Sam Harris on Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness
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- Опубликовано: 30 июн 2024
- Sam Harris gives a synopsis on what he believes consciousness is, and whether or not AI will one day become conscious.
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Great discussion by Salt Bae and goth Ben Stiller
The question is usually asked as if we have a great handle on what the physical world is.
We may have more exact ways to describe the physical world quantitatively, but we can quantify many aspects of the mental world as well.
But the fact is, if you really ask what a photon/field/space/time IS, we really don’t have any better answer for that than what consciousness is. Ultimately we just don’t have any way of knowing the fundamental ontology of things, physical or mental.
So you would say that there is nothing outside the physical realm?
@@mattthelearner2797 I think that question gets muddled in confusion based on what your idea of "physical" is. Some people think that "physical" things are just abstract entities described by equations in physics. I don't believe that. I think that physical things have an ontos and a qualitative aspect to them.
Languages, including mathematical language, cannot describe qualitative things except in relation to other qualitative things. They can describe to what degree of red, green, and blue a color is, but they can't tell you what the experience of red, green or blue is like if you don't already know.
So while I'm a naturalist in that I don't think there's any compelling evidence for any supernatural powers, I may or may not be a physicalist, depending on your definition of "physical".
I do think it's possible that part of why this problem is so challenging relates to aspects of reality/existence that we're not aware of yet. Einstein brought us a new concept of space and time in the early 20th century and since the late 20th century, new ideas about the multiverse and higher dimensions have emerged. It's, in my opinion, very possible that other ideas/concepts about the nature of reality and what exists 'out there' will be needed to enable a smoother, more effective theory of consciousness. After all, if you found a dinosaur fossil in ancient times and had no concepts of evolution, extinction and the preservation of ancient lifeforms, you'd struggle to come up with the right explanation.
One other thought about consciousness that blows my mind is that since it is not (seemingly) a direct part of objective reality, it is not 'real' in the same way as anything else in the real world. It appears to be an entirely different form of real. Makes you wonder is there then a 'third type of real', a 'fourth type of real', and heck, why not an infinite number of types of real?
i cant understand the obsession with objective reality.. ( I truely belive that the reality exsists and only certain objective facts can be said around if you choose a "language" to talk about it - and there can be several physical languages in which to talk about reality).
E.g red is a color in a certain fervency or spectrum of frequencies - but only because we decided the label red was to be put on these frequencies. - the things we associate with red makes it subjectively different (unscientific postulate from my side) and denotes the consciousness (or as some says qualia)... is that mystyrious - no i do not think that - will it make it hard to "copy" one consciouness to another - yes because it dependes on the whole bodys reaction on and state at the moment it happens.
Missed opportunity to mention Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR theory of consciousness tbh 😁
Orch-OR gives biological locations for where consciousness is happening in humans - microtubules - and it can be interfered with predictably - anesthesia during surgery can temporarily and reversibly halt conscious awareness.
This answer will hold up in 100 years.
anesthesia has no effect on ppl who are on the level of accomplishing tukdam. get with the times and stop believing in fairy tales that everything is a property of mass-energy. that hasnt been the case for a long time.
@@5piles
Has there been a study made to test that? Any source?
The hard problem is actially emergence. Better put is how does this level of reality (aka tables and chairs) emerge. The answer may be that when neurons fire together, they form supercells or there is a unified metabolic process and longer Planck Time.....
If we create an Robot that has same basic senses and learns and creates its own neural paths, it would probably be conscious. It will have slightly differnt paths and states and memory and external stimuly at the moment of Red sunset that will make it experience that sunset differently than me. Can we turn it of and on again - yes but then it would be unconsciouns as if we turned off our brain and body. Essential a small death. That is my hypothesis... will we come to understand this.. yes to some extent, but it will not be flattering i suspect for our egos.
We have to deeply explore the funtiom of the brain claustrum. I think that is the key biological component to conciousness
Sam Harris in this interview admits that he cannot imagine a stage in the development of an organism where adding some magical ingredient suddenly brings about consciousness. That is why It should seem even stranger to him that adding a specific line of code to a program would suddenly result in consciousness. But for some reason, the prospect of conscious AI seems entirely plausible to him.
Simply put, we will create a robot to look like a human. Then, we will teach it to communicate in such a way that it behaves like a human. However, we are fully aware that this is a trick, that we have consciously built a neural network to generate responses and emotions that make it impossible for us to distinguish their authenticity. But we know that we specifically designed this system to "fool" us, so why do we suspect that consciousness will appear at some point? We haven’t taken any step toward creating consciousness. We don’t even know what it is. So why do we believe it will suddenly appear in our unfortunate robot?
Accepting this argument that such a robot could be conscious is as assuming that, for example, a car could be conscious, a hairdryer could be conscious, or a pen could be conscious. Because why not? Maybe when we insert an ink cartridge into a plastic tube, creating a pen, consciousness appears in it. This is the kind of reasoning we are dealing with.
Space and time is an illusion..consciousness is fundamental
I find the ‘Westworld is unimaginable’ point extremely flimsy.
I think it totally avoids the fact that humans throughout history have justified doing horrible things to other humans, where the consciousness of the victim was as confirmed as it ever can be. In a situation where consciousness is debatable, even if only by reference to the fact that the victim is a robot and so definitely cannot actually be conscious despite all external evidence of their pain/suffering pointing to the contrary, the likelihood of atrocious behaviour being justified goes way way up.
I think it also ignores another type of human behaviour in the form of kink - plenty of people enjoy impact play and BDSM etc. We don’t (for the most part) consider people who enjoy consensual sadism to have something ‘wrong’ with them - why would we consider people who like causing pain to non-conscious robots, regardless of how realistic their pain may seem, any differently?
Imagine that you are creating a computer out of people. You position individuals in a specific area. We want to replicate the logic gates of a processor using people. Each person is to observe two people standing in front of them and raise their hand or not, depending on whether the people in front of them raise their hands. In this way, you can build logic gates. You also have a second group of people who permanently keep their hands raised or lowered (1 or 0), representing your learned knowledge of the world (the model). By having the model and the logic gates, and positioning these people accordingly, you build an AI. Then you ask a question, which means you input a sequence of people who, by having their hands raised or not, represent the encoded question (in the form of zeros and ones). The question is "Are you conscious?" The people at the beginning start to raise or not raise their hands in response to the input. The domino effect starts. The system works. After some time, at the end, you have 100 people who either have their hands raised or not. They represent the answer. You convert the zeros and ones to human language and get "Yes, I am conscious."
Now, a few questions for you:
- Do you think that throughout this process, a conscious being was created that didn't exist before?
- Does this being have its own internal world and thoughts?
- Do these people have the right to disperse after this experiment? There is a risk that the system became conscious, and if the people disperse, they might kill this conscious being.
- And the final question, completely serious, if people gather at a bus stop and it happens by chance that some of them raise their hands in a specific sequence, is there also a risk that some new conscious being will be created?
If you eat an apple, the apple disappears. It doesn't disappear because someone cast a spell on it and made it vanish. It disappeared because you just ate it. In the same way, the response from our computer exists because people raised their hands, not because some autonomous entity exists that now lives its own life, has its own internal world, and decided to respond in this manner. No separate entity made any decision. There was only the raising and lowering of hands by people. If someone in the group decided to cheat and, instead of raising their hand, lowered it, you would get a different response from the computer. This wouldn't indicate that an autonomous entity, after considering, decided to give a different answer this time. It would only mean that one person in the group decided to have a bit of fun. The system as a whole is not aware of anything. People simply raise or lower their hands, and we interpret this externally in the way we agreed to. There are only people performing an action (raising hands) and people who AGREED to interpret that action in a certain agreed-upon way. Nothing more. The exact same principle applies to a transistor in any processor. The idea that the system seems to gain consciousness along the way is merely an illusion.
Isn't consciousness just a feedback loop, sensory input comes in and you respond to it and constantly do that. But instead of verbalize, you internalize it.
why is the feedback loop red?
if consciousness was a feedback loop then the moment you became conscious of that you would enter universe ending speaker feedback
so if I took a mathematical function, got a result from it, and then fed that result back into the function, you think I would be creating consciousness? Doesn't really make any sense. It's as shoddy as thinking that consciousness is the result of information being processed...like yeah okay, so now my computer is conscious, a plant is conscious, a chemical reaction is conscious, fire is conscious....makes no sense whatsoever. It's the "hard" problem for a reason.
@@sunkintree these examples aren't very good and a mathematical function is not a feedback loop. A plant is not a feedback loop in that sense either. A plant may take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and absorb it. I am talking about 90 years of human life taking in an infinite amount of information over that time and processing it in real time, milliseconds over that time. A computer may not take in that much information and internalize it. A plant will not. There are 100 billion neurons in the brain constantly working every second, every day, for 90 years (or whatever that life cycle is). That is a lot of data. Information coming from sight, touch, sound. So if I think of consciousness, what is the 100 billion neurons doing with that information and internalizing? Creating predictions, building models. That. If you had 100 billion neurons, the brain and there is no input, then it wouldn't have much use. But the human brain is absorbing the environment and being molded with that information over time.
@@berlinbrown03 a computer can process information much more quickly than a human being can
Sorry, but you spent a lot of words saying almost nothing. You just hold so fast to materialism that you can't admit when it has no answer for something
The root of this whole problem is in imagining that there is a separate substance other than mind and pretending it's justified by reifying the mathematical structure of the qualia of mind as such. The "hard problem" only exists in the hard-heads of irrational empiricists. Actually, mind is all. Mind is both mathematical and qualitative, form and content, syntax and semantics, the noumenal and phenomenal, information carrier and information carried. Existence is made of a dual-aspect monistic substance we call mind, energy, light, etc. This is knowable through rationalism, not empiricism. Read the Pythagorean Illuminati.
That was word salad if i know anything... explain
@@svendtang5432 To be less salad-y, there is no hard problem in idealism or panpsychism. Those have always been the more rational positions. Descartes brought the mind-matter problem to the fore in the West. We wouldn't be still talking about this if Descartes had Fourier mathematics, then he would have seen extended matter and unextended mind as one mathematical substance in Fourier feedback loops between the Fourier spacetime domain (matter, extended) and the frequency domain (mind, unextended). Western philosophy hasn't been settled on this issue since then.
When people are talking about the hard problem, the subject implicitly brought into the discussion is the substance of existence, whether or not there's more than one, and its properties. There's no sufficient reason to assume more than one substance and its when you do that you have an unbridgeable interaction problem (like "the hard problem"). When you look into the essence of the substance, mind, mathematics, rationality, will, these are the kinds of things you run into thinking about. There is a rational, philosophical, and mathematical way to explain it all without need of any scientific experiments. Science only investigates the second order derivative layer of reality, not its essence or eternal nature. The world science investigates is on ever changing ground, not eternal ground. It doesn't even use all of mathematics, just an arbitrary slice of it that excludes infinity, zero, and imaginary numbers as acceptable solutions in any circumstance. Nothing is more eternally truth than math.
After Descartes came Leibniz who came closer than anyone ever before to fully mathematically explaining the eternal mathematical and mental nature of reality. Modern Ontological Mathematics is the only subject completely uncovering the truth. All main stream paths like M-Theory are doomed from the outside because of wrong first principles. Ont Math (or Illuminism) is not some fringe bs, it's the only hope for humanity. I know most people wouldn't even consider reading this far but the only reason I type is because I've always sought the truth and for something that can unite humanity to become all it can be. This is it. The problem is, it is far too advanced for the pleb masses. Humanity is in jeopardy.
The idea that we may one day accidentally create conscious computers is one of the silliest ideas I’ve ever heard of… let me repeat it is just plain stupid to think that could happen!
Yes. Debate Bernardo Kastrup!
after all, if such a robot says that it is conscious, you can always change one line of code and it will say that it is not conscious. What is the problem?
Not if the "code" evolved itself.. you would not know wher to change the code because you would only understand the "outset" or very basic functioning of it..
@@svendtang5432 No matter how complex the code is or whether we can trace the reasoning path of such code, it is still just code and will never be conscious. You can conduct a thought experiment similar to the one I described earlier. Every computer can be constructed using only plastic pipes and water flowing under the influence of gravity. Such a computer would be enormous in size but would function exactly like our current computers. Executing code in such a computer would involve water flowing from one pipe to another. We could even assume that the system could expand itself by adding more pipes and flowing more water. However, no matter how complicated the process is or how long the system flows water to generate a response to a given question, we would ultimately know that it is not conscious because it's just pipes and water. Every processor, in its simplest form, is exactly such a system. It's truly shocking how many well-known people don't understand this simple principle.
This entire debate about whether AI will be conscious is nonsense and a fundamental error in reasoning. Will AI be intelligent? - Yes. Will it be a thousand times more intelligent than us? - Yes. Will it want to get rid of us? - Quite possibly. Will it be conscious? - Absolutely not.
If someone thinks we should consider whether AI will be conscious, it should be just as valid to wonder if, for example, a washing machine with a processor and code is conscious. The amount of code does not determine whether something is or will be conscious
In fact, even Sam Harris in this interview admits that he cannot imagine a stage in the development of an organism where adding some magical ingredient suddenly brings about consciousness. It should seem even stranger to him that adding a specific line of code to a program would suddenly result in consciousness
You recalled bon Jovi because as a product of your environment it was imprinted in your storage memory. If you were from New guinea you would not have said bon jovie. We are products of sensory perception.
Correct, but not the point. His point was that there is some kind of process happening below the surface that is happening at the unconscious level that we are not aware of. We are aware of the result of BonJovi, but not aware of the underlying process that made that specific answer come to the forefront. Yes, it was the product of his culture, but why Bon Jovi and not Bruce Springsteen or 100 other possibilities that may have come up.
objective consciousness vs subjective consciousness. the pair that can never touch but are one.
What's objective consciousness?
@@DaveSaysYesh Not sure, but I have a few guesses.
1) The fact that you are even asking questions at all is demonstrating consciousness objectively exists. It is the "I think, therefore I am" argument.
2) We can be conscious of aspects of reality that we can agree between a group of people and even add measurements,, such as a solid block of marble that is 6" x 6" by 6". Everyone in the group can independently verify that perception and therefore we can surmise that we are all experiencing a common objective consciousness of an aspect of reality in the real outside real world.
3) We can observe a complex organism such as a human, dog or cheetah react to stimuli of their environment and act accordingly with complex behavior that strongly suggests that the organism is fully aware of the stimulus and is reacting accordingly.
The unsatisfying answer here is that almost everyone I hear talking about the 'hard problem' are implicitly assuming a false dichotomy. Not ALL of consciousness has to be emergent from or correlated to mechanistic/deterministic measurable observables, and PART of consciousness CAN be computable while something of it can be fundamental to reality itself. People mix this all up and end up talking about and meaning different things when they talk about mind. But let's be clear, no one has ever once been unconscious, asleep, or dead. You always talk about these things from the vantage of an awake being. It is an absolute assumption that you think unconsciousness exists in reality or is a state that subjectively occurs. Sure, you can infer it RELATIVE to yourself as an aware being to self-contrasted dead or asleep animals,, but that relativity is always there. Sure, there are correlations between the brain and PARTS of experience, but that doesn't mean the brain CAUSES experience exclusively. Consciousness, mind, subjectively etc is clearly fundamental, there are no absolute non-relative dead things or inanimate matter... whether you can say anything about that fundamental consciousness or ascribe any attributes to it... well maybe not. Mind is at the furthest boundary of logic and mathematics, because what do you think those things are?
Identify the alleged part of experience that is not correlated to brain activity.
No Language, no hard problem!
the word blue refers to the object that is not the property of any mass-energy, aka the hard problem
@@5piles The word blue is just sounds coming from your mouth.
@@Krod4321 in real life the sound is imposed with a meaning that refers to an actual thing, the appearance of blue.
this object does not require concepts ie. language, contrary to you assertion.
There never was the state we call “nothing.” That is an impossible state.
The best explanation to what Reality is is that it is eternal, having no beginning and no end, and that it is an infinite field of pure awareness which has the power to generate within itself ANY experience. Some small portion of that infinite set of experiences includes being a human being watching a RUclips video and commenting on it. A human life is just a mask we wear for a while and our true nature is an infinite, unified field of light, creativity and unconditional love. We have always been and will always be and we play in this infinite dance of experience wherein we generate universes, minds, lives, deaths, joys, sufferings, etc. etc.
We are one, we are pure being, we are ultimate love and fullness and this game of existence continues forever in infinite variety. And because we have an infinite variety to play with, every new experience can be unique and never arise again. So on one hand this moment is special and will never repeat, but we will never run out of novel experiences either. It’s profoundly beautiful and a perfect way to spend eternity.
In that case, it has to be said that the "reality" we perceive in our day-to-day lives doesn't exist and we are disillusioned into thinking it is. Our true nature is that of the timeless, formless reality not this body-mind-ego self we identify as.
That’s true too, and how I like to think of it is we are in a form. A wave is a form of water, a fist is a form of a hand. In one sense a fist isn’t “real” but it will still hurt to be punched because the hand is real.
This life isn’t real, but YOU are. So it’s only a quasi-illusion. Even the misperceptions are valid experiences. So why are we misperceiving as separate egos? I don’t know but the cosmos doesn’t make mistakes so if we are here there’s a reason even if we can’t know it with our minds.
@@Promatheos the form aspect makes sense. I remember during meditations there are times when it becomes clear that the formless can't be fathomed by the mind because as soon as you try to it takes a form that the thoughts can perceive.
"don’t know but the cosmos doesn’t make mistakes" It's also possible that just like evolution the process of separating into fragments of different egos just happens to take place because of natural laws and the cosmos didn't really have any direct hand in it. If i remember correctly, AV states that differences/dualities appear because of ignorance and it is an illusion. In reality, there is just the Ultimate Reality being superimposed on itself as dualities. However, as you say, if the fist punches it is gonna hurt. So you can't simply dismiss reality as an illusion either.
That's certainly a beautiful possibility. I try to believe in beautiful possibilities but my human consciousness is doubtful.
@@ketansrivastav excogitation on world being illusion is not a dismissal of it .
try to debate Bernardo Kastrup, smarty pants
The consciousness only model makes alot more sense than materialism. Makes Sam Harris ideas on it sound like total waffle ! Trying to fit a square peg in a round hole with linguistic jargon, imo
😂
Bernardo is dumb. He thinks needles are conscious programs, not materials.
@transcendentphilosophy
so you did not understand what he was talking about
@@dwai963 Im literally quoting him
He who has truly meditated, knows that the objective reality is infinitely regressive.
What is an axiom anyway?
P.S. objective reality is purely symbolic.
If consciousness is just a 'brute fact' caused by a specific complexity then one has the further problem of how evolution just 'happened' to stumble upon it purely by chance. It seems to me more likely that the brain 'invented' consciousness, rather than 'discovered' it out of billions of permutations. That would mean consciousness is not at all what we think it is.
No need anything to change nothingness. Time could change nothingness and make relationships between many points of nothingnesses. Thank you.
Before the big bang, time does not exist. It was stated that there were no physical laws.Time is one of those laws.
@@ejtattersall156, You believe the people who wanted to brainwash you to believe their beliefs. You can't decide what time is.
Time is something.
@@kensey007, Time is continuation of nothingness.
I'll just accept your definition of time for the sake of argument. Back to your original claim now that you made this clarification:
"A continuation of nothingness could change nothingness"
I'd love to see an example of that.
It seems Sam is starting to grasp the miraculousness of consciousness and of the Big Bang in a way he didn't 10 years ago.
He has too much invested in his ego, he will never realise anything.
Yes, it's true that one day we will create a robot whose appearance and behavior will be indistinguishable from those of a human. However, just because something imitates human appearance and behavior very well does not mean that it will somehow magically become conscious. How can we even question whether such a robot will be conscious or not? This is not difficult to understand. I don't know why people make this simple mistake in reasoning.
A super-intelligent robot made of silicone, plastic, processors, and silicon is no different from an intelligent washing machine made of the same materials. No matter how fast or how many zeros and ones these systems process per second, it doesn't change the fact that nothing in their construction suggests that consciousness will suddenly emerge from them like a rabbit out of a hat.
To put it another way (if someone still has trouble understanding this simple principle), the only task of a processor in a computer is to process zeros and ones. If we were determined, we could build a processor out of plastic pipes and use gravity to move water in such a way as to create logic gates. Enlarging this construction to massive proportions would ultimately give us the same functionality as a silicon processor. Scaling up the project further, we could run a neural network on such a system and eventually build a robot that behaves and looks just like a human. Yet, we would know that this robot is 100% plastic pipes and water. Would we wonder at what point the synthesis of pipes and water gave birth to consciousness? No. For some reason, when we use silicon instead of plastic pipes, we start to think that the system might become conscious along the way. It's like saying a television could be conscious.
"Would we wonder at what point the synthesis of pipes and water gave birth to consciousness? No."
Why not? I certainly would.
@@Leksa135 You wouldn't wonder. Let's assume we asked such a system made of plastic pipes, "Is it conscious?" First, we would need to translate this question into input data that the system would accept. Suppose that, when translated into binary code, this question corresponds to a certain sequence of zeros and ones. This sequence of zeros and ones might mean, for instance, that at the start of the system, we need to pour 5 liters of water into pipe number 51 and 7 liters into pipe number 61. Theoretically. The water would flow through the system, and you could stand by these pipes and watch the water flow, passing through various pipes and finally exiting at the end of a specific pipe, which would represent the result and a specific sequence of zeros and ones. For example, if the water exits from pipe 158, it means 011100. For instance. After converting the zeros and ones into English, the answer would be "Yes, I am conscious." But you would know how the system arrived at such a statement because you could trace the process that led to it, the water flowing through specific pipes ultimately giving that result. You would know that nothing magical happened along the way; it was just water flowing. So why would you say that somewhere along the way, the pipes and water started to feel consciousness? Every computer in the world today is like our system made of pipes and water, but because we don't see what's happening inside, we make this fundamental mistake in reasoning.
@@Leksa135 You wouldn't wonder. Let's assume we asked such a system made of plastic pipes, "Is it conscious?" First, we would need to translate this question into input data that the system would accept. Suppose that, when translated into binary code, this question corresponds to a certain sequence of zeros and ones. This sequence of zeros and ones might mean, for instance, that at the start of the system, we need to pour 5 liters of water into pipe number 51 and 7 liters into pipe number 61. Theoretically. The water would flow through the system, and you could stand by these pipes and watch the water flow, passing through various pipes and finally exiting at the end of a specific pipe, which would represent the result and a specific sequence of zeros and ones. For example, if the water exits from pipe 158, it means 011100. For instance. After converting the zeros and ones into English, the answer would be "Yes, I am conscious." But you would know how the system arrived at such a statement because you could trace the process that led to it, the water flowing through specific pipes ultimately giving that result. You would know that nothing magical happened along the way; it was just water flowing. So why would you say that somewhere along the way, the pipes and water started to feel consciousness? Every computer in the world today is like our system made of pipes and water, but because we don't see what's happening inside, we make this fundamental mistake in reasoning.
It's truly shocking how many well-known people don't understand this simple principle.
This entire debate about whether AI will be conscious is nonsense and a fundamental error in reasoning. Will AI be intelligent? - Yes. Will it be a thousand times more intelligent than us? - Yes. Will it want to get rid of us? - Quite possibly. Will it be conscious? - Absolutely not.
22:46
learn to meditate kid.
you sound like you dont even have shamata.
Just a way of creatures to survive, just in our case we passed the stage of just surviving. We are at now what.
This doesn't even begin to deal with the Hard Problem
You don't need subjective experience to survive. In fact, it does not even provide any kind of evolutionary advantage.
@@candanieldoesn't necessarily provide an evolutionary advantage but it may just be an inevitable byproduct of it.
@@OrangeUtan1If you watch this video, Sam acknowledges that consciousness could indeed be a byproduct of our evolution. But then he elaborates on why that answer still wouldn’t make consciousness any less mysterious.
All fat and sassy ;)
Sam Harris, the Great Determinist who is always trying to convince people of something and to change their minds and behaviors.
Consciousness can not be explained from outside, only consciousness is conscious unconscious processes can not creat consciousness
Can stand this poser.
Sam Harris laid the hard problem of consciousness out nicely in this clip. However, to not mention idealism as an alternative to materialism even once while talking about ontologies that account for subjectivity, is weird.
He also says multiple times how materialism could still very well be the case, despite the hard problem of consciousness, which, with all respect, is an illogical and incoherent thing to stress. Materialism is highly improbable due to its _in principle_ inability to address this problem, and to affirm multiple times that it could theoretically still be the case, is like affirming that the flying spaghetti monster could theoretically exist - yes, it's possible and not definitively disprovable. But it is incoherent and should not be entertained as a serious possibility.
This to me suggests, that he is either intellectually married to materialism despite its inability to account for the problem, or alternatively, that he wants to appease to a materialist culture and zeitgeist.
Yeh is weird to see such a deep thinker completely blinded by his beliefs in materialism. Its such an engrained worldview that can make intelligent people say nonsensical illogical statements like Sam does here.
@candaniel
Harris is always very careful of what he says. Materialistic science is really the only thing that he can rely on. He can't entertain ideas that go outside of that, well not too much anyway.
While I agree that materialism is highly improbable to be the solution, but given that we have no idea how consciousness works, as in, we literally have better ideas how to do time travel, teleportation or warp drive, than we do of how consciousness works. So far we have nothing, because it is in a sense a miracle. Like the big bang from nothing.
So I I don't think you should give any idea more credence that the other unless you can back it up with something. Personally I think consciousness goes beyond the material realm, but yes, that's just another "miracle" and I can't back it up with anything. Well, if you look into near death experiences, theres something to back it up by. Still, all anecdotal.
Not a big fan of Harris generally, but this is actually the first time I've heard someone articulate the problem so well.
I've had these ideas floating in my head for the better part of 20 years and he summed up them into words so nicely.
There is no guidance except the guidance of Allah. All knowledge comes from Allah and we only have a drop from that ocean.
Any discussion or analysis in which Allah isn’t mentioned is in vain.
When you try to explain things and use the word God, you lose clarity because he is the answer to everything.
What holds the birds in the air? Allah does!!
Such reasoning does not help with understanding the world.
Consciousness emerging from matter is only a hard problem if you have an incorrect hypothesis of the universe and are unwilling to reformulate it despite never being able to prove it.
Matter actually 'emerges' from Consciousness does it not? Consciousness must be present for 'matter' to be observed.
Has anyone seen matter existing outside of consciousness? No and they never will, a hopeless theory.
No. I have heard this argument before and it makes no sense. Matter can and does exist without any consciousness knowing it is there. Exoplanets did not poof into existence once there were measurements taken to inquire if they exist. The order of existence is matter, chemistry, biology, consciousness.
@blaster-zy7xx If you could show me proof of matter existing outside of consciousness, that would be ideal. What would matter look outside of consciousness? With no qualities, only defined quantitatively, so no smell/colour/texture/etc it's totally abstract. Inconceivable by definition, yet you assert this unimaginable, unprovable 'matter' exists.
I'm starting to think it's materialism that makes no sense. It can not explain, even in principle, how consciousness emerges from matter. This is a devastating blow for the theory, and should throw the hypothesis into question.
'Give me 1 miracle and I can explain everything' says religion and materialists.
@@DaveSaysYesh I already did. I gave the example of exoplanets that have a history of existence long before their discovery by any conscious being. But there are hundreds of examples such as the core of the earth that no one has seen or the entire liquid ocean below the ice shell of Europa. All of these exist today even though no conscious being has seen them and they have all existed long before there was any life on planet earth to perceive them. Your argument is usually posited by theists who beleive that it takes a magic deity to create a universe (who was unsurprisingly created in the image of humans). This is just supposition on the part of theists. We have exactly zero examples of any consciousness outside of a physical biological brain. Invisible, immeasurable magic deities are the theists claim, not their evidence. A stone and a molecule has no consciousness. It is just existing matter irrespective if there is a conscious mind to perceive it or not.
@@blaster-zy7xx The planet can still exist as consciousness though, no need for magical "matter" that has no color or other quality so the pop into existence argument is silly. That said it is not a requirement, we may assume there is something beyond our minds that we cannot confirm, but it's a much bigger assumption to say that absolutely everything in our minds is mirrored "out there". Given it's possible that some things don't have an independent existence I see no reason why an exoplanet in particular would be required to have one.
@@bananmanx4764 I want to make sure I understand what you are saying and for you to understand what I am saying.
To clarify my point, I am not claiming that everything in our mind is mirrored "out there". I have written answers before that explain that colors do not exist outside of our own mind. Colors are 100% manufactured inside our own brains.
However, I am claiming that matter does not need consciousness to exist. Matter has existed long before any consciousness existed. Contrary to religious claims and claims of the woo-woo clan, we have exactly zero evidence that any form of consciousness exists outside of a biological brain.There is no evidence that rocks and molecules have any form of consciousness. The order of existence is matter, chemistry, biology, then consciousness.
Could you also please clarify your point better please?
I don't know what these sentences mean: "The planet can still exist as consciousness though", and "Given it's possible that some things don't have an independent existence..."
Lastly, your chosen name of "bananaman" makes me think of the Creationist, Ray Comfort. Are you a creationist?
Surprised Sam is taking a quasi woo woo view of consciousness. He seems to write off Dennett’s work without much analysis.
Dennett seems pretty weak on the Hard Problem. Calling it "vitalism reborn" is a complete cop-out.
I don’t see it that way. Dennet tries to explain consciousness as the suite of senses that culminates into what we perceive as consciousness. But as Sam is pointing out, an AI computer that has the input of the entire internet, plus cameras, microphones and logic programming isn’t conscious like we are, but it may eventually approach the outword appearance of consciousness and we would not know one way or the other.
@@blaster-zy7xx "we perceive"...it's the perceiving part that is the problem with consciousness. The suite of senses don't perceive consciousness. Consciousness perceives consciousness.
@@ejtattersall156 That is a bit of a semantics circular argument. "The suite of senses don't perceive consciousness. Consciousness perceives consciousness." Really? How would you know? That is like having a TV, but all the wires to the screen and the speaker are cut off. How do you know it is a TV??
@@blaster-zy7xx "That is a bit of a semantics circular argument." Yes. That is one of the big problems with consciousness. It is indeed circular. I can't know anything except what my consciousness tells "me," which is my consciousness, through senses that are perceived only by my consciousness. My senses are not perceived by you. I have no proof you are conscious other than what my senses tell my consciousness, which is subjective.
I admire Sam Harris, but this is disappointing. Sam goes on and on about numerous things he says we fundamentally understand (but we actually do not) and then simply asserts that consciousness is different and perhaps cannot be understood, while giving us a synopsis of freshman level epistemology, hard solipsism, metaphysical assumptions of science, and analogies like 4 dimensional space-time that are not intuitive. Seriously? We actually do not understand vision or smell. We do not understand how color is synthesized in the brain - that being a fundamental part of the consciousness of vision. We do not even know the complete wiring of the brain ("connectome"), let alone the synaptic properties that come with the specifics of wiring. Consciousness can be an illusion in the sense that our sense of self, or "I" is something the brain manufactures as an evolved property. Toward the end he gives just a nod to the possibility that consciousness arises through information processing. Ya think? He notes that intelligence is not substrate dependent -- which is today demonstrably true. But somehow, mysterious consciousness is fundamentally different?
Sam Harris is usually a clear thinker and speaker, but this is a lot of rambling. Sam often calls himself a neuroscientist. This claim rests on his having earned a PhD in the subject. Fair enough to a point. Sam indeed dabbled in neuroscience for a few years, and earned a PhD, but an actual neuroscientist is a person who is engaged daily in studying some aspect of nervous systems, who publishes peer-reviewed papers on the subject, and generates ideas deemed worthy of funding through grant review and moves the field forward. Being a public intellectual who writes books is not being a neuroscientist. Mayim Bialik also calls herself a neuroscientist for similar reasons, but she is an actor who hosts a game show. Sam is an excellent writer and polemicist, but he is not the person I'd have called upon to address this topic.
I disagree. He is explaining what the “hard question” is to those who are unfamiliar and explaing that much is known about the physics and chemistry of our receptors feeding signals to our brain and the brain is doing the magic of creating consciousness AND comparing to a computer with ability to process information and output seemingly correct responses better than humans. But he admits that the computer is not conscious, then admits that the thing that makes the lights turn on inside our own brain is still a mystery and may never be understood. And with all that inside our own brain, we can use an esthetics to temporarily “turn off the lights”. No one really know how that works either. Sam does a good job of using analogy to define what we know and where there is still a mystery at the root of explaining consciousness.
There is a mystery in explaining virtually all brain processes not defined as consciousness. Painting consciousness as somehow "magic", different, and unknowable is part of the problem with his whole presentation, and the problem with how philosophers deal with the issue. There is zero reason to think of it in these terms, yet that was the gist of Sam's whole presentation, albeit with a tip of the hat at the end that perhaps consciousness involves information processing. For a "neuroscientist" it was a rambling, disappointing presentation - but I'm glad you found it informative. @@blaster-zy7xx
Yeah, I can’t agree. This seems like one of the clearest topics I’ve heard him speak on.
He disappointingly has to do the intellectually honest thing here and essentially say: “I don’t know how consciousness arises”, but his reason for doing that makes sense to me.
OK, glad you liked it. For a supposed neuroscientist I found it to be a rambling, disappointment - but that's horse racing. @@ryandubois7419
You sound like you disagree with him but your argument is congruent with his. You can only measure consciousness because we know we need it to engage our senses. There are no neurons firing with consciousness like with the senses; consciousness isn’t a sense although we know it exists. It can’t be defined like the senses are defined. There’s no area of the brain responsible for consciousness, that we know of.
He said ‘glass has a lattice structure’ …. Glass has a highly disordered amorphous structure. Instead of asking him about his ideas about ‘consciousness’, ask him to study high school science courses first!!! Sad, what a waste of time putting him on.