The Argument from Psychophysical Harmony w/ Dustin Crummett th-cam.com/video/auahudU1C08/w-d-xo.html Psychophysical Harmony, Physicalism, & God w/ Brian Cutter th-cam.com/video/QHh9SwATLBM/w-d-xo.html Capturing Christianity - Psychophysical Harmony th-cam.com/users/live9b_OliHxaAs?feature=share My Devil’s Advocate Defense th-cam.com/video/qzV3E5NcDTA/w-d-xo.html Theism or Panpsychism: Goff vs. Cutter - The Analytic Christian th-cam.com/users/liveK8T3muAKEw8?feature=share The Nature of the Cosmic Mind - Josh Rasmussen & Philip Goff th-cam.com/users/liveoQLsYCy4joQ?feature=share
Hi! What do you think of the detailed "Nature"-praised (!) debunking of the resurrection of Jesus, called "The Gospel of Afranius", that recently came out in English?
I'm honestly with Emerson. I think psychophysical harmony is a great observation and definitely something that I think will help us narrow down what consciousness could be and how it relates to the brain. But rather than just say "this is only possible if a God created special rules to make this alignment happen," I feel like we could use this observation to eliminate or modify other models of consciousness. It just seems like making a defense of Theism isn't the most natural route to take with this knowledge.
I think the point is that it would be more plausible given theism, but, like Goff was saying, you could opt for something along the liens of what Nagel was toying with in "Mind and Cosmos." That is, that baked into the universe itself is some rationale and purpose to things, some naturalistic teleology. I think you could hold this notion of a purposeful universe and still be an atheist. You would just need to treat such teleogology as a basic fact of the universe like the physical laws, space-time, etc. The theist could rebut and make the case that such a "baked-in" type of purposefulness and rationale to an otherwise unthinking material universe, seems like it would have to be dependent on some conscious intelligence to impart such meaning. The atheist would need to argue that rationality, purpose, teleogoly, can be the product of a purely naturalistic unintelligent universe.
@@gor764 You've already concluded from the observation of psychophysical harmony that the universe must be oriented towards some sort of goal and that we should now be discussing theism vs atheism with that base assumption. But I don't think that conclusion from the pph observation is necessarily warranted. We don't know nearly enough about consciousness and how it interacts with the brain to say what's possible or impossible; again, I think pph is a great observation that'll help provide a piece of the consciousness puzzle, and I'm fine if somebody wants to add it to their cumulative case for their worldview if seems very compatible, but I just don't think the pph observation warrants jumping into arguments about theism vs atheism at this point. Personally I've always been theistically inclined. But I like theories that support the universe being designed in more simplistic ways rather than complex, multi-layered ways that require a lot of constant intervention/changes by a God.
@@josephtnied I think PPH might show that, like Goff states, conscious organisms have some macroscopic top-down rational causation, that the physical world can beget rational agents. I think it can at least get us to think about the nature of matter, and how we may need to revise our understanding of its potencies.
What people are misunderstanding is that any basical evolutionary explanation for psycho physical harmony presumes that the mental is acting prior to the physical. That is, if you say that the reason fire always hurts is because the ancestors that survived were the ones that had the private conscious experience of fire hurting and therefore avoided it. But saying this presumes that that the mental experience of fire hurting somehow determines the material reaction to avoid it. But if matter is doing all the work, then the mental shouldn't be causally determining it, and it's arbitrary as to what the mental state is, the material state should just always behave the same regardless of the mental.
I'm admittedly being lazy and should probably just go read the paper, but I'm gonna bother you to see if you can set me straight and save me some time. If an evolutionary story extends back beyond organisms with meaningful mental lives, like single celled organisms for example, it doesn't seem like there's a harmony problem to solve at that level. You really could have a total teleological disjunction there and a selection process that weeds out misaligned organisms without ever invoking the mental. If the mental is emergent from systems that have been teleologically aligned prior to the mental why is it so unexpected?
I just don't understand this. We can embrace natural selection and also reject epiphenominalism. On such a view, matter does not do all the work. The mental is causal. Epiphenominalism is terrible. So what though? There are lots of other available theories of consciousness many of which are compatible with both natural selection and rejecting epiphenominalism. If an organism evolved so that, mentally, it loved to go into fire, it would not have reproduced. So of course we don't see creatures that love to burn themselves to death - - any such beings extincted themselves. Why isn't simple natural selection plus rejection of epiphenominalism enough to explain psychophysical harmony? Contra to the panelists here, I don't see why you need a motivation towards harmony - - things can flow haphazardly and only the things that work survive.
@@gor764 Just to make sure I'm clear about how I'm using words: I don't think 'evolution' does anything. It's a word that describes a set of related processes. The misaligned get selected out because they are misaligned. They happen to lack teleological alignment and behave in ways that cause them to die. The ones that happen to be aligned persist.
@@23Hiya But then you would have to admit that the purely mental states do play a causative role on the physical states of avoidance. The mental experience of pain causes the physical state of avoiding that experience. On a normal materialistic or epiphenomenal view of consciousnesses, there should be no causative role that the mental plays, but rather it's merely the material states doing all the work and mental states are emergent or illusory, so it shouldn't matter what the mental state is at all, it need not consistently map with the material state. It would be akin to you playing a video game and using what you assume to be a disconnected broken controller. There should be no causal connection between the two, but you notice all the controller inputs begin to match perfectly with the character in the game "X jumps, Circle dodges, Triangle emotes, etc." You might begin to suspect that your presumably broken controller is playing some causal role.
It could be that the greatest challenge to any form of Idealism has is the Necessitation of the appearance of a physical world that is undergoing Change. Time has to be explained!
It could be that "evidence for theism" is seem in the fact that we can not be in a Solipsistic state, unless we actually are "God", but maybe we are bringing in another question: How is it that there seem to exist Many things, not just One thing. We have to account for pluralities of minds with conscious experience.
Isn't this kind of only a good explanation if you have a prima facie reason to think that our experience of the world is valuable? But you could imagine that our experiences were completely disharmonious but we valued those experiences.
I still can't wrap my mind around why natural selection doesn't explain the harmony. The organisms we see today are going to be those whose mental states match up with their physical states because it's more adaptive than the alternative. For example, organisms with disharmonious pain/pleasure would be less likely to avoid danger or pursue food or reproductive opportunities so would be less likely to propagate or survive, and so we wouldn't see such organisms today after billions of years of natural selection in this manner. Why did a god have to create this harmony?
This is just a misunderstanding of the problem - as Philip Goff says here, you are presupposing the answer. You're answering the "easy problem" of psychophysical harmony but not the "hard problem." In your example, an organism that avoids valuable things and is drawn towards harmful things is irrelevant to the psychophysical harmony problem. You're framing the problem as one between value (something good for you) and behavior (what you take physical actions towards). The ACTUAL problem is between mental states (what feels good or bad) and behavior (what you go towards or away from). Like most people who have missed this problem, you're just taking that correlation for granted on its own when in fact it is not necessary whatsoever. The organism is a machine - it will do what it needs to in order to survive, as per natural selection. So why couldn't there be a consciousness inside feeling tortured all the while? Behavior doesn't change, value doesn't change, evolution is unaffected - but life just sucks and makes no sense and feels consistently backwards and irrational from the inside. Similar possibilities are what Dustin offers - why not just white noise? Why does our conscious experience need to match up in ANY way to things that will benefit us?
@@henrykramer365 This is nonsense. The mental state is what motivates the adaptive behavior. Why would an organism have adaptive behavior that causes them a subjectively tortious experience? The answer is it wouldn't because it wouldn't survive. These Chalmers style hypotheticals are meaningless because of their impossibility.
@@hiker-uy1bi You're making it sound so obvious that conscious experience is an absolutely necessary element of behavior and fitness in conscious organisms - that without it, we wouldn't act. But even emergentists acknowledge this is superfluous, the body can act like any machine can act to do what it needs to do. Why our conscious experience correlates with what the machine values is not obvious and not necessary, unless you have an a priori belief in libertarian free will which is incredibly hard to defend and is ultimately superstitious.
@@henrykramer365 So, again, nothing you've stated explains why this "harmony" can't be explained by natural selection. Why do our subjective taste receptors line up favorably with our consumption of fat, salt, and sugar? Why does sex feel good? Why does it hurt to experience bodily damage? The answers to these questions is so ridiculously obvious in light of modern evolutionary biology that I'm flabbergasted this paper got published. Philosophy isn't a very rigorous field.
@@hiker-uy1bi Alright, let me ask you a question. Do you think it is theoretically possible that a biological organism can engage in all of the same behaviors whether conscious or not conscious? Do you believe there are any biological machines that make choices (pursue mates, seek food) that could be NOT conscious? If you do, then you've just undercut your own argument and shown subjective experience to be completely unnecessary. If subjective experience is unnecessary, then even if it exists, it is still not necessary that its existence is harmonious with behavior. Again, if you think the answer to why sex feels good is obvious, you're missing the point. Sex could feel like nothing and it would still happen. It could feel like torture and the organism would still reproduce, because again, behavior is biological not dictated by some magical consciousness. "Feeling" is unnecessary. You're falling back on the intuition that our subjective desires can change what our body does. They don't. They don't matter, they make no impact. Hormones, neurotransmitters, chemical reactions, etc are what determine actions. Not feelings or desires.
Around the 1:30 mark Dustin argued for the idea that most possible forms of laws wouldn't generate anything interesting even with the right constants filled in. One point here: there's no obvious reason that the laws of physics should be uniform across space and across time, as they in fact seem to be. It seems like there's a higher prior probability that the we would just have a chaotic, incomprehensible universe with the behavior of things varying unpredictably from minute to minute and place to place. Arguments from induction would be useless in such a universe. Arguably, it's lucky for the limited god that they got nice uniform laws rather than being stuck with random chaos like that.
Don’t mind my lack of physics knowledge but how could the laws of physics then result in matter and the universe we know now if they aren’t uniform throughout the universe? Then by definition they are not brute/necessary and are contingent.
Phillip seems like he's taken a sort of Nagelian stance which is sort of a variant on Aristotelianism--that value, rationality, meaning are baked into the physical world, and any sort of physical reductionism to explain these things betrays the reality that is irreducibly there, in the same way thag you can't understand the compendium of Shakespeare's work by analyzing the chemical constituents of its ink or the atomic structure of its paper fiber. Would love for Phillip and/or Dustin to talk with Edward Feser, a current Thomistic Aristotelian philosopher. He introduced me to the philosophy of mind and has written on Goff's work before.
Nagel's sort of view is immanent/intrinsic teleology rather than extrinsic teleology/external designer. As a form of naturalism is quite challenging to theism.
@@anteodedi8937 It's basically a return to some sort of Aristotelian view of nature, that metaphysical value is immanent to the world but doesn't seemingly need an ultimate designer to ground this value.
I wonder how much Goff knows about Thomists because one counter they would bring up to his limited God narrative is that suggests God isn't a pure act. That he would have parts that are unactualized. That would put God subject to change.
Philip attributes rudimentary feelings, desires, knowledge to particles... Each particle is a conscious homunculus. A reductio ad absurdum, if I've ever seen one. Now all we need to explain the "hard particle problem", how each particle has these cognitive abilities and conciouss experiences.
That's an issue I always intuited with panpsychism. That and the unity problem--how do trillions of separate and distinct consciousnesses coalesce into seemingly one unified consciousness? You would be better off to entertain some sort of Aristotelian prime matter, where matter in itself has the potential to bring about a macro level consciousness if given the right form. I actually think Goff was getting at something similar to that in this discussion.
@@hiker-uy1bi Both Goff and Nagel seems like they're soft deists in a sense, seeing mind and teleological principles as something fundamental and logically prior to the organization of reality.
@@gor764 I still can't wrap my mind around why natural selection doesn't explain the harmony though. The organisms we see today are going to be those whose mental states match up with their physical states because it's more adaptive than the alternative. For example, organisms with disharmonious pain/pleasure would be less likely to avoid danger or pursue food or reproductive opportunities so would be less likely to propagate or survive, and so we wouldn't see such organisms today after billions of years of natural selection in this manner.
@@hiker-uy1bi The argument seems to be an argument against a materialist/epiphenomenalist view of reality. If matter is doing all the work then it shouldn't matter whether or not you feel something akin to pain, pleasure, burning, etc. The billard balls will continue to bang into each other regardless of what's on the TV, if that makes any sense.
The Argument from Psychophysical Harmony w/ Dustin Crummett th-cam.com/video/auahudU1C08/w-d-xo.html
Psychophysical Harmony, Physicalism, & God w/ Brian Cutter th-cam.com/video/QHh9SwATLBM/w-d-xo.html
Capturing Christianity - Psychophysical Harmony th-cam.com/users/live9b_OliHxaAs?feature=share
My Devil’s Advocate Defense th-cam.com/video/qzV3E5NcDTA/w-d-xo.html
Theism or Panpsychism: Goff vs. Cutter - The Analytic Christian th-cam.com/users/liveK8T3muAKEw8?feature=share
The Nature of the Cosmic Mind - Josh Rasmussen & Philip Goff th-cam.com/users/liveoQLsYCy4joQ?feature=share
Hi! What do you think of the detailed "Nature"-praised (!) debunking of the resurrection of Jesus, called "The Gospel of Afranius", that recently came out in English?
I wish you had more subs. You should. This is a great dialogue
Lately I've been enjoying your content a lot. Thanks for what you do, Emerson! God bless.
This is my favourite philosophy channel, I wish more people knew about it
Great discussion with great guests. Love this! Will have to re-watch to try to understand further!
I'm honestly with Emerson. I think psychophysical harmony is a great observation and definitely something that I think will help us narrow down what consciousness could be and how it relates to the brain. But rather than just say "this is only possible if a God created special rules to make this alignment happen," I feel like we could use this observation to eliminate or modify other models of consciousness. It just seems like making a defense of Theism isn't the most natural route to take with this knowledge.
I think the point is that it would be more plausible given theism, but, like Goff was saying, you could opt for something along the liens of what Nagel was toying with in "Mind and Cosmos." That is, that baked into the universe itself is some rationale and purpose to things, some naturalistic teleology. I think you could hold this notion of a purposeful universe and still be an atheist. You would just need to treat such teleogology as a basic fact of the universe like the physical laws, space-time, etc.
The theist could rebut and make the case that such a "baked-in" type of purposefulness and rationale to an otherwise unthinking material universe, seems like it would have to be dependent on some conscious intelligence to impart such meaning. The atheist would need to argue that rationality, purpose, teleogoly, can be the product of a purely naturalistic unintelligent universe.
@@gor764 You've already concluded from the observation of psychophysical harmony that the universe must be oriented towards some sort of goal and that we should now be discussing theism vs atheism with that base assumption. But I don't think that conclusion from the pph observation is necessarily warranted. We don't know nearly enough about consciousness and how it interacts with the brain to say what's possible or impossible; again, I think pph is a great observation that'll help provide a piece of the consciousness puzzle, and I'm fine if somebody wants to add it to their cumulative case for their worldview if seems very compatible, but I just don't think the pph observation warrants jumping into arguments about theism vs atheism at this point.
Personally I've always been theistically inclined. But I like theories that support the universe being designed in more simplistic ways rather than complex, multi-layered ways that require a lot of constant intervention/changes by a God.
@@josephtnied I think PPH might show that, like Goff states, conscious organisms have some macroscopic top-down rational causation, that the physical world can beget rational agents. I think it can at least get us to think about the nature of matter, and how we may need to revise our understanding of its potencies.
Been waiting for this one :)
This was the most interesting video I've watched in a long time. Thx for making this happen.
Great discussion. For some reason Dustin in this video looks like a video game character
lol he does
What people are misunderstanding is that any basical evolutionary explanation for psycho physical harmony presumes that the mental is acting prior to the physical. That is, if you say that the reason fire always hurts is because the ancestors that survived were the ones that had the private conscious experience of fire hurting and therefore avoided it. But saying this presumes that that the mental experience of fire hurting somehow determines the material reaction to avoid it. But if matter is doing all the work, then the mental shouldn't be causally determining it, and it's arbitrary as to what the mental state is, the material state should just always behave the same regardless of the mental.
I'm admittedly being lazy and should probably just go read the paper, but I'm gonna bother you to see if you can set me straight and save me some time. If an evolutionary story extends back beyond organisms with meaningful mental lives, like single celled organisms for example, it doesn't seem like there's a harmony problem to solve at that level. You really could have a total teleological disjunction there and a selection process that weeds out misaligned organisms without ever invoking the mental. If the mental is emergent from systems that have been teleologically aligned prior to the mental why is it so unexpected?
@@23Hiya But why would evolution weed out the misaligned?
I just don't understand this.
We can embrace natural selection and also reject epiphenominalism. On such a view, matter does not do all the work. The mental is causal.
Epiphenominalism is terrible. So what though? There are lots of other available theories of consciousness many of which are compatible with both natural selection and rejecting epiphenominalism.
If an organism evolved so that, mentally, it loved to go into fire, it would not have reproduced. So of course we don't see creatures that love to burn themselves to death - - any such beings extincted themselves. Why isn't simple natural selection plus rejection of epiphenominalism enough to explain psychophysical harmony? Contra to the panelists here, I don't see why you need a motivation towards harmony - - things can flow haphazardly and only the things that work survive.
@@gor764 Just to make sure I'm clear about how I'm using words: I don't think 'evolution' does anything. It's a word that describes a set of related processes. The misaligned get selected out because they are misaligned. They happen to lack teleological alignment and behave in ways that cause them to die. The ones that happen to be aligned persist.
@@23Hiya But then you would have to admit that the purely mental states do play a causative role on the physical states of avoidance. The mental experience of pain causes the physical state of avoiding that experience.
On a normal materialistic or epiphenomenal view of consciousnesses, there should be no causative role that the mental plays, but rather it's merely the material states doing all the work and mental states are emergent or illusory, so it shouldn't matter what the mental state is at all, it need not consistently map with the material state.
It would be akin to you playing a video game and using what you assume to be a disconnected broken controller. There should be no causal connection between the two, but you notice all the controller inputs begin to match perfectly with the character in the game "X jumps, Circle dodges, Triangle emotes, etc." You might begin to suspect that your presumably broken controller is playing some causal role.
It could be that the greatest challenge to any form of Idealism has is the Necessitation of the appearance of a physical world that is undergoing Change. Time has to be explained!
It could be that "evidence for theism" is seem in the fact that we can not be in a Solipsistic state, unless we actually are "God", but maybe we are bringing in another question: How is it that there seem to exist Many things, not just One thing. We have to account for pluralities of minds with conscious experience.
Isn't this kind of only a good explanation if you have a prima facie reason to think that our experience of the world is valuable? But you could imagine that our experiences were completely disharmonious but we valued those experiences.
I still can't wrap my mind around why natural selection doesn't explain the harmony. The organisms we see today are going to be those whose mental states match up with their physical states because it's more adaptive than the alternative. For example, organisms with disharmonious pain/pleasure would be less likely to avoid danger or pursue food or reproductive opportunities so would be less likely to propagate or survive, and so we wouldn't see such organisms today after billions of years of natural selection in this manner. Why did a god have to create this harmony?
This is just a misunderstanding of the problem - as Philip Goff says here, you are presupposing the answer. You're answering the "easy problem" of psychophysical harmony but not the "hard problem."
In your example, an organism that avoids valuable things and is drawn towards harmful things is irrelevant to the psychophysical harmony problem. You're framing the problem as one between value (something good for you) and behavior (what you take physical actions towards). The ACTUAL problem is between mental states (what feels good or bad) and behavior (what you go towards or away from).
Like most people who have missed this problem, you're just taking that correlation for granted on its own when in fact it is not necessary whatsoever. The organism is a machine - it will do what it needs to in order to survive, as per natural selection. So why couldn't there be a consciousness inside feeling tortured all the while? Behavior doesn't change, value doesn't change, evolution is unaffected - but life just sucks and makes no sense and feels consistently backwards and irrational from the inside. Similar possibilities are what Dustin offers - why not just white noise? Why does our conscious experience need to match up in ANY way to things that will benefit us?
@@henrykramer365 This is nonsense. The mental state is what motivates the adaptive behavior. Why would an organism have adaptive behavior that causes them a subjectively tortious experience? The answer is it wouldn't because it wouldn't survive. These Chalmers style hypotheticals are meaningless because of their impossibility.
@@hiker-uy1bi You're making it sound so obvious that conscious experience is an absolutely necessary element of behavior and fitness in conscious organisms - that without it, we wouldn't act. But even emergentists acknowledge this is superfluous, the body can act like any machine can act to do what it needs to do. Why our conscious experience correlates with what the machine values is not obvious and not necessary, unless you have an a priori belief in libertarian free will which is incredibly hard to defend and is ultimately superstitious.
@@henrykramer365 So, again, nothing you've stated explains why this "harmony" can't be explained by natural selection. Why do our subjective taste receptors line up favorably with our consumption of fat, salt, and sugar? Why does sex feel good? Why does it hurt to experience bodily damage? The answers to these questions is so ridiculously obvious in light of modern evolutionary biology that I'm flabbergasted this paper got published. Philosophy isn't a very rigorous field.
@@hiker-uy1bi Alright, let me ask you a question. Do you think it is theoretically possible that a biological organism can engage in all of the same behaviors whether conscious or not conscious? Do you believe there are any biological machines that make choices (pursue mates, seek food) that could be NOT conscious?
If you do, then you've just undercut your own argument and shown subjective experience to be completely unnecessary.
If subjective experience is unnecessary, then even if it exists, it is still not necessary that its existence is harmonious with behavior. Again, if you think the answer to why sex feels good is obvious, you're missing the point. Sex could feel like nothing and it would still happen. It could feel like torture and the organism would still reproduce, because again, behavior is biological not dictated by some magical consciousness. "Feeling" is unnecessary.
You're falling back on the intuition that our subjective desires can change what our body does. They don't. They don't matter, they make no impact. Hormones, neurotransmitters, chemical reactions, etc are what determine actions. Not feelings or desires.
Around the 1:30 mark Dustin argued for the idea that most possible forms of laws wouldn't generate anything interesting even with the right constants filled in. One point here: there's no obvious reason that the laws of physics should be uniform across space and across time, as they in fact seem to be. It seems like there's a higher prior probability that the we would just have a chaotic, incomprehensible universe with the behavior of things varying unpredictably from minute to minute and place to place. Arguments from induction would be useless in such a universe. Arguably, it's lucky for the limited god that they got nice uniform laws rather than being stuck with random chaos like that.
Don’t mind my lack of physics knowledge but how could the laws of physics then result in matter and the universe we know now if they aren’t uniform throughout the universe? Then by definition they are not brute/necessary and are contingent.
Phillip seems like he's taken a sort of Nagelian stance which is sort of a variant on Aristotelianism--that value, rationality, meaning are baked into the physical world, and any sort of physical reductionism to explain these things betrays the reality that is irreducibly there, in the same way thag you can't understand the compendium of Shakespeare's work by analyzing the chemical constituents of its ink or the atomic structure of its paper fiber.
Would love for Phillip and/or Dustin to talk with Edward Feser, a current Thomistic Aristotelian philosopher. He introduced me to the philosophy of mind and has written on Goff's work before.
Feser has responded to Goff on his blog and Goff replied.
Nagel's sort of view is immanent/intrinsic teleology rather than extrinsic teleology/external designer. As a form of naturalism is quite challenging to theism.
@@anteodedi8937 It's basically a return to some sort of Aristotelian view of nature, that metaphysical value is immanent to the world but doesn't seemingly need an ultimate designer to ground this value.
I wonder how much Goff knows about Thomists because one counter they would bring up to his limited God narrative is that suggests God isn't a pure act. That he would have parts that are unactualized. That would put God subject to change.
is there a discord server for this?
Philip attributes rudimentary feelings, desires, knowledge to particles... Each particle is a conscious homunculus. A reductio ad absurdum, if I've ever seen one. Now all we need to explain the "hard particle problem", how each particle has these cognitive abilities and conciouss experiences.
That's an issue I always intuited with panpsychism. That and the unity problem--how do trillions of separate and distinct consciousnesses coalesce into seemingly one unified consciousness? You would be better off to entertain some sort of Aristotelian prime matter, where matter in itself has the potential to bring about a macro level consciousness if given the right form. I actually think Goff was getting at something similar to that in this discussion.
@@gor764 With this in mind, it would seem that panpsychism is no more probable (maybe less) than simply attributing the harmony to theism.
@@hiker-uy1bi Both Goff and Nagel seems like they're soft deists in a sense, seeing mind and teleological principles as something fundamental and logically prior to the organization of reality.
@@gor764 I still can't wrap my mind around why natural selection doesn't explain the harmony though. The organisms we see today are going to be those whose mental states match up with their physical states because it's more adaptive than the alternative. For example, organisms with disharmonious pain/pleasure would be less likely to avoid danger or pursue food or reproductive opportunities so would be less likely to propagate or survive, and so we wouldn't see such organisms today after billions of years of natural selection in this manner.
@@hiker-uy1bi The argument seems to be an argument against a materialist/epiphenomenalist view of reality. If matter is doing all the work then it shouldn't matter whether or not you feel something akin to pain, pleasure, burning, etc. The billard balls will continue to bang into each other regardless of what's on the TV, if that makes any sense.
Dang I missed this video.