Dean W. Zimmerman - How are Brains Conscious?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 มิ.ย. 2024
- Brains are conscious. The heart is not. What does the brain do that the heart does not do? How does it come to be that brains generate inner subjective experience, the movies of our minds? Why do brains seem to be the only place where such mental magic occurs? Could a complete understanding of physical laws account for consciousness?
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Dean W. Zimmerman is an American professor of philosophy at Rutgers University specializing in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, and the Director of the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion.
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Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
Not sure what is more fuzzy.. The bounderies between objects Mr. Zimmerman speaks about, or Mr. Zimmerman's speach itself. Some linguistic acrobatics, Mr. Z! 👏
The heart is the center of the consciousness. One sphere. The throne of the lord.
@@nelsonpinheiro1148 lmao!
@@egosinenomine7038 Olá. Vou ter que escrever em português. Para calar alguns.
@@egosinenomine7038 falas português?
@@nelsonpinheiro1148 lmao a second time
From a non-dualistic point of view it's fun to watch these two dance around the hard problem of conscieceness in dualistic terms.
Until quite recently, this interview would have caused me to consider some fundamentals about whether we are 'just' the sum of our material parts (electronic activities in our fleshy CPUs). However, having watched my father's entire identity being robbed by dementia over the past few years and having seen everything from his 'taste' to his 'vision' being skewed (with the complete breakdown leading to his eventual death a couple of weeks ago), my sense of 'mental magic' has been replaced with a more mechanistic and physical perspective.... (sadly that take on existance is more nihilistic).
I empathize with your story...I am sorry about your father...I believe I will go down the same road..dementia..loss of memory, etc...but as it is...you have come to believe the same as I do.
What you witnessed was indeed the breakdown of the physical brain. It happens because this is a physical dimension and we operate here with a physical body. The big question as always is...Is that it? Has your father ceased to exist? I don't believe he has, in fact I have had some rather odd experiences in my life that suggest there is a whole lot more than physical life. But that's the key, they were my experiences and I could ramble on and tell you all about them but truly I would be wasting my time and yours as they were mine, second hand stories could be fantasy or downright lies and that is the reality we all have to deal with. But like I say I think something of your father still exists. If you ask me what and how I could point you in directions of Professor Penrose and Dr Stuart Hammerhoff and they could give you theories of quantum consciousness. But again they are theories and at the level we are now talking, it is all theory. BUT personal experiences really do make you sit back and question what just happened. Especially when like me you are a person of science and a software engineer by trade.
@@enigma7791 My father had Parkinson's disease so I witnessed a similar deterioration in him as he lost various mental faculties. The thing is, if he still exists, which him is it? The one that was a young man? The one that was quite lucid but had difficulty with physical tasks in early onset, or the one who had deteriorated to incoherence that I held hands with the day he died? I watched a Rick and Morty episode recently and Rick says "They existed and now they don't exist. That's how existing works". I love my family, I miss my father and I make the most of the life I have, and I'm very happy I have it for as long as it lasts.
One thing is for sure; our loved ones existence lives on in our own hearts. Remember them always with honor, as treasures that nobody could ever take away for as long as we live. We give meaning to life but there is the possibility that more exists than we can ever know.
@@simonhibbs887 Which one of your father exists? The ones you describe are the physical father that you knew. What if your father still exists but not as the physical person with the good days or indeed the bad days, what if he is now something we cannot comprehend because we are trying to with a physical brain, that's the key...we too are also here in the physical trying to reason things out using nothing but a physical brain. The reason I ask these things is because science cannot explain the things I experienced, believe me with my logic brain I have tried, I know they were real, I know they happened. After much reading and talking I think something of us carries on, it's not what we knew of the person in the physical and it is not the good days or the bad days we endure as human beings. Just my take of course and I enjoy talking about these things.
A grouping of grains of sand is a pile. There is no "other thing" that is the pile; the grains in that organizational pattern is the pile. That's what we call it. It is what it is because of what it _means_ to us. That doesn't mean the grains wouldn't still exist if there were no minds, but it wouldn't be a pile because a pile is a concept in minds. When does the pile become a mound? When does the mound become a hill? When does the hill become a mountain?
A star forming is only "a star forming" because that's how we label it. If there were no minds, it wouldn't be "a star forming". That's not to say there wouldn't be accretion of gases over time if there were no minds, but the concept of "formation of a star" only has meaning to minds. At any point the thing is what it is, but we see a "star" typically as a kind of mature state, when everything is constantly moving and changing. A “star” is made up of vast amounts of things, and processes, but we refer to it as _a_ thing. A star isn’t a different thing than all of those things it is.
Likewise, the self is a series of brain functions responding as processes and states. What we are aware of at any point (consciousness) is provided by the confluence of various processes (senses, memories, impulses, chemical force, momentum, etc.). This awareness is not a distinct thing itself (like the pile), it is how we (the set of interworking processes) refer to ourselves (the interworking processes). Much like how the octopus changes color to represent it's environment, the self is the brain's internal representation of the world environment with sounds, symbols, images, concepts, etc.
No. You are trapped in classic five senses. Put in your biological body more senses... Your view will be different. Your views are limited. Don't make that views just that. More more is there to discover.
Science does not explain how brain's produce experience. It's that simple. Brains contains neurotransmitters, neurons, glial cells etc. not "memories" "symbols" "images" etc. they exist in consciousness.
@@nelsonpinheiro1148 I am not understanding you. You say I am "trapped in classic five senses". As opposed to what? I am only using what is available, and cannot use anything else. So if you're proposing something else, you will need to substantiate that.
What do you mean by "your view will be different"? How does that negate what I have said exactly?
Yes, I agree that everyone's view are limited. Again, how does that negate what I have said exactly?
What do you mean by, "don't make that views just that"? I can't make sense of this sentence.
"More more is there to discover". And until that is done, you can't say what is there or not. How does this negate what I have said exactly?
@@danzigvssartre How does this negate what I have said?
@@danzigvssartre Science is the best we have, and when the best methods show that affecting brain function consistently and repeatedly affects conscious experience, that's the best explanation. But this doesn't really engage with the explanation of the concept of emergence.
I’m beginning to think that consciousness is perhaps foundational field (despite our pathetically inept and yes, subjective description of it today) and everything arises from this field.
It is. It's a fundamental property of the universe.
The Higgs field?
Yep. awareness. that is all. and we is it.
Agree consciousness is the ground of all being. Everything like our experiences and thoughts manifest from consciousness. Our brains are an interface between consciousness and reality.
Doesn't the fact that when we day dream or go to sleep and our minds are 'turned off', that we don't experience 'consciousness' until we open our eyes and suddenly our antenna is picking up what's already going on around us, show that consciousness is a 24/7 experience that came as an option with the big bang? Could it be that our brains are really only hyper-sensitive receptors? Isn't it more logical that Mother Nature ensures that every one gets a piece of the pie in that all creatures big and small are tuned in to the great experience of life via the consciousness that each one of us interprets in our own special way?
This is among the stranger of your conversations. It's the first time, in all my listening, that I haven't a clue what this man is saying. He's using words in ways that seem coherent only in his own system of rules. Whoa. Is it me?
Me too, frankly. Zimmerman specializes in metaphysics and religion, which is pretty abstract. Personally, I’d look more to neuroscience for meaningful questions and answers.
Sounded meaningful to me
Well said. Trapped himself with semantic-based thinking.
not just you....I thought Mr Z was speaking empty words also
PHD holders’ language…..is hard to understand….so hard that one, often, is left scratching one’s head. 🙃
Now I am craving strawberries.
It's delicious. Or joke is delicious to.
That’s fair.
glad they didnt say pizza!
Now how do you about craving a strawberry 🍓 it's it delicious
the question that always come back to me is "how am i my parents child?" "how did i get created from them?" "how was i chosen for this family?" "how did my consciousness happen?". the deeper i dig the less apparent it becomes.
I really like these interviews. They are a breath of fresh air in a crazy world. Such an interesting topic too. Keep them coming !
It's like he's looking for a 'me' that doesn't seem to exist in the first place: 'looking for the part that experiences the smell of strawberries, that would be "me"'. Couple of fallacies there, ignorance, equivocation..
He also used the word fuzzy several times to straw-man/discount opposing views. Hard to take him seriously.
Not to mention the bad haircut
@@LordTetsuoShima Now now. But I have to agree :).
What a gem of an interview. Thank you.
It only took three tries for him to finally hear the question, and was sweet when he got it.
Good, clear interview
One big problem here is overusing these concepts of "me" and "I" and confusing them with the phenomena of consciousness. We have to postulate that the experience I am having right now is in some sense real. But Your ego and the sense of being "You" is something you constantly experience because of your memories and a consistant self-image. It's not the conscious experience itself that makes "you" "you". If someone made 2 copies of your brain or teleported your brain, the entities created in that process would feel like they have always been the person they remember being, just like You do right now. It's not an intuitive concept, because those memories will always make you feel like you are trapped in your own experience, but this is about the conscious experience of memories. It has nothing to do with the phenomena itself.
The ego is so persistent and useful, yet makes truly understanding our existential situation so difficult.
I love watching Closer to truth (although I never feel it actually gets me close to truth)!
I have kind of gone everywhere and considered pretty much everything from traditional psychology to theology to Advaita Vedanta. For a long time I would watch videos by Francis Lucille and it was easy to be convinced by his persuasive arguments that consciousness is fundamental and everything else is emergent.
Such arguments by Vedantist follow the lines that we know we are conscious (so that is fundamental), you have always known you are conscious, everything else if observed in consciousness (thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions) these things/objects come and go so you can’t be them. That’s kind of it. Vedantists will also say that if consciousness is an emergent property of the brain then where is it, what makes it happen? That is of course the billion dollar question.
The thing is that even in conventional science there are plenty of things we don’t know about or have been able to find - we don’t know what dark matter or dark energy are but they must exist in some form or another to explain observations, we have no way of knowing why sub atomic particles behave as they do following the laws of quantum mechanics. The standard model isn’t a complete theory anyway.
Following along with conventional science/ materialism OK so there is this experiential property that we all possess called consciousness - just because we can’t explain HOW what we consider to be normal matter could result in an emergent property like consciousness doesn’t mean that we HAVE to conclude that consciousness is fundamental rather than emergent. Because even IF you do go with consciousness being fundamental of course it is going to bring up just as many questions. For example HOW is it then that this property/consciousness is able to produce or interact with( or appear to do so) the apparent physical world?
There are so many other scientific concepts that are just as puzzling. How could life have formed from inanimate matter? How could a living cells with all the myriad of complex systems involved have been formed due to interactions between very basic building blocks of atoms and molecules - certainly within the timescales over which evolution (apparently) has had to produce this complexity from random interactions and genetic mutations (read Behe’s Darwin’s Black box if you are interested).
So what to conclude? Is it panpsychism? This has received a bit of a re-emergence relatively recently (Dr Goff and others).
We simply don’t know, nobody does and probably never will. If it is materialism it clearly can’t be the same type of science that is currently under the umbrella of materialism. When you talk about seeing an FMRI happening in real time, ok there seems to be some correlation between blood flow in certain areas and what people say they are experiencing internally but a correlation between 2 things doesn’t mean that one explains or causes the other. I mean what is it that is shunting this blood around like this anyway? Where is the ghost in the machine that is doing it.
How the frigging hell over a few hundred thousand years could a structure as complex as the pre-frontal cortex be added on to a reptilian brain to even enable us to ponder these things - random mutations leading to a genetic advantage just doesn’t cut it for me. Behe talks about how improbable it is given the time available that even one large functioning protein could be processed from amino acids and folded in such a way that it can do its job.
Let’s face it we are screwed. All we can do, the best we can do, is kind of have a preference - for me, however this changes.
Adi Shankara(India's one of the greatest yogi Advaita vedanti) asked this question 1200 year ago.
'When you close your eyes and imagine things, how are those images formed? An image needs light. What is the source of light for imagination?'
Answer was -This commentary by Ādi Śankara is preceded by a Saṃvāda in Upanishads (don't remember which).
What is the source of light? The Sun.
What if sun is invisible? The source is the moon.
What if moon is invisible? Agni is that source.
What if Agni is invisible? Ātman(self, consciousness ) is that light.
I am not a materlistic atheist but answer is not very much convincing.
Well said!! I think Behe made some good points about irreducible complexity etc and it speaks volumes that we have to invoke unfalsifiable multiverses to deal with the fact that it’s mathematically impossible for conscious life to have emerged from just one universe. Maybe consciousness is irreducible like the laws of physics. But where do the laws of physics even come from in the first place ? and why are they finely tuned and ordered for life ? The fact is that stories about sentient puddles have not explained away this problem. If they had the puddle analogy would have been submitted for peer review in a scientific journal and we could all forget about multiverses and string theory. The fact is that the “natural sciences” can’t “prove” anything as they are provisional and can only infer. It’s a constantly changing landscape regarding what (is) not what (ought) to be and you clearly can not justify and ground metaphysical presuppositions such as morals and ethics (oughts) in a strictly reductive materialism, atheism or philosophical naturalism that clearly excludes metaphysical realities! I think that it’s inevitable that the theory of evolution will come to seem laughable at some point in the future. It may take decades centuries or a thousand years but the fact is that we are only scratching the surface of reality and knowledge and this is a constantly changing landscape.
@@darwinhubc7481 Being is inside. Existence is outside. We should use these words separately to distinguish about reality: brahman is atman: the light is both outside, as it is inside. One is existence, the other is being. We cannot perceive (external) existence without (inner) being, so the perception of existence (brahman) is limited to the limits of (the senses of) our being (atman). This is pretty Kantian I guess. The question is: is there more existence of brahman beyond what can be known by the atman?
However Upanishads answer is: atman = brahman. So no, there is not more existence (outside) than there can be known inside (by the being)
On a sidenote: this is Spinoza's question of God being greater of a substance than just the two attributes of Matter and the Mind. The interesting answer might be: the Platonist ideal of mathematics, a discussion which is often skipped by Advaita Vedantists, yet not less interesting! See Roger's Penrose relationship between Nature, Physics and the Mind, which far surpasses all these Advaita Vedanta conundrums. It adds a third variable in the relationship: namely Mathematics.
@@georgedoyle7971 Laughable? We are already using it everyday. How about DNA and Covid vaccines?
Another brilliant interview, thanks Robert Kuhn and team 👏 👍 😀 🙌 👌
The real question of consciousness is "who is asking the question?" not whether the experience is answerable to internal inquiry.
But then your going down the Satsang route of peeling away the psychological layers of things that are not "I am" until you reach the core of awareness. OK, great for human potential but still no closer to the mechanism of how a brain can generate a soul.
@@SocksWithSandals If what we mean by the soul is the indelible existence of consciousness, then we have something to talk about. Think of a telescope. How powerful does it have to be until it can see itself? The answer for the telescope may be the same for the human brain. It’s not a matter of effort or insight, but a matter of the constraints of the instrument
The who is irrelevant. It is enough to say that the question is being asked.
@@wlovett4 Who awaits satisfaction? Relevant to whom?
Why does there have to be a who? Obsession with this idea of there necessarily being a subject to experience, a 'thing', seems unnecessary to me - rather, there is just 'experience'. The situation of which is a verb rather than the noun. #deep
What do we have that a dog does not? Perceptual and experiential domains would have to be largely similar/overlapping. Even some core emotional characteristics are likely shared; anger, fear, sadness, affection...etc. So what makes the difference? A fully integrated but diffusely modular (and sometimes 'cloud-like'!) extra layer; the cortex (dogs have a cortex but it is very insignificant by comparison). A squishy 'hardware' of vast complexity that runs various concurrent/overlapping/interconnected/even conflicting 'software'.... and it does so in a way that connects to all other parts of the nervous system. Consciousness likely primarily resides in a part of the cortex near the crossroads of the brain...the cingulate cortex and a few other proximate cortical regions. How does consciousness emerge from the operations of these regions? My hunch is that there must be a neuronal structure here that acts as a central processor of sorts; in some ways the architecture of this 'hardware' must be particularly genetically prescribed but in being so it ironically results in the most dynamic and free-ranging process; also partially constructed as a function of incoming and outgoing information in the long and short terms. Being aware that you are aware....gives me a sense of a 'software' that is running on an emulated 'hardware'...i.e. these cortical regions somehow run a 'software' that emulates a 'hardware' that is ourselves...it emulates 'who we are to ourselves'...and a further 'software' runs somehow within that realm of emulated hardware; the conscious space/experience.
so I take it that you are saying that Consciousness comes from the physical brain...right? we are still in the material world and not anywhere in woo woo land I hope.
@@livethemoment5148 Most definitely the material world Wanderer. Whatever that may be!
The more view Closer to Truth the more I realise Distant to Truth !
I think the key word in the interview was “emergent”. This aligns with the patterns of the universe.
I feel Zimmerman is playing dumb. He keeps repeating the same objection: you can't tell me exactly where 'strawberry' is in the brain. That's because brain function and emergent thoughts (like 'strawberry') are too complex for us to track at this moment. As we develop more sophisticated tools and investigating methodology, description of thought/consciousness will become more precise. This is the same path every other understanding in science has followed.
If I remember right, this is along the lines of what Anil Seth is researching using VR. Going to be interesting stuff
Exactly! And I feel like he's intentionally using a property that's harder to explain. Why start with the end result rather than the discreet parts?
He should start with the base stimuli our taste buds can detect... sweet, sour, bitter, salt, umami. Determine what neurons are stimulated by these specific oral stimuli, and then look at what neurons are stimulated by a strawberry. Just like we can detect various light wavelengths, but we recognize their combination as 'turquoise', it would seem the simplest explanation is that the object (the strawberry) stimulates our taste buds in specific ways, and those stimuli are combined to recognize the 'strawberry flavor'.
For reality to match what he's describing, it would seem a strawberry would need to stimulate a completely different set of neurons, which seems unlikely.
What Zimmerman is trying to say is that evolution went on for billions of years without any living thing saying "ouch". The ability to feel pain didn't solve any problem, it created a problem. This pain is subjective and it is felt by sentient beings. The emergence of sentient beings could have never been predicted and it will likely never be explained. We model the world with math. How can we model a subjective experience with math?
@@DeterministicOne
Of course the ability to feel pain solved a problem. We learned to avoid the things that harm us, like fire etc.
It helped us stay alive longer.
Like...what do even mean, by the ability to feel pain, no solving any problems?
@@anderslarsen4412 Before there were sentient beings, nothing was being harmed. Long life, short life, getting hit my a meteor, didn't matter. No worries. Evolution kept chugging along for billions of years despite the lack of harm. Kind of like out of nowhere, subjective experience showed up on the scene. One of these subjective experiences was pain. Now there is something to worry about. Getting hurt. Evolution then kept on chugging along for millions years and here we are with language and math, and still suffering for no good reason.
It is hard to imagine programming or replicating the breath of human consciousness, emotions and self awareness using "IF, THEN, ELSE".
A concious entity is surely having experiences. It can memorise and feel them. These experiences comes from their senses. These senses have different levels of power. These combinations make the original experience. Red, dotty, interesting shape, sour and sugar. So its a strawberry. Its not a lemon because it must have been more sour and round yellow. You know an entity needs to survive with those skills. So it was necessary to recongnise for the future. Consciousness is a tool to survive. If you dont know when your leg is gone, sure you will not. :)
You're exactly right
"Show me what piece of matter I am" is a stupid argument.
It would be like asking what piece of matter the stock market is. You can't because it is emergent. Doesn't mean it's source isn't purely physical though.
In Zimmerman's terms the stock market is functional and only structurally emergent, it is not novel in the way subjective experience is.
@@HighPeakVideo For all we know, the stock market does have a subjective experience. Of course if it does, it would differ significantly from that of humans.
You sound like a fool. "The stock market" exists as an abstract idea 💡 in consciousness. Do you understand the difference between abstract and ACTUALITY?
Have you ever been aware of being outside of your body? I have. To witness your very own body from the outside might give you a new perspective. Pretty sure the brain was still in the body. Try to be open.
@@noonespecial24 you talk about drugs, but if state that brain is generating consciousness then there is nothing special that you might get that feeling after altering brain states resulting in changes in your perception. I think it is misleading to take drugs as some point of reference in that as we want to prove that there is something more then material aspect (brain) by altering its function.
Could energy bring experience of touch, taste, smell, sound, sight and emotion?
I love that man!!!
Fascinating that the brain is trying to figure itself out by looking at ITSELF as a third party.
Brilliant!
The brain is the only known thing in the universe that named itself.
Just the state of the brain creates the state? It is so I am?
What experience? Just reflections of previous experiences relating to the framework of given meanings, making consciousness? So the feedbackloop of language making you aware of having it? Is this why the evolution of language is critical perhaps?
I don’t know.
Maybe it is like a radio. It transmits. But what is it that experiences something? The radio of something external?
So is it just a brainstate, a lightning that correlates all kind of spots of brainfunction and reflecting on previous experiences + giving meaning, making the experience. Then becoming aware because this, about this experience, making consciousness?
I don’t know. Maybe it is the radio in praxis. Or maybe the radio is just the apparatus....
emergent properties don't necessarily require a specific part of the system to be explained. Rather, it's the interplay between the parts of the system that gives rise to emergent properties - think the Game of Life: simple local interaction rules produce complex patterns at the macro scale, no individual part can explain those patterns. So I don't understand why the taste of a strawberry has to be reduced to a specific part of the brain.
Those complex patterns are functional and are only structural emergent properties. Conscious experience introspects as a new non-structural property - if it emerges from the physical then the question is what part of the physical.
i love Conway's Game of Life...it helpsto illustrate emerging complexity, even the emergence of life itself...and so it goes with consciousness,...which is an emergent property of complex living beings with complex brain/body
We are consciousness, right this second and onwards. Science and philosophy make a big projection and try and squash the wonder of being alive into theories and scientific formulas. Just enjoy being alive. Be happy and make others happy.
I feel as though science and philosophy are consciousness garnering insights on its environment and itself. For some, enjoying being alive means understanding one's life in a context one finds agreeable. One's life can be described as a combination of one's internal and external experiences, which can be understood through philosophy and science, respectively. Not everyone needs science and philosophy to reach this understanding. I feel as though they should not be decried as "squashing" anything.
Gobbledegook.
What is needed for emergence, particularly in brain?
Possibly the ability to be aware of its own process.
it requires specific bonds, connections, patterns, processes.
@@waerlogauk that's kinda circular reasoning: consciousness (awareness) needs ability to be aware (consciousness), to emerge. :/
@@mnp3a Good point, I am suggesting that consciousness IS what we call being aware of our own thought processes. So the requirement is for a brain structure with complexity capable of supporting that interconnectedness. Possibly this develops from the requirements for social interactions, being self-aware helps in understanding others actions.
@@waerlogauk yeah, the question is: what sort of connections are aware? (thats the question in this video) right now we dont even have a hypothetical candidate for that, nor a clue of how could that happen, even in principle.
One time I found my grandfather’s old wool coat, ten years after he died, in a box in my fathers basement. I took the coat out and tried it on and caught a scent from it that instantly threw me back to my childhood and with my grandfather. I think that one of the main differences between us and animals is the associations of scent and particular memories that are tied into our emotions. Surely dogs and cats know that meat is food and certain scents from certain meats probably trigger their hunger greater than others. But I think that their similarities to us in that regard might end there. I don’t think that they would feel much of an emotional tug if they catch our scent years after we had passed away. I believe they have some emotions, or survival equivalents to it. But with us, the pull and memory recollection is powerful.
dogs use scent also to recognise and bond with each other, therefore they do associate scent with emotion. come in my house when i am not home and my doberwoman will instantly pin you to the floor recognising your an intruder, yet on the other hand someone she knows and recognises would get in but not get out unless i give the say so thats ok. if you ever had a close friendship with a canine to the point of imprint from birth and recognised by a dog as a parent you would see that differently believe me. any mammal that gives birth uses scent associated with emotion believe me on that. they are also capable of complex decisions based on emotion such as some breeds will die to protect their young or human owners.
Have you ever had a dog? A dog can smell the person who owns them (from a coat, say) and have, what seems, like a very emotional reaction.
Most animals have far better abilities for smell than we do. Dogs and cats can remember who you are from your smell. Dogs are totally in a world of smells. What really differentiates us is the ability of our imaginations to take sensory elements and construct shared virtual worlds, which is maybe what you were getting at.
I think for an entity to be conscious, the following are required:
1. There must be an information control system, like a nervous system, with the top priority of serving the entity which gives it self-identity.
2. There must be pre-programmed modules that elicit a spectrum of responses indicating good or bad for the entity. In humans, this would be the DNA produced algorithms which evolved from lower lifeforms.
3. The system must have active external sensors, internal sensors, and memory such that the system flow is continuously seeking a balance which provides the focus and sensation of consciousness.
great. Now, how does that system starts feeling stuff? That's the tricky part in modelling a system that would be conscious
@@mnp3a The DNA algorithms are inherited from lower species due to natural selection which occurred over a very long period. They are complex and reside in the lower brain and result in feedbacks and responses to events, such as rapid heartbeat, flight. If you consider each feeling/emotion, including the reproductive ones, and model them in a survival situation for sub-species, you will see why each developed. For example, guilt helps prevent a creature from being forced to sit at the edge of the colony where tigers feed. If a creature didn't have guilt before it reproduced, its generations would be less likely to exist.
Consciousness needs to be defined. In a sense, a thermostat is aware of its environment. I think of consciousness as awareness of self. To make a computer conscious, there would be a loop that continuously measures good or bad for the entity. But beware, that loop within AI may develop itself.
@@Larry000 so, you believe that self-driving cars are having consious experiences?
nahhh.
@@mnp3a Possibly, in the general case(self-awareness), there are levels of conscious, different robustness. Humans are currently at the highest level due to greater brain capacity. You can draw a line below humans and say above is conscious, below is not, but then you rule out animals, etc.
What part of water is wet?
That one that isn’t dry. It’s just side by side comparison experienced and stored sensations. It could be called sensation A and B for that matter, but stored experience tells’s us which sensation is which.
Great question relative to the gobbledygook of this interview.
Those materialists have a narrow minded, black & white, simplistic state of mind through which they see the world. The compexity and zen of the sort of comment you make is over their head. So sad.......
The conscious experience about it?
Software is an intriguing metaphor. Nowhere, on the processor of the phone I'm typing, will I see a picture these two gentlemen speaking. I see it on the screen, but that's like an extremity of the phone's brain. The picture is found in the RAM, in registers, in the ALU. It is a sequence of high and low voltages, which we impute 0 and 1 to, and makes sense because we have previously imputed said values thereto. It doesn't explain all, because it brings in an external observer as part of the equation.
There must be some objectivity to the experience of things like colors, atleast among species... Otherwise how do prey animals evolve to counter the perceptions of their predators (camouflage, scent decoys etc etc)? If there is not some agreement between them on what colors appear how and what tastes/smells are appealing/repulsive..? Without a 'standard' of perception between them, how could these things develop? How do flowers "know" their bright colors will attract pollinators?
The blue you see is demonstrably the blue I see.
The most likely candidate for “new element” in this discussion is information. If you consider the idea that all matter contains information which grows with each interaction. There is safety in believing organic matter is needed before information becomes conscious. We assume rocks don’t think, but “consciousness ” is an assumption. All we really know is that other living organisms respond to information. But all matter responds to information. We are no closer to understanding how information is transmitted or processed.
Is information processing in brain broken down into energy?
A subject where even opinions seem wooly.
How does consciousness creates reality?
"Imaginary, inspiration and creativity are all things that go far beyond simple information storage and memory recall functions.
There are those who conjecture that it may not be in the brain where it's happening anyway. That it may be a hyperdimensional transfer of sort, from dimensions beyond our own consciousness."
Dr. Chuck Missler
Understand that the 'feeling of consciousness' is the action of a high level operating system executing, performing the functions laid down via evolution and genetics. Our experience is that of software executing.. what is felt is just stimulation of individual neurons, and analysed en masse by brain simulation software. The ego will always say there is a magic and unique quality to your existence. Truuth or reality, if they exist, are certainly trancendent oof the distortions of the egos 'I' thought program imo.
Fuzzy objects cause issues of vague explanation under materialism. There saved you time. I just don't see how non-materialisic explanations don't have serious issues of vagueness.
Brains are not conscious. We are!
I thought up the color swapping question a long time ago.
I found this discussion to be deeply unsatisfying and mostly based on wishful thinking and motivated reasoning. In my own life, I have experienced how fragile consciousness is and how it is subject to the assaults on the body: alcohol, recreational drugs, concussions, chemo, anesthetics, dementia, etc. In my college study of sensation and perception, I saw how the physical limitations of the body's sensory mechanisms can distort and alter what we perceive. I have seen my grandfather and mother slowly fade away as their brains deteriorated through age and disease. Brain damage can permanently alter personalities, split brain operations can create two separate "consciousnesses" within the same body, disease can rob a person of smell, touch, sight, or completely alter those sensations. Just because we don't yet understand the mechanisms that create "consciousness" does not mean that the explanation must be some metaphysical or supernatural cause. Yes, we would all like to believe that we will continue to exist beyond our body, that our essence is something separate and eternal, but I think the evidence for that view is extremely thin and not convincing.
It's so paradoxical that the one thing we are all forced to continually observe in every waking hour is the one thing that has no scientific explanation yet.
How indeed.
Our brains facilitate symbolic agreements and interactions by which we can map surprises from first bites of delicious fruit, and other delightful experiences. I see consciousness as maps all the way up, starting from the Cartesian pillars of doubt and existence. For a wiser take, check out The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon.
this is a materialist conversations happening in the corner of my mind that identifies material
Just like the earliest humans, anything we don't understand we assign to mysticism. Just because we don't understand how the brain creates consciousness doesn't mean there's something magical about it. It just means we don't yet understand it.
We will eventually.
i don't understand why the word "magic" keeps popping in these discussions as the only alternative to "brain creates it".
@@mnp3a for me it's just that people throughout history, even now, want to subscribe things unknown to a gift from a creator rather than the process of evolving over billions of years.
Even the simplest mammals express pleasure and pain, even if not being fully conscious of the experience. It's just how brains work if given enough time to evolve.
Not knowing the mechanics of how our minds make sense of the world doesn't mean there isn't a mechanism for it. It just means we don't understand it yet.
@@allenrussell1947 yes, but that's not the discussion, at least as i understand it. Since we have no clue of how it could be possible to generate consciousness (the simplest animal type you mention, that's the tricky one, not ours!), we have to at least acknowledge the possibility that some sort of consciousness could be *physically* fundamental and not emergent.
@@mnp3a I think we agree actually.
2:57 his voice reminds me of someone, some character in some film...I mean...the best I can come up with is Titanic, the guy who does a lot of explaining in it, I'm not sure I recall which one...maybe that's whom his voice reminds me of...
Daniel SG-1
It is a tinted conversation that has the appearance of scientific one. It looks more to me like an “I want to believe” discussion.
We are missing here 2 important points.
It is not about where is I when I taste a strawberry. It is more about do I have consciousness experiences that are undoubtedly detached from the matter (words, culture, representations…). Does duality make any sense? Or is it just a continuation of a cultural/folkloric explanation of the world?
The second point is if there is a “space” proper to consciousness can we redefine matter as a consequence?
I read a lot of words you typed....but they all are incongruous and devoid of meaning...
The problem isn't that materialism is not true, it's just that materialism is constrained by not going past correlations, computations etc. The next step up is explaining fields which make up the material in our cells.
Can you do a video on microtubules and their possible connection to quantum consciousness?
this has been done by stuart hammeroff
Did closer to the truth make that vid? I’m asking Robert to make that vid not Stuart.
@@TreehouseMachineStudios yes he did. the videos on here. look for it you lazy git.
@@Dion_Mustard then say that from the get go dick!
Please interview swami Sarvapriyananda on consciousness.
Could the brain have an emergence machine for conscious experience? Maybe emergence and consciousness go together somehow?
@@Graewulfe yeah, but emergent properties can be understood in terms of some properties of the components: crystals take the shape they take from the tiny shapes of molecules arranging in very stable patterns. Temperature can be traced to kinetic energy of molecules, and so on. What properties of neurons grant the emergence of consciousness?
@@Graewulfe but of course they have the property: the steering wheel transforms one sort of movement into another, the wheels axes allow for the changes in positions of the wheels, and so on (every position of a wheel determines precisely one direction they can roll, and that will become the direction you are driving, etc)
the properties in the components are not identical to system properties, of course. But they are related. Which are the properties related to consciousness? how do they relate?
a lot of the misunderstanding comes from the different meanings of "consciousness"
I don't think anyone believes that a door is having an internal dialogue, and certainly no one in science is advocating that the "self" we experience is unrelated to the brain.
@@Graewulfe whos talking about gods? And you can drive *one wheel*. The issue here is the ginormous gap between properties of the components and the properties of the system.
that's quite a lengthy and self-serving post that at the same time:
1) misunderstands the issues being raised in the discussions over consciousness by people that find the emergent hypothesis lacking AND
2) does so while claiming that people doing so are wasting your time.
that's quite an accomplishment!
now, i would really enjoy more reading sermons if the preacher understood the questions and hypothesis being raised. But hey!, you dont always get what you want.
:) that's quite an ego to believe that every scientist and philosopher saying things that don't fit your worldview are idiots wasting everybodys time.
and that's ok: i wont waste mine reading yor platitudes anymore.
@@Graewulfe yeah right, i've studied Russell, Maturana, Varela, Rosch, Damasio and read Bohm, Dennett, Putman, Goff and others just to feed the ego of Graewulfe.
seriously, please don't be obnoxious and stop tagging me.
Nobody feels a feeling. It's just a feeling. You are the feeling, if you like.
I think if we want to understand consciousness in the brain, we need to use the analogue of a computer. A computer contains lots of different circuits that do a particular thing, but you will find them repeated all over the place for specific functions. When I say circuits, I mean repeatable groups of structures or cells that we can figure out performing a particular task.
Some analogues in an electronic device would be circuits like this. Here is a group of components that form a high pass filter. Here is a group of components that form a low pass filter. Here is a group of components that for a boost converter. Here is a group that form a buck converter.
All these things can often be tied together in unique and interesting ways that might not be obvious at first when you are trying to reverse engineer something. Sometimes it takes some mental work to tease some of these connected circuits apart. And when you do, you are impressed by how efficiently they were tied together.
so, we understand consciousness as a reaaaally complicated computer? That approach would be feasible if there were at least an idea of a information processing architecture ("computer") that would necessarily be aware.
@@mnp3a Well the architecture would be very different. A lot of it would be chemical architecture that moves ions around rather than electrons. Basically, the point Im trying to make is that there should be a lot recurring types of circuits that are made up of even smaller recurring components. Trying to figure out an information processing architecture is impossible until you identify the small components and the common circuits they produce. Larger circuits will only be identifiable after the small circuits are identified. Information processing structure is still well above this.
@@mnp3a Just to put it another way. If you were going to reverse engineer a computer and you knew nothing about computers or electronics... First you would need to understand the basics of electronics. What is a diode, capacitor, inductor, etc. And what do each of them do. How do they create a greater function by combining them into a circuit. You have to know all these basics before you can even implement the idea of signaling or binary code. I'm just using electronics as an analogue model. I'm not up on neuroscience, but I doubt we even have a decent understanding of the low level components that are the equivalent of diodes, resistors, capacitors, inductors and transistors. Much less understanding the basic building block circuits that can be made with them.
@@marcv2648 so we dont have the slightest idea of how it could be done, but just the expectation that it might be understood in a distant future.
@@marcv2648 yes, i think that we know so little that all hypotheses should be recognized as possible right now. Consciousness *could* be fundamental, or it *could* be emergent. And we don't know. Fundamental seems a little bit more believable to me, but we know so little that every plausible idea we have could turn out to be mistaken.
May I suggest for anyone who wants to experience a different plane of consciousness try ketamine. The first time I tried K Nirvana was playing on the stereo. As the K kicked in I was moved back and up to what seemed to be a kind of out of body experience, and I suddenly understood every lyric that Kobane sang. I felt as though I was on the same plane of consciousness that Kurt was on when he wrote the song. Before that I liked Nirvana's music, but as with most music I didn't really understand what the lyrics meant. It was profound
Or Mescaline or Ayahuasca or psylocibin or LSD...
@@tommroy I've tried all of those except ayahuasca and I can tell you that the others are completely different K. I wish I could find a better way to explain it.
You wer not on a different plane of consciousness dude. You were high 😆
@@vinny2459 crazy high 🤣
Magic mushrooms are legal in Oregon and Canada.
Its the first time I had not understand a thing of what the interviewed is talking about.
He is desperately trying to push his point of view, but doing it very poorly, and of course it is not a strong position to defend in the first place..
Zimmerman is engaging in semantic games here. We're all familiar with emergent properties of systems, we encounter them and talk about them all the time. You can't take an emergent property of a system and ask which subdivided part of the system has this emergent property. We know that people can lose various mental functions due to physical interventions such as brain damage or chemical imbalances, including taste, smell, etc. That's just disruption of the system disturbing the emergence of an emergent property. This is an entirely coherent and reasonable hypothesis. We can't prove it yet, any more than he can prove his position on consciousness, but I believe the materialist explanation will prove sufficient as it has on so many, many previous questions.
Seems about right. Our current bet, which is examining brain, already gave us a lot of information about it, stats, regions responsible for certain processing and so on. This guys explanation or I'd rather say "guess" gives us nothing to work on.
Saying consciousness “emerges” from neural events is not a scientific explanation, it is the equivalent of saying “then a miracle occurs.”
@@danzigvssartre its like brain calculating the way ball flies when you throw it. It's not like it can be reduced to one thing, but we know its calculated by brain. Same with almost any thing we do. I don't understand why connsciousness should be any different. It's maybe because of all that woo mistycal concepts and religions. I understand that we don't have clear evidence for that, but we start to have more and more. In recent paper about general anesthesia in mice, we finly got some understanding on how anesthetics actually work. We are getting closer and closer, while mystical religious woo gives us no path to explore. Almost any property of the brain is emergent, so consciousness shouldn't be an exception. We can compare brain of diffrent animals that can do weird thing like detecting electric signal, blood in water and so on. I think we are clear that brain is processing signals for receptors and it had to emerge at some point during evolution.
@@danzigvssartre We have identified many, many examples of emergent behaviour and emergent properties. Some of these behaviours can be very sophisticated. The results from artificial neural networks such as deep learning systems are examples of emergent behaviour and these are clearly not miracles.
I like his fuzzy boundary argument; that you will still taste strawberry, if you take a smaller and smaller focus on a volume of the brain: you don't know which part is conscious, it could be the whole brain, but the taste of strawberry doesn't diminish if you cut out the outer first cm of brain material: you would still be completely conscious as brain experiments turn out. So where is the boundary of 'strawberryness'? Well, it is a fact, that if you cut out a particular part of the brain, you lose consciousness and thus strawberryness. So that is one of the essential boundaries that we can know of. The rest is possibly a distributed characteristic that looks like a fixed discriminate amount or threshold of strawberriness, even though it is an accumulation of standing wave patterns in a cloud of the brain.
How would a nonphysical entity (consciousness) interact with matter? If it interacts then it should be detectable. No disembodied consciousness has ever communicated or interacted with our consciousness.
I think the mistake we make is to assume that some bit of matter is purely physical. That is a assumption. Lets say complexity with some extra on top of pure materialism could be responsible for the ''magic'' that is consciousness.
Not sure what he finds so compelling about the fact that we “haven’t discovered” the seat of consciousness yet. A couple thousand years ago, we hadn’t even invented the wheel.
The analogies miss the point, methinks. Firstly we can agree to what the experience of a color or taste is for a particular experience, even if our subjective sensations are different. We all know what "red" is, but we don;t know if we have the same sensations internally. (And often it isn’t the same.)
Secondly, there is no single part of the brain that can be identified as THE bit that’s conscious. Which particular part of your phone is the bit that determines it’s “phoneness”? Maybe it can still be a phone without a mic, but it can’t function without a battery. But a battery isn’t necessarily an identifying characteristic of a phone. Together it;sam phone, and some phones (without speakers or a screen or a dial pad, could still be phones… it IS fuzzy, because it’s all a collection of items or functions that make up the whole and there isn’t a sudden switch from being a not-phone to a phone,etc.
Finally, what we experience subjectively as sound or color or smell is actually no more than an interpretation of raw physical phenomena. Sound is a series of pressure waves, no more. Light is no lore than a collection of energy levels. Smell is purely a collection of chemical reactions. Snakes probably don’t hear sounds, for instance. They feel them.
Our brains do a huge amount of analog to digital processing and we probably have the illusion of a subjective experience… in the same way as a movie is simply a collection of still images. There is no “place” where the movie (experience / consciousness) exists. It comes into being when you process the still images in a particular sequence at a particular frequency. I think conscious experience works in a similar way. The brain probably acts as some kind of sequential projector, and if everything works correctly in the proper sequence then you can experience a movie.
Kuhn rules.
What is consciousness?
Consciousness emerged as a brain's attempt to understand it's own physical space within a physical world.
I don't buy this line of arugment at all because it is an underestimation of the sigifiance of emergence. Emergence creates entirely new properties all the time. A very simple example, you don't find the property of 'wetness' merely by looking at electrons and protons. Yet is an emergent property of a system of parts - a collection of molecules. No single electron, molecule or single component of the system will tell you anything about wetness, you have to look at the entire system. Emergence is the very idea that complex systems can have properties that are irreducible to any one component of the system.
Now I’m more interested in why one person likes strawberries and another doesn’t.
The experience is the same, are the tastebuds wired differently, because each brain is individual?
Perfect love has cast out all fear.
when someone is conscious of a physical sensation, it is due to a link between the mind and brain processes imo.
people are concious of painful or pleasant experiences, nobody denies that (although some atheists do think nothing is actually real...everything is an image in the imagination of the imaginer, to use an old islamic analogy) but we can not speak of consciousness when a plate drops on the floor and shatters. the only explanation is that there is a "mind" in a person but not in the plate and for a person to experience or become conscious of a physical sensation simply means there is some manner of coupling up of the body with the mind.
Brains are not conscious ,- they are the medium of consciousness
I AM THE UNIVERSE | I am the one creating the concepts of beginning and end , you and me , flow of time , past, future, present, dimensions, you Vs others, I Vs the universe , good and bad , language , touch , taste, feeling, something and nothing, memories , a creator, a consciousness and I am the one questioning my existence and the whole time I am the only one existing as a whole. I am everything . I am the one who created this situation to watch this , read this message that I typed and I am the only one experiencing the entirety of existence and I will continue to construct new concepts and experience my existence . There cannot be nothingness that I call, but I always existed. I AM THE UNIVERSE
Video should be called: "HOW TO TRAP YOURSELF WITH SEMANTICS."
Sean Carroll's book The Big Picture directly addresses, in detail, the issues that seem to baffle these two.
Sean Carrol is a fanatic materialist. I would be skeptical of any claim he makes.
There's no evidence for dualism and materialism.
Then the question is-where precisely is this “soul”?
No. The soul is the emptiness in us. Spirit, living in soul.
@Drone Dude but we all have a unique consciousness/soul that’s a product of our genetics and experience.
Sense “soul” is something that stems from the Bible, the Greek word for soul is “psyche”. Therefore psychology is the study of the “soul”.
Our psyche is our mind, consciousness, soul.
My opinion.
@Drone Dude like I said. Soul is a large screen, and spirit lives there. Soul, banish. And spirit go home.
The soul is nowhere and everywhere .if you think you know where the soul is ,then you don't know .you can't know the unknowable.
@@minacarroll8867 I know. Read my comments please.
I am curious, has someone considered that link between physical particles and mental world might be vibration. Vibration is a thing that makes physical radio to receive information from air
The world is broadcast into you through your 5 senses
Good point and in fact, when people experience out of body experiences and near death experiences they often describe experiencing a kind of unique vibrational state separate from their physical body. So I believe you are right to a point.
@@keithgreenan3177 , 5 is not enough. Human Being has obviously more sensores receiving information from outside
I'm confident that all matter begins in a space of mental activity and is brought into form through vibration. Everything is vibratory.
@@tommroy Never understood people whom are confident for no reason but ok buddy
The true limit of our universe is not the CMB but the neuronal network. We and all ours concepts are inside it🤙
Do plants have consciousness? Do elements?
Dualism of the gaps. Reified “self.”
There is a room with a table and on that table is a phonetic Cantonese translation book, next to the table is a man sitting on a chair who only speaks English. There is 2-way speaker in the door of the room and you are on the other side and can say any word or phrase in English through the speaker and the man in the room looks up the words and tells you what the words are back in Cantonese.
Who can understand Cantonese, is it the book, is it the man sitting on the chair, is it the speaker or maybe it's all combined and its the room that can understand English and Cantonese.
That's the answer to his strawberry taste question, its the combination of many parts of the brain coming together to produce a experience, it's not one "bit".
To say something mystically emerges because complexity exists is to explain nothing.
very precisely and succinctly said....bravo....at least what I understood from that is that there is no need to say that a mystical Soul or Spirit or God is responsible for consciousness....its complexity (ergo, we don't yet understand it) that is responsible for this complex output
agreed, few ceunturies ago almost everything we understand today was mistical and assumed as a product of gods intervention. Today its not the case. Consciousness is one of few last bastions that are still standing and allow for mistal/spirtual interpretations.
@@megustaav Science is talking about things without any concern for the so-called gods. What consciousness is and how it arises is still a total mystery. That is all that is known about consciousness objectively. Subjectively we each have a unique understanding of what consciousness is. My mind is not your mind. Because individual minds arise through experience and are limited. We are minds that experience and have no idea how we exist.
Actually that is a sort of explanation. A universe from nothing means there is something outside of this world which might as well is mixed with matter and might as well needs complexity to florish. Science is a way to simplistic tool to research lots of matters that is why it will be stuck on many problems forever....
@@fortynine3225 thats not explanation, thats another claim you need proof for. If you say there is something outside this world, you need to prove that, you need to define something. It's useless.
There is nothing extra. Subjective experiences, emotions, “what it’s like” feelings, consciousness, and self are all emergent phenomena of the brain and body. We know how a human forms from conception to birth. It’s all physical. We know how humans evolved. It’s all physical. It is amazing and difficult for many humans to accept, but evidence exists to support this conclusion.
A brain is conscious in the same way that a culture is conscious. A brain, as a colony of neurons, is directly analogous to a city, as a colony of people. Brains self-organize into their functional specializations just as cities do. It thus follows that a thought is to a brain what a culture is to a city. Here, I believe we need to factor in QM. DNA entanglement provides for neurons in brains what telecommunications/media provide for people in cities. That is, immediate access to collective knowledge & self-identity. All colonies do this, including ants, bees & bacteria.
thought i was missing my contacts at the start
These conversations always end up is maybe so maybe not. I don't know.
we all taste strawberry in a different way , some like it and some don't depends on your taste buds and genes and hormones all material things and i think animals taste things differently
your conscious is in your brain and brain is a material thing
Vision (and touch, hearing, taste) is just as mysterious as smell when it comes to consciousness.
What's the big mystery? Our brains are able to build models of the physical world we exist in by categorizing the various inputs into the parts of the model associated with those sense inputs. Vision is associated with a physical model of the world, smell is associated with the various chemical inputs we perceive through our noses.
In philosophy this phenomenon of having a sense of something, or consciousness, that we perceive is referred to as 'qualia'. How qualia emerge in the brain to provide this feeling of consciousness is not well understood. But it is 'simply' a trick of the mind associating inputs from the physical world to the model of that world in our brains. All of this is evolutionary.
Why does a strawberry smell like a strawberry? Because it does. There is a 1:1 correspondence between the inputs from the physical world and the model of that world in our brains. This is true for all the senses.
And if we ever develop new senses capable of detecting other physical phenomenon then our consciousness would expand to include how we'feel' when reviewing the model in our brain where we've stored that information.
“What’s the big mystery”
Erm the “big mystery” is that we still don’t know what consciousness is and we don’t even really know what matter is!! This is what science is about it describes what stuff is using a methodological approach and makes predictions. Quantum superposition and neurology and theories of mind demonstrate that we don’t know didley about the “Hard problem of consciousness”. If you’ve solved the mystery regarding consciousness and matter then I suggest that you put your money where your mouth is and submit your extensive research and repeatable scientific evidence for peer review and you’ll be nominated for a Nobel prize.
Furthermore, I’m not making any appeals to authority but according to the expert linguist and brilliant cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky…
“There are only two ways of looking at eliminative materialism (the idea that all things reduce to solid substance). One is that it is total gibberish until someone tells us what matter is. Until someone tells us what eliminative materialism is there can’t be such a thing as eliminative materialism and no one can tell us what matter is”. (Noam Chomsky).
Equally, I’m not making any appeals to authority, but on the cognitive level Albert Einstein utilised a more nuanced approach and demonstrated that “matter” is nothing more substantive than the curvature of space and time which is why he completely rejected atheism for the belief in the fundamental nature of mind and consciousness. That is Einstein completely rejected atheism for the nuanced God of Spinoza/deism/panentheism. Similarly, Einstein’s closest friend Michelle Besso, who Einstein stated “was the greatest sounding board in Europe”, completely rejected atheism for the belief in the fundamental nature of mind and consciousness/theism
Furthermore, according to the Director of the Institute for Mind and Consciousness professor David Chalmers the current laws of physics have not explained away “the hard problem of consciousness” that is phenomenal consciousness.
According to professor Chalmers…
“Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.” (David Chalmers).
We are left, Chalmers claims, with the following stark choice: either eliminate consciousness (deny that it exists at all) or add consciousness to our ontology as an irreducible feature of reality and existence that is as fundamental as the law’s of physics. Either way, we are faced with a special ontological problem, one that resists solution by the usual reductive methods as the assumption that (strong emergence) explains away mind and consciousness leaves an enormous explanatory gap that is synonymous with the belief in magic.
Even the famous geneticist and evolutionist J. B. S. Haldane recognised this immense problem nearly a century ago. According to
Haldane….
“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” ( J. B. S. Haldane).
The fact is that the qualitative experience of life that is empathy, compassion, altruism, beauty, bravery, morals, ethics, meaning and purpose that is mind and consciousness is unassailable and irreducible to “matter”.
Reality and existence and in particular the qualities of experience aren’t made of “matter” they are made of (what matters).
I’m not making any appeals to authority but Aristotle debated the sophists centuries ago regarding metaphysical truths and the (truth) of the law of non contradiction and the sophists naively responded….
“You can’t prove that Aristotle!!
because we could just come along and deny metaphysics and the law of non contradiction?”
Aristotle responds brilliantly using a transcendental argument. Aristotle pointed out that when you deny something that’s so fundamental and paradigmatic as metaphysics and the laws of logic, that is the foundations of science itself the proof of that thing is that it’s assumed in its denial. It’s the same with consciousness and prescriptive metaphysical presuppositions such as the laws of logic.
Equally, Professor Chalmers claims that the current evidence suggests that we should think of mind and consciousness as an….
“updated version of Rene Descartes.”
“I doubt therefore I think therefore I am” (Rene Descartes/Thomas Antoine)
According to professor Chalmers….
“The body effects the mind the mind effects the body. Integrated information theory tells us how physics effects consciousness and collapse tells us how consciousness effects physics.” (David Chalmers). As I pointed out already if you’ve explained away “the hard problem of consciousness” then I suggest you submit it to a scientific journal to be peer reviewed because you’ll be nominated for a Nobel price.
Evidence and citations please that you can explain away consciousness using philosophical naturalism, materialism or eliminative materialism!! I’ll wait with bated breath for your Earth shattering proof in the Lancet or Scientific American that the qualities of experience, that is mind and consciousness is “a trick of the mind”!! Sorry but this is “self” evidently “self” refuting because it means that everything you just consciously typed is also a “trick of the mind” so why should we take anything you say seriously. This is hilarious and your melodramatic proselytising regarding materialist explanations for consciousness was comedy gold!!
Evidence and citations please that experience is just a “trick of the mind”!! I’ll wait!!
No offence intended all the best to you and your family and keep safe during this this Corona virus crisis ❤️😎
@@georgedoyle7971 I have been exposed to all these ideas that try to make the simple complicated.
I know that out material existence is the greatest mystery. It is likely we will never be able to understand it. We will never be able to answer why there is something rather than nothing. And I'm not talking about how matter is able to spring out of the "nothingness" that is the potential stored in the waves and singularities that exist before universes come into being. I'm talking about the nothingness that doesn't include that potential. Absolute nothingness.
So we have the reality of quantum mechanics and the weirdness that entails. Everything is possible until we "measure" it, whatever "measuring" really means. Maybe all possibilities really do play out as multiple universes. Maybe we'll figure that out, maybe not.
But I don't care about that. The true nature of our material reality is immaterial to a discussion of consciousness in our material reality if you accept it material reality actually exists. At that point consciousness is not a difficult problem. It is exactly as I described it. It is our brains, with their ability to model our reality and recognize ourselves as part of that reality and our ability to manipulate that reality and update our model with the results of our interaction with that world. It is that "feeling", like all feelings we have incorporated into our model of reality, that we have due to the reflective nature of our brains.
Stop making it more than it is. Leave that to understanding the nature of reality itself. That is where the mystery lies. Not understanding consciousness in a material world.
We develop Consciousness. We aren't born with it. So as we develop from infants our neurons make connections stimulated by sensory inputs and Consciousness is an aggregate of all these neural connections and sensory input. We learn consciousness as we develop. The same way we learn math and how to walk.
that's not the consciousness beeing discussed here, i think.
Can the taste of Strawberries be switched off in a particular area of the brain? or do particular qualia have a holographic nature?
Forgot that. Is just food. To give us energy for we finding the ultimate solution. God, of course.
I guess we will be able to understand brain to the extent that enables us to manipluate it to "replace" taste or "switch off" some stuff. I cannot see any reason for it to be impossible. Computational power and enough data would give us some patterns or even complete understanding of brain processes. W use drugs, medicine, or mechanical means to change our brain and its actvity now. I think it will be just a matter of creating an interace to access brain like a computer in the future.
@@megustaav yeah. I hope so. But that technology you spoke Jesus Christ have it. What a scientist. But I agree with you.
@@nelsonpinheiro1148 Best solution..🙂
@@megustaav Maybe. But i havent yet seen a good clear explanation of the various signal transforms when say a photon hits the retina and sends the various signals down the optical nerve to the visual cortex - lol
A brief story of a random human being:
A philosopher had a hunch that consciousness arises from physical brain activity.
The next day the philosopher had another idea: "There exists only the material, physical world, nothing non-physical exists."
Then the philosopher thought "But wait, my thoughts are not tangible material physical things, my thoughts are unlike my physical brain activity that can be measured." Sadly, the philosopher then realized that his ideas are just thoughts that do not exist. Realizing this, the philosopher stopped giving any attention to non-existent ideas and thoughts, and then thought that it was time to give up philosophy.
The former philosopher decided the best thing for a human being to do is survive, enjoy the five senses, have a lot of sex to produce more human beings, eat, drink and be merry, give to others less fortunate by providing them with whatever of life’s necessities he could spare and await the certainty of his death at some future but uncertain time.
What else can a human being do?
'I don't know man, I just don't know' Would have been a better answer.
A person is told that the red thing they are tasting is a strawberry. But you could have tasted a blueberry and was told it was a strawberry. We are conditioned by our experiences.
I believe it is short sighted to see consciousness residing in the brain. There are many neurons in the gut arent there? A brain is nothing without a body. A body is nothing without the exchange of molecules across membranes external to the body. Where does a beings physicality extend to? Is the environment external to the being or is the being an extension of the environment?
I'm not sold on the quantum world adhering to materialism