Thank you! I only discovered this a few days ago, and I feel like I'm back in grad classes. Thank you! You're good, and certainly give me something to continue researching. My area is human communication, PhD, u of AZ 94
Leí el libro de una red viva de David Eagleman y por eso empecé a buscarlo en internet y este canal es lo mejor que hay para poder aprender, ojalá sigan subiendo videos. Saludos desde Veracruz, México 🇲🇽
Crick had three things you need to be a breakthrough scientist. A driving curiosity, an ability to sift through noise and see what is most important, and a willingness to shed "established knowledge" and rethink the science from scratch. He joins Einstein and others in those respects.
Great episode! I find it fascinating that we are currently converging on consciousness both from neuroscience and AI/programming/math perspective. Exciting times
Having trouble with the "emergence" concept and the ant farming analogy. What arises from individual ant behavior is an economy, an activity (farming), and perhaps a culture based on those. With the human mind, a thing called experience arises a sense of ongoing narrative, with all manner of self-awareness and mental life that in itself can create feedback loops. I get emergence as a general analogy of of parts to the whole, but what arises are two different things. We still lack understanding of experience, consciousness, and subjectivity.
I keep waiting for someone to say, "Consciousness is an experience, a feeling." Memories and neurotransmitters give rise to feelings and experiences. Why aren't these ever brought into the conversation?
Consciousness is described as an experience, a feeling. Why aren't neurotransmitters that give us feelings ever brought into the conversation about consciousness. Evolutionarily these feelings attracted/attached us to mates and children and scared us away from predators and harmful activities.
Favorite episode so far! Only thing I experience differently is I am usually conscious before and after waking. Before waking, I am in imagination schema which has been untethered from any modeling of physical realm for 8 hours. Ppl that awake from state 1 & 2 sleep often report they hadn't fallen asleep, also indicating they were still conscious, but primarily in imagination schema that was beginning to untether the of sounds in physical world from their physical cause and mapping instead to whatever they were thinking of. Of course, as you get deeper in sleep, the slowing frequency of brain waves hyperpolarizes cells, tending to prevent stimuli from entering cortex at all. I think why it feels like waking up is becoming conscious is that you map those sleep imaginations to 'not real,' which makes you forget, plus increase in brain wave frequency may lead to mapping to things in real world again frequently, shutting up the suggestions and memory frames of what you were just dreaming about.
By Darwinian definitions anyway…. Not by the definition from the “symbolic universe” in my books and papers…😂❤ Then it becomes the most important aspect of all existence in combination with meaning. ❤
David, as a layman not in the sciences (I write fiction and teach writing), I have studied evolution and neuroscience informally for several years, via books and RUclips lectures. It has guided my thinking and feeling as a writer. My thought here: I would like to see a neuroscientist rigorously study consciousness in other species, noting the various levels and structures of consciousness. Then analyze the differences in the apparent features and apparent experience of consciousness in other species. I wonder if that were done rigorously, whether some important inferences and advances in understanding consciousness would occur. Personally, my working theory is that consciousness, experience, subjectivity, and ability to abstract are closely related terms, and that the answers might lie in a shadowy territory, an uncertain space, much like relativity and quantum mechanics often rest on uncertainties. The shadowy space lies at the nexus of what we see as objectivity and subjectivity. The objective world can't be wholly known in an objective way by a single consciousness in any intuitive way. But science can makes theories, test them, and create common ground. But how do we know whether an alien race would come to the same scientific results, perhaps measuring or grokking differently from us, but rigorously also, in their own way? Then you get the shadowy world of subjectivity that neuroscience, psychology, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and philosophy study. We can come to some tenuous agreements on that, either scientifically (by study of brain function) or rationally (when certain theories don't hold up to logic or thought experiments.) The term "intersubjectivity," coined by Edmund Husserl and popularized by John Searle among English and philosophy majors, might be a useful concept. The answers may live in the middle, the area where the objective world resists the subjects attempts to understand and the subjective mind resists attempts by objective researchers to study consciousness. Maybe all we can do is filter out the knowable from the presently unknowable. Anyways, that's how an interested layman thinks. The hardest questions are the most fun. 🙂
The metaphor of a radio materialist in a desert trying to find the correlates between the radio and the voices deserves to be one the most interesting thought experiment. It's impossible not to love David Eagleman's genious brain
Really very insightful video to have rational knowledge from scientific perspective... Have been doing meditation from last 1 year with lot many so called spiritual gurus however they have all imgination rather convincing logic for any kind of experience.... Best guard for them is - it can not be expressed in words as there is no words for those experiences... Another one is everyone is going to have different experiment.... Always wondering to have some rational & logical explanation for my own brain to convince it rather just going in black box with meditation..... There is lot of Jargon being used in spiritual world where you can't even ask question & always compel to experience something during meditation session to tell everyone that you felt something.... I guess now is the time to integrate Science with Meditation rather going to Guru.... I am big fan of you on how you explain the Brain which seems to be most complicated stuff even more than our cosmos....
Consciousness begins at the point where language breaks down and can no longer serve the function to form a message that is useful for us to accurately describe something, but the catch is we cannot even accurately describe anything. So in essence, consciousness permeates and pervades us. We are literally it trying to describe itself.
"consciousness permeates and pervades us" Self evidently... Mind is composed entirely of thoughts. Being conscious is a mental activity and therefore must be composed entirely of thoughts. The self is also a thought (though the definition may include the body). Thoughts are about something or other, including other thoughts. That is to say, thoughts represent. Impinging environmental energies initiate biochemical chain reactions that culminate in modulation of the discharge timing patterns of neurons that connect sense organs to the brain. These modulations are encoded representations of the impinging energies. Now extrapolate! Imagine every brain neuron is maintaining a representation (in the encoded form of its discharge timing pattern). Here we have our source of thoughts out of which selfs and minds and being conscious must be constituted. Imagine a hundred billion representations, a brainful, each synaptically connected with 20,000 (on average) other representations so that they are able to intermodulate in the process we call thinking. Now that we know how thoughts are physically instantiated our subsequent thoughts may figure out what a self is and how intermodulation can make a self conscious... Cheers!
It's one thing (a big thing) to become conscious of the feel of silk or the feeling of rain on a hot summer day...but it's yet (maybe) a bigger thing to judge that feeling. Why don't I like raw broccoli? My conscious self can taste it, experience it, notice it...but it also judges it as favorable or unfavorable. It's that last step that interests me with regard to AI. While two machines might become sentient at the same time, will both machines like or hate the same things? Will one machine think that humans are cute and adorbs, while the other thinks we're mangy varmints that are pests to be eradicated? I find this stuff endlessly fascinating. Had I not chosen to do music as a career, if I could go back in time, I'd seriously consider going into neurological science. Thanks for the podcast!
Seems like I finally found my lost kindred: cat lover, a career in music, and a neverending fascination for neuroscience and perception and behavioral neurobiology. Tip of the hat to you, good sir/lady! :D
I do like the way you communicate in a very clear fashion. Your examples are very specific to understanding It seems astounding to me that we find intelligence at every level of life William James said intelligence is the ability to get to a goal in different ways So if we find intelligence at every level, in all forms of life. Would it be very possible that intelligence at the highest level could be nature itself. We are natures self reflection and nature is our reflection. The hard problem of consciousness is going to probably be determined to be a higher intelligence/creator solution. The awakening is on
Descartes seems to be the only one on the right track in that the significant difference between the electrical impulses coursing through our brains and those coursing through a computer is the presence of a soul.
I wish you had also mentioned scientists like Donald Hoffman, who argue that solving the hard problem of consciousness is impossible if we assume that consciousness arises from matter. They propose that material emerges from consciousness-a perspective that many scientists seem to overlook, perhaps because it aligns with ideas often associated with religion.
what a brilliant concept. I'd always wondered where conciousness came from, but its the whole brain. you are your brain it makes sense its like the "running" of an engine, it relys on all parts to work properly and without all of it, it doesnt exist
You ask all the questions I do in such a simple way. Great work. After watching the way large language models work, with a prompt.. Causing a chain reaction of probability for the next word, I believe that's what's happening in our heads. Simple example is when you try and remember the lyrics to a song you know, you have to start at the start to get to the part you forgot. Because you need that language model to follow a sequence. I believe memory which is intimately tied to consciousness, must have some physical changes happen when learning new info, the I. Pulse pattern may cautirise a neuron or I saw somewhere it may even unpack the DNA and alter it. When when the same pattern or similar fires through the network, it activates anything similar within a certain region, forming a cascade of thoughts and memories in your conscious mind. I'd love to put someone, young with few memories or old with dementia, into a sensory dep tank, scan their brain, teach them something new. Scan the brain again and see if you can locate where that memory is stored. Then we just need to analyse those neurons and see what changed. How did it no activate prior to the learning and now suddenly activates when it recalls that new info. There in lies the secret to consciousness. How are memories stored. And once we know that. We will have a better understanding of how the average of a collection of memories forms the perception of consciousness. Which is probably just us experiencing the decided tip of the iceburg of indicision
David, have you thought about the unconscious? There is so much going on, both past and present, that we need a storage space? And does this apply to memory? Thank you.
I define consciousness a little bit differently to most other people. Not as a thing, but rather as a function of the brain. It's the act of focusing attention on a specific function of the brain. Lets take a specific case of waking up. Now when you're asleep, there are noises occurring around you all the time, but, a strange noise wakes you. You can see how this would offer an evolutionary advantage. It also tells us that the part of the brain monitoring sounds, while we are asleep, has the cognitive ability to distinguish normal sounds from unusual sounds. It then wakes us, alerted to the possibility of danger. Now, we focus on the sound to determine how we should react. As you said, there are thousands of processes occurring in the brain at any given moment. Far too many for us to focus on everything. This ability of the brain to focus on one or two processes prevents overloading. Now I don't know how many species have the ability to focus attention on their own thoughts, but let me be clear about this, consciousness doesn't think. Thinking happens in the prefrontal cortex. Consciousness is merely the action of focusing attention on those thoughts, just as we can focus on vision, hearing or even our own emotions. Consciousness isn't self awareness. Focusing on our thoughts is self awareness. We become aware of questions like "Who am I?".
since all the signals in the brain are made of the same stuff, what differentiates them. Is it the repetitive rhythms that are different and they get somehow bundled together ? And how many bundles make up consciousness, layers and layers?
I think that to many people consciousness equals awareness. But too often terms are wrongly used. You're still a being with conscience even when you're asleep. Conscience & conscious are supposed to be different, though conscience is in my opinion, more complex
So there are single cell organisms that will move towards food, and away from danger. To me this is the basis for consciousness, which i see as an "experience" of sensory input, along with chemistry, and in humans, memory of these experiences and anticipation complete the picture... See Michael Levins work about single cells. And awareness
I was enjoying life just fine believing my thoughts came from within my mind, then you presented the radio and tower argument. Now I have to find those towers. Thank you for that... not!
What could we be missing like the guy with the radio? Our mainstream neuroscience ignores the interior of the cell in this context, like trying to understand an animal by only measuring its skin. The inside is filled with highly ordered arrangements of microtubules and actin and spectrin. There is a lot of new experimental work that bears on this issue…for example in papers by Anirban Bandyopadhyay apparently showing interactions between microtubule resonances and membrane potential spikes; and that it spans across a pair of neurons.
The brain has many outputs, but the question should be, for whom is this information created? There has to be a self to experience this, and all there is in a human skull is the living tissue of the brain. Even a single cell creature has simple awareness, which means that consciousness is not a thing really. There is a living organism which experiences the output of its nervous system.
Hi eagleman huge fan , i have a question, If the whole universe and its structure infuences our conciousness then change in universe can effect our conciousness, this basically means that aliens are trying to communicate to us through conciousness?
We are just basically a higher level computer, no different from what we call a basic computer. We all perfoming instructions based on stimuli. How we process them might be different. Consciousness itself might be a byproduct of what we call LIFE itself. Its our own personal experiences subjective to us, but its really nothing, but it means so much to us. Like i said, we are no different from a computer, we might be diffrent in awareness. Beyond that, its nothing.
Really enjoy the content of the podcast. One small comment though, the constant switching between two perspectives makes it difficult to watch. I'm sure you have a program set up that does this automatically, and having the change of perspective is visually interesting, but I think it's happening too often. The constant switch every couple seconds is distracting and actually makes you a little hard to watch. Just a small feedback--the content is great.
But the child is told that the blue, the shape, the movement is a bird. So language is crucially important or at least touch. The guy with the radio had to have been loved (cared for unlike the Roumanian orphans who were never touched or loved or held) and who could never walk in the desert or pick up the radio, let alone turn the dial. I think Jaak Pankskeep’s affective neuroscience must be factored in to this discussion. Consciousness needs the chemical (hormone) to fire it up, like one can’t cook without a source of heat.
You don't know my conscious that's it in a nutshell 🤣 God knows he is in control, and sometimes I take the real and try to steer the wrong direction sometimes that wheel has a lot of play on it that all of the sudden I'll back on track.
One explanation is that evolution has given us just enough to be able to do human stuff, what we see and know is limitive as an image that pulled up from our memory like a computer, reality is more complex, far more than m we need, we have limited colour, we know that,
86 billion cells not 100 billion ur living in d past this video is obviously older then what it shows brilliant scientist David hight of respect for ur work neuroscience has thought me so much
Thanks for the nice presentation. Nice overview of the current scientific worldview. But I think the foundation is a little shaky. IMO the very definition of consciousness was problematic and when you start off with a suspicious premise, everything is shaky. I find it illogical to start talking about consciousness "after waking up". I have very rich sleep content that was just cut off instantly. There are undeniably different levels of awareness during sleep stages, not to mention lucid dreaming which is as conscious as it can get. In many parts of sleep, self-awareness may not be there, but awareness is present in many instances. But in any case, self-awareness cannot be the measure of consciousness, because in that case we'll have to exclude lots of very vivid conscious states like being engrossed in music, different "flow" states, some psychoactive substance peak states, etc. Also, increased brain activity doesn't always correlate with increased awareness. For example, during psilocybin and several other substance trips, brain activity is dramatically decreased, but awareness is heightened.
Yay Binding Problem! A quantum substrate is the only possibility because there are no irreducible wholes in classical physics. The experimental evidence is mounting eg Babcock 2024 microtubule super radiance (a quantum phenomenon) at room temperature!
Sure if all the pieces of a plane are assembled correctly and the plane is all systems go the plane flies but the plane is not conscious.It's not ALIVE.The same goes for computers.Many people in the quantum physics community think of consciousness as being transcendent.If it were an emergent thing as you say we could bring people back from the dead by now just by getting all things all systems go again in the brain and body.There are two things that scientist think of as being transcendent: the eternal void that everything came from at the time of the big bang and consciousness.
This conflates reaction to stimuli, and conciousness. This materialist world view can not account for metaphysics, and requires being granted creation, as well as evolution. It isn't even a hypothesis. To be a legit hypothesis, you would have to come up with control, dependent, and indepe variables to perform a scientific experiment. There is nothing proveable related to conciousness to remove and add in order to conduct an experiment. If a brain is damaged, it could be said that the body's ability to react to stimuli is damaged, but can show that the person's actual conciousness is effected. This dude uses the terms theory and hypothesis interchangeably. A good sign that he is intentionally bastardizing the scientific method.
@ElParacletoPodcast you take an easy shot without giving him credit on how sound his juxtaposing of examples to a mind/intelligence/consciousness is from relatable systems, be it organic or inorganic. Your concerned “bigger problem” would be his eventual address, since it should be a tool an organism advanced from aesthetic-experience-chemistries to none chemicalized signals. you then are the “another failed” comment, due to your unattempted critique to contradict where his relations of systems fail. but ya, it’s a fail, if unless original-progressed nothing from common ignorance on the overall subject of M/I/C since Michael Levin’s works on bioelectrics near appropriate steps to inquire on given academic knowledge to what is the materiality of M/I/C, which already code without the sequences of genotypes. I’ll tell you soon, about all that up there slapped to you, sometime this year
I had to stop watching because of the jump cuts. I know they're supposed to be good for retention but ... they just have the opposite effect on some people. It's a shame - your presentation style is good it would have been cool to hear your theories - I just can't. I ended up leaving the video playing while I (finally) googled "why do youtubers use jump cuts when they're just speaking to the camera. Now I know.
Another failed attempt to define consciousness, then you have an even bigger problem, moral thoughts, that have nothing to do wit the physical, but with abstract concepts.
you take an easy shot without giving him credit on how sound his juxtaposing of examples to a mind/intelligence/consciousness is from relatable systems, be it organic or inorganic. Your concerned “bigger problem” would be his eventual address, since it should be a tool an organism advanced from aesthetic-experience-chemistries to none chemicalized signals. you then are the “another failed” comment, due to your unattempted critique to contradict where his relations of systems fail. but ya, it’s a fail, if unless original-progressed nothing from common ignorance on the overall subject of M/I/C since Michael Levin’s works on bioelectrics near appropriate steps to inquire on given academic knowledge to what is the materiality of M/I/C, which already code without the sequences of genotypes. I’ll tell you soon, about all that up there slapped to you, sometime this year
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
This guy is a fantastic teacher. So much to learn.
This was phenomenal. You didn’t even have to ask… I’ve liked and subscribed. Thank you!
probably one of the best talks on the complex topic of consciousness!
Thank you so much, Inner Cosmos is my favourite podcast at the moment.
Thank you so much for truly expanding our understanding of human behavior.
Thank you! I only discovered this a few days ago, and I feel like I'm back in grad classes. Thank you! You're good, and certainly give me something to continue researching. My area is human communication, PhD, u of AZ 94
Thank you❤
Fascinating. Thank you for your passion and insight. I read Sum last month and reading Livewired now. Keep it all coming!
Leí el libro de una red viva de David Eagleman y por eso empecé a buscarlo en internet y este canal es lo mejor que hay para poder aprender, ojalá sigan subiendo videos. Saludos desde Veracruz, México 🇲🇽
You are amazing
Thank you Sir!
Crick had three things you need to be a breakthrough scientist. A driving curiosity, an ability to sift through noise and see what is most important, and a willingness to shed "established knowledge" and rethink the science from scratch. He joins Einstein and others in those respects.
Great episode! I find it fascinating that we are currently converging on consciousness both from neuroscience and AI/programming/math perspective. Exciting times
Having trouble with the "emergence" concept and the ant farming analogy. What arises from individual ant behavior is an economy, an activity (farming), and perhaps a culture based on those. With the human mind, a thing called experience arises a sense of ongoing narrative, with all manner of self-awareness and mental life that in itself can create feedback loops. I get emergence as a general analogy of of parts to the whole, but what arises are two different things. We still lack understanding of experience, consciousness, and subjectivity.
Agree. Emergence in this use is equivalent to calling it magic.
I keep waiting for someone to say, "Consciousness is an experience, a feeling." Memories and neurotransmitters give rise to feelings and experiences. Why aren't these ever brought into the conversation?
Consciousness is described as an experience, a feeling. Why aren't neurotransmitters that give us feelings ever brought into the conversation about consciousness. Evolutionarily these feelings attracted/attached us to mates and children and scared us away from predators and harmful activities.
Favorite episode so far! Only thing I experience differently is I am usually conscious before and after waking. Before waking, I am in imagination schema which has been untethered from any modeling of physical realm for 8 hours. Ppl that awake from state 1 & 2 sleep often report they hadn't fallen asleep, also indicating they were still conscious, but primarily in imagination schema that was beginning to untether the of sounds in physical world from their physical cause and mapping instead to whatever they were thinking of. Of course, as you get deeper in sleep, the slowing frequency of brain waves hyperpolarizes cells, tending to prevent stimuli from entering cortex at all. I think why it feels like waking up is becoming conscious is that you map those sleep imaginations to 'not real,' which makes you forget, plus increase in brain wave frequency may lead to mapping to things in real world again frequently, shutting up the suggestions and memory frames of what you were just dreaming about.
How would you explain dreams ?
Very carefully 😊
I think the most interesting thing about consciousness is the eventual realization that we dont actually need it to survive, yet we have it.
By Darwinian definitions anyway…. Not by the definition from the “symbolic universe” in my books and papers…😂❤ Then it becomes the most important aspect of all existence in combination with meaning. ❤
How did you come to this conclusion?
@@cruzilla6265 Mostly by watching other animals without it.
@@peacecraft3449 Umm, just because other animals *may* not be conscious doesn't mean it doesn't have survival benefits for animals that do have it.
@cruzilla6265 Like what?
David, as a layman not in the sciences (I write fiction and teach writing), I have studied evolution and neuroscience informally for several years, via books and RUclips lectures. It has guided my thinking and feeling as a writer. My thought here: I would like to see a neuroscientist rigorously study consciousness in other species, noting the various levels and structures of consciousness. Then analyze the differences in the apparent features and apparent experience of consciousness in other species. I wonder if that were done rigorously, whether some important inferences and advances in understanding consciousness would occur.
Personally, my working theory is that consciousness, experience, subjectivity, and ability to abstract are closely related terms, and that the answers might lie in a shadowy territory, an uncertain space, much like relativity and quantum mechanics often rest on uncertainties.
The shadowy space lies at the nexus of what we see as objectivity and subjectivity. The objective world can't be wholly known in an objective way by a single consciousness in any intuitive way. But science can makes theories, test them, and create common ground. But how do we know whether an alien race would come to the same scientific results, perhaps measuring or grokking differently from us, but rigorously also, in their own way?
Then you get the shadowy world of subjectivity that neuroscience, psychology, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and philosophy study. We can come to some tenuous agreements on that, either scientifically (by study of brain function) or rationally (when certain theories don't hold up to logic or thought experiments.) The term "intersubjectivity," coined by Edmund Husserl and popularized by John Searle among English and philosophy majors, might be a useful concept.
The answers may live in the middle, the area where the objective world resists the subjects attempts to understand and the subjective mind resists attempts by objective researchers to study consciousness. Maybe all we can do is filter out the knowable from the presently unknowable.
Anyways, that's how an interested layman thinks. The hardest questions are the most fun. 🙂
It's caused me to settle for "I don't know". Would not be surprised if it remained that way for all of us for a very long time.
You broke my brain. Thanks a lot smart guy.
The metaphor of a radio materialist in a desert trying to find the correlates between the radio and the voices deserves to be one the most interesting thought experiment. It's impossible not to love David Eagleman's genious brain
Yet we know nothing of Life itself that “ignites” and animates all this intricate matter
Really very insightful video to have rational knowledge from scientific perspective... Have been doing meditation from last 1 year with lot many so called spiritual gurus however they have all imgination rather convincing logic for any kind of experience.... Best guard for them is - it can not be expressed in words as there is no words for those experiences... Another one is everyone is going to have different experiment.... Always wondering to have some rational & logical explanation for my own brain to convince it rather just going in black box with meditation..... There is lot of Jargon being used in spiritual world where you can't even ask question & always compel to experience something during meditation session to tell everyone that you felt something.... I guess now is the time to integrate Science with Meditation rather going to Guru.... I am big fan of you on how you explain the Brain which seems to be most complicated stuff even more than our cosmos....
Have you considered having a debate with Bernardo Kastrup? I would love to witness that.
Consciousness begins at the point where language breaks down and can no longer serve the function to form a message that is useful for us to accurately describe something, but the catch is we cannot even accurately describe anything. So in essence, consciousness permeates and pervades us. We are literally it trying to describe itself.
"consciousness permeates and pervades us"
Self evidently...
Mind is composed entirely of thoughts.
Being conscious is a mental activity and
therefore must be composed entirely of thoughts.
The self is also a thought (though the definition may include the body).
Thoughts are about something or other, including other thoughts.
That is to say, thoughts represent.
Impinging environmental energies initiate biochemical chain reactions that
culminate in modulation of the discharge timing patterns of neurons that
connect sense organs to the brain.
These modulations are encoded representations of the impinging energies.
Now extrapolate!
Imagine every brain neuron is maintaining a representation
(in the encoded form of its discharge timing pattern).
Here we have our source of thoughts
out of which selfs and minds and being conscious must be constituted.
Imagine a hundred billion representations, a brainful, each synaptically connected
with 20,000 (on average) other representations so that
they are able to intermodulate in the process we call thinking.
Now that we know how thoughts are physically instantiated
our subsequent thoughts may figure out what a self is and how
intermodulation can make a self conscious...
Cheers!
You've described being drunk.
It's one thing (a big thing) to become conscious of the feel of silk or the feeling of rain on a hot summer day...but it's yet (maybe) a bigger thing to judge that feeling. Why don't I like raw broccoli? My conscious self can taste it, experience it, notice it...but it also judges it as favorable or unfavorable. It's that last step that interests me with regard to AI.
While two machines might become sentient at the same time, will both machines like or hate the same things? Will one machine think that humans are cute and adorbs, while the other thinks we're mangy varmints that are pests to be eradicated?
I find this stuff endlessly fascinating. Had I not chosen to do music as a career, if I could go back in time, I'd seriously consider going into neurological science.
Thanks for the podcast!
Seems like I finally found my lost kindred: cat lover, a career in music, and a neverending fascination for neuroscience and perception and behavioral neurobiology.
Tip of the hat to you, good sir/lady! :D
I do like the way you communicate in a very clear fashion.
Your examples are very specific to understanding
It seems astounding to me that we find intelligence at every level of life William James said intelligence is the ability to get to a goal in different ways
So if we find intelligence at every level, in all forms of life. Would it be very possible that intelligence at the highest level could be nature itself. We are natures self reflection and nature is our reflection. The hard problem of consciousness is going to probably be determined to be a higher intelligence/creator solution.
The awakening is on
Descartes seems to be the only one on the right track in that the significant difference between the electrical impulses coursing through our brains and those coursing through a computer is the presence of a soul.
We are consciousness, that's it,
I wish you had also mentioned scientists like Donald Hoffman, who argue that solving the hard problem of consciousness is impossible if we assume that consciousness arises from matter. They propose that material emerges from consciousness-a perspective that many scientists seem to overlook, perhaps because it aligns with ideas often associated with religion.
what a brilliant concept. I'd always wondered where conciousness came from, but its the whole brain. you are your brain it makes sense
its like the "running" of an engine, it relys on all parts to work properly and without all of it, it doesnt exist
You ask all the questions I do in such a simple way. Great work.
After watching the way large language models work, with a prompt.. Causing a chain reaction of probability for the next word, I believe that's what's happening in our heads.
Simple example is when you try and remember the lyrics to a song you know, you have to start at the start to get to the part you forgot. Because you need that language model to follow a sequence.
I believe memory which is intimately tied to consciousness, must have some physical changes happen when learning new info, the I. Pulse pattern may cautirise a neuron or I saw somewhere it may even unpack the DNA and alter it.
When when the same pattern or similar fires through the network, it activates anything similar within a certain region, forming a cascade of thoughts and memories in your conscious mind.
I'd love to put someone, young with few memories or old with dementia, into a sensory dep tank, scan their brain, teach them something new. Scan the brain again and see if you can locate where that memory is stored.
Then we just need to analyse those neurons and see what changed. How did it no activate prior to the learning and now suddenly activates when it recalls that new info.
There in lies the secret to consciousness. How are memories stored. And once we know that. We will have a better understanding of how the average of a collection of memories forms the perception of consciousness. Which is probably just us experiencing the decided tip of the iceburg of indicision
Mr. Eagleman: Are you happy? What is a close friend?
David, have you thought about the unconscious? There is so much going on, both past and present, that we need a storage space? And does this apply to memory? Thank you.
This is what he is describing stucknut.
How do you explain medium ships?
I define consciousness a little bit differently to most other people. Not as a thing, but rather as a function of the brain. It's the act of focusing attention on a specific function of the brain.
Lets take a specific case of waking up. Now when you're asleep, there are noises occurring around you all the time, but, a strange noise wakes you. You can see how this would offer an evolutionary advantage. It also tells us that the part of the brain monitoring sounds, while we are asleep, has the cognitive ability to distinguish normal sounds from unusual sounds.
It then wakes us, alerted to the possibility of danger. Now, we focus on the sound to determine how we should react. As you said, there are thousands of processes occurring in the brain at any given moment. Far too many for us to focus on everything. This ability of the brain to focus on one or two processes prevents overloading.
Now I don't know how many species have the ability to focus attention on their own thoughts, but let me be clear about this, consciousness doesn't think. Thinking happens in the prefrontal cortex. Consciousness is merely the action of focusing attention on those thoughts, just as we can focus on vision, hearing or even our own emotions. Consciousness isn't self awareness. Focusing on our thoughts is self awareness. We become aware of questions like "Who am I?".
Do you have any answer about why emergent phenomenons exists
since all the signals in the brain are made of the same stuff, what differentiates them. Is it the repetitive rhythms that are different and they get somehow bundled together ? And how many bundles make up consciousness, layers and layers?
Question for you David. If it was possible to upload your consciousness to a computer and therefore render yourself immortal, would you do it?
“Consciousness is a dance between perception and memory.”
- Consciousness in a Nutshell
Thank you Homer Simpson.
It’s an assumption that other animals aren’t conscious .. of course they are .. to the extent I know you are conscious if I meet you.
I think that to many people consciousness equals awareness. But too often terms are wrongly used. You're still a being with conscience even when you're asleep. Conscience & conscious are supposed to be different, though conscience is in my opinion, more complex
So there are single cell organisms that will move towards food, and away from danger. To me this is the basis for consciousness, which i see as an "experience" of sensory input, along with chemistry, and in humans, memory of these experiences and anticipation complete the picture... See Michael Levins work about single cells. And awareness
And where, in the brain, are these assorted separate qualities combined into a unified image?
Is there such a place?
I was enjoying life just fine believing my thoughts came from within my mind, then you presented the radio and tower argument. Now I have to find those towers. Thank you for that... not!
What about out of body experiences. Or does the brain travel to
What could we be missing like the guy with the radio? Our mainstream neuroscience ignores the interior of the cell in this context, like trying to understand an animal by only measuring its skin. The inside is filled with highly ordered arrangements of microtubules and actin and spectrin. There is a lot of new experimental work that bears on this issue…for example in papers by Anirban Bandyopadhyay apparently showing interactions between microtubule resonances and membrane potential spikes; and that it spans across a pair of neurons.
The brain has many outputs, but the question should be, for whom is this information created? There has to be a self to experience this, and all there is in a human skull is the living tissue of the brain. Even a single cell creature has simple awareness, which means that consciousness is not a thing really. There is a living organism which experiences the output of its nervous system.
Hi eagleman huge fan , i have a question,
If the whole universe and its structure infuences our conciousness then change in universe can effect our conciousness, this basically means that aliens are trying to communicate to us through conciousness?
We are just basically a higher level computer, no different from what we call a basic computer. We all perfoming instructions based on stimuli. How we process them might be different. Consciousness itself might be a byproduct of what we call LIFE itself. Its our own personal experiences subjective to us, but its really nothing, but it means so much to us. Like i said, we are no different from a computer, we might be diffrent in awareness. Beyond that, its nothing.
We lack language to explain this
Really enjoy the content of the podcast. One small comment though, the constant switching between two perspectives makes it difficult to watch. I'm sure you have a program set up that does this automatically, and having the change of perspective is visually interesting, but I think it's happening too often. The constant switch every couple seconds is distracting and actually makes you a little hard to watch. Just a small feedback--the content is great.
Experiment: The Easy Way to safely explore personal consciousness/inner universe: Sing *HU* daily. Search how to sing *HU* . Keep It Simple Soul.
The universe and reality was created for us.
Interesting. But in the biggest part David is speaking about perception rather than consciousness.
My RED is not YOUR red, my son told me.
This is what im here for 😂
But the child is told that the blue, the shape, the movement is a bird. So language is crucially important or at least touch. The guy with the radio had to have been loved (cared for unlike the Roumanian orphans who were never touched or loved or held) and who could never walk in the desert or pick up the radio, let alone turn the dial. I think Jaak Pankskeep’s affective neuroscience must be factored in to this discussion. Consciousness needs the chemical (hormone) to fire it up, like one can’t cook without a source of heat.
You don't know my conscious that's it in a nutshell 🤣
God knows he is in control, and sometimes I take the real and try to steer the wrong direction sometimes that wheel has a lot of play on it that all of the sudden I'll back on track.
One explanation is that evolution has given us just enough to be able to do human stuff, what we see and know is limitive as an image that pulled up from our memory like a computer, reality is more complex, far more than m we need, we have limited colour, we know that,
86 billion cells not 100 billion ur living in d past this video is obviously older then what it shows brilliant scientist David hight of respect for ur work neuroscience has thought me so much
Thanks for the nice presentation. Nice overview of the current scientific worldview. But I think the foundation is a little shaky. IMO the very definition of consciousness was problematic and when you start off with a suspicious premise, everything is shaky. I find it illogical to start talking about consciousness "after waking up". I have very rich sleep content that was just cut off instantly. There are undeniably different levels of awareness during sleep stages, not to mention lucid dreaming which is as conscious as it can get. In many parts of sleep, self-awareness may not be there, but awareness is present in many instances. But in any case, self-awareness cannot be the measure of consciousness, because in that case we'll have to exclude lots of very vivid conscious states like being engrossed in music, different "flow" states, some psychoactive substance peak states, etc. Also, increased brain activity doesn't always correlate with increased awareness. For example, during psilocybin and several other substance trips, brain activity is dramatically decreased, but awareness is heightened.
Yay Binding Problem! A quantum substrate is the only possibility because there are no irreducible wholes in classical physics. The experimental evidence is mounting eg Babcock 2024 microtubule super radiance (a quantum phenomenon) at room temperature!
quantum consciousness requires Johansson junctions
🙂🌎⏳🙏♥️
Can we have an episode about what happens to our brain that we commit suicide?
Hey why’d you say my brain cells are tiny? I resemble that remark!
🤍
Sure if all the pieces of a plane are assembled correctly and the plane is all systems go the plane flies but the plane is not conscious.It's not ALIVE.The same goes for computers.Many people in the quantum physics community think of consciousness as being transcendent.If it were an emergent thing as you say we could bring people back from the dead by now just by getting all things all systems go again in the brain and body.There are two things that scientist think of as being transcendent: the eternal void that everything came from at the time of the big bang and consciousness.
I've convinced myself that consciousness is the soul.
This conflates reaction to stimuli, and conciousness.
This materialist world view can not account for metaphysics, and requires being granted creation, as well as evolution.
It isn't even a hypothesis. To be a legit hypothesis, you would have to come up with control, dependent, and indepe variables to perform a scientific experiment. There is nothing proveable related to conciousness to remove and add in order to conduct an experiment.
If a brain is damaged, it could be said that the body's ability to react to stimuli is damaged, but can show that the person's actual conciousness is effected.
This dude uses the terms theory and hypothesis interchangeably. A good sign that he is intentionally bastardizing the scientific method.
@ElParacletoPodcast
you take an easy shot without giving him credit on how sound his juxtaposing of examples to a mind/intelligence/consciousness is from relatable systems, be it organic or inorganic. Your concerned “bigger problem” would be his eventual address, since it should be a tool an organism advanced from aesthetic-experience-chemistries to none chemicalized signals.
you then are the “another failed” comment, due to your unattempted critique to contradict where his relations of systems fail.
but ya, it’s a fail, if unless original-progressed nothing from common ignorance on the overall subject of M/I/C since Michael Levin’s works on bioelectrics near appropriate steps to inquire on given academic knowledge to what is the materiality of M/I/C, which already code without the sequences of genotypes.
I’ll tell you soon, about all that up there slapped to you, sometime this year
I had to stop watching because of the jump cuts. I know they're supposed to be good for retention but ... they just have the opposite effect on some people. It's a shame - your presentation style is good it would have been cool to hear your theories - I just can't. I ended up leaving the video playing while I (finally) googled "why do youtubers use jump cuts when they're just speaking to the camera. Now I know.
Maybe try and own up to the fact that nobody can really work it out 😂
Another failed attempt to define consciousness, then you have an even bigger problem, moral thoughts, that have nothing to do wit the physical, but with abstract concepts.
you take an easy shot without giving him credit on how sound his juxtaposing of examples to a mind/intelligence/consciousness is from relatable systems, be it organic or inorganic. Your concerned “bigger problem” would be his eventual address, since it should be a tool an organism advanced from aesthetic-experience-chemistries to none chemicalized signals.
you then are the “another failed” comment, due to your unattempted critique to contradict where his relations of systems fail.
but ya, it’s a fail, if unless original-progressed nothing from common ignorance on the overall subject of M/I/C since Michael Levin’s works on bioelectrics near appropriate steps to inquire on given academic knowledge to what is the materiality of M/I/C, which already code without the sequences of genotypes.
I’ll tell you soon, about all that up there slapped to you, sometime this year