Hello you beauties. Access all episodes 10 hours earlier than RUclips by Subscribing on Spotify - spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - apple.co/2MNqIgw. Here’s the timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:28 The Real Problem of Consciousness 04:39 Why is the Self Rooted in Consciousness? 13:10 Thought Experiments to Understand Consciousness 19:39 Are We Experiencing a Controlled Hallucination? 22:40 Looking at Perception Through an Evolutionary Lens 32:29 Studying How to Alter the Predictive Brain 41:17 Where Does Consciousness Arise? 45:38 Testing the Consciousness of Lower Animals 49:36 The Most Common Definitions of Consciousness 59:10 The Challenge of Testing the Internal Processes of Animals 1:05:32 Anil’s Experience with LSD 1:11:04 How Anil’s Studies Have Impacted His Outlook 1:15:58 Where to Find Anil
FINALLY someone has brought Trigger’s broom into the philosophical debate on personal identity 😂 I’ve been waiting 15 years for that, so thank you, Chris 🙇🏻♂️
The Ship of Theseus idea, and understanding how our "self" is the pattern we're arranged in, and not the cells themselves, opened me back up to ideas I used to think of as magical, like true resurrection, from dry bones, from dust, from nothing at all. Whatever brought the universe into being, it brought me into being, and it could do again. It would be no greater a miracle to create me again from nothing than it was the first time I came from nothing.
You ARE the universe! A microcosm of the macrocosm. May I suggest to you Advaita Vedanta and since you are a fan of the ship of Theseus thought experiment I'd recommend searching the clay pot/gold necklace metaphor which is a very common teaching in Advaita
"Contrary to what everyone knows is so, it may not be the brain that produces consciousness -- but rather, consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain..."
Doesn't make sense. First you need a physical brain to create something immaterial like consciousness and not otherwise. You're talking magic thinking to say, something immaterial like consciousness can create any physical brain, that's not a scientific speculation.
@@eduardomartin8510 You cannot create a bulb from the light but you can create a light in that bulb with the help of electricity. Our brain does its immaterial function e.g thought processing, predictions, calculation, interpretation, with the help of our senses. Could you imagine how a person who's been born blind projects? Through his or her available senses.
The fact that I can feel pain and pleasure, along with joy and sadness in my dreams. Basically every emotion in real life has been felt when I dream. . We operate in conscious reality, not base reality.
I always wondered since I was a kid if people see the world as I see it. Like how do we know that the colour red looks the same to me as it does to someone else. Fascinating
@@scholaroftheworldalternatehistthat doesn’t matter in this argument really as well color blindness is having problems seeing a color seperately The question here is your separate red my red or some other one
As someone who's autistic (and so had to learn how allistics think) and who has experienced psychedelics, I've long been aware of the variable nature of our perception and that our experience of reality is a construct in our minds. Also, my dog has consciousness and emotions and he dreams. Thanks for having Anil Seth on. Interesting guy.
18:00 Mauler did a breakdown of a game called Soma on his channel, much of the game revolved around questions of identity and what the consequences would be it were possible to copy the mind from the brain to something else which would allow that mind to continue to function - "after a fashion" - it is a horror game...
The trouble with experts in this area is that they tend to just redescribe the traditional problems of philosophy of mind in scientific jargon, add a lot of descriptive detail of the nature of the problem and then pretend that they’ve solved them, when in fact they’re just conducting an elaborate bait and switch.
A very interesting discussion! I think people today have become more machine like than ever before, mostly as a consequence of modern technology. I really hope psychedelics are re-introduced into society soon as I believe they are a conduit back to truth (among many other human experiences that we can have).
I'm 8 minutes in but this guy is a great guest with 'worthwhile' insight, jaja. No really, it's not what you think it is and all IS illusion. We create the world even as it is given to us. Who are we in the context of infinite time. You can't break it down, and our minds demand that we try. 28:00 minutes in and enjoying it. I'm a big fan of Yoga philosophy and believe that in that tradition most of this stuff was worked out a long time ago, in part that our minds just show us what the mind wants to for it's own purposes. Interesting guest. 31:00 *Really interesting* explanation of this stuff from an evolutionary perspective, our minds aren't about reality, they are about keeping us alive in the way they see fit.
I find that describing consciousness as a hallucination, or as Joscha Bach calls it: a dream, misses a critical characteristic of consciousness. And, neither do either of these descriptions capture the ontology of consciousness. Consciousness displays the sense we make of our world. Hallucinations and dreams suggest a disconnection from that world, a fantasy world. Our consciousness models reality with the equipment we have to model it with. Because of that very limited equipment, our sense of the world is nothing like reality. Yet, we and life in general, persist and thrive in the real world, something that fantasies, hallucinations and dreams, do not allow us to do. Both descriptors still leave unanswered what hallucinations and dreams are constructed of. That leaves the hard problem of consciousness still unaddressed. If oxymoron appeals to you, then you may fancy the descriptor, "controlled hallucination." This term still misconstrues consciousness because it doesn't capture its essential, even defining, characteristic of world model, that being our individually experienced sense of our own situation..
Yes and furthermore, hallucinations, dreams, thoughts arising in the senses, thoughts recalled from memory, thoughts synthesized from these, on the fly, by the thinking process are analogous to tomatoes flowing through a ketchup factory. They are of what a self may be conscious, the 'content' of a self-being-conscious-process. If there are no tomatoes flowing then there is no ketchup making process even though the machinery continues running. If a self is conscious of nothing then a self is neither conscious nor existent even though the neural substrate continues living. What is a self and how is it conscious sounds like two but is really one question.
I had a dream last night that terrified me so much that I think I woke up screaming. I was so disturbed that i couldn't sleep the rest of the night. I got goosebumps at the thought of what happened for at least an hour after. I don't even remember for sure that I woke up screaming - all I have left is a strange blur of memory but my sore vocal cords tells me that it probably happened. I have never sleep walked and i don't talk in my sleep. My dreams have almost always been light hearted and happy. But nothing has ever terrified me so much in my life as whatever I woke up from last night. All I remember is some large beast grabbed me and I was powerless to fight back. I was completely convinced I was about to die. I never thought such terror would be my reaction to the likelihood of death but now I guess I know. It really makes me wonder what all of our reality really is.
Last night I had a series of dreams. The last to second one was a demon choking me out. On top of my bed yelling to me not to move and let them take me to hell in like the most vile voice ever. I simply said no, it’s just sleep paralysis no demon here. Well they got angrier and angrier putting a fuck ton of pressure. until I managed to escape cuz I’m built different. I went straight back to sleep to have one of those dreams that make no sense. . I do believe learning to not let dreams shake your confidence is as equally important to not let bad life events shake your confidence either. We must obey reality, but we have full control over the perception of it.
Regarding the 36m mark on split-brain experiments, Ian McGilchrist ("Divided Brain") and VS Ramachandran ("Secrets of the Mind") suggest that the age-old idea that left is the analytical side, and the right is the creative.. is somewhat of a myth. Would love to hear Anil's take on it!
If it's simply an illusion in the brain generated from the known senses how do the separate brains remained synchronized enough to agree sufficiently on reality for a coherent mutual world to emerge. That is simply not possible.
Re the scanning people and recreating on mars thought experiment, I find it fascinating that even smart people do not seem to understand the difference between copying and moving things.
Interesting, at the age of 10 I asked my teacher are we real or is this a dream. Being 40 years on now and watching this; real is subjective not scientific and we are living our own dream. Funny also that the saying “living the dream” is so accurate. I also think all the old sayings “in two minds” “between minds” “my mind is spinning” accurately describe our consciousness/minds state. So glad this clip has come out
Mind and matter can't be too fundamentally different if mind arises from matter. The trick is understanding the limits of mind and learning to expand those limits.
Maybe the mind IS the brain, no causality at all, neurology is just another way of observing the brain/mind. Psychology is another way of observing it.
@@bradmodd7856 again if mind is the brain and we all have the same 100 billion neurons, and the same 10,000 taste buds, why is it that I love anchovies why most people don’t? Why do I have a completely different subjective experience with anchovies? If your experience the same chemical and neural processes ?
@@Allenryan819 The difference in your example lies with the synapses. Those would connect your neurons in a way that is uniquely individual to you. Everyone takes in data and connects the dots (potentially) differently based on their experiences.
The sense of self question is something ive asked myself for a while But a game that does this very well is a game called SOMA (BEWARE OF SPOILERS) to say it quickly Your character finds out hes the only human left and other people have been put into robots but still think they are human Later in the game you become cloned You think you have been cloned seems better to say though You find out it copys you and what your thinking Your ... copyed self realises this and starts freaking out realising whats happend And the new self is told its a thing that happens and hes going crazy ... trying to keep in your mind that your conscienceness went with you and you are the true you ..... its a pretty crazy game and horror based But the questions it posed to me will stick with me for life
How do you differentiate between something recognizing itself in a mirror and it just not giving a shit? I feel like that test is flawed in some fundamental way
I JUST learned last night from a friend's social media post that there are people (more than a few, from the responses to her post) who FEEL their brain working when they think. She can apparently feel blood flow things happening when she focuses her thoughts or engages in certain kinds of thinking. And can also feel those movements inside her skull to predict the onset of migraine headaches. It sounded unreal to me except a bunch of her other friends confirmed this is NOT unique to her. I'm blown away. I've never felt my hardware grinding while my brain is processing reality.
If the body is an antennae for consciousness, then if we understood how a specific consciousness is tuned to a given body, in theory ones consciousness could be transported to another body on Mars. And since a 25 year experiment has now shown that consciousness does not exist in any one, two, or twenty places in the brain, then how can one not consider that the body is merely an antennae and machine that houses a specific consciousness? The better and healthier the body, the better the consciousness can interface with the body, the better the consciousness can operate. This would be a completely reasonable posit in an Electric Universe Model.
@@Xarkom89 That's not my interpretation. There are many reasons to believe everything we observe, all matter, is also made of consciousness. I would argue that everything is an antennae for consciousness. However, sentient biological beings may be the "lottery winners" in that they have the ability to use consciousness in ways that a rock cannot.
Folks that like to link the self to “process”, by definition yoke the self to the temporal. Being requires self. Being is beyond the temporal, just ask a photon.
Water is consciousness. All life processes/metabolism/perception of anything is happening in water. It’s fairly obvious. That’s what my channel is about.
@@brandonross9345 all your perceptions, the stuff related to the nerve impulses and metabolism, are in water. Literally inside the body water. So you know everything you are perceiving right now is a pattern you are seeing and that pattern is located in water. You see water in your perceptions, but the activity leading to the perception of water is in water. We know this from dissecting and testing the body.
@@brandonross9345 the water is actually awareness. The water is what your perceptions and sensations are in. Awareness is what your perceptions and sensations are in. Water is awareness. Water is surrounding all of your perceptions right now. That is what they call the firmament. That is the water which is containing the perception you have of the sky, earth, body, etc. your body water surrounds and contains all of your perceptions. It is possible to notice this directly, but it is not itself a perception, so you experience it in a weird ‘location’ if you can notice it. An obsession with the utility of perception often makes it seem worthless.
The paradox in saying: Your brain hallucinates reality Implies you have full knowledge of the reality of the brain. Thereby destroying the very argument that your brain hallucinates reality. For your have to have full knowledge of the reality of your brain, to say it hallucinates
Thank you. I was wondering if anyone in this comments section knew what they were talking about. What you say right there leads to many more interesting philosophical truths such as the idea of rebirth and, I believe, enlightenment when taken all the way to its logical conclusion
Focus on feeling pain is such a Buddhist thing to do. All creatures even single cell animals react to unwanted harmful stimulus. It doesn't prove they are conscious.
I believe that reality does exist, but we only know about it by taking in data from our senses and then, by mixing that with context, hallucinate a narrative to explain it. So the answer is technically yes, but don't go slipping into solipsism and jump into a volcano.
This makes no sense how can you compare what is a hallucination to reality? When supposedly all our perceptions, is a hallucination, where is the contrast to make such a distinction for such a claim ? We would need to know what reality is to make such a Distinction and comparison ? sorry I don’t agree with this, but hey if you are a hard core materialist, you do you, and believe that if that is the case.
There is a difference between the brain that is matter and the mind that is spirit therefore GOD created the body out of dust/ matter than put our spirit into them which resulted in consciousness/ mind so now you know
Mind is made of thoughts all of which are representations all of which are maintained in the encoded form of neural-discharge-timing-patterns. Neural-discharge-timing-patterns intermodulate with other neural-discharge-timing-patterns via the synapses. This is how representations /thoughts affect each other in the process we call thinking. An explanation with the advantage of lacking all magic thinking.
What do you mean? I think IFS is a means by which events from one’s past are conceptualized in an attempt to give meaning to experiences of current complexity. What is generated in therapy may be useful or not useful and is mostly constructed. Somewhat like arranging colors on a canvas - it’s one of merely hundreds of possible representations. Whether that’s therapeutic is debatable.
Um no. I’ll be the one to die on this hill, if you copy my brain on earth, and make a clone of it on Mars, guess what….you just made a clone of my brain on Mars. The authentic me wouldn’t just randomly teleport. Man, there’s gonna be a massacre with this shit.
I strangely thought something very similar about stubbing my shin on my coffee table.. then your comment flashed up on the comments section - synchronicity
Ex materialist here: i use to say if i ever saw a ghost I would believe i'm going crazy rather than believe the ghost is real. My friend once said, but what it we both saw the ghost? To which i replied, then i would have to take things more seriously. Fast forward a few years and me and a friend are doing lsd together and experiencing at the very least a convincing illusion of telepathy. I think Anil Seth needs to continue his psychedelic explorations in group settings and see if he still has the same beliefs
The more you learn about how shoddy our senses were created 😉the weirder your sense of reality gets, it's not quite a hallucination but to be honest it's not far from that either.
Ahh, panpsychism, I don't think so, maybe if we can digitize it especially if consciousness will soon be downloaded into a machine, then perhaps it is fundamental, but as per current science, such claim is mere superstition.
I'd rather say, Consciousness is the byproduct of all our senses that the brain processes, predicts and interprets. If you were born blind, your consciousness arrives from your sense of smell, hearing, taste and touch. So it's really difficult for a blind at birth person to tell the colors the way we see it, thus impossible, let alone imagine colors in the absence of sight is entirely different from imagining them after seeing what colors look like.
there's just so much to learn and analyze and go back over in this interview; it's incredibly deep material! but here, i've always understood that our perception is not THE reality, as if it was creating the reality that is there, but rather that we perceive and interpret the actual reality that we experience. for instance, at 25:40, professor talks about color not really existing, but the truth is, color is a function of light absorption and reflection as it passes through another medium; it is a real property of physical objects, not simply an abstract thought our brains produce for the fun of it. i'm not sure if i misunderstand him, or if my level of education isn't sufficient in this case?
It is interesting to hear how science defines the self when eastern philosophy has been thinking about it for thousands of years. The sevenfold constitution, for example, has the elements of personality (persona, the mask) which are physical, energetical, emotional and mental and then the higher mind. All of these are interconnected, all must be fed. All change over time, but still remain interconnected. The idea that greatly differs from science is that in ancient Greece, for example, Plato speaks of the concept of emanation which says, in a nutshell, that what's out there (exoteric) is not what's real. What's inside (esoteric) is, according to universal archetypes (beauty, truth, justice, the good) because, among other reasons, we can recognise these in ourselves and in the world without being taught and also because the external world keeps changing, whereas these archetypes do not. It's a fascinating discussion but, being honest, I do not think the self is something that can be defined scientifically. I also do not think it is localised to the brain. Scientists have found neurons in the digestive system and the heart which "think" just like the brain does. And it's not a coincidence that the heart was seen as the central or thinking organ in many ancient cultures. Food for thought!
30:00 "Chris Frith has made the case..." that our insight into our own sense of self was dependent on predicting the mental states and actions of others. Seth then thinks that this goes too far, because we have to initially make predictions about our own bodies' states, even without others. I think Helen Fisher is right: there are a range of brain types that range between both more and less "introspective/individualist/referencing objects" vs. "other-inspired/collectivist/referencing minds" in _both_ of the prior directions, and that this (plus idea creation and permutations of novel ideas or "software") creates the different psychologies we see in the world today.
BUT CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT JUST YOUR EXPERIENCE OR YOUR BRAINWAVE ACTIVITY CONSCIOUSNESS COMES FROM BEYOND YOUR PERSONAL LOCALIZED VIEW WHICH IS WHY YOU'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO SOLVE THE MYSTICAL PROBLEM BY MATERIALISTIC MEANS
Trekkies everywhere going berserk during the teleportation discussion, as this has been debated among their circles for decades..... teleporters technically kill the original and recreate an unknowing, brand new version at the destination....
I always liked psychedelics because of 2 specific things. 1) Your perception of reality is very noticeably different. 2) The sense of connection. Less selfishness, but more feeling like we are all connected. That second thing was always of interest to me. It implies something unifies us all. And that unity feels good. It is a strange thing. Is it the Earth's way of letting us know we are loved? Is it God? I don't know for sure, but I know I experience that sensation and it is as real to me as pain. That was always a mystery to me.
Always trying to find way for instant gratification ! The west will never get over it. Meditation is the only way - ask the yogis, rishis who has been doing this for ages even before the word "psychedelics" was even born.
@@arya7592our dogmatic position clouds your ability to see clearly. Do you mean the yogis that smoke chillum to alter their consciousness? What about the “soma” mentioned in the Rig Veda? Go ahead and read the hymns of chapter 9. Those are written explicitly to a consciousness-altering substance. Sound familiar? “We have drunk Soma and become immortal; We have attained the light, the Gods discovered. Now what harm may foeman’s malice do to harm us? What, O immortal, mortal man’s deception?” - The Rig Veda 8.48.3 Altering consciousness is at the foundation of all mystical traditions, regardless of the “how.” Of course, psychedelics offer a glimpse of a consistent state of consciousness that the yogis and mystics are surrendering in to. Let’s not create arbitrary rules about what’s allowed and what’s not. Many people set out on their meditative journey because of a psychedelic experience. ❤✌️
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Hello you beauties. Access all episodes 10 hours earlier than RUclips by Subscribing on Spotify - spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - apple.co/2MNqIgw. Here’s the timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:28 The Real Problem of Consciousness
04:39 Why is the Self Rooted in Consciousness?
13:10 Thought Experiments to Understand Consciousness
19:39 Are We Experiencing a Controlled Hallucination?
22:40 Looking at Perception Through an Evolutionary Lens
32:29 Studying How to Alter the Predictive Brain
41:17 Where Does Consciousness Arise?
45:38 Testing the Consciousness of Lower Animals
49:36 The Most Common Definitions of Consciousness
59:10 The Challenge of Testing the Internal Processes of Animals
1:05:32 Anil’s Experience with LSD
1:11:04 How Anil’s Studies Have Impacted His Outlook
1:15:58 Where to Find Anil
"Brain is the most important organ" says the Brain.
So full of itself, that brain
A beautiful skeleton is the most valuable attribute you may have
There is no way you could possibly know any different.
That's deep
Too bad it can't exist without the body
FINALLY someone has brought Trigger’s broom into the philosophical debate on personal identity 😂 I’ve been waiting 15 years for that, so thank you, Chris 🙇🏻♂️
The Ship of Theseus idea, and understanding how our "self" is the pattern we're arranged in, and not the cells themselves, opened me back up to ideas I used to think of as magical, like true resurrection, from dry bones, from dust, from nothing at all. Whatever brought the universe into being, it brought me into being, and it could do again. It would be no greater a miracle to create me again from nothing than it was the first time I came from nothing.
You ARE the universe! A microcosm of the macrocosm.
May I suggest to you Advaita Vedanta and since you are a fan of the ship of Theseus thought experiment I'd recommend searching the clay pot/gold necklace metaphor which is a very common teaching in Advaita
"Contrary to what everyone knows is so, it may not be the brain that produces consciousness -- but rather, consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain..."
Damnnnnn bruh!!! So everything we know about brain is also just a projection of consciousness. I don't know what to believe anymore lol.😂
Doesn't make sense.
First you need a physical brain to create something immaterial like consciousness and not otherwise.
You're talking magic thinking to say, something immaterial like consciousness can create any physical brain, that's not a scientific speculation.
@@eduardomartin8510 You cannot create a bulb from the light but you can create a light in that bulb with the help of electricity.
Our brain does its immaterial function e.g thought processing, predictions, calculation, interpretation, with the help of our senses. Could you imagine how a person who's been born blind projects?
Through his or her available senses.
@@myhksm3025i mean thats kinda the point. Thinking, is magic.
The fact that I can feel pain and pleasure, along with joy and sadness in my dreams. Basically every emotion in real life has been felt when I dream.
.
We operate in conscious reality, not base reality.
I always wondered since I was a kid if people see the world as I see it. Like how do we know that the colour red looks the same to me as it does to someone else. Fascinating
As a child I had the exact same thought very often!
Same here!!!
I think it does unless you have a color disability, since we have figured out people who are color blind and who are not, etc.
@@scholaroftheworldalternatehistthat doesn’t matter in this argument really as well color blindness is having problems seeing a color seperately
The question here is your separate red my red or some other one
Same, as long as it's seen on some relative scale I would imagine. RGB scaling
I listened for a long time before subscribing to the newsletter, and boy was I missing out. Best email of the whole week, thank you!
As someone who's autistic (and so had to learn how allistics think) and who has experienced psychedelics, I've long been aware of the variable nature of our perception and that our experience of reality is a construct in our minds.
Also, my dog has consciousness and emotions and he dreams. Thanks for having Anil Seth on. Interesting guy.
18:00 Mauler did a breakdown of a game called Soma on his channel, much of the game revolved around questions of identity and what the consequences would be it were possible to copy the mind from the brain to something else which would allow that mind to continue to function - "after a fashion" - it is a horror game...
16:10 this whole discussion is practically describing the story of the video game SOMA.
If my life is someone's idea of a game, i'm gonna have a good talk with this fella.
Everyone should read his book on consciousness, it will blow your mind!
Read “critique of pure reasoning” by Immanuel Kant. Will surely blow your mind
16:00 That transporter thought experiment has been extensively explored in Star Trek.
Imhotep makes some good points. I hope he can avoid the flesh-eating scarabs this time around
The trouble with experts in this area is that they tend to just redescribe the traditional problems of philosophy of mind in scientific jargon, add a lot of descriptive detail of the nature of the problem and then pretend that they’ve solved them, when in fact they’re just conducting an elaborate bait and switch.
A very interesting discussion! I think people today have become more machine like than ever before, mostly as a consequence of modern technology. I really hope psychedelics are re-introduced into society soon as I believe they are a conduit back to truth (among many other human experiences that we can have).
Very interesting discussion. If we put in more quarters will we learn more?
Love to see you have Rupert spira back again...speaking from first hand experience...it's a mind shift though
Another masterpiece from Chris!
I'm 8 minutes in but this guy is a great guest with 'worthwhile' insight, jaja. No really, it's not what you think it is and all IS illusion. We create the world even as it is given to us. Who are we in the context of infinite time. You can't break it down, and our minds demand that we try.
28:00 minutes in and enjoying it. I'm a big fan of Yoga philosophy and believe that in that tradition most of this stuff was worked out a long time ago, in part that our minds just show us what the mind wants to for it's own purposes. Interesting guest.
31:00 *Really interesting* explanation of this stuff from an evolutionary perspective, our minds aren't about reality, they are about keeping us alive in the way they see fit.
I find that describing consciousness as a hallucination, or as Joscha Bach calls it: a dream, misses a critical characteristic of consciousness. And, neither do either of these descriptions capture the ontology of consciousness. Consciousness displays the sense we make of our world. Hallucinations and dreams suggest a disconnection from that world, a fantasy world. Our consciousness models reality with the equipment we have to model it with. Because of that very limited equipment, our sense of the world is nothing like reality. Yet, we and life in general, persist and thrive in the real world, something that fantasies, hallucinations and dreams, do not allow us to do. Both descriptors still leave unanswered what hallucinations and dreams are constructed of. That leaves the hard problem of consciousness still unaddressed. If oxymoron appeals to you, then you may fancy the descriptor, "controlled hallucination." This term still misconstrues consciousness because it doesn't capture its essential, even defining, characteristic of world model, that being our individually experienced sense of our own situation..
Yes and furthermore,
hallucinations, dreams, thoughts arising in the senses,
thoughts recalled from memory, thoughts synthesized from these,
on the fly, by the thinking process
are analogous to tomatoes flowing through a ketchup factory.
They are of what a self may be conscious,
the 'content' of a self-being-conscious-process.
If there are no tomatoes flowing then
there is no ketchup making process
even though the machinery continues running.
If a self is conscious of nothing then
a self is neither conscious nor existent
even though the neural substrate continues living.
What is a self and how is it conscious
sounds like two but is really one question.
19:42 This fragment is the essence of the idea. Until 22:40
Thanks!
I had a dream last night that terrified me so much that I think I woke up screaming. I was so disturbed that i couldn't sleep the rest of the night. I got goosebumps at the thought of what happened for at least an hour after. I don't even remember for sure that I woke up screaming - all I have left is a strange blur of memory but my sore vocal cords tells me that it probably happened. I have never sleep walked and i don't talk in my sleep. My dreams have almost always been light hearted and happy. But nothing has ever terrified me so much in my life as whatever I woke up from last night. All I remember is some large beast grabbed me and I was powerless to fight back. I was completely convinced I was about to die. I never thought such terror would be my reaction to the likelihood of death but now I guess I know. It really makes me wonder what all of our reality really is.
Last night I had a series of dreams. The last to second one was a demon choking me out. On top of my bed yelling to me not to move and let them take me to hell in like the most vile voice ever. I simply said no, it’s just sleep paralysis no demon here. Well they got angrier and angrier putting a fuck ton of pressure. until I managed to escape cuz I’m built different. I went straight back to sleep to have one of those dreams that make no sense.
.
I do believe learning to not let dreams shake your confidence is as equally important to not let bad life events shake your confidence either. We must obey reality, but we have full control over the perception of it.
Regarding the 36m mark on split-brain experiments, Ian McGilchrist ("Divided Brain") and VS Ramachandran ("Secrets of the Mind") suggest that the age-old idea that left is the analytical side, and the right is the creative.. is somewhat of a myth. Would love to hear Anil's take on it!
If it's simply an illusion in the brain generated from the known senses how do the separate brains remained synchronized enough to agree sufficiently on reality for a coherent mutual world to emerge. That is simply not possible.
I'm so glad you mentioned "triggers broom" I think about that everytime someone mentions the 7 cells or planks of wood on a boat 😂😂
Why on Earth is consciousness a problem to begin with?
Re the scanning people and recreating on mars thought experiment, I find it fascinating that even smart people do not seem to understand the difference between copying and moving things.
Interesting, at the age of 10 I asked my teacher are we real or is this a dream. Being 40 years on now and watching this; real is subjective not scientific and we are living our own dream. Funny also that the saying “living the dream” is so accurate. I also think all the old sayings “in two minds” “between minds” “my mind is spinning” accurately describe our consciousness/minds state. So glad this clip has come out
The original warning was that correlation is very often causality, but be aware that variables can correlate randomly.
Awareness is known by awareness alone.
13:06 - Okay, earned my like.
"Fuck yeah!" You make me smile, Chris.
If you use Luke brown’s art. GIVE HIM CREDIT for it. Could also be Alex greys work
It’s Alex Grey.
Identical twin here, experience makes you very different although some physical inconsistencies must exist in the genetics as well
Mind and matter can't be too fundamentally different if mind arises from matter. The trick is understanding the limits of mind and learning to expand those limits.
Maybe the mind IS the brain, no causality at all, neurology is just another way of observing the brain/mind. Psychology is another way of observing it.
@@bradmodd7856 again if mind is the brain and we all have the same 100 billion neurons, and the same 10,000 taste buds, why is it that I love anchovies why most people don’t? Why do I have a completely different subjective experience with anchovies? If your experience the same chemical and neural processes ?
@@Allenryan819 The difference in your example lies with the synapses. Those would connect your neurons in a way that is uniquely individual to you. Everyone takes in data and connects the dots (potentially) differently based on their experiences.
The sense of self question is something ive asked myself for a while
But a game that does this very well is a game called SOMA
(BEWARE OF SPOILERS)
to say it quickly
Your character finds out hes the only human left and other people have been put into robots but still think they are human
Later in the game you become cloned
You think you have been cloned seems better to say though
You find out it copys you and what your thinking
Your ... copyed self realises this and starts freaking out realising whats happend
And the new self is told its a thing that happens and hes going crazy ... trying to keep in your mind that your conscienceness went with you and you are the true you
..... its a pretty crazy game and horror based
But the questions it posed to me will stick with me for life
Self is another conceptualization.
Who's movie is this? The perfect question
A lot can be explained by Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis. You should have Rupert Sheldrake on!
I hope Chris got permission from Alex Grey to use his artwork.
How do you differentiate between something recognizing itself in a mirror and it just not giving a shit?
I feel like that test is flawed in some fundamental way
It's a hallucination outside the brain. The brain is also being hallucinated by consciousness
I also think this is true but I also don't really know what it means lol. You have some overarching theory you subscribe to?
Why is there even a problem with consciousness
I JUST learned last night from a friend's social media post that there are people (more than a few, from the responses to her post) who FEEL their brain working when they think.
She can apparently feel blood flow things happening when she focuses her thoughts or engages in certain kinds of thinking. And can also feel those movements inside her skull to predict the onset of migraine headaches.
It sounded unreal to me except a bunch of her other friends confirmed this is NOT unique to her.
I'm blown away.
I've never felt my hardware grinding while my brain is processing reality.
47:11 there's a 88.999% chance that vegans will take this portion and use it as their argument to not eat meat
If the body is an antennae for consciousness, then if we understood how a specific consciousness is tuned to a given body, in theory ones consciousness could be transported to another body on Mars. And since a 25 year experiment has now shown that consciousness does not exist in any one, two, or twenty places in the brain, then how can one not consider that the body is merely an antennae and machine that houses a specific consciousness? The better and healthier the body, the better the consciousness can interface with the body, the better the consciousness can operate. This would be a completely reasonable posit in an Electric Universe Model.
It’s concerning that the consciousness needs an “antenna” to begin with though.
It implies without an antenna. It’s useless.
@@Xarkom89 That's not my interpretation. There are many reasons to believe everything we observe, all matter, is also made of consciousness. I would argue that everything is an antennae for consciousness. However, sentient biological beings may be the "lottery winners" in that they have the ability to use consciousness in ways that a rock cannot.
All animals alive are conscious. Chickens n birds love too look at them selves in the mirror.
Folks that like to link the self to “process”, by definition yoke the self to the temporal. Being requires self. Being is beyond the temporal, just ask a photon.
Octopus comes from Greek, Chris, not Latin. Plural would be Octopodes.
Intro changed!
The copy on Mars is not you, the original has experienced a death event so no longer exists, the space-continum of the identity has been terminated
We are created in the image of God. Male and female He created them
❤
Water is consciousness. All life processes/metabolism/perception of anything is happening in water. It’s fairly obvious. That’s what my channel is about.
Water appears in consciousness, therefore this makes no sense.
@@brandonross9345 all your perceptions, the stuff related to the nerve impulses and metabolism, are in water. Literally inside the body water. So you know everything you are perceiving right now is a pattern you are seeing and that pattern is located in water. You see water in your perceptions, but the activity leading to the perception of water is in water. We know this from dissecting and testing the body.
@@Aquaticphilosophia let’s grant you that premise, then it’s still IN water and not water itself 🤷♂️
@@brandonross9345 the water is actually awareness. The water is what your perceptions and sensations are in. Awareness is what your perceptions and sensations are in. Water is awareness. Water is surrounding all of your perceptions right now. That is what they call the firmament. That is the water which is containing the perception you have of the sky, earth, body, etc. your body water surrounds and contains all of your perceptions. It is possible to notice this directly, but it is not itself a perception, so you experience it in a weird ‘location’ if you can notice it. An obsession with the utility of perception often makes it seem worthless.
“Is reality just a hallucination?” No. This title is clickbait.
You either didn’t watch the video or don’t understand what is being said
The paradox in saying:
Your brain hallucinates reality
Implies you have full knowledge of the reality of the brain. Thereby destroying the very argument that your brain hallucinates reality.
For your have to have full knowledge of the reality of your brain, to say it hallucinates
Thank you. I was wondering if anyone in this comments section knew what they were talking about.
What you say right there leads to many more interesting philosophical truths such as the idea of rebirth and, I believe, enlightenment when taken all the way to its logical conclusion
Focus on feeling pain is such a Buddhist thing to do. All creatures even single cell animals react to unwanted harmful stimulus. It doesn't prove they are conscious.
I believe that reality does exist, but we only know about it by taking in data from our senses and then, by mixing that with context, hallucinate a narrative to explain it. So the answer is technically yes, but don't go slipping into solipsism and jump into a volcano.
💜
15:30
Is THIS what GOD is?
🤯
Then that makes the brain a product of hallucination too.
GIANT MICROPHONE MOUNT
Life is not a dream.
This makes no sense how can you compare what is a hallucination to reality? When supposedly all our perceptions, is a hallucination, where is the contrast to make such a distinction for such a claim ? We would need to know what reality is to make such a Distinction and comparison ? sorry I don’t agree with this, but hey if you are a hard core materialist, you do you, and believe that if that is the case.
Pretty sure I just listened to what my brain perceived as over an hour of gibberish
😂
@@Kathy-n7f 😂
read kant bro
Couldn't we just have two of us, one on mars and one here?
There is a difference between the brain that is matter and the mind that is spirit therefore GOD created the body out of dust/ matter than put our spirit into them which resulted in consciousness/ mind so now you know
Mind is made of thoughts all of which are representations all of which are maintained in the encoded form of neural-discharge-timing-patterns.
Neural-discharge-timing-patterns intermodulate with other neural-discharge-timing-patterns via the synapses. This is how representations /thoughts affect each other in the process we call thinking.
An explanation with the advantage of lacking all magic thinking.
So much time and money, so little result. not a single mention of Internal Family Systems Therapy
What do you mean? I think IFS is a means by which events from one’s past are conceptualized in an attempt to give meaning to experiences of current complexity. What is generated in therapy may be useful or not useful and is mostly constructed. Somewhat like arranging colors on a canvas - it’s one of merely hundreds of possible representations. Whether that’s therapeutic is debatable.
Anil seems to want to reach a certain demographic I'm not aware of.
Hallucination is the wrong word. Synthete is the right one.
Please do not adjust your mind,there's fault in reality.
So IF the Reality is Brain hallucination then the only thing real is; The Brain.😂😂
Um no. I’ll be the one to die on this hill, if you copy my brain on earth, and make a clone of it on Mars, guess what….you just made a clone of my brain on Mars. The authentic me wouldn’t just randomly teleport. Man, there’s gonna be a massacre with this shit.
Do DMT
" Is Reality Just A Hallucination In The Brain? " probably, that could explain gender ideology...just saying.
Go vegan
The human brain is like a uterus / womb for a spirit fetus 🙂
Guys, why arent you talking about Wixpool?
Get you a few tabs of LSD and paired with Pink Floyd and you'll get a fast track of an out body /mind experience 🔥
Where can I get
When I took LSD, I hallucinated that I was Homer in the episode in which he got high off Weed 🤣
Stub your toe on the coffee table and reality quickly reveals itself.
I strangely thought something very similar about stubbing my shin on my coffee table.. then your comment flashed up on the comments section - synchronicity
😂
Ex materialist here: i use to say if i ever saw a ghost I would believe i'm going crazy rather than believe the ghost is real.
My friend once said, but what it we both saw the ghost? To which i replied, then i would have to take things more seriously. Fast forward a few years and me and a friend are doing lsd together and experiencing at the very least a convincing illusion of telepathy.
I think Anil Seth needs to continue his psychedelic explorations in group settings and see if he still has the same beliefs
Commenting for the algo but also to say this was worth the wait. Very thoughtful and provoking questions.
The more you learn about how shoddy our senses were created 😉the weirder your sense of reality gets, it's not quite a hallucination but to be honest it's not far from that either.
Consciousness is fundamental
Concur - we need to add consciousness to our ontology as an unreduced feature of reality, like gravity, electromagnetism or the photon
Ahh, panpsychism, I don't think so, maybe if we can digitize it especially if consciousness will soon be downloaded into a machine, then perhaps it is fundamental, but as per current science, such claim is mere superstition.
I'd rather say,
Consciousness is the byproduct of all our senses that the brain processes, predicts and interprets.
If you were born blind, your consciousness arrives from your sense of smell, hearing, taste and touch.
So it's really difficult for a blind at birth person to tell the colors the way we see it, thus impossible, let alone imagine colors in the absence of sight is entirely different from imagining them after seeing what colors look like.
@@craigwillms61
This guy sounds kinda like John Vervaeke. I also speculate that experience occurs from the inside out.
Very cool. I am really enjoying this episode.
there's just so much to learn and analyze and go back over in this interview; it's incredibly deep material!
but here, i've always understood that our perception is not THE reality, as if it was creating the reality that is there, but rather that we perceive and interpret the actual reality that we experience.
for instance, at 25:40, professor talks about color not really existing, but the truth is, color is a function of light absorption and reflection as it passes through another medium; it is a real property of physical objects, not simply an abstract thought our brains produce for the fun of it. i'm not sure if i misunderstand him, or if my level of education isn't sufficient in this case?
It is interesting to hear how science defines the self when eastern philosophy has been thinking about it for thousands of years. The sevenfold constitution, for example, has the elements of personality (persona, the mask) which are physical, energetical, emotional and mental and then the higher mind. All of these are interconnected, all must be fed. All change over time, but still remain interconnected. The idea that greatly differs from science is that in ancient Greece, for example, Plato speaks of the concept of emanation which says, in a nutshell, that what's out there (exoteric) is not what's real. What's inside (esoteric) is, according to universal archetypes (beauty, truth, justice, the good) because, among other reasons, we can recognise these in ourselves and in the world without being taught and also because the external world keeps changing, whereas these archetypes do not.
It's a fascinating discussion but, being honest, I do not think the self is something that can be defined scientifically. I also do not think it is localised to the brain. Scientists have found neurons in the digestive system and the heart which "think" just like the brain does. And it's not a coincidence that the heart was seen as the central or thinking organ in many ancient cultures.
Food for thought!
30:00 "Chris Frith has made the case..." that our insight into our own sense of self was dependent on predicting the mental states and actions of others. Seth then thinks that this goes too far, because we have to initially make predictions about our own bodies' states, even without others. I think Helen Fisher is right: there are a range of brain types that range between both more and less "introspective/individualist/referencing objects" vs. "other-inspired/collectivist/referencing minds" in _both_ of the prior directions, and that this (plus idea creation and permutations of novel ideas or "software") creates the different psychologies we see in the world today.
Ref: The Firesign Theatre - "How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All?"(1969 - Columbia Records))
BUT CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT JUST YOUR EXPERIENCE OR YOUR BRAINWAVE ACTIVITY CONSCIOUSNESS COMES FROM BEYOND YOUR PERSONAL LOCALIZED VIEW WHICH IS WHY YOU'LL NEVER BE ABLE TO SOLVE THE MYSTICAL PROBLEM BY MATERIALISTIC MEANS
yeah seems like we are limited solving this one :)
@@okeyokey578on purpose. That's the whole idea of the ride. Then you remember, then you choose to forget, and on and on
I'm so glad you wrote that in capitals. I'd never have believed it otherwise.
@@DetectiveStablerSVUwhat a ridiculous theory “I’m totally not an agent of the matrix sent to distract you because you figured it out”
@@VortymLichbane😂😂
Trekkies everywhere going berserk during the teleportation discussion, as this has been debated among their circles for decades..... teleporters technically kill the original and recreate an unknowing, brand new version at the destination....
Trigger's broom was taken from Steptoe and Son who did the same joke decades before. Still British humour though.
Just think the way we describe the world around us determines our understanding of what we are. Weird
Brilliant as Always Chris, also congrats on 1 mil which you gonna hit anytime!
donated (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ)
I always liked psychedelics because of 2 specific things.
1) Your perception of reality is very noticeably different.
2) The sense of connection. Less selfishness, but more feeling like we are all connected.
That second thing was always of interest to me.
It implies something unifies us all.
And that unity feels good.
It is a strange thing. Is it the Earth's way of letting us know we are loved?
Is it God?
I don't know for sure, but I know I experience that sensation and it is as real to me as pain.
That was always a mystery to me.
Always trying to find way for instant gratification ! The west will never get over it. Meditation is the only way - ask the yogis, rishis who has been doing this for ages even before the word "psychedelics" was even born.
@@arya7592our dogmatic position clouds your ability to see clearly.
Do you mean the yogis that smoke chillum to alter their consciousness?
What about the “soma” mentioned in the Rig Veda? Go ahead and read the hymns of chapter 9. Those are written explicitly to a consciousness-altering substance. Sound familiar?
“We have drunk Soma and become immortal;
We have attained the light, the Gods discovered.
Now what harm may foeman’s malice do to harm us?
What, O immortal, mortal man’s deception?” - The Rig Veda 8.48.3
Altering consciousness is at the foundation of all mystical traditions, regardless of the “how.” Of course, psychedelics offer a glimpse of a consistent state of consciousness that the yogis and mystics are surrendering in to. Let’s not create arbitrary rules about what’s allowed and what’s not. Many people set out on their meditative journey because of a psychedelic experience. ❤✌️