For me, I watch the headmates or streams of consciousness, and some of them seem more like an llm model than people, but others are very much more aligned with the wave pools with nodes in it. I'm curious how you feel about multiple consciousness or shared consciousness.
@@25_Cats_in_a_Trenchcoat sorry if it is rude to say, but since you seem open about it... i just wanna say i find people who exist within a plurality so incredibly fascinating. it's such an interesting lens into what being a person or a human even is on a philosophical level. also i love your username haha
That point about multiple layers of the mind interacting to create consciousness reminds me of Internal Family Systems, which is a therapeutic framework which posits that the mind is actually a system of parts each with its own motivations, and the parts are governed (ideally) by what is basically described as the super conscious.
jokes aside, i really think we should just start dealing with _awareness_ instead of consciousness, i think it's 1) enough 2) can be a basis of analysis as it has _objects_ instead of just a subject
other than that, people referring to consciousness also usually mean in fact that a system has a self-concept (self-awareness). another intuition-based definition that doesn't really necessitate life, even though all life has it
I think you're wrong. Both awareness and consciousness presuppose a matter of which it is aware or it is conscious, and both are subjective operators typically. They both imply a sort of processing. A lot of this stuff has been pretty well meditated on by philo imo, and this "what is consciousness " stuff that's pretty catchy with pop-sci books lately just seems like a reaction to materialist metaphysics we've had lately in the west. Children raised processing material metaphysics there whole lives come upon consciousness like "wtf omg whaaa" and incredibly complex ideas emerge because they didn't have consciousness as a fundamental at the beginning of their thinking of the universe and its functions - the same thing would happen to explain unconscious material dynamics in civilizational stages that treat too much of the soul or of consciousness, incredibly elaborate dynamics would have to be devised for that too.
@@chaos-fb5nk i think there is good reason for that, though. i think there is a very strong argument to be made for approaching consciousness from a materialist perspective. i personally think there is overwhelming evidence that "self" is wholly emergent from physical causes with no room for a metaphysical component. the reason i believe this is very simple... it is a fact that physically altering one's brain, whether through trauma, or drugs, or degradation, can have a fundamental effect on _who you are as a person._ it's impossible to argue that this does not happen. and if changes to your physical matter can change your integral sense of identity -- both your own internal self-perception, and the way you behave and interact with the world -- truly and completely..... then where is there room for any sort of metaphysical self that has any meaning at all? any existing metaphysical self must be totally devoid of any role in producing your identity -- how can you even call it a "self" then? i don't say this because i _want_ to believe it. in fact, i think it's a pretty difficult fact to come to terms with. but i do believe it, simply because i don't see any alternative that makes sense.
What if the problem lies in trying to define consciousness in the first place? We certainly can make observations and create perspectives, but although a bee’s consciousness may never equal the consciousness of the flower it pollinates, can we really say that one is more conscious than the other? Also, the existence and desire to understand consciousness seems to only be relevant to humans. I like how the creator of this vid describes our observation of consciousness as a narrative, which only serves to satisfy the stories we tell ourselves about anything we seek to understand. In essence, consciousness is whatever we tell ourselves it is. In turn, it influences how we interact with other “conscious” beings.
As Obi-Wan said, “Everything is true, from a certain point of view.” To ensure you know another way to talk with people about it, you’re nudging up on non-duality which is talked about in a lot of religious circles. Non-duality is essentially that: a focus on the experience and building intuitive understanding based on that. I think the way you speak has a lot of utility and provides much inspiration for those who understand it. Perhaps another bit of inspiration: To pass on the torch of knowledge to a broader audience, a great deal more of pragmatism is needed. People want to know your intentions, even when those intentions are half-baked and contemplative.
i think the major flaw with finding an intuitive understanding of consciousness is bias. i see no reason why human consciousness is the yardstick by which we should measure consciousness. our intuitive understanding of consciousness is rooted in bias if we hold ourselves as the standard. we don’t have evidence that shrimp are capable of complex emotional and conceptual thought and experiential processes - so what? human-like complexity of thought or experience is not the subject, consciousness is. so why is something less conscious simply because it is less human, or less complex? why are we even talking of consciousness in terms of a hierarchy, with some beings as “more” or “less” conscious? maybe we could expand our understanding if we decenter ourselves and evaluate our intentions.
Good point. Human consciousness also has the opportunity to evolve faster because the way we can understand and explain to others, Those other consciousness given enough time could become more similar to ours In psychedelics it feels like you can connect to a global consciousness and interact with it and it feels real and complex, yet different
...But isn't the whole motivation for this question to determine whether other creatures have modes of existence as honorable as ours - the one we call conscious?
because of the construction of the body and the spine and the glands it creates the proper structure as a conduit for the higher forms of experience that humans are availed of. But not to say that nature is not altogether charged with an equal propensity for splendor or wonder. Without nature we wouldn't be able to glimpse the divine and the tools needed wouldn't exist, the food and other things. These are ancient bodies of systematized knowledge preserved all the way to today. just saying....
@@john-paulgies4313 "honorable" as decided by the humans. is there escape? can humans ever look at the world through non-human eyes? who's to say? probably the humans.
Hey Web Receptor (if that is your real name!) I recently found your channel. Really great communication and topic choices. Here are a few responses to your video: 1. Be careful with conflating ideas such as mentation and agency with consciousness! Agency is definable (I'd recommend Barandiaran, Di Paolo, and Rohde, 2009) and mentation is arguably one of the contents of consciousness, but its not reasonable to say they are identical and are more like subsets or related phenomena. 2. Interesting to mention that involuntariness seems to be an aspect of consciousness. But does that mean subconsciousness is an aspect of consciousness? Its a question of categorisation. I'd expect that all extant conscious beings have subconscious processes that feed conscious contents, but that might not be required absolutely. 3. Is similarity to humanity a good measure for consciousness? I'd say it is not. Be careful of anthropocentrism, and also with using behavioural reduction as a measure for consciousness (which is phenomenological-qualitative). 4. Your goop-adapter model is similar to the interactional asymmetry point of the mentioned paper. 5. Love the wave model, maybe could be extended by thinking about how perturbable the "standing waves" are. To be conscious, it seems likely that you must have the correct balance of stability and changeableness to adapt to new information and process it meaningfully. The direct corollary of this idea is the "criticality" hypothesis of brain function. You can find a great video by Artem Kirsanov on that one. To end off, I personally define consciousness as the name we give to the virtual space in which qualitative experience arises accessible to a subject-observer, i.e. the field or domain of experience. You seem more like you're trying to classify consciousness in others, rather than define the term though.
Honestly, I kind of see the entirety of the mind as an abstraction process. You start with sensory pulses that get divided into discreet sections. Those sections recur in patterns. For example, with visual information, we start with light, color, and shadow. From those, we can extrapolate forms and 3D space, which can then give us objects, materials, so on. We can, by sorting patterns of patterns of patterns, find increasingly more refined categories for all of the info. The second big layer of abstraction is emotion, where subjective context first emerges. Before you think about anything, you feel it. Your emotional reactions to things are just you ironing out what the information means to you. You 'feel' that things are certain ways, even if you can't explain it. And often you can't explain it because your brain decided it didn't need any further processing. It didn't quite go all the way to consciousness. You may feel something instinctual or impulsive pulling you towards a decision. The final layer of abstraction is conscious thought and observation. All of this information has gone through many layers of abstraction to reach a point of being almost entirely conceptual, and then it was written to memory. And as it was written to memory, you experienced it consciously. And at the same time, it found itself in the context of all of the other abstracted-up info stored in memory. And as you are thinking and processing information getting written to memory, sometimes your consciousness writes some new memories. That's you thinking about it all. This gives you the final layer in the chain, where you experience a perceptual gestalt, and observe your own emotional track. That's just a more abstract interpretation of the same info, which is just impulses. It's just the final step in a long chain of turning pulses into something consistently actionable and understandable. If conscious is anything, it's the echo of what your brain makes out of incoming information. I would argue consciousness is actually quite limited. The more abstraction, the more hardware load. Not to mention, in my model, it doesn't do anything until simpler abstractions are written to memory. However, since it can write to memory too, it can somewhat inform what the layers under it do with future info.
This is all interesting, but it's ancillary to the question. I could model everything you said here in a computer and there'd be no reason to think it has any experience, since it would (maybe) not have any awareness to experience things through
@thisprojectisretired1055 I actually think so too. There's some kind of special sauce to it, something that I think happens because we are organic. There are imperfections and inconsistencies that weirdly seem to make it what it is. A machine, unless we solve quantum computing, will always take the same input down the same track, whereas an organic brain basically never will. That's as close as I can get to bridging the mechanics and the result. EDIT: It also occurred to me that memory is also a major confounding factor that might contribute to an idiosyncratic, emergent experience. My laymen's understanding of how memory works is that you have parts of your brain responsible for regulating memory operations, but they themselves don't store it all. When information moves through the brain, chains of neurons and synapses are excited that themselves are basically an imprint of the information and contextual logic. And then, your 'memory centers' regulate how excitable that path will be going forward via neurotransmitter modulation. Essentially, a memory happens when those parts of your brain decide that synaptic path is valuable, I think probably just by the most normative alignments of synapses - that is the ones that get the highest and most sustained activity get reinforced and linked with neighbors. That's why so much of our learning is through mixes of repetition and intuition. It's kind of like tracing over a line on a piece of paper over and over, your brain is holding the most traveled signal paths as open as possible. Your brain makes the tracks that light up the most, better able to do so, as though training itself on them. In realtime, all kinds of valuations are made on what to prioritize keeping as the paths continually go on, getting drawn all across your brain by input being processed. The most juiced up paths will fire on their own at what are in causal practicality essentially random times, even long after the events leaving that imprint have passed. And you will experience recalling the past thoughts and sensations without any apparent outside impetus, it feels entirely internal. But it colors your experience, and memories being written in that moment form new contextual links with it, and they change each other as the pathways bleed-over in their excitement patterns. What this means in practice is that memory is nascent and lossy. Some lines are so bold and embedded that the things over it lose in conflicts, and many things trigger that memory path. Others have gotten more ambiguous over time, faded and lost in new lines traced across it. In recall, your brain will infer the missing pieces and sort conflicts by the nearest reference points, closest match. This leads the memory, and your perspective on it during recall, to shift over time. Old and new blend to make something that is arguably a different thing from the original. Given that this is a fundamental part of how our hardware deals with information (with a memory like a magnetic HDD or a tape in the sense that original information fades over time, especially with continued writing to the media,) I think it's almost a given that some outlier curveballs will prevail. I think the way that memory works is a big part of what makes the conscious experience come to be. When you think about it, the conscious mind is locked up in the control room - everything it knows is memory. Consciousness is always on its way to the true moment, but never reaching it in time. All of the events it has information about have already transpired and been piped through our lossy, accumulation-based memory to ultimately become something more than the information that forms it. Perhaps that 'becoming' is your conscious experience. It could be tied to the fact that every time you recall something, it is fundamentally changed by the process. It's kind of a mad/maddening thought. This understanding kind of paints the mind as an aftereffect. For instance, you look at your desk and see it, and all of the things that make it a desk, and then your desk. This experience of the desk is the only one you know, nothing is realer or more essential - it's tangible. But the thing that exists in your experience of vision and touch is NOT the same as the actual thing that's there. You never directly get that, only information representing what is there. The desk is a lie XD. But really, what is our sense of meaning in that case? I find it unsatisfying. If consciousness and meaning are simply hallucinations born of alignments in memory, that can look a lot like we are doomed to live in our own subjective bondage. But I tend to think of it like this. Our minds are never getting the full picture of reality - so much of the moment is whizzing right by it, and our brains optimize to get the most new information, while keeping the most consistent picture possible in the temporal domain. Basically, it tries to catch as much as it can, but makes much of its pictures from elaborate series of inferences about future patterns that are derived from prior patterns. Again, a mix of old and new information that is dynamically shifting. Our intelligence is one that favors consistency over final accuracy and precision. We could not survive with the slow reaction times we'd have if we had to understand everything before we could make a decision. The reality is that we DON'T need to understand everything in order to proceed. The best part of being in this cosmic predicament is the endless mystery and depth of experience that our wonky info systems burp out for reasons that confound even the smartest among our kind. I think it's WILD to consider that our whole world, these experiences that we hold so close, might just be down to an unavoidable wiggle in the margins of information. Something so small, spawning something so infinitely vast as to never be fully explorable by anyone person. I think our language and speech play their own roles as well. A conscious narrative for memories is a valuable thing for communicating information to other minds. We try to help eachother fill in the blanks - our way of socializing and forming complex inter-relational contexts between one another is like an extra layer of abstraction. Brains thinking about thinking, talking about thinking as though they themselves are neurons in another brain thinking about thinking. But the changes that conscious expression makes to the information produce perhaps endless confounding factors across the spark gap. I think that our sense of experience and of conscious presence is elevated by the fact that we are such deeply social creatures. A lone human might not have nearly the sense of conscious narrative as we do in our connection-loving society. I know there are tribes in africa where people barely understand the concept of far-future because they live for their hunts and nothing more. All they know is "eating baboon butt is the life." and pretty much center everything they do around that, living extremely simple hunter-gatherer lifestyles. And I hope this clarifies nothing, btw :P
4:38 big assumptions off the bat! 👀 i also think our difficulty distinguishing what might or might not have consciousness is telling and funny! black box processing is nice because it (like the scientific method) accounts for the unknowability of the “other”. in other words, every body/object has equal weight and potential to interact through the act of being and/or being perceived! also the self sketch in this vid was adorable, very Daria! loving the production style of the videos! welcome to the new year yall! *look to install your goop adapter TODAY* ✌️🫀
Your section on the definition game and the idea of defining a chair intuitively reminded me of a study on the fuzziness of how we define things. The study had list of drawings of drink vessels where the participants were asked to define each by whether they were cups/mugs. Notably there was a point in which 50% of the participants disagreed in what was a certain cup/mug would be called. I wrote this before finishing the video so I’ll try to see if this insight becomes relevant to the rest of the discussion of consciousness.
Took shrooms about a year ago, "showed" me that consciousness doesn't exist. I would say that the only thing we can actually control is self reflection which is also a more accurate description I would say. You can't really control when you are conscious, or stop a certain sense from sending information to your brain. I really like your channel, philosophical/scientific discussions remind me how fun it is to be alive :)
@Midwestemoisme i love that youre saying *this* instead of trying to refute the argument that it is self reflection. Feel free to tell me why this perspective is wrong
Born goop, now graduated into slop 💪😮💨 Do you have thoughts on the problem solving element of consciousness? Like why it may or may not matter that a LLM, slime mold, or swarm of ants can solve a problem without an internal representation of that problem (or at least not an obvious one)?
I imagine consciousness as a guess and check feature in multicellular organisms. It's awareness of the self to make behavioral changes to the internal state and maintain homeostasis. So a cell can be conscious in of itself, as it has a sense of its internal systems as it needs to make adjustments and grow/change. But consciousness types can stack, like human cells have their own consciousness that is the building blocks of our human consciousness (ego?) It's the part of the organism that retains self memory and checks it against the void to validate it's function Internal guess/check system like a transistor waiting to output a one or a zero. That's only my intuition on the matter though
I suspect that consciousness is that way because it is intrinsically holistic, I mean, let's say we talk about genes, because of how reality works we would have to say that genes emerge from the "whole" and ultimately "merged" with it again, otherwise you would have to believe mutstions are just random. Same thing with consciousness, we know is not definable, but still we can say a lot of things about it. Anyway that was very engaging, you speak very clearly and make a lot of sense👍
well heck i just spent like an hour typing a mini essay comment and when i clicked post, it just disappeared :c hopefully it's some sort of auto-moderation / requires approval thing. if not, such is life, i suppose... thoughts gone into the void, i suppose...
A psychoanalytic analogy that I think might be interesting/useful to your ends: The phenomena of psychosis (which you've mentioned before) and infant experience. An infant, as far as we can tell, has not yet developed a capacity to differentiate between self and other, "inner" and "outer". It experiences everything essentially simultaneously, and as existing within the same "realm of observation". At the same time and as a result of this, the infant does not yet have a mental apparatus a la the GPT03 systems model you described in the first half, and so is not contemplating its senses as inputs, or using them to produce outputs. Nonetheless, this infant, lacking in an elaborated and organized inner experience, is still very obviously conscious! The case of the infant in the theories of object relations and self psychology seem to match pretty much one to one with your description of a kind of "interaction-first", or maybe "interaction-only" model of consciousness (though these two theories don't really accept this - they seem to come to this conclusion very early on, and then move away from them in favor of rigid mental organizing). The infant does not have an instinctual mental apparatus, no instinctual if-else clause: it seems instead to have an instinctual *orientation* towards the "outside", to attempt to bring inner experience into the world. As this occurs, limits are met (the physical constraints of reality, as well as the emotional constraints of parental responsiveness and empathy), and in these interactions, we see the infant's "consciousness". Indeed, it seems like the mental apparatus, however it's organized, only comes into existence as an emergent property of the baseline experience of interaction between inner and outer experience. In the case of psychosis this is also clear - psychosis is our limited way of describing difficulties with organizing experience into the "inner" and "outer" box. The point there being that this distinction between "inner" and "outer", and thus the creation of an organized mental apparatus, is very much secondary to the experience of consciousness. When we reconcile with that, it starts to look like the mind isn't really about "inputs" and "outputs" - if the baseline human experience is of simultaneously experiencing "inner" thought and "outer" reality, then we have to acknowledge that a logic of input and output is not consistent with lived experience. As an example that might be close to home, if you've ever had sleep paralysis, or even that groggy almost-dream feeling after waking up, you've experienced this baseline human experience firsthand. What was produced by "the inside" was felt to exist in "the outside", and very crucially, it was surprising! It's my belief that at this moment, it's not that you have access to either inner experience or outer reality - you are only accessing the boundary between the two. You experience the interactions between both simultaneously - the inner IN the outer, ON the outer, the two being surprising and not premeditated or prefigured by a mental apparatus. As a final note then, I'd say that the mental apparatus/structure is an emergent property, and that the clarification of boundaries between inner and outer is always a secondary process, which I think matches your wave interference model pretty well.
A horse _is_ a kind of chair, but more things besides. A chair's definition is grounded in its function relative to us: if you sit on a table, either it breaks or it is a chair. A horse is something more than merely its utility to us. Conscience - literally "with knowledge" Whatever consciousness is, it is a state of being that is relative to the act of knowing. ...But you can't really have a meaningful discussion about what a thing is until you determine that it is. You really need a fundamental definition of what we're even talking about before you can talk about it.
You should look into Nagel's definition, Chalmers' hard problem, Dennet's grand illusion, Churchland's neurophenomenology, and the deep literature on why the entire consciousness community has converged to Nagel's definition. Try taking an intro philosophy of mind course for starters.
Isn't consciousness commonly associated with being able to experience? Of course there's no way to verify if anything besides us is conscious, however with that in mind I think this video primarily evaluates what makes something "seem" conscious. But maybe a good way to evaluate a genuinely conscious being *is that very void*-that black box that we can't fully understand. With a large language model, it may seem conscious enough if it's sufficiently advanced but ultimately its processes aren't as enigmatic as beings we think to be conscious. AI mimics the symptoms of consciousness but not the illegibility. They may appear to be black boxes to us but that is due to complexity, not irreducibility. It doesn't defy deeper analysis in the same way. This coincides with some continental philosophy which conceptualizes the subject as a void (although that'd take way to long to get into here). Anywho, very nice video. Am definitely subscribing and checking out more from you :) edit: here's some examples of consciousness as void: Hegel's self-relating negativity, Lacan's entire idea of the subject in general, kinda Sartre's pour-soi (being-for-itself), Stirner's Einzige/creative nothing, also Buddhism's idea of anatta coincides with this. Many frameworks, even across cultures, seem to converge on this idea which coincides the subject with a void or a negation. edit2: also your idea that consciousness isn't strictly internal but arises from that interaction with the outside stimuli is very reminiscent of Hegel and his master-slave dialectic. Essentially for him self-consciousness requires recognition. One only becomes aware of the self in relation to another being. Without that, we have an incomplete consciousness, maybe akin to a surveillance camera. Things only arise through differentiation with other things. This relates to his point in the Science of Logic of how pure being and pure nothingness are empty and that they must immanently include each other in order to begin to mean anything. Being and nothingness collapse into each other creating becoming. x immanently includes ~x edit3: Do note that I'm playing with a lot of nebulous ideas here open to *many critiques*. I bear no illusions in that regard. As Montaigne would say: Que sais-je? (What do I know?) edit4: I like your hair a lot btw. Last edit, cya.
I've been fully conscious, partially conscious and unconscious. I was alive throughout. So does it make sense to draw a line, or is it a sliding scale (possibly which never truly hits zero).
I appreciate it, and I'll probably make a paid tier at some point (maybe sooner than later) but I want to make sure that there's enough value for people paying me :)
Personally my definition of consciousness is whatever the thing is that experiences physical and mental events and has the capacity to make any decision conceivable by that individuals conscious mind. And the reason why I say there has to be something experiencing the events of the body other than the body itself is because the body is physical and we know as much as we possibly can know that physical things like chemicals don't experience being chemicals so body being made up of a lot of chemicals suddenly and magically getting the ability to experience doesn't make any sense.
how is dying different from just total disruption of a system then? we say a computer dies when it no longer works (or out of battery) but we all agree it was not alive to die for real
u have to make assumptions, no? we can tell if "something" is unconscious? like, we don't try to feed a person or kiss them, we just know...they are unconscious!! like recognizes like. u just know...even a baby knows edit: i now lean more towards a sort of animism or something, again, these days. not quite. perhaps morphic resonance...for example, cliche i know, but psychoactive plants. they go beyond just having a molecule to affect our cognition. There is a spiritual entity present within peyote, cannabis, mushrooms. Many foods in fact. see doshas and sattvic diet. humans are considered to be of the highest order because we are able to ascend and other forms are just lower than our consciousness, but cases like many animals, dolphins etc who seem to share an about equal sort of spiritual entity or being consciousness but lack the full breadth of scope in enacting their will upon their world. man is defined by shaping his environment rather than being shaped by the conditions of it. But we do not have to look down on the other life forms, we can still consider that all of life is somehow connected and has an awareness. then there is a totality of awarness that is truly what consciousness is. We are radio receivers. we are individually tuned and within fields and flows like time that determine what we receive etc... Also think of the four worlds or that there are higher and lower realms that together harmonize into life and our awareness. Things that precede our reality, in the shadow realm. or the mirror worlds. These layers govern the process of the spirit and soul activity that preceded our bio life force and is believed by many to be eternal. This is an alternate route for exploration to fully grasp what it is you are exploring. I hope I do not come across as rude or condescending, I myself also wonder. And I enjoy this line of exploration, thank you. actually what you eat and what you see and hear affects your consciousness, just like we affect things by how we behave. so its not even a very fixed thing and has to be determined actively as we may experience varied levels of consciouness. Indeed any practice endeavors to reach sustained states of higher levels of consciouness or awareness...this is utmost other wise we are just animals wandering around doing animal base things.
So as I understand it, your definition of something conscious would apply to anything with an internal state that is unreadable and non constant. And all its outputs are colored by both the input and internal state. Consider a random number generator implemented on a quantum computer. And the internal state is seeded by quantum true randomness. And it is designed in a way that is physically impossible to ever read the entire internal state because of uncertainty principle shenanigans. I belive that this device would fit under your definition of conscious. Personally, I believe that consciousness is defined by the ability to metaphysically experience qualia (the philosophical thing) (relation to my chosen name is entierly coincidental and unintentional) As such generally the only things I know is truely conscious is me - and then everything else I am not sure about. I strongly doubt that pure hydrogen gas is conscious tho. So I generally use an estimation of consciousness that is how similar to me vs something purely elemental. So my family member are the most likely conscious creatues I am aware of after myself. An unborn child is less likely. A monkey is less likely. A fly is even less likely. Plants are even less. Rivers and waterfalls and mountains are somewhere on there. The whole of human society as an organism operates by memes also needs to be that list.
yeah you can only know yourself that you are conscious. I agree. and the rest is like you said, logical understandig down the line of the complexity of the organism and most importantly how much off their language you understand or their ability to have language.
It's related to my own special focus. We are living energy, so the two primary components are the electric and magnetic. Consciousness is electric, and awareness is magnetic. Consciousness is endless created and destroyed moment by moment as the illusion of time progresses, so that we have experiences - thus, it is always Immanent, within in the current reference of time. Since it is bound in time, it is semi-permanent aka mortal. Consciousness is words and narratives, forms and structure. It is Light. It is also masculine. Awareness is wordless, dark, potentially transcendental, and feminine. Feminine awareness holds the potential for masculine however it must become conscious, first - which is to become present. What's important to see is magnetic awareness straddles the axis of the illusion of time. Electric consciousness may not escape time so is always bound by light. I could go on but I'm not sober. Happy new year. Lol.
yeah maybe lay off the drugs xd Always good to have thought processess and trying to think but yeah, thats non sense. Time is no illusion is a concept a frame work for causality, also why would consciousness be destroyed moment by moment, its a process. You also saying its bound in time but you said time is an illusion. now that was the only intelligent part the rest is utter nonsense. Always a good reminder to go sober. no aminosity though, happy new year.
@@catalyzerr it is nonsense yeah, but telling people to get sober is a little bit too besserwisser for my taste. You have no idea if this person has been sober for 10 years already after a 20 year long meth addiction. I can tell you that it doesn't feel too good when people like you assume that one of not sober just for speaking their mind, and I can imagine that you are able to understand that if you took the time to think about it for a while. What's most likely is that this person has absolutely nothing to do with drugs at all and has never had a problematic use or addiction. People really gotta grow some online empathy and understand that there's a real person behind most comments. How would you feel if people told you that you needed to lay off drugs time and time again without taking any drugs or had several years of sobriety? Do you think that makes it easier to wake up in the morning and keep being sober, or just keep trying to find your way in life and not give up, if people time and time again remind you that you were born with a brain that makes it so other people think that you're intoxicated when you're not? Come on now. Just critize what they wrote and leave the hurtful and unnecessary insults out of it. (I'm not from, or living in a, English speaking country and I haven't studied English so there will be several grammatical errors so no need to critique that part because it doesn't hurt me. I'm 35 and started talking and writing English 5 years ago now so I'm happy with where I am, especially with my past)
Mere word association. Doesn't bring much insight except what metaphors to use in one's poetry; not conceptual understanding. Beware of being infatuated with your own thoughts just because they're pretty.
a danger response is mostly not consciousness it is pure information processing and reaction unconsciously, you like stopped at the first 5minutes. What you are right though where she made a mistakes is that plant indeed also react to stimuli.
@@offdabean not even, since a danger response doesnt have to be subjectively experiences, only in sentient beeing it is. Idk what this comment was, not really thought off at all. (not your response)
To your point of differentiating between humans/dogs and fish: I think I disagree, I think it may seem as though we humans should be in a different category when it comes to the reaction to stimuli when we in fact simply have more data to process. But more data doesnt change the process of us getting to a reaction. For example a squirrel finds a nut, now it can self reflect on where to put this nut based on prior experience and in turn make a decision based on that experience. Now applying the example of decisions to a human: This ape finds a plant for example based on prior knowledge it either already knows it is safe to eat the plant or if they don't makes a decision weighing the risk of death with the reward of nutrients. Or let's do fish, they are confronted with a threat which activates fight or flight response. Same with humans.
Consciousness is very simple. The left and right halves of your brain drive most of your actions. Consciousness, the thing that is "you", is very small and weak compared to them. Consciousness is forcibly convinced by the brain that everything that the left and right halves of our brain do is a choice by the consciousness. The evolutionary role of consciousness, of us, is to identify patterns and then engage an emergency override to make the left and right halves of our brain do what we need to to survive. However, untrained consciousness' can not do that for very long. Free will exists, but it is in very short supply and takes a lot of effort to build up. Your role as a human consciousness is literally to train the two animals that exist inside of your head (the halves of your brain), while you are being convinced that what those animals want is what you want. Its compounding, because as you train your animals to help you with simple tasks, that frees up more space for you to focus on higher-level objectives. My achievements as a Software Engineer are stickily because I have identified this information, and trained my animals to be good at solving computer science problems (oh snap that was college).
love ur channel look into those randomly appearing balls of lighting/plasma that im certain is alive they do whatever tf they want and will actively fuck with humans. lots of conspiracy theory relate them to plasma shit that goes on in space and can be visible to earth. (im not well learned on it) BALLOFLIGHTNINGSUPREMACY!!
You should do physiognomy next, like how your physical appearances most likely dictate your personality. Like how we can’t tell if you’re a man or woman and how you don’t like your natural hair color so you dyed it. Something like that
What fell off? This happens to small creators all the time - one video gets pushed by the algorithm, often one of the first videos they make, and then the next video isn't pushed. I've seen it happen to at least 10 smaller RUclips channels the last 12 months. "Fell off" would have been correct if this channel had like 300k concurrent views the last 10-20 videos. And also, you're gonna have a hard time with finding friends without empathy so I hope you're very very young for your sake
"I don't know" is the best way to begin an honest exploration of consciousness, IMO
“I Don’t know”, the genesis of understanding ..
Thought + Attention interference resulting in new, altered thoughts creates the sensation of conscience. This makes prefect sense!
Hi I'm a headmate in a system. I really enjoyed the video. Found the video really interesting in terms of plurality and did/osdd.
For me, I watch the headmates or streams of consciousness, and some of them seem more like an llm model than people, but others are very much more aligned with the wave pools with nodes in it. I'm curious how you feel about multiple consciousness or shared consciousness.
@@25_Cats_in_a_Trenchcoat sorry if it is rude to say, but since you seem open about it... i just wanna say i find people who exist within a plurality so incredibly fascinating. it's such an interesting lens into what being a person or a human even is on a philosophical level.
also i love your username haha
That point about multiple layers of the mind interacting to create consciousness reminds me of Internal Family Systems, which is a therapeutic framework which posits that the mind is actually a system of parts each with its own motivations, and the parts are governed (ideally) by what is basically described as the super conscious.
This is the first RUclips video I've watched on my flip phone! Thank
you for these videos:)
jokes aside, i really think we should just start dealing with _awareness_ instead of consciousness, i think it's 1) enough 2) can be a basis of analysis as it has _objects_ instead of just a subject
other than that, people referring to consciousness also usually mean in fact that a system has a self-concept (self-awareness). another intuition-based definition that doesn't really necessitate life, even though all life has it
I think you're wrong. Both awareness and consciousness presuppose a matter of which it is aware or it is conscious, and both are subjective operators typically. They both imply a sort of processing. A lot of this stuff has been pretty well meditated on by philo imo, and this "what is consciousness " stuff that's pretty catchy with pop-sci books lately just seems like a reaction to materialist metaphysics we've had lately in the west. Children raised processing material metaphysics there whole lives come upon consciousness like "wtf omg whaaa" and incredibly complex ideas emerge because they didn't have consciousness as a fundamental at the beginning of their thinking of the universe and its functions - the same thing would happen to explain unconscious material dynamics in civilizational stages that treat too much of the soul or of consciousness, incredibly elaborate dynamics would have to be devised for that too.
@@chaos-fb5nk i think there is good reason for that, though. i think there is a very strong argument to be made for approaching consciousness from a materialist perspective. i personally think there is overwhelming evidence that "self" is wholly emergent from physical causes with no room for a metaphysical component. the reason i believe this is very simple... it is a fact that physically altering one's brain, whether through trauma, or drugs, or degradation, can have a fundamental effect on _who you are as a person._ it's impossible to argue that this does not happen. and if changes to your physical matter can change your integral sense of identity -- both your own internal self-perception, and the way you behave and interact with the world -- truly and completely..... then where is there room for any sort of metaphysical self that has any meaning at all? any existing metaphysical self must be totally devoid of any role in producing your identity -- how can you even call it a "self" then?
i don't say this because i _want_ to believe it. in fact, i think it's a pretty difficult fact to come to terms with. but i do believe it, simply because i don't see any alternative that makes sense.
What if the problem lies in trying to define consciousness in the first place? We certainly can make observations and create perspectives, but although a bee’s consciousness may never equal the consciousness of the flower it pollinates, can we really say that one is more conscious than the other?
Also, the existence and desire to understand consciousness seems to only be relevant to humans. I like how the creator of this vid describes our observation of consciousness as a narrative, which only serves to satisfy the stories we tell ourselves about anything we seek to understand.
In essence, consciousness is whatever we tell ourselves it is. In turn, it influences how we interact with other “conscious” beings.
As Obi-Wan said, “Everything is true, from a certain point of view.” To ensure you know another way to talk with people about it, you’re nudging up on non-duality which is talked about in a lot of religious circles. Non-duality is essentially that: a focus on the experience and building intuitive understanding based on that. I think the way you speak has a lot of utility and provides much inspiration for those who understand it. Perhaps another bit of inspiration: To pass on the torch of knowledge to a broader audience, a great deal more of pragmatism is needed. People want to know your intentions, even when those intentions are half-baked and contemplative.
i think the major flaw with finding an intuitive understanding of consciousness is bias. i see no reason why human consciousness is the yardstick by which we should measure consciousness. our intuitive understanding of consciousness is rooted in bias if we hold ourselves as the standard. we don’t have evidence that shrimp are capable of complex emotional and conceptual thought and experiential processes - so what? human-like complexity of thought or experience is not the subject, consciousness is. so why is something less conscious simply because it is less human, or less complex? why are we even talking of consciousness in terms of a hierarchy, with some beings as “more” or “less” conscious? maybe we could expand our understanding if we decenter ourselves and evaluate our intentions.
A mouth cannot chew itself. It's why we can't make any progress on figuring it out.
Good point. Human consciousness also has the opportunity to evolve faster because the way we can understand and explain to others,
Those other consciousness given enough time could become more similar to ours
In psychedelics it feels like you can connect to a global consciousness and interact with it and it feels real and complex, yet different
...But isn't the whole motivation for this question to determine whether other creatures have modes of existence as honorable as ours - the one we call conscious?
because of the construction of the body and the spine and the glands it creates the proper structure as a conduit for the higher forms of experience that humans are availed of. But not to say that nature is not altogether charged with an equal propensity for splendor or wonder. Without nature we wouldn't be able to glimpse the divine and the tools needed wouldn't exist, the food and other things. These are ancient bodies of systematized knowledge preserved all the way to today. just saying....
@@john-paulgies4313 "honorable" as decided by the humans. is there escape? can humans ever look at the world through non-human eyes? who's to say? probably the humans.
What a strange account talking about strange subjects. Subscribed & set to notify.
Hey Web Receptor (if that is your real name!) I recently found your channel. Really great communication and topic choices.
Here are a few responses to your video:
1. Be careful with conflating ideas such as mentation and agency with consciousness! Agency is definable (I'd recommend Barandiaran, Di Paolo, and Rohde, 2009) and mentation is arguably one of the contents of consciousness, but its not reasonable to say they are identical and are more like subsets or related phenomena.
2. Interesting to mention that involuntariness seems to be an aspect of consciousness. But does that mean subconsciousness is an aspect of consciousness? Its a question of categorisation. I'd expect that all extant conscious beings have subconscious processes that feed conscious contents, but that might not be required absolutely.
3. Is similarity to humanity a good measure for consciousness? I'd say it is not. Be careful of anthropocentrism, and also with using behavioural reduction as a measure for consciousness (which is phenomenological-qualitative).
4. Your goop-adapter model is similar to the interactional asymmetry point of the mentioned paper.
5. Love the wave model, maybe could be extended by thinking about how perturbable the "standing waves" are. To be conscious, it seems likely that you must have the correct balance of stability and changeableness to adapt to new information and process it meaningfully. The direct corollary of this idea is the "criticality" hypothesis of brain function. You can find a great video by Artem Kirsanov on that one.
To end off, I personally define consciousness as the name we give to the virtual space in which qualitative experience arises accessible to a subject-observer, i.e. the field or domain of experience.
You seem more like you're trying to classify consciousness in others, rather than define the term though.
I wonder what your thoughts on the recent expirements that document ai attempting to decieve the testers!
i am forever grateful to have found this channel
Very interesting video and perspectives. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on free will and similar definitions.
Honestly, I kind of see the entirety of the mind as an abstraction process. You start with sensory pulses that get divided into discreet sections. Those sections recur in patterns. For example, with visual information, we start with light, color, and shadow. From those, we can extrapolate forms and 3D space, which can then give us objects, materials, so on. We can, by sorting patterns of patterns of patterns, find increasingly more refined categories for all of the info.
The second big layer of abstraction is emotion, where subjective context first emerges. Before you think about anything, you feel it. Your emotional reactions to things are just you ironing out what the information means to you. You 'feel' that things are certain ways, even if you can't explain it. And often you can't explain it because your brain decided it didn't need any further processing. It didn't quite go all the way to consciousness. You may feel something instinctual or impulsive pulling you towards a decision.
The final layer of abstraction is conscious thought and observation. All of this information has gone through many layers of abstraction to reach a point of being almost entirely conceptual, and then it was written to memory. And as it was written to memory, you experienced it consciously. And at the same time, it found itself in the context of all of the other abstracted-up info stored in memory. And as you are thinking and processing information getting written to memory, sometimes your consciousness writes some new memories. That's you thinking about it all. This gives you the final layer in the chain, where you experience a perceptual gestalt, and observe your own emotional track. That's just a more abstract interpretation of the same info, which is just impulses.
It's just the final step in a long chain of turning pulses into something consistently actionable and understandable. If conscious is anything, it's the echo of what your brain makes out of incoming information. I would argue consciousness is actually quite limited. The more abstraction, the more hardware load. Not to mention, in my model, it doesn't do anything until simpler abstractions are written to memory. However, since it can write to memory too, it can somewhat inform what the layers under it do with future info.
This is all interesting, but it's ancillary to the question. I could model everything you said here in a computer and there'd be no reason to think it has any experience, since it would (maybe) not have any awareness to experience things through
@thisprojectisretired1055 I actually think so too. There's some kind of special sauce to it, something that I think happens because we are organic. There are imperfections and inconsistencies that weirdly seem to make it what it is. A machine, unless we solve quantum computing, will always take the same input down the same track, whereas an organic brain basically never will. That's as close as I can get to bridging the mechanics and the result.
EDIT: It also occurred to me that memory is also a major confounding factor that might contribute to an idiosyncratic, emergent experience.
My laymen's understanding of how memory works is that you have parts of your brain responsible for regulating memory operations, but they themselves don't store it all. When information moves through the brain, chains of neurons and synapses are excited that themselves are basically an imprint of the information and contextual logic. And then, your 'memory centers' regulate how excitable that path will be going forward via neurotransmitter modulation. Essentially, a memory happens when those parts of your brain decide that synaptic path is valuable, I think probably just by the most normative alignments of synapses - that is the ones that get the highest and most sustained activity get reinforced and linked with neighbors. That's why so much of our learning is through mixes of repetition and intuition. It's kind of like tracing over a line on a piece of paper over and over, your brain is holding the most traveled signal paths as open as possible. Your brain makes the tracks that light up the most, better able to do so, as though training itself on them. In realtime, all kinds of valuations are made on what to prioritize keeping as the paths continually go on, getting drawn all across your brain by input being processed. The most juiced up paths will fire on their own at what are in causal practicality essentially random times, even long after the events leaving that imprint have passed. And you will experience recalling the past thoughts and sensations without any apparent outside impetus, it feels entirely internal. But it colors your experience, and memories being written in that moment form new contextual links with it, and they change each other as the pathways bleed-over in their excitement patterns.
What this means in practice is that memory is nascent and lossy. Some lines are so bold and embedded that the things over it lose in conflicts, and many things trigger that memory path. Others have gotten more ambiguous over time, faded and lost in new lines traced across it. In recall, your brain will infer the missing pieces and sort conflicts by the nearest reference points, closest match. This leads the memory, and your perspective on it during recall, to shift over time. Old and new blend to make something that is arguably a different thing from the original.
Given that this is a fundamental part of how our hardware deals with information (with a memory like a magnetic HDD or a tape in the sense that original information fades over time, especially with continued writing to the media,) I think it's almost a given that some outlier curveballs will prevail. I think the way that memory works is a big part of what makes the conscious experience come to be. When you think about it, the conscious mind is locked up in the control room - everything it knows is memory. Consciousness is always on its way to the true moment, but never reaching it in time. All of the events it has information about have already transpired and been piped through our lossy, accumulation-based memory to ultimately become something more than the information that forms it. Perhaps that 'becoming' is your conscious experience. It could be tied to the fact that every time you recall something, it is fundamentally changed by the process.
It's kind of a mad/maddening thought. This understanding kind of paints the mind as an aftereffect. For instance, you look at your desk and see it, and all of the things that make it a desk, and then your desk. This experience of the desk is the only one you know, nothing is realer or more essential - it's tangible. But the thing that exists in your experience of vision and touch is NOT the same as the actual thing that's there. You never directly get that, only information representing what is there. The desk is a lie XD. But really, what is our sense of meaning in that case? I find it unsatisfying. If consciousness and meaning are simply hallucinations born of alignments in memory, that can look a lot like we are doomed to live in our own subjective bondage. But I tend to think of it like this. Our minds are never getting the full picture of reality - so much of the moment is whizzing right by it, and our brains optimize to get the most new information, while keeping the most consistent picture possible in the temporal domain. Basically, it tries to catch as much as it can, but makes much of its pictures from elaborate series of inferences about future patterns that are derived from prior patterns. Again, a mix of old and new information that is dynamically shifting. Our intelligence is one that favors consistency over final accuracy and precision. We could not survive with the slow reaction times we'd have if we had to understand everything before we could make a decision. The reality is that we DON'T need to understand everything in order to proceed. The best part of being in this cosmic predicament is the endless mystery and depth of experience that our wonky info systems burp out for reasons that confound even the smartest among our kind. I think it's WILD to consider that our whole world, these experiences that we hold so close, might just be down to an unavoidable wiggle in the margins of information. Something so small, spawning something so infinitely vast as to never be fully explorable by anyone person.
I think our language and speech play their own roles as well. A conscious narrative for memories is a valuable thing for communicating information to other minds. We try to help eachother fill in the blanks - our way of socializing and forming complex inter-relational contexts between one another is like an extra layer of abstraction. Brains thinking about thinking, talking about thinking as though they themselves are neurons in another brain thinking about thinking. But the changes that conscious expression makes to the information produce perhaps endless confounding factors across the spark gap. I think that our sense of experience and of conscious presence is elevated by the fact that we are such deeply social creatures. A lone human might not have nearly the sense of conscious narrative as we do in our connection-loving society. I know there are tribes in africa where people barely understand the concept of far-future because they live for their hunts and nothing more. All they know is "eating baboon butt is the life." and pretty much center everything they do around that, living extremely simple hunter-gatherer lifestyles.
And I hope this clarifies nothing, btw :P
the phenomenology of spirit ✌️🕊️
4:38 big assumptions off the bat! 👀 i also think our difficulty distinguishing what might or might not have consciousness is telling and funny! black box processing is nice because it (like the scientific method) accounts for the unknowability of the “other”. in other words, every body/object has equal weight and potential to interact through the act of being and/or being perceived!
also the self sketch in this vid was adorable, very Daria! loving the production style of the videos!
welcome to the new year yall! *look to install your goop adapter TODAY*
✌️🫀
You might be interested in Active Inference and the Free Energy Principle.
Agreed!
Your section on the definition game and the idea of defining a chair intuitively reminded me of a study on the fuzziness of how we define things. The study had list of drawings of drink vessels where the participants were asked to define each by whether they were cups/mugs. Notably there was a point in which 50% of the participants disagreed in what was a certain cup/mug would be called.
I wrote this before finishing the video so I’ll try to see if this insight becomes relevant to the rest of the discussion of consciousness.
I hit play and you essentially the cup/mug study with animals and consciousness. Well played
categorical phase transitions huh... at the right pressure, maybe there's a cup-mug supercritical state :)
YESSSSS!!! U GET IT! KEEP PROCESSING, WEBGIRL!!!! -PO
Took shrooms about a year ago, "showed" me that consciousness doesn't exist. I would say that the only thing we can actually control is self reflection which is also a more accurate description I would say. You can't really control when you are conscious, or stop a certain sense from sending information to your brain. I really like your channel, philosophical/scientific discussions remind me how fun it is to be alive :)
bro really pulled up and said “it came to me in a dream”
@Midwestemoisme i love that youre saying *this* instead of trying to refute the argument that it is self reflection. Feel free to tell me why this perspective is wrong
Born goop, now graduated into slop 💪😮💨
Do you have thoughts on the problem solving element of consciousness? Like why it may or may not matter that a LLM, slime mold, or swarm of ants can solve a problem without an internal representation of that problem (or at least not an obvious one)?
Interesting video. Good job! You definitely made some thought provoking statements.
I imagine consciousness as a guess and check feature in multicellular organisms. It's awareness of the self to make behavioral changes to the internal state and maintain homeostasis.
So a cell can be conscious in of itself, as it has a sense of its internal systems as it needs to make adjustments and grow/change. But consciousness types can stack, like human cells have their own consciousness that is the building blocks of our human consciousness (ego?)
It's the part of the organism that retains self memory and checks it against the void to validate it's function
Internal guess/check system like a transistor waiting to output a one or a zero. That's only my intuition on the matter though
Simon Roper has some interesting videos about why we perceive consciousness the way that we do.
I suspect that consciousness is that way because it is intrinsically holistic, I mean, let's say we talk about genes, because of how reality works we would have to say that genes emerge from the "whole" and ultimately "merged" with it again, otherwise you would have to believe mutstions are just random.
Same thing with consciousness, we know is not definable, but still we can say a lot of things about it.
Anyway that was very engaging, you speak very clearly and make a lot of sense👍
well heck i just spent like an hour typing a mini essay comment and when i clicked post, it just disappeared :c
hopefully it's some sort of auto-moderation / requires approval thing.
if not, such is life, i suppose... thoughts gone into the void, i suppose...
Always save a copy of yt comments anymore.😤
Love the lil plucked chicken reference in there 🌝
A psychoanalytic analogy that I think might be interesting/useful to your ends: The phenomena of psychosis (which you've mentioned before) and infant experience. An infant, as far as we can tell, has not yet developed a capacity to differentiate between self and other, "inner" and "outer". It experiences everything essentially simultaneously, and as existing within the same "realm of observation". At the same time and as a result of this, the infant does not yet have a mental apparatus a la the GPT03 systems model you described in the first half, and so is not contemplating its senses as inputs, or using them to produce outputs. Nonetheless, this infant, lacking in an elaborated and organized inner experience, is still very obviously conscious!
The case of the infant in the theories of object relations and self psychology seem to match pretty much one to one with your description of a kind of "interaction-first", or maybe "interaction-only" model of consciousness (though these two theories don't really accept this - they seem to come to this conclusion very early on, and then move away from them in favor of rigid mental organizing). The infant does not have an instinctual mental apparatus, no instinctual if-else clause: it seems instead to have an instinctual *orientation* towards the "outside", to attempt to bring inner experience into the world. As this occurs, limits are met (the physical constraints of reality, as well as the emotional constraints of parental responsiveness and empathy), and in these interactions, we see the infant's "consciousness". Indeed, it seems like the mental apparatus, however it's organized, only comes into existence as an emergent property of the baseline experience of interaction between inner and outer experience.
In the case of psychosis this is also clear - psychosis is our limited way of describing difficulties with organizing experience into the "inner" and "outer" box. The point there being that this distinction between "inner" and "outer", and thus the creation of an organized mental apparatus, is very much secondary to the experience of consciousness. When we reconcile with that, it starts to look like the mind isn't really about "inputs" and "outputs" - if the baseline human experience is of simultaneously experiencing "inner" thought and "outer" reality, then we have to acknowledge that a logic of input and output is not consistent with lived experience. As an example that might be close to home, if you've ever had sleep paralysis, or even that groggy almost-dream feeling after waking up, you've experienced this baseline human experience firsthand. What was produced by "the inside" was felt to exist in "the outside", and very crucially, it was surprising! It's my belief that at this moment, it's not that you have access to either inner experience or outer reality - you are only accessing the boundary between the two. You experience the interactions between both simultaneously - the inner IN the outer, ON the outer, the two being surprising and not premeditated or prefigured by a mental apparatus. As a final note then, I'd say that the mental apparatus/structure is an emergent property, and that the clarification of boundaries between inner and outer is always a secondary process, which I think matches your wave interference model pretty well.
i like this comment. it challenges my own thoughts a bit. i will have to reread it a few times.
A horse _is_ a kind of chair, but more things besides.
A chair's definition is grounded in its function relative to us: if you sit on a table, either it breaks or it is a chair.
A horse is something more than merely its utility to us.
Conscience - literally "with knowledge"
Whatever consciousness is, it is a state of being that is relative to the act of knowing.
...But you can't really have a meaningful discussion about what a thing is until you determine that it is. You really need a fundamental definition of what we're even talking about before you can talk about it.
What software do you use to make your drawings/diagrams and to put them in your videos? (Great video btw)
I use Procreate on an iPad for the drawings and use Premiere Pro to edit :)
You should look into Nagel's definition, Chalmers' hard problem, Dennet's grand illusion, Churchland's neurophenomenology, and the deep literature on why the entire consciousness community has converged to Nagel's definition. Try taking an intro philosophy of mind course for starters.
Isn't consciousness commonly associated with being able to experience? Of course there's no way to verify if anything besides us is conscious, however with that in mind I think this video primarily evaluates what makes something "seem" conscious. But maybe a good way to evaluate a genuinely conscious being *is that very void*-that black box that we can't fully understand. With a large language model, it may seem conscious enough if it's sufficiently advanced but ultimately its processes aren't as enigmatic as beings we think to be conscious. AI mimics the symptoms of consciousness but not the illegibility. They may appear to be black boxes to us but that is due to complexity, not irreducibility. It doesn't defy deeper analysis in the same way. This coincides with some continental philosophy which conceptualizes the subject as a void (although that'd take way to long to get into here). Anywho, very nice video. Am definitely subscribing and checking out more from you :)
edit: here's some examples of consciousness as void: Hegel's self-relating negativity, Lacan's entire idea of the subject in general, kinda Sartre's pour-soi (being-for-itself), Stirner's Einzige/creative nothing, also Buddhism's idea of anatta coincides with this. Many frameworks, even across cultures, seem to converge on this idea which coincides the subject with a void or a negation.
edit2: also your idea that consciousness isn't strictly internal but arises from that interaction with the outside stimuli is very reminiscent of Hegel and his master-slave dialectic. Essentially for him self-consciousness requires recognition. One only becomes aware of the self in relation to another being. Without that, we have an incomplete consciousness, maybe akin to a surveillance camera. Things only arise through differentiation with other things. This relates to his point in the Science of Logic of how pure being and pure nothingness are empty and that they must immanently include each other in order to begin to mean anything. Being and nothingness collapse into each other creating becoming. x immanently includes ~x
edit3: Do note that I'm playing with a lot of nebulous ideas here open to *many critiques*. I bear no illusions in that regard. As Montaigne would say: Que sais-je? (What do I know?)
edit4: I like your hair a lot btw. Last edit, cya.
I've been fully conscious, partially conscious and unconscious. I was alive throughout. So does it make sense to draw a line, or is it a sliding scale (possibly which never truly hits zero).
I know you’re thinking about making the patreon for free but what if we want to give you money for this?
I appreciate it, and I'll probably make a paid tier at some point (maybe sooner than later) but I want to make sure that there's enough value for people paying me :)
Personally my definition of consciousness is whatever the thing is that experiences physical and mental events and has the capacity to make any decision conceivable by that individuals conscious mind. And the reason why I say there has to be something experiencing the events of the body other than the body itself is because the body is physical and we know as much as we possibly can know that physical things like chemicals don't experience being chemicals so body being made up of a lot of chemicals suddenly and magically getting the ability to experience doesn't make any sense.
If it can die, it's concious
Amputation.
Is the arm conscious while it's dying apart from the body?
how is dying different from just total disruption of a system then? we say a computer dies when it no longer works (or out of battery) but we all agree it was not alive to die for real
how can you not know that consciousness exists? it's the only thing that can't be doubted
maybe you are a robot
those little diagrams at the end were the best! ^-^
Removing urself from the field is also an interaction
Dope channel find
0:58 But what do you think you can do with this information? It is extremely valuable information, so why should you have it?
u have to make assumptions, no? we can tell if "something" is unconscious? like, we don't try to feed a person or kiss them, we just know...they are unconscious!! like recognizes like. u just know...even a baby knows
edit: i now lean more towards a sort of animism or something, again, these days. not quite. perhaps morphic resonance...for example, cliche i know, but psychoactive plants. they go beyond just having a molecule to affect our cognition. There is a spiritual entity present within peyote, cannabis, mushrooms. Many foods in fact. see doshas and sattvic diet. humans are considered to be of the highest order because we are able to ascend and other forms are just lower than our consciousness, but cases like many animals, dolphins etc who seem to share an about equal sort of spiritual entity or being consciousness but lack the full breadth of scope in enacting their will upon their world. man is defined by shaping his environment rather than being shaped by the conditions of it.
But we do not have to look down on the other life forms, we can still consider that all of life is somehow connected and has an awareness. then there is a totality of awarness that is truly what consciousness is. We are radio receivers. we are individually tuned and within fields and flows like time that determine what we receive etc...
Also think of the four worlds or that there are higher and lower realms that together harmonize into life and our awareness.
Things that precede our reality, in the shadow realm. or the mirror worlds. These layers govern the process of the spirit and soul activity that preceded our bio life force and is believed by many to be eternal. This is an alternate route for exploration to fully grasp what it is you are exploring. I hope I do not come across as rude or condescending, I myself also wonder. And I enjoy this line of exploration, thank you.
actually what you eat and what you see and hear affects your consciousness, just like we affect things by how we behave. so its not even a very fixed thing and has to be determined actively as we may experience varied levels of consciouness. Indeed any practice endeavors to reach sustained states of higher levels of consciouness or awareness...this is utmost other wise we are just animals wandering around doing animal base things.
It exists, it's just impossible to explain verbally. Try explaining Space and Time verbally, I don't think I can do that.
So as I understand it, your definition of something conscious would apply to anything with an internal state that is unreadable and non constant. And all its outputs are colored by both the input and internal state.
Consider a random number generator implemented on a quantum computer. And the internal state is seeded by quantum true randomness. And it is designed in a way that is physically impossible to ever read the entire internal state because of uncertainty principle shenanigans.
I belive that this device would fit under your definition of conscious.
Personally, I believe that consciousness is defined by the ability to metaphysically experience qualia (the philosophical thing) (relation to my chosen name is entierly coincidental and unintentional)
As such generally the only things I know is truely conscious is me - and then everything else I am not sure about. I strongly doubt that pure hydrogen gas is conscious tho. So I generally use an estimation of consciousness that is how similar to me vs something purely elemental.
So my family member are the most likely conscious creatues I am aware of after myself. An unborn child is less likely. A monkey is less likely. A fly is even less likely. Plants are even less. Rivers and waterfalls and mountains are somewhere on there. The whole of human society as an organism operates by memes also needs to be that list.
yeah you can only know yourself that you are conscious. I agree. and the rest is like you said, logical understandig down the line of the complexity of the organism and most importantly how much off their language you understand or their ability to have language.
Woah that hair is cool
It's related to my own special focus. We are living energy, so the two primary components are the electric and magnetic. Consciousness is electric, and awareness is magnetic. Consciousness is endless created and destroyed moment by moment as the illusion of time progresses, so that we have experiences - thus, it is always Immanent, within in the current reference of time. Since it is bound in time, it is semi-permanent aka mortal.
Consciousness is words and narratives, forms and structure. It is Light. It is also masculine. Awareness is wordless, dark, potentially transcendental, and feminine. Feminine awareness holds the potential for masculine however it must become conscious, first - which is to become present. What's important to see is magnetic awareness straddles the axis of the illusion of time. Electric consciousness may not escape time so is always bound by light.
I could go on but I'm not sober. Happy new year. Lol.
yeah maybe lay off the drugs xd Always good to have thought processess and trying to think but yeah, thats non sense. Time is no illusion is a concept a frame work for causality, also why would consciousness be destroyed moment by moment, its a process. You also saying its bound in time but you said time is an illusion.
now that was the only intelligent part the rest is utter nonsense. Always a good reminder to go sober.
no aminosity though, happy new year.
@@catalyzerr it is nonsense yeah, but telling people to get sober is a little bit too besserwisser for my taste. You have no idea if this person has been sober for 10 years already after a 20 year long meth addiction. I can tell you that it doesn't feel too good when people like you assume that one of not sober just for speaking their mind, and I can imagine that you are able to understand that if you took the time to think about it for a while.
What's most likely is that this person has absolutely nothing to do with drugs at all and has never had a problematic use or addiction.
People really gotta grow some online empathy and understand that there's a real person behind most comments. How would you feel if people told you that you needed to lay off drugs time and time again without taking any drugs or had several years of sobriety? Do you think that makes it easier to wake up in the morning and keep being sober, or just keep trying to find your way in life and not give up, if people time and time again remind you that you were born with a brain that makes it so other people think that you're intoxicated when you're not?
Come on now.
Just critize what they wrote and leave the hurtful and unnecessary insults out of it.
(I'm not from, or living in a, English speaking country and I haven't studied English so there will be several grammatical errors so no need to critique that part because it doesn't hurt me. I'm 35 and started talking and writing English 5 years ago now so I'm happy with where I am, especially with my past)
@catalyzerr go away liberal
@@catalyzerr We need communities without people like you. Stay away from children.
Mere word association. Doesn't bring much insight except what metaphors to use in one's poetry; not conceptual understanding.
Beware of being infatuated with your own thoughts just because they're pretty.
anything that can sense danger is conscious so all of those including the plant
a danger response is mostly not consciousness it is pure information processing and reaction unconsciously, you like stopped at the first 5minutes. What you are right though where she made a mistakes is that plant indeed also react to stimuli.
I’d argue that’s sentience
@@offdabean not even, since a danger response doesnt have to be subjectively experiences, only in sentient beeing it is. Idk what this comment was, not really thought off at all. (not your response)
Another WRW (web receptor win)
are you an agent?
To your point of differentiating between humans/dogs and fish: I think I disagree, I think it may seem as though we humans should be in a different category when it comes to the reaction to stimuli when we in fact simply have more data to process. But more data doesnt change the process of us getting to a reaction. For example a squirrel finds a nut, now it can self reflect on where to put this nut based on prior experience and in turn make a decision based on that experience. Now applying the example of decisions to a human: This ape finds a plant for example based on prior knowledge it either already knows it is safe to eat the plant or if they don't makes a decision weighing the risk of death with the reward of nutrients. Or let's do fish, they are confronted with a threat which activates fight or flight response. Same with humans.
The line is to the right of plant. Or maximally far to the right idc. Everything is conscious
So pretty
im consciously into u
Cool video! :D
You know nero knowledge
??
We share dna with birds and if i can sit on it, it is a chair
Consciousness is very simple. The left and right halves of your brain drive most of your actions. Consciousness, the thing that is "you", is very small and weak compared to them. Consciousness is forcibly convinced by the brain that everything that the left and right halves of our brain do is a choice by the consciousness. The evolutionary role of consciousness, of us, is to identify patterns and then engage an emergency override to make the left and right halves of our brain do what we need to to survive. However, untrained consciousness' can not do that for very long. Free will exists, but it is in very short supply and takes a lot of effort to build up.
Your role as a human consciousness is literally to train the two animals that exist inside of your head (the halves of your brain), while you are being convinced that what those animals want is what you want. Its compounding, because as you train your animals to help you with simple tasks, that frees up more space for you to focus on higher-level objectives.
My achievements as a Software Engineer are stickily because I have identified this information, and trained my animals to be good at solving computer science problems (oh snap that was college).
I think your horse is a conscious chair
ur amazing all the time
love ur channel look into those randomly appearing balls of lighting/plasma that im certain is alive they do whatever tf they want and will actively fuck with humans. lots of conspiracy theory relate them to plasma shit that goes on in space and can be visible to earth. (im not well learned on it) BALLOFLIGHTNINGSUPREMACY!!
consciousness is internal argument. ooh boy
finally
cool hair
why cant i comment
i have a whole comment that now everytime i past it in retrieves an error. I would send it per email then i guess.
ruclips.net/user/clipUgkxCVLvR74CfPAXQ6ndp6GZ-BAEnfNSH6eu
Peak
love your videos queen. read derrirda if u havent yet
You should do physiognomy next, like how your physical appearances most likely dictate your personality. Like how we can’t tell if you’re a man or woman and how you don’t like your natural hair color so you dyed it. Something like that
26:00 unsubscribed
Jk ;)
Your materialistic thinking will resolve in nothing. The body is more than just goop. Something you've obviously forgotten with your potters hands.
8 views in 11 minutes web receptor fell off 💀
I hope this is a joke I don’t get and not miserable cringe
AGP freak
FIRST
And for no reason; nothing to contribute.
you familiar with sevan bomar yt: innerstanding & dan winter ;))
20 views in 26 minutes web receptor fell off 💀
What fell off? This happens to small creators all the time - one video gets pushed by the algorithm, often one of the first videos they make, and then the next video isn't pushed. I've seen it happen to at least 10 smaller RUclips channels the last 12 months.
"Fell off" would have been correct if this channel had like 300k concurrent views the last 10-20 videos.
And also, you're gonna have a hard time with finding friends without empathy so I hope you're very very young for your sake
No contact in 13 years? My dad fell off 💀