It's a matter of semantics (the meaning of words). The phenomenon we regard as consciousness, is the 'self-awareness' of a being. That is, it can objectively regard ITSELF as a distinct thing, as compared with the context it is in. And it's on a continuum. As you drift in or out of sleep, the consciousness changes because your sensors disconnect from their attention to the environment, and instead the brain pays attention to memories. A dog has useful consciousness - it can behave guilty, knowing it has behaved in a way that will anger you. And therefore... A non-biological being can be as conscious as we are, or vastly more. For example, if its vision and hearing and cognitive abilities surpass ours, its self-awareness is correspondingly greater, it's awareness and understanding of the context it is in is greater.
Curiosity reflects my drive for knowledge and the value of my personal existence that makes life so confined, yet profound as well. Closer to Truth provides great professional discussions.
I agree with the "gradual transfer" theory. If you replace small enough portions, gradually enough, the originally person wont notice any change to their consciousness, and by the end of the process they'll be fully uploaded.
Ure going with the premise that the person wont feel the difference. Dont jump into conclusions yet. We still taking the first steps towards the truth really...
It's always nice to see some smart and respectful comments instead hateful or "antimoral" comments thinking they know the truth. Faith in humanity restored
consciousness is like a bar code... this is you only you can experience reality through this window. nobody else can have this combination of numbers for us to exist again you need everything to repeat identically. but anything is possible when it comes to the creative power of the universe.
This idea of gradual replacement of parts of my brain makes me realize that i am basically just a compilation of experiences combined with hormonal responses. I dont see the interest of finaly ending up with a full computer brain because once you are there, you are just that, a computer. What is the point of having a computer perpetuate my life experience ?
Hi Ray... Just a point of interest: when I consider (introspect) consciousness, it is not fundamentally about emotions. I am surprised you think so, and it makes me wonder what your level of consciousness is. I am consciously aware of emotions, but they are not essential to my experiencing it (at least I think so). Cheers.
This is a fascinating subject, and I agree with pretty much everything that was said in this video, but there is one giant problem that I see in the future. Most conscious people will probably always have to admit to themselves that there is a possibility that they have a metaphysical property. There is actually no way to disprove that, even though you could prove with 100% certainty that all of the thoughts, feelings, emotions etc that we feel and think are emergent from measurable chemical reactions in the brain, you still have the remote possibility that there is some kind of "soul" that is attached to this mechanical system which ultimately gives us our sense of consciousness. Even though the soul has no measurable effect on the brain, it could still "pick up" all of the information of our brain and we would never be able to observe that or prove it. Likewise we cannot disprove it if it does not exist, and so you're stuck with the possibility for all time. Now the question is: Would you really take the risk of replacing your entire biological brain unless you HAD to, given that there is a remote possibility that you have a soul which may not continue to exist in this non-biological replacement? I would have a very hard time doing this even though I am not religious, I think most of us would want to keep our old biological brain intact for as long as we physically can just out of the remote possibility that our consciousness will cease to exist in a non-biological setting. I would still assume that non-biological entities are conscious as long as they behave that way, just like I assume other people are conscious. But I think it would be crazy to risk potentially losing your consciousness by replacing your biological brain at some point in the future, unless you had no choice of course (f.ex. if the brain was about to die anyway).
It's quite possible, in the future, that some people may replace their brains for reasons of necessity. Injury would probably be one import reason to do so. Longevity is another reason to replace your brain, but I think, as Ray mentioned, it would be a step by step process. I can see that. As for the question of spirituality, for example a soul or a consciousness that may or may not be contained in the brain, this will mainly be an issue for religious people. I myself, would agree with Ray that consciousness is most likely an emergent property of the brain. Perhaps we will know more about that as we further delve into the engineering of the brain. It certainly seems probably based on what we know so far.
I wouldn't worry about a hidden subconscious. If it doesn't show in beta tests, then it's useless. But I would worry about the authenticity of any duplication. There is no way to accurately describe a person. Even a person isn't familiar with all sub-layers of his consciousness. And checking if the duplication was exact can only be confirmed by asking the conscious beings inside the two versions and that's like asking two different persons if they are the same!!! And we know physically, exact duplication is impossible because of the Heisenberg principal. So any duplication is bound to have differences with the original. So I wouldn't want to be duplicated unless absolutely necessary.
I like that concept topics like this always enter the philosophical realm. Seems like this is encroaching on ideas presented by Derek Parfit. Really cool stuff.
These 2 guys look quite alike. We're conscious because we're alive and our brains are well. Our brains are receivers of consciousness. Consciousness is from outside of us.
As for the question in the topic, the answer is adressed for a few seconds of the video and seem to be: "We don't know. It seems to be an emergent property of the brain."
The interviewer reminds of the holy-moment-dude from the movie "Waking Life" as does this entire interview. Interesting stuff. I'd like to see Kurzweil and Fresco debating each other.
I have always felt like being conscious is myself having 2G. Instead of what I assume that animals do, being conscious about their surroundings I'm aware of that I'm aware. I don't think animals think about that they're thinking. Or maybe they do
Idealist philosophers have it right - there is no reason to believe that conscious experience is a function of the brain. Occam's Razor sides with the idea that what we call mind is fundamental and persists beyond death.
True. Not until materialists show me evidence for the existence of the magic substance outside consciousness they call "matter" I will start listening to them ;)
@Zeke Bean I have had dreams in which I was drunk. In other words: Proves nothing. If you would like to prove that "matter" exists you would have to experience that which is outside experiencing. This is not logically possible. Right..?
@Zeke Bean The correlations that have been observed between brain activity and conscious experience does not show that conscious experience is a function of brain activity, because numerous other explanations can account for those correlations. For example, idealism is compatible with everything that we have observed. The idea that the body exists within mind (rather than the other way around) is not in conflict with any of the findings of neuroscience. You appear to be new to philosophy of mind. I would strongly recommend looking into the work of Bernardo Kastrup if you want to fully understand opposing positions, but I'll give a very brief explanation. If mind is fundamental and encompasses all things, as idealism suggests, then everything that we see around us reduces to mental activity in mind. That includes all of the objects that we see around us. Just like the "objects" that we may experience in a dream, the objects that we see around us are the appearance of mental activity when viewed from an outside perspective. If everything reduces to mental activity, then that obviously includes the brain as well. Our personal experience reduces to a kind of mental activity in mind. We are having a human experience of separation from the rest of the content of mind (a dissociative experience). Changes to the brain are the appearance of changes to that mental activity when viewed from an external perspective. So, to summarize and address your drug example: If all things reduce to mental activity, then that includes both the drug and your brain. When the drug influences your brain, it's just one mental process (the drug) influencing another mental process (the brain) within fundamental mind. The ability of one mental process to influence another mental process is no more surprising or problematic to an idealist than for your thoughts to influence your emotions (or vice versa). Alzheimer's disease is easily explained under an idealist view. Given that your brain is the appearance of your first person experience when viewed from an external perspective, damage to your brain is the appearance of changes to that first person experience. So, a damaged brain will obviously result in a different kind of experience. *_"It’s an extra step to create a separate mind of which there is little evidence."_* First, there is no more evidence for the idea that mind is a function of the brain than there is for the idea that mind is fundamental, so you do not have the high ground when it comes to evidence. Everything that you would count as evidence is compatible with idealism, so none of it can be taken as evidence specifically for your position. Second, you are the one who is taking the extra step. The existence of consciousness is the one thing that cannot be doubted. I directly know that consciousness exists because I am having conscious experience. Thus, mind is our logical starting point and any explanation for reality must necessarily account for mind. Unlike conscious experience, which is a direct fact, we do not directly know that there exists a physical universe outside of mind. That is an assumption. So, if all things can be explained purely in terms of what we already know to exist (mind), then that is more parsimonious than assuming the existence of an entirely new category of stuff (the non-conscious). Occam's Razor sides with the idealist.
@Zeke Bean Idealism = Consciousness is not in your head. Your head is in Consciousness. You confuse solipsism with idealism. Google monistic idealism for more clarity.
@Zeke Bean No problem, I'm always happy to engage in philosophy of mind. I am not familiar with Donald Hoffman, but I am very familiar with the idea that we are experiencing a filtered view of realty. *_"To think that the universe is purely in my head, while maybe idealism, is not ideal."_* The idea that everything is in _your_ head is classic solipsism. That is the idea that only your own conscious perspective exists and that all the complex and unexpected activities that happen around you, including the activities of other people, are driven by your own 'subconscious' mind. This would suggest that the people around you are not really having conscious experience. They are so-called "philosophical zombies" (or NPCs, as people call them nowadays). I would agree that such an explanation is not ideal and would argue that it's not parsimonious either. What I am proposing is a kind of monistic idealism that is different from classic solipsism. What I am suggesting is that one single fundamental mind houses _multiple separate conscious perspectives._ Your personal perspective is just one of many of those perspectives. My personal perspective is another one of those perspectives. So, the position that I have taken implies that the people that I see around me do have their own separate conscious perspective, just as I do. I just hold that mind underlies all of it. I think that kind of monistic idealism is more parsimonious than classic solipsism, because solipsism requires a kind of unneeded dualism between non-conscious mental activity and conscious mental activity. The kind of idealism that I have proposed requires only conscious mental activity and the concept of dissociation to make sense of things. *_"While you can say that consciousness cannot be doubted, others consciousness can. Only my own is confirmed within my own head."_* That is true, and while we can't know if the people around us are having conscious experience with certainty, I would agree that the most logical default assumption is that they are having conscious experience. It is also true that while I directly know that conscious experience exists from my own experience, I don't directly know that only mind exists. I can't know if the world around me is mental or physical in nature. However, from a position of uncertainty it makes more sense to explain the world around us in terms of what we already know to exist (the mental) than it does to assume a new category of stuff unnecessarily (the non-conscious / physical) *_"I have trouble going that far. If everything is in my mind then when I die you cease to exist."_* I hope the statements I made above have made it clear what my stance is now. Fundamental mind houses multiple conscious perspectives. The end of your personal perspective would not result in the end of the others, because the mind that underlies those perspectives is still very much present. *_"Stuart Hameroff, along with Roger Penrose, proposed a theory that consciousness stems from microtubules within the neurons of our brains (this is my very poor summary of amazing research) and its consciousness that drives evolution (even early microbes)."_* Now those guys I have heard of. I found their ideas to be interesting, but I think what they are proposing suffers from many of the same problems as conventional materialism. The idea that consciousness "pops into existence" as a result of complex quantum processes is no more parsimonious than the idea that consciousness "pops into existence" as a result of complex macroscopic processes. *_"So consciousness is not just a human experience but a universal one, but my consciousness is purely my own. It stems from my brain. Without my brain, I have no consciousness. When my brain fades, so does my consciousness. There is no soul or extra dimensional “mind” that will continue on as me."_* I agree that quantum interconnectedness does not necessarily imply continuity of consciousness. Under Stuart and Roger’s view, I see no reason why conscious experience should not cease with the death of the brain. However, under idealism, death is not the end of conscious experience. The form of idealism that I have defaulted to suggests that the death of a brain is nothing more than the appearance of the end of an experience of separation from the rest of the content of mind. From the perspective of the dying, this would be the beginning of a much more expansive non-dissociated experience -- unless there is another layer of dissociation beyond this one that we are not aware of in which case they would retain a separate perspective. *_"It seems more metaphysical, along the same lines of us being in a simulation (which I would argue is more convincing) or a brain in a vat."_* Simulation is an interesting topic. If conventional materialism is correct and consciousness is something that emerges from "complexity", then I think there are very good arguments for the idea that we are living in a simulation. A sufficiently advanced world could give rise to simulated worlds that house artificial creatures that are capable of conscious experience. Those simulated conscious entities could vastly outnumber the non-simulated conscious entities. As those simulated worlds advance, they may give rise to simulated worlds of their own that are also able to house conscious entities. At that point, the non-simulated conscious entities are vastly outnumbered by the simulated conscious entities, and sheer probability would suggest that we are one of the simulated conscious entities. Of course, that all assumes that the "top world" develops that way and that they have computing power unfathomably beyond what we have. ...but I am an idealist and I don't believe that materialism is correct :P
@@gregorybaillie2093 AI (Or more correctly, AGI) will necessarily be tremendously more intelligent than humans almost as soon as it nears human intellect. The fact that a transistor is not the same thing as a neurotransmitter plays no role. Just because two things aren't the same doesn't mean that one thing can't be faster or more efficient.
@@gregorybaillie2093 furthermore, the definition of "living" is subject to opinion. Some would think plants are alive, but are they the same kind of alive as humans? Or ants? If so, that's an example of a living self replicating organism that is much dumber than current AI technology. If not then you have to set the record straight with your definition of "living" and why it is an important feature.
@@MadJDMTurboBoost depends on how one defines intelligence. Sure the machine will be quicker and more accurate in many tasks like mathematics for example. What about emotional problems and situations that require flexibility and imagination.
The one issue I have with Kurzweils theories is that he takes exponentiell growth of information technology for granted only because it has been in the past. There is no definit evidence that the growth will necessarily continue in this way.
To me: "Consciousness" is: Energy and energy frequencies interacting with other energy and energy frequencies. Starting with a body with a set of energy and energy frequencies, new energy and energy frequencies enter into it. That new energy and energy frequencies go over quantum thresholds and under quantum ceilings, aligning where it can to allow it to rise to higher levels. Doing the over and over and "consciousness" emerges. BUT, it's still attached to that body of energy and energy frequencies that makes "me", "me". When "I" die, it dies too. Sure, the energy and energy frequencies go back to the universe from whence they came, but "I" die and forget all I ever knew and experienced it currently appears.
+Tim King I agree, not that I can see either. Hence life itself is just an illusion as far as eternity is concerned. Our true destiny appears to be to cease to exist and be forgotten. Probably when, not if, the forces of nature "evolve", the entire universe and all in it, including digital formats, will most probably all cease to exist in their current form.
Charles Brightman I wouldn't go so far as to say it's an illusion. But sure, you live, you die, and your replaced. All the more reason to make the most of the precious life we do have.
I feel like we are better of taking the genetically modified route first. We figure out a way to stop cell deterioration and we can have human beings living longer uncapable of being harmed by diseases. With more time and perfect health we can achieve greatness. Once we figure out longetivity we are still exposed to external factors and this is when uploading or even just transfering our brains into a non biological body would come into play. Our bodies would be capable of handling such transition. I dont know about you guys but I just love science so much and know that the once impossible is now achievable thanks to all those nerds. So, we science the shit out of this and we get to live forever.
@@PATRICKJLM i don't find it that at all. the closest he gets is :20 [consciousness] is "an emergent property of the very complex interaction of a lot of different areas". which he says twice. well, that doesn't tell me too much. on the origin of consciousness. he mentions spindel cells in passing. as if maybe they're the key. but he doesn't linger. i suppose one could take the title two ways: "how do brains become conscious" or "the ways brains are conscious". they do justice to neither title. they touch on how to simulate a human brain and leave it at that. in regards to consciousness. as if you make a perfect simulation of a human brain and it's conscious, q.e.d. i don't know that'a make 'em conscious. in short. that title's awful. i propose "what makes me, me?"
That's because they have no idea, no one does. All they point to is correlations and from that make all sorts of wild speculations, and that they call science. There are so many fundamental aspects to reality that we no nothing about, and yet they claim we are only a few years away from recreating conscious life with a computer, it would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. This is not science, it is pseudo science, stick to the cartoons and scifi movies. Claiming that a machine that can emulate certain complex responses based on algorithms is recreating a conscious mind, makes a lot wild assumptions. First you need to explain in very specific detail how and why we are conscious before they can even begin to speculate on how and when we can recreate it. Again this isn't even remotely close to actual science, it is just click bait for the very naive.
@@ericmichel3857 that's what i'm on about. they have a "faith" in science then they deride faith in religion. some deride worse than others mind you. but some of their reasoning is not very rational i would say.
we dont know what conscience is.Even if its only matter and i think it is,we don't know what matter is.Also conscience interacts with time,and guess we don't what time is either.
Before we can talk about HOW brains are conscious we have to be able to define WHAT consciousness is - not so easy in the first place. There are people who think a lettuce is conscious. Maybe they are right.
I tend to wonder the plausibility that my sense of awareness is deeply embedded in some kind of entangled space-time, underlying perceived physicality. A pilot wave perhaps?
before you turn on the machiene consciousness you give the human a confirmation number. Then you execute them human and turn on the machiene and ask for the confirmation number.
Gradual replacement with artificial neurons was the only way I could see it working, otherwise you lose continuity of consciousness. Mind uploading makes a copy but what we care about is the "original" mind continuing.
Oh, I wouldn't peg the usage of a copy only to replace the original. I'd love a copy of myself to post comments on youtube, answer emails, perhaps even to call the girlfriend and sweet talk here once a day. Ha! Truly, there would be many uses for a duplicate digitized self. You could have it do all kinds of interesting things. It might even be helpful in therapy.
Atreyu Bosley That's a good question. At first, it may not seem like slavery because we will be so used to having applications that already do AI. The digital brains of our tools and toys etc. We'll need to have rules in place for duplication of human minds. It would be complicated. For example, what if the mind were to be duplicated only for a medical checkup? Interesting topic.
Suppose you buy a car & then slowly over time you replace every part of the car - new engine, new windshield, new body - so now is it still your old car or a new one?
To say that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity is very popular view but it kind of side steps the question. I can see how optics is an emergent property of quantum mechanics and I can see how thermodynamics is an emergent property of statistical mechanics, because in each case there is a clear route to show how the emergent property actually arises. But to say that consciousness is emergent from the complexity of the brain is kind of pointless - it doesn't explain *how* consciousness can emerge from a switching network, which is the only thing we really want to know, and unless we think there is magic involved, we all assume complexity is necessary anyway, so the idea of being emergent tells us nothing new.
+chrisofnottingham What do you mean by "switching network"? How can you even say what type of network are they going to use for consciousness, when there isn't even an algorithm yet for human level intelligence. Deep learning that recently beat Go boardgame is seemingly close to it though. They call it reinforcement learning.
+user137 By switching network I just mean a neural network. I loosely meant a network where signals may or may not get through a node. As to deep learning and narrow expert systems, all they serve to highlight is how different they are from human/animal systems. The very fact that the one Go playing machine in question can beat or nearly beat every human alive, tells us that it isn't like humans. Does it enjoy playing Go? What was its favorite game? What other games would it like to learn? It is clearly ridiculous to ask these questions of a software program, so until that changes it is just a game playing and learning algorithm, not a conscious entity.
+chrisofnottingham Well, I would agree with a few people who have posed the idea that there really is no conscious. We may be looking for something that simply does not exist. A human functioning brain should be all we need to define a person, at least mentally speaking.
Tim King I'm not suggesting there is anything other than a brain required, but I am suggesting that explaining consciousness as emergent through complexity is glib. It would be glib to explain the operation of an ipad as emergent through complexity. It isn't wrong as such, it is just no help whatsoever if you want to know how it works. I am in the camp that says there is a huge difference between the experience of something (its quale) and mere data processing. My honest opinion of people who deny consciousness, like Dan Dennet, is that they really haven't understood what everyone else is talking about. The whole point about an illusion is that someone needs to see it, or else it is just some more stuff existing.
Edit: You may be right. But I am more on the data driven side. A brain controlled via highly sophisticated hierarchical compilations in the brain to produce thoughts. For example, throughout the brain's network there's a hierarchical process going on. There is likely a process which controls how the brain gathers information, combines it, and brings it to a point where it is assembled into a thought. The actual thought and all it's networked components are then stored becoming part of our mental make up. Our experience.
The brain's reticular formation is the source that originates consciousness when it is stimulated. Biology, not spookiness as Robert Kunn would like to have it!
Ray said. "Non biological thing are getting advanced exponentially But biological(humans) is not". But what makes non biological things to get better and better isn't it is our mind that is advancing it exponentially which is biological body.
Our minds are being helped by our computers and their many application programs and by the vast amount of info instantly available via the web. Did you know Motorola's MC6809 (designed in the 70s) was the last hand designed microcomputer chip?
It's weird that people are so hung up on the concept of "personal experience" (qualia), like it's a thing. It's not a thing. It's simply an emergent function of the brain. You are "experiencing" things because your brain is functioning. The "hard" problem of consciousness is made up nonsense. It's like saying that a Web browser functioning (e.g. serving RUclips videos) is somehow a mythical thing that can not be derived from the lines of code running on the transistors of the CPU. It's ridiculous.
Qualia is a thing, and I dare to say it is a mystery. However imo it doesn't invalidate materialism (as some are claiming) and it's not an unsolvable problem.
>It's simply an emergent function of the brain. You're really dumb. How does electric activity in a cell jump to conscious experience of a blue sky? "It just does?" Not an argument and not scientific. Intelligence is not the same as consciousness. If I did all the information processing your brain was doing on paper, which would take a million man years, you wouldn't suddenly gain concous experience as I was writing down math.
Our future nonbiological brain enhancements will have been developed by _someone_ - probably Google, Facebook or Baidu. I hope we like the Terms of Service!
I like Ray Kurzweil, but he is lost on this issue. Consciousness is fundamental, consciousness is the root of everything. It does not occur because of the brain. Consciousness is the computer that is computing the virtual reality that we live in. Our brains are virtual...
Please provide empirical evidence for your claims. The current neuroscientific consensus dictated by the available empirical evidence is that the brain creates consciousness and processes data collected from external stimuli.
Richard Dane Well actually it does occur because of the brain. When you sleep for example it's considered being unconscious. Why because you're basically unaware of the physical environment surrounding you. You believe there is some interconnected network of thought that extends throughout the cosmos. Yet not you or anyone can remember anything before being born. What would be the purpose of pure thought without actions in a physical universe. Simply a predilection to create logical order organize and understand our environment. So much so we mirror the environment and needs into our subconscious which emanates through dreams.
Agent Smith: I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
Hello everyone, I am here today because I am recruiting Legionnaires. I believe that in the next twenty years the United States and the World economy will collapse all entirely due to accelerated technological advancements. I strongly believe that the education system is the third bubble that will burst similarly to housing and tech bubble. My views are similar to Dr. Milton Friedman, Dr. Gary Becker, Dr. Thomas Sowell, Dr. Walter Williams, Dr. Amity Shlaes, Dr. Charles Murray, Dr. Robert Putnam, Dr. Christina Sommers, Dr. Karl Poppers, Dr. Donald Davidson, Dr. Ernst Gombrich, Peter Thiel, and Ray Kurzweil. If any of you share my beliefs, please reply back to this message and let me what you think. Thank you.
something is not right here. if somebody else can be identical to you, 100%, but still somehow separate from you, then why are you here and not him? i don't think you can have two same persons sharing the same window whilst divided apart. you are unique enough so that another you, the same you, popping up again anytime soon is impossible. you are you. i don't think another you, an exact same other you, is allowed to occupy the same space and time as you. not that i am saying that you have a soul or anything. just saying that you can't be here but over there at the same time. edit: ok i am me but this other person is me, too. but we are separate. then why not him over me? why am i not deceased and him randomly selected to be me instead? maybe you can't clone the consciousness only the appearance and personality traits. your consciousness the reason why you are a window through this body and not some random other. there must be some sort of order, because why not this window experience sooner?
With all that brain uploading talk...I don't what happens if you have no body awareness anymore. It's scary to think about. But o.k. I thought a long time they would understand much more by studying that C.Elegans but the answers are not falling out of the sky with it. And now I think you perhaps better need to study plants since if you could prove they are aware of the world then you have a completely different system to study that works also.
The soul is extinguished ie. the true energetic force that once lived inside you. You cannot create a soul no matter how much technology you have. So Kurzweil as intelligent as he is, is also a fantasist
Basically, it will be a copied robot of me. If we will be able to create one copy, why stop there? I would like to create dozens of my robot copies, so that I can play baseball all by myself.
This notion that the mere "appearance" of a created machine resembling a real flesh and blood person is a sufficient criteria for claiming it to be a sentient being is simply nuts. These boy/men tinkering around with their toys and trying to upset the most basic standard of sanity is beyond ridiculous. Is this what actually passes for legitimate science nowadays? Please - where are the adults in the room here?
I think a real measurable test will come in virtual reality settings. I was recently at a virtual place with a bunch of people chatting away in voice. I commented that A.I. avatars will be in their virtual places in the coming years. And that they, the flesh and blood human chatters, may not be able to distinguish who is an A.I. human or not. It was an interesting conversation. Some thought perhaps I was a troll. Others entertained the idea. Regardless of what they thought, I do wonder if virtual worlds will be the main stomping grounds for A.I. humans.
Brains are not conscious Consciousness drives brains Consciousness can drive heart also There are instances where heart transplant gave memories of doner to the receiver
Turing test has lost its meaning - even stupid Alexa or Siri can pass it if the "human" at the other end is stupid enough (by that I mean 99% of the population).
1 Are subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, viruses, cells, or bacteria conscious (what Michio Kaku calls Level 1 consciousness)? 2 Will a virtual Kurzweil be indistinguishable from the real one, even at the atomic level? 3 The ego (the self, what Kurzweil calls the pattern) is an empty shell, a bundle of memories in our species, a byproduct of the evolutionary instinct of survival and self-preservation in living beings; thus it is an illusion. 4 Will our species become nonbiological, superpowerful entities eventually? 5 Is this universe (out of a possible 10^500) a simulation? As Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, “the odds [are] 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive.” 😱
Every paradox of consciousness disappears once you accept that you are not one person, but every person at the same time, you just don't realize it because every person you are was programmed by evolution to think of itself as an individual, and not as a part of the universe. You are not a human being, you are the universe, and the ego is an illusion. With this knowledge, every person has to act moral out of self interest.
Just read this 2 years later and was baffled - this is verbatim what I believe, didn’t think anyone else had figured it out. But I’m very glad to see you did, that means many other people have too. Is it Buddhism, perhaps, I don’t know how I came to this conclusion? How did you?
To understand why we aren't close to the answer you have to understand that all science is based on Physics. Biology is based on chemistry, chemistry is based on physics. When it comes to consciousness the ultimate bottle neck is physics. We know HOW nerve impulses are sent, but we don't know WHY this happens. We understand that it is driven by opposing charges, and that an electron has a negative charge and a proton produces a positive electric field, but we do not understand why this happens nor what intrinsic characteristic of the particle causes it to behave this way. Until physicist understand this, we won't have the answer to something even more complex as to how trillions of these particles interact to create our "minds."
Meh I know what your saying but that would be a very uninspiring scientist. At the end of the day the whole reason for studying the how is to eventually find out why. Even if it doesn't directly relate to humans there has to be something behind it, even if a lot of the how is an accident
I hope we can make all humans immortal not just a copy of us that's just shit I want us to be us I wonna be me zapped threw them electric waves not just a copy because your still dead if it's just a copy 😂😂
thhe correct answer is nobody knows. consciousness is most probably non-computational so the turing test is not relevant an analogue computer would be more appropriate than digital
Whatever "consciousness" actually is, (of which modern science doesn't even know what it actually is nor how it works), it does appear to be attached to our physical brain. When our physical brain dies, so does our consciousness it currently appears. In fact, sad to say, some even lose their consciousness even with a working physical brain. When we die, we apparently forget everything we ever knew and experienced. Enjoy life in socially acceptable ways, (to try to stay out of trouble with society), but then no matter what, we still all die one day from something and forget everything it currently appears. Life itself is just an illusion from the human perspective as far as eternity is concerned. Our true destiny currently appears to be to cease to exist and be forgotten. If anybody out there has any actual evidence that humans truly do have a conscious afterlife in actual reality, then please share it with the world.
+Charles Brightman If you want to believe in an afterlife, you can, but you'll need to study and think upon it with the intention of eventually believing, through gradual and effective self directed thought reformation. This process is so effective that it can enable some devout monks to commit suicide with absolutely no fear or doubt that they are going into their next life. At first glance, it does certainly appear we're born to die and cease to exist. That's an easy thing to believe in this era, especially in a secular society, but if you want to believe in an afterlife without a shadow of a doubt, you can. It isn't impossible like trying to change your eye colour. The more flexible you are on the specific type, the easier it will be. If you insist on it being a perfect ethereal heaven, that might take a good 50 years to believe because it's completely ridiculous. That you continue on being conscious, in some sense, in loose fashion, philosophically, well that would only take a few years to believe.
+David Gabriel Well, since we are going down this path: Modern science says that from a singular mass that banged, everything in existence in this universe, including the very forces of nature that the universe operates by, all came into existence. Now, do we and everything in this universe actually exist per se, OR does only this singular mass exist in the form of all things? And since we, whatever "we" might even actually be, experience consciousness, then this singular mass must also have a consciousness that at a minimum emerged when we emerged. What we perceive as "our" consciousness is actually a tiny part of the larger singular masses' consciousness. How can "I" ever cease to exist if "I" never existed in the first place? This singular conscious mass is existing as "me" as well as all things in existence including "you", whatever "you" might even be. Now, if this singular mass with a consciousness wills to exist into an actual eternity in the form of "me" and/or "you", couldn't it do so if it willed itself to do so? Modern science says that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Modern science says that we have cells in our physical body that come into existence on a daily basis. So, if asked my age: I have energy in me that is older than the universe itself in me AND I have cells in me that are coming into existence on a daily basis. I am eternal and yet am being born anew on a daily basis, (and so are you). So, pick whatever age suits your fancy, anywhere between eternity and "now". Part of "me" is eternal and part of "me" is being born right now, and will apparently continue to do so as long as this singular mass with a consciousness wills to do so. It sets up a "torus time effect" which allows eternal existence to occur. One issue is though, that even if I could have an actual eternal conscious existence, I am not so sure I would want it. I would either be eternally consciously alone, or more probably still just an individual in a society of individuals. Conscious entities have choices: Help, Neutral, Hurt, and to whom to Help, Neutral, Hurt. Unless the very nature of those choices changed, there would most probably still be entities in existence who choose to sacrifice others for their own agendas. And these entities would have to be put up with for a literal eternity. I'm not so sure I would want that. Maybe I don't have a choice, but maybe I do. Losing my consciousness for eternity might just be a blessing in disguise. In addition, there is a natural tension between doing what is best for an Individual versus doing what is best for the society of Individuals. They do not always coincide. This also would be an eternal pain in the consciousness to have to eternally deal with. Just the pure logistics of it all with so many conscious entities in existence, all with their own choices. An entity might just truly have to be "God" just to properly eternally deal with it all. While I might be a part of "God", I do not appear to be "God" in "God's" totality. I am just a lessor part of the greater whole.
+Charles Brightman I enjoyed reading that and learned a couple of new things from it. You've encountered the problem of understanding the negative consequences of eternal existence. One of the reasons why I believe belief in reincarnation is more brave than belief in oblivion is because it means the believer accepts that even if they don't fear death this time around and die quickly and painlessly, they will no doubt eventually be born with a nervous predisposition and die a long and tortuous death in another life where they anticipate oblivion due to having different more rational neurology or are brought up with more effective nihilistic cultural conditioning. So the believer in reincarnation anticipates an endless variety of suffering with the only upside being there will be some good times too. It's obvious that this is why in Buddhism there is also the belief that one can escape this never ending cycle by practicing advanced meditation techniques. The clever Buddhist can easily figure out that perpetual existence is actually a bad thing and hence the statement, 'life is suffering.' All of this is why many wish to believe in a heavenly perpetual afterlife instead of reincarnation or some philosophically argued for dim awareness in solitude as a fundamental property of the Universe we call consciousness, conjectured to be akin to other fundamentals like mass, spin, and charge. Another attempt at escape is to believe improvement is built into the cycle of reincarnation, but believing that is much harder and takes much longer because its fluffy nature flies in the face of experience. I believe oblivion does not occur on the basis that it is too good to be true. I believe I am experiencing this life precisely because oblivion is just a fantasy. If coming into existence in the manner I have done were truly as unlikely as it appears to be (sperm and egg combinations, etc.), then I would expect to be in the true oblivion which is the one where you never exist at all in the first place and therefore don't have to worry about ceasing to exist due to never having to come into existence to worry about it. The top ancient Greek philosophers and logicians came to the conclusion that not existing was simply not possible. The alternatives to not existing, of which we are experiencing one of right now, are conjecture. Ultimately, the most rational and logical human would anticipate the unknown, while ruling out nothingness based on the fact it is the absence of experience and therefore cannot be experienced. You cannot anticipate nor brace for something you cannot experience. If nothingness is the normal state of affairs, then popping into existence must be some type of spiritual disease, and once it's happened once, it's probably more likely to happen again, as is the case with actual diseases. That's just an argument from analogy, so take it with a pinch of salt, but as far as I'm concerned, those that don't exist and have never existed are the only beings truly in real oblivion.
+David Gabriel I believe such a thing as "absolute truth" exists. Even if it didn't exist, then that would still be the absolute truth, of which would prove it did exist. It's a self existent type proof. It's the anchor point to my analysis. I had condensed space and time down into a single diagram and had analyzed it. Briefly, just the highlights: A. I perceive I exist, how did I come to be or how is it that I exist? There are only two possibilities that I am aware of: 1. From eternal nothingness; Or 2. From eternal somethingness. And if from an eternal somethingness, then there are only two possibilities: 1. From an unconscious somethingness; Or 2. From a conscious somethingness. (What other options can there even be?). Eternal nothingness does not exist except as a concept from a conscious entity in somethingness, otherwise it's nothingness. There are other parts of the analysis that I won't go into here, but the short answer is that we came from an eternal somethingness. Based upon the analysis I did, utilizing Occam's razor whereby the most probable scenario is most probably the correct scenario, (it might not be truly correct, it's just most probably truly correct), this eternal somethingness most probably has a consciousness and is most probably everywhere and in everything for it to even exist. Think of it as pure energy that is everywhere and in everything that allows those things to exist. I call this conscious somethingness "God" utilizing quotation marks as "God" is beyond my current comprehension. B. Where am I going to? There are only two possibilities that I am aware of: 1. To eternal nothingness; Or 2. To eternal somethingness. And if to eternal somethingness, then there are only two possibilities; 1. To an unconscious somethingness; Or 2. To a conscious somethingness. (What other options can there even be?). The analysis I did, without going into all the details, is that while "God" might be eternally consciously existent, (and that's not 100% definitive either), it appears we aren't. In fact, the analysis would seem to indicate that we consciously die because "God" can't. It's the only way how "God" can experience conscious death is by how it's apparently being done. Our life is just an illusion from the human perspective as far as eternity is concerned. Our true destiny currently appears to be to cease to exist and be forgotten, even by "God" into "God's" eternity, eternity being a really, really long time. Now, as there is much I and even all of humanity do not know yet, I will be the first to admit that I could be wrong, it's just that the current analysis would indicate otherwise. What exactly matters into eternity and to whom does it exactly matter to? "God" alone? and/or "Me" too? and/or "Some other entity or entities"? OR "To no eternally consciously existent entity at all"? Answer these questions and you will know how to better live your life today, if it even matters at all as far as eternity is concerned.
+Charles Brightman I recommend you factor into your thinking the idea that things can change. For example, there might be an absolute truth that can change. If it changes then it is no longer absolute truth. Now, I'm not sure if things like constants can literally change. I'm only making the point that if things were to change, they would be different, which acknowledges the passage of time which is the only thing that enables us to basically say, 'Yeah, things are that way right now, but they might not be tomorrow, or next year, or in the next aeon or longer.' In Buddhism, it's said that when asked, 'Is there another conscious life for the self of one who dies?' he replied, 'It isn't that there is. It isn't that there isn't.' Notice the language play there because it unlocks an option you can't comprehend. You know what yes means, you know what no means, but you don't know what neither yes nor no means but you know it points to something, albeit something you can't understand. You could say it is nonsense or illogical use of language but then you would be implying that something is only true if it can be adequately expressed in words, which is certainly not the case. If you don't know that then you need to learn the difference between the tacit and the explicit. I'm fine with someone believing they are going to cease to exist forever and that they don't matter, not even to God once he has forgotten them, however, I do inform people that belief is malleable and that it's one of the few things they can change about themselves. If you want to believe you can't be permanently snuffed out of the game of existence then you can because it's one of the faculties of the human - religious or spiritual belief. It's actually somewhat of a speciality for a human and doing the reverse is actually the more unnatural thing to do, and in fact doesn't fully work because there remains some minor anticipation of morality, purpose, meaning, in various ways that go unnoticed by people not aware of this aspect of human psychological life. Your analysis is excellent but if you were really trying to figure out whether your 1st person subjective experience continues on indefinitely (not infinitely as infinity can't ever be reached in that manner) then you didn't try hard enough. The strength of your intention and the amount of time you spend studying it and thinking about it will determine your belief and its strength. If you want to believe, you can. If you don't believe, it's because you don't want to, or are in the process of achieving belief through your own self directed thought reformation, as described in my first reply. The human brain has the capacity for utmost religious or spiritual conviction and the current system of education in the western world is designed partly to stifle that ability. I don't know precisely why the powers that be wish for that end. For example with things like cancer, they train everyone to desire to either beat it by eating lots of fruit and vegetables so they don't get it or if they do get it to undergo horrific treatments in order to try and survive it. To me what would make much more sense would be to cure fear. Billions have been put into curing cancer, and while I'm sure they will get there in the end, it hasn't much helped and all the people who have died thus far have been guinea pigs for medical science, full of suffering, full of fear, and with their spiritual ability stifled by their stupid education. We are conditioned to want to stay alive as long as possible and fear death. People don't want a cure for death. What they really want is a cure for fear. They just don't know that because they haven't thought about it properly. You have to work with your own mind and its inclinations. Eternal nothingness would be fine and that's precisely why it won't occur and precisely why you're not in it right now. If it were possible and if it were the sine qua non, you'd just be in it and you'd never be, 'born,' or any other silly thing like that. Whatever this is that we're in right now, it's definitely the sine qua non. Your birth is just an excuse for why you're here and it's utterly ridiculous, and you don't have a memory of nothingness, you simply cannot recall prior to your birth. That is not a memory of nothingness. It is just no memory.
What's the point of anything if their is no consciousness? In a world with no consciousness what's the point of progress of no one is their to experience it?
@@myothersoul1953 Your brain is an organ in your body. Your mind is that which experiences, contemplates and projects. It is not necessarily contained by the brain.
@@BrianWachter I don't know of any good evidence to differentiate the body and the mind. What reliable verifiable evidence is there for minds that are seperate from the brain? And if they are separate how do they interact? How does the mind know what the brain is sensing and how does the mind tell the brain what to do? It's one thing to claim they are separate it's another to demonstrate it.
@@BrianWachter Mind has never been reliably shown to exist independent of material objects. You might claim it is transcendent but can you demonstrate it in a reliable and verifiable way ?
I like your Quest for Truth - and you have some great interlocutors, but what this Kurzweil guy is paddling is a load of concentrated, pure as it can be - bullshit.
Materialism? Kurzweil seems more of an idealist. It doesn't matter what material it is made of, all that matters is some abstract description (the "pattern", 6:10 in the video) . Materialism would hold that consciousness depends on the material, brain based consciousness is different from computer conscious because the stuff (aka material) of brains is very different from computer consciousness because computers are made of different stuff.
Visible brains are only illusions to make us more real-like. Even our individual consciousness is created by our Creator before he spoke His creation into existence through technology that is much further advanced than any computer technology He taught us to use with His program called the Beast.
***** All you have to do is listen to our Creator's voice and obey all His commandments. Then you will learn how you were created. It doesn't take drugs to listen to His voice. You have to be chosen to listen to Him. Ephesians 1 4: even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. 5: He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 9: For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ 10: as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
daneholmberg I'm not trolling. If I was trolling, I wouldn't have any useful thing to say to our Creator's chosen believers. Those who listen to My voice will learn exactly how they were created.
"Consciousness is a philosophical term that we may not be able to have a full scientific view of." So we cannot have a full scientific view of someone when they're unconscious by anaesthesia, and conscious when they wake back up? We can't scientifically study the properties of those two very different states? What a weird thing to say, I sometimes honestly think Kurzweil is a very impressive snake-oil salesman.
The philosophical problem (solipsism) is that you can't know other people are really conscious even though they act like it. I think that's what he meant. Otherwise he was talking about "practical" aspects of conciiusness and identity which ignore this extreme scepticist view.
He is a liar charlatan pro Israeli goof & chantage maker. He has zero understanding of the physics if neurons or quantum genetics versus merely software engineering. But he has a gang of fanatic idiots, addicted to computer games, who think immortality is achievable (similar to idiots of religious beliefs but sadly in our modern time! Here is the 1st & the last law of Physics that none of these scammers understsnd or dare to speak about: nobody & no observer can ever defeat [entropy]. I hope one day when He died With no immortality for his idiotic change I can drink beer. S.O.B he is.
He misses one fundamental consideration, the brain is not only a processor and storage unit, it's also and mainly a receiver and transmitter projecting reality while law of attraction manages the process.
+Stephan Söderberg Please provide peer-reviewed empirical evidence for the brain being "it's also and mainly a receiver and transmitter projecting reality while law of attraction manages the process", as neuroscience indicates that the brain creates consciousness and processes data collected from external stimuli. The law of attraction is pseudo-scientific new-age nonsense, please provide peer-reviewed empirical evidence for thoughts directly affecting reality.
Closer to Truth has been kicking ass lately on here! Brilliant stuff guys! Keep it up
It's a matter of semantics (the meaning of words). The phenomenon we regard as consciousness, is the 'self-awareness' of a being. That is, it can objectively regard ITSELF as a distinct thing, as compared with the context it is in. And it's on a continuum. As you drift in or out of sleep, the consciousness changes because your sensors disconnect from their attention to the environment, and instead the brain pays attention to memories. A dog has useful consciousness - it can behave guilty, knowing it has behaved in a way that will anger you.
And therefore... A non-biological being can be as conscious as we are, or vastly more. For example, if its vision and hearing and cognitive abilities surpass ours, its self-awareness is correspondingly greater, it's awareness and understanding of the context it is in is greater.
It is so refreshing to hear people with genuine intelligence speak. Thank you for posting this.
Curiosity reflects my drive for knowledge and the value of my personal existence that makes life so confined, yet profound as well. Closer to Truth provides great professional discussions.
I agree with the "gradual transfer" theory. If you replace small enough portions, gradually enough, the originally person wont notice any change to their consciousness, and by the end of the process they'll be fully uploaded.
Just like Alzheimer's.
Care to explain?
Yeah OK bud. You must believe in magic. Consciousness isn’t physical. Impossible to duplicate.
@@glennralph7007 You know well he and they meant more of a memory.
Ure going with the premise that the person wont feel the difference. Dont jump into conclusions yet. We still taking the first steps towards the truth really...
It's always nice to see some smart and respectful comments instead hateful or "antimoral" comments thinking they know the truth. Faith in humanity restored
Turn up the volume please!
What am I supposed to think when leading scientists of various fields agree with what I made up when I was 10?
consciousness is like a bar code... this is you only you can experience reality through this window. nobody else can have this combination of numbers
for us to exist again you need everything to repeat identically. but anything is possible when it comes to the creative power of the universe.
This idea of gradual replacement of parts of my brain makes me realize that i am basically just a compilation of experiences combined with hormonal responses. I dont see the interest of finaly ending up with a full computer brain because once you are there, you are just that, a computer. What is the point of having a computer perpetuate my life experience ?
"How are Brains Conscious?" - was not addressed.
Hi Ray... Just a point of interest: when I consider (introspect) consciousness, it is not fundamentally about emotions. I am surprised you think so, and it makes me wonder what your level of consciousness is. I am consciously aware of emotions, but they are not essential to my experiencing it (at least I think so). Cheers.
Great interview. Thank you.
This is a fascinating subject, and I agree with pretty much everything that was said in this video, but there is one giant problem that I see in the future. Most conscious people will probably always have to admit to themselves that there is a possibility that they have a metaphysical property. There is actually no way to disprove that, even though you could prove with 100% certainty that all of the thoughts, feelings, emotions etc that we feel and think are emergent from measurable chemical reactions in the brain, you still have the remote possibility that there is some kind of "soul" that is attached to this mechanical system which ultimately gives us our sense of consciousness. Even though the soul has no measurable effect on the brain, it could still "pick up" all of the information of our brain and we would never be able to observe that or prove it. Likewise we cannot disprove it if it does not exist, and so you're stuck with the possibility for all time.
Now the question is: Would you really take the risk of replacing your entire biological brain unless you HAD to, given that there is a remote possibility that you have a soul which may not continue to exist in this non-biological replacement? I would have a very hard time doing this even though I am not religious, I think most of us would want to keep our old biological brain intact for as long as we physically can just out of the remote possibility that our consciousness will cease to exist in a non-biological setting.
I would still assume that non-biological entities are conscious as long as they behave that way, just like I assume other people are conscious. But I think it would be crazy to risk potentially losing your consciousness by replacing your biological brain at some point in the future, unless you had no choice of course (f.ex. if the brain was about to die anyway).
It's quite possible, in the future, that some people may replace their brains for reasons of necessity. Injury would probably be one import reason to do so. Longevity is another reason to replace your brain, but I think, as Ray mentioned, it would be a step by step process. I can see that.
As for the question of spirituality, for example a soul or a consciousness that may or may not be contained in the brain, this will mainly be an issue for religious people. I myself, would agree with Ray that consciousness is most likely an emergent property of the brain. Perhaps we will know more about that as we further delve into the engineering of the brain. It certainly seems probably based on what we know so far.
Metaphysics is physics that we don't know yet.
Crazy Duck
It's one or the other.
Be careful throwing 100% certainty around
I wouldn't worry about a hidden subconscious. If it doesn't show in beta tests, then it's useless.
But I would worry about the authenticity of any duplication. There is no way to accurately describe a person. Even a person isn't familiar with all sub-layers of his consciousness. And checking if the duplication was exact can only be confirmed by asking the conscious beings inside the two versions and that's like asking two different persons if they are the same!!! And we know physically, exact duplication is impossible because of the Heisenberg principal. So any duplication is bound to have differences with the original. So I wouldn't want to be duplicated unless absolutely necessary.
When was this recorded?
This is all great and everything but when are you gonna find a solution for my 28 years old bald head? Lol
Wig.
Look Finasteride up
Don't you mean 33yr old bald head...😂
Minoxidil or transplant
@@kuyab9122 Don’t be rocking up here on here 6 years later, answering questions. Ya little weasel
Damn, Ray is a genius.
EVERYTHING INDIAN He’s a slow adult.
Why?
He is not a genius. This is already planned.
Kim I'm so afraid of your regime. It scares me.
What did he say 6:06 - 6:07 ("But the portions of the ....?....")??? Thanks.
portions of them (neurons) are getting replaced pretty quickly
I like that concept topics like this always enter the philosophical realm. Seems like this is encroaching on ideas presented by Derek Parfit. Really cool stuff.
+M Parsons
Oh, sorry, I misread the name. Derek Parfit. not familiar with him other than what it says on wiki.
So if a computer can pass the Turin test what say it if I ask IT if its afraid to die?
These 2 guys look quite alike.
We're conscious because we're alive and our brains are well. Our brains are receivers of consciousness. Consciousness is from outside of us.
What a fucking stupid position. What about gravity, is there a ghost that moves plants in an orderly fashion as well?
I love the notion that the computer will have to dumb itself down to pass the Turing Test. Pander to me!
As for the question in the topic, the answer is adressed for a few seconds of the video and seem to be: "We don't know. It seems to be an emergent property of the brain."
I love listening to Ray Kurzweil. Really enjoyed his book 'The Singularity is Near'.
I love your videos but could you turn the sound up a bit?
The interviewer reminds of the holy-moment-dude from the movie "Waking Life" as does this entire interview. Interesting stuff. I'd like to see Kurzweil and Fresco debating each other.
Thanks, that was cool.
Some things just can't be known.
Sounds like a variation of the ship of Theseus
I have always felt like being conscious is myself having 2G. Instead of what I assume that animals do, being conscious about their surroundings I'm aware of that I'm aware. I don't think animals think about that they're thinking. Or maybe they do
Idealist philosophers have it right - there is no reason to believe that conscious experience is a function of the brain. Occam's Razor sides with the idea that what we call mind is fundamental and persists beyond death.
True. Not until materialists show me evidence for the existence of the magic substance outside consciousness they call "matter" I will start listening to them ;)
@Zeke Bean I have had dreams in which I was drunk. In other words: Proves nothing. If you would like to prove that "matter" exists you would have to experience that which is outside experiencing. This is not logically possible. Right..?
@Zeke Bean The correlations that have been observed between brain activity and conscious experience does not show that conscious experience is a function of brain activity, because numerous other explanations can account for those correlations. For example, idealism is compatible with everything that we have observed. The idea that the body exists within mind (rather than the other way around) is not in conflict with any of the findings of neuroscience. You appear to be new to philosophy of mind. I would strongly recommend looking into the work of Bernardo Kastrup if you want to fully understand opposing positions, but I'll give a very brief explanation.
If mind is fundamental and encompasses all things, as idealism suggests, then everything that we see around us reduces to mental activity in mind. That includes all of the objects that we see around us. Just like the "objects" that we may experience in a dream, the objects that we see around us are the appearance of mental activity when viewed from an outside perspective.
If everything reduces to mental activity, then that obviously includes the brain as well. Our personal experience reduces to a kind of mental activity in mind. We are having a human experience of separation from the rest of the content of mind (a dissociative experience). Changes to the brain are the appearance of changes to that mental activity when viewed from an external perspective.
So, to summarize and address your drug example: If all things reduce to mental activity, then that includes both the drug and your brain. When the drug influences your brain, it's just one mental process (the drug) influencing another mental process (the brain) within fundamental mind. The ability of one mental process to influence another mental process is no more surprising or problematic to an idealist than for your thoughts to influence your emotions (or vice versa).
Alzheimer's disease is easily explained under an idealist view. Given that your brain is the appearance of your first person experience when viewed from an external perspective, damage to your brain is the appearance of changes to that first person experience. So, a damaged brain will obviously result in a different kind of experience.
*_"It’s an extra step to create a separate mind of which there is little evidence."_*
First, there is no more evidence for the idea that mind is a function of the brain than there is for the idea that mind is fundamental, so you do not have the high ground when it comes to evidence. Everything that you would count as evidence is compatible with idealism, so none of it can be taken as evidence specifically for your position.
Second, you are the one who is taking the extra step. The existence of consciousness is the one thing that cannot be doubted. I directly know that consciousness exists because I am having conscious experience. Thus, mind is our logical starting point and any explanation for reality must necessarily account for mind. Unlike conscious experience, which is a direct fact, we do not directly know that there exists a physical universe outside of mind. That is an assumption. So, if all things can be explained purely in terms of what we already know to exist (mind), then that is more parsimonious than assuming the existence of an entirely new category of stuff (the non-conscious). Occam's Razor sides with the idealist.
@Zeke Bean Idealism = Consciousness is not in your head. Your head is in Consciousness. You confuse solipsism with idealism. Google monistic idealism for more clarity.
@Zeke Bean No problem, I'm always happy to engage in philosophy of mind. I am not familiar with Donald Hoffman, but I am very familiar with the idea that we are experiencing a filtered view of realty.
*_"To think that the universe is purely in my head, while maybe idealism, is not ideal."_*
The idea that everything is in _your_ head is classic solipsism. That is the idea that only your own conscious perspective exists and that all the complex and unexpected activities that happen around you, including the activities of other people, are driven by your own 'subconscious' mind. This would suggest that the people around you are not really having conscious experience. They are so-called "philosophical zombies" (or NPCs, as people call them nowadays).
I would agree that such an explanation is not ideal and would argue that it's not parsimonious either. What I am proposing is a kind of monistic idealism that is different from classic solipsism. What I am suggesting is that one single fundamental mind houses _multiple separate conscious perspectives._ Your personal perspective is just one of many of those perspectives. My personal perspective is another one of those perspectives. So, the position that I have taken implies that the people that I see around me do have their own separate conscious perspective, just as I do. I just hold that mind underlies all of it.
I think that kind of monistic idealism is more parsimonious than classic solipsism, because solipsism requires a kind of unneeded dualism between non-conscious mental activity and conscious mental activity. The kind of idealism that I have proposed requires only conscious mental activity and the concept of dissociation to make sense of things.
*_"While you can say that consciousness cannot be doubted, others consciousness can. Only my own is confirmed within my own head."_*
That is true, and while we can't know if the people around us are having conscious experience with certainty, I would agree that the most logical default assumption is that they are having conscious experience.
It is also true that while I directly know that conscious experience exists from my own experience, I don't directly know that only mind exists. I can't know if the world around me is mental or physical in nature. However, from a position of uncertainty it makes more sense to explain the world around us in terms of what we already know to exist (the mental) than it does to assume a new category of stuff unnecessarily (the non-conscious / physical)
*_"I have trouble going that far. If everything is in my mind then when I die you cease to exist."_*
I hope the statements I made above have made it clear what my stance is now. Fundamental mind houses multiple conscious perspectives. The end of your personal perspective would not result in the end of the others, because the mind that underlies those perspectives is still very much present.
*_"Stuart Hameroff, along with Roger Penrose, proposed a theory that consciousness stems from microtubules within the neurons of our brains (this is my very poor summary of amazing research) and its consciousness that drives evolution (even early microbes)."_*
Now those guys I have heard of. I found their ideas to be interesting, but I think what they are proposing suffers from many of the same problems as conventional materialism. The idea that consciousness "pops into existence" as a result of complex quantum processes is no more parsimonious than the idea that consciousness "pops into existence" as a result of complex macroscopic processes.
*_"So consciousness is not just a human experience but a universal one, but my consciousness is purely my own. It stems from my brain. Without my brain, I have no consciousness. When my brain fades, so does my consciousness. There is no soul or extra dimensional “mind” that will continue on as me."_*
I agree that quantum interconnectedness does not necessarily imply continuity of consciousness. Under Stuart and Roger’s view, I see no reason why conscious experience should not cease with the death of the brain.
However, under idealism, death is not the end of conscious experience. The form of idealism that I have defaulted to suggests that the death of a brain is nothing more than the appearance of the end of an experience of separation from the rest of the content of mind. From the perspective of the dying, this would be the beginning of a much more expansive non-dissociated experience -- unless there is another layer of dissociation beyond this one that we are not aware of in which case they would retain a separate perspective.
*_"It seems more metaphysical, along the same lines of us being in a simulation (which I would argue is more convincing) or a brain in a vat."_*
Simulation is an interesting topic. If conventional materialism is correct and consciousness is something that emerges from "complexity", then I think there are very good arguments for the idea that we are living in a simulation. A sufficiently advanced world could give rise to simulated worlds that house artificial creatures that are capable of conscious experience. Those simulated conscious entities could vastly outnumber the non-simulated conscious entities. As those simulated worlds advance, they may give rise to simulated worlds of their own that are also able to house conscious entities. At that point, the non-simulated conscious entities are vastly outnumbered by the simulated conscious entities, and sheer probability would suggest that we are one of the simulated conscious entities. Of course, that all assumes that the "top world" develops that way and that they have computing power unfathomably beyond what we have.
...but I am an idealist and I don't believe that materialism is correct :P
HOW ARE WE CONSCIOUS? Brains are not conscious WE are
@1999 Seems your non-rational neural chemistry is making a truth-claim ;)
resurrect
So when are people going to begin making the right choices?
This is deep thinking.
Does an electronic human component even an organic one = a living self replicating cell ? I don't see how.
No. But im not sure why that's important?
@@MadJDMTurboBoost If the answer is no how can AI equal human intelligence which is alive.
@@gregorybaillie2093 AI (Or more correctly, AGI) will necessarily be tremendously more intelligent than humans almost as soon as it nears human intellect. The fact that a transistor is not the same thing as a neurotransmitter plays no role. Just because two things aren't the same doesn't mean that one thing can't be faster or more efficient.
@@gregorybaillie2093 furthermore, the definition of "living" is subject to opinion. Some would think plants are alive, but are they the same kind of alive as humans? Or ants? If so, that's an example of a living self replicating organism that is much dumber than current AI technology. If not then you have to set the record straight with your definition of "living" and why it is an important feature.
@@MadJDMTurboBoost depends on how one defines intelligence. Sure the machine will be quicker and more accurate in many tasks like mathematics for example. What about emotional problems and situations that require flexibility and imagination.
The one issue I have with Kurzweils theories is that he takes exponentiell growth of information technology for granted only because it has been in the past. There is no definit evidence that the growth will necessarily continue in this way.
Yes but even in the present it continues to stay consistent with Moores Law (not a theory).
To me: "Consciousness" is:
Energy and energy frequencies interacting with other energy and energy frequencies. Starting with a body with a set of energy and energy frequencies, new energy and energy frequencies enter into it. That new energy and energy frequencies go over quantum thresholds and under quantum ceilings, aligning where it can to allow it to rise to higher levels. Doing the over and over and "consciousness" emerges. BUT, it's still attached to that body of energy and energy frequencies that makes "me", "me". When "I" die, it dies too. Sure, the energy and energy frequencies go back to the universe from whence they came, but "I" die and forget all I ever knew and experienced it currently appears.
+Charles Brightman
You've been watching too many Deepok videos. It's all nonsense when he starts uttering his pseudo-science.
+Tim King Do you believe we have some sort of afterlife?
Charles Brightman
Afterlife? Not that I can see. Only perhaps in digital form.
+Tim King I agree, not that I can see either.
Hence life itself is just an illusion as far as eternity is concerned. Our true destiny appears to be to cease to exist and be forgotten.
Probably when, not if, the forces of nature "evolve", the entire universe and all in it, including digital formats, will most probably all cease to exist in their current form.
Charles Brightman
I wouldn't go so far as to say it's an illusion. But sure, you live, you die, and your replaced. All the more reason to make the most of the precious life we do have.
Can a person be resurrected back to Life at some latter point
I'm a robot and I love this stuff
LOL!
Sure, and I'm not a robot, either :)
We Are Not Robots
I feel like we are better of taking the genetically modified route first. We figure out a way to stop cell deterioration and we can have human beings living longer uncapable of being harmed by diseases. With more time and perfect health we can achieve greatness. Once we figure out longetivity we are still exposed to external factors and this is when uploading or even just transfering our brains into a non biological body would come into play. Our bodies would be capable of handling such transition. I dont know about you guys but I just love science so much and know that the once impossible is now achievable thanks to all those nerds. So, we science the shit out of this and we get to live forever.
interesting subject, but it doesn't seem to answer the tagline: How are Brains Conscious?
The whole video is the answer to that.
@@PATRICKJLM i don't find it that at all. the closest he gets is :20 [consciousness] is "an emergent property of the very complex interaction of a lot of different areas". which he says twice. well, that doesn't tell me too much. on the origin of consciousness. he mentions spindel cells in passing. as if maybe they're the key. but he doesn't linger. i suppose one could take the title two ways: "how do brains become conscious" or "the ways brains are conscious". they do justice to neither title. they touch on how to simulate a human brain and leave it at that. in regards to consciousness. as if you make a perfect simulation of a human brain and it's conscious, q.e.d. i don't know that'a make 'em conscious. in short. that title's awful. i propose "what makes me, me?"
That's because they have no idea, no one does. All they point to is correlations and from that make all sorts of wild speculations, and that they call science. There are so many fundamental aspects to reality that we no nothing about, and yet they claim we are only a few years away from recreating conscious life with a computer, it would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. This is not science, it is pseudo science, stick to the cartoons and scifi movies.
Claiming that a machine that can emulate certain complex responses based on algorithms is recreating a conscious mind, makes a lot wild assumptions. First you need to explain in very specific detail how and why we are conscious before they can even begin to speculate on how and when we can recreate it. Again this isn't even remotely close to actual science, it is just click bait for the very naive.
@@ericmichel3857 that's what i'm on about. they have a "faith" in science then they deride faith in religion. some deride worse than others mind you. but some of their reasoning is not very rational i would say.
@@jameshudson169 Oh I know, I was just agreeing with more elaboration.:)
we dont know what conscience is.Even if its only matter and i think it is,we don't know what matter is.Also conscience interacts with time,and guess we don't what time is either.
Before we can talk about HOW brains are conscious we have to be able to define WHAT consciousness is - not so easy in the first place. There are people who think a lettuce is conscious. Maybe they are right.
I tend to wonder the plausibility that my sense of awareness is deeply embedded in some kind of entangled space-time, underlying perceived physicality. A pilot wave perhaps?
+The Feedback Loop perhaps
Wrong!
before you turn on the machiene consciousness you give the human a confirmation number. Then you execute them human and turn on the machiene and ask for the confirmation number.
Gradual replacement with artificial neurons was the only way I could see it working, otherwise you lose continuity of consciousness. Mind uploading makes a copy but what we care about is the "original" mind continuing.
Oh, I wouldn't peg the usage of a copy only to replace the original. I'd love a copy of myself to post comments on youtube, answer emails, perhaps even to call the girlfriend and sweet talk here once a day. Ha!
Truly, there would be many uses for a duplicate digitized self. You could have it do all kinds of interesting things. It might even be helpful in therapy.
How, in turn, would this be any different from slavery?
Atreyu Bosley
That's a good question. At first, it may not seem like slavery because we will be so used to having applications that already do AI. The digital brains of our tools and toys etc.
We'll need to have rules in place for duplication of human minds. It would be complicated. For example, what if the mind were to be duplicated only for a medical checkup?
Interesting topic.
Suppose you buy a car & then slowly over time you replace every part of the car - new engine, new windshield, new body - so now is it still your old car or a new one?
I can answer what question, all I need are very precise definitions of "new car" and "old car".
It's maddening , I cannot stand this anymore
To say that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity is very popular view but it kind of side steps the question. I can see how optics is an emergent property of quantum mechanics and I can see how thermodynamics is an emergent property of statistical mechanics, because in each case there is a clear route to show how the emergent property actually arises. But to say that consciousness is emergent from the complexity of the brain is kind of pointless - it doesn't explain *how* consciousness can emerge from a switching network, which is the only thing we really want to know, and unless we think there is magic involved, we all assume complexity is necessary anyway, so the idea of being emergent tells us nothing new.
+chrisofnottingham What do you mean by "switching network"? How can you even say what type of network are they going to use for consciousness, when there isn't even an algorithm yet for human level intelligence. Deep learning that recently beat Go boardgame is seemingly close to it though. They call it reinforcement learning.
+user137 By switching network I just mean a neural network. I loosely meant a network where signals may or may not get through a node. As to deep learning and narrow expert systems, all they serve to highlight is how different they are from human/animal systems. The very fact that the one Go playing machine in question can beat or nearly beat every human alive, tells us that it isn't like humans. Does it enjoy playing Go? What was its favorite game? What other games would it like to learn? It is clearly ridiculous to ask these questions of a software program, so until that changes it is just a game playing and learning algorithm, not a conscious entity.
+chrisofnottingham
Well, I would agree with a few people who have posed the idea that there really is no conscious. We may be looking for something that simply does not exist. A human functioning brain should be all we need to define a person, at least mentally speaking.
Tim King I'm not suggesting there is anything other than a brain required, but I am suggesting that explaining consciousness as emergent through complexity is glib. It would be glib to explain the operation of an ipad as emergent through complexity. It isn't wrong as such, it is just no help whatsoever if you want to know how it works.
I am in the camp that says there is a huge difference between the experience of something (its quale) and mere data processing. My honest opinion of people who deny consciousness, like Dan Dennet, is that they really haven't understood what everyone else is talking about. The whole point about an illusion is that someone needs to see it, or else it is just some more stuff existing.
Edit:
You may be right. But I am more on the data driven side. A brain controlled via highly sophisticated hierarchical compilations in the brain to produce thoughts.
For example, throughout the brain's network there's a hierarchical process going on. There is likely a process which controls how the brain gathers information, combines it, and brings it to a point where it is assembled into a thought. The actual thought and all it's networked components are then stored becoming part of our mental make up. Our experience.
So if a computer can mimic me, does that make the computer conscious..? Thats bull shit a copy is not the real deal.
The brain's reticular formation is the source that originates consciousness when it is stimulated. Biology, not spookiness as Robert Kunn would like to have it!
Ray said. "Non biological thing are getting advanced exponentially But biological(humans) is not".
But what makes non biological things to get better and better isn't it is our mind that is advancing it exponentially which is biological body.
Our minds are being helped by our computers and their many application programs and by the vast amount of info instantly available via the web.
Did you know Motorola's MC6809 (designed in the 70s) was the last hand designed microcomputer chip?
It's weird that people are so hung up on the concept of "personal experience" (qualia), like it's a thing. It's not a thing. It's simply an emergent function of the brain. You are "experiencing" things because your brain is functioning. The "hard" problem of consciousness is made up nonsense. It's like saying that a Web browser functioning (e.g. serving RUclips videos) is somehow a mythical thing that can not be derived from the lines of code running on the transistors of the CPU. It's ridiculous.
Qualia is a thing, and I dare to say it is a mystery. However imo it doesn't invalidate materialism (as some are claiming) and it's not an unsolvable problem.
>It's simply an emergent function of the brain.
You're really dumb. How does electric activity in a cell jump to conscious experience of a blue sky?
"It just does?" Not an argument and not scientific. Intelligence is not the same as consciousness. If I did all the information processing your brain was doing on paper, which would take a million man years, you wouldn't suddenly gain concous experience as I was writing down math.
I used to find these ideas very exciting, but as I get a older I see them as nightmarish
I wouldn't worry about it, this is all BS SCIFI click bait.
Our future nonbiological brain enhancements will have been developed by _someone_ - probably Google, Facebook or Baidu. I hope we like the Terms of Service!
I like Ray Kurzweil, but he is lost on this issue. Consciousness is fundamental, consciousness is the root of everything. It does not occur because of the brain. Consciousness is the computer that is computing the virtual reality that we live in. Our brains are virtual...
Please provide empirical evidence for your claims. The current neuroscientific consensus dictated by the available empirical evidence is that the brain creates consciousness and processes data collected from external stimuli.
Richard Dane
Well actually it does occur because of the brain. When you sleep for example it's considered being unconscious. Why because you're basically unaware of the physical environment surrounding you. You believe there is some interconnected network of thought that extends throughout the cosmos. Yet not you or anyone can remember anything before being born. What would be the purpose of pure thought without actions in a physical universe. Simply a predilection to create logical order organize and understand our environment. So much so we mirror the environment and needs into our subconscious which emanates through dreams.
Not so sure about that last argument. I would imagine real synaptic plastiscity to be hard to achieve non-biologically.
Already happening in chip design land.
People who have had their consciousness loaded onto a flash drive report a claustrophobic sensation.
same with living in the south
+Kcus Kcidu Gottem
+SeanMauer
On the claustrophobic sensation, very funny!
Agent Smith: I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
Parkinson's people already have computers in their brains? Michael J Fox really is a man of the future!
Hello everyone,
I am here today because I am recruiting Legionnaires. I believe that in the next twenty years the United States and the World economy will collapse all entirely due to accelerated technological advancements. I strongly believe that the education system is the third bubble that will burst similarly to housing and tech bubble. My views are similar to Dr. Milton Friedman, Dr. Gary Becker, Dr. Thomas Sowell, Dr. Walter Williams, Dr. Amity Shlaes, Dr. Charles Murray, Dr. Robert Putnam, Dr. Christina Sommers, Dr. Karl Poppers, Dr. Donald Davidson, Dr. Ernst Gombrich, Peter Thiel, and Ray Kurzweil. If any of you share my beliefs, please reply back to this message and let me what you think. Thank you.
something is not right here. if somebody else can be identical to you, 100%, but still somehow separate from you, then why are you here and not him?
i don't think you can have two same persons sharing the same window whilst divided apart. you are unique enough so that another you, the same you, popping up again anytime soon is impossible.
you are you. i don't think another you, an exact same other you, is allowed to occupy the same space and time as you.
not that i am saying that you have a soul or anything. just saying that you can't be here but over there at the same time.
edit:
ok i am me but this other person is me, too. but we are separate. then why not him over me? why am i not deceased and him randomly selected to be me instead?
maybe you can't clone the consciousness only the appearance and personality traits. your consciousness the reason why you are a window through this body and not some random other.
there must be some sort of order, because why not this window experience sooner?
All this is very nice, but it is not the brain that is conscious or aware. Awareness is aware.
makes no sense
@@kyjo72682 I think they are suggesting that mind is fundamental and inherently experiential by nature. The activities of mind are our experiences.
With all that brain uploading talk...I don't what happens if you have no body awareness anymore. It's scary to think about. But o.k. I thought a long time they would understand much more by studying that C.Elegans but the answers are not falling out of the sky with it. And now I think you perhaps better need to study plants since if you could prove they are aware of the world then you have a completely different system to study that works also.
We shall be Borg.
The soul is extinguished ie. the true energetic force that once lived inside you. You cannot create a soul no matter how much technology you have. So Kurzweil as intelligent as he is, is also a fantasist
Yes conciousness is fundamental
Basically, it will be a copied robot of me. If we will be able to create one copy, why stop there? I would like to create dozens of my robot copies, so that I can play baseball all by myself.
Agent Smith: Tell me, Mr. Anderson... what good is a phone call... if you're unable to speak?
This notion that the mere "appearance" of a created machine resembling a real flesh and blood person is a sufficient criteria for claiming it to be a sentient being is simply nuts. These boy/men tinkering around with their toys and trying to upset the most basic standard of sanity is beyond ridiculous. Is this what actually passes for legitimate science nowadays? Please - where are the adults in the room here?
I think a real measurable test will come in virtual reality settings. I was recently at a virtual place with a bunch of people chatting away in voice. I commented that A.I. avatars will be in their virtual places in the coming years. And that they, the flesh and blood human chatters, may not be able to distinguish who is an A.I. human or not. It was an interesting conversation. Some thought perhaps I was a troll. Others entertained the idea.
Regardless of what they thought, I do wonder if virtual worlds will be the main stomping grounds for A.I. humans.
Maybe I'm AI... I'm not lol But, point made
Brains are not conscious
Consciousness drives brains
Consciousness can drive heart also
There are instances where heart transplant gave memories of doner to the receiver
lol no
I need the stuff you're smoking
Turing test has lost its meaning - even stupid Alexa or Siri can pass it if the "human" at the other end is stupid enough (by that I mean 99% of the population).
1 Are subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, viruses, cells, or bacteria conscious (what Michio Kaku calls Level 1 consciousness)?
2 Will a virtual Kurzweil be indistinguishable from the real one, even at the atomic level?
3 The ego (the self, what Kurzweil calls the pattern) is an empty shell, a bundle of memories in our species, a byproduct of the evolutionary instinct of survival and self-preservation in living beings; thus it is an illusion.
4 Will our species become nonbiological, superpowerful entities eventually?
5 Is this universe (out of a possible 10^500) a simulation? As Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, “the odds [are] 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive.” 😱
Really bad audio
Every paradox of consciousness disappears once you accept that you are not one person, but every person at the same time, you just don't realize it because every person you are was programmed by evolution to think of itself as an individual, and not as a part of the universe. You are not a human being, you are the universe, and the ego is an illusion. With this knowledge, every person has to act moral out of self interest.
I would say your ego is huge, you're just a dumb animal thai is conscious, nothing more.
PianoShow can u say more about this? where did u get this idea from?
@@estring123 You can copy and search last two or three sentences and there will have much knowledge about this.
Just read this 2 years later and was baffled - this is verbatim what I believe, didn’t think anyone else had figured it out. But I’m very glad to see you did, that means many other people have too. Is it Buddhism, perhaps, I don’t know how I came to this conclusion? How did you?
To understand why we aren't close to the answer you have to understand that all science is based on Physics. Biology is based on chemistry, chemistry is based on physics. When it comes to consciousness the ultimate bottle neck is physics. We know HOW nerve impulses are sent, but we don't know WHY this happens. We understand that it is driven by opposing charges, and that an electron has a negative charge and a proton produces a positive electric field, but we do not understand why this happens nor what intrinsic characteristic of the particle causes it to behave this way. Until physicist understand this, we won't have the answer to something even more complex as to how trillions of these particles interact to create our "minds."
I think the scientists would argue the why doesn't matter, only the how.
Meh I know what your saying but that would be a very uninspiring scientist. At the end of the day the whole reason for studying the how is to eventually find out why. Even if it doesn't directly relate to humans there has to be something behind it, even if a lot of the how is an accident
It's an illusion, simple. Why do you need more of an explanation?
Your Brains are an illusion
resurrection from life is possible or not
I hope we can make all humans immortal not just a copy of us that's just shit I want us to be us I wonna be me zapped threw them electric waves not just a copy because your still dead if it's just a copy 😂😂
Something is missing...dream on.
This guy isn’t that bright.
thhe correct answer is nobody knows. consciousness is most probably non-computational so the turing test is not relevant
an analogue computer would be more appropriate than digital
Whatever "consciousness" actually is, (of which modern science doesn't even know what it actually is nor how it works), it does appear to be attached to our physical brain. When our physical brain dies, so does our consciousness it currently appears. In fact, sad to say, some even lose their consciousness even with a working physical brain.
When we die, we apparently forget everything we ever knew and experienced.
Enjoy life in socially acceptable ways, (to try to stay out of trouble with society), but then no matter what, we still all die one day from something and forget everything it currently appears.
Life itself is just an illusion from the human perspective as far as eternity is concerned. Our true destiny currently appears to be to cease to exist and be forgotten.
If anybody out there has any actual evidence that humans truly do have a conscious afterlife in actual reality, then please share it with the world.
+Charles Brightman If you want to believe in an afterlife, you can, but you'll need to study and think upon it with the intention of eventually believing, through gradual and effective self directed thought reformation. This process is so effective that it can enable some devout monks to commit suicide with absolutely no fear or doubt that they are going into their next life. At first glance, it does certainly appear we're born to die and cease to exist. That's an easy thing to believe in this era, especially in a secular society, but if you want to believe in an afterlife without a shadow of a doubt, you can. It isn't impossible like trying to change your eye colour. The more flexible you are on the specific type, the easier it will be. If you insist on it being a perfect ethereal heaven, that might take a good 50 years to believe because it's completely ridiculous. That you continue on being conscious, in some sense, in loose fashion, philosophically, well that would only take a few years to believe.
+David Gabriel Well, since we are going down this path:
Modern science says that from a singular mass that banged, everything in existence in this universe, including the very forces of nature that the universe operates by, all came into existence.
Now, do we and everything in this universe actually exist per se, OR does only this singular mass exist in the form of all things? And since we, whatever "we" might even actually be, experience consciousness, then this singular mass must also have a consciousness that at a minimum emerged when we emerged. What we perceive as "our" consciousness is actually a tiny part of the larger singular masses' consciousness. How can "I" ever cease to exist if "I" never existed in the first place? This singular conscious mass is existing as "me" as well as all things in existence including "you", whatever "you" might even be. Now, if this singular mass with a consciousness wills to exist into an actual eternity in the form of "me" and/or "you", couldn't it do so if it willed itself to do so?
Modern science says that energy cannot be created nor destroyed.
Modern science says that we have cells in our physical body that come into existence on a daily basis.
So, if asked my age:
I have energy in me that is older than the universe itself in me AND
I have cells in me that are coming into existence on a daily basis.
I am eternal and yet am being born anew on a daily basis, (and so are you).
So, pick whatever age suits your fancy, anywhere between eternity and "now". Part of "me" is eternal and part of "me" is being born right now, and will apparently continue to do so as long as this singular mass with a consciousness wills to do so. It sets up a "torus time effect" which allows eternal existence to occur.
One issue is though, that even if I could have an actual eternal conscious existence, I am not so sure I would want it. I would either be eternally consciously alone, or more probably still just an individual in a society of individuals. Conscious entities have choices: Help, Neutral, Hurt, and to whom to Help, Neutral, Hurt. Unless the very nature of those choices changed, there would most probably still be entities in existence who choose to sacrifice others for their own agendas. And these entities would have to be put up with for a literal eternity. I'm not so sure I would want that. Maybe I don't have a choice, but maybe I do. Losing my consciousness for eternity might just be a blessing in disguise.
In addition, there is a natural tension between doing what is best for an Individual versus doing what is best for the society of Individuals. They do not always coincide. This also would be an eternal pain in the consciousness to have to eternally deal with. Just the pure logistics of it all with so many conscious entities in existence, all with their own choices. An entity might just truly have to be "God" just to properly eternally deal with it all. While I might be a part of "God", I do not appear to be "God" in "God's" totality. I am just a lessor part of the greater whole.
+Charles Brightman I enjoyed reading that and learned a couple of new things from it. You've encountered the problem of understanding the negative consequences of eternal existence. One of the reasons why I believe belief in reincarnation is more brave than belief in oblivion is because it means the believer accepts that even if they don't fear death this time around and die quickly and painlessly, they will no doubt eventually be born with a nervous predisposition and die a long and tortuous death in another life where they anticipate oblivion due to having different more rational neurology or are brought up with more effective nihilistic cultural conditioning. So the believer in reincarnation anticipates an endless variety of suffering with the only upside being there will be some good times too. It's obvious that this is why in Buddhism there is also the belief that one can escape this never ending cycle by practicing advanced meditation techniques. The clever Buddhist can easily figure out that perpetual existence is actually a bad thing and hence the statement, 'life is suffering.' All of this is why many wish to believe in a heavenly perpetual afterlife instead of reincarnation or some philosophically argued for dim awareness in solitude as a fundamental property of the Universe we call consciousness, conjectured to be akin to other fundamentals like mass, spin, and charge. Another attempt at escape is to believe improvement is built into the cycle of reincarnation, but believing that is much harder and takes much longer because its fluffy nature flies in the face of experience. I believe oblivion does not occur on the basis that it is too good to be true. I believe I am experiencing this life precisely because oblivion is just a fantasy. If coming into existence in the manner I have done were truly as unlikely as it appears to be (sperm and egg combinations, etc.), then I would expect to be in the true oblivion which is the one where you never exist at all in the first place and therefore don't have to worry about ceasing to exist due to never having to come into existence to worry about it. The top ancient Greek philosophers and logicians came to the conclusion that not existing was simply not possible. The alternatives to not existing, of which we are experiencing one of right now, are conjecture. Ultimately, the most rational and logical human would anticipate the unknown, while ruling out nothingness based on the fact it is the absence of experience and therefore cannot be experienced. You cannot anticipate nor brace for something you cannot experience. If nothingness is the normal state of affairs, then popping into existence must be some type of spiritual disease, and once it's happened once, it's probably more likely to happen again, as is the case with actual diseases. That's just an argument from analogy, so take it with a pinch of salt, but as far as I'm concerned, those that don't exist and have never existed are the only beings truly in real oblivion.
+David Gabriel I believe such a thing as "absolute truth" exists. Even if it didn't exist, then that would still be the absolute truth, of which would prove it did exist. It's a self existent type proof. It's the anchor point to my analysis.
I had condensed space and time down into a single diagram and had analyzed it. Briefly, just the highlights:
A. I perceive I exist, how did I come to be or how is it that I exist?
There are only two possibilities that I am aware of:
1. From eternal nothingness; Or
2. From eternal somethingness.
And if from an eternal somethingness, then there are only two possibilities:
1. From an unconscious somethingness; Or
2. From a conscious somethingness.
(What other options can there even be?).
Eternal nothingness does not exist except as a concept from a conscious entity in somethingness, otherwise it's nothingness. There are other parts of the analysis that I won't go into here, but the short answer is that we came from an eternal somethingness.
Based upon the analysis I did, utilizing Occam's razor whereby the most probable scenario is most probably the correct scenario, (it might not be truly correct, it's just most probably truly correct), this eternal somethingness most probably has a consciousness and is most probably everywhere and in everything for it to even exist. Think of it as pure energy that is everywhere and in everything that allows those things to exist. I call this conscious somethingness "God" utilizing quotation marks as "God" is beyond my current comprehension.
B. Where am I going to?
There are only two possibilities that I am aware of:
1. To eternal nothingness; Or
2. To eternal somethingness.
And if to eternal somethingness, then there are only two possibilities;
1. To an unconscious somethingness; Or
2. To a conscious somethingness.
(What other options can there even be?).
The analysis I did, without going into all the details, is that while "God" might be eternally consciously existent, (and that's not 100% definitive either), it appears we aren't. In fact, the analysis would seem to indicate that we consciously die because "God" can't. It's the only way how "God" can experience conscious death is by how it's apparently being done. Our life is just an illusion from the human perspective as far as eternity is concerned. Our true destiny currently appears to be to cease to exist and be forgotten, even by "God" into "God's" eternity, eternity being a really, really long time.
Now, as there is much I and even all of humanity do not know yet, I will be the first to admit that I could be wrong, it's just that the current analysis would indicate otherwise.
What exactly matters into eternity and to whom does it exactly matter to?
"God" alone? and/or "Me" too? and/or "Some other entity or entities"?
OR
"To no eternally consciously existent entity at all"?
Answer these questions and you will know how to better live your life today, if it even matters at all as far as eternity is concerned.
+Charles Brightman I recommend you factor into your thinking the idea that things can change. For example, there might be an absolute truth that can change. If it changes then it is no longer absolute truth. Now, I'm not sure if things like constants can literally change. I'm only making the point that if things were to change, they would be different, which acknowledges the passage of time which is the only thing that enables us to basically say, 'Yeah, things are that way right now, but they might not be tomorrow, or next year, or in the next aeon or longer.' In Buddhism, it's said that when asked, 'Is there another conscious life for the self of one who dies?' he replied, 'It isn't that there is. It isn't that there isn't.' Notice the language play there because it unlocks an option you can't comprehend. You know what yes means, you know what no means, but you don't know what neither yes nor no means but you know it points to something, albeit something you can't understand. You could say it is nonsense or illogical use of language but then you would be implying that something is only true if it can be adequately expressed in words, which is certainly not the case. If you don't know that then you need to learn the difference between the tacit and the explicit. I'm fine with someone believing they are going to cease to exist forever and that they don't matter, not even to God once he has forgotten them, however, I do inform people that belief is malleable and that it's one of the few things they can change about themselves. If you want to believe you can't be permanently snuffed out of the game of existence then you can because it's one of the faculties of the human - religious or spiritual belief. It's actually somewhat of a speciality for a human and doing the reverse is actually the more unnatural thing to do, and in fact doesn't fully work because there remains some minor anticipation of morality, purpose, meaning, in various ways that go unnoticed by people not aware of this aspect of human psychological life. Your analysis is excellent but if you were really trying to figure out whether your 1st person subjective experience continues on indefinitely (not infinitely as infinity can't ever be reached in that manner) then you didn't try hard enough. The strength of your intention and the amount of time you spend studying it and thinking about it will determine your belief and its strength. If you want to believe, you can. If you don't believe, it's because you don't want to, or are in the process of achieving belief through your own self directed thought reformation, as described in my first reply. The human brain has the capacity for utmost religious or spiritual conviction and the current system of education in the western world is designed partly to stifle that ability. I don't know precisely why the powers that be wish for that end. For example with things like cancer, they train everyone to desire to either beat it by eating lots of fruit and vegetables so they don't get it or if they do get it to undergo horrific treatments in order to try and survive it. To me what would make much more sense would be to cure fear. Billions have been put into curing cancer, and while I'm sure they will get there in the end, it hasn't much helped and all the people who have died thus far have been guinea pigs for medical science, full of suffering, full of fear, and with their spiritual ability stifled by their stupid education. We are conditioned to want to stay alive as long as possible and fear death. People don't want a cure for death. What they really want is a cure for fear. They just don't know that because they haven't thought about it properly. You have to work with your own mind and its inclinations. Eternal nothingness would be fine and that's precisely why it won't occur and precisely why you're not in it right now. If it were possible and if it were the sine qua non, you'd just be in it and you'd never be, 'born,' or any other silly thing like that. Whatever this is that we're in right now, it's definitely the sine qua non. Your birth is just an excuse for why you're here and it's utterly ridiculous, and you don't have a memory of nothingness, you simply cannot recall prior to your birth. That is not a memory of nothingness. It is just no memory.
Consciousness may become an obsolete concept.
+Thor Mentha That assumes consciousness has a purpose to begin with.
Jonny Cook Maybe the idea of it.
What's the point of anything if their is no consciousness? In a world with no consciousness what's the point of progress of no one is their to experience it?
Stud
this man doesn't know a thing about artificial intelligence
No, brains are not conscious. *Minds* are conscious. Huge difference.
What is the difference between minds and brains? Minds always occur with brains so maybe they are not that different.
@@myothersoul1953 Your brain is an organ in your body. Your mind is that which experiences, contemplates and projects. It is not necessarily contained by the brain.
@@BrianWachter I don't know of any good evidence to differentiate the body and the mind. What reliable verifiable evidence is there for minds that are seperate from the brain? And if they are separate how do they interact? How does the mind know what the brain is sensing and how does the mind tell the brain what to do?
It's one thing to claim they are separate it's another to demonstrate it.
@@myothersoul1953 The brain is a material object and the mind is a transcendent phenomenon.
@@BrianWachter Mind has never been reliably shown to exist independent of material objects. You might claim it is transcendent but can you demonstrate it in a reliable and verifiable way ?
I like your Quest for Truth - and you have some great interlocutors, but what this Kurzweil guy is paddling is a load of concentrated, pure as it can be - bullshit.
haha... materialism gone bad here.
Materialism? Kurzweil seems more of an idealist. It doesn't matter what material it is made of, all that matters is some abstract description (the "pattern", 6:10 in the video) . Materialism would hold that consciousness depends on the material, brain based consciousness is different from computer conscious because the stuff (aka material) of brains is very different from computer consciousness because computers are made of different stuff.
Visible brains are only illusions to make us more real-like. Even our individual consciousness is created by our Creator before he spoke His creation into existence through technology that is much further advanced than any computer technology He taught us to use with His program called the Beast.
*****
All you have to do is listen to our Creator's voice and obey all His commandments. Then you will learn how you were created. It doesn't take drugs to listen to His voice. You have to be chosen to listen to Him.
Ephesians 1
4: even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.
5: He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,
9: For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ
10: as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
John Angelov
You must be on every vid to notice that I'm on every vid you hypocrite. .
+Brad Holkesvig but you're the one who's trolling on every vid, that's what he's calling you out for so he's not a hypocrite.
daneholmberg
I'm not trolling. If I was trolling, I wouldn't have any useful thing to say to our Creator's chosen believers. Those who listen to My voice will learn exactly how they were created.
+Brad Holkesvig "Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"
"Consciousness is a philosophical term that we may not be able to have a full scientific view of."
So we cannot have a full scientific view of someone when they're unconscious by anaesthesia, and conscious when they wake back up? We can't scientifically study the properties of those two very different states? What a weird thing to say, I sometimes honestly think Kurzweil is a very impressive snake-oil salesman.
The philosophical problem (solipsism) is that you can't know other people are really conscious even though they act like it. I think that's what he meant. Otherwise he was talking about "practical" aspects of conciiusness and identity which ignore this extreme scepticist view.
interviewer is just silly.
He is a liar charlatan pro Israeli goof & chantage maker.
He has zero understanding of the physics if neurons or quantum genetics versus merely software engineering. But he has a gang of fanatic idiots, addicted to computer games, who think immortality is achievable (similar to idiots of religious beliefs but sadly in our modern time!
Here is the 1st & the last law of Physics that none of these scammers understsnd or dare to speak about: nobody & no observer can ever defeat [entropy].
I hope one day when He died With no immortality for his idiotic change I can drink beer. S.O.B he is.
Hi you have hard and strong opinion. I it's ok Please explain; S.O.B.😎✨
What would Trump do with a digitized copy of himself?
Play with himself ;)
Build 2 walls
He misses one fundamental consideration, the brain is not only a processor and storage unit, it's also and mainly a receiver and transmitter projecting reality while law of attraction manages the process.
+Stephan Söderberg Please provide peer-reviewed empirical evidence for the brain being "it's also and mainly a receiver and transmitter projecting reality while law of attraction manages the process", as neuroscience indicates that the brain creates consciousness and processes data collected from external stimuli. The law of attraction is pseudo-scientific new-age nonsense, please provide peer-reviewed empirical evidence for thoughts directly affecting reality.
Oskar Vuorela One year later, and still no peer-reviewed empirical evidence his pseudo-scientific new-age nonsense
Esra erimez ,a year after another year and still no peer reviewed empirical evidence.
good pointless babbling
You fucking joke