Was despondent before watching this and now I feel much better. Thanks, Dan, for all the work and for sharing it with us, especially in such a delightful manner.
@@shrutisarangi8387 material physicalism isn't deep. Therefore its advocatrs can be the wxtent they seek to overcome it while embracing it, as his rhetoric unflaggingly does
I think the problem of understanding consciousness is semantics. There are things that we perceive that are not necessarily in our immediate ‘consciousness’. The word itself is confounding. Multiple elements are necessary to understand the thing we finally call consciousness. First is perception. This gives us the raw evidentiary data (not unique to us). Next is the fundamental mental activity of naming or classification of all this sensory input (not unique but rare). We do this ‘subconsciously’ and while dreaming. Next introduce the concept of imaginative memory, the process of integration by way of creative narrative development (the difference maker). We have the ability to remember sensory input and then creatively manipulate it into the narratives we perceive as real time awareness.
I'm a big fan of Dennett, and I think in this video he explains his (often misinterpreted) theory of consciousness very well. Worth watching more than once to really understand what he's saying.
Incredible interviewer! I wish more interviews on experts were by people actually knowledgeable about their work and were well read on the subject at hand. Thanks for this.
I liked it when the interviewer said, "The color red is not instantiated in my brain. It is represented in my brain." Or words to that effect. And then Dennett said, "The former does not exist. The latter does." Or words to that effect. I felt I could understand and hold on to that idea.
"I cannot imagine, will never know, could never know, it seems, how Bach sounded to Glenn Gould. (I can barely recover in my memory the way Bach sounded to me when I was a child.)" from Quining Qualia, by Dennett Maybe that's why they used Bach's Goldberg Variations for the music of the video.
The analogy to the electromagnetic spectrum is beautifully succinct. I would extend this to determinism as well. Just because you understand that free will is an illusion doesn't break the illusion. The colours are as wild and vivid as ever, no matter what you know of their "simple" mechanics.
Thank you so much for sharing this video of Dennett. I've always enjoyed his talks about how some of the things we take for granted as we go about our lives can be beautifully deconstructed. Dan delivers his messages with joy and charm. He is a global treasure.
Very Good interview, only such scientific and analytical insights will get rid of religious and mythological ideas, thank you for making it freely available 👍
@@electrical_cord You too made a statement, but yours is false ... it's actually a lie. You can ignore the irrationality of your claims; I would expect you to.
I have been reading and watching his lectures for decades. The unbelievable truth of qualia, is that they are like all things, matter and energy moving through space and time. In the brain, action potentials responding to other action potentials result in the primary motor cortex stimulating the skeletal-muscles of the diaphragm and larynx extending and contracting to say, blue door.
@@James-ll3jb A physicalist but what else do we have? The more one learns about the brain, structure and function, the more one can see that choices are merely illusions. The same is most like true with regards to interpretation of reality surely. Consciousness as other animals hold it allows them greater chance of survival, humans are the same but we have spun an inner narrative as a result which we believe sets us above basic biological function. It doesn't though.
@@CheeseCrumbs00 It has nothing to do with inner narratives which for many people do not exist. And if detrminism is true, it may have nothing to do with 'physicalism'. Or as Nietzsche put it, "No one has ever even SEEN a 'cause'!" See Bernardo Kastrup but especially Don Hoffman on the intrinsic empirical deceit of materialism!
While I'm not entirely decided on everything he's said, I want to point out that this is why meaning exists within the "shared virtual human world" as I like to call it. We don't have immediate access to another's mind, but our minds were wired to create the same structures of emotions and meaning, at least mostly. So that when we use words like joy, love, pain, melancholy, wonder, and other more nuanced language, we can communicate all of our feelings because we are able to simulate what they are feeling and are therefore able to touch and live their world. Art, music, and language are all at the heart of existing in the same mental space as others and forming our collective reality.
I found that I couldn't just listen to Mr.Daniel on this video as if it were an audio podcast, due to the slight slurring and volume modulation on individual words made the task for listening without headgear incomprehensible. Before using this auditive crutch I decided to read his lips as well. This helped my situation immensely, making his discourse almost crystal clear. Being interested in thorough comprehension of the argument I switched on the subtitles. To my dismay, I'm getting a different translation of what my senses at first decanted from experience. If I were to analyze both versions of Dennett's text in all their permutations I would arrive at a nonlinear quantitative paradox.
I also had a bit of trouble and kept trying to get a little more volume out of my maxed-out audio. Near the end, Professor Dennett said what sounded to me like SEquale or SEqualia. Maybe I'm just to ignorant of the jargon to recognize quite what he was saying.
@@edcottingham1 Sequalae are things that result from something. I guess it's a fancy word for "results". It means all the things that are caused by something. In a sense, they "follow" from it, I suppose, and just as the sequel to a movie follows on from the original, the sequelae follow on from whatever they are the sequelae of. Like most philosophers, Dennett is often hard to understand and sometimes seems to avoid speaking plainly.
8:55 - privileged access to our own experience. This is like computer programs that need administrator permissions to access some advanced functions. Additionally you can get some misfiring programs to work if you start them as though you are the admin
He seems so perplexed by what the big mystery is. Almost as if he’s a non-conscious P-zombie who knows the lingo and knows the arguments, but actually has no idea what people like David Chalmers and Philip Goff are talking about. So, naturally it sounds like woo to him. I was like that until my mid twenties. I was a big rationalist and atheist, and a big fan of people like Dawkins and Sam Harris (and I still am all those things), but all of the sudden it hit me! There’s a vast explanatory gap in getting from the purely physical to subjective, first person experience. Who or what is the “thing” that’s having the experience? And I don’t think this gap can ever be bridged by empirical science. I don’t know what’s really going on “ behind the veil”, but if you think about it, there is no possible concept of an underlying reality that wouldn’t be bizarre if true. I mean, look at all that quantum weirdness. Is it really a stretch to think the explanation for consciousness is incredibly weird and, for lack of a better word, mystical?
I applaud your sudden insight and agree with nearly all you say here about Dennett but I don't see how you could still be a big fan of Dawkins. He strikes me as a militant polemicist, but no great thinker nor particularly scrupulous about mastering fields (like philosophy) that he likes to talk about.
@@torcher88 - I think Dawkins’s “militant atheist” label is a bit unjustified. When the “New Atheist” movement was getting popular, their were a lot of truly militant religionists trying to put pseudoscience into our public school curriculums, blocking sex education, pushing prayer in school, putting religious monuments in public spaces, etc. I think some robust pushback was justified. But I do think Dawkins has underestimated and maybe caricatured some philosophical arguments for theism, or at least some arguments against strict materialism/physicalism. And I have lately come to realize that a lot of materialists are arrogant, and rather unsophisticated in their philosophical arguments. Most of them don’t even seem to realize that materialism is a metaphysical position that fits the evidence no better than other metaphysical positions like dualism, panpsychism, or idealism. They also seem unable to “see” the Hard Problem. Dennett seems completely blind to it, and conceptually confused. Which I actually understand and sympathize with...because that used to be me.
All that said (and I feel very weird writing this), I think the Intelligent Design people actually have some valid arguments. Reading Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos” definitely made me a bit more sympathetic towards some of their arguments, but I still resent their attempts to inject what is _clearly_ pseudoscience into public school curriculums.
@@BugRib One of the problems of the "new atheists" is that they conflate science and materialism, which are not the same. Science is a program of investigation into whatever regularities can be found in matter (whatever that stuff might be), and materialism is the conjecture that all that exists is ultimately material. It's easy to see that the first thing does not entail the second, and I think Newton and the others who actually pioneered science would have expressed puzzlement by the conflation. I think it is in the interests of modern materialists to conflate these distinct things, because materialism is (if I may be frank) utterly untenable, but science has been successful and has acquired a lot of prestige. So, if you can brand those who oppose materialism as "unscientific", you can more easily dismiss their arguments. Unfortunately many people assume that the success of science automatically lends support for materialism, but IMO nothing could be farther from the truth. If everything is material, what exactly are the laws of physics that science posits/discovers? If everything is material, what are the scientifically curious _minds_ who endeavor to posit and test the laws of physics? If anything, a full consideration of science as a human activity totally upholds the traditional three-fold ontology of ancient philosophy: matter (the thing under investigation), mind (the agent investigating), abstract objects (such as mathematical equations, the things under consideration in the investigators' minds). Looking at science in this wide-lens view lends no support to materialism whatsoever.
@@torcher88 - Yeah, I’ve definitely picked up on the conflation of science with materialism/physicalism. They’re so dismissive of anyone who even questions the materialist worldview. I think it really all comes down to whether one can “see” the Hard Problem. I think the philosophical arguments against there being a purely physical explanation for consciousness are slam dunk arguments. But don’t think they’re persuasive enough to convince a longtime materialist who just doesn’t “see” it. I was seriously questioning materialism long before I had ever read any of the arguments against it just because of “seeing” the problem. Of course, you’re never going to persuade a materialist just by trying to tell them what you “see”.
The brain is essentially very much like any digital computer. All the neuronal stuff boils down to making connections between cells depending on information taken in through our senses as well as information already stored in other neurons. Ultimately, however, it boils down to patterns of neuronal activity produced by say looking at a face. Those patterns are compared (by other neural circuits) to stored patterns that generate a “response” in some neurons that says “that is Jerry” or “that is not Sally”. Fundamentally the brain is a comparator, just like a computer. You have no access to any absolute knowledge about the universe - only comparisons. “Qualia” are essentially “apples are red because everyone agrees that they are”. Then when you see a red car, you really mean, that car reflects the same light as an apple. No non-physical “field” is necessary for all this to happen. Consciousness itself is the highest level of comparison. You cannot claim you are conscious without thinking about it - that is, self-reflecting. That requires accessing your immediate memory - comparing your present state to previous states, and saying to yourself, in effect, I am still here, thinking about my “self”. You cannot be conscious without memory - particularly working / short-term memory. Consciousness is, then the “idea” that I am still here.
Ironically viewing the world as purely material feels more profound than seeing it from the spiritual perspective that we are brainwashed into believing it's truly amazing.
Suppose there are 3 doors in front of you each of a different color. You don’t necessarily recognize that they are different colors - you don’t appreciate the different “qualia” of the doors. But if someone says to you, “Go over and open the red door”, then you LOOK at each door and compare them (to each other, or within your memory), and identify the one that is RED. At that point, you experience the qualia of the door, but it is embedded in the experience of a comparison of some sensation with other sensations or remembered inforation.
Yes, there's a sensory map that relates the different hues to each other. But it's completely in terms of relationships; there's nothing "essential" about hues. And the relationship is based on the physics of your cone cells ... of the signal strengths of the axonal spikes caused by light impinging on them.
There must be a solution to "What is consciousness ?". Two 'puzzle pieces' are 1) thought is physically made of forces flowing through the brain's neural structures and sub-systems that include loops, comparitors, differencing and summing, and 2) existence is always and exactly now (the duration of every Now is exactly zero). This is why when being in states of flow, the sense of time disappears. Feeling conscious is 'simply' experiencing those changing, merging, and opposing forces in every moment. After experiencing this conclusion, and with practice, one can step into this knowable state by simply choosing to BE. The causal continuum of forces (that is the entire universe) is just running; it cannot do otherwise. Enjoy the ride.
My best guess: Consciousness had to evolve from the machinery that was available and molded by conditions. Brains developed for the purpose of evaluating the environment for the creatures that posses them. They do this by modeling the inputs from sense organs and continuously monitor and adjust the models to plan ahead and navigate for resources and reproduction. The images (models) we see in our "mind's eye", are only approximations of what our sense organs "see" and hear. The reasonable inference here, is that this constant, real time, evaluation and adjustment of the creature's self-position in space is what most likely produces the sensation of self. And why it mostly disappears when the creature is sleeping and navigation is unnecessary.
Three thoughts on that: 1. Binding Problem. Our brain is fully mapped. We know from each part what it does in receiving, processing and storing sensory input. But there is no part of the brain dedicated to putting it all together. These "models" you talk about, we have no idea where and how in our brain they would be created. 2. A brain doesn't need a consciousness to do that. Just process input and optimize behaviour, tons of lifeforms do that and even machines nowadays. What do you need to have a conscious experience of doing that? 3. It doesn't disappear in sleep. You dream, most of the time. You react to stimuli and so on
@@zumagallerte4669 OP here is pretty much correct. If the senses and especially the sensation of the passing of time (which is stored in a memory buffer of a few seconds) is what leads to a sensation of "self" and consciousness. If you disrupt that, then it results in experiences almost beyond description. Example - if one took too many edible THC products, then one experiences a complete breakdown of the self, as well as subjective time and any feeling of reality. That buffer of memory is truncated to the point where there is no longer an internal narrative. Interestingly enough, the experience itself gets recorded in an entirely different part of the brain, where long-term memory resides. This means that one can have a clear recollection of what it all felt like.
@@zumagallerte4669 "Binding Problem. Our brain is fully mapped. We know from each part what it does in receiving, processing and storing sensory input. But there is no part of the brain dedicated to putting it all together. These "models" you talk about, we have no idea where and how in our brain they would be created." It could be that there is a phisical field for consiousness connected to the brain, where the binding occurs. 2) a brain might not be capable to optimise behavior through the simple connections between neurons. Any computer we have is nothig similar to a brain. And by optimization we are talking about abstraction and correction, the only beings capale of doing that are considered conscious. 3) it does disappear. You sleep for few moments at night, most of your sleep is like being in coma ( not exactly but similar).
@@marco_mate5181 The way I see it, the brain is very very very susceptible to illusory perceptions. Even if all we are is a brain(something I'm VERY skeptical of), does not mean we have reason to trust it in relationship to consciousness.
@@123duelist not the brain, your consciousness is susceptible. You are a consciousness, not a brain, but that consciousness is determined by your brain.
Dan Dennett's view as he expresses here seems to me to be nothing more than an intentional ignorance or misunderstanding. Clearly qualia are not equivalent to our convictions about them. I can't tell if he's trying to tell us 'you don't experience things, you are just programmed to say you do like an npc', or 'I don't like the word qualia because it feels too non-material/subjective', either way he's feining ignorance of the obvious fact that qualia are there. (or he's just an npc himself)
13:30 It's so interesting how the conscious experience of a blue door in itself cannot be found or detected (i.e. it appears simply not to exist) and yet our inner world says clearly that it does.
Dennett's arguments are aimed at people who are non-technical. To an engineer the functional diagrams and circuit schematics can be interpreted by engineers who know they are just descriptions. The components on the circuit board even give an engineer marginal understanding unless its his design. Yes, consciousness is very complex, especially when we are only doing the science for only a few decades. However just like the key to electronic circuitry is knowing what happens INSIDE those individual components. Unlike electronics, neurons interact as something more than point to point devices. As an engineer I suspect electronics only mimic some aspect of brain biology.
Very interesting interview. I will say though that no matter how flawed our experience or our interpretation of our own experience of consciousness, the fundamental mystery of conscious experience remains. That said, perhaps the answers will be 'relatively simple' when we can better understand where reality and consciousness meet on the scale of existence.
My interpretation: Self-evidently, we are nothing more than highly coordinated, goal-seeking organisms. From the inside, the physical processing that is naturally and autonomically occurring at the centre of ourselves is objectively inaccessible, even while being subjectively present. From the outside, this very same processing is objectively accessible, even while being subjectively absent. In contrast with all other physical processes we observe, this central processing seems to be ontologically unique. Because of this, when we conceptually abstract and label it for purposes of discussion, we unwittingly reify it into seeming as though it is, in fact, a non-physical process (commonly known as "consciousness", "awareness", "cognition", "sentience", "mind", etc) that is unobservably generated by our own physical centre. This gives us the false impression that there is a real difference (and therefore, a vast explanatory gap) between our physical centre and our non-physical consciousness. Practically speaking, all that is REALLY there is a highly coordinated, goal-seeking organism, along with its own central processing and all that it involves. Other than this central processing, there is no reason why it feels like anything to BE these organisms that we are. This realisation is the dissolution of the "hard problem of consciousness".
If I'm understanding you correctly, (2 months later haha) is he saying that the processes that occur when, for example we experience a color, ARE the consciousness, like an emergent phenomenon. The electrical activity IS the qualia. This would imply that if we are recording a memory, it's not that there is a "ghost" watching from the inside but rather that the neurons are able to store the electrical/chemical activity in such a way that can be reproduced later. So, it can be said that we do record memories, but not by watching them in a recursive way but rather by "watching them" in terms of electrical activity at the same time the experience is just occuring. Then this gets shared and connected with other experiences and we periodically get the reinforcing feeling of "oneness" to consolidate that this is all a part of the totality of our brain (memories and values) and body which makes us us.
Daniel is really gorging on his "one free miracle". IF you start out in the wrong direction (or with the wrong assumptions), you will miss the truth by wider and wider margins.
Those who are certain that consciousness extends beyond death, become very competitive, in concern with whose consciousness will be rewarded with eternal bliss, compared to whose consciousness will suffer for eternity. “We are all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.” Anil Seth … neuroscientist.
The problem is you can't duplicate the experience. Even if someone were to make an exact copy of me it can never be put in my time and space. The only bridge to reality is consciousness.
An exact copy of you is fully exact, including brain states. An actual exact copy of you (not an identical twin) will share all the same memories you do.
Yet everyone exists between the front and back covers of psychology, neurology, and every other medical textbook. The reality is that we are neither "special" nor "unique," despite what our mothers told us. Also, plant life exists, interacts, and thrives in reality without the need for a "consciousness bridge."
@@woodygilson3465 I'm not claiming anything special. Actualization of the universe requires consciousness. Look at a molecule of estrogen. It's a component to a system. A system situated in a larger system. Plants are living systems with what appears to be minimal to no consciousness. It's still a component to a system.
3:00 at this part of the video I think it's helpful to focus your eyes exclusively on his right arm and simultaneously pay attention to the detail of his face.
Fascinating as always. I'm entirely in agreement with Daniel's undeniable logic that: 1) There is nothing in the brain but electrochemical signalling. 2) Most (all?) of what we experience about the world is a "user-illusion" generated by the brain based on incomplete or poor-quality sensory data. As useful and important a foundation as this is, it raises additional important and hard questions. 1) What is the purpose of qualia or indeed the conscious sense of self. It seems to be an unnecessary extravagance for the universe to add the rich vivacity of qualia and consciousness to mere electrochemical signalling that do not require them to do their information processing. Why are we not all mindless zombies, bereft of internal conscious experience? Why do we experience something rather than nothing? 2) If sensory experience is a user illusion, then to what or whom is the user illusion for the benefit of, especially if consciousness itself is "user-illusions all-the-way-down" as it were, and there is no "I" to experience the illusions. If we dissect a frog further and further until we get down to individual atoms we will logically conclude that as the atoms are demonstrably not alive, then the frog could as a whole cannot be alive, (it only thinks it is). Likewise, by analysing brains we observe that as all experience is mediated by electrochemical signalling which contains no qualia or consciousness, we could logically conclude that brains cannot experience consciousness or vivid qualia, and any personal reports of internal experiences to the contrary must be due to a "user illusion". The error in both cases seems to be that somewhere in the reductionist dissection process we have shot-past the intermediate level of structural organisation at which life and conscious experiences emerge and can be analysed scientifically.
If consciousness is an 'illusion'....then the whole of science is an illusion. There is not a single scientific experiment that has ever been performed from a genuine third party perspective as far as consciousness is concerned, as every result ultimately has to pass through someone's consciousness. Third party 'reports' of conscious experience are first party experiences of the hearer....something Dennett totally overlooks.
@Danny Holland No, that is not what that means at all. I was discussing the difference between brains with internal qualia and "philosophical zombies". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
@@frankfeldman6657 Anaesthetics provide an unequivocal scientific demonstration that consciousness can be affected by manipulation of the brain and its electrochemical signalling. This has been known for so long, it is not even worth further discussion.
He says we need to be able to explain the first-person point of view in third-person terms, otherwise we don’t have an explanation. And then says, we have a third-person point of view now so we don’t need the first-person point of view anymore. We have the explanation of the thing so we can just keep the explanation and drop the thing that is being explained. He is confusing the explanation of something with the thing itself. He thinks the explanation is real and the thing being explained is an illusion. So when he says, ‘I’m not saying consciousness doesn’t exist, it’s just not what you think it is’ he is saying consciousness is the functional explanation of consciousness not the phenomenal experience of consciousness. You can’t deny experience by explaining it. Being able to explain how something works doesn’t make that thing an illusion
Totally agree. Denial of first-person, subjective experience and qualia is desperate and just...insane. They are the most certain things to exist in all of existence.
The point Dennet makes here ist that consciousness is giving back an illusion when it is trying to explain itself. It is not the right tool for a recursive analysis. The Third person view will get rid of that illusion by explaining how consciousness works objectively, it will not eradicate the phenomenon itself.
@tkwtg Ok, then for evasion of any misunderstanding, can you briefly explain the hard problem and distinguish it sharply from the soft problem(s)? Honestly, even the different formulations on wikipedia are inconsistent: either ambiguous or trivial. And in case your definition contains the term "qualia", please explain or at least distinguish these from the words "feelings" and "sensations". I have a hunch, what Chalmers & Co mean, but there might be an army coming in on me screaming, "You just dont get the hard problem!", like one can read allmost everywhre in the comments on YT to Dennetts vids, so I just wait until I come across a definition to work on.
@tkwtg Thanks for your detailed answer! Its rare to find people on YT, who really are interested in an honest discussion and willing to put in the efford. So, Im with you on most of what you stated above. The definition with the "what its like..." approach feels a bit vague, but then I guess any more precise definition could allready contain/imply an answer at least for HOW consciousness is made. So, Ive learned: The hard question is "WHY is there consciousness?". - A WHY-question is of course more ambitious than a HOW-question. In science, WHY-questions are usually broken down into two parts: A HOW-does-it-work-question, where the functional principle is routed to other allready known functional principles from the pool of latest state of research (the easy problem, I take it) and a rather flat WHY-as-in-what-for-question, which is usually just referencing the accomplished function to a benefit to or even a necessity for the whole system like e.g.: Q:"Why do we have a heart?" A:"For pumping the blood around, to distribute the nutricians and collect the waste..." The benefit from a consciousness seems to me to have a second layer on top of the sub-consciousness, where feelings and thoughts are seperated a little more stringent and thus more objectivity can be achieved. The benefit of consciousness would then be a means to not give into any spontanious impulse and double check decisions by comparing them more objectively with the past and so plan further into the future. This conscious result is then fed back into the sub-conscious decision making process to gain better results. - But there is also another way to look at a WHY-question, as it can imply an option. I take it "Why is there consciousness?" implies: "- There neednt be one for the system to work.". This is where Chalmers zombie comes in play. I can agree for simple beeings like spiders etc it would be hard to distinguish a spider zombie from a spider, but that would only be due to the allmost non-existent level of consciousness in a regular spider. But the zombie thought-experiment in my opinion only delivers human zombies, that would be immediately recognised by any conscious person: We would call them either "severely retarded" in case they were allready born in that state or "severely brain damaged" in case that state was reached as a result of an accident or a disease. In no way would a human Chalmanian zombie act like a regular person and it certainly could not speak, as speech is an expression of contents of consciousness (ok, very rarely some sub-conscious content makes it into speech in form of a freudian slip). In fact, one could argue, whether severly retarded humans can reach the same level/state of consciousness. The two of us having this conversation really eliminates the question, whether one of us could be such a zombie. Consciousness thus has a necessity, when it comes to compete with other conscious beeings - Chalmanian Zombies would die out real quick, except for some good looking ZILFs. - There might be an even simpler way of answering the WHY-question: Consciousness could be INEVITABLY what it feels like to think with brains of such complexity. So, since we allmost all can accept rather flat answers for the WHY-question of most body-functions and the body-parts that fullfill those (nobody claims the question of why we have our blood pumped around by our heart to be a "hard question") and not even bother twice, then why is it so hard to simply go with the same flatness about consciousness? I cant see it as giving up rather than assuming the other one holds an empty sack and was tricked into buying it without opening as the knot is too complicated, still.
@tkwtg Hi again. In round 2 Im just quickly going through your answer paragraphs highlighting some things I have problems with or ideas for. Feel free to answer if you like, np if you dont. So far this is a very productive discussion. For the question HOW consciousness is created, I favour good old system theory (the peak achievement of modernism in my opinion) as the approach. Consciousness in my view is a higher function of the brain-system. It emerges alongside higher complexity of the brain. I consider that explanation to be sufficient, though it seems not to many, as it is in contrast to the intuition, that consciousness produces about its own nature. "This and everything else in your paragraph seems to already presuppose the notion that the physical brain cannot function and behave the way it does without having an inner experience." Yes! I really dont see an alternative to this. Such a complex brain without producing consciousness would be either malfunctioning or optimized for solving an extremely narrow category of problems - like a super parallel super stupid pocket calculator - what a waste of energy - evolution either would kill it or come up with a better useage. For the zombie: If fully functional human zombies (as observed from outside) are no problem for your imagination, then can you explain, how they can speak without beeing conscious? Wouldnt that mean speaking without knowing what they say like in the chinese room thought experiment? Why should they be interested in hearing about something, that doesnt exist to them? Its like a psychopath listening to person in agony telling him about pain without having a wound - the psychopath is completely puzzled in that situation and thinks that person has gone mad. "If speech is just a manifestation of physical states then how could it not speak??" Not of any state, only of higher ones and those are just as physical as the lower ones. When consciousness is a higher level of reflecting the data processing of the lower ones (the sub-conscious) then it is necessary for speech, because speech is nothing else than coded thoughts about thoughts and feelings. A sub-conscious zombie cannot speak, because it doesnt have this level of reflection. in short: - sub-consciousness: thoughts/feelings (but no words); product and state of the brain (regular and zombiotic) - consciousness: meta-thoughts/-feelings and also capable of coding these in words; also product and state of the brain (zombies not allowed here by definition) - speech: meta-meta-thoughts/-feelings coded in words; information once produced and coded by a conscious brain to be decoded by another conscious brain. (not of any interest to zombies at all, due to their disability of meta-thinking and decoding) The second WHY-question: I admit, I dont understand it. :( Third person explanation: Of course the third person explanation is, what we are after - we all have the first person experience allready, what else would you expect there?: - A first person experience combined with a first person explanation? Therefor evolution needs to make the step to give the brain a detailed self-diagnose-feedback (very expensive and might be even more in the way of getting laid than beeing intelligent allready is (ruclips.net/video/sP2tUW0HDHA/видео.html)) The only self diagnose of the brain so far has 2 escalation steps: 1: headache (warning) 2: uncounscious (emergency) - A third person explanation combined with a first-to-third person experience? Connecting 2 brains - SF, not going to happen within 100 years from now at least. There is a natural possibility: Siamese twins. But then, same problem for us on the outside: How could we understand, what they experience and then tell us? How could they even understand the difference as long as we dont kill one of them or cut them apart? I also have to admit, that I dont fully understand the party crasher analogy - Why would a mind crash its own party, when its allready there throwing it? On the posibility of the involvement of anything non-physical: Well, I dont have a problem using language of the dualistic view, but just in the metaphorical way, so that everything non-physical ist just a higher function/state of a physical base (here the brain). I refrain from putting a supernatural ingreedient into the puzzle to be solved and I dont see any need to do so for three reasons: 1. Never have I (or anyone through history) come across a puzzle, that needed such a supernatural piece for completion. Actually, without any evidence, the claim for a supernatural ingreedient turns into a belief. 2. Such a supernatural piece would make such a relatively simple puzzle enormously complex. I would rather say "I dont know yet" as opposed to summon a new god of the gaps. 3. Claiming that consciousness is made of a supernatural ingreedient, which isnt needed for anything else in the universe, makes this approach just too anthropocentric, like the soul in religion.
That's certainly one approach, but I prefer one that turns it on its head as Dennett does and starts from the premise that what we are inclined to take as primary (or in Dennett's borrowed term-- the manifest image) is actually emergent. One upside of this view is its amendability to scientific inquiry and experimentation.
I think he went off the rails at the point of disputing pain’s “intrinsic” quality. He moves to define the experience by its effects? No way Dan. That would mean that no sensations have intrinsic qualities. That is just ridiculous. Sex is only, what? Humor, music, etc…these have specific intrinsic identities. It doesn’t make it any less “real” as an experience despite it having a neurological or different level explanation. Music could be reduced to mathematical patterns of sound vibration, but then you’re not able to experience it properly. Is “beauty” an illusion. Yes. But it remains a truth in terms of experience. Why is this requiring a reductive explanation. And by the way, everything you’re saying was already said by Schopenhauer in Will & Representation (after Kant)…just that he didn’t have the scientific advantages of technology you have.
It's also silly to say that you can take away the negative aspects of pain and it would no longer be awful. If you took away those aspects, it wouldn't be awful because it wouldn't be pain anymore.
@@sectorsweep14 No, it's not silly ... and it has been established by drugs that do just that. "If you took away those aspects, it wouldn't be awful because it wouldn't be pain anymore." Um, exactly! Pain consists of nothing other than its consequences on your consciousness (not its "aspects"--that's just stupid essentialist talk).
@@marcelkincaid3450 I am an atheist, I have a scientific, materialistic view of the world, but Denette avoids the question, changes the definition and engages in gaslighting. To say that qualia does not exist is absolutely absurd; I have more reasons to doubt the existence of the external world than the existence of qualia. You are sitting in a cinema, there is a screen in front of you, a film is being shown on it. Dennett is engaged in explaining the film, he tells why the screenwriters wrote such a script, why the cameraman chose such a shot, why the director decided to do it this way and not otherwise, etc. He explained the film, but I don't care about the film, I care about the cinema. During the day I see one film, at night during dreams I see another film, I can close my eyes, start thinking about an apple and a third film with an apple will be shown in front of me. In all cases, no matter what film is shown there is a cinema, sometimes you completely switch off and the cinema itself disappears. A philosophical zombie is a cinema in which no one sits. He talks about the film all the time and studiously avoids all questions about the cinema. You can say that computers or neural networks have a film, because they react to external influences, but computers do not have a cinema. Qualia is a question about cinema, and he doesn’t answer it at all.
Dennets positions seems totaly weird to me. If "Me" is illusion, then who is expiersing that illusion. I don't think that term illusion got any seanse if there is not a conscious agent.
I know this comment is 2 years old and I hope my reply finds you well. I’ve held Dennet’s position for a long time and I’ve felt that the way our language is structured around “me” makes that idea nearly impossible to develop.
@@jameslapinel2603 the more I am into philosophy, there more I think, that it can be said about most of issues. A lot of problems cannot be solved, because they are based on poorly defined terms.
The lights are on, but no one is home! And there may be a part going on, but you wouldn't no it without Language. No Language no you, no counciousness, nohard problem!
I'm interested in the radicality of Dennett's position but I'm not sure if I subscribe to it. It's an interesting thought experiment that may be true. He essentially maintains we are zombies that can refer to ourselves - we have no internal life we just think we do. "Consciousness" is a trick of language... Humans can do this but animals can't- as far as we know. Animals can recognise themselves in mirrors but they may not have the thought "i am thinking about thinking". My cat may not have that particular awareness of herself as a thinking creature but I still feel she is "conscious"; she has a lot of the awareness that I have but there are limits for both of us - language for her (she can't talk) and the sense experiences that she has are beyond me as far as I know what hers are. She has a different world of smell and sight than I have and I have complex language wheres she has very simple language - she can tell me she wants food or to go out and such but I don't know if she has abstract ideas. She may have abstract thoughts but whether she does or not I know she can't articulate them. But how many conversations have you had with other humans about the abstract thoughts that they have? About whether they are conscious or not? It's not a conversation that we often have, we just presume we are all "conscious" which I'll interpret as "I am a being who will shy away from pain and deprivation and sources of stress or I will deliberately move towards sources of discomfort for some reason eg gym, winter swimming, fasting etc but I can largely communicate why I gravitate towards pain or avoid it." People are not confortable having conversations like that for long - they may believe it's a useless waste of time, or that you're under the influence of drugs or that you're even mad. For the world to work, many people must go around in a very limited state of consciousness to a large degree - they go working, shopping, homemaking etc without a single self-reflective thought from day to day.
8:23 third person evidence, picture playing a top down video game and seeing the character, not through it's eyes (first person) you can see farther and are more aware, but in these games you also become more responsible for more area around you.
I have a pain in my knee. It isn't what it does which is awful, it's that it hurts. It's intrinsically awful. I don't think we can reasonably escape that conclusion.
He explained to you what it means for something to hurt, in terms of what the condition in your knee is doing to your consciousness, to the content of your mind. You can't help but attend to your knee. If you could simply not pay attention to it, not have constant awareness of it, then there would be nothing left to "hurt".
@@marcelkincaid3450 I don't really get it. If I don't pay attention to it, then I would just say that in that moment there just is no pain but I still wonder why pain exists in the first person perspective when I pay attention to it.
Wondering what is left of our consciousness if we were to eliminate all the senses…by way of experiment…in some sensory deprivation chamber…taking into account Daniel Dennett’s point about the inflated sense we have of our conscious state and experience…
You would be in point consciousness at that time. In the pulsation state. Ready to go to any other reality. People call it astral travel but there is no travel involved. Just a change of reality frame. And of course reconnecting with the body in this reality frame
5:42 A dog CAN tell a story of what it's thinking about it. That's why they bark to save lives or sometimes even attack to do so. The can also be trained to be service animals. Just because it doesn't speak English doesn't mean it's not thinking or making choices. Assumptions like these make me more skeptical of these types of claims in his arguments.
I will be thankful to anyone who can help me with my two questions: First, given that one of the ways consciousness is defined (by Professor Dennett) is representing representations and reflecting on reflections, can someone tell me what are the processes involved in acquiring such ability of representing our representations and reflect on our reflections? It is obvious that we do not have such capabilities at birth but it is gradually acquired over journey to adulthood, or. still better, journey to "maturity". Second, are there any any possible ways to promote such processes in a healthy way? Thank you.
In a nutshell, this refers to the feedback-loops in our brains. Its not only new info coming in but also allready processed info beeing fed in again and again. And it is not correct, that we do not have such capabilities at birth. Its only obvious that the result of this process is not a meaningfull one at birth and that the brain constantly adjusts its connections by using them to gain better results. On the second part of your question: Beeing good parents and teachers does the trick quite well.
@@petermeyer6873 Thank you for your reply to my query Peter. This is highly contentious issue and I would like to continue to the dialogue for further clarifications. If you are inclined to continue the dialogue, my mail address is mukesh(underscore)a99(at the rate)yahoo(dot)com. We can agree to limit the emails at mutually agreed upon periodicity of once a week, a fortnight, or a month. Please let me know. Permit me to hint at possible questions: Given that human brain is not fully developed at birth, what happens to consciousness as various functionalities are added to the brain? As regards what are the "good" qualities of parents and teachers also needs further discussion. Once again, thank you for your reply.
Dennett is to me one of the greatest philosophers of all time. His functionalist, or let me say, enactivist perspective od consiousness is really enlightening. Maybe he is the biggest after Wittgenstein as a philosopher of mind.
I didn't get the concept of qualia until reading about people with blindsight--a condition where someone's eyes function on all levels but consciously. They can walk down a hallway avoiding obstacles, yet insist they can't see anything. They just "get a feeling" something is in their way, and walk around it. They get scared when there's a snake or spider in front of them, yet can't explain why they feel scared. Hold out an object and tell them to say what it is; "I don't know. I can't see." Get them to take a guess, just a random shot in the dark, and they get it right. Somehow on a subconscious level they can still see, yet they lack the conscious perception of vision. What is it a normal person has, that someone with blindsight _doesn't_ have, if not qualia?
Blindsight isn't as advanced as you're describing. The people with it can only correctly guess how something looks around 80% of the time, and it isn't enough to allow them to walk through hallways or navigate the world without ordinary optical vision.
@@badmittens5160 They can avoid obstacles. You can search a 2008 video here on youtube showing it. For someone who can't consciously see to be able to "guess" the correct item so much better than chance is astonishing. Dennett has spoken on the topic before, but to my knowledge never actually addresses the question of *what it is* you and I have that blindsight patients lack. "The conscious experience of vision" is what I'd call it... and isn't that just qualia's definition?
@@_WhiteMage So, I'm not actually disagreeing with your concept of qualia if that's how my initial comment came off. xD My comment instead was more an explanation for why Blindsight isn't necessarily "living proof" of David Chalmers P-Zombie thought experiment. A P-Zombie still has awareness of what they're seeing and is consciously able to differentiate between colors and the like which Blindsight inflicted people cannot. They only subconsciously have an awareness of their surroundings, and as I said before, it isn't nearly as keen as someone with normal vision. Even if someone with Blindsight can navigate a hallway, it's not as though they're advanced enough to feign sight to someone who doesn't know they're blind. I'm not sure if that was the point you're trying to make but people have used Blindsight in the past as an argument against the Hard Problem of Consciousness, but I don't feel like it holds much weight
@@badmittens5160 I thought the whole point of the p-zombie is they aren't actually "aware" or "conscious" of anything at all. They're like a sufficiently advanced robot that would respond as if hurt when you poked it--even though it isn't actually experiencing pain.
@@_WhiteMage No, they're not like robots per se. Chalmers described P-Zombies as acting exactly identical to ordinary humans with the only difference being they have no "internal world" or qualia, they're just acting out the motions of it without actually feeling any of it internally the way we do
What does the quality of our vision matter? Even without the faculty of sight, conscious experience prevails. If anything, how much we DO experience from such comparatively limited sensory information makes our conscious experience even more baffling - after all, if consciousness is a systemic functional outcome of our faculties, the less credence we give them, the more questions we have (why aren't HD cameras having experience, from their superior ability of vision?). Even without sight, the hard problem remains. The hard problem is not about our experience in itself, it is regarding why there is experience whatsoever.
The point wasn't so much about vision as it was the unreliable nature of our senses in general as a source of epistemic truth. Your "Why" problem isn't a problem. It's a nonsensical question rooted in old myths and ultimately, science denial in favor of idealistic fantasies.
@@woodygilson3465 eh… I think he’s getting at the point that the experience of vision is it’s own form of knowledge as is usually posited by people who bring up the thought experiment of Mary’s room. I do wonder if science could ever extract knowledge of subjective experience from physical material. I think some species of shrimp apparently have 17 more vision cones then humans. It would be cool if science could some how through text alone induce an awareness of the subjective vision experience of this shrimp that presumably has access to colors we have never seen. May as well throw in what it’s like to be a bat for good measure.
I see why Dennette’s view is the majority for materialists/physicalists; what makes me wonder is why they believe so fervently that consciousness is illusory, and that qualia are not real. I understand their/his wanting to avoid dualism, but Chalmers explanation of natural dualism seems to make a lot more sense of the personal “data” / experiences that we all have, and doesn’t require that experience of thought/consciousness to be some sort of ethereal/spiritual/non-physical entity. It seems to me (a layman) that he is overcorrecting by completely disregarding consciousness as illusory. He compares it to color and how we can explain color now, it’s just not what we thought it was, but doesn’t carry that same line of reasoning over to consciousness like he states that he does.
@@middleDZ I thought the same thing. It's a basic fact that our perception of color is some manufactured thing that mixes frequency of photons and compares with neighboring photons and is subject to all sorts of illusory tricks. That's fun to think about and cool. But it contributes very little to the discussion of consciousness.
All that exist is subjective experience. Show me something that exist outside of subjective experience. "If you close your eyes, the tree in front of you still exist" one might argue. The answer is to me - my eyes closed - what exists is an idea of the tree still being there in front of me, while I have my eyes closed. This idea is appearing in my subjective experience. The idea holds true most of the time yes, but the tree itself only exist when I look at it. "So when you hallucinate/dream a pink elephant, does that then exist?" one might argue. Yes, it exists when I'm experiencing it. But we have to differentiate between the consensus hallucination and individual hallucination. Individual hallucination has the characther that when it is over, the person can see that it wasn't part of the consensus hallucination, but an individual one, and also the characther that no other perons can perceive what that person is perceiving. Yet, both types of experience are equally real.
Because the grammar of our language demands a noun to "do" every verb, we mistakenly apply that to reality, which gives us absurd phrases like "It's raining." What is raining? There is only the raining. We also refer to "a shining light"-- but what else shines but light? The self is as illusory as a rainbow, which only appears to exist because of the way light shines through water droplets. Nothing has any inherent identity, he only appears through the confluence of participating factors. Like a wave that appears to move laterally but is only adjacent molecules of H²O moving up and down in succession, the self is just what the universe is doing at a given time in a given place. The universe is imagining itself from multiple, particular points of view. The most fundamental way to define reality is consciousness, an interplay of thoughts. Your soul is not in your brain, your brain is in your soul. You and the "outside" world are identical, the person you habitually think of as yourself is a role the cosmos is playing, a way to turn existence into a personal adventure.
So what do we do with this argument. It could be an argument against any one subjective account of anything happening. Important but also an obfuscation that could be used against any kind of witness, which is scary. Sounds like a good suppression tactic.
Maybe, I see it as more an epistemological tool. Experience itself is insufficient to reach a true conclusion about external reality. That doesn't make it useless. Darwin observed a variety of finch's through his experience, it would be unreasonable to jump to natural selection from there. But that experience sparked a line of questioning and experimentation that eventually culminated in the theory of evolution by natural selection. Our experiences do not provide answers but instead fuel for questions.
@@carlhitchon1009 you are correct to tie this question of qualia to the question of whether the self exists. Both are illusory in a similar way. One one hand there’s clearly something we are referring to as “I” but it’s in a similar category as “red”. We can agree it exists in a subjective sense but will probably part ways on whether it “really” exists. The “you” you reference is a collection of cells & neural patterns; much like Sam Harris describes , we can disassociate from this inner narrative to see it as a product of the brain, sort of like visual hallucinations.
This is just what zen and other (spiritual) philosofies say. And the next challenge of humanity is just what they and Daniel say:Take the mystery out and see what is.
The description before 2:19 - is called LOD in PC video game terms for video processing conserving. LOD - Load on demand - if you have a computer with extensive graphic processing capabilities (big cache for holding instructions close to the processor .. eliminating fetching) - you can load (render) more objects in a game within a preset distance from the focal point.
Consciousness as a nice illusion. Not really enough to get by in the world. This interview is an example of why we need Alfred North Whitehead's process thought.
14 minutes in: the figment of a pigment? I'm getting the Buddhist sense of anatta, no personal self. This sense, I brevet part of tge Buddha's enlightment, is behind his egalitarian and non-violent pholilosophy. It's silly to make hierarchal assessments or make war over fabrications that have no foundation in reality. Thoughts?
Or, 23 minutes in, on disenchantment, to use a Christian reference though out of context: 11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
I disagree with almost everything he says, but his example of pain was really off-base. He tries to say that pain is bad because of its effects, and then goes on to list a whole bunch of effects that were never the source of my extreme dislike toward pain. Pain itself is what I dislike about pain. He is doing that thing he does where he completely disregards the existence of the qualia themselves and only looks at the objectively observable physical effects.
He explains why you FEEL pain. That's because of the effects. We evolve thanks to have that feeling that pain os awful, but it is awful only because of the consequences that produces. Try to suppress every consequence that produce a LOT of pain, as he propose, and you will see that little by little that pain is less awful. You will get to a point in which you suppress every consequence and you won't find an example of a experience like that that is painful.
@@milorodval678 My entire point is that I disagree. Nothing about the objective causal effects of pain make up the real reasons why I dislike it. I dislike it because of the subjective mental sensation, that's all. Removing objective effects of pain but keeping the subjective sensation does nothing to alleviate how much I hate how pain feels.
That's funny, because his whole position seemed rather unintuitive and strange to me until he explained his theory of pain here... I never thought about pain in that way
@@enlightenedturtle9507 Of course, it is an interesting perspective. What is 'pain' when separated from all of its effects on the physical world? If someone claims that something exists, but then can't point to any measurable effects on the physical world, it might as well not exist. This is virtually always a good way of thinking. The only reason why it does not apply well to arguments about consciousness is because we directly observe the existence of the thing that has no obvious physical effects. This leaves us with a choice: 1) We either say something unintuitive, like that the only things we are capable of directly observing...the only things we are capable of knowing with certainty that they exist...don't actually exist. 2) We accept that there are things that exist that don't have obvious effects on the physical world. If you are a materialist, and you only believe that physical things exist, then upon hearing a claim about something that doesn't affect the physical world, you might think that it is irrelevant and meaningless. Even if it truly does exist, if it has no effect on the physical world, who cares? But at the same time, if consciousness truly is something distinct from matter, then of what relevance and meaning is the physical world if you take away all consciousness and subjective experiences? You could just as easily argue that effects on the physical world are meaningless and that only effects on the 'mental' world matter. Dennett's argument is also something of a trap, because while he seems to only be severing the 'physical effects' from pain in an attempt to show that there is nothing left after doing so, he is actually severing 'mental effects' in the process. For example, he describes pain as something that "takes away your attention". If you imagine a pain that doesn't distract you at all, it suddenly seems less menacing. But consciousness and attention are hard to separate. You can't sever away something like 'attention' and act like you didn't touch any of the 'subjective bits'. If you are paying literally no attention to something, then you aren't very conscious of it. Obviously a pain that you aren't conscious of won't hurt, because pain lives within consciousness and can't exist outside of it. A couple more points to consider: 1) It isn't even necessarily the case that something has to have physical effects at all to be meaningful. For all we know, conscious experiences are the 'meaning' assigned to physical events. They don't affect the physical world directly, they are just what give the physical world meaning. Again, where is the meaning of the universe without consciousness experiences? To say the physical effects are all that is important while disregarding non-physical conscious experiences as 'meaningless' is completely backwards. 2) If you work from the other direction, starting from nothing and slowly adding physical effects, 'pain' never seems to come into existence. I can make a robot that responds 'ouch' when I punch it, and water starts to leave from its eye, its robotic heart rate will speed up, its information processing systems will record that it was punched, and it will try to flee or fight back. At what point does it start having subjective experiences? An unconscious robot should be able to reproduce literally all of the physical effects of pain, without ever having a subjective experience.
@@stucrab Without the objective causal effects, there will be no subjective mental sensation. You can't separate one from the other, they're the same thing.
When your car lits "Low fuel" light it is clear that your car is thinking and can communicate that it needs more fuel. Cars can communicate their thoughts.
@@Esidar Since dogs have highly evolved mammalian nervous systems not unlike ours as well as demonstrate behaviours (such as emotions and memory) attributable to that nervous system which cars do not have or demonstrate, it's conceivable that dogs have thoughts but cars don't.
Bad thinking. Mistake. Dogs communicate they feelings, not thoughts. That is the difference between us and animals. We can communicate not only feelings but thoughts too, because we have thoughts.
Consciousness rather than being perceived as a state is often seen as function and confused with the mind. If it is not understood, seeing it as an illusion does not solve the problem. We cannot be aware because of an illusion unless a genie is involved. What should be discussed, and never is, is whether consciousness is subject to motion as is the mind. If it were subject to motion, to the three forces; strong, neutral, and weak, how stable would our existence be then? It would be elemental if it post-dated the three forces, and fundamental if did not. These discussions are always disappointing as the same superficial questions are asked.
I find Dans interpretation of the self empty, hopeless and almost certain to justify ideological atrocities: you only think you exist and experience hope and fear... let us kindly relieve you of that illusion.
So if our brains create everything other than a thumb nails worth of image at arms length, Please explain photography, do our brains influence what the camera images too? Either way your premise is floored by your own Blinkered scientific view of what we are and how we are. As always there is a thread of truth in what he says, our holographic existence perception is fundamentally true.
In reference to the story about his friend’s mom with dementia….if the brain is the creator of consciousness then that is that…but if you think of the brain as a receiver/transceiver picking up consciousness from an outside source than the physical degradation of the brain still disrupts cognition and memory etc….and ultimately leads to the death of the brain and body…but not of identity and consciousness…in other words, given a non local source of consciousness you can observe the same loss of cognition and function without concluding that the conscious being is destroyed…a materialist view really suggests that we’re not really here at all…
Where in the universe is the transmitter of consciousness located? And over what medium are consciousness broadcast? What is the receiving mechanism within the brain? Materialism doesn't suggest in any way that we're not really here. Materialism fully recognizes that we're here. Not only that, but that we're also only here for the brief period of time that we're here - we didn't exist prior to our existence and we won't exist after. We humans have a tendency to want to believe we're something special in the universe (anthropocentrism), even going so far as believing that we might wield some kind of power or influence over it, and that we're somehow (magically) more eternal than the universe itself. It doesn't take a psych degree to recognize the root of such beliefs.
@@woodygilson3465 that’s a great question…excellent! Ben Franklin said something to the effect of; “ Beer is proof that there is a God and he wants us to be happy”…I think he knew something about the attributes of cannabis and would have considered it evidence of providence as well…😎✌️🍺🎶🛸
I am a physicist and I will provide solid arguments that prove that consciousness cannot be generated by the brain (in my youtube channel you can find a video with more detailed explanations). Many argue that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but it is possible to show that such hypothesis is inconsistent with our scientific knowledges. In fact, it is possible to show that all the examples of emergent properties consists of concepts used to describe how an external object appear to our conscious mind, and not how it is in itself, which means how the object is independently from our observation. In other words, emergent properties are ideas conceived to describe or classify, according to arbitrary criteria and from an arbitrary point of view, certain processes or systems. In summary, emergent properties are intrinsically subjective, since they are conceptual models based on the arbitrary choice to focus on certain aspects of a system and neglet other aspects, such as microscopic structures and processes; emergent properties consist of ideas through which we describe how the external reality appears to our conscious mind: without a conscious mind, these ideas (= emergent properties) would not exist at all. Here comes my first argument: arbitrariness, subjectivity, classifications and approximate descriptions, imply the existence of a conscious mind, which can arbitrarily choose a specific point of view and focus on certain aspects while neglecting others. It is obvious that consciousness cannot be considered an emergent property of the physical reality, because consciousenss is a preliminary necessary condition for the existence of any emergent property. We have then a logical contradiction. Nothing which presupposes the existence of consciousness can be used to try to explain the existence of consciousness. Here comes my second argument: our scientific knowledge shows that brain processes consist of sequences of ordinary elementary physical processes; since consciousness is not a property of ordinary elementary physical processes, then a succession of such processes cannot have cosciousness as a property. In fact we can break down the process and analyze it step by step, and in every step consciousness would be absent, so there would never be any consciousness during the entire sequence of elementary processes. It must be also understood that considering a group of elementary processes together as a whole is an arbitrary choice. In fact, according to the laws of physics, any number of elementary processes is totally equivalent. We could consider a group of one hundred elementary processes or ten thousand elementary processes, or any other number; this choice is arbitrary and not reducible to the laws of physics. However, consciousness is a necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrary choices; therefore consciousness cannot be a property of a sequence of elementary processes as a whole, because such sequence as a whole is only an arbitrary and abstract concept that cannot exist independently of a conscious mind. Here comes my third argument: It should also be considered that brain processes consist of billions of sequences of elementary processes that take place in different points of the brain; if we attributed to these processes the property of consciousness, we would have to associate with the brain billions of different consciousnesses, that is billions of minds and personalities, each with its own self-awareness and will; this contradicts our direct experience, that is, our awareness of being a single person who is able to control the voluntary movements of his own body with his own will. If cerebral processes are analyzed taking into account the laws of physics, these processes do not identify any unity; this missing unit is the necessarily non-physical element (precisely because it is missing in the brain), the element that interprets the brain processes and generates a unitary conscious state, that is the human mind. Here comes my forth argument: Consciousness is characterized by the fact that self-awareness is an immediate intuition that cannot be broken down or fragmented into simpler elements. This characteristic of consciousness of presenting itself as a unitary and non-decomposable state, not fragmented into billions of personalities, does not correspond to the quantum description of brain processes, which instead consist of billions of sequences of elementary incoherent quantum processes. When someone claims that consciousness is a property of the brain, they are implicitly considering the brain as a whole, an entity with its own specific properties, other than the properties of the components. From the physical point of view, the brain is not a whole, because its quantum state is not a coherent state, as in the case of entangled systems; the very fact of speaking of "brain" rather than many cells that have different quantum states, is an arbitrary choice. This is an important aspect, because, as I have said, consciousness is a necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrariness. So, if a system can be considered decomposable and considering it as a whole is an arbitrary choice, then it is inconsistent to assume that such a system can have or generate consciousness, since consciousness is a necessary precondition for the existence of any arbitrary choice. In other words, to regard consciousness as a property ofthe brain, we must first define what the brain is, and to do so we must rely only on the laws of physics, without introducing arbitrary notions extraneous to them; if this cannot be done, then it means that every property we attribute to the brain is not reducible to the laws of physics, and therefore such property would be nonphysical. Since the interactions between the quantum particles that make up the brain are ordinary interactions, it is not actually possible to define the brain based solely on the laws of physics. The only way to define the brain is to arbitrarily establish that a certain number of particles belong to it and others do not belong to it, but such arbitrariness is not admissible. In fact, the brain is not physically separated from the other organs of the body, with which it interacts, nor is it physically isolated from the external environment, just as it is not isolated from other brains, since we can communicate with other people, and to do so we use physical means, for example acoustic waves or electromagnetic waves (light). This necessary arbitrariness in defining what the brain is, is sufficient to demonstrate that consciousness is not reducible to the laws of physics. Besides, since the brain is an arbitrary concept, and consciousness is the necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrariness, consciousness cannot be a property of the brain. Based on these considerations, we can exclude that consciousness is generated by brain processes or is an emergent property of the brain. Marco Biagini
@Ralph Macchiato I have not assumed that consciousness is something else than an emergence of physical states; I have provided arguments that prove this.
Where did you get your PhD? For being a physicist you spend an awfully long amount of time on RUclips copy and pasting this comment on every philosophical video you can find.
These perspectives of qualia are circular questions either way. It's like the concept of moral absolutism which requires parameters to hold. We are beings which experience things "as we know it". To wonder whether this human experience is a subjective journey is a natural thing to wonder. Sure. That does not get you anywhere though. The entire premise is a huge waste of time. This is why we assume a scientific objective reality out of utility. What is the point behind thinking molecules exist otherwise. All things perceived by default are subjective and that is the only thing that is truly absolute. How does a person expect to proceed if actually living by that idea? Naturally we have to assume some common ground in order to move forward. Forcing myself to believe in this objective reality out of utility, I at some point will have to believe in the idea that the experience any person has at any time is just a set of data corresponding to the internal and external physical world at the time. Demonstrable and reproducible. Not humanly 'special' in some magic way, but an astronomical number of things occurring which in subsets can be reproduced within the universe. Whatever you're thinking and experiencing right now as a person can be reproduced EXACTLY minus the point in space and time it's occurring because we do not have omnipotent power to control all time and space as we know it. You can either assume that or choose to assume any number of metaphysical questions to get lost in, never to find any answer. I was recently asked about the Mary thought experiment and it just seems ridiculous to me. Mary is automatically just given this absolute understanding of 'everything there is to know' about color without actually having that absolute understanding as proven by the premise. It's like asking if 1+1=2, then does 1+1+1=2 also? We have been capable of at least somewhat comprehending the countless variables our brains are constantly processing via the sensory input. Astronomically more than that of semi conductor computers. People don't want to admit how similar we process data to actual electronic sensors and computer processors because it puts us in the same "meaningless" category as Godless accidental chemical happenings in the universe and people hate that. We may function different but I don't see how we both don't process data we receive from sensory input. The depth of the programming is where the real question comes into play for me. Pain simply cannot be a simple programming of triggers signaled by nerves. It's like an automatic response with more complex forms of if's and elses which allows us to choose to endure it. Obviously I can't hope to comprehend it comparing it to basic programming though. It would be programming I'd imagine all of the Earth's coders would take many lifetimes just to understand the depth of before learning how to reproduce it. Even after all that time we would still be left with the question of whether our creation was having a conscious human experience. We assume so with other humans we meet because they look and act human. So hypothetically hundreds of years later we would still have the same unanswerable question even if we thought we knew everything there was know to know about creating consciousness.
I don't pretend to answer all the questions you introduce, and I'm not sure if I got all you said (don't speak fluent english and the matter is complicated) but the perspective of qualia and subjectiveness for me is utile in some disciplines as it's a remember that we can't know things just by how they behave and the most important, not only from our perspective. For me it is a useful perspective for example in social sciences and psychology (we don't study qualia in the carreer but postmodernism and the fact that we have to coexist with the unknown of other's minds and complex social realities. Perhaps I'm wrong or I don't understand it properly but what I want to say is that it's not really a nihilist or obsolete perspective. It opens the door and considers reality a very complex thing.
@@4haruchan I see what you're saying in that it's a form of utility and thought exercise which can be seen as beneficial. I just think we are too young in our discovery of how the brain works that we assume we have some magical and special lens of the universe which is unique and impossible to reproduce in any other unique person. I highly doubt that is the case. It just really seems that way as of now.
@@Magneticitist I aggree with you, but one thing is the uniqueness of our configuration (related to identity, being) and the other is the experience itself. Those are different things in metaphysics. A bad examle (I should think deeply to find a good comparative but) Perhaps we both have the same qualia (we experience the color red the same way) but you will have your own experience and I will have mine. Perhaps we both experience red the same but you experience it daily and I just experienced it once (or even never). And all this of course, for now at least, can only be theorised. Provably we will never confirm it. Dunno if all this makes sense. Of course I aggree with you that uniqueness of being is rare and it's a very antropocentrist concept. But I think that experience is another branch. And thanks for your answer, I find this topic very interesting! I have to read more about it to have a solid opinion.
@@4haruchan I agree our personal stories which lead all of us to our own unique views and feelings is certainly interesting in that there are an innumerable number of variables at play throughout a lifetime when a person is building his or her 'programming' so to speak. We have a large task ahead of us trying to figure it all out but I feel like the next 100 or so years is going to be very interesting in that regard.
But he does admit as Feyneman does "nobody understands it". Given this and the fact that a a camera suggests the existence of a camera maker then a good God is a possibility.
He acts as if knowledge lives on the collective level of the scientific community, comprising only of the things that can be communicated (sort of replicated) on the basis language of scientific theories. It as if the language itself distributed through the community was what is real to him and not the individual experiences of individual humans. Seems realy crazy, i disagree with it, but it realy looks like that to me.
There's not just the "representation of blue things in are heads" which might someday be measurable (the easy problem), there is also the reality of blue to subjective observer (the hard problem), which is a completely separate--albeit related--thing. Dan doesn't seem to understand what the hard problem is. I wonder if the ability to understand the hard problem might be a sort of Turing test for p-zombies.
In order for any thing to meaningfully be said to exist it must have some sort of fact-fixing relation with the world. The “blueness of blue” can only be described in by the way a specific wavelength of light interacts with our brain. That description is the exact same thing as the qualia of blue.
hearing some people recommend me this video and talking about how they "dont believe in qualia" has kinda shook me tbh. because you dont "believe" in qualia, you either have it or you dont. the only conclusion I can come to is that some people, likely including Dan, really are p-zombies, that it isnt a theoretical construct but in fact very real. which is.. frightening considering my entire ethical and moral framework is built on the idea that other people experience pain or other negative qualia when certain things are being done to them, and that experience of negative qualia is what makes it morally/ethically wrong. if I have to assume that some people just do not have negative qualia no matter what is being done to them, then... it is hard for me to justify any act against them being wrong, no matter how horrible or heinous. and when we get to that point... yeah we have a problem.
Dennett misses the ultimate paradox at the heart of it all, which is that there is not a single scientific experiment that has ever been performed, or neurological examination, or observation of a brain, that has not had to pass through the 'illusory' consciousness of a scientist. If consciousness is an illusion...so too is every scientific observation ever made using it. Which is essentially the whole of science.
A single experiment that passes through the consciousness of "a scientist" wouldn't be very valuable. It's through techniques such as blinding and replication that we get "good science." The goal is to minimize or completely eliminate biases when we conduct an experiment, have different teams or persons repeat the experiment, and the building of a model that continues to be useful with or without the scientists who first built that model.
@@akihitochan Every experiment ever performed has passed through the 'illusory' consciousness of scientists. Third person objectivity is always a subset of first person experience....even if you collate all that first person experience together. Science is a collation of replicated conscious experiences, which proves only that consciousness is consistent and not that it's content literally exists as perceived. You cannot claim in one breath that consciousness is an illusion....and then in the next breath assert that you've grasped objective reality using it ! You have to perform some pretty weird retroactive metaphysical bootstrapping to have your basic substrate and source of all observation be illusory and then shuffle your 'objective' reality prior to that illusion in the ontological order of things.
@@peterstanbury3833 Before I respond, why don't you make your *real* point? You've now moved the goalpost and appear to not be questioning the validity of *a* scientist's interpretation, but the interpretation of every scientist no matter how reliable and predictive the theory is. Are you merely stating Dennett's theory is flawed because it passed through his subjective mind? Because he already owned the fact he *could be* wrong in this very video. Are you trying to point out that ultimately *absolute truth* is unobtainable? Because science doesn't do "absolute truths". Or are you saying the whole of science is flawed because humans are subjective beings? That's truly what it sounds like - that you're trying to use this Dennett's explanation of the illusory of consciousness to ground some form of science denial that resides in your biases.
@@akihitochan I did make my real point...which you clearly haven't grasped. You cannot claim that your ONLY window on the world is illusory, whilst at the same time claiming that you've made objectively real observations using that illusory tool. If consciousness is an illusion...then ALL its content is illusory. You don't get a ' Get out of illusory-ness FREE' card when you pass 'GO' just because you're conducting a scientific experiment ! What's not to comprehend about that ?
@@akihitochan Let me put it another way. We do not know that there is any one-to-one direct perception of reality arising from conscious experience. The sky clearly is not 'really' the blue we experience....all would agree on that...but one can go further and argue whether even space and time are one-to-one perceptions of reality. The tendency to hold onto some last vestige of naive realism ( that what we see is what literally exists ) is very strong...almost programmed into us. But space and time themselves may be every bit as much qualia as the blue of the sky. Your entire framework for objectivity then gets called into question....if the very concepts that define an 'external reality' are conscious creations rather than genuine aspects of any real world. I'm not 'denying science'.....what I am saying is that science is NOT the study of 'the real world'...but the study of how consciousness perceives whatever real world there may be. That is inescapable.
@@b0ondockz838 I dont see him beeing moved at all. I havent read much from Kastrup yet, but I find his statement, that there is only kosmic consciousness/all consciousness is part of a kosmic whole, not in the least provable let alone see any indications to why it should be this way. This combined with the many statements online about his theories, that target at silencing any critics, allready gives his theories the taste of a belief system.
Indeed, and it is theorizing in arm chairs (and other places) that lay the foundation for our faith in any scientific method. Cut out arm chair theorizing and you cut off our trust in science.
The lights are on, but no one is home! And there may be a party going on, but you wouldn't know it without language. No language, no you, no consciousness, no hard problem!
@@Krod4321 "We don't have privileged access to what it's like to be us. We have privileged access to what we THINK it's like to be us, but, that itself can be wrong. As soon as we move away from 'belief,' in what we think is the case, to what IS the case, we're moving away from privileged access." This is just sad...
In a universe of nothing but matter, nothing matters, including convincing anyone that the universe is nothing but matter. Nothing he says matters, by his own belief, nor does his own life.
What the heck does "matters" mean? Things matter *to* people because they care about them--they have certain emotional responses to them. Dennett tried to address a lot of this sloppy fuzzy thinking but most people aren't able to think rationally.
@@marcelkincaid3450 You're funny. You think you exist.Your sense of self is just a delusion created by firing synapses.That sense of self that thinks things matter, doesn't matter. Poof, it's gone.
it only begs the question. cos it seems like a snake sawing off its own tail he is sitting on ;) that monistic materialism claims to try to take care of any loose ends while sitting on one.... enough with metaphors, here are specifics: To claim that monistic materialism is true, you have to infer that your senses are a reliable source of intel (how on earth you could learn about matter if not through senses?) And then you claim that five senses intel is illusory... I do not agree or disagree, it is just plainly self contradictory. I would not like to live with a self contradictory worldview, in psychology it is called cognitive dissonance, it is not healthy. I find no contradictions in Subjective Idealism as presented by George Berkeley. I'd appreciate someone proving otherwise.
Please think about a rainbow! Who has it? The earth? The “sky”? The air? The cloud? The rain? The sun? The photons? A man (who “sees” - it) or an animal or a plant or a mountain? 1: Noone has it. 2: If there is no such corresponding environment/causes/effects etc. than there is no rainbow. 3: Consciousness just like that. No such complex environment, no consciousness. If there is, still noone has it. If there is, then it is emergent phenomenon/property of the complex environment (smaller, bigger, phisical, biological, universal etc. ) but stil does not e x i s t s. 🌎🦉🦧🛰️ (or as Mark Solms says: consciousness is extended homeostasis)((Life is a process not a “thing”. Consciousness is a process based emergent phenomenon not “a thing”.)
I am really glad you mentioned this. For past months i was on a track of dissgarding notion of conaciousness as a thing/property but rather what is happening. A result of complex enviormental interaction. I will check Mark Solmon.
I really like something about his old-timey nautical vocabulary and his wise obese man Santa clause vibes. ...and I think also he talks about free will and stuff or something.
He was such a remarkable human I'm glad he was born
Was despondent before watching this and now I feel much better. Thanks, Dan, for all the work and for sharing it with us, especially in such a delightful manner.
Lol
Re-watching this after hearing that we lost Dennett six days ago. I'm going to miss his deep, agile thinking!
Lol. Agile, yes. Deep? No.
@@James-ll3jbofcourse he is deep...
If he's not deep, I would say no one else is either 😂
@@shrutisarangi8387 material physicalism isn't deep. Therefore its advocatrs can be the wxtent they seek to overcome it while embracing it, as his rhetoric unflaggingly does
Agreed! He has had a huge impact on philosophy. Steered it away from fluff and towards reality!
@@James-ll3jb Maybe you sheep for jeebus? I know few contemporary philosophers who have contributed more to the field.
I think the problem of understanding consciousness is semantics. There are things that we perceive that are not necessarily in our immediate ‘consciousness’. The word itself is confounding. Multiple elements are necessary to understand the thing we finally call consciousness. First is perception. This gives us the raw evidentiary data (not unique to us). Next is the fundamental mental activity of naming or classification of all this sensory input (not unique but rare). We do this ‘subconsciously’ and while dreaming. Next introduce the concept of imaginative memory, the process of integration by way of creative narrative development (the difference maker). We have the ability to remember sensory input and then creatively manipulate it into the narratives we perceive as real time awareness.
You're 100% correct. Finally someone who gets it.
Wow, an actual capable interviewer. Delicious dialogue, mind opening and self-tearing ideas.
I'm a big fan of Dennett, and I think in this video he explains his (often misinterpreted) theory of consciousness very well. Worth watching more than once to really understand what he's saying.
Incredible interviewer! I wish more interviews on experts were by people actually knowledgeable about their work and were well read on the subject at hand. Thanks for this.
Thanks, LL. You're welcome. :)
I liked it when the interviewer said, "The color red is not instantiated in my brain. It is represented in my brain." Or words to that effect. And then Dennett said, "The former does not exist. The latter does." Or words to that effect. I felt I could understand and hold on to that idea.
The background music is such a contrast to what he's saying. Thanks for the footnote on the music piece. This is professional.
Dennet was great and this is probably his best non technical explanation of the essence of a theory of consciousness. Thanks for sharing!!!
This blue door in the wilderness is such a beautiful metaphor
"I cannot imagine, will never know, could never know, it seems, how Bach sounded to Glenn Gould. (I can barely recover in my memory the way Bach sounded to me when I was a child.)"
from Quining Qualia, by Dennett
Maybe that's why they used Bach's Goldberg Variations for the music of the video.
The analogy to the electromagnetic spectrum is beautifully succinct. I would extend this to determinism as well. Just because you understand that free will is an illusion doesn't break the illusion. The colours are as wild and vivid as ever, no matter what you know of their "simple" mechanics.
This is so perfect. I understand and also desiring to understand it all more.
Thank you so much for sharing this video of Dennett. I've always enjoyed his talks about how some of the things we take for granted as we go about our lives can be beautifully deconstructed. Dan delivers his messages with joy and charm. He is a global treasure.
I believe this man is a living legend!
Not anymore
Very Good interview, only such scientific and analytical insights will get rid of religious and mythological ideas, thank you for making it freely available 👍
I think it lends more to that science itself is mystifying and that breeds the desire in us analyze and learn more.
If anything i've noticed that scientific studies have only deepened by belief in God. Especially in regards to quantum physics.
@@electrical_cord Well, that's utterly irrational.
@@marcelkincaid3450 That's a statement, not an argument. So I'll disregard it :)
@@electrical_cord You too made a statement, but yours is false ... it's actually a lie. You can ignore the irrationality of your claims; I would expect you to.
I have been reading and watching his lectures for decades. The unbelievable truth of qualia, is that they are like all things, matter and energy moving through space and time. In the brain, action potentials responding to other action potentials result in the primary motor cortex stimulating the skeletal-muscles of the diaphragm and larynx extending and contracting to say, blue door.
He'sq a simplistic physicalist
@@James-ll3jb A physicalist but what else do we have? The more one learns about the brain, structure and function, the more one can see that choices are merely illusions. The same is most like true with regards to interpretation of reality surely. Consciousness as other animals hold it allows them greater chance of survival, humans are the same but we have spun an inner narrative as a result which we believe sets us above basic biological function. It doesn't though.
@@CheeseCrumbs00 It has nothing to do with inner narratives which for many people do not exist. And if detrminism is true, it may have nothing to do with 'physicalism'. Or as Nietzsche put it, "No one has ever even SEEN a 'cause'!"
See Bernardo Kastrup but especially Don Hoffman on the intrinsic empirical deceit of materialism!
@@James-ll3jb I will take a look, thank you for the reccomendation. Agreed on the narratives point (and it is most definitely determinism).
@@CheeseCrumbs00 Thank you as well. Hoffman is especially worth while.
While I'm not entirely decided on everything he's said, I want to point out that this is why meaning exists within the "shared virtual human world" as I like to call it. We don't have immediate access to another's mind, but our minds were wired to create the same structures of emotions and meaning, at least mostly. So that when we use words like joy, love, pain, melancholy, wonder, and other more nuanced language, we can communicate all of our feelings because we are able to simulate what they are feeling and are therefore able to touch and live their world. Art, music, and language are all at the heart of existing in the same mental space as others and forming our collective reality.
I found that I couldn't just listen to Mr.Daniel on this video as if it were an audio podcast, due to the slight slurring and volume modulation on individual words made the task for listening without headgear incomprehensible. Before using this auditive crutch I decided to read his lips as well. This helped my situation immensely, making his discourse almost crystal clear. Being interested in thorough comprehension of the argument I switched on the subtitles.
To my dismay, I'm getting a different translation of what my senses at first decanted from experience. If I were to analyze both versions of Dennett's text in all their permutations I would arrive at a nonlinear quantitative paradox.
I also had a bit of trouble and kept trying to get a little more volume out of my maxed-out audio. Near the end, Professor Dennett said what sounded to me like SEquale or SEqualia. Maybe I'm just to ignorant of the jargon to recognize quite what he was saying.
@@edcottingham1 Sequalae are things that result from something. I guess it's a fancy word for "results". It means all the things that are caused by something. In a sense, they "follow" from it, I suppose, and just as the sequel to a movie follows on from the original, the sequelae follow on from whatever they are the sequelae of. Like most philosophers, Dennett is often hard to understand and sometimes seems to avoid speaking plainly.
8:55 - privileged access to our own experience. This is like computer programs that need administrator permissions to access some advanced functions. Additionally you can get some misfiring programs to work if you start them as though you are the admin
A very beautiful interview that touched me deeply. Thank you
You're very welcome. :-)
Why?
He seems so perplexed by what the big mystery is. Almost as if he’s a non-conscious P-zombie who knows the lingo and knows the arguments, but actually has no idea what people like David Chalmers and Philip Goff are talking about. So, naturally it sounds like woo to him.
I was like that until my mid twenties. I was a big rationalist and atheist, and a big fan of people like Dawkins and Sam Harris (and I still am all those things), but all of the sudden it hit me! There’s a vast explanatory gap in getting from the purely physical to subjective, first person experience. Who or what is the “thing” that’s having the experience?
And I don’t think this gap can ever be bridged by empirical science. I don’t know what’s really going on “ behind the veil”, but if you think about it, there is no possible concept of an underlying reality that wouldn’t be bizarre if true. I mean, look at all that quantum weirdness. Is it really a stretch to think the explanation for consciousness is incredibly weird and, for lack of a better word, mystical?
I applaud your sudden insight and agree with nearly all you say here about Dennett but I don't see how you could still be a big fan of Dawkins. He strikes me as a militant polemicist, but no great thinker nor particularly scrupulous about mastering fields (like philosophy) that he likes to talk about.
@@torcher88 - I think Dawkins’s “militant atheist” label is a bit unjustified. When the “New Atheist” movement was getting popular, their were a lot of truly militant religionists trying to put pseudoscience into our public school curriculums, blocking sex education, pushing prayer in school, putting religious monuments in public spaces, etc. I think some robust pushback was justified.
But I do think Dawkins has underestimated and maybe caricatured some philosophical arguments for theism, or at least some arguments against strict materialism/physicalism.
And I have lately come to realize that a lot of materialists are arrogant, and rather unsophisticated in their philosophical arguments. Most of them don’t even seem to realize that materialism is a metaphysical position that fits the evidence no better than other metaphysical positions like dualism, panpsychism, or idealism.
They also seem unable to “see” the Hard Problem. Dennett seems completely blind to it, and conceptually confused. Which I actually understand and sympathize with...because that used to be me.
All that said (and I feel very weird writing this), I think the Intelligent Design people actually have some valid arguments. Reading Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos” definitely made me a bit more sympathetic towards some of their arguments, but I still resent their attempts to inject what is _clearly_ pseudoscience into public school curriculums.
@@BugRib One of the problems of the "new atheists" is that they conflate science and materialism, which are not the same. Science is a program of investigation into whatever regularities can be found in matter (whatever that stuff might be), and materialism is the conjecture that all that exists is ultimately material. It's easy to see that the first thing does not entail the second, and I think Newton and the others who actually pioneered science would have expressed puzzlement by the conflation. I think it is in the interests of modern materialists to conflate these distinct things, because materialism is (if I may be frank) utterly untenable, but science has been successful and has acquired a lot of prestige. So, if you can brand those who oppose materialism as "unscientific", you can more easily dismiss their arguments. Unfortunately many people assume that the success of science automatically lends support for materialism, but IMO nothing could be farther from the truth. If everything is material, what exactly are the laws of physics that science posits/discovers? If everything is material, what are the scientifically curious _minds_ who endeavor to posit and test the laws of physics? If anything, a full consideration of science as a human activity totally upholds the traditional three-fold ontology of ancient philosophy: matter (the thing under investigation), mind (the agent investigating), abstract objects (such as mathematical equations, the things under consideration in the investigators' minds). Looking at science in this wide-lens view lends no support to materialism whatsoever.
@@torcher88 - Yeah, I’ve definitely picked up on the conflation of science with materialism/physicalism. They’re so dismissive of anyone who even questions the materialist worldview.
I think it really all comes down to whether one can “see” the Hard Problem. I think the philosophical arguments against there being a purely physical explanation for consciousness are slam dunk arguments. But don’t think they’re persuasive enough to convince a longtime materialist who just doesn’t “see” it.
I was seriously questioning materialism long before I had ever read any of the arguments against it just because of “seeing” the problem. Of course, you’re never going to persuade a materialist just by trying to tell them what you “see”.
The brain is essentially very much like any digital computer. All the neuronal stuff boils down to making connections between cells depending on information taken in through our senses as well as information already stored in other neurons. Ultimately, however, it boils down to patterns of neuronal activity produced by say looking at a face. Those patterns are compared (by other neural circuits) to stored patterns that generate a “response” in some neurons that says “that is Jerry” or “that is not Sally”. Fundamentally the brain is a comparator, just like a computer. You have no access to any absolute knowledge about the universe - only comparisons. “Qualia” are essentially “apples are red because everyone agrees that they are”. Then when you see a red car, you really mean, that car reflects the same light as an apple. No non-physical “field” is necessary for all this to happen. Consciousness itself is the highest level of comparison. You cannot claim you are conscious without thinking about it - that is, self-reflecting. That requires accessing your immediate memory - comparing your present state to previous states, and saying to yourself, in effect, I am still here, thinking about my “self”. You cannot be conscious without memory - particularly working / short-term memory. Consciousness is, then the “idea” that I am still here.
Great conversation, enjoyed it a lot. Loved that subtraction thought experiment too 👍
Ironically viewing the world as purely material feels more profound than seeing it from the spiritual perspective that we are brainwashed into believing it's truly amazing.
No one is brainwashed into seeing the world spiritually. Physically, yes. He's part of it.
Dennett is a great philosopher.
Suppose there are 3 doors in front of you each of a different color. You don’t necessarily recognize that they are different colors - you don’t appreciate the different “qualia” of the doors. But if someone says to you, “Go over and open the red door”, then you LOOK at each door and compare them (to each other, or within your memory), and identify the one that is RED. At that point, you experience the qualia of the door, but it is embedded in the experience of a comparison of some sensation with other sensations or remembered inforation.
Yes, there's a sensory map that relates the different hues to each other. But it's completely in terms of relationships; there's nothing "essential" about hues. And the relationship is based on the physics of your cone cells ... of the signal strengths of the axonal spikes caused by light impinging on them.
There must be a solution to "What is consciousness ?". Two 'puzzle pieces' are 1) thought is physically made of forces flowing through the brain's neural structures and sub-systems that include loops, comparitors, differencing and summing, and 2) existence is always and exactly now (the duration of every Now is exactly zero). This is why when being in states of flow, the sense of time disappears. Feeling conscious is 'simply' experiencing those changing, merging, and opposing forces in every moment.
After experiencing this conclusion, and with practice, one can step into this knowable state by simply choosing to BE. The causal continuum of forces (that is the entire universe) is just running; it cannot do otherwise. Enjoy the ride.
Weird that this doesn't have more views, great video
My best guess: Consciousness had to evolve from the machinery that was available and molded by conditions. Brains developed for the purpose of evaluating the environment for the creatures that posses them. They do this by modeling the inputs from sense organs and continuously monitor and adjust the models to plan ahead and navigate for resources and reproduction. The images (models) we see in our "mind's eye", are only approximations of what our sense organs "see" and hear. The reasonable inference here, is that this constant, real time, evaluation and adjustment of the creature's self-position in space is what most likely produces the sensation of self. And why it mostly disappears when the creature is sleeping and navigation is unnecessary.
Three thoughts on that:
1. Binding Problem. Our brain is fully mapped. We know from each part what it does in receiving, processing and storing sensory input. But there is no part of the brain dedicated to putting it all together. These "models" you talk about, we have no idea where and how in our brain they would be created.
2. A brain doesn't need a consciousness to do that. Just process input and optimize behaviour, tons of lifeforms do that and even machines nowadays. What do you need to have a conscious experience of doing that?
3. It doesn't disappear in sleep. You dream, most of the time. You react to stimuli and so on
@@zumagallerte4669 OP here is pretty much correct.
If the senses and especially the sensation of the passing of time (which is stored in a memory buffer of a few seconds) is what leads to a sensation of "self" and consciousness. If you disrupt that, then it results in experiences almost beyond description.
Example - if one took too many edible THC products, then one experiences a complete breakdown of the self, as well as subjective time and any feeling of reality. That buffer of memory is truncated to the point where there is no longer an internal narrative.
Interestingly enough, the experience itself gets recorded in an entirely different part of the brain, where long-term memory resides. This means that one can have a clear recollection of what it all felt like.
@@zumagallerte4669 "Binding Problem. Our brain is fully mapped. We know from each part what it does in receiving, processing and storing sensory input. But there is no part of the brain dedicated to putting it all together. These "models" you talk about, we have no idea where and how in our brain they would be created."
It could be that there is a phisical field for consiousness connected to the brain, where the binding occurs.
2) a brain might not be capable to optimise behavior through the simple connections between neurons. Any computer we have is nothig similar to a brain. And by optimization we are talking about abstraction and correction, the only beings capale of doing that are considered conscious.
3) it does disappear. You sleep for few moments at night, most of your sleep is like being in coma ( not exactly but similar).
@@marco_mate5181 The way I see it, the brain is very very very susceptible to illusory perceptions. Even if all we are is a brain(something I'm VERY skeptical of), does not mean we have reason to trust it in relationship to consciousness.
@@123duelist not the brain, your consciousness is susceptible.
You are a consciousness, not a brain, but that consciousness is determined by your brain.
Dan Dennett's view as he expresses here seems to me to be nothing more than an intentional ignorance or misunderstanding. Clearly qualia are not equivalent to our convictions about them. I can't tell if he's trying to tell us 'you don't experience things, you are just programmed to say you do like an npc', or 'I don't like the word qualia because it feels too non-material/subjective', either way he's feining ignorance of the obvious fact that qualia are there. (or he's just an npc himself)
13:30 It's so interesting how the conscious experience of a blue door in itself cannot be found or detected (i.e. it appears simply not to exist) and yet our inner world says clearly that it does.
Our brain talks to itself and spins all sorts of narratives.
Dennett's arguments are aimed at people who are non-technical. To an engineer the functional diagrams and circuit schematics can be interpreted by engineers who know they are just descriptions. The components on the circuit board even give an engineer marginal understanding unless its his design. Yes, consciousness is very complex, especially when we are only doing the science for only a few decades. However just like the key to electronic circuitry is knowing what happens INSIDE those individual components. Unlike electronics, neurons interact as something more than point to point devices. As an engineer I suspect electronics only mimic some aspect of brain biology.
If I had to choose one person in the world to have as a dinner guest it would be Daniel Dennett
I enjoyed "Tuesday coffee with Dan" at USCB ... Dennett, myself, and one or two others around a small table outdoors.
Who is this guy talking with Dan. He is immensely underated.
It says who he is up top: Louis Godbout
Very interesting interview. I will say though that no matter how flawed our experience or our interpretation of our own experience of consciousness, the fundamental mystery of conscious experience remains. That said, perhaps the answers will be 'relatively simple' when we can better understand where reality and consciousness meet on the scale of existence.
Whoosh! He explained it here (and elsewhere).
My interpretation:
Self-evidently, we are nothing more than highly coordinated, goal-seeking organisms.
From the inside, the physical processing that is naturally and autonomically occurring at the centre of ourselves is objectively inaccessible, even while being subjectively present.
From the outside, this very same processing is objectively accessible, even while being subjectively absent.
In contrast with all other physical processes we observe, this central processing seems to be ontologically unique.
Because of this, when we conceptually abstract and label it for purposes of discussion, we unwittingly reify it into seeming as though it is, in fact, a non-physical process (commonly known as "consciousness", "awareness", "cognition", "sentience", "mind", etc) that is unobservably generated by our own physical centre.
This gives us the false impression that there is a real difference (and therefore, a vast explanatory gap) between our physical centre and our non-physical consciousness.
Practically speaking, all that is REALLY there is a highly coordinated, goal-seeking organism, along with its own central processing and all that it involves.
Other than this central processing, there is no reason why it feels like anything to BE these organisms that we are.
This realisation is the dissolution of the "hard problem of consciousness".
If I'm understanding you correctly, (2 months later haha) is he saying that the processes that occur when, for example we experience a color, ARE the consciousness, like an emergent phenomenon. The electrical activity IS the qualia. This would imply that if we are recording a memory, it's not that there is a "ghost" watching from the inside but rather that the neurons are able to store the electrical/chemical activity in such a way that can be reproduced later. So, it can be said that we do record memories, but not by watching them in a recursive way but rather by "watching them" in terms of electrical activity at the same time the experience is just occuring. Then this gets shared and connected with other experiences and we periodically get the reinforcing feeling of "oneness" to consolidate that this is all a part of the totality of our brain (memories and values) and body which makes us us.
Daniel is really gorging on his "one free miracle". IF you start out in the wrong direction (or with the wrong assumptions), you will miss the truth by wider and wider margins.
Are you riffing on ideas from Donald Hoffman?
@@colingilchrist7005 DH is a legend, also bernardo kastrup
Inferior mind attacks.
Superb interview.
Those who are certain that consciousness extends beyond death, become very competitive, in concern with whose consciousness will be rewarded with eternal bliss, compared to whose consciousness will suffer for eternity.
“We are all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.” Anil Seth … neuroscientist.
The problem is you can't duplicate the experience. Even if someone were to make an exact copy of me it can never be put in my time and space. The only bridge to reality is consciousness.
An exact copy of you is fully exact, including brain states. An actual exact copy of you (not an identical twin) will share all the same memories you do.
Yet everyone exists between the front and back covers of psychology, neurology, and every other medical textbook. The reality is that we are neither "special" nor "unique," despite what our mothers told us. Also, plant life exists, interacts, and thrives in reality without the need for a "consciousness bridge."
@@woodygilson3465 I'm not claiming anything special. Actualization of the universe requires consciousness. Look at a molecule of estrogen. It's a component to a system. A system situated in a larger system. Plants are living systems with what appears to be minimal to no consciousness. It's still a component to a system.
@@HyzersGR and because of time and space copying a brain is impossible
@@sopanmcfadden276 What do you mean by "actualization"?
3:00 at this part of the video I think it's helpful to focus your eyes exclusively on his right arm and simultaneously pay attention to the detail of his face.
Fascinating as always. I'm entirely in agreement with Daniel's undeniable logic that:
1) There is nothing in the brain but electrochemical signalling.
2) Most (all?) of what we experience about the world is a "user-illusion" generated by the brain based on incomplete or poor-quality sensory data.
As useful and important a foundation as this is, it raises additional important and hard questions.
1) What is the purpose of qualia or indeed the conscious sense of self. It seems to be an unnecessary extravagance for the universe to add the rich vivacity of qualia and consciousness to mere electrochemical signalling that do not require them to do their information processing. Why are we not all mindless zombies, bereft of internal conscious experience? Why do we experience something rather than nothing?
2) If sensory experience is a user illusion, then to what or whom is the user illusion for the benefit of, especially if consciousness itself is "user-illusions all-the-way-down" as it were, and there is no "I" to experience the illusions.
If we dissect a frog further and further until we get down to individual atoms we will logically conclude that as the atoms are demonstrably not alive, then the frog could as a whole cannot be alive, (it only thinks it is).
Likewise, by analysing brains we observe that as all experience is mediated by electrochemical signalling which contains no qualia or consciousness, we could logically conclude that brains cannot experience consciousness or vivid qualia, and any personal reports of internal experiences to the contrary must be due to a "user illusion".
The error in both cases seems to be that somewhere in the reductionist dissection process we have shot-past the intermediate level of structural organisation at which life and conscious experiences emerge and can be analysed scientifically.
If consciousness is an 'illusion'....then the whole of science is an illusion. There is not a single scientific experiment that has ever been performed from a genuine third party perspective as far as consciousness is concerned, as every result ultimately has to pass through someone's consciousness. Third party 'reports' of conscious experience are first party experiences of the hearer....something Dennett totally overlooks.
You wouldn't have a point even if you could show that the brain "generates" consciousness. But, needless to say, you cannot.
"1) There is nothing in the brain but electrochemical signalling."............there's nothing in Shakespeare but letters of the alphabet.
@Danny Holland No, that is not what that means at all. I was discussing the difference between brains with internal qualia and "philosophical zombies". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
@@frankfeldman6657 Anaesthetics provide an unequivocal scientific demonstration that consciousness can be affected by manipulation of the brain and its electrochemical signalling. This has been known for so long, it is not even worth further discussion.
He says we need to be able to explain the first-person point of view in third-person terms, otherwise we don’t have an explanation. And then says, we have a third-person point of view now so we don’t need the first-person point of view anymore. We have the explanation of the thing so we can just keep the explanation and drop the thing that is being explained.
He is confusing the explanation of something with the thing itself. He thinks the explanation is real and the thing being explained is an illusion.
So when he says, ‘I’m not saying consciousness doesn’t exist, it’s just not what you think it is’ he is saying consciousness is the functional explanation of consciousness not the phenomenal experience of consciousness.
You can’t deny experience by explaining it. Being able to explain how something works doesn’t make that thing an illusion
Totally agree. Denial of first-person, subjective experience and qualia is desperate and just...insane. They are the most certain things to exist in all of existence.
The point Dennet makes here ist that consciousness is giving back an illusion when it is trying to explain itself. It is not the right tool for a recursive analysis. The Third person view will get rid of that illusion by explaining how consciousness works objectively, it will not eradicate the phenomenon itself.
@tkwtg Ok, then for evasion of any misunderstanding, can you briefly explain the hard problem and distinguish it sharply from the soft problem(s)? Honestly, even the different formulations on wikipedia are inconsistent: either ambiguous or trivial. And in case your definition contains the term "qualia", please explain or at least distinguish these from the words "feelings" and "sensations". I have a hunch, what Chalmers & Co mean, but there might be an army coming in on me screaming, "You just dont get the hard problem!", like one can read allmost everywhre in the comments on YT to Dennetts vids, so I just wait until I come across a definition to work on.
@tkwtg Thanks for your detailed answer! Its rare to find people on YT, who really are interested in an honest discussion and willing to put in the efford.
So, Im with you on most of what you stated above. The definition with the "what its like..." approach feels a bit vague, but then I guess any more precise definition could allready contain/imply an answer at least for HOW consciousness is made.
So, Ive learned: The hard question is "WHY is there consciousness?".
- A WHY-question is of course more ambitious than a HOW-question. In science, WHY-questions are usually broken down into two parts: A HOW-does-it-work-question, where the functional principle is routed to other allready known functional principles from the pool of latest state of research (the easy problem, I take it) and a rather flat WHY-as-in-what-for-question, which is usually just referencing the accomplished function to a benefit to or even a necessity for the whole system like e.g.:
Q:"Why do we have a heart?"
A:"For pumping the blood around, to distribute the nutricians and collect the waste..."
The benefit from a consciousness seems to me to have a second layer on top of the sub-consciousness, where feelings and thoughts are seperated a little more stringent and thus more objectivity can be achieved. The benefit of consciousness would then be a means to not give into any spontanious impulse and double check decisions by comparing them more objectively with the past and so plan further into the future. This conscious result is then fed back into the sub-conscious decision making process to gain better results.
- But there is also another way to look at a WHY-question, as it can imply an option. I take it "Why is there consciousness?" implies: "- There neednt be one for the system to work.". This is where Chalmers zombie comes in play.
I can agree for simple beeings like spiders etc it would be hard to distinguish a spider zombie from a spider, but that would only be due to the allmost non-existent level of consciousness in a regular spider. But the zombie thought-experiment in my opinion only delivers human zombies, that would be immediately recognised by any conscious person: We would call them either "severely retarded" in case they were allready born in that state or "severely brain damaged" in case that state was reached as a result of an accident or a disease. In no way would a human Chalmanian zombie act like a regular person and it certainly could not speak, as speech is an expression of contents of consciousness (ok, very rarely some sub-conscious content makes it into speech in form of a freudian slip).
In fact, one could argue, whether severly retarded humans can reach the same level/state of consciousness.
The two of us having this conversation really eliminates the question, whether one of us could be such a zombie. Consciousness thus has a necessity, when it comes to compete with other conscious beeings - Chalmanian Zombies would die out real quick, except for some good looking ZILFs.
- There might be an even simpler way of answering the WHY-question: Consciousness could be INEVITABLY what it feels like to think with brains of such complexity.
So, since we allmost all can accept rather flat answers for the WHY-question of most body-functions and the body-parts that fullfill those (nobody claims the question of why we have our blood pumped around by our heart to be a "hard question") and not even bother twice, then why is it so hard to simply go with the same flatness about consciousness? I cant see it as giving up rather than assuming the other one holds an empty sack and was tricked into buying it without opening as the knot is too complicated, still.
@tkwtg Hi again. In round 2 Im just quickly going through your answer paragraphs highlighting some things I have problems with or ideas for.
Feel free to answer if you like, np if you dont. So far this is a very productive discussion.
For the question HOW consciousness is created, I favour good old system theory (the peak achievement of modernism in my opinion) as the approach. Consciousness in my view is a higher function of the brain-system. It emerges alongside higher complexity of the brain. I consider that explanation to be sufficient, though it seems not to many, as it is in contrast to the intuition, that consciousness produces about its own nature.
"This and everything else in your paragraph seems to already presuppose the notion that the physical brain cannot function and behave the way it does without having an inner experience."
Yes! I really dont see an alternative to this. Such a complex brain without producing consciousness would be either malfunctioning or optimized for solving an extremely narrow category of problems - like a super parallel super stupid pocket calculator - what a waste of energy - evolution either would kill it or come up with a better useage.
For the zombie: If fully functional human zombies (as observed from outside) are no problem for your imagination, then can you explain, how they can speak without beeing conscious? Wouldnt that mean speaking without knowing what they say like in the chinese room thought experiment? Why should they be interested in hearing about something, that doesnt exist to them? Its like a psychopath listening to person in agony telling him about pain without having a wound - the psychopath is completely puzzled in that situation and thinks that person has gone mad.
"If speech is just a manifestation of physical states then how could it not speak??"
Not of any state, only of higher ones and those are just as physical as the lower ones. When consciousness is a higher level of reflecting the data processing of the lower ones (the sub-conscious) then it is necessary for speech, because speech is nothing else than coded thoughts about thoughts and feelings. A sub-conscious zombie cannot speak, because it doesnt have this level of reflection.
in short:
- sub-consciousness: thoughts/feelings (but no words); product and state of the brain (regular and zombiotic)
- consciousness: meta-thoughts/-feelings and also capable of coding these in words; also product and state of the brain (zombies not allowed here by definition)
- speech: meta-meta-thoughts/-feelings coded in words; information once produced and coded by a conscious brain to be decoded by another conscious brain. (not of any interest to zombies at all, due to their disability of meta-thinking and decoding)
The second WHY-question: I admit, I dont understand it. :(
Third person explanation: Of course the third person explanation is, what we are after - we all have the first person experience allready, what else would you expect there?:
- A first person experience combined with a first person explanation? Therefor evolution needs to make the step to give the brain a detailed self-diagnose-feedback (very expensive and might be even more in the way of getting laid than beeing intelligent allready is (ruclips.net/video/sP2tUW0HDHA/видео.html))
The only self diagnose of the brain so far has 2 escalation steps:
1: headache (warning)
2: uncounscious (emergency)
- A third person explanation combined with a first-to-third person experience? Connecting 2 brains - SF, not going to happen within 100 years from now at least. There is a natural possibility: Siamese twins. But then, same problem for us on the outside: How could we understand, what they experience and then tell us? How could they even understand the difference as long as we dont kill one of them or cut them apart?
I also have to admit, that I dont fully understand the party crasher analogy - Why would a mind crash its own party, when its allready there throwing it?
On the posibility of the involvement of anything non-physical: Well, I dont have a problem using language of the dualistic view, but just in the metaphorical way, so that everything non-physical ist just a higher function/state of a physical base (here the brain). I refrain from putting a supernatural ingreedient into the puzzle to be solved and I dont see any need to do so for three reasons:
1. Never have I (or anyone through history) come across a puzzle, that needed such a supernatural piece for completion. Actually, without any evidence, the claim for a supernatural ingreedient turns into a belief.
2. Such a supernatural piece would make such a relatively simple puzzle enormously complex. I would rather say "I dont know yet" as opposed to summon a new god of the gaps.
3. Claiming that consciousness is made of a supernatural ingreedient, which isnt needed for anything else in the universe, makes this approach just too anthropocentric, like the soul in religion.
That's certainly one approach, but I prefer one that turns it on its head as Dennett does and starts from the premise that what we are inclined to take as primary (or in Dennett's borrowed term-- the manifest image) is actually emergent. One upside of this view is its amendability to scientific inquiry and experimentation.
I listen to short segment from 20:40 to 20:58 several times. This may be what Dr Dennet wants to say about a complete theory of mind.
I think he went off the rails at the point of disputing pain’s “intrinsic” quality. He moves to define the experience by its effects? No way Dan. That would mean that no sensations have intrinsic qualities. That is just ridiculous. Sex is only, what? Humor, music, etc…these have specific intrinsic identities. It doesn’t make it any less “real” as an experience despite it having a neurological or different level explanation. Music could be reduced to mathematical patterns of sound vibration, but then you’re not able to experience it properly. Is “beauty” an illusion. Yes. But it remains a truth in terms of experience. Why is this requiring a reductive explanation.
And by the way, everything you’re saying was already said by Schopenhauer in Will & Representation (after Kant)…just that he didn’t have the scientific advantages of technology you have.
It's also silly to say that you can take away the negative aspects of pain and it would no longer be awful. If you took away those aspects, it wouldn't be awful because it wouldn't be pain anymore.
Dennett's just a lot smarter and a lot more willing to conceptually investigate things than you are.
@@sectorsweep14 No, it's not silly ... and it has been established by drugs that do just that.
"If you took away those aspects, it wouldn't be awful because it wouldn't be pain anymore."
Um, exactly! Pain consists of nothing other than its consequences on your consciousness (not its "aspects"--that's just stupid essentialist talk).
@@marcelkincaid3450 I am an atheist, I have a scientific, materialistic view of the world, but Denette avoids the question, changes the definition and engages in gaslighting. To say that qualia does not exist is absolutely absurd; I have more reasons to doubt the existence of the external world than the existence of qualia. You are sitting in a cinema, there is a screen in front of you, a film is being shown on it. Dennett is engaged in explaining the film, he tells why the screenwriters wrote such a script, why the cameraman chose such a shot, why the director decided to do it this way and not otherwise, etc. He explained the film, but I don't care about the film, I care about the cinema. During the day I see one film, at night during dreams I see another film, I can close my eyes, start thinking about an apple and a third film with an apple will be shown in front of me. In all cases, no matter what film is shown there is a cinema, sometimes you completely switch off and the cinema itself disappears. A philosophical zombie is a cinema in which no one sits. He talks about the film all the time and studiously avoids all questions about the cinema. You can say that computers or neural networks have a film, because they react to external influences, but computers do not have a cinema. Qualia is a question about cinema, and he doesn’t answer it at all.
@@fenixfve2613 You're all emotive; you're not rational, intelligent, or intellectually honest enough to understand Dennett's arguments.
Dennets positions seems totaly weird to me. If "Me" is illusion, then who is expiersing that illusion. I don't think that term illusion got any seanse if there is not a conscious agent.
We are more so products of the world than the world is a product of ourselves.
I know this comment is 2 years old and I hope my reply finds you well. I’ve held Dennet’s position for a long time and I’ve felt that the way our language is structured around “me” makes that idea nearly impossible to develop.
@@jameslapinel2603 the more I am into philosophy, there more I think, that it can be said about most of issues. A lot of problems cannot be solved, because they are based on poorly defined terms.
The lights are on, but no one is home! And there may be a part going on, but you wouldn't no it without Language. No Language no you, no counciousness, nohard problem!
I'm interested in the radicality of Dennett's position but I'm not sure if I subscribe to it. It's an interesting thought experiment that may be true.
He essentially maintains we are zombies that can refer to ourselves - we have no internal life we just think we do. "Consciousness" is a trick of language...
Humans can do this but animals can't- as far as we know. Animals can recognise themselves in mirrors but they may not have the thought "i am thinking about thinking". My cat may not have that particular awareness of herself as a thinking creature but I still feel she is "conscious"; she has a lot of the awareness that I have but there are limits for both of us - language for her (she can't talk) and the sense experiences that she has are beyond me as far as I know what hers are. She has a different world of smell and sight than I have and I have complex language wheres she has very simple language - she can tell me she wants food or to go out and such but I don't know if she has abstract ideas. She may have abstract thoughts but whether she does or not I know she can't articulate them.
But how many conversations have you had with other humans about the abstract thoughts that they have? About whether they are conscious or not? It's not a conversation that we often have, we just presume we are all "conscious" which I'll interpret as "I am a being who will shy away from pain and deprivation and sources of stress or I will deliberately move towards sources of discomfort for some reason eg gym, winter swimming, fasting etc but I can largely communicate why I gravitate towards pain or avoid it."
People are not confortable having conversations like that for long - they may believe it's a useless waste of time, or that you're under the influence of drugs or that you're even mad.
For the world to work, many people must go around in a very limited state of consciousness to a large degree - they go working, shopping, homemaking etc without a single self-reflective thought from day to day.
8:23 third person evidence, picture playing a top down video game and seeing the character, not through it's eyes (first person) you can see farther and are more aware, but in these games you also become more responsible for more area around you.
"Stay Hard" - David Goggins
I have a pain in my knee. It isn't what it does which is awful, it's that it hurts. It's intrinsically awful. I don't think we can reasonably escape that conclusion.
He explained to you what it means for something to hurt, in terms of what the condition in your knee is doing to your consciousness, to the content of your mind. You can't help but attend to your knee. If you could simply not pay attention to it, not have constant awareness of it, then there would be nothing left to "hurt".
@@marcelkincaid3450 I don't really get it. If I don't pay attention to it, then I would just say that in that moment there just is no pain but I still wonder why pain exists in the first person perspective when I pay attention to it.
HOLY HELL. THAT IS MY HOMETOWN. IT IS NEVER FEATURED ANYWHERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Are not beliefs/conviction caused by physical make up of subject?
Wondering what is left of our consciousness if we were to eliminate all the senses…by way of experiment…in some sensory deprivation chamber…taking into account Daniel Dennett’s point about the inflated sense we have of our conscious state and experience…
You would be in point consciousness at that time. In the pulsation state. Ready to go to any other reality. People call it astral travel but there is no travel involved. Just a change of reality frame. And of course reconnecting with the body in this reality frame
5:42
A dog CAN tell a story of what it's thinking about it. That's why they bark to save lives or sometimes even attack to do so. The can also be trained to be service animals. Just because it doesn't speak English doesn't mean it's not thinking or making choices. Assumptions like these make me more skeptical of these types of claims in his arguments.
I will be thankful to anyone who can help me with my two questions: First, given that one of the ways consciousness is defined (by Professor Dennett) is representing representations and reflecting on reflections, can someone tell me what are the processes involved in acquiring such ability of representing our representations and reflect on our reflections? It is obvious that we do not have such capabilities at birth but it is gradually acquired over journey to adulthood, or. still better, journey to "maturity". Second, are there any any possible ways to promote such processes in a healthy way? Thank you.
In a nutshell, this refers to the feedback-loops in our brains. Its not only new info coming in but also allready processed info beeing fed in again and again. And it is not correct, that we do not have such capabilities at birth. Its only obvious that the result of this process is not a meaningfull one at birth and that the brain constantly adjusts its connections by using them to gain better results.
On the second part of your question: Beeing good parents and teachers does the trick quite well.
@@petermeyer6873 Thank you for your reply to my query Peter. This is highly contentious issue and I would like to continue to the dialogue for further clarifications. If you are inclined to continue the dialogue, my mail address is mukesh(underscore)a99(at the rate)yahoo(dot)com. We can agree to limit the emails at mutually agreed upon periodicity of once a week, a fortnight, or a month. Please let me know.
Permit me to hint at possible questions: Given that human brain is not fully developed at birth, what happens to consciousness as various functionalities are added to the brain? As regards what are the "good" qualities of parents and teachers also needs further discussion.
Once again, thank you for your reply.
almost inaudible. please re-upload this great interview with correct audio levels.
Love the discussion!
Does anyone know the name of the motor proteins Dan mentions that use this sail-like mechanism for movement?
Kinesin and dynein.
18:07 is why I liked this video lol.
Dennett is to me one of the greatest philosophers of all time. His functionalist, or let me say, enactivist perspective od consiousness is really enlightening. Maybe he is the biggest after Wittgenstein as a philosopher of mind.
So you are a materialist. You are nothing more than a bunch of athoms or if you change your level if description a moist robot or meat Machine.
check out Bernardo Kastrup, also a giant, but on the other side.
Chalmers > Dennett
@@Philo-ul2uqsuperintendent
I didn't get the concept of qualia until reading about people with blindsight--a condition where someone's eyes function on all levels but consciously. They can walk down a hallway avoiding obstacles, yet insist they can't see anything. They just "get a feeling" something is in their way, and walk around it. They get scared when there's a snake or spider in front of them, yet can't explain why they feel scared.
Hold out an object and tell them to say what it is; "I don't know. I can't see." Get them to take a guess, just a random shot in the dark, and they get it right. Somehow on a subconscious level they can still see, yet they lack the conscious perception of vision.
What is it a normal person has, that someone with blindsight _doesn't_ have, if not qualia?
Blindsight isn't as advanced as you're describing. The people with it can only correctly guess how something looks around 80% of the time, and it isn't enough to allow them to walk through hallways or navigate the world without ordinary optical vision.
@@badmittens5160 They can avoid obstacles. You can search a 2008 video here on youtube showing it.
For someone who can't consciously see to be able to "guess" the correct item so much better than chance is astonishing. Dennett has spoken on the topic before, but to my knowledge never actually addresses the question of *what it is* you and I have that blindsight patients lack.
"The conscious experience of vision" is what I'd call it... and isn't that just qualia's definition?
@@_WhiteMage So, I'm not actually disagreeing with your concept of qualia if that's how my initial comment came off. xD
My comment instead was more an explanation for why Blindsight isn't necessarily "living proof" of David Chalmers P-Zombie thought experiment. A P-Zombie still has awareness of what they're seeing and is consciously able to differentiate between colors and the like which Blindsight inflicted people cannot. They only subconsciously have an awareness of their surroundings, and as I said before, it isn't nearly as keen as someone with normal vision. Even if someone with Blindsight can navigate a hallway, it's not as though they're advanced enough to feign sight to someone who doesn't know they're blind.
I'm not sure if that was the point you're trying to make but people have used Blindsight in the past as an argument against the Hard Problem of Consciousness, but I don't feel like it holds much weight
@@badmittens5160 I thought the whole point of the p-zombie is they aren't actually "aware" or "conscious" of anything at all. They're like a sufficiently advanced robot that would respond as if hurt when you poked it--even though it isn't actually experiencing pain.
@@_WhiteMage No, they're not like robots per se. Chalmers described P-Zombies as acting exactly identical to ordinary humans with the only difference being they have no "internal world" or qualia, they're just acting out the motions of it without actually feeling any of it internally the way we do
What does the quality of our vision matter? Even without the faculty of sight, conscious experience prevails. If anything, how much we DO experience from such comparatively limited sensory information makes our conscious experience even more baffling - after all, if consciousness is a systemic functional outcome of our faculties, the less credence we give them, the more questions we have (why aren't HD cameras having experience, from their superior ability of vision?). Even without sight, the hard problem remains. The hard problem is not about our experience in itself, it is regarding why there is experience whatsoever.
The point wasn't so much about vision as it was the unreliable nature of our senses in general as a source of epistemic truth.
Your "Why" problem isn't a problem. It's a nonsensical question rooted in old myths and ultimately, science denial in favor of idealistic fantasies.
@@woodygilson3465 eh…
I think he’s getting at the point that the experience of vision is it’s own form of knowledge as is usually posited by people who bring up the thought experiment of Mary’s room.
I do wonder if science could ever extract knowledge of subjective experience from physical material.
I think some species of shrimp apparently have 17 more vision cones then humans. It would be cool if science could some how through text alone induce an awareness of the subjective vision experience of this shrimp that presumably has access to colors we have never seen.
May as well throw in what it’s like to be a bat for good measure.
Fantastic.
I see why Dennette’s view is the majority for materialists/physicalists; what makes me wonder is why they believe so fervently that consciousness is illusory, and that qualia are not real. I understand their/his wanting to avoid dualism, but Chalmers explanation of natural dualism seems to make a lot more sense of the personal “data” / experiences that we all have, and doesn’t require that experience of thought/consciousness to be some sort of ethereal/spiritual/non-physical entity. It seems to me (a layman) that he is overcorrecting by completely disregarding consciousness as illusory. He compares it to color and how we can explain color now, it’s just not what we thought it was, but doesn’t carry that same line of reasoning over to consciousness like he states that he does.
@@middleDZ I thought the same thing. It's a basic fact that our perception of color is some manufactured thing that mixes frequency of photons and compares with neighboring photons and is subject to all sorts of illusory tricks. That's fun to think about and cool. But it contributes very little to the discussion of consciousness.
All that exist is subjective experience. Show me something that exist outside of subjective experience.
"If you close your eyes, the tree in front of you still exist" one might argue.
The answer is to me - my eyes closed - what exists is an idea of the tree still being there in front of me, while I have my eyes closed. This idea is appearing in my subjective experience. The idea holds true most of the time yes, but the tree itself only exist when I look at it.
"So when you hallucinate/dream a pink elephant, does that then exist?" one might argue. Yes, it exists when I'm experiencing it.
But we have to differentiate between the consensus hallucination and individual hallucination.
Individual hallucination has the characther that when it is over, the person can see that it wasn't part of the consensus hallucination, but an individual one, and also the characther that no other perons can perceive what that person is perceiving. Yet, both types of experience are equally real.
I thought you were worth an answer until you said "consensus hallucination".
Daiel denet is materialist matter only get shapes from conciouness they are interdependent
Because the grammar of our language demands a noun to "do" every verb, we mistakenly apply that to reality, which gives us absurd phrases like "It's raining." What is raining? There is only the raining. We also refer to "a shining light"-- but what else shines but light? The self is as illusory as a rainbow, which only appears to exist because of the way light shines through water droplets. Nothing has any inherent identity, he only appears through the confluence of participating factors. Like a wave that appears to move laterally but is only adjacent molecules of H²O moving up and down in succession, the self is just what the universe is doing at a given time in a given place. The universe is imagining itself from multiple, particular points of view. The most fundamental way to define reality is consciousness, an interplay of thoughts. Your soul is not in your brain, your brain is in your soul. You and the "outside" world are identical, the person you habitually think of as yourself is a role the cosmos is playing, a way to turn existence into a personal adventure.
So what do we do with this argument. It could be an argument against any one subjective account of anything happening. Important but also an obfuscation that could be used against any kind of witness, which is scary. Sounds like a good suppression tactic.
Maybe, I see it as more an epistemological tool. Experience itself is insufficient to reach a true conclusion about external reality. That doesn't make it useless. Darwin observed a variety of finch's through his experience, it would be unreasonable to jump to natural selection from there. But that experience sparked a line of questioning and experimentation that eventually culminated in the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Our experiences do not provide answers but instead fuel for questions.
Lone witness is an epistemological dead-end. Repeated corroboration builds confidence in the probability of the phenomenon being real.
@@chemquests This is true, i agree. Everyone will always agree in Perfect
@@chemquests It exists. It's how you exist.
@@carlhitchon1009 you are correct to tie this question of qualia to the question of whether the self exists. Both are illusory in a similar way. One one hand there’s clearly something we are referring to as “I” but it’s in a similar category as “red”. We can agree it exists in a subjective sense but will probably part ways on whether it “really” exists. The “you” you reference is a collection of cells & neural patterns; much like Sam Harris describes , we can disassociate from this inner narrative to see it as a product of the brain, sort of like visual hallucinations.
Was Dennett joking when he said that motor proteins were like helmsman, and that this was somehow inspiring?
No. He was a sailor.
This is just what zen and other (spiritual) philosofies say. And the next challenge of humanity is just what they and Daniel say:Take the mystery out and see what is.
The description before 2:19 - is called LOD in PC video game terms for video processing conserving.
LOD - Load on demand - if you have a computer with extensive graphic processing capabilities (big cache for holding instructions close to the processor .. eliminating fetching) - you can load (render) more objects in a game within a preset distance from the focal point.
Consciousness as a nice illusion. Not really enough to get by in the world. This interview is an example of why we need Alfred North Whitehead's process thought.
14 minutes in: the figment of a pigment? I'm getting the Buddhist sense of anatta, no personal self. This sense, I brevet part of tge Buddha's enlightment, is behind his egalitarian and non-violent pholilosophy. It's silly to make hierarchal assessments or make war over fabrications that have no foundation in reality. Thoughts?
Or, 23 minutes in, on disenchantment, to use a Christian reference though out of context: 11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
I disagree with almost everything he says, but his example of pain was really off-base. He tries to say that pain is bad because of its effects, and then goes on to list a whole bunch of effects that were never the source of my extreme dislike toward pain. Pain itself is what I dislike about pain. He is doing that thing he does where he completely disregards the existence of the qualia themselves and only looks at the objectively observable physical effects.
He explains why you FEEL pain. That's because of the effects. We evolve thanks to have that feeling that pain os awful, but it is awful only because of the consequences that produces.
Try to suppress every consequence that produce a LOT of pain, as he propose, and you will see that little by little that pain is less awful. You will get to a point in which you suppress every consequence and you won't find an example of a experience like that that is painful.
@@milorodval678 My entire point is that I disagree. Nothing about the objective causal effects of pain make up the real reasons why I dislike it. I dislike it because of the subjective mental sensation, that's all. Removing objective effects of pain but keeping the subjective sensation does nothing to alleviate how much I hate how pain feels.
That's funny, because his whole position seemed rather unintuitive and strange to me until he explained his theory of pain here... I never thought about pain in that way
@@enlightenedturtle9507 Of course, it is an interesting perspective. What is 'pain' when separated from all of its effects on the physical world?
If someone claims that something exists, but then can't point to any measurable effects on the physical world, it might as well not exist. This is virtually always a good way of thinking. The only reason why it does not apply well to arguments about consciousness is because we directly observe the existence of the thing that has no obvious physical effects. This leaves us with a choice:
1) We either say something unintuitive, like that the only things we are capable of directly observing...the only things we are capable of knowing with certainty that they exist...don't actually exist.
2) We accept that there are things that exist that don't have obvious effects on the physical world.
If you are a materialist, and you only believe that physical things exist, then upon hearing a claim about something that doesn't affect the physical world, you might think that it is irrelevant and meaningless. Even if it truly does exist, if it has no effect on the physical world, who cares?
But at the same time, if consciousness truly is something distinct from matter, then of what relevance and meaning is the physical world if you take away all consciousness and subjective experiences? You could just as easily argue that effects on the physical world are meaningless and that only effects on the 'mental' world matter.
Dennett's argument is also something of a trap, because while he seems to only be severing the 'physical effects' from pain in an attempt to show that there is nothing left after doing so, he is actually severing 'mental effects' in the process. For example, he describes pain as something that "takes away your attention". If you imagine a pain that doesn't distract you at all, it suddenly seems less menacing. But consciousness and attention are hard to separate. You can't sever away something like 'attention' and act like you didn't touch any of the 'subjective bits'. If you are paying literally no attention to something, then you aren't very conscious of it. Obviously a pain that you aren't conscious of won't hurt, because pain lives within consciousness and can't exist outside of it.
A couple more points to consider:
1) It isn't even necessarily the case that something has to have physical effects at all to be meaningful. For all we know, conscious experiences are the 'meaning' assigned to physical events. They don't affect the physical world directly, they are just what give the physical world meaning. Again, where is the meaning of the universe without consciousness experiences? To say the physical effects are all that is important while disregarding non-physical conscious experiences as 'meaningless' is completely backwards.
2) If you work from the other direction, starting from nothing and slowly adding physical effects, 'pain' never seems to come into existence. I can make a robot that responds 'ouch' when I punch it, and water starts to leave from its eye, its robotic heart rate will speed up, its information processing systems will record that it was punched, and it will try to flee or fight back. At what point does it start having subjective experiences? An unconscious robot should be able to reproduce literally all of the physical effects of pain, without ever having a subjective experience.
@@stucrab Without the objective causal effects, there will be no subjective mental sensation. You can't separate one from the other, they're the same thing.
Could also be an explanation for why we are blind to the truth. All the time. Which is something i will ignore. Or go insane.
When a dog begs for food it is clear they are thinking and they communicate that they want food. Animals can communicate their thoughts.
When your car lits "Low fuel" light it is clear that your car is thinking and can communicate that it needs more fuel. Cars can communicate their thoughts.
@@Esidar In that case, there's no evidence that you have thoughts either.
@@Esidar Since dogs have highly evolved mammalian nervous systems not unlike ours as well as demonstrate behaviours (such as emotions and memory) attributable to that nervous system which cars do not have or demonstrate, it's conceivable that dogs have thoughts but cars don't.
Bad thinking. Mistake. Dogs communicate they feelings, not thoughts. That is the difference between us and animals. We can communicate not only feelings but thoughts too, because we have thoughts.
@@urgestefan, how do you differentiate feelings and thoughts? Apparently dogs dream. That's a form of thinking isn't it?
Of course there had to be a blue door in a snowy field, why wouldn't there? :-D
Consciousness rather than being perceived as a state is often seen as function and confused with the mind. If it is not understood, seeing it as an illusion does not solve the problem. We cannot be aware because of an illusion unless a genie is involved. What should be discussed, and never is, is whether consciousness is subject to motion as is the mind. If it were subject to motion, to the three forces; strong, neutral, and weak, how stable would our existence be then? It would be elemental if it post-dated the three forces, and fundamental if did not. These discussions are always disappointing as the same superficial questions are asked.
I find Dans interpretation of the self empty, hopeless and almost certain to justify ideological atrocities: you only think you exist and experience hope and fear... let us kindly relieve you of that illusion.
Oh you poor thing.
So if our brains create everything other than a thumb nails worth of image at arms length,
Please explain photography, do our brains influence what the camera images too? Either way your premise is floored by your own Blinkered scientific view of what we are and how we are.
As always there is a thread of truth in what he says, our holographic existence perception is fundamentally true.
In reference to the story about his friend’s mom with dementia….if the brain is the creator of consciousness then that is that…but if you think of the brain as a receiver/transceiver picking up consciousness from an outside source than the physical degradation of the brain still disrupts cognition and memory etc….and ultimately leads to the death of the brain and body…but not of identity and consciousness…in other words, given a non local source of consciousness you can observe the same loss of cognition and function without concluding that the conscious being is destroyed…a materialist view really suggests that we’re not really here at all…
Where in the universe is the transmitter of consciousness located? And over what medium are consciousness broadcast? What is the receiving mechanism within the brain?
Materialism doesn't suggest in any way that we're not really here. Materialism fully recognizes that we're here. Not only that, but that we're also only here for the brief period of time that we're here - we didn't exist prior to our existence and we won't exist after.
We humans have a tendency to want to believe we're something special in the universe (anthropocentrism), even going so far as believing that we might wield some kind of power or influence over it, and that we're somehow (magically) more eternal than the universe itself. It doesn't take a psych degree to recognize the root of such beliefs.
@@woodygilson3465 that’s a great question…excellent! Ben Franklin said something to the effect of; “ Beer is proof that there is a God and he wants us to be happy”…I think he knew something about the attributes of cannabis and would have considered it evidence of providence as well…😎✌️🍺🎶🛸
@@docsoulman9352 😊✌️
I am a physicist and I will provide solid arguments that prove that consciousness cannot be generated by the brain (in my youtube channel you can find a video with more detailed explanations). Many argue that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but it is possible to show that such hypothesis is inconsistent with our scientific knowledges. In fact, it is possible to show that all the examples of emergent properties consists of concepts used to describe how an external object appear to our conscious mind, and not how it is in itself, which means how the object is independently from our observation. In other words, emergent properties are ideas conceived to describe or classify, according to arbitrary criteria and from an arbitrary point of view, certain processes or systems. In summary, emergent properties are intrinsically subjective, since they are conceptual models based on the arbitrary choice to focus on certain aspects of a system and neglet other aspects, such as microscopic structures and processes; emergent properties consist of ideas through which we describe how the external reality appears to our conscious mind: without a conscious mind, these ideas (= emergent properties) would not exist at all.
Here comes my first argument: arbitrariness, subjectivity, classifications and approximate descriptions, imply the existence of a conscious mind, which can arbitrarily choose a specific point of view and focus on certain aspects while neglecting others. It is obvious that consciousness cannot be considered an emergent property of the physical reality, because consciousenss is a preliminary necessary condition for the existence of any emergent property. We have then a logical contradiction. Nothing which presupposes the existence of consciousness can be used to try to explain the existence of consciousness.
Here comes my second argument: our scientific knowledge shows that brain processes consist of sequences of ordinary elementary physical processes; since consciousness is not a property of ordinary elementary physical processes, then a succession of such processes cannot have cosciousness as a property. In fact we can break down the process and analyze it step by step, and in every step consciousness would be absent, so there would never be any consciousness during the entire sequence of elementary processes. It must be also understood that considering a group of elementary processes together as a whole is an arbitrary choice. In fact, according to the laws of physics, any number of elementary processes is totally equivalent. We could consider a group of one hundred elementary processes or ten thousand elementary processes, or any other number; this choice is arbitrary and not reducible to the laws of physics. However, consciousness is a necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrary choices; therefore consciousness cannot be a property of a sequence of elementary processes as a whole, because such sequence as a whole is only an arbitrary and abstract concept that cannot exist independently of a conscious mind.
Here comes my third argument: It should also be considered that brain processes consist of billions of sequences of elementary processes that take place in different points of the brain; if we attributed to these processes the property of consciousness, we would have to associate with the brain billions of different consciousnesses, that is billions of minds and personalities, each with its own self-awareness and will; this contradicts our direct experience, that is, our awareness of being a single person who is able to control the voluntary movements of his own body with his own will. If cerebral processes are analyzed taking into account the laws of physics, these processes do not identify any unity; this missing unit is the necessarily non-physical element (precisely because it is missing in the brain), the element that interprets the brain processes and generates a unitary conscious state, that is the human mind.
Here comes my forth argument: Consciousness is characterized by the fact that self-awareness is an immediate intuition that cannot be broken down or fragmented into simpler elements. This characteristic of consciousness of presenting itself as a unitary and non-decomposable state, not fragmented into billions of personalities, does not correspond to the quantum description of brain processes, which instead consist of billions of sequences of elementary incoherent quantum processes. When someone claims that consciousness is a property of the brain, they are implicitly considering the brain as a whole, an entity with its own specific properties, other than the properties of the components. From the physical point of view, the brain is not a whole, because its quantum state is not a coherent state, as in the case of entangled systems; the very fact of speaking of "brain" rather than many cells that have different quantum states, is an arbitrary choice. This is an important aspect, because, as I have said, consciousness is a necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrariness. So, if a system can be considered decomposable and considering it as a whole is an arbitrary choice, then it is inconsistent to assume that such a system can have or generate consciousness, since consciousness is a necessary precondition for the existence of any arbitrary choice. In other words, to regard consciousness as a property ofthe brain, we must first define what the brain is, and to do so we must rely only on the laws of physics, without introducing arbitrary notions extraneous to them; if this cannot be done, then it means that every property we attribute to the brain is not reducible to the laws of physics, and therefore such property would be nonphysical. Since the interactions between the quantum particles that make up the brain are ordinary interactions, it is not actually possible to define the brain based solely on the laws of physics. The only way to define the brain is to arbitrarily establish that a certain number of particles belong to it and others do not belong to it, but such arbitrariness is not admissible. In fact, the brain is not physically separated from the other organs of the body, with which it interacts, nor is it physically isolated from the external environment, just as it is not isolated from other brains, since we can communicate with other people, and to do so we use physical means, for example acoustic waves or electromagnetic waves (light). This necessary arbitrariness in defining what the brain is, is sufficient to demonstrate that consciousness is not reducible to the laws of physics. Besides, since the brain is an arbitrary concept, and consciousness is the necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrariness, consciousness cannot be a property of the brain. Based on these considerations, we can exclude that consciousness is generated by brain processes or is an emergent property of the brain. Marco Biagini
@Ralph Macchiato I have not assumed that consciousness is something else than an emergence of physical states; I have provided arguments that prove this.
Where did you get your PhD? For being a physicist you spend an awfully long amount of time on RUclips copy and pasting this comment on every philosophical video you can find.
Ok then, there is a little magic ghost living in you. Hahahaa
LOL. So many cranks. There's just a bunch of silly circular arguments here.
These perspectives of qualia are circular questions either way. It's like the concept of moral absolutism which requires parameters to hold.
We are beings which experience things "as we know it". To wonder whether this human experience is a subjective journey is a natural thing to wonder. Sure. That does not get you anywhere though. The entire premise is a huge waste of time. This is why we assume a scientific objective reality out of utility. What is the point behind thinking molecules exist otherwise. All things perceived by default are subjective and that is the only thing that is truly absolute. How does a person expect to proceed if actually living by that idea? Naturally we have to assume some common ground in order to move forward. Forcing myself to believe in this objective reality out of utility, I at some point will have to believe in the idea that the experience any person has at any time is just a set of data corresponding to the internal and external physical world at the time. Demonstrable and reproducible. Not humanly 'special' in some magic way, but an astronomical number of things occurring which in subsets can be reproduced within the universe. Whatever you're thinking and experiencing right now as a person can be reproduced EXACTLY minus the point in space and time it's occurring because we do not have omnipotent power to control all time and space as we know it. You can either assume that or choose to assume any number of metaphysical questions to get lost in, never to find any answer.
I was recently asked about the Mary thought experiment and it just seems ridiculous to me. Mary is automatically just given this absolute understanding of 'everything there is to know' about color without actually having that absolute understanding as proven by the premise.
It's like asking if 1+1=2, then does 1+1+1=2 also?
We have been capable of at least somewhat comprehending the countless variables our brains are constantly processing via the sensory input. Astronomically more than that of semi conductor computers. People don't want to admit how similar we process data to actual electronic sensors and computer processors because it puts us in the same "meaningless" category as Godless accidental chemical happenings in the universe and people hate that. We may function different but I don't see how we both don't process data we receive from sensory input. The depth of the programming is where the real question comes into play for me. Pain simply cannot be a simple programming of triggers signaled by nerves. It's like an automatic response with more complex forms of if's and elses which allows us to choose to endure it. Obviously I can't hope to comprehend it comparing it to basic programming though. It would be programming I'd imagine all of the Earth's coders would take many lifetimes just to understand the depth of before learning how to reproduce it. Even after all that time we would still be left with the question of whether our creation was having a conscious human experience. We assume so with other humans we meet because they look and act human. So hypothetically hundreds of years later we would still have the same unanswerable question even if we thought we knew everything there was know to know about creating consciousness.
I don't pretend to answer all the questions you introduce, and I'm not sure if I got all you said (don't speak fluent english and the matter is complicated) but the perspective of qualia and subjectiveness for me is utile in some disciplines as it's a remember that we can't know things just by how they behave and the most important, not only from our perspective. For me it is a useful perspective for example in social sciences and psychology (we don't study qualia in the carreer but postmodernism and the fact that we have to coexist with the unknown of other's minds and complex social realities. Perhaps I'm wrong or I don't understand it properly but what I want to say is that it's not really a nihilist or obsolete perspective. It opens the door and considers reality a very complex thing.
@@4haruchan I see what you're saying in that it's a form of utility and thought exercise which can be seen as beneficial. I just think we are too young in our discovery of how the brain works that we assume we have some magical and special lens of the universe which is unique and impossible to reproduce in any other unique person. I highly doubt that is the case. It just really seems that way as of now.
@@Magneticitist I aggree with you, but one thing is the uniqueness of our configuration (related to identity, being) and the other is the experience itself. Those are different things in metaphysics. A bad examle (I should think deeply to find a good comparative but) Perhaps we both have the same qualia (we experience the color red the same way) but you will have your own experience and I will have mine. Perhaps we both experience red the same but you experience it daily and I just experienced it once (or even never). And all this of course, for now at least, can only be theorised. Provably we will never confirm it. Dunno if all this makes sense. Of course I aggree with you that uniqueness of being is rare and it's a very antropocentrist concept. But I think that experience is another branch. And thanks for your answer, I find this topic very interesting! I have to read more about it to have a solid opinion.
@@4haruchan I agree our personal stories which lead all of us to our own unique views and feelings is certainly interesting in that there are an innumerable number of variables at play throughout a lifetime when a person is building his or her 'programming' so to speak. We have a large task ahead of us trying to figure it all out but I feel like the next 100 or so years is going to be very interesting in that regard.
what is not matter dos not matter
But he does admit as Feyneman does "nobody understands it". Given this and the fact that a a camera suggests the existence of a camera maker then a good God is a possibility.
17:04 Dennet maybe a good philosopher but he's absolutely terribly mistaken about this. Maybe he is an NPC.
A reasonable point of view, but how do you know it's correct? What would be needed to prove it one way or the other?
He acts as if knowledge lives on the collective level of the scientific community, comprising only of the things that can be communicated (sort of replicated) on the basis language of scientific theories. It as if the language itself distributed through the community was what is real to him and not the individual experiences of individual humans. Seems realy crazy, i disagree with it, but it realy looks like that to me.
There's not just the "representation of blue things in are heads" which might someday be measurable (the easy problem), there is also the reality of blue to subjective observer (the hard problem), which is a completely separate--albeit related--thing. Dan doesn't seem to understand what the hard problem is.
I wonder if the ability to understand the hard problem might be a sort of Turing test for p-zombies.
In order for any thing to meaningfully be said to exist it must have some sort of fact-fixing relation with the world. The “blueness of blue” can only be described in by the way a specific wavelength of light interacts with our brain. That description is the exact same thing as the qualia of blue.
hearing some people recommend me this video and talking about how they "dont believe in qualia" has kinda shook me tbh. because you dont "believe" in qualia, you either have it or you dont. the only conclusion I can come to is that some people, likely including Dan, really are p-zombies, that it isnt a theoretical construct but in fact very real. which is.. frightening considering my entire ethical and moral framework is built on the idea that other people experience pain or other negative qualia when certain things are being done to them, and that experience of negative qualia is what makes it morally/ethically wrong. if I have to assume that some people just do not have negative qualia no matter what is being done to them, then... it is hard for me to justify any act against them being wrong, no matter how horrible or heinous. and when we get to that point... yeah we have a problem.
Wow, it only took Dan here 21:10 minutes to say something meaningful! This guy! 😂
Dennett misses the ultimate paradox at the heart of it all, which is that there is not a single scientific experiment that has ever been performed, or neurological examination, or observation of a brain, that has not had to pass through the 'illusory' consciousness of a scientist. If consciousness is an illusion...so too is every scientific observation ever made using it. Which is essentially the whole of science.
A single experiment that passes through the consciousness of "a scientist" wouldn't be very valuable. It's through techniques such as blinding and replication that we get "good science." The goal is to minimize or completely eliminate biases when we conduct an experiment, have different teams or persons repeat the experiment, and the building of a model that continues to be useful with or without the scientists who first built that model.
@@akihitochan Every experiment ever performed has passed through the 'illusory' consciousness of scientists. Third person objectivity is always a subset of first person experience....even if you collate all that first person experience together. Science is a collation of replicated conscious experiences, which proves only that consciousness is consistent and not that it's content literally exists as perceived. You cannot claim in one breath that consciousness is an illusion....and then in the next breath assert that you've grasped objective reality using it ! You have to perform some pretty weird retroactive metaphysical bootstrapping to have your basic substrate and source of all observation be illusory and then shuffle your 'objective' reality prior to that illusion in the ontological order of things.
@@peterstanbury3833 Before I respond, why don't you make your *real* point? You've now moved the goalpost and appear to not be questioning the validity of *a* scientist's interpretation, but the interpretation of every scientist no matter how reliable and predictive the theory is. Are you merely stating Dennett's theory is flawed because it passed through his subjective mind? Because he already owned the fact he *could be* wrong in this very video. Are you trying to point out that ultimately *absolute truth* is unobtainable? Because science doesn't do "absolute truths". Or are you saying the whole of science is flawed because humans are subjective beings? That's truly what it sounds like - that you're trying to use this Dennett's explanation of the illusory of consciousness to ground some form of science denial that resides in your biases.
@@akihitochan I did make my real point...which you clearly haven't grasped. You cannot claim that your ONLY window on the world is illusory, whilst at the same time claiming that you've made objectively real observations using that illusory tool. If consciousness is an illusion...then ALL its content is illusory. You don't get a ' Get out of illusory-ness FREE' card when you pass 'GO' just because you're conducting a scientific experiment ! What's not to comprehend about that ?
@@akihitochan Let me put it another way. We do not know that there is any one-to-one direct perception of reality arising from conscious experience. The sky clearly is not 'really' the blue we experience....all would agree on that...but one can go further and argue whether even space and time are one-to-one perceptions of reality. The tendency to hold onto some last vestige of naive realism ( that what we see is what literally exists ) is very strong...almost programmed into us. But space and time themselves may be every bit as much qualia as the blue of the sky. Your entire framework for objectivity then gets called into question....if the very concepts that define an 'external reality' are conscious creations rather than genuine aspects of any real world. I'm not 'denying science'.....what I am saying is that science is NOT the study of 'the real world'...but the study of how consciousness perceives whatever real world there may be. That is inescapable.
"armchair theorizing is almost bound to give you a very distorted sense of what the phenomena are"
Dennett: *proceeds to armchair theorize*
But Dennet does incorporate the state of scientific knowledge into his theories. I dont know of many other philosophs, who do so to that extent.
@@petermeyer6873 I think Bernardo Kastrup blows Dennett away in making an opposing argument.
@@b0ondockz838 I dont see him beeing moved at all.
I havent read much from Kastrup yet, but I find his statement, that there is only kosmic consciousness/all consciousness is part of a kosmic whole, not in the least provable let alone see any indications to why it should be this way. This combined with the many statements online about his theories, that target at silencing any critics, allready gives his theories the taste of a belief system.
Indeed, and it is theorizing in arm chairs (and other places) that lay the foundation for our faith in any scientific method. Cut out arm chair theorizing and you cut off our trust in science.
@@reasonforge9997
While that is true, science works whether we like it or not. Our technology is the evidence.
No. It's in the form of the response of my senses to the world.
It is response to contact.
guys I'm in class what is he saying please sum up the video I need this please
The lights are on, but no one is home! And there may be a party going on, but you wouldn't know it without language. No language, no you, no consciousness, no hard problem!
Give me a break
@@James-ll3jb ?
@@Krod4321 "We don't have privileged access to what it's like to be us. We have privileged access to what we THINK it's like to be us, but, that itself can be wrong. As soon as we move away from 'belief,' in what we think is the case, to what IS the case, we're moving away from privileged access."
This is just sad...
@@Krod4321 language=consciousness. An absurd leap.
@James-ll3jb Language = Self-awareness! What's absurd about that?
In a universe of nothing but matter, nothing matters, including convincing anyone that the universe is nothing but matter. Nothing he says matters, by his own belief, nor does his own life.
What the heck does "matters" mean? Things matter *to* people because they care about them--they have certain emotional responses to them. Dennett tried to address a lot of this sloppy fuzzy thinking but most people aren't able to think rationally.
@@marcelkincaid3450 You're funny. You think you exist.Your sense of self is just a delusion created by firing synapses.That sense of self that thinks things matter, doesn't matter. Poof, it's gone.
Unfortunately, the depth of field effect we experience is most likely due to both hardware and software limitations.
مساء النور شكرا لك على مشاركة الفديو اتمنى لك يوم موفق 👍👍👍🌹
it only begs the question. cos it seems like a snake sawing off its own tail he is sitting on ;) that monistic materialism claims to try to take care of any loose ends while sitting on one.... enough with metaphors, here are specifics:
To claim that monistic materialism is true, you have to infer that your senses are a reliable source of intel (how on earth you could learn about matter if not through senses?) And then you claim that five senses intel is illusory...
I do not agree or disagree, it is just plainly self contradictory. I would not like to live with a self contradictory worldview, in psychology it is called cognitive dissonance, it is not healthy. I find no contradictions in Subjective Idealism as presented by George Berkeley. I'd appreciate someone proving otherwise.
Please think about a rainbow! Who has it? The earth? The “sky”? The air? The cloud? The rain? The sun? The photons? A man (who “sees” - it) or an animal or a plant or a mountain? 1: Noone has it. 2: If there is no such corresponding environment/causes/effects etc. than there is no rainbow. 3: Consciousness just like that. No such complex environment, no consciousness. If there is, still noone has it. If there is, then it is emergent phenomenon/property of the complex environment (smaller, bigger, phisical, biological, universal etc. ) but stil does not e x i s t s. 🌎🦉🦧🛰️ (or as Mark Solms says: consciousness is extended homeostasis)((Life is a process not a “thing”. Consciousness is a process based emergent phenomenon not “a thing”.)
I am really glad you mentioned this. For past months i was on a track of dissgarding notion of conaciousness as a thing/property but rather what is happening. A result of complex enviormental interaction. I will check Mark Solmon.
I really like something about his old-timey nautical vocabulary and his wise obese man Santa clause vibes.
...and I think also he talks about free will and stuff or something.