Has anyone in the comments read any post-Cartesian phenomenology like Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty? It's wild how this conversation at large just continues with new lexicons, each of a higher resolution, each smuggling in the baggage of their specific ontic mode of analysis.
These consciousness videos are so far above my education level and general understanding, but I love learning about it. Thank you for putting it out there for us in plain speaking that the common man like me can understand
Been following Mr Roper for a few years now. Don’t understand much of his content, but I do like the presentation. Got to 16:36 on this video and I must say the visual composition and colour blocking is lovely.
My friend, Brian Edmonds, majored in chemistry. This is the kind of conversation that he would enjoy. His father was a forensic scientist. He ended up working in a bookstore after a short period of working as a journalist covering the town meetings at a local paper.
I haven't watched the video yet, but based on what you wrote in the description "Neutral monism proposes that the fundamental stuff of physics has both a mechanistic, relational aspect (how particles behave) and a subjective, qualitative aspect (what particles are like, in and of themselves)" that is actually not right, that sounds like Russellian-panypsychism, what Neutral Monsim, as defined by one of the founders of those ideas Bertrand Russel is the view that "both mind and matter are composed of a neutral-stuff which, in isolation, is neither mental nor material", so the most fundamental building blocks of the reality are neither subjective, qualitative/ nor mechanistic/physical, but a neutral substance that could give rise to both.
yes in the video you are definitely talking about Russellian-panpsychism, and not neutral monism, and your criticism of it around minute 14 is misplaced, consciousness plays a very important role in Russellian-panpsychism, it's the only thing that is actually doing anything, you are understanding it in a far more dualistic way, it's a monist theory so in some sense fundamentally the only things that exist are conscious things, all the behavioral complexity we see is the results of these conscious entities interacting in the way they do, they behave the way they do because of their conscious nature, similar to how we explain human avoidance behavior to something that causes pain, the human avoided the painful stimulus because they felt pain a subjective experience, the felt experience of pain is playing an active role, all the behavioral aspects of the brain are just the behavioral descriptions that are the result of consciousness, to give a simple analogy this of the world views physics as the software and consciousness as the hardware, so you can't criticize it for saying there has to be a hole in fundamental physics, the only reason physics is physicsing! on this view is because of the actions of consciousness, no hole is needed, now what i am giving here is a very simple, and in some way inaccurate sketch of how to make russellian-panpsychism precise, if you want read a more careful treatment google "How to Understand Russellian Panpsychism Ataollah Hashemi" to see a precise account
@lolroflmaoization I agree the criticism of neutral monism at around minute 14 is much more a criticism of dualism, but the problem is that neutral monism does start to resemble a pointless version of dualism - with qualia tacked onto a purely physical world for no reason at all. Rusellian monism, that makes the psychic qualities effectively fundamental, is the best way out of that objection that I've found.
Thanks for another wonderful video. I do agree that insofar as the physicalist theories I’ve seen offered, what you describe is fairly strong. I’m not as confident as you were in your previous video that it can really successfully explain qualia, but I shall leave that be for now, as that wasn’t a specific focus in this video. I do want to address that the difference between the elephant and consciousness is significant here - maybe not in your point in how somehow can get caught in the logical trap, but in that which is constructed vs phenomenologically foundational. Certainly consciousness may be indeed be constructed in a way we cannot comprehend, but this difference does matter in terms of how we actual define reality, which is where I go to my second point. When we make assessments about what abilities or skills are evolutionarily useful, or how they correspond to reality, and so on, we are not using this as a starting place - it’s something we are building based on education, and ultimately, our experiences of the world. I can be wrong about my experiences as you say - but as a prerequisite to not being solipsistic I have to accept the foundations of my experiences as being what builds reality. I must accept, for instance, the existence of light well before any sort of understanding or study on photons can be conducted, and even then, the concept of light, ie the ability to hold visual perceptions, is completely different from the concept born from scientific theory. Even if everything I experience is some grand hallucination, I must accept this. And accepting it along with its co-fundamentals is essential to accepting anything else at all. Of course one may decide to reject it after accepting what conclusions it may have lead to… but such a thing will always be arbitrary and divorced from any science. Now, consciousness isn’t a fundamental in the sense that any of the senses are. We can, without consciousness, accept senses, draw physicalist conclusions, and complete the loops by explaining our senses. And this can be done quite cleanly, for exactly the reason you put it - it follows naturally that we would develop ways of sensing and understanding the world that allows us to be successful is passing forward our genes, which can then be used to assess and understand the world. But consciousness is not insofar as we can really tell, necessary - and yet we find it foundational in our experiences of reality. And so that a physicalist theory (without, as far as I know, neurological backing at this time) can potentially explain this away to me is insufficient cause to reject it, or even give it less credence. Though perhaps this difference is more fundamentally metaphysical, as I also generally see this as a general reason to reject physicalist, in spite of my intuition pressuring me to accept it. Anyway, if you read this thanks for taking the time, and apologies for any formatting or rambling. RUclips doesn’t exactly make it easy to type long comments on mobile.
Immanuel Kant: Every body (object) has extension (a non-zero size). I call this the analytic a priori, a property is inherent in the definition. Clever, what? Physicists: What about the electron? Current theory makes it a point with no size. Kant: I lived 200 years ago. Evidence, schmevidence. And don't get me on the neutrino. Physicists: You mean how every body has mass (a synthetic a priori, arrived at by reason). We used to think it was massless... Kant: Yeah but you were wrong! Physicists: Lucky shot
First time tuning into a consciousness video of yours and I'm pleasantly surprised by the clarity of thought you put into this (not as a dig against you; only because the average level of discussion on consciousness on the internet is so terribly poor). The fact that a nonphysical consciousness would have tangible effects on the Standard Model is something Sean Carroll (and I) would agree with, and his typical rejoinder is to ask how they'd modify the Standard Model.
The reason consciousness is not like an elephant is that it is primary. It comes before the laws and mechanisms of interaction. The idea of something being physical or something being a mechanism is a judgement inside your mind. So to use this to explain away your experience as mechanism is like confusing the map for the territory. It is like seeing a mountain and then pointing at your map where this mountain is not mapped and saying there is no mountain there. The world can never BE the map because then it would stop being a map and just be the world again. But the map clearly is not the world because you use the map as a tool to navigate something else.
A computer could use the same line of reasoning to decide that its operating system is "primary" and that the operating system therefore creates its hardware and backend code. Would it be correct?
@creditmetory When we see a red object pass before our eyes we can understand that we have categories like 'red' and 'object' that are evoked by physical processes inside us. This is as far as a computer will go and see no contradiction. Because having categories itself is not the problem but the experience of them. If the operating system did see a contradiction like a human, it would be valid to see the thing it derives its model of the world from as primary and the model that is incapable of reproducing its inner state as a flawed secondary.
This might sound a little uninformed but I think that the "I" in "I think therefore I am" is the root of the problem. We define ourselves "ourselves" as the entity that directly perceives consciousness. It's more of a "I think therefore it's me". And it is relevant and it challenges Descartes's point, at least in relation to consciousness, because the definition of "I" hangs on the definition of consciousness.
I think one way of getting around this is by assuming that the qualitative aspect is an aspect of whatever gives rise to interaction, i.e. both are aspects of something beyond or scientific framework. Assuming there are objects with both a relational aspect and a qualitative aspect is already putting the relational aspect first: "objects" are are contained within a relational paradigm. If there's instead something "preceding" both aspects, it seems at least conceivable that you might see a correlation (and possibly a presumed casual relation) from one aspect to the other, while both are really only reflections of the same underlying "thing" (I guess not really a think in the"object" sense).
As a physics student, I think your explanation of physics describing things in a relational way is very accurate. It becomes abstract very quickly. The qualities, normal terms we think in are quickly lost. That being said, I can imagine, if I spend a lot of time on one subject, delving into theory, discussing it and doing experiments, I could develop qualia for those abstract concepts. If that’d ever be such a clear qualia as for example red, I don’t know. But take photons, which are often described as waves and as particles. By now I’ve accepted them as being their own thing, not really connected to ripples in water or a spray can. I don’t go about my day consciously observing photons though, but there is an understanding that they’re part of reality and it feels intuitive even if it is still abstract. I do think the abstract thinking has become part of my consciousness in some way, at least it informs my attention. Still though, physics does a very bad job at describing what the world feels like, or no job maybe. I had hoped it would, but I’ve come to realise that it won’t. It cannot make red unred. I’ll keep thinking/feeling in qualia.
Funny that you're attributing this dualistic split between the relational and subjective realms to neutral MONISTS. I don't think they believe that these things are disjoint realms that must be slotted in to one another, but rather that they're distinct lenses on or means of interpretation of the same, single, substance.
standard model has huge holes. what it does have is very consistent, but it certainly has holes when considered in context with what we would imagine to be a complete understanding of nature. Perhaps I mean fundamental physics more broadly, but i think thats a better object of comparison than just the standard model, but anyway, holes of various sizes and levels of legitimacy include: strong cp problem, hierarchy problem, measurement problem/collapse, fine tuning problem, origin of the neutrino masses, foundational/ontological interpretations with respect to the aspects of locality, realism, and determinism, and of course quantum gravity/unification of all forces generally. maybe we can fit a little bit of 'experience' in those holes, maybe ;) excellent video! thank you 🙏
I think a lot of this hinges on the definition of "physical". I really do experience the color blue. If the experience of the color blue is not a part of the "physical" description of my brain, then this conscious experience in nonphysical. If you say that this percept is within the realm of the physical, then you would basically be saying "when these neurons fire, this firing is what the perception of blue is." And that means that the intimate perception of blue is one perspective on the same information you would get from a neuronal circuit map. I personally think this perspective is different enough from the map that it warrants a different "category", but these categories are of course very related - like the man said, the existence of consciousness does physically affect our actions.
I recommend you read Fichte and Novalis' partial critique of him in his 'Fichte Studies'. I also recommend Schelling's later work such as his essay on human freedom. Hegel and Heidegger and Deleuze, if you're interested in more. Don't remain stuck in contemporary analytic philosophy and it's reformulations, read the originals. Plato, Spinoza and Kant too, if you haven't already. You're getting deep enough into this, that you might as well take the plunge all the way xD
Rusellian Monism is a subtly different alternative to pansychism, which I'd love to hear your thoughts on. The idea is that it's hard - perhaps impossible - to explain any subjective experience through objective physicalist descriptions. But the reverse is much, much easier.
18:20 - “let’s say that you did conduct a very thorough study of the person’s brain, and you isolated the circuitry that was generating this percept of an elephant, and you completely understood why the person was standing there in the room with no elephant and yet seeing and perceiving one.” In your scenario of course you are inherently begging the question. In your scenario you have already declared that you are able to fully account, based on the brain circuitry, for why the person sees an elephant. But of course the entire idea behind those who reject physicalism is that the physical aspects of the brain circuit cannot possibly give rise to the phenomenal experience of seeing an elephant, whether real or hallucinatory. You’re simply positing that the physical events involved in brain circuitry alone are sufficient to explain qualia without providing an explanation for how this happens. And Graziano, unless I missed something in your other video, does not do this either. He just tries to avoid it altogether by stating that it is the result of attention schema. Well, why should those neural circuits of the attention schema be accompanied by subjective experience? This is explicitly not answered, and it quickly dissolves into an infinite regress. 14:48 - “Physical processes happening that aren’t straightforwardly explained by the standard model. You’d have to add something from the qualitative side of things into the standard model in order to fill the hole.” This may be true of panpsychism but is not true of analytic idealism. I think you should look into analytic idealism a la Bernardo Kastrup, because it is the only theory, in my opinion, that is completely consistent with the laws of physics and the existence of phenomenal consciousness. And it avoids the flaws of panpsychism. Briefly, the idea is that if we are being truly ontologically unbiased, we must conclude that: There is a correlation between brain activity and conscious states. Empirically it is silly to deny this. If I take a bullet to my occipital lobes, my vision will be affected. If you stimulate my temporal lobes, I will have some perception changes. And so on. We CANNOT begin by assuming that brain states *cause* conscious states, as we do not know that for sure, merely that they are strictly correlated. As Kastrup correctly points out, what laypeople would call the “physical brain” is, if we are being empirically unbiased, the second-person perspective of another person’s first person experience. If you look at my nervous system and the entirety of its metabolic activity etc (which of course your eyeballs alone cannot see), you are directly viewing what my first person experience looks like when viewed from the outside (Kastrup would say when “viewed across a dissociative boundary”). We cannot say, empirically, that one generates the other, only that they are two views of the same thing - hence the strict correlation between “physical” brain activity and internal consciousness. And when I look at another person’s active brain, I am seeing a second person perspective of someone else’s first person experience. The brain is a ‘physical’ system composed of subatomic particles and electromagnetic fields etc just like the external universe. Thus the most natural inference is that when one is viewing the external universe - also composed of subatomic particles and quantum fields - one is also viewing the second person perspective of a conscious experience. Thus, what we call “physicality” is *merely* the appearance of what external conscious states look like when viewed from a first-person perspective. At this point most physicalists would object: “how can you say the external world is in fact consciousness when it behaves nothing like consciousness and its behavior is described well by the laws of physics?” Well, as you noted, physics (and I have a degree in physics and am a practicing neurologist so I think I can lend myself a bit of hubris here) only describes the *behavior* of subatomic particles (really quantum fields, whose manifestations are what we measure as subatomic particles, but that’s beside the point). As you hinted at, physics does not, and cannot, address the underlying ontological nature of a subatomic particle or field - what it truly IS, rather than just how it behaves. The idea that conscious cannot behave in ways predictable by relations laws and equations is merely a metaphysical bias and not grounded in any sort of good faith ontological reasoning. The flaw with physicalism is that it *posits* an external world composed of purely quantitative physical entities, and then turns around and points the arrow inward from that conjecture, and tries to explain the only certain bit of datum that there is (i.e., that subjective experience exists) in terms of that conjecture of physicality, and then scratches its head when it cannot do so (also known as the hard problem of consciousness). Idealism succeeds because the hard problem of consciousness simply melts away if one does away with this conjecture. Idealism states that the supposed physical entities (particles, quantum fields, etc) we observe either outside of us or in our brains are simply the appearance of what external conscious states look like when viewed from a first person perspective. Thus no aspect of physics contradicts analytic idealism. This cannot be emphasized enough. In this theory, unlike panpsychism, there is nothing that it feels like to be an atom or a chair. In idealism, it is not the case that “everything is conscious”; rather, it can be crudely summarized as “everything exists in consciousness.” Physicalists also often object as well by stating the fact that a physical object such as alcohol or a surgeon’s scalpel can so strongly influence my conscious experience suggests that my conscious experience is secondary to physical objects - that physical objects have causal power over my consciousness, thus proving physicalism. But this is entirely missing the point. In idealism, the scalpel and the alcohol are simply the appearance of certain types of external conscious states, rather than being “physical”; thus there is no problem when a scalpel influences my internal conscious experience, because it is trivial to posit that one conscious experience should be able to directly influence another (after all, this happens within us all the time; one thought leads to another, an emotional change influences my thinking, etc). Thus, idealism is able to fully account for the existence of internal consciousness (it posits that consciousness is the only ontological given) and the existence of an external world that is outside of our internal consciousness, and runs into no hard problem while being perfectly consistent with the laws of physics, thus making it the superior theory.
To quote Marx, who I think was quoting Hegel “Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.” and I think that this is the main issue when discussing consciousness. We're looking for one thing, I don't think it is one thing, I don't think its a building block. Consciousness is probably a large relational network of different things.
there's the "god of the gaps" that purports to place god in every gap that our current understanding of physics maintains, and then there's the "consciousness of the gaps"... also, i assume someone is going to raise the argument that "our brains need to have somewhat accurate percepts in order for us to survive" presumes our brains haven't lied to us to trick us into thinking that darwinian evolution (the description of which is a product of human neural networks) is a real thing.
In the relational model of physics, You describe the standard model as only caring about particles relations, not what they are in themselves. You then provide an example of a potential question that would be of the particle in themselves, that is what is the colour of it. But how is that not just another relational question? why cant the equations describing its movement be a question of the same sort? Sure you can experience the colour of a thing, but you can also experience its movement
Neutral monism does not necessarily entail panpsychism. By the usual definitions neutral monists can still have objects or collections of objects which have no mental properties whereas panpsychists believe mental properties are present at every level of physical objects.
@didack1419 We're deep in the categories and sub categories here. Merely stating that consciousness emerges is not granular enough for the discussion at play. Neutral Monist theories can be emergent in addition to the structuralism about physics and realism about conscious experience alluded to within this video. But emergentism of course does not require structuralism or that kind of realism about conscious experience.
regarding isolating the circuitry generating the elephant, is this not a matter of scale? at another level, we've already isolated that the brain is the primary seat of consciousness, and at a higher level, the whole human mind-body is the circuit. these answers are clearly unsatisfying, and so I agree that it would be similarly dissatisfying the isolate the Graziano circuit.
If a consciousness is attached to a system of interacting physical entities (like a brain), then what is the limit on which ones? Our minds are a ship of theseus of atoms and particles, so does that mean all atoms that interact with my brain are involved? Technically every particle in the universe interacts with every other, so where is the line drawn? Any self-contained system of matter that processes input and reacts to it? Our minds are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Your computer's processor is made of protons neutrons and electrons and interacts with its surroundings based on inputs it receives, just as we do. Who is to say that a machine does not have consciousness if consciousness can be extended to all entities which take in input and are capable of digesting information. We consider animals to be conscious, perhaps with a different scope of experience, but still conscious. Where is the limit drawn? Does a cat have consciousness? A mouse? An ant? An aphid? A germ? Is the line just "any multicellular life?" Does it even have to be alive? If we entertain the idea that single-celled life has a consciousness too, then what about non-biological systems with similar complexity? What makes a biological set of molecules different from another set, as the atoms can just be rearranged anyways.
Perhaps the chief problem with "I think therefore I am.' is that we simply lack the word to say what we actually mean. Maybe "I am who am" does come closer. Besides, both are translations into English, so just what was the originally intended meaning of "I am who am"?
I prefer “consciousness observes consciousness.” it leaves out concern over the “I am” which leads into a discussion of psychology has to be dealt with on individual level. Saying simply the consciousness observed consciousness is universal. What do you think?
@@adrianmole4389 both? Are you referring to the Bible with "I am who am"? I don't know that quote from anywhere else. I mean, 'cogito' really means "to think", and the other really is just the Hebrew copula.
@@adrianmole4389 where is "I am who am" from? I only know that quote from the Bible. "Cogito" really means "to think" and the other is really just the Hebrew copula.
@@adrianmole4389 where is "I am who am" from? I only know it from the Bible. 'Cogito' does mean 'to think' and the other really is the Hebrew word for "to be".
3:45 "a particle is a physical thing." not so fast Mojo Jojo. I'm not a physical reductionist; I believe that there's some inexplicable magic going on which makes consciousness irreducible and I would never deny free will as an illusion of a deterministic universe; I do not believe that the universe is deterministic. however, I've got to challenge you on this. we think of ourselves as physical, and yet we discovered that atoms and molecules are quite a lot of empty space. so what's physical? and what's so physical as thing get smaller and smaller? marbles are physical at our level, but at another level they're a whole lot of empty space. subatomic particles are certainly not purely marble-like, as the double slit experiment shows. I understand the intuition behind thinking of ourselves, atomic, and subatomic particles as physical, but this is an assumption. and perhaps it's an assumption that creates a false dichotomy between the intuitively physical (body) and intuitively non-physical. I don't know. I feel ill-equipped and uninclined to continue to explore this question, but I have a feeling it's worth exploring, even if the conclusion is still "I don't know".
I like to imagine domains that are inaccessible to science. I have a thought experiment which is related to the China brain and to these inaccessible domains. imagine that our reality is actually like one of those duck-rabbit illusions in that you can look at our reality and see life on planet Earth orbiting the sun (etc.) and that this is not the only reality that could manifest from this configuration; if our world is the rabbit world, perhaps there's a duck world made in some sense of all of the same stuff, but presenting much differently, with even consciousness manifesting differently. this is untestable and uncomfirmable, but it's also undeniable. or, imagine that there's actually some consciousness and associated that arises from other networks in our world: the human collective consciousness is one common example, but what about arbitrary arrangements of rocks, schools of fish, or groves of trees? it's absolutely possible that a tree, like a neuron, might not be conscious, but that a forest could be. and what about consciousness taking place over much slower or faster time scales? the earth is old - what if there's some neuron-like activity to be observed in collections of terrestrial objects, but only at geologic time scales, rather than human time scales? consciousness could be everywhere and we might never know.
Lots of things to unpack here. It needs a lot more thought than I can give right now. A few random thoughts, though: do not dismiss solipsism so lightly; consciousness might live beyond the capability of our limited brain capacity and, therefore will always be out of reach; remember that Descartes was trying to prove the existence of God. My recently late mum had an unusual form of tinnitus that convinced her she could hear music (in reality she was extremely hard of hearing in her latter years) and no matter how often we told her that there was no music, she was convinced there was. How can we know that non-humans (or even other humans) experience consciousness? My own personal view is that we will never solve the hard problem. Nor, in my lifetime, will we reconcile General Relativity with quantum theory. Perhaps consciousness is fundamental and everything else derivative. Who knows? And who can know?
Let me try to understand: In this physicalist view, our consciousness is the "subjective" side of the physical reality of the brain's neurological activity. It's not an illusion or a trick: It just so happens that physical objects really do have a property of "subjectivity" and therefore every object is technically conscious (but, due to lacking the integrated information system that exists within the brain, most object's subjective experiences are basically devoid of content); thus, it is a panpsychist view. Is this an accurate summary of the perspective you're outlining here?
Isn't one of the issues here that we know we are conscious? I don't mean that we can intellectualise about it. I mean we are conscious we are conscious. In this sense it would seem other living things are aware they are conscious as well. Maybe not all though. To get to grips with the idea you have to go back through evolution and try to see at which point our type of consciousness arose. Does it require a central nervous system? A worm would be aware of consciousness in that case but not a single celled animal or a plant. However, even these forms of life have to respond to their environment. They may be conscious in some sense. What is it about the process of evolution that enables life to move from one level to the next? The whole process of the evolution of life is about taking whatever is useful in an inanimate world and utilising it to help sustain the living thing. At some point in evolution we become aware that we have utilised something called consciousness as part of this process. We have utilised it, as we have utilised water, oxygen and so on, because it is there to be used. Wouldn't this at least suggest consciousness existed before life even came about?
I"ve found the idea of Panpsychism to be best and most simply reduced to the idea of the words used in representing scale. Quantum Scale, Micro Scale, Meso Scale (Our frame of reference as humans), Cosmological Scale, etc.
Btw i am curious if you Graziano's theory, then are committed to some of it's very controversial claims ,for example that fish are not conscious creatures ? if so you should be very comfortable torturing fish : p so you better be right.
Consciousness is all there is. That science considers it to be the “hard problem” tells you all you need to know about “science”. To quote the great Thomas Dolby…”She’s blinding me! With science!!”
@ I’ve seen physicists postulate on it, but again, it’s totally improvable and we will probably never have any way of approving what consciousness is either way
My favorite youtube notifications are simon roper videos about consciousness
Mine too! Yuppie!
I'm so glad I'm not the only one who leaves the spoon in my cups. Everyone calls me weird for that. Oh yeah, great video as always.
just yesterday or so i was thinking about your consciousness series and hoped you’d film another video soon. wish granted, thank you!
Has anyone in the comments read any post-Cartesian phenomenology like Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty?
It's wild how this conversation at large just continues with new lexicons, each of a higher resolution, each smuggling in the baggage of their specific ontic mode of analysis.
These consciousness videos are so far above my education level and general understanding, but I love learning about it. Thank you for putting it out there for us in plain speaking that the common man like me can understand
Been following Mr Roper for a few years now. Don’t understand much of his content, but I do like the presentation. Got to 16:36 on this video and I must say the visual composition and colour blocking is lovely.
My friend, Brian Edmonds, majored in chemistry. This is the kind of conversation that he would enjoy. His father was a forensic scientist. He ended up working in a bookstore after a short period of working as a journalist covering the town meetings at a local paper.
Thank you Simon.
I haven't watched the video yet, but based on what you wrote in the description "Neutral monism proposes that the fundamental stuff of physics has both a mechanistic, relational aspect (how particles behave) and a subjective, qualitative aspect (what particles are like, in and of themselves)" that is actually not right, that sounds like Russellian-panypsychism, what Neutral Monsim, as defined by one of the founders of those ideas Bertrand Russel is the view that "both mind and matter are composed of a neutral-stuff which, in isolation, is neither mental nor material", so the most fundamental building blocks of the reality are neither subjective, qualitative/ nor mechanistic/physical, but a neutral substance that could give rise to both.
yes in the video you are definitely talking about Russellian-panpsychism, and not neutral monism, and your criticism of it around minute 14 is misplaced, consciousness plays a very important role in Russellian-panpsychism, it's the only thing that is actually doing anything, you are understanding it in a far more dualistic way, it's a monist theory so in some sense fundamentally the only things that exist are conscious things, all the behavioral complexity we see is the results of these conscious entities interacting in the way they do, they behave the way they do because of their conscious nature, similar to how we explain human avoidance behavior to something that causes pain, the human avoided the painful stimulus because they felt pain a subjective experience, the felt experience of pain is playing an active role, all the behavioral aspects of the brain are just the behavioral descriptions that are the result of consciousness, to give a simple analogy this of the world views physics as the software and consciousness as the hardware, so you can't criticize it for saying there has to be a hole in fundamental physics, the only reason physics is physicsing! on this view is because of the actions of consciousness, no hole is needed, now what i am giving here is a very simple, and in some way inaccurate sketch of how to make russellian-panpsychism precise, if you want read a more careful treatment google "How to Understand Russellian Panpsychism Ataollah Hashemi" to see a precise account
@lolroflmaoization I agree the criticism of neutral monism at around minute 14 is much more a criticism of dualism, but the problem is that neutral monism does start to resemble a pointless version of dualism - with qualia tacked onto a purely physical world for no reason at all.
Rusellian monism, that makes the psychic qualities effectively fundamental, is the best way out of that objection that I've found.
@BMarcJ right you mean something like the phenomenal powers view i assume ?
@@lolroflmaoization not familiar with that one!
Thanks for another wonderful video. I do agree that insofar as the physicalist theories I’ve seen offered, what you describe is fairly strong. I’m not as confident as you were in your previous video that it can really successfully explain qualia, but I shall leave that be for now, as that wasn’t a specific focus in this video.
I do want to address that the difference between the elephant and consciousness is significant here - maybe not in your point in how somehow can get caught in the logical trap, but in that which is constructed vs phenomenologically foundational. Certainly consciousness may be indeed be constructed in a way we cannot comprehend, but this difference does matter in terms of how we actual define reality, which is where I go to my second point.
When we make assessments about what abilities or skills are evolutionarily useful, or how they correspond to reality, and so on, we are not using this as a starting place - it’s something we are building based on education, and ultimately, our experiences of the world. I can be wrong about my experiences as you say - but as a prerequisite to not being solipsistic I have to accept the foundations of my experiences as being what builds reality. I must accept, for instance, the existence of light well before any sort of understanding or study on photons can be conducted, and even then, the concept of light, ie the ability to hold visual perceptions, is completely different from the concept born from scientific theory. Even if everything I experience is some grand hallucination, I must accept this. And accepting it along with its co-fundamentals is essential to accepting anything else at all. Of course one may decide to reject it after accepting what conclusions it may have lead to… but such a thing will always be arbitrary and divorced from any science.
Now, consciousness isn’t a fundamental in the sense that any of the senses are. We can, without consciousness, accept senses, draw physicalist conclusions, and complete the loops by explaining our senses. And this can be done quite cleanly, for exactly the reason you put it - it follows naturally that we would develop ways of sensing and understanding the world that allows us to be successful is passing forward our genes, which can then be used to assess and understand the world. But consciousness is not insofar as we can really tell, necessary - and yet we find it foundational in our experiences of reality. And so that a physicalist theory (without, as far as I know, neurological backing at this time) can potentially explain this away to me is insufficient cause to reject it, or even give it less credence. Though perhaps this difference is more fundamentally metaphysical, as I also generally see this as a general reason to reject physicalist, in spite of my intuition pressuring me to accept it.
Anyway, if you read this thanks for taking the time, and apologies for any formatting or rambling. RUclips doesn’t exactly make it easy to type long comments on mobile.
Immanuel Kant: Every body (object) has extension (a non-zero size). I call this the analytic a priori, a property is inherent in the definition. Clever, what?
Physicists: What about the electron? Current theory makes it a point with no size.
Kant: I lived 200 years ago. Evidence, schmevidence. And don't get me on the neutrino.
Physicists: You mean how every body has mass (a synthetic a priori, arrived at by reason). We used to think it was massless...
Kant: Yeah but you were wrong!
Physicists: Lucky shot
First time tuning into a consciousness video of yours and I'm pleasantly surprised by the clarity of thought you put into this (not as a dig against you; only because the average level of discussion on consciousness on the internet is so terribly poor). The fact that a nonphysical consciousness would have tangible effects on the Standard Model is something Sean Carroll (and I) would agree with, and his typical rejoinder is to ask how they'd modify the Standard Model.
neutral monism sounds cool. I like it. I like this idea that there's something such as what it feels to be a rock, but that rocks aren't conscious.
The reason consciousness is not like an elephant is that it is primary. It comes before the laws and mechanisms of interaction. The idea of something being physical or something being a mechanism is a judgement inside your mind. So to use this to explain away your experience as mechanism is like confusing the map for the territory. It is like seeing a mountain and then pointing at your map where this mountain is not mapped and saying there is no mountain there. The world can never BE the map because then it would stop being a map and just be the world again. But the map clearly is not the world because you use the map as a tool to navigate something else.
A computer could use the same line of reasoning to decide that its operating system is "primary" and that the operating system therefore creates its hardware and backend code. Would it be correct?
@creditmetory When we see a red object pass before our eyes we can understand that we have categories like 'red' and 'object' that are evoked by physical processes inside us. This is as far as a computer will go and see no contradiction. Because having categories itself is not the problem but the experience of them. If the operating system did see a contradiction like a human, it would be valid to see the thing it derives its model of the world from as primary and the model that is incapable of reproducing its inner state as a flawed secondary.
This might sound a little uninformed but I think that the "I" in "I think therefore I am" is the root of the problem. We define ourselves "ourselves" as the entity that directly perceives consciousness. It's more of a "I think therefore it's me". And it is relevant and it challenges Descartes's point, at least in relation to consciousness, because the definition of "I" hangs on the definition of consciousness.
I think one way of getting around this is by assuming that the qualitative aspect is an aspect of whatever gives rise to interaction, i.e. both are aspects of something beyond or scientific framework. Assuming there are objects with both a relational aspect and a qualitative aspect is already putting the relational aspect first: "objects" are are contained within a relational paradigm. If there's instead something "preceding" both aspects, it seems at least conceivable that you might see a correlation (and possibly a presumed casual relation) from one aspect to the other, while both are really only reflections of the same underlying "thing" (I guess not really a think in the"object" sense).
As a physics student, I think your explanation of physics describing things in a relational way is very accurate. It becomes abstract very quickly. The qualities, normal terms we think in are quickly lost. That being said, I can imagine, if I spend a lot of time on one subject, delving into theory, discussing it and doing experiments, I could develop qualia for those abstract concepts. If that’d ever be such a clear qualia as for example red, I don’t know. But take photons, which are often described as waves and as particles. By now I’ve accepted them as being their own thing, not really connected to ripples in water or a spray can. I don’t go about my day consciously observing photons though, but there is an understanding that they’re part of reality and it feels intuitive even if it is still abstract. I do think the abstract thinking has become part of my consciousness in some way, at least it informs my attention. Still though, physics does a very bad job at describing what the world feels like, or no job maybe. I had hoped it would, but I’ve come to realise that it won’t. It cannot make red unred. I’ll keep thinking/feeling in qualia.
Funny that you're attributing this dualistic split between the relational and subjective realms to neutral MONISTS. I don't think they believe that these things are disjoint realms that must be slotted in to one another, but rather that they're distinct lenses on or means of interpretation of the same, single, substance.
standard model has huge holes. what it does have is very consistent, but it certainly has holes when considered in context with what we would imagine to be a complete understanding of nature. Perhaps I mean fundamental physics more broadly, but i think thats a better object of comparison than just the standard model, but anyway, holes of various sizes and levels of legitimacy include: strong cp problem, hierarchy problem, measurement problem/collapse, fine tuning problem, origin of the neutrino masses, foundational/ontological interpretations with respect to the aspects of locality, realism, and determinism, and of course quantum gravity/unification of all forces generally. maybe we can fit a little bit of 'experience' in those holes, maybe ;)
excellent video! thank you 🙏
Great. I get it. Makes sense. Just one question, why IS there an elephant?
I think a lot of this hinges on the definition of "physical". I really do experience the color blue. If the experience of the color blue is not a part of the "physical" description of my brain, then this conscious experience in nonphysical. If you say that this percept is within the realm of the physical, then you would basically be saying "when these neurons fire, this firing is what the perception of blue is." And that means that the intimate perception of blue is one perspective on the same information you would get from a neuronal circuit map. I personally think this perspective is different enough from the map that it warrants a different "category", but these categories are of course very related - like the man said, the existence of consciousness does physically affect our actions.
I recommend you read Fichte and Novalis' partial critique of him in his 'Fichte Studies'.
I also recommend Schelling's later work such as his essay on human freedom. Hegel and Heidegger and Deleuze, if you're interested in more.
Don't remain stuck in contemporary analytic philosophy and it's reformulations, read the originals. Plato, Spinoza and Kant too, if you haven't already.
You're getting deep enough into this, that you might as well take the plunge all the way xD
Rusellian Monism is a subtly different alternative to pansychism, which I'd love to hear your thoughts on. The idea is that it's hard - perhaps impossible - to explain any subjective experience through objective physicalist descriptions. But the reverse is much, much easier.
18:20 - “let’s say that you did conduct a very thorough study of the person’s brain, and you isolated the circuitry that was generating this percept of an elephant, and you completely understood why the person was standing there in the room with no elephant and yet seeing and perceiving one.” In your scenario of course you are inherently begging the question. In your scenario you have already declared that you are able to fully account, based on the brain circuitry, for why the person sees an elephant. But of course the entire idea behind those who reject physicalism is that the physical aspects of the brain circuit cannot possibly give rise to the phenomenal experience of seeing an elephant, whether real or hallucinatory. You’re simply positing that the physical events involved in brain circuitry alone are sufficient to explain qualia without providing an explanation for how this happens. And Graziano, unless I missed something in your other video, does not do this either. He just tries to avoid it altogether by stating that it is the result of attention schema. Well, why should those neural circuits of the attention schema be accompanied by subjective experience? This is explicitly not answered, and it quickly dissolves into an infinite regress.
14:48 - “Physical processes happening that aren’t straightforwardly explained by the standard model. You’d have to add something from the qualitative side of things into the standard model in order to fill the hole.” This may be true of panpsychism but is not true of analytic idealism.
I think you should look into analytic idealism a la Bernardo Kastrup, because it is the only theory, in my opinion, that is completely consistent with the laws of physics and the existence of phenomenal consciousness. And it avoids the flaws of panpsychism. Briefly, the idea is that if we are being truly ontologically unbiased, we must conclude that:
There is a correlation between brain activity and conscious states. Empirically it is silly to deny this. If I take a bullet to my occipital lobes, my vision will be affected. If you stimulate my temporal lobes, I will have some perception changes. And so on. We CANNOT begin by assuming that brain states *cause* conscious states, as we do not know that for sure, merely that they are strictly correlated.
As Kastrup correctly points out, what laypeople would call the “physical brain” is, if we are being empirically unbiased, the second-person perspective of another person’s first person experience. If you look at my nervous system and the entirety of its metabolic activity etc (which of course your eyeballs alone cannot see), you are directly viewing what my first person experience looks like when viewed from the outside (Kastrup would say when “viewed across a dissociative boundary”).
We cannot say, empirically, that one generates the other, only that they are two views of the same thing - hence the strict correlation between “physical” brain activity and internal consciousness. And when I look at another person’s active brain, I am seeing a second person perspective of someone else’s first person experience.
The brain is a ‘physical’ system composed of subatomic particles and electromagnetic fields etc just like the external universe. Thus the most natural inference is that when one is viewing the external universe - also composed of subatomic particles and quantum fields - one is also viewing the second person perspective of a conscious experience. Thus, what we call “physicality” is *merely* the appearance of what external conscious states look like when viewed from a first-person perspective.
At this point most physicalists would object: “how can you say the external world is in fact consciousness when it behaves nothing like consciousness and its behavior is described well by the laws of physics?” Well, as you noted, physics (and I have a degree in physics and am a practicing neurologist so I think I can lend myself a bit of hubris here) only describes the *behavior* of subatomic particles (really quantum fields, whose manifestations are what we measure as subatomic particles, but that’s beside the point). As you hinted at, physics does not, and cannot, address the underlying ontological nature of a subatomic particle or field - what it truly IS, rather than just how it behaves. The idea that conscious cannot behave in ways predictable by relations laws and equations is merely a metaphysical bias and not grounded in any sort of good faith ontological reasoning.
The flaw with physicalism is that it *posits* an external world composed of purely quantitative physical entities, and then turns around and points the arrow inward from that conjecture, and tries to explain the only certain bit of datum that there is (i.e., that subjective experience exists) in terms of that conjecture of physicality, and then scratches its head when it cannot do so (also known as the hard problem of consciousness).
Idealism succeeds because the hard problem of consciousness simply melts away if one does away with this conjecture. Idealism states that the supposed physical entities (particles, quantum fields, etc) we observe either outside of us or in our brains are simply the appearance of what external conscious states look like when viewed from a first person perspective. Thus no aspect of physics contradicts analytic idealism. This cannot be emphasized enough.
In this theory, unlike panpsychism, there is nothing that it feels like to be an atom or a chair. In idealism, it is not the case that “everything is conscious”; rather, it can be crudely summarized as “everything exists in consciousness.”
Physicalists also often object as well by stating the fact that a physical object such as alcohol or a surgeon’s scalpel can so strongly influence my conscious experience suggests that my conscious experience is secondary to physical objects - that physical objects have causal power over my consciousness, thus proving physicalism. But this is entirely missing the point. In idealism, the scalpel and the alcohol are simply the appearance of certain types of external conscious states, rather than being “physical”; thus there is no problem when a scalpel influences my internal conscious experience, because it is trivial to posit that one conscious experience should be able to directly influence another (after all, this happens within us all the time; one thought leads to another, an emotional change influences my thinking, etc).
Thus, idealism is able to fully account for the existence of internal consciousness (it posits that consciousness is the only ontological given) and the existence of an external world that is outside of our internal consciousness, and runs into no hard problem while being perfectly consistent with the laws of physics, thus making it the superior theory.
From lingustics to the consciousness, you've become another one of many people that been spiritually awakened too
i think you'd dig galen strawson's 'stuff, quality, structure: the whole go'
To quote Marx, who I think was quoting Hegel “Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes.” and I think that this is the main issue when discussing consciousness. We're looking for one thing, I don't think it is one thing, I don't think its a building block. Consciousness is probably a large relational network of different things.
there's the "god of the gaps" that purports to place god in every gap that our current understanding of physics maintains, and then there's the "consciousness of the gaps"...
also, i assume someone is going to raise the argument that "our brains need to have somewhat accurate percepts in order for us to survive" presumes our brains haven't lied to us to trick us into thinking that darwinian evolution (the description of which is a product of human neural networks) is a real thing.
Y'know, I never heard it expressed, but I've believed that for a long time. Well said.
TY Simon
I'm not conscious, and I'm glad about that. It sounds exhausting.
hi simon :3
What's the difference between a quality and a property?
"Consciousness is not the same thing as an elephant" -- I respectfully disagree.
I think, therefore I am an elephant
In the relational model of physics, You describe the standard model as only caring about particles relations, not what they are in themselves. You then provide an example of a potential question that would be of the particle in themselves, that is what is the colour of it. But how is that not just another relational question? why cant the equations describing its movement be a question of the same sort? Sure you can experience the colour of a thing, but you can also experience its movement
Neutral monism does not necessarily entail panpsychism. By the usual definitions neutral monists can still have objects or collections of objects which have no mental properties whereas panpsychists believe mental properties are present at every level of physical objects.
I assumed this, but it makes the idea feel like it could just be reduced to a generic emergentism about consciousness. How is it not redundant?
@didack1419 We're deep in the categories and sub categories here. Merely stating that consciousness emerges is not granular enough for the discussion at play. Neutral Monist theories can be emergent in addition to the structuralism about physics and realism about conscious experience alluded to within this video. But emergentism of course does not require structuralism or that kind of realism about conscious experience.
regarding isolating the circuitry generating the elephant, is this not a matter of scale? at another level, we've already isolated that the brain is the primary seat of consciousness, and at a higher level, the whole human mind-body is the circuit. these answers are clearly unsatisfying, and so I agree that it would be similarly dissatisfying the isolate the Graziano circuit.
If a consciousness is attached to a system of interacting physical entities (like a brain), then what is the limit on which ones? Our minds are a ship of theseus of atoms and particles, so does that mean all atoms that interact with my brain are involved? Technically every particle in the universe interacts with every other, so where is the line drawn? Any self-contained system of matter that processes input and reacts to it?
Our minds are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Your computer's processor is made of protons neutrons and electrons and interacts with its surroundings based on inputs it receives, just as we do. Who is to say that a machine does not have consciousness if consciousness can be extended to all entities which take in input and are capable of digesting information.
We consider animals to be conscious, perhaps with a different scope of experience, but still conscious. Where is the limit drawn? Does a cat have consciousness? A mouse? An ant? An aphid? A germ? Is the line just "any multicellular life?" Does it even have to be alive? If we entertain the idea that single-celled life has a consciousness too, then what about non-biological systems with similar complexity? What makes a biological set of molecules different from another set, as the atoms can just be rearranged anyways.
Perhaps the chief problem with "I think therefore I am.' is that we simply lack the word to say what we actually mean. Maybe "I am who am" does come closer. Besides, both are translations into English, so just what was the originally intended meaning of "I am who am"?
I prefer “consciousness observes consciousness.” it leaves out concern over the “I am” which leads into a discussion of psychology has to be dealt with on individual level. Saying simply the consciousness observed consciousness is universal. What do you think?
@@adrianmole4389 both? Are you referring to the Bible with "I am who am"? I don't know that quote from anywhere else.
I mean, 'cogito' really means "to think", and the other really is just the Hebrew copula.
@@adrianmole4389 where is "I am who am" from? I only know that quote from the Bible.
"Cogito" really means "to think" and the other is really just the Hebrew copula.
@@adrianmole4389 where is "I am who am" from? I only know it from the Bible.
'Cogito' does mean 'to think' and the other really is the Hebrew word for "to be".
Are you familiar with Michael Levine and the notion that memory is itself 'intelligent' with agency?
3:45 "a particle is a physical
thing." not so fast Mojo Jojo. I'm not a physical reductionist; I believe that there's some inexplicable magic going on which makes consciousness irreducible and I would never deny free will as an illusion of a deterministic universe; I do not believe that the universe is deterministic. however, I've got to challenge you on this. we think of ourselves as physical, and yet we discovered that atoms and molecules are quite a lot of empty space. so what's physical? and what's so physical as thing get smaller and smaller? marbles are physical at our level, but at another level they're a whole lot of empty space. subatomic particles are certainly not purely marble-like, as the double slit experiment shows. I understand the intuition behind thinking of ourselves, atomic, and subatomic particles as physical, but this is an assumption. and perhaps it's an assumption that creates a false dichotomy between the intuitively physical (body) and intuitively non-physical. I don't know. I feel ill-equipped and uninclined to continue to explore this question, but I have a feeling it's worth exploring, even if the conclusion is still "I don't know".
I like to imagine domains that are inaccessible to science. I have a thought experiment which is related to the China brain and to these inaccessible domains. imagine that our reality is actually like one of those duck-rabbit illusions in that you can look at our reality and see life on planet Earth orbiting the sun (etc.) and that this is not the only reality that could manifest from this configuration; if our world is the rabbit world, perhaps there's a duck world made in some sense of all of the same stuff, but presenting much differently, with even consciousness manifesting differently. this is untestable and uncomfirmable, but it's also undeniable. or, imagine that there's actually some consciousness and associated that arises from other networks in our world: the human collective consciousness is one common example, but what about arbitrary arrangements of rocks, schools of fish, or groves of trees? it's absolutely possible that a tree, like a neuron, might not be conscious, but that a forest could be. and what about consciousness taking place over much slower or faster time scales? the earth is old - what if there's some neuron-like activity to be observed in collections of terrestrial objects, but only at geologic time scales, rather than human time scales? consciousness could be everywhere and we might never know.
I wonder what you think about the work Michael Levin is doing, relating to biology and intelligence
Sheldrake much?
Aldous Huxley was into panpsychism
Check out Rupert Sheldrake and Donald Hoffman if you didn't already
Lots of things to unpack here. It needs a lot more thought than I can give right now. A few random thoughts, though: do not dismiss solipsism so lightly; consciousness might live beyond the capability of our limited brain capacity and, therefore will always be out of reach; remember that Descartes was trying to prove the existence of God. My recently late mum had an unusual form of tinnitus that convinced her she could hear music (in reality she was extremely hard of hearing in her latter years) and no matter how often we told her that there was no music, she was convinced there was. How can we know that non-humans (or even other humans) experience consciousness?
My own personal view is that we will never solve the hard problem. Nor, in my lifetime, will we reconcile General Relativity with quantum theory. Perhaps consciousness is fundamental and everything else derivative. Who knows? And who can know?
Let me try to understand:
In this physicalist view, our consciousness is the "subjective" side of the physical reality of the brain's neurological activity. It's not an illusion or a trick: It just so happens that physical objects really do have a property of "subjectivity" and therefore every object is technically conscious (but, due to lacking the integrated information system that exists within the brain, most object's subjective experiences are basically devoid of content); thus, it is a panpsychist view. Is this an accurate summary of the perspective you're outlining here?
Isn't one of the issues here that we know we are conscious? I don't mean that we can intellectualise about it. I mean we are conscious we are conscious.
In this sense it would seem other living things are aware they are conscious as well. Maybe not all though.
To get to grips with the idea you have to go back through evolution and try to see at which point our type of consciousness arose. Does it require a central nervous system? A worm would be aware of consciousness in that case but not a single celled animal or a plant. However, even these forms of life have to respond to their environment. They may be conscious in some sense.
What is it about the process of evolution that enables life to move from one level to the next?
The whole process of the evolution of life is about taking whatever is useful in an inanimate world and utilising it to help sustain the living thing. At some point in evolution we become aware that we have utilised something called consciousness as part of this process. We have utilised it, as we have utilised water, oxygen and so on, because it is there to be used.
Wouldn't this at least suggest consciousness existed before life even came about?
with salvia, you too can experience what it is like to be a chair
Consciousness is a human created matter. All sentient beings reach towards comfort and pleasure. It is we who make it about us.
I wonder what it feels like to be a dork
"Imagine you're a philosopher", sorry, you lost me at that point, as if I could ever even begin to imagine myself as a philosopher 🤷♂
I"ve found the idea of Panpsychism to be best and most simply reduced to the idea of the words used in representing scale. Quantum Scale, Micro Scale, Meso Scale (Our frame of reference as humans), Cosmological Scale, etc.
Ultimately without consciousness there's no observer so it doesn't really matter if the Universe exists without consciousness.
Btw i am curious if you Graziano's theory, then are committed to some of it's very controversial claims ,for example that fish are not conscious creatures ? if so you should be very comfortable torturing fish : p so you better be right.
Consciousness is all there is. That science considers it to be the “hard problem” tells you all you need to know about “science”. To quote the great Thomas Dolby…”She’s blinding me! With science!!”
This is just a straight up anti-intellectualist statement. If you know so well, I'm looking forward to seeing your papers/books.
Or perhaps consciousness is a quantum illusion, the good thing is, we will never know.
This is a misconception.
@ I’ve seen physicists postulate on it, but again, it’s totally improvable and we will probably never have any way of approving what consciousness is either way
Illusion is a state of consciousness
not all of us assume that stupid people are conscious.
there may well be a barrier.
No way there is a barrier, if anything it'll be a continuum.