Neutral Monism - A Little Critique
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
- In a follow-up to my video about Graziano's Attention Schema Theory, I present an alternative hypothesis, and some criticisms of it. Neutral monism proposes that the fundamental stuff of physics has both a mechanistic, relational aspect (how particles behave) and a subjective, qualitative aspect (what particles are like, in and of themselves).
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Mine too! Yuppie!
Same
Same!
4:17 Physicist here. The fundsmental ontology of the Standard Model isn't the particles, but quantum fields. Particles are something that the fields do. For example, photons are the particles of the electromagnetic field, and electrons are the particles of the electon field.
Has anyone in the comments read any post-Cartesian phenomenology like Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty?
It's wild how this conversation at large just continues with new lexicons, each of a higher resolution, each smuggling in the baggage of their specific ontic mode of analysis.
just yesterday or so i was thinking about your consciousness series and hoped you’d film another video soon. wish granted, thank you!
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who leaves the spoon in my cups. Everyone calls me weird for that. Oh yeah, great video as always.
totally normal thing to do, why would you take it out it only leaves a small puddle wherever you put it
My friend, Brian Edmonds, majored in chemistry. This is the kind of conversation that he would enjoy. His father was a forensic scientist. He ended up working in a bookstore after a short period of working as a journalist covering the town meetings at a local paper.
*I think therefore I am* is problematic in itself.
It postulates the „I“ before arguing for it. It’s circular. All we know is that „thinking“ as a phenomenon exists. Not the „I“ necessarily. That sense of “I” is mere prejudice if we really want to attach to it any more ontological aspects, beyond it being a by-product of the “thinking-phenomenon”. Also it falsely states that thinking and thus language is an individual phenomenon and not a social one. Thinking only happens in the case of social organisms. All that the thinking phenomenon proves, is that it’s a phenomenon purely experienced, and verifiably so, by social organisms. It does not prove the existence of an isolated “I”. Language comes after the self (The self being a social construct) and not the other way around.
Im just here to say there seems to be an assumption everyone says conciousness is non physical. It just never really occurred to me it was non- physical. Of course im a sort of computer doing a bunch of iterative calculations in a time frame. Of course these give me the illusion of free will. Perhaps the illusion of free will is the closest the universe permits to free will. So be it. Ive evolved to be such. And its a wonderful miracle. Might as well enjoy it.
In regards to the elephant, you might want to look into the fascinating side effects of 'split brain' surgery - i.e. where one side of the brain tries to account for the lack of communication with the other.
Thank you, interesting to listen to. I agree with you on everything. The only problem is that I don't have any feeling of contradiction listening to the Graziano's theory, to me it feels intuitive. Those people would probably call me unconscious.
I also have no feeling of contradiction and I'm honestly a bit perplexed that some people seem to experience this feeling. To me it seems completely intuitive that consciousness is something my brain does and that there's no need for a non physical layer added on top. I'm quite curious about the ratio of people who experience one side of this or the other, and if there's any explanations exist for such contradictory experiences.
Could you do a bookshelf and room tour Simon? I've been seeing glimpses for years but I am I'm sure many viewers would like to see. I'm especially interested in your academic/old english book collection.
18:20 - “let’s say that you did conduct a very thorough study of the person’s brain, and you isolated the circuitry that was generating this percept of an elephant, and you completely understood why the person was standing there in the room with no elephant and yet seeing and perceiving one.” In your scenario of course you are inherently begging the question. In your scenario you have already declared that you are able to fully account, based on the brain circuitry, for why the person sees an elephant. But of course the entire idea behind those who reject physicalism is that the physical aspects of the brain circuit cannot possibly give rise to the phenomenal experience of seeing an elephant, whether real or hallucinatory. You’re simply positing that the physical events involved in brain circuitry alone are sufficient to explain qualia without providing an explanation for how this happens. And Graziano, unless I missed something in your other video, does not do this either. He just tries to avoid it altogether by stating that it is the result of attention schema. Well, why should those neural circuits of the attention schema be accompanied by subjective experience? This is explicitly not answered, and it quickly dissolves into an infinite regress.
14:48 - “Physical processes happening that aren’t straightforwardly explained by the standard model. You’d have to add something from the qualitative side of things into the standard model in order to fill the hole.” This may be true of panpsychism but is not true of analytic idealism.
I think you should look into analytic idealism a la Bernardo Kastrup, because it is the only theory, in my opinion, that is completely consistent with the laws of physics and the existence of phenomenal consciousness. And it avoids the flaws of panpsychism. Briefly, the idea is that if we are being truly ontologically unbiased, we must conclude that:
There is a correlation between brain activity and conscious states. Empirically it is silly to deny this. If I take a bullet to my occipital lobes, my vision will be affected. If you stimulate my temporal lobes, I will have some perception changes. And so on. We CANNOT begin by assuming that brain states *cause* conscious states, as we do not know that for sure, merely that they are strictly correlated.
As Kastrup correctly points out, what laypeople would call the “physical brain” is, if we are being empirically unbiased, the second-person perspective of another person’s first person experience. If you look at my nervous system and the entirety of its metabolic activity etc (which of course your eyeballs alone cannot see), you are directly viewing what my first person experience looks like when viewed from the outside (Kastrup would say when “viewed across a dissociative boundary”).
We cannot say, empirically, that one generates the other, only that they are two views of the same thing - hence the strict correlation between “physical” brain activity and internal consciousness. And when I look at another person’s active brain, I am seeing a second person perspective of someone else’s first person experience.
The brain is a ‘physical’ system composed of subatomic particles and electromagnetic fields etc just like the external universe. Thus the most natural inference is that when one is viewing the external universe - also composed of subatomic particles and quantum fields - one is also viewing the second person perspective of a conscious experience. Thus, what we call “physicality” is *merely* the appearance of what external conscious states look like when viewed from a first-person perspective.
At this point most physicalists would object: “how can you say the external world is in fact consciousness when it behaves nothing like consciousness and its behavior is described well by the laws of physics?” Well, as you noted, physics (and I have a degree in physics and am a practicing neurologist so I think I can lend myself a bit of hubris here) only describes the *behavior* of subatomic particles (really quantum fields, whose manifestations are what we measure as subatomic particles, but that’s beside the point). As you hinted at, physics does not, and cannot, address the underlying ontological nature of a subatomic particle or field - what it truly IS, rather than just how it behaves. The idea that conscious cannot behave in ways predictable by relations laws and equations is merely a metaphysical bias and not grounded in any sort of good faith ontological reasoning.
The flaw with physicalism is that it *posits* an external world composed of purely quantitative physical entities, and then turns around and points the arrow inward from that conjecture, and tries to explain the only certain bit of datum that there is (i.e., that subjective experience exists) in terms of that conjecture of physicality, and then scratches its head when it cannot do so (also known as the hard problem of consciousness).
Idealism succeeds because the hard problem of consciousness simply melts away if one does away with this conjecture. Idealism states that the supposed physical entities (particles, quantum fields, etc) we observe either outside of us or in our brains are simply the appearance of what external conscious states look like when viewed from a first person perspective. Thus no aspect of physics contradicts analytic idealism. This cannot be emphasized enough.
In this theory, unlike panpsychism, there is nothing that it feels like to be an atom or a chair. In idealism, it is not the case that “everything is conscious”; rather, it can be crudely summarized as “everything exists in consciousness.”
Physicalists also often object as well by stating the fact that a physical object such as alcohol or a surgeon’s scalpel can so strongly influence my conscious experience suggests that my conscious experience is secondary to physical objects - that physical objects have causal power over my consciousness, thus proving physicalism. But this is entirely missing the point. In idealism, the scalpel and the alcohol are simply the appearance of certain types of external conscious states, rather than being “physical”; thus there is no problem when a scalpel influences my internal conscious experience, because it is trivial to posit that one conscious experience should be able to directly influence another (after all, this happens within us all the time; one thought leads to another, an emotional change influences my thinking, etc).
Thus, idealism is able to fully account for the existence of internal consciousness (it posits that consciousness is the only ontological given) and the existence of an external world that is outside of our internal consciousness, and runs into no hard problem while being perfectly consistent with the laws of physics, thus making it the superior theory.
I think this was wonderfully presented. Enjoyed reading this.
"be accompanied by subjective experience?" this is where you, and many others, reveal a hidden dualism. The point of functionalism is that the information processing is NOT accompanied by subjective experience. It IS the subjective experience, because the subjective experience is part of the information. The information processing contains narratives, and these narratives, in words and other modalities, is what creates subjective experience. Subjective experience is completely real, no reasonable physicalist denies that.
When you see a car and I ask you what it is, the word car just comes "to you", or just comes out of your mouth. You have no introspecive insight into how that happens. When the organisational functions of your brain operate on the virtual space of your "inner world", the narrative that this is subjective experience, ineffable qualia, just comes to you. You have no insight how that happens. The whole point is that your judgements depend on the wiring of your brain. If you model qualia as ineffable, then qualia are real, and they realy are ineffable, in the world of your constructed mind. That is not an illusion. The illusion is that this tells us anything at all about what is fundamental in the world.
Idealism is NOT compatible with the laws of physics, unless you marry it with epiphenomenalism, in which case it is pointless:
If I do a perfect scan of your body and brain while you say "I am aware of the sense of redness right now", then you have to either commit to: the perfect scan will reveal that the particles in your body obeyed the laws of physics OR that the particles violated the laws of physics. If they obeyed them, then the explanation for your saying "I am aware of..." can be accounted ENTIRELY by the particles structural, physics-obeying behaviour, without any nonphysical qualia. Then, it doesn't matter if there are nonphysical qualia, or fundamental consciousness, since there is no connection between that those qualia and anything you say. From this follows that your argument have nothing to do with qualia, and we shouldn't listen to them, even if you could be right. If you commit to the particles not obeying the laws of physics, then well, idealism is not compatible with the laws of physics.
Stating that physics is a manifestation in consciousness is, besides the intelligibility of what that actually means, doesn't help. The laws of physics either hold, or they don't.
That was a great reply, thanks. I too engage with Kastrup’s ideas, mainly because science, as great as it is, seems to be a total failure when it comes to consciousness. I want to bring your attention to a hypothesis that’s not that far from Kastrup, one which is (at the very least) interesting.
This is the hypothesis of a researcher named Andres Gomez Emilsson. Metaphysically he holds a monist non-materialist view, meaning that he believes there’s only one type of stuff and this stuff is qualitative (it has intrinsic existence, rather than having just extrinsic appearance like "matter" has). Also, this fundamental stuff is field-like, what scientists are referring to as "quantum fields" (or quantum field, if the physicists’ unification project is right). But these fields’ extrinsic observable & measurable behaviors are also accompanied by intrinsic qualitative phenomena (the mathematical formalisms describing physical configurations & dynamics are also implicitly/indirectly describing _phenomena)._ This view doesn’t imply that a chair is a conscious being (that would be animism) and it doesn’t mean that there’s a God-mind out there holding the chair into existence as a kind of thought/imagination. And _seemingly_ paradoxically, it doesn’t mean that the brain is conscious _as a brain._ The brain’s architecture is just a huge complex bundle of quantum field excitations (particles) that _don’t_ have any idea they form together a brain, any more than pixels on a screen have any idea they collectively create an image.
So, we have the quantum fields of physics that are secretly "qualia fields". But how does a quantum field, which is a continuous entity that _cannot_ be cut into pieces, give rise to local individual conscious entities like us?
The information-processing LLM-like architecture of the brain, made of quintillion particle "pixels", has evolved to consult a physical (reservoir computing) oracle. Reservoir computing refers to the exploitation of physical mediums for fast cheap computation-you just have to devise a mapping from to and then you induce & read out its state-transitions in terms of inputs & outputs. Many different possibilities about how a brain could implement reservoir computing but (due to reasons I won’t go into here) this is likely done by a _topologically closed pocket_ of the electromagnetic field that spans most of the brain. The dynamical structure of the brain (comprised of charged particles: electrons, ions, other large polar molecules) is pinching off the environmental EM field in such a way that, even though the overall EM field remains integral, its field lines define a very complex _closed_ 3D loop. Evolution recruited this type of physical reservoir because it produces _fast cheap integration_ in virtue of its physical nature, integration which otherwise, if it were to be _approximated_ (not actually instantiated) via digital computing would need great energy & runtime complexity. If you’d try to digitally simulate the behavior of this physical/analog reservoir, even though you’d get a great approximation in the limit, you’d _never_ be able to output an actual physically _unified_ state.
The brain’s electromagnetic physical oracle serves as input, output & _inherently valuable intermediary state._ The surrounding LLM learned how to formulate queries as boundary conditions for the EM physical reservoir but it has absolutely no idea about its bound qualitative states. So animal compute is a hybrid system made out of a mechanistic neural-net-like structure (the unconscious, having mere functional unity) that’s in constant bidirectional feedback with a holistic field (which is the conscious, making up a wholistic entity). In this way, the existence of bound conscious experiences resides within bound physical states, instead of phenomenal binding being somehow (magically) implemented by spatio-temporally distributed digital steps (computationalism/functionalism). The AI silicon circuits don’t have such an oracle, the engineers do everything they can to insulate the electrical logic from any surrounding electromagnetic field interference, so LLM’s are purely unconscious. As for us, we don’t exactly have conscious free-will but our consciousness isn’t epiphenomenal either.
I (the brain’s EM field) don’t have any idea how i produced these words, i have no idea how i moved my hand over the keyboard, i don’t have access into the LLM like processes (like the ones that parse sentence structure or govern the barrages of micro-excitations sent to the dozens of hand & forearm muscles). And the LLM has no qualitative insight into what it does & why it’s doing it, it’s just functionally adroit & learned through evolution to consult the oracle. But this can fail, LLMs can alienate from their oracle, which could explain rationalists/functionalists acting as if they’re p-zombies/pure-replicators out of touch with what IMO is actually real & valuable (me: "there’s so much pain in the world"; rationalist: "you’re plagued by naive understanding, pain is just prediction error, there’s no actual problem… how it presents itself is an illusion"; me [silently to myself]: "😶… i genuinely wish this idiot has a chance to experience intense pain so he stops running around saying that pain is an illusion/isn’t a problem")
There are many reputable scientists believing that the brain’s EM field is the 3rd person aspect of our 1st person consciousness (see neurobiology professor Bruce MacIver, published consciousness researcher Susan Pocket, physicist Johnjoe McFadden, etc) but Andres Gomez Emilsson’s unique insight resides in this topological interpretation which explains why our conscious experience is globally bound but isolated from the rest of the universe. I could add a couple of interviews where he better explains his hypothesis if anyone wants to engage further, but won’t do it in this message because links sometimes get erased.
@@raresmircea i kinda vaguely understand this but how would you explain this to someone very stupid or at least not that well versed in physics or computing? or would you be able to send the interviews?
Idealism seems like an artful dodge of the confusion caused by the "hard problem".
The "hard problem" itself seems to be based on a merely intuitive refusal to accept our physicality.
It smells very homosapien.
Something like- "I can't grapple with the complexity of my brain and the depth of my interconnectedness to the physical world around me, therefore I must shrink my identity to something I can behold. I am a separate mind/soul/spirit/consciousness, and my thoughts are the only things I can ever know FOR SURE are real."
Run away from the scary lack of certainty, and build an ivory tower for yourself in your mind.
Smart enough to see the logical problems with dualism, but not willing to let go of the premises that give rise to it.
When you suggest physicalists entirely miss the point, I think you've misunderstood theirs. Your take from them hasn't taken on their premise, that there isn't a separate realm of consciousness getting "effected" by the physical at all. That defining "consciousness" as non-physical is a total fabrication from the start, not something that needs to be explained.
Would you really expect me to believe that everything we've learned about our reality and the best methods of gaining reliable knowledge simply cannot apply when we try to understand our own experience? Funny you mention hubris.
good video but you still haven't explained why the elephant was following that poor guy around
Been following Mr Roper for a few years now. Don’t understand much of his content, but I do like the presentation. Got to 16:36 on this video and I must say the visual composition and colour blocking is lovely.
Thanks Simon for sharing your insights with us. Your posts are always cogent and thought provoking, across your various domains of interest.
can't express in words how glad i am to have found this channel. simon is an intellectual in the purest sense of the word, which is a vanishingly rare thing nowadays. it's always a joy to listen to his thoughts on serious topics like consciousness, even if i cant necessarily follow every argument precisely. thank you for doing what you do
I recommend you read Fichte and Novalis' partial critique of him in his 'Fichte Studies'.
I also recommend Schelling's later work such as his essay on human freedom. Hegel and Heidegger and Deleuze, if you're interested in more.
Don't remain stuck in contemporary analytic philosophy and it's reformulations, read the originals. Plato, Spinoza and Kant too, if you haven't already.
You're getting deep enough into this, that you might as well take the plunge all the way xD
Please never stop making videos!
This might sound a little uninformed but I think that the "I" in "I think therefore I am" is the root of the problem. We define ourselves "ourselves" as the entity that directly perceives consciousness. It's more of a "I think therefore it's me". And it is relevant and it challenges Descartes's point, at least in relation to consciousness, because the definition of "I" hangs on the definition of consciousness.
We have a winner ladies and gentlemen!
I watched this last night and was intrigued, and quite out of my depth. So then I started reading up on the hard problem and I was awake all night wrestling with the idea of whether Mary would really know what red was before seeing it. Thanks Simon! I came here for the linguistics, but this is absolutely fascinating to think about.
The view that feels right to me is that early organisms that were able to react to their surroundings in some way to avoid being eaten or another form of death obviously reproduced and evolved successfully.
Evolution of memory, stress, discomfort at unfamiliar situations also helped, as did oxytocin induced love, a predisposition to look for patterns even when there were none, and an ability to look forward, visualize the future and to plan.
All living creatures have some form of consciousness suitable for their survival, but perhaps human consciousness developed beyond what was necessary for survival alone, something, (maybe gene mutation or moving to the bipedal life, change in diet) meant that our consciousness has become something wonderful, but probably unnecessarily complex.
I don’t know if other animals have this, but human consciousness has evolved to give us the illusion that we are a whole rather than a collection of cells working together. We create a story about ourselves, positive or negative, depending on our personal experience. We feel this story is truly us and we present it to others. It feels as solid and true as the colour we perceive and the sounds we hear.
You truly are a one of a kind creator
As a physics student, I think your explanation of physics describing things in a relational way is very accurate. It becomes abstract very quickly. The qualities, normal terms we think in are quickly lost. That being said, I can imagine, if I spend a lot of time on one subject, delving into theory, discussing it and doing experiments, I could develop qualia for those abstract concepts. If that’d ever be such a clear qualia as for example red, I don’t know. But take photons, which are often described as waves and as particles. By now I’ve accepted them as being their own thing, not really connected to ripples in water or a spray can. I don’t go about my day consciously observing photons though, but there is an understanding that they’re part of reality and it feels intuitive even if it is still abstract. I do think the abstract thinking has become part of my consciousness in some way, at least it informs my attention. Still though, physics does a very bad job at describing what the world feels like, or no job maybe. I had hoped it would, but I’ve come to realise that it won’t. It cannot make red unred. I’ll keep thinking/feeling in qualia.
Simon, you should check out the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta if you haven't already. I think you'd like it. It discusses the unity of all of existence, in which consciousness is taken to be fundamental.
Thanks!
I'd guess he probably knows about it, but why would he like it? It is not compatible with physicalism. Personally, I like advaita vedanta, but as a kind of poetry, that for sure can trigger important, transformational experiences. But there are no empirical reasons to believe it, as there are for no other philosophies of mind besides physicalism.
Also, there's a world of difference between what an object is like to an outside observer and what it feels like from within. These are two fundamentally different things.
There are no outside observers.
"I can't grapple with the complexity of my brain and the depth of my interconnectedness to the physical world around me, therefore I must shrink my identity to something I can behold. I am a separate mind/soul/spirit/consciousness, a ghost in this machine, and my thoughts and feelings are the only things I can ever know FOR SURE are real."
Run away from the scary lack of certainty, and build an ivory tower for yourself in your mind.
off topic
the natural ability to automatically adapt to various accents when listening and understanding, despite huge differences in pronunciation to what you consider normal, is somewhat fascinating
I haven't watched the video yet, but based on what you wrote in the description "Neutral monism proposes that the fundamental stuff of physics has both a mechanistic, relational aspect (how particles behave) and a subjective, qualitative aspect (what particles are like, in and of themselves)" that is actually not right, that sounds like Russellian-panypsychism, what Neutral Monsim, as defined by one of the founders of those ideas Bertrand Russel is the view that "both mind and matter are composed of a neutral-stuff which, in isolation, is neither mental nor material", so the most fundamental building blocks of the reality are neither subjective, qualitative/ nor mechanistic/physical, but a neutral substance that could give rise to both.
yes in the video you are definitely talking about Russellian-panpsychism, and not neutral monism, and your criticism of it around minute 14 is misplaced, consciousness plays a very important role in Russellian-panpsychism, it's the only thing that is actually doing anything, you are understanding it in a far more dualistic way, it's a monist theory so in some sense fundamentally the only things that exist are conscious things, all the behavioral complexity we see is the results of these conscious entities interacting in the way they do, they behave the way they do because of their conscious nature, similar to how we explain human avoidance behavior to something that causes pain, the human avoided the painful stimulus because they felt pain a subjective experience, the felt experience of pain is playing an active role, all the behavioral aspects of the brain are just the behavioral descriptions that are the result of consciousness, to give a simple analogy this of the world views physics as the software and consciousness as the hardware, so you can't criticize it for saying there has to be a hole in fundamental physics, the only reason physics is physicsing! on this view is because of the actions of consciousness, no hole is needed, now what i am giving here is a very simple, and in some way inaccurate sketch of how to make russellian-panpsychism precise, if you want read a more careful treatment google "How to Understand Russellian Panpsychism Ataollah Hashemi" to see a precise account
@lolroflmaoization I agree the criticism of neutral monism at around minute 14 is much more a criticism of dualism, but the problem is that neutral monism does start to resemble a pointless version of dualism - with qualia tacked onto a purely physical world for no reason at all.
Rusellian monism, that makes the psychic qualities effectively fundamental, is the best way out of that objection that I've found.
@BMarcJ right you mean something like the phenomenal powers view i assume ?
@@lolroflmaoization not familiar with that one!
Funny that you're attributing this dualistic split between the relational and subjective realms to neutral MONISTS. I don't think they believe that these things are disjoint realms that must be slotted in to one another, but rather that they're distinct lenses on or means of interpretation of the same, single, substance.
We'll that's the problem with everything other than physicalism - it's always dualistic to some degree. Neutral monism may claim to be monist, and they are sincere, but mistaken. But this single "substance" has at it's core two aspects - the matter/structural aspect and the mind (or quiddities) aspect. Two totally different things - and it claims they are the same. Is that really a "theory"? Is it reall not dualistic? I don't think they should be given that credit
I'd imagine they'd say that colors corresponding with neural activations doesn't preclude talking about colors as colors. An ascii file is also a binary file; it has a binary aspect and an ascii aspect. In the case of neutral monism I think the controversy is in putting neither abstraction as higher than the other. It depends whether you view emergent behaviors as fundamentally derivative of their substrates, rather than as their own "thing".
Also, it is likely that phenomenal experience will continue to abstract over a disjoint subset of reality than reason is capable of apprehending. Even if we have a theory of everything, making use of it (i.e. computing predictions) on a human scale would run into the limits of information theory.
I would say that a predictive theory of everything which is actually being executed models (or even is) neutral substance, but something actually happening is not reducible to the properties and preconditions which give rise to that happening. The happening is distinct and fundamental. Physical and phenomenological properties both live there.
Immanuel Kant: Every body (object) has extension (a non-zero size). I call this the analytic a priori, a property is inherent in the definition. Clever, what?
Physicists: What about the electron? Current theory makes it a point with no size.
Kant: I lived 200 years ago. Evidence, schmevidence. And don't get me on the neutrino.
Physicists: You mean how every body has mass (a synthetic a priori, arrived at by reason). We used to think it was massless...
Kant: Yeah but you were wrong!
Physicists: Lucky shot
It seems like a lot of the people I subscribe to have been putting out videos lately that for some reason just haven't been taking off. It's really really strange, because they're from all different genres. Anyway, just tuning in. Thanks for posting.
Glad we have videos like this
I still think that the fact that at the bottom of even our physical universe exists only intangibles powerfully demonstrates an immaterial worldview. The universe is literally made of facts and qualia. That's spiritual.
standard model has huge holes. what it does have is very consistent, but it certainly has holes when considered in context with what we would imagine to be a complete understanding of nature. Perhaps I mean fundamental physics more broadly, but i think thats a better object of comparison than just the standard model, but anyway, holes of various sizes and levels of legitimacy include: strong cp problem, hierarchy problem, measurement problem/collapse, fine tuning problem, origin of the neutrino masses, foundational/ontological interpretations with respect to the aspects of locality, realism, and determinism, and of course quantum gravity/unification of all forces generally. maybe we can fit a little bit of 'experience' in those holes, maybe ;)
excellent video! thank you 🙏
So much has been learned about neurology by studying people with whose brains don’t function correctly. The first book I ever read related to the subject was “The man who mistook his wife for a hat” by Oliver Sachs, and another was Phantoms in the Brain by V S Ramachandran, and your illustration of the elephant in the room reminded me of them.
Thank you Simon.
We don't know for sure the nature of what we are. Yes. Thanks Simon😊
It is always weird to see you post a video about the exact thing I have been thinking about recently.
What are you going to be thinking about next, so I can compare with my own plans?
I'm looking at the history of linguistics neuroscience research 1990-2010 right now. Limitations of fMRI and EEG and such.
Thanks for another wonderful video. I do agree that insofar as the physicalist theories I’ve seen offered, what you describe is fairly strong. I’m not as confident as you were in your previous video that it can really successfully explain qualia, but I shall leave that be for now, as that wasn’t a specific focus in this video.
I do want to address that the difference between the elephant and consciousness is significant here - maybe not in your point in how somehow can get caught in the logical trap, but in that which is constructed vs phenomenologically foundational. Certainly consciousness may be indeed be constructed in a way we cannot comprehend, but this difference does matter in terms of how we actual define reality, which is where I go to my second point.
When we make assessments about what abilities or skills are evolutionarily useful, or how they correspond to reality, and so on, we are not using this as a starting place - it’s something we are building based on education, and ultimately, our experiences of the world. I can be wrong about my experiences as you say - but as a prerequisite to not being solipsistic I have to accept the foundations of my experiences as being what builds reality. I must accept, for instance, the existence of light well before any sort of understanding or study on photons can be conducted, and even then, the concept of light, ie the ability to hold visual perceptions, is completely different from the concept born from scientific theory. Even if everything I experience is some grand hallucination, I must accept this. And accepting it along with its co-fundamentals is essential to accepting anything else at all. Of course one may decide to reject it after accepting what conclusions it may have lead to… but such a thing will always be arbitrary and divorced from any science.
Now, consciousness isn’t a fundamental in the sense that any of the senses are. We can, without consciousness, accept senses, draw physicalist conclusions, and complete the loops by explaining our senses. And this can be done quite cleanly, for exactly the reason you put it - it follows naturally that we would develop ways of sensing and understanding the world that allows us to be successful is passing forward our genes, which can then be used to assess and understand the world. But consciousness is not insofar as we can really tell, necessary - and yet we find it foundational in our experiences of reality. And so that a physicalist theory (without, as far as I know, neurological backing at this time) can potentially explain this away to me is insufficient cause to reject it, or even give it less credence. Though perhaps this difference is more fundamentally metaphysical, as I also generally see this as a general reason to reject physicalist, in spite of my intuition pressuring me to accept it.
Anyway, if you read this thanks for taking the time, and apologies for any formatting or rambling. TH-cam doesn’t exactly make it easy to type long comments on mobile.
I’ve had a bit more time to think and want to expand my thoughts beyond my initial comment. This I think, will be more concise.
The question “I understand why this would make me report that I am conscious, but not why I am conscious” is not analogous to “I understand why I report an elephant in the room, but not why there is an elephant in the room.” This is because the former isn’t actually meant to presuppose consciousness, but rather is highlighting the particularness of it - better phrased, the question is “why does what I report to be consciousness seem to be as it is?” Which is a bit more like asking “why does the supposed elephant look like an elephant?” The question concerning the elephant is easy to answer. The neuroscience explains the particular combinations and the association of concepts, and externally, we can say what an elephant would look like if it really were in the room with us, even though it is not. In contrast, even if a theory of consciousness is able to explain away the reporting of consciousness, it doesn’t address why it seems to be as it seems. Why red seems red, and so on. This failure it not due to a presupposition of the “actualness” of consciousness or qualia, but due to the fact that the reports have a particularness to them that remain totally unaddressed.
I think one way of getting around this is by assuming that the qualitative aspect is an aspect of whatever gives rise to interaction, i.e. both are aspects of something beyond or scientific framework. Assuming there are objects with both a relational aspect and a qualitative aspect is already putting the relational aspect first: "objects" are are contained within a relational paradigm. If there's instead something "preceding" both aspects, it seems at least conceivable that you might see a correlation (and possibly a presumed casual relation) from one aspect to the other, while both are really only reflections of the same underlying "thing" (I guess not really a think in the"object" sense).
Ok I’ve been thinking about this and have some notes - it’s already been pointed out that neutral monism is different from panpsychism, but that doesn’t really affect the argument I don’t think, if you sub out the terms, so all that being said I probably agree with the majority of your critique of any kind of panpsychic schema or the way neutral monism is often talked about in which “mind” or whatever you want to call it is some kind of derivative substance which is at least functionally distinct from “matter” as that may at least look like it solves the hard problem but produces more, probably worse problems of causation or mechanism of interaction (or even why such a derivative substance exists in the first place, in that it seems to be designed as an ad hoc explanation).
However I think I can present a reformulation of how I think about the hard problem which may illuminate why it is a problem (at least for physicalism), and what that problem entails: while dualism is, on reflection incoherent, it appears by intuition to be straightforwardly true, because of the subject-object distinction which is itself a product of consciousness, and therefore consciousness at least appears to be primary. This intuition is, on reflection, false - as it is merely the result of privileging one side of the subject-object relationship and reifying the opposition between the two, but that itself doesn’t get rid of the subject-object distinction, which is the root of the problem. Mind (whatever that is) is, in fact, epistemologically primary in that it is definitionally incoherent to speak of “knowing” things entirely objectively, without any subject, as the subject is necessary for knowledge, because knowledge without a subject is just “the world” and identical to its referents (thus, “objective” knowledge in the epistemological sense is not truly objective so much as much aggregate subjective knowledge), This means that, in order to explain anything in a fundamental way you need to explain how “knowing” exists in the first place - in so far as knowledge always refers to something rather than it being the thing in itself (this may result in an infinitely recursive loop but I don’t think it has to). Thus, most answers to the hard problem state that the problem itself does not truly exist in some way or other - it appears the easiest way to defeat the problem is to assert the problem rests on some kind of fundamental misunderstanding. This may be internally coherent, but I don’t think it’s necessarily strong, as you still have this gap between subject and object (even if the subject is always "mistaken" about itself) which does not seem to be reducible to any physical property.
And, more importantly, if you do away with the subject that knows things knowing evaporates - the grounding of a theory of knowledge is removed, making it at least appear to be self-defeating.
I think the actual answer has to be something that explains reference - the hard problem becomes analogous to the sceptical problem of how we know anything at all. This, for me is not just how we can know that something is true, but even how we can be mistaken, as that, too, entails “aboutness.” I think this is a serious issue for Graziano, as it makes “aboutness” a philosophical problem rather than just the vague and nearly impossible to define “consciousness.” This appears straightforwardly to me to require the positing a way in which reference (“aboutness”) that exists outside of consciousness (or at least “our” consciousness insofar as that can be generalized). I think McDowell (in Mind and World, a very good read) does a good job of laying out this case and is not necessarily antithetical to naturalism. This last bit is important as non-physicalist monisms are not necessarily distinct from naturalism. This would also apply to Russell (at least charitably) in that most of these postions are merely positing that there is a consubstantiality between mind and world and that “consciousness” is itself a thing in some way. This is also why you get, for instance, mathematical realists who posit that the stuff of mathematics is a discovered feature of reality rather than a creative descriptive schema that is on some level contingent and arbitrary in the same way natural language is - which seems to me worth taking seriously, as it raises questions about the observable uniformity of the universe and its functions and features, and their ability to be apprehended and assimilated by thought, which is itself a really interesting philosophical phenomenon. So in a way I see this line of thought as essentially an investigation of, and taking seriously of, the way in which out thought about the world appears to cohere with it in a remarkable way, such that we can gain as much predictive power as we have, which has allowed us to transform out environment in as substaintial ways as we have.
I’d also add that, regarding causal effects, Hume is worth bringing up here as well, as the observation of predictable temporal procession is different from actually observing causation - this is a very fine grained distinction but worth keeping in mind, particularly when dealing with things that we can't even observe directly, and making chains of inferences. I’m not entirely sure what to do with that implication but I think it is important to keep in mind, and leads to a bunch more issues and complications further down the road
with salvia, you too can experience what it is like to be a chair
neutral monism sounds cool. I like it. I like this idea that there's something such as what it feels to be a rock, but that rocks aren't conscious.
When I consider a table, I am conscious on its behalf, and it has will so long as I have will for it
The table is not as such. Even if it was, you couldn't do anything on its "behalf".
Who told you this stuff?
there's the "god of the gaps" that purports to place god in every gap that our current understanding of physics maintains, and then there's the "consciousness of the gaps"...
also, i assume someone is going to raise the argument that "our brains need to have somewhat accurate percepts in order for us to survive" presumes our brains haven't lied to us to trick us into thinking that darwinian evolution (the description of which is a product of human neural networks) is a real thing.
Y'know, I never heard it expressed, but I've believed that for a long time. Well said.
I suspect that consciousness is simply an experience. We sometimes call it a "feeling", but ultimately it is just an experience with a tangible impact on the real world.
For example, I heat some iron, it experiences an input of energy and then expands, eventually melting oxidising etc. Take the heat away and it contracts.
Our consciousness is likely just a combination of processes, evolved to perform a function. This function is the tangible result. Our experience is simply the combination of those processes. It matters not that we understand the process or what we believe about that process as long as our experience (consciousness) does not interfere with the function it has evolved to perform.
Rusellian Monism is a subtly different alternative to pansychism, which I'd love to hear your thoughts on. The idea is that it's hard - perhaps impossible - to explain any subjective experience through objective physicalist descriptions. But the reverse is much, much easier.
Beautiful knit sweater
From lingustics to the consciousness, you've become another one of many people that been spiritually awakened too
Like all God of the Gaps arguments, the trouble with inserting consciousness into the gaps that the Standard Model can't explain, is what happens when we do find explanations that close off the gaps?
There are some hard materialists out there who could really benefit from watching this
i think you'd dig galen strawson's 'stuff, quality, structure: the whole go'
It reminds me of a teaching Alan Watts gave when discussing Chinese philosophy. Things aren’t really things, because our categories for discerning this from that are merely ideas in our brain and have no objective physical reality. Really, the world and the “things” in it are *doings* rather than mere objects or stuff. The closer you look at reality, the more you find that everything is a vibrating system of interconnected vibrating/resonating processes (known as particles & atoms). This observation I think proves that everything is a continuous flow of vibrating interconnected energy
"Consciousness is not the same thing as an elephant" -- I respectfully disagree.
I think, therefore I am an elephant
I'd have a look at "Analytic Idealism In A Nutshell", By Bernardo Kastrup. He does a good job at providing a scientifically sound non-physical ontology
First time tuning into a consciousness video of yours and I'm pleasantly surprised by the clarity of thought you put into this (not as a dig against you; only because the average level of discussion on consciousness on the internet is so terribly poor). The fact that a nonphysical consciousness would have tangible effects on the Standard Model is something Sean Carroll (and I) would agree with, and his typical rejoinder is to ask how they'd modify the Standard Model.
There’s nothing scarier to me than a universe that’s completely subjective. As time goes on I feel more like a vessel that collects and stores data. There doesn’t seem to be a distinction between consciousness and psychics to me.
TY Simon
I like to imagine domains that are inaccessible to science. I have a thought experiment which is related to the China brain and to these inaccessible domains. imagine that our reality is actually like one of those duck-rabbit illusions in that you can look at our reality and see life on planet Earth orbiting the sun (etc.) and that this is not the only reality that could manifest from this configuration; if our world is the rabbit world, perhaps there's a duck world made in some sense of all of the same stuff, but presenting much differently, with even consciousness manifesting differently. this is untestable and uncomfirmable, but it's also undeniable. or, imagine that there's actually some consciousness and associated that arises from other networks in our world: the human collective consciousness is one common example, but what about arbitrary arrangements of rocks, schools of fish, or groves of trees? it's absolutely possible that a tree, like a neuron, might not be conscious, but that a forest could be. and what about consciousness taking place over much slower or faster time scales? the earth is old - what if there's some neuron-like activity to be observed in collections of terrestrial objects, but only at geologic time scales, rather than human time scales? consciousness could be everywhere and we might never know.
If you have ever watched the progression of dementia you would understand that what "we" are is an emergent stream of conscience.
It's a perception of continuance.
Consciousness is a human created matter. All sentient beings reach towards comfort and pleasure. It is we who make it about us.
Aldous Huxley was into panpsychism
Fantastic video as always, lots to think about! 💜 I'm an idealist so I'm especially interested in this subject, and I feel you might be interested in monist idealism as well. It's closely related to your discussion, and I'd particularly recommend checking out some work by Dr. Bernardo Kastrup who has plenty of books and a wide TH-cam presence.
To quote Marx, who I think was quoting Hegel “Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.” and I think that this is the main issue when discussing consciousness. We're looking for one thing, I don't think it is one thing, I don't think its a building block. Consciousness is probably a large relational network of different things.
Infinity=the present=consciousness=truth=3rd dimension
They're all one and the same thing
Great. I get it. Makes sense. Just one question, why IS there an elephant?
I think a lot of this hinges on the definition of "physical". I really do experience the color blue. If the experience of the color blue is not a part of the "physical" description of my brain, then this conscious experience in nonphysical. If you say that this percept is within the realm of the physical, then you would basically be saying "when these neurons fire, this firing is what the perception of blue is." And that means that the intimate perception of blue is one perspective on the same information you would get from a neuronal circuit map. I personally think this perspective is different enough from the map that it warrants a different "category", but these categories are of course very related - like the man said, the existence of consciousness does physically affect our actions.
The reason consciousness is not like an elephant is that it is primary. It comes before the laws and mechanisms of interaction. The idea of something being physical or something being a mechanism is a judgement inside your mind. So to use this to explain away your experience as mechanism is like confusing the map for the territory. It is like seeing a mountain and then pointing at your map where this mountain is not mapped and saying there is no mountain there. The world can never BE the map because then it would stop being a map and just be the world again. But the map clearly is not the world because you use the map as a tool to navigate something else.
A computer could use the same line of reasoning to decide that its operating system is "primary" and that the operating system therefore creates its hardware and backend code. Would it be correct?
@creditmetory When we see a red object pass before our eyes we can understand that we have categories like 'red' and 'object' that are evoked by physical processes inside us. This is as far as a computer will go and see no contradiction. Because having categories itself is not the problem but the experience of them. If the operating system did see a contradiction like a human, it would be valid to see the thing it derives its model of the world from as primary and the model that is incapable of reproducing its inner state as a flawed secondary.
It may be primary at the epistemic level, but not necessarily at the ontological level. You’re assuming that it’s primary at both levels, which physicalists would simply deny.
@bourbon2242 I am saying that if by using a tool you construct something that convinces you the tool does not exist, you made a mistake.
@@Multirightguy That analogy doesn’t really work, since a tool is recognised as having an ontological reality, whereas the ontological reality of consciousness is what’s being debated to begin with.
Neutral monism does not necessarily entail panpsychism. By the usual definitions neutral monists can still have objects or collections of objects which have no mental properties whereas panpsychists believe mental properties are present at every level of physical objects.
I assumed this, but it makes the idea feel like it could just be reduced to a generic emergentism about consciousness. How is it not redundant?
@didack1419 We're deep in the categories and sub categories here. Merely stating that consciousness emerges is not granular enough for the discussion at play. Neutral Monist theories can be emergent in addition to the structuralism about physics and realism about conscious experience alluded to within this video. But emergentism of course does not require structuralism or that kind of realism about conscious experience.
I'm not conscious, and I'm glad about that. It sounds exhausting.
Are you familiar with Michael Levine and the notion that memory is itself 'intelligent' with agency?
These consciousness videos are so far above my education level and general understanding, but I love learning about it. Thank you for putting it out there for us in plain speaking that the common man like me can understand
In the relational model of physics, You describe the standard model as only caring about particles relations, not what they are in themselves. You then provide an example of a potential question that would be of the particle in themselves, that is what is the colour of it. But how is that not just another relational question? why cant the equations describing its movement be a question of the same sort? Sure you can experience the colour of a thing, but you can also experience its movement
Your problem here with it is something that I agree with here, yet this sort of argument never seems to convince anyone that thinks the hard problem of consciousness is actually a problem
Nice job, Simon! The "hard problem of consciousness" seems in some ways equivalent to the "god of the gaps" approach to rescuing god(s) from a general improvement in our understanding of the universe we are part of. Dualists, deists, and other adherents and proponents of a "man-centric" universe have not come to grips with the Copernican revolution, are in denial about Darwin, and usually disdain (or try to pervert?) the painstaking labour of objective examination of the world and the universe that we are an intrinsic component of, because with each advance in our understanding so far we loose more and more of our sense of centrality and necessity in the universe's continued existence. It's hard to be the smartest fleck of dust in a shady corner of the cave...
The elephant analogy isn’t quite right because it is not possible to be mistaken about the fact that we experience anything at all. This is categorically different from the claim that I experience one thing compared to another, as in the elephant case. To explain the elephant case, it’s fine to point to a neural circuit firing awry *as long as you start from the assumption that, in general, neural circuits are capable of generating experiences*. And while this latter assumption is helpful in the elephant case, it is exactly what is in question for the case of experience in general.
This is not “I think, therefore I am,” although it follows a similar pattern. It’s more like “I perceive, therefore something is perceivable.” I could be wrong about *what* I perceive, but not *the fact that* I perceive. Similar to your stance on Descartes’ argument: it is indeed necessary *that* I am, although *what* I am is up for debate. You may point to a neural circuit that determines why I think I am a human rather than an elephant, but no neural circuit will explain away the fact that I exist.
True, kind of. But missing the crucial point.
Functionalism easily, in my mind, deals with all of that beautifully. If you are the one seeing the elephant: what we need to explain is not just the elephant representation in your brain - but the accompanying information processing that makes you say all the things you said in your comment. We need to explain why and how, when neurons represents an elephant, other neurons begin generating the language and other behaviour that makes you say - I might see an elephant, that might not be real, but at least something is happening here, I am really conscious!
In other words, we need to explain the cognition that integrates beliefs about what experience is, and generates your responses. We need to explain how those beliefs are constituted. What do you mean by "experience"? How, mechanically, is the response "the fact that it's like anything at all to be me" generated? We need to explain how your brain models reality. By starting with macroscopic behaviour - how you move your body parts, mouth, vocal cords and fingers included, and then looking at the microsopic behaviour - your neurons etc. and looking at the computations being made, then we get to understand how YOU create your consciousness, with all the beliefs, the stuff that you call experience, and so on.
It's counter-intuitive, but basically, you have to accept this, or else you have to commit to the laws of physics not holding true in brains.
None of this is to dismiss the reality of subjective experience. Just the illusory "hard problem", which in reality, is one of the easy problems (which are hard)
@@youflubber I don't think this is right at all. I'll point out this sentence of yours that I think is exactly the problem. You say the following:
"We need to explain why and how, when neurons represents an elephant, other neurons begin generating the language and other behaviour that makes you say - I might see an elephant, that might not be real, but at least something is happening here, I am really conscious!"
In other words, we don't need to explain why people *truly* experience things, but rather why people *say* they experience things. This would only be an acceptable shift of frame if you believed, for example, that people don't truly experience things, or that what it is to experience something is just to say that you experience it. I don't believe either of those - I'm not a behaviorist, and few people are anymore.
Moreover, it's really not about the laws of physics: epiphenomenalism or aspect dualism may be true, in which cases nothing about physics needs to change.
@TheMerlinMan357 I'm not saying we're done just by looking at behaviour. But behaviour is the portal in which we can begin to make sense of how we model ourselves. We work downward. By doing this, we get to understand what experience is.
Epiphenomenonalism and aspect dualism gets right at it. There, consciousness has no causal power. It's this exact world. Philosophy of mind is identical if that's true. So, if anti-physicalist arguments can be accounted for by physics, then why would I believe them? If you say "because of subjective experience" you're missing my point.
Furthermore, I've never heard anything other than physicalism actually propose what consciousness is. It seems to me all the other theories just pose consciousness as out there or an additional property or fundamental, just postponing the problem
@@youflubber Because of subjective experience
@@TheMerlinMan357 what precisely is this a reply to?
Let me ask - do you think subjective experience is a kind of object? Like a mental object? Observed by a mental subject?
I'm not questioning the realness of subjective experience. I'm questioning the "just knowing" that subjective experience is non-physical.
That is interesting.
While I admit I have not read Graziano, based on your explanation, I think he may be mixing up consciousness with self-consciousness, which is a distinction that many philosophers (in the tradition of Hegel particularly) have made. When we objectify ourselves and our own subjective experience, we put ourselves in relation to it, as if it were a thing that could be studied relationally, like atoms or apples. But this doesn’t mean that this objectified consciousness is fundamentally the same as consciousness itself - it may just be a surface, in the way that we only ever know the surfaces of atoms, etc., and not their true selves. In other words, our knowledge of ourselves is always mediated, not immediate.
I’m not entirely sure I understand your suggestion that the qualitative aspect of something must have relational/behavioural effects in order to be compatible with physical models. If knowing something relationally means always knowing the surface of a thing (or the surfaces of its constituent parts), and the concept of a surface implies that there is something beyond (or beneath) that surface, then it would seem impossible to say that physical models of a thing necessarily exhaust all that that thing is. So the inability of an object’s existence in and for itself to be taken into account in physicalist explanation of its relations to other things doesn’t strike me as a particularly convincing explanation of its metaphysical impossibility.
I found your elephant in the room analogy to be unconvincing, because it already assumes that consciousness is the kind of thing that can be proven to be illusory. But assuming this implies that consciousness the kind of thing whose existence is necessarily exhausted by its relational/behavioral (and thus externally observable) qualities. And so this is begging the question, because it is precisely the ontological status of consciousness that this discussion is attempting to clarify.
If you'll permit me to speculate for a moment, it seems like your objections to non-physicalist accounts of consciousness turn on the idea that, because consciousness cannot be positively provable, in the sense that physical phenomena are, this must mean that arguments for the reality of consciousness must rest essentially on appeals to subjective feeling - i.e. “but I feel that I am conscious." But I think this may be missing the more substantive point of many of these non-physicalist accounts, which is not to prove consciousness’ existence per se, but instead to cast doubt on the assumption that, were consciousness to be a thing that exists, that it must necessarily be fully exhausted by its relational/observable qualities.
I'd be interested to know what you think about all this. But in any case, thanks for your interesting talk!
If a consciousness is attached to a system of interacting physical entities (like a brain), then what is the limit on which ones? Our minds are a ship of theseus of atoms and particles, so does that mean all atoms that interact with my brain are involved? Technically every particle in the universe interacts with every other, so where is the line drawn? Any self-contained system of matter that processes input and reacts to it?
Our minds are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Your computer's processor is made of protons neutrons and electrons and interacts with its surroundings based on inputs it receives, just as we do. Who is to say that a machine does not have consciousness if consciousness can be extended to all entities which take in input and are capable of digesting information.
We consider animals to be conscious, perhaps with a different scope of experience, but still conscious. Where is the limit drawn? Does a cat have consciousness? A mouse? An ant? An aphid? A germ? Is the line just "any multicellular life?" Does it even have to be alive? If we entertain the idea that single-celled life has a consciousness too, then what about non-biological systems with similar complexity? What makes a biological set of molecules different from another set, as the atoms can just be rearranged anyways.
What's the difference between a quality and a property?
I can't tell whether I am a brain or a computer programme or a cyclops's dream. But whatever it is, it IS.
Perhaps the chief problem with "I think therefore I am.' is that we simply lack the word to say what we actually mean. Maybe "I am who am" does come closer. Besides, both are translations into English, so just what was the originally intended meaning of "I am who am"?
I prefer “consciousness observes consciousness.” it leaves out concern over the “I am” which leads into a discussion of psychology has to be dealt with on individual level. Saying simply the consciousness observed consciousness is universal. What do you think?
@@adrianmole4389 both? Are you referring to the Bible with "I am who am"? I don't know that quote from anywhere else.
I mean, 'cogito' really means "to think", and the other really is just the Hebrew copula.
@@adrianmole4389 where is "I am who am" from? I only know that quote from the Bible.
"Cogito" really means "to think" and the other is really just the Hebrew copula.
@@adrianmole4389 where is "I am who am" from? I only know it from the Bible.
'Cogito' does mean 'to think' and the other really is the Hebrew word for "to be".
regarding isolating the circuitry generating the elephant, is this not a matter of scale? at another level, we've already isolated that the brain is the primary seat of consciousness, and at a higher level, the whole human mind-body is the circuit. these answers are clearly unsatisfying, and so I agree that it would be similarly dissatisfying the isolate the Graziano circuit.
In the elephant analogy you're missing the entire point. Explaining the cause of the experience does not explain what the experience itself is. A cause of something is not the thing itself.
Have we accepted Abiogenesis yet? Life from non-life is a bit magical, like mind from matter.
hi simon :3
The particles you're talking about aren't exactly fundamental to the currently accepted views in physics, but the more fundamental stuff is weird enough that you can't really describe it as "smaller", and it doesn't affect your main point anyway
Not everything is conscious - but 'everything' forms a gestalt consciousness. We live in a thing.
Surprised nobody's really figured this out already. Obviously, folks like Spinoza and Teilhard de Chardin covered aspects of it and others also. But it's really obvious we live in a big cell (well, big to us)
A tangential topic: One of the things that irritates me about psychology is how there is so much skepticism surrounding severe dissociative disorders, where one person's entire sense of self is fragmented into multiple parts. Consciousness is stratified and compartmentalized. There is no "I" in a classic sense. There is no specific self.
The undue skepticism hinders progress because I think severe disorders of consciousness and self are precisely what we need to study in order to unlock new insights into what conscious is, and is not.
Is it ‘consciousness’ that’s disordered? What do you mean by psychological skepticism? Serious questions.
@christopherhamilton3621 For some context, very young humans can be roughly thought of as having fragmented personalities. As our brains develop, these parts of our self fuse to become a single person with different moods and different sides to that self (e.g. ego states, code switching). One self perceiving the world. One perceived consciousness.
But when severe trauma interferes with healthy brain development, it disrupts this process. And at the extreme end of outcomes can create separate consciousnesses within a single mind. To the point where there is complete and total amnesia between these "parts". Discontinuity of experience prevents the experiences of one "part" from bleeding into another "part" (in the most extreme presentations of this disorder). Therefore, each part has different life experiences even though it is a single body experiencing it. This means can result in starkly differing worldviews, and even health problems that are specific to only one part.
It is wild how the human mind survives.
Extreme disorders of dissociation are defined in both the US and European diagnostic manuals yet there are quite a few psychologists who refuse to believe the extreme manifestations are real, because they can't comprehend it. This results in real harm to patients who've developed such disorders.
The problem is that physicalism can't account for the illusion of consciousness either. Or, in other words, unlike elephants, consciousness does in fact exist by virtue of the very fact that an illusion of it exists. Non-conscious objects can't have illusory experiences any more than they can have veridical ones. If you can explain how an illusion of consciousness, or some rudimentary minimal form of consciousness, or anything else that's actually experienced by anyone in an manner, can come about, you've solved the hard problem. You can't.
Yes, behavior and relations. The fact that human capabilities and efforts are not yet up to the task of adequately understanding some parts of nature is no good reason to resort to traditional metaphysical "explanations." Those that make the (Cartesian) subject/object distinction might assess what American pragmatist philosophers have written about it.
I mean, what is anything anyway?
If life didn't exist there'd be nothing to observe anything, there'd be no reason for anything, and therefore nothing would exist.
If you traveled at light speed, no universe would exist: you wouldn't even experience yourself since the signals between your neurons wouldn't be able to catch up. You'd be frozen until a gravitational pull slowed you down - you'd be dead, until you weren't, as if you went asleep and woke up. And by then who knows how much time had passed. A million years, a googol?
The fact that something exists at all is a paradox in itself, because what else would there be if there was nothing?
The universe is something that happens naturally to make nothing exist.
In that sense i believe that consciousness exists only as a result of complexity: a shared effect that occurs to all living beings like the existence of a hole in a piece of paper; it is there, but contains nothing, as it is the result of the paper around it, and not a thing in and of itself.
Therefore I think our minds and our bodies are unique experiences to us, while being concious and alive is not: thus we are all one and the same; essentially immortal, without knowing it, since each time we die we hit the reset button.
Consciousness is the hole in the paper, the thing that is because of the sum of other things. We can die, but cannot cease to be.
I don't know what happened before my birth, nor will I know what happens after my death.
All I know is that I know what it means to not exist because I know what it is to be alive. And that is the paradox of life.
I wonder what you think about the work Michael Levin is doing, relating to biology and intelligence
Perhaps the person has the ability to detect dark matter elephants.
Let me try to understand:
In this physicalist view, our consciousness is the "subjective" side of the physical reality of the brain's neurological activity. It's not an illusion or a trick: It just so happens that physical objects really do have a property of "subjectivity" and therefore every object is technically conscious (but, due to lacking the integrated information system that exists within the brain, most object's subjective experiences are basically devoid of content); thus, it is a panpsychist view. Is this an accurate summary of the perspective you're outlining here?
Does anyone know the email to send Simon a question?
It is
So because we can talk about our own consciousness and process information about it with our brains mechanistically, are you saying that should imply that the thing we are talking about doesn't have a qualitative aspect? What makes us unique is that we can communicate about "what it is like to be us" but that doesn't rule out that our consciousness itself might not be exactly the experience of "what it's like to be my neural activity". The chair simply doesn't have the cognition to do that part. So I think I see what you're getting at, but I don't see why it makes it unlikely that there is also a purely subjective, experiential aspect to being a conscious being.
Then I wonder if this suggests that there really is no such thing as qualities at all. If at the most fundamental level, the subatomic particles don't have actual qualities, but rather just behaviors, is everything just behaviors and anything outside of that is illusion, something we are projecting onto the behaviors we observe? It does seem kind of silly to ask the question of "what it is like to be a chair" after all.
th-cam.com/video/0FUFewGHLLg/w-d-xo.html
3:45 "a particle is a physical
thing." not so fast Mojo Jojo. I'm not a physical reductionist; I believe that there's some inexplicable magic going on which makes consciousness irreducible and I would never deny free will as an illusion of a deterministic universe; I do not believe that the universe is deterministic. however, I've got to challenge you on this. we think of ourselves as physical, and yet we discovered that atoms and molecules are quite a lot of empty space. so what's physical? and what's so physical as thing get smaller and smaller? marbles are physical at our level, but at another level they're a whole lot of empty space. subatomic particles are certainly not purely marble-like, as the double slit experiment shows. I understand the intuition behind thinking of ourselves, atomic, and subatomic particles as physical, but this is an assumption. and perhaps it's an assumption that creates a false dichotomy between the intuitively physical (body) and intuitively non-physical. I don't know. I feel ill-equipped and uninclined to continue to explore this question, but I have a feeling it's worth exploring, even if the conclusion is still "I don't know".
Lots of things to unpack here. It needs a lot more thought than I can give right now. A few random thoughts, though: do not dismiss solipsism so lightly; consciousness might live beyond the capability of our limited brain capacity and, therefore will always be out of reach; remember that Descartes was trying to prove the existence of God. My recently late mum had an unusual form of tinnitus that convinced her she could hear music (in reality she was extremely hard of hearing in her latter years) and no matter how often we told her that there was no music, she was convinced there was. How can we know that non-humans (or even other humans) experience consciousness?
My own personal view is that we will never solve the hard problem. Nor, in my lifetime, will we reconcile General Relativity with quantum theory. Perhaps consciousness is fundamental and everything else derivative. Who knows? And who can know?