Tim Maudlin - Does Consciousness Defeat Materialism?
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What would it take for consciousness to defeat materialism or physicalism? This is the worldview that only the physical is real, which is the dominant view of scientists and philosophers. Here’s what it would take: our inner awareness, our experience of what things feel like, could not be explained by physical brain alone That’s it. A tall order, though.
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Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of science and a Professor of Philosophy at New York University.
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Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, 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.
Good presentation and it is nice to have someone who is willing to say they don't know. I wish that Mr. Maudlin's last sentence: "conciseness supervenes on physics", was expanded upon. If I understand it, conciseness builds upon the physical brain. Life on earth has had a long time to develop a brain that exhibits consciousness and the how is a closely held secret.
i also wish he would have expanded on that. personally i have not seen anyone be able to defend that claim. that we are conscious may be due to our biological brains and bodies. but other instantiations of consciousness may not have had any material origins at all. consciousness may have always existed.
@@cosminvisan520 the reason i don't state it definitively is because I'm not sure I have a sound justification for it. However I don't find non-consciousness meaningful, so in that sense i understand everything there is to just be consciousness. I started reading your paper but I'm a slow reader. If you could just give the argument that it's necessary here in the comments I'd much rather prefer that.
@@cosminvisan520 i think it's true but I'm not sure what the argument would be that I am always being true is logically necessary?
There is no evidence that there is (or has ever been) consciousness absent a physical/biological brain.
Tim is so clear….great piece
Excellent... thanks 🙏.
pure gold- the problem lucidly explicated - makes all the other interviews on this matter redundant - full circle Robert methinks!!!!
This is one of the most realistic and honest excerpts. The guest is crystal clear. Robert, can you identify and quantify pain in the part of the brain responsible for pain?
Of course you can identify the neurostructures that are responsible for pain...That is what neuroscience and pain management been doing for decades now. We know the pathways, the changes in glial cell activation, the receptor changes in dorsal horns, the thalamic changes and the anterior cingulate cortex changes as well. The guest is extremely ignorant by bringing pain as the foundation for consciousness. Pain is clearly a physically/materialistically explainable process which explains the methods we use to treat it ( e.g neuromodulation, cord or nerve stimulators, ketamin and NDMa agonists, TMS, first neuron stimulation with intracranial implantable leads ).
People should not get raved by ignorant people with "overconfident" statements
@@grolstum211 Tim Maudlin makes no overconfident statements. He fully accepts neuroscience's ability to describe the very close correlations between feelings such as pain and physical goings-on in the brain. He also accepts that these findings are extremely helpful in enabling doctors to provide effective treatments for pain.
What Tim Maudlin points out is that neuroscience, of itself, cannot explain how or why such correlations exist.
@@peterells1720 Neuroscience can perfectly fine explain how and why there is correlation between the physical ( central nervous system changes) and the subjective ( pain). His example of pain as an argument to prove the non-physicality of consciousness ( when he could have used any other aspect from emotions, cognition etc) was a complete failure and shows he is completely ignorant of the subject "pain". His examples e.g with the lobster were horrible and very easy to dismantle.
@@grolstum211 for whatever reason people from neuroscience most of the time skip a fundamental issue here: guest is not questioning neuroscience's advances in understanding the physiology of pain. Not at all!. It's the other way around: Not from fully working brains towards understanding its dynamics (which is great useful deep amazing science), but from minimal mechanical structures towards understanding WHY there should necessarily be an experience of pain. Thats why he brought the lobster up: here is a different highly evolved organism. Why and how could you be certain it feels or doesnt feel pain?
the question is how experience appears in mechanical systems, not how can we describe in functional terms some experience-associated dynamics in specific organisms.
@@peterells1720 ...therefore magic.
Great conversation. I thought the camera panning in then out was a bit distracting, but please keep up the good work!
Very interesting interview .. i also think that materialism is defeated by the universe initial set.
Tim Maudlin is always so lucid. Wow.
Funny 😄
He is very ignorant when it comes to neuroscience. Pain is extremely easy to correlate physically/materialistically compared to consciousness.
@@grolstum211 Pain is consciousness though.
@@oldrusty6527 Pain is qualia just like every other sense input and processing ( smell, vision, proprioception, kinesthesia). Maudlin brought the example of the lobster and how we are unable ( physics) to differentiate between autonomic movements or true pain while boiling. Well we are definitely able to do that because we know the neuroscience behind these 2 things. We know which pathways are used, which neurostructures are excited/use oxygen. Very very weak argument
@@grolstum211 OK, I see what you are saying now. Personally I would say his overall point still stands.
Something like Kastrup's alters is what currently connects the most dots & by FAR IMO.
i doubt many people wanna hear it though
@@highvalence7649 Why do you think people don't want to hear it?
@@idonotlikethismusic good question. i'm not sure but speculatively if we heard it and accepted it we'd in adopting a world view that emphasises less the realness of matter become less materialistic and many of us would then lose interest in technological advancement and material production. we'd all become poor and at best we'd all become mystics and go into narvi kalpa samadhi and all die. may be a slippery slope, though. idk
but i suspect it's built into this manifestation that we are not to realize the true nature of this world as consciousness (or not do it until a certain point), because then we wouldn't have as much interest in creating civilisation and modern civilisation. the game here is kind of a struggle if you wanna make it good and maybe we wouldn't think it's worth it if we saw it more like a game and we'd rather just go back into infinite nothingness, but that would be infinitely boring, so let's create a game but in order to follow through in the game i must think this world is more than something i've just created myself.
Yeah, a starting point is Why Materialism is Baloney, as one of his books is titled
How does he account for the dissociation into an alter? Which seems to be a similar problem as getting emergence from matter
Materialists need to remember that, in the end, it is consciousness, and not matter, that is “primary” and irrefutable. Anyone who refers to matter, does so because she is conscious of it. For us to be conscious of matter, we need consciousness.
Spiritualists need to remember that we are only aware that we are conscious, because we apprehend matter. If there was nothing to be conscious of, then “consciousness” will be moot.
I still think consciousness is primary, and possibly independent of matter. However, it is the second preposition that is hard to prove (or, per scientific method, non-falsifiable).
This is the problem of concepts vs reality. Reality is beyond all concepts. We need consciousness in order to label a thing matter but the things is always what it is in itself.
Underated comment.
There's a great philosopher, Bernardo Kastrup who has created a cogent compellin g argument with known facts, logical inferences, and empirical evidence and obvious paradoxes in quantum mechanics, And neuroscience, pretty much proving that universal consciousness is the ground state of the universe. It is the ontological primitive as philosophers say.
Neuroscience cannot find memory... There is no physical location for it. There is no possible arrangement of neurons that can create it. They can cut 90% of a mouse's Brain of way and it still find its way through a maze.. how is that possible? Because memory exists outside of the physical brain. Sound revolutionary, it's not. Mine is the ground state of reality, and when we die we return to a universal Consciousness. Terminal lucidity, a profound phenomena if verified, alone will disprove and falsify physicalism. If there is no neurological structure, if there is scar tissue, how can there be varsity near death Databases have been created to study this amazing phenomena more closely.
Great job explaining idealism. I wrote about three paragraphs in response and it disappeared before I could upload it.
Tim Mauldin is very smart, he understands that the mind-consciousness is aloof from matter.
Recognising that does not make anyone very smart. We can all see that.
Maudlin used the wrong analogy on the wrong interviewer. I think what we have here is an excellent demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Consciousness is fundamental, we actually live in our minds, reality is merely an illusion.
physical reality created your physical mind. you want to play make believe?
@@fullyawakened How can you be sure what you perceive is reality?
@@niftyszn9469 he doesn’t.
@@niftyszn9469 reality you see, touch, and experience is only a persistent illusion. Essentially, everything tangible is just a swirl of particles in a void. When unmeasured What's more, atoms, the building blocks of reality, are not solid. So he’s very own subjective view what he describes what reality is defeats his own argument.
Perhaps just as big (if not bigger) point to be made, in the beginning’s analogy, is if someone was asked to design a robot displaying that kind of behaviour then, sure, they would do it (given enough incentive!), But the building of of a robot that actually FEELS those things? Well, not only would the person not be able to do it BUT there wouldn’t be many people (one hopes!) who Could be WILLING to do it … think about that!
In these discussions of the hard problem of consciousness I always wonder how much harder it is to explain brain activity leading to consciousness than it is to explain why and how matter affects time and space or how electrons repel one another. We know they do these things but we don't know how. We can describe and predict phenomenon but can't ultimately explain any of them. They're all ultimately hard problems, right?
How do we know brain activity leads to consciousness?
There's a difference between
what's happening in the brain
and
how does it feel.
Or other example
I listen to two pieces of music.
One gives me the feeling of overwhelming joy
the other annoys me to death.
How do you explain this phaenomenon?
From the view of the brain?
From the view of the musical score?
From the data of the soundwaves?
From the view of a newborn baby?
What about phantom limb pain? There is a place in the brain that still feels the pain
Kudos for accepting not-knowing, but categorically dismissing a physical explanation is one step too far, isn’t it?
some people would argue it's conceptually impossible to give consciousness a physical explanation. if that can be succesfully argued, it's not taking it a step too far. but i don't know if that can be succesfully argued. i'm not even sure what we mean by explanation in this context.
@@highvalence7649 agreed. But new physics might pop up. Or consciousness looses it’s magic by some other explanation, maybe it’s not “that” special.
Agreed.
People forget that "materialism" is the only thing we've ever observed that's ever explained anything so far.
How does one study the "non physical "?
@@highvalence7649 I think it is conceptually impossible. Because we’ve never experienced anything we call material, only our perceptions, which exist exclusively in consciousness. How could something - material - which exists only as an assumed concept from our conscious perceptions create the thing that’s assuming it? (Like trying to say an email on the screen created the monitor)
@@dav1729 well I'm not sure what explanation that might be, nor what magic there would be about consciousness without any such explanation.
Are people reducible to their smiles?
That mechanical regularity (and that’s what physical matter means) supervenes on consciousness seems to nake much more sense than the other way around.
The pseudoscientific drug enjoyers don't like you saying it, but it's clearly true. If it's not, then we might as well believe in ghosts, because apparently physical evidence doesn't matter anymore.
I am in chronic pain and I'm in Pain management. It causes a host of secondary problems dealing with hospitals and doctors especially in the current opioid panic. I have often asked, "Can't doctors see pain with fmri's or something?" I was always told NO. They say you CAN. 02:50 So what is it?
two people can have very similar fmri brain activity but describe their emotions differently, some people may say they feel irritated/hurt/agony same goes for positive emotions. they may be able to roughly catagorise your emotions with good accuracy, the struggle is finding a way to use this information to improve your healthcare plan. good luck with managing such a difficult condition.
Physicalist idiocy is looking for the meaning of the novel in the cellulose structure of the paper it's printed on, the shape of letters it's typeset in, in the grammar of the language, in the taxonomy of the animal whose skin went into the leather binding - and not in the human culture, a tiny slice of which is captured in the narrative.
is there a way to tell if quantum measurements happen in physical brain?
We don’t know just how, yet. But it’s easy to imagine that one trillion synapses can provide an experience perceived by the organism as consciousness.
Any consciousness you see in those one trillion synapses exists in your imagination, not in the synapses themselves. Even the concept of a synapse exists only as an abstract idea in your conscious mind.
Sure, you can measure brain activity and correlate it with the conscious experience of the individual whose brain activity is being measured, as verbally described by him. But you can't find consciousness in brain activity.
I've known Materialists say "Brain activity is consciousness", as if its an established fact. Its not. If you say that you're just stating a belief.
Then before life, therefore before consciousness, there was was nothing?
I find it not just unimaginabe but unintelligible.
@@jamesnasmith984 right, just like before smiles there where no people.
well, how exactly do you imagine the trillion synapses generating an experiencing self?
how might consciousness bring about physical nature, or even laws of nature?
Imagine you cut your finger when cooking diner. Now if you “go towards” the pain with your attention you will feel it is just a neutral vibration. The pain is “an idea” in the mind based on that neutral vibration. If you continue to focus on that vibration you will realize it’s your consciousness.
There are no mechanics involved here because that’s not the nature of reality.
I'm not sure Tim actually understood the argument against his position as Robert elaborated it.
What this interviewer fails to understand is that the brain and nervous system is an epiphenomenon of the consciousness, the immutable essence we all are.The brain is no more than a switchboard at the physical body level.The awareness of awareness unit , the perceiver is the source of everything else.
The suggestion that you could program a robot to pretend to hurt if you dropped something on its foot- and it wouldn't indicate consciousness -- but that's clearly the case if the foot isn't damaged- if it is damaged and the robot was reacting to the potential for such damage to be serious- then if it behaves as if it hurts- then, well, it's on the way to consciousness, maybe. Big difference from dropping something which isn't potentially going to hurt the robot's foot.
We can’t really answer that until we know how consciousness works.
Consciousness, contentiousness, empathy, love, are divine gifts afforded to humans that define our distinction over all other materials. Denying this is like standing in rain and denying that water exists
Pure word salad.
Obviously you're not a golfer
I suppose that hate, anger, jealousy, etc are divine curses then?
pure nonsense
Thank you.
Magnitude through the physical inside a void of understanding (the hysterical relationship contained in the void) that is magnitude in all subjective and objective measures with an assumption of historical experience/social wind fulfilling the construct Yes you could make a robot feel pain you would just need to creat the void and give it magnitude ie fear
Are we gradually coming around to the possibility that we exist outside of our bodies (non- local consciousness) maybe a physical body is just a way of enacting our consciousness !
Maybe death is just “a casting off” of the physical but we continue outside of a physical state.
Who was it that said “ I can live without my body but my body cannot live without me”
Yeah humans definitely love getting "explanatory satisfaction". They love the idea that the universe will be conveniently explainable by our perceptions and capabilities.
*They want to be The God.*
absolutely. we fear not knowing how things work.
Union of human sperm and egg is a material event. It is unlikely that a material event would spawn an "immaterial" reality. It is more likely that consciousness is an outgrowth of material phenomena that are simply, poorly understood. Consciousness is not an undifferentiated "entity" or "field", not something on the order of, say, "electromagnetism", but is a *process* involving a complex *system* that has multiple component parts, working together to create the experience of an integrated whole. To some degree, the distinction between a "material" phenomenon and and "immaterial" one is a question of linguistics. You could take the position that any observable phenomenon in the universe is "material".
This is a wonderful discussion between two of my favourite philosophers. I'd like to make a few points:
(1) If instead, all physical facts supervene on mental facts (i.e., if idealism is true), then this explains tight mind-body correlations equally well.
(2) The problem, of which physical systems are centres of experience and which are not, vanishes if we also adopt (non-physicalist) panpsychism.
(3) Physical "laws" are strange things to take as causes: Who or what enforces these laws? It is more accurate to describe such "laws" as no more than mathematical descriptions of regularities in the course of observed events. Physical laws do not amount to causes.
(4) The only causes lie at the foundational level of this idealist system: they consist in the agency of each centre of experience.
(5) Physical laws (including statistical laws, such as the Born Rule) summarise the typical behaviours of such agents.
My book promoting this viewpoint is published today (December 9, 2022). Regards, Peter
Forking our discussion from the other thread:
You haven't provided a definition or description of the non-physical process, it's just a hand-wave substitute for an explanation. There's no description of how it interfaces with the physical world. It's a god-of-the-gaps explanation, indistinguishable from magic. Panpsychism doesn't provide any details on the specifics of the non-physical processes either, other than vague analogies derived from the physical world. Nor provide any testable claims.
The suggestion that mathematics are emergent & descriptive rather than fundamental & causal has no bearing on the question of whether consciousness is non-physical. Also I'm not sure how you'd demonstrate that either way.
"The only causes lie at the foundational level of this idealist system: they consist in the agency of each centre of experience"
Ok, but what is the agency of each centre of experience made from? You haven't solved the regress problem just by claiming that agency or experience are the centre of things. It's an empty claim.
(2) The problem, of which physical systems are centres of experience and which are not, vanishes if we also adopt (non-physicalist) panpsychism.
not true. the binding problem is still very difficult from a panpsychic perspective. Saying "everything is conscious" doesn't really illuminate anything in this regard. This is said as a panpsychist.
Ok. I’ll bite. What is the name of your book?
@@Manikese Thanks for asking. The book is called "Mind, Quantum, and Free Will". I have a short video describing it on my TH-cam channel. One correction I'd like to make is that the book has been published in the UK today. It will be out in the USA on January 1st.
@@mymyscellany Hi, Thanks. My book proposes that, at any given moment, the wavefunction of the universe is maximally factorised into parts that cannot be factorised further, Each such factor is an entangled system, and each has an irreducible unity of behaviour.
I identify these factors as being the agents/centres of experience. As time passes, these factors interact - combining and splitting. This is a partial solution to the binding/combination problem.
You say that you are a panpsychist (presumably also a physicalist). The difficulty here is that physicalism accepts causation by physical laws. This leads to the problem of causal overdetermination: whatever mental properties any physical system (say an atom) may have, the physical properties/laws give the fullest-possible explanation of the atom's behaviour: The mental properties cannot have causal powers - they must be epiphenomenal.
This last difficulty is what lead me to combine panpsychism with idealism.
This is the standard view of philosophers of science who know what they're doing. It's been obvious since Descartes (though the phenomenology took time to develop)... consciousness and its objects are as different as... consciousness and its objects (that really is the limiting case of divergences ... being and nothingness, in Sartre's terminology).
If consciousness evolved from matter, as most materialists believe, then it would be easy to explain as anything whose original is material or elemental can be scientifically studied and explained. The reason it cannot be studied or explained indicates that it predates matter and the material world of forces; the strong, neutral and weak and the elemental world they engender.
The existence of meanings defeats materialism. Meanings can't be defined from things. Things, which represent complex meanings, depend on abstract meanings, revealing a hierarchy of meanings with the independent whole as the origin.
Awareness is known by awareness alone.
Usefully, in his book “Being You “, Anil Seth renames the discussion as the Real Problem, not the Hard Problem. Consciousness is not a Thing, it is a process- more usefully called Awareness and accompanied by memory. So events are experienced and remembered. We persist in imagining that a lot is going on when we are aware but this is the brains trickery. It’s hard to believe that such a good friend as our brain would completely fool us about what’s going on. It has its reasons.
I'm positively surprised by Tim Maudlin's view on consciousness and I can only agree with him. It would be interesting to watch him debating this issue with Daniel Dennett - two physicalists pitted against each other one saying that there is an explanatory gap and the other saying that there's none whatsoever.
Sounds like a plausible explanation of his view of consciousness to me. Or maybe for him philosophy is like some kind of glorified sudoku - it's sufficient that everything adds up on paper, even if it doesn't make any sense in the real world.
As far as human consciousness goes, my money is on it being a highly evolved, multi dimensional state of awareness of ones environment. Evolved from an early single, and much simpler, cellular lifeforms electro/chemical responses to its environment. Akin to our full colour, adjustable focus and three dimensional vision evolving from an instance of a simple light sensitive patch.
@@cosminvisan520 run head first into "the environment" and when you wake up and recover from your concussion tell me it doesn't exist
Respectfully though, you're not actually explaining anything. You're *redefining* consciousness as opposed to explaining how it "being a highly evolved, multi dimensional state of awareness of one's environment" actually tells us how we come to the smell of a rose, the taste of chocolate, the feeling of falling in love or anything specific w/ respect to our conscious experiences.
This, frankly, is the consistent problem w/ materialistic explanations of consciousness. There's never anything about them that answers the basic question of *how* unconscious ingredients like neurons in the brain could *ever* give rise to their polar opposite in conscious experience.
I would respectfully argue that it's because they don't.
@@ryanashfyre464 and you have only your "feelings" to lead you to that conclusion
This does not explain the hard problem discussed here if you really deeply think about it. Between a neuron detecting light and the subjective experience of light -- there is a huge unexplained. gap. A machine can detect but has no conscious awareness. Simple answers just shortcut the actual problem without understanding of what is means here.
@@RolandHuettmann we don't know enough yet about the brain to say one way or another. Saying that consciousness cannot be materialistic, given our current knowledge, is the same as saying that some supernatural force caused life to form because we don't fully understand Abiogenesis
Tim, robot 1 and 2 are the same robot! Read Baudrillard on this: the best way to convince someone you are in pain is to actually be in pain. Of course, we have no way of knowing that humans feel pain, either. For all we know, they are just faking it, too.
This! Thank you.
We do have a way of knowing if humans feel pain. Ask twins. Ask mothers. Genuine empathy too is something that can put you in touch directly with others feelings.
I don't see why it's such a big deal to be conscious.
For an extremely complex organism to monitor all of it's sensory input, while locating a "self" in the world to do the monitoring, seems like just an efficient way to get the job done.
"Wow! I'm aware that I exist, so that means that I'm something beyond any physical understanding!" -But why?
However many billions of neurons and synapses firing in wavelike patterns across the brain is bound to use some kind of a subjective reference to organize the flood of information involved.
How do you know you're not "programmed" to yell, jump up and down when the bowling ball lands on your foot?
There probably could be some amazing, weird, dimension of "being" but I can't imagine how you would even create a plausible hypothesis to define something like that.
It makes more sense to me to keep searching for a physical cause and effect system to explain it. However complex it might be.
Great video as usual!
Suppose there's a god who designed this world to be purely deterministic after setting initial conditions. This God is a scientist running an experiment and doesn't want anyone in this bubble universe to think that "god" is messing around with them. Wherever they look, they never see god, virtually guaranteed, so they'll never stop entertaining free will and moral obligations. How will the people in this world start talking about god, and why? What would have caused that?
Not a rhetorical question btw, idk where this thought goes, or even why I dropped it here
I am the programmer. I created your brain and its program to run you. I am you.
I wish the beginning of these videos were not blurry- serves no purpose but gives me a headache.
I can't even figure out what the question posed in the title means. Defeat materialism? Huh?
Tim Maudlin nails it with the lobster example :+1:
as a software engineer I enjoy the Hardware vs Software combo and of course "data" is present in hardware and processes by both software/hardware.. I can't resist comparing non computer engineering issues with this trinity of hardware-software and data, and I strongly believe its simplicity could help most of discussions that tend to be "open" and never really mean anything, it remembers me the song from fat slim boy "They know what is what
But they don't know what is what
They just strut (strut, strut, strut)
What the fuck?" its boring times we reached high hardware and software capacity but it's painful the clueless of most scientific community which keeps looping around same open ended repeated inconclusive ideas. I think we already more than needed the keep looping in open ended discussions trying to reach the ultimate is there a God? can you detect pain the computer RAM ? oh we good in correlations till understand the pain its just bits hold hy transistors, but we need more ?!? 😳 in the end its a mirror 🤔 stop counting how many turtles in the pyramid that holds Earth in place
If you understand Microcosm & Macrocosm then the Material existence is just a Transit of Both entity ! Equations are just Maths to describe Matter which stop at '0' and begins at '0' !
I think consciousness is a function of material and because everything is non local the consciousness pervades all that is.
No. The material is a function of consciousness.
Quantum theory seems strange and counterintuitive, but we should press for ontology and explanation. Consciousness seems strange and counterintuitive, but we should conclude physics 'in principle' can't ever explain it? Not having a conceptual connection seems like weak evidence to take the route Maudlin avoids in realm of foundations of physics.
"consciousness supervenes on physics." you can't draw that conclusion based on the evidence alone. that there are tight correlations between mental states and physical states is compatible with consciousness not being necessitated by any physical phenomena. the idea that consciousness is necessitated by physical phenomena just seems to be an assumption rather than a well-reasoned conclusion.
@@cosminvisan520 irrefutable
If you believe in evolution, complex organisms evolved from simple ones. Consciousness emerges from complexity. Is it an emergent property? I'd think yes. Feelings and sensations are motivational signals that are programmed by evolution. Only motivated organisms survive
The idea that consciousness is an emergent property is not implied by evolution. Why do you think consciousness is an emergent property?
@@highvalence7649 An emergent property occurs or doesn't occur from components of a system. It can't be derived before hand, only understood after its comprehension.
@@PeterXiao1 yes, just like people as an emergent property of smiles
@@PeterXiao1 “…only understood after its comprehension” In other words, it’s understood after it’s understood. Well, I certainly agree with that. But emergent properties are sometimes predictable prior and certainly scientifically explainable after, based on the properties of materials involved. But science has zero explanation of how any properties of inanimate material can somehow come together to create the conscious experience(s) we have
@@tomarmstrong3297 Yes, it is understood until it's understood. From parts to whole isn't a deductive process. Rather it's a synthesis, a qualitative jump in understanding. Likewise, from inorganic chemistry to organic one is a jump that can't be explained, at least for now. Just like a seed falling to the ground grows into a tree. An egg, given certain heat, can grow into a chick. From complex neuros, bursts into consciousness, it's imaginable.
The industrial Revolutionary mindset influenced by consumption and materialism ran its course it antiqauted and out dated now.' we used it as much as we could exhausted all lines of thought even with the death and despair it's caused along with the good.
This is the age of idealism with computers and simulation which is from the line of thought of idealism. It now shapes our youths minds and best explains our environment ..
It makes for a better parable in explaining and teaching.
I fail to see why the industrial revolution had anything to do with physicalism. Naturalism developed long be for the mid-1800's. As for idealism, for me the world exists regardless of any minds thinking about it.
@@chrisconklin2981 first part was mindset and how everyone and youth was thinking and it made for a great tool and comparable to convey limited evidence that at this time appeared to point to such a fundamental structured reality.
@@chrisconklin2981 as for the idealism and physicalim even today 96% of the universe is classified under idealism .
4% is physical.
The great scientist who came before established the perimeters and goals of the following generation.
This is how we stand on the shoulders of those who came before and keep maturing ideas
@@chrisconklin2981 if your asking what is classification that allows us to catergorize things it's very simple and straight forward,
Physicalism is objective evidence pretty straight forward.
But the love you have for your kids and gravity can't be directly observed or tested but we can build lines of evidence proving that they do exist if only in theory.
Ether theory being renamed DARK MATTER doesn't change any value in this idea.
It sounds more materlistic .lol
When mankind named Wine spirits for example it wasnt to trick people or push some world view. They just assumed gas and spirit oc decay and entropy to be one and the same catergory.
It's ancient and old. Been modified but is still someone we can't prove is physical.
This is deep learning that one has to be critical of themselves to help limit cognitive blind bias to undertake such a fair and balanced quest .
What?
👍🏽♥️👍🏽
This interview was really good. Not sure about the video's title though. I understand the clickbait, yet at the same time I'd see a channel like this to be above the need for such technique.
The topic is fascinating though. However, I'm not sure how asking a philosopher what reductive account of consciousness could be given in physicalist terms is supposed to help us get 'closer to truth'. Is it the philosopher's job to do so? Is he in the business of knowledge production?
Conversely, why not asking him if consciousness counts as a defeater - philosophically speaking - to physicalism, since he is a physicalist philosopher, and it _was_ the question in consideration? I get the impression that this interview was framed as though a philosophical question was asked to a scientist, even though it turned out to be the other way around. Unfortunate.
The robot argument ultimately fails because it can never be an exact one-to-one comparison. Unless you actually made a literal human being (and maybe even then, and that would be the interesting debate), it would still finally be apples to oranges.
Survival instinct?
I can see that this is a problem for particular kinds of vulgar, dogmatically reductionist materialism, but if you take materialism to include emergence, or what in my kind of tradition is called dialectics then I don't think the 'in principle' impossibility remains.
'Does consciousness defeat materialism?'🤔
Let's have fun with the question.
If consciousness is the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings, then it is trivially compatible with materialism, since everything about the conscious experience of awareness and responsiveness to one's surroundings is seemingly inherently materialistic.
If consciousness is however "the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world", then it is also trivial to realise that this fact is a generalisation of a lifetime of conscious experience, by the mind of itself and the world; a lifetime in which the mind has gathered the following companion facts:
▪︎ the body was born, and the body will die
▪︎ the mind gradually occurred, embodied
▪︎ the mind isn't always conscious, in fact it isn't conscious at least a third of its whole lifetime, plus at its early stage of development, and when it falls unconscious
▪︎ the body's lifespan consequently exceeds the mind's lifetime (the zygote then embryo is the body's first phase of being alive, but not the mind's first phase alive; the body can also be still 'alive' yet not the mind, as braindead patients demonstrate)
▪︎ the mind _hasn't_ been actually observed, in this lifetime, to be able to live, or even exist, when the body is absent.
These additional companion facts combined, seemingly indicate that consciousness at the very least codepends on the mind and body, and is even more finite than either the body or the mind. Consciousness also seems to be in a hierarchical relationship wherein it is apparently part of the mind, and the mind part of the body, but not the other way around. None of this is surprising, let alone incompatible, under 'materialism'. Yet these facts and inferences are consistent with virtually the entirety of our lifetime of conscious experience.
Per Laplace's Principle, the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness, or as Sagan later rephrased it: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Given the aforementioned lifetime of both mental and sensory data, the idea that consciousness defeats materialism seems to be one such strange or extraordinary claim. It therefore seemingly requires an extraordinary amount of evidence in order to overcome what our lifetime of experience tell us about the consistency of consciousness with materialism, whether we appreciate and adopt this view or not.
This entails that, however unintuitive it may sound to the antimaterialist-leaning, materialism is grounded in basic facts and properly basic beliefs known by virtually everyone. In other words, it's the mundane view, whereas non-materialism is hopelessly estranged from the mundane, amounting to an insignificant quantity and quality of experiences compared to one's lifetime of materialism-friendly experiences. The onus is on non-materialist views to overcome this strong body of evidence and meet their burden of persuasion, as consciousness supports rather than defeats materialism.
@@cosminvisan520 Oh, you mean all those *mental and sensory experiences.* What a strange way of agreeing with me. Altjough, if you genuinely think colours, sounds, tastes, have nothing to do with the senses, you're way beyond help. Ditto if you think emotions and thoughts are not mental experiences.
When it comes to AI, if "we" imitate structures that are like those correlated to our own (i.e. neural structures) who's to say that we might not produce a being with consciousness without understanding how that happens exactly? At some point the robot might report subjective experience, and we might be no more sure one way or the other than we are about each other.
@@cosminvisan520 Brains don't exist? Next.
@@cosminvisan520 thanks for answering your own question for me. To truly demonstrate you have an understanding of a thing, it's most clear that's correct if you can build it when and IF that's possible. The idea that something like a brain isn't real would indicate nothing is real. It's all just a projection of the mind without a physical basis. I think there's an objective reality that exists outside and includes my subjective experiences. On the other hand, perhaps I'm just a projection of your mind out to annoy you. Why do you not simply will me gone? It's as easy as not debating me. Have a great day, friend.
@@cosminvisan520 I might agree with that after I'm dead. There's only one problem.
@@cosminvisan520 the universe before life.
@@cosminvisan520 Well, nothing is 100% right or wrong in a way one can be certain of-- some things come close. Your assertions are made with confidence. I'll give you that-- and only that.
Okay, it's a hard problem, and perhaps this one will never be fully understood. But if you can't assume a lobster is in pain even though it's acting as if it is, then you use that as as excuse to dismiss the prospect, then you could just as easily do that with a dog or another person. At some point we need to make a guess as to the reality of other's subjective states. Nothing in science is absolute anyway. Why dismiss tight colorations altogether, or worse fill in the blanks with who-knows-what?
When we can explain the neural correlates of consciousness, we're done. That's all there is. The brain produces our experiences. They feel like something. Those feelings may trigger behaviors. That's what they are for. Mulling over this reality as if it were some deep mystery is like the gorilla beating his chest in front of a mirror. He confuses the reflection with an actual gorilla. Our self-awareness produces the mental analog of this reflection. Joscha Bach captures the idea well when he says "Only software can be conscious". Here he describes it at greater length:
"At some point, you can collapse the division between a personal self and world generator again. (He says "again" because we are not born with a self-concept. It must be developed.) A lot of people get there via meditation or some get there via psychedelics. Some of them by accident. And you suddenly notice that you are not actually a person, but you are a vessel that can create a person, and that person is still there. You observe that personal self, but you observe the personal self from the outside and you notice the representation. And you might also notice that the world that is being created is a representation. If not then you might experience that I am the universe. I am the thing that is creating everything. And of course, what you are creating is not quantum mechanics and the physical world. What you are creating is this game engine that is updating the world and you are creating your valence, your feelings, and all the people inside that world, including the person that you identify with yourself in this world."
Yes, I think it does. Materialists will never admit it though. They'll defend their beliefs till their last breath.
I really hate watching physicalists spin their wheels over and over. It's time to open new doors.....new tools new generations of physicists that are willing to ask and research those concepts that were once considered taboo. 💯
are we supposed to distinguish conscious and unconscious activities 🤔... there's much cross-reference and ambiguity in many cases... unfortunately, the mechanics of many unconscious activities are not accessible to our conscious state...
There are not unconscious activities. We should be clear everything is conscious weather we realise about it or not
I think it is a natural consequence of being human, cause we are curious from nature. We are an introspective&outerspective specy. Our labeling is ofc not perfect, it comes with a degree of resolution. So it is always bit relative.
@@DeportivoRavens unfortunately we are not aware of many processes that are taking place 24/7... do you know how many such processes exist and what is their nature (mechanic, autonomic, intelligent) 🤔
@@blijebij we've already touched this topic a few other times... we're indeed curious by nature and that's probably the reason we are trying to understand more about ourselves... we're surrounded by mysteries in either direction, it's very conspicuous, to say the least 🤔
@@r2c3 you are right, maybe thats the charm of the journey :) maybe what we identify with as a self are fractionized parts of awareness, seeking wholeness.
'I don't understand consciousness' in no way equates to 'consciousness defeats materialism'.
Some things we can say:
1. All observed consciousness comes with an associated brain.
2. Damage to the brain predictably impacts consciousness.
3. Physical stimulation of the brain predictably impacts consciousness.
4. Consciousness predictably disappears when the brain is destroyed.
5. Non-human brains also have consciousness.
6. Conceiving consciousness as non-physical has not produced any pragmatic advances.
7. Conceiving consciousness as an emergent property of the physical has produced pragmatic advances.
1. The only thing anyone has ever experienced is consciousness.
2. It is impossible to step outside of consciousness and discover something independent of consciousness without being conscious of it.
3. A belief that the only thing that has ever been experienced (consciousness) arises from something that can never be experienced without consciousness is entirely unverifiable.
4. The only way to know for sure that consciousness disappears when the brain is destroyed is to be conscious of a lack of consciousness which is impossible.
5. Correlation does not prove causation.
4 should be consciousness instantiated in a human predictably disappears when the brain (of the human) is destroyed.
What's the argument for 6 and 7?
Otherwise 1-5 (if 4 is corrected) is compatible with idealism and I'm not convinced it constitutes definitive evidence consciousness is necessitated by the brain, or even that it supports that conclusion any more than the conclusion that it's not necessitated by the brain.
@@Shane7492 Yes, we only experience through consciousness. No argument there. So what? That point is entirely consistent with consciousness being an emergent property of brains. Your other points are arguments for hard solipsism, and surely you are not suggesting this? And an argument for life after death. Given we have zero evidence for life after death, are you serious about this wild, unsupported speculation?
Putting aside your idealistic, theoretical meanderings, what practical benefit - in reality - comes from imagining consciousness to be fundamental? Zero.
In contrast, every medical advance has arisen from treating consciousnesses as an emergent property of a physical brain - through drugs, surgery, etc
@@canwelook No, I did not argue for solipsism, and I am not a solipsist. Nor did I argue for life after death. I simply stated that for you, or anyone, to know for sure that consciousness disappears when the brain is destroyed would require you to be conscious of a state of no consciousness, and that is impossible to do. You're assuming consciousness disappears based on your presupposition that consciousness is an emergent property of a brain. It's not actually based on evidence or experience. Given we have zero evidence of anything existing prior to or independent of consciousness, are you serious about your unsupported speculation? Give an example of one, just one, thing that exists outside of consciousness without anyone being conscious of it.
Whether anyone believes consciousness is fundamental or something independent of consciousness is fundamental changes nothing about the pursuit of science. Knowing that my sleep dreams are entirely a manifestation of mind doesn't prevent me from studying the contents of the dream and developing theories about it.
@@Shane7492 Once again you are deeply stuck in theory-land. Now back to the real world ... I never claimed absolute certainty of anything. I live in an ambiguous, changing world using reasoned and tentative belief, not imagined certainties. If I died and found myself conscious, then I would believe in consciousness after death. Why? Because then I would have the necessary evidence to support a justified belief. Right now, neither you nor I do. Correct?
Who were you before you were born? Tell me about that consciousness. You can't? Let me guess. You think that suddenly your conscious 'soul' was zapped into existence and you will then live on forever. Finite past, infinite future. Sounds ridiculous, does it not?
The problem is there just isn't any evidence of anything existing that is *not* in the physical universe (unless one argues that consciousness is evidence, but that assumes the conclusion by mere assertion). I agree that the problem is hard, and completely unresolved, and reject suggestions put forward to solve the 'hard problem' as a mere matter of emergence from complexity, which is a kind of magical thinking, and also pretty strongly agree that consciousness really exists -- although D. Dennet makes interesting arguments to suggest that, to the extent it exists, consciousness has highly illusory properties and does not exist in the way we perceive it to exist, that we are in effect, philosophical zombies and just don't realize it.
I think to exclaim that we have no idea how consciousness arises and then to suggest it is not in the physical universe is similar to putting "God in the gaps" where we assume something not in evidence to be the 'default' if we do not (yet) have any explanation. Since everything else we *do* understand is part of physical reality, it should be the default assumption that consciousness is also physical, until such time that we have some knowledge of how it arises and can determine from that knowledge that it isn't.
The “physical universe” is a scientific model. It’s not an actual thing that exists.
@@youssefalaoui4286 Well, according to German Philosopher Emmanual Kant, you are correct insofar as he made a convincing argument that we can never really apprehend the actual world of 'things in themselves', only their appearances, which are the products of our minds. So let me amend my remarks to suggest that there is no evidence of anything that does not fit into scientific models which are sometimes referred to as 'physicalist' or materialist, though these notion is vague even in physics nowadays (according to some interpretations of quantum physics and with the preference for field theory over particle theory) But however one refers to it, or conceptualized it, everything for which there is an empirical, scientific basis has a place in this physicalist model, and no validated observations exist of anything inconsistent with it.
@@kschuman1152 What about existence itself ?
How do you converge existence and physicalism ?
I ask this because for me consciousness is existence.
@@youssefalaoui4286 Answer 2: I can't converge them, because we don't understand consciousness (IMHO). So I am just applying the most likely assumption based on all that can be verified by multiple observers on a repeatable basis does converge with what is referred to as a physicalism interpretation of the world.
It might be reasonably argued that the methods of science are inherently incapable of detecting anything besides elements of the 'physicalist' realm, which does not mean there is nothing else. Perhaps that or some more refined version of that argument may be true. A good part of the problem with scientific investigation of 'consciousness' is that it is an inherently subjective phenomenon, so science must reject Decart's (sic) testimonial evidence "cogito ergo sum" (sic), even if I find it more or less persuasive.
Even so it seems probably to me that eventually we may develop a theory that explains how the 'experience of red' arises out of the same world that other phenomenon we better understand (scientifically speaking) ...
@@kschuman1152 Your first comment is not showing here. Probably auto-deleted by youtube for some reason. Try to shorten your comments and only post once at a time. TH-cam is very annoying in this regard but we have to adapt to its rules I guess. Anyways I did got all the comments in my email box so here is my response;
You “assume” there are multiple observers of the same world. From that it follows that the world is likely to be a world outside our minds which can be translated as “a physical world”. I agree with you completely. But I then have to ask the question as to what-is-it that gives the “physical world” existence. Or put differently; in what way does the physical world exist? When I reflect on that I feel that it is my consciousness that gives the physical world existence. From that it follows that consciousness is not something that is confined within an individuals brain. It is actually outside the brain, giving the brain (and everything else physical) it’s existence. This is the solution to your problem of multiple observers. We take consciousness out of the brain. We kinda have to because if we start out with a physical brain we already asserted the conclusion that the world is physical which is circular reasoning.
I hope this spaghetti makes sense to you 😁
Administering anesthesia takes away consciousness - is it causation or correlation?
depends on what you mean. i dont see how that's definitive evidence consciosuness doesn't exist without brains, even if individual people cannot be conscious without a brains or certain functionings of a brain.
@@highvalence7649 Are you talking about possibility of ghosts and spirits?
@@SandipChitale not necessarily
@@SandipChitale how does the evidence you appeal to constitute conclusive evidence there is no consciousness without brains?
@High Valence The burden of proof is on the party that claims that consciousness can exist without physical substrate such as brain. Also, explain such consciousness - ghost, spririt or what?
I think focusing on the physics, as he does, is looking in the wrong place. We need to be looking at information theory and self-referential systems of environment and social modelling. Information is a separate category from physics and supervenes on it in much the way that he talks about consciousness.
@@cosminvisan520 Well, you know my take on that. Zero knowledge proofs can logically prove the existence of information that has never been observed by a human. You're a physicist, if you believe things are possible to be proved, then we know for sure there exists information that doesn't exist in consciousness.
Consciousness ( the MIND ) is the processor of invisible data in the form of waves ( vibrations ) containing the programmed thoughts of our Creator both temporary and eternal that forms all the visible images that are observed by the created AI, which is what I AM. So all there is to this creation is the AI, the individual created minds and all our life experiences in the form of vibrations.
Brad you are off your meds. Please get the help that you need.
@@tomjackson7755 Thanks Repeat Tom.
If you drop a bowling ball in your foot, do you feel it in your head? I feel it in my foot. I don't think, I move, very quickly - because consciousness is not involved, the "conscious brain" receives the nerve impulse from the foot only after the "animal brain".
YES because Consciousness is MORE than brain.
Does consciousness defeat materialism? Yes yes and yes.
His objection about the lobster: we cannot experience lifting a weight of a thousand pounds, but we can equate it with the feeling of lifting 500 bags of potatoes. Weight or mass is actually accepted as a physical entity and thus part of physicalism. So too can a lobsters consciousness be equated with how similar it is to the human brain structure in the end. Does this tell us all about conscious beings, and all conscious beings that are possible? No. But it is a measure. This is also how our physics works: we don't experience heat of 5000 degrees Celsius: however we assume it to be the case to be 100 times hotter than a bath of 50 degrees. You can say but we can measure it: but what value does this measurement have except for extrapolation of data or the assumption our laws are generalizably valid? I'm trying to cater to the extreme skeptics out there. Again my favorite is the lifting of weights that are inhumanly possible and not experienced by any being alive ever, yet we accept it to be true due to similarity and extrapolation: everything needs a benchmark. We also do not know why a meter in space is a meter and why a second of time is a second. These are similarly hard problems!
Make the robot say it feels pain if an object of a certain weight and above drops on its foot. That should be easy.
Thats not an experience of pain.
Consciousness clearly emerges from a physical brain
Wrong. The brain is the interface to consciousness.
"Consciousness clearly emerges from a physical brain" -- No it does not and you do not know what you are talking about,
Now I'm worried lobsters may feel pain. I was under the illusion that they couldn't. I can't afford to eat them anyway but that's not the point.
I would say every living thing feels pain.
You are a lobster
@@itsnoteasy5339 that's the point
@@highvalence7649 Precisely
Every day a wise man passes a sheep grazing in a field.
And every day the wise man thinks “the sheep does nothing except eat grass, what kind of life is that?”
One day the man stops and speaks to the sheep, “What are you doing?”
The sheep looks at the man and motions to the sun with his hoof and then motions to the grass. The sheep then continues to graze.
Awestruck, the wise man sits down and thinks about what the sheep had done. After a while, the man gathers himself and says to the sheep, “I see now: matter in the sun becomes light and some of that light gives life to the grass. You eat the unconscious grass and now the matter in your body is conscious. You are making the universe conscious.” The sheep stops grazing and looks at the man and said, “Yes that is true, and what are you doing?”
Science can only study objective things. Even thoughts are objects in the sense that they appear in you, the conscious subject. The subject, i.e. consciousness, itself never becomes an object to be studied. That's why it's a futile attempt to say that I am studying consciousness.
Mental states correlate with, and supervene brain states. Why is that true? That relationship/mechanism must be explained in the course of finding a solution to the problem of consciousness.
Idealism = solipsism, religion = dogma, a material explanation can not be ruled out.
The world champion of chess and go is a machine that uses AI not rote memory to achieve its goal. As primitive as AI currently is it can accurately solve protein folding problems that human brains need years to solve. At some point in time AI will self evolve.
The solution to questions of consciousness lies in the artificial neural network of a super computer not that far away.
@@cosminvisan520 For the 3rd time >> What is an idea? How, Why, and What causes an idea?
.. if ideas exist
.. and brain is an idea
.. then brain exists
.. if brains don't exist
.. and brain is an idea
.. then idea does not exist
How would you prove robot has consciousness using empirical data. How do you prove to blind man what color red is using empirical data. In theory, robot can be programmed to move its hand when it touches hot surface. How do I know its having the experience of hot using test tube(Deduction/induction). The only thing i am certain of is that i have experience of hot. This experience can only come from entity that can already experience existence (Allah-one/indivisible/self-sufficient/unique/All-Loving infinite perfection). If you cannot prove your own consciousness using “scientific method”, then how can you reject the existence of Perfect/infinite metaphysical being(Allah)? “Cogito ergo sum”( I think therefore I am) should be read as “cogito ergo est”(I think therefore Allah is)
Please objectively and unambiguously define Consciousness___________________.
I'm gonna tik tok around the clock tonight
Why wouldn't a lobster feel pain just becuase it cant speak!?
The lobster _will_ speak (albeit with a limited vocabulary) _if_ you understand its language.
Consciousness makes perfect sense from the perspective of thinking about things. It's pretty easy to understand why it evolved.
@@cosminvisan520 More ridiculous nonsense.
@@cosminvisan520 Anyone who claims anything is "eternal' is clearly speaking about something they know nothing about.
People evolved from smiles.
@@cosminvisan520>”Consciousness is eternal”
Until we become unconscious, at which point it kind of obviously isn’t.
@@cosminvisan520 You can't speak with any authority about anything involving "eternity" because it simply isn't in your experience. I'm sure you're terrified of dying so you want to believe that "consciousness" is eternal, but that's just your fear talking.
So, I should quickly kill the Lobster seconds before I plunge it into the boiling water? Lobster: no life = no pain. Me: dead Lobster = no pain = happy me?
Robert you're the man!
Fact of the matter is, when something is made by man it starts in the mind, of consciousness and intellect -- of course those whom think consciousness and intellect are products of matter than, this means little -- and it likely is the same with everything else in consciousnese/God, or the cosmos, perhaps 'mind' of God. Matter just hasn't the attributes, for form, being, light....heck, high energized light is hydrogen....we can scientifically say that matter is from light, and not vice versa.
I'm practicing 'non duality', as duality is superimposed. Ultimately because matter comes from light, light and mater are one; differing only in modality. All is One, and One is in All.
There is no problem, or duality. The India seers are likely right, regarding their views of Consciousness.
Asking: does consciousness defeat materialism is = does ice defeat water; or steam the ice?
We're likely 'superimposing', and defeating only ourselves.
But, the whole 'pain' and feeling phenomena -- incredible.
I wouldn't say there isn't a God, there is something...and somee really seek to understand....ancient Greeks, India, Egyptians.
What are you talking about matter gets crushed into being under its own gravity.
@@kos-mos1127 that's cute. Thx for sharing.
@@S3RAVA3LM That is what happens.
@@kos-mos1127 99% of everything you comment and reply is utter trash. You follow the most clueless clowns of modern academia's today whom I'd never waste my time with. I follow only closer to Truth to get a sense of what BS is among the consensus.
You think energy is quantum material, that nature is an explanation, and that matter gets crushed into being under its own gravity.
Shut up.
@@cosminvisan520 they dont teach critical thinking, negation, or dialectic in schools. All kos mos knows to do is to memorize what foolish physicists say in videos, he thinks that's education.
Tim Maudlin needs to read more and talk more with scientists like Dr. Kuhn.
Materialism is dead. It was always such a lightweight argument it requires only two pallbearers: semiotics and consciousness.
Let the ululating begin!
'Materialism is dead'
It should be by now
@@cosminvisan520 Materialism was WRONG from the beginning; it certainly was not dead.
Says the self-declared philosopher of the comment section.
@@anteodedi8937 You might want to look up the term "self-declared" and then do a quick review. The host and guests are the "self-declared" ones. I just bring my love of professional wrestling to the proceedings.
@@whitefiddle depends on how we cash out the term materialism. l'm not sure it's even wrong. I'm not sure it expresses a proposition, and if it doesn't express a proposition it can't even be wrong.
Well, he´s just talking a out animals and pain. but human consciuosness is quite another thing. Anyhow he has no argument against the emergence of consciuosness
I'd like to see a robot built identical to Dr. Kuhn but which could actually feel intellectually coherent.
You can never prove it does or doesn't.
We exclude the idea of sophism and trust that you exist just as I do since I can test your shared experience but it requires a leap of faith.
It could very well be my world with all you actors playing in it. Lol
This just doesn't have value to science
😂
FIrst off, consciousness is not a thing it is a process.
consciousness is a process of the brain just like people are processes of a smile.
Guys doesnt knows in conscieness. Consciencess are unpredicted so far. What he Said about robot or pain are lacking neuros Science standard. How he show up funcions in a brains where pain occured? He only explains it though baseless speculations.
You're too much into your own feelings.
In the first explanation of human vs robot you are wrong, but because your human experience makes you thinks it's special, you discount the robots interpretation of pain.
Our reflexes are not because of the "pain". The pain is the sensory signal after the fact or concurrently. We have automatic reflexes that respond to the stimulus.
I just don't see the whoop around consciousness, we are meat machines for sure. Are we so desperate to be special that we continue with all this mystic around consciousness?
Monistic idealism!
Consciousness is non-material in the same way that software is non-material. Both consciousness and software require a physical / material infrastructure in order to exist at all. In a computer, that infrastructure is electronic, magnetic, or optical. In the brain, that infrastructure is a biological nervous system.
why do you think consciousness requires a physical / material infrastructure in order to exist at all?
Do you have evidence for this or is it just your way of looking at it?
You’ve described how are brains can be like computers, but computers are not conscious, and we are
@@tomarmstrong3297 Are insects conscious?
All information is physical...
Lord Krishna says our existence consist of 3 levels 1.Gross body 2.Subtle body i.e mind, intellect and ego 3.Soul.Now conciousness emarges from soul and mind is the interface between outer world and soul.
you are lord krishna
@@highvalence7649 No , I am His servent.