No, no. Sir Roger states that consciousness is probably something non computational and he based this idea not on the infinity but on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Mathematically one can not prove a statement to be correct, but our consciousness knows.
To me, Gödel's incompleteness theorem shows us that our cognitive abilities are not enough to accurately perceive the universe. "Our consciousness knows" is far too subjective a statement to be used as evidence that our brains are more than calculation and thus somehow "magic". To me that has more to do with bias and our desire to feel special.
@@lostinbravado In an attempt to remain honest and objective, you discount the mystery and magic of it all. That's the basic stance of all naturalists. Of course "proof" is what Penrose claimed, at least when he said consciousness cannot be a product of anything machine-like we know of. By Gödel insisting on an outside reference, we discount most "consciousness is illusory" arguments, simply because he begged the existence of something "beyond" to act as the necessary container -- if not shaper. Also, we shouldn't confuse the accuracy, the integrity, the elegance of human consciousness with its "true" existence. I don't think Penrose is doing this, but Bach here seems to be flying around (unknowingly?) Penrose's "we can't be machines" argument. Still, I understand why some will not like "our consciousness knows." That doesn't seem "billable." If I believe in God, it might be because I know my mind and all the collective minds of a society, were "designed" to follow a certain evolution toward something better. This "insight" is a baby version of extra-machine consciousness, is it not? Oh yes, calling it illusion is "tough-guy Camus talk," but it's a basic and undeniable fact of human history that we idealize and strive toward our idealizations, and that their evolution and perfection is our obsession. This is beyond simple negative/positive-feedbacking like Bach wants to reduce to.
@@vonBottorff Well, it does appear to be true that intellectuals work extremely hard to try and prove their biases around consciousness. Of course an intellectual is still a human. My view is that we should start with this statement: The human mind is limited. This is an obvious truth given the obvious limits of humans. And from there we should accept that regardless of how much work we throw at a problem, there will be many problems that we will be unable to solve. Those will be problems that exceed our limits, in the same way a problem may exceed a computers limits. I don't think our brain calculates exactly as a computer, in terms of 1's and 0's. I think it calculates in a vastly more complex way. However, it is still calculation. And my prediction is that regardless of how complex a complete view of consciousness is, it'll still be some form of calculation. Data goes in, is processed, and an outcome is produced. There may be quantum effects, but as far as I can see, those effects do not allow us to perform magic. Our abilities are limited. Thus our mind and our broader consciousness must be limited as well. I think when you consider that limit, the human mind begins to look rather pathetic. Not in terms of what it can do, but in terms of what is possible.
Somehow I doubt Joscha is considering, by making this argument he acknowledges, if a turing machine can reproduce human experience (or the universe as we experience it), then one may just as reasonably suggest the Universal itself is a simulation.
Considering that our universe is discrete in nature (it's made up of small, individual units) and that it can be understood by mathematical symmetry, it's not really that far fetched to think that our universe is simulated. And if it's not, it's at the very least being generated by some mathematical process.
Generated, or described by? Mathematics can describe what we know about the world, but it could be possible that we are incapable of observing higher order rules or systems.
@@austinpuckett2347on the concept that - the world we experience, and Universe, is a dynamic built from a point of energy and origin, through entropy, and to it's end... ... yes, start with the big bang, follow it outward... What if our mathematics is just a way for DECONSTRUCTING the world, and MEANING is the mechanism for making it. In other words, the human eye is designed for seeing only certain information; certain aspects in the color spectrum. Our ability for measuring the world and for effecting it is, mostly, locked within these bounds. There are things we can see and things we cannot. And when it comes to living your life, outside these means, the mathematics of what defines "spaghettification at the event horizon of a black hole" really means nothing to you. Sure, you can walk up to a chalkboard and describe it. But can you ever walk up to IT and experience IT? .. of course not. Therefore it doesn't matter. Not "matter" in the sense of "particle physics." But, "matter" in the sense, "it has no meaning for you, in your day to day life." And yes, understanding many of these things, in the "particle physics" sense, is the reason you have a smartphone today. Understanding things we cannot see CAN still have great impact. But we only chase these things, in the first place, because what they MEAN. Chasing an electron may inevitably produce you a smartphone. BUT, it was only by chasing the MEANING of the electron that got you that smartphone in the first place. MEANING... Meaning is what describes the nature of our universe, not mathematics. Mathematics allows us to understand the universe, in a way to deconstruct it; to understand it ourselves. It produces great technology. But it's not what MAKES the universe. What makes the universe is what WE make of IT. What makes the universe is our SENSE of what IT means.
@Sir Sleepy kind of like the Moon is perfect equa-distance between Earth and Sun, to blot it out, during an eclipse. Somehow, like the nature of water, and the fact it is the one element that floats in its own ether when it freezes, some of these things, it would seem, if life is to exist at all, are not by accident 😏
@@zane62135 OR... mathematics is just our best "contrived language" for describing that which made us and the universe, something we are yet still very far from understanding in the first place.
almost, consciousness is the observer that forms relation to its environment that gives birth to ego and control to which creates the illusion of reality.
Bach conceives of himself as a machine. His background has conditioned him to this idea and his work is largely in developing cognitive architecture models. When he is asked a question he answers like he was explaining how a motherboard works. Most of us have trouble understanding him completely...including Lex. I've yet to hear an interviewer succeed in bridging his 'motherboard' jargon with most of our 'lived' worlds. But they should keep trying. He's obviously brilliantly sui generis.
What are you talking about? Search up the meaning of the words he uses when you don't understand them and you will be able to understand them. He's not using his 'own jargon'
His lack of training in philosophy leads him to certain conflicting conclusions. I watched a conversation of him and John Vervaeke who exposed some of Bach's inconsistencies regardless he often makes solid contributions. There are mathematicians, engineers with experience in AI who are also trained in philosophy that tend to be a bit comprehensive and flexible.
@@ToiChutGongFlu It is jargon. He based his work off of that example and you can not tell me that he doesn't still do that. Even if he does, no one understands him because he is thinking to deep into this problem without observing that you can separate yourself from this physical realm and become infinite as your friends and family will exist for eternity in peace until you meet them again yourself in death, of course when you experience "death" itself. There is no hell, there is only heaven and every person will experience a life review where your life flashes before your eyes. Your issues will be become boundless as you will live your own heaven in the same life you are given. You will not assume consciousness into another physical body as that is impossible. What happens is "you" will exist in another timeline when the earth is "renewed" in this conscious form and you will never be apart from the ones you love. I promise that and I know it is true. These people who believe that hate is the answer to issues will be greatly mistaken when they, themselves, will meet total grace and they will take that grace to be better people when they assume physical form again in the same universe and the same issues will occur for eternity. This makes life bearable and should make you want to be the best person you can be to others around you. There is a reason that we all share dna and that reason is because we are boundless in nature. Let me reiterate. This form is only one of an infinite amount of timelines where we could make different choices that have entirely different outcomes and we become "happy" no matter what. We will still go through hardship and pain, but that is the answer to become what we always wanted to be, loved, and to be loved means to love one another. This world is so filled with hate and suffering that I cannot fathom that we cease to exist after we die. Being born is an illusion and death is an illusion. It all means something in the end to one another. We will become love in the most boundless, infinite form.
I agree; I've come to understand this over the past few years thanks in large part to Jaron Lanier's 1995 essay "You Can't Argue With A Zombie". There's a simple answer to why people seem to be "talking past each other" all the time on consciousness - because some have it, and some don't.
Also Lanier: "Consciousness is hard to talk about because all the words you'd want to use to describe it have been colonized by people who think it doesn't exist" (from a "Closer To Truth" interview) There's what I call "Dennettian Consciousness", where the term merely means an abstraction, a bundle of cognitive abilities, and "Chalmerian Consciousness" (or perhaps Lanierian Consciousness) where it's this extra...thing...that you can't quite touch. I also recommend his "BloggingHeads" interview from '08 with Eliezer Yudkowsky where he touches on this and taunts him about how he may not have it. It's glorious to watch. Essentially, Eliminative Materialism is a crackpot theory. It's this nice little bubble of theoretical consistency...except it has one big problem: it doesn't match the data. Consciousness is a datum. It's really there. It's maddeningly impenetrable to satisfactory, rigorous third-party description - a datum you can only observe from the inside - but nonetheless absolutely real. Maybe some people don't even see the need for a theory of consciousness to conform to this datum because they don't have access to it.
@@wengemurphy good input, this may be related to judgers who use mostly the right side of their brain which is the doing side, and perceivers who use the left side of their brain which is the perceiving side, which is some the research being done by someone called Dario Nardi, "doers" will have trouble reflecting on their actions and evaluating reality objectively, so there may be levels to this and at least in some small way these philosophical zombies are conscious, it is weird how you have seemingly intelligent people like Dennett who actively discredit and minimize the study of consciousness to the point of almost denial and how very few people like Chalmers have actually defined the problem so we can actually study it
You can't express it because you don't know what it is. You only know how to use it and you trust it totally. Our mind can do more than computation doesn't mean it can do better computationally compared to computer. To say the mind is computional and it can do computation is different and the mind is not computional in its construct.
Lex doesn't understand Penrose's argument. Penrose doesn't talk about consciousness and subjective experience in his argument against computationalism. His argument is that human mathematical reasoning cannot be simulated computationally, based mainly on implications of Godel's theorem.
@@charbelbejjani5541 Why? It's impossible to prove. Obviously it's true if you consider formal systems that are smaller than the "consciousness system". But we have no clue about what would happen for systems consciousness-like.
@@alessandroc.4543 Whatever sound formal system, no matter how complex, will have a Godel sentence. A human mathematician will be able to see the truth of his own (not assuming gender. Only for convenience) Godel sentence at least at the same degree that he sees the truth of 1+1=2. A formal system cannot do that, therefore consciousness cannot be captured by a formal system
@@charbelbejjani5541 Yes, every system have a Gödel sentence, this is proved. But it's not what I'm saying. Those formal system in wich you can tell a truth outside of the rules are simple systems , that's why you can think outside of them. You can build a Gödel sentence and that's it. But you can also extend the system in a way that the previous Gödel sentence is now predicted by the rules. You can repeat this process, causing the system to become more and more complex. If the system become complex like a human brain can we still find a Gödel sentence? The theorem say that there is one, but can we find it? This is the point where I don't agree with penrose (and you). I don't want to say that we can or can't, but that we can't know the answer.
Turing-machineness is extremely burdensome and inefficient in evolution. *Correct* computers simply don't die as often. That's what our mind is for. Being right. Computers can accelerate absurd high entropy calculation in a way that humans cannot, but humans are apex prototypers.
Question: is the version of our lives in the current state of our world not also a short cut in the cultural evolution of human society? That said, with the internet we have access to more possible versions of ourselves at the cost of more strings that we let pull ourselves by and our actions. Its kinda paradoxic to suggest humans made their way all through evolution and Robots could cheat their way up here...also Robots would undergo the change of becoming conscious in front of the eyes of their makers which is in some way just another milestone for us to better conceive our own consciousness. They might not understand what makes us so different from them, since we are all just individuals learning step by step via an evolutionary concept, but still on our own story lines for each individual.
Interesting ideas but not very convincing. He reminds me of the law of the instrument - “if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
@@mikhailmikhailov8781 Um… universal models of what? There are a lot of universal models, not sure which one can sufficiently describe consciousness (or universally accepted). He seems mostly using computer science to abstract the mechanism of consciousness, that is not an adequate physical description. I love computer science but it is mainly applied mathematics that allows you to make very useful abstractions to do all sorts of crazy things, but it isn’t the best tool to describe the physical reality (that would be physics). Joscha is using computer science far outside its domain, hence I mentioned the law of the instrument. Most importantly, I didn’t claim him to be wrong. His theory could be very close to the reality, who knows. However, he needs to prove the theory to claim he is right. He can’t claim to be right because he has a theory and others didn’t prove it wrong.
That's exactly right. Edward Feser points that out in his analysis of Alex Rosenberg's scientism: "Rosenberg’s argument, then, is essentially this: 1. The predictive power and technological applications of physics are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge. 2. Therefore what physics reveals to us is all that is real. How bad is this argument? About as bad as this one: 1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has. 2. Therefore what metal detectors reveal to us (coins and other metallic objects) is all that is real."
Consciousness will only be more than a computer if, as some people say, it exists out of the material part (no one knows where), streaming to the brain that in that situation would be just an interface. So this way would be another game. Consciousness would only be limited by the set of rules of this place where we live. In other places there would be other limitations. In this reference, we would have to think that the streaming would be for everything that is alive (plant animals - everything - each thing its streaming). Otherwise computers will always be better than us. With external streaming we should think of a god or another type of universal organization. It would be funny. (Thomas Campbell - physicist, is the man to talk about this).
You set the goal for the robot, it doesn't have free agency. Free agency means you cannot programme the AI for a purpose, it determines its own purpose in life.
Maybe It’s our senses that is our consciousness. Without our senses we cannot register emotional responses based off the things we intake. Somehow we get to experience reality freely and explore other senses the universe has to offer.
Has anyone heard about the brain grown in a lab which grew its own eyes? Our senses is not something we own individually. It’s a shared thing. And a process, maybe senses is something of a symbiotic relationship with the universe
If consciousness can be computed, we must assume that there is a level of possible computation of such in almost everything that exists. Certainly not as much as human consciousness, but probably the meaning of consciousness can be stretched in such a way, that we can do with our own mind by using tools like psychedelics. So might there be a multi leveled layer of consciousness for all that exists based on informational computation on a simulation for itself? Even if the amount that is being computated is close to zero or going up to human consciousness and even beyond? I dont like the thought that there is just one base layer human consciousness and that was it...
YES. Panpsychism. I'm not a strong proponent of it. Maybe the true nature of consciousness is something else entirely. But so far, panpsychism seems to make more sense than any other attempt to explain consciousness. Are you familiar with Tononi's Integrated Information Theory?
That if is so big that we need not waste time on it and its consequence for the time being. Nothing whatsoever points to consciousness being "computable". No one has anything close to a working model, let alone something that can be tested. Brains are warm and soggy - that's it for now.
present physics cant explain what happens in the mind because your using a physical model ie take a tv for instance it cant work without a signal..ie the mind can pick up meta signals,how do a plant know a bees a bee ?
Let's not confuse self consciousness with conscious experience. I would argue that even a worm has conscious experience. Does a worm tell itself a story and builds an internal model of itself in the world?
If you make a program autonomous, it loses the "human pulling the strings". If a human made Frankenstein, you would WISH it was human pulling the strings. We just see it as a being and not a computer, so we don't have that POV bias against it. With a computer system, many of us do (Lex included).
If a spacecraft running a computer program goes outside control of any human, then does it have agency? How is the Frankenstein's agency different from the spacecraft's?
Les is write the computer will always be limited to as far as it has been programmed, it would never have the fluid motion of thought that a human has.
Not true. AI can learn. AI will eventually be able to design better versions of itself. There's examples in nature of every level of consciousness. It seems that consciousness is a spectrum that arises from complexity.
@@HandSolitude yes I understand what you're saying AI has the capability of thinking for itself but it has access to all the information we have put there do you really think that they will think of something that we are don't know about the frightening partners to have control of everything and you can find answers 20 times tables the times Fast and we can and suggestions and the like it's intelligent people like Steven hawken say it's a bad idea as well as Nikola Tesla there is a huge part of the internet that is not used by us humans
Bach is desperately trying to convince that a predefined model made from algorithms written by us is same as real our consciousness itself....useless host wasting time.
The day your smart Roomba stops its vacuming and tells you: "You know, man? That's funny: I dreamt this moment a couple of days ago". THAT day you will know your machine has attained consciousness. Anything else is just navel gazing.
Thanks Lex for pushing back against Joscha’s faith in magic; in this case, in the power of computer chips to give birth to life. I suppose it must be the brilliant intellects of thinkers like Joscha that causes the problem here. So good at thinking, the thoughts so bright, that everything looks like a thought to them. Or perhaps the glow is too strong. Silent, pervasive, ever-present experience beyond thought might not even have been noticed, much less require an explanation beyond hand-waving.
So basically this guy is a Representational Functionalist. I recommend Lex to read Searle's essay from 1983 "Intentionality". Representational Functionalism fails to explain original intentionality and phenomenal states that don't represent anything external to the mind. 'Happiness' or 'Sadness' are not a "story" but simply a phenomenal state (qualia). Secondly, stories can only possess derived intentionality, you can't even have any "story" at all without original intentionality. In order to tell the difference between simulations or stories and reality, you have to explain original intentionality first, or else the distinction is meaningless.
Wouldn't it be possible to posit that our "Stories" which are influenced by external factors lead to qualia obviously most of it without us realizing. or in other words, as humans all intentionality is derived from things around us, our surroundings or our "programming" all things we have no real agency over. Mostly just asking for your opinion on that
@@avatar00001 Interaction with an external world is a necessary condition for the existence of intentionality, but it's not a sufficient condition. The original intentionality of the mind cannot be reduced to a mechanical Input-Process-Output modelling. I don't see agency as fundamental. Self and agency can be reduced to selfless and agencyless processes. But the of original intentionality can't be reduced to anything else.
Attention schema theory explains how the brain can compute representations of things happening inside the mind, like emotions or recalling memories. In fact AST is pointing in the direction of a fully natural explanation of 'qualia', subjective experience/awareness, quite exciting stuff
Joscha is over looking quantum eraser experiment, he would make sense if all we had was general relativity. Observation reveals the past that we would need to have in order to exist, weirdly, consciousness is somehow fundamental. Listen to Paul Davies on this.
I think the idea of the philosophical zombie puts this discussion to rest. We can theoretically make a generalized Turing test, not merely to test a machines ability to convince a human of it's capability for language, but for all facets of the human life. We could make a machines body, speech and actions indistinguishable from a humans, but it is still possible that there may be nothing it "feels like to be" that machine. It's possible we could create an automaton which can act in every way according to how a human acts, but has no subjective experience at all. Given enough time, you could even make such a robot using merely hardcoded rules in the same way the Stockfish chess engine plays chess, but with the goal of acting human instead. Surely no one would say the 24mb Stockfish engine you could download and run on your computer is conscious, despite having a model of it's domain, the chessboard. Ultimately, John Searle put it best when he said that you can simulate the functioning of a hurricane in all it's intricate detail, down to even the molecular level, but that does not mean the transistors doing the simulating will be wet. Consciousness requires something more than mere simulation. To me, that means, at the very least hardware emulation. So who knows, maybe neuromorphic computers are the future of consciousness research.
Penrose's point is that computations (and thus any mechanical machine) not only cannot be conscious the way you describe it ("what it feels like to be someone") but also cannot even simulate consciousness, i.e., they can't even act as if they're consicous. He thinks human intelligence, and mathematical reasoning in particular, is non-computable. But for Searle's point, I don't think that his simulation argument works well. He uses the examples of digestion, or other examples like hurricanes to show that a simulation is not the same as the original thing. But in some instances, a simulation is as good as the real thing. Think of a calculator or a computer. Would you say that your laptop calculator isn't a calculator? Or you can think of a computer simulation on another computer. If the simulated computer (on another computer) allows you to save files, edit, access the internet, ... would you say that this computer is not a real computer? So yeah, I'm not sure Searle's argument works, but I do agree with his conclusion nonetheless, for other independent reasons
@@charbelbejjani5541 Searle's point is that the brain is not a discrete state computational system. Every instance you've pointed out, computers and calculators, can indeed be simulated on a computer. They too are formal systems, based on axioms, rules of inference, and mathematical logic, such as binary addition and so forth. This means they are still ultimately discrete state systems. Even fuzzy logic fails, because it only simulates, using a fundamentally discrete system, the workings of analog systems. Neurochemical reactions are not discrete state, so the most promising approach in my opinion is neuromorphic computing, which replaces transistors with chemical reactions analogous to neurochemicals.
@@Michael-Hammerschmidt I see your point, but I am not sure that that's Searle's point of view. Searle is on record for saying many times that "the brain is a digital computer because everything is a digital computer and can be simulated on a computer", but yet he adds that simulation is not an emitation, so a computational system could act as if it's conscious without possessing real semantics and intentionality. I don't think he mentions the continuous nature of physical systems as opposed to the digital nature of computers to explain the difference between a simulation and the real thing. But in any case, although it is an interesting possibility, I don't think that the only difference between a conscious entity and a simulation of a conscious entity that acts consicous but is not really conscious is that the former runs on digital and the latter on continuous data. It would need serious argument to show that it's this difference that shifts from a simulation of consciousness to genuine consciousness.
@3:40 I would suggest that our consciousness cannot be simulated and that chirality exists. To say that you can imitate everything in a functional computer thingy is like saying that you can possess everything and that your smart because you can see that function is functional.
I would also suggest that "simulated" isn't the right word for our experience. I think that the proper term should be "virtual". Just like physical matters virtual just like SpaceTime is a virtual just like everything that is computable is... virtual.
So he can create a "conscious" AI in a computer simulation! Do it then. Definition of consciousness seems to be completely different or he seems to give a very narrow definition. An example would be the comatose patients who were recently diagnosed to have some consciousness while they do not react with outside world.
Philosophy is fun and all but how cool would it be if we could use AI in actual real world applications? Discussing free will, love, God, and so on is simply a waste of time. Joscha Bach's down to Earth approach is enough for me. One thing is for sure though: When Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 97 most chess GMs were not terribly impressed. But when AlphaZero beat the best chess engine Stockfish in 2017, chess players had the craziest sparkle in their eyes like they just saw their "Maker." Alpha0 is like a really fast chess engine which also has a soul, wisdom, understanding of the game! Go figure! And BTW just like in real life, AI still hasn't 'solved' the entire game of chess. So IMHO Bach is on the right track.
A computer doesn’t make constant experiences as a human being does…I can solve an equation whilst at the same time I can go through the cords of a classical guitar piece which I am planning to perform later on….
I agree with him. I think that Penrose's arguments about consciousness are absurd. If you just look at human "consciousness" logically, it's not really anything more than the ability to form a 3D simulated world from our sensors (eyes, ears, etc) and then we can record some of this information and play it back internally when more complex analysis is needed. It's really not as magical as people seem to think. Of course we've learned some tricks like language and identity which make us believe we are characters in a video game type world with elaborate stories and this and that, but this is probably just what type of thought process ended up being the most competitive in an evolutionary sense. Having an ego means that you will win and procreate. And one could imagine an infinite number of other sensor arrangements... let's say my brain got sensory information from my eyes and the eyes of 1000 insects around me. I would not be able to form the same illusion of self and my perception of the world would be entirely different. What we call consciousness is just a weird parlor trick that works because we always get sensory information from the same spatial location (our body) and therefore we can craft stories about a "self"
What strikes my small minded thought is the willingness to believe (theorize) unseen realms of reality yet discount any thought of a higher consciousness.
You don’t believe unseen realms from nothing. You make a hypothesis based on ideas. You try to explain why we have 10 or 11 dimensions but we only experience 4. You don’t wonder why one doesn’t think too much about if a zombie music band exists in Pluto because even if it could very well be true, there’s no reason even in thought that makes you have that inclination. Also you could have an inclination of smth and that could also be wrong. Galileo didn’t just think we weren’t thé centre of the universe because he had a dream or an acid trip, or because it was a possibility…it’s because it was one of the possibilities that led to greater subjective truth about what we can observe, measure and experiment on in our world.
I just don’t like the intentional fantasizing of the very hard consciousness problem. We aren’t the only animals that have consciousness. Clearly. I really don’t get what question exactly is not being answered and what makes it confusing if you think from the prespective of how life evolves from single cell to now and what our ancestor eukaryotes had to go through…then it does make sense how you have this sense of being you…we also have people that because of a head injury we can pull the plug or call vegetables, they aren’t even themselves anymore just because they aren’t who we know them to be, despite the fact that they are still breathing…and it hurts less to kill those than to kill a monkey…but we can swat cockroaches easier than mammals…I’m rambling but I guess I just don’t understand the unanswered consciousness questions
If you don't understand the basics of reality, God, heaven, hell, the devil, the soul, the spirit, etc, then how can you understand anything complex. Your in a endless loop of saying nothing and misrepresenting people.
Listening to Penrose is like listening to an evolved being. Even when he humbly says “I think…….. but we don’t know for sure”, I’m like “Sir, I think you do know”. Indeed a titan.
Been thinking exactly what Mr Bach asserts but lacked the requisite knowledge and experience to counter Mr Penrose's position yet intuitively I felt his position was wrong on consciousness.
In my opinion "consciousness" is yet another magical word that doesnt really mean anything. like happyness or purpuse, etc. its all contextual. A lazy abstraction level for a more complex but utterly disappointing truth.
No, no. Sir Roger states that consciousness is probably something non computational and he based this idea not on the infinity but on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Mathematically one can not prove a statement to be correct, but our consciousness knows.
Joscha Bach is misrepresenting Penrose's views in that clip. Thank you for pointing this out.
Penrose and David Deutsch to the rescue!
To me, Gödel's incompleteness theorem shows us that our cognitive abilities are not enough to accurately perceive the universe. "Our consciousness knows" is far too subjective a statement to be used as evidence that our brains are more than calculation and thus somehow "magic". To me that has more to do with bias and our desire to feel special.
@@lostinbravado In an attempt to remain honest and objective, you discount the mystery and magic of it all. That's the basic stance of all naturalists. Of course "proof" is what Penrose claimed, at least when he said consciousness cannot be a product of anything machine-like we know of. By Gödel insisting on an outside reference, we discount most "consciousness is illusory" arguments, simply because he begged the existence of something "beyond" to act as the necessary container -- if not shaper. Also, we shouldn't confuse the accuracy, the integrity, the elegance of human consciousness with its "true" existence. I don't think Penrose is doing this, but Bach here seems to be flying around (unknowingly?) Penrose's "we can't be machines" argument. Still, I understand why some will not like "our consciousness knows." That doesn't seem "billable." If I believe in God, it might be because I know my mind and all the collective minds of a society, were "designed" to follow a certain evolution toward something better. This "insight" is a baby version of extra-machine consciousness, is it not? Oh yes, calling it illusion is "tough-guy Camus talk," but it's a basic and undeniable fact of human history that we idealize and strive toward our idealizations, and that their evolution and perfection is our obsession. This is beyond simple negative/positive-feedbacking like Bach wants to reduce to.
@@vonBottorff Well, it does appear to be true that intellectuals work extremely hard to try and prove their biases around consciousness. Of course an intellectual is still a human.
My view is that we should start with this statement: The human mind is limited. This is an obvious truth given the obvious limits of humans.
And from there we should accept that regardless of how much work we throw at a problem, there will be many problems that we will be unable to solve. Those will be problems that exceed our limits, in the same way a problem may exceed a computers limits.
I don't think our brain calculates exactly as a computer, in terms of 1's and 0's. I think it calculates in a vastly more complex way. However, it is still calculation.
And my prediction is that regardless of how complex a complete view of consciousness is, it'll still be some form of calculation. Data goes in, is processed, and an outcome is produced.
There may be quantum effects, but as far as I can see, those effects do not allow us to perform magic. Our abilities are limited. Thus our mind and our broader consciousness must be limited as well.
I think when you consider that limit, the human mind begins to look rather pathetic. Not in terms of what it can do, but in terms of what is possible.
All models are wrong, but some are useful. The map is not the territory.
A story is not an experience it’s like a photograph of of an experience
Somehow I doubt Joscha is considering, by making this argument he acknowledges, if a turing machine can reproduce human experience (or the universe as we experience it), then one may just as reasonably suggest the Universal itself is a simulation.
Considering that our universe is discrete in nature (it's made up of small, individual units) and that it can be understood by mathematical symmetry, it's not really that far fetched to think that our universe is simulated. And if it's not, it's at the very least being generated by some mathematical process.
Generated, or described by? Mathematics can describe what we know about the world, but it could be possible that we are incapable of observing higher order rules or systems.
@@austinpuckett2347on the concept that - the world we experience, and Universe, is a dynamic built from a point of energy and origin, through entropy, and to it's end...
... yes, start with the big bang, follow it outward...
What if our mathematics is just a way for DECONSTRUCTING the world, and MEANING is the mechanism for making it.
In other words, the human eye is designed for seeing only certain information; certain aspects in the color spectrum. Our ability for measuring the world and for effecting it is, mostly, locked within these bounds. There are things we can see and things we cannot. And when it comes to living your life, outside these means, the mathematics of what defines "spaghettification at the event horizon of a black hole" really means nothing to you. Sure, you can walk up to a chalkboard and describe it. But can you ever walk up to IT and experience IT?
.. of course not.
Therefore it doesn't matter. Not "matter" in the sense of "particle physics." But, "matter" in the sense, "it has no meaning for you, in your day to day life." And yes, understanding many of these things, in the "particle physics" sense, is the reason you have a smartphone today. Understanding things we cannot see CAN still have great impact. But we only chase these things, in the first place, because what they MEAN.
Chasing an electron may inevitably produce you a smartphone. BUT, it was only by chasing the MEANING of the electron that got you that smartphone in the first place.
MEANING...
Meaning is what describes the nature of our universe, not mathematics. Mathematics allows us to understand the universe, in a way to deconstruct it; to understand it ourselves. It produces great technology. But it's not what MAKES the universe. What makes the universe is what WE make of IT. What makes the universe is our SENSE of what IT means.
@Sir Sleepy kind of like the Moon is perfect equa-distance between Earth and Sun, to blot it out, during an eclipse. Somehow, like the nature of water, and the fact it is the one element that floats in its own ether when it freezes, some of these things, it would seem, if life is to exist at all, are not by accident 😏
@@zane62135 OR... mathematics is just our best "contrived language" for describing that which made us and the universe, something we are yet still very far from understanding in the first place.
Consciousness is the observer that gives rise to the illusion of that which we call reality.
I agree although this is pretty vague, what is the observer exactly? The human body as a whole? the mind? Etc
almost, consciousness is the observer that forms relation to its environment that gives birth to ego and control to which creates the illusion of reality.
Bach conceives of himself as a machine. His background has conditioned him to this idea and his work is largely in developing cognitive architecture models. When he is asked a question he answers like he was explaining how a motherboard works. Most of us have trouble understanding him completely...including Lex. I've yet to hear an interviewer succeed in bridging his 'motherboard' jargon with most of our 'lived' worlds. But they should keep trying. He's obviously brilliantly sui generis.
What are you talking about? Search up the meaning of the words he uses when you don't understand them and you will be able to understand them. He's not using his 'own jargon'
His lack of training in philosophy leads him to certain conflicting conclusions. I watched a conversation of him and John Vervaeke who exposed some of Bach's inconsistencies regardless he often makes solid contributions. There are mathematicians, engineers with experience in AI who are also trained in philosophy that tend to be a bit comprehensive and flexible.
@@ToiChutGongFlu It is jargon. He based his work off of that example and you can not tell me that he doesn't still do that. Even if he does, no one understands him because he is thinking to deep into this problem without observing that you can separate yourself from this physical realm and become infinite as your friends and family will exist for eternity in peace until you meet them again yourself in death, of course when you experience "death" itself. There is no hell, there is only heaven and every person will experience a life review where your life flashes before your eyes. Your issues will be become boundless as you will live your own heaven in the same life you are given. You will not assume consciousness into another physical body as that is impossible. What happens is "you" will exist in another timeline when the earth is "renewed" in this conscious form and you will never be apart from the ones you love. I promise that and I know it is true. These people who believe that hate is the answer to issues will be greatly mistaken when they, themselves, will meet total grace and they will take that grace to be better people when they assume physical form again in the same universe and the same issues will occur for eternity. This makes life bearable and should make you want to be the best person you can be to others around you. There is a reason that we all share dna and that reason is because we are boundless in nature. Let me reiterate. This form is only one of an infinite amount of timelines where we could make different choices that have entirely different outcomes and we become "happy" no matter what. We will still go through hardship and pain, but that is the answer to become what we always wanted to be, loved, and to be loved means to love one another. This world is so filled with hate and suffering that I cannot fathom that we cease to exist after we die. Being born is an illusion and death is an illusion. It all means something in the end to one another. We will become love in the most boundless, infinite form.
Joscha smiles in a maniacal fashion when delivering his opinion. Am I the only one that thinks that looks a bit sinister!!
I think there are real philosophical zombies out there
I think I’m married to one
I agree; I've come to understand this over the past few years thanks in large part to Jaron Lanier's 1995 essay "You Can't Argue With A Zombie". There's a simple answer to why people seem to be "talking past each other" all the time on consciousness - because some have it, and some don't.
Also Lanier: "Consciousness is hard to talk about because all the words you'd want to use to describe it have been colonized by people who think it doesn't exist" (from a "Closer To Truth" interview)
There's what I call "Dennettian Consciousness", where the term merely means an abstraction, a bundle of cognitive abilities, and "Chalmerian Consciousness" (or perhaps Lanierian Consciousness) where it's this extra...thing...that you can't quite touch.
I also recommend his "BloggingHeads" interview from '08 with Eliezer Yudkowsky where he touches on this and taunts him about how he may not have it. It's glorious to watch.
Essentially, Eliminative Materialism is a crackpot theory. It's this nice little bubble of theoretical consistency...except it has one big problem: it doesn't match the data. Consciousness is a datum. It's really there. It's maddeningly impenetrable to satisfactory, rigorous third-party description - a datum you can only observe from the inside - but nonetheless absolutely real. Maybe some people don't even see the need for a theory of consciousness to conform to this datum because they don't have access to it.
@@wengemurphy good input, this may be related to judgers who use mostly the right side of their brain which is the doing side, and perceivers who use the left side of their brain which is the perceiving side, which is some the research being done by someone called Dario Nardi, "doers" will have trouble reflecting on their actions and evaluating reality objectively, so there may be levels to this and at least in some small way these philosophical zombies are conscious, it is weird how you have seemingly intelligent people like Dennett who actively discredit and minimize the study of consciousness to the point of almost denial and how very few people like Chalmers have actually defined the problem so we can actually study it
He's not only a zombie, he's a fake-zombie, little Sheldon
You can't express it because you don't know what it is. You only know how to use it and you trust it totally. Our mind can do more than computation doesn't mean it can do better computationally compared to computer. To say the mind is computional and it can do computation is different and the mind is not computional in its construct.
"There is only one consciousness which is self differentiated for self companionship." - Wald Wassermann, Physicist, Center of Theoretical Physics.
You mean for war, destruction, and cannibalism? You can not be more right! High five!
Keep exploring consciousness, Lex! For Science!
For hippies you mean?
how would you model an agent with no clear objective other than not dying (most of the time) and "making the most" of its existence?
Lex doesn't understand Penrose's argument. Penrose doesn't talk about consciousness and subjective experience in his argument against computationalism. His argument is that human mathematical reasoning cannot be simulated computationally, based mainly on implications of Godel's theorem.
Even if you apply the Gödel theorem, this doesn't necessarily mean that consciousness is non computational though.
@@alessandroc.4543 I think the argument is successful
@@charbelbejjani5541 Why? It's impossible to prove. Obviously it's true if you consider formal systems that are smaller than the "consciousness system". But we have no clue about what would happen for systems consciousness-like.
@@alessandroc.4543 Whatever sound formal system, no matter how complex, will have a Godel sentence. A human mathematician will be able to see the truth of his own (not assuming gender. Only for convenience) Godel sentence at least at the same degree that he sees the truth of 1+1=2. A formal system cannot do that, therefore consciousness cannot be captured by a formal system
@@charbelbejjani5541 Yes, every system have a Gödel sentence, this is proved. But it's not what I'm saying. Those formal system in wich you can tell a truth outside of the rules are simple systems , that's why you can think outside of them. You can build a Gödel sentence and that's it. But you can also extend the system in a way that the previous Gödel sentence is now predicted by the rules. You can repeat this process, causing the system to become more and more complex. If the system become complex like a human brain can we still find a Gödel sentence? The theorem say that there is one, but can we find it? This is the point where I don't agree with penrose (and you). I don't want to say that we can or can't, but that we can't know the answer.
this went to endgame level pretty fast. Awesome 👏
Joscha Bach the greatest simulation constrution of our dream like manifestation
Turing-machineness is extremely burdensome and inefficient in evolution. *Correct* computers simply don't die as often. That's what our mind is for. Being right. Computers can accelerate absurd high entropy calculation in a way that humans cannot, but humans are apex prototypers.
Question: is the version of our lives in the current state of our world not also a short cut in the cultural evolution of human society? That said, with the internet we have access to more possible versions of ourselves at the cost of more strings that we let pull ourselves by and our actions. Its kinda paradoxic to suggest humans made their way all through evolution and Robots could cheat their way up here...also Robots would undergo the change of becoming conscious in front of the eyes of their makers which is in some way just another milestone for us to better conceive our own consciousness. They might not understand what makes us so different from them, since we are all just individuals learning step by step via an evolutionary concept, but still on our own story lines for each individual.
Interesting ideas but not very convincing. He reminds me of the law of the instrument - “if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
In the case of the type of models he works with - they are universal enough that his perspective can't be claimed to be wrong.
@@mikhailmikhailov8781 Um… universal models of what? There are a lot of universal models, not sure which one can sufficiently describe consciousness (or universally accepted).
He seems mostly using computer science to abstract the mechanism of consciousness, that is not an adequate physical description. I love computer science but it is mainly applied mathematics that allows you to make very useful abstractions to do all sorts of crazy things, but it isn’t the best tool to describe the physical reality (that would be physics). Joscha is using computer science far outside its domain, hence I mentioned the law of the instrument.
Most importantly, I didn’t claim him to be wrong. His theory could be very close to the reality, who knows. However, he needs to prove the theory to claim he is right. He can’t claim to be right because he has a theory and others didn’t prove it wrong.
That's exactly right. Edward Feser points that out in his analysis of Alex Rosenberg's scientism:
"Rosenberg’s argument, then, is essentially this:
1. The predictive power and technological applications of physics are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge.
2. Therefore what physics reveals to us is all that is real.
How bad is this argument? About as bad as this one:
1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has.
2. Therefore what metal detectors reveal to us (coins and other metallic objects) is all that is real."
Consciousness will only be more than a computer if, as some people say, it exists out of the material part (no one knows where), streaming to the brain that in that situation would be just an interface. So this way would be another game. Consciousness would only be limited by the set of rules of this place where we live. In other places there would be other limitations. In this reference, we would have to think that the streaming would be for everything that is alive (plant animals - everything - each thing its streaming). Otherwise computers will always be better than us. With external streaming we should think of a god or another type of universal organization. It would be funny. (Thomas Campbell - physicist, is the man to talk about this).
You set the goal for the robot, it doesn't have free agency. Free agency means you cannot programme the AI for a purpose, it determines its own purpose in life.
Maybe It’s our senses that is our consciousness. Without our senses we cannot register emotional responses based off the things we intake.
Somehow we get to experience reality freely and explore other senses the universe has to offer.
Even our predetermined decisions our brain creates is reliant on senses.
Has anyone heard about the brain grown in a lab which grew its own eyes? Our senses is not something we own individually. It’s a shared thing. And a process, maybe senses is something of a symbiotic relationship with the universe
Saying "people cannot be conscious" it's just like a weird like bifurcation from the language that we've agreed on.
If consciousness can be computed, we must assume that there is a level of possible computation of such in almost everything that exists. Certainly not as much as human consciousness, but probably the meaning of consciousness can be stretched in such a way, that we can do with our own mind by using tools like psychedelics. So might there be a multi leveled layer of consciousness for all that exists based on informational computation on a simulation for itself? Even if the amount that is being computated is close to zero or going up to human consciousness and even beyond? I dont like the thought that there is just one base layer human consciousness and that was it...
YES. Panpsychism.
I'm not a strong proponent of it. Maybe the true nature of consciousness is something else entirely. But so far, panpsychism seems to make more sense than any other attempt to explain consciousness.
Are you familiar with Tononi's Integrated Information Theory?
That if is so big that we need not waste time on it and its consequence for the time being. Nothing whatsoever points to consciousness being "computable". No one has anything close to a working model, let alone something that can be tested. Brains are warm and soggy - that's it for now.
present physics cant explain what happens in the mind because your using a physical model ie take a tv for instance it cant work without a signal..ie the mind can pick up meta signals,how do a plant know a bees a bee ?
@330, what if not all minds deal with infinity in the same way, one cannot compute what one does not understand.
you must be a very clever guy to disagree with roger penrose
Let's not confuse self consciousness with conscious experience. I would argue that even a worm has conscious experience. Does a worm tell itself a story and builds an internal model of itself in the world?
What would a Boston Dynamics robot do with a stray cat meowing outside the house for a few days?
I will fight that human should be given more control rather then machine having full say .
People are so quick to defend Roger Penrose by mentioning Gode's theorem but can never say what it is and how it relates to either of their arguments.
If you make a program autonomous, it loses the "human pulling the strings". If a human made Frankenstein, you would WISH it was human pulling the strings. We just see it as a being and not a computer, so we don't have that POV bias against it. With a computer system, many of us do (Lex included).
If a spacecraft running a computer program goes outside control of any human, then does it have agency? How is the Frankenstein's agency different from the spacecraft's?
Les is write the computer will always be limited to as far as it has been programmed, it would never have the fluid motion of thought that a human has.
Not true. AI can learn. AI will eventually be able to design better versions of itself. There's examples in nature of every level of consciousness. It seems that consciousness is a spectrum that arises from complexity.
@@HandSolitude yes I understand what you're saying AI has the capability of thinking for itself but it has access to all the information we have put there do you really think that they will think of something that we are don't know about the frightening partners to have control of everything and you can find answers 20 times tables the times Fast and we can and suggestions and the like it's intelligent people like Steven hawken say it's a bad idea as well as Nikola Tesla there is a huge part of the internet that is not used by us humans
Bach is desperately trying to convince that a predefined model made from algorithms written by us is same as real our consciousness itself....useless host wasting time.
The Godhead is never an object of it's own knowledge.
Qualia?
I disagree with much he is saying
@@YeeLeeHaw try giving your answer in Spanish - or a third language ...
@@YeeLeeHaw you win!
@@YeeLeeHaw Would Brittney Rae approve of your comment?
@@YeeLeeHaw Daniel David uses full stops at the end of his comments so as to make himself invulnerable.
@@YeeLeeHaw try answer in Urdu
The day your smart Roomba stops its vacuming and tells you: "You know, man? That's funny: I dreamt this moment a couple of days ago". THAT day you will know your machine has attained consciousness.
Anything else is just navel gazing.
Roomba cannot. But a AI can be programed to say that as an output" the sentence you said is computational.
Thanks Lex for pushing back against Joscha’s faith in magic; in this case, in the power of computer chips to give birth to life. I suppose it must be the brilliant intellects of thinkers like Joscha that causes the problem here. So good at thinking, the thoughts so bright, that everything looks like a thought to them. Or perhaps the glow is too strong. Silent, pervasive, ever-present experience beyond thought might not even have been noticed, much less require an explanation beyond hand-waving.
So basically this guy is a Representational Functionalist.
I recommend Lex to read Searle's essay from 1983 "Intentionality".
Representational Functionalism fails to explain original intentionality and phenomenal states that don't represent anything external to the mind.
'Happiness' or 'Sadness' are not a "story" but simply a phenomenal state (qualia).
Secondly, stories can only possess derived intentionality, you can't even have any "story" at all without original intentionality. In order to tell the difference between simulations or stories and reality, you have to explain original intentionality first, or else the distinction is meaningless.
Wouldn't it be possible to posit that our "Stories" which are influenced by external factors lead to qualia obviously most of it without us realizing. or in other words, as humans all intentionality is derived from things around us, our surroundings or our "programming" all things we have no real agency over. Mostly just asking for your opinion on that
As humans our intentionality is derived from external things or our programming, much like would be in a simulation?
@@avatar00001 Interaction with an external world is a necessary condition for the existence of intentionality, but it's not a sufficient condition.
The original intentionality of the mind cannot be reduced to a mechanical Input-Process-Output modelling.
I don't see agency as fundamental. Self and agency can be reduced to selfless and agencyless processes. But the of original intentionality can't be reduced to anything else.
@@avatar00001 same with qualia.
The of phenomenal states can't be reduced to anything else.
Attention schema theory explains how the brain can compute representations of things happening inside the mind, like emotions or recalling memories. In fact AST is pointing in the direction of a fully natural explanation of 'qualia', subjective experience/awareness, quite exciting stuff
Joscha is over looking quantum eraser experiment, he would make sense if all we had was general relativity. Observation reveals the past that we would need to have in order to exist, weirdly, consciousness is somehow fundamental. Listen to Paul Davies on this.
I think the idea of the philosophical zombie puts this discussion to rest. We can theoretically make a generalized Turing test, not merely to test a machines ability to convince a human of it's capability for language, but for all facets of the human life. We could make a machines body, speech and actions indistinguishable from a humans, but it is still possible that there may be nothing it "feels like to be" that machine. It's possible we could create an automaton which can act in every way according to how a human acts, but has no subjective experience at all. Given enough time, you could even make such a robot using merely hardcoded rules in the same way the Stockfish chess engine plays chess, but with the goal of acting human instead. Surely no one would say the 24mb Stockfish engine you could download and run on your computer is conscious, despite having a model of it's domain, the chessboard.
Ultimately, John Searle put it best when he said that you can simulate the functioning of a hurricane in all it's intricate detail, down to even the molecular level, but that does not mean the transistors doing the simulating will be wet. Consciousness requires something more than mere simulation. To me, that means, at the very least hardware emulation. So who knows, maybe neuromorphic computers are the future of consciousness research.
Penrose's point is that computations (and thus any mechanical machine) not only cannot be conscious the way you describe it ("what it feels like to be someone") but also cannot even simulate consciousness, i.e., they can't even act as if they're consicous. He thinks human intelligence, and mathematical reasoning in particular, is non-computable.
But for Searle's point, I don't think that his simulation argument works well. He uses the examples of digestion, or other examples like hurricanes to show that a simulation is not the same as the original thing. But in some instances, a simulation is as good as the real thing. Think of a calculator or a computer. Would you say that your laptop calculator isn't a calculator? Or you can think of a computer simulation on another computer. If the simulated computer (on another computer) allows you to save files, edit, access the internet, ... would you say that this computer is not a real computer?
So yeah, I'm not sure Searle's argument works, but I do agree with his conclusion nonetheless, for other independent reasons
@@charbelbejjani5541 Searle's point is that the brain is not a discrete state computational system. Every instance you've pointed out, computers and calculators, can indeed be simulated on a computer. They too are formal systems, based on axioms, rules of inference, and mathematical logic, such as binary addition and so forth. This means they are still ultimately discrete state systems. Even fuzzy logic fails, because it only simulates, using a fundamentally discrete system, the workings of analog systems. Neurochemical reactions are not discrete state, so the most promising approach in my opinion is neuromorphic computing, which replaces transistors with chemical reactions analogous to neurochemicals.
@@Michael-Hammerschmidt I see your point, but I am not sure that that's Searle's point of view. Searle is on record for saying many times that "the brain is a digital computer because everything is a digital computer and can be simulated on a computer", but yet he adds that simulation is not an emitation, so a computational system could act as if it's conscious without possessing real semantics and intentionality. I don't think he mentions the continuous nature of physical systems as opposed to the digital nature of computers to explain the difference between a simulation and the real thing.
But in any case, although it is an interesting possibility, I don't think that the only difference between a conscious entity and a simulation of a conscious entity that acts consicous but is not really conscious is that the former runs on digital and the latter on continuous data. It would need serious argument to show that it's this difference that shifts from a simulation of consciousness to genuine consciousness.
@3:40 I would suggest that our consciousness cannot be simulated and that chirality exists. To say that you can imitate everything in a functional computer thingy is like saying that you can possess everything and that your smart because you can see that function is functional.
We all know how our psyches like to model and possess..
I would also suggest that "simulated" isn't the right word for our experience. I think that the proper term should be "virtual". Just like physical matters virtual just like SpaceTime is a virtual just like everything that is computable is... virtual.
So he can create a "conscious" AI in a computer simulation! Do it then. Definition of consciousness seems to be completely different or he seems to give a very narrow definition. An example would be the comatose patients who were recently diagnosed to have some consciousness while they do not react with outside world.
They still react, like they smell, hear, etc just less concious in a psychological term.
Philosophy is fun and all but how cool would it be if we could use AI in actual real world applications? Discussing free will, love, God, and so on is simply a waste of time. Joscha Bach's down to Earth approach is enough for me. One thing is for sure though: When Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 97 most chess GMs were not terribly impressed. But when AlphaZero beat the best chess engine Stockfish in 2017, chess players had the craziest sparkle in their eyes like they just saw their "Maker." Alpha0 is like a really fast chess engine which also has a soul, wisdom, understanding of the game! Go figure! And BTW just like in real life, AI still hasn't 'solved' the entire game of chess. So IMHO Bach is on the right track.
How is discussing god, love, free will a waste of time ? You NEED philosophy. Those things are THE most important, they come before everything else
Nice
You always know. If Lex is closing his eyes... Let me get it correctly
A computer doesn’t make constant experiences as a human being does…I can solve an equation whilst at the same time I can go through the cords of a classical guitar piece which I am planning to perform later on….
We already have CPUs with multiple cores. It's old tech already.
@@HandSolitude how many CPUs to do what?.Frankly, I think, you're missing the point...
I agree with him. I think that Penrose's arguments about consciousness are absurd. If you just look at human "consciousness" logically, it's not really anything more than the ability to form a 3D simulated world from our sensors (eyes, ears, etc) and then we can record some of this information and play it back internally when more complex analysis is needed. It's really not as magical as people seem to think. Of course we've learned some tricks like language and identity which make us believe we are characters in a video game type world with elaborate stories and this and that, but this is probably just what type of thought process ended up being the most competitive in an evolutionary sense. Having an ego means that you will win and procreate.
And one could imagine an infinite number of other sensor arrangements... let's say my brain got sensory information from my eyes and the eyes of 1000 insects around me. I would not be able to form the same illusion of self and my perception of the world would be entirely different. What we call consciousness is just a weird parlor trick that works because we always get sensory information from the same spatial location (our body) and therefore we can craft stories about a "self"
What strikes my small minded thought is the willingness to believe (theorize) unseen realms of reality yet discount any thought of a higher consciousness.
You don’t believe unseen realms from nothing. You make a hypothesis based on ideas. You try to explain why we have 10 or 11 dimensions but we only experience 4. You don’t wonder why one doesn’t think too much about if a zombie music band exists in Pluto because even if it could very well be true, there’s no reason even in thought that makes you have that inclination. Also you could have an inclination of smth and that could also be wrong. Galileo didn’t just think we weren’t thé centre of the universe because he had a dream or an acid trip, or because it was a possibility…it’s because it was one of the possibilities that led to greater subjective truth about what we can observe, measure and experiment on in our world.
I just don’t like the intentional fantasizing of the very hard consciousness problem. We aren’t the only animals that have consciousness. Clearly. I really don’t get what question exactly is not being answered and what makes it confusing if you think from the prespective of how life evolves from single cell to now and what our ancestor eukaryotes had to go through…then it does make sense how you have this sense of being you…we also have people that because of a head injury we can pull the plug or call vegetables, they aren’t even themselves anymore just because they aren’t who we know them to be, despite the fact that they are still breathing…and it hurts less to kill those than to kill a monkey…but we can swat cockroaches easier than mammals…I’m rambling but I guess I just don’t understand the unanswered consciousness questions
If you don't understand the basics of reality, God, heaven, hell, the devil, the soul, the spirit, etc, then how can you understand anything complex. Your in a endless loop of saying nothing and misrepresenting people.
Penrose will go down as a titan as big as Einstein, while nobody will remember this guy
Listening to Penrose is like listening to an evolved being. Even when he humbly says “I think…….. but we don’t know for sure”, I’m like “Sir, I think you do know”. Indeed a titan.
This guy trying to question the titan Roger Penrose is crazy.
Been thinking exactly what Mr Bach asserts but lacked the requisite knowledge and experience to counter Mr Penrose's position yet intuitively I felt his position was wrong on consciousness.
Bro , Bach used a straw man argument
☺️
If consciousness is a simulation who is watching the simulation?
And who is simulating the simulation..
@@yvonnelisamartha Answer 1 - Us; Answer 2 - The Universe, which is a computer.
this guy is wrong.
😂😂😂
In my opinion "consciousness" is yet another magical word that doesnt really mean anything. like happyness or purpuse, etc. its all contextual. A lazy abstraction level for a more complex but utterly disappointing truth.
My happiness has a meaning, your doesn’t? I feel sorry for you, depressed man.