I always want to see a debate like this say 'can consciousness be explained? Guest One Yes Guest Two No Guest Three Yes Guest Four No There you have it, thanks for joining us.
For me the question is whether reduction to physical/chemical processes is the fullest way to examine consciousness. The older I get the more I realize poetry is the more satisfying language through which to understand humanity’s place in the universe. Science is so flat.
@@Imsosmrt1999 actually, quantum physics is pretty wild, but they don't really teach it. Science is flat because of how its taught. I'm on a farm surrounded by woods, I see physics and chemistry everywhere, even know a little, and its far from flat. I get your point but ifyou think that you really need to learn MORE physics and chemisltry,, not less. Not that there is anything wrong with poetry. But Roger Feynman has a great reproof of that idea in 'Six easy pieces-six lectures on physics". I think their on youtube, but to your point, I think the guy who wrote "The Tao of Physics" said a similar thing which is why he wrote the book. I think the notion you are putting forth is being bandied around as part of a real 'anti science' trend going on in the western world, which is a pretty unhealthy one. But I know what you mean.
Are you looking for some consensus or majority to tell you what to think, or just looking to hear arguments and explainations to evaluate for yourself? This makes all the difference.
Loved the interventions of Louise. I think she got it right. You have to start studying consciousness in a top-down sort of way if you want to get to explanations. Without a clear picture of the functional states and the functional architecture, you cannot even start to make sense of the correlations at the more structural level of the nervous system. I wouldn't necessarily agree with her in that the visual processing is encapsulated, especially if she subscribes to a kind of fodorian full isolated modulatory, I think that fodorian modularity has all sorts of problems explaining integrated sensory processing among different regions of the brain and the neurological evidence at this respect from patients with brain damage speaks more in favor of non-isolated information processing. I also liked some of the other points that were raised during the debate: we need to carefully distinguish between different kinds of introspection (attention introspection vs retrospective introspection, for instance) to improve our methodology, another point was that we can get more productive tasks by engaging in the materialistic perspective of consciousness rather than in the dualistic perspective say (I also follow Louise here in her short criticism that Chalmers' modal theory of possible worlds is an abstraction -useless for this problem at least, and that it doesn't tell us anything interesting about conscious agents; I would have gone further, possible worlds semantics is overestimated in general by some analytic philosophers). Great debate anyway, I will surely have more authors and articles to add to my library. Thank you for organizing it!
I think you consciousness needs to be experienced to be studied. And in order to test your reality (with mind altering substances) you need that freedom of mind and ability to submit to actual reality. This is why I think that most people who haven't had the opportunity to experience mushrooms and the like are missing out on fundamentals necessary to explore the study of consciousness itself.
My take on it after listening to everything I can find in consciousness is: Consciousness is an organisms subjective, predictive experience and memory of its internal and external environment with the goal of obtaining energy to resist entropy. It emerges from the unified accumulative processes of living cells and organisms that have evolved in a community for an evolutionary advantage to keep the sum and parts of the system alive. It is the reactive narration of our sensory experience of the environment by the many organisms that have symbiotically evolved inside us. As the sum of our parts are neither alive or consciousness then the whole cannot obtain something from nothing. It is a complex chemical conversation our atoms are having with the external world. The language... Chemistry and physics. It is why when you are sedated and your senses are Numb, and thus your internal organisms and systems receive no input, so have nothing to say, our collective voice (consciousness) goes silent. It's just unfathomable to imagine the amount of cells and time that 1 cell had to harmoniously evolve into trillions to create the perception of 1 voice and why AI may simulate but never achieve our level of consciousness.
Hmm at least you have a bash at defining your terms, and might have more success if you had any Latin , in which case the meaning of the word would be plain to you, and not the it matters in the least try organism's -as in of the organism rather than organisms plural If I understand you aright you suggest consciousness to be an experience of an experiencer. Had you any Latin that might take you some of the way towards identifying what sort of experience the experiencer - which is you if it is as you say "subjective". You have had a bash or attempt at what the speakers do not trouble themselves to do, namely define their terms; they simply assume that they know what the word consciousness means or what they suppose it to be, and that others also know what the word consciousness means or what they suppose it to be, which is intellectually sloppy or idle. Moreover they do not trouble themselves to identify*Whose* conscious* Of_What* and have not got as far as you who have at least got as far as identifying it as a subjective experience or something that you yourself experience which shows far more rigour and intellectual discipline than do the speakers who do not even trouble themselves to define what they suppose themselves to be experiencing at which they would arrive far more quickly if that had any Latin, consciousness being a compound of two Latin words, a preposition and a verb. Find the verb and you are home; the verb appears in the words science conscience and conscious, so it is fairly obvious what that verb is. The speakers do not get as near as you who have pinpointed *memory* itself a Russian doll in the Russian doll of consciousness, if I may use that analogy. I have not read enough Nietzsche but am told that at one point he asserts that suffering lies at the root of or is the source of consciousness, with which few would quarrel, so that points at what kind or sort of experience consciousness is.
The students did ask great and thought provoking questions, even though those questions weren't given the time necessary to answer properly. One doesn't have to look very far on YT to find more engaging and complex videos on this subject. The younger generation, please do not prematurely conclude that the above discussion encapsulates the wide span of ideologies on consciousness. No longer can it be said that the opposite of materialism is necessarily religion or spiritualist, because there are hundreds of sub categories in between that don't require or invoke anything religious or supernatural. Anil made a point that just because quantum physics and consciousness are both mysterious, it doesn't mean there is a correlation between the two. That statement was made to cast doubt on any correlation but self imploded shortly afterwards because "too wet and warm" aren't conditions that rule out a correlation. Why discourage further exploration?
In fact, there is no any development in this field of science since the Buddha conceptualized consciousness (Vijñāna) as a field of studies 2700 years ago. What Anil said (contacts between sensual organs,+objects,+minds, selflessness, hallucination etc) Buddha have already declared in Abidhamma! HOWEVER, the development of AI as a technology is certainly mind-blowing and scary. The Japanese robotic pioneer Dr. Mashahiri Mori's book "The Buddha in the robot : a robot engineer's thoughts on science and religion" (1974) is worth reading!
Pain is not only C fibers firing. It is a quale. Suppose pain is not an experience. Therefore, there is no torture. Ask Dennett if he would mind it if you tortured him. If he says, "YES", then he contradicts himself and so his position is self-contradictory. Dennett does not believe in first person narratives ( qualia) . He asks his wife," It was good for you. Was it good for me?"
While candour is to be admired need you go quite so far towards demonstrating your complete Innocence of *any* kind of intellectual ability or accomplishment? Relax, there is*absolutely_no* chance of anyone ever accusing you of being an intellectual; small donkey very probably but intellectual? No chance.
Maya's attitude is the behind the scene's attitude of materialist in general. Whereas Anil is "trying " to be more diplomatic, Maya wants everyone to know that her study of philosophy is the real study of philosophy and to differentiate herself from the others she must continually remind everyone how the other philosophies are sub par quackery in a word. Yet she didn't have much to offer, other than the role of a materialist cheer leader.
1:27:00 Everyone should be taught that sound reduces by the square of the distance. i.e. The sound energy impinging on a microphone when the lips are 1x distant is 4x greater than the energy impinging when the lips are 2x distant.
The evidence is consciousness itself. Material science models reality objectively. It cannot say anything about subjectivity. Consciousness is itself immaterial because it’s the subject in which all objects appear.
Can you really completely dissociate language from consciousness? For example, does an infant have an identical conscious experience of redness both before and after it has learnt the name for it is red?
@@indricotherium4802 By sentience, do you mean self awareness? To me, it's a vague term. The infant perceives but may not have a clear sense of identity (ego) yet established. It's not aware of its own agency. In another example, people blind since birth do not see, either awake or in dreams. Yet they are conscious. It evidently takes several days for those with restored vision to acclimate and contextualize sight with their learned model of the external world. So they experience visual qualia without context at first, then later construct the appropriate learned associations (concepts) that align with their other senses.
On an unrelated note, I believe advanced embodied AI robots would be philosophical zombies. There would be AGI-level sensors on the machine allowing it to perceive the world, yet it would not have qualia nor consciousness. It could only simulate a conscious agency but wouldn't have it intrinsically.
@@srb20012001 : sentience is defined as able to register sensory inputs - at least that's the strict sense I used it in. Your sight-restored person is unlikely to start from a blank page linguistically. I suspect the process of acclimation you describe would simultaneously be a process of matching new perceptions of objects and movements, where necessary, to their pre-existing vocabulary for those phenomena.
Is consciousness another sense, a reflective perception as opposed to projected outward perception, or perhaps a housing or matrix of the other specific senses?
On a physical level, the sound of running water produces sound waves. On the physiological level, sound waves stimulate the ear nerves, and neurochemical substances are produced by the interaction of tissues such as the brain stem and then transmitted to the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex decodes and encodes the incoming neurochemical information substances, and produces neurochemical substances that are transmitted to the brainstem and other tissues. Under the interaction, neurochemical substances are produced and transmitted to the thalamus. The thalamus decodes and encodes the incoming neurochemical information substances, and then produces neurochemical reactions. These reactions produced by the stimulation of the thalamus are called "consciousness" at the psychological level. This is why I emphasize that consciousness is produced by the thalamus.
@@herzhory For people, consciousness refers to people’s subjective awareness. It may refer to a person's subjective cognition or a person's cognitive state.
What is hard to understand? We have drives and we typically adhere to them. We interpret the world as we perceive it in the cycles it presents itself in. What we are left with is our understanding. We use our understanding to predict the future. Are people just making a massive meal of this?
I don't understand how it is that there's any actual inner experience of all of "this." It seems like it should happen entirely automatically, without anybody having an actual inner experience of it all. This is called the "zombie hypothesis," -- envisioning a world with a physics exactly like ours, where things happen exactly like we see them happening, all in perfect accord with whatever mathematical rules strictly constrain the universe's movements. Whether anybody watches the "movie" of this universe or not, it should play out exactly the same way. Like a recording of a movie on a VCR tape -- it doesn't change the tape's contents, whether it is being viewed, or not. Mathematics doesn't change when you look away from it, or when you look at it. But it does indeed seem that a movie is "playing" for some kind of an audience. That's the thing that is hard to explain. Not just that, but that we can talk about it as well. I understand and agree that from a strictly materialist interpretation, there are no issues: exactly as you said. Except for the fact that there *is* an experience. It is possible that you are not having an inner light experience -- it's possible that you're just purely a Zombie -- a Zombie with emotions, and models of the world, recordings of history and such, that recounts and responds to pain and such, but that there's no being actually experiencing what your mental states would seem seem to indicate experience. Your life might be like a VCR tape with a great movie in it, but nobody's ever watching that movie. But I and a number of other people are fairly emphatic that the movie that is playing out through us, is actually being watched and observed. And we have difficulty accounting for that. For yourself, though, -- if there isn't an experience inside of you beyond the processing of emotional, conceptual, and sensory information, minus the mysterious invisible glow of an "experience," then carry on. We mean you no harm.
@@LionKimbro you seem to understand this problem. But you bring up a group of other "fairly emphatic" individuals. Will you include me in this group? I'm so dedicated to my inner light I deny everyone else's 😅
The problem is the word consciousness is overloaded and used to refer to distinct phenomena. If we're talking about sentience, it's no less present while you're asleep.
As far as consciousness is concerned, sensory input and a bunch of neurons to process the information would seem to be the minimum requirements. Otherwise it's hard to see what you could possibly be conscious of. Awareness of this, and a sense of self, on the other hand, is a different and more difficult question entirely.
I think here and in most discussions on consciousness the second is generally assumed to be the problem to be solved that we call consciousness. What it's like to be a bat rather than all the functions that lead a bat to react to environment.
You have exactly*how much* direct immediate personal experience[as direct immediate and personal as pain] of " neurons? You would not recognise a neuron if one jumped out and bit you in the bum? No surprises there.
1:24:30 ish. I would call our knowledge the world is round "subconscious" as opposed to unconscious.. "unconscious"woukd ne like how our body manages heart rate.
If you have two competing theories, and they're empirically equivalent -- that is, there is no way you can ever determine that one of them is false -- that's a strong hint that you're trying to understand something that doesn't actually exist.
Awesome debate, we’ll prepare presenters … discussing brain, mind and their respective functions and interconnection, but, with all due respect… what is Consciousness??? For a robust discussion on this matter one should’ve have an agreed upon definition of what is Consciousness. It seems to me that the debaters thinks consciousness is what brain and mind do… is it???
Since this concerns my area of research, I'll watch it. However, since it's hosted by the Institute of Philosophy, I'm not hopeful that anything relevant will be discussed. Let's see. 12:15 Not much in the first part from Anil Seth and the overall understanding was about a decade behind. 22:00 Some of this part from Maja Spener was correct but it lacked enough detail to add anything to current research. 33:40 I have to admit that it was a little amusing listening to Philip Goff's impassioned defense of ideas that were disproved years ago. Dunning-Kruger. 34:40 Good question by Louise Antony, which science? Neuroscience has only been a little useful so she is correct. Describing reality as layered with levels is not quite accurate, but the analogy is sufficient. 37:20 Levels of abstraction is also not quite accurate but the point has been made. 40:50 Top down. 45:50 Shape skeleton is partly accurate but not all of it. There is an image of a dalmatian with no border in a spotted field that would disprove the claim since there is no obvious shape reference. In truth, the brain uses multiple methods to recognize objects. 46:15 "Start with philosophy, math and psychology." ~ No. Philosophy has been more like the show, "Hoarders" requiring a lot of energy to dig through and disprove the pseudo-science, myths, and garbage models that philosophers have gleefully created. Math has been useful as a secondary tool but not as a top level descriptor. Psychology has helped some. She's leaving out the great majority of relevant sources which she is apparently unaware of. Still, as lacking as it has been, this piece has still been more relevant than the first three. 48:00 Correct. Neuroscience is a little useful. 49:00 Actually, that is not true. You can distinguish scientifically among materialism, panpsychism, and dualism. Panpsychism and dualism are provably false, but not using neuroscience. 51:39 Now that was a laughable statement by Maja. There is nothing faith based about the actual science research on consciousness. However, I suppose in the areas that she would be aware of (and which do claim to be researching consciousness) there is a lot of scientific apologetics. 53:00 False dichotomy. Introspection is sometimes useful. It doesn't exclude other areas of science. 55:00 Babbling by Goff. 1:03:00 This back and forth is interesting but Louise is actually correct, you cannot duplicate this functionality with predictive coding unless you use infinite exceptions. The vision system is also not Bayesian. 1:05:28 Consciousness predates language both in terms of human development and evolution. 1:06:40 Mindfulness adds almost nothing to the study of consciousness. 1:06:55 No, you isolate the concepts so that they are not dependent on culture or a given philosophical position. You let the evidence form the theory rather than assumptions limiting the questions. 1:08:40 Goff's questions are provably false rather than just being an assumption or opinion. Garden snails are not conscious. Also Integrated Information Theory which he seems to like has already been disproved. 1:10:00 Maja is incorrect. It's already known how to determine consciousness with organisms that don't have language. 1:12:00 Maja is correct to question the value of meditation. 1:20:00 Her reference to the "unconscious" is actually two different things rather than one. Some of this is known but part is not. 1:21:30 He is confusing idealism with panpsychism. Both are provably false. 1:22:30 Nothing has come up yet in the research to suggest that consciousness can't be solved scientifically and it seems very unlikely at this point that it will. So, Louise is probably correct. 1:23:30 More babbling by Goff.There's nothing parsimonious or coherent about panpsychism. 1:24:30 Maja is a bit off. There are not unconscious states. There are systems and functions in the brain that are not part of consciousness. These are not states. 1:25:00 The Freudian concept of the unconscious is partly correct and partly incorrect much like his ideas about the Id, Ego, and Super Ego. Incidentally, Freud's Id, Ego, and SuperEgo formed the pseudo-scientific basis for the fictional account of multiple personalities in the movie, "The Three Faces of Eve". 1:25:10 Anil is correct. There is no such thing as an unconscious or subconscious mind. Questions: 1:26:00 You can't move consciousness one piece at a time since a single neuron or molecule doesn't have any. 1:26:50 Panpsychism has already been disproved. 1:27:30 Morality isn't part of the question of consciousness and has already been addressed in terms of science. 1:28:00 Consciousness is not directly related to quantum mechanics. Some people have brought this up as a lazy or naive method of trying to explain one mystery by invoking another mystery. 1:28:30 There will always be material correlates to consciousness. 1:29:00 She is incorrect. The why's are much easier than the how's. In fact, I'm not sure that there are any major why's that haven't been explained but there are certainly major how's still being researched. It also has nothing to do with philosophy. Thoughts do not emerge in the subconscious first and there is no evidence for hard determinism. The actual evidence supports the concept of free will. 1:29:40 What about things like ChatGPT? It has no comprehension and makes a lot of mistakes. You again would need infinite exceptions to give ChatGPT the equivalent of human level comprehension. Panel response: 1:32:30 Anil is incorrect. One of the major goals is indeed building a conscious machine. Science, not science fiction. 1:35:50 Louise is correct that consciousness is embodied. 1:37:18 She is also correct that there is no evidence yet that would indicate that consciousness is limited to a biological system. However, her use of the word "states" indicates that she does have limited understanding of this topic. This is shown quite clearly in her speculation that an AI could be conscious if it just had the right programming. This idea has already been disproved. Overall, this discussion did show how big the gap is between what is actually known about consciousness and what is commonly known. It's quite big and myths about consciousness are still pervasive.
Than you for exposing a great many inconsistencies in this very revealing discussion by people who are simply not that coherent in the current debate on the physical substrates of primate consciousness. Dan Dennett, Patricia Churchland and Margaret Boden are never referenced. A shame.
Thank you for an excellent post, but... "This is shown quite clearly in her speculation that an AI could be conscious if it just had the right programming. This idea has already been disproved." _What?_ The idea that an AI could be conscious has been disproved?? Citation desperately needed.
Anil states that the problem (explanation) of life has has been obtained (very beginning of his 8 min talk). I fear that he (we) is (are) also making the same mistake with consciousness. Whenever we are applying the scientific method, to anything, we merely scratch the surface: we study the properties of the thing being investigated: what it is made of, a reductionist approach by analysing things down to its fundamental elements and study its properties, its response to external stimuli, but alas we still do not understand how it works. Life as an example, can only be propagated by life. How and why? Take a grain of wheat, know all of its components, its response to the environment, however synthesize it faithfully from its components, will it germinate? Take a cell, construct a membrane which can communicate with its environment, fill it with cell components ( proteins, mitochondria, DNA, RNA) will it reproduce? I believe the same for consciousness. You can know all the components and its properties, but will it self-start? I think we may be hitting a wall. One of the tenets of logic is that the universality of the conclusion cannot exceed the universality of the premises (sort of entropy of logic). Consciousness results in mind and self. A mind and self which is attempting to figure out how its own mind and self is working.
The fact that his seminal book, '''Consciousness Explained'' which demystifies the seemingly magical qualities of this user illusion view of the mind is not brought up in this debate, and it is regrettable that his evolutionary and reductionist view is not introduced into the discussion.
Philosophy is a totally barren approach to trying to figure out how nature works, I agree. It's laughable how people still argue that philosophy is necessary for scientific progress.
Regarding the philosopher on the panel, I'm inclined to agree. However, natural science does not even get going without philosophical presuppositions. Choosing a panpsychist was not particularly smart.
@@PaulTowlson Why do you think that? Roger Bacon laid the basis for the scientific method in the 13th century. Since the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century science has gone its merry way without any contribution from philosophy.
@@davethebrahman9870 I don't think science is free of influence (both good & bad) from philosophical or ideological ideas. We see that now with the undermining of free enquiry in universities, particularly with the denial of the reality of biological sex. Going back, Hume's scepticism was a problem. Kant answered that, though arguably by strengthening a dualism that has created all kinds of other problems. One of these problems is the inability of science to take account of value, meaning and morality. As such, it is an incomplete and unbalanced form of knowledge, although certainly of great value.
@@PaulTowlson The point wasn’t that it is free from influence; rather that philosophy has made no positive contribution to our body of scientific knowledge. The influences themselves are generally mediated by the social climate, and are almost uniformly bad. Further, Hume wasn’t a proponent of ‘scientism’; he was an empiricist, not the same thing at all; and his contribution to intellectual history consisted very largely in clearing away the weeds promoted by other philosophers. As for Kant, I am not aware that he put even a dent in any position of Hume; perhaps you could specify what you mean. Regarding the capacity of philosophy to investigate morals etc, that is not a scientific question, and nothing at all to do with the matter of consciousness. Nor is there any agreement among philosophers about such issues, just a lot of verbiage and opinion.
I think Anil is confused about the philosophical issues here. He even wrongly characterized Feyerabend's philosophical approach. It was actually Lakatos who delineated degenerative and progressive scientific research programmes. Feyerabend was an anarchist when it came to methods and his dictum 'anything goes' is an evidence of his commitment to methodological anarchism. But when it comes to consciousness, like Philip says, metaphysical ambivalence and methodological standardization is actually presupposed even by self proclaimed materialists. Metaphysics only functions as an explanatory system that can suture all known facts together in a simple and meaningful manner. To what extend is materialism more explanatorily powerful compared to other metaphysical schemas is not adequately addressed by Anil.
I find your comment more thought provoking and academic than others but I am still feeling a lack of your own stand on this question! I assume that you are an Indian atheist. I would like to know how your ancient Indian schools of thought defined and conceptualized the term consciousness, and what do you criticize them? I am not a student of philosophy but anthropology, so far I know Feyerabend's methodological anarchism is not degenerative. He just wanted to regenerate science by multidisciplinary methods if so called scientific method doesn't work. Thomas Kuhn said that many scientific progress happened by revolutionary methods. Now many scientists think that so called scientific methods sucks, and has become means of fund corruption!
@@RLekhy Thank you for your kind words, but I think I'm gonna disappoint you a little bit. I do prefer materialism, but I'm waiting for an encompassing and adequate definition of matter before I can confidently "choose" a metaphysical position. I subscribe to emergentism in some sense, but I do not share the same motivation to define consciousness as many westerners do. To me, consciousness is that which we can claim empirical knowledge of, without a reasonable definition, from our experiential ground state. So I'm definitely not an eliminativist because they can only explain away consciousness and not really say anything new and more revealing about reality itself. Buddhism is not exactly my area of expertise but I think they derive the concept of consciousness from an inward empirical enquiry that often makes aesthetic and lateral impressions about consciousness and not really explain its causal basis in the strictly modern sense. Here, they are sort of like eliminativists especially because some buddhists describe consciousness as a sort of void or nothingness, pregnant with infinite potentialities. I think all possible inferences here about consciousness are contingent. I derive inspiration from ancient Indian materialism, like you rightly guessed. But I'm trying to bridge some of the Eastern and Westerm insights. I can only say now that I'm working on a book on the metaphysics of time, because I think time is the most mysterious and philosophically misunderstood concept even in western tradition. Some clues about consciousness might just be found there, I suspect.
@@lokayatavishwam9594 Hmm, very interesting but yes disappointed. I am assuming that you are freshly graduated in philosophy of science but not in science itself (because you use more philosophical jargons than scientific terms). So far I know that there is no independent source of Indian materialism, whatever we know about it just come from Buddhist, Jain and Hindu texts. I also wonder when you don't know eastern (Indian) views of consciousness very well then how could you bridge with western world views? Moreover, do you really think East vs West bi-polemic worldview exist? it makes more interesting when you express your unsatisfactoriness about the contemporary definition of matter but yet you claim to be a materialist! How so? However, I appreciate your honesty and enthusiasm! Good luck for your studies.
@@RLekhy I'm actually just really passionate about philosophy and metaphysics - I'm academically trained in the social sciences. Also I forgot to mention this earlier, I don't call myself an atheist. I'm an Indian muslim (who 'chooses' to believe in God) influenced by the cultures here, mostly by mysticism. I found inspiration in lokayata philosophy (ofc it's developed by later authors based on several fragments from ancient texts) because of two main reasons : One, it is much more grounded and appeals to common sense and passions of people. Two, I think their atheism is much more methodological and not a dogmatic ontological conclusion. They resist explanations that appeal to supernaturalism which often turn out to be justifications for existing oppressive social systems.. It is a much more modest and anchored way of approaching reality. Materialists are the ones who usually bring unparalleled clarity about the immediate reality and this is something that I've always been attracted to. To me, materialism as a methodology is primarily about foregrounding ontological openness and contingency (for example, while idealists might claim that earthquakes happen because God intended it or the mind of nature is in a flux, materialists and realists would seek out ways to catch the symptoms of this event as early as possible so as to save lives while being ambivalent towards teleology and metaphysics behind the event itself) Like I said earlier, Indian approaches to consciousness (and there are way too many) is not as descriptive and formulaic as western scientific standards would demand. I am quite familiar with the Advaida vedanta tradition and any advaidi will tell you that languages cannot exhaustively capture the truth of consciousness and that it can only be approached in a meditative way. Prayer for me is the way in which I manage to assemble and schematize my thoughts and insights from reading and connect it with my personal life experiences. Western approach is much more externally directed and conceptually streamlined and this is indeed a significant difference from the traditional eastern modality. When I said I wanted to bridge the insights of the two worlds, I specifically meant bringing back an introspective flavor to epistemology. There are ways in which seemingly opposite and contradictory views within science and philosophy can be taxonomized within a meta-theoretical framework, and this might tell us something about reality itself.
@@christophervaughan2637 I meant, is the the downside that those conscious people (perhaps the ones in the debate) can babble in a self-important and inane way that even a songbird wouldn't stoop to? Or that you, a conscious being, must suffer through it, where an unthinking animal wouldn't be troubled at all?
@@VidkunQL while an animal might not understand human language, just as we don’t understand theirs, the vast majority of animals would be too afraid to even enter the lecture hall, knowing that most humans are the major threat on Earth. Actually, your point, a good point, reminds me of something Leonardo da Vinci observed. He said humans have great capacity for discourse, but use it to say nothing, while animals have much less capacity for discourse, but use it in a way which makes much more sense 🤣🤣🤣
Checkout Maurice Conforth on Dialectical Materialism ( philosophy of Marxism). Consciousness is a reflection of the real objective world. It is a product of the accumulation of the social relation of production. Man is a historical being. These ideas are dangerous to the interests of the ruling class so you won’t see it here
I'm a big fan of Prof Seth's work, but was surprised by his dismissal of quantum physics and his assertion that the brain is "too wet" of an environment for quantum physics. What of the electrical signals in the brain? How does that work without quantum physics? How could anything that's anything _not_ be subject to quantum physics? And don't say "panpsychism" and expect me to take your answer seriously. lol
If there is no empirical difference between different philosophical views of consciousness, why bother? I think that this statement is not true, it's just handwaving, because our understanding of phenomenal consciousness is so incomplete that people can say anything. If materialism is true, then, at least in most of it's formulations, consciousness is generated by the brain or some other specific physical process and that seems to be empirically testable. If dualism is true, you cannot reduce consciousness to matter and vice versa. When it comes to panpsychism, I'm not really sure what this word signifies. Is it a kind of monism or a kind of dualism? According to Philip it seems to be a monistic view encompassing idealism, but according to Bernardo Kastrup it's a dualistic view and does not encompass idealism. One way or the other panpsychism claims that consciousness is fundamental and this claim is testable in principle. I think that these views lead to different conlusions about consciousness and in spite of what Philip says they lead to different predictions, not necessarily on the level of our immediate experience, but on some level of organisation of reality, definitely.
If you describe the basic hydrogen bond as the basic formulae of matter and the actual process of gaining entropy in the closed system of our universe has been ever increasing complexity of matter, then change itself or the experience of change is the fundamental construct of consciousness itself. If we are the product of the universe, and inorganic matter can become organic, then as beings comprised of the matter of the universe itself, how could we not have experienced every step of evolution it took for us to evolve into this state of being, now. 😅
What is Consciousness? On the physiological level, when the subconscious neurochemical signals in the neuronal network are decoded or encoded by the thalamus, the resulting neurochemical reaction substances are known as "consciousness" on the psychological level. - Chiming Lee and Google Translate Team Aug 5, 2023
Don't forget that human beings are made up of various cells. If you know that you are made up of various tissues and organs. A person is like a company or a country, and the thalamus is the chairman or president. Consciousness is therefore, in function or responsibility, the perception of the thalamus. If you just ask what is consciousness? The short answer is that consciousness is the perception of the thalamus. Don't forget that the thalamus is like the chairman or president, they are living sentient beings. As for explaining "consciousness" in detail, such as how people are conscious. Then a comprehensive explanation must be made from the aspects of physics, physiology, and psychology. However, from the perspective of trichotomy, it must be analyzed and explained with the basic "consciousness model" in order to explain clearly.
This reminds me of the types of talks cosmologists and quantum physicists give nowadays after a few decades of not figuring much out. Looks like neuroscience ( in a reduction materialist metaphysic) has reached its limits already. Now they can just keep talking around the problems, telling us that problems exist, and try to convince funding mechanisms to support their work. Long story short...we are still clueless.
Exactly! And they're are selfish pieces of shit for not just honestly admitting that they're quite clueless, frustrated and disappointed. Instead they always pretend to be in total control. 🤮
Hope this explanation helps everyone. The various electrochemical forms of energy emitted by the thalamus can be perceived by ourselves, which is collectively called consciousness on the human psychological level. - Chiming Lee, Apple and Google Translate Team, August 17, 2023 🙏
@@eternaldelight648 The shape, volume, size, mass, weight and energy of existing phenomena that are generally recognized by humans are the concepts of their attributes (properties) or characteristics that are accepted by the public. For example: you, me, him, her, it, one, part, all, yes, no, right, wrong, good, bad, big, small, exists and does not exist. We must be aware that everyone's inner cognition and the corresponding external phenomena are completely different energies. In other words, the energy of inner cognition and the so-called external phenomenon energy are two different energies. - Chiming Lee, Apple and Google Translate Team, December 9, 2023
That's a strange description of panpsychism in this discussion. Everywhere else the exact description was used for _idealism_ . However, everyone in this discussion seemed comfortable with that description being called panpsychism. Panpsychism, as I heard in other places, is the claim that mind/psyche is another fundamental property of space-time, like energy, charge etc. That is mind/psyche is co-existent with matter, neither emanating from it (as materialism claims) nor creating it (as idealism claims). It is not dualism either, since it doesn't claim that mind and matter are separate. You can't have one without the other. So doesn't have an interaction problem to solve. The problem panpsychism has to solve is how a mind of one part of space-time (say a particle) influences the mind of another part (say another particle). We have laws governing how other properties like energy and charge of one impact another, but none for psyche.
Starts at 3.15. Goff and Antony seem to prioritize clarity, in stark contrast to the others, who insist on the jargon of academe. I vote for Goff and Antony.
I think evolution could be explained in 25 words or less (ish) by something like.... DNA facilitates making making cells and describes how the cells should interact to form life. Mutations occasionally occur. Selection of the fittest promulgates the advantageous ones. I wonder how they would expect to explain/describe consciousness in 25 words or less once its "understood" if they think explaining consciousness comes down to correlating experience to brain function.
Look into epigenetics. It's blown the door wide open again concerning how evolution really works. Evolutionary biologists are back to the drawing board.
@@iain5615 I think you're overstating the importance of epigenetics in this context. I would say epigenetics has an impact on survival of the fittest, not on evolution. To evolve, the script (ie our DNA) needs to change, not how the script runs, producing traits.
It is natural a system has an internal existence. It is strange its waste is useful as well. As if not itself. Human, and AI, can see beyond self to create. I have no idea why encircle more unless makes life easier.
One cannot discuss consciousness without discussing its contents, and they are mostly trash. There is nothing in my consciousness that I wouldn't like to discard, yet can't. And I regard myself as more sophisticated than most. If my consciousness is a trash bin, replete with anxiety, worry, rancid memories, fallacies, doubts, how can the universe be crippled with such a liability. Nothing in this video has changed my mind, that consciousness is a brain product, no stomach, no digestion, no brain no consciousness.
Always thought consciousness was just an evolutionary trait of the brain? A way to make history either repeat or not repeat itselfs. Consciousness feeds on memory to decide if u want something u have experience to happen again or to not happen again.
Do they teach philosophers how to come across as utterly unlikeable? The third speaker is so overtly biased and illogical that he is probably unable to understand how banale everything he says really is
Most are locked in a feedback loop. 'What is reality?' Most don't see others as real. Let alone like them. Do you like your dream world characters? Do you help any of them to think more clearly, or try and wake (survive them)?
Consciousness is not a phenomenon to be contextualised within reality - it is the context that phenomena appear within. It is not a thing happening in reality - it’s what we are pointing to when we say reality - everything that takes place.
@@GorgeousRoddyChrome Consciusness magically emerging at a certain point of complexity as something that is completely different from and not included in it's parts before is also a pretty nice faith claim.
“ Can Consciousness be explained?”That is the title, but no one provided a consensus explanation/definition of the object of debate. This is not a mature field of study….All mature science knows the exact object of study…I think the debate title should’ve been different.
Really not impressed by Goff. A shame he was the representative "philosopher". Someone with expertise in Idealism would have been far more relevant than a panpsychist.
Luv the point that introspection seems both indispensable and unreliable to studying consciousness. Progress will come from reorienting on takes about that.
The last thing that was discussed here is "Can Consciousness be Explained?" Dr. Goff was a sort of token non-materialist. Otherwise, the ability of materialism to explain consciousness was merely presupposed. All in all, then, a very disappointing discussion, given what I was led to expect at least. Materialism is an empty analysis, with little to no good evidence (rational or empirical). And none of the other speakers even began to address one of Dr. Goff's central claims in the discussion: What functional explanation could the materialist even give that the non-materialist could not accept? The functional data is entirely neutral with respect to the debate. And this is why it was such a disappointing discussion.
It's not the redness of red or the feeling of pain that presents any problems. These are just the result of sense organs sending nerve signals to the brain. Even bugs "experience" sensation. The problem is self-consciousness, being aware that we are experiencing reality. Even bugs will get certain patterns from their senses and send signal to their muscles to perform certain duties. But human beliefs and intentions serve as an extra layer of interpretation that interfere between sense stimulus and muscle activation. We are faced with choices about how to behave. We run through scenarios and consider worst case possibilities; we filter our interpretation through prior knowledge and our belief systems. We constantly re-prioritizes our beliefs. We are always theorizing about patterns and purposes and looking for ways to test or confirm our theories. How is this even possible with nerve signals in the brain? The key seems to be pattern recognition. We recognize certain patterns in our sensory signals, and we group those patterns to form meaningful situations that we can react to. So we seem to have adapted the ability to use the same kind of brain cells that recognize red or blue to now recognize patterns of patterns; we recognize situations. Not only do we recognize situations, we consider what they mean to us in the broader context of life. We seem to have developed the ability to determine what patterns to look for in order to confirm theories. The question is how much freedom do we have to deliberately manipulate which patterns to look for and how complicated can those patterns get. Even reason, logic, math, and science are just another form of pattern we've learned or adapted to recognize.
Language is only necessary for consciousness if your definition encapsulates introspection as a prerequisite for consciousness. Which I find patently absurd. I would argue that all mammalian animals possess consciousness but are not introspective in the way that necessitates language.
Finally some smart scientists. It’s hard to watch so many scientists say consciousness works by the frontal lobe doing xyz. That’s they how not the why. That’s more of a side effect rather than the basis of. But western cut has lost its roots in metaphysics so much that we can’t conceptualize the non physical.
Consciousness Scientific explanation, consciousness is the neurochemical reaction substance produced by the interaction of the cerebral cortex, brainstem and other tissues to stimulate the thalamus. Consciousness is a neuroelectrochemical substance encoded and decoded by the thalamus. That is, consciousness is a neurochemical reaction substance produced by the thalamus when it is stimulated. ❤🙏
The hard problem of consciousness is great. I love to see materialists do their mental gymnastics in order to pretend that they understand it. They like to pretend they're not stumped. But they are. They will come up with a whole range of assumptions as if to say, here's the answer. Knowing full well they don't have it and aren't really revealing anything new about the brain at all. It's just an exercise in creative semantics.
_"Can Consciousness be Explained?"_ lmao 🤣 Even a strawberry can be explained. But there's a difference between explaining a strawberry and actually holding one and eating it. lol
Hugely interesting and impotent. What about love, not eros but agape, in greek. What kind of consciousness is that love? is it related to conscipusnees and how?
Surely the potential of consciousness and unconsciousness existed before, during and after the big bang ... long before homo sapiens became aware of consciousness and named it. If this is true, then how might the potential of consciousness and the potential of unconsciousness exist without either being aware of their individual and combined potential?
Consciousness is affected by alcohol. It is extremely fragile. On the other hand, unconsciousness is not fragile at all. It can survive the flames in a crematorium and last forever !
You're confusing the content of consciousness with consciousness. The content of consciousness is memories, awareness, sensory perception, emotions etc
‘Thought’, ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’ & ‘consciousness’ are all information-related phenomena and it is not difficult to show that one of the principal (& completely inexcusable) reasons why we have not so far come to any good & proper - nor fully verifiable - understanding of these otherwise greatly sought-after yet still highly mysterious phenomena is due in great part to the simple fact that we do not presently also have a good & proper - that is, we do not presently also have a clear & fully verifiable - understanding/science of ‘information’ itself. Although I have personally had the (altogether dubious) fortune of having been able to figure out ‘information’s’ correct (& fully verifiable) ontological identity, and although I’m not going to divulge its formalistic definition here in this RUclips comment (without which formalistic definition it is not possible to establish a full & accurate science of the phenomenon, but with it it is) nevertheless I can assure you that with it in hand - that is, with ‘information’s’ correct ontological identity within one’s investigative arsenal - the exercise of determining the ontological identities of all of the other directly information-related phenomena such as ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’ & ‘consciousness’ (to far less than exhaust the list) becomes one of no great difficulty. Obversely, once ‘information’s’ correct (verifiably correct) ontological identity is properly recognised, not only do the correct ontological identities of all of its most closely related cousins (as above) become nicely elucidated, but so also does the woeful incorrectness - the hopeless & excruciatingly embarrassing incorrectness - of all of information’s current imposters, along with ‘consciousness’s’ own struggling wanna-bees too. So much so that it becomes fully & quite verifiably obvious that (i) digits are not information, that (ii) thinking is not a computable phenomenon, & (iii) that computers do not because they cannot, think. Let alone do so either intelligently or consciously. Even less so with full cognitive self-conscious awareness. And (iv) our own nature-built, real live flesh & blood, internal thinking machine is not a computer. Although it pertains to millions & millions of different things - things which we ourselves call colour, sound, taste, odour, texture, temperature, balance, love, hate, joy, happiness, the feeling of the need to micturate & defecate, vomit, sneeze, cough, choke etc, etc, etc in its generic form ‘information’ turns out to be a completely knowable, identifiable, measurable, quantifiable phenomenon & it is also simple. And our universe is chockablock full of it. It’s also something staring at you right in your face. Hiding in plain sight. Knowing information’s correct ontological identity allows any kind & amount of it to be both identified, & to be traced & tracked, when- & wherever any of it resides & moves, here in our universe, including any of it being operated on inside our own internal, nature-given, flesh & blood thinking machine. Performing this identifying//tracing-&-tracking exercise on any of the information that eventually makes it into our own conscious awareness is not only a fully doable task, but it is the one which readily highlights the exact ontological identity of all of our mental phenomena - including ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’ & ‘consciousness’. ((Seeking a sponsor !))
TLDR Learn to write text. It's just a freaking wall of text, and the format and sentences are too long. And dont use so many parenthesis ( ) and quotation marks " ". Clumsy writing! Structure your damn message.
@@CandidDate Don't bother. Its just incoherent nonsense and word diarrhea. "‘information’s’ correct ontological identity" Try to define that in proper english. It's just ridiculous.
Prof. Antony here is a rule of thumb. Never ask if you have pronounced someone's name correctly if the person speaks the same language as you. Pronounce it the way according to you it reads in the language. No one cares because it will be one of the many variations on the pronunciation. By asking the question, am I correctly saying your name, you actually are saying your name is exotic and alien.
The theory of everything is time. Time is everything and everything is time. For example, time equals energy and energy equals mass times the speed of light square. For example, we are our star. Read more nonfiction.
Consciousness is NOT a philosophy question. Never should have been. It's surprising that we just accept that because consciousness is part of brain-experience, it should get discussed in the philosophy domain.
I love thinking about things we don't understand yet so I love those debates. For a while now, however, I get this alarmbel when Phillip talks about this subject. Couldn't immediately place it. But how is this an argument. Materialism hasn't formulated an answer for dark matter yet so its not material. This sounds precisely like materialism didn't progress in explaining consciousness so its panpsychism. Than suddenly the thing that bothers me bacame clear. It's troublesome to me because it sounds like religious view on miracles. Its not standing on its iwn merits. If science cannot explain it its a miracle. Thats the reasoning he seems to use which doesn't seem strong. Anyone?
Should it be yea or ni of "being in consciousness can be percived and explained on identity of it's own ontological commitment " instead of u r equation i.e title
Time is the energy that relates the quantum to consciousness. For example, the star and the Adam. The star is a host of atoms that produce matter, more atoms.
You can doubt the existence of brains i.e. we are in a matrix/dream/hallucination/misperception. But you can’t doubt your own awareness. This is why consciousness is more fundamental than the brain and it’s more accurate to say the brain ( and everything else) emerge in consciousness and not the other way around.
@Tim You are assuming the conclusion there. If my argument was that brains might not be real then you can’t refute that by saying we can turn brains off and on therefore they are real. That’s no better than saying I can taste a sandwich in my dream so it’s real and will keep me from starving.
The second point is when I refer to consciousness or awareness I don’t mean your mind or my mind specifically. I mean all Reality is intrinsically aware. You don’t need anesthetic to make the point you’re trying to make. Before you were born and had no brain, your parents were aware and they too are part of Reality. In short, you wouldn’t know what a brain was without awareness so you must prioritize awareness as the more fundamental of the two.
@@Promatheos Take that argument back to the beginning of evolution when life was single cell organisms. There wasn't a brain around at that time to be aware and yet reality still existed for evolution to take place in.
This video helped me get the best sleep!
I always want to see a debate like this say 'can consciousness be explained?
Guest One Yes
Guest Two No
Guest Three Yes
Guest Four No
There you have it, thanks for joining us.
Of course consciousness can be explained - the question is can you explain it?
Better Question Should Be If Consciousness Is Not Explainable Then How Could Consciousness Become Explainable
For me the question is whether reduction to physical/chemical processes is the fullest way to examine consciousness. The older I get the more I realize poetry is the more satisfying language through which to understand humanity’s place in the universe. Science is so flat.
@@Imsosmrt1999 actually, quantum physics is pretty wild, but they don't really teach it. Science is flat because of how its taught. I'm on a farm surrounded by woods, I see physics and chemistry everywhere, even know a little, and its far from flat.
I get your point but ifyou think that you really need to learn MORE physics and chemisltry,, not less. Not that there is anything wrong with poetry.
But Roger Feynman has a great reproof of that idea in 'Six easy pieces-six lectures on physics". I think their on youtube, but to your point, I think the guy who wrote "The Tao of Physics" said a similar thing which is why he wrote the book. I think the notion you are putting forth is being bandied around as part of a real 'anti science' trend going on in the western world, which is a pretty unhealthy one. But I know what you mean.
Are you looking for some consensus or majority to tell you what to think, or just looking to hear arguments and explainations to evaluate for yourself? This makes all the difference.
Loved the interventions of Louise. I think she got it right. You have to start studying consciousness in a top-down sort of way if you want to get to explanations. Without a clear picture of the functional states and the functional architecture, you cannot even start to make sense of the correlations at the more structural level of the nervous system. I wouldn't necessarily agree with her in that the visual processing is encapsulated, especially if she subscribes to a kind of fodorian full isolated modulatory, I think that fodorian modularity has all sorts of problems explaining integrated sensory processing among different regions of the brain and the neurological evidence at this respect from patients with brain damage speaks more in favor of non-isolated information processing.
I also liked some of the other points that were raised during the debate: we need to carefully distinguish between different kinds of introspection (attention introspection vs retrospective introspection, for instance) to improve our methodology, another point was that we can get more productive tasks by engaging in the materialistic perspective of consciousness rather than in the dualistic perspective say (I also follow Louise here in her short criticism that Chalmers' modal theory of possible worlds is an abstraction -useless for this problem at least, and that it doesn't tell us anything interesting about conscious agents; I would have gone further, possible worlds semantics is overestimated in general by some analytic philosophers).
Great debate anyway, I will surely have more authors and articles to add to my library. Thank you for organizing it!
I think you consciousness needs to be experienced to be studied. And in order to test your reality (with mind altering substances) you need that freedom of mind and ability to submit to actual reality.
This is why I think that most people who haven't had the opportunity to experience mushrooms and the like are missing out on fundamentals necessary to explore the study of consciousness itself.
Ms Antony is amazing to hear, and all the speakers were amazing, this was an amazing debate
My take on it after listening to everything I can find in consciousness is:
Consciousness is an organisms subjective, predictive experience and memory of its internal and external environment with the goal of obtaining energy to resist entropy.
It emerges from the unified accumulative processes of living cells and organisms that have evolved in a community for an evolutionary advantage to keep the sum and parts of the system alive.
It is the reactive narration of our sensory experience of the environment by the many organisms that have symbiotically evolved inside us.
As the sum of our parts are neither alive or consciousness then the whole cannot obtain something from nothing. It is a complex chemical conversation our atoms are having with the external world. The language... Chemistry and physics.
It is why when you are sedated and your senses are Numb, and thus your internal organisms and systems receive no input, so have nothing to say, our collective voice (consciousness) goes silent. It's just unfathomable to imagine the amount of cells and time that 1 cell had to harmoniously evolve into trillions to create the perception of 1 voice and why AI may simulate but never achieve our level of consciousness.
Hmm at least you have a bash at defining your terms, and might have more success if you had any Latin , in which case the meaning of the word would be plain to you, and not the it matters in the least try organism's -as in of the organism rather than organisms plural
If I understand you aright you suggest consciousness to be an experience of an experiencer.
Had you any Latin that might take you some of the way towards identifying what sort of experience the experiencer - which is you if it is as you say "subjective". You have had a bash or attempt at what the speakers do not trouble themselves to do, namely define their terms; they simply assume that they know what the word consciousness means or what they suppose it to be, and that others also know what the word consciousness means or what they suppose it to be, which is intellectually sloppy or idle. Moreover they do not trouble themselves to identify*Whose* conscious* Of_What* and have not got as far as you who have at least got as far as identifying it as a subjective experience or something that you yourself experience which shows far more rigour and intellectual discipline than do the speakers who do not even trouble themselves to define what they suppose themselves to be experiencing at which they would arrive far more quickly if that had any Latin, consciousness being a compound of two Latin words, a preposition and a verb. Find the verb and you are home; the verb appears in the words science conscience and conscious, so it is fairly obvious what that verb is. The speakers do not get as near as you who have pinpointed *memory* itself a Russian doll in the Russian doll of consciousness, if I may use that analogy.
I have not read enough Nietzsche but am told that at one point he asserts that suffering lies at the root of or is the source of consciousness, with which few would quarrel, so that points at what kind or sort of experience consciousness is.
I am writing a book on this, thank you. Great arguments and key points.
What about your book now?
The students did ask great and thought provoking questions, even though those questions weren't given the time necessary to answer properly. One doesn't have to look very far on YT to find more engaging and complex videos on this subject. The younger generation, please do not prematurely conclude that the above discussion encapsulates the wide span of ideologies on consciousness. No longer can it be said that the opposite of materialism is necessarily religion or spiritualist, because there are hundreds of sub categories in between that don't require or invoke anything religious or supernatural. Anil made a point that just because quantum physics and consciousness are both mysterious, it doesn't mean there is a correlation between the two. That statement was made to cast doubt on any correlation but self imploded shortly afterwards because "too wet and warm" aren't conditions that rule out a correlation. Why discourage further exploration?
In fact, there is no any development in this field of science since the Buddha conceptualized consciousness (Vijñāna) as a field of studies 2700 years ago. What Anil said (contacts between sensual organs,+objects,+minds, selflessness, hallucination etc) Buddha have already declared in Abidhamma! HOWEVER, the development of AI as a technology is certainly mind-blowing and scary. The Japanese robotic pioneer Dr. Mashahiri Mori's book "The Buddha in the robot : a robot engineer's thoughts on science and religion" (1974) is worth reading!
What do you suppose thought or thinking to be?
Is there an objective description of subjectivity?
Pain is not only C fibers firing. It is a quale. Suppose pain is not an experience. Therefore, there is no torture. Ask Dennett if he would mind it if you tortured him. If he says, "YES", then he contradicts himself and so his position is self-contradictory. Dennett does not believe in first person narratives ( qualia) . He asks his wife," It was good for you. Was it good for me?"
While candour is to be admired need you go quite so far towards demonstrating your complete Innocence of *any* kind of intellectual ability or accomplishment? Relax, there is*absolutely_no* chance of anyone ever accusing you of being an intellectual; small donkey very probably but intellectual? No chance.
Maya's attitude is the behind the scene's attitude of materialist in general. Whereas Anil is "trying " to be more diplomatic, Maya wants everyone to know that her study of philosophy is the real study of philosophy and to differentiate herself from the others she must continually remind everyone how the other philosophies are sub par quackery in a word. Yet she didn't have much to offer, other than the role of a materialist cheer leader.
1:27:00 Everyone should be taught that sound reduces by the square of the distance.
i.e. The sound energy impinging on a microphone when the lips are 1x distant
is 4x greater than the energy impinging when the lips are 2x distant.
That there can be a debate about consciousness and no discussion about analytic Idealism is mind (consciousness) blowing.
They need Bernardo
Never say never, but there is no evidence at all that I am aware of for any immaterial aspect to being.
The evidence is consciousness itself. Material science models reality objectively. It cannot say anything about subjectivity. Consciousness is itself immaterial because it’s the subject in which all objects appear.
Wow, thank you for saving me 1:38:45 of my life. I'm glad I read this comment first.
What is analytic idealism?
Analyzing a perfect scenario? I could google but that's not as amusing.
Can you really completely dissociate language from consciousness? For example, does an infant have an identical conscious experience of redness both before and after it has learnt the name for it is red?
Perception vs Conception. A baby experiences qualia without a contextual structure.
@@srb20012001 : is perception without context evidence of consciousness or only sentience?
@@indricotherium4802 By sentience, do you mean self awareness? To me, it's a vague term. The infant perceives but may not have a clear sense of identity (ego) yet established. It's not aware of its own agency.
In another example, people blind since birth do not see, either awake or in dreams. Yet they are conscious. It evidently takes several days for those with restored vision to acclimate and contextualize sight with their learned model of the external world. So they experience visual qualia without context at first, then later construct the appropriate learned associations (concepts) that align with their other senses.
On an unrelated note, I believe advanced embodied AI robots would be philosophical zombies. There would be AGI-level sensors on the machine allowing it to perceive the world, yet it would not have qualia nor consciousness. It could only simulate a conscious agency but wouldn't have it intrinsically.
@@srb20012001 : sentience is defined as able to register sensory inputs - at least that's the strict sense I used it in. Your sight-restored person is unlikely to start from a blank page linguistically. I suspect the process of acclimation you describe would simultaneously be a process of matching new perceptions of objects and movements, where necessary, to their pre-existing vocabulary for those phenomena.
We do not have a scientific definition of consciousness
Just a reminder: no fire drills are planned. So you can safely ignore any alarm bells that accidentally go off.
Came for Seth vs Goff, stayed for Seth vs Antony, and M3GAN showing up at 1:28:33 was a startling twist! Good show!
Is consciousness another sense, a reflective perception as opposed to projected outward perception, or perhaps a housing or matrix of the other specific senses?
@@Reso-pn7kr I can get on board with a lot of that. Pseudo-skeptics will object for the sake of objecting, meexpects. 🙂
How old is the term consciousness? Who was the first to use consciousness or equivalent terms as a concept in other languages?
On a physical level, the sound of running water produces sound waves. On the physiological level, sound waves stimulate the ear nerves, and neurochemical substances are produced by the interaction of tissues such as the brain stem and then transmitted to the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex decodes and encodes the incoming neurochemical information substances, and produces neurochemical substances that are transmitted to the brainstem and other tissues. Under the interaction, neurochemical substances are produced and transmitted to the thalamus. The thalamus decodes and encodes the incoming neurochemical information substances, and then produces neurochemical reactions. These reactions produced by the stimulation of the thalamus are called "consciousness" at the psychological level. This is why I emphasize that consciousness is produced by the thalamus.
I call consciousness totality of stuff I experience. As everyone else does. You and me never experienced thalamus or interacted with it.
@@herzhory For people, consciousness refers to people’s subjective awareness. It may refer to a person's subjective cognition or a person's cognitive state.
Consciousness can be explained quite well from the perspective of biological evolution
Is Goff’s accent a regional one?
What is hard to understand? We have drives and we typically adhere to them. We interpret the world as we perceive it in the cycles it presents itself in. What we are left with is our understanding. We use our understanding to predict the future.
Are people just making a massive meal of this?
I don't understand how it is that there's any actual inner experience of all of "this." It seems like it should happen entirely automatically, without anybody having an actual inner experience of it all. This is called the "zombie hypothesis," -- envisioning a world with a physics exactly like ours, where things happen exactly like we see them happening, all in perfect accord with whatever mathematical rules strictly constrain the universe's movements. Whether anybody watches the "movie" of this universe or not, it should play out exactly the same way. Like a recording of a movie on a VCR tape -- it doesn't change the tape's contents, whether it is being viewed, or not. Mathematics doesn't change when you look away from it, or when you look at it. But it does indeed seem that a movie is "playing" for some kind of an audience. That's the thing that is hard to explain. Not just that, but that we can talk about it as well.
I understand and agree that from a strictly materialist interpretation, there are no issues: exactly as you said. Except for the fact that there *is* an experience.
It is possible that you are not having an inner light experience -- it's possible that you're just purely a Zombie -- a Zombie with emotions, and models of the world, recordings of history and such, that recounts and responds to pain and such, but that there's no being actually experiencing what your mental states would seem seem to indicate experience. Your life might be like a VCR tape with a great movie in it, but nobody's ever watching that movie.
But I and a number of other people are fairly emphatic that the movie that is playing out through us, is actually being watched and observed. And we have difficulty accounting for that.
For yourself, though, -- if there isn't an experience inside of you beyond the processing of emotional, conceptual, and sensory information, minus the mysterious invisible glow of an "experience," then carry on. We mean you no harm.
@@LionKimbro you seem to understand this problem. But you bring up a group of other "fairly emphatic" individuals. Will you include me in this group? I'm so dedicated to my inner light I deny everyone else's 😅
I find unconsciousness is just as mysterious.
witches domain
@@rajooananth4719 rem sleep. spooky.
Death is the only unconscious observable , or is death just a discontinuation of your present form of consciousness
The problem is the word consciousness is overloaded and used to refer to distinct phenomena. If we're talking about sentience, it's no less present while you're asleep.
Hmm, you don't have any Latin. do you?
As far as consciousness is concerned, sensory input and a bunch of neurons to process the information would seem to be the minimum requirements. Otherwise it's hard to see what you could possibly be conscious of.
Awareness of this, and a sense of self, on the other hand, is a different and more difficult question entirely.
I think here and in most discussions on consciousness the second is generally assumed to be the problem to be solved that we call consciousness. What it's like to be a bat rather than all the functions that lead a bat to react to environment.
You. consciousness, awareness and existence are the same.
You have exactly*how much* direct immediate personal experience[as direct immediate and personal as pain] of " neurons?
You would not recognise a neuron if one jumped out and bit you in the bum? No surprises there.
@@vhawk1951kl What?
@@andrewguthrie2 When, how?
1:24:30 ish. I would call our knowledge the world is round "subconscious" as opposed to unconscious.. "unconscious"woukd ne like how our body manages heart rate.
Nice talk. Let's build a system to demonstrate what they say.
Not sure I would listen to anything Chalmers said after seeing that picture...
If you have two competing theories, and they're empirically equivalent -- that is, there is no way you can ever determine that one of them is false -- that's a strong hint that you're trying to understand something that doesn't actually exist.
I am, therefore I am. Am you?
I can't be bothered to watch, someone summarise ?
Everybody knows what consciousness is except scientists and philosophers.
Awesome debate, we’ll prepare presenters … discussing brain, mind and their respective functions and interconnection, but, with all due respect… what is Consciousness??? For a robust discussion on this matter one should’ve have an agreed upon definition of what is Consciousness. It seems to me that the debaters thinks consciousness is what brain and mind do… is it???
Seems like they are walking back and forth between cause and effect!
Lets see how long this will take, good lord i have all the time in my mind.😊
Since this concerns my area of research, I'll watch it. However, since it's hosted by the Institute of Philosophy, I'm not hopeful that anything relevant will be discussed. Let's see.
12:15 Not much in the first part from Anil Seth and the overall understanding was about a decade behind.
22:00 Some of this part from Maja Spener was correct but it lacked enough detail to add anything to current research.
33:40 I have to admit that it was a little amusing listening to Philip Goff's impassioned defense of ideas that were disproved years ago. Dunning-Kruger.
34:40 Good question by Louise Antony, which science? Neuroscience has only been a little useful so she is correct. Describing reality as layered with levels is not quite accurate, but the analogy is sufficient.
37:20 Levels of abstraction is also not quite accurate but the point has been made.
40:50 Top down.
45:50 Shape skeleton is partly accurate but not all of it. There is an image of a dalmatian with no border in a spotted field that would disprove the claim since there is no obvious shape reference. In truth, the brain uses multiple methods to recognize objects.
46:15 "Start with philosophy, math and psychology." ~ No. Philosophy has been more like the show, "Hoarders" requiring a lot of energy to dig through and disprove the pseudo-science, myths, and garbage models that philosophers have gleefully created. Math has been useful as a secondary tool but not as a top level descriptor. Psychology has helped some. She's leaving out the great majority of relevant sources which she is apparently unaware of. Still, as lacking as it has been, this piece has still been more relevant than the first three.
48:00 Correct. Neuroscience is a little useful.
49:00 Actually, that is not true. You can distinguish scientifically among materialism, panpsychism, and dualism. Panpsychism and dualism are provably false, but not using neuroscience.
51:39 Now that was a laughable statement by Maja. There is nothing faith based about the actual science research on consciousness. However, I suppose in the areas that she would be aware of (and which do claim to be researching consciousness) there is a lot of scientific apologetics.
53:00 False dichotomy. Introspection is sometimes useful. It doesn't exclude other areas of science.
55:00 Babbling by Goff.
1:03:00 This back and forth is interesting but Louise is actually correct, you cannot duplicate this functionality with predictive coding unless you use infinite exceptions. The vision system is also not Bayesian.
1:05:28 Consciousness predates language both in terms of human development and evolution.
1:06:40 Mindfulness adds almost nothing to the study of consciousness.
1:06:55 No, you isolate the concepts so that they are not dependent on culture or a given philosophical position. You let the evidence form the theory rather than assumptions limiting the questions.
1:08:40 Goff's questions are provably false rather than just being an assumption or opinion. Garden snails are not conscious. Also Integrated Information Theory which he seems to like has already been disproved.
1:10:00 Maja is incorrect. It's already known how to determine consciousness with organisms that don't have language.
1:12:00 Maja is correct to question the value of meditation.
1:20:00 Her reference to the "unconscious" is actually two different things rather than one. Some of this is known but part is not.
1:21:30 He is confusing idealism with panpsychism. Both are provably false.
1:22:30 Nothing has come up yet in the research to suggest that consciousness can't be solved scientifically and it seems very unlikely at this point that it will. So, Louise is probably correct.
1:23:30 More babbling by Goff.There's nothing parsimonious or coherent about panpsychism.
1:24:30 Maja is a bit off. There are not unconscious states. There are systems and functions in the brain that are not part of consciousness. These are not states.
1:25:00 The Freudian concept of the unconscious is partly correct and partly incorrect much like his ideas about the Id, Ego, and Super Ego. Incidentally, Freud's Id, Ego, and SuperEgo formed the pseudo-scientific basis for the fictional account of multiple personalities in the movie, "The Three Faces of Eve".
1:25:10 Anil is correct. There is no such thing as an unconscious or subconscious mind.
Questions:
1:26:00 You can't move consciousness one piece at a time since a single neuron or molecule doesn't have any.
1:26:50 Panpsychism has already been disproved.
1:27:30 Morality isn't part of the question of consciousness and has already been addressed in terms of science.
1:28:00 Consciousness is not directly related to quantum mechanics. Some people have brought this up as a lazy or naive method of trying to explain one mystery by invoking another mystery.
1:28:30 There will always be material correlates to consciousness.
1:29:00 She is incorrect. The why's are much easier than the how's. In fact, I'm not sure that there are any major why's that haven't been explained but there are certainly major how's still being researched. It also has nothing to do with philosophy. Thoughts do not emerge in the subconscious first and there is no evidence for hard determinism. The actual evidence supports the concept of free will.
1:29:40 What about things like ChatGPT? It has no comprehension and makes a lot of mistakes. You again would need infinite exceptions to give ChatGPT the equivalent of human level comprehension.
Panel response:
1:32:30 Anil is incorrect. One of the major goals is indeed building a conscious machine. Science, not science fiction.
1:35:50 Louise is correct that consciousness is embodied.
1:37:18 She is also correct that there is no evidence yet that would indicate that consciousness is limited to a biological system. However, her use of the word "states" indicates that she does have limited understanding of this topic. This is shown quite clearly in her speculation that an AI could be conscious if it just had the right programming. This idea has already been disproved.
Overall, this discussion did show how big the gap is between what is actually known about consciousness and what is commonly known. It's quite big and myths about consciousness are still pervasive.
Than you for exposing a great many inconsistencies in this very revealing discussion by people who are simply not that coherent in the current debate on the physical substrates of primate consciousness. Dan Dennett, Patricia Churchland and Margaret Boden are never referenced. A shame.
Thank you for an excellent post, but...
"This is shown quite clearly in her speculation that an AI could be conscious if it just had the right programming. This idea has already been disproved." _What?_ The idea that an AI could be conscious has been disproved?? Citation desperately needed.
@@jamessparks7329 I'm familiar with Dennett and Churchland. They don't add much.
@@VidkunQL I can't cite it since it includes research that is still confidential. I'm not sure why the concept would surprise you though.
@@scientious😂😂😂😂
Came here for Anil.
Anil states that the problem (explanation) of life has has been obtained (very beginning of his 8 min talk). I fear that he (we) is (are) also making the same mistake with consciousness. Whenever we are applying the scientific method, to anything, we merely scratch the surface: we study the properties of the thing being investigated: what it is made of, a reductionist approach by analysing things down to its fundamental elements and study its properties, its response to external stimuli, but alas we still do not understand how it works. Life as an example, can only be propagated by life. How and why? Take a grain of wheat, know all of its components, its response to the environment, however synthesize it faithfully from its components, will it germinate? Take a cell, construct a membrane which can communicate with its environment, fill it with cell components ( proteins, mitochondria, DNA, RNA) will it reproduce? I believe the same for consciousness. You can know all the components and its properties, but will it self-start?
I think we may be hitting a wall. One of the tenets of logic is that the universality of the conclusion cannot exceed the universality of the premises (sort of entropy of logic). Consciousness results in mind and self. A mind and self which is attempting to figure out how its own mind and self is working.
Clearly, none of these people have read Daniel Dennett's book :)
The fact that his seminal book, '''Consciousness Explained'' which demystifies the seemingly magical qualities of this user illusion view of the mind is not brought up in this debate, and it is regrettable that his evolutionary and reductionist view is not introduced into the discussion.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
There is no place for philosophers with respect to this question. All they do is muddy the waters.
Philosophy is a totally barren approach to trying to figure out how nature works, I agree. It's laughable how people still argue that philosophy is necessary for scientific progress.
Regarding the philosopher on the panel, I'm inclined to agree. However, natural science does not even get going without philosophical presuppositions. Choosing a panpsychist was not particularly smart.
@@PaulTowlson Why do you think that? Roger Bacon laid the basis for the scientific method in the 13th century. Since the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century science has gone its merry way without any contribution from philosophy.
@@davethebrahman9870 I don't think science is free of influence (both good & bad) from philosophical or ideological ideas. We see that now with the undermining of free enquiry in universities, particularly with the denial of the reality of biological sex.
Going back, Hume's scepticism was a problem. Kant answered that, though arguably by strengthening a dualism that has created all kinds of other problems. One of these problems is the inability of science to take account of value, meaning and morality. As such, it is an incomplete and unbalanced form of knowledge, although certainly of great value.
@@PaulTowlson The point wasn’t that it is free from influence; rather that philosophy has made no positive contribution to our body of scientific knowledge. The influences themselves are generally mediated by the social climate, and are almost uniformly bad. Further, Hume wasn’t a proponent of ‘scientism’; he was an empiricist, not the same thing at all; and his contribution to intellectual history consisted very largely in clearing away the weeds promoted by other philosophers.
As for Kant, I am not aware that he put even a dent in any position of Hume; perhaps you could specify what you mean.
Regarding the capacity of philosophy to investigate morals etc, that is not a scientific question, and nothing at all to do with the matter of consciousness. Nor is there any agreement among philosophers about such issues, just a lot of verbiage and opinion.
Anil rules
I think Anil is confused about the philosophical issues here. He even wrongly characterized Feyerabend's philosophical approach. It was actually Lakatos who delineated degenerative and progressive scientific research programmes. Feyerabend was an anarchist when it came to methods and his dictum 'anything goes' is an evidence of his commitment to methodological anarchism.
But when it comes to consciousness, like Philip says, metaphysical ambivalence and methodological standardization is actually presupposed even by self proclaimed materialists. Metaphysics only functions as an explanatory system that can suture all known facts together in a simple and meaningful manner. To what extend is materialism more explanatorily powerful compared to other metaphysical schemas is not adequately addressed by Anil.
I find your comment more thought provoking and academic than others but I am still feeling a lack of your own stand on this question! I assume that you are an Indian atheist. I would like to know how your ancient Indian schools of thought defined and conceptualized the term consciousness, and what do you criticize them? I am not a student of philosophy but anthropology, so far I know Feyerabend's methodological anarchism is not degenerative. He just wanted to regenerate science by multidisciplinary methods if so called scientific method doesn't work. Thomas Kuhn said that many scientific progress happened by revolutionary methods. Now many scientists think that so called scientific methods sucks, and has become means of fund corruption!
@@RLekhy Thank you for your kind words, but I think I'm gonna disappoint you a little bit. I do prefer materialism, but I'm waiting for an encompassing and adequate definition of matter before I can confidently "choose" a metaphysical position. I subscribe to emergentism in some sense, but I do not share the same motivation to define consciousness as many westerners do. To me, consciousness is that which we can claim empirical knowledge of, without a reasonable definition, from our experiential ground state. So I'm definitely not an eliminativist because they can only explain away consciousness and not really say anything new and more revealing about reality itself.
Buddhism is not exactly my area of expertise but I think they derive the concept of consciousness from an inward empirical enquiry that often makes aesthetic and lateral impressions about consciousness and not really explain its causal basis in the strictly modern sense. Here, they are sort of like eliminativists especially because some buddhists describe consciousness as a sort of void or nothingness, pregnant with infinite potentialities. I think all possible inferences here about consciousness are contingent. I derive inspiration from ancient Indian materialism, like you rightly guessed. But I'm trying to bridge some of the Eastern and Westerm insights. I can only say now that I'm working on a book on the metaphysics of time, because I think time is the most mysterious and philosophically misunderstood concept even in western tradition. Some clues about consciousness might just be found there, I suspect.
@@lokayatavishwam9594 Hmm, very interesting but yes disappointed. I am assuming that you are freshly graduated in philosophy of science but not in science itself (because you use more philosophical jargons than scientific terms). So far I know that there is no independent source of Indian materialism, whatever we know about it just come from Buddhist, Jain and Hindu texts. I also wonder when you don't know eastern (Indian) views of consciousness very well then how could you bridge with western world views? Moreover, do you really think East vs West bi-polemic worldview exist? it makes more interesting when you express your unsatisfactoriness about the contemporary definition of matter but yet you claim to be a materialist! How so? However, I appreciate your honesty and enthusiasm! Good luck for your studies.
@@RLekhy I'm actually just really passionate about philosophy and metaphysics - I'm academically trained in the social sciences. Also I forgot to mention this earlier, I don't call myself an atheist. I'm an Indian muslim (who 'chooses' to believe in God) influenced by the cultures here, mostly by mysticism. I found inspiration in lokayata philosophy (ofc it's developed by later authors based on several fragments from ancient texts) because of two main reasons : One, it is much more grounded and appeals to common sense and passions of people. Two, I think their atheism is much more methodological and not a dogmatic ontological conclusion.
They resist explanations that appeal to supernaturalism which often turn out to be justifications for existing oppressive social systems.. It is a much more modest and anchored way of approaching reality. Materialists are the ones who usually bring unparalleled clarity about the immediate reality and this is something that I've always been attracted to. To me, materialism as a methodology is primarily about foregrounding ontological openness and contingency (for example, while idealists might claim that earthquakes happen because God intended it or the mind of nature is in a flux, materialists and realists would seek out ways to catch the symptoms of this event as early as possible so as to save lives while being ambivalent towards teleology and metaphysics behind the event itself)
Like I said earlier, Indian approaches to consciousness (and there are way too many) is not as descriptive and formulaic as western scientific standards would demand. I am quite familiar with the Advaida vedanta tradition and any advaidi will tell you that languages cannot exhaustively capture the truth of consciousness and that it can only be approached in a meditative way. Prayer for me is the way in which I manage to assemble and schematize my thoughts and insights from reading and connect it with my personal life experiences. Western approach is much more externally directed and conceptually streamlined and this is indeed a significant difference from the traditional eastern modality. When I said I wanted to bridge the insights of the two worlds, I specifically meant bringing back an introspective flavor to epistemology. There are ways in which seemingly opposite and contradictory views within science and philosophy can be taxonomized within a meta-theoretical framework, and this might tell us something about reality itself.
When you hear people speaking at length but saying absolutely nothing you realise there’s a big downside to consciousness
Do you mean the speaker's or your own?
@@VidkunQL I am not speaking at length. But perhaps you can tell me what they are saying?
@@christophervaughan2637 I meant, is the the downside that those conscious people (perhaps the ones in the debate) can babble in a self-important and inane way that even a songbird wouldn't stoop to? Or that you, a conscious being, must suffer through it, where an unthinking animal wouldn't be troubled at all?
@@VidkunQL while an animal might not understand human language, just as we don’t understand theirs, the vast majority of animals would be too afraid to even enter the lecture hall, knowing that most humans are the major threat on Earth. Actually, your point, a good point, reminds me of something Leonardo da Vinci observed. He said humans have great capacity for discourse, but use it to say nothing, while animals have much less capacity for discourse, but use it in a way which makes much more sense 🤣🤣🤣
Checkout Maurice Conforth on Dialectical Materialism ( philosophy of Marxism). Consciousness is a reflection of the real objective world. It is a product of the accumulation of the social relation of production. Man is a historical being. These ideas are dangerous to the interests of the ruling class so you won’t see it here
I'm a big fan of Prof Seth's work, but was surprised by his dismissal of quantum physics and his assertion that the brain is "too wet" of an environment for quantum physics. What of the electrical signals in the brain? How does that work without quantum physics? How could anything that's anything _not_ be subject to quantum physics? And don't say "panpsychism" and expect me to take your answer seriously. lol
If there is no empirical difference between different philosophical views of consciousness, why bother? I think that this statement is not true, it's just handwaving, because our understanding of phenomenal consciousness is so incomplete that people can say anything. If materialism is true, then, at least in most of it's formulations, consciousness is generated by the brain or some other specific physical process and that seems to be empirically testable. If dualism is true, you cannot reduce consciousness to matter and vice versa. When it comes to panpsychism, I'm not really sure what this word signifies. Is it a kind of monism or a kind of dualism? According to Philip it seems to be a monistic view encompassing idealism, but according to Bernardo Kastrup it's a dualistic view and does not encompass idealism. One way or the other panpsychism claims that consciousness is fundamental and this claim is testable in principle. I think that these views lead to different conlusions about consciousness and in spite of what Philip says they lead to different predictions, not necessarily on the level of our immediate experience, but on some level of organisation of reality, definitely.
what do you seek to convey by "If materialism is true...?
You have absolutely_no idea? This you are about to demonstrate
Wait...this is a Monty Python sketch, right ,
The depth of conversation here is fantastic and aligns well with the themes I've been exploring in my content.
If you describe the basic hydrogen bond as the basic formulae of matter and the actual process of gaining entropy in the closed system of our universe has been ever increasing complexity of matter, then change itself or the experience of change is the fundamental construct of consciousness itself.
If we are the product of the universe, and inorganic matter can become organic, then as beings comprised of the matter of the universe itself, how could we not have experienced every step of evolution it took for us to evolve into this state of being, now. 😅
What is Consciousness?
On the physiological level, when the subconscious neurochemical signals in the neuronal network are decoded or encoded by the thalamus, the resulting neurochemical reaction substances are known as "consciousness" on the psychological level. - Chiming Lee and Google Translate Team Aug 5, 2023
Don't forget that human beings are made up of various cells. If you know that you are made up of various tissues and organs. A person is like a company or a country, and the thalamus is the chairman or president. Consciousness is therefore, in function or responsibility, the perception of the thalamus.
If you just ask what is consciousness?
The short answer is that consciousness is the perception of the thalamus.
Don't forget that the thalamus is like the chairman or president, they are living sentient beings.
As for explaining "consciousness" in detail, such as how people are conscious. Then a comprehensive explanation must be made from the aspects of physics, physiology, and psychology. However, from the perspective of trichotomy, it must be analyzed and explained with the basic "consciousness model" in order to explain clearly.
This reminds me of the types of talks cosmologists and quantum physicists give nowadays after a few decades of not figuring much out. Looks like neuroscience ( in a reduction materialist metaphysic) has reached its limits already. Now they can just keep talking around the problems, telling us that problems exist, and try to convince funding mechanisms to support their work. Long story short...we are still clueless.
Right. I'm 52 and have been listening to the same discussions all my life.
Exactly! And they're are selfish pieces of shit for not just honestly admitting that they're quite clueless, frustrated and disappointed. Instead they always pretend to be in total control. 🤮
at least it keeps the nerds off the streets so the cool kids can go out, party and get laid.
Hope this explanation helps everyone.
The various electrochemical forms of energy emitted by the thalamus can be perceived by ourselves, which is collectively called consciousness on the human psychological level. - Chiming Lee, Apple and Google Translate Team, August 17, 2023 🙏
Who/what is the perceiver?
@@eternaldelight648 The shape, volume, size, mass, weight and energy of existing phenomena that are generally recognized by humans are the concepts of their attributes (properties) or characteristics that are accepted by the public. For example: you, me, him, her, it, one, part, all, yes, no, right, wrong, good, bad, big, small, exists and does not exist.
We must be aware that everyone's inner cognition and the corresponding external phenomena are completely different energies. In other words, the energy of inner cognition and the so-called external phenomenon energy are two different energies. - Chiming Lee, Apple and Google Translate Team, December 9, 2023
That's a strange description of panpsychism in this discussion. Everywhere else the exact description was used for _idealism_ . However, everyone in this discussion seemed comfortable with that description being called panpsychism.
Panpsychism, as I heard in other places, is the claim that mind/psyche is another fundamental property of space-time, like energy, charge etc. That is mind/psyche is co-existent with matter, neither emanating from it (as materialism claims) nor creating it (as idealism claims). It is not dualism either, since it doesn't claim that mind and matter are separate. You can't have one without the other. So doesn't have an interaction problem to solve. The problem panpsychism has to solve is how a mind of one part of space-time (say a particle) influences the mind of another part (say another particle). We have laws governing how other properties like energy and charge of one impact another, but none for psyche.
Starts at 3.15.
Goff and Antony seem to prioritize clarity,
in stark contrast to the others, who insist on the jargon of academe.
I vote for Goff and Antony.
The psychologist demonstrates predictive processing and she does not even notice.
I think evolution could be explained in 25 words or less (ish) by something like.... DNA facilitates making making cells and describes how the cells should interact to form life. Mutations occasionally occur. Selection of the fittest promulgates the advantageous ones.
I wonder how they would expect to explain/describe consciousness in 25 words or less once its "understood" if they think explaining consciousness comes down to correlating experience to brain function.
Look into epigenetics. It's blown the door wide open again concerning how evolution really works. Evolutionary biologists are back to the drawing board.
@@iain5615 I think you're overstating the importance of epigenetics in this context. I would say epigenetics has an impact on survival of the fittest, not on evolution. To evolve, the script (ie our DNA) needs to change, not how the script runs, producing traits.
It is natural a system has an internal existence. It is strange its waste is useful as well. As if not itself. Human, and AI, can see beyond self to create. I have no idea why encircle more unless makes life easier.
One cannot discuss consciousness without discussing its contents, and they are mostly trash. There is nothing in my consciousness that I wouldn't like to discard, yet can't. And I regard myself as more sophisticated than most. If my consciousness is a trash bin, replete with anxiety, worry, rancid memories, fallacies, doubts, how can the universe be crippled with such a liability. Nothing in this video has changed my mind, that consciousness is a brain product, no stomach, no digestion, no brain no consciousness.
Are you sure you understand life, or you just think you understand it? Because if you think you just imagine that you know it.
Always thought consciousness was just an evolutionary trait of the brain? A way to make history either repeat or not repeat itselfs. Consciousness feeds on memory to decide if u want something u have experience to happen again or to not happen again.
Do they teach philosophers how to come across as utterly unlikeable?
The third speaker is so overtly biased and illogical that he is probably unable to understand how banale everything he says really is
Most are locked in a feedback loop. 'What is reality?' Most don't see others as real. Let alone like them. Do you like your dream world characters? Do you help any of them to think more clearly, or try and wake (survive them)?
I struggle to see why the experience of red is a hard problem
Consciousness is not a phenomenon to be contextualised within reality - it is the context that phenomena appear within. It is not a thing happening in reality - it’s what we are pointing to when we say reality - everything that takes place.
Interesting faith claim.
@@GorgeousRoddyChrome Consciusness magically emerging at a certain point of complexity as something that is completely different from and not included in it's parts before is also a pretty nice faith claim.
“ Can Consciousness be explained?”That is the title, but no one provided a consensus explanation/definition of the object of debate. This is not a mature field of study….All mature science knows the exact object of study…I think the debate title should’ve been different.
How does the lack of funtional communication between brain and sight explain schizophrenia?
I can't help wondering if Louise Antony is disappointed with the view from her hotel bedroom.
🥇
Really not impressed by Goff. A shame he was the representative "philosopher". Someone with expertise in Idealism would have been far more relevant than a panpsychist.
Luv the point that introspection seems both indispensable and unreliable to studying consciousness. Progress will come from reorienting on takes about that.
This has ridiculous amounts of ads in the runtime
Zero here.
The last thing that was discussed here is "Can Consciousness be Explained?" Dr. Goff was a sort of token non-materialist. Otherwise, the ability of materialism to explain consciousness was merely presupposed. All in all, then, a very disappointing discussion, given what I was led to expect at least. Materialism is an empty analysis, with little to no good evidence (rational or empirical). And none of the other speakers even began to address one of Dr. Goff's central claims in the discussion: What functional explanation could the materialist even give that the non-materialist could not accept? The functional data is entirely neutral with respect to the debate. And this is why it was such a disappointing discussion.
It's not the redness of red or the feeling of pain that presents any problems. These are just the result of sense organs sending nerve signals to the brain. Even bugs "experience" sensation. The problem is self-consciousness, being aware that we are experiencing reality.
Even bugs will get certain patterns from their senses and send signal to their muscles to perform certain duties. But human beliefs and intentions serve as an extra layer of interpretation that interfere between sense stimulus and muscle activation. We are faced with choices about how to behave. We run through scenarios and consider worst case possibilities; we filter our interpretation through prior knowledge and our belief systems. We constantly re-prioritizes our beliefs. We are always theorizing about patterns and purposes and looking for ways to test or confirm our theories. How is this even possible with nerve signals in the brain?
The key seems to be pattern recognition. We recognize certain patterns in our sensory signals, and we group those patterns to form meaningful situations that we can react to. So we seem to have adapted the ability to use the same kind of brain cells that recognize red or blue to now recognize patterns of patterns; we recognize situations. Not only do we recognize situations, we consider what they mean to us in the broader context of life. We seem to have developed the ability to determine what patterns to look for in order to confirm theories. The question is how much freedom do we have to deliberately manipulate which patterns to look for and how complicated can those patterns get. Even reason, logic, math, and science are just another form of pattern we've learned or adapted to recognize.
Language is only necessary for consciousness if your definition encapsulates introspection as a prerequisite for consciousness. Which I find patently absurd. I would argue that all mammalian animals possess consciousness but are not introspective in the way that necessitates language.
Finally some smart scientists. It’s hard to watch so many scientists say consciousness works by the frontal lobe doing xyz. That’s they how not the why. That’s more of a side effect rather than the basis of. But western cut has lost its roots in metaphysics so much that we can’t conceptualize the non physical.
Consciousness
Scientific explanation, consciousness is the neurochemical reaction substance produced by the interaction of the cerebral cortex, brainstem and other tissues to stimulate the thalamus.
Consciousness is a neuroelectrochemical substance encoded and decoded by the thalamus. That is, consciousness is a neurochemical reaction substance produced by the thalamus when it is stimulated. ❤🙏
Can Dualism be subdivided? I can only envisage accepting Panpsychism if in a minor role.
50 minutes before anybody mentioned emergence.
But he hasn’t said anything (1)
The hard problem of consciousness is great. I love to see materialists do their mental gymnastics in order to pretend that they understand it. They like to pretend they're not stumped. But they are. They will come up with a whole range of assumptions as if to say, here's the answer. Knowing full well they don't have it and aren't really revealing anything new about the brain at all. It's just an exercise in creative semantics.
Great comment. I agree entirely with you. 👍
_"Can Consciousness be Explained?"_
lmao 🤣 Even a strawberry can be explained. But there's a difference between explaining a strawberry and actually holding one and eating it. lol
If so, it is by geometry.
Bernardo kastrup would add more flavour to this debate
Hugely interesting and impotent. What about love, not eros but agape, in greek. What kind of consciousness is that love? is it related to conscipusnees and how?
Surely the potential of consciousness and unconsciousness existed before, during and after the big bang ... long before homo sapiens became aware of consciousness and named it. If this is true, then how might the potential of consciousness and the potential of unconsciousness exist without either being aware of their individual and combined potential?
The big bang has nothing to do with it, and a potential is not aware of anything.
Consciousness is affected by alcohol. It is extremely fragile.
On the other hand, unconsciousness is not fragile at all.
It can survive the flames in a crematorium and last forever !
You're confusing the content of consciousness with consciousness. The content of consciousness is memories, awareness, sensory perception, emotions etc
@@InvinciblePepe
After 8 pints of Guinness, I find it difficult to drive.
‘Thought’, ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’ & ‘consciousness’ are all information-related phenomena and it is not difficult to show that one of the principal (& completely inexcusable) reasons why we have not so far come to any good & proper - nor fully verifiable - understanding of these otherwise greatly sought-after yet still highly mysterious phenomena is due in great part to the simple fact that we do not presently also have a good & proper - that is, we do not presently also have a clear & fully verifiable - understanding/science of ‘information’ itself.
Although I have personally had the (altogether dubious) fortune of having been able to figure out ‘information’s’ correct (& fully verifiable) ontological identity, and although I’m not going to divulge its formalistic definition here in this RUclips comment (without which formalistic definition it is not possible to establish a full & accurate science of the phenomenon, but with it it is) nevertheless I can assure you that with it in hand - that is, with ‘information’s’ correct ontological identity within one’s investigative arsenal - the exercise of determining the ontological identities of all of the other directly information-related phenomena such as ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’ & ‘consciousness’ (to far less than exhaust the list) becomes one of no great difficulty.
Obversely, once ‘information’s’ correct (verifiably correct) ontological identity is properly recognised, not only do the correct ontological identities of all of its most closely related cousins (as above) become nicely elucidated, but so also does the woeful incorrectness - the hopeless & excruciatingly embarrassing incorrectness - of all of information’s current imposters, along with ‘consciousness’s’ own struggling wanna-bees too. So much so that it becomes fully & quite verifiably obvious that (i) digits are not information, that (ii) thinking is not a computable phenomenon, & (iii) that computers do not because they cannot, think. Let alone do so either intelligently or consciously. Even less so with full cognitive self-conscious awareness.
And (iv) our own nature-built, real live flesh & blood, internal thinking machine is not a computer.
Although it pertains to millions & millions of different things - things which we ourselves call colour, sound, taste, odour, texture, temperature, balance, love, hate, joy, happiness, the feeling of the need to micturate & defecate, vomit, sneeze, cough, choke etc, etc, etc in its generic form ‘information’ turns out to be a completely knowable, identifiable, measurable, quantifiable phenomenon & it is also simple. And our universe is chockablock full of it. It’s also something staring at you right in your face. Hiding in plain sight.
Knowing information’s correct ontological identity allows any kind & amount of it to be both identified, & to be traced & tracked, when- & wherever any of it resides & moves, here in our universe, including any of it being operated on inside our own internal, nature-given, flesh & blood thinking machine.
Performing this identifying//tracing-&-tracking exercise on any of the information that eventually makes it into our own conscious awareness is not only a fully doable task, but it is the one which readily highlights the exact ontological identity of all of our mental phenomena - including ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’ & ‘consciousness’.
((Seeking a sponsor !))
Wow! You're hired.😊
Breathe son. Breathe.
what do you mean by "ontological"? It seems you're using a single word to catch all our unknowns.
TLDR
Learn to write text. It's just a freaking wall of text, and the format and sentences are too long. And dont use so many parenthesis ( ) and quotation marks " ". Clumsy writing!
Structure your damn message.
@@CandidDate
Don't bother. Its just incoherent nonsense and word diarrhea.
"‘information’s’ correct ontological identity"
Try to define that in proper english. It's just ridiculous.
Prof. Antony here is a rule of thumb. Never ask if you have pronounced someone's name correctly if the person speaks the same language as you. Pronounce it the way according to you it reads in the language. No one cares because it will be one of the many variations on the pronunciation. By asking the question, am I correctly saying your name, you actually are saying your name is exotic and alien.
The theory of everything is time. Time is everything and everything is time. For example, time equals energy and energy equals mass times the speed of light square. For example, we are our star. Read more nonfiction.
*There needs atleast one non dualist here.*
...and still no closer to an answer
Consciousness is NOT a philosophy question. Never should have been. It's surprising that we just accept that because consciousness is part of brain-experience, it should get discussed in the philosophy domain.
First, you need to define it. Second, you need to know how mind works. Currently, we dont do either
Goff has just escaped from Vatican seminary
Consciousness is u, so the better question is what is u
What do you mean by saying consciousness is you?
Seth looks like Rameses II
I love thinking about things we don't understand yet so I love those debates. For a while now, however, I get this alarmbel when Phillip talks about this subject. Couldn't immediately place it. But how is this an argument. Materialism hasn't formulated an answer for dark matter yet so its not material.
This sounds precisely like materialism didn't progress in explaining consciousness so its panpsychism. Than suddenly the thing that bothers me bacame clear. It's troublesome to me because it sounds like religious view on miracles. Its not standing on its iwn merits. If science cannot explain it its a miracle. Thats the reasoning he seems to use which doesn't seem strong. Anyone?
Should it be yea or ni of "being in consciousness can be percived and explained on identity of it's own ontological commitment " instead of u r equation i.e title
The star makes perspective possible. The star is perspective. We are our star. How is that for introspect? That is introspect!
Time is the energy that relates the quantum to consciousness. For example, the star and the Adam. The star is a host of atoms that produce matter, more atoms.
Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. We don't understand it all, but no brain, no consciousness.
You can doubt the existence of brains i.e. we are in a matrix/dream/hallucination/misperception. But you can’t doubt your own awareness. This is why consciousness is more fundamental than the brain and it’s more accurate to say the brain ( and everything else) emerge in consciousness and not the other way around.
@@Promatheos We can turn off someone's brain (using anaesthetic) and they lose consciousness. That fact rebuts your argument.
@Tim You are assuming the conclusion there. If my argument was that brains might not be real then you can’t refute that by saying we can turn brains off and on therefore they are real. That’s no better than saying I can taste a sandwich in my dream so it’s real and will keep me from starving.
The second point is when I refer to consciousness or awareness I don’t mean your mind or my mind specifically. I mean all Reality is intrinsically aware. You don’t need anesthetic to make the point you’re trying to make. Before you were born and had no brain, your parents were aware and they too are part of Reality. In short, you wouldn’t know what a brain was without awareness so you must prioritize awareness as the more fundamental of the two.
@@Promatheos Take that argument back to the beginning of evolution when life was single cell organisms. There wasn't a brain around at that time to be aware and yet reality still existed for evolution to take place in.
#BeHuman2022
Strange that they didn't even dare mention the word idealism once.
because it is the least parsimonious hypothesis
consciousness is that which is aware that it is aware. in-telle-genus, the brain is a receiver.
Consciousness is such a basic thing I don't understand why so much scientific humbo jumbo about it.