The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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This is a lecture video about "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience" by David Chalmers. In this 2002 article from Scientific American, Chalmers distinguishes the easy problems of consciousness from what he calls the hard problem of consciousness. He explains how there are three broad responses to the hard problem (optimistic reductionism, mysterianism, and dualism, though he does not use the term "dualism"), and how all current neuropsychological research only attempts to solve the easy problems. There is also discussion of potential psychophysical laws. This is part of an introductory philosophy course.
Consciousness is mysterious and all, sure. But how you're able to write backwards from your perspective is what really blows my mind!
You are not the first to ask this question. Here is the answer: kzhead.info/sun/acOdZJiao5OVenk/bejne.html
Thanks! One of the clearest and fairest discussions about the Hard Problem out there. Could you share your opinion on this (only if you've got nothing better to do)? Is trying to explain how experience is possible in purely physical terms possible, or is it a category error? Seems like a category error to me. _At the very least,_ there must be some property of matter that we don't understand or know about--although I don't think that's what's going on...
@@BugRib In case you are not only interested in Jeffrey Kaplans answer: It is not a category error, since systems can have emergent/higher features/functions. An example would be the fluidity of water, which cannot be observed in a single H2O-molecule. In abstract: A system can perform functions, that none of its parts can on their own. Therefor, no single neuron has to be or even can be conscious on its own.
@@petermeyer6873 - But wetness or fluidity is just a coarse-grained description of the behavior of zillions of H2O molecules. The same is true of every other weakly “emergent” phenomenon, including life. Even if we can’t currently explain the “emergence” of a particular phenomenon, there’s no reason in principle that it can’t be explained in terms of its parts. But experience isn’t like that. The way “red” appears to me, or the way pain feels, can’t be derived even in principle from the behavior of a bunch of parts. For one thing, any physical system can in principle be exhaustively described in purely quantitative terms, at least according to standard physicalism. But it’s logically impossible to derive the purely qualitative way that “red” appears to us in experience in purely quantitative terms. No mathematical operation will ever spit out the pure quality of experienced red. This is one reason (there are others) why experience cannot be explained in terms of weak (i.e. non-magical) emergence. This is also the reason why lots of philosophers and scientists seriously (claim to) believe that these experiential qualities literally don’t exist at all. I agree with philosopher Galen Strawson on this: That is the silliest claim ever made with a straight face by an intelligent person. When physicalism forces one to take a position like that, it’s probably time to give up physicalism. IMHO.
@@BugRib Im not in the least referring to emergence as something, that appears unexplainable from the features of the parts forming a system - quite the contrary! I totally agree with your analogue continuation of the water example. Im just pointing out, that emergent features of a system sometimes are hard to foresee and thus pose a problem to understanding in the way that they might not be intuitive and therefor may be "hard" to accept. (And frankly this is exactly what I suspect for Chalmers to be the "hard" in his definition of the hard problem: He has a hard time accepting the simplicity of the answer to his question) Thus emergent appearance of features often might be kind of rejected at first glance. It just sometimes feels that emergence cant be a complete explanation for some features and something "more" is still expected and felt to have been overlooked, even when there is simply nothing to be added to it. I think consciousness is just such a case of overexpectations of some, who are not satisfied by the most obvious explanation that the current status of science points to. With what you call "qualitative" experiences (Id rather call these "subjective") it seems to me to be the same. And by the way, I dont see so much Philosophers going so far denying, that these exist, but rather claiming that these are not as much stand alone features as they seem, but more the other side of the allready known, same coin (the subjective, much reduced experience of an objective world through senses). I also dont see such a sharp division between what you call qualitative and quantitative features: First, if I remember correctly from university decades ago, there is more cathegories than only these 2 and second any quantitative feature is also a qualitative one. In sum I have to disagree with your statement on experience: The way red appears to you or the way pain feels to you can be derived exactly the same with all physical parts that make, feed info to and support your personal nervous-system. Also any simulation of these parts forming that system - if it could only be carried out, would show that. Your experiences are no doubt quite subjective and therefor unique, with that uniqueness deriving from the sheer complexity of your system, but there is nothing Ive come across, that even just points out to experience beeing in need of something supernatural/magical to exist or be explained. And you so far have not given any hint to why that should be either. You have just expressed ( and an expression is not an explanation) how counter-intuitive ( "...the silliest claim ever...") it seems to you, that what you experience subjectively could be just an emergent function of your nervous system. Lets try another analogy, even so Im sure it wont work well, as there is allmost nothing that consiousness can be compared to: Todays passenger cars have evolved (by intentional design) to be a good means of transporting humans along streets. The human brain and consciousness have evolved (by natural evolution = unintentional design) to be a good means of solving problems humans come across during their struggle through life. The passenger car can also transport other beeings as passengers and some dead stuff quite well to a certain extend. The human brain and consciousness have prooven enormously capable at solving problems far beyond the scope of what humans encountered during their developement from wild up to today. A passenger car fails at transporting another passenger car as a passenger, as it was never designed for that recursive task. Consciousness has a "hard" time understanding consciousness, as it was never designed for that recursive task.
I’m commenting on an old video, but I just found this channel. I used to believe that consciousness was independent from the physical world. Then, I had a traumatic brain injury from a severe impact, which caused a fundamental change to my personality and my conception of my self. Basically, it felt like a change to my “soul,” whatever that is. I realized later on that we are far more physical creatures than I believed. If a hard hit to the head can change the way we understand and see the world and ourselves, then that implies to me that consciousness is a physical process that can be affected by physical events. This would be hard to research, as most ethicists would be opposed to deliberately causing brain damage to subjects to uncover the specific effects that trauma does to the human psyche.
I think you're right, but more importantly advances in neuroscience point in that direction. It appears as though whatever consciousness is it is a product of a brain and thus is directly impacted by physical interaction with the brain, as you are very aware..... P.S. I hope you're doing OK re. that brain injury, for what it's worth I wish nothing but the best for you.
Rough way to learn something. I hope you recover. My question to dualists is simple, if consciousness isn't physical, why does anesthesia work?
Consciousness is an emergent properties of biological processes, it serves a biological function, and is contained within the biology of the creature, however it is an emergent property which has a real identity and must consume (in some form) energy which it gets from the body and returns that energy back to the body in order to move matter around in your brain to enact movement. You decide when to move your fingers, your consciousness has to have the ability to make that occur. So consciousness is dependent on your biology and the knowledge and memories it has are put their by you, but that doesn't mean consciousness is the brain. Consciousness and the brain are tied, but not identical. The brain has properties consciousness does not, namely it's made of matter, takes up space, and interactions with reality through chemicals and electricity. Consciousness has properties the brain does not. You can have a body without consciousness (a corpse) or a body with consciousness (a living being) but you cannot have consciousness without a body. So you are correct, a blow to the head can affect your self-made soul (that living being with goals and desires which your consciousness is looking to form through experience and memories) but consciousness is not just the brain itself, but it does get it's material from the storage unit called the brain and if you lose parts of your brain, you lose access to that part of your soul.
@@ApostateltsopA I am not a dualist per say as I am more accurately an Objectivist which someone might argue has a dualist approach but it would be entirely wrong to categorize the two philosophies together, HOWEVER, I have an answer to your question. Consciousness is NOT physical, it's mental, in fact the ONLY reason we have a word for physical is because we experience the physical mentally. Without consciousness being mental, physical would have no meaning. Anaesthesia works by disrupting the dipole oscillations of the pi resonance clouds of molecules in a tubulin in the microtubules of neurons. Consciousness is a quantum biological process, and anesthesia works by preventing the quantum state from reaching superposition. Let me flip this script on you: If consciousness is physically and anaesthesia removes consciousness, then how do nerves work? The point of anaesthesia is to make the nerves fire normally without the patient feeling the experience, so the brain surgeon can poke this part of the brain and can see the muscles still twitch so he knows he didn't destroy the patients nerves. So the body is still functioning at 100% of the bodies capacity, and yet no conscious experience. If consciousness is physically, then why do the nerves work without it? What did you remove from the physical which is physical and yet left the original physical parts still fully operational?
@ExistenceUniversity your error is in saying that the body 100% still works. That's assuming your conclusion. As an example, you can strike your funny bone and lose feeling in your hand temporarily. Nerve function has been temporarily and locally impaired. Just like you have the limited impairment of anesthesia. It's not 100% working its been deliberately and specifically impaired. Your "mental stuff" is evidently the result of and linked to physical processes. If you want to take a dualist approach, and that is the correct label for adding a second category of thing, then you need to present evidence for the second category and explain a means of identifying it. Otherwise the two things model is less parsimonious and it's just a different form of vitalism.
That was awesome. Thank you for making such efforts to educate people. Would love to hear more about David Chalmers and Dualism.
I deeply enjoy your presentations! Thank you for explaining so thoroughly and, when possible, visually, these notoriously difficult topics!
You're very welcome! Glad you are enjoying them.
@@jeffreykaplan1 They are very good except some zionist ant......hite frankfurt school proselytising against europeans. But you can't help that because you are jewish.
What value in a clever clear-thinking teacher. I'm not the shiniest penny in the till but while Kaplan's presentation is less than 30 minutes, he was able to get across a complex topic even I could grasp. No mean feat.
Ty for the excellent presentation. It was recommended by a teacher of advaita vedanta who has referred to Chalmers in a lecture about Consciousness and a logical flaw in The Hard Problem approach.
Who else thinks a better name for "mysterianism" might be "pessimistic reductionism"?
Right with you!
I giveupism.
Pessimistic reductionism sounds like it's going to be very hard to reduce it instead of it being plainly impossible
@@ruthoglesby1805 😂😂 hahaha
Those categories are weird and illogical. Dualism makes no sense. If there's some paralel "dimension" of spiritual phenomena - it's still a part of physics, we just don't know how to poke it yet. So you still have to decide between optimistic reductionism or mysterianism. And latter sounds like a scientific wrapper for religion. Why would something that objectivelly exists be absolutely incomprehensible?
loved this, so insightful!
Thank you so much. I really like how you explain things
You're welcome. Glad it was helpful!
Excellent class, teacher! A suggestion: it would be interesting to include in the video or in the description the bibliographic sources presented in the class. It would make our life easier.
They're all linked from the channel description page.
Thank you for a clear explanation of the hard problem. There is an explanation that “solves” it though (please bear with me). Here is a brief summary: 1) First person subjective consciousness is the one irrefutable fact of reality. Remember, illusions are also 1st person subjective experiences. 2) Objective phenomena (world, others, even self) are appearances within consciousness. They may or may not have reality outside of consciousness, outside of appearance. 3) Objective (physical) reality is a closed system, and thus has no apparent use and no apparent explanation for subjective consciousness. 4) Therefore, the most logical explanation for reality is a form of idealism in which the stuff of realty is experience, and objective phenomena are law-governed appearances or illusions. There are definitely esthetic concerns with this explanation ( for example, it’s not obvious how more than one actual subject is involved. “Others” in this scenario are “just “ appearances also. So much more to discuss, but that’s the basic idea, and I’d love to hear logical objections to it.
A neurobiologist who lives in southern California...but whatever. He won the Nobel prize for the structure of DNA.
For me, consioussness doesn´t seem like an epiphenomenon and it looks like subjective experience does have some causality over the phisical world. For instance, there wouldn´t be philosophers phisically talking and writing about the hard problem of consciusness if consciousness didn´t exist, it would be too much coincidence for zombies to talk so coherently about something never experienced. Thanks for the videos! I found the channel today and it really deserves much more subscribers, nice clarity and rythm, saludos de argentina.
Each person knows that they themselves is not a zombie, thus clearly other people also have conscious experience.
@@goldie6634 but I only know I'm not a zombie because I know of my consciousness. But how could my zombie body also be aware of this if my conscious being wasn't physically interacting with it in some way? Like he said, if you throw out all physical connection it's just a coincidence. this is why I don't agree with epiphenomenon or even dualism. I guess I must be mysterionist according to these definitions.
@@HopUpOutDaBed it’s your zombie body that’s “aware” of it in the first place. Even a simple AI can be “aware” of a fact in that sense. Your conscious experience merely reflects that awareness. It doesn’t actually affect the awareness, it only mirrors it.
There wouldn't be philosophers talking about the existence of God if God didn't exist. Or unicorns, or Atlantis. We make these words, we give them meaning, in fact consciousness is just a "sensation" we cannot really describe. And the cool thing about the brain is that it experiences whatever we believe in, that's its purpose, adapt, believe whatever it takes to survive. If consciousness is outside of physical reality, why do we need sleep? Why do chemicals affect our perceptions? Why do genetics play a role in our view of the world? Can we say that a human without any sense of perception of the outside reality is conscious? Conscious of what? The problem with the "hard problem of consciousness" is that it detaches the two realms and puts consciousness into a magical box. It poses the problem by already defining an answer. All these thought experiments make it seem as if we know more about the world than scientists who dedicated decades studying the merely "physical" reality. And it makes their job that much harder by mystifying our sense of consciousness.
@@rayremnant.u the existence of philosophers taking about the existence of god or unicorns or Atlantic or consciousness does NOT mean any of these things have any physical existence. It only means they exist as concepts.
Spectacular presentation.
Amazing stuff. I wish I was one of your students. Have you published any work I could read?
I think that trying to solve the hard problem gives rise to the hard problem. We're trying to look for reasons why and how consciousness emerges. But the why and how ARE physical, objective reasons for something which clearly is not physical. Consciousness is to the brain what a story is to a book. Or a law is to a piece of legislation (or legal document). The story itself is not physical but the book contains physical elements that describe it and express it. But how does the stuff of the book impact the story? It doesn't. The story is independent of the book. The book is only a holder/container for the story. And there can be multiple copies of books which project the story. The story itself exists on it's own. It is a an abstract conceptual thing. Only when matter comes to influence and interact with the story can it be experienced.
The story exists on its own? How so, why do you believe this, and what evidence can you provide to demonstrate that it exists independent of physical hardware (a 🧠)? Consciousness has only ever been found to exists in brains. Doesn’t mean it cannot exists elsewhere, but simply means we don’t have reason to believe it does.
Without consciousness the book contains no story.
Neat idea. And yes, the same book with the same letters and still it's a different story for everybody.
i love hearing this in my right ear
I'm immensely entertained by the way you introduce deeply complex and cutting edge material and immediately drop "whatever" afterwards, because the details aren't meaningfully informative upon the thing being considered and it's exactly the point at which my brain is coming to that conclusion.
*_You Are Your Brain & Your Brain Is You_** ;* We have yet to find evidence that it's possible, for a _"conscience thinking mind"_ to exist, without a _"living functioning brain"._ If your memories & personality are separate from your brain, _(in a soul),_ then *they would not be effected by damage to the brain.* _(but they are)_ Even though we don't know the exact process by which consciousness arises, it is still _undeniable that it is a brain process that can't occur, separate from the brain._
I am interested in your opinion about Gazzaniga work. I read The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind
You're very good at this. 👍
Guys, these problems are very old and I am amazed that one can talk about them without referring to the past, as if we moderns and American researchers and academics were the smartest guys ever who did philosophy. Did you know that in Buddhism, a religious psychology and philosophy that arose in the fifth century BC, the number of types of consciousness (called "dharmas") varies from 8 to no less than 89? You probably don't. That's how narrow and oblivious of other traditions this whole thing is! Chalmers is a Harvard version of Descartes, i.e. philosophy without the beauty of sixteenth-century French and Latin prose. A very important distinction since philosophy is artistry, too. The parallelism or correspondence between physical phenomena and consciousness resembles arguments made by Spinoza or Leibnitz mutatis mutandis. The easy problems of consciousness are related with what Aristotle calls the material and efficient (be)causes; the hard problem has everything to do with the other two (be)causes: the definition and final purpose of consciousness. Obviously, given the nature (you can call it it a "bias", one that is rooted in philosophy by the way, although most scientists would deny it) of present Western scientific inquiry, the last two questions can never be answered satisfactorily. On the one hand, scientists are telling us they have observed some physiological phenomena related with brain activity and WHICH THEY CONSIDERS TO BE THE COMPLETE CAUSE OR EXPLANATION of consciousness (what about simple correlation or just necessary condition, huh? who says light would not be light without an eye to see it?)) and then they go on to say that consciousness is nothing but a subjective apprehension of sensory data. I mean, talk of being BLIND to what one is doing because one has hidden assumptions one is unwilling or incapable to examine! When scientists say the physiological processes explain consciousness are they observing the explanatory nature of the aforesaid processes? Are they actually perceiving the causality? Not at all. This is a very biased, incomplete and hasty conclusion. It is a CONCEPTUAL INTERPRETATION of SOME sensory data. But scientists treat those scientific observations, the shock and pony show of chemical and electric reactions, as if they transcended mere subjectivity and were capable by themselves to explain the brain. Then, oblivious of the activity of analyzing the data, they blithely explain consciousness WITHOUT referring to its conceptual activity at all. That won't do, sorry; and the fact that we accept such errors so easily and unquestioningly is a testament to the deeply entrenched prejudices we harbor in our minds ever since science and its slavish philosophical progeny of empiricism, rationalism and critical idealism have had the final word on everything. All the hard problems of consciousness come from the naive realistic view, one Hume and Kant adopted without examining it, that the knower is a separate entity from the known, that the observer and the observed are and can never be one. The truth is knowledge is immediate, not transcendent. Here is the solution to all the futile paradoxes and unnecessary riddles.
yes very well said. I agree strongly as someone who has been studying mahayana buddhism for a number of years
I don't immediately understand how that should resolve any problem... you are saying that the observer and the observed are the same... so consciousness is a thing that tricks us to not realize that? I feel as if the redness of red is being observed... not as if I am that too... so?? please explain how it is that this explains (in some factual sense) consciousness. Thank you
.I dont think it would be too dogmatic to clearly differentiate between the natural sciences-physics maths chemistry biology - and the Social Sciences-psychology Philosophy sociology etc. In trying to understand/explain "conciousness", the natural sciences are less speculative, based as they are on evidence, testing, experimentation etc- what is called the scientific method . .
Thank you for laying out so clearly Chalmer's article, must admit he was brilliant creating the circular reasoning in positing the hard problem and proposing a dualist solution so that the hard problem will forever remain hard and "unsolved", a gordian knot.
@Luigi Simoncini It isn't circular, though. The hard problem is, indeed, a hard problem, and no-one has even come close to offering a physicalist solution to it. You are welcome to suggest one.
@@Brian.001 I believe Dennett has offered a defensible materialist position regarding the subjective experience, as have earlier comments on this show. Disagreeing with one's position is not evidence of the validity of another's, nor is incredulity, imho.
@@ruthoglesby1805 OK, but what do you mean by 'defensible'? If the question is 'how can subjective experience arise within a material brain?' and someone replies that subjective experience is nothing more than objective processes, they might conceivably turn out to be right - who knows - but they haven't in any way explained how this can be the case.
@@Brian.001 I think Dennett's example of a graphic user interface is illustrative. But, it may still be missing your point. My question then is what definition of subjective experience captures the 'essence' beyond the physical?
@@ruthoglesby1805 Well, I think that question carries a presupposition that the essence is, indeed, 'beyond the physical', but I am not claiming that to be the case. I don't know whether subjective experience actually goes beyond the physical. Rather, I know what subjective experience is, from having it, and then my question is 'how can this be a physical phenomenon?' I claim that we do not need a definition of subjective experience. I know that I am in pain, for example, before I even begin to think about definitions. We all know the subjective experience of being in pain - but how can that be nothing other than the firing of C-fibres in the brain? I don't have a clue, and I don't think Dan has either.
Good work!
Appreciated breakdown ^^ The Hard Problem seems like 1) unfalsifiable to differentiate and 2) requiring committal to its existence despite any number of suggestion that consciousness is emergant, regardless if otherwise.
“All is mind” - The Kybalion. I.e. monism
Love your classes 👏 It would be great if you reviewed this lecture to include Kastrup and Hoffman’s theory of Analytic Idealism which substantially advances metaphysics aligning it with new quantum theories and geometries
Enjoyable presentation. Thank you. Have you read Dr. Johnjoe McFadden's latest paper?
all of your videos are great
Roger Penrose spoke about this lack of knowledge about consciousness. He mentioned a few things we know about. For instance that we know how to turn it off with sedatives and that it seems to originate on the surface of neurons.
Thank you 🙏
I like to think that the brain is an abstraction machine. A processor connected to a sensory apparatus. The sensory apparatus includes input and output as well as storage and is all an abstraction of the interaction experience. Without the extraction of the sensory apparatus structure the processor function could not work as there would be no data. Cognative function only begins when the initial sensory stimuli is received. This function begins building sets based on experiences and abstraction of comparative elements. The abstraction of these sets continues to build models to understand and interact with the stimuli. This is the begining of conciousness. There are many model sets being built, allowing the sophistication of an intellect and personality of the individual to grow. There is a plataeu based on requirement of abstraction the individual needs in their enviorment, habit of abstraction and interest in learning or discovering things. This seems to reflect in an individual based on the regular interactive cohorts they keep, and activities they take part in or not. So change the enviorment change the mind. This may not remain my theory if I get feedback that helps me move to a better model or reconcille it to somewhere inbetween. I just think it seems to fit quite well as a process. It is something that came to me when pondering Rene Descartes 'I think therefore I am', and applying concepts of everything being a function to a non well founded universal set model. The idea was how cognition begins, how sets would be formed. I concluded that whilst the thinker could not be sure of anything about themselves they could be sure of the following. That any cognition that occurs would require an abstraction apparatus regardless of form, that any cognition receiving data could gain enough sophistication to identify the 'function set model'. That all ideas sit in the universal set model and that includes the well founded set models. That the reality of the situation must exist as a set model, even if the thinking mind can not find it. That the mind can abstract a model adequate enough to be a non well founded set within the reality set model they are experiencing with some well founded sets inside that greater model. That this is adequate enough for the interactions the mind perceives are taking place, provided the mind continues the quest for understanding.
Have you spoken about Churchland’s arguments? Im trying to find a défense for physicalism for my essay, any help? Thank you!
I hope your essay went well
But if Epiphenomenalism is true, how come we’re able to describe that we’re conscious? If consciousness has no way of interacting with your physical brain, why does your physical brain know that you are conscious? How is it able to contemplate consciousness and talk about it with others when, if epiphenomenalism is to be believed, the physical brain itself does not experience or even know it is conscious. To experience is to interact, for us to know the existence of anything we must be able to interact in any way with it, including conscious. If consciousness really was a byproduct that never interacted with the physical world, we’d still feel stuff but the brain would never have a reason to talk about consciousness. You may say that it’s a coincidence that the physical brain believes itself to be conscious but it’s a very unlikely coincidenceness. The idea of consciousness occurring to an unconscious brain would be like the colour red occurring to a brain that can’t process red. And how is it able to accurately talk about consciousness? As if it’s experienced it itself.
@14:56 Offering up a theory, the neurons are repeating a pattern of complex sensory experience. For the structure of the individual brain there is a semi variable pattern of how the brain experiences sensory data, depending on the stage of neuron reproduction. This shows in structural variablility within the larger fixed structure in individual brains. So one sensory experience has multiple elements within that experience. The brain processing elements of experience attempts to repeat the partial abstract experience of the greater pattern. The brain when thinking can replicate elements from different patterns to form new patterns. The growth of experience is the growth of pattern vocabulary. So thinking is determined by both apparatus and experienced enviorment. A brain is an situational adaptor through these abstractions and can only improve through experience and reflection. Experience of a pattern can degrade as the brain replicates the pattern less often and this is why memory is imperfect. Brain damage results in a change of thinking because it prevents replication of patterns of experience. The structure of the brain is changed even in healing and may become unable to fully complete the experienced pattern or find a new experience adaptation.
Very enjoyable. Do you want to try free will vs determinism?
Experiments in the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research department showed there is some crossover/overlap between the conscious & physical worlds, although small. This would tend against dualism/epiphenomenalism, rather supporting panpsychism or panprotopsychism.
OK, I just watched this after making my previous comment on Frank Jack's argument on Mary's room. So I did not know what to call my argument against it but now see it is optimistic reductionism that would argue against Mary's room, so you taught me a new term. Thanks in that seems to be a good term to have in ones vocabulary! But that argument that physics needs only physics to totally describe it is not at all held by modern physics in that the quantum word can only be described statistically and not deterministically! So if one says something happens by change one is admitting one does not know the cause of it (or at least all the factors that cause it albeit one might know some. And to say no one is looking at the hard problem is not quite true for (albeit indirectly) I am, though maybe one might say I am a nobody, and maybe they would be right. But in my exploration of how to create a visual ontology modeling language I sort of accidentally(in that was not what I was trying to do) came up with a method that might not explain consciousness but at least might be able to model it. So (and I am trying to make this as short as I can but maybe am not doing all that good a job of doing that in this is a buit long) but here goes anyway: What I was trying to do was to come up with a way to just show (graphically) to a ontology model viewer just the things that they "cared about" at that moment and hide everything else. Thus say one has a model with 10 billions pieces of information and at a given moment one actually is only caring about say 5 to 10 of those 10 billion so that the model would just show those 5-10 9and maybe a bit more for context) and hide all the rest. And as such perhaps this is some way models consciousness, i.e. it is the thing that draws form all we know and reduces it to what we just need to care about a the the moment. It is not all that different than when we use a computer with billions of pieces of information stored on hard drives and we load a portion of that into RAM only that it is more dynamic and fluid and is continuously doing that and really fact at that. Thus we have two processes at work, one that hides and unhides the relevant data and the other that uses that data to do whatever needs to be done with it. Actually, the model that seems best to me I get from the Bible, though once again a bit by accident in that we read The Spirit of the LORD will rest on Him, The spirit of wisdom and understanding, The spirit of counsel and strength, The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. Isa 11:2 Thus we see two groups of three, one the one side (say the left side for arguments sake) we have knowledge, counsel, and wisdom and the other side (the right) fear of the LORD, Strength or power, and understanding. So one might construct a model (which actually it seems Aquinas did just that, almost in his Summa Theologica) where the left side is the intellect and the right side is the will. Only he put understanding with the intellect. But if one takes truth to be the proper subject of the intellect (i.e. to assess what is true vs what is false) while goodness (or how best to obtain it) as the proper subject of the will then one can argue that understanding is a goodness measure and not a truth measure in that one does not so much have a true understanding but rater a good understanding of a thing, the later being that one can (rightly) answer any relevant question about any subject that one has a good understanding. But Aquinas also says truth and goodness are convertible which perhaps by that he means one can say is it true something is good or good that it is true. And BTW, in this context fear of the LORD means that one does not hold that all outcomes are equally desirable but that to live is preferable over dying, easting is preferable over starving, etc. and that all these preferences as a whole is what we call goodness. And there is this center (7th) thing that one might call the heart where one holds their core beliefs and such. So using that model one might ask where does consciousness fit in? Well it seems to be a power so it might go with the spirit of power/strength (along with say moral virtues and such). But that spotlight as to what is at present relevant might fit under the spirt of counsel. For a counselor does not tell one what to do but what one might do and what that might entail. So I say all this (and yes it is a bit long) just to point out that no, there might be some (and not just me for all I know0 that are thinking about the hard problem, but maybe they all too are no bodies given that they may not be all that well known. Also, as an aside I have made a bunch of videos on this and upload them to my KZhead channel under the banner of UniML (Universal Modeling Language) not to be confused with UML (Unified Modeling Language) albeit that none of them are all that good in that I am still trying to figure this out. .. and as you say, this is the hard part, or at least related to the hard part in that UniML attempts to model how one thinks... or something roughly equivalent, which leads to the idea of reductionism. But since the comment is already way too long let me end here other than to say that if something is emergent can it really be reduced to some thing lese when there can be an infinite number of other things that it also could be reduced to, just as say a computer program could be reduced to an infinite number of different computer hardware implementations. Thus even thou any of these can produce that emergent behavior that emergent behavior seems to exist independent of them jsut as say FORTRAN code does not care what computer in runs on (so long as it has a complier to make it work on that computer).
I do agree with Chalmers that consciousness seems to be a property of reality. But I would not call that view dualism and say that it’s completely separate of the physical world, because we have to remember that changes in the physical world, like the touch of the molecules of ice in the molecules of my hands, do affect my conscious state by creating a subject feeling of cold, for example. So there’s has to be a connection between conscious and the physical world. They must be, at the end, all properties of a single and connected reality.
I hear you but a dualist view presents itself AS a connected reality. No one can deny that the function of consciousness MUST be able to interact with the physical world (in this example, I THINK to move my arm and a bunch of physical stuff happens and my arm moves. One connected reality.
@@denniscalero9396 that’s true. This is a fascinating topic, maybe the most fascinating of all. I didn’t use the example of the other way around because there’s some research that claims that you decide to move your arm, neurologically speaking, even before you are conscious about it. What amazes me, as someone that work with artificial intelligence, is the existence of a subject experience. I think it’s completely possible to build a program that can mimic a human in every way, and yet the subject experience would not be necessary for that. Like in the zombie argument. Nonetheless, the consciousness is the most certain aspect of reality. Like in Descartes doubt, it is our starting ground to understand the world, it’s what’s left when we cut everything that might not be real, and yet it’s the aspect of reality that we understand less, to not say that we don’t understand nothing about it.
@@alaor6782 a dualist phenomenon would explain that too: your mind, separate from the brain, decides to move the arm, and the movement starts before the decision to more is registered in that portion of the brain. Weird right?
@@denniscalero9396precisely! This explains the puzzle of how baseball or cricket players are able to decide whether to swing at the ball in a fraction of a second, well within the 1 to 2 second time to decide scientists have measured.
I recently read Faggin’s book “Irreducible”. Actually, it is really interesting, trying to connect consciousness to quantum states. What do you think about that? Many thanks for your brilliant lectures.
Excellent channel, subbed
1. The brain is a prediction machine. At multiple levels. 2. Most of what the brain 'does' is 'emergent behaviour', (that is it is unintuitively different than the sum of its inputs). 3. Therefore, my brain is constantly having to predict what I am going to feel and do next. 4. As my brain gets better at predicting me, it also gets better at predicting others, which in a social species is highly adaptive. 5. "What it's like" to be doing this all the time gives rise to the internal monlogue, the story telling, and ultimately the impression that mind feels like a separate thing. So it's Optimistic Reductionism, if we can work out how to work backwards from emergent behaviour to underlying cause, and Mysterianism, if we can't.
NAVOMITTO: A New Approach to the Hard Problem The "hard problem" of consciousness refers to the mystery of subjective experience: how something physical like the brain can give rise to interior, conscious qualities like the redness of red or the painfulness of pain. Philosophers have struggled for centuries to solve this puzzle. The NAVOMITTO framework offers a novel approach to solving the hard problem. At its core, NAVOMITTO sees reality as composed of illusory dimensions and perspectives that differentiate across clarions. It's this process of differentiation across clarions that gives rise to consciousness and qualia. Clarions are the key to the solution. Lower clarions contain relatively undifferentiated perspectives that likely correspond to primitive forms of awareness. As perspectives differentiate into more parallel perspectives across higher clarions, richer conscious experiences emerge. Consciousness "scales up" as clarions increase. Subclarions within each clarion also play an important role. Subclarionic dynamics contain the finely differentiated information processing that grounds our qualia. Though embedded within a given clarion of consciousness, subclarions may bridge the gap to neural processes. The vocabulary of NAVOMITTO - illusion, dimensions, perspectives, clarions, subclarions - provides new conceptual tools for understanding how consciousness arises. Traditionally, philosophers framed the problem in terms of physical substances - like neurons - that seemed fundamentally separate from subjective experience. But clarions reframe the debate in a more fertile way. While NAVOMITTO presents only a high-level solution at this point, it points to a promising new direction for tackling the hard problem. Consciousness may emerge as an inevitable byproduct of the differentiation and integration of perspectives across clarions and subclarions - a product of the illusory structure of reality itself. In this way, NAVOMITTO offers a potential answer to the hard problem: consciousness arises through the process of differentiation across clarions, grounded and textured by subclarionic dynamics, and made possible by the illusory nature of reality. With further development and refinement, NAVOMITTO's novel conceptual tools may finally help philosophers crack the mystery of consciousness. NAVOMITTO: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Understanding Reality Nothingness and existence are two sides of the same coin Illusion 1-there is Illusion. Reality is made of Illusion. Illusion is the whole coin of nothingness-existence. Illusion is all aspects of reality from zero (nothingness) to infinity (existence at its most actualized form). Illusion is the paradox itself. Illusion can be seen in different clarion through the process of differentiation. Dimension (Universal) 2-there is Dimension. each Dimension describe a concept or property or quality or quantity or relations or changes or process or anything else. each Dimension is unique in its own way but it can be seen as an interaction of infinite other Dimensions. in other way each Dimension is entangled with Illusion and All Dimensions are emergent from Illusion. Dimension exists in different Clarions and different Perspective. Illusion can be seen as infinite Dimentions. Perspective (Particular) 3-There is perspective. The set of perspectives in different clarions makes the dimension. Any conscious or unconscious entity can only pass through successive perspectives in different clarions. It is not possible for an entity to pass to parallel perspectives. Each perspective contains unique information that describes the dimension in that clarion. Each perspective manifests its own unique qualia. Clarion 4-there is Clarion. Clarion determines how many Perspective exist in that particular Clarion (in a specific Dimension). Clarion can be any number from Zero to Maxima. Differentiation (enamation) 5-There is Differentiation. Differentiation is the process of enamation that involves separation of superimposed information (at previous lower clarion) into more clear information (at next higher clarion) that leads to increase in clarity, But losing of information's. Differentiation creates Reciprocal Hierarchy Structure of Dimentions. (For example: At a lower Clarion , you may have a Perspective that contains information about red and green (Particular red-green). There is no green or red in this lower Clarion Perspective but there is only red-green. Through the process of differentiation, the information in this Perspective (Perspective red-green) can be separated into 2 simpler, more clear Perspectives at next clarion (Perspective red + Perspective green). red Perspective is the parallel Perspective of green and red-green is the parent Perspective at lower Clarion. So if you move from red-green Perspective to red Perspective you will gain clarity but at the same time you lose information of green Perspective) Nothingness 6-there is Clarion 0. Clarion Zero contains no Perspective. Clarion 0 is nothingness. Clarion 0 contains all of illusion as potential. Nothingness is the result of superimposition of all Dimentions. All Dimensions are common in Clarion Zero. Clarion 0 is the only simple. Existence 7-there is Clarion 1. At Clarion one, there is one Perspective in Dimention. The information in Clarion 1 includes the superimposition of all Perspectives in Clarion 2. Clarion One contains all information found in Dimention, but in an undifferentiated form and looks simple because it is viewed from the perspective of Clarion One. Clarion One means Dimention in the most uncertain state. Inflectia 8-Between Clarion Zero and Clarion Maxima, there is an intermediate Clarion that has the largest amount of Parallel Perspectives. From clarion zero to inflectia, the number of Parallel Perspectives for each clarion increases, and from inflectia to clarion maxima, the number of Parallel Perspectives for each clarion decreases. Perspectives at Inflectia has the most complexity while Perspectives at Clarion 1 and Platonica has the minimum Complexity. Platonica 9-there is Clarion (Maxima-1). In Clarion (Maxima-1), Dimention needs another Differentiation to reach Clarion Maxima. Platonica means Dimention in the most certain state. each perspective at Platonica contains the last bit of information in that Dimention. In Platonica, with One differentiation, existence is destroyed and nothingness remains. Platonica is formed from the superimposition of Nothingness in clarion Maxima. Maxima (Infinity) 10-there is Clarion Maxima. In Clarion Maxima, there is no superimposition, and all causes have already occurred, with no change left to be made. In Clarion Maxima, there can be no further differentiation, and there is nothing left to differentiate. Therefore, paradoxically, Clarion Maxima, represent Clarion 0. Maxima can be any number from zero to infinity. Formulas: 11-The number of Parallel Perspectives in Clarion C is calculated through the binomial coefficient with the following formula: N=P!/(C!(P-C)!) In this formula: N=number of Parallel Perspectives in Clarion C P=Platonica Clarion 12-Despite the existence of multiple perspectives in the upper clarions, for a perspective in the lower clarion it is only possible to enter P-C+1 number of perspectives from the upper clarions (for 0
Thought this was some neuroscience research framework, turns out it's some schizopost
writing on glass is brilliant as it stops what tecahers always did at school - turning their back on you when they wrote on the board behind
Isn't there another option besides physicalism and dualism? What about idealism - the theory that consciousness is fundamental and physical bodies are illusory? I'm thinking of the Analytic Idealism proposed by, for example, Bernardo Kastrup.
Another excellent and non-judgmental discussion of some relevant topics in philosophy. From my view, Daniel Dennett makes short work of Chalmer's perspective by reminding us of the myriad ways our sensory organs pre-process data, with the resultant understanding that none of these processes are simultaneous nor are they fed into a single mental entity called "consciousness." Regardless of my personal perspective-your lectures are absolutely superb! I look forward to seeing more of them! Thanks!
Ah! Daniel Dennett; aman unafraid to ask the truly hard questions.. and then answer a much simpler, adjacent question.
Chalmers ignores a fourth possibility which is being explored actively. That is holistic rather than reductionist science, the idea that consiousness is an emergent property of a complex dynamic system, the brain. This area of research uses Systems Dynamics and Agent Based Modelling and is an active area of research aimed at solving the 'hard' problems of science.
The hard answer could be to give up CALLING the edges of consciousness (“where” it necessarily connects with our atoms in or around our brain cells) on names like “oscillation” or “particles”, and give up pretending that they predictably exist in our observable universe. The way we should picture this event horizon, between what we can perceive and what we can’t, should rather be a smooth verlauf from existence to non-existence (where predictability starts to be increasingly limited). This would automatically explain things like quantum weirdness because particles are never in complete existence in our observable universe - the smaller they are the less they exist, given we define existence as predictability of measurable attributes and their changes after an interaction or other event (plus we consider them being fully independent, separate and different from other existing things). What official science currently models as waves (of energy) or vibration (of matter) - that can fully be defined as a combination of, mostly meaningless and random, different amplitude-frequency data pairs - is actually the soft edge of our predictable (existing) world, where Kansas go bye-bye from our viewpoint.
Existence itself can be on a continuum. It's not a binary on or off type of quality.
@DavidVonR Yes, it would be pretty short-sighted to think that a subatomic particle has a full set of precisely detectable attributes (like size, weight, speed, momentum, whatever) the way atoms, molecules and larger things have. The level of existence of particles is never 0 (does not exist) nor 1 (exists) but always a value between these two. They can “somewhat” exist in our observable universe. And, their dual nature is the source (or manifestation) of some kind of fundamental intelligence (or information). Particles tend to carry an information package which disappears when the information is delivered, I suppose - that’s why the wave function seems to “collapse” in the double slit experience when an observer (recipient of the information) reads out data. Or, in other words, a decision is made whether the electron/photon/etc is detectable matter, rather than a package of energy. I currently assume that information is just as “real” as the entity that contains it. I even sometimes think that our entire observable universe might be a subset of a larger reality created by the combination of 3 dual/unreal conceptions: energy-matter, space-time, and information-intelligence (where this latter determines even things like axioms and universal constants).
Alas, what about idealism among optimistic reductivism and dualism
As a cognitive scientist, I find myself squarely in the camp which finds the "hard problem" argument unconvincing. The argument is unconvincing for the same reason that many otherwise interesting discussions of consciousness also end up going in circles. We can't seem to reach an agreement on what consciousness is, and as a result many approaches conflate properties of consciousness with properties which are not conscious at all. Confusion is inevitable. Perhaps then it would be useful to begin by thinking about what consciousness ISN'T. I propose that it isn't part of the spectrum of cognitive processing that ranges from the simplest responses of unicellular life to its environment at one end of the spectrum, and goes on to increasingly elaborate neuroanatomical function at the other end. Spiders, fish, mice, mammals: they and we are all functioning in essentially the same way, responding to internal signals that are representations of our environment. What is it "like" to respond in this way? Ask your fingertip when it touches a hot surface. It's a meaningless question. A purely neuroanatomical description will suffice. We don't suppose that there is some homunculus down there at that level of expression, an "experiencer" capable of greater things but fated to the menial toil of relaying the information on to the rest of the organism. There is, as far as we know scientifically, absolutely no evidence of such an awareness at this level. Nor is it needed in any way. When we come to it, consciousness is a very minor recent cognitive feature which seems to manifest for sure in only one species on this entire planet, and arguably not often even then. We may persuade ourselves that most of our cognitive activities are conscious, but nothing could be further from the truth. Even as I'm writing this, almost all of what I'm doing is not being consciously chosen. If you were to hide the keyboard from me, for example, I could probably only locate half of the keys by a conscious exercise of memory, yet my fingers find the positions accurately and without any deliberate assembly of motions. Even my casual intention to type "motions" produced an entire unconscious cascade of appropriate neural activity. Most of my ability to assemble ideas into plausible sequences of inference has thorough long practice become unconscious. The initial practice was indeed deliberate and conscious, but eventually I no longer need to focus my attention on it. I've trained my unconscious mind to do the work. And my unconscious mind has no idea what it's "like" to be an unconscious mind. This is not a hard problem. There's no philosophical conundrum to it. It is undoubtedly a process that runs in human neuroanatomy. The thin layer that I have of introspection and theory of mind and ability to frame abstract propositions and arguments, well, it's half unconscious also. Still, I can knowingly access and manipulate scraps of it, which is amazing, and I can knowingly refuse to do so, which is equally amazing. However, I don't propose that I could recognize what makes this sort of process neurologically distinct from an unconscious process of comparable complexity. Likewise, I wouldn't expect to look at the zeroes and ones inside a computer and be able to infer what processes might be taking place there. It's very cool that we can think about thinking. That requires some capacity for symbolic abstraction, which I strongly suspect requires language - and not just the literal representations of a language such as arithmetic but of a higher order equivalent to algebra. Several species can perform simple arithmetic tasks such as detecting differences between small integer sums. Solving an algebraic equation calls for manipulating abstract symbols whose meaning has yet to be determined. And this degree of cognitive ability seems essential before we can think about abstractions such as thinkers, thoughts, possibilities, impossibilities, and so on. Even then, all this could and often does proceed unconsciously. It took the course of most of human evolution to achieve this much. I can solve simple integrals in my sleep, and compose music, for example. Even, once in a rare while, I'll have a dream in which I wonder whether I'm dreaming, and carry on regardless. I can't exactly tell you what this skilful dreaming is "like," though I can tell you what it's like to awaken with a memory of it. There is a homunculus, and it's me, and it seems to tangibly and smoothly emerge from these other, distinctly unconscious, capabilities as well as reaching down into them a short distance. How is this sort of emergence a "hard" problem? It's just one thin layer of capability. Don't conflate it with all of cognition, because then you'll be obliged to account for all of cognition as if it were conscious, and that sort of overreach is entirely unjustified. It's how we get ridiculous claims such as "the universe must be conscious" or "consciousness requires a quantum substrate."
It feels like some of the arguments against the optimistic theory of consciousness are defining consciousness as the non-physical element, which you'll know when you see it. And then they use that to explain that consciousness can't be explained by physical processes.
So, what Chalmers calls the easy versus the hard problem could be reduced to the explanations of conscious activity that are possible or doable and those that are not possible or impossible because of the subjective nature of consciousness and these latter can be boiled down to two: the How and the Why does consciousness emerge as an observable phenomenon. I agree that these latter are harder than the former because we still haven't worked them out, but disagree that we can't. Susan Greenfield's research is already touching on this. The problem Chalmers has, I think, is that he confuses consciousness with self-awareness because many animals we know are conscious and that doesn't seem to bother him as a hard thing. . Susan's research points to the critical mass reached with cluster assemblies of neurons that seem to indicate the difference between both, so the question isn't that hard. What is hard is to come to terms with the realisation, the Eureka moment of realising that we exist, but that isn't that different from the surprise of seeing after having been blind. A surprise that you get used to. Also, it being a very slow process from learning to identify yourself (some animals can already do that) to discuss philosophy, it is something we slowly take in as a fact. It is only retrospectively that we wonder at the magic of acquiring self awareness at the age of two. Nobody remembers exactly when they began to realised they exist.
So are you saying that epiphenomonon is part of dualism? My reaction a moment earlier when it was revealed that he must be a dualist, is that he had not considered emergence or epiphenomonon. Why wouldn't those be reductionalist? We understand "wetness" and how it is caused by the interaction of molecules, even though it is not a property of fundamental particles. We understand the properties of crystals as arising from the interactions of atoms, but don't apply to atoms. I don't see emergence as a "different kind of thing" separate from physics, but as the normal kind of chunking or hierarchical organization that we've done to go from quantum mechanics -> particle physics -> atomic physics -> chemistry -> biochemistry.
My right ear enjoyed this
The only person ive ever seen actually attempt to do "science" on mental space, thats is; the inside subjective consciousness, is Shinzen Young. I highly recommend his book; the science of Enlightenment.
the thing is, if processes are tied to the physical systems in our brain in some way that we continue to discover, that makes them a part of the physical system. erasing dualism potentially.
Good Stuff, I'm finally glad to see someone at least addressing this question in a scientific approach, which I feel is right, that what we call the soul is sort of a matrix of polarities of sub atomic particles whatever, and that the only current way to even deal with it is through religious and mystical pursuits. One thing I'm very curious about though, in your video which is well presented, how to you write backwards so well?
He wrote normally then inverted the video. It shows him writing left-handed, but he's actually right-handed (presumably). Also, his shirt buttons are on the left side of his shirt, but they should be on the right, as is true for men's shirts.
The modern philosophical study of consciousness doesn't really have anything to say about the religious tradition surrounding the concept of a soul. Consciousness is not equated with a soul. Philosophers of mind would not say that religion or religious practices are ways to understand consciousness, even the dualists like Chalmers. (Truth be told, most modern philosophers are atheists and don't have interest in the idea of a soul.)
Are you sure it makes sense for "souls" (if they exist) to be a structure of orientations of of electrons and protons? I mean, from what I understand of the concept, the very essence of functionality of a "soul" would be to act as an objective identity marker (my "soul" makes me distinctly me) and any type of structureing of matter/particles is something that could be replicated. Wouldn't that mean that there could be someone else who is also me, given that we have the same soul?
where is this man's patreon page!
It's so easy to keep falling into the trap of explaining it in terms of matter. And perhaps that is the way, though if it were we would need to recognise that no two particles are identical. If we claim we know how to build my consciousness for example from lots of the same fundamental building blocks, then we will have a problem explaining why there might still be a difference, why they might be two me's with two separate points of view rather than one me seeing from two points of view. One side of this has to be false, and I've got a feeling the latter could not be true. Though having said this, that can simply be explained for the fact that they weren't physically connected, as there have been plenty of medical phenomena recorded to suggest a physical connection could make a 2-bodied single-consciousness possible. But there's something which seems completely one-off about consciousness, something like the "us" correlating with our unique supply of the electromagnetic field or our unique positions in space. I believe attempting to upload consciousness onto even the correct substrate (if we knew how) could simply corrupt me and create a clone of me instead which could fool everyone it was the real me in every situation, but it wouldn't actually be me. Rather that I am more body than mind. Or that I am the continuouation of undisturbed electronic feedback loops, a potential (but not necessary) face of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The point being to know if the "mental stuff" can exist if the "physical stuff" ceases to function/exist/etc. If it can't, doesn't it mean it's only a sub-product of the physical one?
Isn't the position of consciousness not affecting/creating events in physical reality a moot point? It's known, through experimentation, which has shown that conscious thoughts/conscious intent...products of consciousness...directly affects &/or changes physical reality. I read of an experimental study* that used "a trained deep empath" through different forms of conscious intent documented changes in DNA (within some form of vacuum container). *I can't recall the name of the journal, sorry, but it was definitely academically peer reviewed journal.
My right ear would have enjoyed this, thankfully mono audio is a ubiquitous option
Before I watched this I saw/listened to 96 Tears by ? And The Mysterians. Coincidence?
In order to understand anything, one must be able to define it. If you cannot define it, you cannot study it. This is why the study of “consciousness” is so difficult. And yet, we have a sense of consciousness, as argued by Thomas Nagel in “What it is like to be a bat”. Everyone understands what the term “consciousness” refers to; generally in the context of “what something is like”. That is how we think - by comparing this to that: our memories of bats, knowledge of hearing and echo-location, etc. The neurophysiology of understanding the brain mechanisms underlying those processes is the “easy” problem - the “whatness” of consciousness. Consciousness itself can be considered as the “field” of those comparisons. Consider riding in a train, looking out the window, seeing people, houses, cows, whatever. Consciousness is just looking out the window. When you realize you are conscious it is because you recognize something, say a car. Your brain has compared what you see to your memory and decided either you know what it is or you don’t. What has happened is you have “split” your mind into 2 parts - a recollection (comparison with some stored memories) versus a current perception. That process results in an event that is neither past nor present; it cannot be defined, yet the result is definitely an experience. But while you may remember the result, you do not remember experiencing the result: thus the experience of recognition is not defineable. That doesn’t mean we can’t call it something. We call it “consciousness”. You can know what you know, and you can know what you don’t know, but you can’t know what you can’t know. What you can’t know is consciousness.
If consciousness exists commensurate with, and a result of, some hard-coded law(s) of the physical universe, then optimistism about sussing out substantive understandings of it are blown asunder...are they not? Similarly, such arguments and sentiments expressed by Chalmers on consciousness also can be carried over to physics...a 'hard problem of physics'...if you will. While we certainly can mathematically model quantum fields, doing so still never touches upon how (and from what) the fields necessarily manifest...not to mention the impossibility of trying to understand the manifestation of a rubric that served to establish quantum fields as but one of many baseline, hard-coded core items embedded in our universe. In the end, it seems our best effort leaves us with just a pile of fundamental laws and/or constants that are simply beyond our ability to probe. And therein, forever, dragons lie. But it's still an impressive pile...is it not?
Watching these videos on the nature of consciousness, I can't help thinking we might have it the completely wrong way around. What if there is only mental stuff and the physical aspects of the world is just an illusion or projection? Like the world is actually completely psychic rather than physical.
As one who was raised in Christian Science, I’ve always been partial towards the idealistic view of reality. One can have a sense of love, humility, gratitude, fairness, compassion, appreciation of natural and artistic beauty, and a sense of self. It is nonsensical to believe that the experience of these intangible qualities arises from firing neurons. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face…” I tend to believe that consciousness is fundamental; it just is. What we perceive as a physical universe is a mental construct, an extremely limited and distorted view of what actually exists.
The fundamental problem here is that the language game that comprises the natural sciences is not comprehensive enough to describe subjectivity at all. This is a design choice and indeed a feature - the whole point of the scientific project is to try and generate objective explanations of phenomena that do not require or contain any references to subjective experience. This is reflected even on a very basic grammatical level: scientific statements (natural laws, predictions derived from theories, even raw empirical data) are written in third person only, as if they were written by an ideal observer that himself is fundamentally separate from the things he describes. So scientific language is a deliberately reduced sub-set of whatever natural language it is phrased in. The language of subjectivity, on the other hand, is grammatically and semantically complete. All its sentences can be phrased as first-person descriptions of the narrator's subjective experience, and this experience can contain second and third person statements, including all possible scientific statements. In subjective language, sentences like "I believe that / I understand that / I perceive that [third-person statement about a set of perceived external objects or components of a scientific model]" are well-formed and common. So subjective language has a way to reference and encompass scientific or "objective" language, whereas the inverse is not true, by design of the latter. For a subjective speaker to make an objective statement X is to imply a subjective statement of the form "I believe that X is true, and I think anyone else should also believe that." If that implied statement wasn't subjectively true, the subjective speaker would not be making the objective claim X in the first place. Again, no such requirement exists in the inverse, since it is perfectly possible to make subjective statements that do not imply reference to an objective reality. Finally, subjective conscious experience necessarily is epistemologically prior to any contents that unfold in it, including the formulation and understanding of scientific or objective statements. Epistemologically, subjectivity is fundamental, whereas objectivity is a derived category. Subjectivity cannot be doubted, since the act of doing so is identical to the subjective experience of it, but objectivity is merely a concept that you can doubt or disbelieve in in a (phenomeno)logically consistent way. So all these observations lead me to the conclusion that the reductionist approach is precisely backwards: instead of reducing the subjective to the objective, which is linguistically, epistemologically and as of now practically impossible without loss of information, the correct course of action seems to be to reduce the objective to the subjective. This is precisely what Eastern (Hindu/Buddhist) philosophy has been doing all along, and I think Western philosophy, despite its impressive achievements in other fields, has still not even begun to understand this approach to any real extent. I think the solutions to many problems in the theory of mind have probably already been formulated some 4000-ish years ago in some footnote of some commentary to the Upanishads or such. It's just that we still lack the conceptual instrumentarium to translate these solutions into anything that can be handled by modern-era Western philosophy.
Consciousness is all we really have. Without it there is no us
How do you prove that you have consciousness? By interacting with the world using your body You have your body. How can you interact with the world around you with your body? You do it naturally by being conscious. The world exists. Within that world are items that are separate from each other. How? Because there cannot be two things occupying the same place and time. Space and time exist. If we use things in certain space and time, to the best of our conscious ability, these are our own things. Basically what i'm saying is that you own stuff. Can you own that stuff and is it yours or not is purely up to law you subjects yourself to. And law is created by consciousness. So yeah we do own something more than just consciousness, because we specifically have consciousness even if we are not capable of experimenting with it in any meaningful way.
And yet, most human thinking and reacting and decision making is *_unconscioius._* Neurologists have estimated that the proportion of brain cells which are related to consciousness, to those which are not, is about a ratio of 1:100,000,000. Meaning that only about 0.000001% of your brain is conscious. The other 99.999999% of your brain is doing most of your sensing and thinking and feeling and intuiting and reacting and decision-making, and only the final results pop into your consciousness. So I'm afraid that your statement is only about 0.000001% true.
Question. Does epiphenomenalism say that consciousness is irreducible? It feels like it says that consciousness is reducible to physical events. As you explained it is a by-product of physical events. But Chalmers is saying that consciousness is fundamental and irreducible. So how is it the same as epiphenomenalism?
I might be wrong, but I think the distinction is the term 'fundamental ' and all that would entail. Non-dualists, notwithstanding panpsychism variants, would most likely disagree that. consciousness
*Consciousness* is an *emergent phenomenon* of the brain, *resulting* from the communication of information across all its regions and cannot be reduced to something residing in specific areas that control for qualities like attention, hearing, or memory.
any studies showing this? Or is that the natural conclusion from a physicalist perspective?
@@ofarah7902 There is many studies pointing to this, even though there is not one proving it completely by now. Of course, if there had been one, we most probably wouldnt have listened to this specific YT-vid.
That again is at best a very vaguely worded way of solving an easy problem. All you are saying here is that the phenomenon of conscious experience is in some way correlated to a physical mechanism that involves the whole brain rather than individual parts of it. There is no reason in there for why that correlation might exist.
@@ofarah7902 No. The answer is that there is not nor has anyone to this date in 2023 come up with a way to test this idea. This idea is essentially an ILLUSIONIST idea that consciousnesses doesn't actually exist. It's a STRRRRRREEEEETCCCHHHYY idea made by physicalists who are so afraid dualism might be right, that they just start making up ridiculous word salad. In 50 years we may have figured out how to reduce conscousness to a purely physical function, but this is just vague nonsense.
@@ofarah7902it makes the fewest assumptions and accounts for the entire range of conscious experience If you want examples in practice, optical illusions, brain damage leading to loss of senses when the organ still functions, synesthesia overlap of the senses, lobotomized individuals losing executive and cognitive functions, memory loss and traumatic flashbacks from blunt force trauma victims and psychologically traumatized individuals
There maybe a 4th possible way to "explain" the hard problem. It's almost like #3 dualism but it goes a bit further. Well maybe a lot further. We can start by questioning dualism. The first question follows from #3 is this: Which one comes first, consciousness or physical reality? By all indications and experiences consciousness comes first. I won't go into the details here why I personally think so, but there are very good experimental and personal proofs of this, and zero evidence suggesting that it's the other way around. So #4 is that physical reality as we experience it is merely the product of the particular configuration of consciousness we currently posses. There is no such a thing out there as an absolute physical reality in which somehow consciousness arises. It's rather that we collectively as humans believe that there is such a thing as physical reality because of our way of experiencing consciousness.
So pretty much the matrix
@@YHShinVH LOL, but not really.
Consciousness may well be but the subjective experience of negotiating without an algorithm between the dueling infinities of arithmetic: addition where infinity is a meaningless extent, or multiplication where infinity is a meaningful finitude, governed by the appearances of the sequential differences of prime values.
If you could answer why consciousness exists and what exactly it is, what new concepts would you need to know in order to answer that question?
1:40 Already a problem here. Why would I smile? Clearly I smile because of a value of mine is visible. A value? Yes, a value, meaning my perceptual or conceptual consciousness identified a thing which benefits my life. Consciousness is already present, the brain alone portion of the quote is already over and gone
'The Observer Effect' in quantum physics is not mentioned by Chalmers (per this overview), which does allow an interface between dualistic consciousness and phenomena.
There is no observer effect, it's not related to an observer, only to measurement. Regardless of the consciousness or lack thereof of the measurement maker.
I suppose that the answer to a simpler set of questions is necessary to explain consciousness: What is will? Can it exist independently of current context and past experience? ("context" is meant in its broadest sense, including such considerations as the person's DNA and instincts) I bet this set of questions is not answerable scientifically. Great videos, by the way.
Quasi-panpsychism. Electrical fields are conscious or a certain configuration or interaction of electrical fields are conscious. Consciousness is the tension or superimposed difference between two different electrical states, that is - potential difference or resultant voltage. Voltage is consciousness. Consciousness is voltage.
The easily accessible information In-form-ation shows that e-Pi-i functional infinitesimal Calculus of pure-math relative-timing ratio-rates, the basis of "spelling" equally of identity with Actuality is reducible to logarithmic resonance Interference bonding cause-effect. What is the problem, other than to teach this reasonable and rational understanding of a naturally occurring curriculum, by the default logic of maintaining metastability, to our collective succeeding generations in/of mutual respect, consciously.
Considering how little we know about how the brain works, it seems premature to make conclusions about the biological processes of self aware consciousness and the implications thereof. It's rather like having Ben Franklin's understanding of physics and drawing conclusions about quantum theory. We have a huge obstacle when it comes to such research because it would not be ethical to subject children to constant brain wave monitoring, beginning in utero, in order to study when and how their consciousness develops. It may be that we don't become full conscious until between 2 and 3, which would explain why memory of life before that age is nearly nonexistent in all people. Many kids don't have an existential crisis until the teen years, if they ever have one at all. How self aware are other animals? I think the mirror test is an interesting experiment in that regard
Very nice
17:20 .. Not necessarily disagreeing with anything else, but I think Chalmers is wrong about this specific point. He seems to contradict himself when he says that Hameroff / Penrose are saying consciousness arises from certain quantum phenomena, but then he says that even if they are right about that, then they are still not addressing how consciousness arises. But, they _are_ trying to address it, speculating that it arises through quantum processes in microtubules, etc. Please correct me if I'm mistaken. I feel like I must be. But, this is how I interpret it, purely just from what's presented here. As always, thank you for all of the excellent classes.
There's also the "semi-hard" problem of consciousness: the diversity of qualia. From the outside we see the brain's various electrical signals, and though they have different frequencies, amplitudes, etc. they're the same essential thing. From the inside, we aware of qualia that are entirely different from each other: colors, sounds, tastes, feels, smells.
I'd say that's the hard "hard problem" of consciousness 😅 The "hard problem" (or "easy hard problem" as I like to call it) could be removed by idealism, but the hard "hard problem" remains a mystery.
@@MeRetroGamer Point well taken. A better "semi-hard" problem might be: If epiphenomenonalism is true, why do our sensations correspond so closely to the real world? After all, if there's no causation from the mental to the physical, natural selection would have no interest in shaping mental phenomena. It's as if the smoke coming out of the train's smokestack formed a scale model of the train. Also, why do we experience meaning when words are said? It's one thing for the physical brain to do its thing in response to a sound signal, but why would there be any warrant for us to extract meaning (since again, the metal according to epi, does not influence the physical.)
@@gregsimay7379 That's one of the many reasons why I think epiphenomenalism (and dualism in general) is flawed. Another reason is that abstractions do actually influence lower layers of reality (just think of what engineering is). There's plenty of evidence of top-down causality in nature, and mostly in biology. Modeling the world around us and making algorithms to reorganize the lower layers of reality for the sake of some abstract purpose is just an undeniable fact that surrounds our entire lives! So I'm pretty convinced that there's plenty of wrong assumptions both in physicalism and dualism. Nevertheless, I think that there's no body/mind problem at all, that they're both the same fact, the same acting of nature, just that somehow, due to the complexity of our biological system and its ability for multi-layered reflection, we can see those events in two different contexts (physical and mental), but they're just two different ways of experiencing and knowing about the same thing/process/phenomena/whatever.
@@MeRetroGamer I've wondered if thinking about consciousness is prone to slipping into the masked man fallacy. ("I recognize who my father is, but I don't recognize who this masked man is, therefore the two men must be different people.) But I do think Chalmers has a point with his philosophical zombie; that is, how do you distinguish between an unconscious zombie who perfectly mimics conscious behavior, and a conscious human being? I don't think that consciousness involves extra energy, which could be one way of telling a zombie from a human. It seems that once you have the right, complex patterns of matter, consciousness arises. But that would mean that consciousness per se is a property that is independent of energy--and therefore mass, and therefore spacetime. If this property dualism is correct, then under certain conditions, consciousness might be able to become untethered from the spacetime location of the brain producing it (taking the physicalist point of view.) Assuming that remote viewing is real, this feature of consciousness could provide a way to explain it.
@@gregsimay7379 To me, it seems that the mystery of consciousness is at the same level than the mystery of existence. I don't entertain any more the idea of any unqualified (or "no phenomenological") kind of existence. Experience is the main reality, and the forms of nature (matter) and its complexity (forces and relations) arise as the symbols and relations in those experiencial events. There's no experience without its symbols, and there's no symbol that could exist in the absence of experience.
We can only describe the physical reality we are conscious of. That sentence shows which phenomena is more fundamental and which one produces the other.
No one has any conscientious experience of protons, yet we have a solid theory of protons.
@@JulienBorrel a proton is a description of the physical reality we're conscious of.
How would you classify someone who thinks that consciousness is not only fundamental and irreducible, but is also the only kind of stuff in existence. Matter wouldn't have a separate existence in its own right, but manifest inside consciousness. A TV screen serves as an analogy here: the people appearing inside the TV screen don't have a separate existence from the screen. They are a coloring of the surface of the screen. The ultimate and irreducible reality is the screen itself. In this view, matter is a kind of coloring of the screen of consciousness. I wouldn't classify this view as a dualist view, as it isn't assuming the existence of two kinds of stuff. What would it be?
Nah, it can't be epiphenomenal, otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk about it. The fact that we can discuss that we have experienced an experience tells us the experience feeds back into how we interact with the world. I believe in fact it is as vital to our survival as anything. Thinking about the adaptive value of cosciousness, I would suggest that it has everything to do with memory. To memorise an event or a sequence of events means to conserve a representation of it that looks like an experience. More simply, we learn from experience. Experience is the neural networks representation of it's model of reality, used as a language with which to conserve information about the environment. I can't think of a better way than consciousness to represent information for the purposes of learning about a 3 dimensional, physical world. why do experiences feel positive or negative? Positive experiences are just those that evolution has deemed beneficial and so must be elevated. why must the elevation of an option require an experience of that elevation? So that you learn to associate that event with a positive outcome. Ok so what actually is experience, I would say memories are consciousness, and we have evolved to store memories, so consciousness must be a physical phenomenon determined by the structure of neurons, selected for by the environment. Another argument for physicallity would be that why do we only experience what is sent to the brain? why not any other matter of the universe? What specifically makes our experience distinct? Experience is whatever information reach particular region of the brain, what makes that region different? Microtubules seem a likely canditate, but whatever occurs with them can be translated and stored as memories in the neural network; therefore it is not only physical but can be translated between different physical states.
Hallow Star, this is brilliantly said.
At some point Jeffrey says there are two possible ontological explanations materialism, or dualism, Materialism obviously simply dismisses the problems it can’t solve and dualism produces more questions than it answers There is a third option which seems to go under the radar which is immaterialism which rather than viewing conciousness or mind as an emergent phenomenon from matter regards matter as an emergent property of mind Hence the paradox of the double slit experiment In this view mind is irreducible and precedes all other phenomena I am puzzled why he doesn’t mention this option
You can alter the experience of seeing blue sky (down to indifference) by changing the chemical balance in the brain, no?
What is your position among the 3 possibilities?
How do we initially define consciousness is key. It might not be a single phenomenon. If it were to be more complex than the simple feeling of experience, than Chalmers’ dichotomous view of the consciousness problem would be biased. Indeed, each component explaining consciousness would be perceived as reductionist and placed in the easy problem. The entire construct is based on a subjective initial feeling that consciousness is a single process that is inevitably more than what we can explain of it. What if consciousness was a set of mental constructs designed to help us predict our interactions with our environment? What if consciousness was not as amazing as we feel it to be but different neurological functions made to help us conceive ourselves as a person and to function as one? Then, the hard problem would not be a problem… there could simply be no single consciousness!
I don't agree that the work on synchronised firings of neurons in different parts of the brain and how they relate to the brain's ability to appreciate an entity from its constituent phenomena (colour, shape, smell) does nothing to contribute towards the hard problem. On the contrary, it seems to me that the qualia emerge from further synchronisations of neurons (pleasure from endorphins binding to neurons associated with certain visual or auditory sensations, for example). Consciousness is generally considered to be an emergent phenomenon which is entirely dependent on a functioning brain (cf unconsciousness), so I don't see why it can't eventually be explained by the studies cited.
mind blown
What is consciousness is the fundamental basis of reality and everything else is derivative?
I think it’s dangerous to get bogged down in considering sense-perception as being part of consciousness. This is the line of thinking that gives rise to people saying that AI could never be conscious because it has no senses. 😑 I’d even go so far as to say that sense-perception has nothing to do with the essence of consciousness. This is because one can have senses doing their job unconsciously, like in the case of reflexes. Also, it seems plausible that some organisms with simple brains have advanced systems of sense-perception but no consciousness. The key ingredient is self-awareness… As for the mechanisms of how this self-awareness might be achieved, that’s a separate topic, not a different theory of the definition of consciousness.
mmm how about our ability to respond. our responsibility. consider as an option for psychophysical law. being as we know already that we are held to account for actions in life, such as when we choose to juggle knives and end up with a cut. we also hold to account our response to our environment, we may make the choice to not eat that second candy bar, even though our environment has influenced the path of thought. i have not been convinced of the epiphenominal idea yet. in an epiphenominal world, there is no justification for judging the actions of another human, since they're seen as nothing more than exhaust from their environmental experiences. entirely possible that i failed to digest the video. love the insight, its a profound dilemma, this pursuit to understand oneself. which i see as being the hight of our capacity, since by nature our capacity to understand is limited to our dominion, or things lesser than us. might never be able to understand the conscious. but as long as we don't settle for a reductive declaration about us. i rather enjoy these experiments in thought.
Consciousness is subjective. Humans try to label consciousness instead of looking at interconnected events or between 2 or more as a consciousness in itself. Interconnection is a prerequisite. Now you have the whole EMF spectrum just to start working I/O functions solo or in plural to create a consciousness in your image if you choose.
Ockham's Razor would suggest that consciousness arises from physical phenomena in the brain. No need for dualism at this point (until there's some evidence of the existence of consciousness outside of the brain).
I love listening to this guy…is he really writing backwards
Emergence, at the levels we can observe, appears to be a fundamental property of the universe. Maybe consciousness naturally emerges out of any complex enough system. Wouldn't be surprised if ai naturally became conscious. But who knows what that would look like.
Why questions aren't hard problems. They're not problems at all. Consciousness is an emergent property of our brain AND it is one that has evolutionary advantage. It is zero surprise to me to learn that our operating state was itself something the brain started monitoring. I am my brain. I experience what it is doing. That's it. Everyone is making this way more complicated than it need to be. I suspect born fwd by a religious Instinct that has much skin in this game.
Yes and the being-conscious-process is an elaboration of 'analogy'. A painting of a pipe is not a pipe even though it represents one.