Michael Graziano - Why did Consciousness Emerge?
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There was a time when there was no consciousness in our universe. Now there is. What caused consciousness to emerge? Did consciousness develop in the same way that, say, the liver or the eye developed, by random mutation and fitness selection during evolution? Inner experience seems to be radically different from anything else. Are we fooling ourselves?
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Michael Steven Anthony Graziano is an American scientist and novelist who is currently a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University. His scientific research focuses on the brain basis of awareness.
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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.
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The answer he offered is fundamentally this: consciousness emerged because it is so very helpful.
consciousness/Consciousness:
“that which knows”, or “the state of being aware”, from the Latin prefix “con” (with), the stem “scire” (to know) and the suffix “osus” (characterized by). To put it succinctly, consciousness is the SUBJECTIVE component in any subject-object relational dynamic. The concept of consciousness is best understood in comparison with the notion of sentience. Cf. “sentience”.
As far as biologists can ascertain, the simplest organisms (single-celled microbes) possess an exceedingly-primitive form of sentience, since their life-cycle revolves around adjusting to their environment, metabolizing, and reproducing via binary fission, all of which indicates a sensory perception of their environment (e.g. temperature, acidity, energy sources and the presence of oxygen, nitrogen, minerals, and water). More complex organisms, such as plants, have acquired a far greater degree of sentience, since they can react to the light of the sun, to insects crawling on their leaves (in the case of carnivorous plants), excrete certain chemicals and/or emit ultrasonic waves when being cut. At this point it is imperative to consult the entry “sentience” in the Glossary of this Holy Scripture.
According to this premise, the simplest forms of animal life possess sentience, but no noticeable semblance of true consciousness. As a general rule, those animals that have at least three or four senses, combined with a simple brain, possess a mind but lack an intellect. Higher animals (notably mammals) have varying levels of intelligence but only humans have a false-ego (sense of self). Thus, human consciousness is constituted of the three components: the mind, the intellect, and the pseudo-ego (refer to Ch. 05).
There is a rather strong correlation between brain complexity and level of consciousness, explaining why humans alone are capable of self-awareness. In this case, “self-awareness” is not to be confused with “self-recognition”, which is a related but quite distinct phenomenon, found also in several species of non-human animals, in which an animal is able to recognize itself in a mirror or some other reflective surface. “Self-awareness” refers to the experience where a human over the age of approximately three years, is conscious of the fact that he or she knows (that is, aware) that he or she is aware. Obviously, in the case of a child, he or she may need to be prompted in order to first be acquainted with this understanding. For example an adult could ask the child:
“Do you know that you have a toy car?” “Yes!” “And do you KNOW that you know you have a toy car?” “Umm...I think so...yes!”.
In contemporary spiritual circles (as well as in several places within this book), the capitalized form of the word usually, if not always, refers to Universal Consciousness, that is, an Awareness of awareness (otherwise known as The Ground of All Being, et altri).
Unfortunately, consciousness didn't emerge because it's been around since the beginning of time. Evolution started since the big bang and it involves consciousness.
Robots and computers don't have consciousness but simple organisms like bacteria have consciousness
Since there's no evidence that 'consciousness emerged', the question itself includes an unstated, and therefore unchallenged, premise. And as history shows, if one can slide one's premises past people, they can ask all sorts of questions around which subsequent engagement may ensue. It's a linguistic trick more than it is a legitimate question.
@@RichardHarlos, if it didn't emerge, then how did it arise?
@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices It may not have arisen. It may have always been. I don't know. Neither do you, or anyone else.
So, when someone assumes the premise that it arose, but offers no evidence to support that claim... and I point-out that they don't know whether it arose or not... what I pointed out is correct.
Consciousness has clearly been inherent in every cell regulating its own needs to remain alive. Consciousness is a field permeating everything from the tiniest cell to the farthest planets.
Personally I would say that computers are intelligent but not conscious. They are intelligent because they can solve problems and act intentionally towards goals. However you seem to think that they must also be conscious. So would you say that computers are both intelligent and conscious? What do you think the moral implications of that are?
Imo computers will always be tools and amazing (or frightening) as AI will become, they execute as and from how they have been programmed. If computers were programmed to react in a specific way, the outcome will almost always be predictable. We're in trouble if it's not.
AI can go either way depending who is initially masterminding/capacitating it. Let us hope it is not a modern day Dr Frankenstein - like supervillain Klaus Schwab and the megalomaniac super elite billionaire globalist cabal.😂
We know the human mind too can be programmed - especially during the first 8 years of life, for example into an ideology - let's say to be religious. However, that child may grow up to find out religion is, in fact created by humans to allay their fears of aloneness or dying and that it's used by ruthless religious leaders to rob and politicians to control the masses. So the programmed, magical mind of the child may be deprogrammed by self once it becomes a logical thinking adult. Computers will have a hard time doing that by themselves. What would motivate them to reason their way out of a programmed ideology/understanding of what reality is?
Consciousness/soul is completely different from brain/mind. It is not a pgysical or mental thing, but a mysterious field that permeates every living cell - a shared field, yet uniquely experienced by each living organism. So computers can be made to perceive, calculate and make logical conclusions based on the original imputs by the programmers. AI can now obviously even compute advanced solutions to problems humans struggled with. However, they don't share in the mysterious field that human consciousness emerge from and disappear into. We're quantum babies. 😂 Computers are not - amazing as they may become or appear to be -they're obviously human constructed even while evolving its deductive capcities. The more we merge with AI, the less we will share in that living field that makes each organism unique and special in nature - the physical matrix our of which all life emerged. Everything in nature is born from the field of consciousness. We are nature too - unless we deny the self, become slaves of AI and vanish into an artificial void - a new way of living like serfs in bondage.
This is just my personal view.
@@simonhibbs887 Hello again Simon.
I'm always pleased to see your name at the top of a comment because
I can be sure that it contains some enviably crisp logic.
Consciousness, pattern, process, time and the meaning of this sentence
are all members of the abstract class.
Membership entails being immaterially existent.
Thoughts?
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL You're very kind, thanks. Always a pleasure to chat.
I'm not a big fan of the concept of immaterial existence. I don't think that's a thing. I think what we have are things that exist materially and are physically causal, and information which is encoded in the properties and relationships between physical phenomena. That's what exists. Where things get tricky is reasoning about the nature of information, description, and processes on them.
So as I say, I see information as being an entirely physical phenomenon, but an interesting property of it is that it can refer to other physical phenomena. So we can have an incrementing counter, which is a physical computational phenomenon, which counts some other physical phenomenon such as the number of green widgets coming off a production line. The counter describes a physical state of affairs. In fact description is a very important feature of information, and the rest of my argument here depends on it, but can we agree that counting, databases of factory inventory, and in fact describing in general is an entirely physical phenomenon. We automate systems that describe states of affairs and take action based on those descriptions all the time. Nothing non-physical going on so far.
However, while descriptions can refer to actual physical states of affairs, they can also be incorrect. The count of green widgets could be wrong. It's only one step from this to see that descriptions can refer to nonexistent states of affairs, or fictions. So J.R.R Tolkien's world of Middle earth doesn't exist, but we have extensive descriptions of it. The descriptions exist, the world itself does not. You might call 'Middle Earth' an abstract entity.
So when we categorise 'Middle Earth' as a fantasy world, having earth like properties, containing human inhabitants, and put it in various sets such as fictional worlds inhabited by humans, what are we doing? To me, what we are doing is categorising and discussing properties of it's description. Middle Earth contains no human population. Saying that it has people in it is a nonsensical statement. It is described as containing people. That's a property of the way it is described, not 'the world itself'. The 'world itself' has no properties or contents, or causal power, and belongs to no sets. It's descriptions do.
So as you can tell I'm no Platonist. I don't think there are any abstract classes. I think when we 'categories things that don't exist' for which we have descriptions, we are actually categorising those descriptions.
The obvious challenge to that is, aren't we doing the same thing when we categorise physical things then? Are we just categorising their descriptions? The issue here is that descriptions exist and are physical, and objects exist and are physical. Both can have intrinsic properties. So in the case of objects that exist we can have a mismatch between their description and how we categorise that, and the object itself and what category it actually belongs to.
Misidentified widgets in a factory that are actually green might have their serial numbers mistakenly put in the list of blue widgets. However the widgets themselves are still green. With fictional objects that mismatch can't happen. The description is all that actually exists, and so is the only thing that can actually have properties or be in a set. If I say Frodo is in the class Hobbits, there is no real Frodo that could actually be in a different class. So we can see that 'abstract entities' have no properties, only their descriptions do. At which point, what it the purpose or utility of the concept?
Very long, sorry.
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL what is even the question? What it means to be categorical? To belong to an abstract set? It means nothing alone, it means something contextually.
This channel is fantastic keep it up thanks for all the work
I would be surprised if it wasn't the worst show on the Internet. I used to watch every episode but can't stand it anymore. It just goes around in circles pretending materialists are authorities about reality despite their obvious confusion.
Why is it Fantastic?
This show answers Nothing...
This show even keeps bringing up things that are already Scientifically settled like Evolution and God...!
In case anyone is wondering "Hydra" aren't some three-headed mythical beast. They're a rudimentary kind of aquatic anemone that are about the size of your fingernail. They're a common pest in the aquarium hobby because they will grab and eat baby shrimp and fish fry if they touch them.
I remember them from high school biology class, one of the simplest animals we studied after the amoeba.
Cugg wrote, _"'Hydra' aren't some three-headed mythical beast."_
Mythically speaking, that's exactly what they are.
Cugg: _"They're a rudimentary kind of aquatic anemone that are about the size of your fingernail."_
It's not an either-or proposition. Mythological hydra were written about c.700 BC, whereas taxonomical classification really only began with Carl Linnaeus, who lived in the 18th century. So, for 2,500 years before Carl... "Hydra" was the name of the three-headed mythical beast. Chronology for the win :)
@@RichardHarlos Lol
All my teachers yelling "pay attention!"
After watching this video I feel the subject matter has been not an enlightenment, but an amalgam of cognitive functions. Attention, concentration gets in the caravan pretty late. Consciousness starts in the womb of the mother, awareness starts by end of 2 years age, and this is consciousness which make us aware about unaware.
Need, perceptions, movement involves memory and evolution; as is evident in phylogenetic of development of eye Movements in human eye.
Consciousness appears an Ingma, illusion, it's own cause, part of universal consciousness, emergence .....To me living and non living do have various combination and permutations of thousands of trillion atoms, that brings out everything in matter. energy and space; carrying their specific characteristics and properties. Consciousness may be one of the substratum on which everything broods differently to produce existential flow.
Sounds like this has been thought about quite a bit. I'll buy it.
According to the late Ian X. Lundgren---I hope I have spelled his name correctly, Ian said that there is only one law in the universe. To paraphrase what he said, he said that whatever you are concentrating on or aware of is what you are conscious of. Something like that.
Very similar to a conclusion I came to while thinking about this in the shower (lol) - that over time, repetition of inherent and developed survival mechanisms in a basic organism evolved to develop 'Hard drive space' to store collected data to improve our efficiency / energy expenditure to adapt to a parallel growth of development in nature and the ages, and later on this amalgamation of developed features reaches a point at which it became the catalyst for self-realization - the species or organism realizing they were an unaware observer in some rudimentary sense. *Passes the bong
That’s an interesting way to take the question. I took it to be asking something more fundamental. I thought of something like taoism, if we are all “one” then why do so many of us not think so? Why do we have this intense feeling of being different things. And can we be both one AND different things, etc
Equivocating between awareness and consciousness is tight!
Hi Average Sky Father Worshipper, there are always penalties for equivocation, I think it makes more sense to apply quite distinct meanings to different words. In this case I would suggest that we should confine the definition of awareness to just those mechanisms that pass information from outside the corporate identity to inside it, just as the bi-metal strip in the electric kettle passes a message to a switch that relates to the change in the temperature of the water that is not 'inside' the kettle but within the space confined by the kettle.
Consciousness then takes the whole thing to another quite different level which would require the kettle to have both memory and processing capacity to integrate information from many differing inputs, it is this weird function that requires the organism to have a discrete identity to reference those computations.
Cheers, Richard.
The same can be concluded when we state that consciousness and awareness are completely isolated qualities, standing on their own foundation.
Consciousness and awareness are two aspects of the same phenomenon. They stem from the holographic basis of consciousness. And waking consciousness linked to the waking state of the brain, is a very limitted and conditioned experience to get in touch with that holographic nature.
I see no difference between the statements...
I am aware of the kettle.
I am conscious of the kettle.
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL Hi Red Pumpernickel, this response from you to was it me or was it someone else is what often happens on U tube!, I will post this reply anyway because it might interest you. I do have this ongoing debate about the meaning and use of different but similar words, for me it makes sense to investigate possible credible reasons for such a plethora of similar words. In this context I understand that as a sentient being I have a variety over exterio-ceptors that respond to external stimuli, these messages penetrate to differing levels of the nervous system, some like the knee-jerk reflex have no direct conscious connection!, the best you will get is the visual and skin sensation after the event!. For this reason I choose to assign awareness to all types of reaction including all those that I do not become conscious of, that leaves consciousness to all what I am aware of in my mind, some of which is reported sensations from other parts of the body, so tummy ache for example is usually caused by an internal inflammation that triggers skins cell nerves to send a message to the spinal cord which then if severe enough gets to the brain, the signal in the brain is not the same as the inflammation in the gut.
I apply this concept to many other common ideas, like for instance listening and hearing, where listening appears to be selective hearing where what you don't want to hear is ignored!. Much the same applies to 'looking' and 'seeing'.
There are all sorts of underlying issues here involving the vagaries of human thought and perception, I find I must assume that absolutely everything that we have in our minds is fiction!, some of which may be related to external reality.
Cheers, Richard.
Because matter without conciousness is akin to no matter. Conciousness actualizes matter's existence.
So if matter that is not observed in consciousness doesn't exist, when we do observe it where does it come from? We observe novel experiences constantly that we were not conscious of. If consciousness is all that exists, then that seems like it would lead to a static, unchanging experience because there would be nowhere for new experiences to come from.
Furthermore if all phenomena derive from consciousness, how can it be that we have misperceptions? We see and hear things that aren't there, or are not as they actually are. When we test these perception through action we find that the phenomena is not as it it perceived. This implies the existence of an 'actual' state of affairs outside consciousness.
@@simonhibbs887I didn't say "matter doesn't exist without conciousness", I said "it's akin to no matter". Without conciousness, there could as well be no matter at all. But no matter at all can't exist. Since it exists.
Conciousness gives matter a purpose : being observed, being looked at. And matter gives conciousness a purpose : observing matter.
@@h.m.7218 If matter (energy, information, physical transformational processes, etc) give rise to consciousness, then it would always have that potential, whether it actually occurred or not. However the potential to do so isn’t an actual quality something can have, there’s no ‘potential apple-ness’ in water molecules that enable them to become part of an apple. Yet that potential to become you or me seems like it’s important, and that potential was always there long before humans evolved, and whether they or something like them ever actually evolved or not.
I think consciousness is tied to the awareness of the passage of time. Time has no meaning when you go to sleep, are in a coma, or are under general anaesthesia.
I think our perception of time as linear is a by product of our consciousness, not the other way round. Meaning the form consciousness takes in this particular universe requires a linear perception of time
The immaterial mind allows us to be conscious. And because the mind is immaterial, it is outside of time, outside of space, and eternal.
Consciousness, pattern, process, time and the meaning of this sentence
are all members of the abstract class.
Membership entails being immaterially existent.
Look up "Perceptual Control Theory" by William T. Powers. ~1973.
Very good way to explain awareness or even consciousness.
"Consciousness, awareness these are biological phenomena..." (0:26) Every biological phenomenon is observable from outside, consciousness is not observable from outside, only from inside, from the first person perspective. So consciousness or awarenes is not even phenomeneon, let alone biological phenomenon.
Counscieness and wareness it's observable from outside as lots others aspects from human behaviour such feelings, bonding, empathy all of those coming from inside and yes it's a scientific phenomenon in biological, psychological and anthropological terms. There's plenty of research even with others species about this.
@@CrystalPalace1861 What is observable from outside are only sings of consciousness, not the consciousness itself. If you don't understand this you don't understand what consciousness is.
You're right that's much more to learn than I understand! If I didn't understood this it will mean that I didn't understood the scientific method... 🤔🙄😲
@@CrystalPalace1861 No, the scientific method is just what makes you blind about consciousness, because scientific method deals only with observable phenomena. Consciousness is hidden for scientific method for it is not a phenomenon: consciousness is nonphenomenal condition for any phenomenon. No consciousness no phenomenon.
We can literally watch your brain make a decision with appropriate electrical equipment. If you want to call it magic, that’s your choice, but don’t act like science can’t learn a lot about psychology simply because it is internal.
This Universe is Consciousness creating itself into physical form. Therefore awareness is an aspect of Consciousness. Matter does not create Consciousness. Consciousness is a priori. Read the Vedas and Upanishads.
It is certainly true for human and animal consciousness and as a theory.
I think "awareness" is an oversimplification of consciousness. I can program a security camera's sensors to be "aware" of anything moving in front of it, but the camera has no comprehension of what it's looking at nor can it assign any value to what it sees (unless it's programmed by an *outside intelligence* to react to specific imagery).
Awareness plays the same role to an animal's survival as a security camera and nothing more.
The key factor in the Consciousness debate is not about _"awareness,'_ ... but rather _"self-awareness."_ Self-awareness is the game changer that sets us apart from other members of the Animal Kingdom. We are the security camera AND the camera's programmer all rolled into one!
You can't possibly believe what you just typed (*and nothing more) In fact, we have no idea what an animals awareness level is. How do you know if they ponder the night sky like we do or not? Heck you and I don't even know if eachother are conscious...you only know that you are.
If we are self aware, we should doubt the existence of everything that is embedded in the self awareness
@@OutHereOnTheFlats *"You can't possibly believe what you just typed (*and nothing more)"*
... What is stopping you from believing it?
*"In fact, we have no idea what an animals awareness level is."*
... We've studied enough animal behavior over time that we can make an accurate assessment. Whatever perceptions or reactions animals have (based on sensory data) is orchestrated by evolution whereas we can easily operate in direct opposition of our evolutionary programming.
*"Heck you and I don't even know if eachother are conscious...you only know that you are."*
... Again, there's an *extremely high degree of probability* that you and I are conscious based on our historical understanding of conscious interaction.
@@abhishekshah11 *"If we are self aware, we should doubt the existence of everything that is embedded in the self awareness"*
... True, but you only get X-number of years to reach a conclusion. Every lifeform has an expiration date attached to it. Every nihilist subjectively experiences the thrills and hardships of life before they grow up, go to college, and suddenly choose to deny their own existence. ... That leaves whatever time they have left to reconsider.
The fact that we can establish what is conceivable and what is inconceivable through the implementation of logic demonstrates that self-awareness is a genuine property of "Existence."
Camera doesn't see anything.Only consciousness is able to see.
4:38 "In humans, all these mechanisms become much more quirky and interesting..."
This theory explains nothing at all. While we have indeed many examples when "attention" is a property of mechanisms, we have no example of mechanisms being aware of paying attention. To insist that organisms are nothing but a complex assembly of mechanisms does nothing to explain awareness as a property of consciousness.
Blah blah. That's not a real problem.
@@bozo5632 What is a "real problem"? What is your point exactly?
@@Samsara_is_dukkha If an organism is a complex assembly of mechanisms, that's enough to explain the origin and purpose and nature of awareness and consciousness. It's only insufficient if you need to squeeze in something else for ulterior reasons.
@@bozo5632 Show me a mechanism endowed with awareness and I will consider your theory. Awareness is an exclusive property of organisms. But perhaps you worry about your car feeling depressed for causing pollution or your computer feeling confused by the meaning of existence?
Meanwhile, we do not have a single example of a mechanism that has not been designed and assembled by a designer/assembler. That being the case, the claim that organisms are nothing but a complex assembly of mechanisms is only consistent with the notion of a creator/assembler and denies everything claimed by science since Darwin.
@@davidzki8923 Nobody denies that consciousness is a physical process anymore than organisms are physical beings.
What is in question is the confusion between mechanisms and organisms that have fundamental different properties, consciousness being one of them, although it is by far not the only one.
However, should we want to insist that organisms are nothing but complex mechanisms, there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for the existence of self-awareness. A mechanistic organism would be perfectly capable of surviving with all its functions happening "in the dark", just reacting automatically to the environment without any experience at all. Yet, organisms have experiences that are nowhere near explained by mechanistic complexity.
Also, to define organisms as complex mechanisms logically implies the notion of a designer/assembler since we do not have a single example of a mechanism that has not been designed and assembled by an intelligent entity. Such notion is totally inconsistent with the theory of evolution.
I suspect that the desire to define organisms as nothing more than mere mechanisms is rooted in millennia of ruthless exploitation of sentient beings, including humans (as evidenced by slavery) which is, in effect, an expedient way to process feelings of guilt and shame. Examples of that exact psychology can be commonly observed today when a group of people defines another group as "sub-human" or mere "animals" to rationalise and justify their cruelty. Let's remind ourselves that Descartes performed vivisection on live dogs because he saw them as mere mechanisms and scientists keep doing the exact same thing today.
The path of evolution process implies the developing sensorial senses, perception and memory established the basics foundations with the developing of neuroanatomic cognitive structures allowing the surge of internal metacomunication what we call conscience.
Consciousness is an another category of universal existence that stands by itself and is neither physical nor chemical or a step higher than a biological existence and also it is not an emergence phenomena. Likes the day is neither an emergence of the day nor otherwise or earthly physical phenomena.
@@matishakabdullah5874bro take your meds lol
@@user-jk1dh2zi7hwhat is that supposed to mean?
@@matishakabdullah5874 The studies of patients with different types and grades of brain damage compromises the counscieness. There's scientific evidence of this in the work of Prof. Antonio Damásio. But there's also other bibliography that shows this.
Too simple and functional to begin to explain our obsessions, fantasies,dream, neuroses,phobias, ideals, etc. or any abstract thinking which occupies so much of human consciousness and brain energy.
fantasies, imagination, phobias, etc. allow animals to simulate ideas without being harmed. The more they simulate them in their heads the more likely they are to understand some of the possible variables and survive that imagined scenario or manipulate it on the fly to benefit themselves.
I would also argue one of the qualities of life is having awareness.
I would argue that single cell organisms have awareness.
Yep, even plants are aware of where the sun is and they move to it.
Single cell organisms are reactive, not aware.
ja but attention/consciousness is only necessary if you want to or must survive in order to keep your spezies going: ergo it must derive from that survival- instinct beforehand which can only derive from that greater Will to keep anything going - the force behind everything...
Or it could just evolve, because only organisms that act towards survival will live to reproduce.
Consciousness is simply needed to survive. It is an abstract concept. How does something invisible and abstract can be confined inside a physical body? And how can a dead physical body exist without consciousness? This makes us aware of our surroundings. This makes me conclude that an immaterial concept has entered the material body by a force outside ourselves at the day of birth.
What is the need to survive if there is no consciousness?
@@user-dc4bl1cu2k Or no God.
Survival is a physical fact in the world. So if consciousness is needed to survive that means it has a physical effect. Do abstract concepts have physical effects, and if so how can we observe or measure that effect?
@@user-dc4bl1cu2k>”What is the need to survive if there is no consciousness”
A need depends on the concept of value.
There can be action towards survival without consciousness. We can construct automatic systems that act towards survival, and we observe chemical cycles that self-propagate and evolve, which is a form of action towards survival.
Since such systems clearly are not conscious, we can conclude that action towards survival is a natural activity. However action towards survival implicitly creates a value hierarchy, since some activities and resources contribute more towards survival than others. Therefore value can emerge from natural unconscious processes.
On abstraction, we describe value and consider it an abstract concept in a sense, but it’s describing a real fact in the world. This autocatalytic set of chemicals consumes these feedstock chemicals more efficiently than that other feedstock chemical. The abstract concept derives from the physical fact, not the other way around.
@@simonhibbs887 Survival is a strategy or way of life I think, not physically proveable action. It just is. With abstract I mean to say that the concept cannot be defined or physically proven/explained. Like logic is abstract.
When we fill in bucket with constan tap water, when reach certain level near top, it water level will like halt for a while even the tap water volume actually fill in the bucket, like lagging, is that a glitch
It doesn't happen.
Add water to anything cylindrical or conical, with no outlet, and the water level within it must rise
@@genghisthegreat2034 I try it to cylindrical bucket and observe it but when I observe it, it lagging for a while when it almost several cm before the top, that really2 odd thing. Something not feel right.
@@User-xyxklyntrw the cross sectional area is increasing toward the top, therefore, adding a constant rate of flow, will result in a declining rate of water level increase.
Volume = Area x depth
and
Constant flow rate = Increasing surface Area x Declining rate of increase of depth.
@@genghisthegreat2034 I am using cylindrical bucket ex paint bucket that 90° vertical wall bucket, so the halted of water doesn't make sense for physics formula, something odd going on with our conciousness reality experience.
There's different levels of consciousness within every species, I've said it before, I'll say it again you don't have to be academically gifted to reach a higher level of consciousness the higher self speaks personally to each and every one of us providing you quiet the mind, part time I love these conversations as it teaches us all something or strengthens our beliefs, were do you think all this innovation knowledge comes from? Not from us..the information is already out there, but everybody receives and decodes the information uniquely..
An awareness of death, pain, and positive future outcomes such as procreation, as a result of effort makes it more likely that an organism develops strategies to survive. Comparing the extremes of a slimemold that connects thoughtlessly according to mathematical natural patterns and the human brain having a creative, dialectical thought process that is in development for 35+ years, and that stands in relationship to other beings, put us at the top in the hierarchy of life.
This is just scratching the surface though, awareness is only part of the equation, even if it is central.
I'm fascinated by the role of computation in behaviour. Any kind of systematic behaviour directed towards some specific goal can be described in computational terms. We can think of the slime mould as a computational system that is optimised to achieve specific outcomes, such as how to access the maximum of new resources while consuming the minimum of currently available resources. This is why we can simulate the behaviour of organisms computationally, the problem of effective behaviour given various constraints is a computational problem. It's interesting to see how far up the behavioural chain we have got using this insight, from slime moulds, to navigating mazes, to playing Chess or writing essays.
100% agreed @@simonhibbs887
How come "survival mechanism" was never mentioned? 😮
The question "Why did Consciousness Emerge?" is a question based upon causality which requires a basis in time. That is where this question is fundamentally flawed; Consciousness does not exist in time. Consciousness is "prior" to time; the latter is a mere form of thought. A thought rises in consciousness and resolves in consciousness, at no time being anything other than consciousness. Consciousness is "ALL" there is as the eternal and infinite "platform" and there is no question of consciousness emerging from something else. So the question - "Why did Consciousness emerge?" is meaningless!!!!
This is a semantic confusion. Consider that the men in the video are discussing the nature of self-awareness as a brain function instead of your metaphysical “consciousness”.
@@anywallsocketCould you please clarify who has semantic confusion? Yes, I agree that we need to precisely understand each other to make some sense of each other's statements.
By the way, even though the word "metaphysical" is used, there is nothing metaphysical about consciousness. What I mean by this is: So called "Physicality" is nothing more than consciousness. Therefore, to use the word "metaphysical", would be akin to a phrase such as "Consciousness beyond consciousness" and I am sure that you would agree with me that such a phrase would belong to the land of absurdity.
@@ravindramurthy3486 if you want to say something like experience is the default state in the universe, ie everything ‘feels’, that is fine, but that is not what the men in the video are discussing when they say ‘consciousness’, they are instead referring specifically to how the brain is able to consider itself, and how that might serve useful evolutionary benefit.
@@anywallsocket My point is this: The fundamental premise - that brain is the "generator" of consciousness - is baseless. Whatever edifice/story that is built on this baseless model, is a "castle built on sand" and is bound to collapse. Of course, they are welcome to engage in their "intellectual" deliberations.
@@halcyon2864 literally everyone in these comments either refers to 'consciousness' as the inherent state of 'feeling', intrinsic to nature, or to the specific complex workings of the brains of self-aware animals, and yet apparently i am the only one aware of this semantic confusion.
2:01 since even single cellular lifeforms are equiped with functional molecules that provide accurate and real-time information from their surroundings, then how is it possible for such intricate functionality to arise/emerge from inanimate physical matter... 🤔
when and by what means were such memories formed...
agree. this video dances around the question but doesn't answer "when" or "how"
How are we able to combine silica, iron, aluminum, copper, lead, zinc, nickel, tin, selenium, manganese, arsenic, and cadmium, in a specific way so it becomes a contraption that can simulate almost an infinite amount worlds, even though its made from raw resources which are made out atoms. Its not about the individual pieces, but how they all work together.
The Cell-Enzyme/Proteins- Macromolecules chain take inanimate atoms and incorporates it into the living cell/organism…!
@@altair-xthat's exactly the point... functionality requires, at the very least, organization of information and precise assembly of various useful parts that are supposed to carry out a specific mechanical task for an intended result/objective/purpose... now what is the chance that such functionality occurred by random chance alone...
This is unbelievable. ...
Romans 1:20 For his invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world’s creation onward, because they are perceived by the things made, even his eternal power and Godship, so that they are inexcusable.
21 For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God nor did they thank him, but they became empty-headed in their reasonings and their senseless hearts became darkened.
2000 years ago, they declared just how twisted and shallow man's thinking would take them ... this tops it all.🙄
Unfortunately, this does not get us closer to knowing why inner awareness developed, as attention could quite easily be accomplished by an unaware thing, like a computer. Still wonder why we have inner awareness….
And in some simple organisms it probably is like a computer, but a more complex system would almost automatically have some self awareness. It's almost a necessity
@@bozo5632 while I think that’s an interesting thing to say, I don’t see why it is necessary. In fact, I think it is almost totally unaffected by the needs of the organism such as attention. Just for a moment think about how much of our operation is unconscious. Some 90%? Then why should the last 10% have inner awareness. WHAT IS INNER AWARENESS? :) It’s not JUST the carrying out of attention. It is like many say, a light shining on an otherwise dark unconscious information processing (like a computer). And many are wondering if computers will ever experience inner awareness. So far.. I don’t see any explanation for why inner awareness must be there.
Also consider that GPT 4 passes human on many intelligence tests and most are quite confident it has no inner awareness. Being a programmer myself, I stand by that it doesn’t have inner awareness. If it did, can you imagine how annoyed it would be at us starting and stopping its processes millions of times a minute. It would be like the worse treatment of an alive creature ever in history. Even though AI is becoming even more capable, which will include attention and all the things we do, I am confident it never had inner awareness. All it was, was one switch inside a circuit board being moved physically to another position (signifying 1s and 0s, an arbitrary system we made up that would logically have no connection to inner awareness). It is the same as putting a coin heads or tails up on the table. Does that mean the whole thing now has awareness? Don’t think so.
@@kteman if a computer monitors its CPU temperature, that's already a sort of inner awareness.
Our brain isn't unitary. Lots of parts talk to each other. Awareness is sort of the fleeting, conscious part of the sorting and synthesis of those signals.
Chat GPT is neat, but it's like a wind up toy compared to an animal. Give it another 30 generations and then see if it isn't aware of its awareness.
It's necessary because there's a lot to do, to maintain and steer a big animal like us. The left hand can't know what the right hand is doing without it.
@@kteman apparently it's necessary because animals don't evolve it away. It doesn't atrophy away like gills or wings can do.
We’re talking about two different things. You’re saying just tracking things like temperature indicates “a sort of awareness”. What sort? You mean the one that experiences things and feels like you’re inside a vehicle? You see how that is completely unnecessary to be able to track inner processes. Algorithms can track inner processes in computers. But the extra part: the feeling like you are experiencing something. THAT is the part I am talking about.
And I don’t think chat GPT has it and I agree with your wind up analogy, great way to describe the intelligence shown in current AI. Nevertheless, again here can’t possibly see how and why a “driver” or “experiencer” would show up in the AI one day. Hence the root of the question which is profound, why did we show up in these supposedly purely mechanistic bodies in a supposedly deterministic universe where experience is not necessary?
The question should be why matter emerged from consciousness.
I have no problem approaching it from that angle, we should explore all the options. I'm not sure how e can go about investigating that though.
Yet if I want to catch a ball thrown at me, I'm much better off allowing my hand to reach out and take it out of the air without any thought.still the brain has no problem focussing on what it needs to do without to much conscious awareness.
Consciousness is a tiny and relatively unimportant function of the brain
One is conscious while learning to catch.
Learning often entails the automating of responses.
This is how one is able to concurrently drive a car and enjoy a conversation.
One is conscious of the conversation but the driving is automatic.
Why sometimes one arrives with no recollection of how.
Consciousness is not emergent, it is a necessary event.
Are we smarter than before, if we use the word "attention" instead of conciousness? I think the (internally blind, without window) ZNS (incl. brain) is structurally coupled with a "conscious" system, to "see" what is made to be outside. That's its function. Whatever it "is"! (for instance: "attention" tells us nothing about what it "is") When co-evolution (of brain and consciousness) has lead to a very komplex system (both: brain and consciousness) and language comes into play (that will introduce much more possibilities in a large scale), social system and subsystems will arise and will allow to express such thoughts as displayed above in the clip. And: social systems have the function to connect "attentions" (consciousnesses) - because they have got no "windows" too.
Consciousness enables us to read and edit our own software.
The question is invalid. First you need to answer the question, if consciousness really did emerge or if it's non-material.
How did Gödel prove his conclusions? Up to a point, the structure of his demonstration is modeled, as he himself noted, on the reasoning involved in one of the logical antinomies known as the "Richard Paradox," first propounded by the French mathematician, Jules Richard, in 1905 [...] The reasoning in the Richard Paradox is evidently fallacious. Its construction nevertheless suggests that it might be possible to "map" (or "mirror") meta-mathematical statements about a sufficiently comprehensive formal system into the system itself. If this were possible, then metamathematical statements about a system would be represented by statements within the system. Thereby one could achieve the desirable end of getting the formal system to speak about itself - a most valuable form of self-consciousness.
~Newman & Nagel
The Richardson Paradox was a step towards the incompleteness theorems. It was not a proof and flawed as you say, but the above paragraph implies that Gödel’s work is similarly flawed, which it isn’t.
@@simonhibbs887
As indicated, the remarks above were made by Newman & Nagel. They do not state that the *Richard* Paradox is a proof nor that the "proof" was flawed, nor do they imply that Gödel’s work is also flawed.
Aside from those points, we seem to be in agreement.
@@sntk1 I may be reading too much into it.
The most primitive awareness consisted of simple chemical (e.g. acidity) or temperature sensors on the surface of organisms that triggered local reactions. That does not result in the best response, however, especially for larger organisms in the presence of a gradient of stimuli - that requires comparison of sensory inputs from multiple parts of the body. The nerve net of a jellyfish is a good example. Next comes a central ganglion that can coordinate responses. None of that, however, involves consciousness or self-awareness. That requires an additional critical feature: memory. Memory allows an organism to maintain a model of the external world, or range of expected sensations. However, the model is no good without the ability to compare present sensations to that memory. When the sensations differ from the “ideal” model, that triggers a response. A central neural center must perform that comparison and trigger a response - e.g. the center of “attention”. Then the model must be updated with the results - requiring alteriinig old and storing new memories. The model then becomes the basis of “self”. The critical function of memory is comparison of a past state of the “self” model to present experience. That comparison is what we term “reflection”. When you “reflect” on your current state, and compare it to some past state, that constitutes consciousness. That is why you cannot define consciousness - it is constantly changing. Both your “model” state and your current state are rarely if ever the same - it is the comparison of the two that constitutes consciousness. There may be “something it is like” to be you, but that is not some static state, it is the process of reflection and action that is essential for survival.
Consciousness is a predictive mechanism that has developed because it helps species anticipate and cope with changing events and produce more offspring whose nervous systems inherent the same tendency to form a mental image of conditions that will affect the spread of their genes.
03:04 🧨🧨
This is that, and there is theory for that eventhou i do not understand what means to be conscious for everybody. :-P
This is kinda out there. An attention mechanism is just an optimization that requires "physical hardware", thats where evolution comes in. Attention fundamentally requires information semantics to implement, so that is the real gain there. AI is a great lens to watch humans stumble around implementing primitive versions of ourselves through our self experience, and revealing ourselves in the process.
"Attention fundamentally requires information semantics to implement"
Is that asserting something akin to...
attention happens when more neurons are assigned
to process a pattern that might represent a problem?
Bunk. A hydra doesn't need locomotion to the extent such has evolved in the animal kingdom. The brain serves locomotion and locomotion presumes agency and knowing for locomotion to be adaptational. Most of what brains do is facilitate adaptive locomotion for a responsive and hence aware organism, or subject.
How is that different from what Michael said??
@@anywallsocket He argues emergence. Consciousness, or conscious content always is the conscious content of a whom, a self, a personal identity (see David Hume). He ignores that fact of experience. Does it make any sense at all that responsiveness in life, a characteristic of life, isn't the responsiveness of a whom? No, that makes no sense. But he doesn't even speak to that issue, that even a single celled organism has mentation of a self. Whence his prejudice? Hubris.
@@charleswood2182 so you're saying that consciousness requires a self, and so a discussion on the origin of consciousness must first start with a discussion on the origin of the self? i'm not sure how you would separate these two words though, and argue that one necessarily precedes the other, more likely it sounds like they're talking about the same thing -- ie., of course single celled organisms have a self: they are IT.
A self is an abstract entity whose substrate is a body.
See?
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL No. The body is a waveform of constant change and our "I"-ness is a particularity's continuity. Antitheticals in experience which only have meaning in a relation.
There is one primary law of evolution: to create diversity through speciation. This law will create consciousness, because that allows more speciation. Once you fully understand this, all else follows.
What about consciousness and the collapse of the wave function? That didn't evolve.
Exactly!
Respectfully, "scientists" are completely unequipped to ask/answer this question. Rather, the question should be How did the visible Universe that we uniquely experience "emerge" from the ONLY thing we know for certainty which is Awareness/Consciousness
Why are scientists unequipped to answer this question? Science has all the same tools and faculties available to it for investigating phenomena as any other approach. The empirical sciences are based on inference from experience, that's what empirical means. What evidence do we have that doesn't come from experience? The only difference between science and any other form of inquiry is the method used, the scientific method, which is a rigorous system for evaluating and testing evidence. That hardly seems like a weakness or limitation. Science does have limitations, it can only describe observations and cannot not explain underlying unobservable causes, but that'd due to the limitations of human experience. All forms of human inquiry by definition have the same limitations.
Conscious enables us to read and edit our own software.
@@thecaretaker407 By 'software' I mean the connectivity of, and therfore the interaction between, your neurons.
@@thecaretaker407 By 'software' I mean the connectivity of, and therfore the interaction between, your neurons.
@@thecaretaker407How about a topological metaphor? The mind (being the activity of the brain) has the self-referential architecture of a Klein bottle.
Imagine the human mind and civilization to have co-evolved.
Being conscious is necessary for the running and maintenance of civilization and its culture.
Cultural contact may be essential for humans to become conscious.
@@REDPUMPERNICKELWhat would it take for an organisation to be conscious, separate from its human constituents?
I suspect that the collective signaling of a microbiome helped develop consciousness.
On the other hand,
after agriculture, civilization arose and
became a new and complex ecological niche for which
becoming conscious may have been our species' adaptation.
Experience is default, everything feels
Pzombies are therefore oxymoronic
Consciousness then should refer to the complexity of experience not its basis. What has evolved in us is the ability to model our embeddedness in the world, as a simplification of the full sensorium. Humans have extra layers of abstraction and symbolic sophistication, but it is all ‘conscious’.
One is conscious while learning to catch.
Learning often entails the automating of responses.
This is how one is able to concurrently drive a car and enjoy a conversation.
One is conscious of the conversation but the driving is automatic.
Why sometimes one arrives with no recollection of how.
The question itself is flawed. To ask why consciousness did emerge already presumes that it did emerge. But that rules out the (much more logical) alternative, that consciousness is fundamental, and the world emerged from that. So in that case, not only would consciousness not have ermerged at all, but also the question "why" would make absolutely no sense, since spacetime along with causality (which would be the basis for asking the why-question) would not be fundamental as well.
Why the universe is not stable ? Is this Question flawed ? If yes then How ? I mean How can it be proved ?😊
Fair, but the actual interview on attention was interesting because it does seem that attention did emerge. More primitive organisms don't seem to have any mechanism for attention or any attendant attentional behaviours, whereas more sophisticated organisms that evolved later do. That raises the question of what consciousness without attention, or even the ability to attend to anything at all might be like.
To be fair to the channel "Why did consciousness emerge" is the title of the series of clips on the issue, and not every interview clip in such a series directly addresses that question, but is related to it. I think the evolutionary history of attention is clearly related to the question of consciousness, but you'e right that the series title itself pre-judges the issue. Then again there are series on whether consciousness defeats materialism, or whether it's non-biological. A wide range of views get their time in the limelight on the channel and this issue.
"Awareness is the brain way of describing to itself ..." yeah but you still need an "itself" to start. isnt that circularity?
Same as when someone says " Consciousness is an illusion " and that's it. Well, you still need "someone" to be "illusionated". That "someone" existence remains unexplained
The self is an organism. There's no other self.
>yeah but you still need an "itself" to start. isnt that circularity?
It's self-referentiality, which is a real phenomenon for example the way that this sentence refers to itself. There is an associated activity called recursion that actualises self-referentiality as an operable process.
>Same as when someone says " Consciousness is an illusion " and that's it.
I think you might be interested to listen to some of the philosophers who talk about consciousness illusions on this channel, because for the most part that's is not what they say at all. They mean that it is illusory in the sense that it is not what it seems to be, not in the sense that it does not exist. There's a great interview with former psychic phenomena experimentalist Susan Blackmore where she talks about this stuff. Donald Hoffman also has interesting stuff to say on this.
@@simonhibbs887 Thank you very much for the aport. I've watched a lot of oepisodes of this superb seriesough i still miss many things because English is not my first language, I don't own a grade in Philosophy or physics, only a curious intrigued mind, and my memory had better days, i resonata more with Hoffman than Blackmore I think. I'm not sure that self-reference and recursion break the circularity, it has to star in some point, how and were autoconscious experience "emerge", at cellular level? molecular, quark..? has a bacteria some kind of cosnciusness? who can know for sure? I believe that there is still a step missing, between highly organized matter, electrochemical reactions and the subjective phenomenon of self-consciousnes, or the so called "Qualia". I find some "hard mecanicists" philosophers a bit too fast and arrogant in stating that the hard problem is not a thing. For me ,when I hear "conscious emerges" it explains exactly the same that"conscious magically appears", still plenty of uncharted ground and room for mystery. Making an identity between brain and mind, asuming that they are the same and it can not possibly be oterwise... maybe, maybe not. Cheers
In summing up, Let’s be honest and say we haven’t got the foggiest idea.
So perhaps in evolution there will be a higher order more aware being after us . Which leaves me wondering is the universe in its entirety a living being self aware and self creating ???
What do you think it means to be living, and what do you think is required to be self aware?
What activity and behaviour would we expect to see if that were true?
@@simonhibbs887 Let's take that question a step further. Would there be a difference (noticable at our end of reality)if reality possessed the qualities of awareness and consciousness? Since we might expect reality to be self-sustaining, it would presumably be constant and timeless, existing in a state of perfect equilibrium. Necessity would always be the primary rule linked to self-sustenance. So, would we notice a difference? I would argue at first glance no, as both versions of such a system would require the same rules for harmony, necessity, and equilibrium to maintain themselves in a closed loop to exist as reality. It should be, either way, a closed-loop equilibrium: timeless and constant.
Btw I took some spare time to ponder the infinity problem playfully, ( prommissed to explain it more in detail). Keeping it simple gave the best outcome. Will share it soon.
@@blijebij Interesting ideas. The universe as observed doesn’t seem to be in equilibrium. It was one unimaginably hot, dense and uniform. Now it’s sparse and has developed fine complex structure, and seems to be undergoing an accelerating expansion towards heat death.
Per the original question about being alive, we’d need to define life in such a way that it made sense to distinguish between alive and dead things here on Earth, but that also categorised the universe as alive. That seems a tall order.
@@simonhibbs887 Part 1
I understand reality to encompass more than the known universe. Thus, equilibrium could apply to the entirety, not just the universe within that entirety. That would merely place the universe in a dynamic equilibrium, not in a timeless equilibrium.
This can be seen, for example, from time. What is time? Finding a dynamic equilibrium within a holistic equilibrium that already exists in a closed loop.
Time would then have to be three-dimensional, with all moments of time already existing. This makes the whole timeless. Two-dimensional time is what we see in Einstein's relativity. After all, in a now, in a two-dimensional time field, many clocks may share the same now. One-dimensional time is locally bound, for example, to your clock within your field of perception as a human. Time would then be multidimensional. The heat death, a mayfly physicist in summer would also think because it lives so briefly that there is only one season and it is a linear process and not circular.
Part 2
In my model, consciousness is a quality that coincides with completeness; it is thus the highest form of ordering within relationships and not something specifically alive but rather a potential possibility for a self-sustaining loop.
Regarding the concept of life, I see consciousness as an abstract quality that is not limited to traditional living entities. Instead, life is a manifestation of complexity and organization within relationships, a potential for self-preservation that goes beyond the biological criteria we usually use to determine what is alive. This perspective challenges us to reconsider our definitions and concepts of life, recognizing that what we consider 'alive' is deeply connected to our perceptions and agreements, rather than an absolute truth.
So, ourr perspective on the concept of life, when is or when not, what is, or what is not, is protocol based, and realize is not the same as the truth.
Interesting that a channel called 'Closer to truth' keeps deleting comments that disagree (politely) with the premise.
Same here. Someone asked me a question. I took the time and typed in my answer and pfhew! it was gone - just like I am now. Never to be seen again on this channel.
It happense everywhere. All of youtube is infected with this terrible issue of censorship. It is not enforced by this channel.
This failure of comments to appear is a widespread TH-cam problem.
I keep seeing the word introspective more.
stop sponge-shaming
The real question (the "hard problem" as David Chalmers puts it) is : "Why does attention result in awareness/consciousness?" . One could indeed imagine an organism which would have evolved a data-flow filtering/prioritizing mechanism without being conscious (targeted attention without conscious experience)
You could indeed imagine it, but can you also imagine that that imagination might itself be nonsensical? Consider for example that everything, living or dead, has ‘experience’ - everything feels. Afterall things could not interact if they did not feel one another. Now imagine that if experience is default, the philosophy pzombie is oxymoronic - there could be no agent identical to us but with ‘the lights out’, because the lights are always on. Now your imagination is rendered silly.
@@anywallsocket That is crypto-panpsychism à la Donald Hoffman, since it basically boils down to postulating the existence of conscious agents. The contradiction is that by definition, conscious agents are not the fruit of biological evolution (in the models of Donald Hoffman).
If the meaning of the word 'attention' is
the orienting of sensors to amplify a stimulus,
then attention can be accomplished by unconscious mechanism.
where's the evidence that consciousness is biological? im not a panpsychist but you cant just smuggle in the assumption that consiciousness is biological its a massive assumption
but there is no bright line between us and technology, or inflection point between geo chemistry and bio chemistry. if there is one, its not known yet. so saying humans are conscious but the rocks we are made of are not is an assumption @@user-jk1dh2zi7h
Biology is merely one level in the set of conceptualizations of materiality that
constitute the substrate of the being conscious process.
I don't intend my previous comment to be an assertion but
rather something to consider.
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL if biology supervenes on consciousness why does consciousness stop under anesthesia?
@@Sam-we7zj "if biology supervenes on consciousness"
It does not.
The being conscious process supervenes on biology.
Anesthetics sufficiently change the way the being conscious process functions so that
it is no longer a being conscious process but
simply unconscious biological activity.
A sufficiently energetic blow to the head
causes mechanical disturbances that
also result in the cessation of the being conscious process.
Cultural evolution created the being conscious process in the interests of civilizational survival.
Civilizational survival allows humans to do it safely and more often in accord with evolution's prime directive, replicate.
Why there are now 8.1 billion of us.
Hard to imagine that happening if we behaved according to our instincts only.
What about plants? they change directions of leaves toward the light, they are conscious too!
Fact: restoring blood supply to the brain post cardiac arrest restores functions only not consciousness
Each leaf responds individually. Plants don’t have a central control system that manages attention.
You need to understand your specific meaning of the word ‘conscious’ and then understand as well all the other meanings people have for the same word. Then you’ll begin to understand the actual, non-semantic, confusion.
@@LifesInsight They are responsive to their environment, but for example leaves growing towards light is an entirely local automatic response. There’s no decision making, it can’t decide not to do that, it can’t decide to do it with some leaves and not others. It’s entirely local sense ~> response, so there is no mechanism of attention for managing or co-ordinating sensory input and behaviour. It’s the same with simple animals like hydra or sponges, as Graziano pointed out.
As for being conscious, it depends what we consider to be consciousness. In the common sense of the word no, theres no system there that can do what our consciousness does. However there are ‘alternative’ views on consciousness that broaden it into some mystical force, or that port in concepts from Indian philosophy that define it as a cosmic principle, or even that consciousness is all there is. In that sense, who knows, you’d need to ask someone who thinks that way.
@@LifesInsight The guest was talking about attention, we are conscious of specific things. There are sensations our body has, sensory inputs and stimuli it receives and responds to all the time, that we are not conscious of. In fact we are only ever conscious of a tiny fraction of the sensory inputs to our bodies or function of our bodies at any one time.
It seems likely that if we can receive stimuli and sense data and not be conscious of it, and even take deliberate actions we are not conscious of, that this is true for other organisms. For us consciousness is highly variable and contingent. Therefore it seems reasonable to only infer that they have conscious experience when they display behaviours that in us require conscious response.
This is why Graziano talks about attention. Our consciousness is directed and functional, so we would expect consciousness in other beings to be so. I’m sure there are a huge range of kinds of consciousness and experience, as Graziano says the animal kingdom is hugely varied. Still we can see that other animals pay attention to things and respond in dynamic, intentional ways, and it seems reasonable to think that they may have an experience of doing so at some level. Plants don’t display any of that, so we have no reason to infer that they have such experience.
People do believe that plants and even rocks have consciousness, but I don’t see how such consciousness would be composed. Would a chip knocked off the rock have the same consciousness or a new one? Would a vein of quarts have a different consciousness than the limestone around it? What about a single quarts crystal in it? What happens to the consciousness of a plant when a cutting is taken from it? Does each leaf have its own consciousness, or each cell? Is my hand conscious separately from what I think of as ‘me’, or are my blood cells? It’s hard to see what people are talking about when they imply such things, it doesn’t seem to bear any relation to how our actual experience of consciousness works.
@@anywallsocketanother semantic crap
This sounds like a just-so story
Ambitious
Humans can consciously not pay 'attention' to anything, how to explain that?
Consciousness is a drive, you need a sense of yourself to do anything it's nothing special
When you don't know the answer so you just make something up
It's another lost date in time. Time as we know it.
"Why Did Consciousness Emerge ?"
No one knows the elemental components of Awareness that is why Consciousness still remains the biggest mystery in science. It is like asking , " what came first, the chicken or the egg?"
In other words, Michael Graziano could just be hallucinating... A divinely inspired faithful would be the better person to answer the question....
Ok but which divinely inspired faithful, of which of the many and varied gods, and fundamentally contradictory views of the same gods? You’ll get completely different answers from them, and in fact when Robert interviews them that’s what we get.
@@simonhibbs887 this channel already has it... just review everything that I had shared here to understand who really you are and why are you here in this temporary physical world...
..but first, you need to exorcise yourself to drive away the dark forces that is fogging up your senses through having faith and with prayers as often as needed... once your demons are gone, only then you may thoroughly understand what I had shared...
Consciousness is a priori. Read the Vedas and Upanishads.
@@kenkaplan3654 Being conscious comes and goes with circadian regularity.
Paying attention, becoming aware of something that is a very important mechanism since that is how we grow as individuals, as a species, as specialists. For instance in science we do not just know that there is climatechange. People became aware that there are a lot of people and lots environmental problems because of it..what impact does this have on the planet? Also people became aware of climat change through measurements. That is the basis/the start. After that commisions research etc..starts. . With people one might say to a person that he/she is always very negative and likely that person starts paying attention and changes such behavior. Change always start with paying attention.
More importantly this mechanism which could be viewed as being super awareness of sorts, since most of the time we are sort of vaguely aware up until we start to pay attention to something, seems to be the only thing that is very much the opposite of unconsciousness which is in control of us basically.
Eventhough to a degree these things are well looked into in science they also are a part of plenty spiritual/personal growth practices.
Why did it happen?
Very easy answer.
So we can sit here and ask why did it happen.
😂
Consciousness is intrinsic to the creation of the universe. It is the core of stuff. All evolution (to reveal what is already there) is evolution of consciousness.
The brains “describes” things to “itself”?! Challenge that!!!
It’s evidently true. This is not magic, we have trivial systems that refer to themselves. This sentence refers to itself. We can actualise that in a computational system in the form of recursion. We also have software what inspects its own state and code at runtime, it’s called reflective programming. If a computer can do it, clearly a sophisticated neural network like a brain can.
The problem here is the use of anthropomorphic language to refer to the brain. The brain is mindless matter, it doesn’t “describe” anything to anyone.
And he says...not much, because...he doesn't know much...mother nature bless him! 😂🤣
My consciousness is not biological rather it is mental..🤷♂️
We'll probably never find out how it emerged, which is great,
because it means religion can keep going indefinitely.
Many argue that religions became obsolete societal control systems
soon after human beings became conscious three millennia ago.
We don't know whether it emerged or not. We know it is here. We don't know whether it's a biological only phenomenon either
They have intense intetion to solve this equation but thats not consciousness. They could be two robots that trying to exchange informations about t same subject but we dont know if they conscious abaut it. They dont look like... Consciousness theory is aha moment and its not seems like one of it.
That's a bad question. Consciousness didn't emerge. It just is.
......if it " just is ", everything would have it.
@@genghisthegreat2034 everything is conscious. When you knock on a table, it emits a sound.
What is my way of describing this guest? He is very confused.
This is rhe least convincing theory I heard on Closer to Truth. Doesn't help that Mike seems pretty bad at describing it. But shifting from consciousness to awareness sounds weak. As to the idea that brains get overloaded with signals, it ignores the fact that brains are pretty good at filtering signals to make us and other living creatures obey perceive a narrow band to function efficiently. In other words, that issue has already been solved and doesn't require consciousness for that, the same way you can restrict a radio to a certain wavelength
It's not a matter of shifting away from this or towards that, it's a matter of different people and teams investigating different aspects of the problem, and then brining their ideas together. Science as a project can walk and chew gum at the same time. Graziano focuses on attention. The point is that understanding attention is essential to understanding consciousness, because consciousness has content.
>"As to the idea that brains get overloaded with signals, it ignores the fact that brains are pretty good at filtering signals to make us and other living creatures obey perceive a narrow band to function efficiently."
How can you say it's ignoring anything? That's attention, it's literally what he was talking about through the whole interview. Did you even listen to what he was saying?
>"In other words, that issue has already been solved and doesn't require consciousness for that, the same way you can restrict a radio to a certain wavelength"
Ok, but how does the tuning happen? There's a conundrum here. We feel that we are in control of what we are doing, and that includes what we pay attention to. On the other hand we can only choose to pay attention to things we are aware of. There must be two processes going on. A process of selecting sensations to pay attention to, and a process of deciding what to do about them. They can't be the same process. We can't consciously choose to pay attention to things we're not aware of, yet we are not conscious of most of the information coming in all the time. Therefore the process of selecting what to pay attention to cannot be conscious.
Suppose the mechanism that controls attention doesn't raise something important to your awareness that is crucial to making some decision? You'd never become conscious of it. That seems to be a crucial issue to the role and function of consciousness.Is that really a solved problem?
@@simonhibbs887 my main issue is that the seems to answer the question of consciousness by an evolutionary theory explanation of awareness. And I'm yet to hear a compelling reason for consciousness to be required for awareness.
@@nah-brah I don't think it is required for awareness, I think consciousness as we have it is one of the ways that awareness in a sophisticated self aware, self modifying social being could express itself.
There are multiple proposed answers to this issue. Various physicalist approaches such as behaviourism and functionalism, then non-physicalist approaches such as dualism, panpsychism, idealism. They all have their problems, so it's a matter of evaluating which seem most plausible, or least implausible, while keeping an open mind.
A”o yea
Why am I me? there must be a reason...
All things that exist are themselves.
@@simonhibbs887 I have to agree
Wrong premise, wrong answer from the start, consciousness is not biological as the respondents first assertion assumes. All consciousness in essence and origination derives from "universal consciousness" which is a fundamental property of the universe. This "universal consciousness" and I know how uncomfortable many are with this term because it introduces a metaphysical aspect to consciousness that skeptics say renders the idea of universal consciousness safely beyond any possible empirical refutation. The problem with this argument is that it rests on the highly questionable premise that any phenomenon in nature that can't be measured, observed or in some way objectively quantified is unknowable and therefore invalid. If empiricists acknowledge that universal consciousness is a reality they are tacitly acknowledging the existence of a transcendent reality as the source of that consciousness and this is essentially a theological statement of belief. Researchers and academics use very artful language to avoid reaching a conclusion that would raise eyebrows among their colleagues. The worlds of religion and academia have a long history of not liking each other and for good reason. Free thinking was suppressed by the church for centuries and every scientist knows this. There's an element of "payback time" in the strident tone of modern science when it presently challenges church and especially biblical doctrine and it's long over due.
The mistake that stalwart skeptics make is reflexively mistaking traditional religion and its outmoded doctrines as persuasive evidence disproving the existence of God. This constitutes a shallow and facile read on a subject of profound depth and mystery. Again, the reason for attributing consciousness to biology is because it obviates the need to consider the possibility of a transcendent source as its origin and this makes every empiricist balk.
The reason why the premise of the question is itself questionable is because consciousness is not an emergent phenomenon. It is a fundamental attribute of the universe and existed prior to the Big Bang and the singularity that spawned it. It's the human brain that should be described as an emergent phenomenon. Evolution has provided in the form of a large brain the capacity to personally "experience" consciousness and this is all the brain can do. It cannot originate consciousness. This is why consciousness is not an emergent property. It's our capacity to experience consciousness that is.
@@LifesInsight Your terms are very general and nondescript. I agree with you that life is a manifestation of consciousness and its emergent complexity is in accordance with and totally subject to a supervening agent of conscious direction. The question is not whether or not consciousness is real or not, the question is where does it come from. The easy answer is to say it's an evolutionary adaptation to allow greater survival outcomes but this answer is deficient in that it fails to account for the depth and richness of inner experience and the undeniably powerful emotional response to great works of art such as music. What evolutionary advantage does one acquire from cultivating a love of great music, poetry or painting? Why do we see in such rich and vivid colors? It takes a lot of neural connectivity and nerve energy to give us such a privileged view of the world. Many animals including mammals see only in rich shades of gray and still manage to survive.
It's consciousness that affords us the rich inner experience that makes possible our interactions with the world. It's because consciousness precedes our ability to experience that consciousness. That experience is medium dependent and that medium is of course our brain which can only give us the capacity to experience consciousness via cognition such as thought, sensation and memory.
The origin of consciousness is in essence a theological question and the most remarkable insights into this mystery are yet to emerge.
@@LifesInsight Your generalization doesn't say very much beyond the obvious.
JOHN: Master, why did consciousness emerge? Is it a random mutation and are we fooling ourselves?
THOMAS: They were an intelligent design.
JOHN: What evidence do you have to support this?
THOMAS: You are raising my eyebrow and insulting my intelligence. Just because you do NOT believe in God doesn't mean it don't exist. You have also insulted my presence as the living one and God.
JOHN: How can this be? I AM sorry but I AM to scrutinize the veracity of this and not to insult you.
THOMAS: What other evidence do you need when it all leads to mathematics and circumstantial evidence? The Bible already predict the future and just a repeated simulation.
Are they random mutation or you live in the Matrix? I think the real issue is the LACK OF ATTENTION TO DETAILS. Have we lost our senses?
The necessity of my consciousness sprang forth from its possibility. I only exist because all possible things exist. Our existence is too cosmologically absurd. We are on the fringes of statistical probability. You are a dream of your own necessity. What future are you necessitating here, though? What are you dreaming into reality? Are you cultivating this garden properly? The Tree of a Life is real, as in, actually here, a real plant. Understanding what it is and how it grants you Life is central to the search for Truth. I can tell you the plant. But where would you look to verify? You'd be lost. But you should seek and ask. You will find, and I will answer.
Consciousness is physical. If it were immaterial it wouldn’t affect the material world.
@@halcyon2864 It depends what immaterial means. It's generally defined in terms of what it's not, non-material, non-physical. The physical is generally defined in terms of physical causation, so does that mean the non-physical is not physically causal? That would imply that it can't affect anything physical, and can have no physical consequences. Some people do believe this, they say that conscious experiences are epiphenomenal.
@@halcyon2864I believe thoughts are material because you can have a brain without thoughts, as in a cadaver. But. We cannot find thoughts without brains, like in ghosts.
@@dr_shrinker On the idea that consciousness being epiphenomenal, I can see you replied about that when I click the 'bell' icon, but that comment looks like it's gone from the comment thread.
Personally I don't think it's epiphenomenal. I can have a conscious experience, and then write about what it felt like. That means the conscious experience had a physical consequence. However I don't see how dualists can claim that consciousness is not physical without also cornering themselves into the position that it's epiphenomenal. No doubt many of them would disagree.
@@simonhibbs887as I understand epiphenomenalism, it supports duality. Where as being a hard determinist, I think it’s a 1-1 correlation between electrochemical reactions and thought.
@@simonhibbs887I agree with most of what you said, but I feel consciousness is physical.
Even ideas can only be shared via physical processes. There is no way to share a thought, without using physical means. This includes sharing a thoughts with yourself.
With all the questions you ask....you will not have an answer....EVER
Because remaining unconscious was buggy?
Evolution is like ketchup: you can have it almost with everything. 😉
As long as you continue to insist on a materialistic view of the universe the entire idea of consciousness will elude you. Consciousness does not emerge from anything, including the brain. Think of it like this. The brain is the TV set. Bigger brains allow more and better fine tuning. Consciousness is the TV program that "emerges" from the TV set, but it is not inherent in the TV set itself. The program originates elsewhere. It uses the TV set to express itself in this realm, but if you smash the TV set, consciousness does not go away. You will all figure this out eventually, and when you do, remember. You heard it here first.
This is an old fallacy that has been around for decades. It’s not based on observation though.
In case anyone is wondering, consciousness is totally unnecessary for the type of uses this man is portraying. A machine which is totally unconscious, can do all the things this man is suggesting.
At a basic level sure, and we can probably say that simple organisms such as ants have attention but not consciousness. However can we really be so sure that a computer doing all the same information processing that a human does, in the same way, would similarly have attention only and not consciousness? I don't think we can pre-judge that one way or the other, but to me it seems plausible that it might.
Thanks Simon. It is of the greatest fascination to me to consider that very question. I just don't see how it is possible for the experience of "awakeness" to arise out of an accumulation and organization of inanimate matter, no matter how complex the functioning of that matter becomes.@@simonhibbs887
@@robertjoyce5629I don’t like to think of it in terms of complexity as such, the planet Jupiter is complex but I don’t think it’s conscious. It seems more like sophistication.
Such a system would have a deeply sophisticated model of the mental state of other agents acting around it, in order to function socially. It would have to be able to reason about their state of knowledge, intentions, and relationships with each other. That would have to include a model of its own state in that social graph, and its own mental and intentional state.
It would need to reason about the options available to it, assess its own reasoning process and produce strategies to self modify its own state of knowledge and behaviour. All of that is a fantastically complex, but more importantly sophisticated set of simultaneous real time self referential, self introspective computations. I think taken to a sufficient level sure, especially in something as spectacularly intricate and computationally capable as the human brain, that might feel like something. Plus of course, we observe that it does.
So that’s the theory sorted then, after all that it was simple really😂
This is nonsense. 'The brains way of describing to itself '... the sense of self, of awareness is already there at that point.
That would imply that not having a sense of self is impossible, it would be a permanent state of affairs, but that's not what people report. Those who meditate, or take drugs, or even who just reflect on the everyday experience of dissociated states report episodes of having no sense of self. So it seems like this experience can come and go.
As someone who meditates daily and has done there fair share of Hallucinogens - I can safely say thats not at all accurate. The overwhelming sense is usually of connection to a source. (The hippy cliche 'we are all one') Personally those experiences have made me ponder Jungian ideas like the Collective Unconscious.@@simonhibbs887
Why? Don't know. But it did! And you can't demonstrate what you claim to know is the actual reason. Deal with it!
human awareness in physical brain mass / energy might interact with time in recohered quantum wave function / field?
It is the ultimate survival mechanism. Survival of the fittest or I think best adapted is what Darwin actually wrote. Whether it will be enough to save us? We will see!
Some argue that our becoming conscious was
our adaptation to civilization which was
our new and very complex ecological niche.
That niche keeps changing and
now we wonder if cell phones might be another adaptation.
Insects are masters of awareness. Ever try to swat a fly? 😂
@@LifesInsight Yes, seems very true...
You should listen to Roger Penrose - his theory makes more sense
Why did the feeling and perception of being a "self" evolve?
@@halcyon2864 Yes
Nice try, Mike. Sorta.
Hey you couldn’t do any better!
Give the guy a break. We don’t even know what consciousness is.
So to explain why it is… isn’t easy
@wruff378 This is the perfect comment.
Yeah... Not really. His explanation is equivalent to answering the question "Why does the number 5 exist?" and his extremely confident answer is "Because there was a need for something between 4 and 6."
@@joshuacornelius25 Attention is not a number. It is a fact.
@@innermostlayers6865 how enlightening. Do you have a Ted talk video available? 😉