I don't understand why Philip keeps saying panpsychism is the way to explain everything and then never explains anything. It's like a promise that never delivers. I just don't understand consciousness any better by hearing that it is fundamental. It sounds an awful like the enchanted world of the pre-scientific days.
It's all just hiding behind fuzzy words. He would have to show that saying electrons are minutely conscious makes them different than saying they are just physical electrons that we understand today. But of course he would never even dare try that because he obviously is not an expert in physics. So it's just, like Sean said, warm and fuzzy feelings or a way to satisfy people's sci-fi like dreams. It doesn't actually have any meaning
To be fair, we generally take it that given a dichotomy of p V ~p, one of the two must be true, and the other must be not true. Philips approach is an argument by impossibility of the contrary, which is a perfectly fine form of argument. If you don't accept what he's said, then you either believe he has not shown a true dichotomy, meaning there are other options besides what he posited, or you think there's a problem in his reasoning that one of the options is impossible, in which case you should say what the specific issue is.
You probably are not understanding how his view explains what consciousness is because thats not exactly the main point of his view. It seems youre just misunderstanding it. We understand what consciousness is (or at least is like) based on our immediate awareness of it and its effects on the world. The view is mainly trying to explain facts about the world that seem to point to consciousness as a best explanation. These facts are absolutely falsifiable. If you come away from someone's explanation of their view thinking that they have genuinely explained nothing (despite supposedly having claimed to) and that they have views only someone of a prescientific age could hold, then you should probably just think about it a little more or retreat their argument(s) / ideas again.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 05:16 🧠 Consciousness and physical reality present the ancient challenge of how to unify scientific data (public data) and our private experiences (private data). Private data includes feelings, experiences, and sensory perceptions like color and taste. 07:36 🧪 The Mind-Body problem explores how Consciousness and the physical world connect. There are three main solutions: physicalism (physical world is fundamental), panpsychism (Consciousness is fundamental), and dualism (both are fundamental). 09:56 🧠 Scientific experiments can't distinguish between these options, leaving it as a philosophical challenge. Panpsychism asserts that Consciousness is fundamental, with the physical world emerging from underlying Consciousness. 13:54 🧪 Physicalism faces a conceptual mismatch between the quantitative language of physics and the qualitative aspects of Consciousness, making it difficult to explain experiences in purely physical terms. 18:47 🔄 Russell-inspired panpsychism posits that Conscious entities interact, giving rise to mathematical structures, which are what we observe as physics. Panpsychism successfully explains the physical world in terms of Consciousness. 22:51 🌌 Physicalism remains a strong approach, considering our excellent understanding of the physical world. Altering our fundamental understanding of physical reality due to challenges in understanding Consciousness might not be the best approach. 26:45 🧠 Sean Carroll discusses levels of explanation in Consciousness, ranging from fundamental quantum fields to human experiences and behaviors. 27:27 🧪 Different levels of vocabulary (physical, biological, and human-scale) describing Consciousness are compatible and do not conflict with each other. 28:23 🌌 While Sean Carroll admits not fully understanding Consciousness, he is confident that any explanation will fit within the framework of physicalism, emphasizing the importance of mapping Consciousness in physical terms. 29:33 🧠 Sean Carroll illustrates the relationship between thoughts and brain activity, emphasizing the ongoing research efforts to describe Consciousness in physical terms. 30:29 🤔 Sean Carroll addresses the "satisfaction gap," highlighting the dissatisfaction some have with physicalist explanations of Consciousness. He contrasts this with the panpsychist approach. 31:55 🔴 Carroll critiques the "knowledge argument," challenging the idea that the qualitative experience of Consciousness cannot be explained within physicalism. He asserts that the argument does not undermine physicalism. 33:19 🌐 Sean Carroll outlines the core Theory in physics, emphasizing our deep understanding of fundamental particles and forces. He explains the limits of potential new particles' relevance to Consciousness and biological processes. 36:44 ❓ Carroll presents the "satisfaction gap" dilemma for panpsychists, highlighting the challenge of reconciling their views with the well-established core Theory of physics. 37:24 ❓ Sean Carroll challenges panpsychists to either modify the core Theory of physics to fit their views or accept that Consciousness does not require such modification. 42:55 🌌 Carroll emphasizes that Consciousness is intricately tied to behavior. He asserts that any theory of Consciousness must account for its impact on human behavior and experiences. 43:21 🧠 Sean Carroll believes Consciousness is complex and challenging to understand but contends that changing the entire universe's framework is unnecessary. He advocates for working within the physicalist paradigm while exploring Consciousness further. 50:25 🧠 Panpsychism views physics as a computational structure (software) realized in Consciousness (hardware), akin to how software can run on different devices like iPhone and laptop. 51:06 🤔 Panpsychism posits Consciousness as a fundamental layer underlying physics, not necessarily changing physics but offering a deeper understanding of reality. 53:55 🔬 Panpsychism does not alter physics; it proposes a more fundamental layer beneath physics, challenging the scientistic view that only experimentally provable aspects matter. 56:28 🌌 Panpsychism provides a coherent explanation linking physical reality to underlying facts about Consciousness, presenting a viable solution to the Mind-Body problem. 59:01 🧐 Panpsychism argues for the importance of integrating our immediate awareness of Consciousness with scientific knowledge, emphasizing the need for philosophical exploration beyond experiments. 01:00:12 🧠 Panpsychism challenges the fundamental dilemma: Does it change core physics? The debate hinges on whether panpsychist views necessitate altering the core Theory of physics. 01:05:14 🌈 Panpsychism asserts that explaining Consciousness involves understanding both qualitative experiences and their neural correlates, highlighting the challenge of defining what constitutes an explanation. 01:11:12 🤷 Panpsychism questions the notion of the "hard problem of Consciousness," suggesting that as scientific understanding advances, the hard problem might dissolve without a distinct solution. 01:13:18 🧠 The knowledge argument is about the incompleteness of materialism. Mary, a neuroscientist, learns new information about experiencing red, indicating materialism's limitations. 01:14:47 🌌 Panpsychism aims to explain physical reality in terms of consciousness, not just explain consciousness itself. It offers an alternative to materialism in understanding reality. 01:17:39 💡 Consciousness is a unique case; it's privately known, not publicly observable. The challenge is to integrate the reality of consciousness with the reality of the physical world. 01:20:43 🌟 The debate highlights implicit assumptions in understanding the fundamental nature of reality. Different views exist due to the complexity of the problem; there's room for differing interpretations. 01:31:15 🧐 The introspective data on consciousness, although subject to interpretation, provides a real, rich understanding of subjective experiences, challenging the notion of Consciousness as purely inferential. 01:36:19 🎨 Philip introduces the example of Fred, a character who sees two distinct colors despite others seeing one, highlighting a gap in our understanding of consciousness and physicalism. 01:37:31 🦐 The existence of creatures like the mantis shrimp challenges our understanding of consciousness, indicating something missing in the current neurological explanations. 01:38:48 🎨 Descriptions of experiences such as seeing red are relational and subjective, making it difficult to provide objective answers within panpsychism or physicalism. 01:41:57 💭 The zombie argument challenges the concept of consciousness by proposing beings that behave identically to humans but lack subjective experience, raising questions about the nature of consciousness. 01:45:55 🌍 Panpsychism emphasizes continuity in nature, suggesting that consciousness evolves from simpler forms, offering a Copernican view of consciousness in the universe. 01:47:11 🧩 The combination problem in panpsychism explores how smaller conscious entities combine to form complex consciousness, a challenge that researchers are actively engaging with. 01:52:29 🤔 Sean asserts that he feels physicalism is true, aligning his inner experiences with his understanding of the physical world, highlighting the complexity of consciousness as a key challenge. 01:54:48 🧠 Philip discusses the limits of physicalism, emphasizing the need for an intelligible story explaining the emergence of subjective qualities from quantitative physical processes. The debate extends to other non-scientific data like value and mathematics. Made with HARPA AI
how to unify scientific data (public data) and our private experiences Create a cybernetical theory of private experiences. It is just one function among others.
You can’t really respond to your opponent’s arguments when they’ve failed to respond to yours. All he can really do is point out that Sean doesn’t understand the problems he’s trying to refute.
@@bracero7628 I think I would respect Phillip more if he just argued that people have souls. insisting that leptons have "consciousness" is pretty meaningless.
@@JakobVirgil I'm not a physicalist, but I don't see how it's any more meaningless than saying they're made of the same stuff human bodies are made of.
@@bracero7628 Electrons are leptons and are one of the things that make up human bodies. So I don't follow. Assuming that a part of thing that is conscious must be conscious seems to be related to the fallacy of composition to me.
Instead of spending so much time arguing physics is not fundamental, Philip would be more convincing if he elaborated more on how panpsychism gives rise to mathematical structures of physics and how exactly does physics emerges from consciousness. To me, physicalism is simpler than panpsychism, so really, the only criteria to judge panpsychism is its own explanatory power, but he never actually presents it in any depth in this video.
And I would like to know more from Sean about how we get from the core theory to a theory of the unique first person felt experience that each of us all have. We all just have to believe and trust in Sean that one day physicalism will make it happen.
Physics doesn't emerge *from* consciousness in panpsychism, rather consciousness is a fundamental, or inseparable, *property* of physical reality. Much like you can't separate properties lime charge, spin, momentum or mass from particles, so too you cannot divorce consciousness (qualia, or what I prefer to term proto-consciousness) from the fundamental fabric of existence. The unassailability of the solipsist argument is itself a clue.
@@pandoraeeris7860 great so panpsychism IS a physicalist theory and should therefore be testable. After all, we can measure spin states. So all the panpsychist has to do is explain how consciousness physically influences the world. Where is it hiding and what is the mechanism of action that produces a measurable change in brain state?
I dream of one of these debates where Phillip will finally say something substantial about the explanatory power of panpsychism, so far just hot air, I'm afraid. And I would so much like to know...
I feel you. I think the idea is that with panpsychism, we can account for both physics and consciousness. However, to me it seems we can still only account for consciousness in a general form, but we cannot derive any actual experience. It seems that it thus has slightly more explanatory power than physicalism, but any given experience itself still has to be taken as a brute fact.
It explains nothing, it just states that the "mysterious thing" is fundamental. That is no explanation, it has no added value whatsoever, Sean explicitly mentioned that, Philip just laughed it smugly away.
@@ivanvnucko3056I really don’t understand how these guys have jobs and get published. I don’t have anything against Goff personally, but panpsychism is so incredibly, glaringly flimsy, I don’t understand why he has a career. Who in academia is buying this stuff? SMH.
@@leoinstatenisland Physicalism is no less flimsy than panpsychism. They are both metaphysical theories. They are both compatible with physical science. You shouldn't confuse physics with physicalism, they are very different things.
a nonissue since IIT is specifically designed to model this mathematically and will accomplish it with sufficient biological investigation and advances in neural imaging tech. the issue for both camps, identically necessitated by their reliance on folk introspection, are the untestable metaphysical assumptions required to proceed and which do not address the essential questions regarding the nature and functions of consciousness. since william james' conclusion that a method for advancing beyond folk introspection is impossible or unknown, it has occurred to noone to bypass all metaphysical speculation and instead just do actual science, meaning advancing beyond folk introspection by developing methods of rigorously observing the object we wish to understand.
@@bobkat8765 theres nothing tongue in cheek about having located the neural correlates for voluntary attention and concentration. we know who sucks and who doesnt. endless metaphysical speculation by ppl like carroll and goff who are only capable of 2 seconds max is meaningless and useless. just as galileo wiped out 1400yrs of medieval scholarship with 1 week of rigorous observation of the object he sought to understand, 1000yrs of continued work done in goffs and carrolls manner is wiped away by a single person who based on neural correlate monitoring we can confirm is capable of sustained attention and concentration not for second or minutes but several hours, remaining completely undistracted and unimpinged by any external or internal stimulus while only focused on rigorously observing directly the mind its nature and functions.
@@joeredman569 So you believe people having an epileptic seizure are exponentially more “conscious” then, since their brains are far more integrated than brains not in seizure, right?
@@joeredman569 Hossenfelder: The Mathematics of Consciousness: th-cam.com/video/efVBUDnD_no/w-d-xo.htmlsi=aU2rc7uQ3B3d-c-R Hossenfelder: Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics: th-cam.com/video/v1wqUCATYUA/w-d-xo.htmlsi=GB9lc4wUCUyfSVCI
It's interesting how Goff offers some really weak points in his opening: 1. Lack of progress (or rather, lack of relative perceived progress) is not quality evidence against physicalism. The inability of humans, at this point in time, to arrive at conclusive determinations about the complete physical explanation of subjective experiences, is no indication that there is none. By analogy, that's like saying because the vast majority of the observable universe seems to be made up of dark matter and dark energy, which are still mysteries to humans, that there is no scientific physical explanation for these things. Some things are very complex, relative to human understanding, and the inability of humans to fully explain these things, despite the relative time and effort put into attempting to understand them, is not strong opposition. 2. The sample results of the PhilPapers Survey, with a margin of 60%, is also not good evidence. For one, this is a slim majority. For two, this majority consists of people who accept or lean toward the proposition; these are not people who have made up their minds conclusively on the issue. Thirdly, this is not something people can provide substantive and conclusive evidence for, so there's no test results (or deductive processes) to support the opinions of these people who accept or lean toward this position.
what do you expect, he has no way of rigorously observing the object he wishes to understand, so he has no choice but to adopt metaphysics. in that regard although i am deeply opposed to keith frankish's position his conceptual fluency and attempts to adhere to intellectual honesty to far greater degree than most physicalists who are complete degenerates, makes his arguments more powerful due merely to more visible internal consistency. carroll is irrelevant and doesnt even need addressing.
however as a scientist this assertion of his is inaccurate and unscientific because it contradicts the currently available scientific literature. we know the neural correlates for voluntary attention and concentration. we know the avg person such as carroll and goff are only capable of 2 seconds max on avg. however we have known now for almost 2 decades that there are trained person who based on neural correlate monitoring and testing are verified to be capable of sustaining attention and perfect concentration not for 10 seconds but 10 hours, meaning they remain completely undistracted and unimpinged by any external or internal stimulus focused directly on the nature and function of the mind itself. therefore his opinion his true of himself and ppl like him, but has nothing to do with the latter type of persons. further, he speaks universally, as if he is in a position to comment on both, which he is not, which is the opposite of humility.
@@5piles So if I go up and slap that guy who supposedly completely undistracted for 10 hours straight he won't notice? I can just take a piss in his mouth and he won't notice? That sounds like a lack of consciousness to me.
LOL. I was about to ask if this is some kind of Tibetan monk BS you're talking about, but then I checked and saw that it IS actually Tibetan monk BS! Well, at least you write eloquently, as if you were smart. But then, that's the one thing Tibetan monks are good at. Sell BS to people that somehow sounds profound. Which is also why Michael Roach made this his business model. And why wouldn't he? He learned from the best. I wonder if this is all "voluntary"? Whatever "voluntary" even means, because actually its just their material brains doing its thing and giving them the false impression that they had a choice in it.
@@flashmutex i dont know what neural correlate research in neuroscience has to do with tibetan monks in particular. you for example if tested would be measured in at only 2 second of voluntary attention and concentration, as does everyone else ever tested aside for an extremely select few. you can mock the difference between your mere 2 seconds and their sustained concentration for hours, but that would indicate you are psychotic. regarding tibetan buddhism, sorry, tukdam in taipei 2020 was fully tested and monitored by scientists and neuroscientists. their finds completely wipe away modern biology, physics, physicalism, etc. but hey, keep trying to pray nonexistent emergent properties into existence. you should look into christianity, you'd fit right in, though the idol worship of the avg physicalists has become more severe than the avg theist.
@@5piles You keep saying "voluntary attention and concentration" without explain what you mean by "voluntary". You cannot "voluntarily" force the brain into something as if it were another organ of the body separated from the mind, because "willing" to do that is already the brain in action. Someone staying concentrated for longer periods means nothing. It's still just the material brain doing its thing. To suggest otherwise is to say that something outside of the material brain is doing something to keep it concentrated. So what is it? Some kind of external consciousness controlling the material brain? A soul? A spirit? You telling me that I fit into religion is funny, because it seems like you're the one preaching religion without being "conscious" of it. > "they remain completely undistracted and unimpinged by any external or *internal* stimulus focused directly on the nature and function of the mind itself." What's that even supposed to mean? A dead brain without internal activity? A functioning brain stimulates itself permanently via recurrent neural paths.
I think Philip doesn't actually understand the knowledge problem! When Mary sees red for the first time, retinal photoreceptors, optic pathways, and neuonal networks are engaged for the first time. She learns something new, which is encoded as a change in the neurophysicalchemical structure of her brain. And, it does seem impossible to learn that information from reading ("learning") about the physical facts of seeing red. But that does not mean it takes something nonphysical to obtain that knowledge, which is Sean's point. In principal, if the knowledge gained from seeing red equates to a change in her brain structure, then with sufficient technology able to adjust brain structure on a neuron and neurochemical level (nanobots or whatever, doesn't matter), then it is in theory possible for her to absolutely learn about the quality of seeing red without actually seeing red. Think of it as a scifi memory transplant. If a purely physical process can produce the brain structure that equates to the knowledge (memory) of what the experience of "seeing red" feels like, without the conscious process of actually seeing red, then there is nothing about the conscious experience not fully explained by physicalism. It is the philosophers' insistence that the possible ways Mary can interact with the physical world to learn about what seeing red would be like be limited to ingestion of facts through traditional currently possible methods. This is just a failure of imagination. And unnecessary limitation that makes the thought experiment invalid, and not an argument in favor of what they believe it is. Philip doesn't actually understand the knowledge argument.
Yes, but the problem is that what she’s seeing should already be in her head as a set of quantitative facts described by physical science. The experience should be superfluous if reality is fundamentally physical. All you’re saying here is that the brain state correlates to a qualitative experience. Even if you alter Mary’s brain to implant the qualitative experience of red, the qualitative knowledge and the brain states are still going to be two different phenomena. You’re smuggling in the qualia without actually explaining it, and no matter how many layers deep we go, you’re going to be forced to do that same thing again and again.
I disagree with essentially everything you said. First, if unconscious nanobots or whatever alters Mary's brain structure in a way that she is entirely unaware of (let's say it happens slowly, over a week), then there is no conscious process involved in the creation of that brain state. At the completion of the task, she will have a brain state representing the memory of the experience of having seen red and knowing what that feels like that is to the atomic level indistinguishable from the brain state produced from having actually seen red. From any objective measure the two are identical, and from Mary's subjective feeling the two are identical. So the qualia knowledge "learned" is identical in both cases. One involved a conscious process, the other did not at any point. The same will hold true for any other brain state you can imagine, corresponding to any other fact, subjective feeling, experience etc that you can imagine. Therefore, there is no room left for a conscious experience that can't be reproduced (and therefore entirely explained) by pure physical phenomenon. Just because we can't explain that level of detail now does not mean it's impossible. Sean's point. Second, if you have an issue with this refutation being about just the "memory" of the experience, and not the experience itself, then it can be easily extended there as well. According to physicalism, the active ongoing experience of an event just corresponds to a particular and dynamic series of structural/chemical/electrical brain states. Allow our nanobots to in real time manipulate the brain to match that specific set of brain states, and the subject will have the identical subjective experience. The subject will "see red" with no red and no eyes involved. Again, there is no room left for a conscious process that can't be exactly replicated and thus fully explained by our nanobots, and entirely physical process. Also, the requirement that Mary's knowledge of physical facts be limited invalidates the thought experiment. If you want to make the point that knowledge learned through reading about a subject and knowledge learned by using our senses sight/hearing/touch/taste/smell to explore a subject are different, then fine. That much is obvious. Imposing the limitation on Mary as you do just highlights that distinction. But both types of knowledge correspond to physical brain states as shown above. That one type can't be gained from reading a book is irrelevant. As an analogy, consider a simple digital circuit that can add or subtract numbers. It has a subroutine that looks for a sign designator, and when it sees negative it subtracts by flipping the polarity of some transistor. Otherwise it adds. So you construct an experiment where it is only feed positive numbers, and ask if the circuit can subtract. It isn't allowed to "see" a negative sign. No matter the number or order of positive digits fed, it can never enter the state corresponding to subtraction. See, you say, subtraction must be something non physical. Some other fundamental type of thing. But wait. I point out I can easily just flip that polarity externally, and entirely physical process, and it can subtract. No, you insist. That would either be against the rules of your experiment or would somehow represent some sort of "different" reversed polarity state. Why? Why the limitation? Why do you believe the physical state of the circuit is different if the polarity is flipped externally vs being flipped from sensing a negative sign on a monitored input? There is nothing but physical processes. There is no scenario you can construct that can't be reproced in theory by an unconscious physical process.
@@richardhosch6073 yeah, the basic problem is still there, no matter how you try to rework it. To recollect the experience of red is still a conscious and qualitative experience. To remember red would require experiencing red, you’d just be experiencing it as a thought rather than as an interaction with a red physical object. If red is not experienced, the nanobots haven’t done their job. But this will still be an experience of red, not of a correlated brain state. The interaction problem is robust-you can correlate conscious experiences to brain states all day, but you can’t turn a conscious experience into a brain state. As I said, at every level where you try to offer a physical explanation, you will still be trying to explain something other than the physical process itself. The same problem obtains in your adding machine example. The physical processes that correspond to subtraction don’t make up subtraction-they correspond with it. While it is true that physicalists try to explain this in terms of supervenience or epiphenomenalism, both are self-defeating: if everything about the experience can be explained in terms of physical processes, why is the experience happening at all? Why shouldn’t it be that we’re all just philosophical zombies? It’s an extraneous brute fact, which to me amounts to a tacit admission that physicalism is false. As soon as you accept that non-physical things exist and nothing explains their correlation to physical things, physicalism becomes self-defeating.
OK, I see your argument more clearly. I just wholeheartedly reject it. The brain state IS the experience. There is no experience apart from the series of brain states. What is qualia? It is how a certain series of brain states "feels". That's it. There is nothing else to explain. You invent or insist on the subjective experience being something else, something above and beyond the corresponding brain states. I reject that. Yes... in a very real sense we are all philosophical zombies. There is nothing else going on but the series of brain states that constitutes our lives. Our subjective experiences are just how that series of information processing feels. That's it. No need to invite something else that offers zero additional explanatory power. As for Mary, I say the nanobots can recreate exactly the brain states necessary for remembering seeing red, as well the series of states necessary to subjectively be experiencing seeing red. You ask Mary, and she tells you both situations are indistinguishable to her from the memory of and subjective experience of having actually seen red. You insist there is still a difference, that the implanted qualia/memories/experiences are philosophical zombies. Fine. Then so are the actual memories/experiences. There is no difference.
@@bracero7628I think it would be wise and humble for you to realize that both assertions (it can be created physically vs. it can't) are just based on intuition and aren't somehow objectively corroborated, and maybe even cannot be. Your position is just more ontologically costly, because it assumes some "ghost in the machine" for which we have no prior evidential support. And "ghost in machine"arguments have one frustrating property - they are irrefutable.
Can't find the comment now, but whoever suggested watching Sean Carroll vs Alan Wallace at ICE Dartmouth (MANY thanks!) will watch a far more even battle of brains.
Golden comment! Thanks for that. A experienced Buddhist intelectual and an experienced physicalist debating! Looking forward to watching the whole debate
What a fascinating subject that of consciousness. While I welcome the “thinking outside the box” efforts panpsychism brings to the table, - and actually admit a small bias toward liking the idea of something similar to it being the case - on this debate I feel like Sean was much clearer and concise in explaining his reasoning than Philip. Philip kept saying “we bridged the gap” or “we solved it” but never really explained how exactly in my opinion. I have purchased his latest book (Why?) to see if he is able to better present such ideas. The subjective experience of consciousness is very rich and layered, and engaging in practices like meditation and psychedelics really emphasize this in my opinion. So at this time my analytical and pragmatic mind sides with Sean, while my intuitive and spiritual sides see something worth investigating further with classically unorthodox approaches such as Panpsychism. The thing here of course is that like it or not, logic tends to have a much better track record than intuition. Would love to hear the thoughts of people who find themselves in a somewhat similar spot.
The jaw-dropping assurance and self-confidence with which Carroll demolishes a complete misunderstanding of the knowledge argument is a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The fact that after having it explained to him *multiple times*, he still insists on misunderstanding it, astonished me and makes me a bit wary of his intellectual integrity
It's jaw-dropping how Philip still doesn't understand that all he's doing is insisting that consciousness is magic. Even after that's been made painfully clear.
I love witnessing two very different & intelligent minds contemplate the very same thing from drastically different perspectives... and get totally frustrated with the opposing viewpoint which they find incomprehensible 😂It was a lot of fun to listen to, thanks!
@@5pilesdo you have a link? I find Goff does a lot of figurative and literal hand waving with no convincing arguments. He self-undermined himself many times so I couldn't listen to him anymore, even though I'm open to the possibility of consciousness being fundamental. Edited: N/m, found it. You were right, it was a good one. It's The Nature of Reality video if anyone's interested.
Also, I completely agree that Goff is out of his league. We need to bring in some heavy hitters like Bernardo Kastrup and/or Donald Hoffman because Sean is a formidable opponent. If we could have a tag team match between Kastrup-Hoffman and Carroll-Hossenfelder, that would be the ultimate showdown.
He's not saying reality "comes out of or from" consciousness. He's saying reality IS consciousness. A reasonable position given that all experience of reality is by definition experience of consciousness.
I don't remember hearing him use that wording and that would be such as linguistic sleight of hand it would have set off a significant exchange.@@RogerCurtisFriddle
good question,nobody knows how physical things get into consciousness but rocks are more physical than sadness, but sadness can be harder to experience.
@@RogerCurtisFriddle no consciousness' doesn't lead to >> no world to produce consciousness' , the world is still going to be there to have the opportunity TO produce consciousness' in fact , an EMERGENT property kind off NEEDS a world FIRST , in order TO produce consciousness , for a couple million years at least ... it's a totally ridiculous notion that YOU produced the world around you , while EVERYONE else would need to think the same thing , now , wouldn't they ?
Wait. I think Philip misrepresented IIIT at 9:51 If I remember reading Kochs book the idea behind Tononi's IIIT is that there is proto consciousness even in simpler physical systems. That is a form of psychism. That cannot be grouped under physicalism by any means. And panpsychism does solve the mind body problem. So IIIT is a solution.
I don't think the consciousness is special people explain themselves very well and they could do with going back and rephrasining their arguments with different words. To me, they basically say that the subjective experience of qualia for a given individual gives us objective data about reality, but this is a weird argument given that, for one thing, there's no way (at least currently, or even conceivably?) to know whether someones qualia is the same as someone else's qualia, given the same input. We'd have to literally output someone's qualia into someone's else's brain and make them experience the incoming qualia directly, rather than their own qualia of that input to see if they matched up. If they don't then 'the redness of red' is meaningless as far as objective reality goes.
The best spokespeople for the "consciousness is special" movement are Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup, IMO. Very much worth your time to hear them out, particularly because Kastrup approaches it philosophically while Hoffman approaches it scientifically. I've always found Goff to be pretty fluffy in his explanations.
I agree with both of them. The whole problem here and I agree with Sean’s pain, is that this debate is Philosophy debating Science and it just sounds weird mixing the two. Sean is way out of Phillip’s league too.
I still haven’t gotten into watching this video. Keep forgetting to make time for it. And I don’t know either of these individuals that well so I don’t have allegiance to either But I think that science and philosophy are already mixed So even though at times it’s a bit of a category error It is also the case that’s science can’t exist without philosophy And so if science is trying to answer fundamental questions. It’s philosophies job to gate keep science to some degree
I enjoyed watching, but I don't think it made many new contributions to Carroll and Goff's brief history of debating one another. I felt I heard essentially the same points as usual, with seemingly the same misunderstandings of one another. Or at least, talking past one another at the same junctions--I'm not sure whether to attribute this to neither participant willing to engage directly with one another or willfully misunderstanding the others argument to make them seem the better. I thought Sean came ahead in several respects; I admired his intellectual honesty and willingness to be undogmatic, I thought he made contact with Goff's arguments better, and I felt he structured his argument more clearly. On the other hand, Goff felt mostly empty because he made claims without defending them and reiterated points without responding in a way that satisfied me. He declares several times that science has fallen short and physicalism needs to be discarded, but I didn't feel he argued for this strongly. Conversely, Carroll admits readily why he has a high credence in the scientific methodology to answer these difficult problems. Also the point that we haven't finished the project of fundamental physics and we should expect consciousness, a complex phenomenon, to be much harder to crack: in this light it isn't surprising we haven't solved it yet and it's too early to throw up our hands. Admittedly, I'm amenable to these arguments already, but I would have loved to see Goff be a bit more articulate. In the end, I found it enlightening to show that Goff's standards for what a theory should be able to explain are nonspecific, wooey, and may not be fair to expect. No one ever promised you a rose garden, there just may not be more to explain over and above the complete physical mechanism of consciousness. Needing something more reeks of essentialism, looking for the essence of consciousness, when there may not be such a thing! Sort of a Wittgensteinian unasking of the question. I have a question for those familiar with the Mary's room thought experiment and those who felt that Carroll's response fell short--why is admitting that the brain state of seeing red is different from the brain state of knowing physical facts about red not a satisfactory answer? It seems true to me that the brain state associated to experiencing red is simply different from anything you read in a book and there's nothing nonphysical about that.
To answer your question, Sean's response to the thought experiment fails. This is because his response "when Mary learns science, neurons fire and when Mary sees red, different neurons fire" can (possibly) account for the fact that Mary learns something new. It can however (presumably) not account for the actual new fact she learns. There is a subtle distinction between the two. By admitting that she indeed does learn something new, Sean effectively undermines his own position. He admits there exists a fact that Mary did not know despite her knowing all of science.
@@CulusMagnussorry, I still don't get it. I think it's a problem of the "loose" usage of language in philosophy, but not really sure. It would be helpful to try to explain in each use case what is meant by "fact", what by "knowledge", what by "learns" and how these uses relate to presumed brain states. In this form what I "hear" from you is something akin to "you can account for the trees, but not for the forest"
@@ivanvnucko3056 Let's use an analogy. Let's say you are solving a math problem which results in you learning that the orbital period of the moon is roughly 30 days. In this analogy, there are two facts at play: the fact that the moon's orbital period is roughly 30 days _and_ the fact that you learn the previous fact. In this case, both facts are accounted for by science. The first due to physics, the second due to neuroscience, at least conceivably so. In Mary's case, there are also two facts. The fact of what red looks like and the fact that she learns this fact. Sean's argument explains the second fact. Presumably through neuroscience, we can explain the fact that Mary will learn a new fact. However, very obviously, the fact which Mary learns, what red is like, is left unexplained in this. Just like we do not learn from neuroscience what the orbital period of the moon is, we do not learn from neuroscience what red is like. In both cases, neurosciences tells us only that a fact has been learned. I hope this makes the distinction a little more clear.
@CulusMagnus oh, ok, thank you. So my intuition was correct, it is a matter of term conflation. Why do you presume that "what it is like to see red" is a fact in the same sense as the period of planet is?
@@ivanvnucko3056 Well, we have to distinguish what I think from what Sean argues. My point here is to show that Sean's response fails. On the surface, it seems that Sean concedes that there is indeed a fact of what red is like. This is because he concedes the point that Mary learns something new and he even explains it using neuroscience. Presumably then, it is a fact that Mary learns and it is the fact of what red is like. Personally, I think there is a fact regarding what red is like because of my own introspection. I can look at a blue object and say "this is what red is like" and be wrong and look at a red object and say "this is what red is like" and be correct. Introspectively, I can tell no difference between the factuality of what qualia are like and the factuality of any other proposition. It is, however, possible to dispute this and many so-called illusionists do. Denying the existence of qualia or "phenomenal facts" is a valid response to the knowledge argument. It is just the opposite of what Sean gives.
Carroll's two fatal mistakes are: (1) claiming consciousness is weakly emergent on physicalism and thus compatible with lower level physical descriptions, and (2) claiming consciousness is not a sharp property (is not dichotomously characterizable as either had or not had, as either on or off. There can somehow be an inbetween state).
@@nickelchlorine2753 (1) No researcher would dare make what statement? Could you clarify that? If what you mean is "no reasearcher would dare call consciousness weakly emergent," doesn't that work against Carroll? (2) The impossibility of determining a middle ground. It seems like it is either 'something it is like to be,' or it is not 'something it is like to be.' That seems like a true dichotomy that defies gradualism about consciousness.
@@nickelchlorine2753 Thanks for clarifying (1) Two points: Firstly and most importantly, when you say, "There is no reason to assume that "consciousness" is the only exception.," what are your thoughts on the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness' that Goff argues as a reason? Because when you suggest, " [given equivalences between what is physical and computable],... one task for philosophers would be to identify seemingly strongly emergent systems and reduce them to weakly emergent ones," if the seemingly strongly emergent phenomenon in question is consciousness, and one finds the hard problem of consciousness to be compelling, this is a conceptually impossibile task *in principle* to ask of anyone, scientist or philosopher. Second, about the point regarding strong emergence and simulation, is the question of property realizability in simulated processes a different one from that of emergence? If you accept the thesis of multiple realizability because you are, say, a functionalist physicalist about consciousness, then a strongly emergent simulated property emerging from a physical process is technically possible in a sheer compatibility sense. You would simply need simulations to have the proper functions. Maybe also third, you mention "Turing Completness," but admittedly I don't know anything about that. (2) I don't quite follow you here, though I am reading it over and over as it seems complex. At any rate, I can't help but think: isn't the biology of living things completely explicable in terms of the physical structure and material dynamics of it's consitutent parts? I just don't see what you are trying to articulate is strongly emergent about living things
The problem with the redness argument in panpsychism is that they are unable to articulate what it is about redness that can't be explained by physicalism. They haven't provided an explanation either, merely asserted that physicalists can't do it so they must be wrong. It's God of the Gaps again, asserting that it can be explained is not an explanation and does not get you any points.
Exactly. We all know what they mean. We get it. They insist we don't, but we do. What they don't insist on is an actual explanation of it, because they don't have the goods. They just invent some odd thing called "panpsychism" with the fantastic defining property that it "explains that thing we're having trouble explaining". Oh, wait, I've heard of this before! I think they teach it in church.
Are you familiar with Godel Incompleteness theorem? Its pretty much "God of the gaps" all the way down. Every rational frame work requires axioms that must be accepted before anything can be built upon it. At least panpsychism builds a frame work on the only thing we can say is evident "Awareness/ consciousness"
The incompleteness theorem does not imply you require axioms... you require an axiomatic system to even apply it in the first place. All it says is that in a sufficiently powerful framework, not everything that is can be proven. Your point about "God of the gaps" all the way down is EXACTLY why panpsychism is useless: all it does is pushes the burden of explaining consciousness to the fundamental level. It solves absolutely nothing, and instead introduces a wealth of new unsolvable problems. Why does it introduce new problems? Because its implications weren't true in the original theory to begin with. It's new axiomatic data. I'll explain: Panpsychism has the fundamental problem that its only source of data is personal experience. If you want to take on assumption that panpsychism somehow "just works" and comes together as consciousness, then you have the tricky task of proving that a rock is not conscious. If you want to claim a rock isn't conscious, prove it! If a rock isn't conscious, why is my brother conscious? Why is my mom conscious? I don't know, I have no data on their personal experience! The only data I have is their physical construction, which is similar to mine, and by your claim has no relation to conscious experience. Good luck! If you DON'T want to assume that panpsychism "just works", then it IS a physical theory, and you should play by the rules! I implore you to come up with a model that subsumes quantum field theory and general relativity. Go ahead. Win a Nobel prize (or 3). Until then, I won't believe it. In the same way that I don't believe string theory, even though it's great candidate for a ToE (I give panpsychism more credit than it's due here: string theory has a lot more to say than a lazy tautology). Again I emphasize: it solves nothing. That experience of red? It will never be explained to your satisfaction. Ever. @@kimiscool7
I wonder about claims like "your pain is not a scientific datum". Why not? If someone tells me they're in pain, i generally take their word for it. If this happens every time I twist their arm (or see c fibers firing, or whatever), I count this as a correlation. There is science to be done with this type of thing. It could turn out I'm being lied to (or only dreamt about twisting their arm... they shouldn't have lied to me about that pain thing), which means it is defeasible, but still evidence in the meantime.
I don't think they consider the graduated value of different type of evidence: Induction, deduction and abduction. These roughly correlates to Mathematics, Logic/reasoning and common personal/group beliefs, and they are statistically _not_ equally valuable for finding an approximation for truth/reality.
31:06 The information gained when she sees red is not a quality of red it is a quality of her. She learns her experience of red. That is not something about red that is something about her. She didn't learn anything new about red. She learned what happens to herself in the pressence of red.
Exactly, congrats, you win! Out of the tenths of more or less convoluted comments here trying to explain "the hell" of Mary's room and failing, yours is a simple, clear and direct explanation of what is wrong with the whole debate
@@APaleDot You haven't said anything at all. "Red is not some external thing." What does that mean? Because the physical photon of red light is very much an external thing. Or, when you say "red" do you mean her idea of what red is? Her mental image of red? Because, her mental image of red is not the same thing as the physical photon of light. I can't see in the UV spectrum. I can study UV light though. I can learn all of the physical qualities of UV light. Now let's say I get some gene editing therapy and grow a fourth cone in my eyes. Now I can see in UV. When I do I don't learn anything new about UV light. I learn what happens to my brain in the presence of UV light. If we could mind meld, and I showed you what I see as red, and you showed me your red. Then we compared and contrasted them, we wouldn't learn anything new about the physical photon of red light. We would learn about our experiences being exposed to red light.
@@DrewTrox Sure, but Mary isn't restricted to only learning about light. The setup of the thought experiment is that she learns all the physical facts about color perception. That includes light, but also everything about seeing color in the brain (which doesn't require light at all). Given that she knows all these fact about the brain, is she surprised when she actually sees what red looks like? or does it look like she would expect it to look based on her research?
Regarding the thought experiment: Mary, the color-scientist, does learn a very important new fact that could alter her entire career. With repetition she could eventually confirm that she is the kind of person who can reliably distinguish colors in good light. It is easy to overlook a fact that is produced by such gradual learning. With the first observation, it's not natural to think, "One hundred percent so far." But it is a fact.
it's great to see sean in a debate, i hope he finds time to do more. i've listened to goff before, why do people think that talking can make things poof into existence?
I don't think that's what he's doing here, they're both just looking for an explanation for mind. What I don't understand is how Goff makes a claim about parsimony, while smuggling in an assumption the size of all reality.
Philip starts out weak with "private data" which is useless. He can't prove it unless it's "public data", it's self defeating. He's already lost without Sean saying anything.
He can prove it only if you’re willing to meet him halfway and admit that you are conscious. That’s your private data, and he’s telling you to stop ignoring it. If you’re not willing to meet him halfway, you have to run around claiming you aren’t conscious.
@@jamesking2439We also don't have to assume that it will show up in our physical brain activity either, though? Goff's argument is that it hasn't yet, so why shouldn't we consider alternatives? And even if a full correlation between experience/consciousness/redness and physical brain activity somehow appears, it's not logical to consider that correlation as a causation.
Don't know but Is Consciousness Fundamental? Conference Talk, September 2023 @ Annaka Harris ! Great approach.. very impressed I stopped. Other things to thing through.. just.. a matter of time
1:01:00 The answer to that question could be more complex than a simple yes or no. It could be yes at one level, no at another level. Forcing Goff to answer with one word is disingenuous in itself.
At 06:00 Philip lists 3 philosophical solutions to the mind-bod problem, but the definition he gives for panpsychism is actually a form of idealism. Panpsychism is only a meta-theory of mind that is compatible with dualism and physicalism. It is idealism that is a real alternative to physicalism and dualism.
Wish Philip had really taken on Sean's claim, "Doesn't matter if it doesn't change physics." The real problem with that statement is that it reveals Sean's conflation of scientific methodology with metaphysical materialism. Sean is unaware of this conflation so he REALLY means it when he says that. He honestly believes that the regularities in nature's behavior that all scientists study prove physicalism. Many physicalist scientists and philosophers do not conflate them. Sean does. Not sure why. In other words, there is a simple reason why there are great physicalist, dualist, idealist, and panpsychist scientists all over the world: because studying and thinking about the regularities in nature's behavior does not push against any ontological position. If Sean recognized his conflation of scientific method with scientific materialism, he could still take the "I don't 'care" attitude. It would just mean that he would be agnostic ontologically, simply interested in the patterns for themselves with no commitment to what nature actually is. Yes, some people say, "Nature IS the patterns." Fine, then that person is an idealist because the patterns themselves are abstract cognitions (mental) and direct perceptions (mental).
I think you misunderstood Sean. The question of changing/not changing physics is not about some metaphysical principles. It is a very rudimentary question of "how does your mystical woo work in the reality we observe"? Let me explain: We have the core theory about the behavior of particles (which are also in your brain) completely described by an equation. Deterministic. Given a state there is a principled way to predict future states and retrodict past states. I do not assert there are no unknown particles or forces, I do say that there are particles and forces we know the deterministic patterns of behavior of and that these particles and forces are at least a part of what is your brain made of. The other data point are the experiments showing correlation between conscious experiences and processes in the brain, and by processes I mean changes in behavior of these very same particles in the brain. And so: If you propose some new unknown "stuff" that "explains" our consciousness (or creates it or whatever) this new stuff MUST either: a) somehow affect the particles and forces we know complete deterministic behavior of so they don't do what the equations would suggest (changing physics) OR b) it don't affect what these particles and forces are doing, so they obey the simple deterministic equations we know BUT given the correlation we mentioned it means that the "new stuff" is also obeying the same deterministic equations. And now choose your poison: If a) new stuff isn't unobservable by science, the effects on the matter we know should be empirically testable and honestly, with the history of experiments and measurements already observed. If b) the new stuff isn't really new, it is just underlying the stuff we already know, and for all intents and purposes it can be ignored.
@@WalterHassell Yeah, analytical idealism satisfies my preference for monism, naturalism, and for a theory with explanatory power that does not presume a self-conscious Creator God of any kind.
@@rooruffneck Interesting. I wonder how you’d account for reality existing at all, then? Most philosophers agree there must be a necessary foundation to reality (a necessary fundamental reality), and to me this is God.
@@ivanvnucko3056 Thanks. I don't think science observe matter. I think that we use regular patterns in our observations to form the concept of 'matter.' That probably isn't controversial claim. You said: "If you propose some new unknown "stuff" that "explains" our consciousness..." I don't think I'm proposing something 'new' in referring to experience. In the context of a conversation in which we ALL are assuming the metaphysics of physicalis, sure, it's sort of 'new' to say, "Hey, let's pretend that there's something it is like to be an electron.' But that wouldn't be a fair way of looking at the conversation being had. And I don't think you are doing that. I just don't see how referencing experience is referencing to 'new stuff.' When any physicist (regardless of ontology refers to what they conversationally refer to as 'matter', they are typically referring simply to the patterns of behavior, not making metaphysical claims about its nature. There is a perfectly good reason why you can be a panpsychist (I'm not) and agree with any physical theory. You are agreeing with an account of the patterns of behavior. Nobody is making an ontological claim about its nature. Just because the first thinkers/researchers who divorced the mind from the observable materials were not physicalists, it didn't stop them from recognizing the utility of merely studying those observable patterns. Just because a majority of modern western scientists might say there is only physical reality, doesn't change the fact that the method of study remains the same. It's simply a conflation to state that these modern theories are proving or imply the metaphysicis of physicalism. Any argument about the actual nature of reality will refer to empirical aspects but will be more occupied by other lines of reasoning. Philosophers who are physicalists don't spend much time talking about physics research because they realize this same research works just fine for other ontologies. So they try to make more stronger ontological arguments instead. They don't conflate their research with their philosophical conclusions as Sean does. The reason that lots of physicalists tear their hair out when listening to him is simply because they hear the same kinds of omissions and conflations that Philip struggled (don't get me started) to point out. Sure, they agree with his conclusion. They just don't agree with his reasoning. I'm simply pointing to the way he honestly believes the research itself is an ontological argument. Unless somebody is claiming to clairvoyantly study the ghosts behind the observable patterns of nature, they are stuck studying those patterns of nature's behavior. Like every other human being. And, then, we come up with reasons for inferring consciousness. Just like we do when we talk to somebody at the store. Or study a beetle, or speculate that the underlying field of reality is of an experiential nature. But I see where we differ and realize why, for you, it'll seem nearly crazy for somebody to simply want to imagine that experience can be in stuff other than organisms. Unless you are the kind of physicalist who sees that their are reasons for such assumptions (that you just don't agree with), it's not that interesting to go back on forth about how nuts and unjustified such and such a statement is. I'd much rather hear you talk about your favorite physicalist speculations regarding ontological primitives. That is always helpful for me to hear about regardless of the ontology.
As I see it, all entities exist in a state of physical resonance with other entities in their surrounding environment, meaning that reverberations of other entities naturally occur within the physiological structure of every entity The reverberations occurring within an entity whose survival requires the active navigation of its environment naturally "inform" the entity of the critically noteworthy features of the environment, whereas the reverberations occurring within an entity with no such requirement do not. Therefore, this "informative resonance" IS the entity's consciousness, which is utilised by the entity similarly to the way one utilises a map.
1:00:52 Dude, Goff already said at the start that the ontological models are empirically equivalent. What about physics would be changed in light of that? The only thing I think would change is your initial assumptions or axioms, which may certainly lead to a different set of conclusions, but if the models are truly empirically equivalent, then Carroll is just posting a ghost target with this bonky question.
I think Sean’s point is, “if the ontological models are equivalent, then who cares?” I’ve got two bowls of cornflakes, regular and magic. They taste the same, smell the same, make you feel the same way, but this bowl is MAGIC! Great who cares?
I just keep hearing Goff changing consciousness from the level of emergent phenomena in the brain to fundamental reality on which everything else emerges, without ever stating what consciousness really is. It is as Patricia Churchland has said in several occasions , panspsychism sounds a lot like vitalism.
The demand for satisfaction is unreasonable. Goff wants an explanation for consciousness that is as satisfying as the explanation for the boiling point of water. I don’t think he actually finds that satisfying. Not in the way he wants for consciousness. “H2O becomes mostly gaseous at 100c and 1 atmosphere” is not satisfying at all; It’s almost useless information to the cook. A chemistry student would need to learn the difference between boiling and evaporating. A chemical engineer would need to know about the purity of the water and the container and the heat source and the other gas and the reason you are wanting steam. We could definitely get that type of explanation for consciousness. The anesthesiologist could tell you what chemicals make it go away. The neurologist could tell you what parts of the brain you need to make it. The developmental psychologist could tell you at what age you feel it. I know that’s not satisfying, but it’s AS satisfying as the water-becomes-steam story. And just as useful.
You could say the exact same thing for the theory that consciousness is emergent. You haven't actually explained anything, you've just slapped a word on it.
@@APaleDot Carroll says ( and that's my point of view also, with a subtle difference..) that we don't know much about consciousness at the moment, and how it emerges , but we'll continue to learn more, gradually, in the future, correlating our macroscopic observations and subjective experiences with the underlying more fundamental laws of physics. That's possible, in principle ( at least up to some subtleties that cannot be mentioned here..) , so with physicalism we will learn more! This is not the case with panpsychism though...
@@dimitrispapadimitriou5622 Not true. Everything he says about correlating our scientific observations with subjective experiences holds true regardless of your metaphysics. The difference is that in panpsychism we have a story about why this is possible, whereas in physicalism it is simply a brute fact about reality that these two very different things are correlated.
@@APaleDot Actually, this is what happens with physicalism throughout the history. Newton ( e.g.) didn't have much to say when asked to explain how Gravity works! But a few centuries later , Einstein did that! In the late 19th century people didn't have a good idea about what matter is at the micro level, but a few decades later Quantum mechanics occurred, and so on... Just saying that "consciousness is fundamental" won't give you a motivation to go further, to really explain what's going on with things like self awareness / qualia etc... Panpsychism is just a kind of self deception.
The way to bridge the gap between quantity and quality is to reproduce the quality in the brain via a fully quantitative understanding of conscious experiences. The way to do that is via direct stimulation of the brain and recreate virtual experiences directly from stimulating the brain. When people would enjoy full virtual environments that are created by such stimulations nobody would ask the idiotic question of how to explain the redness of red (answer I just did when I made you see red where there was no red at all).
There's lots of smart people in this thread, so I'm gonna ask a slightly related question. For any of you who think that things like cars and tables are ontologically distinct objects, can you please make the case to me? To be clear, I obviously acknowledge them as epistemological and perceptual objects. I see and can know about 'cars' and 'tables'. I want to hear how and why people think of them as ontologically distinct. Thanks to anybody who chimes in!
Sean answered this... There are different layers/scales you can inspect reality at and we have different vocabularies for different layers. In our "everyday scale" there are distinct objects as far as we talk about, manipulate, see, recognize, etc... them as such. The criteria for differentiating them are utilitarian and subjective and often fuzzy. Reality itself doesn't work that way as far as we can say.
@@ivanvnucko3056 Again, I agree with all of that. I didn't feel like Philip was arguing that we can't talk about any of this stuff. I think the argument is about what in principle we can talk about as grounding something else. For instance, I can come up with a narrative about how stubbing my toe when I was five played a significant role in quitting my job when I was 45. Sure, it's probably bullshit, but I can tell a story in which no step of the sequence suddenly introduces something that can't be derived from the earlier steps. So maybe it would help me get clear if I just asked you. How do you see consciousness being derived, even in principle, from the basic laws of physics? That is not the same question as how a trickle of water could possible create a Grand Canyon, or how the interaction of certain radio active ways could create patterns in water millions of miles away or how wind and sand can create fascinating mathematical patterns. All of those are derivable (could be wrong, of course) without adding a presto. I guess it would help to at least hear your best account of deriving consciousness from material arrangments. Not the kind of typical hand wave that says, "Well, it could be when you get matter doing this and this at the same time THAT becomes consciousness." I'm asking how a new ontological category would be derivable from the quantitative categories that make up the concept of matter.
You are asking to explain ‘weak emergence’ Sean mentioned. I’d recommend reading up since it’s not a trivial thing. Intuitively, the argument is based on the fact that complexity emerges with scale. That is how physicalism, or more precisely, modern science, is making progress towards providing an account of consciousness.
Maybe it's because I'm a physics graduate, but everything Sean says seems to make lucid sense, and everything his debate opponents say sounds like wishful woo-woo. (Apart from his going for the many worlds interpretation of qm, which is ridiculously unparsimonious - the transactional interpretation is way better)
@@danzigvssartre You won't find a car looking through an electron microsope. But cars are made out of fundamental particles and obey the laws of physics.
Nice, for people who are not familiar with the mind-body problem. But with the risk of sounding rude: this discussion could have taken place centuries ago. Both philosophers seem to be stuck in the same Cartesian framework (in which Goff bars matter and Carroll mind). In order to make some progress, we should get beyond the matter-mind framework. My suggestion is an old one: the common foundation of both is the phenomenal world, which is a world of qualities and also the setting in which empirical science is done. This sounds trivial, but it is easy to forget that real colors are based on actual processes (not mathematical models). Whether you call these processes physical or mental is a matter of taste.
Mental is almost definitely an emergent property of an extremely intricate network of physical processes...which is why consciousness is difficult to define. How do you really even give a good physical representation of something that feels extremely subjective to us. It won't recreate the phenomena...it will just show relationships of neurons and conscious outcomes.
@@brad1368 Correct me if I'm wrong: you consider consciousness to be a property, depending on matter, but not being reducible to it (since you use the term "emergence", which has certain connotations in philosophy). You suggest, like Leibniz, that we will not find consciousness inside grey matter (at best, we might find out which dynamic patterns correspond to certain experiences). I think these views are based on sound intuitions, but they are still too much tainted by Cartesianism (even if you don't like Descartes). We don't have to look for consciousness or phenomena inside the brain, which is itself already a phenomenon. They are not flawless, but I like Putnam's ideas about "direct perception" and Noë's view that perception is virtual, all the way in.
Where is the audience? This college must not like philosophy or cosmology. 😁 I think it’s very important to understand that this is a fairly recent effort to build a foundation. Most people look for answers. We don’t even know what the question is or how to go about finding the answer.
@@soylatte1288 No, 'Wu' is when someone makes wide claims based on abduction and personal feelings without any grounding in core reality (the direct physical, mathematical world - our CORE theory). The system of Science have a lot of structural flaws, but have _enormous_ explanatory powers, that by far outshines any of the 'WU' claims.. Btw. Your attack on Atheists are misplaced. Atheists are believers too, so being an atheist doesn't automatically make you a non believer or a scientist, so don't go there. Capitalism, Socialism and Communism are all atheist belief systems, flat earth, ghosts, pan-psychism, UFO's + other wu claims are also atheist belief system, and none of them Science. Your current belief system is obviously under pressure from science, so you just lash out..
Numbers allow us to read words in the brain, it is just a bunch of numbers in a volt meter (that is what an EEG is) and they are transformed into words the subject thought about, we can do that too with colors now and other "mental" experiences. Soon we will be able to go the other way around and use numbers in instruments to excite the right neurons to make people see images or hear sounds or have any thoughts. Would the bridge between math and mental experiences be real then?
@@ai._m all to myself? What is that supposed to mean? I can still appreciate Carrol's science even if I don't think he's a great philosopher. And if you don't like Goff, maybe you'll prefer another philosopher
@@numericalcode Carrol is smart but that has given him an undeserved arrogance in philosophy and given that this is explicitly a debate, I'm not sure why you think having a debate with anyone should be as simple as explaining a concept (I reckon it would be a lot more complex).
@@samuelblackmon Sorry I was unclear. I don’t think it is simple. But it should not be emotionally onerous. I don’t think Goff feels it is. He must see some value in that he continues to engage with Carroll.
@@null.och.nix7743 he's insufferable. Sean Carroll actually calls him out on his dishonest debating technique in this. I've never heard Sean call anyone out so explicitly lol
I don't understand what Philip doesn't understand about the weakness of his position. He's basically said "We have this problem. Let's imagine it answered by new fundamental laws. Problem solved!". No, literally. That's all he's putting forward, and he expects everybody else to just fall into line. If he wants to convince anybody, he's got to come up with an actual theory, not just postulate something that is "correct" by tautology. His further point is that physics will never be able to explain the character of experience. This is not true. What I buy, is that we may never be able to SHOW that it explains the character of experience. But in that case, I bet strongly that NO theory will be able to explain it without resorting to the lazy sort of tautology panpsychists wheel out. Oh, and I still can't believe he doesn't understand the problem with Mary the neuroscientist. It doesn't mean anything; in fact, it poses more problems for the arrogant panpsychist than for the humble physicist. Why? Because the physicist can eventually explain all of the neurological processes that give rise to Goff's precious experiences and be happy with it, but the panpsychist will NEVER have the data to explain the experience of a rock.
@@kimiscool7 cos they are all material, it will be complex and it will take a very long time, but it is just a problem of time and kit, we're part way there. your brain is just material doing stuff.
@4:31 He says you can’t see inside someone’s brain and see their feelings and experiences. Yet we have already started to do that. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we can see the brain activity when particular thoughts occur. This capability will only get better with time. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that one day we will be capable of having very clear views of what people are thinking.
@@plafar7887 No different than hearing someone tell you about their subjective experiences. You correlate the sound waves they emit to understand what they say they experience.
@@karagi101 Yes, so what? The point is: subjective experiences exist, they're not the same as externally observing their physical correlates, and Physics deals only with external observation. Ergo: something's missing. In other words, Consciousness is not explained by Physics.
@@plafar7887 The point is that the conscious person verified that what the fMRI saw was what he was thinking of - proving that we can determine people’s feelings/thoughts by observing the activity in their brain. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from chemical and electrical processes in a brain. If the brain is injured (e.g by a stroke) consciousness often diminishes, people lose cognitive abilities. When the brain ceases to operate, there is no consciousness. Physics is the basis of everything. Internal and external. Nothing is missing other than we are still learning how consciousness emerges (from physical processes). For there to be some other “force” or whatever that is not part of physics would entail contradicting all physical laws - laws that we’ve verified operate in all domains. Good luck with that.
How to start looking for something that isn't something? By telling people to stop looking for something? Great plan! Let me know when you can define it.
That was cringeworthy. The more Philip does this the more he drifts into quantum mysticism. I appreciated their first debates, but now I kind of don’t know why Carroll is validating Philip by continuing to do events with him. Sean is his best advertising at this point.
@@kimiscool7 if you ever met me, you’d know that MY consciousness is the last thing you’d want to build an axiomatic framework upon. But seriously folks. “I love the taste of chocolate,” or, “hey look, a red thing!” is not, for me, strong enough evidence to overturn the core theory, the single most successful intellectual undertaking in the history of our species. I don’t mean this to be insulting but maybe that’s inevitable - at the end of the day, panpsychism and dualism are built on a kind of narcissistic infatuation with the specialness of your own subjectivity. I simply don’t share that confidence in mine. I am very comfortable with the idea that my consciousness is in large part illusory, deterministic, and certainly does not require anything beyond the standard model to explain why I’m always late for meetings.
@@leoinstatenisland ok I deserve these comments and I need to think through this more and provide a better argument. I am not a panpsychist but agree with more of the analytical idealist as described by Bernardo Kastrup. I am pretty agnostic however I can’t buy into the materialism frame work. I don’t think it’s narcissism to point that everything we understand about physics/ math is subject to our subjective perception filters. I really found Dr Stephen Wolfram work compelling and fascinating. He says that physics and reality is as it is to us because of how we are as computationally bounded observers. Anyways I love theses discussions.
@@leoinstatenisland also the work of Micheal Levin is pretty fascinating. It’s doesn’t support panpsychism but he describes consciousness from the cellular level and how nested hierarchy to form larger conscious structures. Anyways fascinating stuff.
@@kimiscool7 I do too! And I think the point Sean would make about materialism is that you don’t have to be a materialist! You just can’t cosplay as an empiricist at the same time. Philip’s mistake isn’t believing in a soul. It’s the incompatibility of that belief with physicalism that is at issue. Goff wants to have it both ways - he wants to say “luminous beings are we, not this crude matter,” but he also wants to be taken seriously by physicists. So he won’t say his belief is supernatural, but he also doesn’t want to take on the job of changing the core theory, because on some level he recognizes that’s somewhere between “completely futile” and “a LOT more work than I want to do.” I think Sean is just saying, “have the confidence to take your own beliefs seriously. Stop all this mucking around with zombies, and fully commit to a non-physical soul and make that argument, or roll up your sleeves and tell us how panpsychism actually works.”
Sean: "We need to address XYZ to take this argument seriously." Philip: "Sean doesn't understand XYZ, embarrassingly so." Philip then demonstrates that he doesn't understand XYZ while simultaneously proving that Sean did. I love the nervous breakdown at 44:00 when he implies he would give Sean a bad grade in his class for not answering with the nonsense answer that he is looking for. Like getting a bad grade in Astrology class or Alchemy... or a bad score on your wizard exam at wizard school. I'm sure Sean was crushed.
Sean couldn't explain certain XYZ to an embarrassing degree either. He made it through this whole debate while dodging the central issue, the hard problem. He doesn't have the answer. The mind/brain problem shockingly remains unresolved. No need to resort to hitting below the belt.
Approx 1:14:00 I would say that having a full and complete theory on black holes is very different from experiencing spaghettification. So he’s just re-stated Sean’s point as an example of how Sean doesn’t understand the question. Oy.
Exactly, or understanding the principles of combustion is very different from an actual fire. The descriptions of the world are different then the actual things they describe. Just like a map is different than the terrain, or a picture is different than the real object.
At the end of the day, I feel both Philip and Sean are at their strongest when criticizing the other’s view, and their weakest when making the case that their own view “explains” consciousness in any way (or could do so in the future). Sean admits his own view (physicalism) WON’T do that, as he believes the best we’ll ever do under this paradigm is map all the neurocorrelates of consciousness. Then he imagines the Hard Problem will just… disappear? Because he imagines others, like him, will agree to sweep it under the rug? No. Any good scientist would want a theory that says “here’s why these neuro correlates correspond to the taste of chocolate, and could not correspond to the taste of raspberry, for PRINCIPLED reasons.” Correlation isn’t enough in science; has it ever been? As a science-minded person myself, I was deeply disappointed in Sean’s admission that, essentially, his view will never be able to explain consciousness, and he’s ok with that. I think we can do better. As for Philip. I think Sean did a good job pointing out his view does nothing to “explain” consciousness, though at times it sounded like Philip may have been arguing as much. Instead, Philip simply assumes consciousness is fundamental (and yes he has arguments to that effect, so he’d say it’s a conclusion not an assumption, fine - the point is that, in his theory itself, the fundamentality of consciousness is assumed/an axiom). But… the entirety of the Core Theory is also assumed to be fundamental, on philip’s view (it’s just cashed out differently). But yet he wants to argue his view is more theoretically virtuous compared to Sean’s? Really? I mean, I’d agree with him if he took consciousness as fundamental and then SHOWED how we could get back the Core Theory WITHOUT assuming the different elements of it (like spacetime etc), but he said nothing of the sort. So it seems like Philip’s view explains just as much as Sean’s, but assumes a whole lot more, rendering it theoretically less virtuous (all else being equal). I loved this debate and hope there are 100 more like it. But I still think both views have massive issues to deal with.
Not only has Philip failed (so far) to recast physics as emergent from consciousness (an achievement that surely would win a Nobel prize!), but he has not even given any sort of explanation of consciousness, let alone one that meets his own criteria for success. At around 11:45 he strongly suggests that he is about to do so, but then he does something else: firstly, he reiterates his arguments against physicalism, and then, at 21:15, he says (about panpsychism) "We've solved all the mysteries - we know how to do this", but all he does is to claim that Russellian Monism will deliver the answers. It should go without saying that knowing how to do something is not the same as having done it, and the longer he claims to know how to do it without to actually doing it, the less plausible his claim to know how to do it appears. Rather ironically, Philip puts a great deal of weight on the "Mary the neuroscientist" thought experiment from Frank Jackson's knowledge argument against physicalism (he has called it the greatest thought experiment, at least on the topic of consciousness.) It is, however, easily generalized into an argument that works equally well against the current state of panpsychism. The original argument was discussed in the debate: it is the one where Mary has been confined for her whole life to a monochromatic world, during which she has learned everything the physical sciences could ever say pertaining to color vision. The question is whether she will learn anything new when she finally gets to see colors (or be surprised by the experience, or have a curiosity about what it's like satisfied), and the presumed answer is in the affirmative. Let's just make one small change: Mary studied panpsychism, and knows all there is to know about it: _now_ will she be surprised? If the original is a strong argument against physicalism, then panpsychism had better be able to give a different answer (and justify it), but panpsychism, in its current form, cannot do that. The straightforward fact is that we have _no_ explanation of consciousness; instead we have a multitude of beliefs about what an explanation would look like, and a paucity of evidence. That's what makes it easier to argue against any one of them than for one.
@@A.Raybould I like your point a lot, but we have a slight disagreement based on the very last point you made: not ALL theories of consciousness are easier to argue against than for. Only the theories which START with assuming the existence of the physical world (both Sean and Philip do this) and seek to EXPLAIN consciousness run into that issue. Because you’re right! The Mary argument applies equally well against all such theories. But there’s a rarer form of theories of consciousness that seeks to solve the problem in the other direction: mind -> matter INSTEAD OF matter -> mind. On that account, consciousness is what’s fundamental, but physics isn’t; spacetime and particles EMERGE from the underlying dynamics of conscious agents. I’m thinking of Donald Hoffman’s mathematically precise theory of conscious realism. His theory alone (and others like it, if they exist) escapes the devastating critique you point to.
@@WalterHassell The usage of the phrase "Donald Hoffman’s mathematically precise theory of conscious realism" invokes more of a wikipedia article abstract vibe then a informed opinion of a inquiring human being. Are you sure you know Hoffman's work? I do only know some third hand analysis (with citations nonetheless) and my impression is: desperate try to fill the vacuous "consciousness is fundamental" idea with some substance by misusing a lot of simple and complex mathematics, which is really not that hard, only laborious and pointless. Math is supposed to be a tool which we can use to efficiently inspect the properties of complex structures of reality, not the other way around - to invent them (well, it is used that way too, but only for fun!). But to the main point: Lead by motivated reasoning to invent a whole new semantics of language and completely different underlying reality Hoffman paradoxically reduces the rich meaning of the term "consciousness" to a mere synonym of "atom", because, ... suprise, suprise, ..., when you set something as "fundamental", it comes with the price of reducing the complexity of that "thing". Something cannot be fundamental and yet complex. Fundamental things tend to be simple and boring. Which, by the way, even christian theologians of the past understood and therefore digged themselves into that mess of divine simplicity.
@@WalterHassell I must admit that I had not considered theories that avoid supposing that the physical world exists - but does Hoffman really hold that view? I take your point that the generalized knowledge argument is only relevant to hypotheses that 1) take Jackson's version of the knowledge argument as a strong argument against physicalism, and 2) in addition to claiming physicalism is false, also propose an alternative. To be clear, my final sentence ("that's what makes it easier to argue against any one of them than for one") was referring only to the combination of many hypotheses and a paucity of data, and not to the generalized knowledge argument.
At no point Sean said physicalism will not eventually explain consciousness. In fact, he made it painfully clear that he believes the ongoing research is our best bet to provide such an explanation. If you pay any attention to modern research, you’d note a great deal of progress has been made in the last decades, so his belief seems perfectly reasonable.
Although I don't necessarily agree with Goff's panpsychism, Carroll spent the entire debate fundamentally misunderstanding his arguments. Carroll admits Mary learns something new when she left the room and is therefore also admitting neuroscientific knowledge can't possibly be the full description - i.e. Physicalism is false.
@@christopherhamilton3621 Exactly, physicalism is insufficient which is literally what Goff is arguing. Physics/science cannot explain everything because it only describes physical properties and doesn't account for subjective experiences. That is why he's positing a theory that accounts for both the physical properties observed in science and the mental properties we know in consciousness.
@@OswaldMoggWhat does Philip propose and how does it explain anything? Because I really didn't get anything substantial from Philip in this talk other than: 1. physicalism doesn't do the job and 2. consciousness is fundamental.
Just because we don't yet understand how the brain produces a "qualitative" experience, it doesn't mean we can't or won't. This seems like a very obvious flaw in Philips argument. He assumes that the emergence of qualitative experience is somehow unknowable.
As a fellow physicist who really likes Sean’s work, I did feel that he dodged engaging with the hard problem of consciousness. The issue is not that we can’t explain subjective experience as an internal representation of physical information in the brain, the issue (and Sean should know this) is that there is never just one representation of a given set of information. I know what red looks like to me and what blue looks like to me, yet if those representations of the colors were flipped in my perception of reality it would make no functional difference to how I navigate the world because all that matters in how I interact with the external world is my ability to distinguish one wavelength of light from one another. There as a continuum of possible ways that colors could be represented in my perception which would all serve equally well to allow me to distinguish one color from another. There is a degeneracy in how to map the set of physical stimuli onto the much larger set of possible subjective representations of those physical stimuli. It is a perfectly well formed question to ask why our perception of reality takes the particular form it does when there are other ways that our perception of world could have been that would be functionally the same but perceptually different. This is by definition outside the scope of physics because physics is about the information within a system, that which is invariant with respect to a change of the representation of the system, where as the hard problem of consciousness is about the lack of a 1-1 map between the physical information and any particular representation of it, yet our subjective experience is a single particular representation of that information.
A wonderfully well formed objection! However it seems to assert that we cannot in principle divine a reason why physical stimuli map to the perceptual representations they do. Why are you so certain of that? Isn’t it possible that there is a simple, contingent, evolutionary, neurological reason that we have the perceptual experiences we do? It seems like your objection is fundamentally epistemic and not ontological, which is what Philip seems to be concerned with.
There is no objective reference to your representations of red and blue. So "if they were flipped" is a pointless thought experiment. If there was some objective inquisition tool then maybe we could find out that my internal representation of seeing red is the same as yours of taste of chocolate, but that is in principle impossible. The only real issue I could think that the concrete instantiation of this mapping for you could raise is: how do multiple people correctly communicate their subjective perceptions of color of the same object and the answer there is very simple - the objective thing here is the wavelength and the mapping is learnt in childhood.
@@leoinstatenisland I think that we can get very far in understanding how different aspects of our perception of reality must relate to one another based on what physical information (stimuli, internal brain states etc…) is being represented to us through that perception. I am sure that neuroscience will reveal the process by which the brain constructs and interacts with mental “objects” within its internal model of reality. I am sure we will be able to someday watch a thought progress through someone’s brian under an MRI and decode facts about what the person is thinking/feelings But we don’t have anyway of directly comparing our subjective experiences, short of physically merging our brains I suppose. If I communicate to you about what I am experiencing, you relate my words to your own version of those experiences. If I say I am hungry, you understand that in terms of your own experience of what hunger feels like, that’s all you can do. If you see on an MRI that the pain center of my brain is active, then you understand that in terms of your own experiences of what pain feels like. Our only understanding of subjective experience is our own and we make reasonable guesses about what other people might be experiencing by taking the objective facts about what is happening in their brain and relating that information back to what we know it would feel like to us if that same thing happened in our brain. An individual could learn the full map of how their brain states correspond to subjective experience by sitting in an MRI, having some fancy technology stimulate specific regions of the brain, and seeing what sensations they get from zapping each part of their brian. Any individual could learn what there personal physical-to-experiential correspondence is. But how do we compare subjective experiences between individuals? Language has its limitations, you can’t ever sufficiently describe the experience of seeing red to a color blind person. There could be differences in how to people experience something which we don’t have language to communicate and can’t develop any language to communicate it if we don’t even know what those differences are. Without a means of stepping strait into each others minds we can’t do a complete comparison of how our experiences may differ from those of other people.
But now I think I understand your point differently: Why is a persons internal representation that one that it is and not another one. But this is the type of question as "why are the physical constant the values that they are?" One obvious answer is: because it has to be one of the options and not multiple at the same time. And the actual set can be by chance, maybe there are some underlying constraints, we don't know. But this question isn't outside of physicalism and I don't think it is what Chalmers meant with "hard problem of consciousness" and if yes, then the "hard problem" is even more meaningless for me then I thought
The problem is. that we cannot explain how and why matter -neurons feel something in the first person, there is only the belief that these are the functions of neurons. And this is not a question of physics at all. So rest with your "colleague".
Sean's arguments are 'natural' and scientific, Philip's arguments are supernatural and magical. Its surprising the latter is still being seriously debated.
I would argue that consciousness *doesn't* affect behaviour - you could hypothetically program human behaviour in some kind of artificial machine. But that doesn't mean consciousness isn't important. If an entity can suffer, surely you must treat it differently than if it can't.
What this discussion is missing Kastrupian monistic idealism. No conversation about consciousness is complete without it. And Carroll is straw-manning the definition of consciousness…nothing new there.
I want to respect Philip, but I can't. He goes three times over the knowledge argument and either he is stupid or malicious. When Mary sees red for the first time, new neurological circuitry is activated. Sean says time and again that knowledge results from experience, not from reading about experiences. You don't learn to drive a car by reading about it because reading involves different circuits than driving. But Philips keeps adjudicating to Sean reasoning not Sean's but Philip's misunderstanding or malicious citation. For Philip, when Mary does actually see red for the first time, all the circuitry was there because she read about it, but the magic dust of consciousness spills in her understanding the concept of red that Philip wants, so he can always win.
Popcorn and chill.. Just waiting on human consensus between the nodes.. after all we create our own information (perspective, reality) as we go. Can't make fine wine without waiting.
This of course a good talk, but it's obvious Carroll is much less convinced by the pertinence of his argument, than Goff is of his. I think this particularly because Carroll only dares to talk about *weak emergence*, because that is of course the logically more correct, defensible interpretation. Maximally philosophically pedantic it would have been a bit dishonest if he instead didn't separate emergence, and instead just talked about simple "emergence". It would have been an understandable simplification, because this talk is intended for a popular audience. But he didn't do it, because he is aware that the mortal coup de grace against physicalism is the charge, that it requires **strong emergence** to get consciousness out of of colliding particles and wave functions. Strong emergence is generally understood to be equivalent to positing that at some point something "magical" happens that can IMPOSSIBLY be ever described by human minds (because if it could, it would only be weak emergence).
Physics is behaviouristic. Only behaviours (eg. liquidity, photosynthesis) could be derived from physics. In order to claim that subjective experience can be derived from physics, one would also have to claim that subjective experience is just a behaviour. This amounts to eliminativism. So if one thinks that subjective experience emerges from physics, one is essentially of the opinion that subjective experience doesn’t exist.
1:38:50.... exactly, the interesting thought experiment is this: take away all those relational thoughts/answers you have and can come up with when experiencing red, or pain in your toe. One by one. What is it that is left then?
Professional philosophers can choose between supporting arguments for the supernatural and pseudoscience, or they can support arguments based on science. Panpsychists and pantheists choose the supernatural to support their arguments, although in the history of humankind there is no objective evidence for the supernatural existing. Philip Golff chips away at the respect I have for the discipline of philosophy. It's difficult to know if he's simply intellectually dishonest or a liar. His arguments are easy to compare to the word salad of Jordan Peterson and William Lane Craig.
love how sean opens his talk here. its very reminiscent of the "god of the gaps" argument theists have in the discussion regarding the existence of god; we dont understand x (yet) therefore god did it. its .. so naive, misguided and objectively wrong.
This is precisely backwards. Goff's argument is that physicalists can't explain redness so it must be panpsychism (like theists saying atheists can't explain X so it must be god). Carroll's argument is that the mere fact that physics hasn't explained redness, doesn't mean it can't. He's not arguing that physics is right *because* panpsychism hasn't explain redness, he thinks physics is right for other reasons completely aside from consciousness.
Also, where is this “we can derive physics from consciousness” claim coming from? Bertrand Russell did not actually show this. I heard something about “Ramsey sentences” I think.
Glad to see that Goff seems to have learned something from his debates with Bernardo Kastrup. Looks like he's pivoted from his constitutive panpsychist views to the more general panpsychist framework under which something like idealism, could be considered a subsidiary theory. But shame on him for not at least mentioning idealism in his talk. Feels like a way to maintain brand consistency more than anything, and for a philosopher, that's lame. BUT much bigger shame on Carroll here. He really really is out of his depth in these discussions. He could have started and ended his presentation with 28:32 and nothing of value would have been lost, save for giving us another example of why prominence in a given field in modern society is so often anti-correlative with deservingness of occupying said prominence (see also: Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, and Daniel Dennett.) Carroll continues to make elementary mistakes about the very way in which we form theories. For instance, whenever he alludes to a correlation between observed patterns in the brain and states of consciousness, he's making the very same error as the "fewer pirates = more global warming" flub in reasoning that Pastafarians have spent the past two decades making fun of fundamentalist Christians for. Say it with me: Correlation does not equal causation! It's AS plausible on the evidence that consciousness causes brain states as the other way around. The key, as Goff points out (in an admittedly clumsy way), is which theory can account for the observations and muster the most explanatory power, while holding to the fewest assumptions. This is how proper theorizing is done, and Carrol would adhere to that principle in all other domains, right up until the point that his precious physicalism is challenged, at which time, he conveniently forgets that this is how rational theorizing works. Folks, this is your brain on scientism. Honestly, if one can truly grasp this flaw in reasoning, the answer to the whole sordid conundrum just kind of falls into place: 1) Consciousness (which is to say, qualities of experience-i.e. the only thing one can ever have direct acquaintance with) is fundamental. In other words: is the ontological primitive of all reality, which presents itself as a field with different patterns of activity. [this is the only assumption, everything else follows from this.] 2) These different patterns of activity can be experienced either a) through direct acquaintance (that which one IS), or b) as that which one is NOT directly acquainted (as other to oneself). Those patterns of consciousness which have developed the capacity to make this distinction are what we call "life". 3) Through the evolutionary process, beings have evolved different ways of presenting the patterns of consciousness they are not directly acquainted with through, what one could call their "user interfaces". 4) Physics is the study and application of mathematical models (i.e. quantitative formulae) to the patterns of activity of the fundamental field of consciousness, rendered from a 3rd-person, objective (i.e. public) point of view. Physics itself has no way of getting at the private, 1st-person experience, which occurs in our personal minds.* 5) Matter, properly understood, is thus only a quantitative description we give to patterns occurring in the underlying field of consciousness. So too, things are not actually "things" but rather those "doings" of the field of consciousness with sufficiently stable extension into our time-space interfaces as to warrant a nominal designation of "thinginess". But to think of matter as having fundamental existence separate from the entire field of reality in which it is appearing, is to think that the wave is something over than the ocean in which it forms. 6) The brain is then, like all matter, the image/representation of specific patterns of conscious activity. So, the fact that the brain and conscious activity are correlated, or that damaging the brain-say, with a scalpel in surgery-affects consciousness is not at all surprising under this view. Here, one fundamentally conscious pattern represented by our interface as a physical object (the scalpel) is interacting with another fundamentally conscious pattern represented by our interface as a physical object (the brain), and the result is a changed fundamentally conscious pattern represented by our interface as a physical object (the cut brain). No appeals to physicalism necessary! *(one might be tempted here to label the former as "b" and the latter as "a" from the bullet (2). However, when one carefully observes their own patterns of thought, one can see that even thoughts are encountered as other than the "I" doing the observing. In fact, even notions of "selfhood" are merely encountered by the "I" in this way. Only the fact of being the I falls under the "a" categorization in the above. But that can quickly get confusing, as it no doubt has here...) Anyways, this is longer than I meant it to be. Apologies for that. But please, do yourself a favour and look up Kastrup's work-if you somehow haven't already. When, in the next few decades, the world has finally come around to analytic idealism, you'll be thankful.
@@ark-LCarroll doesn't use correlation to imply causation. You got the basic idea completely wrong. He says that if there is correlation, then your new genius explanation must somehow explain that correlation too. So if we have an equation how particles in your brain behave (deterministic!) and your "fundamental consciousness" doing something correlates with that, then your "new stuff" either is the basis/underlies our equations (deterministic!) or it changes them somehow in a way we didn't observed yet.
@@ark-L no, I guess I don't think either side here is making a basic, obvious mistake. I am even in academic philosophy, although this isn't my area of specialization. I'm baffled that every time I click on a video like this, the comments are full of very confident idealists proclaiming their minority position is not only correct, which is fine, but obviously so, to the point where their opponents are clearly and obviously wrong.
🐟 02. A BRIEF SYNOPSIS OF “LIFE”: Everything, both perceptible and imperceptible - that is, any gross or subtle OBJECT within the material universe that can possibly be perceived with the cognitive faculties, plus the SUBJECT (i.e. the observer of all phenomena) - is unknowingly to what most persons generally refer when they use the term “God”, since they usually conceive of Ultimate Reality as being the Perfect Person, and “God” is a personal epithet of the Impersonal Absolute. However, this anthropomorphized conception of The Monad is a fictional character of divers mythologies. According to most every fully-enlightened sage in the history of the human species, Ultimate Reality is, far more plausibly, consubstantially and simultaneously, Absolutely NOTHING and Absolutely EVERYTHING - otherwise called “The Tao”, “The Great Spirit”, “(Param) Brahman”, “Cosmic Consciousness”, “Eternal Awareness”, “Independent Existence”, “Unconditioned Truth”, “Uncaused Nature”, “The Universal Self”, “The Ground of All Being”, “The Undifferentiated Substratum of Reality”, “The Unified Field”, et cetera - yet, as alluded to above, inaccurately referred to as a personal deity by the masses (e.g. “God”, “Allah”, “Yahweh”, “Bhagavan”, etc.). Subsequent chapters expand on this axiom. In other words, rather than the Supreme Truth being a separate, Blissful, Supra-Conscious Being (The Godhead Himself, or The Goddess), Ultimate Reality is Eternal-Existence Limitless-Awareness Unconditional-Peace ITSELF. That which can be perceived, can not be perceiving! This understanding can be factually-realized by studying a systematic method of introspection, called “gnosticism” (“jñāna yogaḥ”, in Sanskrit). Because the Unmanifested Absolute (i.e. NO-THING) is infinite creative potentiality, “It” perpetually actualizes as the manifest creation (i.e. EVERY-THING), in the form of ephemeral, cyclical universes/multiverses. In the case of our particular universe, we reside in a cosmos consisting of space-time, matter and energy, and because phenomenal existence is dualistic, there cannot be a single object without at least one subject. Just as a knife cannot cut itself, nor the mind comprehend itself, nor the eyes see themselves, The Absolute cannot know Itself (or at least objectively EXPERIENCE Itself), and so, has manifested this phenomenal universe within Itself for the purpose of experiencing Itself, particularly through the lives of self-aware beings, such as we sophisticated humans. Therefore, this world of duality is really just a play of consciousness within Consciousness, in the same way that a dream is a person’s sleeping narrative set within the life-story of an “awakened” individual. PURPORTEDLY, this universe, composed of “mind and matter”, was created from the initial event (the so-called “Big Bang”), which started, supposedly, as a minute, slightly uneven ball of immeasurably-dense light, which in turn, was ultimately instigated by Extra-Temporal Supra-Conscious Bliss. From that primal event, every motion or action that has ever occurred, has been a direct or indirect result of that expansion. Just as all the extant energy in the universe was once contained within the inchoate singularity, Infinite Consciousness was NECESSARILY present at the beginning of the universe, and is in no way an epiphenomenon of a neural network. Discrete consciousness, on the other hand, is entirely dependent on the neurological faculty of individual animals (the more highly-evolved the species, the greater its cognitive abilities). “Sarvam khalvidam brahma” (a Sanskrit maxim from the “Chandogya Upanishad”, meaning “all this is indeed Brahman” or “everything is the Universal Self alone”). There is NAUGHT but Eternal Being, Conscious Awareness, Causeless Peace - and you are, quintessentially, that! This “Theory of Everything” can be more succinctly expressed by the mathematical equation: E=A͚ (Everything equates to Infinite Awareness). HUMANS are, essentially, this Eternally-Aware-Bliss, acting through an extraordinarily-complex biological organism, comprised of the eight rudimentary elements - pseudo-ego (the assumed sense of self), intellect, mind, solids, liquids, gases, heat (fire), and ether (three-dimensional space). When one peers into a mirror, one doesn’t normally mistake the reflected image to be one’s real self, yet that is how we humans conventionally view our ever-mutating forms. We are, rather, in a fundamental sense, that which witnesses all transitory appearances. Everything that can presently be perceived, both tangible and immaterial, including we human beings, is a culmination of the primary manifestation. That is the most accurate and rational explanation for “karma” - everything was preordained from the initial spark, and every subsequent action has unfolded as it was predestined in ETERNITY, via an ever-forward-moving trajectory. The notion of retributive (“tit-for-tat”) karma is just that - an unverified notion. Likewise, the idea of a distinct, reincarnating “soul” or “spirit”, is largely a fallacious belief. Cont...
Even you knowing or experiencing something is behavior, just self-reflected behavior. They eye can see itself of course, it takes a mirror to do that, and the brain can know itself by experiencing itself and it just needs the brain to do that.
To me the key thought experiment is this: Given two exactly equivalent apparatus, one known to be conscious, do you deduce that the other is conscious too? My answer: Yes, if and only if you add this as a fundamental axiom to your logical system. There can’t be any debate about the axiom as long as it can’t be tested experimentally. Which by construction (see “equivalent” above) should be hard, if not impossible. But be aware of a corrolary: without this axiom, you must deduce that you are the ONLY being which is concious. All others around you are not. Which probably means you are kind of in a simulation, dreaming or whatever. So what the axiom does really add is the assumption that reality isn’t just a complete illusion. Most people therefore would add this axiom to their thinking. Which somehow decides and ends this debate.
It sometimes feels as if today's world is dominated by physicists who may not fully grasp the nuances of philosophical arguments. Sean Carroll didn't snag the victory here!
The “nuances” lol. And it sometimes feels that philosophers think they are on equal footing to centuries of established physical knowledge based on reproducible data, all because they claim to have “thought very hard” as Goff said multiple times. Goff fails to show Sean doesn’t understand the knowledge argument, as I continue giving a similar sounding rebuttal as Sean’s original every iteration I hear Goff discuss the knowledge argument: experiencing red is not a “new fact” beyond what would be obtainable through physicalist means, it’s an arrangement of neurons that could be perfectly described by a physical theory.
@@coreyleander7911 If you're struggling to understand this concept, I recommend considering a philosophy course. I prefer not to explain it here, as I've recently had an extensive discussion with someone else who also had difficulty understanding it. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Sean Carroll arguing that more detailed neurocorrelations of conciousness will make the hard problem disappear is like arguing that a near perfect simulation of kidney function on my computer will make it pee on the desk (as Bernardo Kastrup always argues) . It's a category error and a symptom of the metaproblem of concioisness - namely that he just doesn't get the implications of the hard problem.
That analogy isn't doing anything here, we know what a category error is and the whole point of the debate is that we physicalist say it is not a category error and you idealist people say it is.
@@ivanvnucko3056If that analogy isn’t an effective intuition pump for you, see my main comment on here for why Sean’s view is unscientific re consciousness
@Enderismypseudonym Not a problem of pumping intuition, I said I know what a category error is, I don't need this analogy, and it is lame anyway. "Any good scientist would want a theory that says “here’s why these neuro correlates correspond to the taste of chocolate, and could not correspond to the taste of raspberry, for PRINCIPLED reasons.” - Now this a category error for me. What if you have it backwards? Maybe "taste of raspberry" is a state definition and there are no PRINCIPLED reasons it is not the "taste of chocolate" other than the person experiencing it sees himself putting a raspberry into his mouth and not chocolate and ate both of them already in the past and can remember.
@@ivanvnucko3056 You just gave me a (hypothetical) principled reason why one would taste one taste as opposed to another. It looks like we’re both scientifically-minded men who expect principled reasons of some sort for our experiences. Sean Carroll is not such a man.
Goff's ENTIRE argument is just one giant appeal to ignorance fallacy. Again, like sean says, his argument explains nothing. He believes that because physics cant explain consciousness, it must be fundamental. In his last rebuttal, he mentions that we "need" a connecting theory, and because physics can't connect them at this very moment, his theory must be right. The absence of current physical evidence does not prove ANYTHING about his claim. A whole debate about nothing 😂😂😂
44:45 This entire section where Goff ridicules Carroll's argument is entirely baffling to me. A physicalist would say that a blind person cannot experience "redness" because there's something physically broken with said person. Why would anyone expect a physicalist to think the opposite? It's actually the pan psychist that could hypothesize some way of transferring the experience of "redness" to the blind person despite the broken physical apparatus. Goff might as well claim that a materialist should expect a non functioning stove to still boil the water. It would make just as little sense.
This is a good point. I mean I'm amazed Sean Carroll is so patient with all these people who obviously don't understand basic science. They don't understand the limits of science and meaning. They're really just magical thinkers, wrapping up their religious impulse in philosophical, vague philosophical, assertions. Everything is best understood as physical systems. And consciousness is one specific almost infinitely complex type of physical system. The attributes of human beings cannot be prescribed onto electrons or atoms or rocks or dirt. It's just an incredibly different scale of physical complexity
That's not what Goff said. He made it very clear that he was not talking about a blind person having the actual experience of redness. He said it multiple times. Rather, under a physicalist paradigm, the blind person would have some kind of knowledge of the redness just from learning about the physical facts. To extend his thought experiment a little: imagine we have the technology to stimulate a person's visual cortex to make them see red. So after the blind person learns every physical fact about color experience, we stimulate their brain to experience red. The physicalist should expect the blind person to say "yeah, that's basically how I imagined it would feel like", whereas the non-physicalist would expect them to say "wow, I could never have imagined that's what the experience of color was like!" Which seems more likely to you?
@@APaleDot dude this is so crazy! Materialism or physicalism doesn't say that learning about a topic is the same as doing it. You've created this total strawman argument. Obviously learning about what fire is and actually starting fires are two different things. But just because they're different doesn't mean fire is more than the burning of hydrocarbons according to a certain chemical reaction. Just because the actuality of fire is more than the book definition doesn't mean the book definition is wrong or incomplete. Just stick with the basic idea of a fire. No one says we don't know what fire is right? In the same way consciousness is just a much more complicated chemical reaction that doesn't mean it's anything more than a physical chemical reaction... I mean seriously you don't get the point that learning about something and having a description in a book is obviously different than the thing in itself... It doesn't mean that physicalism is incomplete just means that our descriptions of things are different than the things they are describing... It's the same way that a map is different than the terrain it describes that doesn't mean the map is wrong. Or a picture of something is different than the thing you are taking the picture of. That doesn't mean the picture is incomplete... Saying that everything is conscious, is just like saying everything is God, it doesn't add any kind of real explanation. You're just creating this fantasy world. Obviously everything is not conscious. Tables and chairs and rocks and electrons and photons are not conscious in the same way that people are. It's a completely meaningless use of language. It's obviously just people's magical inclinations and the need for fantasy
@@origins7298 I'm sorry but your fire example is really bad. If I knew all the physical facts about fire, I would know what shape it would take. I would know what wavelengths of light it would emit. I would know what byproducts it would produce and what temperature it would burn at. If you then actually showed me a fire, I would say "yeah, that's basically what I expected" because it corresponds exactly to the facts I learned in the book. No such correspondence exists for experiences. "Obviously everything is not conscious." We literally don't know. Obviously tables and chairs don't have thoughts like we do, because thoughts are just patterns in the brain. But we have absolutely no idea what subjectivity is, except that we experience it directly and privately.
@@APaleDot yeah but consciousness or life, on a human scale of complexity, is billions of times more complex than fire. Of course we can't know conscious experience just from a linguistic description In other words obviously learning about neurons and neural connections is much different than the experiences we have because the scales of complexity are way different And I don't agree with your fire description. Even if you knew all of the wavelengths of light as a physics description that wouldn't tell you the experience of seeing a fire or a raging fire taking out a whole forest . It's just common sense that descriptions are different than the things they are describing Just like a map of the United States is much different than actually traveling around the United States Anyway, you seem like a reasonably intelligent guy, just tell me what is Philip Goff actually adding to the conversation in terms of understanding the world ? What does it even mean to say that everything is conscious or consciousness is fundamental? It's totally nonsensical gibberish How does it help us understand the world better ? If a baby is starving or people are starving around the world does saying everything is consciousness in any way help people understand the world and alleviate human suffering and create infrastructure It's the same thing as religious mumbo jumbo. At the end of the day praying doesn't feed a baby. Believing in God doesn't help us understand the world. And saying everything is consciousness doesn't help at all clarify what the hell is going on It's obvious that consciousness is something that involved as life evolved over billions of years on earth I mean we know what life is and we know how it has evolved over billions of years. Consciousness is just a word we use to describe the evolved abilities of certain organisms I mean come on let's all study some biology and chemistry and physics and actually learn about the world instead of just making up nonsense that doesn't do anything but give people warm and fuzzy feelings or sci-fi fantasies or whatever
Sean bypasses the hard problem (which is about ontology) by switching the frame to epistemology. Nobody disagrees that we can describe different aspects of reality via different descriptive systems.
How do you propose to provide an account in ontology without using epistemology? More concretely, Sean’s point fundamentally is about empiricism vs theology. Panpsychism is a theological belief. It has the same “explanatory” power as the belief that Vishnu is the fundamental force underlying reality. This is why Goff can’t offer any explanations or predictions that could be tested.
Goff here presents panpsychism as something that is supposedly true, but also non-testable and outside the realm of science. If that is not a theological belief, what is it?
@@leoinstatenislandWhat version of Theism are you ascribing to Goff? Christian Theism - for instance - is a form of philosophical substance dualism. Goff is not a philosophical substance dualist nor is he proposing any such thing. The distinction between what Goff is proposing and the standard religious concept of a soul is clear, sharp, and not at all hard to understand.
From auditing the opening speech of Sean it's apparent that he has not understood the nature of the hard problem of consciousness. Using rhetoric and sarcasm to mask the significance of the issues raised, he simply eulogizes the materialistic ideology. He forgets that the physicalist approach is suited only to objective material phenomena. The subjective first person experience that consciousness is, is beyond the pale of and transcendental to the physical world of material phenomena. Indeed, consciousness is the apprehender of nature, not nature itself.
It's not a material phenomenon. It's a necessary assumption about your fellow human beings. It's what we derive the golden rule from. Drop that assumption and humans will immediately proceed to make life like hell on Earth for other humans.
About the knowledge argument, Sean assumes knowing what it's like to see red = seeing red. But! The panpsychist assumes that if physicalism is true then it's logically possible to know what things are like without experiencing them. Thoughts?
Uh, not ever did I believe Sean intended to convey that knowing what it's like to see red = seeing red. He simply says, Mary can both know every physical fact about red, and when she walks outside, there will be new neural pathways that have not been taken before. He doesn't think there is a conflict between the two. It's in his slide!
We only feel there’s an interesting explanatory gap w/ concs. because it’s not yet explained physically. Successful physical explanations include persuasive arguments that close the gap, by connecting theory about cold hard matter with our first hand impressions. It’s not always easy. Some dualists still hold out for an elan vitale. Ironically, some skeptics claim that physics has no explanatory gaps, while there are gaps all over the place! There’s no explanation for how the dynamics of fundamental particles causes the electromotive force, for example. It’s just “the way things are”. This is why scientists tend to be physicalists about consciousness: It’s not that we’re devoted to matter, it’s that we used to these fuzzy-edge cases where scientific theory is just a good enough story, with some data to back it up, that models whatever the real thing is. Many panpsychists are much more confident about scientific explanations generally than they should be.
Panpsychism explains how the laws of physics are downstream from human consciousness, but it doesn't explain how the motion or distribution of stars can be better and more clearly explained in terms of the consciousness of the stars than by using the laws of physics.
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I don't understand why Philip keeps saying panpsychism is the way to explain everything and then never explains anything. It's like a promise that never delivers. I just don't understand consciousness any better by hearing that it is fundamental. It sounds an awful like the enchanted world of the pre-scientific days.
he might as well just say "god does it" it has no practical application other than his eat at a uni.
It's all just hiding behind fuzzy words. He would have to show that saying electrons are minutely conscious makes them different than saying they are just physical electrons that we understand today. But of course he would never even dare try that because he obviously is not an expert in physics. So it's just, like Sean said, warm and fuzzy feelings or a way to satisfy people's sci-fi like dreams. It doesn't actually have any meaning
To be fair, we generally take it that given a dichotomy of p V ~p, one of the two must be true, and the other must be not true. Philips approach is an argument by impossibility of the contrary, which is a perfectly fine form of argument. If you don't accept what he's said, then you either believe he has not shown a true dichotomy, meaning there are other options besides what he posited, or you think there's a problem in his reasoning that one of the options is impossible, in which case you should say what the specific issue is.
Because there is no evidence other than subjective experience 😅
You probably are not understanding how his view explains what consciousness is because thats not exactly the main point of his view. It seems youre just misunderstanding it. We understand what consciousness is (or at least is like) based on our immediate awareness of it and its effects on the world. The view is mainly trying to explain facts about the world that seem to point to consciousness as a best explanation. These facts are absolutely falsifiable. If you come away from someone's explanation of their view thinking that they have genuinely explained nothing (despite supposedly having claimed to) and that they have views only someone of a prescientific age could hold, then you should probably just think about it a little more or retreat their argument(s) / ideas again.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
05:16 🧠 Consciousness and physical reality present the ancient challenge of how to unify scientific data (public data) and our private experiences (private data). Private data includes feelings, experiences, and sensory perceptions like color and taste.
07:36 🧪 The Mind-Body problem explores how Consciousness and the physical world connect. There are three main solutions: physicalism (physical world is fundamental), panpsychism (Consciousness is fundamental), and dualism (both are fundamental).
09:56 🧠 Scientific experiments can't distinguish between these options, leaving it as a philosophical challenge. Panpsychism asserts that Consciousness is fundamental, with the physical world emerging from underlying Consciousness.
13:54 🧪 Physicalism faces a conceptual mismatch between the quantitative language of physics and the qualitative aspects of Consciousness, making it difficult to explain experiences in purely physical terms.
18:47 🔄 Russell-inspired panpsychism posits that Conscious entities interact, giving rise to mathematical structures, which are what we observe as physics. Panpsychism successfully explains the physical world in terms of Consciousness.
22:51 🌌 Physicalism remains a strong approach, considering our excellent understanding of the physical world. Altering our fundamental understanding of physical reality due to challenges in understanding Consciousness might not be the best approach.
26:45 🧠 Sean Carroll discusses levels of explanation in Consciousness, ranging from fundamental quantum fields to human experiences and behaviors.
27:27 🧪 Different levels of vocabulary (physical, biological, and human-scale) describing Consciousness are compatible and do not conflict with each other.
28:23 🌌 While Sean Carroll admits not fully understanding Consciousness, he is confident that any explanation will fit within the framework of physicalism, emphasizing the importance of mapping Consciousness in physical terms.
29:33 🧠 Sean Carroll illustrates the relationship between thoughts and brain activity, emphasizing the ongoing research efforts to describe Consciousness in physical terms.
30:29 🤔 Sean Carroll addresses the "satisfaction gap," highlighting the dissatisfaction some have with physicalist explanations of Consciousness. He contrasts this with the panpsychist approach.
31:55 🔴 Carroll critiques the "knowledge argument," challenging the idea that the qualitative experience of Consciousness cannot be explained within physicalism. He asserts that the argument does not undermine physicalism.
33:19 🌐 Sean Carroll outlines the core Theory in physics, emphasizing our deep understanding of fundamental particles and forces. He explains the limits of potential new particles' relevance to Consciousness and biological processes.
36:44 ❓ Carroll presents the "satisfaction gap" dilemma for panpsychists, highlighting the challenge of reconciling their views with the well-established core Theory of physics.
37:24 ❓ Sean Carroll challenges panpsychists to either modify the core Theory of physics to fit their views or accept that Consciousness does not require such modification.
42:55 🌌 Carroll emphasizes that Consciousness is intricately tied to behavior. He asserts that any theory of Consciousness must account for its impact on human behavior and experiences.
43:21 🧠 Sean Carroll believes Consciousness is complex and challenging to understand but contends that changing the entire universe's framework is unnecessary. He advocates for working within the physicalist paradigm while exploring Consciousness further.
50:25 🧠 Panpsychism views physics as a computational structure (software) realized in Consciousness (hardware), akin to how software can run on different devices like iPhone and laptop.
51:06 🤔 Panpsychism posits Consciousness as a fundamental layer underlying physics, not necessarily changing physics but offering a deeper understanding of reality.
53:55 🔬 Panpsychism does not alter physics; it proposes a more fundamental layer beneath physics, challenging the scientistic view that only experimentally provable aspects matter.
56:28 🌌 Panpsychism provides a coherent explanation linking physical reality to underlying facts about Consciousness, presenting a viable solution to the Mind-Body problem.
59:01 🧐 Panpsychism argues for the importance of integrating our immediate awareness of Consciousness with scientific knowledge, emphasizing the need for philosophical exploration beyond experiments.
01:00:12 🧠 Panpsychism challenges the fundamental dilemma: Does it change core physics? The debate hinges on whether panpsychist views necessitate altering the core Theory of physics.
01:05:14 🌈 Panpsychism asserts that explaining Consciousness involves understanding both qualitative experiences and their neural correlates, highlighting the challenge of defining what constitutes an explanation.
01:11:12 🤷 Panpsychism questions the notion of the "hard problem of Consciousness," suggesting that as scientific understanding advances, the hard problem might dissolve without a distinct solution.
01:13:18 🧠 The knowledge argument is about the incompleteness of materialism. Mary, a neuroscientist, learns new information about experiencing red, indicating materialism's limitations.
01:14:47 🌌 Panpsychism aims to explain physical reality in terms of consciousness, not just explain consciousness itself. It offers an alternative to materialism in understanding reality.
01:17:39 💡 Consciousness is a unique case; it's privately known, not publicly observable. The challenge is to integrate the reality of consciousness with the reality of the physical world.
01:20:43 🌟 The debate highlights implicit assumptions in understanding the fundamental nature of reality. Different views exist due to the complexity of the problem; there's room for differing interpretations.
01:31:15 🧐 The introspective data on consciousness, although subject to interpretation, provides a real, rich understanding of subjective experiences, challenging the notion of Consciousness as purely inferential.
01:36:19 🎨 Philip introduces the example of Fred, a character who sees two distinct colors despite others seeing one, highlighting a gap in our understanding of consciousness and physicalism.
01:37:31 🦐 The existence of creatures like the mantis shrimp challenges our understanding of consciousness, indicating something missing in the current neurological explanations.
01:38:48 🎨 Descriptions of experiences such as seeing red are relational and subjective, making it difficult to provide objective answers within panpsychism or physicalism.
01:41:57 💭 The zombie argument challenges the concept of consciousness by proposing beings that behave identically to humans but lack subjective experience, raising questions about the nature of consciousness.
01:45:55 🌍 Panpsychism emphasizes continuity in nature, suggesting that consciousness evolves from simpler forms, offering a Copernican view of consciousness in the universe.
01:47:11 🧩 The combination problem in panpsychism explores how smaller conscious entities combine to form complex consciousness, a challenge that researchers are actively engaging with.
01:52:29 🤔 Sean asserts that he feels physicalism is true, aligning his inner experiences with his understanding of the physical world, highlighting the complexity of consciousness as a key challenge.
01:54:48 🧠 Philip discusses the limits of physicalism, emphasizing the need for an intelligible story explaining the emergence of subjective qualities from quantitative physical processes. The debate extends to other non-scientific data like value and mathematics.
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Amazing!! summary Thank you
Beautiful!! 💕 much love to you for this 🥰
wow, thanks!
how to unify scientific data (public data) and our private experiences
Create a cybernetical theory of private experiences. It is just one function among others.
@@kimiscool7is there a way to get this summary in text form? Got it! I had to switch to a PC.
Phillip lost the debate after the second time spoke, repeating what he said on the first go, and unable to meet any of Sean’s challenges
I think he lost during his first talk
You can’t really respond to your opponent’s arguments when they’ve failed to respond to yours. All he can really do is point out that Sean doesn’t understand the problems he’s trying to refute.
@@bracero7628 I think I would respect Phillip more if he just argued that people have souls. insisting that leptons have "consciousness" is pretty meaningless.
@@JakobVirgil I'm not a physicalist, but I don't see how it's any more meaningless than saying they're made of the same stuff human bodies are made of.
@@bracero7628 Electrons are leptons and are one of the things that make up human bodies. So I don't follow. Assuming that a part of thing that is conscious must be conscious seems to be related to the fallacy of composition to me.
Instead of spending so much time arguing physics is not fundamental, Philip would be more convincing if he elaborated more on how panpsychism gives rise to mathematical structures of physics and how exactly does physics emerges from consciousness. To me, physicalism is simpler than panpsychism, so really, the only criteria to judge panpsychism is its own explanatory power, but he never actually presents it in any depth in this video.
And I would like to know more from Sean about how we get from the core theory to a theory of the unique first person felt experience that each of us all have. We all just have to believe and trust in Sean that one day physicalism will make it happen.
@@fs5775you don't have to trust Sean, but there is nothing else we have that will do the job, if it is a doable job in the first place
Physics doesn't emerge *from* consciousness in panpsychism, rather consciousness is a fundamental, or inseparable, *property* of physical reality.
Much like you can't separate properties lime charge, spin, momentum or mass from particles, so too you cannot divorce consciousness (qualia, or what I prefer to term proto-consciousness) from the fundamental fabric of existence.
The unassailability of the solipsist argument is itself a clue.
@@pandoraeeris7860 great so panpsychism IS a physicalist theory and should therefore be testable. After all, we can measure spin states. So all the panpsychist has to do is explain how consciousness physically influences the world. Where is it hiding and what is the mechanism of action that produces a measurable change in brain state?
@@leoinstatenislandAll the atheists here seem to think Goff is proposing a "God of the gaps" argument. He isn't.
I dream of one of these debates where Phillip will finally say something substantial about the explanatory power of panpsychism, so far just hot air, I'm afraid. And I would so much like to know...
I feel you. I think the idea is that with panpsychism, we can account for both physics and consciousness. However, to me it seems we can still only account for consciousness in a general form, but we cannot derive any actual experience. It seems that it thus has slightly more explanatory power than physicalism, but any given experience itself still has to be taken as a brute fact.
It explains nothing, it just states that the "mysterious thing" is fundamental. That is no explanation, it has no added value whatsoever, Sean explicitly mentioned that, Philip just laughed it smugly away.
@@ivanvnucko3056I really don’t understand how these guys have jobs and get published. I don’t have anything against Goff personally, but panpsychism is so incredibly, glaringly flimsy, I don’t understand why he has a career. Who in academia is buying this stuff? SMH.
@@leoinstatenisland yes, that's what surprises me, it must be so easy to get one of these posts.
@@leoinstatenisland
Physicalism is no less flimsy than panpsychism. They are both metaphysical theories. They are both compatible with physical science.
You shouldn't confuse physics with physicalism, they are very different things.
Arguing science with non scientists is completely frustrating. Kudos for trying.
I agree that would be totally pointless. Hence why as a non-scientist, I never debate science.
“How do you add up little conscious things to make big conscious things.”
Current state of panpsychism theory.
a nonissue since IIT is specifically designed to model this mathematically and will accomplish it with sufficient biological investigation and advances in neural imaging tech.
the issue for both camps, identically necessitated by their reliance on folk introspection, are the untestable metaphysical assumptions required to proceed and which do not address the essential questions regarding the nature and functions of consciousness.
since william james' conclusion that a method for advancing beyond folk introspection is impossible or unknown, it has occurred to noone to bypass all metaphysical speculation and instead just do actual science, meaning advancing beyond folk introspection by developing methods of rigorously observing the object we wish to understand.
@@5piles If that’s tongue in cheek, it’s hilarious! 😂😂
@@bobkat8765 theres nothing tongue in cheek about having located the neural correlates for voluntary attention and concentration. we know who sucks and who doesnt. endless metaphysical speculation by ppl like carroll and goff who are only capable of 2 seconds max is meaningless and useless. just as galileo wiped out 1400yrs of medieval scholarship with 1 week of rigorous observation of the object he sought to understand, 1000yrs of continued work done in goffs and carrolls manner is wiped away by a single person who based on neural correlate monitoring we can confirm is capable of sustained attention and concentration not for second or minutes but several hours, remaining completely undistracted and unimpinged by any external or internal stimulus while only focused on rigorously observing directly the mind its nature and functions.
@@joeredman569 So you believe people having an epileptic seizure are exponentially more “conscious” then, since their brains are far more integrated than brains not in seizure, right?
@@joeredman569
Hossenfelder: The Mathematics of Consciousness:
th-cam.com/video/efVBUDnD_no/w-d-xo.htmlsi=aU2rc7uQ3B3d-c-R
Hossenfelder: Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics:
th-cam.com/video/v1wqUCATYUA/w-d-xo.htmlsi=GB9lc4wUCUyfSVCI
It's interesting how Goff offers some really weak points in his opening:
1. Lack of progress (or rather, lack of relative perceived progress) is not quality evidence against physicalism. The inability of humans, at this point in time, to arrive at conclusive determinations about the complete physical explanation of subjective experiences, is no indication that there is none. By analogy, that's like saying because the vast majority of the observable universe seems to be made up of dark matter and dark energy, which are still mysteries to humans, that there is no scientific physical explanation for these things.
Some things are very complex, relative to human understanding, and the inability of humans to fully explain these things, despite the relative time and effort put into attempting to understand them, is not strong opposition.
2. The sample results of the PhilPapers Survey, with a margin of 60%, is also not good evidence. For one, this is a slim majority. For two, this majority consists of people who accept or lean toward the proposition; these are not people who have made up their minds conclusively on the issue. Thirdly, this is not something people can provide substantive and conclusive evidence for, so there's no test results (or deductive processes) to support the opinions of these people who accept or lean toward this position.
22:15 Just finished Phillip Goff’s intro… woefully unconvincing as of yet
what do you expect, he has no way of rigorously observing the object he wishes to understand, so he has no choice but to adopt metaphysics.
in that regard although i am deeply opposed to keith frankish's position his conceptual fluency and attempts to adhere to intellectual honesty to far greater degree than most physicalists who are complete degenerates, makes his arguments more powerful due merely to more visible internal consistency. carroll is irrelevant and doesnt even need addressing.
Big fan of Sean and Philip - thanks for more food for thought!
“I do not know how to refute an incredulous stare” 💎👏🏻👏🏻 oh so good
Sean Carroll embodies humility through his arguments. We can't describe consciousness and what we describe is purely subjective. That's wisdom.
however as a scientist this assertion of his is inaccurate and unscientific because it contradicts the currently available scientific literature.
we know the neural correlates for voluntary attention and concentration. we know the avg person such as carroll and goff are only capable of 2 seconds max on avg. however we have known now for almost 2 decades that there are trained person who based on neural correlate monitoring and testing are verified to be capable of sustaining attention and perfect concentration not for 10 seconds but 10 hours, meaning they remain completely undistracted and unimpinged by any external or internal stimulus focused directly on the nature and function of the mind itself.
therefore his opinion his true of himself and ppl like him, but has nothing to do with the latter type of persons.
further, he speaks universally, as if he is in a position to comment on both, which he is not, which is the opposite of humility.
@@5piles So if I go up and slap that guy who supposedly completely undistracted for 10 hours straight he won't notice? I can just take a piss in his mouth and he won't notice? That sounds like a lack of consciousness to me.
LOL. I was about to ask if this is some kind of Tibetan monk BS you're talking about, but then I checked and saw that it IS actually Tibetan monk BS!
Well, at least you write eloquently, as if you were smart. But then, that's the one thing Tibetan monks are good at. Sell BS to people that somehow sounds profound. Which is also why Michael Roach made this his business model. And why wouldn't he? He learned from the best.
I wonder if this is all "voluntary"? Whatever "voluntary" even means, because actually its just their material brains doing its thing and giving them the false impression that they had a choice in it.
@@flashmutex i dont know what neural correlate research in neuroscience has to do with tibetan monks in particular. you for example if tested would be measured in at only 2 second of voluntary attention and concentration, as does everyone else ever tested aside for an extremely select few. you can mock the difference between your mere 2 seconds and their sustained concentration for hours, but that would indicate you are psychotic.
regarding tibetan buddhism, sorry, tukdam in taipei 2020 was fully tested and monitored by scientists and neuroscientists. their finds completely wipe away modern biology, physics, physicalism, etc. but hey, keep trying to pray nonexistent emergent properties into existence. you should look into christianity, you'd fit right in, though the idol worship of the avg physicalists has become more severe than the avg theist.
@@5piles You keep saying "voluntary attention and concentration" without explain what you mean by "voluntary". You cannot "voluntarily" force the brain into something as if it were another organ of the body separated from the mind, because "willing" to do that is already the brain in action. Someone staying concentrated for longer periods means nothing. It's still just the material brain doing its thing. To suggest otherwise is to say that something outside of the material brain is doing something to keep it concentrated. So what is it? Some kind of external consciousness controlling the material brain? A soul? A spirit? You telling me that I fit into religion is funny, because it seems like you're the one preaching religion without being "conscious" of it.
> "they remain completely undistracted and unimpinged by any external or *internal* stimulus focused directly on the nature and function of the mind itself."
What's that even supposed to mean? A dead brain without internal activity? A functioning brain stimulates itself permanently via recurrent neural paths.
22:38 Sean Carroll pt. 1
59:16 Sean Carroll pt. 2
1:21:24 Sean Carroll pt. 3
Thank you!
Better not waste our precious time with the vague and handwavy other parts of the video...
Yes let’s just confirm our biases, how fun and informative.
@@NewCommentsWith Goff I’ve never seen someone talk so much while saying nothing
what an incredibly narrow-minded approach to the world. Sean Carroll himself would not support your narrow-mindedness
@@fs5775 I’ve listened to Goff for hours with an open mind. I don’t get it.
I think Philip doesn't actually understand the knowledge problem!
When Mary sees red for the first time, retinal photoreceptors, optic pathways, and neuonal networks are engaged for the first time. She learns something new, which is encoded as a change in the neurophysicalchemical structure of her brain.
And, it does seem impossible to learn that information from reading ("learning") about the physical facts of seeing red. But that does not mean it takes something nonphysical to obtain that knowledge, which is Sean's point.
In principal, if the knowledge gained from seeing red equates to a change in her brain structure, then with sufficient technology able to adjust brain structure on a neuron and neurochemical level (nanobots or whatever, doesn't matter), then it is in theory possible for her to absolutely learn about the quality of seeing red without actually seeing red. Think of it as a scifi memory transplant.
If a purely physical process can produce the brain structure that equates to the knowledge (memory) of what the experience of "seeing red" feels like, without the conscious process of actually seeing red, then there is nothing about the conscious experience not fully explained by physicalism.
It is the philosophers' insistence that the possible ways Mary can interact with the physical world to learn about what seeing red would be like be limited to ingestion of facts through traditional currently possible methods. This is just a failure of imagination. And unnecessary limitation that makes the thought experiment invalid, and not an argument in favor of what they believe it is. Philip doesn't actually understand the knowledge argument.
Yes, but the problem is that what she’s seeing should already be in her head as a set of quantitative facts described by physical science. The experience should be superfluous if reality is fundamentally physical. All you’re saying here is that the brain state correlates to a qualitative experience. Even if you alter Mary’s brain to implant the qualitative experience of red, the qualitative knowledge and the brain states are still going to be two different phenomena. You’re smuggling in the qualia without actually explaining it, and no matter how many layers deep we go, you’re going to be forced to do that same thing again and again.
I disagree with essentially everything you said.
First, if unconscious nanobots or whatever alters Mary's brain structure in a way that she is entirely unaware of (let's say it happens slowly, over a week), then there is no conscious process involved in the creation of that brain state. At the completion of the task, she will have a brain state representing the memory of the experience of having seen red and knowing what that feels like that is to the atomic level indistinguishable from the brain state produced from having actually seen red. From any objective measure the two are identical, and from Mary's subjective feeling the two are identical. So the qualia knowledge "learned" is identical in both cases. One involved a conscious process, the other did not at any point. The same will hold true for any other brain state you can imagine, corresponding to any other fact, subjective feeling, experience etc that you can imagine. Therefore, there is no room left for a conscious experience that can't be reproduced (and therefore entirely explained) by pure physical phenomenon. Just because we can't explain that level of detail now does not mean it's impossible. Sean's point.
Second, if you have an issue with this refutation being about just the "memory" of the experience, and not the experience itself, then it can be easily extended there as well. According to physicalism, the active ongoing experience of an event just corresponds to a particular and dynamic series of structural/chemical/electrical brain states. Allow our nanobots to in real time manipulate the brain to match that specific set of brain states, and the subject will have the identical subjective experience. The subject will "see red" with no red and no eyes involved. Again, there is no room left for a conscious process that can't be exactly replicated and thus fully explained by our nanobots, and entirely physical process.
Also, the requirement that Mary's knowledge of physical facts be limited invalidates the thought experiment. If you want to make the point that knowledge learned through reading about a subject and knowledge learned by using our senses sight/hearing/touch/taste/smell to explore a subject are different, then fine. That much is obvious. Imposing the limitation on Mary as you do just highlights that distinction. But both types of knowledge correspond to physical brain states as shown above. That one type can't be gained from reading a book is irrelevant.
As an analogy, consider a simple digital circuit that can add or subtract numbers. It has a subroutine that looks for a sign designator, and when it sees negative it subtracts by flipping the polarity of some transistor. Otherwise it adds. So you construct an experiment where it is only feed positive numbers, and ask if the circuit can subtract. It isn't allowed to "see" a negative sign. No matter the number or order of positive digits fed, it can never enter the state corresponding to subtraction. See, you say, subtraction must be something non physical. Some other fundamental type of thing. But wait. I point out I can easily just flip that polarity externally, and entirely physical process, and it can subtract. No, you insist. That would either be against the rules of your experiment or would somehow represent some sort of "different" reversed polarity state.
Why? Why the limitation? Why do you believe the physical state of the circuit is different if the polarity is flipped externally vs being flipped from sensing a negative sign on a monitored input?
There is nothing but physical processes. There is no scenario you can construct that can't be reproced in theory by an unconscious physical process.
@@richardhosch6073 yeah, the basic problem is still there, no matter how you try to rework it. To recollect the experience of red is still a conscious and qualitative experience. To remember red would require experiencing red, you’d just be experiencing it as a thought rather than as an interaction with a red physical object. If red is not experienced, the nanobots haven’t done their job. But this will still be an experience of red, not of a correlated brain state. The interaction problem is robust-you can correlate conscious experiences to brain states all day, but you can’t turn a conscious experience into a brain state. As I said, at every level where you try to offer a physical explanation, you will still be trying to explain something other than the physical process itself.
The same problem obtains in your adding machine example. The physical processes that correspond to subtraction don’t make up subtraction-they correspond with it. While it is true that physicalists try to explain this in terms of supervenience or epiphenomenalism, both are self-defeating: if everything about the experience can be explained in terms of physical processes, why is the experience happening at all? Why shouldn’t it be that we’re all just philosophical zombies? It’s an extraneous brute fact, which to me amounts to a tacit admission that physicalism is false. As soon as you accept that non-physical things exist and nothing explains their correlation to physical things, physicalism becomes self-defeating.
OK, I see your argument more clearly. I just wholeheartedly reject it.
The brain state IS the experience. There is no experience apart from the series of brain states. What is qualia? It is how a certain series of brain states "feels". That's it. There is nothing else to explain. You invent or insist on the subjective experience being something else, something above and beyond the corresponding brain states. I reject that.
Yes... in a very real sense we are all philosophical zombies. There is nothing else going on but the series of brain states that constitutes our lives. Our subjective experiences are just how that series of information processing feels. That's it. No need to invite something else that offers zero additional explanatory power.
As for Mary, I say the nanobots can recreate exactly the brain states necessary for remembering seeing red, as well the series of states necessary to subjectively be experiencing seeing red. You ask Mary, and she tells you both situations are indistinguishable to her from the memory of and subjective experience of having actually seen red. You insist there is still a difference, that the implanted qualia/memories/experiences are philosophical zombies. Fine. Then so are the actual memories/experiences.
There is no difference.
@@bracero7628I think it would be wise and humble for you to realize that both assertions (it can be created physically vs. it can't) are just based on intuition and aren't somehow objectively corroborated, and maybe even cannot be. Your position is just more ontologically costly, because it assumes some "ghost in the machine" for which we have no prior evidential support. And "ghost in machine"arguments have one frustrating property - they are irrefutable.
Can't find the comment now, but whoever suggested watching Sean Carroll vs Alan Wallace at ICE Dartmouth (MANY thanks!) will watch a far more even battle of brains.
Golden comment! Thanks for that. A experienced Buddhist intelectual and an experienced physicalist debating! Looking forward to watching the whole debate
What a fascinating subject that of consciousness. While I welcome the “thinking outside the box” efforts panpsychism brings to the table, - and actually admit a small bias toward liking the idea of something similar to it being the case - on this debate I feel like Sean was much clearer and concise in explaining his reasoning than Philip. Philip kept saying “we bridged the gap” or “we solved it” but never really explained how exactly in my opinion. I have purchased his latest book (Why?) to see if he is able to better present such ideas.
The subjective experience of consciousness is very rich and layered, and engaging in practices like meditation and psychedelics really emphasize this in my opinion. So at this time my analytical and pragmatic mind sides with Sean, while my intuitive and spiritual sides see something worth investigating further with classically unorthodox approaches such as Panpsychism. The thing here of course is that like it or not, logic tends to have a much better track record than intuition. Would love to hear the thoughts of people who find themselves in a somewhat similar spot.
The jaw-dropping assurance and self-confidence with which Carroll demolishes a complete misunderstanding of the knowledge argument is a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The fact that after having it explained to him *multiple times*, he still insists on misunderstanding it, astonished me and makes me a bit wary of his intellectual integrity
Carroll is right
@@rhrh9012 And it's not just Sean Carroll; it's like the entire modern world is in on it!
It's jaw-dropping how Philip still doesn't understand that all he's doing is insisting that consciousness is magic. Even after that's been made painfully clear.
Unless I missed it, Goff never explains what the misunderstanding is.
I love witnessing two very different & intelligent minds contemplate the very same thing from drastically different perspectives... and get totally frustrated with the opposing viewpoint which they find incomprehensible 😂It was a lot of fun to listen to, thanks!
should watch carroll vs wallace. goff is a lightweight.
@@5pilesdo you have a link? I find Goff does a lot of figurative and literal hand waving with no convincing arguments. He self-undermined himself many times so I couldn't listen to him anymore, even though I'm open to the possibility of consciousness being fundamental.
Edited: N/m, found it. You were right, it was a good one. It's The Nature of Reality video if anyone's interested.
Also, I completely agree that Goff is out of his league. We need to bring in some heavy hitters like Bernardo Kastrup and/or Donald Hoffman because Sean is a formidable opponent. If we could have a tag team match between Kastrup-Hoffman and Carroll-Hossenfelder, that would be the ultimate showdown.
Their is nothing intelligent about sean carroll
LOL@@ossiedunstan4419
Philip, could you go over again how panpsychism explains how what we call physical reality comes out of or from consciousness?
He's not saying reality "comes out of or from" consciousness. He's saying reality IS consciousness. A reasonable position given that all experience of reality is by definition experience of consciousness.
I don't remember hearing him use that wording and that would be such as linguistic sleight of hand it would have set off a significant exchange.@@RogerCurtisFriddle
good question,nobody knows how physical things get into consciousness but rocks are more physical than sadness, but sadness can be harder to experience.
'rocks are more physical than sadness' just begs the question@@bradmodd7856
@@RogerCurtisFriddle no consciousness' doesn't lead to >> no world to produce consciousness' ,
the world is still going to be there to have the opportunity TO produce consciousness'
in fact , an EMERGENT property kind off NEEDS a world FIRST , in order TO produce consciousness , for a couple million years at least ...
it's a totally ridiculous notion that YOU produced the world around you , while EVERYONE else would need to think the same thing , now , wouldn't they ?
So excited to watch this!
I have never clicked on a video so fast! Will post my thoughts once I get through watching.
i can wait!
@@HarryNicNicholas Assuming you meant “I can’t wait,” and weren’t being sarcastic, I’ve posted my thoughts in another comment.
The memory of seeing red is part of the knowledge Mary is given.
Memory of what? She never saw it
@@Sampsonoff ever remember seeing something red? Do you have knowledge of it?
@@TheVan453 but the room has never had wavelengths between 620 to 750 nm (aka “red”). So how can she access that memory?
Does your memory of red have those wavelengths? How can she have all knowledge of red, if she doesnt have the knowledge of seeing red?@@Sampsonoff
@@TheVan453 oh I see what you mean now. Interesting. I’ll have to think about that
Wait. I think Philip misrepresented IIIT at 9:51 If I remember reading Kochs book the idea behind Tononi's IIIT is that there is proto consciousness even in simpler physical systems. That is a form of psychism. That cannot be grouped under physicalism by any means. And panpsychism does solve the mind body problem. So IIIT is a solution.
I don't think the consciousness is special people explain themselves very well and they could do with going back and rephrasining their arguments with different words.
To me, they basically say that the subjective experience of qualia for a given individual gives us objective data about reality, but this is a weird argument given that, for one thing, there's no way (at least currently, or even conceivably?) to know whether someones qualia is the same as someone else's qualia, given the same input.
We'd have to literally output someone's qualia into someone's else's brain and make them experience the incoming qualia directly, rather than their own qualia of that input to see if they matched up. If they don't then 'the redness of red' is meaningless as far as objective reality goes.
The best spokespeople for the "consciousness is special" movement are Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup, IMO. Very much worth your time to hear them out, particularly because Kastrup approaches it philosophically while Hoffman approaches it scientifically. I've always found Goff to be pretty fluffy in his explanations.
I agree with both of them. The whole problem here and I agree with Sean’s pain, is that this debate is Philosophy debating Science and it just sounds weird mixing the two. Sean is way out of Phillip’s league too.
I still haven’t gotten into watching this video. Keep forgetting to make time for it.
And I don’t know either of these individuals that well so I don’t have allegiance to either
But I think that science and philosophy are already mixed
So even though at times it’s a bit of a category error
It is also the case that’s science can’t exist without philosophy
And so if science is trying to answer fundamental questions. It’s philosophies job to gate keep science to some degree
Bernardo Kastrup is way out of Sean's league!
@@joeredman569 well he can date whoever he wants to date joe. Its none of your business
@@ninjaturtletyke3328 What a wit!
@@joeredman569 tanks!
I enjoyed watching, but I don't think it made many new contributions to Carroll and Goff's brief history of debating one another. I felt I heard essentially the same points as usual, with seemingly the same misunderstandings of one another. Or at least, talking past one another at the same junctions--I'm not sure whether to attribute this to neither participant willing to engage directly with one another or willfully misunderstanding the others argument to make them seem the better. I thought Sean came ahead in several respects; I admired his intellectual honesty and willingness to be undogmatic, I thought he made contact with Goff's arguments better, and I felt he structured his argument more clearly. On the other hand, Goff felt mostly empty because he made claims without defending them and reiterated points without responding in a way that satisfied me. He declares several times that science has fallen short and physicalism needs to be discarded, but I didn't feel he argued for this strongly. Conversely, Carroll admits readily why he has a high credence in the scientific methodology to answer these difficult problems. Also the point that we haven't finished the project of fundamental physics and we should expect consciousness, a complex phenomenon, to be much harder to crack: in this light it isn't surprising we haven't solved it yet and it's too early to throw up our hands. Admittedly, I'm amenable to these arguments already, but I would have loved to see Goff be a bit more articulate.
In the end, I found it enlightening to show that Goff's standards for what a theory should be able to explain are nonspecific, wooey, and may not be fair to expect. No one ever promised you a rose garden, there just may not be more to explain over and above the complete physical mechanism of consciousness. Needing something more reeks of essentialism, looking for the essence of consciousness, when there may not be such a thing! Sort of a Wittgensteinian unasking of the question.
I have a question for those familiar with the Mary's room thought experiment and those who felt that Carroll's response fell short--why is admitting that the brain state of seeing red is different from the brain state of knowing physical facts about red not a satisfactory answer? It seems true to me that the brain state associated to experiencing red is simply different from anything you read in a book and there's nothing nonphysical about that.
To answer your question, Sean's response to the thought experiment fails. This is because his response "when Mary learns science, neurons fire and when Mary sees red, different neurons fire" can (possibly) account for the fact that Mary learns something new. It can however (presumably) not account for the actual new fact she learns. There is a subtle distinction between the two. By admitting that she indeed does learn something new, Sean effectively undermines his own position. He admits there exists a fact that Mary did not know despite her knowing all of science.
@@CulusMagnussorry, I still don't get it. I think it's a problem of the "loose" usage of language in philosophy, but not really sure. It would be helpful to try to explain in each use case what is meant by "fact", what by "knowledge", what by "learns" and how these uses relate to presumed brain states. In this form what I "hear" from you is something akin to "you can account for the trees, but not for the forest"
@@ivanvnucko3056 Let's use an analogy. Let's say you are solving a math problem which results in you learning that the orbital period of the moon is roughly 30 days. In this analogy, there are two facts at play: the fact that the moon's orbital period is roughly 30 days _and_ the fact that you learn the previous fact. In this case, both facts are accounted for by science. The first due to physics, the second due to neuroscience, at least conceivably so.
In Mary's case, there are also two facts. The fact of what red looks like and the fact that she learns this fact. Sean's argument explains the second fact. Presumably through neuroscience, we can explain the fact that Mary will learn a new fact. However, very obviously, the fact which Mary learns, what red is like, is left unexplained in this. Just like we do not learn from neuroscience what the orbital period of the moon is, we do not learn from neuroscience what red is like. In both cases, neurosciences tells us only that a fact has been learned.
I hope this makes the distinction a little more clear.
@CulusMagnus oh, ok, thank you. So my intuition was correct, it is a matter of term conflation. Why do you presume that "what it is like to see red" is a fact in the same sense as the period of planet is?
@@ivanvnucko3056 Well, we have to distinguish what I think from what Sean argues. My point here is to show that Sean's response fails. On the surface, it seems that Sean concedes that there is indeed a fact of what red is like. This is because he concedes the point that Mary learns something new and he even explains it using neuroscience. Presumably then, it is a fact that Mary learns and it is the fact of what red is like.
Personally, I think there is a fact regarding what red is like because of my own introspection. I can look at a blue object and say "this is what red is like" and be wrong and look at a red object and say "this is what red is like" and be correct. Introspectively, I can tell no difference between the factuality of what qualia are like and the factuality of any other proposition.
It is, however, possible to dispute this and many so-called illusionists do. Denying the existence of qualia or "phenomenal facts" is a valid response to the knowledge argument. It is just the opposite of what Sean gives.
Carroll's two fatal mistakes are: (1) claiming consciousness is weakly emergent on physicalism and thus compatible with lower level physical descriptions, and (2) claiming consciousness is not a sharp property (is not dichotomously characterizable as either had or not had, as either on or off. There can somehow be an inbetween state).
@@nickelchlorine2753 (1) No researcher would dare make what statement? Could you clarify that? If what you mean is "no reasearcher would dare call consciousness weakly emergent," doesn't that work against Carroll? (2) The impossibility of determining a middle ground. It seems like it is either 'something it is like to be,' or it is not 'something it is like to be.' That seems like a true dichotomy that defies gradualism about consciousness.
@@nickelchlorine2753 Thanks for clarifying
(1) Two points:
Firstly and most importantly, when you say, "There is no reason to assume that "consciousness" is the only exception.," what are your thoughts on the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness' that Goff argues as a reason? Because when you suggest, " [given equivalences between what is physical and computable],... one task for philosophers would be to identify seemingly strongly emergent systems and reduce them to weakly emergent ones," if the seemingly strongly emergent phenomenon in question is consciousness, and one finds the hard problem of consciousness to be compelling, this is a conceptually impossibile task *in principle* to ask of anyone, scientist or philosopher.
Second, about the point regarding strong emergence and simulation, is the question of property realizability in simulated processes a different one from that of emergence? If you accept the thesis of multiple realizability because you are, say, a functionalist physicalist about consciousness, then a strongly emergent simulated property emerging from a physical process is technically possible in a sheer compatibility sense. You would simply need simulations to have the proper functions.
Maybe also third, you mention "Turing Completness," but admittedly I don't know anything about that.
(2) I don't quite follow you here, though I am reading it over and over as it seems complex. At any rate, I can't help but think: isn't the biology of living things completely explicable in terms of the physical structure and material dynamics of it's consitutent parts? I just don't see what you are trying to articulate is strongly emergent about living things
(3) debating idiots
The problem with the redness argument in panpsychism is that they are unable to articulate what it is about redness that can't be explained by physicalism. They haven't provided an explanation either, merely asserted that physicalists can't do it so they must be wrong. It's God of the Gaps again, asserting that it can be explained is not an explanation and does not get you any points.
It’s, you know, the “redness” of the red, man. 🙄
Exactly. We all know what they mean. We get it. They insist we don't, but we do. What they don't insist on is an actual explanation of it, because they don't have the goods. They just invent some odd thing called "panpsychism" with the fantastic defining property that it "explains that thing we're having trouble explaining". Oh, wait, I've heard of this before! I think they teach it in church.
Are you familiar with Godel Incompleteness theorem? Its pretty much "God of the gaps" all the way down. Every rational frame work requires axioms that must be accepted before anything can be built upon it. At least panpsychism builds a frame work on the only thing we can say is evident "Awareness/ consciousness"
@@kimiscool7 so it builds on something that doesn't exist? i can go with that.
The incompleteness theorem does not imply you require axioms... you require an axiomatic system to even apply it in the first place. All it says is that in a sufficiently powerful framework, not everything that is can be proven. Your point about "God of the gaps" all the way down is EXACTLY why panpsychism is useless: all it does is pushes the burden of explaining consciousness to the fundamental level. It solves absolutely nothing, and instead introduces a wealth of new unsolvable problems. Why does it introduce new problems? Because its implications weren't true in the original theory to begin with. It's new axiomatic data. I'll explain:
Panpsychism has the fundamental problem that its only source of data is personal experience. If you want to take on assumption that panpsychism somehow "just works" and comes together as consciousness, then you have the tricky task of proving that a rock is not conscious. If you want to claim a rock isn't conscious, prove it! If a rock isn't conscious, why is my brother conscious? Why is my mom conscious? I don't know, I have no data on their personal experience! The only data I have is their physical construction, which is similar to mine, and by your claim has no relation to conscious experience. Good luck!
If you DON'T want to assume that panpsychism "just works", then it IS a physical theory, and you should play by the rules! I implore you to come up with a model that subsumes quantum field theory and general relativity. Go ahead. Win a Nobel prize (or 3). Until then, I won't believe it. In the same way that I don't believe string theory, even though it's great candidate for a ToE (I give panpsychism more credit than it's due here: string theory has a lot more to say than a lazy tautology).
Again I emphasize: it solves nothing. That experience of red? It will never be explained to your satisfaction. Ever. @@kimiscool7
I wonder about claims like "your pain is not a scientific datum". Why not? If someone tells me they're in pain, i generally take their word for it. If this happens every time I twist their arm (or see c fibers firing, or whatever), I count this as a correlation. There is science to be done with this type of thing. It could turn out I'm being lied to (or only dreamt about twisting their arm... they shouldn't have lied to me about that pain thing), which means it is defeasible, but still evidence in the meantime.
I don't think they consider the graduated value of different type of evidence: Induction, deduction and abduction. These roughly correlates to Mathematics, Logic/reasoning and common personal/group beliefs, and they are statistically _not_ equally valuable for finding an approximation for truth/reality.
Why Russell and not Whitehead?? @philipgoff
31:06 The information gained when she sees red is not a quality of red it is a quality of her. She learns her experience of red. That is not something about red that is something about her. She didn't learn anything new about red. She learned what happens to herself in the pressence of red.
Exactly, congrats, you win! Out of the tenths of more or less convoluted comments here trying to explain "the hell" of Mary's room and failing, yours is a simple, clear and direct explanation of what is wrong with the whole debate
@@ivanvnucko3056 Thanks. I'm always second guessing myself, so the validation is nice. Despite my poor grammar of saying her instead of herself.
Red is not some external thing. Learning about red is not distinct from learning about herself. You haven't really said much here.
@@APaleDot You haven't said anything at all. "Red is not some external thing." What does that mean? Because the physical photon of red light is very much an external thing. Or, when you say "red" do you mean her idea of what red is? Her mental image of red? Because, her mental image of red is not the same thing as the physical photon of light.
I can't see in the UV spectrum. I can study UV light though. I can learn all of the physical qualities of UV light. Now let's say I get some gene editing therapy and grow a fourth cone in my eyes. Now I can see in UV. When I do I don't learn anything new about UV light. I learn what happens to my brain in the presence of UV light.
If we could mind meld, and I showed you what I see as red, and you showed me your red. Then we compared and contrasted them, we wouldn't learn anything new about the physical photon of red light. We would learn about our experiences being exposed to red light.
@@DrewTrox
Sure, but Mary isn't restricted to only learning about light. The setup of the thought experiment is that she learns all the physical facts about color perception. That includes light, but also everything about seeing color in the brain (which doesn't require light at all).
Given that she knows all these fact about the brain, is she surprised when she actually sees what red looks like? or does it look like she would expect it to look based on her research?
Regarding the thought experiment:
Mary, the color-scientist, does learn a very important new fact that could alter her entire career. With repetition she could eventually confirm that she is the kind of person who can reliably distinguish colors in good light. It is easy to overlook a fact that is produced by such gradual learning. With the first observation, it's not natural to think, "One hundred percent so far." But it is a fact.
it's great to see sean in a debate, i hope he finds time to do more. i've listened to goff before, why do people think that talking can make things poof into existence?
I don't think that's what he's doing here, they're both just looking for an explanation for mind. What I don't understand is how Goff makes a claim about parsimony, while smuggling in an assumption the size of all reality.
Well, it doesn't sound like you tried to understand him
Philip starts out weak with "private data" which is useless. He can't prove it unless it's "public data", it's self defeating. He's already lost without Sean saying anything.
These were exactly my thoughts (no pun intended).
He can prove it only if you’re willing to meet him halfway and admit that you are conscious. That’s your private data, and he’s telling you to stop ignoring it. If you’re not willing to meet him halfway, you have to run around claiming you aren’t conscious.
@@bracero7628We don't have to assume our conscious state is truly private and doesn't show up in our physical brain activity.
@@jamesking2439We also don't have to assume that it will show up in our physical brain activity either, though? Goff's argument is that it hasn't yet, so why shouldn't we consider alternatives? And even if a full correlation between experience/consciousness/redness and physical brain activity somehow appears, it's not logical to consider that correlation as a causation.
Thanks for posting this debate. Were the other talks in this conference recorded?
Don't know but
Is Consciousness Fundamental? Conference Talk, September 2023
@ Annaka Harris ! Great approach.. very impressed I stopped. Other things to thing through.. just.. a matter of time
1:01:00 The answer to that question could be more complex than a simple yes or no. It could be yes at one level, no at another level. Forcing Goff to answer with one word is disingenuous in itself.
At 06:00 Philip lists 3 philosophical solutions to the mind-bod problem, but the definition he gives for panpsychism is actually a form of idealism. Panpsychism is only a meta-theory of mind that is compatible with dualism and physicalism. It is idealism that is a real alternative to physicalism and dualism.
Wish Philip had really taken on Sean's claim, "Doesn't matter if it doesn't change physics."
The real problem with that statement is that it reveals Sean's conflation of scientific methodology with metaphysical materialism.
Sean is unaware of this conflation so he REALLY means it when he says that. He honestly believes that the regularities in nature's behavior that all scientists study prove physicalism. Many physicalist scientists and philosophers do not conflate them. Sean does. Not sure why.
In other words, there is a simple reason why there are great physicalist, dualist, idealist, and panpsychist scientists all over the world: because studying and thinking about the regularities in nature's behavior does not push against any ontological position.
If Sean recognized his conflation of scientific method with scientific materialism, he could still take the "I don't 'care" attitude. It would just mean that he would be agnostic ontologically, simply interested in the patterns for themselves with no commitment to what nature actually is.
Yes, some people say, "Nature IS the patterns." Fine, then that person is an idealist because the patterns themselves are abstract cognitions (mental) and direct perceptions (mental).
Excellent point. I wonder if you’re an idealist too?
I think you misunderstood Sean. The question of changing/not changing physics is not about some metaphysical principles. It is a very rudimentary question of "how does your mystical woo work in the reality we observe"? Let me explain: We have the core theory about the behavior of particles (which are also in your brain) completely described by an equation. Deterministic. Given a state there is a principled way to predict future states and retrodict past states. I do not assert there are no unknown particles or forces, I do say that there are particles and forces we know the deterministic patterns of behavior of and that these particles and forces are at least a part of what is your brain made of. The other data point are the experiments showing correlation between conscious experiences and processes in the brain, and by processes I mean changes in behavior of these very same particles in the brain. And so: If you propose some new unknown "stuff" that "explains" our consciousness (or creates it or whatever) this new stuff MUST either: a) somehow affect the particles and forces we know complete deterministic behavior of so they don't do what the equations would suggest (changing physics) OR b) it don't affect what these particles and forces are doing, so they obey the simple deterministic equations we know BUT given the correlation we mentioned it means that the "new stuff" is also obeying the same deterministic equations. And now choose your poison: If a) new stuff isn't unobservable by science, the effects on the matter we know should be empirically testable and honestly, with the history of experiments and measurements already observed. If b) the new stuff isn't really new, it is just underlying the stuff we already know, and for all intents and purposes it can be ignored.
@@WalterHassell
Yeah, analytical idealism satisfies my preference for monism, naturalism, and for a theory with explanatory power that does not presume a self-conscious Creator God of any kind.
@@rooruffneck Interesting. I wonder how you’d account for reality existing at all, then? Most philosophers agree there must be a necessary foundation to reality (a necessary fundamental reality), and to me this is God.
@@ivanvnucko3056
Thanks.
I don't think science observe matter. I think that we use regular patterns in our observations to form the concept of 'matter.' That probably isn't controversial claim.
You said: "If you propose some new unknown "stuff" that "explains" our consciousness..."
I don't think I'm proposing something 'new' in referring to experience. In the context of a conversation in which we ALL are assuming the metaphysics of physicalis, sure, it's sort of 'new' to say, "Hey, let's pretend that there's something it is like to be an electron.'
But that wouldn't be a fair way of looking at the conversation being had. And I don't think you are doing that. I just don't see how referencing experience is referencing to 'new stuff.' When any physicist (regardless of ontology refers to what they conversationally refer to as 'matter', they are typically referring simply to the patterns of behavior, not making metaphysical claims about its nature.
There is a perfectly good reason why you can be a panpsychist (I'm not) and agree with any physical theory. You are agreeing with an account of the patterns of behavior. Nobody is making an ontological claim about its nature.
Just because the first thinkers/researchers who divorced the mind from the observable materials were not physicalists, it didn't stop them from recognizing the utility of merely studying those observable patterns. Just because a majority of modern western scientists might say there is only physical reality, doesn't change the fact that the method of study remains the same.
It's simply a conflation to state that these modern theories are proving or imply the metaphysicis of physicalism.
Any argument about the actual nature of reality will refer to empirical aspects but will be more occupied by other lines of reasoning. Philosophers who are physicalists don't spend much time talking about physics research because they realize this same research works just fine for other ontologies. So they try to make more stronger ontological arguments instead. They don't conflate their research with their philosophical conclusions as Sean does. The reason that lots of physicalists tear their hair out when listening to him is simply because they hear the same kinds of omissions and conflations that Philip struggled (don't get me started) to point out.
Sure, they agree with his conclusion. They just don't agree with his reasoning. I'm simply pointing to the way he honestly believes the research itself is an ontological argument.
Unless somebody is claiming to clairvoyantly study the ghosts behind the observable patterns of nature, they are stuck studying those patterns of nature's behavior. Like every other human being. And, then, we come up with reasons for inferring consciousness. Just like we do when we talk to somebody at the store. Or study a beetle, or speculate that the underlying field of reality is of an experiential nature.
But I see where we differ and realize why, for you, it'll seem nearly crazy for somebody to simply want to imagine that experience can be in stuff other than organisms. Unless you are the kind of physicalist who sees that their are reasons for such assumptions (that you just don't agree with), it's not that interesting to go back on forth about how nuts and unjustified such and such a statement is.
I'd much rather hear you talk about your favorite physicalist speculations regarding ontological primitives. That is always helpful for me to hear about regardless of the ontology.
As I see it, all entities exist in a state of physical resonance with other entities in their surrounding environment, meaning that reverberations of other entities naturally occur within the physiological structure of every entity
The reverberations occurring within an entity whose survival requires the active navigation of its environment naturally "inform" the entity of the critically noteworthy features of the environment, whereas the reverberations occurring within an entity with no such requirement do not.
Therefore, this "informative resonance" IS the entity's consciousness, which is utilised by the entity similarly to the way one utilises a map.
1:00:52 Dude, Goff already said at the start that the ontological models are empirically equivalent. What about physics would be changed in light of that? The only thing I think would change is your initial assumptions or axioms, which may certainly lead to a different set of conclusions, but if the models are truly empirically equivalent, then Carroll is just posting a ghost target with this bonky question.
I think Sean’s point is, “if the ontological models are equivalent, then who cares?” I’ve got two bowls of cornflakes, regular and magic. They taste the same, smell the same, make you feel the same way, but this bowl is MAGIC! Great who cares?
I just keep hearing Goff changing consciousness from the level of emergent phenomena in the brain to fundamental reality on which everything else emerges, without ever stating what consciousness really is. It is as Patricia Churchland has said in several occasions , panspsychism sounds a lot like vitalism.
Consciousness is just subjective experience. It's not a very difficult thing to define. The only difficulty is explaining it.
If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
Sean Carroll disproves atheism by becoming god
And Sean Carroll is very much against hero worship so he wouldn't be impressed by your comment
@@fs5775 it's a joke bud relax
@@fs5775 has he said so in the past? I wasn’t aware of that
The demand for satisfaction is unreasonable. Goff wants an explanation for consciousness that is as satisfying as the explanation for the boiling point of water. I don’t think he actually finds that satisfying. Not in the way he wants for consciousness.
“H2O becomes mostly gaseous at 100c and 1 atmosphere” is not satisfying at all; It’s almost useless information to the cook. A chemistry student would need to learn the difference between boiling and evaporating. A chemical engineer would need to know about the purity of the water and the container and the heat source and the other gas and the reason you are wanting steam.
We could definitely get that type of explanation for consciousness. The anesthesiologist could tell you what chemicals make it go away. The neurologist could tell you what parts of the brain you need to make it. The developmental psychologist could tell you at what age you feel it. I know that’s not satisfying, but it’s AS satisfying as the water-becomes-steam story. And just as useful.
Thank you I should watch this.
1:05:20 Carroll 's argument here is so obviously correct, that someone could say it's almost trivial.
Yet, there are people that still don't get it..
You could say the exact same thing for the theory that consciousness is emergent.
You haven't actually explained anything, you've just slapped a word on it.
@@APaleDot Carroll says ( and that's my point of view also, with a subtle difference..) that we don't know much about consciousness at the moment, and how it emerges , but we'll continue to learn more, gradually, in the future, correlating our macroscopic observations and subjective experiences with the underlying more fundamental laws of physics.
That's possible, in principle ( at least up to some subtleties that cannot be mentioned here..) , so with physicalism we will learn more!
This is not the case with panpsychism though...
@@dimitrispapadimitriou5622
Not true. Everything he says about correlating our scientific observations with subjective experiences holds true regardless of your metaphysics.
The difference is that in panpsychism we have a story about why this is possible, whereas in physicalism it is simply a brute fact about reality that these two very different things are correlated.
@@APaleDot Actually, this is what happens with physicalism throughout the history.
Newton ( e.g.) didn't have much to say when asked to explain how Gravity works!
But a few centuries later , Einstein did that!
In the late 19th century people didn't have a good idea about what matter is at the micro level, but a few decades later Quantum mechanics occurred, and so on...
Just saying that "consciousness is fundamental" won't give you a motivation to go further, to really explain what's going on with things like self awareness / qualia etc...
Panpsychism is just a kind of self deception.
Philip reminds me of Christian apologists. Such utter conviction behind such gasious foundations.
The way to bridge the gap between quantity and quality is to reproduce the quality in the brain via a fully quantitative understanding of conscious experiences. The way to do that is via direct stimulation of the brain and recreate virtual experiences directly from stimulating the brain. When people would enjoy full virtual environments that are created by such stimulations nobody would ask the idiotic question of how to explain the redness of red (answer I just did when I made you see red where there was no red at all).
There's lots of smart people in this thread, so I'm gonna ask a slightly related question. For any of you who think that things like cars and tables are ontologically distinct objects, can you please make the case to me? To be clear, I obviously acknowledge them as epistemological and perceptual objects. I see and can know about 'cars' and 'tables'. I want to hear how and why people think of them as ontologically distinct. Thanks to anybody who chimes in!
Can you re-iterate without "ontological". I think it's confusing the question. Do you mean like, "in reality" are there distinct objects?
@@pjaworek6793
Yeah. What is a distinct object in reality? Are chairs, cars, mountains, rivers...?
Sean answered this... There are different layers/scales you can inspect reality at and we have different vocabularies for different layers. In our "everyday scale" there are distinct objects as far as we talk about, manipulate, see, recognize, etc... them as such. The criteria for differentiating them are utilitarian and subjective and often fuzzy. Reality itself doesn't work that way as far as we can say.
@@ivanvnucko3056
Again, I agree with all of that. I didn't feel like Philip was arguing that we can't talk about any of this stuff.
I think the argument is about what in principle we can talk about as grounding something else.
For instance, I can come up with a narrative about how stubbing my toe when I was five played a significant role in quitting my job when I was 45. Sure, it's probably bullshit, but I can tell a story in which no step of the sequence suddenly introduces something that can't be derived from the earlier steps.
So maybe it would help me get clear if I just asked you. How do you see consciousness being derived, even in principle, from the basic laws of physics?
That is not the same question as how a trickle of water could possible create a Grand Canyon, or how the interaction of certain radio active ways could create patterns in water millions of miles away or how wind and sand can create fascinating mathematical patterns. All of those are derivable (could be wrong, of course) without adding a presto.
I guess it would help to at least hear your best account of deriving consciousness from material arrangments. Not the kind of typical hand wave that says, "Well, it could be when you get matter doing this and this at the same time THAT becomes consciousness." I'm asking how a new ontological category would be derivable from the quantitative categories that make up the concept of matter.
You are asking to explain ‘weak emergence’ Sean mentioned. I’d recommend reading up since it’s not a trivial thing. Intuitively, the argument is based on the fact that complexity emerges with scale.
That is how physicalism, or more precisely, modern science, is making progress towards providing an account of consciousness.
The audio Is too low or Is Just mine?
It's quite low.
It's actually too loud
Maybe it's because I'm a physics graduate, but everything Sean says seems to make lucid sense, and everything his debate opponents say sounds like wishful woo-woo. (Apart from his going for the many worlds interpretation of qm, which is ridiculously unparsimonious - the transactional interpretation is way better)
Yes. Its because your are a physics grad. You won’t find consciousness looking in an electron microscope or by perusing data from the hadron collider.
@@danzigvssartre You won't find a car looking through an electron microsope. But cars are made out of fundamental particles and obey the laws of physics.
@@SkyGodKing Since when were cars conscious?
@@danzigvssartre Do you not understand the analogy?
Many worlds is unparsimonious like atomic theory is unparsimonious. How could a theory posit so many atoms, that's unparsimonious!?!?!
Nice, for people who are not familiar with the mind-body problem. But with the risk of sounding rude: this discussion could have taken place centuries ago. Both philosophers seem to be stuck in the same Cartesian framework (in which Goff bars matter and Carroll mind). In order to make some progress, we should get beyond the matter-mind framework.
My suggestion is an old one: the common foundation of both is the phenomenal world, which is a world of qualities and also the setting in which empirical science is done. This sounds trivial, but it is easy to forget that real colors are based on actual processes (not mathematical models). Whether you call these processes physical or mental is a matter of taste.
Mental is almost definitely an emergent property of an extremely intricate network of physical processes...which is why consciousness is difficult to define. How do you really even give a good physical representation of something that feels extremely subjective to us. It won't recreate the phenomena...it will just show relationships of neurons and conscious outcomes.
@@brad1368 Correct me if I'm wrong: you consider consciousness to be a property, depending on matter, but not being reducible to it (since you use the term "emergence", which has certain connotations in philosophy). You suggest, like Leibniz, that we will not find consciousness inside grey matter (at best, we might find out which dynamic patterns correspond to certain experiences).
I think these views are based on sound intuitions, but they are still too much tainted by Cartesianism (even if you don't like Descartes). We don't have to look for consciousness or phenomena inside the brain, which is itself already a phenomenon. They are not flawless, but I like Putnam's ideas about "direct perception" and Noë's view that perception is virtual, all the way in.
Where is the audience? This college must not like philosophy or cosmology. 😁 I think it’s very important to understand that this is a fairly recent effort to build a foundation. Most people look for answers. We don’t even know what the question is or how to go about finding the answer.
Poor Deepak Goff. So many claims, so little evidence. So much hot air, so little information. So much wuwu, so little sense.
“Woo” a toddler level insult so atheists can continue to justify their fast food binging, sleeping around lifestyle with junk science
@@soylatte1288 No, 'Wu' is when someone makes wide claims based on abduction and personal feelings without any grounding in core reality (the direct physical, mathematical world - our CORE theory).
The system of Science have a lot of structural flaws, but have _enormous_ explanatory powers, that by far outshines any of the 'WU' claims..
Btw. Your attack on Atheists are misplaced. Atheists are believers too, so being an atheist doesn't automatically make you a non believer or a scientist, so don't go there.
Capitalism, Socialism and Communism are all atheist belief systems, flat earth, ghosts, pan-psychism, UFO's + other wu claims are also atheist belief system, and none of them Science.
Your current belief system is obviously under pressure from science, so you just lash out..
The irony 😂
What is wuwu about positing the one thing we are directly acquianted with more than anything else as intrinsic to nature? 😂
This Goff guy is seriously talking absolute fantasy
I agree and most people want to believe that their fantasies are true.
1:43:09 the point is that the behavior, just like perception **CORRELATES** with other things we can detect and measure!
Numbers allow us to read words in the brain, it is just a bunch of numbers in a volt meter (that is what an EEG is) and they are transformed into words the subject thought about, we can do that too with colors now and other "mental" experiences. Soon we will be able to go the other way around and use numbers in instruments to excite the right neurons to make people see images or hear sounds or have any thoughts. Would the bridge between math and mental experiences be real then?
I feel for Goff. Having a conversation with someone as philosophically dense as Sean has got to be like drinking a flat soda.
That would be no different than explaining things to the public. That should not be a chore.
@@ai._m all to myself? What is that supposed to mean? I can still appreciate Carrol's science even if I don't think he's a great philosopher. And if you don't like Goff, maybe you'll prefer another philosopher
@@numericalcode Carrol is smart but that has given him an undeserved arrogance in philosophy and given that this is explicitly a debate, I'm not sure why you think having a debate with anyone should be as simple as explaining a concept (I reckon it would be a lot more complex).
@@samuelblackmon Sorry I was unclear. I don’t think it is simple. But it should not be emotionally onerous. I don’t think Goff feels it is. He must see some value in that he continues to engage with Carroll.
@@numericalcode you're right about that. My lament is less mature than Goff's attitude.
Phillip Goff really struggles never offering a solid counterpoint. Admit you don’t know and put your efforts toward figuring it out.
he is just a quacko
@@null.och.nix7743 he's insufferable. Sean Carroll actually calls him out on his dishonest debating technique in this. I've never heard Sean call anyone out so explicitly lol
I don't understand what Philip doesn't understand about the weakness of his position. He's basically said "We have this problem. Let's imagine it answered by new fundamental laws. Problem solved!". No, literally. That's all he's putting forward, and he expects everybody else to just fall into line. If he wants to convince anybody, he's got to come up with an actual theory, not just postulate something that is "correct" by tautology.
His further point is that physics will never be able to explain the character of experience. This is not true. What I buy, is that we may never be able to SHOW that it explains the character of experience. But in that case, I bet strongly that NO theory will be able to explain it without resorting to the lazy sort of tautology panpsychists wheel out.
Oh, and I still can't believe he doesn't understand the problem with Mary the neuroscientist. It doesn't mean anything; in fact, it poses more problems for the arrogant panpsychist than for the humble physicist. Why? Because the physicist can eventually explain all of the neurological processes that give rise to Goff's precious experiences and be happy with it, but the panpsychist will NEVER have the data to explain the experience of a rock.
@@Krispio666 What makes you think physicist can eventually explain all of the neurological processes that give rise to experience???
@@kimiscool7 cos they are all material, it will be complex and it will take a very long time, but it is just a problem of time and kit, we're part way there. your brain is just material doing stuff.
@4:31 He says you can’t see inside someone’s brain and see their feelings and experiences. Yet we have already started to do that. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we can see the brain activity when particular thoughts occur. This capability will only get better with time. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that one day we will be capable of having very clear views of what people are thinking.
No, you see neural correlates, not the subjective experiences themselves.
@@plafar7887 No different than hearing someone tell you about their subjective experiences. You correlate the sound waves they emit to understand what they say they experience.
@@karagi101 Yes, so what? The point is: subjective experiences exist, they're not the same as externally observing their physical correlates, and Physics deals only with external observation. Ergo: something's missing. In other words, Consciousness is not explained by Physics.
@@plafar7887 The point is that the conscious person verified that what the fMRI saw was what he was thinking of - proving that we can determine people’s feelings/thoughts by observing the activity in their brain. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from chemical and electrical processes in a brain. If the brain is injured (e.g by a stroke) consciousness often diminishes, people lose cognitive abilities. When the brain ceases to operate, there is no consciousness. Physics is the basis of everything. Internal and external. Nothing is missing other than we are still learning how consciousness emerges (from physical processes). For there to be some other “force” or whatever that is not part of physics would entail contradicting all physical laws - laws that we’ve verified operate in all domains. Good luck with that.
How to start looking for something that isn't something?
By telling people to stop looking for something?
Great plan!
Let me know when you can define it.
That was cringeworthy. The more Philip does this the more he drifts into quantum mysticism. I appreciated their first debates, but now I kind of don’t know why Carroll is validating Philip by continuing to do events with him. Sean is his best advertising at this point.
Awareness/ consciousness is the only rational axiom to build any mathematical frame work.
@@kimiscool7 if you ever met me, you’d know that MY consciousness is the last thing you’d want to build an axiomatic framework upon.
But seriously folks. “I love the taste of chocolate,” or, “hey look, a red thing!” is not, for me, strong enough evidence to overturn the core theory, the single most successful intellectual undertaking in the history of our species. I don’t mean this to be insulting but maybe that’s inevitable - at the end of the day, panpsychism and dualism are built on a kind of narcissistic infatuation with the specialness of your own subjectivity. I simply don’t share that confidence in mine. I am very comfortable with the idea that my consciousness is in large part illusory, deterministic, and certainly does not require anything beyond the standard model to explain why I’m always late for meetings.
@@leoinstatenisland ok I deserve these comments and I need to think through this more and provide a better argument. I am not a panpsychist but agree with more of the analytical idealist as described by Bernardo Kastrup. I am pretty agnostic however I can’t buy into the materialism frame work. I don’t think it’s narcissism to point that everything we understand about physics/ math is subject to our subjective perception filters. I really found Dr Stephen Wolfram work compelling and fascinating. He says that physics and reality is as it is to us because of how we are as computationally bounded observers. Anyways I love theses discussions.
@@leoinstatenisland also the work of Micheal Levin is pretty fascinating. It’s doesn’t support panpsychism but he describes consciousness from the cellular level and how nested hierarchy to form larger conscious structures. Anyways fascinating stuff.
@@kimiscool7 I do too! And I think the point Sean would make about materialism is that you don’t have to be a materialist! You just can’t cosplay as an empiricist at the same time. Philip’s mistake isn’t believing in a soul. It’s the incompatibility of that belief with physicalism that is at issue. Goff wants to have it both ways - he wants to say “luminous beings are we, not this crude matter,” but he also wants to be taken seriously by physicists. So he won’t say his belief is supernatural, but he also doesn’t want to take on the job of changing the core theory, because on some level he recognizes that’s somewhere between “completely futile” and “a LOT more work than I want to do.” I think Sean is just saying, “have the confidence to take your own beliefs seriously. Stop all this mucking around with zombies, and fully commit to a non-physical soul and make that argument, or roll up your sleeves and tell us how panpsychism actually works.”
Sean: "We need to address XYZ to take this argument seriously."
Philip: "Sean doesn't understand XYZ, embarrassingly so."
Philip then demonstrates that he doesn't understand XYZ while simultaneously proving that Sean did.
I love the nervous breakdown at 44:00 when he implies he would give Sean a bad grade in his class for not answering with the nonsense answer that he is looking for. Like getting a bad grade in Astrology class or Alchemy... or a bad score on your wizard exam at wizard school. I'm sure Sean was crushed.
Sean couldn't explain certain XYZ to an embarrassing degree either. He made it through this whole debate while dodging the central issue, the hard problem. He doesn't have the answer. The mind/brain problem shockingly remains unresolved. No need to resort to hitting below the belt.
@@PatrickODowd702seems that Goff didn’t understand the knowledge problem either when he repeatedly asserted an experience as a new fact
What is a good example or evidence of consciousness/mind in humans, absent the physical/brain?
Approx 1:14:00
I would say that having a full and complete theory on black holes is very different from experiencing spaghettification.
So he’s just re-stated Sean’s point as an example of how Sean doesn’t understand the question.
Oy.
Exactly, or understanding the principles of combustion is very different from an actual fire. The descriptions of the world are different then the actual things they describe. Just like a map is different than the terrain, or a picture is different than the real object.
At the end of the day, I feel both Philip and Sean are at their strongest when criticizing the other’s view, and their weakest when making the case that their own view “explains” consciousness in any way (or could do so in the future).
Sean admits his own view (physicalism) WON’T do that, as he believes the best we’ll ever do under this paradigm is map all the neurocorrelates of consciousness. Then he imagines the Hard Problem will just… disappear? Because he imagines others, like him, will agree to sweep it under the rug? No. Any good scientist would want a theory that says “here’s why these neuro correlates correspond to the taste of chocolate, and could not correspond to the taste of raspberry, for PRINCIPLED reasons.” Correlation isn’t enough in science; has it ever been? As a science-minded person myself, I was deeply disappointed in Sean’s admission that, essentially, his view will never be able to explain consciousness, and he’s ok with that. I think we can do better.
As for Philip. I think Sean did a good job pointing out his view does nothing to “explain” consciousness, though at times it sounded like Philip may have been arguing as much. Instead, Philip simply assumes consciousness is fundamental (and yes he has arguments to that effect, so he’d say it’s a conclusion not an assumption, fine - the point is that, in his theory itself, the fundamentality of consciousness is assumed/an axiom). But… the entirety of the Core Theory is also assumed to be fundamental, on philip’s view (it’s just cashed out differently). But yet he wants to argue his view is more theoretically virtuous compared to Sean’s? Really? I mean, I’d agree with him if he took consciousness as fundamental and then SHOWED how we could get back the Core Theory WITHOUT assuming the different elements of it (like spacetime etc), but he said nothing of the sort. So it seems like Philip’s view explains just as much as Sean’s, but assumes a whole lot more, rendering it theoretically less virtuous (all else being equal).
I loved this debate and hope there are 100 more like it. But I still think both views have massive issues to deal with.
Not only has Philip failed (so far) to recast physics as emergent from consciousness (an achievement that surely would win a Nobel prize!), but he has not even given any sort of explanation of consciousness, let alone one that meets his own criteria for success. At around 11:45 he strongly suggests that he is about to do so, but then he does something else: firstly, he reiterates his arguments against physicalism, and then, at 21:15, he says (about panpsychism) "We've solved all the mysteries - we know how to do this", but all he does is to claim that Russellian Monism will deliver the answers. It should go without saying that knowing how to do something is not the same as having done it, and the longer he claims to know how to do it without to actually doing it, the less plausible his claim to know how to do it appears.
Rather ironically, Philip puts a great deal of weight on the "Mary the neuroscientist" thought experiment from Frank Jackson's knowledge argument against physicalism (he has called it the greatest thought experiment, at least on the topic of consciousness.) It is, however, easily generalized into an argument that works equally well against the current state of panpsychism. The original argument was discussed in the debate: it is the one where Mary has been confined for her whole life to a monochromatic world, during which she has learned everything the physical sciences could ever say pertaining to color vision. The question is whether she will learn anything new when she finally gets to see colors (or be surprised by the experience, or have a curiosity about what it's like satisfied), and the presumed answer is in the affirmative.
Let's just make one small change: Mary studied panpsychism, and knows all there is to know about it: _now_ will she be surprised? If the original is a strong argument against physicalism, then panpsychism had better be able to give a different answer (and justify it), but panpsychism, in its current form, cannot do that.
The straightforward fact is that we have _no_ explanation of consciousness; instead we have a multitude of beliefs about what an explanation would look like, and a paucity of evidence. That's what makes it easier to argue against any one of them than for one.
@@A.Raybould I like your point a lot, but we have a slight disagreement based on the very last point you made: not ALL theories of consciousness are easier to argue against than for. Only the theories which START with assuming the existence of the physical world (both Sean and Philip do this) and seek to EXPLAIN consciousness run into that issue. Because you’re right! The Mary argument applies equally well against all such theories.
But there’s a rarer form of theories of consciousness that seeks to solve the problem in the other direction: mind -> matter INSTEAD OF matter -> mind. On that account, consciousness is what’s fundamental, but physics isn’t; spacetime and particles EMERGE from the underlying dynamics of conscious agents. I’m thinking of Donald Hoffman’s mathematically precise theory of conscious realism. His theory alone (and others like it, if they exist) escapes the devastating critique you point to.
@@WalterHassell The usage of the phrase "Donald Hoffman’s mathematically precise theory of conscious realism" invokes more of a wikipedia article abstract vibe then a informed opinion of a inquiring human being. Are you sure you know Hoffman's work? I do only know some third hand analysis (with citations nonetheless) and my impression is: desperate try to fill the vacuous "consciousness is fundamental" idea with some substance by misusing a lot of simple and complex mathematics, which is really not that hard, only laborious and pointless. Math is supposed to be a tool which we can use to efficiently inspect the properties of complex structures of reality, not the other way around - to invent them (well, it is used that way too, but only for fun!). But to the main point: Lead by motivated reasoning to invent a whole new semantics of language and completely different underlying reality Hoffman paradoxically reduces the rich meaning of the term "consciousness" to a mere synonym of "atom", because, ... suprise, suprise, ..., when you set something as "fundamental", it comes with the price of reducing the complexity of that "thing". Something cannot be fundamental and yet complex. Fundamental things tend to be simple and boring. Which, by the way, even christian theologians of the past understood and therefore digged themselves into that mess of divine simplicity.
@@WalterHassell I must admit that I had not considered theories that avoid supposing that the physical world exists - but does Hoffman really hold that view?
I take your point that the generalized knowledge argument is only relevant to hypotheses that 1) take Jackson's version of the knowledge argument as a strong argument against physicalism, and 2) in addition to claiming physicalism is false, also propose an alternative.
To be clear, my final sentence ("that's what makes it easier to argue against any one of them than for one") was referring only to the combination of many hypotheses and a paucity of data, and not to the generalized knowledge argument.
At no point Sean said physicalism will not eventually explain consciousness. In fact, he made it painfully clear that he believes the ongoing research is our best bet to provide such an explanation. If you pay any attention to modern research, you’d note a great deal of progress has been made in the last decades, so his belief seems perfectly reasonable.
Although I don't necessarily agree with Goff's panpsychism, Carroll spent the entire debate fundamentally misunderstanding his arguments. Carroll admits Mary learns something new when she left the room and is therefore also admitting neuroscientific knowledge can't possibly be the full description - i.e. Physicalism is false.
Incomplete & insufficient, not false…
@@christopherhamilton3621 Exactly, physicalism is insufficient which is literally what Goff is arguing. Physics/science cannot explain everything because it only describes physical properties and doesn't account for subjective experiences. That is why he's positing a theory that accounts for both the physical properties observed in science and the mental properties we know in consciousness.
@@OswaldMoggWhat does Philip propose and how does it explain anything? Because I really didn't get anything substantial from Philip in this talk other than: 1. physicalism doesn't do the job and 2. consciousness is fundamental.
“We could go on forever, couldn’t we?”
Just because we don't yet understand how the brain produces a "qualitative" experience, it doesn't mean we can't or won't.
This seems like a very obvious flaw in Philips argument.
He assumes that the emergence of qualitative experience is somehow unknowable.
As a fellow physicist who really likes Sean’s work, I did feel that he dodged engaging with the hard problem of consciousness. The issue is not that we can’t explain subjective experience as an internal representation of physical information in the brain, the issue (and Sean should know this) is that there is never just one representation of a given set of information. I know what red looks like to me and what blue looks like to me, yet if those representations of the colors were flipped in my perception of reality it would make no functional difference to how I navigate the world because all that matters in how I interact with the external world is my ability to distinguish one wavelength of light from one another. There as a continuum of possible ways that colors could be represented in my perception which would all serve equally well to allow me to distinguish one color from another. There is a degeneracy in how to map the set of physical stimuli onto the much larger set of possible subjective representations of those physical stimuli. It is a perfectly well formed question to ask why our perception of reality takes the particular form it does when there are other ways that our perception of world could have been that would be functionally the same but perceptually different. This is by definition outside the scope of physics because physics is about the information within a system, that which is invariant with respect to a change of the representation of the system, where as the hard problem of consciousness is about the lack of a 1-1 map between the physical information and any particular representation of it, yet our subjective experience is a single particular representation of that information.
A wonderfully well formed objection! However it seems to assert that we cannot in principle divine a reason why physical stimuli map to the perceptual representations they do. Why are you so certain of that? Isn’t it possible that there is a simple, contingent, evolutionary, neurological reason that we have the perceptual experiences we do? It seems like your objection is fundamentally epistemic and not ontological, which is what Philip seems to be concerned with.
There is no objective reference to your representations of red and blue. So "if they were flipped" is a pointless thought experiment. If there was some objective inquisition tool then maybe we could find out that my internal representation of seeing red is the same as yours of taste of chocolate, but that is in principle impossible. The only real issue I could think that the concrete instantiation of this mapping for you could raise is: how do multiple people correctly communicate their subjective perceptions of color of the same object and the answer there is very simple - the objective thing here is the wavelength and the mapping is learnt in childhood.
@@leoinstatenisland I think that we can get very far in understanding how different aspects of our perception of reality must relate to one another based on what physical information (stimuli, internal brain states etc…) is being represented to us through that perception. I am sure that neuroscience will reveal the process by which the brain constructs and interacts with mental “objects” within its internal model of reality. I am sure we will be able to someday watch a thought progress through someone’s brian under an MRI and decode facts about what the person is thinking/feelings
But we don’t have anyway of directly comparing our subjective experiences, short of physically merging our brains I suppose. If I communicate to you about what I am experiencing, you relate my words to your own version of those experiences. If I say I am hungry, you understand that in terms of your own experience of what hunger feels like, that’s all you can do. If you see on an MRI that the pain center of my brain is active, then you understand that in terms of your own experiences of what pain feels like. Our only understanding of subjective experience is our own and we make reasonable guesses about what other people might be experiencing by taking the objective facts about what is happening in their brain and relating that information back to what we know it would feel like to us if that same thing happened in our brain. An individual could learn the full map of how their brain states correspond to subjective experience by sitting in an MRI, having some fancy technology stimulate specific regions of the brain, and seeing what sensations they get from zapping each part of their brian. Any individual could learn what there personal physical-to-experiential correspondence is. But how do we compare subjective experiences between individuals? Language has its limitations, you can’t ever sufficiently describe the experience of seeing red to a color blind person. There could be differences in how to people experience something which we don’t have language to communicate and can’t develop any language to communicate it if we don’t even know what those differences are. Without a means of stepping strait into each others minds we can’t do a complete comparison of how our experiences may differ from those of other people.
But now I think I understand your point differently: Why is a persons internal representation that one that it is and not another one. But this is the type of question as "why are the physical constant the values that they are?" One obvious answer is: because it has to be one of the options and not multiple at the same time. And the actual set can be by chance, maybe there are some underlying constraints, we don't know. But this question isn't outside of physicalism and I don't think it is what Chalmers meant with "hard problem of consciousness" and if yes, then the "hard problem" is even more meaningless for me then I thought
The problem is. that we cannot explain how and why matter -neurons feel something in the first person, there is only the belief that these are the functions of neurons. And this is not a question of physics at all. So rest with your "colleague".
Sean's arguments are 'natural' and scientific, Philip's arguments are supernatural and magical. Its surprising the latter is still being seriously debated.
I mean just check the comments here. As long as the public thirsts for it things will never change
So consciousness is fundamental, and the earth must be the center of the universe. Right?
I would argue that consciousness *doesn't* affect behaviour - you could hypothetically program human behaviour in some kind of artificial machine. But that doesn't mean consciousness isn't important. If an entity can suffer, surely you must treat it differently than if it can't.
What this discussion is missing Kastrupian monistic idealism. No conversation about consciousness is complete without it. And Carroll is straw-manning the definition of consciousness…nothing new there.
I want to respect Philip, but I can't. He goes three times over the knowledge argument and either he is stupid or malicious. When Mary sees red for the first time, new neurological circuitry is activated. Sean says time and again that knowledge results from experience, not from reading about experiences. You don't learn to drive a car by reading about it because reading involves different circuits than driving. But Philips keeps adjudicating to Sean reasoning not Sean's but Philip's misunderstanding or malicious citation.
For Philip, when Mary does actually see red for the first time, all the circuitry was there because she read about it, but the magic dust of consciousness spills in her understanding the concept of red that Philip wants, so he can always win.
why is the audio/volume so friggin low, dear lord it's like whispers.
Yes, and then the ads interrupt at full volume!
Popcorn and chill..
Just waiting on human consensus between the nodes.. after all we create our own information (perspective, reality) as we go. Can't make fine wine without waiting.
Philip Chopra is hilarious.
Lol
How did you come up with that?! You must be a deepok thinker!
@@stupidas9466 Shhh, shhh, enough.
This of course a good talk, but it's obvious Carroll is much less convinced by the pertinence of his argument, than Goff is of his. I think this particularly because Carroll only dares to talk about *weak emergence*, because that is of course the logically more correct, defensible interpretation. Maximally philosophically pedantic it would have been a bit dishonest if he instead didn't separate emergence, and instead just talked about simple "emergence".
It would have been an understandable simplification, because this talk is intended for a popular audience. But he didn't do it, because he is aware that the mortal coup de grace against physicalism is the charge, that it requires **strong emergence** to get consciousness out of of colliding particles and wave functions.
Strong emergence is generally understood to be equivalent to positing that at some point something "magical" happens that can IMPOSSIBLY be ever described by human minds (because if it could, it would only be weak emergence).
Physics is behaviouristic. Only behaviours (eg. liquidity, photosynthesis) could be derived from physics. In order to claim that subjective experience can be derived from physics, one would also have to claim that subjective experience is just a behaviour. This amounts to eliminativism. So if one thinks that subjective experience emerges from physics, one is essentially of the opinion that subjective experience doesn’t exist.
1:38:50.... exactly, the interesting thought experiment is this: take away all those relational thoughts/answers you have and can come up with when experiencing red, or pain in your toe. One by one. What is it that is left then?
Professional philosophers can choose between supporting arguments for the supernatural and pseudoscience, or they can support arguments based on science. Panpsychists and pantheists choose the supernatural to support their arguments, although in the history of humankind there is no objective evidence for the supernatural existing. Philip Golff chips away at the respect I have for the discipline of philosophy. It's difficult to know if he's simply intellectually dishonest or a liar. His arguments are easy to compare to the word salad of Jordan Peterson and William Lane Craig.
love how sean opens his talk here. its very reminiscent of the "god of the gaps" argument theists have in the discussion regarding the existence of god; we dont understand x (yet) therefore god did it. its .. so naive, misguided and objectively wrong.
This is precisely backwards. Goff's argument is that physicalists can't explain redness so it must be panpsychism (like theists saying atheists can't explain X so it must be god). Carroll's argument is that the mere fact that physics hasn't explained redness, doesn't mean it can't. He's not arguing that physics is right *because* panpsychism hasn't explain redness, he thinks physics is right for other reasons completely aside from consciousness.
Awareness is the only constant of all experience what could be more fundamental to reality than that? Awareness is known by awareness alone.
Also, where is this “we can derive physics from consciousness” claim coming from? Bertrand Russell did not actually show this. I heard something about “Ramsey sentences” I think.
Glad to see that Goff seems to have learned something from his debates with Bernardo Kastrup. Looks like he's pivoted from his constitutive panpsychist views to the more general panpsychist framework under which something like idealism, could be considered a subsidiary theory. But shame on him for not at least mentioning idealism in his talk. Feels like a way to maintain brand consistency more than anything, and for a philosopher, that's lame.
BUT much bigger shame on Carroll here. He really really is out of his depth in these discussions. He could have started and ended his presentation with 28:32 and nothing of value would have been lost, save for giving us another example of why prominence in a given field in modern society is so often anti-correlative with deservingness of occupying said prominence (see also: Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, and Daniel Dennett.)
Carroll continues to make elementary mistakes about the very way in which we form theories. For instance, whenever he alludes to a correlation between observed patterns in the brain and states of consciousness, he's making the very same error as the "fewer pirates = more global warming" flub in reasoning that Pastafarians have spent the past two decades making fun of fundamentalist Christians for. Say it with me: Correlation does not equal causation! It's AS plausible on the evidence that consciousness causes brain states as the other way around. The key, as Goff points out (in an admittedly clumsy way), is which theory can account for the observations and muster the most explanatory power, while holding to the fewest assumptions. This is how proper theorizing is done, and Carrol would adhere to that principle in all other domains, right up until the point that his precious physicalism is challenged, at which time, he conveniently forgets that this is how rational theorizing works. Folks, this is your brain on scientism.
Honestly, if one can truly grasp this flaw in reasoning, the answer to the whole sordid conundrum just kind of falls into place:
1) Consciousness (which is to say, qualities of experience-i.e. the only thing one can ever have direct acquaintance with) is fundamental. In other words: is the ontological primitive of all reality, which presents itself as a field with different patterns of activity. [this is the only assumption, everything else follows from this.]
2) These different patterns of activity can be experienced either a) through direct acquaintance (that which one IS), or b) as that which one is NOT directly acquainted (as other to oneself). Those patterns of consciousness which have developed the capacity to make this distinction are what we call "life".
3) Through the evolutionary process, beings have evolved different ways of presenting the patterns of consciousness they are not directly acquainted with through, what one could call their "user interfaces".
4) Physics is the study and application of mathematical models (i.e. quantitative formulae) to the patterns of activity of the fundamental field of consciousness, rendered from a 3rd-person, objective (i.e. public) point of view. Physics itself has no way of getting at the private, 1st-person experience, which occurs in our personal minds.*
5) Matter, properly understood, is thus only a quantitative description we give to patterns occurring in the underlying field of consciousness. So too, things are not actually "things" but rather those "doings" of the field of consciousness with sufficiently stable extension into our time-space interfaces as to warrant a nominal designation of "thinginess". But to think of matter as having fundamental existence separate from the entire field of reality in which it is appearing, is to think that the wave is something over than the ocean in which it forms.
6) The brain is then, like all matter, the image/representation of specific patterns of conscious activity. So, the fact that the brain and conscious activity are correlated, or that damaging the brain-say, with a scalpel in surgery-affects consciousness is not at all surprising under this view. Here, one fundamentally conscious pattern represented by our interface as a physical object (the scalpel) is interacting with another fundamentally conscious pattern represented by our interface as a physical object (the brain), and the result is a changed fundamentally conscious pattern represented by our interface as a physical object (the cut brain). No appeals to physicalism necessary!
*(one might be tempted here to label the former as "b" and the latter as "a" from the bullet (2). However, when one carefully observes their own patterns of thought, one can see that even thoughts are encountered as other than the "I" doing the observing. In fact, even notions of "selfhood" are merely encountered by the "I" in this way. Only the fact of being the I falls under the "a" categorization in the above. But that can quickly get confusing, as it no doubt has here...)
Anyways, this is longer than I meant it to be. Apologies for that. But please, do yourself a favour and look up Kastrup's work-if you somehow haven't already. When, in the next few decades, the world has finally come around to analytic idealism, you'll be thankful.
TH-cam idealists are so weird lmao
@@nowonder6086 I don't disagree! I'd plead guilty to the weirdness charge. But you do see the basic mistake(s) Carroll is making, or no?
Lot of story, but one cannot stop wondering: why do you call the universal wave function "consciousness field". 😂
@@ark-LCarroll doesn't use correlation to imply causation. You got the basic idea completely wrong. He says that if there is correlation, then your new genius explanation must somehow explain that correlation too. So if we have an equation how particles in your brain behave (deterministic!) and your "fundamental consciousness" doing something correlates with that, then your "new stuff" either is the basis/underlies our equations (deterministic!) or it changes them somehow in a way we didn't observed yet.
@@ark-L no, I guess I don't think either side here is making a basic, obvious mistake. I am even in academic philosophy, although this isn't my area of specialization. I'm baffled that every time I click on a video like this, the comments are full of very confident idealists proclaiming their minority position is not only correct, which is fine, but obviously so, to the point where their opponents are clearly and obviously wrong.
🐟 02. A BRIEF SYNOPSIS OF “LIFE”:
Everything, both perceptible and imperceptible - that is, any gross or subtle OBJECT within the material universe that can possibly be perceived with the cognitive faculties, plus the SUBJECT (i.e. the observer of all phenomena) - is unknowingly to what most persons generally refer when they use the term “God”, since they usually conceive of Ultimate Reality as being the Perfect Person, and “God” is a personal epithet of the Impersonal Absolute. However, this anthropomorphized conception of The Monad is a fictional character of divers mythologies.
According to most every fully-enlightened sage in the history of the human species, Ultimate Reality is, far more plausibly, consubstantially and simultaneously, Absolutely NOTHING and Absolutely EVERYTHING - otherwise called “The Tao”, “The Great Spirit”, “(Param) Brahman”, “Cosmic Consciousness”, “Eternal Awareness”, “Independent Existence”, “Unconditioned Truth”, “Uncaused Nature”, “The Universal Self”, “The Ground of All Being”, “The Undifferentiated Substratum of Reality”, “The Unified Field”, et cetera - yet, as alluded to above, inaccurately referred to as a personal deity by the masses (e.g. “God”, “Allah”, “Yahweh”, “Bhagavan”, etc.). Subsequent chapters expand on this axiom.
In other words, rather than the Supreme Truth being a separate, Blissful, Supra-Conscious Being (The Godhead Himself, or The Goddess), Ultimate Reality is Eternal-Existence Limitless-Awareness Unconditional-Peace ITSELF. That which can be perceived, can not be perceiving!
This understanding can be factually-realized by studying a systematic method of introspection, called “gnosticism” (“jñāna yogaḥ”, in Sanskrit).
Because the Unmanifested Absolute (i.e. NO-THING) is infinite creative potentiality, “It” perpetually actualizes as the manifest creation (i.e. EVERY-THING), in the form of ephemeral, cyclical universes/multiverses. In the case of our particular universe, we reside in a cosmos consisting of space-time, matter and energy, and because phenomenal existence is dualistic, there cannot be a single object without at least one subject.
Just as a knife cannot cut itself, nor the mind comprehend itself, nor the eyes see themselves, The Absolute cannot know Itself (or at least objectively EXPERIENCE Itself), and so, has manifested this phenomenal universe within Itself for the purpose of experiencing Itself, particularly through the lives of self-aware beings, such as we sophisticated humans. Therefore, this world of duality is really just a play of consciousness within Consciousness, in the same way that a dream is a person’s sleeping narrative set within the life-story of an “awakened” individual.
PURPORTEDLY, this universe, composed of “mind and matter”, was created from the initial event (the so-called “Big Bang”), which started, supposedly, as a minute, slightly uneven ball of immeasurably-dense light, which in turn, was ultimately instigated by Extra-Temporal Supra-Conscious Bliss. From that primal event, every motion or action that has ever occurred, has been a direct or indirect result of that expansion.
Just as all the extant energy in the universe was once contained within the inchoate singularity, Infinite Consciousness was NECESSARILY present at the beginning of the universe, and is in no way an epiphenomenon of a neural network. Discrete consciousness, on the other hand, is entirely dependent on the neurological faculty of individual animals (the more highly-evolved the species, the greater its cognitive abilities).
“Sarvam khalvidam brahma” (a Sanskrit maxim from the “Chandogya Upanishad”, meaning “all this is indeed Brahman” or “everything is the Universal Self alone”). There is NAUGHT but Eternal Being, Conscious Awareness, Causeless Peace - and you are, quintessentially, that!
This “Theory of Everything” can be more succinctly expressed by the mathematical equation: E=A͚ (Everything equates to Infinite Awareness).
HUMANS are, essentially, this Eternally-Aware-Bliss, acting through an extraordinarily-complex biological organism, comprised of the eight rudimentary elements - pseudo-ego (the assumed sense of self), intellect, mind, solids, liquids, gases, heat (fire), and ether (three-dimensional space). When one peers into a mirror, one doesn’t normally mistake the reflected image to be one’s real self, yet that is how we humans conventionally view our ever-mutating forms. We are, rather, in a fundamental sense, that which witnesses all transitory appearances.
Everything that can presently be perceived, both tangible and immaterial, including we human beings, is a culmination of the primary manifestation. That is the most accurate and rational explanation for “karma” - everything was preordained from the initial spark, and every subsequent action has unfolded as it was predestined in ETERNITY, via an ever-forward-moving trajectory. The notion of retributive (“tit-for-tat”) karma is just that - an unverified notion. Likewise, the idea of a distinct, reincarnating “soul” or “spirit”, is largely a fallacious belief.
Cont...
You need to relate this back to the video in question otherwise it is just spam.
get out of it.
Even you knowing or experiencing something is behavior, just self-reflected behavior. They eye can see itself of course, it takes a mirror to do that, and the brain can know itself by experiencing itself and it just needs the brain to do that.
To me the key thought experiment is this: Given two exactly equivalent apparatus, one known to be conscious, do you deduce that the other is conscious too? My answer: Yes, if and only if you add this as a fundamental axiom to your logical system. There can’t be any debate about the axiom as long as it can’t be tested experimentally. Which by construction (see “equivalent” above) should be hard, if not impossible. But be aware of a corrolary: without this axiom, you must deduce that you are the ONLY being which is concious. All others around you are not. Which probably means you are kind of in a simulation, dreaming or whatever. So what the axiom does really add is the assumption that reality isn’t just a complete illusion. Most people therefore would add this axiom to their thinking. Which somehow decides and ends this debate.
It sometimes feels as if today's world is dominated by physicists who may not fully grasp the nuances of philosophical arguments. Sean Carroll didn't snag the victory here!
Where the hell do you think this twerp was anywhere close to saying anything coherent, let alone snagging victory?
The “nuances” lol. And it sometimes feels that philosophers think they are on equal footing to centuries of established physical knowledge based on reproducible data, all because they claim to have “thought very hard” as Goff said multiple times.
Goff fails to show Sean doesn’t understand the knowledge argument, as I continue giving a similar sounding rebuttal as Sean’s original every iteration I hear Goff discuss the knowledge argument: experiencing red is not a “new fact” beyond what would be obtainable through physicalist means, it’s an arrangement of neurons that could be perfectly described by a physical theory.
@@coreyleander7911 If you're struggling to understand this concept, I recommend considering a philosophy course. I prefer not to explain it here, as I've recently had an extensive discussion with someone else who also had difficulty understanding it. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Sean Carroll arguing that more detailed neurocorrelations of conciousness will make the hard problem disappear is like arguing that a near perfect simulation of kidney function on my computer will make it pee on the desk (as Bernardo Kastrup always argues) . It's a category error and a symptom of the metaproblem of concioisness - namely that he just doesn't get the implications of the hard problem.
That analogy isn't doing anything here, we know what a category error is and the whole point of the debate is that we physicalist say it is not a category error and you idealist people say it is.
@@ivanvnucko3056If that analogy isn’t an effective intuition pump for you, see my main comment on here for why Sean’s view is unscientific re consciousness
@Enderismypseudonym Not a problem of pumping intuition, I said I know what a category error is, I don't need this analogy, and it is lame anyway.
"Any good scientist would want a theory that says “here’s why these neuro correlates correspond to the taste of chocolate, and could not correspond to the taste of raspberry, for PRINCIPLED reasons.” - Now this a category error for me. What if you have it backwards? Maybe "taste of raspberry" is a state definition and there are no PRINCIPLED reasons it is not the "taste of chocolate" other than the person experiencing it sees himself putting a raspberry into his mouth and not chocolate and ate both of them already in the past and can remember.
@@ivanvnucko3056 You just gave me a (hypothetical) principled reason why one would taste one taste as opposed to another. It looks like we’re both scientifically-minded men who expect principled reasons of some sort for our experiences.
Sean Carroll is not such a man.
@@WalterHassellI strongly disagree... and you can choose the part or parts of your comment it applies😂
I wish the ORC OR hypothesis was included in this debate.
Goff's ENTIRE argument is just one giant appeal to ignorance fallacy. Again, like sean says, his argument explains nothing. He believes that because physics cant explain consciousness, it must be fundamental. In his last rebuttal, he mentions that we "need" a connecting theory, and because physics can't connect them at this very moment, his theory must be right. The absence of current physical evidence does not prove ANYTHING about his claim. A whole debate about nothing 😂😂😂
44:45 This entire section where Goff ridicules Carroll's argument is entirely baffling to me. A physicalist would say that a blind person cannot experience "redness" because there's something physically broken with said person. Why would anyone expect a physicalist to think the opposite? It's actually the pan psychist that could hypothesize some way of transferring the experience of "redness" to the blind person despite the broken physical apparatus.
Goff might as well claim that a materialist should expect a non functioning stove to still boil the water. It would make just as little sense.
This is a good point. I mean I'm amazed Sean Carroll is so patient with all these people who obviously don't understand basic science. They don't understand the limits of science and meaning. They're really just magical thinkers, wrapping up their religious impulse in philosophical, vague philosophical, assertions.
Everything is best understood as physical systems. And consciousness is one specific almost infinitely complex type of physical system. The attributes of human beings cannot be prescribed onto electrons or atoms or rocks or dirt. It's just an incredibly different scale of physical complexity
That's not what Goff said. He made it very clear that he was not talking about a blind person having the actual experience of redness. He said it multiple times. Rather, under a physicalist paradigm, the blind person would have some kind of knowledge of the redness just from learning about the physical facts.
To extend his thought experiment a little: imagine we have the technology to stimulate a person's visual cortex to make them see red. So after the blind person learns every physical fact about color experience, we stimulate their brain to experience red. The physicalist should expect the blind person to say "yeah, that's basically how I imagined it would feel like", whereas the non-physicalist would expect them to say "wow, I could never have imagined that's what the experience of color was like!" Which seems more likely to you?
@@APaleDot dude this is so crazy! Materialism or physicalism doesn't say that learning about a topic is the same as doing it. You've created this total strawman argument. Obviously learning about what fire is and actually starting fires are two different things. But just because they're different doesn't mean fire is more than the burning of hydrocarbons according to a certain chemical reaction. Just because the actuality of fire is more than the book definition doesn't mean the book definition is wrong or incomplete.
Just stick with the basic idea of a fire. No one says we don't know what fire is right? In the same way consciousness is just a much more complicated chemical reaction that doesn't mean it's anything more than a physical chemical reaction...
I mean seriously you don't get the point that learning about something and having a description in a book is obviously different than the thing in itself...
It doesn't mean that physicalism is incomplete just means that our descriptions of things are different than the things they are describing...
It's the same way that a map is different than the terrain it describes that doesn't mean the map is wrong. Or a picture of something is different than the thing you are taking the picture of. That doesn't mean the picture is incomplete...
Saying that everything is conscious, is just like saying everything is God, it doesn't add any kind of real explanation. You're just creating this fantasy world.
Obviously everything is not conscious. Tables and chairs and rocks and electrons and photons are not conscious in the same way that people are. It's a completely meaningless use of language. It's obviously just people's magical inclinations and the need for fantasy
@@origins7298
I'm sorry but your fire example is really bad. If I knew all the physical facts about fire, I would know what shape it would take. I would know what wavelengths of light it would emit. I would know what byproducts it would produce and what temperature it would burn at. If you then actually showed me a fire, I would say "yeah, that's basically what I expected" because it corresponds exactly to the facts I learned in the book. No such correspondence exists for experiences.
"Obviously everything is not conscious."
We literally don't know. Obviously tables and chairs don't have thoughts like we do, because thoughts are just patterns in the brain. But we have absolutely no idea what subjectivity is, except that we experience it directly and privately.
@@APaleDot yeah but consciousness or life, on a human scale of complexity, is billions of times more complex than fire. Of course we can't know conscious experience just from a linguistic description
In other words obviously learning about neurons and neural connections is much different than the experiences we have because the scales of complexity are way different
And I don't agree with your fire description. Even if you knew all of the wavelengths of light as a physics description that wouldn't tell you the experience of seeing a fire or a raging fire taking out a whole forest .
It's just common sense that descriptions are different than the things they are describing
Just like a map of the United States is much different than actually traveling around the United States
Anyway, you seem like a reasonably intelligent guy, just tell me what is Philip Goff actually adding to the conversation in terms of understanding the world ?
What does it even mean to say that everything is conscious or consciousness is fundamental? It's totally nonsensical gibberish
How does it help us understand the world better ?
If a baby is starving or people are starving around the world does saying everything is consciousness in any way help people understand the world and alleviate human suffering and create infrastructure
It's the same thing as religious mumbo jumbo. At the end of the day praying doesn't feed a baby. Believing in God doesn't help us understand the world. And saying everything is consciousness doesn't help at all clarify what the hell is going on
It's obvious that consciousness is something that involved as life evolved over billions of years on earth
I mean we know what life is and we know how it has evolved over billions of years. Consciousness is just a word we use to describe the evolved abilities of certain organisms
I mean come on let's all study some biology and chemistry and physics and actually learn about the world instead of just making up nonsense that doesn't do anything but give people warm and fuzzy feelings or sci-fi fantasies or whatever
Sean bypasses the hard problem (which is about ontology) by switching the frame to epistemology. Nobody disagrees that we can describe different aspects of reality via different descriptive systems.
How do you propose to provide an account in ontology without using epistemology?
More concretely, Sean’s point fundamentally is about empiricism vs theology. Panpsychism is a theological belief. It has the same “explanatory” power as the belief that Vishnu is the fundamental force underlying reality. This is why Goff can’t offer any explanations or predictions that could be tested.
@@miedzinshs
Panpsychism can't be equated with theism. You must know that.
Goff here presents panpsychism as something that is supposedly true, but also non-testable and outside the realm of science. If that is not a theological belief, what is it?
@@rooruffneck it’s theism for academics who are afraid they won’t get tenure if they start talking about a soul in their undergraduate lecture.
@@leoinstatenislandWhat version of Theism are you ascribing to Goff? Christian Theism - for instance - is a form of philosophical substance dualism. Goff is not a philosophical substance dualist nor is he proposing any such thing. The distinction between what Goff is proposing and the standard religious concept of a soul is clear, sharp, and not at all hard to understand.
From auditing the opening speech of Sean it's apparent that he has not understood the nature of the hard problem of consciousness. Using rhetoric and sarcasm to mask the significance of the issues raised, he simply eulogizes the materialistic ideology. He forgets that the physicalist approach is suited only to objective material phenomena. The subjective first person experience that consciousness is, is beyond the pale of and transcendental to the physical world of material phenomena. Indeed, consciousness is the apprehender of nature, not nature itself.
It's not a material phenomenon. It's a necessary assumption about your fellow human beings. It's what we derive the golden rule from. Drop that assumption and humans will immediately proceed to make life like hell on Earth for other humans.
About the knowledge argument, Sean assumes knowing what it's like to see red = seeing red. But! The panpsychist assumes that if physicalism is true then it's logically possible to know what things are like without experiencing them.
Thoughts?
Uh, not ever did I believe Sean intended to convey that knowing what it's like to see red = seeing red. He simply says, Mary can both know every physical fact about red, and when she walks outside, there will be new neural pathways that have not been taken before. He doesn't think there is a conflict between the two. It's in his slide!
Kudos to Sean for being able to treat such an idiotic conspirationist with patience and elegance.
go Sean 🎉🎊🤸🤸♂🤸♀🏋🏋♂🏋♀ he nailed it yet again!!!!!🏆🏆🏆
We only feel there’s an interesting explanatory gap w/ concs. because it’s not yet explained physically. Successful physical explanations include persuasive arguments that close the gap, by connecting theory about cold hard matter with our first hand impressions. It’s not always easy. Some dualists still hold out for an elan vitale.
Ironically, some skeptics claim that physics has no explanatory gaps, while there are gaps all over the place! There’s no explanation for how the dynamics of fundamental particles causes the electromotive force, for example. It’s just “the way things are”. This is why scientists tend to be physicalists about consciousness: It’s not that we’re devoted to matter, it’s that we used to these fuzzy-edge cases where scientific theory is just a good enough story, with some data to back it up, that models whatever the real thing is. Many panpsychists are much more confident about scientific explanations generally than they should be.
Panpsychism explains how the laws of physics are downstream from human consciousness, but it doesn't explain how the motion or distribution of stars can be better and more clearly explained in terms of the consciousness of the stars than by using the laws of physics.