Two Unanswerable Questions About the Mind
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- Опубликовано: 18 фев 2024
- Clip taken from Heretics with Andrew Gold: • Slogans Have Killed Ra...
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Alex O'Connor
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If you cut open my brain, I can guarantee you, that you will see red.
😂😂😂😂
😂
Your red or my red? I don't believe you will be able to fight in that condition, buddy.
@@user-zn4pw5nk2v fair point
@@user-zn4pw5nk2v eh, I assume both of our brains bleed red if they are cut open ;)
Hi Alex I'm one of the former member of a cult religious group JMS, your contents helped me recover from my bad experiences.
Nice to hear! Remember that living a life with other things than religion is just as valuable, moral and beautiful, in the case you are not into religion anymore.
That's great .
I escaped the CBGC
Crazy, similar experience here. Something about pondering consciousness is so comforting these days.
Sadly Alex doesnt read comments
I think qualia is an emergent property of information processing. Asking where the “redness” is is like looking at an engine and asking where the “functioning” is. There are certain parts that do stuff when the engine functions, and likewise certain neurons are probably more associated with redness-qualia, but asking for a concrete thing or and location that is only the “functioning” bit, nothing more nor less, doesn’t make much sense.
Heh, I was just about to make the same engine analogy. You wouldn't cut up a motor in search of the motion it produces at the wheels - it is the functioning whole of the motor from which the motion emerges.
Well, we do know that the original signal we interpret as red is derived from the red cone cell. If you google 'protanopia visuals' assuming you have normal eyes, you can see that if you lack the red cone cell you simply cannot see red. If we ever built a computer that's powerful enough to simulate every atom in a human brain, you could isolate that red cone cell signal and what happens to it inside the brain. But then of course even if you did manage to trace it through the brain all the way until an experience happens, I imagine just as you say we would find ourselves at the same dead end.
The hard problem of consciousness is something I doubt we'll ever solve to be honest, that thing is just fucked to think about.
But I don't think a materialist would say that the concept of something "functioning" is _real_ in a way that elementary particles or forces are. At the end of the day, the materialist would never even have to use the word "function" to fully describe an engine: Like everything else, it's just a bunch of particles or waves behaving according to some natural laws.
Qualia however seems to be a "real" thing. It's not a concept a materialist could simply discard like he did with the concept of "functioning". Of course he could call it an emergent property, which it probably is, and describe the complex interactions between the neurons that cause the experience of redness, but he can never describe redness itself in terms of materialistic categories.
I think the reason qualia is so baffling, even against your analogy, is that we can assume motion would exist without an observer, but redness would not.
Agreed. More broadly, it can be like calling a verb a noun. That might not always be the case, though. But then context and usage matters, in some cases allowing for identical spellings, at least in English (British or American). Misunderstandings abound. Which is why Alex kept clarifying his points repeatedly. If you say that the parts of speech are not in the same category of a philosophical or scientific inquiry into questions about redness, I would agree. Still, I see enough similarities to make some tentative predictions. Disciplines often overlap.
Seeking redness in the brain is analogous to expecting to find a little Mario figure inside the silicon of a computer. Mario is there, but only as a collection of on/off transistor states. In a similar way, redness is in the brain as a complex collection of neuron firings.
By the way - Alex I greatly admire you and your work. Keep it up.
Perfect analogy. Our consciousness is an emergent property of our brains.
Now a lot of us have lost our beliefs in magical thinking, like religion. We became to understand that there is a very high probability that everything that is, doesn't reach beyond the materialistic. But we still have an innate fear of death. Something we evolved with and that exists inside of our ego. This is why we still have the propensity to try and find solutions toward the problem of non existence after death. I believe our consciousness doesn't continue after breaking down. And I have for a long time now believed that we also probably don't have true free will. Still I'm not afraid (anymore) and I live like I do have free will. What helps me accept my own non existence is realising that after death my state will be exactly the same as it has been for billions of years, before I was born. No state. Just try to do your best, try to be grateful for as much as you can and try to live for others as much as you are capable off. Enjoy, accept and experience ❤.
@youssefalaoui4286 our experience/consciousness of our world/reality is never the same as the world/reality that's supposedly there. It's always s a very tiny interpretation of what is there. Filtered through our senses, biases, filters and preconceived notions. This is why we have different experiences, different opinions of those experiences and why my red might not be the same as yours. These things are mere concepts and emergent capabilities of the fleshy thing made up of billions of neurons.
@@youssefalaoui4286 no. The neurons are real (as far as we know). The experiences that emerge from them, are subjective however. I think you've missed my point. Maybe someone else can explain it better than I'm able to.
But those binary states ultimately can be traced materially if we sat down and went through every signal, to the pixels appearing in on the screen. And that’s a picture of the little Mario figure. Alex is not saying that hes gonna actually see the color red somewhere deep in the neurons for the brain (experiencing the color red is redness), but that if we traced those neuronal pathways and its connection to the occipital lobe through the eyes, there is no conceivable or possible physical explanation of what redness is. Positing that we can see something represented physically in another form (transistor states rather than neuronal potentials) through our own conscious subjective experience is not an explanation of how conscious subjective experience arises from physical phenomena, it only delays the hard problem.
But we can identify the qualitative properties of Mario as present in a particular location on the screen. However, when it comes to qualitative aspects of mental images such as geometric structure and colour, the same cannot be done.
I do feel like he answered his own question there. If red doesn't exist the redness cannot exist either. What is perceived as red IS the activation of certain neurones, electrochemical actions/reactions that are testably there. If you were to remove or damage said components then the redness goes away also, as in the first account of where consciousness resides.
“There is no hard problem of consciousness.”
4:24
But if you imagine "red" without actually seeing it, then what makes that "redness experience"? There isn't any red, but you are still able to create "redness experience".
That was my exact reaction to that as well. Just as imagination or entire dreams aren't going to be found when you cut open a brain, it's explained by exactly what he articulated. The mind obviously doesn't materialize objects into the brain when we think, it's purely experience caused by brain chemistry.
@@GospodinStanoje You would be recollecting the redness you interpreted from light. This example of redness is an obtuse way to just talk about the hard problem itself, as how you get from any type of brain activity to an experience is a complete mindfucker.
I think what people are missing about Alex' second point is that he is talking strictly about the first person experience of the mind and how no amount of science can tell us about what the mind (subjectively) actually IS. Forget about redness. He is basically asking the question 'where is a thought?' if you actually look, it is completely unfindable. If you look for the mind, or rather, if the mind looks for itself, it is elusive, like mist. There is nothing to point to, intangible like empty space. No amount of study from the outside can account for this seamless expanse of consciousness we call the mind.
This is the argument against conciousness being the result of physical matter, because there is no evidence as a matter of direct experience for that to be the case. We can suggest that it is a product of the brain, but the only absolute evidence we have is that of our own experience, which tells us otherwise.
I get his point I just disagree with his conclusion. He uses the “redness” problem to illustrate it but for me it falls apart in the same way trying to “find” love does. We cannot define what love actually IS as it’s also a concept or collective of processes. We can talk about love in many ways and experience it even if it’s “unfindable” in the sense that we cannot cut open the brain and see it. We know a lot about how the brain processes information and how those processes can be altered through physical manipulation which seems like ample evidence that the mind is simply the term we use for the end result of brain activity.
Consciousness is simple. I wasn't conscious of what you wrote till I looked and read, then I was. There is no mystery to it. Primary thought is what we call sense, the rest stem from this original. Where did redness come from ... sense experiences.
i dont think many people miss his point, more like they ignore it becouse they subconciusly considered it and came to a conclusion. that being it doesnt hold its weight in reality. there is absolutly no reason to assume that the mind is anything more then neurons firing, given all the science and experiments we can alredy do to actively alter the "Mind". therefore this question gets perfectly answerd by people explaining the origins of "redness" in patterns of neurons. Assuming there is anything more to it and then using said asumption as proof that the mind is anything more then neuron patterns is a circular argument and not worth considering. now if we instead argue a mind exist and the proof is a subjective interpretation of the same reality, then we are back at the "redness" question but it disproves the existence of the mind, since against its easily and reliably explained by neurological patterns. so we are back to square one.
I've always thought of it as a process rather than one particular object. Similar to the idea of 'work', it's multiple things converging to create something measurable but immaterial.
Correct - it's a category error to think of 'consciousness' as an object. It's also an idea that's decades out of date in psychology and neuroscience. We're talking early to mid-20th century ideas, like the search for the 'engram', which were abandoned in about the 1950s when people like Donald Hebb figured out how neurons work together within the brain. Unfortunately, many 'philosophers of mind' (let alone journalists, like Andrew Gold here) seem to be a century or so behind the science.
"a shadow"
I agree. I come from the embodied cognition camp, where mind and selfhood are processes of constitution. It's guys like Alex that haven't really read much of the literature and thus are stuck in outdated Cartesian-physicalism dialectics, based on flawed mechanistic metaphysics.
@@evangelium5376 Indeed, since the formulation of the hard problem of consciousness, which involves locating qualities such as 'redness' and other products of consciousness either in a physical place or assuming an irreducible stance from the material to the platonic, numerous criticisms and approaches have emerged attempting to address these issues. For example, from the perspective of systems and process philosophy, these products are considered emergent constructs in multivariate processes. Obviously, when you open a brain, you do not see 'redness', but through techniques like CT scans, it is possible to observe the neural networks executing the 'redness' process. This process is the result of emerging memory and nervous interactions forming ideas and images in the brain. Why do we see images that do not exist in reality? Because they exist as memory processes where we remember them or even 'draw' them mentally in an emerging neural process.
It's like an old video game cartridge: someone asks where Mario is, jumping and defeating mushrooms. Opening the cartridge reveals no Mario, no mushrooms; even dismantling each chip and examining them under a magnifying glass, none of this is found. However, we know they exist. Of course, their existence is manifested only during the game process with the console, and it's viewed on the TV. It is the sum of those parts and does not exist in a Platonic universe; it is simply the emergence of a material process. To see it would mean interpreting the language and processes that emerge from the interaction of all parts.
@@Grim_Beard To that I can only say that the subjective experience of red is OBVIOUSLY the experience of a THING, not a “process”. There’s a visual component of my subjective experience, and THAT component, which IS red, is a thing, not a process. Just like the round components of, say, a billiard game are objects, not processes. A process would be for my experience of red to turn into an experience of blue (or of sound, or pain, for that matter), by SUCH processes couldn’t BE RED even in principle: they could be fast or intricate, but not colored - so to call a process “red” is the actual category mistake. Colors are indeed properties of objects.
Loved doing this interview, one of my favourites yet on my Heretics channel!
When you close your eyes and ‘see’ redness, you’re remembering redness. It’s the same as remembering Tower bridge or any other other landmark. And if your brain were to be cut open you would not find tower bridge, or any other memory of a lifetime’s accumulation.
Precisely. If I were to see a picture on a computer (local), and then I cut open the computer, and (presumably in some magical safe way), look at the combinations of electrons then I would, be able to see the sequence, then reproduce that same sequence somewhere else to see the same image.
Could you, take specific electrons stored in electrochemical charges in the brain, to reconstruct in a different context to see the same image?
You are not seeing/remembering Tower Bridge, you are seeing/remembering a certain interpretation of various light wavelengths hitting your sensory organs in a certain way. Those interpretations are not inherent to Tower Bridge. We seem to know, for example, that a dog would interpret the exact same object in a different way.
The question is: where do the interpretations themselves exist? We know that the image in our mind -- our mental cinema -- exists. It is, in fact, one of the most imminently knowable things available to us, as close to us as our own thoughts. We cannot doubt its existence. Even a hallucination cannot be doubted qua the hallucination itself. You really did see that talking mushroom. There may be no mushroom in itself, but the image, the sound etc of said hallucination did exist at one point in space and time.
Yet, we cannot locate it in space-time. Basically, we seem to have found things in existence that lack any form of material extension. How does that gel with our biological understanding of the brain?
In short, it seems we have established the existence of some sort of metaphysical thing. That metaphysical may or may not depend entirely or in part on the physical, but that is beside the point. In itself, the experience of redness, Tower Bridge or that hallucinated talking mushroom cannot be reduced down to something physical, even if they are entirely dependent on the physical.
@@thebrahmnicboy Yes, it's been done with music.
@@andresgarciacastro1783 i heard about a new research on generated images and videos too
@@thebrahmnicboyhow do I put this...yes. if you actually had the imaging and stimulation tools necessary, you could trigger the same pathways to get the same response in the person. I've found it weird for a while now that we call that beyond the physical or somehow not fully physical.
the redness argument seems to be the one of naming. it's an emergent phenomenon, of neurons firing in a specific way. you can no more dissect a brain to detect redness, than you can seperate water into hydrogen and oxygen to detect wetness.
You make a good point, however we have a clear understanding of how water molecules, en masse, produce the quality of wetness, through their physical and chemical qualities and interactions. We have no such understanding of how neuronal activity produces consciousness, nor why some such neuronal activity produces redness and not chocolateyness or any other quality of perception.
My point: you’re assuming consciousness is an emergent phenomenon resulting from neuronal activity, yet we have no clue how this could possibly come about. (Hard problem of consciousness). This leaves open the possibility - perhaps likelihood - that consciousness is not an emergent property of neuronal activity.
not in a specific way, thats just what it does, it does not contribute to some "extension" of itself, otherwise if you could simulate the brain theres no need to have a brain in the first place, why would you wanna create 2 versions of the exact same thing only one is real and the other is just an idea in your head.
So glad to hear people talking about this. Its such a difficult yet fascinating topic.
Maybe I have failed to properly understand what it is that Alex is seeking to explain. But with reference to the cutting open of the brain and not being able to find the sensation or experience of _red_ anywhere within, is this not akin to cutting open my computer and not being able to find the photographs, or indeed anything else, that is stored there? This doesn't appear strange to me. As I say, perhaps I have failed to fully appreciate what it is that Alex is trying to say, could anybody elucidate?
Yes, but redness is an experience facilitated by software, not hardware. A computer without software can't produce anything like 'red', it's just a mechanism. You have to load software onto it before its processing power can lend itself to the 'redness project'.
Just as with consciousness, a therapist or other professional can delve into your psyche and discover your 'redness experience', whilst a technician can query the software and understand how it processes redness, and where it stores the 'redness' files.
However, if the brain is consciousness, which is to say the mechanism is the software - there is no duality - then we should be able to investigate the brain and find the redness cell, or cellular machine which is responsible. Alex is pointing out that on the basis of current investigations, no such topography is even remotely suspected.
He's talking about subjective conscious experiences or "qualia". The software analogy doesn't work unless the software produces subjective conscious experiences (i.e., if your computer is conscious).
@@willquinn8993This is a wonderful explanation - thank you.
@@willquinn8993 This relies on the assumption that creating a model for the colour red is an any way different from the generic model creation process that takes place within the brain, interpreting all the senses for improvement of the world model. If someone was to supply me with some foul tasting medicine tomorrow I expect I would be able to add it to my personal model of the world and re-imagine the experience. I suspect I would have no cell or cellular mechine dedicated to the colour, smell, taste, or after effects of this medicine.
I find it far stranger that we have a personal learning process for sensory inputs and still have inherited memory that makes us alarmed when babies cry, for example.
I totally agree - Alex is confusing levels here, as explained in great depth by Douglas Hofstadter in his 1979 book "Godel Escher Bach". "Redness" is an emergent property of complex neural and hormonal activity in the brain, just as a photo on a computer is an emergent property of the microprocessor, operating system, image processing software and image file specifications. The distinction between software and hardware is totally irrelevant here: when software is run, it is encoded by material states in the computer's memory, just as the microprocessor itself is encoded by material connections on the microchip. What causes the phenomenon of the photo exist on the computer is the complex interactions between all of these underlying processes, not any one of them in particular.
The question isn't "where is consciousness?", but it is "why have we got consciousness so wrong?"
I think Alex that it is similar to trying to cut open a hard drive with a knife. The hard drive might contain a bunch of software and various files for the software to work with, but cutting it with a knife is just not a proper way of getting to what is on a hard drive. What we lack is a way to connect a brain and produce an interface that is understandable to us. A knife isn't that tool. We might never get a fully functional way to interface with a brain on that level, but we can already interface to some lesser degrees with the brain. So the problem is the knife being the tool, not the hypothesis that it is in fact installed softwares and stored files in the system we call our brain.
Beautifully balanced presentation of a great problem. Whatever approach you belong to - always try to clash it with the best points the opposite one has to offer.
Oversimplified, the mind is an emergent property. Just as a highway has "traffic", the cars all together create a phenomenon greater than the cars themselves.
I've been trying to explain the "Redness" thing for decades....goes over so many heads!
And now you see many such heads talking in the comments. Maybe we should replace redness with blackness?
Have you read "Godel Escher Back" by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) ?
@@johnjameson6751 I had. I also have read all of Dennett’s books. And “the redness thing” goes over Hofstadter’s and Dennett’s heads as well.
Maybe I can learn from you then, as you understand about level distinctions, category errors and emergent phenomena. So for example you understand that in sand dunes, grains of sand do not know what is a dune, and no ant in a colony understands its emergent beheviour. Why is "redness" different?
@@johnjameson6751 I don’t get your attempt at an analogy here. Sure, grains of sand don’t _understand_ what is a dune (nor a dune understands what are the grains that compose it), as neither grains nor dunes have minds and intelligence for understanding. That’s just obvious and has nothing to do with reductionism or emergence. That said, a dune can be _reduced,_ ontologically, to the grains that compose it, meaning: the existence of the dune doesn’t imply the existence of anything over and above the grains that compose it. That point, true as it is, has nothing to do with “understanding”.
So that’s why I’m confused by what you mean with “why is ‘redness’ different?”?
I will suppose you are talking about just emergence, not “understanding” in that odd way I didn’t get, so your question would really be: _why can a dune be reduced to grains of sand, but not the mind (or “redness”, which is an example of a mental property) to neurons? Why is the mind (“redness”) different from a dune?_
It should just be OBVIOUS that they are different. We can intuitively see how grains of sand can compose a big group of such grains, called “dune”. We can even intuitively see, _in the exact same way,_ how neurons and synapses can compose a big structure called “brain”, for a brain is a physical object that is nothing but such smaller physical components.
But it’s just as obvious that something like _the subjective mind_ (where “redness” exists) is totally another kind of thing; it’s kinda “virtual”, for lack of a better word, and not a piece of matter composed of smaller parts. It doesn’t exist in the tridimensional space that matter occupies, it _couldn’t_ exist in that way, for to exist _as pain_ (or red) is to exist _as a representation being experienced in first person_ and NOT as a physical structure located in public space _and btw independently of being experienced._ Either you understand this and therefore will consider it fully obvious and undeniable (literally, just as obvious as to say that abstract numbers can’t be made up of physical matter, or vice-versa), or you just don’t get it at all.
It's such a fascinating concept to think about how our brain processes information and creates our perception of reality. It's almost like our mind is a complex puzzle, with different pieces working together to form our conscious experience.
Exactly what Advait vedant says. It's an ancient sect in Hinduism.
@@vaibhavyadav9912 99% sure he's being sarcastic. This is literally what science says our brain is.
I pity every single human being who hasn’t studied complex biology, neuroscience and endocrinology…etc, oh my god life would’ve been waaay less interesting
@@necromancer6405 Wrong. Brain experiments show the brain holds memories and thoughts the same way a cd does. Holographically. Mind isn’t in the brain. The brain is a radio and signals don’t exist inside radios.
@@necromancer6405 What's sarcastic about it? What he says is true. It's our mind and senses that makes up our world around us.
Every being sees the world differently. So who's seeing the truth? No one is. Our mind and senses dumb down the True Reality so that we can work, interact and perform action.
The phenomenon of local realism which was thought to be true, was proven false in 2022 by a group of scientists. Who also got Nobel for it. Which essentially means no property of matter is absolute. It is us, the seer, who gives property to matter. It is only you, the seer, who's absolute.
Check out Dr Donald Hoffman for more. And then if you want to understand how everything fits, check what Advait vedant says.
not a neuroscience expert by any stretch but i think the second part about the red experience is just the brain invoking the same neuron-firing pattern/memory of what it has learned to perceive as the red wavelength of light. Its arguably no different than recalling a memory or a particular cup. Just that redness isnt very specific and thus can be more heavily only experiencial without any direct association
Indeed, since the formulation of the hard problem of consciousness, which involves locating qualities such as 'redness' and other products of consciousness either in a physical place or assuming an irreducible stance from the material to the platonic, numerous criticisms and approaches have emerged attempting to address these issues. For example, from the perspective of systems and process philosophy, these products are considered emergent constructs in multivariate processes. Obviously, when you open a brain, you do not see 'redness', but through techniques like CT scans, it is possible to observe the neural networks executing the 'redness' process. This process is the result of emerging memory and nervous interactions forming ideas and images in the brain. Why do we see images that do not exist in reality? Because they exist as memory processes where we remember them or even 'draw' them mentally in an emerging neural process.
It's like an old video game cartridge: someone asks where Mario is, jumping and defeating mushrooms. Opening the cartridge reveals no Mario, no mushrooms; even dismantling each chip and examining them under a magnifying glass, none of this is found. However, we know they exist. Of course, their existence is manifested only during the game process with the console, and it's viewed on the TV. It is the sum of those parts and does not exist in a Platonic universe; it is simply the emergence of a material process. To see it would mean interpreting the language and processes that emerge from the interaction of all parts
i‘ve spent some time with this question and here‘s a reframing of the issue that might help you: there seem to be first person experiences that are completely inaccessible to anyone but ourselves (as opposed to third person attributes that can be accessed by anyone). Even if my brain was scanned and every neuron was monitored, if I feel an itch or see red no one knows what the experience is like, unless I describe it and they can remember having had a similar experience. There‘s an example of a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the human eye, colors and brain interpretation, but the scientist is blind and so will never truly know what it is like to experience redness f.e.
So there seems to be something beyond third person attributes that seems to emerge when things with third person attributes are combined in the right way, but how? What changes about a dust cloud f.e. if I add more dust particles and swirl them around in one way instead of another that could create a new category of attribute? It’s a construction problem. In the same way that it doesn‘t matter how much wood I have, I can‘t make a marble house, it‘s just not the right material.
But maybe there is a way to add up things with purely third person attributes to something with first person attributes, or maybe there‘s a foundation of first person attributes beneath even the simplest particles which allows them to combine in such a way. If we manage to answer the “how it‘s possible“, we‘ll still have to wrestle with “why it happened“. I don‘t think there‘s any reason why evolution should prefer a conscious creature over a philosophical zombie that acts in just the same way but lacks any first person sensibilities.
I honestly think it‘s with pretty good reason that some philosophers look at these questions and just toss the idea of personhood alltogether.
@@RojirigoDinteresting example. I‘d reply that I can point you exactly to where mario is - on the TV (and no where else). If we examine the cartridge closely we can actually find the code written on it and none of it involves “mario“, but some of it involves direction to place pixels at certain spots on a screen. There is no additional “mental image“ of the game within the cartridge that is inaccessible to us, as far as we know. There is nothing that it is like to be a game cartridge, we assume. If I waved a wand and turned myself into a Super Mario N64 cartridge I would not see the game running, instead I wouldn‘t have any experience whatsoever. In that sense I actually feel like this example helps to illustrate the problem very well, but doesn‘t provide an answer to it
@@RojirigoD I think this kind of misses the point. It's not so much about locating redness within the brain, the question is: can we describe subjective experience in physical terms, even in principle? If I could enhance my brain to make it perceive a 4-th color, what would it feel like? Would it map onto something I can already experience or be totally new? Would the experience be determined by the physical nature of this information or by the structure of the neural network or actiavtion patterns that represent it, and in what way?
@@AlexanderShamov It begins by recognizing how we are talking about an emergent process, not a magical thing floating in a neuron but "emergence" as a result of interactions, we are talking about a systemic neuronal process.
Neurons in different parts of the brain do not work in isolation; instead, they integrate information from multiple sensory sources to create a unified perception. This happens through networks of neurons that cross various regions of the brain. At the same time, past experiences, stored in memory, play a role in how we interpret and give meaning to information. The hard problem would simply be a technical challenge of mapping and understanding these processes, rather than a deep ontological mystery.
"can we describe subjective experience in physical terms, even in principle?"
Although it is possible to describe subjective experience in physical terms, this does not mean that it is a simple or directly intuitive process. Subjective experience are probably emergent properties of the complex interaction of neural systems. This means that although the basic components are physical (neurons and their connections), the way they combine and interact gives rise to something that is not easily understood only with the language of this mapping. We are talking about a complex mapping processes of this neural networks in the brain. It's similar to describing Mario jumping and killing a mushroom if we sees electrical currents reading bits from the console to the monitor, but we don't have the monitor yet, just the electrical currents and we see how the bits interact between the microchips. We can see which electrical currents in which parts of the bits are executing Mario's jump, which parts are processing the jump, but without the monitor it is just a technical problem not to see this process graphically, although we are seeing it in a way if we observe the currents and bits processing on the chips.
Although we are still in progress understanding how physical processes are accurately interpreted in subjective experience, the constant advancement of neuroscience and technology promises to make this understanding better. The video game analogy mentioned above illustrates that, although we do not yet have "the monitor" to directly visualize how neural activity translates into subjective experience, we do have access to "the currents and the bits" (neural activity) and are learning how interpret these signals.
I'm personally satisfied with the explanation that our consciousness is an emergent property of simpler subsystems, a complexity that cannot be broken down into its individual components (whole greater than the sum of its parts). I find this plausible because it happens all the time in nature and even human engineering but at the same time we don't really have a good grasp of the theory behind complexity and how simple systems interact with each other to create complexity in this way.
The book Gödel, Escher, Bach is essentially about this topic (and other related to it), and has really shaped the way I define the word "genius". Somehow, the individuals in the title were able to, in their respective domains (math, painting, music), create works of art (Incompleteness Theorem, Paintings, Canons and Fugues) so intricate and complex out of extremely individual components that it would've taken a deep understanding of the systems and their interactions to first come up with and then execute. The genius is the one eho can piece them together in a way that is much faster and much higher quality than the average person because of the exploitation of some internal structure that is either latent in the process or invented.
This is how we function as a consciousness; if any part of the structure gets damaged, the subsystems fail to interact in the desired way and we get a less functional system/consciousness.
Of course I don't think a genius creator designed us but in the same way that Bach's pieces are still listened to today and worse music faded away from history via natural selection, so did oir consciousness prevail because it had thr strongest evolutionary advantage.
I find arguments around qualia wholly unconvincing. I don't think that "redness" is a thing at all any more than any other thought I'm having. Sure, we can't locate it in the brain 'exactly', but it's at least within the realm of reason to consider that we could know enough about a brain to know that it is experiencing redness, or thinking about a tree, or desiring a chocolate ice cream, or whatever else. I'm wholly in the physicalist camp here, I'll freely admit, but I have a hard time conceiving why everyone else isn't in the same camp along with me. It just seems straightforward and obvious to me.
I think I probably lean that way.
if you are able to "know that a mind is experiencing redness" that doesn't answer the question of where the canvas that the "experience of redness" is painted on.. the "internal world" of the brain, so to speak. we know it's tied to the brain, we can observe changes to it brought about by prodding the brain, technology may evolve enough to be able to display a video on a screen of the image of a red object that you see in your mind's eye through a helmet scanning your brain activity, but none of those contributes to understanding if all of these phenomena that we can interact with and affect, actually exist or not.
A counter argument would be that you are relying on a belief that science “will eventually” find physicalist explanations for qualia, which is a belief that you cant justify with current science. Current science provides no explanation for why or how we have these subjective experiences at all.
I disagree, I think qualia arguments are extremely convincing. The world doesn't look like, taste like, smell like, or sound like anything unless there is an agent there to see it, taste it, smell it or hear it.
Such things don't "exist "in" the world" yet we know they exist by direct experience.
I believe this makes it impossible to reduce things to "material composition" because in order to be "made of something" it must exist in the material world.
Qualia and other mental phenomena like thoughts, have no material composition.
You cannot show me the location or mass of the thought of an apple for example.
I'll try to explain. The general idea behind the problem is that, if we suppose our minds are basically like really complicated computers, we would expect them to act kind of like input-output machines just like computers. Our brains would take inputs, do complex operations on those inputs, maybe use some data from the memory, and then spit out outputs. To take a simple real-life example of this, consider the pain reflex. Nerves of the skin detect a hot surface, the signal travels to the spinal cord and then back to the muscles which react to pull you away from the surface. Input = hot surface, output = muscle reflex. This particular event works nicely with our current understanding of computation.
What this model does not seem to explain is any step in the middle between the input and output, in our own "inner" world, of qualia or consciousness. When we see red, that's not an "output" per say, because it's an entirely "inner" experience. It's simply not in the realm of possibility, not even in the vocabulary, of computer engineers to make something in the "inner world" of a computer (with our current knowledge and capabilities, that is).
Of course it is possible to argue that we simply need to learn more in order to be able to explain how, physically, the experience of "redness" could be created. I think, however, that this new understanding would have to be something very radical, not just along the lines of what we've discovered previously, because as I explained, our current understanding can be distilled down to inputs -> computation -> outputs, which leaves no room for an inner world.
"Redness" is just a thought or an idea, information expressed/experienced by the brain. I don't see the mystery here.
A rabbit can feel fear, or hunger, but you cannot cut open a rabbit to find these experiences and bottle them.
Moby Dick is a book about a whale, but you can't find an actual living breathing whale no matter how carefully you search through the pages.
The mystery is how would you come to terms with thoughts being material when you apparently cannot locate these within the brain. *"Redness" is just a thought or an idea* is what is challenging to the material idea here
Yes, exactly, a rabbit can feel hunger and you cannot cut it open to find the experience. That’s exactly his point. Where does the experience itself take place.
Consciousness is just what brain chemistry looks like from the inside.
The problem is that you can't find that exact thing in your brain, and the more you get into an explanation you get to an immaterial one, like it is in your brain produced by the collitions of these neurons etc, but it is not, seemingly "matter".
@@comment6449 Why not matter? I don't see why it can't reduce to matter.
Mind is just a part of brain. Before seeing my uncle who got dementia a year ago, I was more ready to believe that mind is out of or above brain. But..seeing him..always very active, talkative, life wise, clever man..turning into empty eyed, silent, weird stranger in less than a year..killed my illusions that there is "something more"
1. The interaction problem
2. The hard problem of consciousness
It's probably related to electro-chemical reactions. Experiencing something builds a neural pathway, and then when the reaction happens through that pathway you remember what's encoded there.
In that sense, I think consciousness emerges from the ongoing activity, not the brain matter. Kind of like a story not being the words on a page, but what we imagine/experience when we read it.
It's not just things on the visual spectrum either. People with Aphantasia can't picture "Redness" in their "Mind's Eye". The "Mind's Eye" as we call it is the very thing that the mystery is about. "Mind's Ears", "Mind's Nose". Sense datum that people "experience". That (The "Mind's Eye", "Mind's Nose", etc...), to me, is what we can't open the brain and find.
Basically, when someone 'visualizes' redness in their imagination, on what is that being projected?
that cut away animation at the very end scared the fk out of me
Very nice topic ❤
Really it’s a mystery
My opinion is that the mind/consciousness is a process that is acted out by the neurons firing inside a brain producing every single conscious and unconscious thought I have from the moment of the formation of my brain to my death. Experiencing redness in this case is a thought, a reaction to stimuli be it as an outside one - seeing something red - or self-afflicted - imagining the color red (which is more like remembering the concept of red which depending on your level of aphantasia could trigger the feelings (visualization) of red).
In this view experiencing redness is the same as opening an application (thought) on an operating system (consciousness) running on a computer (brain/body). The application doesn't exist in the same way as a property as the weight or structure of the computer. Its not a part of it in the way the motherboard is. An experience/thought is just like an application, a state in which a system can be in.
So in the same way you cannot cut a brain open and find the "redness" experience you cannot cut a Processor open to find that application, because it's not a "thing" but a state. The only difference is that we (mostly) know how computers and electronics work while we don't know enough about our brains to point to the however many neurons lighting up in our brain to produce the experience redness.
The computer doesn't experience its applications. We do experience red - or pain.
I'm struggling to understand his problem with seeing red when eyes are closed. It's a memory at that point. The electromagnetic signal comes into the eyes, and is interpreted by the brain as "red" by the firing of neurons in complex patterns. When we replay a memory in our head, we're just firing those neurons in the same, or very similar patterns as when they were interpreted by the brain to begin with...
Sign of the Omnipresent Universal Consciousness
@@theunclejesusshow8260 no lol
@@theunclejesusshow8260 why do we worship Jesus, Jesus was a F4ggot
The problem is that we have yet to find even one single way of creating experiences. We don't know what they're made of, we simply know that they have something to do with brains.
So can we make a sensor and a software that recognise red electromagnetic waves? Totally.
Can we create redness (the experience) with those components?
Nope.
That system can only predict when our mind will create redness when exposed to the recognised wavelengths, but it can't create it. So what is redness? We have 0 idea.
@@tacitozetticci9308it’s evolution it’s there for survival omg
You can cut open a memory stick and find the zeros and ones that translate into red, but not the red itself. The memory stick doesn't need the initial stimulation of wavelengths that caused the cameras' sensor to "see" red
We can think similarly about the brain. You see it, you associate it with a concept (red) enough times, and your brain now has stored the experience and can retrieve it
Here’s a thought. Brain makes a “world model” like we see advanced image and video generating ai’s. The brain acting like a computer, the structure of the neurons acting like a machine learning model that builds a simulation/simulated experience of the world which you then see within your “minds eye”.
There are already simulation software that recreate the laws of physics(take video games for example). An easy explanation is that the brain makes one of these kinds of simulations, stores “redness” in your memory which the simulation has access to. If you think of the brain as an advanced computer this is a sort of solved problem(except we don’t know everything about how the brain operates thus this can only remain in the realm of theory until we learn more about how the structure of the brain corresponds to actual output)
I think the second piece is a little overstated. You absolutely can find where red is in the brain, you would just need the right tools to be able to analyze either the memory recall portion of the brain or the visual cortex. So I think that's second argument gets a little bit indulgent and wishy-washy in how it is presenting itself.
so we just need better brain chips to read our mind and problem solved
But that's not true. We are tempted to think that when we look at a red rose, our mind or brain generates an 'inner picture' of the rose - which is what we perceive. Where is this picture? Where is this experience?
@james1098778910 in all good faith: what do you mean by "where"? If you mean physically where, well in several places. It's precisely the location of the material that stimulates your perception of whatever it is you are perceiving. I really don't understand why it can't be explained by the particulars of perception, surely you don't think perception is infallible? I mean your brain could be mistaken and actually be interpreting something that is blue, this is just as equally the "location" of the phenomena as something you are soberly percieving
We can find the brain circuits associated with redness, but they don't have the property of redness themselves. Just like a photon has a wavelength associated (by humans) with redness but not the property itself.
recall does not explain the experience of redness
exactly like asking why you can’t cut open a digital camera’s hardware in see the pictures it took, the medium in which it’s stored can only be interpreted by mechanism it was meant to be interpreted by. for a digital camera it would have to be a computer screen and for your mind it would be your eyes or memory visualizer
I can't use my eyes to see what's in my mind.
But how is a computer screen actually interpreting pictures? This doesn't make sense to me, it's just representing them. Or do you think the computer screen has actually subjectiv perception?
agreed. This may be the worst take Alex has ever had lol. Smoked too much weed when he made this take
@@tollictollic3610 Even if you don't know the details of how a digital camera works that does not mean it is reasonable to assume that the pictures are not in the camera, in the same way, even if you don't know about the details of how the brain works, that does not mean it is reasonable to assume that redness and other subjective experiences are not in the brain.
You could have a camera that doesn't store the pictures inside but uploads them to the cloud, in that case, you can test that hypothesis and place the camera in different locations, in some locations you would have access to your pictures while not in others. The same test can be made with a brain, to my knowledge, all tests so far point to a mind located in the brain. I would be glad to know if you have evidence to the contrary.
@@MC-ep8cu you don't understand the problem of consciousness - which is a riddle that loads of scientists work on, not Alex' stupid idea
You can't find love in the heart either yet you feel it in your heart through joy or sorrow
I used to be in the cult.of atheism. Escaped about 6 years ago. Been a Christian ever since. Never felt freer!
Don't show your face around here, they might get you again!
There's a cult of atheism? Where can I join? Do they throw parties?
@@andreasvox8068 they are all over the internet.
Alex, I'd love to hear you talk about the Psychedelic experience and the questions that arise from it. You don't have to have it yourself to discuss it, but if you would try it, it would be amazing to hear your reflections on it. You're the man for this job!
@@silverstorm819 what are you doing here, youtube is for people who are 13+ years old. Go and play with gravel or something.
@@silverstorm819 what are you doing here? youtube is for people who are 13+ years old. Go and play with gravel or something.
@@silverstorm819what could *possibly* go wrong?
As someone who is interested in the mind I am sure he'll be tempted. Whether he will or not, who knows. I very much doubt he'd be up front about it (at least initially) as he'd have to gauge his audience's reaction to it.
Just DON'T mention it around Hitchens
Rumors are that Alex is just about to record an interview with Bernardo Kastrup on ontology and analytical idealism. Can't wait.
After reading some of those comments I sure hope so. People are so clueless on this topic.
I would think the reason you could still imagine something in graphic detail while either having your eyes closed or while you are dreaming, is possibly the same reason why when you are under the influence of certain drugs like hallucinogens, why you would experience things like color and sound even though you are not observing or experiencing the external colors and sounds from the world, it would have something to do with chemicals in the brain and memory working together to provide these things in our imaginative world.
We precisely live in the time where this question, even though can't be really answered, yet can be explored from other angles:
With the progress of AI and neural network, we are able to make artificial brains made frome code and algorythms whose productions: images, texts, and now videos, can't be found in it, but "emited" as code and "projected" on screens as texts and images and videos.
Our counciousness could similarly be a projection of our brains activity. But what is the medium it is projected onto? Well, our brain also. But it is not an infinity closed loop! There are inputs and feedbacks from our different senses, combined with hard wired pusions and instincts!
Fascinating question...
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
2 + 2 = 5. In other words, a collection of material matter acting in a certain manner can give rise to immaterial consciousness.
We shouldn't be asking "where" is the redness physically hidden in the brain, since perception isn't material and therefore isn't spatial.
Rather, we should be asking "what" is the neurological permutation of neurons firing that equates to the perception of redness.
I sometimes think that mind is to brain what picture is to monitor. A picture is an emergent property of some monitors that fulfil a certain set of requirements. But I wouldn't say that the "whole" of a functioning monitor is bigger than the sum of its physical parts. The emergent property "picture" is fully contained in the physical state of the monitor at the given time. As in, if you know where every electron "is" inside the monitor, you know what color and intensity each pixel is as well. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this analogy.
@@bluevayero Please bear with me. For the monitor is to picture analogy, yes the whole is the same as the sum of its parts, because the monitor along with all the tiny pixel lightbulbs are just as much material. There is no picture emerging, only the monitor firing up different permutations of tiny lightbulbs.
The thing about the brain is that when it fires up different permutations of neurons, beyond just that, the perception of redness emerges.
It is one thing to register and translate photons and vibrating air molecules, this is what the physical device or physical organ does.
It is an additional thing to PERCEIVE light and sound, which implies the presence of a conscious mind.
Try to think of red without thinking of a red object. no red paint, no red powder, no red material. just think of red. I don't think we can think of red without imagining it in the form of an object we have experienced before.I think our brain gets red from a form of red we have seen before and then assign it to whatever we want to assign it to. For example, we can't describe a color to a blind person, the person has to have experienced it before.
If any of you have had an outer body experience you'll know without a doubt you don't need your physical body to experience the world around you. I did it as a sort of experiment willing myself out of my body during sleep paralysis. I got as far as my front door before waking up. But the experience was unmistakable. I attempted it again that same night only to unfortunately float up into the air and feel myself bouncing around my room. That was genuinely quite scary so I've never done it again! But it convinced me.
It is mental. Your mind can pretty much create that.
Alex, please interview Peter Hacker on the problems of mind/consciousness. It'll do the world lots of good to realize that these "unanswerable" questions are actually expressions of conceptual confusion/misunderstanding.
I second this, that would be great! Although I am afraid he isn't doing interviews any more?
@@james1098778910
There's a slim chance. It's just frustrating how widespread these confused ways of thinking and speaking are now, and how people are approaching things from completely the wrong starting-point.
All one needs to see through these questions is to realize that "mind" and "consciousness" do not denote entities at all, and that 'redness' is by definition a property of physical things (so it cannot be 'in' anything).
"There is a grand loop of computation goin on, thats it"
~Someone in future.
The way I parse it, is that the mind is an emergent property of the brain and one cannot exist without the other. This is to say that the brain causes the mind and the brain inputs experiential qualia to the mind that forms experience. The mind, being emergent, can't cause things in the brain, but the mind is capable of non-causal consideration of it's phyical causes (one can imagine dying without experiencing death). This is what thought and learning are, as well as a part of will and desire (the other part of will and desire being physical neccessity).
The mind is not an emergent property of the brain; it's the other way around. In order to have a brain, it requires self-awareness to name something a brain.
@@talastra but that self awarness is conciousness. Conciousness is fundamentaly what the mind is, and conciousness is an emergent property of the brain. If conciousness creates the brain through perception thereof that definition is circular, and fundamentally useless.
@@OdinOfficialEmcee Bless you, but could you not be so tedious. "Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain" says consciousness, not brain. Without consciousness first, you can't say "the brain is responsible for it." Stop mistaking your descriptions of reality for reality, you models of reality for reality. If I showed you a picture of a football game, you wouldn't say it ?IS? the football game. Why are you pretending that the re-presentation of your Consciousness of Reality "SI" reality? Just sit and think that through before you reply.
He talking about opening the brain reminds me of Björk opening a tv and examining its little parts, being intrigued with how they produce images.
bad question, fell off, literally not even hard to explain. You see, if you were to "cut open" (meaning to observe in its completeness) a brain, you would se the cascade of information in the brain related to redness, whenever redness is experienced. Of course no experience of redness is the same (as in the reaction/cascade differs when seeing red blood and red hearts for example), but saying that all things that are understood as red (that is; it activates a redness-related cascade) must look the same (as in elicit the same reaction/cascade), is trying to achieve some sort of metaphysical true red. That does not have to exist. You simply must experience something as familiar to an earlier experience for that thing to be "experienced". It is simply a pattern finding mechanism. Red exists only as far as you understand it to, and that "understanding" is simply a relation to previously constructed pathways, the construction happening as an automatic reaction to stimuli. Bam, agnosticism destroyed, git good, strongest immaterial supporter vs weakest empiricist enjoyer :P
This is pretty much what I was thinking on that redness part
Your just saying that because you've never experienced true redness.
Fine, so how is this pattern finding mechanism accompanied by / or identical to conscious experience? What makes information so magical as to generate conscious experience?
@@moonAwake247 its clearly a joke
This is probably one of the main reasons for why I'm agnostic
You could say that making changes to the brain changes the conditions of consciousness but not the ONE who is conscious.
well not necessarily. Cus removing the brain entirely which is clearly making a change to the brain by shutting it off, then the final condition is no longer having a ONE who is conscious. Its just a gradation I believe
@@parkerschab1129 I would say that it doesn't necessarily remove the one who is conscious. What I find interesting is that we can only describe conditions of consciousness, not consciousness itself. We can say that it is that which is conscious, but we can't describe "that". Death of the brain may bring an end to everything we can describe about consciousness in terms of its many conditions but not the field in which the conditions occur. You can't just say the field is the brain because that is just another condition that is describable. There are scientists now (for example Donald Hofman) who think consciousness may be fundamental and everything else we perceive are representations of reality created in the brain but not reality itself
consciousness is just an idea. an idea is not reality.
The name of the latter thing Alex is talking about is qualia, what you are describing here, is the mystery of qualia! Very interesting conversation!
The mind is generated in the reticular formation. It links the various modules of sensory, cognitive, and motor inputs and outputs. The brain stores concepts, such as redness, in various modules and can manipulate the stored concepts.
"There is nothing more dangerous than to confide in our own strength, and trust to feelings of fervor. We are full of malice, and capable of committing the most enormous crimes, unless God supports us.”
-Fr. Ignatius of the Side of Jesus, p. 85-86
I'd say that "redness" is an emergent property of many neural interactions. In a similar way, a whirlpool is an emergent property of water molecules. Studying individual water molecules will not allow you to predict the property of whirlpools, yet they exist. Emergent properties can't be inferred from a reductionist approach.
Blind (from birth) people cannot imagine red, so sighted people minds imagine red, by remembering it. Just like a dream in colour, very simple, no mystery, simply dreaming or imagining in colour, by remembering what those colours are.
A red square on a computer monitor is a red square but cut open the motherboard and you won’t see a red square. It’s just the emergent property of a set of processes.
But there js no red square in the computer monitor. The red square is in your subjective translation of the wavelength of the screen
For the most rigorous solution to these two questions, read Peter Hacker. But, for a quicker read that still resolves the "redness" question, while engaging with science, read Alva Noë's "Out of Our Heads".
From a materialist perspective, viewing consciousness as a process rather than a structure makes a lot more sense imo. Consciousness is something that the brain does, not something that exists as is in the brain. Just as you don't point at a wheel and ask where the rolling is or look for where the hitting on a hammer is located, trying to figure out where in the brain certain qualia exist is going at it the wrong way. I'm sure this kind of thinking won't automatically solve the big questions about the topic, but to me it seems to be a better place to start.
I have thought about the problem of consciousness a lot and have come with a very compelling theory that could explain so much and I wish I had the opportunity to discuss this with you in person. I think it could help. Even if my theory is not correct or not believed by others, it's still interesting to think about.
"Who would not think, seeing us compose all things of mind and body, but that this mixture would be quite intelligible to us? Yet it is the very thing we least understand. Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being." - Augustine
I mean I think much like consciousness, our experiences are something that emerges from us. It isn’t tied to some particular thing within our head but rather a collection of things. I think it’s a bit like genetic traits… from what I understand there are multiple different genes that code for the same thing, and you could remove one, lose the experience of red, remove another and regain the experience of red. It’s a complex set of interactions we don’t quite understand yet.
Not a theory, but an uninformed thought: If consciousness is a universal construct, that has existed since the early universe, like visible light waves, and our brains have evolved to perceive and interact with this universal consciousness, as eyes perceive part of the light spectrum, then universal consciousness would persists after the brain dies, just as visible light waves exists after our brains cease to function. It's a good premise for a sci-fi novel if nothing else. :)
Praying for you
I feel like the point being made is that "experience" isn't found anywhere in the brain, the causes of experience are but not experience itself.
By the way. Consciousness does not faithfully represent colour, meaning that the same light frequency can appear as different colours in consciousness. This can happen when entering the eye at the same time from different parts of the view. There are optical illusions demonstrating this. The differences are usually not large but nevertheless they are very noticeably.
He's talking about David Chalmers, I think. Chalmer's point was that consciousness and the material are different categories. So you can know all about the wavelengths of light, how the photons hit the retina and how the neurons in the brain fire to identify the colour without being able to say the first thing about the experience of redness.
Hey Alex,
My perspective from a biologist perspective would be:
The mind does not exist itself unless you define it as the experience of living. There is no possibility to evaluate if we actually have a continuous stream of consciousness or just an impression of our current brain state including all memories we have.
There is just the brain - neurons, axons, synapses, hormones. The thing we call "ourselves" is dependent on the current brain state and nothing more, but this brain state is constantly changing.
Maybe this goes into last-thursday-ism but just for our self perception and for each instance of time with some kind of floating window perspective.
If you think about teleportation: the common idea is, that during a Star Trek like teleportation you would die and another you with your memories would be formed. Your current mind would cease to exist.
Try to imagine that but for each instance of time. We would not "wake up" from that, thinking we just came into existence because our brain state contains information of "before". There is no reason to assume our mind is not strictly relying on our brain and there is no reason to assume that what we call consciousness or mind is actually continuous.
This is obviously speculative and not even a hypothesis, but would rely purely on the known biology of the brain and this speculation excludes assumptions we make to fit our perception.
I think "red" is encoded in the connections of our neurons, similarly as the information in a artificial neural network is in the weights of the connections.
Alex explains that he isn't talking about the connections of our neurons in our brains, or the wavelength of the light, but the experience itself. You are misunderstanding.
@@philippegauthier5922 I've rewatched and you're right, but I'm more confused now. I honestly can't imagine beyond that.
It's far easier for me to put a parallel with ANNs, and even if we can probe to check everything that goes through them, sometimes it's hard to pinpoint where (or how) they decide that something is a cat and not a dog. But as they don't experience consciousness, it probably is not a fair comparison.
@@ghsinoara
You're confused because you're trying to interpret what was said based on your knowledge of the brain and computers. But Alex is referring to your experience, which you knew about before any of that other stuff. Just look at your own experience and you'll see directly what Alex means by 'red'.
I feel that consciousness is affected by injuries to the brain much the same way that a TV's picture is affected by damage to the internal circuitry - in the sense that you haven't altered or affected the signal that's passing through it, but only its ability to accurately convey the signals it's receiving. I would LOVE to hear Alex have a conversation with Robert Lanza (author of Biocentrism), since that book changed my views on the role played by consciousness.
Energy is immaterial too, but is also inextricably tied to physical objects. We can't put our hands inside an object and pull out its energy, but we can effect the state of the energy inside of it by effecting the object.
Immaterial in what way? It's still a thing that physically exists.
Immaterial maybe, but so is gravity. So what? It's still physical.
For the question of why consciousness stops working (or is affected) so heavily by the brain, and yet people believe the brain doesnt actually create consciousness, the most compelling answer ive heard is that it behaves like a "receiver" of consciousness, much like a radio is a "receiver" of radio waves.
A radio is able to "receive" information from radio waves. We experience that information through sound. If you destroy the radio, you no longer have those sounds, but you haven't destroyed the radio waves (or the information in them). The radio waves continue to exist. You've only destroyed the instrument that can receive that information.
In a similar way, the brain "receives" consciousness. If you destroy the brain, you also stop conscious experience, but consciousness itself hasn't gone anywhere.
I hope Alex brings on someone like Bernardo Kastrup to discuss Idealism and the primacy of consciousness as a potential model for the nature of reality.
Cool, but this view doesn't propose any physical mechanism for how this receiver might work, nor an evolutionary reason for it to form, nor does it give any insight into the split brain experience or any of the other weird stuff. It's pretty much like phlogiston theory in that it feels like an actual hypothesis while being essentially vacuous.
@@AlexanderShamov yes that's true, the physical mechanism hasn't been provided. However, that's the same brick wall that any study of consciousness is coming across. I'm only putting this forward as a potential model that doesn't necessarily violate what we know already about the brain and warrants further investigation.
As for an evolutionary reason for it to form and an explanation for separate experiences, the explanations given by idealism/Bernardo seem plausible from a logical/reason perspective (to me), but again isn't based on hard science as we haven't even figured out what consciousness is yet. I would normally post a link or two but YT will delete my comment, so can summarise myself if you prefer.
As a result, the explanations are more in line with spiritual/religious/mystical explanations for the nature of consciousness/mind. Not in a divine revelation sort of way (I don't really believe in those kinds of things), but more from those who've investigated the nature of consciousness/mind from a subjective perspective like Buddhists/Hindus/gnostics have.
I liken it to a computer with a hard drive and RAM and projecting an image onto your computer monitor. You won't find the image as displayed on the monitor, but rather a bunch of data as 1's and 0's. I don't know about human consciousness being eternal or whatever, but I can at least fathom that it could be a matter of interface differences between life as we know it and whatever is other than life as we know it. Interesting to ponder.
People mistake thinking for consciousness. Thinking is not consciousness. The brain is what controls the body’s ability to process what is being perceived as well as how well it is able to move /function and communicate with things around it. If a part of the brain is damaged, whatever function it provides will be affected. If that’s motor skills, language, even thinking it will be altered. But consciousness is not altered, it is that which is aware of what is happening, it is not that which is happening.
Qualia, the way we experience things like the color red, might be a result of how our brains process information. It's like asking where the "functioning" part of an engine is. Different parts work together to make the engine run, just as different neurons in our brain likely contribute to the experience of redness. Asking for one specific part that's only responsible for the experience itself doesn't quite make sense.
Here's how I see it, the redness that you "see in you mind" is a recollection, or memory recall, of something that you saw that was red. That's all things you see in your mind are, memory recall, imagination, etc, just things that your mind and brain does.
Well according to 'C-Pattern Theory' (Wikipedia) these questions are solved like this: The brain doesn’t generate conscious experiences; instead, it generates c-patterns, short for "content of experience encoding patterns".
A c-pattern is a complex geometric three-dimensional structure made of all action potentials from all of the brain’s neurons firing at any moment.
The c-pattern’s specific form and geometry is what fully defines any conscious experience.
At any moment, there’s a different c-pattern generated by the brain, and a corresponding experience defined by this c-pattern.
C-patterns are discrete expressions of a universal geometric experience language ("c-pattern language") which applies to all organisms with a brain.
Experiences are created by the universe, in that c-patterns are constantly „read“ and converted to actual experiences.
Only consciousness can be what’s having all experiences; therefore we are neither brain, body, senses or neural firing, but parts of consciousness.
Each part is coupled to an organism, with different c-patterns, experiences, and levels of understanding reality.
True progress is only possible by deciphering c-pattern language, and if c-patterns can be expanded towards greater understanding ("to the next level").
seems simple to say that the reason the brain affects consciousness isn't because it produces consciousness , it's because it channels it. like a radio - it doesn't produce the waves that make the music - it transmits the waves. therefore, if you damage the radio, or change the channel - it would effect how we percieve the waves / music.
in other words - there is something called consiousness, the reality, which is passed through the brain and creates experiences (like the waves produce music once passed through the radio transmittor). damage the brain - change the experience. doesn't effect the consciousness itself - just like the music waves are still presesnt even though the broken radio can't read them.
Redness is a state that a tiny part of your brain can be in. There is probably not a single neuron that corresponds to that state it more of a collective mode. As a physicist I like to think of it in an analogous way to phases of matter. A water molecule in it self is not solid, liquid or gas. It requires a huge number of them to for the system to exhibit the characteristics of a solid, liquid or a gas.
1:18 "Why is it that pushing this part of matter affects this immaterial thing that exists and transcends this material plane?"
- Here you presume that it needs to affect the immaterial thing if consciousness is immaterial. But it doesnt need to: you also have the notion that the brain is a receiver. Like a radio picking up radiowaves. If you kill the radio, you wont hear any of the external radiosignals it would otherwise picks up on
The difference between "seeing" red and imagining red in mind is actually a lot like the displacement property of human-exclusive languages. I wonder if the animals can imagine red the same way we do
The second question is a bit silly. It's like cutting open a computer drive and asking where a movie or a song is.
@@Kobriks1 We didn't design the hard drive and we barely understand how it works. This is like someone in the 16th century being given a hard drive, told it contains music, and when they cut it open they don't find it. Of course they won't. They don't understand how the physical material inside the hard drive stores and communicates the song.
@@Kobriks1 And what is that hard problem?
@@pawelstuglik4737 Alex is talking about subjective conscious experiences or "qualia". The computer drive analogy doesn't work unless the movies or songs stored in it are subjective conscious experiences of the computer drive (i.e., if the computer drive is conscious). Now, if computer drives are in fact conscious, then that brings up a lot of interesting ethical questions: can computer drives suffer? Is it immoral to store things in a computer drive that they experience as painful? Should laws be enacted to protect the conscious well-being of computer drives? Of course, if computer drives lack consciousness, these questions are non-sensical, but then your analogy would also be non-sensical.
@@Kobriks1 I think what th3walrus said makes sense. You asked since we know how neuron works down to the level of atoms themselves, but nothing about these atoms say anything about what is being experienced? You need a whole infrastructure to interpret these signals. In the computer, it's the CPU and GPU computing, interpreting and rendering these bits of information (which are just 1s and 0s really, on their own). In humans, the brain is the infrastructure that interprets these signals according to a set of rules that was taught to it before (if you can experience "redness", or close your eyes and "recall" this redness, it's because you were taught as a baby that the experience of the lightwaves in this band of frequency is associated with the concept of the color red).
But this infrastructure is more than just the CPU & GPU in computers, and more than just the brain in humans. You're a biological machine that has millions of sensors and actuators (inputs and outputs). When your optical nerves in your eyes were hit with a certain kind of information (the color red, for example), the signal is sent to the brain to interpret it and contextualize it to make it your experience. Similarly, the computer has keyboard and mouse inputs for example, which are giving the whole system bits of electrical signals, which would be interpreted as letters typed. If you press R-E-D on your keyboard, and the word shows up on screen, or the color shows up on screen (i.e. an output device), the information shown to you was heavily interpreted.
You think it's "a terrible analogy that just obscures the essence of hard problem". I think it's a great analogy that pointed out the ridiculousness of expecting to see interpreted information (conceptual redness in the brain, or movies or music in the computer) independent of the infrastructures (the entire human nervous system, or all of the components connected to a computer) that was used to interpret the raw data (bits in computers, or biochemicals and bioelectrical signals in a human body).
@@spiritrealminvestigator6342I was talking more about the idea of "immaterial things" like redness having a physical representation. Whether we're talking about subjective experiences or a book, song, whatever.
These qualia are what happens when you stimulate the brain a certain way (or simulate that stimulation). They don't exist beyond that. I don't see anything mysterious here.
I pulled my phone completely apart, examined each piece under high magnification & put it back together again, but I couldn’t find this videoness. Maybe this video is immaterial.
Redness is a pattern encoded in our neurons generated by the experience of receiving a particular wavelength of light on the cones of our retinas. If you look for Microsoft Word in a printout of its assembly language instruction set, you won't find it. It doesn't exist in the code, but you can experience Microsoft Word when you run the code on the appropriate hardware. The fact that we can't directly "read" the contents of a brain just means we don't yet understand the encoding method, and/or the mechanism for outputting the contents of a brain as a kind of movie or PowerPoint presentation.
“Redness” is just a memory. It exists only in your memory. If you just saw a flash it would be a short memory and experience. If the redness lasted for say hours you’d develop more impactful memories that may last longer
Please try to interview P.M.S Hacker on this issue!! He's the leading authority on Wittgenstein and imho the best philosopher currently alive. He does an amazing job showing how all those "riddles" are grammatical confusions i.e. confusions brought about by the misuse of language.
It’s extremely difficult to get people to escape from the conceptual illusions that they’ve been subject to for ages and which are constantly being reinforced to them by 99% of people who discuss philosophy of mind.
It’s just such a shame that people like Peter Hacker don’t get more publicity, and people who spread conceptual confusions get enormous publicity (e.g. this very channel and countless other thinkers).
Needless to say, few people will be convinced in comment sections.
Alex has brought up the qualia issue of redness a few times now, and every time I'm surprised he thinks this is a conundrum. We all agree there are tornadoes. But if you were to lash yourself to a tree when one is passing and open up a jar to capture the tornado to understand it, you'll look inside the jar and find no "tornadoness", and not just because you were unlucky. It wouldn't matter which part of the tornado you looked at, there is no tornado. When it eventually dies down, again, there is no residual tornadoness -- because what we call tornadoness is a particular state of an atmospheric condition.
Likewise, of course you can tear open someone's brain and not find a locus where red lives. Hell, the same person looking at the exact same red flower under the same lighting conditions can have two different experiences of it because the redness isn't some intrinsic property of the flower.
Going back to the first part of the discussion, I've asked dualists what is the soul/mind doing while the brain is asleep. Surely the mind has no need for a metabolic rest. If I get drunk, does my mind get drunk too, or is it sober and just waiting for the brain to get back to normal? If so, it seems like my mind could do work and solve problems and then when I sober up it could feed me the answers to all the things it figured out while I was drunk. The fact that doesn't happen tends to indicate that the mind is indistinguishable from the brain.
Even if mind is indistinguishable from the brain, we still have the problem how consciousness arises. There's no consciousness in computers. Even if we make computers million times more complex, why would consciousness arise in them? It will be exactly the same computational process as in contemporary computers.
Talking about redness is one way of trying to capture that there exists something in animals that is not present in computing machines. We know it exists. Actually, it is the only thing we actually truly know exists. All the material world can be doubted, but consciousness certainly exists because it's the only thing we have direct access to. And yet we can't even phatom a process that would invoke consciousness in a silicon processor.
For a very long time, this concept has mystified and perplexed me. Another related thing that I have pondered relates to the idea of living for eternity, which is what Christianity teaches (and I am a Christian). I am a computer programmer and am familiar with the ideas of memory and storage capacity. It has been said that humans only use a relatively low percent or our "brain capacity". Regardless of the truth of that, or the exact percentage used, I think that we can all agree that there is a finite capacity to the physical brain's ability to store information. Accordingly, at some point, in the future, our brain would reach its "capacity." What then? Does the brain start dumping certain information, to make room for new information? If the "solution" is that the information is stored in the mind, and that the mind does not have this limitation (though it would, of course, never contain an actual infinite amount of information), then it further begs the question of the relationship between the mind and the physical brain.
An immaterial mind is speculative and superfluous.
I suggest that redness, and all consciousness, is associated with a mental activity, a property of a changing physical state in the brain (a repetitive activity producing an apparent static quality like redness). Redness is not a physical thing to be found in the brain.
I also suggest that consciousness is a sensory phenomenon. We know of our normal senses; sight, sound, touch, etc. We can sense thoughts. That might not be startling news, but I have not heard mention of it as one of our senses.
so like a secondary calculation
@@godassasin8097 A property like mass, or speed, but more like the shape of the surface of the ocean, that responds passively.
Philosophers tend to see problems where none exist, and the issue of where "redness" is in the brain is one such "problem" (promoted most notably by David Chalmers, who invented a term for it: "the Hard Problem of Consciousness"). The simple answer is that "redness" does not exist in the brain. It is a mental construct, a "concept" or "abstraction"-like all other abstractions-and when we close our eyes and imagine "redness" and see the colour "red", the brain is using the "concept" of redness to stimulate those areas of the brain that would be stimulated if our eyes were open and light waves in the red frequency range were entering them. The experience of "redness" is stored in the memory centres of the brain, and that experience can be retrieved from storage on demand. When we close our eyes and think of "redness" we are, in effect, recalling our past experiences of seeing red things, and stimulating those areas of the brain that produce the sensation of seeing the colour red.
This doesn't answer the hard problem
@@JHeb_ The so-called "Hard Problem" is an invented problem. There is no "Hard Problem" in realithy. I started out by saying that philosopers see problems where none exist. Daniel Dennett has effectivel "debunked" the "Hard Problem", so there is nothing to provide an answer for. However, there is a good explanation for how we arrive a subjective experiences.
@@MichaelMendis Science, let alone neuroscience did not provide any explicit evidence that would explain how physical quantities (mass, charge, frequency, amplitude, etc.) give rise to subjective qualities (feeling of love, regret, disappointment, experience of the color red or smell of coffee). The evidence is only correlational, i.e. we see that brain activity is related to some experiences, but even then the evidence often seems contradictory.
Therefore, the hard problem exists.
@@JHeb_ That is simply not the case. It *is* possible to create subjective states by stimulating (with an electrical current) various regions of the brain that are responsible for various subjective experience. It *is indeed possible* to make someone see the colour red or smell the smell of coffee by passing a mild electrical current through those areas of the brain where data regarding these subjective sensations are stored. This is exactly what brain surgeons do when they are performing delicate brain surgery and want to ensure that they do not damage parts of the brain that are not the cause of the problem they are working to correct. That is sufficient to demonstrate that the the relationship between physical brain states and subjective experiences is *NOT* merely "correlational". If the eivdence were "contradictory"-as you claim-precise brain surgeny would *not* be possible.
@@MichaelMendis
That is still correlational. You're just skipping the instrument dedicated to sending that impulse by default (your eye and optic nerve) to an instrument that directly sends the signal to your brain. But it's still just stimuli getting delivered to the consciousness. It provides no causal explicit explanation of how this gives any awareness of the experience at all.
The evidence is still contradictory. If all experience is associated with brain activity, then you can assume that a more intense experience will result in more brain activity. Because of that, up until a few decades ago, it was believed that psychedelics increased the activity of your brain by lighting it like a Christmas tree. But that is not the case. Brain actually has a large decrease in activity, especially in the most active areas, and yet this results in a far more rich and intense experience than you would expect.
The red is simply in your memory, which is stored in your neurons. I can close my eyes and envision red in my "mind" because I've seen red and remember what it looks like; it has left an imprint on my neurons. I can see red, I can see triangles as well as formless globs, have tunes in my mind, picture people and their faces in my mind... but it is all patterns that my neurons form so that I can survive in the environment. Where was that funny-shaped tree with the sweet, round, red-colored fruit on it? I need to remember those things and be able to envision those things in my mind (my brain) to survive better, to eat, and thrive. Images, flavors, shapes, feelings, sounds... they are all imprinted in our neurons, stored there so we can remember and recognize the important stuff in our environment that gives us a better chance to survive.
Nobody who knows anything about the topic says that consciousness 'is' the brain. That would be like saying that walking 'is' the legs. Consciousness is something that the brain _does_ just like walking is something that the legs do. You can't cut open the brain and find 'redness', you can't cut open the legs and find 'walking'. Expecting either 'redness' or 'walking' to be a physical object is a category error.
Also, the experience of 'redness' in the brain is, like everything else in the brain, distributed (i.e. there's no single 'redness' neuron). With sensitive enough apparatus you _could_ find an individual's experience of redness in the pattern of activation of a neural pathway. The physical properties of those neural connections are the nearest thing to 'redness' as a physical 'object', if you want to analogise it in those terms. However, it's still the _activation_ of those connections in a specific way that are the experience of redness, just like it's the activation of the nerves, muscles etc. in the legs that are the action of walking.
it's informational, just like numbers. you could replace the current numbers we do maths with different symbols, but keep the same informational value and they will do the exact same thing as current numbers. you can't hold information in your hands, you can have a representation of that information on a drive, in a book, in your mind, but it's only a representation of the information. :)
I would argue that redness is like a pile of sand. If you dig into that pile, nowhere will you find the singular object "a pile of sand", that you could remove and separate from the other grains to no longer be left with a pile of sand. The "pile of sand", rather, is a neuronal abstraction occurring in the brain, and we could identify which neurons are responsible for creating such an abstraction. I also like to borrow analogies from AI and machine learning: redness could be a latent representation, that is, a lower dimensional representation in the brain than the actual wavelengths of light striking the retina that can be directly recognized and interpreted. Our brains run on our brains, so if there is a collection of neurons that fires when red is seen, that mere firing is what "redness" is, that's the only sensible explanation IMO. Redness is simply what we call those neurons firing.
The pile of sand is a collection of objects. You can find the pile of sand quite easily, just pick out all the objects in the collection. That's the pile. It has the property of being a pile of sand.
You can do the same with neurons. Pick out all the neurons associated with the experience of red. That's not the hard part. The problem arises because unlike the pile, the neurons don't have the property of being red. They have the property of being associated with the the experience of red, like photons of a certain wavelength are associated with the experience of red. But neither are actually red themselves.
Why do we have thoughts if it's all just matter working how it needs to for function? Sometimes my mind swirls rapidly with imagery that I have zero control over, creating new things completely beyond my conscience ability to describe. It's brilliant and fascinating.
Regarding the visualisation of colours, here is how I believe it works: the reason why we are able to visually picture a colour when we close our eyes is because we experienced and memorised its appearance. Therefore, it’s more of a memory than an image of the colour because all our memories are based on things that we’ve experienced. That’s also why blind people don’t have visual dreams.
but its missing the point of why redness is there to begin with.
Alex is talking about the subjective experience of seeing red. Subjective experience is the consequence of emergence from the brain. Consciousness emerges from the neural activity within the brain. Now it may very well be there are neurons associated with 'redness', but only in that the idea of red is connected to the visual cortext and language. It could be that brain damage would destroy your ability to remember the name of the colour even if you still experience it.
So unconscious particles suddenly realize the sense of I-amness if they're positioned in a special way?
There is a one grand question which cannot be answered and it is even more grand than Alex's redness. The question is, where is my mom, when I close my eyes
Hey Alex, this is a phenomenally well explained exerpt of they key problems of questions on the theory of mind.
A German Professor for Philosophy and Author has Published a great book in which he uses these Problems to formulate a very interesting theory.
The mans named Markus Gabriel and his book titled
"Neo- Existenzialismus" meaning neo-existentialism.
You may very well have read it, as you two use a very similar technique in arguing these questions, however if you havent yet, please consider doing so.
I think this book might very well be a great read for you!
Red in physicality is a certain group of waveleghts of light, as you said. The red that you see in your head is a concept invented and transmitted by humans. It is just an unversally agreed upon concept. Much like money in physicality is just paper, but in our heads, or in our collective conciousness, it becomes something much more.
This is why certain colours did not exsist in ancient times. Green for example was concider as just a shade of blue.
Therefore conciousness is not only in your brain, thanks to language, it’s in all of our brains. It IS all of our brains.