Can Enlarged Materialism Explain Consciousness? | Episode 1608 | Closer To Truth
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 เม.ย. 2020
- Materialism is the belief that only physical things are real. But physical things seem so utterly different from mental things. Could there be more to materialism than the known laws of physics? Featuring interviews with Colin McGinn, Dean Radin, Anirban Bandyopadhyay, and Ken Mogi.
Season 16, Episode 8 - #CloserToTruth
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Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn takes viewers on an intriguing global journey into cutting-edge labs, magnificent libraries, hidden gardens, and revered sanctuaries in order to discover state-of-the-art ideas and make them real and relevant.
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Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
#Materialism #Consciousness
I’m just beginning to realize what you are trying to do here. Amazing. Thank you for sharing your work freely.
What do you mean?
This channel is a miracle for platforming these important questions. I thank you! Don't give up! Your work is not vain at all.
It is not at all an important question, merely pouring from the empty into the void and using undefined term such as "real"
@@vhawk1951kl
You watch Democracy Now? In terms of political philosophy we will not agree on anything. I'll assume the same goes for ordinary philosophy as well. Have a good day.
@@Adeptus_Mechanicus Taking as I do the view that "democracy was the fool invention of a psychopath - in which respect I agree with Plato, I tend to avoid that which invokes such a fool invention of a psychopath.
Indeed it is not in vain. I can't say how much my life has been enriched by learning from these brilliant people.
Consciousness does not require an explanation. It is the explanation.
It's amazing how much we know and how much more we still need to learn.
I love when intellectuals are humble enough to say "I don't know."
It seems a difficult thing to do for some.
From where do you creatures get this "we" fantasy?
@@vhawk1951kl If this comment section was a poker game, you've got a hell of a tell.
@@mortalclown3812 and you are what? - 13 years old at most?
Materialism is probably the single biggest obstacle in understanding consciousness.
I agree. Until people are able to think outside of a materialistic worldview, they will refuse to even see the possibility of a spiritual worldview or come to an understanding of just what exactly consciousness is.
"Materialism" Being the supposition or belief that only physical things are "real"Or at least that is the assertion of the wiseacre pouring from the empty into the void in this piece. Is it not utterly futile and meaningless to speak of materialism (as defined) unless you define or set out what you mean by "real"?- Does it not also scream the question what you mean by "physical"?
What do you yourself suppose either physical or real, to mean or what do those words convey to you, or what you seek to convey when you use if you ever use them without defining your terms?
Maybe, but there are a lot of goofy theories also about universal resonance and things that are completely wishful thinking. I m looking for the truth, not for another religion.
This is so great, so many opposing and carefully thought out ideas put on table. Thank you so much for the great material
"The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine." -Sir James Jeans, English physicist, astronomer and mathematician
Thought is mechanical.
@@daithiocinnsealach3173 No, you rationalize mechanisms, your rationalisation is not mechanic.
It is the mechanism that evolves.
@@daithiocinnsealach3173 mechanical is a worldview given that the "mechanisms" of elementry particles are an ontological mystery (Copenhagen interpretation) 🤔
@@ShawarMoni "mystery"...thus we are free to try to answer this mystery with a bigger mystery.? Sir That's not philosophy
In truth, only consciousness explains consciousness since only consciousness is a self-explanatory reality. Because I know myself I know other things so knowledge of objective things depends on our subjective reality.
Kuhn is incredibly well versed, dude has hung in the convo with sooo many pov's
Colin was most impressing!! His knowledge and understanding is astonishing ;) Personally , I agree with Dean. It really would make the most sense that basically everything is just ONE thing. Great interviews!! Thanks, one oft the best :)
Colin and Dean are the coolest. Colin understands that consciousness has to be seeing from a first person perspective to be understood instead of a third person. Dean while not jumping into dualism, realizes that it is just a different refinement of the natural world.
Love this show, hits at the deepest questions in life, Colin McGinn and Dean Radin have good take on this subject.
One of your best ones yet! Bravo!
These are my absolute favorite videos!!
Great video, thanks.
I am deeply touched by the video -- the question, the right protecting, the curiosity. But there was one thing that was really missing for me, and that I never heard really addressed. It's this: That not only is it clear that consciousness exists, but furthermore, it is clear that consciousness has voice.
Whose "consciousness" of what?
Conscious means "with knowledge, and the verb to know is transitive
It is utterly pointless and meaningless to speak of knowledge without defining whose knowledge and whose knowledge of what
If we regard the quantum field, or strings, or whatever is at the base, as, in essence, 'reified raw existence' then we can presuppose there are other forms of 'raw existence' (that aren't simply higher-level combinations thereof) that express dramatically differently than the reified physical form. Of course this different expression would be consciousness or "souls". My mind state is near-infinitely different from a material thing like a rock, but it definitely exists, just like the rock.
It's like how we separate ice and water mentally into two different things even though they are the same expressed dramatically differently.
'reified raw existence' wow nice empty deepity!
"then we can presuppose there are other forms of 'raw existence' ".......lol this is not philosophy mate!
"My mind state is near-infinitely different from a material thing like a rock, but it definitely exists, just like the rock."
-Strawman argument. Biology differs from rocks. Biological properties (like properties of a brain) do not exists like things do (rock).
Biological properties (consciousness, mitosis, digestion, photosynthesis) are like material properties (hardness, liquidity, conductivity,wetness etc).
So properties "do not exist" in that sense, they are emergent qualities of structures. More complex structures give rise to more complex properties.
One of the best sites on the net, thank you :)
If you picture consciousness as described below (an enlarged materialism), you can integrate it with the rest of your mind:
Sensory inputs and memories cause neurons to fire. Chemoelectric signals are generated in the synapses.
Consciousness manifests when a critical mass of neurons are generating chemoelectrical signals. As these electrical signals travel on the axons, electromagnetic waves are produced that radiate short distances. When multiple neurons fire simultaneously, a complex field is created by these intersecting EM waves.
Feed back loops and resonances of some waves occurs and becomes regulated by an emergent brain property, consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to focus and regulate these feed back loops.
Oh hell yeah, I didn't see this before I commented on the other video. This is great, the differentiation of consciousness and behavior. Perfect.
17:02 Haha, that smile says it all :'D
Great content as always. Sound is off a little though. Watching on my TV as I work I find I have to turn up the volume when Kuhn narrates and turn it down when he interviews (so I don't upset the neighbours).
This is happening in all of the full episodes.
The audio people need to equalise or balance (or whatever they call it) before the video is uploaded. Better to do it now, at the beginning, before they upload the other 1700+ long-form videos they have.
Turn on loudness equalization in your sound settings.
I would really love to see Annaka or Sam Harris on this series!
Talk about stretching a term unnecessarily. All that we know is the physical/material, and all claims for another reality have either been falsified or are unfalsifiable. So, why the perseveration over something that is probably not real? How is the mystery of consciousness different than the mystery of life? Both are “hard problems”, but there’s much less scientific controversy regarding the latter. Is it because we seem to be getting closer to understanding the origin of life?
We're really just trying to.figure out where it all came from and to that we have absolutely no answer and likely never will. We simply do not know what this stuff is we are made from or where income from or for what, if any, purpose it came to be. Purpose may be a purely human concept.
Vaul, Dog Warrior , Agree .
Actually I think that's backwards. All that we know is consciousness, and claims of another reality is a theoretical inference but consciousness is directly available to our knowledge.
Here is a quote by physicist Andrei Linde:
"Let us remember that our knowledge of the world begins not with matter but with perceptions. I know for sure that my pain exists, my “green” exists, and my “sweet” exists...everything else is a theory. Later we find out that our perceptions obey some laws, which can be most conveniently formulated if we assume that there is some underlying reality beyond our perceptions. This model of material world obeying laws of physics is so successful that soon we forget about our starting point and say that matter is the only reality, and perceptions are only helpful for its description.”
See?
The only way for there not to be another reality is if consciousness is reducible to and literally is the same thing as some physical fact. But of course, we haven’t been able to reduce consciousness to the physical. If reductive physicalism is true, which seems to be the view you are alluding to, then consciousness must, however, be reducible to the physical world. But it seems hard to imagine what such a reduction would even look like. See the following quote by philosopher Thomas Nagel:
“ If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view. “
So, until we know for certain that consciousness is reducible to the physical, we do not know that the physical world is all there is as consciousness may also exist or may be the only reality there is.
@@highvalence7649 , this is philosophical gibberish. We ONLY know consciousness as emergent from the physical. Anything else is speculation.
@@86645ut i don't think it's gibberish. You may just not be used to philosophy. Which is fine. We can't be well-versed in everything.
I would like to challange you on the more or less implicated claim that consciousness is an emergent property of physical facts about brains and bodies by asking you how you come to that conclusion, but even if that is true, however, that still does not mean that the physical world is the only reality there is as emergentism is consistent with and perhaps even is a form of property dualism, which I understand as a view that entails that consciousness, while being a property of the physical world, still is distinct from the physical world in a dualist sense. At least, emergentism is consistent with nonreductive physicalism which I do think entails some form of dualism in that I understand dualism to be the view that the mental and the physical are mutually irredicible and irredicible to another kind of thing.
So, if emergentism is true, then a form of nonreductive physicalism is true, and then some form of dualism is true, then it seems to follow that the mental instantiates a reality of its own irredicible to matter or anything else and hence, it would be false that the only thing or reality there is is the physical or material world.
many time in the past consciousness has been likened to the relationship between a radio station broadcasting and a radio receiver where conscious awareness is the successful tuning of the receiver IE the ACT of tuning the receiver is consciousness and what is received is...'what it feels like'..and by extension the development of conscious awareness is the refining of the tuning process
I liked the comment that we don’t really understand matter, or space/time, let alone consciousness! I’m puzzled why RLK rejects Extended Materialism in his final comments. Unless we come to reject Materialism altogether (eg. for some form of Idealism), some extended version of Materialism is going to be necessary (even if it’s only to include an experiential dimension as in Panpsychism). I think some version of Dean Radin’s Dual Aspect Monism might be the kind of synthesis that embraces both consciousness and Physics in a single ontology.
"We", being you and which particular identifiable interlocutor? It is not exactly a crime for you to have no idea or a little understanding of any of those things, but you get points for admitting that you have not the faintest idea about any of them what is this consciousness mumbo-jumbo about which you buffoons keep wittering?
You have not the faintest idea? - No surprises there.
I think that consciousness is simply what causation looks like. To take a classic example, what happens when a pool cue hits a ball? What causes the ball to roll across the table rather than simply sitting still? I think it's perfectly legitimate to say that the ball is conscious of the stick's causal action and acts accordingly. In this way, the ball possesses the sort of proto-consciousness mentioned in the video.
This viewpoint has the added benefit of answering Hume's objection to the nature of causality itself. Conscious is universal because causation is universal, and the two things are one and the same.
You are doing great work
I think perception of each person is different due to past experience and memories
You may argue that why new born child behave differently because may be there is no past memory but there is biological memory that make difference
So human body is a chemical factory
And consiousness rare product of it
It would be interesting to approach the subject from Gustavo Bueno's Philosophical Materialism. His Materialistic Special Ontology is a good example of an "extended materialism".
Could consciousness in brain be matter changing into energy and back again to produce inner subjective feeling?
The starting point is qualia. And the question is . . . what causes qualia? What causes red, sound etc. However, because we are locked inside the realm of qualia it is impossible to know what is outside the realm of qualia. Every hypothesis about what is outside of qualia is impossible to verify from inside qualia. All the external data gets converted into qualia in the process of experiencing it (assuming there is external data). Hence we are trapped within. Exploring outside of qualia is impossible and therefore an adventure we will never undertake. We are locked in a conundrum.
Take a shot every time this guy says qualia. 😋
One of the special properties of consciousness is that the interpretation is very reflective of the person trying to understand it.
You can't voice a belief on consciousness without it reflecting oneself. Unless you are similar to the person in a certain respect, that explanation won't feel right.
If we ever get our answer we could all understand, far more people are going to think they were right all along than we expect.
For example, evolution theory to me offers a powerful explanation in the sense of understanding how it forms, as imo the best way to try and grapple with what it could be.
But it lacks phenomenology. If consciousness is comprehensible, it loses part of its substance, and so for those where that missing substance is the most important part, the view isn't valued.
One of the "special properties" of whose consciousness?
It is meaningless and futile to speak of consciousness as a vague generality or tantamount to no more than stuff and without specifics, for example whose consciousness and whose consciousness of what.
What do you suppose consciousness and consciousness of what to be?
What experience of what you call "consciousness" do you have?
What exactly do you suppose yourself to be interpreting"? Generally speaking one only makes use of an interpreter where two parties to a conversation do not speak the same language, or simply cannot understand one another
Which party is which?
@@vhawk1951kl Consciousness is asserted on ourselves and then others, by just being. The working out of what consciousness means comes after that assertion.
I'm stating that self-reflection reaches different conclusions in people. (So the consciousness of a person on themselves if you need the who and what.) Subsequently, the consciousness of the person on what the spoken term "consciousness" means (which is a different entity than the actual process) is different.
My point in noting this line of thinking is to explain how the term consciousness can't easily be agreed upon. I don't understand why you think this explanation needs a "who", when I need to account for many different views to explain how we disagree.
Consciousness for me is the point where my subconscious processes amalgamate so that I can be aware of something. It's a process happening all the time I'm awake, on all manner of things. But this wasn't part of my point. Delving deep into that gets complicated.
From where do you creatures get this "we" fantasy?
What exactly do you mean by "consciousness" and what exactly is your experience of it and how you know that it is what you call consciousness or attracts that particular epithet?
Until you tell me whose consciousness and consciousness of what you might as well say nothing and I will be no further forwards?
Absent defining consciousness when it you just substitute because the stuff, and similarly I would be no further forward.
.
If nouns could be transitive, certainly consciousness (whatever you mean by consciousness) and other nouns that are associated with actions or what is firstly call "doing", then consciousness which simply means with_knowledge is like knowledge or knowing, transitive, completely meaningless without a subject and object who is doing what.
It is simply gibberish to speak of consciousness in limbo or in vacuo or just using it as a substitute for stuff or things generally, and to be frank whenever you speak of consciousness you might as well just say stuff., for all it communicates or conveys.
It is gibberish to speak of with knowledge that identifying knowledge of what and the knower. It is identical to your saying to me without more "Know" or perhaps "Am", Whereupon I would no doubt wait for the other shoe to drop, being in no better or worse position than if you had said absolutely nothing at all, or just "stuff", for I would be left with that partner of nonsense and nothing else.Let me try another meaningless word elsimbolop - jolly interesting stuff elsimbolop.
I repeat from where do you creatures get this "we or "our" fantasy.
By the way I came across some cosmic elsimbolop the other day, and jolly fascinating it was to, and it was served on a bed of stuff and nonsense.
Oddly enough elsimbolop is Venusian for some dreamer came up with, and wafted about, the place, some meaningless word.
@@vhawk1951kl "We" means I assume a shared experience. I use "we" to indicate I find discussing consciousness, causes disagreement and I expect others to find that using their translation of "disagree" in their consciousness, will yield an understanding similar enough to my own so that we can communicate further. I also used "ourselves" assuming a shared experience that others consider themselves to be conscious. Concepts are received not in the same way, as they are sent (as it is a different mind) but when I'm talking to other people, the language implicitly extracts the commonality, so that we still exchange some information.
Again. I am commenting only on the disagreement about consciousness, which is a social phenomenon that is not consciousness itself and can quite adequately be acknowledged. All your complaints of nonsense for something I'm not doing is best I ignore. (I alter my language to fit people who'd like the video, so it feels you are being a deliberate contrarian to comment here.)
"Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind."
- Santiago Ramon y Cajal
Damn, this is perfect.
I like that 1 thing theory. Makes sense. Very versatile indeed!
It's the oldest recorded theory of them all. We haven't really come very far at all in 2500 years.
you are both kidding right?
Not kidding at all! If you are a theist or a realist, knowing all matter and particles are made of energy and that's all there really is; God being everywhere at all times and energy being everything I I beleive the 2 are one in the same. In, through and as is all there is is God or energy. KISS makes it much more likely and acceptable. So, not kidding whatsoever.
@@robertjkuklajr3175 I prefer to be educated and rational.
So I am a Methodological Naturalist and I don't use made up mysterious concepts to explain things that are the way the are or things I don't understand.
"God being everywhere at all times and energy being everything I I believe the 2 are one in the same."
- So god is matter? cool If the word god is a fancy way to describe matter , I have no problem.
The only issue I have is that the word god is used in our culture to describe an intelligent agent and that doesn't fit with your claim...
The great thing is it is entirely speculation. I beleive what I beleive and so do you. I dont have a problem with that. No forced anything. Just is what it is to whomever. If it help me sleep awsome!
Also known as materialism of the gaps.
It's quite literally the other way around. Consciousness is currently an unexplained phenomenon. And it may very well be that materialism will ultimately be unable to explain consciousness. However, it is philosophers and theologians who are using a "gaps" argument with regard to consciousness. Gaps arguments always find regions of reality that remain unexplained by science and then use that gap to "reason" something like, "Therefore God" or "Therefore materialism is false." Those who make this argument, however, should note the many, many thinkers of the past who made the same mistake about phenomenon that are now very well explained and well understood by science.
@@ultimateman55 I couldn't have said it better myself.
Also known as a strawman argument....
Why all of you are trying to explain a physical phenomenon through pseudo Philosophical worldviews when we have science to deal with the investigation of hard questions...
@@nickolasgaspar9660 who are you talking to?
Another wonderful investigation of the mystery of consciousness. I've read some of Colin McGinn's work, so it was great to see him talking in a video. I especially enjoyed Ken Mogi's perspective on things. But please, Robert, stop teasing us with all this dancing around the issue and just... GIVE US THE ANSWER! 😀
If you hope to find it out in one video, I don't have good news for you. Kuhn has been trying to find the answer for more than two decades.
I am not sure that you are searching the correct field for answers about a biological phenomenon.
Any philosophical inquiry that ignores our current scientific epistemology is pseudo philosophy by definition, according to the goals of philosophy(etymology) and the method identified by Aristotle and still being used.
Depending on whatever you suppose "consciousness" to be - and depending on whether or not you can set out clearly exactly what you mean by "consciousness", what exactly do you find "mysterious" about whatever you mean by (even though you have actually no idea) "consciousness"?
@@vhawk1951kl Depending on exactly how one parses your grammatically complex question -- or is it actually intended as a rhetorical statement? -- many books have been written on the subject. I won't attempt to condense all the issues into a single TH-cam comment. Do you not find (whatever you mean by) consciousness mysterious?
@@zenbum2654 You appear to be telling me exactly what I supposed or imagined you would tell me, namely that you have not the faintest idea what you mean by consciousness and also no experience of consciousness whatsoever. If you do not understand a question or simply cannot understand a question is always open to you to ask questions or request further and better particulars thereof.
I am always happy to try to assist those with slower or fewer wits and mine own.
Even if perfect materialism models were produced to demonstrate consciousness, something tells me there would still be no scientific consensus. It would turn into an epistemological ontological argument, like asking “what is the size of infinity?”.
Aatmiya DIVINITY
Be Blessed
HARE KRSNA
Materialism can never ever explain Consciousness.
On the contrary Consciousness only Consciousness enables to know, learn, understand and recognise matter.
Very respectfully Loving ❤️ ING You One and All DIVINE ❤️
When everything is energy and energy is vibration then I suspect that consciousness has its vibration as well. I just think ... gives something vibrations or are they vibrations .. Anyway, I don't know but if vibrations can be measured then consciousness too ..?
"Everything disappears into clouds and waves"....exactly or makes perfect sense that position and location, or materialism emerges....not a problem...but a process......VP
Great, careful and humble discussion on a pressing topic as usual. Thanks. I’m puzzled why you hold on to such a shibboleth as “materialism” when all your interlocutors carefully explained how etiolated this idea has become in modern physics. Your own ideas seem to be: only the material is real; the material is what physics studies (the physical). But when contemporary physics suggests you have to give up the comfortable certainties of traditional materialism you take fright, withdraw from discussion and proclaim, “I’m not convinced”. We’d be closer to the truth if we considered without anxiety some aspects of the monism on offer.
To suggest that materialism has gone out of fashion in modern physics is merely to reveal how out-of-touch you are with modern physics. The overwhelming majority of physicists lean heavily towards materialism and their theories only describe the material, including not only matter of course but also energy and fields.
well materialism and any other metaphysical type of "ism" are irrelevant to this discussion.
The only rational path to understand anything in nature is through Methodological Naturalism aka Science. We don't need to go to the extremes and make absolute statements about the nature of reality. What we should do is to keep our causal descriptions inside our limits of investigation.
Philosophical worldviews that go beyond our scientific observations are pseudo philosophy by definition.
Nickolas Gaspar I agree with you 99%. It’s just your last statement that goes well beyond anything allowable in standard science. This is the problem with the scientistic viewpoint, which thankfully only involves a small minority, often not practicing scientists. Most get on with their research working fruitfully within a methodologically naturalist framework.
Gief Grief I don’t necessarily disagree, but if you’ve listened carefully to current debates in physics, the term “material” or “physical” has lost any meaning (apart from “what physicists study” - which makes your statement trivially true and not worth saying, except to add “and there is nothing else to study”, which is trivially false (and not part of physics).
@@valkonrad Which was my last statement that goes well beyond anything allowable in standard science.?
"Philosophical worldviews that go beyond our scientific observations are pseudo philosophy by definition."
What science has to do with this?Science is only a step in our philosophical inquire and when it is ignored that is a huge problem.
That is a Descriptive not a Normative classification of different types of Philosophy. I am not saying that speculations beyond our knowledge are Wrong or incorrect. I am only saying that those are irrational beliefs and they should not be presented as a result of a legit philosophical process.
The etymology of the word is main standard of evaluation of what is philosophy and what is not. The six basic steps of Aristotle distinguish a philosophical inquire form a pseudo philosophical one.
Pls elaborate, I am always happy to find holes in my reasoning and correct them.
An enlarged materialism can be pragmatically useful but cannot explain qualities parsimoniously. A physics of internal mental states can be useful. But ultimately, awareness is, and isn't matter, the regularities of phenomenality. Consciousness and qualities could be selectively applied to "internal matter", but that's dualism.
The Rainbow, mirrors our Life- and Consciousness-structure,
six parts of our body-structure, six Conscious-Abilities,
the physical body, and the five Night-Bodies, (Deep-Sleep)
> Instinct, - Gravity, - Feeling, - Intelligence, - Intuition, - Memory, >
The Circuit-Principle, >
All Life-Units have the same Eternal Size,
Micro- Medio- and Macro-Cosmos,
have to do with the Perspective-Principle.
Consciousness been a conundrum for nearly a century, but only for materialists who insist that metaphysics is a quaint way of looking at things. Eben Alexander, MD survived an attack by bacteria on his brain, putting him in a coma for a week, providing this trained scientist with his own experience of life after death. On recovery he sat in on the medical discussion about what had happened to him in which he could analyze the consciousness he had experienced in view of what medical science understands. All explanations required a functioning brain, especially a neocortex, which, in his case was being eaten by microbes. He wrote "Proof of Heaven" to share what he had learned from his Near-Death Experience. "I understood how blind to the full nature of the spiritual universe...I had been, who had believed that matter was the core reality. p. 57. I explored this revelation in "Surviving the Micronova."
There is an underlying presumption here that human understanding is sufficient to answer these kinds of questions. But just as goldfish can't grasp certain concepts that humans easily can, it's entirely plausible to assume that there are some things not even the most sophisticated human minds are capable of understanding. The riddle of consciousness, the true nature of matter, the origin of the universe, etc., may just be beyond the power of our cognitive apparatus to comprehend.
This is what I believe. It’s bizarre to me that humans think our brains can figure out the consciousness problem. It’s beyond our understanding
Between closer to the truth, spirit science, are many other things, we have only begun to scratch the surface.
I love your show, very interesting and educational.
Consciousness existed in a pure form before the brain was developed, like in an embryos a fetus or a new born.
As the brain grows and ages, Consciousness grows and intensify as knowledge, intentions and actions are created.
Every philosopher And scientists have this backwards, Consciousness is not born in the brain or the gift or a bonus in order for our creation to be autonomous, the brain is the gift. By the way, order for a car to be autonomous, it needs a brain not consciousness.
The truth we are trying to get to should have some beauty to it, something deeply satisfying, or why should we even bother pursuing these lofty ideas? Just get on with living a happy life if none of this matters. One hopes the truth about our reality is ultimately simple and explainable. The mathematical idea that we spring from an underlying symmetry connects philosophically to the Teilhardian Omega Point, and my video that starts with "We Start With a Point" is an exploration of where we can go from there.
The last one hundred years have seen a suppression of the idea that the mathematics of quantum mechanics, relativity, gravity, light, and the infinitely scalable electromagnetic waves of our observed reality, all fit together at the fifth dimension. There has also been a push towards "science is the only truth" and "religion is delusion" over the past 100 years, a viewpoint embraced by many. Thankfully, that is changing now that we have a Nobel laureate supporting these same ideas. In his book The Science of Interstellar, Kip Thorne explains how an observer in the fifth dimension is able to see the different possible worldlines of Everett's Universal Wavefunction as the different 4D worldlines (or "world tubes" as Thorne calls them) stretching away from them in the writhing geometries of the tesseract. Christopher Nolan's cinematic genius allowed us to see this idea on the big screen. The truth we are getting closer to must resolve this conflict between science and spirituality because the truth must ultimately be right in the middle, in that Omega Point that we come from and go to "before" and "after" the existence of the universe we are observing.
Welcome to the fifth dimension! It's where we've been all along, observing it one Planck frame after another, as we ride Wheeler's Self-Excited Circuit. Mathematically and as consciousness, we are the universe observing itself. And we are all observing the same wavefunction, there are not multiple wavefunctions. So in that sense we are all one, how about that! Because we are all observing the same thing, the current solution to Everett's equation.
"can materialism explain consciousness?"
We have to figure out how to explain materialism first
in truth, without consciousness there would be no explaining of things.
@@williamburts5495 Truth be told
Bright !
If consciousness is a sort of substance that differs in refinement would that mean that consciousness is not isomorphic?
The level of consciousness a human has is more refined than that of a moth.
Can consciousness get any more refined than the human consciousness?
Consciousness resides in the past. We cannot know the future and everything that is not the future has to be the past. Our brains create a now from our experience of the past. We don’t have a problem watching a film we know was made in the past. We watch it like it “is” happening “now”. Science doesn’t tell us what “is” it tells us what our perception of material “was”, remove the “now” and this discussion looks a whole lot different.
The present is a paradox, Zeno was on to that one 2.000 years ago!
And the Indians and Chinese were onto it 2500 years ago if not longer!
I think there's definitely some truth to this, as modern brain science has shown some quite interesting results with regard to temporal brain function. Like how when you touch your toe with your finger, the nerve impulse from your finger arrives to your brain first due to the shorter distance, yet the brain has a delay in processing, it waits for more input, and the two ultimately feel simultaneous. I've often pondered if consciousness could experienced and/or be real if memory didn't exist. The knee jerk reaction is "Of course it's real without memory!" but then again, without memory, you future self would have no identity, no understanding of the past, no memories of experience. The link between consciousness and memory, the past, fascinates me.
Or the obvious conclusion, there is only the everpresent NOW. There 'exists' neither a past, nor a future. Shocking Zeno somehow missed that.
@@ultimateman55
Consciousness is a dumping ground for non-conscious activity.
It receives feelings, inner vocalisation, and mental imagery, all from the non-conscious mind.
The core of what you are is simply awareness. Awareness has no power to do anything. It is the "am" in "I think, therefore I am" Awareness has no desires, no feelings, no morality, ..., ..., it's nothing but aware. It is also always present and affected by nothing. Your awareness doesn't 'get sick' for example. The bodily feelings of sickness are in your body, and the mental feelings of sickness are in your consciousness, you are 'aware' of both sensations, yet your awareness itself is merely the unaffected perceiver. Awareness affects nothing, and is affected by nothing. Awareness is also present in all things at all times. Your awareness is exactly identical to mine, to a sheep, to a bird, to a... The awareness is gawd. That's why gawd knows all, because gawd IS all
Consciousness disappears when you sleep, or when you're under anesthesia. Awareness is eternal and always active in some form. Without consciousness however, you don't experience 'your' awareness.
Vedic philosophy explains it better than I ever could. They also explain how the ONLY thing that exists is the mind of gawd.
There is no 'self', there is no 'you', or 'me', in fact babies under 12 months don't even have the concept of a self. Everything everywhere is god's mind. Your computer, the food you eat, you, dirt, sand, fire, water, wood, plastic, glass, steel, ..., ..., ... all just a part and expression of the infinite mind of gawd.
@@TasteMyStinkholeAndLikeIt ^ expert troll
That will prove the material basis
The theme music is jarring to my ears. As a muscian, I wouldn't change a thing. The topics are jarring too. Nice fit.
The area under the curve?
17:24 he saved the best for last.
What if consciousness is the effect of a dual hemisphere brain. Or in general multiple neural systems working together to be conscious. One being the part of us that operates body functions and one being the part of our brain that observes and correlates the inputs from our senses with memory. If we were only this we would be a biological machine but we have a second system in us. The one that observes the status and inputs of the body system. The higher brain function that serves as the observer of our body system is what we call consciousness.
To be conscious you must have a way to process input from the world and a way to store memory and a higher brain function that is the observer that has access to all subsystems of the brain
We are created in the imagination of a greater conciseness manifest in gravity.
There is truth in this.
Yes. And we are also part and parcel with the vibrational frequencies and soul of the quantum mechanical wave function of the universe.
See? I can make stuff up too!
@@ultimateman55 lol! nice one. People just love pretending to know things they don't....and express them in the form of deepities !
It's physical but it is alive so Consciousness emerges out of this materialism because it is alive. Another words is active.
Consciousness is an irreducible feature of particular persons, is not a simple idea, so cannot be captured by objective generalization. It may suit our interests to identify an apple or a space ship as and entity that can be captured descriptively (by words) as a concept, but this can be done only by capturing the idea of apple as a member of the set of apples by cutting away all properties that individuate particular apple. If you try to force consciousness into a simple concept, you trim away what is most important about it: the properties that make it a feature of a particular. Brains are material, but matter today includes energy. As an aspect of a living thing, energy is a life involved quantity that is required to make matter alive; physical sensors in our bodies sense when energy is getting low and the pain it signals we learn is associated with hunger and we learn how to respond to that discomfort; the mother presents her breast and the baby "learns" to link hunger with ways of doing away with that frightening feeling of disorder, or whatever the feeling is. Babies who associate hunger-pain satisfaction with sucking may be diverted with a pacifier until the hunger feeling mounts to a higher level. Being at the nexus of a material bodily sense of energy change and the state of energy expenditure, physical mass thus causes the signaling that calls for the learned physical response of the constructed mind.
Consciousness is the mother of materialism, matter is a byproduct of imagination,built on a memory of the past, with our thoughts and imagination,we are the creators, this cell phone we use to share this video and and comment section was once someone’s imagination from the past,the Buck Rogers of the 40s,,the scientists have the hard job, they have to do the math
Okay, one question. what is matter? answer that and then lets go on to materialism.
Urghh. When you really know,you'll be able to communicate clearly without stuttering over nothing.
imho - the problem seems to be; coming to terms with the fact there are two 'realities' sharing the same space. By that I mean, the world of the incredibly small (quantum) and the world WE operate in have two completely differing sets of physics rules. For example, the issues with observing the very small (quantum) causing what is being observed to be 'disrupted' from its field by the observation process itself (skewing/falsifying the results seen). All because the Quantum doesn't play well with our forms of observation (used in our reality).
These physics rules seem so radically opposed to one another. So we are currently scratching our heads trying to come to terms with that fact. And, that their 'opposed' positions are needed for existence to be.
Scientists are having fun trying to explain it too ..when the current 'goal posts' are forever shifting :-)
I'm guessing the explanations will only get harder to formulate (and also transfer to the layman), especially as computers do more and more of the complex work. It would be nice if it boiled down to a two digit number, but I got the feeling it might be harder to grasp.
I'm still trying to understand the theory that the universe could be an 'event' caused by two energy waves colliding together (like two walls of water hitting one another), causing a new universe. Then (due to this 'event'), the two fields are pushed a part. Finally, after many trillions of 'our' years (after the universe has dissipated), they are attracted back together again where another 'event' occurs (rinse and repeat).
It can in principle
How? Please tell me how! I want to be a famous philosopher :D
Yeah I never bought that nihilist idea that consciousness, free will and soul are an illusion. This epiphenomenon is, by definition, the base for all empirical observation and experience
Why are those two facts in conflict? I don't see how they are?
@@DavidSmith-wp2zb
If the conscious awareness which is used to deduce reality is an illusion then reality itself is an illusion because an illusion is what deduced reality.
@@JohnDoe-bt4ps I'm not sure that's true. Why can't an illusion perceive reality? Your cell phone camera does that every day!
@@DavidSmith-wp2zb
If your perception is an illusion how can it perceive anything other than illusionary things?
@@DavidSmith-wp2zb
Let's take a person whose mind sees things that aren't there why is their conscious experience wrong when it's all an illusion? Why are they labeled as crazy?We are thus all crazy and believe in illusionary things that aren't really there.
I cannot understand what else could be there except what is actually there. It is all material to me.
How about the consciousness you are using to apprahend the material world with.?You are having phenomeonological experiences of varioius sorts--the phenomenological experience of colors of the physical world for example. We don't know wether they are reducible to matter.
@@highvalence7649 There is one way you can find out now. Destroy your brain and see if you experience anything.
@@andrebrown8969 How does that help us find out whether consciousness is reducible to matter? What I mean by "reducible" is that consciousness must be able to be explained in terms of matter. But this has yet to be done. All we have are observations regarding tight correlations and causal relations, but these are not the same as explanation or reduction.
Here is a quote by physicist Andrei Linde
:
"Let us remember that our knowledge of the world begins not with matter but with perceptions. I know for sure that my pain exists, my “green” exists, and my “sweet” exists...everything else is a theory. Later we find out that our perceptions obey some laws, which can be most conveniently formulated if we assume that there is some underlying reality beyond our perceptions. This model of material world obeying laws of physics is so successful that soon we forget about our starting point and say that matter is the only reality, and perceptions are only helpful for its description.”
See?
The only way for there not to be another reality is if consciousness is reducible to and literally is the same thing as some physical fact. But of course, we haven’t been able to reduce consciousness to the physical. If reductive physicalism is true, which seems to be the view you are alluding to, then consciousness must, however, be reducible to the physical world. But it seems hard to imagine what such a reduction would even look like. See the following quote by philosopher Thomas Nagel:
“ If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view. “
So, until we know for certain that consciousness is reducible to the physical, we do not know that the physical world is all there is as consciousness may also exist or may be the only "thing" there is.
@@highvalence7649 My brain is made of matter. If it is destroyed I cannot experience anything. I do not need quotes or academics to know that.
@@andrebrown8969 Well I doubt the claim that you cannot experience anything after the destruction of your brain. Although I'm not even sure that's the right way to think about it as the the continuity over time of the 'I' that experiences relates alot to nuanced questions of personal identity. We'll see if we need to get into that. But moreover, while I doubt your claim, it still does not appear to follow that the material is all there is from the premises that your brain is made of matter and that if your brain is destroyed, you cannot experience anything. It is not that easy I'm afraid. If it was that easy, everybody would be materialists. The issue is not as simple as that. It's alot more sophisticated.
I am a fundamentalist YEC Christian. I believe our consciousness is entirely dependent on the brain. That is their is no conscious agent without the brain, atleast in the case of the created humans who descend from Adam and Eve some 6000 years ago.
I believe the bible actually teaches, or atleast suggests this. This is part of the incredible glory of Gods majestic, creative genius.
The brain is matter that is determined by causal laws. Mind is what happens when the brain serves us in our experiential development and in our experience in every moment. The brain, being causally determined, is a third person entity that is not experienced as such and which is principally the same in humans in general. Mental development is experience and first-person in nature; it is not accessible as experience to others; we experience nothing but experience and others experience our behaviors said to be a product of our experience in the largest sense. The experience of things is empirical; the experience of experience itself may be phenomenal, but it is is empty of objective content, and, as Wittgenstein suggested, cannot be fixed in language, in propositions. There is nothing that it's like to be a bat: a bat has no experiences of itself that can be objectively compared to anything else.
The principal reason we cannot currently understand consciousness is due to the very simple and easily demonstrated, but fortunately easily rectified, fact that we do not presently have a correct identity/definition of ‘information’ itself as a phenomenon in its own right & not just what any of it ‘says’ or ‘means’.
Hint - it’s not ‘digits’ no matter how many of them one may have at one’s disposal nor how cleverly arranged they are, nor how large, powerful and globally interconnected are the machines operating on them.
As George Gilder points out in ‘Life After Google’ all such digit-using machines are nothing more than glorified abacuses - massively miniaturised, user-friendlied, vastly accelerated, electronically automated devices, yes, but for all that nothing more than glorified abacuses and as such completely unable to ‘think’ (which ‘thoughtfulness’ can be accomplished only via the use of real information, not digits), let alone think intelligently.
Now I’m not going divulge ‘information’s’ correct ontological identity here in this TH-cam comment (but you’ll be able to find it in the up-coming FQXi Essay Contest fqxi.org/community/essay/rules) but I can confidently assure you that once we have it - once we have ‘information’s’ correct ontological identity - under our belt, no great methodological nor conceptual difficulty attends the exercise of further establishing that of all of the directly information-related phenomena such as ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘consciousness’ - to far less than exhaust the list.
Indeed, building on both ‘information’ itself in its corrected identity status, along with that of all of the newly defined, directly information-related phenomena to boot, no great difficulty further attends the additional exercise of newly establishing, or more properly clarifying, the ontological identities of everything else here inside of our Universe - time, space, matter & energy. (Although it must be noted, this ‘corrected’ line of investigation no more elucidates anything ‘outside’ of our universe - presumably that external realm where the creator of it all resides, along with its means, methods & madnesses for so doing - than does any other extant worldview.)
One of the many epochal findings spotlighted by this corrected-information-based line of inquiry is the understanding that we live in a panpsychic Universe, that is to say one in which some very certain kind & amount of fully measurable ‘sentience’, or ‘consciousness’ exists as the pen-ultimate quintessence of all matter.
Matter is simply congealed sentience.
Margriet O'Regan is that nature equals god?
Kuhn is actually taller than Radin!
Can't hear the words over the music
Computers compute rather than actually think. Humans think rather than simply and solely compute.
What is the significant difference between computing and thinking?
@@daithiocinnsealach3173 Awareness
Habib C, yeah, but that's subjective. How you can tell that it's not present in computers or animals?
I suspect it's only a matter of time before many computers reading this remark are quite offended. When that happens, look for an inordinate amount of upvotes of this comment. xD
Roger Penrose: th-cam.com/video/hXgqik6HXc0/w-d-xo.html
So much speculation, worth noting that no-one can have a factual approach yet. We clearly need to develop better tools.
There is a theme of assumption here - that our conscious experience is the genesis of our mind's logical processes. If anything, neurological evidence indicates that the conscious experience follows and post-rationalises (to the same 'conscious' system, as a feedback loop) the actual decisions made by, and the actions resulting from, the rest of the brain.
I have personally come to view consciousness as the 'emotional post-processing' of the mind. An adaptation for successfully navigating the ultra-complex social environment of humanity; with the illusion of 'experience' as a by product.
I take issue with your primary definition of consciousness ...'what it feels like..." this is a blatant mis-interpretation consciousness ISN'T what it feels like (description)..it is the process of feeling (act/action)... what one chooses to be conscious of is 'what it feels like'..
Like zen
17:23 "But to explain the whole ediface of reality by vibrations is not taken seriously by modern science." Oops!, String Theory is rather orthodoxy in today's physics.
Studied, it is. However, it's anything but orthodox. As a field yet to make a testable prediction, it remains a purely mathematical theory that currently has little acceptance as describing reality among the scientific community. There are those that have hunches it may be right, but until empirical observations are confirmed, it's anything but orthodox.
String Theory is far from an accepted framework, but we have some good ideas on testing this idea.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-string-theory-finally-be-put-to-the-experimental-test/
Of course the downplay of vibrations as an essential ingredient of reality is unjustified. After all everything we have investigated in a fundamental scale is always a result of some kind of kinetic energy applied on essential particles of matter.
lol string theory is dead and basically refuted as an artifice of mathematics.
@@AdamTait-hy2qh lol its just a hypothesis with instrumentally valuable mathematics.
For a hypothesis to be dead...it needs to be falsified. So you are not justified to say such a thing.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 What a useless thing to say.
Read "My big TOE" of Thomas Campbell
What does he mean by "physical"? It seems that no one defines the term in any way other than to give a few synonyms.
Trying to understand something immaterial with empirical data seems like a bad start.
Can energy be non-dualistic real mind stuff?
A compromise between materialism and dualism? Does that guy at the end believe in 1.41 entities??
If enlarged materialism explain consciiousness, would one be able to measure consciousness, either at level of person or universe / cosmological level?
That’s the scientists job,figuring the math
The dean guy is right
Materialism will never be able to deal with the mind/brain problem, as information, which the mind/brain deals with, has an immaterial nature. Information is beyond the physical -- metaphysical, immaterial, nonphysical or incorporeal in nature. As such, information has no physical properties, no size, not extended in space, no weight, no color, no shape -- yet it has existence, existing in a realty beyond the material, otherwise we could not deal with information.
In order to move information between two points, one needs a code or symbol system with meaning. Since any physical symbol has no meaning in of itself, in order for it to be a meaningful symbol, a symbol must be assigned a metaphysical/immaterial information tag by an intelligence. This is true whether the coding system is digital or analog, and these symbols can be ink on a paper, wood, stone, or something having some physical shape. They can even be symbols or letters on a computer screen where some physical object is lighted up in the shape of the symbol.
For the English language which uses 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, the letters and combinations of letters have to be assigned meaning. But the English language could have used any 26 symbols or physical squiggles to represent the information assigned to them. And the same 26 letters of the English language can be used in other languages like Italian, German, or French … etc. So the symbols, or letters, don’t have any inherent meaning in of themselves -- they have just been assigned a particular meaning by an intelligence -- man.
Take the English phrase … "the red tree" … , in other languages the same alphabet symbols of the English language have been reassigned into different combinations with the same meaning …
French … l'arbre rouge
Spanish … el árbol rojo
German … der rote Baum
This simple demonstration shows that different symbol combinations can convey the same information, so the meaning or information attached to a particular set of physical symbols can be completely arbitrary. Also, note that changing the information attached to a symbol doesn't affect the symbol in any physical way, so the information has an immaterial existence.
In … "A Brief History of Time" … Stephen Hawking mentions that monkeys pounding away on keyboards will "very occasionally" by pure chance type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets.
While the probability of a monkey typing even a small paragraph with any coherent meaning is impossibly small in the grand scheme of even the known universe, the probability argument of the monkey typing a verse from Shakespeare misses the real problem with this example. The real problem here is that a foundation based on materialism cannot construct a coherent theory of reality as observed. Where is a monkey going to get a typewriter with symbols that have any meaning in the first place? A purely material process of chemistry + physics + chance has no way to construct a symbol system with meaning.
If I make a typewriter with 26 new symbols with no assigned meaning -- I can type and send mountains of raw undefined data or symbols, but I will never convey any information unless the symbols are assigned a meaning. Trying to send information with a typewriter with meaningless symbols would be impossible.
Give the monkey a typewriter with 26 squiggles with no meaning, and then ask the question again whether the monkey will type any meaningful passages with that typewriter? Nothing, zilch, big zero -- the monkey and his random typing will never type any passage of Shakespeare or anything at all with meaning.
Symbols and information with meaning demonstrate that materialism is false and that man has an immaterial aspect to his nature.
Is information "Material"? If you read this comment, nothing "material" passes from my brain to yours. Yet you are aware that I just asked that question. Similarly, when you watch this video, nothing material travels from the TH-cam server to your brain. TH-cam could delete this video from the server, not by removing any "material" but by using energy to simply re-arrange some magnetic molecules. So before launching into consciousness, consider that question. "Is information "material"?
Activation of the neurons is the effect, not the cause.
Cool that the guy cannot hide his point of view. He stares at his own hands with a sense of awe. And smiles at the possibility that asian polytheism is nothing but something western philosophy surpassed. Think I'd have the same expressions.
What a dog's breakfast of attempted explanations.
🤷♀️ 🐕 💩
dontzenyourselfout No. I can’t give an account of the Mind-Body problem.
If all biological forms share same quantum mechanism, than why can't we talk to plants and other animals, maybe even to bacteria? Should be simple, we don't need to know what they think and how they observe self and the world, just feel what they feel, by merging our mind with their neurons somehow. Except we can't do that, brain is a part of a body and works only in appropriate environment. One thing is how brain is constructed and branched between other cells, another thing is voltage, electric charge necessary for healthy functions. Maybe we could transfer human brain in monkey body, but it wouldn't work, our organ need more sugar to operate and control each cell. I wouldn't say plants are conscious, there's no need for expanded mind if you are rooted to the ground, but most animals definitely are, so we must talk processor power here also. Still i believe times will come when humanity will share global awareness with another kind of consciousness, if not aliens, somebody will make a monkey or a dog able to talk and teach their younglings about their culture. And it will not stop with one species, once we know how to induce consciousness to another species, many animals will became civilized and we will also talk with artificial intelligence.
Talk to them? I can't even talk to my Polish neighbour.
@@daithiocinnsealach3173 Use Jedi mind trick.
Vaul, Dog Warrior, simply because you don't want too. That's the free will (a property of consciousness) in action.
Idealist, monist, dualist, materialist, computationalist, behaviorist......but in the end the eliminitivist will prove them all and disprove them all. Since we don't fully understand the brain deep enough into the neurons, we float in this philosophical soup.
A bunch of waves having a complicated conversation about how one day they will be able to explain how ripples produce water without invoking anything mystical, magical or theological such as 'The Ocean'.
So wind isn’t real; how about shadows?
Materialists make "stuff" up to explain away "The Consciousness" that made all stuff. Until materialists can explain life and it's origin, abiogenesis, they, you can stuff it...
Hilarious, sounds like religious bias. We all need to start from the position of admitting we know very little, and follow best evidence.
@@ThePurza Actually your bias is proven. The best evidence, you are either ignorant of or choose to ignore is conclusive. The 20 essential amino acids biological proteins are constructed of require well over fifty of those proteins arranged in complex macromolecular machines such as enzymes and ribosomes that assemble 100% left handed amino acids into those proteins. That's without the code provided by Rna and Dna which are constructed of nucleic acids and carbohydrates and those molecules are 100% right handed and not to mention the lipids of the dissimilar bia layer cell walls. Men in the most sophisticated laboratories, with the simplest single celled organism in hand as a working model fail dismally duplicating it from chemicals. You believe a warm little pond, primordial soup or what ever, unguided, undirected, without purpose or design has greater creative power to exceed the consciousness of man? One detail. Those 20 amino acids when syntheticly produced and combined do not, will not assemble into any protein. Hilariously irrational.. You tell me who's biased in this case. And thinking of randomness+time can overcome this? Some details: http//www.darwinsmaths.com/
@@VernonChitlen so you see complexity and say "my bronze-age god did it". Yes you are the rational one.
Purnel You believe a perfectly unconscious, deaf, dumb and blind mud puddle has greater creative power than all mankind? That's rational..lol!
@@VernonChitlen of course I don't believe that, who ever said that!?
Consciousness was left out of science for a reason. There are things science is not meant to explain nor was it built to.
By trying to explain everything with it you are opening up science towards scientology and it then becomes a religion and not a method.
we maybe know how to build a car, but we never know how it is to be the car... hah!
"Can Enlarged Materialism Explain Consciousness? Where are the headquarters of ENLARGED materialism? This question goes Closer to Moronicism!
Correct....this question comes straight out from a pseudo philosopher hiney lol
When he said that science didn't seriously consider vibrations as fundamental I thought of those poor string theorists
Materialism enlargement pills - absolute state of science 😂
Define consciousness. Is a plant conscious? Is it only humans?
Great questions. Most of philosophers aren't able to define the phenomenon or to distinguish it from the rest of the mind properties.
Here is the official scientific definition of this mind property.
"Consciousness is an arousal and awareness of environment and self, which is achieved through action of the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) on the brain stem and cerebral cortex"
So our ability to consciously attend environmental and organic stimuli by specific functions of our brains is what we identify as conscious states.
Here is the publications that includes the definition and the responsible areas of our brain.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3722571/
Maybe consciousness is a whole body phenomenon. Every part, every organ, nerve, blood cell etc. working together to form a conscious body.
Consciousness is our ability to address all environmental and organic stimuli detected by our sensory system and produced by our brain .
So consciousness is a phenomenon produced by this ability of our brain to be aware of other phenomena (body, existing emerging thoughts, environments etc).
They are not the same phenomenon.
Let's just try to understand Quantum Mechanics first 😆
"Real" for whom?
Define "real"