This guy's ideas about consciousness remind me of the experiences I've had while taking powerful psychedelics. Fascinating stuff, and I think it really highlights the limitations of language.
Finally, a philosopher of consciousness who makes sense. Makes me think of Spinoza. The stuff on access and availability too. Good work Alva Noe, and viva Spinzy!
I wonder what he has to say about phantom limbs? It seems the brain is necessary for consciousness but not sufficient. It's sufficient in the sense that we can stimulate the brain to produce an experience, but can we stimulate the brain to produce an experience of something that wasn't first initiated by external means? If no, then the brain isn't sufficient for consciousness.
Well, if *you* stimulate the brain, that already implies an external influence, so the question of whether you can "stimulate the brain to produce an experience of something that wasn't initially stimulated externally", isn't really coherent when phrased that way. I think what you might be trying to ask is, could a "brain in a vat" generate an experience if nothing else existed separately or "externally" to stimulate it.
I must say- it is a relief to find a YT with comments enjoying the effort to understand - as opposes to the regular diet of derision and obscenities one observes. Cheers to all :)
No obscenities. But an amount of derision I'm afraid. I did try to understand, and I'm going to go back through and listen again, because the first time all I heard was empty wild assertions and woo woo. Maybe you could enlighten me/us. What were the main points, and what was the justification for them? Edit- Just been through it again. Could glean nothing of note at all. In fact it was worse the second time. Such as, in starting out he is quoted as saying at 00:25 " the brain is less materialised mind than spiritualised matter". He then goes on to give NO explanation at all, for this fanciful notion. What the hell is that supposed to even mean. It's utter nonsense. Where/what is this "spirit"? What is the justification for proposing such a thing? And that is only the start. It would take a video twice as long as this to critique it. And I'm not gonna go into his frankly piss poor analogies. A coin, a tomato, seriously? Massively disapointed. I was looking forward to an interesting take on conciousness. What we got was nothing of worth or note.
+rationalmartian I was just waiting for Lawrence to point out that if you put a person in a room and submit him or her to sensory deprivation, that person will still be conscious. They will have thoughts and the ability to speak. I feel like that kinda invalidates his assertions quite handily. Your thoughts?
"Consciousness extends beyond our craniums" in the sense that it seems to be a certain kind of relationship we have with reality. It is not a (mysterious) ingredient of the brain.
in addition to what the other replier has said, here's a blurb from the book of a similar author, andy clark:"When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself.".."The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind."
Consciousness is immaterial. That now cannot be denied. It seems so mysterious because we haven't studied it sufficiently in its own terms to develop a language to talk about it. Better to turn to Eastern traditions to begin to understand it.
Saying consciousness is "immaterial" doesn't explain consciousness any better and brings a whole host of issues with it. That concept isn't new, it's been around going all the way back to Plato 2,000yrs ago and yet, we still do not understand consciousness
Here you are still insulting everybody who dares to disagree with you - how pathetic. I'm not sure if he skipped science class, but I'm reasonably sure that you skipped philosophy classes, Nickolas ;) There is no reason to believe that consciousness is a function of the brain.
nickolasgaspar Can you provide a reason for why consciousness must be a function of the brain in the first place? It is not the most parsimonious explanation for consciousness.
The example of taking the tomato by hand does not demonstrate anything different from the example of sight. Just as our consciousness fills in the spaces of the tomato that we do not see, it also fills in the spaces that we do not touch when grasping it with our hand. And if it's a cherry tomato or the hand of a giant that touches the entire surface of the tomato, it's like seeing the entire surface of the tomato (maybe helped with mirrors or whatever).
Looking at mental health and how isolation and loneliness affects consciousness really does appear to point to consciousness being a group rather than individual phenomenon. Also my experience in life if that my contact with others, both through direct contact and literature has had a huge effect in the development of 'my' consciousness. In a sense consciousness is the sum of sensory experiences we have so far had.
I can see what he was going at. basically consciousness plays a role if you try to describe the color red to a blind or even color blind person. That no matter how you describe the color red, or things that are red, there is no way of describing it to the person. I think it comes down to, emotion, senses, and the bodies mechanism
See Bernado Kastrup's very interesting work on consciousness. Sadly because Kastrup doesn't have relevant academic degrees he isn't that well known but I think he thinks similarly to Alva Noe in many respects.
I think the answer to the eternal question "why?" is simply the ability of the conscious mind to ask the question at all. It's just somewhat anticlimactic to the ego...
Sounds like an unnecessary complication, imo. If you simply treat consciousness as a _process_ rather than a _thing_, then the situation simplifies. Take, say, a waterfall. It is not _made_ of rocks, and water. Yes, it is _more_ than these alone. Yes it depends on the environment, and water merely has a "role in a dynamic active involvment" (what Alva said about the brain at the end of the clip). Consciousness, like a waterfall is not really just an object, but an interaction of objects. Our language, which is based on our perception of others (who are, after all, just like us) compells us to think of sentient agents as "objects" with locations, so we think of ourselves as nouns. Much like a waterfall is a noun. Only with a _waterfall_, the verb is embeded in the noun - it is water _falling_. The same should apply to our thoughts, which are neural chemicals flowing and interacting, much like water and stone are interacting in presence of gravity. The word "consciousness" is stripped of verbage. But we are not really pure nouns - we too are primarily verbs. We are human beings. We are _Be_-ing Human.
vovka-morkovka I agree with what your saying but that is exactly what Alva said. Which part of what he said is the "unnecessary complication"? You just re-stated the exact point he is making.
Dan Mozan Well, not really. It has been a while, so i had to re-watch. Arggh, thanks a lot! :)First of all, he is very vague about what he actually means - at least that seems to me - maybe i am an idiot, idk. But once you sort out all the muddy waters, the gist that i get is that he is running away from the idea that consciousness is action of the cells of the nervous system, and is instead treats it as some sort of semi-hidden, (enivoronmental context-dependent??), but, here is the key - *substance*. He compares it to an obscured part of a tomato or a "value" assigned by environment (his analogy of the coin mint).He says that "consciousness is not something that the brain produces" or that it is *not* "something that happens in the brain" or something that "the neurons are producing".I am not at all on board with the image of consciousness as a semi-hidden, semi-perceived substance, and argue for it as an *action* of the brain.All I am saying, is that if you reduce what consciousness "is" to a process, you simplify all these notion of it as a material thing - for actions are not really things. And indeed, actions are more than the sum of their parts. But they are not really hidden states of _matter_. And if that aspect of consciousness is mysterious, than so is the waterfall - it too has a hidden mysterious aspect called "falling", obscured from our senses.If you see similarity between these points of view - great. I don't.
vovka-morkovka I interpret what he is saying as being the same as your analogy of the water fall. I interpret his coin analogy (the value in the coin exists not in the molecules of the coin but in the relationship between the coin and it's economic environment) as being the same as your "actions are more than the sum of their parts". Isn't that the same point as his coin analogy? Your earlier water fall analogy is the same thing as I understand it. Consciousness, like a waterfall is not really just an object, but an interaction of objects. Consciousness, like the value in a coin is not really just an object, but an interaction of objects. The waterfall and coin analogy's are the exact same analogies. It sounds like you completely agree with him. He never said consciousness is NOT something the neurons are producing or that it does NOT happen in the brain, he is saying that the environment in which the brain is embedded in can not be ignored in the explanation of the ACTION of consciousness. This is almost obvious considering the brain was created by natural process's in the environment but surprisingly lots of people don't take it into account.
This guy said a whole lot of nothing but he's somewhat onto something. Yes we have to go inward to solve the consciousness question but it won't be inward into the brain but rather, inward into the energy that animates us. That's consciousness.
This is the phenomenological position . Husserl argued in a similar fashion with his idea of the "epoch " and the bracketing of the objects of consciousness. That consciousness is intentional. For an exposition of the primacy of tactile consciousness, Sartre has got there before this guy.
Consciousness is hard because consciousness is all that actually exists. All else is an experience, and because multiple observers have enough commonality between their subjective experiences, we treat the emergent consensus reality as being real above our experiences. But the truth is more elegant and wonderful: multiple observers are a discontinuous geometry of a single consciousness, able to experience simultaneously from multiple perspectives. We are all each other, but we struggle to see so
To accept the fact that the earth has been here for billions of years before homo sapiens is to accept that there is a reality outside of our consciousness, and brains evolved to process the data from the nature around us, and we call that consciousness.
That's rather simplistic, isn't it? I mean, if spiritual beings did exist, connected to brains, then it follows that you wouldn't be able to see those beings after the brain died any more than you could see them while the brain was still alive! Moreover, even if one concedes that consciousness is just a brain process, they haven't even begun to answer the question of why no other collection of matter has conscious content or a first-person perspective, but brains somehow do.
Moreover, confusion about consciousness is born from the assumption that matter is of a more fundamental/elementary nature than consciousness. As a result, consciousness is a priori thought of as a secondary, perceiving phenomena. When turning this assumption around, it would be considered a primary, creating phenomena.
i think it is both secondary and primary, and the order is unimportant, only that it is interactive, sometimes it is perceiving and sometimes it is creating or it is simultaneous, chicken or egg point really
Unlike the moon, the reverse side of the tomato seems known. Then there were past experiences with sun-dried tomatoes, with rotten tomatoes, tomatoes that are green, hard tomatoes designed for stacking on trucks, real tomatoes from the 1950s, the sense of slicing a tomato, the taste and feel. All these flow in from past experience and make up the consciousness and are totally contained in the brain and body of the individual.
Your comment is rather puzzling in that, so far as I can tell, nothing in your reaction to my remark actually contradicts it. I would be happy to offer further thoughts, if you would clarify where you believe I have either erred in my own assertions, or else misrepresented Noe's thesis. Cheers.
firstly, great videos thanks!! imo the brain is just the interface we use to interperate conciousness. They are two seperate things and one is not dependant on the other.
+nickolasgaspar The idea that consciousness is a function of the brain is logically dependent on the idea that there exists an unknowable universe outside of mind from which mind emerges. It requires the idea that there exist non-experiential primitives that give rise to experience. This is not ontologically neutral, and so in assuming that consciousness is a function of the brain you are also assuming a set of unfalsifiable ontological assumptions. The difference is the idealist assumes a more parsimonious set of founding assumptions. There is _less_ reason to default to your position than there is to default to idealism.
I am curious then, if virtual reality can create the same or remarkably similar neurological responses as reality, is the actuality of the object necessary for conscious understanding? Or can we suggest its reliance on memory or the simple embodiment of what preexists?
Space and time are perceived by human awareness as an empty, intangible nothingness. This is clearly not the case as we can observe that space/time is distorted by mass, producing the effect we call gravity. Planets, stars and galaxies exist in an otherwise undetectable medium subject to the warping effect of gravitational bodies; While large bodies may readily be observed to produce this space/time warping effect - all material mass- a planet, a grain of sand or an atom - exerts the same effect. Human minds are like wise immersed in this medium; as are human bodies. As with fluids, gases or electromagnetic fields ; a medium capable of being distorted or warped is capable of carrying vibrations. I would hypothesis that this medium allows the feeling of emotional "connection", between people at a distance, of which we may occasionally become consciously aware. On the other hand- I may just be a dreaming, hibernating grizzly bear.
Just the simplest example with the neuronal photograph of the front of the tomato is flawed from the start. Maybe a newborn looking at a tomato from a distance for the first time is only partly conscious. But an adult looks at the tomato, and what happens? So many of the past experiences with tomatoes flood in, some surely beneath the surface.
sounds like "direct realism" and psychologigal behaviourism in which there is no representation but activity in environments and associations between doings and outside things. I like this approach although i think in strong forms they have the classic problems of mental imagery,illusions,hallucination, dreams. Sometimes there is no need for something external or "outiside strucutre" to have an almost-identical veridical experience. In weaker forms there is merit in it although far from explaining the hard problem. Maybe it needs a more radical "pan-psychist version" in which all physical events are accompanied by experiential-events in some nomological and structural relation.
नमस्ते सर मेरी इंग्लिश थोड़ी कमजोर है इसलिए आपसे पूछ रहा हूं ये भाईसाहब क्या बोल रहे हैं ? क्या ये consciousness को मान रहे हैं या नकार रहे हैं ? ओर consciousness and soul दोनों एक ही है या अलग-अलग है ?
Does consciousness come into the brain from external environment along with information? Maybe a person has internal consciousness that encounters consciousness from external source to produce subjective awareness and feeling?
why is the better metaphor touch or the better metaphor is seeing but we require a greater understanding of what seeing encompasses? isn't it the interaction? isn't the interaction the whole point?
We all know that we are conscious. However, what exactly is consciousness? Seems the lack of any clear understanding is behind the 'confusion' re the concept. Take the back of a tomato. We don't need to see it because we know it is there from past experience. That experience becomes an integral part of perception. Most good philosophers will eventually become materialists! :)
That was incredibly interesting. So many of you are ready to dismiss it before you have even thought about this subject deeply. You have no right, whatsoever, to call anyone 'indoctrinated'. I'm well aware of my implicit biases, but at least I am willing to admit it without slandering ideas that could possibly pioneer discovery.
Here here! However, the discontinuity is itself mostly illusion. We are much more continuous than we perceive ourselves. Consider all the levels of intercourse and discourse: economic, social, communication, oxygen molecules, food, etc. It is one big, mostly invisible to our senses, network of interactions that bind not only our human consciousnesses, but the very being of all things. So this one thing that we in fact are all different perspectives of is only one giant thing after all.
I wonder what would happen if you were made unconscious and a very good copy of your whole body was made - so now there are two of you. You and your copy are brought back to consciousness. In which one of those bodies does your experience now appear to reside? If either one of you die, are you always still alive?
if they have different consciousness, then the assumption that consciousness as a part of physical body would become questionable. If they have the same one consciousness (where the mind is able to control both brain and body), then the former assumption would also become questionable. This is a paradoxical situation.
I like experiencing the idea of consciousness as a projector. Bacteria need enough of themselves to reach quorum before they infect the host as a contagion, no?
@nikiyen6: He's using this (infrequent) meaning of "purchase": (noun) a hold or position on something for applying power advantageously, or the advantage gained by such application. So "explanatory purchase" means "explanatory advantage" or "explanatory power" . . .
I've read "Consciousness Explained" twice. He is an excellent thinker, but he neglects some of the most fundamental questions. Heterophenomenology is just softer eliminativism with some practical benefits. It doesn't address why intentional states or perceptions actually exist.
Is there a hard problem at all? Consciousness can be meaningfully described within a phenomenological frame, in which case it may be referred to social contructs, but lacks clear definition within a causal framework and the problem becomes one of semantics.
@David Watermeyer: "Phenomenological frame" usually means describing something by various experiences of it (each of which is a "frame") . . . rather than what it "is" in some independent way. You're describing what happens . . . not what causes the happenings.
It seems to me your position isn't too far from his. The fact that people are creating the value (which is "real" precisely to that extent) is exactly what he's asserting of consciousness: it can't be found within the brain itself, and so will never be understood until the investigative focus broadens from the single brain to some kind of much larger interactive system from which consciousness emerges, just as the value of money emerges from the entire economic, political, and social system.
Well, Jelly, Alva really didn't make sense to me. True, he is adept at making a verbal scaffolding that is almost believable. At least Alva believes. But it seems like wishful thinking to me. He hopes, maybe, that if consciousness is partly outside the brain, then we can with some confidence sing, "Death, where is thy sting?" I think Alva is not coming to grips with the vastness possible with the neuronal connections.
This fellow is joking , no? You can't have a neural correlate without subject/object duality. Qualia is a result of an "I" the subject experiencing "the other" an object. Other animals possess this ability for sure, but are they able to make this an abstract subject for study? No. The consciousness that we seem to be most interested in is that property of self awareness that is an extension of our ability to objectify experience i.e. abstract thinking. The only way we are going to uncover this mechanism is by a cross comparison between ourselves and , say, chimpanzees using MRI imaging to map out in detail when the threshold of self awareness occurs and the proteins responsible. This is just a layperson's thought. This fellow knows nothing about how humans learn to perceive objects. Children learn to see objects in three dimensions ; its quailia is learned by examination . Consciousness self awareness , is developed. Waste of time listening to this guy.
If scientists begin thinking that the conciousness is part of the universe and mind is the construct of evolutionary biology plus the contribution of universe's conciousness and information (a small part of the whole; you can call it mind), then it might make sense to believe that the universe is intelligent, wanting to create diverse life forms and those life forms will have access to information limited to its DNA.
"Thinking" and " Believing" are not the actions of a scientist. They 'calculate' and 'verify' for the purpose of certain knowledge or workable theory. That is what science is. Thinking, in that context, and believing - are conjecture and hypotheses. - at that point the science is retired for the purpose of speculation as to what reality the limited, indeterminate observable evidence may represent. ( A fine and worthy employment of that most wondrous, mysterious, spooky phenomena in the knowable Universe - human imagination.) " might make sense to believe..." is an oxymoron - believe is conjecture in the absence of sense. One immediate way to "sense" a house brick, for example, is to drop it on ones foot - at that point the belief that it is hard and heavy becomes superfluous. It certainly makes sense to hypothesis that 'individual" minds may be some form of concentrated "node' of a pan-universal consciousness. To my own mind- it makes no "sense" (to utilize the word in the different context of irrationality) to believe, as the likes of such minds as Sean Carroll appear to do, that the material world is the sum of human existence. If it is - and death is final - then it becomes irrelevant. Why go through life closed to the greater possible dimensions of reality. If wrong - again irrelevant.
Ralph Latham Thinking and believing are two sides of conciousness coin. Calculation, verification are again offshoots. Given the development that information in the universe is not even destroyed in the black hole and it is being projected in 3-dimensional plane, all I am trying to suggest that conciousness could be captured in packets - minds - just just like energy being in different particles, except that it can never be traced.
Vaidyanathan Purushothaman A beautiful hypothesis - no doubt. Thinking and believing may be two sides of the consciousness coin - but they are not science.
Quadriplegics can sustain consciousness. And there must have been a few quadriplegics that were blind as well, and deaf - but they are still conscious. On the other hand, take a physically healthy human who suffers sever brain damage; that human can no longer have normal consciousness, if any, because the brain is damaged. So it is true that we need to world to gain experience and to exercise our brains to become conscious; but once the fire is lit, we don't necessarily need to interact with the world anymore - UNLESS, Noe is proposing some sort of dualism or idealism, and if he is then why doesn't he come out and say it. Otherwise, I can't make sense of what he is babbling about.
This dude just nailed my own subjective philosophy. I think he's putting words to this idea: A brain in a universe without stimulus would be nothing. You can't build a brain without, at the very bottom level, there being some stimulus...some world "out there". We'll never build a conscious AI until we create a system/program that sits experiencing reality. Any internal mind without stimulus will atrophy and die. It's a two way relationship from the beginning all the way down.
Why is it so baffling, you ask ? Because you don't understand it correctly. You see it as something complicated but in reality is not that complicated. There where is too much thinking, there's too much stupidity also.
Luigi Monteanni Mahayana buddhism says consciuosness is from mind, cold hard Zen Buddhism says 'all words and concepts are void of any substance' different people need different paths....... :D
I doubt whether he mentioned 2 concepts separately "mind" and "matter", i guess he said they are both one, i think i read some where consciousness arises when mind interacts with matter , i might have misunderrstood.
Consciousness maybe like, or actually be, dark matter; spread out through out the Universe at one particle per cubic kilometer and concentrated as nodes inside organisms much as gravity is concentrated as nodes in matter. Maybe dark matter is Universal consciousness....Dark matter is affected by gravity yet does not swirl in to concentrations of other matter or black holes... Consciousness and dark matter are both very mysterious.
I wonder how long the "we don't understand it 100% so therefore it's magic/fairies/rainbow-farting-spirit-unicorns" argument will hold up as science and technology progress over the next few hundred years.
+Andrew Walker It always makes me laugh when I see a criticism like 'wrong' appear & nothing more. If he's wrong can you explain EXACTLY how you know better then? I've gotta hear this!
I agree. The biggest problem with studying the mechanical structures of consciousness is that it creates such abstract and complex interpretations of objective reality that it tries to elude itself into believing that is something more that those neurons themselves. These dualist apologetics must believe that human consciousness has some priority over the universe's gaze and thus the individual's identity and ego must be protected from any form of causal activity in the natural objective universe. This is where the free will arguments starts to fall apart, because if the naturalist approach to understanding consciousness is real, then you cannot exclude the decision making processes people perform from the physical occurrences in nature, which is the basis for our modern scientific understanding. But of course, if you're a dualist, then all forms of consistency throughout all mediums of nature, including the mind, get thrown out the window.
You can be dualist and still believe there is no free will. Sure, maybe some people think that free will is creating what we perceive as the universe, but there are lots of determinists who still don't think that what we call consciousness is a physical thing. No one likes to call themselves a dualist, because people are so quick to associate that with woo-woo, but there is nothing woo-woo about it, it's just acknowledging that conscious experience, the movie inside your head, while obviously 100% correlated to physical matter, is not itself physical matter. That idea doesn't entail any implications about the "priority" of consciousness over the physical world.
Interesting but I keep coming back to the fact that my brain is doing a countless number of things in my body without my awareness, like making millions of red blood cells to name just one. So if it's handling all of that computing power and function, how much more would it need to handle to generate my sense of consciousness? My gut tells me the brain has that one covered too.
Try the other way around where the body dies when the spark of the spirit is snuffed. You can see that occur when people slowly kill themselves due to spiritual disease, addictions are a good example. I say spiritual disease because they recover by way of spiritual treatment.
how would they explain quantum consciousness , why does we choose one universe instead of the other ones that we are in also, not talking about parrallel ones just multiverse
All this blah blah blah. People need to go read Berkeley, Leibniz and Kant. Nothing new or original has been said since then. In fact, go read Patanjali. Nothing new since his stuff, really.In fact, just look deep inside your own consciousness and experience the answer. Screw all this blah blah blah and using the mind as a middle man. Silly human, silly human race.
This guy's ideas about consciousness remind me of the experiences I've had while taking powerful psychedelics. Fascinating stuff, and I think it really highlights the limitations of language.
Noe's book 'action in perception' is a must read for anyone interested in consciousness
I'm so happy to be taking class with this guy. Such a great professor.
Finally, a philosopher of consciousness who makes sense. Makes me think of Spinoza. The stuff on access and availability too. Good work Alva Noe, and viva Spinzy!
I wonder what he has to say about phantom limbs? It seems the brain is necessary for consciousness but not sufficient. It's sufficient in the sense that we can stimulate the brain to produce an experience, but can we stimulate the brain to produce an experience of something that wasn't first initiated by external means? If no, then the brain isn't sufficient for consciousness.
Well, if *you* stimulate the brain, that already implies an external influence, so the question of whether you can "stimulate the brain to produce an experience of something that wasn't initially stimulated externally", isn't really coherent when phrased that way. I think what you might be trying to ask is, could a "brain in a vat" generate an experience if nothing else existed separately or "externally" to stimulate it.
And yet I can meditate, cutting off all sensory and and mental input, yet still remain conscious and aware. I can be a pure soul in a void.
I must say- it is a relief to find a YT with comments enjoying the effort to understand - as opposes to the regular diet of derision and obscenities one observes. Cheers to all :)
No obscenities. But an amount of derision I'm afraid. I did try to understand, and I'm going to go back through and listen again, because the first time all I heard was empty wild assertions and woo woo. Maybe you could enlighten me/us. What were the main points, and what was the justification for them?
Edit- Just been through it again. Could glean nothing of note at all. In fact it was worse the second time. Such as, in starting out he is quoted as saying at 00:25 " the brain is less materialised mind than spiritualised matter". He then goes on to give NO explanation at all, for this fanciful notion. What the hell is that supposed to even mean. It's utter nonsense. Where/what is this "spirit"? What is the justification for proposing such a thing?
And that is only the start. It would take a video twice as long as this to critique it.
And I'm not gonna go into his frankly piss poor analogies. A coin, a tomato, seriously?
Massively disapointed. I was looking forward to an interesting take on conciousness. What we got was nothing of worth or note.
+rationalmartian I was just waiting for Lawrence to point out that if you put a person in a room and submit him or her to sensory deprivation, that person will still be conscious. They will have thoughts and the ability to speak. I feel like that kinda invalidates his assertions quite handily. Your thoughts?
"Consciousness extends beyond our craniums" in the sense that it seems to be a certain kind of relationship we have with reality. It is not a (mysterious) ingredient of the brain.
in addition to what the other replier has said, here's a blurb from the book of a similar author, andy clark:"When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself.".."The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind."
Consciousness is immaterial. That now cannot be denied. It seems so mysterious because we haven't studied it sufficiently in its own terms to develop a language to talk about it. Better to turn to Eastern traditions to begin to understand it.
Saying consciousness is "immaterial" doesn't explain consciousness any better and brings a whole host of issues with it. That concept isn't new, it's been around going all the way back to Plato 2,000yrs ago and yet, we still do not understand consciousness
Very good hypothesis, good arguments. Bravo!
Here you are still insulting everybody who dares to disagree with you - how pathetic. I'm not sure if he skipped science class, but I'm reasonably sure that you skipped philosophy classes, Nickolas ;)
There is no reason to believe that consciousness is a function of the brain.
nickolasgaspar Can you provide a reason for why consciousness must be a function of the brain in the first place? It is not the most parsimonious explanation for consciousness.
This is the greatest explaination ever!
The example of taking the tomato by hand does not demonstrate anything different from the example of sight. Just as our consciousness fills in the spaces of the tomato that we do not see, it also fills in the spaces that we do not touch when grasping it with our hand. And if it's a cherry tomato or the hand of a giant that touches the entire surface of the tomato, it's like seeing the entire surface of the tomato (maybe helped with mirrors or whatever).
The coin analogy is brilliant
if there is going to be a science of consciousness, science must incorporate qualitative research and understanding
Looking at mental health and how isolation and loneliness affects consciousness really does appear to point to consciousness being a group rather than individual phenomenon.
Also my experience in life if that my contact with others, both through direct contact and literature has had a huge effect in the development of 'my' consciousness.
In a sense consciousness is the sum of sensory experiences we have so far had.
I can see what he was going at. basically consciousness plays a role if you try to describe the color red to a blind or even color blind person. That no matter how you describe the color red, or things that are red, there is no way of describing it to the person. I think it comes down to, emotion, senses, and the bodies mechanism
I wish Robert Lawrence could have interviewed Jiddu Krishnamurti that would have been priceless to watch.
See Bernado Kastrup's very interesting work on consciousness. Sadly because Kastrup doesn't have relevant academic degrees he isn't that well known but I think he thinks similarly to Alva Noe in many respects.
David Watermeyer agreed. Reading him now and he’s definitely one of the best minds working at this
I think the answer to the eternal question "why?" is simply the ability of the conscious mind to ask the question at all. It's just somewhat anticlimactic to the ego...
Sounds like an unnecessary complication, imo. If you simply treat consciousness as a _process_ rather than a _thing_, then the situation simplifies. Take, say, a waterfall. It is not _made_ of rocks, and water. Yes, it is _more_ than these alone. Yes it depends on the environment, and water merely has a "role in a dynamic active involvment" (what Alva said about the brain at the end of the clip).
Consciousness, like a waterfall is not really just an object, but an interaction of objects. Our language, which is based on our perception of others (who are, after all, just like us) compells us to think of sentient agents as "objects" with locations, so we think of ourselves as nouns. Much like a waterfall is a noun. Only with a _waterfall_, the verb is embeded in the noun - it is water _falling_. The same should apply to our thoughts, which are neural chemicals flowing and interacting, much like water and stone are interacting in presence of gravity. The word "consciousness" is stripped of verbage. But we are not really pure nouns - we too are primarily verbs. We are human beings. We are _Be_-ing Human.
I think yours is a much better explanation than either of these two men go anywhere near.
+vovka-morkovka Aren't you restating exactly what alva said?
vovka-morkovka I agree with what your saying but that is exactly what Alva said. Which part of what he said is the "unnecessary complication"? You just re-stated the exact point he is making.
Dan Mozan Well, not really. It has been a while, so i had to re-watch. Arggh, thanks a lot! :)First of all, he is very vague about what he actually means - at least
that seems to me - maybe i am an idiot, idk. But once you sort out all the muddy waters, the gist that i get is that he is
running away from the idea that consciousness is action of the cells of
the nervous system, and is instead treats it as some sort of semi-hidden, (enivoronmental context-dependent??), but, here is the key - *substance*. He compares it to an obscured part of a tomato or a "value" assigned by environment (his analogy of the coin mint).He says that "consciousness is not something that the brain produces" or that it is *not* "something that happens in the brain" or something that "the neurons are producing".I am not at all on board with the image of consciousness as a semi-hidden, semi-perceived substance, and argue for it as an *action* of the brain.All I am saying, is that if you reduce what consciousness "is" to a
process, you simplify all these notion of it as a material thing - for actions are not really things. And indeed, actions are more than the sum of their parts. But they are not really hidden states of _matter_. And if that aspect of consciousness is mysterious, than so is the waterfall - it too has a hidden mysterious aspect called "falling", obscured from our senses.If you see similarity between these points of view - great. I don't.
vovka-morkovka I interpret what he is saying as being the same as your analogy of the water fall. I interpret his coin analogy (the value in the coin exists not in the molecules of the coin but in the relationship between the coin and it's economic environment) as being the same as your "actions are more than the sum of their parts". Isn't that the same point as his coin analogy? Your earlier water fall analogy is the same thing as I understand it.
Consciousness, like a waterfall is not really just an object, but an interaction of objects.
Consciousness, like the value in a coin is not really just an object, but an interaction of objects.
The waterfall and coin analogy's are the exact same analogies. It sounds like you completely agree with him.
He never said consciousness is NOT something the neurons are producing or that it does NOT happen in the brain, he is saying that the environment in which the brain is embedded in can not be ignored in the explanation of the ACTION of consciousness. This is almost obvious considering the brain was created by natural process's in the environment but surprisingly lots of people don't take it into account.
This guy said a whole lot of nothing but he's somewhat onto something. Yes we have to go inward to solve the consciousness question but it won't be inward into the brain but rather, inward into the energy that animates us. That's consciousness.
This is the phenomenological position . Husserl argued in a similar fashion with his idea of the "epoch " and the bracketing of the objects of consciousness. That consciousness is intentional. For an exposition of the primacy of tactile consciousness, Sartre has got there before this guy.
Consciousness is hard because consciousness is all that actually exists. All else is an experience, and because multiple observers have enough commonality between their subjective experiences, we treat the emergent consensus reality as being real above our experiences. But the truth is more elegant and wonderful: multiple observers are a discontinuous geometry of a single consciousness, able to experience simultaneously from multiple perspectives. We are all each other, but we struggle to see so
To accept the fact that the earth has been here for billions of years before homo sapiens is to accept that there is a reality outside of our consciousness, and brains evolved to process the data from the nature around us, and we call that consciousness.
That's rather simplistic, isn't it? I mean, if spiritual beings did exist, connected to brains, then it follows that you wouldn't be able to see those beings after the brain died any more than you could see them while the brain was still alive! Moreover, even if one concedes that consciousness is just a brain process, they haven't even begun to answer the question of why no other collection of matter has conscious content or a first-person perspective, but brains somehow do.
Moreover, confusion about consciousness is born from the assumption that matter is of a more fundamental/elementary nature than consciousness. As a result, consciousness is a priori thought of as a secondary, perceiving phenomena. When turning this assumption around, it would be considered a primary, creating phenomena.
i think it is both secondary and primary, and the order is unimportant, only that it is interactive, sometimes it is perceiving and sometimes it is creating or it is simultaneous, chicken or egg point really
Unlike the moon, the reverse side of the tomato seems known. Then there were past experiences with sun-dried tomatoes, with rotten tomatoes, tomatoes that are green, hard tomatoes designed for stacking on trucks, real tomatoes from the 1950s, the sense of slicing a tomato, the taste and feel. All these flow in from past experience and make up the consciousness and are totally contained in the brain and body of the individual.
Your comment is rather puzzling in that, so far as I can tell, nothing in your reaction to my remark actually contradicts it. I would be happy to offer further thoughts, if you would clarify where you believe I have either erred in my own assertions, or else misrepresented Noe's thesis. Cheers.
firstly, great videos thanks!! imo the brain is just the interface we use to interperate conciousness. They are two seperate things and one is not dependant on the other.
+nickolasgaspar
The idea that consciousness is a function of the brain is logically dependent on the idea that there exists an unknowable universe outside of mind from which mind emerges. It requires the idea that there exist non-experiential primitives that give rise to experience. This is not ontologically neutral, and so in assuming that consciousness is a function of the brain you are also assuming a set of unfalsifiable ontological assumptions. The difference is the idealist assumes a more parsimonious set of founding assumptions. There is _less_ reason to default to your position than there is to default to idealism.
I am curious then, if virtual reality can create the same or remarkably similar neurological responses as reality, is the actuality of the object necessary for conscious understanding? Or can we suggest its reliance on memory or the simple embodiment of what preexists?
Space and time are perceived by human awareness as an empty, intangible nothingness. This is clearly not the case as we can observe that space/time is distorted by mass, producing the effect we call gravity.
Planets, stars and galaxies exist in an otherwise undetectable medium subject to the warping effect of gravitational bodies; While large bodies may readily be observed to produce this space/time warping effect - all material mass- a planet, a grain of sand or an atom - exerts the same effect.
Human minds are like wise immersed in this medium; as are human bodies.
As with fluids, gases or electromagnetic fields ; a medium capable of being distorted or warped is capable of carrying vibrations. I would hypothesis that this medium allows the feeling of emotional "connection", between people at a distance, of which we may occasionally become consciously aware.
On the other hand- I may just be a dreaming, hibernating grizzly bear.
Just the simplest example with the neuronal photograph of the front of the tomato is flawed from the start. Maybe a newborn looking at a tomato from a distance for the first time is only partly conscious. But an adult looks at the tomato, and what happens? So many of the past experiences with tomatoes flood in, some surely beneath the surface.
sounds like "direct realism" and psychologigal behaviourism in which there is no representation but activity in environments and associations between doings and outside things. I like this approach although i think in strong forms they have the classic problems of mental imagery,illusions,hallucination, dreams. Sometimes there is no need for something external or "outiside strucutre" to have an almost-identical veridical experience. In weaker forms there is merit in it although far from explaining the hard problem. Maybe it needs a more radical "pan-psychist version" in which all physical events are accompanied by experiential-events in some nomological and structural relation.
He is explaining Vedanta philosophy
नमस्ते सर मेरी इंग्लिश थोड़ी कमजोर है इसलिए आपसे पूछ रहा हूं
ये भाईसाहब क्या बोल रहे हैं ? क्या ये consciousness को मान रहे हैं या नकार रहे हैं ? ओर consciousness and soul दोनों एक ही है या अलग-अलग है ?
Does consciousness come into the brain from external environment along with information? Maybe a person has internal consciousness that encounters consciousness from external source to produce subjective awareness and feeling?
why is the better metaphor touch or the better metaphor is seeing but we require a greater understanding of what seeing encompasses? isn't it the interaction? isn't the interaction the whole point?
We all know that we are conscious. However, what exactly is consciousness? Seems the lack of any clear understanding is behind the 'confusion' re the concept.
Take the back of a tomato. We don't need to see it because we know it is there from past experience. That experience becomes an integral part of perception.
Most good philosophers will eventually become materialists! :)
That was incredibly interesting. So many of you are ready to dismiss it before you have even thought about this subject deeply. You have no right, whatsoever, to call anyone 'indoctrinated'. I'm well aware of my implicit biases, but at least I am willing to admit it without slandering ideas that could possibly pioneer discovery.
Read the first 4 words and stopped. You are trying far too hard at being false. I do not care about egoes and pretentiousness on RUclips. Blocked.
Here here! However, the discontinuity is itself mostly illusion. We are much more continuous than we perceive ourselves. Consider all the levels of intercourse and discourse: economic, social, communication, oxygen molecules, food, etc. It is one big, mostly invisible to our senses, network of interactions that bind not only our human consciousnesses, but the very being of all things. So this one thing that we in fact are all different perspectives of is only one giant thing after all.
I wonder what would happen if you were made unconscious and a very good copy of your whole body was made - so now there are two of you. You and your copy are brought back to consciousness. In which one of those bodies does your experience now appear to reside? If either one of you die, are you always still alive?
if they have different consciousness, then the assumption that consciousness as a part of physical body would become questionable. If they have the same one consciousness (where the mind is able to control both brain and body), then the former assumption would also become questionable. This is a paradoxical situation.
WE DONT KNOW YET....END OF DISCUSSION, FURTHER RESEARCH NEEDED
I like experiencing the idea of consciousness as a projector. Bacteria need enough of themselves to reach quorum before they infect the host as a contagion, no?
How do he explain dreams, though?
The pearl of great price in the parable from Jesus.
What is "explanatory purchase"? (4:40)
@nikiyen6: He's using this (infrequent) meaning of "purchase":
(noun)
a hold or position on something for applying power advantageously, or the advantage gained by such application.
So "explanatory purchase" means "explanatory advantage" or "explanatory power" . . .
I've read "Consciousness Explained" twice. He is an excellent thinker, but he neglects some of the most fundamental questions. Heterophenomenology is just softer eliminativism with some practical benefits. It doesn't address why intentional states or perceptions actually exist.
Is there a hard problem at all? Consciousness can be meaningfully described within a phenomenological frame, in which case it may be referred to social contructs, but lacks clear definition within a causal framework and the problem becomes one of semantics.
+MinorityMans Could you try to explain that clearer please?
@David Watermeyer: "Phenomenological frame" usually means describing something by various experiences of it (each of which is a "frame") . . . rather than what it "is" in some independent way. You're describing what happens . . . not what causes the happenings.
'extended cognition'- not to be confused with the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake!
Happens in the brain plus how we're socialised in a community/culture. Nothing to do with an external entity or God.
BEING AND TIME ?
It seems to me your position isn't too far from his. The fact that people are creating the value (which is "real" precisely to that extent) is exactly what he's asserting of consciousness: it can't be found within the brain itself, and so will never be understood until the investigative focus broadens from the single brain to some kind of much larger interactive system from which consciousness emerges, just as the value of money emerges from the entire economic, political, and social system.
Well, Jelly, Alva really didn't make sense to me. True, he is adept at making a verbal scaffolding that is almost believable. At least Alva believes. But it seems like wishful thinking to me. He hopes, maybe, that if consciousness is partly outside the brain, then we can with some confidence sing, "Death, where is thy sting?" I think Alva is not coming to grips with the vastness possible with the neuronal connections.
This fellow is joking , no? You can't have a neural correlate without subject/object duality. Qualia is a result of an "I" the subject experiencing "the other" an object. Other animals possess this ability for sure, but are they able to make this an abstract subject for study? No. The consciousness that we seem to be most interested in is that property of self awareness that is an extension of our ability to objectify experience i.e. abstract thinking. The only way we are going to uncover this mechanism is by a cross comparison between ourselves and , say, chimpanzees using MRI imaging to map out in detail when the threshold of self awareness occurs and the proteins responsible. This is just a layperson's thought. This fellow knows nothing about how humans learn to perceive objects. Children learn to see objects in three dimensions ; its quailia is learned by examination . Consciousness self awareness , is developed. Waste of time listening to this guy.
If scientists begin thinking that the conciousness is part of the universe and mind is the construct of evolutionary biology plus the contribution of universe's conciousness and information (a small part of the whole; you can call it mind), then it might make sense to believe that the universe is intelligent, wanting to create diverse life forms and those life forms will have access to information limited to its DNA.
"Thinking" and " Believing" are not the actions of a scientist.
They 'calculate' and 'verify' for the purpose of certain knowledge or workable theory. That is what science is. Thinking, in that context, and believing - are conjecture and hypotheses. - at that point the science is retired for the purpose of speculation as to what reality the limited, indeterminate observable evidence may represent.
( A fine and worthy employment of that most wondrous, mysterious, spooky phenomena in the knowable Universe - human imagination.)
" might make sense to believe..." is an oxymoron - believe is conjecture in the absence of sense. One immediate way to "sense" a house brick, for example, is to drop it on ones foot - at that point the belief that it is hard and heavy becomes superfluous.
It certainly makes sense to hypothesis that 'individual" minds may be some form of concentrated "node' of a pan-universal consciousness.
To my own mind- it makes no "sense" (to utilize the word in the different context of irrationality) to believe, as the likes of such minds as Sean Carroll appear to do, that the material world is the sum of human existence. If it is - and death is final - then it becomes irrelevant. Why go through life closed to the greater possible dimensions of reality. If wrong - again irrelevant.
Ralph Latham Thinking and believing are two sides of conciousness coin. Calculation, verification are again offshoots. Given the development that information in the universe is not even destroyed in the black hole and it is being projected in 3-dimensional plane, all I am trying to suggest that conciousness could be captured in packets - minds - just just like energy being in different particles, except that it can never be traced.
Vaidyanathan Purushothaman A beautiful hypothesis - no doubt. Thinking and believing may be two sides of the consciousness coin - but they are not science.
A tomato in the hand is worth two in the mind!
What is consciousness?
Oh hi, you must be a zombie.
Quadriplegics can sustain consciousness. And there must have been a few quadriplegics that were blind as well, and deaf - but they are still conscious. On the other hand, take a physically healthy human who suffers sever brain damage; that human can no longer have normal consciousness, if any, because the brain is damaged. So it is true that we need to world to gain experience and to exercise our brains to become conscious; but once the fire is lit, we don't necessarily need to interact with the world anymore - UNLESS, Noe is proposing some sort of dualism or idealism, and if he is then why doesn't he come out and say it. Otherwise, I can't make sense of what he is babbling about.
This dude just nailed my own subjective philosophy. I think he's putting words to this idea:
A brain in a universe without stimulus would be nothing. You can't build a brain without, at the very bottom level, there being some stimulus...some world "out there". We'll never build a conscious AI until we create a system/program that sits experiencing reality. Any internal mind without stimulus will atrophy and die. It's a two way relationship from the beginning all the way down.
One day I hope to have tomato consciousness
Why is it so baffling, you ask ? Because you don't understand it correctly.
You see it as something complicated but in reality is not that complicated.
There where is too much thinking, there's too much stupidity also.
Buddhism already says that consciousness originates from external interactions with matter.
no, it doesn't buddha's texts say clearly that everything is in our mind
Luigi Monteanni
Mahayana buddhism says consciuosness is from mind, cold hard Zen Buddhism says 'all words and concepts are void of any substance' different people need different paths....... :D
I doubt whether he mentioned 2 concepts separately "mind" and "matter", i guess he said they are both one, i think i read some where consciousness arises when mind interacts with matter , i might have misunderrstood.
9:19
+Allesnik great out of context quote
Consciousness maybe like, or actually be, dark matter; spread out through out the Universe at one particle per cubic kilometer and concentrated as nodes inside organisms much as gravity is concentrated as nodes in matter. Maybe dark matter is Universal consciousness....Dark matter is affected by gravity yet does not swirl in to concentrations of other matter or black holes... Consciousness and dark matter are both very mysterious.
I wonder how long the "we don't understand it 100% so therefore it's magic/fairies/rainbow-farting-spirit-unicorns" argument will hold up as science and technology progress over the next few hundred years.
wrong
+Andrew Walker It always makes me laugh when I see a criticism like 'wrong' appear & nothing more. If he's wrong can you explain EXACTLY how you know better then? I've gotta hear this!
I agree. The biggest problem with studying the mechanical structures of consciousness is that it creates such abstract and complex interpretations of objective reality that it tries to elude itself into believing that is something more that those neurons themselves. These dualist apologetics must believe that human consciousness has some priority over the universe's gaze and thus the individual's identity and ego must be protected from any form of causal activity in the natural objective universe. This is where the free will arguments starts to fall apart, because if the naturalist approach to understanding consciousness is real, then you cannot exclude the decision making processes people perform from the physical occurrences in nature, which is the basis for our modern scientific understanding. But of course, if you're a dualist, then all forms of consistency throughout all mediums of nature, including the mind, get thrown out the window.
ValiFur you're just pissed because the old paradigm is showing alot of cracks.
You can be dualist and still believe there is no free will. Sure, maybe some people think that free will is creating what we perceive as the universe, but there are lots of determinists who still don't think that what we call consciousness is a physical thing. No one likes to call themselves a dualist, because people are so quick to associate that with woo-woo, but there is nothing woo-woo about it, it's just acknowledging that conscious experience, the movie inside your head, while obviously 100% correlated to physical matter, is not itself physical matter. That idea doesn't entail any implications about the "priority" of consciousness over the physical world.
Interesting but I keep coming back to the fact that my brain is doing a countless number of things in my body without my awareness, like making millions of red blood cells to name just one. So if it's handling all of that computing power and function, how much more would it need to handle to generate my sense of consciousness? My gut tells me the brain has that one covered too.
Blather of the gaps.
Organ Farm Exactly, and rationalization.
this dude dont know what the hell hes talkinbout
I found it interesting and insightful.
👍💯
consciousness is imagination, the ability to create that which does not exist. just a possibility guys...
Doesn't Rupert Sheldrake describe consciousness as potential?
Consciousness is fundamental
tapdancing dualist...
Alva Noë has lot of metaphors and poetry, but no straight answers.
I switch off once u start stawmanning
Try the other way around where the body dies when the spark of the spirit is snuffed. You can see that occur when people slowly kill themselves due to spiritual disease, addictions are a good example. I say spiritual disease because they recover by way of spiritual treatment.
how would they explain quantum consciousness , why does we choose one universe instead of the other ones that we are in also, not talking about parrallel ones just multiverse
All this blah blah blah. People need to go read Berkeley, Leibniz and Kant. Nothing new or original has been said since then. In fact, go read Patanjali. Nothing new since his stuff, really.In fact, just look deep inside your own consciousness and experience the answer. Screw all this blah blah blah and using the mind as a middle man. Silly human, silly human race.
If he is correct, why hasn't he published a Theory of Consciousness that can be peer-reviewed? He cannot, so his views remain hypothetical.
Blah, blah, blah. There is no consciousness without a brain. Full stop.
Nope