I'm saddened by some of the comments that were recorded in the synchronous viewer chat beside the video. Mind Chat is all about communication between people who have different views but are committed to the search for truth.
Excellent conversation Keith!! To put it succinctly why do brains generate alpha waves and gamma waves,? Those may be what philosophers call epiphenomenonal, but they are telling me something else in terms of how we generate experience. I think you need to get an engineer in on one of these discussions...I'm game!
I do understand your frustrations. Yet it's what it is. It's all over the spectrum. If you are different whether due to a different religious belief, sex, skin color ideas.... It doesn't matter. People believe that you are to be ridiculed. But that's the ignorance that comes from people who don't have a clue how new discoveries come into being.
Philip's crucial mistake is dialectical, he doesn't listen to others. You can see this by how he paraphrases their arguments, he mischaracterizes and exceedingly strips them of their force and nuance by making them short slogans.
@@JackPullen-Paradox No. Sean actually KNOWS the physics, so he is the one that shows the lack of reality in the opposers arguments. He made the awesomely powerful point, that, in order for this "strong emergence" or "universal consciousness" to be true, the whole core of physics would have to be changed or overturned. And people forget that those core principles aren't just come up with in a vacuum. They make FULFILLED predictions. So unless ALL the predictions are somehow flukes... 😁☮️☮️
No not really, or at least exceedingly less than Phillip does. I mean you can hear the franticness of his voice, his desperate grasping at straws. Sean is calm, patient, and collected. @@JackPullen-Paradox
Given that Phillip's position is heavily dependent on his acceptance of Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument (aka 'Mary the Neuroscientist', 'Mary's Room'...), I would like to point out that Paul Churchland gave what I regard as the definitive response in "Knowing Qualia: a Reply to Jackson" (1998). In this short paper, he argues that Jackson equivocates over the meaning of 'knows': what Mary knows before seeing red is propositional knowledge, while what she learns from seeing red is not - per Nagel ("What is it like to be a bat?", a favorite of dualists), all sorts of animals experience redness, but, lacking language, they cannot have any sort of propositional knowledge of it. When, at 1:43:00 [1], Keith asked Phillip to say what Mary has learned about what it is like to see red, and its intrinsic nature, without using any relational, demonstrative or indexical terms, he is, in effect, making that point. If what she learned is not propositional, there's nothing mysterious in her not learning it in her studies, but only from having the experience. [1] th-cam.com/video/azroNJhQd1U/w-d-xo.html
@queerdo You may be right about Philip's position beyond this discussion, but here, where he is arguing with Barry over whether introspection gives credence to panpsychism, it is the knowledge argument that he chooses to bring up. At this point, Barry had just challenged the idea that the conceivability of zombies can tell us anything about what pain is, so when Philip turns to the knowledge argument, he seems to be either deflecting Barry's question, or perhaps using the knowledge argument to justify the zombie one. In other work, he seems to find the zombie argument persuasive, but he does not seem to be making that particular claim in this discussion (Barry alone mentioned zombies.) Nor do I recall him raising Chomsky's objection, though I may have overlooked it. Insofar as Philip's panpsychism has been described as a form of Russellian monism, there is a sense in which most of the discussion is about that.
@queerdo One other issue: it seems, from the chat log, that you think 'physical' is ill-defined by physicalists, but I feel it is actually at least as well-defined by them as it is by dualists (who also need a definition in order to draw a line), and considerably better-defined than the alternatives being proposed. We can start with everything known to and explained by current physics - roughly, that which is under the purview of Sean's Core Theory.
Secondly, there are those areas where the core theory makes predictions, but where that are either known or strongly suspected to be incorrect, such as the mass of the neutrino or the question of why stars in galaxies are moving faster than can be accounted for. It would be absurdly tendentious to define these as non-physical - one might as well say that the physical begins and ends with the four classical elements, or at Descartes' knowledge of the material world. More generally, our knowledge of the physical world can reasonably be expected to grow by those methods described by the philosophy of science, and physicalists will take this knowledge to be about the physical world as well. This is as much of a definition as is needed by any form of physicalism that I am aware of, and it is quite conservative. Some physicalists, such as Searle and Penrose, think it will take some new fundamental physics to explain the mind, but there are many people, including Sean, who strongly suspect that the core theory will be sufficient. We are well aware that we do not have such an explanation, and therefore that this expectation is falsifiable, and I think most of us would be willing to leave it at that until more progress is made. There are also quite a few people, however, saying that this can not possibly be the case, so naturally we are interested in evaluating their arguments. Turning to the specific positions being debated in these chats, Philip has written, in his reply to Sean within 'Putting Consciousness First', that the physical (his choice of word) properties that the core theory operates on, such as mass, spin and charge, are, according to Russellian panpsychism, forms of consciousness. He underscores this by saying that this is not just an analogy. I do not see how you can say that and then claim that this is not a physical hypothesis! Whether it is a plausible modification of the core theory is impossible to say today, as it has not been worked out in anything near sufficient specificity for anyone to tell. You have claimed that physicalists are just saying that the physical is all there is, which is not so, as shown by the definitions above, but ironically we seem to have Philip saying here that panpsychism is all there is! With regard to Philip's alternative hypothesis, strong emergence, he says "If strong emergence is true, [the core theory] will make some false predictions about the locations of the particles in my brain at t+1." Well, by any reasonable definition, the positions and motions of particles are an aspect of the physical world, and it would be rather blatantly begging the question to add "...except in the brain", even though you have tried to put the mechanism beyond scientific explanation with the ad-hoc stipulation that it is strongly emergent (in another comment, @Lukas A. made the cautionary point that C. D. Broad "was more or less the last one to think that chemistry is strongly emergent" - his "The Mind and its Place in Nature" was published right at the time when atomic physics was explaining chemical interactions via quantum mechanics.) It is one thing to make vague and general statements about ceteris paribus laws, but quite another to carve a specific exception out of the core theory for humans or human brains. Sean Carroll, in 'Consciousness and the Laws of Physics', made several specific arguments about how difficult that would be, and in this discussion, Philip acknowledged that addressing them required more work. So long as one holds that the mind is causally effective in the physical world, it is a physical phenomenon by the definitions given above, which neither entail nor are predicated on saying that the physical world is all there is. One possible way out is epiphenomenalism, albeit one that Philip seems to be reluctant to take (for one thing, it might be antithetical to his views on cognitive phenomenology.) I agree with Keith when he suggests that Philip's line of reasoning leads to epiphenomenalism. The more I learn about this debate, the more clear it seems that the willingness of those opposed to physicalism to embrace wildly speculative and empirically unsupported hypotheses comes down to one point that Bertrand Russell nailed with this aphorism: "It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not a part of physics." That, however, works as well if you substitute 'philosophy' for 'physics', and no alternative to physicalism has done any better in answering this challenge (just saying "well, it's not physical" does not explain anything.) Elsewhere in these comments I have explained why I think there is a very plausible path to a physical explanation for why we cannot tell other people what it is like for us to see colors or smell ammonia.
@queerdo Anyone - dualist or not - claiming that their hypothesis is not a physicalist one is just as much in need of a definition of physicalism as physicalists. Furthermore, the volume of verbiage on the topic shows that there is a sufficient definition for that debate to be conducted, and you have not, so far, said anything to the contrary. I will, for now, ignore your ad-hominem bullshit, which merely reflects on your own immaturity.
@queerdo Your ad-hominems reveal a deep insecurity matched by a lack of maturity, but, aside from pointing this out, I will continue to ignore them for now. I take, however, your point that I would be more likely to get worthwhile responses from you if I cut the issues up into bite-sized chunks for your consumption (naturally, I would prefer a response from Philip or Keith, but beggars can't be choosers...), so here goes... I have already told you that there is already a satisfactory working definition of the physical, for the purpose of this discussion: everything explained by what Sean calls the core theory, plus, optionally, everything that could be explained by the future application of methods accepted by the philosophy of science. This is conservative, as science is not guaranteed to be able to explain everything that might fall under a broader but still coherent definition, but it turns out that antimaterialism is unable to prove that minds cannot fall within that restricted scope. The definition you have given is at odds with this. We can probably skip the gratuitous "quantitative" - it so happens that scientific explanations are often quantitative, but Darwin wasn't wrong because he did not know the math of genetics - but the "publicly observable" part is an arbitrary, if not tendentious, stipulation. For brevity, I will make just one point, in the form of a quote from Freeman Dyson: "The Schrodinger wave-function is expressed in a unit which is the square root of an inverse cubic meter. This fact alone makes clear that the wave-function is an abstraction, forever hidden from our view. Nobody will ever measure directly the square root of an inverse cubic meter." You could, I suppose, argue that this shows physicalism restricted to the scope of current knowledge is incoherent, but you would be preaching to the choir. Your assignment for tonight is to refute the argument I started this thread with, the one set out by Paul Churchland in "Knowing Qualia: a Reply to Jackson". For bonus points, explain why, if Philip does not put much store in the knowledge argument, it is the one he brings up to justify his dismissal of the physical difficulties facing his hypotheses.
@queerdo Much as you would like to direct the discussion in any other direction, one thing is abundantly clear: you have been unable to come up with any counter to Churchland. Once you either put up or acknowledge that to be so, we can move on to the next step. For additional commentary, see the comments under episode 6b. Update: There was a comment from @queerdo posted earlier today, to which this was a direct response, but it seems to have disappeared from the thread, at least temporarily.
Sean is plain stooo-pid. "We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description." Sean Carroll As if Sean cares about reality. How did Sean get around the first verses of the bible with God creating and giving life? Real science says nothing does nothing. Real science says if there was something there already it must fit with the evidence of what we know. We know the 1LT says there's a conservation of energy. It can change forms and neither can be created or destroyed. Creation cannot happen by natural means. The 2LT has various aspects, one being the universe is winding down, entropy. Usable energy is becoming less usable, so at one point usable energy was at its max. This all points to a supernatural creation, by a supernatural creator at a certain point in which matter, space, and time were created. When I read how it can happen otherwise, ALL the fools resort to science-fiction. Once a supernatural creation is accepted, then the next step is finding proof of what supernatural power did it. We KNOW these laws. We have NO doubts about them. We also KNOW that the laws of nature can't come about without a Lawgiver, God. So if Sean wants to pretend to be smart, please give me the laugh by giving science how creation really happened by natural means. Life only comes from life. Law of biogenesis. God is the reason for us and all we have. th-cam.com/video/JiMqzN_YSXU/w-d-xo.html The odds are NOT there. th-cam.com/video/W1_KEVaCyaA/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/yW9gawzZLsk/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/ddaqSutt5aw/w-d-xo.html
1:15:45 it's more akin having studied the limits of the wavelengths of visible light and concluding that there are probably no swans with a novel color outside of that spectrum.
What makes me see red is Goff's rambling incoherent presentation and irrelevant whiny asides. Goff doesn't listen to the other panelists and he seems unable to complete a single logical idea or grammatical sentence. He drones on and on with tired ideas like the Mary experiment which don't, as Sean says, have any probative value. Goff is not just a panpsychist, he is a severe annoyance.
When Mary asks "I wonder what it's like to experience red?" - she can have all the information about red, and she will have perfect understanding of the neural pattern that would occur in her brain after she sees red, the information she is missing is the indexical what is it like to be "a version of her" with that new neural pattern of seeing red. She can't know that because it is indexical, she can't have someone else's subjective experience because she IS her subjective experience. If she had someone else's subjective experience, it wouldn't be Mary, it would be someone else. Confusing part is - if right now you are not seeing or actively imagining red, do you right now know what it feels like to see red? Maybe we tend to say yes because we has easy access to the memory of seeing red and in normal contexts that is what we mean by knowing. But knowing what it is like to see red IS knowing what it is like to be someone who is seeing red, which is indexical, and if you right now are not someone who is experiencing red, it makes sense to say you don't have that knowledge. Mary is surprised because she feels like her before seeing red and her after seeing red is the same person, at the same time the information about what it feels like to be her past/future self is the same indexical information tha she can't have. But she still has the memory of what it felt like to be her before seeing red. When she acceses that memory, she doesn't directly have the same experience she had in the past, she has the experience of being someone who is seeing red and at the same time is accessing a memory of being someone who has never seen red. "Surprise" is obviously vaigue but this hopefully gives an account of why it happens, because it seems to be a pretty surprising experience to have. Experience is indexical, Mary is surprised because of indexical information about what it feels like to be somone who sees red and remembers not seeing it.
Frank Jackson himself made an important, but often overlooked, point about this issue: if all Mary learns is about herself (such as indexical knowledge like "That is what red is like", where "that" picks out an experience she is having), then his argument would not succeed, as that is new knowledge, created by her new experiences, so there is nothing to be explained in her not learning it from her studies. Jackson's contention, made more forcefully in 'What Mary Did Not Know', is that she learned something about what it is like for other people - and if that is factual knowledge, then those facts were true while she was studying, so the question would be, why did she not learn them then? That "if it is factual knowledge" is an important caveat (to anyone who wonders if there is any other sort of knowledge, consider this: do you suppose someone, who had never ridden a bicycle, could read a book purportedly containing the facts that constitute the knowledge in knowing how to ride a bicycle, pass a written test on the subject, and then get on a bicycle and ride off as if they had been doing it all their lives?) This is what Churchland challenged (as did others, but I feel Churchland was most direct.) Nothing ever seems to be settled in philosophy, however, and this has spawned epicycle-upon-epicycle of ever more nuanced argument. If nothing else, this should make it clear that the argument is not the slam-dunk many people think it is. To your suggestion that "if you right now are not someone who is experiencing red, it makes sense to say you don't have that knowledge", a dualist might say that you still have that knowledge, as you will be able to call on it when the occasion arises, and furthermore, you can make that happen just by imagining red - after all, I know a certain amount of math, even though I am not using it at the moment. This, however, would be very much like another early response to Jackson: the Ability Hypothesis, which says that what Mary gains are abilities, such as to remember the experience of colors and compare those memories to what is before us, and that these abilities do not seem to work by knowing facts. This has fallen out of favor for reasons that often seem to me to be vague and tendentious, such as that it doesn't feel complete enough an explanation of experience, or that she must gain some non-indexical knowledge (but what? That's behind the question Keith asked Phillip, that I mentioned in my previous post.) Personally, I think the ability hypothesis is close to the truth, except that she does not gain the abilities on her release, she 'learned' them through evolution, but she has been prevented from exercising them. To many dualists, the subjectivity of experience is persuasive, but it is possible to suppose that this is physically explicable. We know that new experience causes physical changes in the brain, and the physicalist supposition is that these are sufficient to account for Mary's mental changes. Mary's exhaustive scientific knowledge should allow her to predict what those changes will be in any color-vision scenario (and Jackson has stipulated that all those predictions are part of her scientific knowledge.) If she could put her brain in such a state, physicalism supposes she would now know what seeing colors is like, to the same extent and in the same sense as if she had actually undergone the corresponding experience. But she cannot do that! The aware, reasoning, language-using part of our mind cannot address, let alone make precise changes to, the detailed physical state of our brains through its own mental efforts - it is just not wired that way (which is just as well, probably; if we had that power, it might be easy to accidentally 'brick' our own minds.) You do not have to be a physicalist to see that this is a way in which Jackson's argument could be unsound, and not through a technicality - it really is straightforward in principle, even though we don't have the scientific knowledge yet to say this is the way things are. In this view, the private, personal and ineffable nature of our experiences, which leads to them being subjective, follows automatically: the structure of our brains only grants our self-aware minds very limited access to our brains, and none to those of other people. We can only talk about our experiences on the assumption that other people experience life more-or-less like we do (and anyone for whom this is not the case has difficulty in understanding and communicating with other people about their experiences.) Someone who says this can't be right because experience is too remarkable or nuanced or [insert adjective here] for this to be plausible is simply trying to use the Knowledge Argument to justify an argument from incredulity. Someone who says this can't be right because experience is a different sort of thing than anything physical is begging the question. Someone who says this can't be right because of zombies puts more faith in what a philosopher says he can conceive of than any possible amount of empirical evidence about how the actual world works. The Knowledge Argument is interesting, not because it proves something, but because it confronts us with the tacit assumptions we are making.
@@A.Raybould Excellent writeup. Philip seems to give too much weight to the intuitive feel of seeing red and thinking that that is not the short-hand form of registering and reporting of changed brain state. There is a little bit of incredulity in there. And on that basis the desire to amend the well-established core theory just because it does not feel right is misplaced. Historically we were not directly aware of what happens microscopically and did not understand the laws of physics. But we did have direct experiences of the world. That is why our intuition is to think that the high-level description of the experience is primary. This is understandable. It is like people attributing the causes of diseases to eating rotten meat or spells and not knowing that the real cause is microorganisms.
@@SandipChitale Thank you for your comments. To be fair to Phillip, though, the topic here was not the arguments against physicalism, so it is understandable if he passed over some of the subtleties. I also suspect Keith was on to something when, at the end, he suggested that Phillip's line of thought might end up in epiphenomenalism.
@@A.Raybould one reason I don't really like ability hypothesis is aphantasia - it seems that people who have no visual imagination would still be surprised upon seeing red for the first time and not consecutive times, so they must gain knowledge. This knowledge apppears to be very socially constructed. We see red incredibly often, we have a very complex idea of what red is, what it means for us, what things are red, what emotion it causes in us, and many other things that we ascribe to knowing what red is, being able to imagine red is not necessarily one of them. Thinking about that knowledge, it is incredibly complex higher level information, but it is not indexical. After Mary sees red she forms a memory and certain relation to red, and if Mary before had perfect understanding of what that memory and relation would be, I think I lean towards the possibility that she wouldn't even be surprised upon seeing red. Before seeing red she would be in the same position as any of us can be when we are not seeing or actively imagining red. If she gets surprised, because of her perfect knowledge she would know beforehand that she will get surprised and what will surprise her which doesn't really make sense. She would acquire the indexical knowledge of what it is like to see red, maybe, but it should be possible to describe that completely in relational terms. It would be strange if you can get surprised by the just the indexical knowledge alone, knowing everything relational about it, what would be there to cause surprise?
Philip, you seem to have the impression that the laws of quantum mechanics have only been validated for "a small number of particles". But, my impression, is that quantum physics makes predictions of macroscopic properties of things like the heat capacities, difussion coefficients, for example, of liquids that agree amazingly well with measurements. The quantum chemists field predict the structures of objects like proteins (nano scale, with hundreds of thousands of atoms), using algorithm that solve the sheoedinger eqn, and condensed phase physicists can predict the properties of metallic crystals, which are macroscopic objects ( Avogadro's number) also only using physics theories. At least in these fairly complex and huge domains, there has been little need to modify the theories - the brain, admittedly is more complex, but it's only in the sense that is more heterogeneous in composition... But i hope you can see better why most scientists don't expect strong emergence to be of any use.
It was a point of agreement with Sean that, in general, the experiments that confirm the Core theory involve small numbers of particles. I appreciate that certain chemical properties can be derived from QM. But we aren't able to test whether the core theory gives accurate predictions in any relatively complex living system, never mind a functioning brain.
@@philipgoff7897 wow, thanks for replying! I enjoy your podcast guys, keep it going. I guess what I'm getting at, is that one can use efficient approx. to the sheoedinger eqn. that area able to semiquantitatively predict the structure and function of proteins, polymers, sugars, DNA, etc ... As well as predicting complex chemistry (all of it, as far as we ever looked, in agreement with QM) in liquids... In short, The building blocks of biology can be understood via molecular models that obey physics. Weak physics emergence can model the biological world satisfactorily whenever we are capable of applying it - that gives, you have to grant, a huge baesian prior to expect the same in the brain.
@@philipgoff7897 sean can't even explain how we got our brains! "We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description." Sean Carroll As if Sean cares about reality. How did Sean get around the first verses of the bible with God creating and giving life? Real science says nothing does nothing. Real science says if there was something there already it must fit with the evidence of what we know. We know the 1LT says there's a conservation of energy. It can change forms and neither can be created or destroyed. Creation cannot happen by natural means. The 2LT has various aspects, one being the universe is winding down, entropy. Usable energy is becoming less usable, so at one point usable energy was at its max. This all points to a supernatural creation, by a supernatural creator at a certain point in which matter, space, and time were created. When I read how it can happen otherwise, ALL the fools resort to science-fiction. Once a supernatural creation is accepted, then the next step is finding proof of what supernatural power did it. We KNOW these laws. We have NO doubts about them. We also KNOW that the laws of nature can't come about without a Lawgiver, God. So if Sean wants to pretend to be smart, please give me the laugh by giving science how creation really happened by natural means. Life only comes from life. Law of biogenesis. God is the reason for us and all we have. th-cam.com/video/JiMqzN_YSXU/w-d-xo.html The odds are NOT there. th-cam.com/video/W1_KEVaCyaA/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/yW9gawzZLsk/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/ddaqSutt5aw/w-d-xo.html
@@philipgoff7897 Doesn't your acceptance that the Core Theory might explain brain function undermine your brilliant, key point that if human self-consciousness is fundamental to all meaning, then arguments about physical theories are irrelevant? Incidentally, so does your quasi-nominalism about "parties" and your quasi-reductionism about 'weakly' emergent features. No wonder they can't get what your "consciousness-first" really means - let alone preface ALL their philosophy of physics statements, as they should, with "assuming human grasp of meaning is not foundational".
As Sean repeatedly and clearly explained, there is zero reason to believe physics is different in the brain than in a rock, a tree, the planet Jupiter, or anywhere else barring truly extreme environments such as a black hole. It’s laughable that you think it would be. This whole exchange felt like you bringing an intellectual toothpick to a nuclear bomb fight. Almost pitiful to see you make the same silly points over and over.
On first question, "My own view is that, relative to the physical domain, there is just one sort of strongly emergent quality, namely, consciousness. I do not know whether there is any strong downward causation, but it seems to me that if there is any strong downward causation, quantum mechanics is the most likely locus for it. If both strongly emergent qualities and strong downward causation exist, it is natural to look at the possibility of a close connection between them, perhaps along the lines mentioned in the last paragraph. The question remains wide open, however, as to whether or not strong downward causation exists" David Chalmers.
It seems folks carry such divergent intuitions into these sorts of debates that no amount of argument is going to bring respective views closer together. I share some of Philip's intuitions about the knowledge argument, but Barry dismisses this intuition with his sense of different kinds of concepts. I'm not a Wittgensteinian when it comes to metaphysics, but listening to exchanges like this tempts me to throw up my hands and accept that we're all just playing different language games.
I will say, though, that Sean Carroll's conception of the "core theory" is a mash-up and not serious physics. Plasma physicist Tim Eastman (2020) has several pages of criticisms of Carroll's view as articulated in his book 'The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself' (2016). Carroll takes up the God’s eye perspective by offering a single “core theory,” an equation combining quantum mechanics, spacetime, gravity, matter, the Higgs field, and other forces, which he claims leaves no room for new aspects of the universe that are not already well understood. Eastman points out that, while the components of this core equation represent great achievements, in practice no one has ever succeeded in combining them into a practical model or simulation. Carroll’s core theory thus amounts to no more than a mashup and is not anywhere close to being a working equation (126). On Eastman’s reading, Carroll makes several unstated metaphysical assumptions including actualism, physicalism, and causal closure, leading him to mistake an amalgam of dyadic input-output models as though they could serve as an ultimate explanation for the universe (127). Rather than accepting Carroll’s actualist rendering of the Feynman path-integral formulation of quantum physics (where electrons are assumed to take every path, with the largest probability being given to that path which approaches classical physics), Eastman argues that “physical relations emerge from [the] multiple sampling of potentiae pre-space, which is operationally handled by the principle of least action, reflecting optimization of relations of relations in this pre-space” (138). Rather than prematurely limiting our creative cosmos to the idealized deductivist models of current physics, or suggesting untestable “scientific exotica”(82) like the vast ontological overflow of actualized possible worlds as in the “many-worlds” interpretation, Eastman leaves open the possibility of genuinely novel emergence within the only universe we could ever know anything about.
I know I'm a nobody but i just can't understand how can eminent philosophers like Dennett, Frankish or a good physicist like Carroll don't recognise that consciousness is something fundamental and non physical? All analogies such as digestion and what not simply fail because consciousness is the only non physical example there is.
@@vanonu It's because they haven't seen any convincing arguments that it is nonphysical (there aren't any). Saying that analogies don't apply to it because it's not physical is begging the question. The argument that subjective experiences are fundamentally inaccessible to others just doesn't work, as Sean pointed out. If consciousness affects the external world and vice versa there is nothing preventing us from forming inferences about it using the same methods we might use for anything else.
@@GammaPunk Just a quick question. Say lots of 700nm photons enters my eye and then the following happens: 1) Chemicals, electrons move between neurons and other stuff in brain take place. 2) I experience the visual feeling of redness. Are you/Carroll saying 1=2 or 1 causes 2?
I've heard the Mary in a black and white room allegory 100 times and every time it just illustrates the limits of language in its usefulness to explain subjective experience. What the allegory does not, however, is somehow explain how elections have feelings if you put enough in a room together.
Philip's objection that there are "only simplicity reasons" to expect physics to work in the brain is technically correct, but that's because simplicity is a surprisingly deep and necessary part of science and all other forms of inference. The theory that the sun will rise every day is only slightly more simple than the theory that the sun will rise every day except next Tuesday and only in a small village in the Alps. But a person who lives in that village is still justified in expecting the sun to rise on that day, and inference of any kind would be impossible if they could not do so. Sean is right that there is more than *just* a parsimony argument here, at least on the surface, but it's unavoidable in the foundational justification of science. Even if there are deep and sacred principles of QFT that say that it should work in this case, you have to appeal to simplicity to say that those principles still apply to new situations without modification. That's fine, we have to make that assumption to do any inference or prediction of any kind. I see this happening over and over again with science deniers and bad philosophers: since the Problem of Induction isn't solvable, any time science makes a prediction you can simply ignore it if it's in any way inconvenient to you.
You've misunderstood my argument. I totally agree that we should take simplicity constraints very seriously, in the absence of other grounds for belief. The point is I think we have strong philosophical grounds for thinking consciousness is strongly emergent.
@@philipgoff7897 The rejection of materialistic reduction in the explanation of qualia does not logically imply strong emergence (i.e. modification of the existing Core Theory). Qualia could just be an aspect of reality which, admittedly, is currently not accounted for by our physical theories (hence the knowledge argument), but whose relevance might only be epiphenomenal, i.e. might play no role in the aspects of reality captured by our physical laws i.e. structure and dynamics
@@ugocorda2029 sure, I was simplifying in lots of ways. My point was just that reflections on physics did nothing to counterbalance any philosophical case against strong emergence
It seems the panpsychist reductionism is mislabeled as an 'idealist reductionism.' Panpsychism would be that there are, at the fundamental, rock bottom level, physical aspects of nature, and 'also' consciousness or proto-consciousness fundamentally, so that there are two, irreducible aspects of nature, physics and consciousness. the idea that mind is fundamental and physics is derivative is idealism. Idealism is defined as the view that all that exists is mental, or mind-dependent. Therefore, the idea that everything is dependent on and reducible to mind, is idealism, not panpsychism.
Just that the "mental nature" of things on close examination is not helpful at all, other than it's so ad hoc that it can seem like a possible explanation. And at the same time there are so much better explanation that do not require any ontological lift
Although Philip did appear to be somewhat dogmatic here, and struggled to present a compelling case for strong emergence, I feel for his frustration in this video. How on earth are these intellectuals thinking or acting like there is nothing to be disturbed by the hard problem of consciousness? Poor Philip's repetition of the philosophers' poll might have come from the desperation that nobody wants to acknowledge that the problem is not as easily demystified as they presume. Keith and Barry surely would know how delicate the problem is as any other philosophical problem is, but their attitudes are like those old-school physicists who pretend (or believe) that there is nothing serious or mysterious about the measurement problem, if you just shut up and calcus.
There are actual mental illnesses & injuries, that take away that "consciousness" feeling & the feeling that they themselves have their own "feelings" or awareness, in their sufferers. They do stuff etc, but they actually feel like a zombie or like they are already "dead". If consciousness was not what Sean etc explain ( physics, & so physical senses giving a feeling of self awareness ), then that would not be possible, for a person that works, in all respects except that damaged part ( just like brain damage changes personality etc ) I think, once you've come to the awareness, that consciousness is purely physically emergent of chemical interactions, then you start to be able to feel what that means, in your own mind/ consciousness. You start to lose the whole "illusion" of consciousness, & become aware of the physical clicking over of each input & interaction. THATS why I can see Sean is right. Cos when you let go of that illusion, your brain "opens the doors" to reality, without the layers between to hide it. 😁🌏☮️
I think one line of argument for strong emergence might go: 1. The normal state of reality is nothingness 2. In order to get the universe "started" or "off the ground", we need something metaphysically different from nothingness; something strongly emergent because there can't be weak emergence from nothingness 3. The most plausible candidate for that "something" are the laws of physics 4. Therefore, the fundamental laws of physics are strongly emergent - we can't probe any further why they exist, they just do, and they are why there is something rather than nothing 5. Despite their strong emergence, the laws of physics are intelligible and create the reality we exist in 6. Consciousness is just like these fundamental laws, except at a higher macrolevel 7. Consciousness as a strongly emergent property or set of laws is likewise intelligible with the universe, because the strongly emergent fundamental laws are capable of creating an intelligible universe, so why not just add consciousness in that mix? Of course this would result in altering the core theory - the contention would be that the core theory + consciousness gives the real description of reality and that our current theory is incomplete. I also don't think this would work on Sean since I think he's a Humean about laws of physics. I'm also not sure if I'm equivocating on the phrase "strong emergence" here.
Great debate, frustrating as hell sometimes, but that is often a symptom of a substantial discussion. I don't think that "Mary's room" is some kind of silver bullet for antiphysicalists and it is not that complicated either. Let's say on physicalist view that information, knowledge, memory for a human are just complex states of particles in that humans brain over some time. What new "information" did Mary gain? The answer is simple and physical - there was a new configuration of particles in her brain, which did not occur before - the configuration we coloquially call "Mary saw red" and Mary would call "experience of red".
Why does the configuration of particles equate to the sensation of red? Are we to infer that consciousness is everywhere since configurations of particles are everywhere? If not, why only some configurations and not others?
@@transcendentphilosophy Why do some configurations of particles equate to a planet and some other configurations to a car? That's how it works, there are the building blocks and you can build many different things from them.
Something I was not sure about here: is the primary issue about strong emergence of any kind in the brain, or strong emergence that in some way involves violations of the laws of physics at the level of macroscopic systems like the brain? Philip's view, to my understanding, is based on rejecting constitutive varieties of Russelian monism. It seems to me a main motivation is rejecting that the microqualities (which are the intrinsic natures of microphysical particles) metaphysically necessitate the macroqualities. The reason I am curious about this is that Sean actually draws the dilemma out, where the panpsychist either accepts an account of the microqualities that doesn't modify the laws of physics/behavior (in which case he sees the view as inconsequential) or does admit such modification. I would think that the brain being within the domain that the core theory applies tells us more about ruling out modifications of the laws of physics at the macro-level than about strong emergence of the "inconsequential" sort (the kind not modifying behavior), which is addressing the difference between constitutive panpsychists and emergentist ones. In particular, constitutive panpsychism would involve adding a lot of theory to our core physics theory as is -- basically, a theory of the intrinsic natures at the micro-level. Without these microqualities, the question of Philip's kind of strong emergence seems not to arise -- I don't think he views consciousness at the level of the brain as strongly emerging from the kinds of properties of microphysics in our current core theory, so much as emerging from a core theory that is modified not just at the macro-level but the micro-level to add the microqualities/intrinsic natures? On a different note, for what it's worth, I've tended to think the best answer to Sean's challenge about what use/consequence there is to adding these extra microqualities in panpsychism is really if they somehow explained why the fundamental particles of microphysics follow the laws of physics they do -- that is, explain the causal powers. But of course, this would be true of virtually any sort of additional info about the nature of physical particles granted by Russelian monism -- whether of a panpsychist variety or otherwise (there are some flavors that are more physicalist).
Yes. That is the whole point! There is a QUALITY to experience that cannot be described by physics. Please explain to me how a physical model could explain the qualitative experience of green, even in principle?
Maybe this helps clear-up some of the confusion... Philip's interlocutors might, unwittingly, be Platonists. Only for platonic ideals can one equate comprehension with expereince. Let us take the example of the non-platonic experience of "Red color", i.e., of redness. (1) There is the phenomenon of "Redness". All red color has redness, but so does purple color, and orange have redness (2) There is the concept of "Red color", viz., a color that generates the phenomenon of redness in the non-color blind (3) There is the red object, say Erythrosine dye molecule. Note that, to the non color blind, erythrosine will provide the experience of redness, and therefore it will be considered red by them. A spectrophotometer, too, will ascribe the label "Red" to it, but that without the experience of redness (in the sense you and I might have it). A color bind person might calibrate a shade of grey to red, and so she too will then see red, but not experience redness. Evolutionarily, the experience of redness has no additional benefits, beyond the discernment of "Red". The comprehension of RED, as a category, is sufficient for survival. The experience of redness, in addition to that comprehension of RED, is not incrementally beneficial to survival. (4) The word, "RED" is a lexical label, and (5) The wavelength 700 nm is a spectral signal for REDNESS (6) Them, there is chemical isomerism that helps translate the radiation to a chemical signal, which then (7) Gets carried into the brain as a neuronal signal (electro-chemical gradients?) (8) The brain then combines the information into a composite input, that connects the mere input of RED, with info relating to sounds, speeds, memories, space, time, etc. At the level of the brain, we already have level 5 autonomy. What we do not have yet is "EGO", the sense of self. And therefore, we do not yet have agency. (9) Finally, the "MIND" is where meaning, including the association with the sense of "ME" occurs. The mind is where agency rests. There is no subjective experience yet. None is needed for autonomy or agency. (0) The activities of the mind are enlivened into an experience by Consciousness. "REDNESS" is only meaningful because we have consciousness of it. That is why Consciousness is primitive to Redness. Consciousness comes first in the epistemic and ontological analysis of our reality. Now, Mary's optical apparatus has not encountered 700 nm electromagnetic energy, and so her rods and cones have not activated the neuronal signal that leads to the brain-state of RED, and the mental activity of "I SEE RED". Unlike Philip, I believe that this entire chain, up to & including the mental activities listed, is non-spiritual, and quite possibly explained by the physics we already have. The red dye is not the experience of redness, nor is the 700 nm light, nor the inverted real image, that falls on rods on cones, causing their molecules to isomerize, those isomers are not the awareness of red color, nor is the neural signal it generates, etc. Unlike Keith, et al., I do not believe this explains the subjective experience of REDNESS. It is an empty and untenable claim that the electrochemical potential state of a bunch of neurons is the same as an experience. This sounds like a massive category error. There is a distance of 1 km between Rose and Jack's homes. The map too illustrates it. However, to assert that the map is identical to reality, or even our apprehension of reality, is a case of severe naivete. Is Redness a reality in the same sense as mass, space, speed, temperature, etc., are realities? Yes, in the sense of our consciousness of these qualia, abso-bloomin-lutely. Where mass has an objective aspect, and so does Red (700 nm, or erythrosin, or a certain conformation of rotamers in cones), but these objective fabulations rely on consciousness, the first person subjective experience, for realization. Here is what that means. Let us say you are told to contemplate 10 kgs. You cannot contenplate 10 kgs without some subjective mental representation. Your mind invokes the sense of certain muscular challenge, the pressure of (say) a 10 kg metal ball in your hand. The ball has a certain appearance and feel and, if you dropped it, the possibility of a metallic report. The point is, like Barkley, you conclude that the objective and the subjective are inseparable when you need to make sense of them. When you do math, and say, 10kg is 7 kg greater than 4 kg, then you are not so much dealing with kgs, as with ideas (of numbers and subtraction). And in that case, your relationship to the reality of ideas is essentially platonic. Experience is NOT the same as a commensurable objective reality. Experience is subjective reality, and is essentially non-commensurable. Personally, I believe it might not be where physics ends, but where it begins. Consciousness might be the basis of all reality, including physics.
1:00:00 "Mary gains information"...well it's personal experience but to make it information means should could pass it on to her twin or use it herself at a later date.
You can't convey the character of a red experience to someone who hasn't had the experience, but it's information nonetheless, as shown by the fact that Mary's curiosity is satisfied 'Ah, so that's what it's like to see red!'
@@philipgoff7897 Thank You Philip...yes all information is personal. When Einstein discovered Special Relativity only he knew it and understood it subjectively, until he could pass it on to others. Seeing Red is subjective but we cannot pass it on through language. Language is how we access each other's minds. There is a science language incompleteness working for subjective experiences that are hidden. However Mary knows the personal meaning of red and can talk about it in a more complete way with others? Science language is about being counterintuitive or breaking accepted intuitions, like the earth moves, time is relative, there are fields and action at a distance. Mary can read all of the literature about seeing red, but what intuitions can she break by reading about it?
That would be like defining energy as that which can be passed on to another atomic entity at a later time. Bound energy may not be so transmitted except in catastrophic circumstances. Personal experience is transmitted based on shared experiences but not directly. That is like transmitting mathematical truth, to name one of the simpler truths that we impart. The person to whom the truth is imparted must have gone on the journey to learn the truth for himself. You would just be a beacon light pointing out the location and general nature of the truth.
How did we even get the brain? Oh, and atoms? "We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description." Sean Carroll As if Sean cares about reality. How did Sean get around the first verses of the bible with God creating and giving life? Real science says nothing does nothing. Real science says if there was something there already it must fit with the evidence of what we know. We know the 1LT says there's a conservation of energy. It can change forms and neither can be created or destroyed. Creation cannot happen by natural means. The 2LT has various aspects, one being the universe is winding down, entropy. Usable energy is becoming less usable, so at one point usable energy was at its max. This all points to a supernatural creation, by a supernatural creator at a certain point in which matter, space, and time were created. When I read how it can happen otherwise, ALL the fools resort to science-fiction. Once a supernatural creation is accepted, then the next step is finding proof of what supernatural power did it. We KNOW these laws. We have NO doubts about them. We also KNOW that the laws of nature can't come about without a Lawgiver, God. So if Sean wants to pretend to be smart, please give me the laugh by giving science how creation really happened by natural means. Life only comes from life. Law of biogenesis. God is the reason for us and all we have. th-cam.com/video/JiMqzN_YSXU/w-d-xo.html The odds are NOT there. th-cam.com/video/W1_KEVaCyaA/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/yW9gawzZLsk/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/ddaqSutt5aw/w-d-xo.html
If you stick with the core theory, you are staying or stuck at a very fundamental level. Consciousness reduces to that level in the same way that water reduces to that level. However it is molecular structure that causes the unique emergence of water. Likewise it is biological cells and specifically neurons that emerge consciousness.
@@philipgoff7897 You can devise a physical theory of consciousness based on Planck Time that is emergence which does not modify the laws. Why does the brain emit alpha waves and gamma waves which are in the range of 40 Hz? These waves are regular and not the result of random firing of neurons. These biological periods are much slower periods than the atomic or molecular levels. To an engineer like me it's more a question of how a lower level of reality scales (emerges) into our level of reality.
The key question here is what does Philip mean when talking about Mary the colour scientist by saying "she gains new information", or rather how should we think about this process. The problem as I see it is that saying "she has all the information that physics can tell us about colour" sounds very innocent but actually is a very misleading statement. One has to bear in mind that all the information that physics can tell us about colour is larger than the information storage capacity of Mary's brain, and it is not clear that it is even a finite amount of information. Importantly a subset of the information of what physics can tell us about colour would include a complete model of the brain of a human seeing colour. It would also include a complete model of an octopus brain seeing colour. In the case of the octopus brain it is clear that Mary does not contain the computational capacity to store or use this model. With the example of a human brain seeing colour she does not need to hold a model in her brain, she can just directly use her brain as the model. To do so she would need to induce the neuronal firings that cause a human to see colour. The counter to the thought experiment would be to consider Marvin the super-intelligent being. Marvin has a computational capacity that is many orders of magnitude larger than a human and is capable of modifying his computational centre (his equivalent of a brain). The question then is, if Marvin has the capacity to (and does) simulates an entire human being seeing the colour red, does Marvin know what it is like to be a human who sees the colour red? I think the honest answer is that we can't ever hope to *know* the answer to the Marvin question, as we ourselves have limited computational capacity. We could only ever infer that Marvin did know what it was like in the same way that I can infer that it is likely that other humans have a similar experience to me when they see the colour red. But we certainly have no evidence to suggest that Marvin doesn't know what it is like to be a human who sees the colour red.
We already have a legal and ethical and in fact a required procedure before a surgery in which an Anesthesiologist predicts and injects a brain state into the brain of a patient who has previously not experienced unconsciousness (analogous to Mary not having seen red before situation), and after the anesthesia wears off the patient does say their curiosity of what it feels like to be unconscious is satisfied (analogous to Mary's curiosity about seeing red being satisfied after seeing an actual red object). To the extent I know, the chemistry of the interaction of the anesthesia and brain is well within the core theory. Isn't that enough to give high credence to the physicalism-based theory of consciousness? And mind you this is not about a mere conscious experience like seeing red. This is about taking away the very consciousness. Anesthesiologist predictably applies anesthesia and puts a patient under and takes away their consciousness. They do it using a physical substance/chemical. Of course, anesthesiologist does not know how the patient is feeling when unconscious. But they can make the patient unconscious predictably. And that prediction is based on an understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology of the brain. I think if science can predict how a person's consciousness can be PREDICTABLY affected using the physical mechanisms that tells us that physicalism is likely true. And even more so when the absence of physical effect will not cause the corresponding change in conscious experience. That is a positive and anti-positive case for it. One more thing, we do not only have to externally do the measurement to say the patient is unconscious. We can just and also ask them after the anesthesia wears out. The point being we can, in such an experiment, use the reporting of the state of consciousness by the subject themselves as the data point. Philip admitted that there HAS to be a physical change to Mary's brain for Mary to say that she now knows what red looks like and more IMPORTANTLY, that it will NOT be the case if THAT physical change was prevented from occurring (say by stopping signals from eyes to reach the brain or disrupting the brain chemistry such that it cannot process the signals the right way) then he is admitting to physicalism. It seems to me that Philip's incredulity that the notion of Mary reporting that she now knows what red looks like could be the same as the high-level language expression of the fact that she has this new state of the brain resulting from seeing the red color, is the cause of his objection to physicalism. But as was pointed out by Sean several times, one's incredulity cannot be a strong enough motivation to propose that the core theory needs to be augmented to account for consciousness. It seems to me that Philip may be taking that too lightly. Keith also pointed out that if one insists that the reporting of certain conscious experiences is not the same as high-level shorthand for reporting brain states, cause Philip to demand that physicalism cannot explain the subjective experience. A simple question Philip should ask is - is it conceivable that Mary could be made to know what red looks like without making any change to her brain whatsoever. I think the answer to that is no. I think Philip probably missed the point that Sean made about science works i.e. how we predict what happens at the center of the Sun even though we have never put an actual experiment there. Using a similar methodology, Sean was saying that the physics of particles inside the brain is same as their physics outside the brain. This is the point about the applicability of laws of physics in different regimes. And that we do not (practically) have ANY reason to think that the regime inside the brain is different than that outside the brain as far as applicability of core theory goes. And even though Sean was jokingly saying that there are many Nobel prizes ready to be had if one can make proposals to change the core theory that actually works, it is also a very serious point. I never understand what is so clever and special about Mary's experiment. The main point of is true for any new experience, right? Seeing red for the first time is different than seeing blue for the first time. Why do we need to specifically imagine a black and white room etc.
Playing Thought Experiments: If you throw a collection of car parts into a box, you would not claim there is........ "vehicleness"... Assemble them into an automobile and you can argue vehicleness is fundamental to those parts. If those parts were the most fundamental level of nature you could argue vehicleness is fundamental to nature. Sean is correct because you don't need to change the laws of physics vs figure out how those neurons and brains are assembled. Of course they used to have the same argument two centuries ago about biology, life and vitalism. The consciousness debate is just the result of not getting to the next step up from biology.
Can any of these jokes explain how we even got the brain? "We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description." Sean Carroll As if Sean cares about reality. How did Sean get around the first verses of the bible with God creating and giving life? Real science says nothing does nothing. Real science says if there was something there already it must fit with the evidence of what we know. We know the 1LT says there's a conservation of energy. It can change forms and neither can be created or destroyed. Creation cannot happen by natural means. The 2LT has various aspects, one being the universe is winding down, entropy. Usable energy is becoming less usable, so at one point usable energy was at its max. This all points to a supernatural creation, by a supernatural creator at a certain point in which matter, space, and time were created. When I read how it can happen otherwise, ALL the fools resort to science-fiction. Once a supernatural creation is accepted, then the next step is finding proof of what supernatural power did it. We KNOW these laws. We have NO doubts about them. We also KNOW that the laws of nature can't come about without a Lawgiver, God. So if Sean wants to pretend to be smart, please give me the laugh by giving science how creation really happened by natural means. Life only comes from life. Law of biogenesis. God is the reason for us and all we have. th-cam.com/video/JiMqzN_YSXU/w-d-xo.html The odds are NOT there. th-cam.com/video/W1_KEVaCyaA/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/yW9gawzZLsk/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/ddaqSutt5aw/w-d-xo.html
Carroll's argument for the causal closure of physics is great but the statement that no one cares about theories of consciousness which don't modify physics just doesn't seem true: If we are living in a simulation we would still care about our experience in the simulation much more than whatever's happening in the true "physical" base layer; We care about dreams and ppl with locked-in syndrome even though subjective experience doesn't influence behavior in those contexts (sure neuron patterns are changing but surely that's not what ppl care about). Hope we can see some discussions with epiphenomenalists such as Richard Chappell on MindChat!
I don’t understand how the red example proves anything about a strong emergence. There are two examples of how this is simply new information. The side effect of you feeling elated doesn’t make it anything more than new information. When I first saw pictures of flowers taken in ultraviolet, I felt intrigued and elated. I could appreciated what a bee was seeing and how flowers communicated to insects. It was novel and new info that had an emotional part because I feel connected to nature. The emotional part is just that: emotions. The above example would still work if my eyes and brain only evolved to deal with one frequency range around red. The flower pattern would be different to what i’m accustomed to seeing and the patterns would be striking and help me understand how a bee locates a flower. I’d find that exciting even if I had the visual capacity of a dog. Regarding a person who is a physicist specialising in electromagnetic radiation and colour in general but has a vision problem with colour blindness: let’s say they get new glasses that somehow fix the deficit in the eye cones and suddenly they start seeing colours. What happens other than existing brain pathways getting stimulated and making connections they should have done before. I’m sure the person would feel a welling of mixed emotions. They have new information that may help them navigate the world better. It would also help them navigate their social world better. I’m afraid that the absolute majority who want to stick to such notions of consciousness being outside the laws of physics, are really holding on to archaic vestiges of emotional feelings as being more real than reality itself. In my experience, emotions have added colour to my life but they haven’t served me well. For somebody with ADHD and an amygdala that isn’t properly tempered by a frontal lobe, emotions can lead to a world of pain through impulsive decision making. To survive you have to reign in your emotions and distrust them without blocking them. Emotions are intrinsically tied to consciousness but they aren’t physically real. We perceive them as being real because that’s how the brain evolved. The world doesn’t change when I’m angry. I can take stupid decisions though and change outcomes for me and those around me.
During a brain MRI the atoms in the brain behave exactly according to current physical theories used to design the MRI machine: no surprising behavior of atoms was ever noticed from the fact of being inside a brain. More detailed examination of particle behavior inside the brain would be very interesting but extremely difficult to achieve. For example, comparing the probability profile of a quantum measurement of the same particle inside and outside the brain.
Each pixel on fmri scan corresponds to 5.5 millions neurons. We have no idea what it would or wouldn't look like if what we're seeing were reducible to currently understood chemistry/physics.
@@philipgoff7897 Quite the contrary. MRI works BECAUSE we know exactly what it looks like due to our current understanding of physics (chemistry has nothing to do with this). fMRI is not the same as MRI, and we do have neuron scale MRI and other imaging modalities.
Reality is all there is. A believer or non-believer can agree on this. To a believer reality is god, to a non-believer reality does not have an identity. Otherwise they experience the same reality. Consciousness being reality and consciousness being god, means reality has an identity. If consciousness had no identity from where did we require our individualities and identities? We are not consciousness, we share in consciousness. So consciousness is other than us, an otherness in which we share.
Consciousness is non-computational (per Penrose). Therefore, mathematics at best can only "point" to Consciousness, if coupled with IIT (Integrated Information Theory). The question of what Consciousness is, "In-Itself" was addressed by Shankara, 788-820. but going back to Aristotle Shankara provided various mantras that are intended to help people tap directly into Pure Consciousness (Brahman), and merge with it (Samadhi, leading to Enlghtenment. Mathematics, logic, and physics won't get you there, but are useful and "fun' in their own right..
I don’t see how it’s even “scientific” to say consciousness must be explained scientifically. It seems a fallacy to think something subjective must be explained objectively for it to exists
Also scientists will constantly talk about how marvelous and advance our physical structures are but then refuse to accept any data from internal experiments such as meditation
Victory to our own self. There are 2 apparently distinct aspects of our experience. There is our own self and there is everything else. Non dualism perceives it as if they are one thing or at least not 2 things. All of us are the same. The outside world with its Gods and minds of others are seen as being totally powerless. They are not real. They are imagined. Nothing may be real. Our own self may be unreal also. When everything is perceived as unreal our own self has achieved victory. Everything is perceived as being powerless. All experiences are powerless and not real. What about the pain and pleasure of our experience? Love the all powerful all. Ask it for help with every problem. The all powerful all is not over us, rather it is us. We are all the same. Love everyone. Have no enemies. Get rid of all hate toward others and self. Do not worry about changing the others. There is only one self. It will take care of itself. Our wrong beliefs that are false are being replaced by correct beliefs that are true. There is no us and them. There is only the all powerful all.
The whole example with Mary, the color-blind scientist, seeing red and learning something new seems silly to me. He kept saying that the new thing in her brain was the satisfaction of her curiosity, but that assumes Mary has never had that "Ah ha" brain state. All that would happen when she finally sees red is that she experiences the brain state of "revelation" (maybe the wrong word there). That is surely something that she's already experienced before. There are no new brain states that comes into being for Mary. Am I thinking about this incorrectly?
I think by, "satisfaction of her curiosity", he means she is experiencing a specific new thought (i.e. what some would call a 'red' quale). Seems to me we cannot know whether or not Mary's academic knowledge combined with her imagination enabled her to synthesize/imagine/experience a 'red' quale especially in light of the fact that she is physiologically equipped to see colour. Even then she wouldn't know what name to attach to the quale because associating labels to experiences involves culture and learning. Seems to me we must admit that whatever thought manifests in someones conscious field in response to visual stimulation by light of a wavelength between 740 and 625 nanometers IS red for that someone, regardless of labels.
They are just F00LS. "We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description." Sean Carroll As if Sean cares about reality. How did Sean get around the first verses of the bible with God creating and giving life? Real science says nothing does nothing. Real science says if there was something there already it must fit with the evidence of what we know. We know the 1LT says there's a conservation of energy. It can change forms and neither can be created or destroyed. Creation cannot happen by natural means. The 2LT has various aspects, one being the universe is winding down, entropy. Usable energy is becoming less usable, so at one point usable energy was at its max. This all points to a supernatural creation, by a supernatural creator at a certain point in which matter, space, and time were created. When I read how it can happen otherwise, ALL the fools resort to science-fiction. Once a supernatural creation is accepted, then the next step is finding proof of what supernatural power did it. We KNOW these laws. We have NO doubts about them. We also KNOW that the laws of nature can't come about without a Lawgiver, God. So if Sean wants to pretend to be smart, please give me the laugh by giving science how creation really happened by natural means. Life only comes from life. Law of biogenesis. God is the reason for us and all we have. th-cam.com/video/JiMqzN_YSXU/w-d-xo.html The odds are NOT there. th-cam.com/video/W1_KEVaCyaA/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/yW9gawzZLsk/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/ddaqSutt5aw/w-d-xo.html
philpp Goff is right. Mary acquires new information because she discovers a reality that is irreducible to the physics of the brain and that she did not previously know.
I don't understand the following though: isn't the conversation supposed to be about the thing-in-itself? Or is Philip's view not focusing on that? Because for the thing-in-itself his arguments have some merit in my opinion. Then the physics indeed is not so important if we are just talking about the kind of substance which is observed by measurements and if we are structuralists about physics. However you don't get to give causal powers to consciousness I suppose, you only get to propose a kind of property dualism which Sean says at the start of the conversation he doesn't really care about as it's not much different than physicalism. I suppose you could even have a property dualism on a physicalist view without even calling it monism or anything.
52:00 Your 'red' and my 'red' cannot be compared. There is nothing that IS red in the world as clearly demonstrated by illuminating a ball that reflects only photons with wavelengths below 590 nanometers with light whose every photon is of wavelength shorter than 590 nanometers. Each of us undergoes a process in which we *learn* to associate the word 'red' with whatever thought arises in our conscious field in response to visual stimulation by photons with wavelengths greater than 590 nanometers and less than about 740. Thoughts are neural-frequency-discharge-pattern *encoded representations*. All thoughts! Thus thoughts are instantiated and maintained by *physical* processes. All it takes to understand the meaning of the word 'conscious' is to achieve the realization that a self IS a thought. It is both self evident and indubitable that one's self IS conscious, what one means when one says... 'I am conscious'. Consciousness is not a 'something' that I have! Conscious is what I AM. I am conscious. One IS either conscious or non existent. The curious thing about 'pattern' and 'process' is they are both abstract notions. Perhaps this is why thoughts and minds and selves have this odd immaterial flavour to them.
I would realy like to be a panpsychist because its so poetic as much as monotestic religion or idealistic phylosophy. But I got isues wich shows in some questions: If nothin exist but consciousness, then why my foot, toes, heart, or any other organs in my body isnt conscious, why my consiousness cant change moons gravity or suns orbit or gravity or move sun from its location to for exemple other star system, dont you say physical reality is constructing by our consciusness? then my consciousness must have capability to chnage physicla laws as he wish!
We are limited by our mind/body. Which are appearances within consciousness but we claim them regardless. Consciousness illuminates consciousness and it takes form as the laws of physics or our latest understanding at least
This is where Philip says that what it is like to have pain is information, and you cannot get that from physical science. I think Philip could reasonably respond to your point by saying that science may be experience, but it is not one like pain; for one thing, it is objective. On the other hand, his preferred alternatives do not seem to do any better. Panpsychism seems to say that the elements of consciousness are fundamental, so we just have to accept them without explanation, while strong emergence says they are not fundamental, and yet not explained by anything fundamental either, so we just have to accept them as they are in that case also. Philip also seems to be demanding more from science than we expect in any other circumstance, as there are no other cases where we expect a scientific explanation to create the phenomenon being explained. We have an explanation of thunderstorms, which does not, of course, actually create them, and yet we don't take this as reason to believe they are not physical. I would like to know more about what Philip means by "get" when he says you cannot get the information that is pain from physical science. It is certainly true that I cannot show you what my pain is like through language, but that is true of all language, whether scientific, philosophical or poetic (actually, the poets may have an edge over the other two!) There is, however, a plausible physical explanation for why that is so, that I sketched out in my earlier reply to carnap3 (TLDR; our self-aware, conscious minds have only a very limited access to our brain's physical state, and none to those of other people.)
@@A.Raybould Thanks for your reply. All science is objective so it can be passed around as language of science, information, repeatable data...But even with the science of meteorology we can make awesome predictions with supercomputers but no data tells us "what it's like to be a thunderstorm". The SO called problems with consciousness are: it is our most intimate experience, no objective data can explain the subjective, why red is 🟥.....or they have an entire ensemble of "the dog ate the homework". My pov as an engineer is they get hung up on the words in the advertising brochure and think they are solving the problem vs explaining their psychological straits. I'll begin my explanation at a simpler level from the psychologist pov with quarks and atoms that interact with their environments (their reality) under one set of laws.
Just to restate that all observations of the external start as experience or personal information. Like Newton watching the apple fall from the tree or Galileo observing the planets. Instruments like telescopes or colliders and measurement devices just enhance our senses or mimic them by detecting. Sean said you do the experiment in the collider and detect the energy for data and confirmation. Our own qualia or 🟥 is energy in unique distinguishable...forms (information). All of the Mary activity is about fact gathering so she can understand a unique information or energy state she attains. What do we mean by learn? ...something she can teach others? Teach herself?...
I think Sean is absolutely correct that wanting to change the core theory to account for consciousness is not really reasonable. I sympathise entirely with Philip's insistence that in consciousness there really is something that physicalism fails to explain, and it's very difficult to see how physicalism could *ever* explain it, since qualia are not accessible to third person observation. But I think Sean is totally wrong to say that consciousness is just a way of speaking about lower level phenomena, analogous to the way temperature weakly emerges from the motion of atoms. In the case of temperature, the lower level description *explains* the emergent feature. The hard problem of consciousness is that physicalist reduction *fails to explain* consciousness. Sean wants to have his cake and eat it - he wants to be a qualia realist, but he also wants physicalist reduction (aka weak emergence) to work. Perhaps we can have both, but until we have a theory of how the brain generates consciousness, we have have a profound explanatory gap. I would be much more convinced by Sean if he acknowledged that there is a crucial difference between a) one objectively observable property (e.g. temperature, or life) emerging weakly from lower level phenomena such that the lower level explains the emergent property; and b) something subjective, unobservable, but real (i.e. qualia, consciousness) emerging from lower level phenomena without any explanation as to how this happens. If Sean would admit this, he could then say that we need a theory that's consistent with the core theory to explain it, then I would agree with him. I think Sean realises that this would lead him to epiphenomenalism, and he doesn't want to go there, so instead he tries to convince us that b) is just like a) when it isn't. I think the choices are: commit to physicalism and say qualia don't exist (like Keith); be prepared to change the core theory to make way for consciousness with causal power (like Philip); or hang on to both the core theory and qualia but say goodbye to mental causation (epiphenomenalism). The pill that Sean doesn't seem to want to swallow is that if you build up your picture from quantum fields, to atoms, to molecules to cells, to a brain...you end up with a zombie. Physicalism is a compelling story that can account for everything we see, including human behaviour, without getting stuck - but it leaves out consciousness. Consciousness looks like an unnecessary add-on, which is why eliminativism (aka illusionism for Keith) is appealing. But if you won't accept that (and I certainly won't, I know damn well I'm conscious) then it looks like physicalism has got something missing, and then you're faced with some hard choices.
Hopefully. The only problem is that kastrup gets so wound up he gets emotional instead of sticking to the points. Hopefully the more practice he gets in his convos he will do better
Phillip was ganged up on! Is he really being antiscientific? That seems to be Sean's assumption. I think that the physicalist argument can be attacked at its base: it assumes that every thought has a corresponding brain state. I have a fanciful argument that I think has a visceral appeal and could be made into a proper argument if informed by known science and the correct example. Let me present it: The story of Mary shows one thing: that there is a plot and that there is a play. There is the Mathematical description and there is the reality. The mathematical description of a ball thrown in the air is not the same as the ball thrown in the air. In the same way, electro-chemical transmitters and the neurons and ganglia are not the experiences that the thrower of the ball encounters. All evidence is that something has these experiences. What, exactly, do the physicalists say that something is? Well, it’s a configuration of the brain, viz., brain states. Is it true that there are separate brain states for each experience of a human being? Is it true that for each emotional state we can point to specific brain and hormonal states that are reproducible? If all this were really true, the physicalists should be able to read minds after their program is realized. In that case, the physicalist could list the brain states and the thoughts and emotions implied by each brain state. I'm assuming a certain threshold that forces discretization of the brain states. But the fact is, there are only finitely many possible brain states in our universe and, therefore, only finitely many possible humanly recognizable thoughts at a given segment of time. So, what happens when we develop AGI, for instance, and the computer comes up with an idea outside of the humanly possible number of thoughts? Will we be able to understand the new thought at least as a thought? If you don't like that idea, what about if we list all the possible human thoughts and use some mechanical means of forming a new thought that is different from all the thoughts on our list? Will we not be able to understand that thought as a thought? For to understand the basic import of the thought the statement of the thought would have to be among the finite number of thoughts possible to humans. Would the thought when read appear to us as a random or nonsense sentence? That is, would we not be able to detect that intelligence could have created the thought thus stated? To be a little more specific, suppose that we generated elementary thoughts in increasing order about integer numbers for instance. Let’s say we look at numbers like 1.000000000000000 x 10^15, 1.000000000000001 x 10^15, …, 9.999999999999999 x 10^15. If each distinct number has its own configuration of neural pattern corresponding to the thought, there will have to be a integer number that we could not recognize as a integer number because all the possible neural patterns were used up. However, if it is not true that a mind presented with the numbers as given eventually reaches an impasse, then every mental phenomenon would not have its own unique brain state, and there would have to be something in addition to the finite brain involved in the phenomenon of thinking about the numbers. An intuition is that the mind would not reach such an impasse, and therefore, there must be something in addition. If so, what seems the most likely at the present time? (I realize that the plasticity of the brain may allow us to eventually understand the thought if we ever conclude that there is sense in it. But my argument does not depend upon whether we accept this possibility.)
Philips whole argument is "but I've got a feeling, so that equals more than 2 centuries of the collected works of physics", as if his subjective feeling overrides physics. There are mental diseases & injury, that can make people actually lose their "subjective" feeling of being consciously "alive". They still eat , walk, live ,etc. But some of them can end up dying of starvation etc, cos they aren't made aware of their bodies needs, in a personally important feeling way. Once you're made aware that consciousness is illusion, then your brain stops trying so hard to make you not notice it's actions. You become more aware of the purely physical interactions, make us "aware" of our subjective self. 😁🌏☮️
@@claudiaarjangi4914 But how does one know that the individual has lost his subjective feeling of being conscious given that it is subjective? Does the person report, "I have lost my subjective feeling of being conscious?" If so, who is "I" and why is "I" aware of anything? But the fact is, even if we found a thousand people who were automatons, that would not prove that consciousness is an illusion.
He keeps repeating that Mary gains new information, yet never explains how that proves or disproves the arguments laid out. It's such a nothing burger but he keeps repeating it like it's some kind of profound evidence that prohibits any other view from being correct then his. You see this all the time in debates between atheists and religious people, every time their argument is broken down they just repeat it again, demonstrating a complete lack of engagement with the discussion. "I'm right because I feel right" is really all it boils down to... They respond directly to what he says and then he says "that's not my point" but then never actually articulates the argument. He makes statements and declares them as arguments. Philip needs to learn how logic works.
Either Mary has all the physical facts, including the physical facts about the subjective experience of colour, or she has only the facts she could conceivably learn in her restricted monochrome learning environment. The thought experiment needs to make up its mind which of these things is actually true, then the outcome is obvious.
The issue is that current physical theories do not account for the subjective experience of color. We can of course add it “by hand” saying that the subjective experience emerges from the physics as described by current theories, but that is because we already know there is such experience. Imagine an extraterrestrial from another dimension with different physical laws being told that anything to known about reality on earth is described in the Core Theory. Life is not included in the Core Theory, but the extraterrestrial could run a simulation and see autonomous movement, duplication, etc. and conclude there is some form of life on earth. But the same conclusion could not be derived for the case of consciousness: the most the extraterrestrial could draw from the Core Theory is that we are a bunch of David Chalmers’ philosophical zombies
@@ugocorda2029Subjective experience, whatever it is, has physical effects; if you want to say that the cause is nonphysical then physically-identical zombies would lack those physical effects and could not be behaviourally identical; if the cause is physical then physically-identical "zombies" would have those effects and would be behaviourally identical, but would have subjective consciousness and not be zombies. If it turned out, though I doubt it, that the cause of subjective experience is novel to physics (rather than a novel way of understanding known physics), whether you want to call it physical or not is just a choice about the definitions of words.
@@paultrembath4131 I did not say that subjective experience is not physical, I said that you cannot currently derive it from the Core Theory. Which means that our latest physical theories are incomplete because they do not capture some aspects of the reality we experience. That does not imply, of course, that physical theories will not be extended in the future to capture those aspects. But right now they don’t: as David Chalmers says, from structure and dynamics (what our current physical theories capture) you can only derive structure and dynamics. By the way, if it is true that current physics is causally closed (Sean Carroll’s position), then those future extensions will only capture epiphenomenal aspects
What's remarkable is that Goff can go for two hours without saying anything sensible at all. It is remarkable that Sean Carroll could control himself in the face Goff's utterly senseless gibberish.
@@JackPullen-Paradox I agree. The one thing that I do like about him though is that he at least seems to really believe his stuff (nonsense as it is) . Can;t say the same for Kastrup and many others
I'm neither a physicist nor a philosopher but I reckon a philosopher would need to understand first the core theory of physics before arguing with a physicist about physics and changing the law of physics. This particular chat is painful to listen to as for the most part, a certain philosopher main argument is 30% of other philosophers agreed with me, so I must be at least 50% correct. If this is the quality of philosopher of our age, we should do better.
Phillip is being asked to go against the absolute determinism demanded by the current crop of physicist. I suppose that he was hoping against hope that his adversaries will demonstrate a little humility and realize that even though they know a little physics, they don't know everything. Which brings up the point that Phillip may be required to know Core Theory, but Sean should know a whole lot of things he doesn't know about philosophy. As for changing the laws of physics, since physics is all-encompassing, anything Phillip could have considered would require changing a law of physics. Sean focused the discussion on known theories and didn't allow consideration of anything else. Am I wrong?
I like Sean, but his views on philosophy zombie argument just being behavioral doesn't seem right to me. I am more in the camp with Phillip but I am def not for panpsychism.
I think Philip is the only one in the discussion that is able to Experience the Red Quale, or in other words the Experience of Redness. He seems to be frustrated with the other three who continuously try to minimize, distract, and obfuscate the Existence of the Redness Experience. I have come to the conclusion that Philip actually does Experience Redness in the same way that I do but the other three panelists do not have the Experience of Redness or the Redness Quale. The reason Philip is so frustrated is that he is arguing with people who are Qualia Blind for Color. They must never have actually Experienced the Redness Quale, but rather they Detect Red by sensing their Neural Activity, Brain States, in some way. So they are not Color Blind because they can tell when their Brain is signaling Red but they are not Experiencing the Redness Quale. It is telling that the only thing they think that Mary discovers outside the Gray Scale room is a new Brain State. That is exactly what they would Experience. They would not Experience something New like the Experience of Redness. The Experience of Redness transcends anything you think you know about Brain States. The Redness Experience cannot be Explanatorily pushed into any Brain State no matter how hard you try. The Redness only Correlates to Brain States and it is completely inexplicable how it IS a Brain State. But why should we all have the same kind of Experiences? Why can't there be people that have categorically Different and even Alien Experiences of Sense inputs? We won't know until Science is able to Measure actual Conscious Experiences instead of merely things that are Correlated with Conscious Experiences. These differences in how we Experience things is probably the cause for the endless arguments about Conscious Experience and Qualia. Some people might not have Qualia for certain senses. Edit addition: Another symptom for the lack of Qualia in three of the panelists is their inability to stay focused on the Redness Experience. They will almost always immediately drop back to talking about Brain States and Neural Activity. They cannot stay focused on the Quale of Redness because they don' t have it. They only have Brain states. Keith will say he Experiences the Redness Quale, but that Philip is just not thinking about it the right way. He does not even realize that there are not a bunch of ways of thinking about it, but rather you directly and immediately Experience it without any thinking needed. The Redness Quale is not the product of some kind of thinking, because it Exists as a thing in itself that is part of the Visual Experience that is Embedded in the front of our faces. Who can say what Keiths Experience of Redness is. Whatever his Brain State sensation might be, he thinks that is the Qualia because he has not known anything else. He seems to really have no idea what the Quale Redness Experience could possibly be (by the way he so blithely dismisses it as Illusion), and I have no idea what his Experience of Brain States are. He can only insist that the Brain States ARE the Experience of Redness because he does not know what the Quale of Redness is.
I wondered the same thing!! From what I can gather, think these types of physicalists must be property-dualists, in that they believe that certain physical states can have both physical properties and mental properties...and the existence of the mental properties is just handwaved away as higher-order emergence...
So, I take issue with Sean's framing of consciousness in behavioral terms. He claims that he is only interested in consciousness to the extent it impacts behavior, citing the philosophic zombie thought experiment as evidence that behavior can be explained without consciousness, and adding consciousness doesn't add any new behavior, and hence this added consciousness is meaningless. The core problem with this stance is that most people will fundamentally disagree. This is most easily elucidated by the example of a comatose patient. To the extent that the comatose patient is not conscious, we have the innate sense that their physical situation is less relevant since they can't feel it. Yet, to the extent that comatose patients ARE conscious, we are very interested and concerned about their state of affairs and making sure we don't add unnecessary discomfort to them while they are in that state. The conscious comatose patient and the unconscious comatose patient are identical in terms of behavior, but our value systems are keenly aware of the ethical difference.
Philip won this one as early on as @10:10 when he transitions to a deep growl to say the mathematical relations between consciousnness "ARE" the laws of physics...
What a disgusting video. If only the respective representatives of their business model of consciousness could see how utterly empty their product promises are. How they use all kinds of mental foam to uphold the correctness of their model as the only justifiable self-evident fact. Yes, I admit it, it is also partly amusing and certainly better than the shaman's heartfelt prayer in the Brazilian jungle.
I'm saddened by some of the comments that were recorded in the synchronous viewer chat beside the video. Mind Chat is all about communication between people who have different views but are committed to the search for truth.
Excellent conversation Keith!!
To put it succinctly why do brains generate alpha waves and gamma waves,? Those may be what philosophers call epiphenomenonal, but they are telling me something else in terms of how we generate experience.
I think you need to get an engineer in on one of these discussions...I'm game!
First rule of TH-cam: never read the comments
I do understand your frustrations. Yet it's what it is. It's all over the spectrum. If you are different whether due to a different religious belief, sex, skin color ideas.... It doesn't matter. People believe that you are to be ridiculed. But that's the ignorance that comes from people who don't have a clue how new discoveries come into being.
In your own words, define “TRUTH”. ☝️🤔☝️
@@ReverendDr.Thomas sounds kinda biased
Philip's crucial mistake is dialectical, he doesn't listen to others. You can see this by how he paraphrases their arguments, he mischaracterizes and exceedingly strips them of their force and nuance by making them short slogans.
And Sean doesn't?
@@JackPullen-Paradox
No. Sean actually KNOWS the physics, so he is the one that shows the lack of reality in the opposers arguments.
He made the awesomely powerful point, that, in order for this "strong emergence" or "universal consciousness" to be true,
the whole core of physics would have to be changed or overturned.
And people forget that those core principles aren't just come up with in a vacuum.
They make FULFILLED predictions. So unless ALL the predictions are somehow flukes...
😁☮️☮️
No not really, or at least exceedingly less than Phillip does.
I mean you can hear the franticness of his voice, his desperate grasping at straws. Sean is calm, patient, and collected.
@@JackPullen-Paradox
@@JackPullen-Paradoxno i don’t think so
Sean and Barry are like, totally private chatting each other right? It looks like it. Lmao.
Given that Phillip's position is heavily dependent on his acceptance of Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument (aka 'Mary the Neuroscientist', 'Mary's Room'...), I would like to point out that Paul Churchland gave what I regard as the definitive response in "Knowing Qualia: a Reply to Jackson" (1998). In this short paper, he argues that Jackson equivocates over the meaning of 'knows': what Mary knows before seeing red is propositional knowledge, while what she learns from seeing red is not - per Nagel ("What is it like to be a bat?", a favorite of dualists), all sorts of animals experience redness, but, lacking language, they cannot have any sort of propositional knowledge of it.
When, at 1:43:00 [1], Keith asked Phillip to say what Mary has learned about what it is like to see red, and its intrinsic nature, without using any relational, demonstrative or indexical terms, he is, in effect, making that point. If what she learned is not propositional, there's nothing mysterious in her not learning it in her studies, but only from having the experience.
[1] th-cam.com/video/azroNJhQd1U/w-d-xo.html
@queerdo You may be right about Philip's position beyond this discussion, but here, where he is arguing with Barry over whether introspection gives credence to panpsychism, it is the knowledge argument that he chooses to bring up. At this point, Barry had just challenged the idea that the conceivability of zombies can tell us anything about what pain is, so when Philip turns to the knowledge argument, he seems to be either deflecting Barry's question, or perhaps using the knowledge argument to justify the zombie one. In other work, he seems to find the zombie argument persuasive, but he does not seem to be making that particular claim in this discussion (Barry alone mentioned zombies.) Nor do I recall him raising Chomsky's objection, though I may have overlooked it.
Insofar as Philip's panpsychism has been described as a form of Russellian monism, there is a sense in which most of the discussion is about that.
@queerdo One other issue: it seems, from the chat log, that you think 'physical' is ill-defined by physicalists, but I feel it is actually at least as well-defined by them as it is by dualists (who also need a definition in order to draw a line), and considerably better-defined than the alternatives being proposed.
We can start with everything known to and explained by current physics - roughly, that which is under the purview of Sean's Core Theory.
Secondly, there are those areas where the core theory makes predictions, but where that are either known or strongly suspected to be incorrect, such as the mass of the neutrino or the question of why stars in galaxies are moving faster than can be accounted for. It would be absurdly tendentious to define these as non-physical - one might as well say that the physical begins and ends with the four classical elements, or at Descartes' knowledge of the material world.
More generally, our knowledge of the physical world can reasonably be expected to grow by those methods described by the philosophy of science, and physicalists will take this knowledge to be about the physical world as well.
This is as much of a definition as is needed by any form of physicalism that I am aware of, and it is quite conservative. Some physicalists, such as Searle and Penrose, think it will take some new fundamental physics to explain the mind, but there are many people, including Sean, who strongly suspect that the core theory will be sufficient. We are well aware that we do not have such an explanation, and therefore that this expectation is falsifiable, and I think most of us would be willing to leave it at that until more progress is made. There are also quite a few people, however, saying that this can not possibly be the case, so naturally we are interested in evaluating their arguments.
Turning to the specific positions being debated in these chats, Philip has written, in his reply to Sean within 'Putting Consciousness First', that the physical (his choice of word) properties that the core theory operates on, such as mass, spin and charge, are, according to Russellian panpsychism, forms of consciousness. He underscores this by saying that this is not just an analogy.
I do not see how you can say that and then claim that this is not a physical hypothesis! Whether it is a plausible modification of the core theory is impossible to say today, as it has not been worked out in anything near sufficient specificity for anyone to tell.
You have claimed that physicalists are just saying that the physical is all there is, which is not so, as shown by the definitions above, but ironically we seem to have Philip saying here that panpsychism is all there is!
With regard to Philip's alternative hypothesis, strong emergence, he says "If strong emergence is true, [the core theory] will make some false predictions about the locations of the particles in my brain at t+1." Well, by any reasonable definition, the positions and motions of particles are an aspect of the physical world, and it would be rather blatantly begging the question to add "...except in the brain", even though you have tried to put the mechanism beyond scientific explanation with the ad-hoc stipulation that it is strongly emergent (in another comment, @Lukas A. made the cautionary point that C. D. Broad "was more or less the last one to think that chemistry is strongly emergent" - his "The Mind and its Place in Nature" was published right at the time when atomic physics was explaining chemical interactions via quantum mechanics.)
It is one thing to make vague and general statements about ceteris paribus laws, but quite another to carve a specific exception out of the core theory for humans or human brains. Sean Carroll, in 'Consciousness and the Laws of Physics', made several specific arguments about how difficult that would be, and in this discussion, Philip acknowledged that addressing them required more work.
So long as one holds that the mind is causally effective in the physical world, it is a physical phenomenon by the definitions given above, which neither entail nor are predicated on saying that the physical world is all there is. One possible way out is epiphenomenalism, albeit one that Philip seems to be reluctant to take (for one thing, it might be antithetical to his views on cognitive phenomenology.) I agree with Keith when he suggests that Philip's line of reasoning leads to epiphenomenalism.
The more I learn about this debate, the more clear it seems that the willingness of those opposed to physicalism to embrace wildly speculative and empirically unsupported hypotheses comes down to one point that Bertrand Russell nailed with this aphorism: "It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not a part of physics." That, however, works as well if you substitute 'philosophy' for 'physics', and no alternative to physicalism has done any better in answering this challenge (just saying "well, it's not physical" does not explain anything.) Elsewhere in these comments I have explained why I think there is a very plausible path to a physical explanation for why we cannot tell other people what it is like for us to see colors or smell ammonia.
@queerdo Anyone - dualist or not - claiming that their hypothesis is not a physicalist one is just as much in need of a definition of physicalism as physicalists. Furthermore, the volume of verbiage on the topic shows that there is a sufficient definition for that debate to be conducted, and you have not, so far, said anything to the contrary.
I will, for now, ignore your ad-hominem bullshit, which merely reflects on your own immaturity.
@queerdo Your ad-hominems reveal a deep insecurity matched by a lack of maturity, but, aside from pointing this out, I will continue to ignore them for now.
I take, however, your point that I would be more likely to get worthwhile responses from you if I cut the issues up into bite-sized chunks for your consumption (naturally, I would prefer a response from Philip or Keith, but beggars can't be choosers...), so here goes...
I have already told you that there is already a satisfactory working definition of the physical, for the purpose of this discussion: everything explained by what Sean calls the core theory, plus, optionally, everything that could be explained by the future application of methods accepted by the philosophy of science. This is conservative, as science is not guaranteed to be able to explain everything that might fall under a broader but still coherent definition, but it turns out that antimaterialism is unable to prove that minds cannot fall within that restricted scope.
The definition you have given is at odds with this. We can probably skip the gratuitous "quantitative" - it so happens that scientific explanations are often quantitative, but Darwin wasn't wrong because he did not know the math of genetics - but the "publicly observable" part is an arbitrary, if not tendentious, stipulation. For brevity, I will make just one point, in the form of a quote from Freeman Dyson: "The Schrodinger wave-function is expressed in a unit which is the square root of an inverse cubic meter. This fact alone makes clear that the wave-function is an abstraction, forever hidden from our view. Nobody will ever measure directly the square root of an inverse cubic meter." You could, I suppose, argue that this shows physicalism restricted to the scope of current knowledge is incoherent, but you would be preaching to the choir.
Your assignment for tonight is to refute the argument I started this thread with, the one set out by Paul Churchland in "Knowing Qualia: a Reply to Jackson". For bonus points, explain why, if Philip does not put much store in the knowledge argument, it is the one he brings up to justify his dismissal of the physical difficulties facing his hypotheses.
@queerdo Much as you would like to direct the discussion in any other direction, one thing is abundantly clear: you have been unable to come up with any counter to Churchland.
Once you either put up or acknowledge that to be so, we can move on to the next step.
For additional commentary, see the comments under episode 6b.
Update: There was a comment from @queerdo posted earlier today, to which this was a direct response, but it seems to have disappeared from the thread, at least temporarily.
As someone from the computer science perspective, I feel like when talking about emergence, the word abstraction could also be useful.
Awesome : Sean: "what happens inside vs. outside planets" :) Even better was the conservation of momentum extending to weekends
Sean is plain stooo-pid.
"We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description." Sean Carroll
As if Sean cares about reality.
How did Sean get around the first verses of the bible with God creating and giving life?
Real science says nothing does nothing. Real science says if there was something there already it must fit with the evidence of what we know. We know the 1LT says there's a conservation of energy. It can change forms and neither can be created or destroyed. Creation cannot happen by natural means. The 2LT has various aspects, one being the universe is winding down, entropy. Usable energy is becoming less usable, so at one point usable energy was at its max. This all points to a supernatural creation, by a supernatural creator at a certain point in which matter, space, and time were created. When I read how it can happen otherwise, ALL the fools resort to science-fiction. Once a supernatural creation is accepted, then the next step is finding proof of what supernatural power did it. We KNOW these laws. We have NO doubts about them. We also KNOW that the laws of nature can't come about without a Lawgiver, God.
So if Sean wants to pretend to be smart, please give me the laugh by giving science how creation really happened by natural means.
Life only comes from life. Law of biogenesis.
God is the reason for us and all we have.
th-cam.com/video/JiMqzN_YSXU/w-d-xo.html
The odds are NOT there.
th-cam.com/video/W1_KEVaCyaA/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/yW9gawzZLsk/w-d-xo.html
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1:15:45 it's more akin having studied the limits of the wavelengths of visible light and concluding that there are probably no swans with a novel color outside of that spectrum.
When one looks as consciousness being the primary existence and physics being a later development, so much makes sense and fits.
What makes me see red is Goff's rambling incoherent presentation and irrelevant whiny asides. Goff doesn't listen to the other panelists and he seems unable to complete a single logical idea or grammatical sentence. He drones on and on with tired ideas like the Mary experiment which don't, as Sean says, have any probative value. Goff is not just a panpsychist, he is a severe annoyance.
The great thing about Philip is that he really struggles with solving the problem
When Mary asks "I wonder what it's like to experience red?" - she can have all the information about red, and she will have perfect understanding of the neural pattern that would occur in her brain after she sees red, the information she is missing is the indexical what is it like to be "a version of her" with that new neural pattern of seeing red. She can't know that because it is indexical, she can't have someone else's subjective experience because she IS her subjective experience. If she had someone else's subjective experience, it wouldn't be Mary, it would be someone else.
Confusing part is - if right now you are not seeing or actively imagining red, do you right now know what it feels like to see red? Maybe we tend to say yes because we has easy access to the memory of seeing red and in normal contexts that is what we mean by knowing. But knowing what it is like to see red IS knowing what it is like to be someone who is seeing red, which is indexical, and if you right now are not someone who is experiencing red, it makes sense to say you don't have that knowledge.
Mary is surprised because she feels like her before seeing red and her after seeing red is the same person, at the same time the information about what it feels like to be her past/future self is the same indexical information tha she can't have. But she still has the memory of what it felt like to be her before seeing red. When she acceses that memory, she doesn't directly have the same experience she had in the past, she has the experience of being someone who is seeing red and at the same time is accessing a memory of being someone who has never seen red. "Surprise" is obviously vaigue but this hopefully gives an account of why it happens, because it seems to be a pretty surprising experience to have. Experience is indexical, Mary is surprised because of indexical information about what it feels like to be somone who sees red and remembers not seeing it.
Frank Jackson himself made an important, but often overlooked, point about this issue: if all Mary learns is about herself (such as indexical knowledge like "That is what red is like", where "that" picks out an experience she is having), then his argument would not succeed, as that is new knowledge, created by her new experiences, so there is nothing to be explained in her not learning it from her studies. Jackson's contention, made more forcefully in 'What Mary Did Not Know', is that she learned something about what it is like for other people - and if that is factual knowledge, then those facts were true while she was studying, so the question would be, why did she not learn them then?
That "if it is factual knowledge" is an important caveat (to anyone who wonders if there is any other sort of knowledge, consider this: do you suppose someone, who had never ridden a bicycle, could read a book purportedly containing the facts that constitute the knowledge in knowing how to ride a bicycle, pass a written test on the subject, and then get on a bicycle and ride off as if they had been doing it all their lives?) This is what Churchland challenged (as did others, but I feel Churchland was most direct.) Nothing ever seems to be settled in philosophy, however, and this has spawned epicycle-upon-epicycle of ever more nuanced argument. If nothing else, this should make it clear that the argument is not the slam-dunk many people think it is.
To your suggestion that "if you right now are not someone who is experiencing red, it makes sense to say you don't have that knowledge", a dualist might say that you still have that knowledge, as you will be able to call on it when the occasion arises, and furthermore, you can make that happen just by imagining red - after all, I know a certain amount of math, even though I am not using it at the moment.
This, however, would be very much like another early response to Jackson: the Ability Hypothesis, which says that what Mary gains are abilities, such as to remember the experience of colors and compare those memories to what is before us, and that these abilities do not seem to work by knowing facts. This has fallen out of favor for reasons that often seem to me to be vague and tendentious, such as that it doesn't feel complete enough an explanation of experience, or that she must gain some non-indexical knowledge (but what? That's behind the question Keith asked Phillip, that I mentioned in my previous post.) Personally, I think the ability hypothesis is close to the truth, except that she does not gain the abilities on her release, she 'learned' them through evolution, but she has been prevented from exercising them.
To many dualists, the subjectivity of experience is persuasive, but it is possible to suppose that this is physically explicable. We know that new experience causes physical changes in the brain, and the physicalist supposition is that these are sufficient to account for Mary's mental changes. Mary's exhaustive scientific knowledge should allow her to predict what those changes will be in any color-vision scenario (and Jackson has stipulated that all those predictions are part of her scientific knowledge.) If she could put her brain in such a state, physicalism supposes she would now know what seeing colors is like, to the same extent and in the same sense as if she had actually undergone the corresponding experience.
But she cannot do that! The aware, reasoning, language-using part of our mind cannot address, let alone make precise changes to, the detailed physical state of our brains through its own mental efforts - it is just not wired that way (which is just as well, probably; if we had that power, it might be easy to accidentally 'brick' our own minds.)
You do not have to be a physicalist to see that this is a way in which Jackson's argument could be unsound, and not through a technicality - it really is straightforward in principle, even though we don't have the scientific knowledge yet to say this is the way things are.
In this view, the private, personal and ineffable nature of our experiences, which leads to them being subjective, follows automatically: the structure of our brains only grants our self-aware minds very limited access to our brains, and none to those of other people. We can only talk about our experiences on the assumption that other people experience life more-or-less like we do (and anyone for whom this is not the case has difficulty in understanding and communicating with other people about their experiences.)
Someone who says this can't be right because experience is too remarkable or nuanced or [insert adjective here] for this to be plausible is simply trying to use the Knowledge Argument to justify an argument from incredulity. Someone who says this can't be right because experience is a different sort of thing than anything physical is begging the question. Someone who says this can't be right because of zombies puts more faith in what a philosopher says he can conceive of than any possible amount of empirical evidence about how the actual world works. The Knowledge Argument is interesting, not because it proves something, but because it confronts us with the tacit assumptions we are making.
@@A.Raybould Excellent writeup. Philip seems to give too much weight to the intuitive feel of seeing red and thinking that that is not the short-hand form of registering and reporting of changed brain state. There is a little bit of incredulity in there. And on that basis the desire to amend the well-established core theory just because it does not feel right is misplaced.
Historically we were not directly aware of what happens microscopically and did not understand the laws of physics. But we did have direct experiences of the world. That is why our intuition is to think that the high-level description of the experience is primary. This is understandable. It is like people attributing the causes of diseases to eating rotten meat or spells and not knowing that the real cause is microorganisms.
@@SandipChitale Thank you for your comments. To be fair to Phillip, though, the topic here was not the arguments against physicalism, so it is understandable if he passed over some of the subtleties. I also suspect Keith was on to something when, at the end, he suggested that Phillip's line of thought might end up in epiphenomenalism.
@@A.Raybould Agree.
@@A.Raybould one reason I don't really like ability hypothesis is aphantasia - it seems that people who have no visual imagination would still be surprised upon seeing red for the first time and not consecutive times, so they must gain knowledge. This knowledge apppears to be very socially constructed. We see red incredibly often, we have a very complex idea of what red is, what it means for us, what things are red, what emotion it causes in us, and many other things that we ascribe to knowing what red is, being able to imagine red is not necessarily one of them.
Thinking about that knowledge, it is incredibly complex higher level information, but it is not indexical. After Mary sees red she forms a memory and certain relation to red, and if Mary before had perfect understanding of what that memory and relation would be, I think I lean towards the possibility that she wouldn't even be surprised upon seeing red. Before seeing red she would be in the same position as any of us can be when we are not seeing or actively imagining red. If she gets surprised, because of her perfect knowledge she would know beforehand that she will get surprised and what will surprise her which doesn't really make sense.
She would acquire the indexical knowledge of what it is like to see red, maybe, but it should be possible to describe that completely in relational terms. It would be strange if you can get surprised by the just the indexical knowledge alone, knowing everything relational about it, what would be there to cause surprise?
Philip, you seem to have the impression that the laws of quantum mechanics have only been validated for "a small number of particles". But, my impression, is that quantum physics makes predictions of macroscopic properties of things like the heat capacities, difussion coefficients, for example, of liquids that agree amazingly well with measurements. The quantum chemists field predict the structures of objects like proteins (nano scale, with hundreds of thousands of atoms), using algorithm that solve the sheoedinger eqn, and condensed phase physicists can predict the properties of metallic crystals, which are macroscopic objects ( Avogadro's number) also only using physics theories. At least in these fairly complex and huge domains, there has been little need to modify the theories - the brain, admittedly is more complex, but it's only in the sense that is more heterogeneous in composition... But i hope you can see better why most scientists don't expect strong emergence to be of any use.
It was a point of agreement with Sean that, in general, the experiments that confirm the Core theory involve small numbers of particles. I appreciate that certain chemical properties can be derived from QM. But we aren't able to test whether the core theory gives accurate predictions in any relatively complex living system, never mind a functioning brain.
@@philipgoff7897 wow, thanks for replying! I enjoy your podcast guys, keep it going. I guess what I'm getting at, is that one can use efficient approx. to the sheoedinger eqn. that area able to semiquantitatively predict the structure and function of proteins, polymers, sugars, DNA, etc ... As well as predicting complex chemistry (all of it, as far as we ever looked, in agreement with QM) in liquids... In short, The building blocks of biology can be understood via molecular models that obey physics. Weak physics emergence can model the biological world satisfactorily whenever we are capable of applying it - that gives, you have to grant, a huge baesian prior to expect the same in the brain.
@@philipgoff7897 sean can't even explain how we got our brains!
"We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description." Sean Carroll
As if Sean cares about reality.
How did Sean get around the first verses of the bible with God creating and giving life?
Real science says nothing does nothing. Real science says if there was something there already it must fit with the evidence of what we know. We know the 1LT says there's a conservation of energy. It can change forms and neither can be created or destroyed. Creation cannot happen by natural means. The 2LT has various aspects, one being the universe is winding down, entropy. Usable energy is becoming less usable, so at one point usable energy was at its max. This all points to a supernatural creation, by a supernatural creator at a certain point in which matter, space, and time were created. When I read how it can happen otherwise, ALL the fools resort to science-fiction. Once a supernatural creation is accepted, then the next step is finding proof of what supernatural power did it. We KNOW these laws. We have NO doubts about them. We also KNOW that the laws of nature can't come about without a Lawgiver, God.
So if Sean wants to pretend to be smart, please give me the laugh by giving science how creation really happened by natural means.
Life only comes from life. Law of biogenesis.
God is the reason for us and all we have.
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The odds are NOT there.
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@@philipgoff7897 Doesn't your acceptance that the Core Theory might explain brain function undermine your brilliant, key point that if human self-consciousness is fundamental to all meaning, then arguments about physical theories are irrelevant? Incidentally, so does your quasi-nominalism about "parties" and your quasi-reductionism about 'weakly' emergent features.
No wonder they can't get what your "consciousness-first" really means - let alone preface ALL their philosophy of physics statements, as they should, with "assuming human grasp of meaning is not foundational".
As Sean repeatedly and clearly explained, there is zero reason to believe physics is different in the brain than in a rock, a tree, the planet Jupiter, or anywhere else barring truly extreme environments such as a black hole. It’s laughable that you think it would be. This whole exchange felt like you bringing an intellectual toothpick to a nuclear bomb fight. Almost pitiful to see you make the same silly points over and over.
The volume of each person was not very equalized... made a bit hard to listen.
On first question,
"My own view is that, relative to the physical domain, there is just one sort of strongly
emergent quality, namely, consciousness. I do not know whether there is any strong
downward causation, but it seems to me that if there is any strong downward causation,
quantum mechanics is the most likely locus for it. If both strongly emergent qualities and
strong downward causation exist, it is natural to look at the possibility of a close connection
between them, perhaps along the lines mentioned in the last paragraph. The question remains
wide open, however, as to whether or not strong downward causation exists"
David Chalmers.
I thought of a few new words while listening to this exchange: "Panfrustrationism" and "Panconfusionism"
It seems folks carry such divergent intuitions into these sorts of debates that no amount of argument is going to bring respective views closer together. I share some of Philip's intuitions about the knowledge argument, but Barry dismisses this intuition with his sense of different kinds of concepts. I'm not a Wittgensteinian when it comes to metaphysics, but listening to exchanges like this tempts me to throw up my hands and accept that we're all just playing different language games.
I will say, though, that Sean Carroll's conception of the "core theory" is a mash-up and not serious physics. Plasma physicist Tim Eastman (2020) has several pages of criticisms of Carroll's view as articulated in his book 'The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself' (2016). Carroll takes up the God’s eye perspective by offering a single “core theory,” an equation combining quantum mechanics, spacetime, gravity, matter, the Higgs field, and other forces, which he claims leaves no room for new aspects of the universe that are not already well understood. Eastman points out that, while the components of this core equation represent great achievements, in practice no one has ever succeeded in combining them into a practical model or simulation. Carroll’s core theory thus amounts to no more than a mashup and is not anywhere close to being a working equation (126). On Eastman’s reading, Carroll makes several unstated metaphysical assumptions including actualism, physicalism, and causal closure, leading him to mistake an amalgam of dyadic input-output models as though they could serve as an ultimate explanation for the universe (127). Rather than accepting Carroll’s actualist rendering of the Feynman path-integral formulation of quantum physics (where electrons are assumed to take every path, with the largest probability being given to that path which approaches classical physics), Eastman argues that “physical relations emerge from [the] multiple sampling of potentiae pre-space, which is operationally handled by the principle of least action, reflecting optimization of relations of relations in this pre-space” (138). Rather than prematurely limiting our creative cosmos to the idealized deductivist models of current physics, or suggesting untestable “scientific exotica”(82) like the vast ontological overflow of actualized possible worlds as in the “many-worlds” interpretation, Eastman leaves open the possibility of genuinely novel emergence within the only universe we could ever know anything about.
I know I'm a nobody but i just can't understand how can eminent philosophers like Dennett, Frankish or a good physicist like Carroll don't recognise that consciousness is something fundamental and non physical? All analogies such as digestion and what not simply fail because consciousness is the only non physical example there is.
@@vanonu It's because they haven't seen any convincing arguments that it is nonphysical (there aren't any). Saying that analogies don't apply to it because it's not physical is begging the question. The argument that subjective experiences are fundamentally inaccessible to others just doesn't work, as Sean pointed out. If consciousness affects the external world and vice versa there is nothing preventing us from forming inferences about it using the same methods we might use for anything else.
@@GammaPunk Just a quick question. Say lots of 700nm photons enters my eye and then the following happens:
1) Chemicals, electrons move between neurons and other stuff in brain take place.
2) I experience the visual feeling of redness.
Are you/Carroll saying 1=2 or 1 causes 2?
I've heard the Mary in a black and white room allegory 100 times and every time it just illustrates the limits of language in its usefulness to explain subjective experience. What the allegory does not, however, is somehow explain how elections have feelings if you put enough in a room together.
Philip's objection that there are "only simplicity reasons" to expect physics to work in the brain is technically correct, but that's because simplicity is a surprisingly deep and necessary part of science and all other forms of inference. The theory that the sun will rise every day is only slightly more simple than the theory that the sun will rise every day except next Tuesday and only in a small village in the Alps. But a person who lives in that village is still justified in expecting the sun to rise on that day, and inference of any kind would be impossible if they could not do so.
Sean is right that there is more than *just* a parsimony argument here, at least on the surface, but it's unavoidable in the foundational justification of science. Even if there are deep and sacred principles of QFT that say that it should work in this case, you have to appeal to simplicity to say that those principles still apply to new situations without modification. That's fine, we have to make that assumption to do any inference or prediction of any kind.
I see this happening over and over again with science deniers and bad philosophers: since the Problem of Induction isn't solvable, any time science makes a prediction you can simply ignore it if it's in any way inconvenient to you.
You've misunderstood my argument. I totally agree that we should take simplicity constraints very seriously, in the absence of other grounds for belief. The point is I think we have strong philosophical grounds for thinking consciousness is strongly emergent.
@@philipgoff7897 What philosophical arguments make you think the Core Theory is not applicable inside the brain?
@@GammaPunk It's complicated, but for a start, there are good arguments against materialist reduction (e.g. knowledge argument).
@@philipgoff7897 The rejection of materialistic reduction in the explanation of qualia does not logically imply strong emergence (i.e. modification of the existing Core Theory). Qualia could just be an aspect of reality which, admittedly, is currently not accounted for by our physical theories (hence the knowledge argument), but whose relevance might only be epiphenomenal, i.e. might play no role in the aspects of reality captured by our physical laws i.e. structure and dynamics
@@ugocorda2029 sure, I was simplifying in lots of ways. My point was just that reflections on physics did nothing to counterbalance any philosophical case against strong emergence
It seems the panpsychist reductionism is mislabeled as an 'idealist reductionism.' Panpsychism would be that there are, at the fundamental, rock bottom level, physical aspects of nature, and 'also' consciousness or proto-consciousness fundamentally, so that there are two, irreducible aspects of nature, physics and consciousness. the idea that mind is fundamental and physics is derivative is idealism. Idealism is defined as the view that all that exists is mental, or mind-dependent. Therefore, the idea that everything is dependent on and reducible to mind, is idealism, not panpsychism.
Just that the "mental nature" of things on close examination is not helpful at all, other than it's so ad hoc that it can seem like a possible explanation. And at the same time there are so much better explanation that do not require any ontological lift
Poor Philip is on his toes the whole episode lol. Loved the conversation guys.
He was last episode too. He should get josh Rasmussen on here with Sean
Panpsychism is seemingly the most wrong view 😂 either illusionism or idealism should be the arguments.
Although Philip did appear to be somewhat dogmatic here, and struggled to present a compelling case for strong emergence, I feel for his frustration in this video. How on earth are these intellectuals thinking or acting like there is nothing to be disturbed by the hard problem of consciousness? Poor Philip's repetition of the philosophers' poll might have come from the desperation that nobody wants to acknowledge that the problem is not as easily demystified as they presume. Keith and Barry surely would know how delicate the problem is as any other philosophical problem is, but their attitudes are like those old-school physicists who pretend (or believe) that there is nothing serious or mysterious about the measurement problem, if you just shut up and calcus.
There are actual mental illnesses & injuries, that take away that "consciousness" feeling & the feeling that they themselves have their own "feelings" or awareness, in their sufferers.
They do stuff etc, but they actually feel like a zombie or like they are already "dead".
If consciousness was not what Sean etc explain ( physics, & so physical senses giving a feeling of self awareness ),
then that would not be possible, for a person that works, in all respects except that damaged part
( just like brain damage changes personality etc )
I think, once you've come to the awareness, that consciousness is purely physically emergent of chemical interactions,
then you start to be able to feel what that means, in your own mind/ consciousness.
You start to lose the whole "illusion" of consciousness, & become aware of the physical clicking over of each input & interaction.
THATS why I can see Sean is right.
Cos when you let go of that illusion, your brain "opens the doors" to reality, without the layers between to hide it.
😁🌏☮️
@@claudiaarjangi4914 Well put!
@@Ryebread8373 Thankye.😁🌏☮️
I think one line of argument for strong emergence might go:
1. The normal state of reality is nothingness
2. In order to get the universe "started" or "off the ground", we need something metaphysically different from nothingness; something strongly emergent because there can't be weak emergence from nothingness
3. The most plausible candidate for that "something" are the laws of physics
4. Therefore, the fundamental laws of physics are strongly emergent - we can't probe any further why they exist, they just do, and they are why there is something rather than nothing
5. Despite their strong emergence, the laws of physics are intelligible and create the reality we exist in
6. Consciousness is just like these fundamental laws, except at a higher macrolevel
7. Consciousness as a strongly emergent property or set of laws is likewise intelligible with the universe, because the strongly emergent fundamental laws are capable of creating an intelligible universe, so why not just add consciousness in that mix?
Of course this would result in altering the core theory - the contention would be that the core theory + consciousness gives the real description of reality and that our current theory is incomplete. I also don't think this would work on Sean since I think he's a Humean about laws of physics. I'm also not sure if I'm equivocating on the phrase "strong emergence" here.
The work of August Stern and his Matrix Logic is a proposal for how the cognitive brain affects the fundamental wave mechanics of the brain.
My sister-in-law found out pineapples are a symbol of a warm welcome. So, my brother and sister-in-law have pineapple designs all over their home.
Amazing discussions, I delighted the exchanges.🎉 1:03:43
Hows that circle going team? Still round? Keep up the good work team 👌🏼
Great debate, frustrating as hell sometimes, but that is often a symptom of a substantial discussion. I don't think that "Mary's room" is some kind of silver bullet for antiphysicalists and it is not that complicated either. Let's say on physicalist view that information, knowledge, memory for a human are just complex states of particles in that humans brain over some time. What new "information" did Mary gain? The answer is simple and physical - there was a new configuration of particles in her brain, which did not occur before - the configuration we coloquially call "Mary saw red" and Mary would call "experience of red".
Why does the configuration of particles equate to the sensation of red? Are we to infer that consciousness is everywhere since configurations of particles are everywhere? If not, why only some configurations and not others?
@@transcendentphilosophy Why do some configurations of particles equate to a planet and some other configurations to a car? That's how it works, there are the building blocks and you can build many different things from them.
This was very frustrating to listen to. I think I will need to listen to it again.
Something I was not sure about here: is the primary issue about strong emergence of any kind in the brain, or strong emergence that in some way involves violations of the laws of physics at the level of macroscopic systems like the brain? Philip's view, to my understanding, is based on rejecting constitutive varieties of Russelian monism. It seems to me a main motivation is rejecting that the microqualities (which are the intrinsic natures of microphysical particles) metaphysically necessitate the macroqualities.
The reason I am curious about this is that Sean actually draws the dilemma out, where the panpsychist either accepts an account of the microqualities that doesn't modify the laws of physics/behavior (in which case he sees the view as inconsequential) or does admit such modification. I would think that the brain being within the domain that the core theory applies tells us more about ruling out modifications of the laws of physics at the macro-level than about strong emergence of the "inconsequential" sort (the kind not modifying behavior), which is addressing the difference between constitutive panpsychists and emergentist ones.
In particular, constitutive panpsychism would involve adding a lot of theory to our core physics theory as is -- basically, a theory of the intrinsic natures at the micro-level. Without these microqualities, the question of Philip's kind of strong emergence seems not to arise -- I don't think he views consciousness at the level of the brain as strongly emerging from the kinds of properties of microphysics in our current core theory, so much as emerging from a core theory that is modified not just at the macro-level but the micro-level to add the microqualities/intrinsic natures?
On a different note, for what it's worth, I've tended to think the best answer to Sean's challenge about what use/consequence there is to adding these extra microqualities in panpsychism is really if they somehow explained why the fundamental particles of microphysics follow the laws of physics they do -- that is, explain the causal powers. But of course, this would be true of virtually any sort of additional info about the nature of physical particles granted by Russelian monism -- whether of a panpsychist variety or otherwise (there are some flavors that are more physicalist).
This Philips WHOLE argument is "bu bu but i feel a thing!!!"
🤦♀️🌏☮️
Yes. That is the whole point! There is a QUALITY to experience that cannot be described by physics. Please explain to me how a physical model could explain the qualitative experience of green, even in principle?
Maybe this helps clear-up some of the confusion...
Philip's interlocutors might, unwittingly, be Platonists. Only for platonic ideals can one equate comprehension with expereince.
Let us take the example of the non-platonic experience of "Red color", i.e., of redness.
(1) There is the phenomenon of "Redness". All red color has redness, but so does purple color, and orange have redness
(2) There is the concept of "Red color", viz., a color that generates the phenomenon of redness in the non-color blind
(3) There is the red object, say Erythrosine dye molecule. Note that, to the non color blind, erythrosine will provide the experience of redness, and therefore it will be considered red by them. A spectrophotometer, too, will ascribe the label "Red" to it, but that without the experience of redness (in the sense you and I might have it). A color bind person might calibrate a shade of grey to red, and so she too will then see red, but not experience redness.
Evolutionarily, the experience of redness has no additional benefits, beyond the discernment of "Red". The comprehension of RED, as a category, is sufficient for survival. The experience of redness, in addition to that comprehension of RED, is not incrementally beneficial to survival.
(4) The word, "RED" is a lexical label, and
(5) The wavelength 700 nm is a spectral signal for REDNESS
(6) Them, there is chemical isomerism that helps translate the radiation to a chemical signal, which then
(7) Gets carried into the brain as a neuronal signal (electro-chemical gradients?)
(8) The brain then combines the information into a composite input, that connects the mere input of RED, with info relating to sounds, speeds, memories, space, time, etc. At the level of the brain, we already have level 5 autonomy. What we do not have yet is "EGO", the sense of self. And therefore, we do not yet have agency.
(9) Finally, the "MIND" is where meaning, including the association with the sense of "ME" occurs. The mind is where agency rests.
There is no subjective experience yet. None is needed for autonomy or agency.
(0) The activities of the mind are enlivened into an experience by Consciousness. "REDNESS" is only meaningful because we have consciousness of it. That is why Consciousness is primitive to Redness. Consciousness comes first in the epistemic and ontological analysis of our reality.
Now, Mary's optical apparatus has not encountered 700 nm electromagnetic energy, and so her rods and cones have not activated the neuronal signal that leads to the brain-state of RED, and the mental activity of "I SEE RED". Unlike Philip, I believe that this entire chain, up to & including the mental activities listed, is non-spiritual, and quite possibly explained by the physics we already have. The red dye is not the experience of redness, nor is the 700 nm light, nor the inverted real image, that falls on rods on cones, causing their molecules to isomerize, those isomers are not the awareness of red color, nor is the neural signal it generates, etc.
Unlike Keith, et al., I do not believe this explains the subjective experience of REDNESS. It is an empty and untenable claim that the electrochemical potential state of a bunch of neurons is the same as an experience. This sounds like a massive category error. There is a distance of 1 km between Rose and Jack's homes. The map too illustrates it. However, to assert that the map is identical to reality, or even our apprehension of reality, is a case of severe naivete.
Is Redness a reality in the same sense as mass, space, speed, temperature, etc., are realities? Yes, in the sense of our consciousness of these qualia, abso-bloomin-lutely. Where mass has an objective aspect, and so does Red (700 nm, or erythrosin, or a certain conformation of rotamers in cones), but these objective fabulations rely on consciousness, the first person subjective experience, for realization.
Here is what that means. Let us say you are told to contemplate 10 kgs. You cannot contenplate 10 kgs without some subjective mental representation. Your mind invokes the sense of certain muscular challenge, the pressure of (say) a 10 kg metal ball in your hand. The ball has a certain appearance and feel and, if you dropped it, the possibility of a metallic report. The point is, like Barkley, you conclude that the objective and the subjective are inseparable when you need to make sense of them.
When you do math, and say, 10kg is 7 kg greater than 4 kg, then you are not so much dealing with kgs, as with ideas (of numbers and subtraction). And in that case, your relationship to the reality of ideas is essentially platonic.
Experience is NOT the same as a commensurable objective reality. Experience is subjective reality, and is essentially non-commensurable. Personally, I believe it might not be where physics ends, but where it begins. Consciousness might be the basis of all reality, including physics.
What does physics teach us about consciousness? Apparently nothing!
1:00:00 "Mary gains information"...well it's personal experience but to make it information means should could pass it on to her twin or use it herself at a later date.
You can't convey the character of a red experience to someone who hasn't had the experience, but it's information nonetheless, as shown by the fact that Mary's curiosity is satisfied 'Ah, so that's what it's like to see red!'
@@philipgoff7897 Thank You Philip...yes all information is personal. When Einstein discovered Special Relativity only he knew it and understood it subjectively, until he could pass it on to others. Seeing Red is subjective but we cannot pass it on through language. Language is how we access each other's minds. There is a science language incompleteness working for subjective experiences that are hidden. However Mary knows the personal meaning of red and can talk about it in a more complete way with others? Science language is about being counterintuitive or breaking accepted intuitions, like the earth moves, time is relative, there are fields and action at a distance. Mary can read all of the literature about seeing red, but what intuitions can she break by reading about it?
That would be like defining energy as that which can be passed on to another atomic entity at a later time. Bound energy may not be so transmitted except in catastrophic circumstances. Personal experience is transmitted based on shared experiences but not directly. That is like transmitting mathematical truth, to name one of the simpler truths that we impart. The person to whom the truth is imparted must have gone on the journey to learn the truth for himself. You would just be a beacon light pointing out the location and general nature of the truth.
great point by Keith about reference. Also about atoms in the brain
How did we even get the brain? Oh, and atoms?
"We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description." Sean Carroll
As if Sean cares about reality.
How did Sean get around the first verses of the bible with God creating and giving life?
Real science says nothing does nothing. Real science says if there was something there already it must fit with the evidence of what we know. We know the 1LT says there's a conservation of energy. It can change forms and neither can be created or destroyed. Creation cannot happen by natural means. The 2LT has various aspects, one being the universe is winding down, entropy. Usable energy is becoming less usable, so at one point usable energy was at its max. This all points to a supernatural creation, by a supernatural creator at a certain point in which matter, space, and time were created. When I read how it can happen otherwise, ALL the fools resort to science-fiction. Once a supernatural creation is accepted, then the next step is finding proof of what supernatural power did it. We KNOW these laws. We have NO doubts about them. We also KNOW that the laws of nature can't come about without a Lawgiver, God.
So if Sean wants to pretend to be smart, please give me the laugh by giving science how creation really happened by natural means.
Life only comes from life. Law of biogenesis.
God is the reason for us and all we have.
th-cam.com/video/JiMqzN_YSXU/w-d-xo.html
The odds are NOT there.
th-cam.com/video/W1_KEVaCyaA/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/yW9gawzZLsk/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/ddaqSutt5aw/w-d-xo.html
If you stick with the core theory, you are staying or stuck at a very fundamental level. Consciousness reduces to that level in the same way that water reduces to that level. However it is molecular structure that causes the unique emergence of water. Likewise it is biological cells and specifically neurons that emerge consciousness.
The argument is not whether the core theory can explain consciousness, but whether physics gives us grounds for doubting strong emergence.
@@philipgoff7897 You can devise a physical theory of consciousness based on Planck Time that is emergence which does not modify the laws. Why does the brain emit alpha waves and gamma waves which are in the range of 40 Hz? These waves are regular and not the result of random firing of neurons. These biological periods are much slower periods than the atomic or molecular levels. To an engineer like me it's more a question of how a lower level of reality scales (emerges) into our level of reality.
The key question here is what does Philip mean when talking about Mary the colour scientist by saying "she gains new information", or rather how should we think about this process.
The problem as I see it is that saying "she has all the information that physics can tell us about colour" sounds very innocent but actually is a very misleading statement. One has to bear in mind that all the information that physics can tell us about colour is larger than the information storage capacity of Mary's brain, and it is not clear that it is even a finite amount of information.
Importantly a subset of the information of what physics can tell us about colour would include a complete model of the brain of a human seeing colour. It would also include a complete model of an octopus brain seeing colour. In the case of the octopus brain it is clear that Mary does not contain the computational capacity to store or use this model. With the example of a human brain seeing colour she does not need to hold a model in her brain, she can just directly use her brain as the model. To do so she would need to induce the neuronal firings that cause a human to see colour.
The counter to the thought experiment would be to consider Marvin the super-intelligent being. Marvin has a computational capacity that is many orders of magnitude larger than a human and is capable of modifying his computational centre (his equivalent of a brain). The question then is, if Marvin has the capacity to (and does) simulates an entire human being seeing the colour red, does Marvin know what it is like to be a human who sees the colour red?
I think the honest answer is that we can't ever hope to *know* the answer to the Marvin question, as we ourselves have limited computational capacity. We could only ever infer that Marvin did know what it was like in the same way that I can infer that it is likely that other humans have a similar experience to me when they see the colour red. But we certainly have no evidence to suggest that Marvin doesn't know what it is like to be a human who sees the colour red.
We already have a legal and ethical and in fact a required procedure before a surgery in which an Anesthesiologist predicts and injects a brain state into the brain of a patient who has previously not experienced unconsciousness (analogous to Mary not having seen red before situation), and after the anesthesia wears off the patient does say their curiosity of what it feels like to be unconscious is satisfied (analogous to Mary's curiosity about seeing red being satisfied after seeing an actual red object). To the extent I know, the chemistry of the interaction of the anesthesia and brain is well within the core theory. Isn't that enough to give high credence to the physicalism-based theory of consciousness? And mind you this is not about a mere conscious experience like seeing red. This is about taking away the very consciousness.
Anesthesiologist predictably applies anesthesia and puts a patient under and takes away their consciousness. They do it using a physical substance/chemical. Of course, anesthesiologist does not know how the patient is feeling when unconscious. But they can make the patient unconscious predictably. And that prediction is based on an understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology of the brain. I think if science can predict how a person's consciousness can be PREDICTABLY affected using the physical mechanisms that tells us that physicalism is likely true. And even more so when the absence of physical effect will not cause the corresponding change in conscious experience. That is a positive and anti-positive case for it.
One more thing, we do not only have to externally do the measurement to say the patient is unconscious. We can just and also ask them after the anesthesia wears out. The point being we can, in such an experiment, use the reporting of the state of consciousness by the subject themselves as the data point.
Philip admitted that there HAS to be a physical change to Mary's brain for Mary to say that she now knows what red looks like and more IMPORTANTLY, that it will NOT be the case if THAT physical change was prevented from occurring (say by stopping signals from eyes to reach the brain or disrupting the brain chemistry such that it cannot process the signals the right way) then he is admitting to physicalism. It seems to me that Philip's incredulity that the notion of Mary reporting that she now knows what red looks like could be the same as the high-level language expression of the fact that she has this new state of the brain resulting from seeing the red color, is the cause of his objection to physicalism. But as was pointed out by Sean several times, one's incredulity cannot be a strong enough motivation to propose that the core theory needs to be augmented to account for consciousness. It seems to me that Philip may be taking that too lightly. Keith also pointed out that if one insists that the reporting of certain conscious experiences is not the same as high-level shorthand for reporting brain states, cause Philip to demand that physicalism cannot explain the subjective experience. A simple question Philip should ask is - is it conceivable that Mary could be made to know what red looks like without making any change to her brain whatsoever. I think the answer to that is no. I think Philip probably missed the point that Sean made about science works i.e. how we predict what happens at the center of the Sun even though we have never put an actual experiment there. Using a similar methodology, Sean was saying that the physics of particles inside the brain is same as their physics outside the brain. This is the point about the applicability of laws of physics in different regimes. And that we do not (practically) have ANY reason to think that the regime inside the brain is different than that outside the brain as far as applicability of core theory goes. And even though Sean was jokingly saying that there are many Nobel prizes ready to be had if one can make proposals to change the core theory that actually works, it is also a very serious point. I never understand what is so clever and special about Mary's experiment. The main point of is true for any new experience, right? Seeing red for the first time is different than seeing blue for the first time. Why do we need to specifically imagine a black and white room etc.
Playing Thought Experiments:
If you throw a collection of car parts into a box, you would not claim there is........ "vehicleness"... Assemble them into an automobile and you can argue vehicleness is fundamental to those parts. If those parts were the most fundamental level of nature you could argue vehicleness is fundamental to nature.
Sean is correct because you don't need to change the laws of physics vs figure out how those neurons and brains are assembled. Of course they used to have the same argument two centuries ago about biology, life and vitalism. The consciousness debate is just the result of not getting to the next step up from biology.
Can any of these jokes explain how we even got the brain?
"We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description." Sean Carroll
As if Sean cares about reality.
How did Sean get around the first verses of the bible with God creating and giving life?
Real science says nothing does nothing. Real science says if there was something there already it must fit with the evidence of what we know. We know the 1LT says there's a conservation of energy. It can change forms and neither can be created or destroyed. Creation cannot happen by natural means. The 2LT has various aspects, one being the universe is winding down, entropy. Usable energy is becoming less usable, so at one point usable energy was at its max. This all points to a supernatural creation, by a supernatural creator at a certain point in which matter, space, and time were created. When I read how it can happen otherwise, ALL the fools resort to science-fiction. Once a supernatural creation is accepted, then the next step is finding proof of what supernatural power did it. We KNOW these laws. We have NO doubts about them. We also KNOW that the laws of nature can't come about without a Lawgiver, God.
So if Sean wants to pretend to be smart, please give me the laugh by giving science how creation really happened by natural means.
Life only comes from life. Law of biogenesis.
God is the reason for us and all we have.
th-cam.com/video/JiMqzN_YSXU/w-d-xo.html
The odds are NOT there.
th-cam.com/video/W1_KEVaCyaA/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/yW9gawzZLsk/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/ddaqSutt5aw/w-d-xo.html
2:00:54. One word sums up Sean's explanation... environment.
Carroll's argument for the causal closure of physics is great but the statement that no one cares about theories of consciousness which don't modify physics just doesn't seem true: If we are living in a simulation we would still care about our experience in the simulation much more than whatever's happening in the true "physical" base layer; We care about dreams and ppl with locked-in syndrome even though subjective experience doesn't influence behavior in those contexts (sure neuron patterns are changing but surely that's not what ppl care about).
Hope we can see some discussions with epiphenomenalists such as Richard Chappell on MindChat!
Yea I agree with this if epiphenomenalism is true, I would still care. And that would be compatible with causal closure.
I don’t understand how the red example proves anything about a strong emergence. There are two examples of how this is simply new information. The side effect of you feeling elated doesn’t make it anything more than new information.
When I first saw pictures of flowers taken in ultraviolet, I felt intrigued and elated. I could appreciated what a bee was seeing and how flowers communicated to insects. It was novel and new info that had an emotional part because I feel connected to nature. The emotional part is just that: emotions.
The above example would still work if my eyes and brain only evolved to deal with one frequency range around red. The flower pattern would be different to what i’m accustomed to seeing and the patterns would be striking and help me understand how a bee locates a flower. I’d find that exciting even if I had the visual capacity of a dog.
Regarding a person who is a physicist specialising in electromagnetic radiation and colour in general but has a vision problem with colour blindness: let’s say they get new glasses that somehow fix the deficit in the eye cones and suddenly they start seeing colours. What happens other than existing brain pathways getting stimulated and making connections they should have done before. I’m sure the person would feel a welling of mixed emotions. They have new information that may help them navigate the world better. It would also help them navigate their social world better.
I’m afraid that the absolute majority who want to stick to such notions of consciousness being outside the laws of physics, are really holding on to archaic vestiges of emotional feelings as being more real than reality itself. In my experience, emotions have added colour to my life but they haven’t served me well. For somebody with ADHD and an amygdala that isn’t properly tempered by a frontal lobe, emotions can lead to a world of pain through impulsive decision making. To survive you have to reign in your emotions and distrust them without blocking them.
Emotions are intrinsically tied to consciousness but they aren’t physically real. We perceive them as being real because that’s how the brain evolved. The world doesn’t change when I’m angry. I can take stupid decisions though and change outcomes for me and those around me.
During a brain MRI the atoms in the brain behave exactly according to current physical theories used to design the MRI machine: no surprising behavior of atoms was ever noticed from the fact of being inside a brain.
More detailed examination of particle behavior inside the brain would be very interesting but extremely difficult to achieve. For example, comparing the probability profile of a quantum measurement of the same particle inside and outside the brain.
Each pixel on fmri scan corresponds to 5.5 millions neurons. We have no idea what it would or wouldn't look like if what we're seeing were reducible to currently understood chemistry/physics.
@@philipgoff7897 Quite the contrary. MRI works BECAUSE we know exactly what it looks like due to our current understanding of physics (chemistry has nothing to do with this).
fMRI is not the same as MRI, and we do have neuron scale MRI and other imaging modalities.
Reality is all there is. A believer or non-believer can agree on this. To a believer reality is god, to a non-believer reality does not have an identity. Otherwise they experience the same reality. Consciousness being reality and consciousness being god, means reality has an identity. If consciousness had no identity from where did we require our individualities and identities? We are not consciousness, we share in consciousness. So consciousness is other than us, an otherness in which we share.
Consciousness is non-computational (per Penrose). Therefore, mathematics at best can only "point" to Consciousness, if coupled with IIT (Integrated Information Theory). The question of what Consciousness is, "In-Itself" was addressed by Shankara, 788-820. but going back to Aristotle Shankara provided various mantras that are intended to help people tap directly into Pure Consciousness (Brahman), and merge with it (Samadhi, leading to Enlghtenment. Mathematics, logic, and physics won't get you there, but are useful and "fun' in their own right..
I don’t see how it’s even “scientific” to say consciousness must be explained scientifically. It seems a fallacy to think something subjective must be explained objectively for it to exists
Also scientists will constantly talk about how marvelous and advance our physical structures are but then refuse to accept any data from internal experiments such as meditation
Victory to our own self.
There are 2 apparently distinct aspects of our experience. There is our own self and there is everything else. Non dualism perceives it as if they are one thing or at least not 2 things. All of us are the same.
The outside world with its Gods and minds of others are seen as being totally powerless. They are not real. They are imagined. Nothing may be real. Our own self may be unreal also. When everything is perceived as unreal our own self has achieved victory. Everything is perceived as being powerless. All experiences are powerless and not real. What about the pain and pleasure of our experience?
Love the all powerful all. Ask it for help with every problem. The all powerful all is not over us, rather it is us. We are all the same. Love everyone. Have no enemies. Get rid of all hate toward others and self. Do not worry about changing the others. There is only one self. It will take care of itself. Our wrong beliefs that are false are being replaced by correct beliefs that are true. There is no us and them. There is only the all powerful all.
P.s Let me know how the straight line experiment is going, yours sinceritly mangatomutopoohoewetararara
The whole example with Mary, the color-blind scientist, seeing red and learning something new seems silly to me. He kept saying that the new thing in her brain was the satisfaction of her curiosity, but that assumes Mary has never had that "Ah ha" brain state. All that would happen when she finally sees red is that she experiences the brain state of "revelation" (maybe the wrong word there). That is surely something that she's already experienced before. There are no new brain states that comes into being for Mary.
Am I thinking about this incorrectly?
I think by, "satisfaction of her curiosity",
he means she is experiencing a specific new thought
(i.e. what some would call a 'red' quale).
Seems to me we cannot know whether or not Mary's
academic knowledge combined with her imagination
enabled her to synthesize/imagine/experience a 'red' quale
especially in light of the fact that
she is physiologically equipped to see colour.
Even then she wouldn't know what name to attach to the quale because
associating labels to experiences involves culture and learning.
Seems to me we must admit that
whatever thought manifests in someones conscious field
in response to visual stimulation by light of a wavelength between 740 and 625 nanometers
IS red for that someone,
regardless of labels.
Amazing discussion! Keep it up
They are just F00LS.
"We are looking for a complete, coherent, and simple understanding of reality. Given what we know about the universe, there seems to be no reason to invoke God as part of this description." Sean Carroll
As if Sean cares about reality.
How did Sean get around the first verses of the bible with God creating and giving life?
Real science says nothing does nothing. Real science says if there was something there already it must fit with the evidence of what we know. We know the 1LT says there's a conservation of energy. It can change forms and neither can be created or destroyed. Creation cannot happen by natural means. The 2LT has various aspects, one being the universe is winding down, entropy. Usable energy is becoming less usable, so at one point usable energy was at its max. This all points to a supernatural creation, by a supernatural creator at a certain point in which matter, space, and time were created. When I read how it can happen otherwise, ALL the fools resort to science-fiction. Once a supernatural creation is accepted, then the next step is finding proof of what supernatural power did it. We KNOW these laws. We have NO doubts about them. We also KNOW that the laws of nature can't come about without a Lawgiver, God.
So if Sean wants to pretend to be smart, please give me the laugh by giving science how creation really happened by natural means.
Life only comes from life. Law of biogenesis.
God is the reason for us and all we have.
th-cam.com/video/JiMqzN_YSXU/w-d-xo.html
The odds are NOT there.
th-cam.com/video/W1_KEVaCyaA/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/yW9gawzZLsk/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/ddaqSutt5aw/w-d-xo.html
philpp Goff is right. Mary acquires new information because she discovers a reality that is irreducible to the physics of the brain and that she did not previously know.
I don't understand the following though: isn't the conversation supposed to be about the thing-in-itself? Or is Philip's view not focusing on that?
Because for the thing-in-itself his arguments have some merit in my opinion. Then the physics indeed is not so important if we are just talking about the kind of substance which is observed by measurements and if we are structuralists about physics. However you don't get to give causal powers to consciousness I suppose, you only get to propose a kind of property dualism which Sean says at the start of the conversation he doesn't really care about as it's not much different than physicalism.
I suppose you could even have a property dualism on a physicalist view without even calling it monism or anything.
52:00
Your 'red' and my 'red' cannot be compared.
There is nothing that IS red in the world as clearly demonstrated by
illuminating a ball that reflects only photons with wavelengths below 590 nanometers
with light whose every photon is of wavelength shorter than 590 nanometers.
Each of us undergoes a process in which we *learn* to associate the word 'red'
with whatever thought arises in our conscious field in response to
visual stimulation by photons with wavelengths greater than 590 nanometers and
less than about 740.
Thoughts are neural-frequency-discharge-pattern *encoded representations*.
All thoughts!
Thus thoughts are instantiated and maintained by *physical* processes.
All it takes to understand the meaning of the word 'conscious'
is to achieve the realization that a self IS a thought.
It is both self evident and indubitable that one's self IS conscious,
what one means when one says...
'I am conscious'.
Consciousness is not a 'something' that I have!
Conscious is what I AM.
I am conscious.
One IS either conscious or non existent.
The curious thing about 'pattern' and 'process' is
they are both abstract notions.
Perhaps this is why thoughts and minds and selves have this
odd immaterial flavour to them.
I would realy like to be a panpsychist because its so poetic as much as monotestic religion or idealistic phylosophy. But I got isues wich shows in some questions: If nothin exist but consciousness, then why my foot, toes, heart, or any other organs in my body isnt conscious, why my consiousness cant change moons gravity or suns orbit or gravity or move sun from its location to for exemple other star system, dont you say physical reality is constructing by our consciusness? then my consciousness must have capability to chnage physicla laws as he wish!
We are limited by our mind/body. Which are appearances within consciousness but we claim them regardless. Consciousness illuminates consciousness and it takes form as the laws of physics or our latest understanding at least
55:00 science itself is a subcategory of experience.
This is where Philip says that what it is like to have pain is information, and you cannot get that from physical science.
I think Philip could reasonably respond to your point by saying that science may be experience, but it is not one like pain; for one thing, it is objective.
On the other hand, his preferred alternatives do not seem to do any better. Panpsychism seems to say that the elements of consciousness are fundamental, so we just have to accept them without explanation, while strong emergence says they are not fundamental, and yet not explained by anything fundamental either, so we just have to accept them as they are in that case also.
Philip also seems to be demanding more from science than we expect in any other circumstance, as there are no other cases where we expect a scientific explanation to create the phenomenon being explained. We have an explanation of thunderstorms, which does not, of course, actually create them, and yet we don't take this as reason to believe they are not physical.
I would like to know more about what Philip means by "get" when he says you cannot get the information that is pain from physical science. It is certainly true that I cannot show you what my pain is like through language, but that is true of all language, whether scientific, philosophical or poetic (actually, the poets may have an edge over the other two!) There is, however, a plausible physical explanation for why that is so, that I sketched out in my earlier reply to carnap3 (TLDR; our self-aware, conscious minds have only a very limited access to our brain's physical state, and none to those of other people.)
@@A.Raybould Thanks for your reply. All science is objective so it can be passed around as language of science, information, repeatable data...But even with the science of meteorology we can make awesome predictions with supercomputers but no data tells us "what it's like to be a thunderstorm". The SO called problems with consciousness are: it is our most intimate experience, no objective data can explain the subjective, why red is 🟥.....or they have an entire ensemble of "the dog ate the homework".
My pov as an engineer is they get hung up on the words in the advertising brochure and think they are solving the problem vs explaining their psychological straits. I'll begin my explanation at a simpler level from the psychologist pov with quarks and atoms that interact with their environments (their reality) under one set of laws.
Just to restate that all observations of the external start as experience or personal information. Like Newton watching the apple fall from the tree or Galileo observing the planets. Instruments like telescopes or colliders and measurement devices just enhance our senses or mimic them by detecting. Sean said you do the experiment in the collider and detect the energy for data and confirmation. Our own qualia or 🟥 is energy in unique distinguishable...forms (information). All of the Mary activity is about fact gathering so she can understand a unique information or energy state she attains. What do we mean by learn? ...something she can teach others? Teach herself?...
I think Sean is absolutely correct that wanting to change the core theory to account for consciousness is not really reasonable. I sympathise entirely with Philip's insistence that in consciousness there really is something that physicalism fails to explain, and it's very difficult to see how physicalism could *ever* explain it, since qualia are not accessible to third person observation. But I think Sean is totally wrong to say that consciousness is just a way of speaking about lower level phenomena, analogous to the way temperature weakly emerges from the motion of atoms.
In the case of temperature, the lower level description *explains* the emergent feature. The hard problem of consciousness is that physicalist reduction *fails to explain* consciousness. Sean wants to have his cake and eat it - he wants to be a qualia realist, but he also wants physicalist reduction (aka weak emergence) to work. Perhaps we can have both, but until we have a theory of how the brain generates consciousness, we have have a profound explanatory gap. I would be much more convinced by Sean if he acknowledged that there is a crucial difference between
a) one objectively observable property (e.g. temperature, or life) emerging weakly from lower level phenomena such that the lower level explains the emergent property; and
b) something subjective, unobservable, but real (i.e. qualia, consciousness) emerging from lower level phenomena without any explanation as to how this happens.
If Sean would admit this, he could then say that we need a theory that's consistent with the core theory to explain it, then I would agree with him. I think Sean realises that this would lead him to epiphenomenalism, and he doesn't want to go there, so instead he tries to convince us that b) is just like a) when it isn't.
I think the choices are: commit to physicalism and say qualia don't exist (like Keith); be prepared to change the core theory to make way for consciousness with causal power (like Philip); or hang on to both the core theory and qualia but say goodbye to mental causation (epiphenomenalism). The pill that Sean doesn't seem to want to swallow is that if you build up your picture from quantum fields, to atoms, to molecules to cells, to a brain...you end up with a zombie. Physicalism is a compelling story that can account for everything we see, including human behaviour, without getting stuck - but it leaves out consciousness. Consciousness looks like an unnecessary add-on, which is why eliminativism (aka illusionism for Keith) is appealing. But if you won't accept that (and I certainly won't, I know damn well I'm conscious) then it looks like physicalism has got something missing, and then you're faced with some hard choices.
Bernardo Kastrup rants in many places about two guests on this pannel. A future dialogue maybe?
Hopefully. The only problem is that kastrup gets so wound up he gets emotional instead of sticking to the points. Hopefully the more practice he gets in his convos he will do better
Phillip was ganged up on! Is he really being antiscientific? That seems to be Sean's assumption.
I think that the physicalist argument can be attacked at its base: it assumes that every thought has a corresponding brain state. I have a fanciful argument that I think has a visceral appeal and could be made into a proper argument if informed by known science and the correct example. Let me present it:
The story of Mary shows one thing: that there is a plot and that there is a play. There is the Mathematical description and there is the reality. The mathematical description of a ball thrown in the air is not the same as the ball thrown in the air. In the same way, electro-chemical transmitters and the neurons and ganglia are not the experiences that the thrower of the ball encounters.
All evidence is that something has these experiences. What, exactly, do the physicalists say that something is? Well, it’s a configuration of the brain, viz., brain states.
Is it true that there are separate brain states for each experience of a human being? Is it true that for each emotional state we can point to specific brain and hormonal states that are reproducible? If all this were really true, the physicalists should be able to read minds after their program is realized.
In that case, the physicalist could list the brain states and the thoughts and emotions implied by each brain state. I'm assuming a certain threshold that forces discretization of the brain states. But the fact is, there are only finitely many possible brain states in our universe and, therefore, only finitely many possible humanly recognizable thoughts at a given segment of time.
So, what happens when we develop AGI, for instance, and the computer comes up with an idea outside of the humanly possible number of thoughts? Will we be able to understand the new thought at least as a thought?
If you don't like that idea, what about if we list all the possible human thoughts and use some mechanical means of forming a new thought that is different from all the thoughts on our list? Will we not be able to understand that thought as a thought? For to understand the basic import of the thought the statement of the thought would have to be among the finite number of thoughts possible to humans. Would the thought when read appear to us as a random or nonsense sentence? That is, would we not be able to detect that intelligence could have created the thought thus stated?
To be a little more specific, suppose that we generated elementary thoughts in increasing order about integer numbers for instance. Let’s say we look at numbers like 1.000000000000000 x 10^15, 1.000000000000001 x 10^15, …, 9.999999999999999 x 10^15. If each distinct number has its own configuration of neural pattern corresponding to the thought, there will have to be a integer number that we could not recognize as a integer number because all the possible neural patterns were used up.
However, if it is not true that a mind presented with the numbers as given eventually reaches an impasse, then every mental phenomenon would not have its own unique brain state, and there would have to be something in addition to the finite brain involved in the phenomenon of thinking about the numbers.
An intuition is that the mind would not reach such an impasse, and therefore, there must be something in addition. If so, what seems the most likely at the present time?
(I realize that the plasticity of the brain may allow us to eventually understand the thought if we ever conclude that there is sense in it. But my argument does not depend upon whether we accept this possibility.)
Philips whole argument is "but I've got a feeling, so that equals more than 2 centuries of the collected works of physics",
as if his subjective feeling overrides physics.
There are mental diseases & injury,
that can make people actually lose their "subjective" feeling of being consciously "alive".
They still eat , walk, live ,etc.
But some of them can end up dying of starvation etc,
cos they aren't made aware of their bodies needs, in a personally important feeling way.
Once you're made aware that consciousness is illusion, then your brain stops trying so hard to make you not notice it's actions.
You become more aware of the purely physical interactions, make us "aware" of our subjective self.
😁🌏☮️
@@claudiaarjangi4914 But how does one know that the individual has lost his subjective feeling of being conscious given that it is subjective? Does the person report, "I have lost my subjective feeling of being conscious?" If so, who is "I" and why is "I" aware of anything?
But the fact is, even if we found a thousand people who were automatons, that would not prove that consciousness is an illusion.
what did i learn today ? i) Naturalism is true
ii) one must follow the evidence
iii) Phil and the Qualia people want a new core theory.
He keeps repeating that Mary gains new information, yet never explains how that proves or disproves the arguments laid out. It's such a nothing burger but he keeps repeating it like it's some kind of profound evidence that prohibits any other view from being correct then his. You see this all the time in debates between atheists and religious people, every time their argument is broken down they just repeat it again, demonstrating a complete lack of engagement with the discussion. "I'm right because I feel right" is really all it boils down to...
They respond directly to what he says and then he says "that's not my point" but then never actually articulates the argument. He makes statements and declares them as arguments. Philip needs to learn how logic works.
Either Mary has all the physical facts, including the physical facts about the subjective experience of colour, or she has only the facts she could conceivably learn in her restricted monochrome learning environment. The thought experiment needs to make up its mind which of these things is actually true, then the outcome is obvious.
The issue is that current physical theories do not account for the subjective experience of color. We can of course add it “by hand” saying that the subjective experience emerges from the physics as described by current theories, but that is because we already know there is such experience. Imagine an extraterrestrial from another dimension with different physical laws being told that anything to known about reality on earth is described in the Core Theory. Life is not included in the Core Theory, but the extraterrestrial could run a simulation and see autonomous movement, duplication, etc. and conclude there is some form of life on earth. But the same conclusion could not be derived for the case of consciousness: the most the extraterrestrial could draw from the Core Theory is that we are a bunch of David Chalmers’ philosophical zombies
@@ugocorda2029Subjective experience, whatever it is, has physical effects; if you want to say that the cause is nonphysical then physically-identical zombies would lack those physical effects and could not be behaviourally identical; if the cause is physical then physically-identical "zombies" would have those effects and would be behaviourally identical, but would have subjective consciousness and not be zombies. If it turned out, though I doubt it, that the cause of subjective experience is novel to physics (rather than a novel way of understanding known physics), whether you want to call it physical or not is just a choice about the definitions of words.
@@paultrembath4131 I did not say that subjective experience is not physical, I said that you cannot currently derive it from the Core Theory. Which means that our latest physical theories are incomplete because they do not capture some aspects of the reality we experience. That does not imply, of course, that physical theories will not be extended in the future to capture those aspects. But right now they don’t: as David Chalmers says, from structure and dynamics (what our current physical theories capture) you can only derive structure and dynamics.
By the way, if it is true that current physics is causally closed (Sean Carroll’s position), then those future extensions will only capture epiphenomenal aspects
goff making a fool of himself again. luv 2 see it
What's remarkable is that Goff can go for two hours without saying anything sensible at all. It is remarkable that Sean Carroll could control himself in the face Goff's utterly senseless gibberish.
This man Philip is crazy, buy your own program, bla, bla, bla
Idealism v illusionism please. What’s the deal with panpsychism ? I feel like it’s just materialists who don’t want to be idealists 😂
AT 1:00:00 Philipp is correct that they are not answering his question.
Philip is under the illusion that an outsider can sit down with the big boys and have a productive conversation.
@@JackPullen-Paradox I agree. The one thing that I do like about him though is that he at least seems to really believe his stuff (nonsense as it is) . Can;t say the same for Kastrup and many others
exactly. Kastrup is fraud, if you ask me
I'm neither a physicist nor a philosopher but I reckon a philosopher would need to understand first the core theory of physics before arguing with a physicist about physics and changing the law of physics. This particular chat is painful to listen to as for the most part, a certain philosopher main argument is 30% of other philosophers agreed with me, so I must be at least 50% correct. If this is the quality of philosopher of our age, we should do better.
Phillip is being asked to go against the absolute determinism demanded by the current crop of physicist. I suppose that he was hoping against hope that his adversaries will demonstrate a little humility and realize that even though they know a little physics, they don't know everything.
Which brings up the point that Phillip may be required to know Core Theory, but Sean should know a whole lot of things he doesn't know about philosophy. As for changing the laws of physics, since physics is all-encompassing, anything Phillip could have considered would require changing a law of physics. Sean focused the discussion on known theories and didn't allow consideration of anything else. Am I wrong?
I love Sean Carroll, always a pleasure.
I like Sean, but his views on philosophy zombie argument just being behavioral doesn't seem right to me. I am more in the camp with Phillip but I am def not for panpsychism.
Thanks for a great episode. Even though the discussion was very interesting there was a lot of cross-purposes conversation.
My brain is full...smh
I think Philip is the only one in the discussion that is able to Experience the Red Quale, or in other words the Experience of Redness. He seems to be frustrated with the other three who continuously try to minimize, distract, and obfuscate the Existence of the Redness Experience. I have come to the conclusion that Philip actually does Experience Redness in the same way that I do but the other three panelists do not have the Experience of Redness or the Redness Quale. The reason Philip is so frustrated is that he is arguing with people who are Qualia Blind for Color. They must never have actually Experienced the Redness Quale, but rather they Detect Red by sensing their Neural Activity, Brain States, in some way. So they are not Color Blind because they can tell when their Brain is signaling Red but they are not Experiencing the Redness Quale. It is telling that the only thing they think that Mary discovers outside the Gray Scale room is a new Brain State. That is exactly what they would Experience. They would not Experience something New like the Experience of Redness. The Experience of Redness transcends anything you think you know about Brain States. The Redness Experience cannot be Explanatorily pushed into any Brain State no matter how hard you try. The Redness only Correlates to Brain States and it is completely inexplicable how it IS a Brain State. But why should we all have the same kind of Experiences? Why can't there be people that have categorically Different and even Alien Experiences of Sense inputs? We won't know until Science is able to Measure actual Conscious Experiences instead of merely things that are Correlated with Conscious Experiences. These differences in how we Experience things is probably the cause for the endless arguments about Conscious Experience and Qualia. Some people might not have Qualia for certain senses.
Edit addition: Another symptom for the lack of Qualia in three of the panelists is their inability to stay focused on the Redness Experience. They will almost always immediately drop back to talking about Brain States and Neural Activity. They cannot stay focused on the Quale of Redness because they don' t have it. They only have Brain states. Keith will say he Experiences the Redness Quale, but that Philip is just not thinking about it the right way. He does not even realize that there are not a bunch of ways of thinking about it, but rather you directly and immediately Experience it without any thinking needed. The Redness Quale is not the product of some kind of thinking, because it Exists as a thing in itself that is part of the Visual Experience that is Embedded in the front of our faces. Who can say what Keiths Experience of Redness is. Whatever his Brain State sensation might be, he thinks that is the Qualia because he has not known anything else. He seems to really have no idea what the Quale Redness Experience could possibly be (by the way he so blithely dismisses it as Illusion), and I have no idea what his Experience of Brain States are. He can only insist that the Brain States ARE the Experience of Redness because he does not know what the Quale of Redness is.
I wondered the same thing!! From what I can gather, think these types of physicalists must be property-dualists, in that they believe that certain physical states can have both physical properties and mental properties...and the existence of the mental properties is just handwaved away as higher-order emergence...
This panpsychist view will dwindle away and take the way of the god of the gaps...
And Phillip should not always interrupt his guests.
"Over 30% of philosophers believe this", therefore... argumentum ad populum fallacy?
Philip your microphone is overmodulating take down the input level a bit please.
46:00 lol
These two are hilarious.
So, I take issue with Sean's framing of consciousness in behavioral terms. He claims that he is only interested in consciousness to the extent it impacts behavior, citing the philosophic zombie thought experiment as evidence that behavior can be explained without consciousness, and adding consciousness doesn't add any new behavior, and hence this added consciousness is meaningless.
The core problem with this stance is that most people will fundamentally disagree. This is most easily elucidated by the example of a comatose patient. To the extent that the comatose patient is not conscious, we have the innate sense that their physical situation is less relevant since they can't feel it. Yet, to the extent that comatose patients ARE conscious, we are very interested and concerned about their state of affairs and making sure we don't add unnecessary discomfort to them while they are in that state. The conscious comatose patient and the unconscious comatose patient are identical in terms of behavior, but our value systems are keenly aware of the ethical difference.
Philip won this one as early on as @10:10 when he transitions to a deep growl to say the mathematical relations between consciousnness "ARE" the laws of physics...
Terrible host. Rambling along for a massive 20 (!) minutes before we finally hear a word from Sean Carroll.
yeah but it is like that with him get used to it.
patently nothing because of zombies
What a disgusting video.
If only the respective representatives of their
business model of consciousness could see
how utterly empty their product promises are.
How they use all kinds of mental foam to
uphold the correctness of their model as the
only justifiable self-evident fact.
Yes, I admit it, it is also partly amusing and
certainly better than the shaman's heartfelt
prayer in the Brazilian jungle.
bring bernardo kastrup quickly