@@longcastle4863 - I get your point, but I don't see an inconsistency as long as "try your best" means conducting oneself in accordance with rational and moral principles-that is, with integrity. In my view, "taking yourself seriously" is the error of letting one's ego get into the driver's seat, in which case, there goes the ball game. The ego doesn't like truth; truth exposes ego as the fiction that it is. We all have a certain amount of ego; we need it to survive, and I don't see anything wrong with taking my survival seriously, as long as I exercise "free won't"; that is, my moral compass steers me away from coercion (force or fraud), which is the intentional interference with the life or other property of another person. Where we get cross-threaded-your excellent metaphor of "pulling the rope in opposite directions"-is where protecting the fiction that our ego is infallible becomes more important than rational (truth+logic) or moral (non-coercive) criteria in our interactions with the universe, especially other volitional beings. Admittedly, it's a balancing act, but in my experience, it's like any other skill. Doing the right thing becomes automatic after enough exercise and practice. Alas, it's practically impossible if you aren't already clear on the difference between right and wrong. Unfortunately, we're immersed in a culture that doesn't place a high value on that distinction. The toughest job we have is learning how to tell right from wrong in the first place, when we're surrounded by superficiality and moral relativism. Yet, good people do seem to find their way. For my part, I figure the best thing I can do is be one of them. I can't control anyone else.
Can conciousness exist without a brain or once the brain is physically dead? That is the question seeking answer, not whether consciousness is the brain?
I am now convinced that everything possesses a certain degree of consciousness and intelligence. I raked away a dump-truck-size load of leaves from in front of my garage door only to find that they've all returned the next day. ... It's like they _wanted_ to be there!
@@longcastle4863 *"So, it’s finally animism then? As opposed to the leaves by your door being blown there by the wind?"* ... Yes, they knew what they were doing. They had a plan and an attitude to go with it. They also bum-rushed my garage when I opened up the door.
@@longcastle4863 based on how OP has framed his post, I feel it leans more towards panpsychism than animism. What do you think? Please correct me if my inference seems wrong.
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC Obviously they’ve heard about you chopping down that oak in your backyard and are seeking revenge. Be careful if they start seeking alliances with any large tomatoes plants. They’ve been on the warpath ever since they learned about the whole ketchup thing.
@@longcastle4863 *"Be careful if they start seeking alliances with any large tomatoes plants."* ... Yah, being called a "vegetable" while stuck in a coma doesn't have the same negative impact as it used to. 🙂
Way back in the Cambrian, some of the very first creatures with light sensitive patches of skin on their bodies (representing the first kind of proto eyes) attached by a thin line of neurons to a slightly larger clump of neurons inside their bodies (representing the first kind of proto brain), were able, by means of this early sensory perceptual system, to translate changes in the steady stream of light waves in their watery environments into images of light and shadow, alerting them of dangers and/or potential sources of food, etc… So the question seems to be, how was such an early sensory perceptual system able to translate such concrete things as light waves into such seemingly non concrete things as visual experience. A very interesting question, imo, but maybe not with all spiritual implications some want to impose on it, when you consider it from the perspective of such early life forms. Or from the perspective of any life form much further down on the phylogenetic tree.
Light waves aren't all that concrete. They travel through air and water and striking that sensitive patch made that Cambrian critter jet away from the predator's shadow to live another day and to reproduce. I wish these theoretical eggheads would use more geological examples like this since it's obvious that consciousness began in the Precambrian ooze and not on the quantum chalkboard or the tip of God's Rod. 😅
@@browngreen933 It's not obvious to me. The chains of physical/chemical causes and effects that a transient shadow might trigger in some Cambrian organism may be summarized with the single word, 'reactive'. Seems to me that 'reactive' is not what we mean by 'conscious' though no doubt reactivity is one of the pillars on which being conscious stands.
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL True, modern human consciousness is not purely "reactive" but it had to start somewhere. And we know without doubt that consciousness began somewhere in the early fossil history record. But even modern human consciousness remains highly reactive. Just watch the eye contact, hand waving interaction between Robert and Koch. We're not that far away from the primordial pool as we think.
@@browngreen933 "but it had to start somewhere" We agree but just when it happened I'll bet we don't. Some assert every living thing is conscious but obviously they've forgotten about 'instinct'. It seems to me it is a fact that instinct ruled behavior for billions of years between the time when there was only reactivity and the very recent rise of "modern human consciousness". So imagine, in accord with the anthropologists, that human apes branched from the tree of evolution seven million years ago, then spent 6,990,000 years behaving according to their instincts and not at all conscious in the modern human sense. Then agriculture was discovered and village life was born. The transition from nomadic induced explosions in technology and language. And social life complexified immensely as populations got beyond the size in which an alpha male was able to control group behavior via face-to-face confrontations. It was at this time, about ten thousand years ago, that human mentality began to transition from instinct driven to bicameral control. This bicameral mode of behavioral control was able to support the growth of populations from village sized all the way to cities of up to about a million. Beyond a million societies inevitably collapsed. Bicameral minds were unable to deal with the complexity. So, to get beyond a million, cultural evolution came up with "modern human consciousness". According to the theory of mental evolution just briefly sketched, the great transiliation from bicameral to modern began three thousand years ago and was complete at about the time of Jesus. Some, like me, who adhere to the theory, believe that the immense and widespread cruelty of those days was the first crude solution to the problem of controlling newly conscious peoples by the first conscious leaders who inherited their roles atop the pyramids of power. If you want to read the theory get Julian Jaynes' great book, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". If you want to listen to his book tour lecture just click on my icon and play the video 'Bicameral Garden'. Cheers!
As Christof noted “my pain is not my brain”. The experience of pain is clearly different from the underlying physical neurological and biochemical correlates notwithstanding that the relationship is not in dispute. However this difference between experience and the physical neurological substrate necessary for the emergence of the experience ( pain is a good example) mean a that from Christof all sentient animals that experience pain are by definition conscious. This dilutes the definition of consciousness as being useful in how human consciousness is unique. If pain is really the same as love or the qualia of seeing blue then consciousness is best studied at the simpler animal levels where we try to understand what the relationship with Brian and experience may be. We then end up with the circular argument that water and its properties are different from the underlying physical causes ( hydrogen and oxygen at the right pressure and temperature to bind giving rise to wetness which is obviously different from the hydrogen and oxygen properties that preceded the reaction that formed water). There isn’t much mystery in that?
Thank you! 😊 This is well said. It's not just distinguishing between lower animal and human consciousness, to claim that brain and pain are separate... Of course they are. Pain is interpreted somewhere in the brain stem, and has nothing to do,,, initially, with our upper cortex's awareness of it. Fish fighting on a fisherman's line. Is that fish aware of doing that, do they get angry? Do they have some kind of internal self representation of what that pain is causing their nervous system to do? Does pain initially create a fight or flight response? I would say no... Pain apparently resides before the medulla a... And that means exactly what you said. Literally all things that have a multi level brain, require the wiring and the programming for pain response, before upper brain function can even evolve. Consciousness of stimuli seems to be a pre requirement, but any animal not having a 'next level of brain,' just dense nerve bundles, would not exhibit anger or higher cognition functions of complex brains, they would still squirm though. And this is followed, in my own opinion, with the human pre requirement of idea and language faculties, before an ego-self could emerge from the brain. Not only this, but that social culture required whatever gave us oxytocin bonding, before ideas and language faculties could even be selected for... Brains have to be ready for whatever emerges from them, which apparently means they select for somehow pre understood outcomes. Selective pressures alone, I don't think, fully explain everything neatly. But neither does mysticism... So, I would rather talk about the top of the coin, the part we can see and agree already exists...
@@longcastle4863 I tend to agree with you; Since we have one of the most complex brains out of the entire animal kingdom, it's reasonable to conclude that we experience things that other animals cannot (music, for example, requires specific structures in the brain to process - let alone, appreciate). That being said, other animals also experience things we cannot. Conscious experience then, seems to be a feature set. Christof's argument that "we need to add something" to bridge this apparent gap between neurophysical processes in the brain and conscious experience may be correct - but at the end of the day, it must also be a physical property of the universe. He likened this to the discovery of electromagnetism - which in my opinion, is not a great analogy - but probably as close as we can get right now; There is some natural effect or process that allows brains to generate this composite experience of all our senses, emotions, and thoughts. It is truly a deep problem to understand, but I think we'll get there.
If consciousness is to be explicable, then it is deterministic and it is physical. Consciousness is sensory. It is an interpretation of mental activity, not all mental activity. It does not do the interpreting but is a part of the process. It is a physical property of mental activity. There must be activity, there is no consciousness derived from a static state. In addition to light, sound, touch etc we sense thoughts (as differentiated from light, sound, touch, etc). The brain does the processing and consciousness can be a part of the process. Consciousness itself can be analysed by the brain and the conclusion be added to consciousness or used to modify/correct consciousness (and we are aware that we are aware). Consciousness is useful in making and correcting a model of the world that is experienced.
At 2:46--2:54 Koch says of "black holes and viruses and neurons" that "none of those things has subjective experience, but brains do." Yet elsewhere in this interview and in his books, he embraces panpsychism, the view that experience is a fundamental property of matter like gravity or electric charge, so that everything has experience, however rudimentary or elemental that experience might have to be. Which is it? Schopenhauer had a similar problem; he said a stone has a will, "but not a conscious will." Koch makes use of panpsychism to fill the explanatory gap that IIT shares with every other theory of consciousness. If the appeal to "intrinsic causal power" were enough to explain how experience arises from any system with a high enough amount of integrated information, there would be no need for him to appeal to panpsychism. For me, Koch's problem is the lack of any specific argument connecting panpsychism to IIT.
if you mean going to college then go for it, just make sure you're really good at advanced math first or you'll have a horrible time, and in that case plenty of other fields you could enjoy and have similar intellectual fulfillment
I don't think we need to broaden the definition of "physical", instead we need to broaden the definition of of "experience" Experience broadly defined is an interaction with an environment. On that account even rocks and electrons have experiences, and histories. To experience and be experienced is the essence of existence. The depth of our experience is defined by the depth and sophistication of our memories. Is pain a sensation or a memory? Is consciousness a kind of memory projected on the immediate future. If time were running backward, you're experience of reality would look exactly the same as it does now. 8:55
If you enjoyed that you might like this conversation with Christof Koch. I was lucky enough to ask him "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how can we make a better world?" - as well as exploring his views on sentience and consciousness of course... th-cam.com/video/DBmfQ0UlFt4/w-d-xo.html @sentientism
6:13 Isn't having a very lawful relationship to an underlying substrate the very definition of "reducible"? If not reducible then Homomorphic or Isomorphic.
IF consciousness emerges from the brain as a byproduct of physical relations, then it is possible to say that there are specific arrangements of physical stuff that may give rise to consciousness, and therefore, we should assume that there might be other forms of consciousness emerging from other solid stuff on the universe that are not brains.
4:57 hugely important that he doesn't seem to be aware of the phenonomenal binding problem/combination problem... by far the most important thing that the quantum brain theory "buys you" the hard problem is way easier to solve, the question is how to reconcile it with physicalism 8:00 my personal opinion is that Koch is completely missing the overwhelmingly more obvious answer which is that PHYSICS DESCRIBES CONSCIOUSNESS... why create a whole new category when you havent even defined what "physical" means?
Every conscious thought or experience is relative to the body. If it were not so, I could agree a bigger picture view is needed. Maybe we will be the ancient Greeks to those in the future. We will have thought of the atom but found to be on track to discovering what consciousness is.
4:45 wrong, they don’t go against it, what happens is that push and pull because of the feedback. Only positive and the creature is met with something negative and it struggles. It’s showing in us literally lmao to grow you need both or else you get guided by things. It’s like becoming an addict, do the grits make you do them or is it you? It’s the same thing as those paradox’s. They work because they balance and that’s why reality grows these things instead of other things. It’s like evolution until grow a different aspect and then merge and grow branches. It’s so nuts to think about and see, i have a vivid imagination so i really try to see what I’m describing here. Plus i use analogy’s a lot so visually merging them helps to understand how and see how the dots connect when lining them up in ways.
I wonder if Analytical Idealism as described by Bernardo Kastrup wouldn't explain that physics is what nature "looks like" from our dissociative boundary and that nature is not physical but mental. Our dissociative boundary is our bodies driven by metabolism. Thanks Christof and Robert for this fascinating discussion!
Kastrup's ideas are an assertion, but I wouldn't say it's an explanation. What explanatory power does it have? What features of the mental and physical does it predict that we didn't already know?
@@simonhibbs887 what does non-idealism predict that we didn't know? these types of questions dont seem epistemically relevant unless there's reason to believe any of these theories are older than the other? but why would we think one's older? but it also seems quite questionable that the age of a theory is epistemically relevant at all...as if the truth would depend on what theory we're able to think of first. that would seem to say more about our cognition or our minds more than it would say about reality.
Imo, Kastrup has very questionable reasoning, which seems to go like this: that because we cannot know the real reality that is out there for sure (like with the _noumena_ or the _thing in itself_ from a Kantian perspective), all of that reality-that reality that we cannot know, remember-is therefore Consciousness.… I would ask, how does he know that if it cannot be known? Also, the more you listen to Kastrup, the more the underlying motive for much of his, imo, tortured and unsatisfying logic becomes clear: it’s the old classic: the desire for life after death.
@@longcastle4863 his argument here is that because we cannot know the real reality that is out there for sure, it is therefore more epistemically reliable to infer that what's "out there" is also consciousness.
@@longcastle4863 "it’s the old classic: the desire for life after death." why do you think that? kastrup has said he finds materialism more comforting in that there will be a garantuee of no suffering after death, whereas there is no such garantuee under the form of idealism he endorses, which to him is less comforting
The Quantum connection would be the ability for consciousness to "dream" or apparently leave the physical realm for a time sometimes when you are unconscious.
Many great minds have come before us and figured it all out ages ago. Too many teachers nowadays focus on the fact that "all is one". Yes, we already know that. Nothing new under the sun. The question is not if all is one; the question is why is there differentiation within oneness. Jesus figured it out alright. Louis Armstrong too and I quote: "love baby love, that's the secret".
Yes. There are strong arguments and growing experimental evidence. Eg Babcock 2024 shows quantum super radiance in microtubules at room temperature that gets stronger as they are joined into larger structures. They are both wrong about this.
Well, this video was posted seven months before this comment, before Christof's most recent book was published. The book contains an endnote reference to the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, so if he wasn't aware of it then, he certainly is now. But perhaps he's unaware of physicist Anirban Bandyopadhyay's work, which provides experimental evidence of quantum-like processes in the microtubule bundles in neurons. Electronic currents in the microtubules were observed by Bandyopadhyay to behave in accordance with the Schrödinger wave equation's probability distribution. These currents operate in a huge bandwidth in the kilohertz to terahertz range. Hameroff has proposed correlations between the much lower beat frequencies generated by interactions between the high frequency waves and the corresponding lower frequencies mapped by EEG in neuronal activity. Bandyopathy's experiments have confirmed distributed coherent resonance interactions between the primary waves among systems of microtubule bundles. The timing sequence of these oscillations is the key. According to Hameroff, the microtubular activity very definitely *_precedes_* the neuronal activity. It is his hypothesis that the information processing and integration occurs in the microtubules, before the neurons fire. Additional corroboration is needed of course, and research continues. But at this point, it does appear that Christof's assertion that "there is no experimental evidence" may not have had the benefit of more recent empirical findings.
Consciousness itself does not require experience to make decisions. Experience allows for a more subjective state of consciousness. Once subjective experience is accrued, the 'Mind' emerges to form a 'Conscious-Mind'.
He’s right! Consciousness is so much more than the brain. If I bump my toe, I can tell you what causes the pain but that’s not the experience of the pain from bumping your toe. When I eat Pizza, I can describe to you the physics of digestion but that’s not the experience of eating pizza. You can show what part of the brain is active when you’re in love, but there’s no part of the brain that shows what you experience when you’re in love. Experience can’t come from the brain. It’s like the TV allows you to watch a movie but the TV doesn’t determine what you experience while watching the movie. Your brain and your eyes allow you to see a sunset but they don’t determine what you experience while seeing the sunset.
I am reading your comment on a tablet somewhere in the Netherlands and wonder whether I should empathize with your bumping your toe or whether perhaps you were just using it as an example and never really experienced it yourself. Only through a few photons emanating from my lcd screen, I am made aware of the sensations of pain in my toe (recollection from years back) and of dripping hot 🧀 and pepperoni, which saturate my consciousness. And only youtube(and google) knows where you are located. But why is my brain wasting energy on these thoughts?
Love pain etc is compliment...lets talk basic....no matter in the world has color...and your brain is made of the same matter....so how can a bunch of neuron make me see whatever i see when i look at color named red.
It’s interesting that I should come across this as I’m finishing up a course on consciousness online with MIT. Physicalism is still the predominant view. And it just seems so obviously inadequate. And the difference between consciousness and all of the other past “mysteries” like magnetite, is that all those Mysteries are observable phenomena from a third person perspective whereas consciousness is not. It is a unique mystery. I think more and more philosophers and neuroscientists are gonna come around to the idea that a radical new view is necessary. A view that prioritizes experience. After all, experience is the only thing we have absolute direct knowledge of.
What is missing is the understanding of what degrees of freedom really are, in relation to what we call constraints. Experience doesn't require intelligence, but it's evolve due the experience of constraints of the environment
5:08 quantum mechanics are not THE reason but more of a set of guidelines we’ve seen in the current of ours. Using the guidelines we can see how plants use quantum mechanics in cells and how humans do as well. Those cells emit and use quantum particles similar to humans eating food or seeing images and then using the material to grow and adapt in connection to the things around us. The cells emit signals in various forms such as chemicals and electrical and the materials matter as well because they are grown custom to that thing and it’s growing through those connections and growing others as well. We see light and our brain grows /evolves custom cells branching and connecting since birth and the dna and rna and its first sensory inputs. Our sensors are tuned to the dna and rna of the previous connections and that’s how we start and adapt to the current. I use my mind a lot to visually see what I’m saying so idk if it shows well in here but i hope you see the things i see and understand what i keep growing to understand. It’s not like I’m saying 100 percent but quantum fluctuations grow matter in ways and that matter connects and grows since our energy comes from the sun. We are just using the various details to fuel us in various ways. Different tools react to different forms of energy.
If consciousness, self-awareness (at least in a dozen or so other species known so far), and our personalities lay in some metaphysical realm, explain why diseases like Alzheimer's and other dementia effectively destroy it?
I don’t think he or any serious scientist/thinker would say the mind is totally detached from the physical realm. Obviously there is a deep connection between mind and body however you cannot explain it all by looking purely at one constituent.
He does not think it lies in a metaphysical realm. He likens it to back in the day when we knew nothing about magnetic fields. He is saying there is something very real missing in our current knowledge of the physical world.
Agreed. The brain and body are not discreet, isolated bits of biology. They're an integrated biological system. Both can influence the other. What gets very old with Kuhn, is his obsession with some religious or other metaphysical explanation, when we just don't know. Could there be an incredibly advanced Intelligence (Class III+), that could create a Universe, I don't know. I'm sure of one thing though, whatever that may be would not care if you failed to put money in the Collection Plate. kk@@whitb62
@@jeremymanson1781 so what does this "missing" thing do besides make us aware of our world? Seems just a tad anthropocentric, doesn't it. This fundamental thing just waited around interacting with nothing else until our brains gave it a function... That really seems like magical thinking. I mean, the rest of the universe just doesn't seen to need consciousness to do its thing.
@@selwynr I have no idea. I suppose you could say we weren't aware of radio waves. Once we built a receiver we could make use of them. So building a brain up to a certain level of complexity turns it onto a receiver? Seems rather unlikely.
Fundamentally, all entities exist in a state of physical resonance with other entities in their surrounding environment. In other words, reverberations of nearby entities naturally occur within the physical structure of every entity. The reverberations occurring within an "actively mobile entity" (i.e. an entity whose innate survival preference necessitates an active engagement with its environment) naturally "inform" this entity of its surroundings, whereas the reverberations occurring within all other classes of entity are not informative to those entities. Therefore, this "informative resonance" IS the entity's consciousness, which is utilised by the entity similarly to the way one utilises a map. In this way, the situation of consciousness can be conceptually described as being "ontologically inextricable" from active mobility. Non-conceptually, the situation of consciousness is functionally indistinguishable from active mobility.
I wrote a paper- Physical Brain's knowing itself as Physical- proving what physicalists trying to prove. It is just like saying nature knows as nature. What is this self awareness of physical, mechanical and physical brain's or as a by-product of nature? This boils down to nature's self-knowledge of matter of itself as matter. This is called in the ancient Indian logic as Arthaantara- proving what one initially wants to disprove
Physicalists about consciousness appeal to various correlations and causal relations between brain and consciousness, such as that changing the brain changes consciousness, and that damaging certain parts of the brain or removing those parts leads to the loss of certain mental functions or aspects of consciousness. However this doesn’t seem to show that consciousness is necessitated by physical structure, such as the brain, beyond reasonable doubt, nor does it seem to show that that theory that consciousness is necessitated by physical, structures such as the brain, is a better theory compared to other rival theories where consciousness is not necessitated by structures within the physical world such as brains. We rather seem to have a problem of underdetermination here.
@@rafael.frigori lol that's not a claim youll be able to back up. What's the argument that there are no other theories that are able to make predictions?
Do these other theories explain the correlations we observe, and why we observe them in the brain? If not, they are ignoring the evidence and should be dismissed as beliefs rather than science.
If consciousness itself is not physical, it's hard to see how physical injuries would change it. They might change it's ability to interact with the physical world through the brain. If the brain receives signals from non-material consciousness we might expect physical brain injuries to affect people's ability to express things physically, such as in speech or physical action. Their visual experience might be affected by damage to the visual cortex. However brain damage goes much further than that, it affects people's reasoning ability, their personality, their decision making, their personality. If those aspects of consciousness are so intimately dependent on physical brain function, there really isn't much left for dualism for example to explain. A bit maybe, but take libertarian free will. If freely choosing is a non-physical process, how can brain damage change how and what we choose?
If consciousness is something separate or additional to our physical existence than so is software or anything that is the result of computation which is essentially what are brains are. Our software is unique in its complexity but this will change soon with the advent of A.g.i
Particle theiry of Consciousness: My hypothesis is that consciousness is physical, but just as with dark matter, it can't be detected or measured. One possible way this could happened-my hypothesis- is that there is a field that pervades all of spacetime; when this field puddles or clusters at a place, it is awareness. The trick is to figure out how to detect those puddles or clusters, which would be analogous to physical.particles.
Experiencing something is different from sharing an experience with someone. The description of "nature" is not what nature "is". This is a very old realization. So trying to find a communicable description of an experience is like squaring the circle.
Tips from a visual artist: Warm and soften the color scheme and lighting scheme, especially the neon triangle light all alone on the big wall behind the guest. Change the red color wall and table, and glares of light off the table. Stabilize the camera. Moving cameras like this are purposefully used in horror movies to make people feel uncomfortable. That unsettling effect is creating the same feeling here. Hope this helps a bit.
The question is poorly posed. The mind is the functioning of the brain. It is analogous to the relationship between running and the legs that allow that activity. Is running entirely physical? A cell in that leg does not run. Running is not physical. The leg is physical. Running is the functioning of that physical object.
I think that before we start launching in various directions to describe consciousness as something more, we have to understand how the brain stores data including instructions - the application that is your brain function. After all, a computer starts with a simple boot function and then reads instructions it executes and reads and writes data including inputs from other devices. I can send outputs to those devices and control them. So far no one has described anything that the brain does that doesn’t have a computer analog. Computers can modify themselves. An application can modify itself on the fly. It can survive a reboot (near death or death). It can even exist in more than one physical place - e.g. clouds) Cells dying and being replaced? Not a problem if the data is stored as stuff that itself is not alive and that living brain cells can access and interpret. So how is data stored? What are its formats? Do they include data that are instructions as well as data that is acted upon? If the answers are “no” then we need to look further, but first let’s rule out the computer analog through experimentation and discovery.
The way I see it is that nothing could be perceived to underlie consciousness since such an existence would have to flow along the stream of awareness or consciousness for it to be known thus making it content within consciousness therefore realizing some existence as being the substratum of consciousness to me would be impossible.
When people stroke half of soul fail When get demantia you are alive but your soul change dramaticly beacuase brain machine fail There is no soul out of physic or brain machine We like to belive there is something survive death but there isnt
@@peacecraft3449 Exactly this. Owing to personal experience with a dementia sufferer in the family, i can say hand on heart, this happened in the final moments and cannot simply be explained away as once the brain is damaged, the consciousness changes unless it can miraculously heal while simultaneously shutting down and dying.
And what if consciousness is just an awareness of things that have happened? If the universe is indeed based on rules of interaction that can be predicted knowing their prior state, then that interview, as well as me typing this comment, were both inevitable results of the alignments of every particle in the universe, and our "consciousness" is simply the awareness of what has transpired. I'm still not convinced that "consciousness" has a role in the debate, until we can determine for certain if reality is or is not completely deterministic. If so, then we are simply the awareness of ourselves. If not, then... who knows. But if that's the case, then so many facets of physics get upended, that it's hard to even consider the option...
I am 35, and I thought about the hard problem of consciousness (and also read and watched materials about it) for probably the last 20 years. Up to perhaps a year ago, I though it must be something very special and separate from cognition, derived from a new property of physics or created by some very special algorithm. I would consider people who deny the importance of the problem idiots. I no longer think that. After listening to some people much smarter than I am (i.e. Joscha Bach) I now believe there is no "hard problem", really. The very existence of the hard problem is an illusion, in some ways similar to the illusion of free will. It does not mean that that there is no consciousness, because it is obviously real. But it's purely a computational phenomenon, with no magic to it, and nothing beyond cognition needed to explain it. Try this pseudo thought experiment: forget about the hard problem entirely, but imagine you have an agent that is in every other way identical to a human. It has general intelligence, some internal compression/model of reality, and within that model it possesses self-awareness. It examines the world with senses like sight, and it maps what it sees onto it's internal model. Now ask it to tell you what it knows about the color blue. It could perhaps tell you about it's wavelength, name some blue things in the world. But what would happen if you'd ask it what the color is like, when presented to it? It could surely notice it with it's sight, register it and map it onto it's internal model. But it would not be able to describe the nature of this information to you, because it would be a simple data-point mapped into it's internal model. This data-point would be activated by an external input, objective reality, but it would still remain an internal data-point. An inherently subjective thing, exactly like qualia. The color would exist for the agent, it would not be just some abstraction within the internal model, yet it would not have a direct analog to objective reality. Than you might ask a follow-up question: why this exact sensation is assigned to this exact color, and how could you possibly encode a sensation like that with purely computational tools in a purely reductionist framework? The answer to that is: it would not be impossible, if the very "self" that experiences the color exists within the same abstract. To paraphrase Joscha Bach, the mind does not use the language of physics or atoms. It has it's own, emergent, higher-level "code" or "language", and both you and your sensations are encoded with it. So maybe panpsychists are correct? Perhaps computation within our universe is somehow intrinsically "conscious"? Sadly for panpsychists, no. If I would ask you if you are conscious, you'd probably say yes. So your consciousness would physically manifest itself. And if panpsychists were right, and there was some "conscious component" to universe separate from computation, one would still need a mechanism to bridge the gap between the physical actions of mater and it's conscious component, in order for me to write this post or make out loud claims about my internal sensations. So panpsychism in unnecessary at best, or dead wrong at worst. We thought that a philosophical zombies are a default, and our conscious existence is somehow "extra". It's probably the other way around. p-zombies are something we've invented through a cognitive error, our conscious existence is the actual default for out type of cognition. I tried to present my case to the best of my ability, but I know I'm not smart enough (or speak English good enough) to properly present this concept to a wide group of people. But I try, because it would be fantastic to perhaps inspire even one person who's actually smart and works in fields like artificial intelligence to consider this perspective.
Jocha Bach is as much a philosophical dead end as he is a job hopper. The guy certainly is well read and well spoken, but he has contributed nothing of value to computer science, cognitive science, AI or the world. His ideas don't hold up to scrutiny and behind the clutter of confident mumbo jumbo, end up being similar to Dennett's nonsensical "consciousness is an illusion" argument.
You and I think so much alike. Good job expressing your ideas. I think you're more correct than Christoph Koch. It's sad to see the "hard problem" has him now looking to non-physical magic for an explanation. As you said, the hard problem is a human construct. I think we still need to identify the physical process which is the substrate of the feeling of consciousness, along with all other algorithms in brains. The information is supported, represented, and controlled by wetware - neurons etc. - but what is the information encoded in? I think it is electric field. I think I am the result of the organization of electric fields into logical patterns meant to create an algorithm of self, which exists in order to give a locomotive animal a driver, something that cares about what happens to the body.
@@polyscient To my best knowledge ions moving through neurons are what processes the information in the most fundamental and meaningful way. By my best understanding, ions must move through the web of neurons for cognition to arise. If you think about it deeply, consciousness only makes any sense as a dynamic process. It only works in a constantly moving and changing system. If you "freeze frame" the mind and it becomes a static system, with ions stuck in one place, the system no longer observers itself and consciousness no longer makes sense. Perhaps I've just made a very obvious, stupid and naive point. But it also explains how a unified experience can be generated in a reductionist system. As time moves forward and signals propagate through the brain, large chunks of information can communicate and synchronize.
I feel this is more or less exactly what is going on. Very well said. Very well written. You have made me think about this even deeper. I am a huge proponent of the idea of the brain being a modeling agent for the entire body. The ‘self’ we feel is likely the brain modeling the outside world. Thanks for your excellent explanation.
@@polyscientalso very well put. We think a lot alike on this. I see the brain as a modeling agent. Consciousness is simply an aggregate of models we use to navigate.
Consciousness is like infinity manifested as a physical object in the universe, like a black hole, with infinite complexity, but focussed within one singular point, where infinity it self renders the normal laws of nature incomplete, and only can be describes as something more than "space, time, matter and energy", as you put it in this video
Consciousness and infinity are equally baffling and mind bending concepts, but that's about all they have in common. Your comment is poetic, but I don't think brains, black holes, and infinity have much to do with each other.
Also, quantum mechanics in the brain has been shown through experiments. Quantum computation was found in the brain and quantum vibrations was found in microtubles in the brain.
Yes, superposition and aspects of retrocausality 'reek of QM' as Penrose would say. It's abundantly clear that neither of the guys in this video have made a serious effort to read Penrose and Hammeroff's work. This is a repeated pattern I keep seeing. There's a conference online between Penrose and Chris Fuchs where, within 30 seconds, Fuchs completely mischaracterized Penrose's theory and gets corrected by them in their presence. The only expert I've seen make an actual critique of OrchOR is Max Tegmark and even that was a relatively minor technical criticism. The bigger point is that none of these people are actually talking to each other, or up to date on what each other is doing. It's ridiculous.
@@erawanpencil good points and there’s a video on TH-cam where Hameroff confronts Max Tegmark and Tegmark can’t respond. There’s been a lot of misrepresentation of their theory.
@@jjay6764 do you remember which video it is or where it was at? The Fuchs one is easy to find and it's towards the end I remember. Someone should make a compilation video lol.
@@erawanpencil it’s called Stuart Hameroff vs. Max Tegmark a Quantum Consciousness Debate. Basically, Tegmark misrepresents Hameroff-Penrose theory by calculating decoherence time in microtubles when Hameroff-Penrose are talking about subunits in microtubles. This is a very important difference because the smaller subunits can hold superpositions longer than Tegmark’s calculations of decoherence in microtubles themself. Max knows this but it’s not about truth it’s about obfuscation of truth and that’s why Hameroff is so upset in the debate.
I think objectivity is necessary for good science. So if one were to posit that experience is independent of physical laws, then I would need a model that demonstrates how experience can be changed/not changed.
I don't think Koch claimed that experience is independent of physical laws, but that it's a different sort of "stuff". I don't think he'd suggest the causes aren't physical, just that the subjective content of the events isn't exhaustively explained via our physical laws.
@@dinospumoni5611 "Koch advocates for a modern variant of panpsychism, the ancient philosophical belief that some form of consciousness can be found in all things. One criticism of panpsychism is that it cannot be empirically tested. " Wikipedia
@@mesplin3Yes, panpsychism, in its modern form, is pretty famous for suggesting that consciousness is part of the "stuff" of physicalism. Not really interested in what Wiki editor chose to put today I'll change that in a few days and nobody will notice (Wiki editor with 50,000+ edits).
It's funny how physics is able to explain almost everything in the universe. But the simplest thing - the thought "I am Me" - it can't explain. I always wondered how newborn babies can understand music without knowing anything about eighth notes, dotted rhythm, triads, consonances and dissonances, scales etc.
Hi Sir, I have a simple question. Inside a factory at the end of the shift a supervisor and his co-worker are counting the produced objects, the objects are approximately the size of a tennis ball. It is their daily routine,the worker counts the objects as he takes it from the production lot and puts it inside a bag. The role of the supervisor is to keep watch so that there is no mistake while counting. One fine day, before starting the counting process, the supervisor looks at the lot and writes down some random three digit number as quantity of the produced items, in short he assumes that the actual quantity would probably match with that number. Now the question is what are the chances of that actual quantity matching exactly with that random number?
Not enough information is provided. For just one example, if the number produced is always in the tens of thousands, then his randomly writing down a three digit number is near meaningless and the chances are extremely low. But if the number produced is always in the hundreds, then other factors come into play. What is the point of your question?
@@longcastle4863 Thanks for your reply. It is not a regular occurrence, it is a story of that perticular day and that particular moment when they complete the counting process. The supervisor writes a three digit number just looking at the produced lot.
basically life is sensation computing, programmed to replicate and update. the output is adaptive response and it is not local, as it happens in a larger scale. life is an active and perpetual computing mechanism, it generates its own subjective calculations known as experiences. We are here for the ride and nothing more. one important thing to ponder upon is how this computing evolved over time, by then we will understand the rest of the mystery.
He does mention information science, and I think information theory has a lot to offer in understanding consciousness. I'm not sure what his ideas about 'experience' might add on top of that though. Everything about consciousness seems to me to be informational. We experience stimuli. We construct a mental model of the world. We reason about what we experience, our intentions and desires. We store and retrieve memories. We make decisions to initiate actions, and we persist and recall memories. All of those are informational phenomena and processes. We are self-referential, introspect out own state, we think recursively. These are all processes we implement in computational systems all the time. However just because consciousness is a process on information, that doesn't make all processes on information conscious. It does mean that there is a consistency of kind though between consciousness and everything else that exists in the universe. Everything that exists and has a state or structure encodes information, it's fundamental to everything that exists. So in that sense I think panpsychists are on the right track. The phenomenon underlying consciousness is everywhere, and consciousness is a particular activity or process of that phenomenon.
@@Jun_kid It is physical. All information that exists does so in the form of the attributes and structure of a physical system. Holes burned into a CD, the distribution of beads on an abacus, the pattern of electrical charge in a computer memory, etc. To say that we have information or that information exists, such as that we have a copy of it, is to say that it does so physically. Consider hypothetical information that does not exists. Music that has not yet been composed, or a long lost book every copy of which was destroyed. It is because information exists physically that it can have causal effects, such as a CD playing music, or a robot using a map in it's memory to navigate an environment.
*" So in that sense I think panpsychists are on the right track."* ... Look at you, ... tasting the forbidden fruit of nonphysicality! _"Once you go meta, there's nothing bettah!"_
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC Not really, my account of information intrinsically and inseparably associates it with the physical. They are both just different ways of thinking about the same thing.
O.k.- you have all these sensory organs/systems- obviously the purpose of which is to help you create a mental image or map of your immediate surroundings- which has obvious evolutionary benefits. So, if the brain didn't create internal experience, qualia, or whatever you want to call it- how would it represent the world to you with all its subtly? I mean you can think of really simplistic systems for keeping track of your surroundings I suppose- but they all simplify the world around you. If you want to experience the world in its fullness, the richness of it, all the little, tiny details and nuances- I don't see any other way than subjective experience. Subjective experience is so good at this job that we develop intuition based on tiny little clues we aren't even conscious of-we do it all the time. We read the context of our surroundings and know which way to go, where to find things, what things to be afraid of, what thing to maybe eat, who we can mate with, etc., etc. If you didn't have subjective experience- you would be like one of these robots they create that sort of fakes being conscious. Could we survive this way- maybe, but we would never thrive this way. Our species hasn't just survived- look around you- we thrive. Why? I think because we have a deeper, richer subjective experience of the world around us. I think at some point that subjective experience begins to fuel complexity in your brain- your brain develops further, the experience deepens, which in turn fuels more complexity, which in turn deepens our experience even further- and it's a never ending, self-perpetuating cycle.
Conciousness l believe is much more than mind,its an energy thats timeless,once the physical has expired ,this concious energy could return to its Universal birth place..l hope l made a little sense here??😮
But that is the point what kind of consciousness is being discussed? Physical, metaphysical, or just average normal consciousness and just mechanical industrial On which average public operates on survival of existence levels which is how 80%human groups of this world functions on
How is it that logic seems to fall down so fast at the end of this dialogue, and why is the idea of consciousness as a physical mechanism, so instantly baffling?
Materialism seems content on giving sweeping superficial "explanations" of conscious experience. Something something patterns of neuronal activity.. And of course, the promissory materialism never fails. Because it's not falsifiable.
Didnt convince me.. just seems like a bit of a cop out. To say "I can't imagine how experience could emerge therefore it must be fundamental" kind of misses the point of emergence imho. Emergent phenomena is not expected to resemble just the sum of its parts but to appear as something qualitatively different. We dont explain why a bronze atom in a square of a major city is located there by talking about the atoms history as a fundamental particle and its motions through the universe. Instead we talk about cities, historical events, craftsmanship etc. Conciousness seems special because it comes with this experience of an "I" and this is something qualitatively different than just describing the underlying physical mechanics of the brain. However I think its more likely that the thing we call "experience" is an emergent property of computation - namely that our brains are hardware running a sophisticated software program, and our "experience" is actually the software program. No one explains software programs in terms of the state of indivdual transistors. Instead we talk about lines of code and logic. The behaviour of the software program is emergent from the state of the physical hardware. I think this person is basically saying that he things human conciousness is somehow a special thing fundamentally different from anything computation / software could deliver and therefore there is no danger from his perspective that we will create a concious AGI unless we infuse it with the mystical "experience atom" that hasnt yet been discovered.
I think in the opposite way to him..I think that the thing we call software (or more broadly, computation) has the capacity to produce things like conciousnesses / experiences. Depending on the features / architecture of the software will dictate whether it gives rise to what can be considered a conciousness. The software - when running, is essentially simulating its own logical domain, and this could be thought about as its own universe with its own laws coded in, and state transitions etc, conceptually no different from ours, except the software program running on a human computer is going to be vastly more constrained and thus the universes that humans create with software programs are today very special cased for solving particular problems then terminating - and nothing like simulating a general purpose place of existence like our own universe.
My guess is that consciousness arose with life. And with consciousness came experience. The first experience of what it was like to live on this planet, probably came with the planet’s first instance of life. Which was probably way below even the fleeting consciousness of a newborn baby, but was still consciousness and experiencing of a sort, nonetheless.
I don't get the notion of "non-reducible". Just simply from systems theory, one can say "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts". So is the whole "non-reducible"? (Semantics?). The claim is "experience" is non-reducible. But is this really so? Seems to me like an impressionistic claim, which people may differ on. Also, let's take one step from consciousness. Let's just look at biological systems. There seems to be something "extra", apart from the chemical reactions, electrical signaling, in biological processes. People talked about the "elan vital" at one point. So is this what he's saying?
Long ago there were those who understood that there is something non physical about our minds. "But there is a spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that gives him understanding" Job 32:8 from the bible and 1 Corinthians 2:11, "For no one knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him." Just food for thought.
i don't think that's at all evident, i think the most likely explanation is that physics describes consciousness keep in mind, physics doesn't say anything about what it's describing, it just describes what it _does_... it's merrely a tradition that we assume the stuff physics describes is non-mental, nebulous stuff
@@Stegosaurus12345 These qualities may become apparent if one thinks carefully about the difference between matter and movement. Movement is not a property of any particular material object because as we all know, movement is relative. Thus movement is not a thing-in-itself, not materially existent, immaterial in fact. One cannot see movement per se, one can only see things. Yet movement cannot exist without matter to do it. It's useful to think of matter as the 'substrate' of movement. If being conscious is indeed a process then, since process is essentially lots of little movements and movement is immaterial, we have a perfect candidate to account for the immateriality of mind. (Of course, what the process is doing is hugely important to the understanding of how we are conscious. As a hint to get started, consider the processes going on in our sense organs. Impinging environmental energies initiate biochemical chain reactions that culminate in modulation of the discharge timing patterns of neurons that connect the organs to the brain. These modulations are encoded representations of the impinging energies. Representation is the keyword for as we know, every thought is a representation (and is not the whatever it represents). Now we know what thoughts are made of subsequent thoughts may figure out what a self is and how a self is conscious... Cheers!
Oh we try to make this so complicated, and it is not! Consciousness is not a POSSESSION, it is a PROCESS. Any entity which receives input, processes that input, and produces an output experiences some degree of consciousness. Simplest explanation that describes this intangible experience we all share. Occam's Razor would point to this explanation being the most correct one.
@@Stegosaurus12345 Well I do agree that it's a hard concept for people to wrap their heads around. Of course the bouncy ball machine does not do any processing, and thus has zero consciousness. Consciousness is something that is present in different degrees, shades of grey so to speak. When I put an earthworm on a fishing hook I personally believe there is "somebody in there" that is feeling and reacting to the pain of being skewered. Is their consciousness like yours and mine? Of course not. But in some rudimentary way I believe an awareness exists. Thanks for commenting, even though it was a bit insincere. I do enjoy discussing such concepts and have been a student of consciousness and sense-of-self for quite a few decades now. Now that AI has emerged on the scene it is becoming ever more pertinent. Surprising to me how many really smart people have so many different interpretations. Keep an open mind.
@@andrewhanson5942 It was not insincere, and I disagree that no processing occurs in the coin-op machine I mentioned. Further, the processing in the brain or in an earthworm can be looked at on minute scales to reveal that what is going on in a mechanical sense is a series of very small processes on the same level as the coin-op machine.
@@Stegosaurus12345 OK Steg, you've broken my mind with that one! Guess I'll have to open my mind a bit more to imagine how that might feel to the vending machine. Will work on that one.
If consciousness is physical, this conversation is nothing but a movie being played by physical whatever. Then what the hell is you that you believe who you are? Whether consciousness is physical or not, I agree with the determinism.
Classical physics pushes its complexity down upon many disciplines where we or workers constantly statistically correct for its failures. This is why its so many cults and such a stagnant it keeps our dashboard consumed by calculating sums of approximation. But qauntom physics absorbs some complexity actually explaining some of our real life experiences we do correlate all 5 senses with the very small like a red low entry apple. You can not trick us into thinking purple high entropy apples are really red ..lol The physical elements defiantly became entangled with a powerful critical extreme state . Even if it was multiple passing nutron stars and a black hole with lots of Zapping the solar system and earth in the perfectly fine tuning for life . As far as emerging levels of consciousness biology plays a role in accessing this field. Its a triality not a duality
Good for a Friday night. I always thought of my consciousness as the sensation that the physical inputs into my brain, in real time, are matched to abstractions in parallel. For example: the picture in my mind of dancing on the table as I walk past the real table. In any case, I like my consciousness closely tied to my physical reality as I do not want my consciousness doing things behind my back, like getting in touch with the "Dark Side."
One thing is undeniable. It takes consciousness to take/perceive itself as physical. Physicality ows its being to consciousness.You are consciousness first and physical after.
Analytic Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup has an interesting argument where he defines the 'physical' as a part of a universal, fundamental consciousness. look it up: it's his analytical idealism course
@@stringX90 I've come across Kastrup. Ok, so maybe consciousness is an activity of the physical. Maybe the physical is an activity of consciousness. Either way there's still an explanatory gap, of how either emerges from the other. The thing is we have a pretty decent track record of explaining all sorts of phenomena in terms of physical processes. We've been pretty busy working that out over the last few hundred years and we've done pretty well by it. Physical processes also explain information, and pretty much everything we know about conscious experiences is in terms of information. Sensory stimuli, our spacial extent and position, our emotional state, storing and retrieving memories, introspection, using logic or reason to evaluate information and make decisions. All of these are informational phenomena, we have rigorous formal mathematical models and proofs for all of that, and we can engineer systems that do every one of those to at least some extent. The only remaining gap is conscious awareness itself, but everything we are aware of is entirely explicable in terms of information, and therefore the physical. Meanwhile, what phenomena or processes in the world have we explained based on consciousness. Not much springs to mind. So there's not a lot to hang a hat on there, it seems to have a serious deficit in the explanatory power stakes.
@@simonhibbs887Hi but that just sounds just like looking for ever more sub atomic particles. The kind of work that is done at CERN. It all loks nice published in Nature but doesnt really advance our understanding of the universe!
Quantummechanics is non deterministic. If we were completely deterministic there would be no room for decision making or the feedback our consciousness gives us. If we were only passive viewers we would not be aware of consciousness. How much influence our consciousness has on the progression of anything is, at least to me, the real question. If we could just determin what our consciouness is doing to our brain, and also how our brains are connected to our consciousness. Without our brains we seem to be nothing, but without our consciousness we also would be nothing.
It could be that consciousness and the ability to make choices (which is how I define free will) emerged out of a fully deterministic system with the emergence of biological life. Does it really need to be impossible for something to emerge out of a fully deterministic system with traits and characteristics that make it no longer fully bound to that system?
@@longcastle4863 But why could it even evolve, if there is no feedback from consciousness at all ? Panpsychism maybe, but still, if there is no feedback, why would the brain evolve to give us this ability or the illusion of it ? Evolution does not work like that...
@@marcelmommsen5308 I just think a brain, a nervous system, a consciousness proved useful for a species adaption and survival and so chance improvements in those things were seized upon. Leading from before earthworms to us in a series of probably millions upon millions of tiny micro baby steps. All “selected” for because they improved the species chances of continuing on. To the point of us, where we get to decide if we want to carry on.
When he said we don't need quantum mechanics to explain why the table is solid, he is simply wrong. He said we can do that using "conventional physics." That statement was proved wrong 100 years ago when scientists started understanding what atoms are and how they create solidity. You cannot explain it properly without quantum mechanics. So judge for yourself how much to trust his other claims.
The human brain is the most complex organization of matter in the universe (that we know of). Why is it so hard to imagine that unimaginably complex things can emerge from that?
Consciousness is 100% Electrical. All Stuff, is more or less dense 'veaved' Electricity. Life have a Life-side and a Stuff-side, Consciousness is Eternal, the Day-Consciousness, Thinking, is Life-side. So, Consciousness also have a 'stuff-side', Fine- or Above-physical stuff, as We normaly dont think of physical. The Thinking is the 'Printer' of Reality, it is Here the Energies Turn, and input becomes output.
Christof has made progress of a kind, finally admitting that consciousness cannot be explained in physical terms. He has still to let go of the notion that 'brains are conscious' however, so that he may understand that animals (including their brains) are what conscious non-physical beings look like when projected into the physical plane.
Consciousness and religion are obviously fundamental to the universe. After all, one has been around for a smudge of time and the other for a micro dot.
I used to think this as well - that we were getting hung up on semantics when describing conscious experience. But, now I think I better understand those that pose the existence of the hard problem of consciousness - and I do think there is one. Simply saying that the brain is responsible for our conscious experience through neurophysical reactions between neurons and synapses is all good and fine - but it does NOTHING to explain the translation from those electrical impulses, to the subjective feeling of warm, or the sensation of seeing blue. Yes, the brain is doing all this. But we don't know how. We cannot currently say, "When photons of 380nm strike our retina and enter our visual cortex, the sensation of blue light is rendered by means of... blah de bla blah." We simply don't know how/why blue looks blue. Obviously, the brain is differentiating between wavelengths of light - But we cannot explain how the brain generates the experience of blue. I think this is where people deviate from "there is or isn't" a hard problem of consciousness. If you're just OK not knowing how a brain does this, then you say there is no hard problem. You might dismiss it as getting hung up on the ability of language to adequately explain what it is we're referring to when we say "subjective, conscious experience". But merely dismissing this experience as a collection of neurons firing in the brain has slightly more explanatory power as saying "GOD did it". Yeah, the brain is involved. But we literally have NO IDEA how this conscious experience gets generated as this cohesive, composite model of our world.
@@ryandinan You are doing all those things through Language without Language there is no feeling of warmth. There is only feeling, no description added. There is only sensing going on here. Language creates self awareness, which creates a you to have a subjective experience no Language no you! No experience!
@ryandinan The translation of electrical impulses to produces the subjective feeling of warm? What subjective feeling of warm or seeing blue? There is no subjective experience without Language! Feeling warm or seeing blue are conceptual, concepts. Language is conceptual. Reality is not, Reality is not an idea. What is warmth besides a sensation? What is seeing Blue besides seeing? A sensation.
@@Krod4321 You can absolutely have experiences without language. Do you think that other animals don't experience anything? Language allows us to describe our experiences to others (and to ourselves) - but it is not required to have an experience. What you DO need for experience, is a brain to process signals from your nervous system. These impulses carry our senses of smell, touch, sight, hearing, etc. The brain is responsible for translating and interpreting all those signals into a composite, conscious experience. How the brain processes those signals and how it generates the actual sensations is something we do not yet fully understand. Once we do, we will have a much firmer grip on what consciousness is.
We are here to experience. We shouldn't take others or ourselves too seriously. We should try our best and let go of the rest.
Don’t take yourself seriously but try your best seems to be pulling the rope in opposite directions.
You left out the "too" that I put in.@@longcastle4863
Humans are forever searching to understand the unknown.
@@longcastle4863 - I get your point, but I don't see an inconsistency as long as "try your best" means conducting oneself in accordance with rational and moral principles-that is, with integrity. In my view, "taking yourself seriously" is the error of letting one's ego get into the driver's seat, in which case, there goes the ball game.
The ego doesn't like truth; truth exposes ego as the fiction that it is. We all have a certain amount of ego; we need it to survive, and I don't see anything wrong with taking my survival seriously, as long as I exercise "free won't"; that is, my moral compass steers me away from coercion (force or fraud), which is the intentional interference with the life or other property of another person.
Where we get cross-threaded-your excellent metaphor of "pulling the rope in opposite directions"-is where protecting the fiction that our ego is infallible becomes more important than rational (truth+logic) or moral (non-coercive) criteria in our interactions with the universe, especially other volitional beings.
Admittedly, it's a balancing act, but in my experience, it's like any other skill. Doing the right thing becomes automatic after enough exercise and practice. Alas, it's practically impossible if you aren't already clear on the difference between right and wrong.
Unfortunately, we're immersed in a culture that doesn't place a high value on that distinction. The toughest job we have is learning how to tell right from wrong in the first place, when we're surrounded by superficiality and moral relativism. Yet, good people do seem to find their way. For my part, I figure the best thing I can do is be one of them. I can't control anyone else.
we are not here for anything - we just choose (or allow others to choose for us)
You don't know what it is, you are only having a perception of what it could be, this it is. Bedankt voor het delen!
Can conciousness exist without a brain or once the brain is physically dead? That is the question seeking answer, not whether consciousness is the brain?
I am now convinced that everything possesses a certain degree of consciousness and intelligence. I raked away a dump-truck-size load of leaves from in front of my garage door only to find that they've all returned the next day. ... It's like they _wanted_ to be there!
So, it’s finally animism then? As opposed to the leaves by your door being blown there by the wind?
@@longcastle4863 *"So, it’s finally animism then? As opposed to the leaves by your door being blown there by the wind?"*
... Yes, they knew what they were doing. They had a plan and an attitude to go with it. They also bum-rushed my garage when I opened up the door.
@@longcastle4863 based on how OP has framed his post, I feel it leans more towards panpsychism than animism. What do you think? Please correct me if my inference seems wrong.
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC Obviously they’ve heard about you chopping down that oak in your backyard and are seeking revenge. Be careful if they start seeking alliances with any large tomatoes plants. They’ve been on the warpath ever since they learned about the whole ketchup thing.
@@longcastle4863 *"Be careful if they start seeking alliances with any large tomatoes plants."*
... Yah, being called a "vegetable" while stuck in a coma doesn't have the same negative impact as it used to. 🙂
Way back in the Cambrian, some of the very first creatures with light sensitive patches of skin on their bodies (representing the first kind of proto eyes) attached by a thin line of neurons to a slightly larger clump of neurons inside their bodies (representing the first kind of proto brain), were able, by means of this early sensory perceptual system, to translate changes in the steady stream of light waves in their watery environments into images of light and shadow, alerting them of dangers and/or potential sources of food, etc… So the question seems to be, how was such an early sensory perceptual system able to translate such concrete things as light waves into such seemingly non concrete things as visual experience. A very interesting question, imo, but maybe not with all spiritual implications some want to impose on it, when you consider it from the perspective of such early life forms. Or from the perspective of any life form much further down on the phylogenetic tree.
Light waves aren't all that concrete. They travel through air and water and striking that sensitive patch made that Cambrian critter jet away from the predator's shadow to live another day and to reproduce. I wish these theoretical eggheads would use more geological examples like this since it's obvious that consciousness began in the Precambrian ooze and not on the quantum chalkboard or the tip of God's Rod. 😅
@@browngreen933
It's not obvious to me.
The chains of physical/chemical causes and effects that
a transient shadow might trigger in some Cambrian organism
may be summarized with the single word, 'reactive'.
Seems to me that 'reactive' is not what we mean by 'conscious'
though no doubt reactivity is one of the pillars on which being conscious stands.
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL
True, modern human consciousness is not purely "reactive" but it had to start somewhere. And we know without doubt that consciousness began somewhere in the early fossil history record. But even modern human consciousness remains highly reactive. Just watch the eye contact, hand waving interaction between Robert and Koch. We're not that far away from the primordial pool as we think.
@@browngreen933
"but it had to start somewhere"
We agree but just when it happened I'll bet we don't.
Some assert every living thing is conscious but
obviously they've forgotten about 'instinct'.
It seems to me it is a fact that instinct ruled behavior for billions of years
between the time when there was only reactivity and
the very recent rise of "modern human consciousness".
So imagine, in accord with the anthropologists,
that human apes branched from the tree of evolution seven million years ago,
then spent 6,990,000 years behaving according to their instincts and
not at all conscious in the modern human sense.
Then agriculture was discovered and village life was born.
The transition from nomadic induced explosions in technology and language.
And social life complexified immensely as populations got beyond the size in which
an alpha male was able to control group behavior via face-to-face confrontations.
It was at this time, about ten thousand years ago,
that human mentality began to transition from instinct driven to bicameral control.
This bicameral mode of behavioral control was able to support the growth of populations
from village sized all the way to cities of up to about a million.
Beyond a million societies inevitably collapsed.
Bicameral minds were unable to deal with the complexity.
So, to get beyond a million, cultural evolution came up with "modern human consciousness".
According to the theory of mental evolution just briefly sketched,
the great transiliation from bicameral to modern began three thousand years ago and
was complete at about the time of Jesus.
Some, like me, who adhere to the theory, believe that the immense and widespread cruelty
of those days was the first crude solution to the problem of controlling newly conscious peoples
by the first conscious leaders who inherited their roles atop the pyramids of power.
If you want to read the theory get Julian Jaynes' great book,
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind".
If you want to listen to his book tour lecture just
click on my icon and play the video 'Bicameral Garden'.
Cheers!
@@browngreen933great point!!
As Christof noted “my pain is not my brain”.
The experience of pain is clearly different from the underlying physical neurological and biochemical correlates notwithstanding that the relationship is not in dispute.
However this difference between experience and the physical neurological substrate necessary for the emergence of the experience ( pain is a good example) mean a that from Christof all sentient animals that experience pain are by definition conscious.
This dilutes the definition of consciousness as being useful in how human consciousness is unique.
If pain is really the same as love or the qualia of seeing blue then consciousness is best studied at the simpler animal levels where we try to understand what the relationship with Brian and experience may be.
We then end up with the circular argument that water and its properties are different from the underlying physical causes ( hydrogen and oxygen at the right pressure and temperature to bind giving rise to wetness which is obviously different from the hydrogen and oxygen properties that preceded the reaction that formed water).
There isn’t much mystery in that?
Thank you! 😊
This is well said.
It's not just distinguishing between lower animal and human consciousness, to claim that brain and pain are separate... Of course they are.
Pain is interpreted somewhere in the brain stem, and has nothing to do,,, initially, with our upper cortex's awareness of it.
Fish fighting on a fisherman's line. Is that fish aware of doing that, do they get angry? Do they have some kind of internal self representation of what that pain is causing their nervous system to do?
Does pain initially create a fight or flight response? I would say no... Pain apparently resides before the medulla a... And that means exactly what you said.
Literally all things that have a multi level brain, require the wiring and the programming for pain response, before upper brain function can even evolve.
Consciousness of stimuli seems to be a pre requirement, but any animal not having a 'next level of brain,' just dense nerve bundles, would not exhibit anger or higher cognition functions of complex brains, they would still squirm though.
And this is followed, in my own opinion, with the human pre requirement of idea and language faculties, before an ego-self could emerge from the brain. Not only this, but that social culture required whatever gave us oxytocin bonding, before ideas and language faculties could even be selected for...
Brains have to be ready for whatever emerges from them, which apparently means they select for somehow pre understood outcomes. Selective pressures alone, I don't think, fully explain everything neatly. But neither does mysticism... So, I would rather talk about the top of the coin, the part we can see and agree already exists...
Human consciousness is not unique. It is just a more complex version of what all animals experience.
@@longcastle4863 I tend to agree with you; Since we have one of the most complex brains out of the entire animal kingdom, it's reasonable to conclude that we experience things that other animals cannot (music, for example, requires specific structures in the brain to process - let alone, appreciate). That being said, other animals also experience things we cannot. Conscious experience then, seems to be a feature set.
Christof's argument that "we need to add something" to bridge this apparent gap between neurophysical processes in the brain and conscious experience may be correct - but at the end of the day, it must also be a physical property of the universe. He likened this to the discovery of electromagnetism - which in my opinion, is not a great analogy - but probably as close as we can get right now; There is some natural effect or process that allows brains to generate this composite experience of all our senses, emotions, and thoughts. It is truly a deep problem to understand, but I think we'll get there.
If consciousness is to be explicable, then it is deterministic and it is physical.
Consciousness is sensory. It is an interpretation of mental activity, not all mental activity. It does not do the interpreting but is a part of the process. It is a physical property of mental activity. There must be activity, there is no consciousness derived from a static state. In addition to light, sound, touch etc we sense thoughts (as differentiated from light, sound, touch, etc). The brain does the processing and consciousness can be a part of the process. Consciousness itself can be analysed by the brain and the conclusion be added to consciousness or used to modify/correct consciousness (and we are aware that we are aware). Consciousness is useful in making and correcting a model of the world that is experienced.
At 2:46--2:54 Koch says of "black holes and viruses and neurons" that "none of those things has subjective experience, but brains do." Yet elsewhere in this interview and in his books, he embraces panpsychism, the view that experience is a fundamental property of matter like gravity or electric charge, so that everything has experience, however rudimentary or elemental that experience might have to be. Which is it? Schopenhauer had a similar problem; he said a stone has a will, "but not a conscious will." Koch makes use of panpsychism to fill the explanatory gap that IIT shares with every other theory of consciousness. If the appeal to "intrinsic causal power" were enough to explain how experience arises from any system with a high enough amount of integrated information, there would be no need for him to appeal to panpsychism. For me, Koch's problem is the lack of any specific argument connecting panpsychism to IIT.
Now that's a video I can show my mom to tell her what I want to investigate.
if you mean going to college then go for it, just make sure you're really good at advanced math first or you'll have a horrible time, and in that case plenty of other fields you could enjoy and have similar intellectual fulfillment
I don't think we need to broaden the definition of "physical", instead we need to broaden the definition of of "experience" Experience broadly defined is an interaction with an environment. On that account even rocks and electrons have experiences, and histories. To experience and be experienced is the essence of existence. The depth of our experience is defined by the depth and sophistication of our memories. Is pain a sensation or a memory? Is consciousness a kind of memory projected on the immediate future. If time were running backward, you're experience of reality would look exactly the same as it does now. 8:55
If you enjoyed that you might like this conversation with Christof Koch. I was lucky enough to ask him "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how can we make a better world?" - as well as exploring his views on sentience and consciousness of course... th-cam.com/video/DBmfQ0UlFt4/w-d-xo.html @sentientism
6:13 Isn't having a very lawful relationship to an underlying substrate the very definition of "reducible"? If not reducible then Homomorphic or Isomorphic.
Physical is much more than we thought.
Yes, as scientists you are called upon to explain it. We are waiting.
why wait? just jump the gap
IF consciousness emerges from the brain as a byproduct of physical relations, then it is possible to say that there are specific arrangements of physical stuff that may give rise to consciousness, and therefore, we should assume that there might be other forms of consciousness emerging from other solid stuff on the universe that are not brains.
Maybe not assume, but not be completely surprised.
4:57 hugely important that he doesn't seem to be aware of the phenonomenal binding problem/combination problem... by far the most important thing that the quantum brain theory "buys you"
the hard problem is way easier to solve, the question is how to reconcile it with physicalism
8:00 my personal opinion is that Koch is completely missing the overwhelmingly more obvious answer which is that PHYSICS DESCRIBES CONSCIOUSNESS... why create a whole new category when you havent even defined what "physical" means?
Every conscious thought or experience is relative to the body. If it were not so, I could agree a bigger picture view is needed. Maybe we will be the ancient Greeks to those in the future. We will have thought of the atom but found to be on track to discovering what consciousness is.
4:45 wrong, they don’t go against it, what happens is that push and pull because of the feedback. Only positive and the creature is met with something negative and it struggles. It’s showing in us literally lmao to grow you need both or else you get guided by things. It’s like becoming an addict, do the grits make you do them or is it you? It’s the same thing as those paradox’s. They work because they balance and that’s why reality grows these things instead of other things. It’s like evolution until grow a different aspect and then merge and grow branches. It’s so nuts to think about and see, i have a vivid imagination so i really try to see what I’m describing here. Plus i use analogy’s a lot so visually merging them helps to understand how and see how the dots connect when lining them up in ways.
I wonder if Analytical Idealism as described by Bernardo Kastrup wouldn't explain that physics is what nature "looks like" from our dissociative boundary and that nature is not physical but mental. Our dissociative boundary is our bodies driven by metabolism. Thanks Christof and Robert for this fascinating discussion!
Kastrup's ideas are an assertion, but I wouldn't say it's an explanation. What explanatory power does it have? What features of the mental and physical does it predict that we didn't already know?
@@simonhibbs887 what does non-idealism predict that we didn't know? these types of questions dont seem epistemically relevant unless there's reason to believe any of these theories are older than the other? but why would we think one's older?
but it also seems quite questionable that the age of a theory is epistemically relevant at all...as if the truth would depend on what theory we're able to think of first. that would seem to say more about our cognition or our minds more than it would say about reality.
Imo, Kastrup has very questionable reasoning, which seems to go like this: that because we cannot know the real reality that is out there for sure (like with the _noumena_ or the _thing in itself_ from a Kantian perspective), all of that reality-that reality that we cannot know, remember-is therefore Consciousness.… I would ask, how does he know that if it cannot be known? Also, the more you listen to Kastrup, the more the underlying motive for much of his, imo, tortured and unsatisfying logic becomes clear: it’s the old classic: the desire for life after death.
@@longcastle4863 his argument here is that because we cannot know the real reality that is out there for sure, it is therefore more epistemically reliable to infer that what's "out there" is also consciousness.
@@longcastle4863 "it’s the old classic: the desire for life after death."
why do you think that? kastrup has said he finds materialism more comforting in that there will be a garantuee of no suffering after death, whereas there is no such garantuee under the form of idealism he endorses, which to him is less comforting
The Quantum connection would be the ability for consciousness to "dream" or apparently leave the physical realm for a time sometimes when you are unconscious.
Many great minds have come before us and figured it all out ages ago. Too many teachers nowadays focus on the fact that "all is one". Yes, we already know that. Nothing new under the sun. The question is not if all is one; the question is why is there differentiation within oneness. Jesus figured it out alright. Louis Armstrong too and I quote: "love baby love, that's the secret".
The 3 spatial dimensions (1D, 2D, 3D) are physical.
Shouldn't consciousness be 0D, geometrically speaking?
awareness emerges in brain from consciousness in quantum?
No proof or even suggestion of that. What we know is that consciousness emerges with biology.
Yes. There are strong arguments and growing experimental evidence. Eg Babcock 2024 shows quantum super radiance in microtubules at room temperature that gets stronger as they are joined into larger structures. They are both wrong about this.
Sir, your research not just good, it's incredible without doubt.
Good and bad are RELATIVE. 😉
Incidentally, Slave, are you VEGAN? 🌱
Well, this video was posted seven months before this comment, before Christof's most recent book was published. The book contains an endnote reference to the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, so if he wasn't aware of it then, he certainly is now. But perhaps he's unaware of physicist Anirban Bandyopadhyay's work, which provides experimental evidence of quantum-like processes in the microtubule bundles in neurons.
Electronic currents in the microtubules were observed by Bandyopadhyay to behave in accordance with the Schrödinger wave equation's probability distribution. These currents operate in a huge bandwidth in the kilohertz to terahertz range. Hameroff has proposed correlations between the much lower beat frequencies generated by interactions between the high frequency waves and the corresponding lower frequencies mapped by EEG in neuronal activity. Bandyopathy's experiments have confirmed distributed coherent resonance interactions between the primary waves among systems of microtubule bundles.
The timing sequence of these oscillations is the key. According to Hameroff, the microtubular activity very definitely *_precedes_* the neuronal activity. It is his hypothesis that the information processing and integration occurs in the microtubules, before the neurons fire. Additional corroboration is needed of course, and research continues. But at this point, it does appear that Christof's assertion that "there is no experimental evidence" may not have had the benefit of more recent empirical findings.
Consciousness itself does not require experience to make decisions. Experience allows for a more subjective state of consciousness. Once subjective experience is accrued, the 'Mind' emerges to form a 'Conscious-Mind'.
He’s right! Consciousness is so much more than the brain. If I bump my toe, I can tell you what causes the pain but that’s not the experience of the pain from bumping your toe. When I eat Pizza, I can describe to you the physics of digestion but that’s not the experience of eating pizza. You can show what part of the brain is active when you’re in love, but there’s no part of the brain that shows what you experience when you’re in love. Experience can’t come from the brain. It’s like the TV allows you to watch a movie but the TV doesn’t determine what you experience while watching the movie. Your brain and your eyes allow you to see a sunset but they don’t determine what you experience while seeing the sunset.
I am reading your comment on a tablet somewhere in the Netherlands and wonder whether I should empathize with your bumping your toe or whether perhaps you were just using it as an example and never really experienced it yourself.
Only through a few photons emanating from my lcd screen, I am made aware of the sensations of pain in my toe (recollection from years back) and of dripping hot 🧀 and pepperoni, which saturate my consciousness. And only youtube(and google) knows where you are located.
But why is my brain wasting energy on these thoughts?
Check out near death experiences.
What?
Love pain etc is compliment...lets talk basic....no matter in the world has color...and your brain is made of the same matter....so how can a bunch of neuron make me see whatever i see when i look at color named red.
There is no hard problem. Language makes it seem There is. Without communication or Language no hard problem.
It’s interesting that I should come across this as I’m finishing up a course on consciousness online with MIT. Physicalism is still the predominant view. And it just seems so obviously inadequate. And the difference between consciousness and all of the other past “mysteries” like magnetite, is that all those Mysteries are observable phenomena from a third person perspective whereas consciousness is not. It is a unique mystery. I think more and more philosophers and neuroscientists are gonna come around to the idea that a radical new view is necessary. A view that prioritizes experience. After all, experience is the only thing we have absolute direct knowledge of.
What is missing is the understanding of what degrees of freedom really are, in relation to what we call constraints. Experience doesn't require intelligence, but it's evolve due the experience of constraints of the environment
5:08 quantum mechanics are not THE reason but more of a set of guidelines we’ve seen in the current of ours. Using the guidelines we can see how plants use quantum mechanics in cells and how humans do as well. Those cells emit and use quantum particles similar to humans eating food or seeing images and then using the material to grow and adapt in connection to the things around us. The cells emit signals in various forms such as chemicals and electrical and the materials matter as well because they are grown custom to that thing and it’s growing through those connections and growing others as well. We see light and our brain grows /evolves custom cells branching and connecting since birth and the dna and rna and its first sensory inputs. Our sensors are tuned to the dna and rna of the previous connections and that’s how we start and adapt to the current. I use my mind a lot to visually see what I’m saying so idk if it shows well in here but i hope you see the things i see and understand what i keep growing to understand. It’s not like I’m saying 100 percent but quantum fluctuations grow matter in ways and that matter connects and grows since our energy comes from the sun. We are just using the various details to fuel us in various ways. Different tools react to different forms of energy.
If consciousness, self-awareness (at least in a dozen or so other species known so far), and our personalities lay in some metaphysical realm, explain why diseases like Alzheimer's and other dementia effectively destroy it?
I don’t think he or any serious scientist/thinker would say the mind is totally detached from the physical realm. Obviously there is a deep connection between mind and body however you cannot explain it all by looking purely at one constituent.
He does not think it lies in a metaphysical realm. He likens it to back in the day when we knew nothing about magnetic fields. He is saying there is something very real missing in our current knowledge of the physical world.
Agreed. The brain and body are not discreet, isolated bits of biology. They're an integrated biological system. Both can influence the other. What gets very old with Kuhn, is his obsession with some religious or other metaphysical explanation, when we just don't know. Could there be an incredibly advanced Intelligence (Class III+), that could create a Universe, I don't know. I'm sure of one thing though, whatever that may be would not care if you failed to put money in the Collection Plate. kk@@whitb62
@@jeremymanson1781 so what does this "missing" thing do besides make us aware of our world? Seems just a tad anthropocentric, doesn't it. This fundamental thing just waited around interacting with nothing else until our brains gave it a function... That really seems like magical thinking. I mean, the rest of the universe just doesn't seen to need consciousness to do its thing.
@@selwynr I have no idea. I suppose you could say we weren't aware of radio waves. Once we built a receiver we could make use of them. So building a brain up to a certain level of complexity turns it onto a receiver? Seems rather unlikely.
Fundamentally, all entities exist in a state of physical resonance with other entities in their surrounding environment. In other words, reverberations of nearby entities naturally occur within the physical structure of every entity.
The reverberations occurring within an "actively mobile entity" (i.e. an entity whose innate survival preference necessitates an active engagement with its environment) naturally "inform" this entity of its surroundings, whereas the reverberations occurring within all other classes of entity are not informative to those entities.
Therefore, this "informative resonance" IS the entity's consciousness, which is utilised by the entity similarly to the way one utilises a map.
In this way, the situation of consciousness can be conceptually described as being "ontologically inextricable" from active mobility.
Non-conceptually, the situation of consciousness is functionally indistinguishable from active mobility.
I wrote a paper- Physical Brain's knowing itself as Physical- proving what physicalists trying to prove. It is just like saying nature knows as nature. What is this self awareness of physical, mechanical and physical brain's or as a by-product of nature? This boils down to nature's self-knowledge of matter of itself as matter. This is called in the ancient Indian logic as Arthaantara- proving what one initially wants to disprove
Physicalists about consciousness appeal to various correlations and causal relations between brain and consciousness, such as that changing the brain changes consciousness, and that damaging certain parts of the brain or removing those parts leads to the loss of certain mental functions or aspects of consciousness. However this doesn’t seem to show that consciousness is necessitated by physical structure, such as the brain, beyond reasonable doubt, nor does it seem to show that that theory that consciousness is necessitated by physical, structures such as the brain, is a better theory compared to other rival theories where consciousness is not necessitated by structures within the physical world such as brains. We rather seem to have a problem of underdetermination here.
There are no other theories able to do predictions, that's the point.
@@rafael.frigori lol that's not a claim youll be able to back up. What's the argument that there are no other theories that are able to make predictions?
Do these other theories explain the correlations we observe, and why we observe them in the brain? If not, they are ignoring the evidence and should be dismissed as beliefs rather than science.
If consciousness itself is not physical, it's hard to see how physical injuries would change it. They might change it's ability to interact with the physical world through the brain. If the brain receives signals from non-material consciousness we might expect physical brain injuries to affect people's ability to express things physically, such as in speech or physical action. Their visual experience might be affected by damage to the visual cortex. However brain damage goes much further than that, it affects people's reasoning ability, their personality, their decision making, their personality.
If those aspects of consciousness are so intimately dependent on physical brain function, there really isn't much left for dualism for example to explain. A bit maybe, but take libertarian free will. If freely choosing is a non-physical process, how can brain damage change how and what we choose?
@@degigi2003 yes they explain them. Or at least one does. It logically entails that these correlations will be observed or will happen.
If consciousness is something separate or additional to our physical existence than so is software or anything that is the result of computation which is essentially what are brains are. Our software is unique in its complexity but this will change soon with the advent of A.g.i
Particle theiry of Consciousness: My hypothesis is that consciousness is physical, but just as with dark matter, it can't be detected or measured. One possible way this could happened-my hypothesis- is that there is a field that pervades all of spacetime; when this field puddles or clusters at a place, it is awareness. The trick is to figure out how to detect those puddles or clusters, which would be analogous to physical.particles.
If it is anything like that it is the electromagnetic field.
Once we have the NCC, could we build machines that generate qualia we do not yet know?
That would be cool
Experiencing something is different from sharing an experience with someone. The description of "nature" is not what nature "is". This is a very old realization. So trying to find a communicable description of an experience is like squaring the circle.
Tips from a visual artist:
Warm and soften the color scheme and lighting scheme, especially the neon triangle light all alone on the big wall behind the guest.
Change the red color wall and table, and glares of light off the table.
Stabilize the camera. Moving cameras like this are purposefully used in horror movies to make people feel uncomfortable. That unsettling effect is creating the same feeling here.
Hope this helps a bit.
The question is poorly posed.
The mind is the functioning of the brain.
It is analogous to the relationship between running and the legs that allow that activity.
Is running entirely physical? A cell in that leg does not run.
Running is not physical. The leg is physical. Running is the functioning of that physical object.
Moreover, that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. Richard Lewontin
I think that before we start launching in various directions to describe consciousness as something more, we have to understand how the brain stores data including instructions - the application that is your brain function. After all, a computer starts with a simple boot function and then reads instructions it executes and reads and writes data including inputs from other devices. I can send outputs to those devices and control them. So far no one has described anything that the brain does that doesn’t have a computer analog. Computers can modify themselves. An application can modify itself on the fly. It can survive a reboot (near death or death). It can even exist in more than one physical place - e.g. clouds) Cells dying and being replaced? Not a problem if the data is stored as stuff that itself is not alive and that living brain cells can access and interpret. So how is data stored? What are its formats? Do they include data that are instructions as well as data that is acted upon? If the answers are “no” then we need to look further, but first let’s rule out the computer analog through experimentation and discovery.
Very good!
The way I see it is that nothing could be perceived to underlie consciousness since such an existence would have to flow along the stream of awareness or consciousness for it to be known thus making it content within consciousness therefore realizing some existence as being the substratum of consciousness to me would be impossible.
Excellent....
This is why I follow this more than politics religion sports culture...older I get the more I embrace this info
When people stroke half of soul fail
When get demantia you are alive but your soul change dramaticly beacuase brain machine fail
There is no soul out of physic or brain machine
We like to belive there is something survive death but there isnt
How do you explain terminal lucidity?
@@peacecraft3449 Exactly this. Owing to personal experience with a dementia sufferer in the family, i can say hand on heart, this happened in the final moments and cannot simply be explained away as once the brain is damaged, the consciousness changes unless it can miraculously heal while simultaneously shutting down and dying.
Maybe we are making too much of ‘subjective experience’. Is consciousness really such a big deal?
Min 5:50 "...experience is irreducible..."
And what if consciousness is just an awareness of things that have happened? If the universe is indeed based on rules of interaction that can be predicted knowing their prior state, then that interview, as well as me typing this comment, were both inevitable results of the alignments of every particle in the universe, and our "consciousness" is simply the awareness of what has transpired. I'm still not convinced that "consciousness" has a role in the debate, until we can determine for certain if reality is or is not completely deterministic. If so, then we are simply the awareness of ourselves. If not, then... who knows. But if that's the case, then so many facets of physics get upended, that it's hard to even consider the option...
I am 35, and I thought about the hard problem of consciousness (and also read and watched materials about it) for probably the last 20 years. Up to perhaps a year ago, I though it must be something very special and separate from cognition, derived from a new property of physics or created by some very special algorithm. I would consider people who deny the importance of the problem idiots. I no longer think that. After listening to some people much smarter than I am (i.e. Joscha Bach) I now believe there is no "hard problem", really. The very existence of the hard problem is an illusion, in some ways similar to the illusion of free will. It does not mean that that there is no consciousness, because it is obviously real. But it's purely a computational phenomenon, with no magic to it, and nothing beyond cognition needed to explain it. Try this pseudo thought experiment: forget about the hard problem entirely, but imagine you have an agent that is in every other way identical to a human. It has general intelligence, some internal compression/model of reality, and within that model it possesses self-awareness. It examines the world with senses like sight, and it maps what it sees onto it's internal model. Now ask it to tell you what it knows about the color blue. It could perhaps tell you about it's wavelength, name some blue things in the world. But what would happen if you'd ask it what the color is like, when presented to it? It could surely notice it with it's sight, register it and map it onto it's internal model. But it would not be able to describe the nature of this information to you, because it would be a simple data-point mapped into it's internal model. This data-point would be activated by an external input, objective reality, but it would still remain an internal data-point. An inherently subjective thing, exactly like qualia. The color would exist for the agent, it would not be just some abstraction within the internal model, yet it would not have a direct analog to objective reality. Than you might ask a follow-up question: why this exact sensation is assigned to this exact color, and how could you possibly encode a sensation like that with purely computational tools in a purely reductionist framework? The answer to that is: it would not be impossible, if the very "self" that experiences the color exists within the same abstract. To paraphrase Joscha Bach, the mind does not use the language of physics or atoms. It has it's own, emergent, higher-level "code" or "language", and both you and your sensations are encoded with it. So maybe panpsychists are correct? Perhaps computation within our universe is somehow intrinsically "conscious"? Sadly for panpsychists, no. If I would ask you if you are conscious, you'd probably say yes. So your consciousness would physically manifest itself. And if panpsychists were right, and there was some "conscious component" to universe separate from computation, one would still need a mechanism to bridge the gap between the physical actions of mater and it's conscious component, in order for me to write this post or make out loud claims about my internal sensations. So panpsychism in unnecessary at best, or dead wrong at worst. We thought that a philosophical zombies are a default, and our conscious existence is somehow "extra". It's probably the other way around. p-zombies are something we've invented through a cognitive error, our conscious existence is the actual default for out type of cognition.
I tried to present my case to the best of my ability, but I know I'm not smart enough (or speak English good enough) to properly present this concept to a wide group of people. But I try, because it would be fantastic to perhaps inspire even one person who's actually smart and works in fields like artificial intelligence to consider this perspective.
Jocha Bach is as much a philosophical dead end as he is a job hopper. The guy certainly is well read and well spoken, but he has contributed nothing of value to computer science, cognitive science, AI or the world. His ideas don't hold up to scrutiny and behind the clutter of confident mumbo jumbo, end up being similar to Dennett's nonsensical "consciousness is an illusion" argument.
You and I think so much alike. Good job expressing your ideas. I think you're more correct than Christoph Koch. It's sad to see the "hard problem" has him now looking to non-physical magic for an explanation. As you said, the hard problem is a human construct. I think we still need to identify the physical process which is the substrate of the feeling of consciousness, along with all other algorithms in brains. The information is supported, represented, and controlled by wetware - neurons etc. - but what is the information encoded in? I think it is electric field. I think I am the result of the organization of electric fields into logical patterns meant to create an algorithm of self, which exists in order to give a locomotive animal a driver, something that cares about what happens to the body.
@@polyscient To my best knowledge ions moving through neurons are what processes the information in the most fundamental and meaningful way. By my best understanding, ions must move through the web of neurons for cognition to arise. If you think about it deeply, consciousness only makes any sense as a dynamic process. It only works in a constantly moving and changing system. If you "freeze frame" the mind and it becomes a static system, with ions stuck in one place, the system no longer observers itself and consciousness no longer makes sense. Perhaps I've just made a very obvious, stupid and naive point. But it also explains how a unified experience can be generated in a reductionist system. As time moves forward and signals propagate through the brain, large chunks of information can communicate and synchronize.
I feel this is more or less exactly what is going on. Very well said. Very well written. You have made me think about this even deeper. I am a huge proponent of the idea of the brain being a modeling agent for the entire body. The ‘self’ we feel is likely the brain modeling the outside world. Thanks for your excellent explanation.
@@polyscientalso very well put. We think a lot alike on this. I see the brain as a modeling agent. Consciousness is simply an aggregate of models we use to navigate.
Awareness is known by awareness alone.
Consciousness is like infinity manifested as a physical object in the universe, like a black hole, with infinite complexity, but focussed within one singular point, where infinity it self renders the normal laws of nature incomplete, and only can be describes as something more than "space, time, matter and energy", as you put it in this video
Consciousness and infinity are equally baffling and mind bending concepts, but that's about all they have in common. Your comment is poetic, but I don't think brains, black holes, and infinity have much to do with each other.
Thanks and bravo!
Also, quantum mechanics in the brain has been shown through experiments. Quantum computation was found in the brain and quantum vibrations was found in microtubles in the brain.
Yes, superposition and aspects of retrocausality 'reek of QM' as Penrose would say. It's abundantly clear that neither of the guys in this video have made a serious effort to read Penrose and Hammeroff's work. This is a repeated pattern I keep seeing. There's a conference online between Penrose and Chris Fuchs where, within 30 seconds, Fuchs completely mischaracterized Penrose's theory and gets corrected by them in their presence. The only expert I've seen make an actual critique of OrchOR is Max Tegmark and even that was a relatively minor technical criticism. The bigger point is that none of these people are actually talking to each other, or up to date on what each other is doing. It's ridiculous.
@@erawanpencil good points and there’s a video on TH-cam where Hameroff confronts Max Tegmark and Tegmark can’t respond. There’s been a lot of misrepresentation of their theory.
@@jjay6764 do you remember which video it is or where it was at? The Fuchs one is easy to find and it's towards the end I remember. Someone should make a compilation video lol.
@@erawanpencil it’s called Stuart Hameroff vs. Max Tegmark a Quantum Consciousness Debate. Basically, Tegmark misrepresents Hameroff-Penrose theory by calculating decoherence time in microtubles when Hameroff-Penrose are talking about subunits in microtubles. This is a very important difference because the smaller subunits can hold superpositions longer than Tegmark’s calculations of decoherence in microtubles themself. Max knows this but it’s not about truth it’s about obfuscation of truth and that’s why Hameroff is so upset in the debate.
Wow, a rare sense speaker!
I think objectivity is necessary for good science. So if one were to posit that experience is independent of physical laws, then I would need a model that demonstrates how experience can be changed/not changed.
I don't think Koch claimed that experience is independent of physical laws, but that it's a different sort of "stuff". I don't think he'd suggest the causes aren't physical, just that the subjective content of the events isn't exhaustively explained via our physical laws.
@@dinospumoni5611 "Koch advocates for a modern variant of panpsychism, the ancient philosophical belief that some form of consciousness can be found in all things. One criticism of panpsychism is that it cannot be empirically tested. "
Wikipedia
@@mesplin3Yes, panpsychism, in its modern form, is pretty famous for suggesting that consciousness is part of the "stuff" of physicalism.
Not really interested in what Wiki editor chose to put today I'll change that in a few days and nobody will notice (Wiki editor with 50,000+ edits).
It's funny how physics is able to explain almost everything in the universe. But the simplest thing - the thought "I am Me" - it can't explain.
I always wondered how newborn babies can understand music without knowing anything about eighth notes, dotted rhythm, triads, consonances and dissonances, scales etc.
If existence exist as something what is that something, and if existence exist as all things what knows all things?
Hi Sir, I have a simple question. Inside a factory at the end of the shift a supervisor and his co-worker are counting the produced objects, the objects are approximately the size of a tennis ball. It is their daily routine,the worker counts the objects as he takes it from the production lot and puts it inside a bag. The role of the supervisor is to keep watch so that there is no mistake while counting. One fine day, before starting the counting process, the supervisor looks at the lot and writes down some random three digit number as quantity of the produced items, in short he assumes that the actual quantity would probably match with that number. Now the question is what are the chances of that actual quantity matching exactly with that random number?
1/899
Not enough information is provided. For just one example, if the number produced is always in the tens of thousands, then his randomly writing down a three digit number is near meaningless and the chances are extremely low. But if the number produced is always in the hundreds, then other factors come into play. What is the point of your question?
@@longcastle4863 Thanks for your reply. It is not a regular occurrence, it is a story of that perticular day and that particular moment when they complete the counting process. The supervisor writes a three digit number just looking at the produced lot.
basically life is sensation computing, programmed to replicate and update. the output is adaptive response and it is not local, as it happens in a larger scale. life is an active and perpetual computing mechanism, it generates its own subjective calculations known as experiences. We are here for the ride and nothing more. one important thing to ponder upon is how this computing evolved over time, by then we will understand the rest of the mystery.
is there a way to use microtubules in neurons of brain to test for conscious awareness / experience?
That theory of consciousness has pretty much fallen flat.
He does mention information science, and I think information theory has a lot to offer in understanding consciousness. I'm not sure what his ideas about 'experience' might add on top of that though. Everything about consciousness seems to me to be informational. We experience stimuli. We construct a mental model of the world. We reason about what we experience, our intentions and desires. We store and retrieve memories. We make decisions to initiate actions, and we persist and recall memories. All of those are informational phenomena and processes. We are self-referential, introspect out own state, we think recursively. These are all processes we implement in computational systems all the time.
However just because consciousness is a process on information, that doesn't make all processes on information conscious. It does mean that there is a consistency of kind though between consciousness and everything else that exists in the universe. Everything that exists and has a state or structure encodes information, it's fundamental to everything that exists. So in that sense I think panpsychists are on the right track. The phenomenon underlying consciousness is everywhere, and consciousness is a particular activity or process of that phenomenon.
@@Jun_kid It is physical. All information that exists does so in the form of the attributes and structure of a physical system. Holes burned into a CD, the distribution of beads on an abacus, the pattern of electrical charge in a computer memory, etc. To say that we have information or that information exists, such as that we have a copy of it, is to say that it does so physically. Consider hypothetical information that does not exists. Music that has not yet been composed, or a long lost book every copy of which was destroyed. It is because information exists physically that it can have causal effects, such as a CD playing music, or a robot using a map in it's memory to navigate an environment.
Is there anything that cannot be viewed as informational?
*" So in that sense I think panpsychists are on the right track."*
... Look at you, ... tasting the forbidden fruit of nonphysicality! _"Once you go meta, there's nothing bettah!"_
@@longcastle4863 Information seems to be intrinsic to what it means for something to be real.
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC Not really, my account of information intrinsically and inseparably associates it with the physical. They are both just different ways of thinking about the same thing.
O.k.- you have all these sensory organs/systems- obviously the purpose of which is to help you create a mental image or map of your immediate surroundings- which has obvious evolutionary benefits. So, if the brain didn't create internal experience, qualia, or whatever you want to call it- how would it represent the world to you with all its subtly? I mean you can think of really simplistic systems for keeping track of your surroundings I suppose- but they all simplify the world around you. If you want to experience the world in its fullness, the richness of it, all the little, tiny details and nuances- I don't see any other way than subjective experience. Subjective experience is so good at this job that we develop intuition based on tiny little clues we aren't even conscious of-we do it all the time. We read the context of our surroundings and know which way to go, where to find things, what things to be afraid of, what thing to maybe eat, who we can mate with, etc., etc. If you didn't have subjective experience- you would be like one of these robots they create that sort of fakes being conscious. Could we survive this way- maybe, but we would never thrive this way. Our species hasn't just survived- look around you- we thrive. Why? I think because we have a deeper, richer subjective experience of the world around us. I think at some point that subjective experience begins to fuel complexity in your brain- your brain develops further, the experience deepens, which in turn fuels more complexity, which in turn deepens our experience even further- and it's a never ending, self-perpetuating cycle.
He had a NDE that really shook his views up.
Experience Emergence.
Conciousness l believe is much more than mind,its an energy thats timeless,once the physical has expired ,this concious energy could return to its Universal birth place..l hope l made a little sense here??😮
But that is the point what kind of consciousness is being discussed? Physical, metaphysical, or just average normal consciousness and just mechanical industrial
On which average public operates on survival of existence levels which is how 80%human groups of this world functions on
As always, a thought-provoking video and lots of really interesting Comments.
How is it that logic seems to fall down so fast at the end of this dialogue, and why is the idea of consciousness as a physical mechanism, so instantly baffling?
To the person who replied (now deleted); I agree. I think that is possibly playing a big part in their reluctance to reason farther.
So can AI become conscious?
Materialism seems content on giving sweeping superficial "explanations" of conscious experience. Something something patterns of neuronal activity.. And of course, the promissory materialism never fails. Because it's not falsifiable.
Success we have taken their minds this is more proof our magic works 👁
Didnt convince me.. just seems like a bit of a cop out. To say "I can't imagine how experience could emerge therefore it must be fundamental" kind of misses the point of emergence imho. Emergent phenomena is not expected to resemble just the sum of its parts but to appear as something qualitatively different. We dont explain why a bronze atom in a square of a major city is located there by talking about the atoms history as a fundamental particle and its motions through the universe. Instead we talk about cities, historical events, craftsmanship etc. Conciousness seems special because it comes with this experience of an "I" and this is something qualitatively different than just describing the underlying physical mechanics of the brain. However I think its more likely that the thing we call "experience" is an emergent property of computation - namely that our brains are hardware running a sophisticated software program, and our "experience" is actually the software program. No one explains software programs in terms of the state of indivdual transistors. Instead we talk about lines of code and logic. The behaviour of the software program is emergent from the state of the physical hardware. I think this person is basically saying that he things human conciousness is somehow a special thing fundamentally different from anything computation / software could deliver and therefore there is no danger from his perspective that we will create a concious AGI unless we infuse it with the mystical "experience atom" that hasnt yet been discovered.
I think in the opposite way to him..I think that the thing we call software (or more broadly, computation) has the capacity to produce things like conciousnesses / experiences. Depending on the features / architecture of the software will dictate whether it gives rise to what can be considered a conciousness. The software - when running, is essentially simulating its own logical domain, and this could be thought about as its own universe with its own laws coded in, and state transitions etc, conceptually no different from ours, except the software program running on a human computer is going to be vastly more constrained and thus the universes that humans create with software programs are today very special cased for solving particular problems then terminating - and nothing like simulating a general purpose place of existence like our own universe.
My guess is that consciousness arose with life. And with consciousness came experience. The first experience of what it was like to live on this planet, probably came with the planet’s first instance of life. Which was probably way below even the fleeting consciousness of a newborn baby, but was still consciousness and experiencing of a sort, nonetheless.
I don't get the notion of "non-reducible". Just simply from systems theory, one can say "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts". So is the whole "non-reducible"? (Semantics?).
The claim is "experience" is non-reducible. But is this really so? Seems to me like an impressionistic claim, which people may differ on.
Also, let's take one step from consciousness. Let's just look at biological systems. There seems to be something "extra", apart from the chemical reactions, electrical signaling, in biological processes. People talked about the "elan vital" at one point. So is this what he's saying?
Consciousness has been an enigma for centuries. It has always seemed evident to me that it is not physical.
Long ago there were those who understood that there is something non physical about our minds. "But there is a spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that gives him understanding" Job 32:8 from the bible and 1 Corinthians 2:11, "For no one knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him." Just food for thought.
Either that or the physical has qualities that are not evident from the outside.
i don't think that's at all evident, i think the most likely explanation is that physics describes consciousness
keep in mind, physics doesn't say anything about what it's describing, it just describes what it _does_... it's merrely a tradition that we assume the stuff physics describes is non-mental, nebulous stuff
@@Stegosaurus12345 precisely
@@Stegosaurus12345
These qualities may become apparent if one thinks carefully about
the difference between matter and movement.
Movement is not a property of any particular material object because
as we all know, movement is relative.
Thus movement is not a thing-in-itself, not materially existent, immaterial in fact.
One cannot see movement per se, one can only see things.
Yet movement cannot exist without matter to do it.
It's useful to think of matter as the 'substrate' of movement.
If being conscious is indeed a process then,
since process is essentially lots of little movements and movement is immaterial,
we have a perfect candidate to account for the immateriality of mind.
(Of course,
what the process is doing is hugely important to the understanding of how we are conscious.
As a hint to get started, consider the processes going on in our sense organs.
Impinging environmental energies initiate biochemical chain reactions that culminate in
modulation of the discharge timing patterns of neurons that connect the organs to the brain.
These modulations are encoded representations of the impinging energies.
Representation is the keyword for as we know,
every thought is a representation (and is not the whatever it represents).
Now we know what thoughts are made of
subsequent thoughts may figure out what a self is and how a self is conscious...
Cheers!
Oh we try to make this so complicated, and it is not! Consciousness is not a POSSESSION, it is a PROCESS. Any entity which receives input, processes that input, and produces an output experiences some degree of consciousness. Simplest explanation that describes this intangible experience we all share. Occam's Razor would point to this explanation being the most correct one.
What about those machines in the grocery store where you put in a quarter, turn the knob, and get a bouncy ball?
@@Stegosaurus12345 Well I do agree that it's a hard concept for people to wrap their heads around. Of course the bouncy ball machine does not do any processing, and thus has zero consciousness.
Consciousness is something that is present in different degrees, shades of grey so to speak. When I put an earthworm on a fishing hook I personally believe there is "somebody in there" that is feeling and reacting to the pain of being skewered. Is their consciousness like yours and mine? Of course not. But in some rudimentary way I believe an awareness exists.
Thanks for commenting, even though it was a bit insincere. I do enjoy discussing such concepts and have been a student of consciousness and sense-of-self for quite a few decades now. Now that AI has emerged on the scene it is becoming ever more pertinent. Surprising to me how many really smart people have so many different interpretations. Keep an open mind.
@@andrewhanson5942 It was not insincere, and I disagree that no processing occurs in the coin-op machine I mentioned. Further, the processing in the brain or in an earthworm can be looked at on minute scales to reveal that what is going on in a mechanical sense is a series of very small processes on the same level as the coin-op machine.
@@Stegosaurus12345 OK Steg, you've broken my mind with that one! Guess I'll have to open my mind a bit more to imagine how that might feel to the vending machine. Will work on that one.
@@andrewhanson5942 Haha. I broke my mind long ago by obsessing over consciousness.
If consciousness is physical, this conversation is nothing but a movie being played by physical whatever. Then what the hell is you that you believe who you are? Whether consciousness is physical or not, I agree with the determinism.
Classical physics pushes its complexity down upon many disciplines where we or workers constantly statistically correct for its failures.
This is why its so many cults and such a stagnant it keeps our dashboard consumed by calculating sums of approximation.
But qauntom physics absorbs some complexity actually explaining some of our real life experiences we do correlate all 5 senses with the very small like a red low entry apple. You can not trick us into thinking purple high entropy apples are really red ..lol
The physical elements defiantly became entangled with a powerful critical extreme state .
Even if it was multiple passing nutron stars and a black hole with lots of Zapping the solar system and earth in the perfectly fine tuning for life .
As far as emerging levels of consciousness biology plays a role in accessing this field.
Its a triality not a duality
Good for a Friday night. I always thought of my consciousness as the sensation that the physical inputs into my brain, in real time, are matched to abstractions in parallel. For example: the picture in my mind of dancing on the table as I walk past the real table. In any case, I like my consciousness closely tied to my physical reality as I do not want my consciousness doing things behind my back, like getting in touch with the "Dark Side."
Or like projecting the table the room and your brain to fool you into thinking there is something physical to cause inputs.
I agree with the guest except where Robert made him agree that consciousness is entirely physical with a caveat.
They keep asking the same question over and over again and expecting a different answer, truth is nobody knows, and we probably never will.
0:10
Consciousness, as Marvin Minsky indicated is physical. Emanating from the brain. Occam’s razor.
Sure, we just can't tell which physical things are conscious, and which are not. We need a solid theory around this.
Why do materialist sidestep esp
Because they looked at it and found nothing there.
Emergence
One thing is undeniable. It takes consciousness to take/perceive itself as physical. Physicality ows its being to consciousness.You are consciousness first and physical after.
Good point. Like he said... "Consciousness is different than its underlying physical state"
But how can we expand our definition of 'physical' Something is either physical or not!
He means identify new, currently unknown physical phenomena that might help explain consciousness.
Analytic Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup has an interesting argument where he defines the 'physical' as a part of a universal, fundamental consciousness. look it up: it's his analytical idealism course
@@stringX90 I've come across Kastrup. Ok, so maybe consciousness is an activity of the physical. Maybe the physical is an activity of consciousness. Either way there's still an explanatory gap, of how either emerges from the other.
The thing is we have a pretty decent track record of explaining all sorts of phenomena in terms of physical processes. We've been pretty busy working that out over the last few hundred years and we've done pretty well by it.
Physical processes also explain information, and pretty much everything we know about conscious experiences is in terms of information. Sensory stimuli, our spacial extent and position, our emotional state, storing and retrieving memories, introspection, using logic or reason to evaluate information and make decisions. All of these are informational phenomena, we have rigorous formal mathematical models and proofs for all of that, and we can engineer systems that do every one of those to at least some extent. The only remaining gap is conscious awareness itself, but everything we are aware of is entirely explicable in terms of information, and therefore the physical.
Meanwhile, what phenomena or processes in the world have we explained based on consciousness. Not much springs to mind. So there's not a lot to hang a hat on there, it seems to have a serious deficit in the explanatory power stakes.
@@simonhibbs887Hi but that just sounds just like looking for ever more sub atomic particles. The kind of work that is done at CERN. It all loks nice published in Nature but doesnt really advance our understanding of the universe!
@@stringX90Ok thanks but I struggle a bit with some of the philishophical aspects having more of a physical science background! Thanks though 🙏
Quantummechanics is non deterministic. If we were completely deterministic there would be no room for decision making or the feedback our consciousness gives us. If we were only passive viewers we would not be aware of consciousness. How much influence our consciousness has on the progression of anything is, at least to me, the real question. If we could just determin what our consciouness is doing to our brain, and also how our brains are connected to our consciousness. Without our brains we seem to be nothing, but without our consciousness we also would be nothing.
It could be that consciousness and the ability to make choices (which is how I define free will) emerged out of a fully deterministic system with the emergence of biological life. Does it really need to be impossible for something to emerge out of a fully deterministic system with traits and characteristics that make it no longer fully bound to that system?
@@longcastle4863
But why could it even evolve, if there is no feedback from consciousness at all ? Panpsychism maybe, but still, if there is no feedback, why would the brain evolve to give us this ability or the illusion of it ? Evolution does not work like that...
@@marcelmommsen5308 I just think a brain, a nervous system, a consciousness proved useful for a species adaption and survival and so chance improvements in those things were seized upon. Leading from before earthworms to us in a series of probably millions upon millions of tiny micro baby steps. All “selected” for because they improved the species chances of continuing on. To the point of us, where we get to decide if we want to carry on.
Consciousness is experience, intelligence, culture, knowledge, physical, in the brain, ... Pain is in the brain.
Not so. "Every cell is sentient." - International Record of Medicine and General Practice Clinics, Volume 73, 1901.
When he said we don't need quantum mechanics to explain why the table is solid, he is simply wrong. He said we can do that using "conventional physics." That statement was proved wrong 100 years ago when scientists started understanding what atoms are and how they create solidity. You cannot explain it properly without quantum mechanics. So judge for yourself how much to trust his other claims.
The human brain is the most complex organization of matter in the universe (that we know of). Why is it so hard to imagine that unimaginably complex things can emerge from that?
Hey, ants are conscious too!
David Bohm would disagree as would Bernardo Kastrup.
Consciousness is 100% Electrical.
All Stuff, is more or less dense 'veaved' Electricity.
Life have a Life-side and a Stuff-side,
Consciousness is Eternal,
the Day-Consciousness, Thinking, is Life-side.
So, Consciousness also have a 'stuff-side',
Fine- or Above-physical stuff, as We normaly dont
think of physical.
The Thinking is the 'Printer' of Reality, it is Here
the Energies Turn, and input becomes output.
If you believe that the Universe makes sense at a basic level, it wouldn't make sense that all of our experience would end with our death.
Isn't this something like Peter T. Russell is trying to explain?
Christof has made progress of a kind, finally admitting that consciousness cannot be explained in physical terms. He has still to let go of the notion that 'brains are conscious' however, so that he may understand that animals (including their brains) are what conscious non-physical beings look like when projected into the physical plane.
Nonsense is still nonsense even when spoken as if from on high
Consciousness is the Planck frequency of time-invariant superfluid quantum space.
Consciousness and religion are obviously fundamental to the universe. After all, one has been around for a smudge of time and the other for a micro dot.
There is not a hard problem. Language makes it seem there is. Without communication or Language no hard problem.
I used to think this as well - that we were getting hung up on semantics when describing conscious experience. But, now I think I better understand those that pose the existence of the hard problem of consciousness - and I do think there is one. Simply saying that the brain is responsible for our conscious experience through neurophysical reactions between neurons and synapses is all good and fine - but it does NOTHING to explain the translation from those electrical impulses, to the subjective feeling of warm, or the sensation of seeing blue. Yes, the brain is doing all this. But we don't know how. We cannot currently say, "When photons of 380nm strike our retina and enter our visual cortex, the sensation of blue light is rendered by means of... blah de bla blah." We simply don't know how/why blue looks blue. Obviously, the brain is differentiating between wavelengths of light - But we cannot explain how the brain generates the experience of blue.
I think this is where people deviate from "there is or isn't" a hard problem of consciousness. If you're just OK not knowing how a brain does this, then you say there is no hard problem. You might dismiss it as getting hung up on the ability of language to adequately explain what it is we're referring to when we say "subjective, conscious experience". But merely dismissing this experience as a collection of neurons firing in the brain has slightly more explanatory power as saying "GOD did it". Yeah, the brain is involved. But we literally have NO IDEA how this conscious experience gets generated as this cohesive, composite model of our world.
@@ryandinan You are doing all those things through Language without Language there is no feeling of warmth. There is only feeling, no description added. There is only sensing going on here. Language creates self awareness, which creates a you to have a subjective experience no Language no you! No experience!
Try and have an experience without Language. You can't not one you would be aware of.
@ryandinan The translation of electrical impulses to produces the subjective feeling of warm? What subjective feeling of warm or seeing blue? There is no subjective experience without Language! Feeling warm or seeing blue are conceptual, concepts. Language is conceptual. Reality is not, Reality is not an idea. What is warmth besides a sensation? What is seeing Blue besides seeing? A sensation.
@@Krod4321 You can absolutely have experiences without language. Do you think that other animals don't experience anything? Language allows us to describe our experiences to others (and to ourselves) - but it is not required to have an experience.
What you DO need for experience, is a brain to process signals from your nervous system. These impulses carry our senses of smell, touch, sight, hearing, etc. The brain is responsible for translating and interpreting all those signals into a composite, conscious experience. How the brain processes those signals and how it generates the actual sensations is something we do not yet fully understand. Once we do, we will have a much firmer grip on what consciousness is.