absence of adequate theorems you already have more than enough equipment to know its subjective features, and that's not something anyone else could tell you.
Ignoblape Looks like it is going to be egg and chicken like case, and that is puzzling for me. We are conscious that's why we feel or we feel information processing that's why we are conscious. I don't know! ... it is just puzzling!!..??
Definitely sounds like the ultimate chicken and egg! (Funny I made a comment earlier on the same video alluding to chickens laying potatoes! lol) I find chicken and egg problems to be indicative of inherent trouble with assigning predicates consistently and the notion of "essence". It would seem in the context of the presentation "feel like" and "consciousness" are taken to be synonymous identities. What does it feel like to be unconscious?
Varied attempts over the centuries are made by greater the greatest minds from almost all the fields of knowledge trying to answer/understand this.... every time we are so close yet so far and the only thing I can say about the questions like, "What does it feel like to be unconscious?" that they are going to pose more hard times as we move further on the quest to get the ultimate answer.... :P
Consciousness is just the way information feels . But to feel don't one need to be conscious ? Isn't that a circular argument ?
Hicham, Exactly. Lots of semantic confusion, category errors and poorly thought analogies in this talk, i'm really not impressed with Tegmark on this. He's one of those people who tries to convince himself that _everything_ is really well understood or just about to be, when the issues are so complicated that we actually barely know how to talk about them. Look for my other comment under the video.
This man is pure genius
Got a fresh perspective on TNG: Measure of a Man. Thanks!
Max, You out of all the great minds today are the closest to making the big breakthrough to the next plane of understanding. I believe I know what that portal is: Our existence as made up of mass and energy does not influence space-time. I assert that all we are is a manifestation of space-time itself. Two analogies: We are the paper that gets thrown away after cutting out a paper doll, not the doll we cut out. We are the audio wave that rides onto of the RF carrier wave in a.m. modulation.... Max, you are SO CLOSE!!
ericjane747 Wavy Gravy said it best: "You are what you don't shit."
ericjane747 I tend to belong to this line of thinking too, friend.
I'm interested in what Non-space ACTUALLY is!
I understand this post because I am conscious. How do I understand consciousness because of this post?
To understand consciousness would be a result of consciousness!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!
+Daniel Woodward hahahaha geil
We have all spent our entire lives devoted to consciousness.
Time to get free of the matrix of consciousness and time and be the open shared/sharing no-thing.
physicists and astrophysicists CAN MEASURE MATERIAL , BUT THEY CAN NOT MEASURE CONCIOUESNES OR TOUGHTS OR FELLING AND EMOTION. THATS WHY,THIS VIDEO IS NO RELEVANT
Well said thank you! Consciousness is a mathemathical pattern for sure. Maybe some recursive and fractalistic, chaotic, integer valued functions and series. Have no doubt about that. But i came here for to see some formulas!
Wow mind blown! This together with the TED talk on Quantum Computing has some amazing implications!
Nature uses Quantum Computing.
In Nature, the process of Computing IS the process of Creating!
It solves a mathematical problem by creating the problem AND the solution simultaneously! This is Quantum Physics 2.0 - seeing Nature not in terms of energy and matter but more in terms of Information Processors and Physics in terms of Information Flow!
Consciousness is the thing that creates even as it computes - and computes as it creates!
i wonder what this guy would say if he took a thumprint of lsd and smoked dmt on the peak
+jimmy v Super, super valid point! If he did, he would immediately FEEL FOOLISH about his "pattern" beliefs.
+Pablo_Duran Hmm.. I scored in the 99th percentile on my SAT math. So how do you reconcile that with your ignorant opinion?? You can't. I accept your apology. PEACE ;)
***** Okay, without referencing ANY external material.. here is my question for you? If you were talking to someone right now with an I.Q. of over 200.. would you be able to recognize it? You have the floor., and my attention. I look forward to your response! PEACE ;)
+Pablo_Duran While there are infinite answers to every question.. here are a couple: ;)
You cannot know what you do not know. You may be able to identify many things you do not know.. but that still leaves potentially millions or trillions of things you do not know you do not know.
A person's current world_view/understanding always has SUB-CONSCIOUS assumptions that they are not even aware of. It is when these assumptions are CHANGED.. that one then becomes more aware of possibilities they never knew even existed.
However, changing these are EXTREMELY DIFFICULT for the problem is that these sub-conscious assumptions are BEYOND one's awareness. They are , in essence, the outer_boundaries of ones awareness and one, by definition, cannot be aware of that outside of their awareness.
[ "It is not a window until a second is found." --tINp ©2015]
Additionally, these sub-conscious assumptions play a critical role in determining one's CORE consciousness frequency.
And why does THIS matter?
Because thoughts don't originate inside the brain, rather you are essentially a consciousness having a certain ability to RECEIVE thoughts at a certain frequency from the ethers/universal_mind... based upon your consciousness level. (higher the frequency.. the more evolved - or in alignment with deeper laws/"God_Light" - are the thoughts that are returned)
Your brain has no thoughts. (BTW) It retrieves them. This is why there is a LONG HISTORY of "geniuses" getting the same ideas or innovations at the same time.. they both reached a frequency where they were able to retrieve the concepts from the universal_mind at roughly the same time. (Also, there are higher-level entities actually responsible for managing thoughts.. and sometimes.. thoughts are even planted into the local_mind of Earth.. so humans of sufficient consciousness can retrieve them.)
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Anywho.. you may well be able to identify someone "slightly smarter" than you.. as they are still operating within the same general consciousness realm/continuum as you.. just a little higher up in it. (like your 140+I.Q. acquaintances you referenced)
However, at a certain point.. in order to have a much higher I.Q. one must graduate from a certain frequency of consciousness and go into whole other realms of awareness.. which the mainstream intelligentsia will not really have a means of appreciating for they don't have the frequency of consciousness yet to be able to grab from the ethers thoughts that can make sense of (or appreciate) what they are being exposed to.
In sum, one can only appreciate or value those attributes/understandings that are both WITHIN RANGE of one's current abilities and also on a similar CONTINUUM of conscious experience, so a 200 I.Q. would probably be extremely difficult for you to identify. The person would just be presenting a lot of "curious" stuff that seems far-fetched or maybe even loony. ;)
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my G+ profile has abundant personal info and views (at levels beyond mainstream science) However, since mainstream science is Materialist.. Scientists always want "proof".. However, ironically, the nature and understanding of what PROOF is changes dramatically at higher levels of understanding. It is sort of a catch-22.
PEACE ;)
+Pablo_Duran My history is in my Google+ profile (About section). While at the top H.S. in the US.. I developed ADD.. which I had for 27 years. -under-performing.. until I cured it. Thereafter, my consciousness rose to "the next level".
By the way.. do you see how in my last response how I wrote a whole lot of stuff.. touched lightly on multiple subjects from somewhat novel angles.. yet you just brushed over it. That's what happens when stuff doesn't resonate (yet). It is just sort of ignored. That is the nature of consciousness differentials. This is not to say you won't emerge & develop someday into a true genius. Frankly, one of the reasons I am here.. is for the younger generation age 0 -> 30. In some cases, you just need to be challenged to question mainstream thought. PEACE ;)
Perhaps matter is an emergent property of consciousness.
Harold Baker wow i like ur comment sir
I have a lot of stuff, therefore I exist.
Harold Baker - our Consciousness does live on after shedding our " matter " or bodies in plain english bro. Just just like changing or clothes.
Harold Baker excellent
woah.. i've just been mind blown by that statement.
We came from a fractal autoreferential eternal consciousness, it is the canvas of all of these patterns that amaze us.
I like Max. As far as a materialist can go, he is the one of the best out there.
While I agree with his basic position; that is, that inanimate particles can produce emergent characteristics to include consciousness, this only explains the 'how'. I'm much more interested in the 'what'. With waves and states of matter we have predictability and can quantify: so much of this at such and such condition produces that effect. We can't, as yet at least, make a recipe for consciousness. We have already proven that intelligence is not a prerequisite for consciousness and the other way around so when we finally achieve AI that passes (or even far exceeds) the Turing test we still won't necessarily be able to say we've created consciousness. At best, therefore, to say that consciousness is simply a particular arrangement of particles is unproven and, worse, it fails to say anything about the nature of consciousness. Can it, like a wave, be transferred? Can it be controlled, stored, copied? And the biggest question of all: why is consciousness local, forever confined to each individual during his or her lifetime?
+Rasiel Suarez Really appreciate the questions you've raised. It will be interesting to see what more we discover.
Rasiel Suarez would love to get your thoughts on my thoughts... i see things like this.... the universe exists only IN consciousness. The universe appears ONLY in your consciousness to you, and for me the same. The universe exists only in consciousness. With my senses which are all outward bound, I take in different information and like a super computer my brain puts all this information together and my universe appears from WITHIN me... you do the same and generate your own universe. So does an ant with its antenna and its eyes and smell the ant creates his universe... so the universe appears or exists only IN consciousness... consciousness contains the universe not the other way round. That’s why you will never find it measure it transmit it what ever.. it’s like water in a fish tank.. the tank is consciousness, and the water inside is the universe... the glass tank is outside of the water as it contains the water, it can not be found IN the water itself ... Does that make sense..? Or do I smoke to much?
So, according to this logic, The Chinese Room would have a consciousness of its own. Or rather, the pattern of the information processed in it would.
To find a unified theory, rather calling them computronium and perceptronium, Michau Kakou says that consciousness is the number of interactions/feedback loops that exist between the subject and the object. We as human beings after looking through our senses also have an interation with our thoughts and emotions based on that image, uncontrolled due to our experiences in the past. And that makes all the difference. The calculations are enormous and we are still to find patterns.
I want to see your full work on this topic sir . This is very interesting! I want to know in depth. I would love to do some research on this 😍✌️🎆
read life 3.0
Spinozaism! its similiar with differences.
This is a great demonstration of wishful thinking.
Mathematics have no creative power (unless someone may demonstrate that ?) but this is assumed here, apparently. They are descriptive, for all I know.
Along the lines of the presentation we are told that life is a mere reorganization of elements - it may be so, but I have colleagues who specialize in studying the origin of life and apparently they are not aware that this has been demonstrated in any way. If our speaker has the answer it would be really nice of him to let them know.
The idea that "information feels" anything is just laughable : what does that even mean ???
Invoking an emergence phenomena is nice, but then you have to explain it from the bottom up - we have a whole discipline called statistical physics that does just that. It's not just "a bunch of molecules have diffusivity property". For all I know, we don't have the start of a theory to explain a jump from information to consciousness, so invoking emergence is pure faith.
Finally, it would be a good idea to study a little philosophy and wonder if physics only know what matter is made of... because it doesn't, and cannot, at the most elementary level : it can only know quantitative properties, not qualitative one (see Aristotle and the concept of matter and form).
But it sure does sound fancy.
What evidence is there for dualism or whatever you're proposing?
Most physicists especially quantum physicists think that universal consciousness preexists everything including matter. So it might well be just a mathematical structure
@@mouwersor Where did I propose anything ? I just pointed a bunch of assumptions implicitly made by the speaker... You're more than welcome to respond to my points, if you'd like...
@@nolanr1400 I don't think that what you say is true, but then maybe do you have poll data that show what you say. Anyway, my point about the causal ineffectiveness of maths remains : where do you see them having any causal power so that they might .. induce ? ... consciousness... the least scientific phenomenon on the planet : how can you even test objectively for subjective experience ?
It is a fractal geometric pattern (See Mandelbrot set) that is received through the medium of light.
Very interesting and insightful !
The way informations feels... Feels to what?
" to a conscious system.." No doubt, lol. But then explain logic, without resort to it as well as "consciousness".
@@MagnumInnominandum But that is the problem, isn't it? I don't intend to cast doubt on the valuable insights of this talk. Yet, the conclusion, at least as presented, is lacking in clarity. But that in itself is quite telling of the fundamental nature of the problem, which the speaker addresses. It's the "cracking" of these seemingly self-evident phenomena and the development of an ability to explain them in terms which are not self-referential and circular that has advanced our understanding of the world. Just like the notion of mass in physics.
Michael Fassbender playing Steve Jobs.
lmao
made me think!! never heard of consciousness being related to patterns and structures
Conciousness is a Wave. Its a Combination of the Conciousness of Your Parents and GrandParents, anyone who you were close to becomes you.