John Searle - Can Brain Explain Mind?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ม.ค. 2016
- What is it about the brain that enables many scientists to claim brain can fully explain mind? And what is it about such neuroscientific explanations of mental experience that some philosophers reject?
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Searle's distinction between causal reduction and ontological reduction blooms my mind! Respect!
Can you explain further?
Ehhh
So many experts on consciousness in the comment section. I don’t understand why we don’t have wrap on this yet with so many experts around.
Experts? Searle is like a car mechanic explaining consciousness to you....he knows how it all works, while Chalmers knows that he doesn't have a clue
You are telling me that people here in the TH-cam comment section are not experts in the philosophy of mind that have solved key philosophical problems?! That is preposterous!
Lol who IS an expert though? Hahah
@@EinsteinKnowedIt no there is no kicker
Well, at least he admits that "conscious is not ontologically reducible".
Wonderful discussion. Credit goes to both of them.
imaging does NOT locate consciousness. It merely indicates that wherever or whatever consciousness is, some of its extended activities show up at certain locations that can be seen using certain brain imaging techniques. That MAY be 'where' consciousness 'is", but it does not prove where it is.
Consciousness is the functioning of the reticular formation of the brain in humans. When this is stimulated we are conscious. Biology and neurology. No spooky business like John Searle and Robert Kuhn - "deep thinkers" - would like to have it.
Exactly! Correlation does NOT equal causation. This is a rookie scientific fallacy being told here.
John’s good. It’s not just the brain we have to take seriously. It’s our nervous system within a body in motion (living, alive) within an environment that we have to take seriously. Let’s expand the concept. Good stuff John. 👍
The basic problem here, for me, is that the discussion always seems start off with the assumption that our 3rd person model of the world (our "representation" a la Schopenhauer) actually has any veracity. The way we are set up to think of objectivity and subjectivity as binary opposites could rest on an error on the part of the subjective bias. We categorically mistake our model of the world for the actual nature of the world itself (which could be insoluble - a la new mysterianism), and in doing so we don't even realize that what we are trying to dissect and understand is merely a conceptual fiction of the mind - a model. A world we exist in is evident - that our minds are capable of having any certitude about the nature of this world or how "qualia" comes about is not evident.
At least, not yet. "Progress" in philosophy could change that. It's all a puzzle, after all.
John Searle is so good.
I've been chuckling under my breath. Consciousness is the ultimate reality. It is fundamental. The correlations with brain activity are compatible with filtration theory. Metaphysical idealism gets rid of the hard problem of consciousness that plagues materialism.
at 7.45 " And there the answer, I think, follows more or less
immediately; namely all of these conscious states everything is realized in the brain." I feel; Identifying consciousness in the form of flashes of neural activity in the brain is as misleading as realizing and feeling, the joy and hope of the New Year on the basis of Fireworks on the eve of the new year.
8:42 get 'em robert! (i was thinking THAT myself!)
👍😄😄😄
Wish I could hear this
Amazing video, thanks! "Causal reduction without ontological reduction", this is precisely why consciousness is problematic.
Can you explain further or give an example?
@@james6401 Consider a chair for example. If you know everything about the atoms that constitute the chair you know everything about the chair ie, you can explain the chair entirely by its atoms (causal reduction). You can also argue that it is an ontological reduction, because the chair does not really exist, only the atoms that constitute it do exist. BTW you could do the same for atoms and explain them in terms in terms of particles which themselves could be explained in terms of quantum fields. And maybe something else as science progress. Anyway you get the idea.
For consciousness, it is different. You could have causal reduction. Maybe (its not clear yet how to do it), you can map every thought in your mind to a configuration of neurons and therefore explain entirely your consciousness in terms of neuron configuration (causal reduction). However, you cannot say that your consciousness does not exist and that only neurons do. Because to create and understand the concept of neurons (or anything else), you need a consciousness in the first place! Or to put in a different way, if consciousness is an illusion, what is illuded? That's why you cannot talk about an ontological reduction. At best, you only have a causal reduction.
@@nono-bt8gy thank you, that's pretty clear considering the subject matter. I had an idea there was some circularity if not a contradiction in the theory of mind - Searle was talking about the processes and light effects involved in vision and this reminded me of George Berkeley's ideas. All our knowledge and all our theories about science are based on our sensory data and yes, ultimately a consciousness has to be in charge of that. We are a part of the universe looking at a part of itself.
I'll have to think about that a bit more but at bottom it looks like there's a limit to our theories based on the knowledge we have at whatever time we are formulating our picture of ourselves.
@@nono-bt8gy I'm wondering if the chair can reflect on itself as a chair - probably not but a human can do that, to whatever extent we consider our consciousness doing that reflecting. We have much more complex genetic and other molecular machinery than a chair though - are we sure that a realm of ontology changes when we go down to the very small - the quantum dimension?
‘That’s just the way nature turned out’ is his answer and we know of nothing else like it.
The idea that consciousness itself has a spacial location based on the fact that neuronal activity correlate with colour perception is incomplete. It’s possible that this neuronal activity functions as the coding system through which external stimuli can be localised (ie reduced to an experience), by the brain, and that brain functions as mediator between physical reality and field of consciousness, which would consist of the remaining aspects of reality which we can’t perceive because it is that which we fundamentally are; formless observers of form. Hence why mind can alter neuroanatomy independent of external influence
Formless observers… can you expand on that?
At 2:05 “Step number 1 is you take the brain seriously.” I.e., the biological processes of the brain produce both the state and the experience of consciousness (... and also the state and the experience of decision-making ...). Check.
i agree with this. I don't think it is unique to people. And I think it is also partially to communicate.
I'm unimpressed. Trying to reduce metaphysical processes into physical stimuli needs a tie between the two. Simply showing electrical impulses in the brain doesn't prove consciousness nor creativity. The brain is the place where soul meets the physical universe. How do you like this statement Searle made? "That's just how nature turned out". That is a complete faith statement from a naturalistic worldview.
I want to ask them about synesthesia. I have experienced this on occasion. Not often and not without chemical assistance. But it happened. Also, for me, numbers(integers) have specific colors. I can’t explain it and the different colors are often nearly the same but with obvious subjective differences.
I"m not sure why, but I like this guy.
+madmax2976
Yes, John Searle is a real interesting guy,. I've watched a lot of his university lectures.
madmax2976 You’d like me too, if I had that shirt.
Any male or suitably older female would like Searle... Young (and attractive) women who are part of his circle -- not so much! Google "Searle + sexual harrassment" for the details...
What are possibilities of consciousness if causally reducible but not ontologically?
God bless John Searle
Can't subjectivity be reduced again though? I'm a biological organism same as my cat with drives to survive and chemicals zooming around that interpret threats and treats and these help me to survive or not. My subjectivity can be reduced to me wanting to keep this organism alive but it can be reduced to my chemicals wanting to keep themselves alive. Through genes ultimately.
It feels like it's the same "me" that's been inside my head since day one. Is it just my brain that's doing that?
It could be that every moment of time there is new “you” that is generates and vanishes but the last having physical acces to the past has no idea or simply has no way to determine whether this identity is preserved in time.
Yes
It should perhaps be noted here that John Searle is a ''Materialist'', just not a ''Reductive Materialist''. Many people now and in the past have held the same views as Searle and called themselves ''Materialists'' for example, La Mettrie, Diderot, D'Holbach, Helvetius, Priestley, Cabanis etc. I'm also reminded that the quote (and I think its a great quote) that ''Mind/Thinking is to the organ called Brain as digestion is to the organ called Stomach'' I first read as quoted by Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis. Cabanis also remarks ''Sense impressions arriving at the brain make it enter into activity, just as food falling into the stomach excites it to more abundant secretions of gastric fluid''
I was thinking that perhaps he very precisely describes the situation and yet something extra is missing but it's perhaps not something from our world. The brain could be interacting with a omnipresent low energy panpsychic consciousness field which is impersonal and everywhere to make something localised, highly energized and personal. So for this to be true, there should be so extremely sensitive places in the brain, so sensitive that it's perhaps comparable to neutrino detection. Problem is that there is nothing like that to find, I guess.
I think the problem is that he thinks he understands life and can reduce it to the ontological level of "it's just chemistry." I understand that no one can find anything but chemistry, but it's also true that while all the various processes of digestion are reproducible in the lab, no one has reproduced the micro-functions of a cell, or even the macro-functions. It could happen, but I think the understanding of the ontological basis of life might also answer the question of consciousness. Time will tell.
At around 4 minutes in he's already made a grave error in his thinking; he says it's clear that a certain signal in the optical systems in the brain causes visual experience, which further implies that consciousness is caused by brain functioning (not exactly a new claim). However, upon closer examination, this assumes a causal relationship, and thus begs the question; the only thing there's actual evidence for is a correlation between the conscious experience and the various goings-on of the brain.
If my assumption that consciousness is itself fundamental is correct, and that the brain is a representation within the mind of the mind itself, then all that is going on is that the consciousness is continuously generating this self-referential representation of the mind as a brain with signalling corresponding to it.
he's categorically stated that consciousness is ontologically irreducible, while simultaneously being causally reducible. what more do you want? he's merely stating facts here. and no, you cannot have an opinion on facts. please, look at the facts and learn to question yourself.
Analogies are good as far as they go but are better to simplify complex processes but if we don't get much out of analogies lacking the understanding of the complexity in the first place.
I think one is left with a basic question here: why do the brain processes go accompanied by experience rather than in the darkness ?
He said he is not materialist... really? So what you call a person who explain consciousness as a product of brain activities?
Someone who is following the evidence?
audio?
It's life that is ontologically subjective, and consciousness is a property of life.
There is only one observer in my brain. I am an eternal legend in my mind, trapped in a biological construct I did not create. This body keeps interrupting my plans by overriding my will..
Could this mean that you are not here for your purpose but you were deployed to serve the purpose of some other theme of interest or there is some invisible stakeholding cause?
I agree with John. However, the self, the "I", is simply the executive function that is required by biological systems to be able to survive. Even a bacteria needs to be aware of itself and its surroundings and decide how to act in order to survive. It is a totally logical and expectable requirement of evolution to see that as life becomes more complex, so too does the brain, the degree to which living systems are conscious, and the more profound the sense of self becomes.
How do we know that consciousness is in the 'Head'? Where does it go when we sleep? How about memory
? How do we store it?
Where are you suggesting it is? Mountains of text books on different types of memory and how they are stored or means by how they can be stored more efficiently (when yr studying for exams)
@@sof553 I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about the *Savants, the peeps that see it one time & never forget it, those peeps. The *Scholarship Blokes that Yale, & MIT & Harvard all pay 'THEM' to go to their schools, those Blokes have no clue why they know what they know, trust me on that one, or how they store information.
The mind-body problem is really the presocratic problem of Being. The Internet, for example: is it a single, spacetimeless being (Parmenides’ Being) or the spacetime plurality of devices that make it possible (materialism or the reality we experience)? If it’s both, it’s a self-contradicting being. If we say that the Internet doesn’t exist, we’re saying that we (the subject, consciousness) don’t exist. When we solve that metaphysical problem, we will have solved Everything.
Respectfully disagree. Complexity of whatever physical processes cannot and will never explain sentience, qualia
Indeed. If one instead uses logic to understand that reality must necessarily define itself (if something external to reality were to define to reality, the term "reality" itself would be ill-defined, since the new combination of what the old term referred to and that external to it would constitute actual reality), it becomes clear that physical processes, including the brain, are mere representations and expressions of this self-defining reality. This is nothing new to anyone well-versed in ancient Greek philosophy, or Vedic philosophy for that matter. Goethe put it well in Faust too:
"Everything transitory is but an image."
You are right. Adding more non conscious atoms into a larger and larger clump is not going to generate intentionality.
And why are you so confident about that?
My friend...ANY animal that can perceive and react to stimuli, is sentient.. obviously there are degrees of sentience, but I'll ASSUME you meant CONSCIOUSNESS, in which case I'll respectfully ask, do you think a chimpanzee is conscious?
@@JoshuaHults That's totally an assumption. You might as well say that adding more and more non-calculating atoms can't make a calculating machine. But that's wrong, as we have calculators
So consciousness will be scientifically explained some time in the future (8:18), but it really won't be part of any ontology (9:47). Funny way of reasoning...
Indeed...
Body Mind And Consciousness are three different things. Brain is a part of the body. Mind stationed at front junction of chest ribs. Consciousness is not bodily. It comes to mind and go away during sleep or death. Consciousness with Mind forms Conscious-Mind which is the key thing. Conscious- Mind uses brain to perform. Mind becomes inactive after death and consciousness never comes to body. Conscious-Mind leads to self identity, awareness and generate emotions, thought and desires. Fulfilling desire is happiness and whole life our Conscious-Mind drive our body through brain to achieve those desires. Brain is processor, memory, logics, judgement, body operator...
What we aquire through are senses is information about the reality. The brain uses it and it creates a map of the reality. The map is not the reality itself but it’s like an illusion. We can also do research and improve this map or find details about how the world works and that takes you closer to truth :). Anyway we experience consciously a map, you can say it’s an illusion but the consciousness itself is not an illusion. It doesn’t even make sense to say it’s an illusion.
When we understand how information passes through the system, such as the orchestration occurring at the cellular level we will have moved into a realm of fields and frequencies.
No, that is like saying the car and explain the driver
"Consciousness is special because its the only thing we know in the universe that has this subjective ontology, BUT that's just how nature turned out"
Brilliant answer !!
Just because you can raise your arm and you have the conscious experience of sending that command doesn't mean the conscious experience was the thing that caused the raising of your arm. The cause could be coming from elsewhere and your consciousness just rides on top. I'm surprised he made such a simple mistake.
Where is elsewhere, exactly ?
Exactly. There have been dozens of experiments that show that conscious apprehension of deliberative decision come *after* the brain has already decided (say between pushing a button with the left vs. right hand).
I'm with Daniel Dennett in his suggestion that there is no 'hard' problem of consciousness, and that consciousness is a meta-phenomena.
Lol, do you mean the libet-experiment? Seriously?
alo2acs “Simple mistake”? This simple mistake destroys all philosophical discussions towards free will. These guys are not conscious enough of it, so they will keep speculating. Science and most philosophers will reject and keep rejecting that there is no free will. So, this “simple mistake” is not in any way “simple”. 99% of humans die without knowing this.
I can't deny love and hate, even if I can't explain their nature -illusion or not.
Touché!
'If it seems to me that I'm conscious then I am conscious' - what about when we are dreaming? We are unconscious but we may perceive ourselves as conscious (inside the dream).
Because dreaming is not unconsciousness, but a different form of consciousness.
@@nicktraynor29 What form is that? Time and time again people say that you are unconscious when you are asleep.
7777777 I wouldn’t get hung up on words here. In your dreams you still have experience via consciousness. If you didn’t have consciousness, then you wouldn’t have dreams at all. This is the sort of “I am conscious” being talked about here. So, yes, you are conscious in dreams. Also, check out the phenomenon of Lucid Dreaming.
have you ever heard of radical doubt by Descartes?? I believe his notion perfectly explains ur question!
When you dream, your sense of "I"-ness is centered in the dream. Some dreams are so real that you forget all about yourself existing as a person lying in a bed in a dark room....until you wake up. Can this be nature's way of hinting to us that this, what we call waking reality, is similar to that of which our brains also generated to us in what we call a dream state? Isn't it all just labels made by humans in the end?
Conscious, or our sense of "I" isn't limited to a brain. Every single living being has this sense of "I". This is what we all are. This is God. As a rastafarian would say "it's the JA in all of us. Or as Jesus would say, "I and my father are one". Or as Islam would say "submit" to the "I". All are saying to submit to your true self. Conscious being! God.
This is better than mukbang. 👍👍👍
video starts at 1:47
Use the metric system
Forget about it.
Conciousness is like flatulence - both involve hot air.
Sounds like a form of transcendental materialism rather than biological naturalism. But when he tracks a visual stimulus over the LGN and to the visual cortex and so on, shows how an object can appear to us, and the color, red, can appear through neurophysiological steps. He then uses this to argue that consciousness is therefore a neurochemical process. But this is too simple. Consciousness is able to be conscious of an object, but also be conscious at the same time it is not that object.
“Life is no longer a mystery” really??
Sure we understand RNA and DNA a bit, but we have no clue how it happened.
Da Koos In another video this guy said we know all about how the brain works. Yet I wonder why all scientists will tell you science knows very little about the brain. Hmmmm. This guy knows nothing. He’s weird, actually.
Glenn Ralph
The brain remains a mystery. How billions of dead atoms somehow thinks will be the final frontier. If we ever figure it out.
Da Koos Exactly. The brain is a mystery. Science knows some of course, but not much. So funny how this guy thinks he knows how every part of the brain works but nobody else on the planet does lol
Causally reducible but not ontologically reducible ?
Does the physical brain develop from DNA information, with something more needed to produce consciousness?
DNA produces consistent gross morphology within a phenotype, but epigenetic processes during each individual's development, from birth to death, cause enormous variation in the detailed anatomy and functioning of each individual. Gerald Edelman's extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection is the most convincing brain and consciousness theory I've come across. It's a relentlessly materialistic theory, and very complex in all its glory.
The environment. The question is at what does awareness begin, and how much and what kind of stimuli are needed for an organism to be conscious.
But...that's not really even a theory, or a model, or anything else. It's not even an idea. It's a just-so story.
Embrassing really, and I say that respectfully. At the end he claims that the debate on life originating from matter is not passionate anymore today because we know about dna and replication and figured it out. That's a crazy non sequitur. The debate is very alive in academia, and it baffles me that he seemed to forget that. The issue is exactly how dust and rock hovering in space crashes together because of gravity and THEN becomes dna, rna and what have you. Secondly, his position on consciousness being a biological process like digestion, which might be correct in a sense, is not the only interpretation of the phenomena. That is exactly the problem, we observe some firing in the brain and we see it happening, for example when we see color and we make a causal connection, but that's no different that looking at the inner parts of a TV firing when certain colors are projected. It's not the TV causing them, the TV receives those information from the radio waves and then expresses them on the screen. For this reason it would be just as a valid opinion to claim that the brain is an antenna for consciousness and not the producer of consciousness. Not trying to prove the professor or disprove him (except for the dna, life and matter thing, that was embarassing), just highlighting the crazy bias going on in science today, in my opinion atleast.
"The brain is an antenna for consciousness"...wow..you realize that any signal that supposed antenna could receive would be EASILY detected by any scientist in the planet today?
You know that in order for a sigal be small enough to not be detected by the current technology, it would need to be smaller than a neutrino?
You realize that if its smaller than a neutrino your brain would need to be bigger than the milk way in order to interact with that signal or get any signal????
First, you quoted me out of context. If you had read carefully you would have understood that what I meant is that because you can interpret the data with more than one valid interpretation then you're scientifically in no position to claim that one is more likely than the other if you have no data to support the claim, which in the case of consciousness being directly "caused" by the brain we don't have.
Secondly, you made a baseless claim and a baseless presupposition. The baseless presupposition is that in the case I proposed the brain would act like the antennas that we do, which would not have to necessarily be the case. The baseless claim is that we could detect such a signal if it was there because of our technological means. Both of course, both are evidently false.
As food for thought I would suggest you to study more about dark matter and dark energy. Guess why they include the word "dark". That's right, because we can't directly detect them except by secondary means (such as their effect).
Having said this, I hope you noticed me being polite enough to ignore your rude tone (hopefully I'm wrong about your tone). Also, my main contention was that Searle is as biased as a "bandwagon" (hope you got the pun), and that bias leads him to spurt the nonsense he spurted, which is shameful.
p.s. I'm nevertheless interested about the brain needing to be bigger than the milk way to recieve such signal if it was smaller than a neutrino. Could you quote some reference?
Peace out
@@Domispitaletti To detect a signal requires appropriate kind of apparatus. (You can’t detect light with a microphone; you can't detect sound signals with a telescope;... et cetera -- for obvious reasons!). The remark you responded to surmised that the appropriate apparatus for “detecting consciousness” is a brain. Your response is logically flawed. It misses the point.
(I'm not saying I accept the "antenna" hypothesis, but that's separate issue...)
Hopefully this isn't too late of a reply. You are right to bring up about dust and rocks hovering in space and because of gravity and how these managed to form into such organized designed like structures such as RNA and DNA. I am sorry to assume, so please correct me if I am wrong but when you say ''THEN'' becomes RNA/DNA and what we have, you seem to completely ignore the processes that happened to get to RNA / DNA. You come across as incredibly ignorant, this is not an insult, just an assumption from the very big gap you are leaving out from ''space rocks crashing together because gravity and then becomes DNA''. This did indeed happen. However, you must understand that, let's say, 6 billion years ago when the solar system was a protoplanetary disc, a very young star. From observations, we see other proplanetary discs with their discs dense gas and dust containing very fundamental chemicals that are orbiting this disc at very high speeds, hitting one another, forming new molecules for millions of years. Fast forward another million years, the sun is still a protoplanetary disc, a million years ha pasted and basically not much has changed. Maybe a few asteroids, tiny ones. The material in space acts very different on earth, if you'd send two pieces of metal in space and they touched, it would become one because there is not an oxygen layer on them, in space without oxygen, metals naturally get bound together, rather than bounce off them. What my point is that we must grasp the time that these processes took to come to be what they are today. Now, let's fast forward another million years, the earth still doesn't even exist yet; we are still at the protoplanetary disc with dense gas and dust still dynamically bounding together, creating new chemicals. if you'd zoom into the dust , you'd see that the dust is very tiny peieces of all sorts of metals which bound together, slowly, slowly becoming bigger and bigger over tens of millions of years.
Let's fast forward to when Earth is very young. What may ponder about it is the mysterious nature of water, the thing we come across every day which is abundant makes us too used to being around it and forgetting how fundamental water really is. Water is VERY soluble. If you think of a dry desert, not much is going to change there due to nothing moving it around. If the desert is dry for thousands of years, again not much would change compared to say, a flowing river where molecules can bump into one another very quickly, diversly, and much more dynamically than if stuck in a pile of sand in a desert. Now, if you contemplate my analogies, the dry desert where nothing is moving/changing, basically stuck in time and compare it to the flowing water where the molecules can freely and dynamically bound together or think of the ocean where it is very dynamic there with big waves crashing into shore, bringing material back out and mixing with other material, thus creating more complex structure, simply by the movement/change of the material being soluble in water. But we have to understand that these molecules that became sentient came from trillions of chemical reactions to get to where what it has become today. When these molecules were in the early stages, say, 4 billion years ago, the earth was a very different place with lava, unique material spewing from volcanoes, lighting striking these materials creating new materials/molecules, bounding into new molecules thousands of years then another thousand, ten thousand years, still simply molecules, not yet sentient, and so on and on until we get to a PROTOCONSICOUNESSS. Then this proto-consciousness is what evolves into what we are today but just incomprehensible slow. If you count to five minutes, even that is slow to us, so just imagine how slow a million years is. There's a quote I heard from someone who said something like ''if you wait for a million years, a Boeing 747 will pop into existence'' Obviously this is ridiculous and the person said this is completely ignoring that complexity and order does not arise from mere time, it is far more complex to say that ''order came into be from pure chance'' No, trillions upon trillions of chemical reactions happened for millions upon millions and tens of millions of years. If you would think back to my desert analogy, you can see that if you were to wait for a long time in the dry barren desert, not many chemical reactions would occur there, thus nothing like a Boeing 747 would ''pop'' into existence. However, in a much more dynamic environment, many more chemical reactions are taking place, new molecules are being ordered due to how soluble water really is. Another analogy I ponder is that when you make soup,, add the vegs and do not add water, or heat, nothing would occur, but once you add water and heat it would start being complex as the water allows the vegs to freely move around, and eventually a soup is made. Time and water are fundamental for life to occur. Earth took av ery long time to come into existence, about 10 billion years after the big bang. If the universe were 300,000 years old, the earth wouldn't exist, the universe would constantly be in the phase of plasma; if the plasma never cooled down then the universe would still be in that phase. You need time for life, cause without it, four billion years of evolution would never have occurred, time gives the matter the ability to eventually order into us.
07:10
Brain = Consciousness
Stomach = Digestion
Food = ?
Thots
Searle, ironically, literally hand waves consciousness away. Pretty dire tbh
The origin of life has been solved ..? Come on how da hell how do we go from physical “materia” to cells and consciousness tf dude the missing parte between has never been solved believe
I'm not conscious of this comment.
How does one explain different levels of consciousness; like experiences of a ape> dog> chicken etc.
Different kinds of brains, different kinds of minds.
different evolution paths
3:55 "...this process is causing visual experiences ..." The mistake is to separating the process from the experience. The process is the experience. Conscious states are not caused by neuronal processes, they are neuronal processes. Once you separate the brain from consciousness you've committed a dualism whether you want to admit or not.
He’s not doing that
Neural correlates aren't the answer, they are the problem.
LOL @8:06 about supposedly "solving the problem of life", buddy if you actually understood the "biochemical basis of life" then you would be able to BUILD life in your lab the way one can build a car or an airplane
I gave this a thumbs up because Searle is brilliant and this (and all the videos of him) are great for learning some of the fundamentals. HOWEVER, being brilliant does not imply being correct. It really bothers me that he states with such firmness and confidence that the brain is the source of consciousness, even though (as he admits) we know very little about the brain. I'm not saying he's wrong... it's quite likely that he's right. However, you can't construct a proof if you don't even have good evidence for its propositions. His argument is particularly problematic as he is trying to argue against dualism, and his entire argument about the spatial location of consciousness seems to depend on scans of the brain "lighting up" when someone thinks. That's not enough to make his case. We simply don't know enough about the brain to make the kinds of firm statements that he makes.
Woah woah woah... "Consciousness is real and it is caused by brain processes." Then Robert asks the question of how this, "real" thing causes things to happen...
Brain causes consciousness, Consciousness causes brain to do something. Isn't that just brain causes brain to do something? That seems entirely self-contained and entirely beyond deliberate actions. Your brain causes your brain to raise its arm.
He isn't saying you are your brain though. He's saying it causes consciousness and that consciousness is responsible for deliberate choices. So again, your brain causes your brain to do something... where does consciousness come in?
Consciousness is caused by the brain, then consciousness causes the brain to do something. There's a problem here I know it.
That would just mean that the brain is causing itself to do things and so, there would just be an epiphenomenal "riding of the wave".
This is too much. Where have I gone wrong?
I, the brain, object to this view of reality.
Jokes aside, Searle makes a fundamental error when stating that processes in the brain causes consciousness, forgetting two very important facts:
1) There is only a correlation; i.e. conscious experience occurs at the same time as brain functioning, including subsets thereof.
2) The brain and its functions, indeed the entire body and all of reality, only exist within consciousness.
Based on these facts, especially the second, it seems far more plausible to conclude with the brain being a representation within the mind of the mind itself.
@@nicholastidemann9384 I’d love to see 2 established as fact.
I can't abide dogmatic statements like "obviously false".
In pretty much any and every point he makes he has already assumed materialism...
BecomingMike ? What viable alternative is there?
Not materialism, thats for sure
How can there ever be more then what is?
Who do you mean? Are you equating "what is" with materialism? If so, you do realize that that would just be begging the question. Whether materialism could ever answer the hard problem is exactly the question at hand
What is “materialism” anyway? The concept is ill-defined. “Dualism”, in its original form proposed by Descartes, was eventually rejected by science because it is expressed in terms of “materal substances” (the kinds of things studied by the physical sciences) and a "non-material substance” (“consciousness”, the realm of “free will”, qualia, etc). The question of how two ontologically distinct aspects of reality can interact with each other is irresolvable. Fundamental physics in its present form (eg, at the level of quantum theory) is no longer expressed in terms of “material substances”. Our present understanding of physical reality leaves out of account phenomena that are unarguably real (subjective experiences, that occur “in consciousness”). Understanding will emerge only when the false dichotomy “EITHER determinism OR random probability” is discarded. The need is to acknowledge that reality is not constrained to operate according to human preconceptions.
It's all in the software, doh! ;)
The question of life has not been solved, because science doesn't know how it started.
do you? and can you prove it? because science would have to show it be both reasonable and demonstrable, to 'know'.
A brain is only an illusion that keeps man from understanding how His consciousness was created. Man doesn't need a physical brain to experience life but in this first age, a visible brain keeps man believing he is real.
I'm sorry, what are you talking about?
Victor Pinchulaf
The visible objects that we perceive in our consciousness are not real objects made out of hard physical matter. They are only illusions that are processed from information in the form of vibrations, which is our Creator's computing language.
+Brad Holkesvig for what it is processed?
Guhan Tas Each of us is a created being that is much like a computer processor. Think of each of us as a computer hooked up to the internet where a cloud of information is available. All that information is available to each of us except that it's metered out to us according to a designed program. In other words, you do not have control of what you're going to experience because you're actually experiencing one picture of information at a time similar to watching a cinema movie.
A cinema movie made from a computer program is viewed by us one frame of information at a time but a speed that gives us the illusion of motion. With motion, we get the sense of time, gravity, three dimensional world to walk around in and our created senses are also experienced by us.
However, the speed at which we experience life is much faster that a cinema movie. In fact, it's so fast we get the sense of light traveling from one point to another. This is all done by the processing of invisible information. Light is nothing but invisible waves that have to be processed by each of us to actually observe light. There are many forms of light that we can't actually observe but all light has to be processed in order for it to exist in the simulation program we're involved in.
Brad Holkesvig “Berkeley's argument is seen to be wrong in substance as well as in form, and his grounds for supposing that 'idea'-i.e. the objects apprehended-must be mental, are found to have no validity whatever. Hence his grounds in favour of the idealism may be dismissed."
7:45 the origin of life has been explained???! Really?? How many assumption come out from this interview?
Not well thought out at all. He did not explain how you go from a series of events, to an aboutness and awareness. All of this is believed by the dualist, nobody denies anything he said about the processes of the brain from dualist perspective. He just assumed his conclusion however as his starting point which is circular reasoning. This is not deep thinking. When one tries to reduce intentionality to a clump of atoms, one is left crossed eyed.
I think the dualist is right. There is an "i" which works in harmony with the body to produce "life." Materialism is short circuiting materialists brains lol
The intention to do something is incredibly easy to explain materialistically--it's a preparedness or readiness to behave and think in certain ways, and by think i mean do computations about how things likely are and will be. It's the subjective experience of things that's less easy to understand. This is basically what computers do--lots of little bits (like atoms) that come together to represent information. That's essentially what intentionality is.
And everything he just divulged is a lie.
Mind is a metaphor for the patterns in the brain. It's as simple as that.
We don't know an awful lot about the brain, but we go into it with knives anyway.
Not just for fun, though. Usually.
I think these guys have an IQ over 175
Combined?
Brad Holkesvig- What? Talk about dreaming. So you know this creator and you have a ticket to his movie huh? Wow, I used to believe in a sky god but that is gone once one stops lying to oneself. There are starving kids that get eaten alive by insects through disease etc. Many children are sold into slavery of all kinds, but there is some sky god enjoying a good picture show right? Oh my, what man will do to give himself hope. Sorry but could not resist. I am so tired of people making things up! If there was a loving creator we would not have this kind of hell happening period, end of story. Free will was invented to cover up this monstrous delusion. By the way, I like John Searle. PS. Not trying to be rude to Brad
We will never figure out consciousness, it is everywhere and nowhere, these clowns can talk in circles all day long, just sit back and be an observer, our ego always needs an answer, ha!
I bet your ancestors said the same thing about fire, and the seasons, and the moon.
Steelcitybaby76 well put. I would just add I believe we will never figure it out going through this path, in my opinion. It's not about neurons and synapses, to me.
"our ego always needs an answer.."
Yes, otherwise there would be no scientific exploration and discovery!.
Xxxaaaccbb Ego gives meaning to life, doesn’t it?
This clown can’t show proof for anything he is saying😂😂😂😂
I am studying philosophy and understanding consciousness had been special intrest to me and I try to be as unbiased as i could and what this guy is saying is very helpful in understanding the possibilities in this field.
Well this clown is considered one of the 20 greatest philosophers of the Twentieth Century.
So many assumptions, so much arrogance. Sad
Absolutely.
0 dignity.
?
@@rclrd1 dignity
noun plural -ties
a formal, stately, or grave bearing he entered with dignity
the state or quality of being worthy of honour the dignity of manual labour
relative importance; rank he is next in dignity to the mayor
sense of self-importance (often in the phrases stand (or be) on one's dignity, beneath one's dignity )
high rank, esp in government or the church
a person of high rank or such persons collectively