What is Consciousness?
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- Опубліковано 1 жов 2024
- Where is it? Can it be measured? Replicated? Created? Marcus du Sautoy puzzles the problem of consciousness.
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Brain imagining techniques have shown that our minds work differently when we're asleep compared to when we're awake, conscious vs unconscious. Integrated information theory attempts to measure how conscious a system is using mathematical formulae. Could maths answer the question about what consciousness is or do we need to look to philosophy?
This animation was produced by Diana Gradinaru, our 2018-19 animator-in-residence, supported by the Sfumato Foundation and was inspired by Marcus du Sautoy's book "What We Cannot Know".
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Great minds seem to think alike. If you liked our take on the topic of consciousness, you might also enjoy this brilliant film on the origin of consciousness from Kurzgesagt that came out only last month - ua-cam.com/video/H6u0VBqNBQ8/v-deo.html
Consider the following:
Modern science claims that everything in existence came from an expanding singularity, including the very forces of nature that this universe functions by.
But now, does everything in existence actually exist per se, OR does only the singularity exist in the form of all things? Especially considering that the singularity came before all things.
Consider also the following:
Un-named concept -> Given a name (could be a sound, symbol, etc, of some sort) -> With an attached meaning to that name -> And maybe even other meanings depending upon context -> And maybe even other names for the same concept.
So, how do we really know that we can even actually perceive the un-named concept we call consciousness? Maybe our perception of reality does not allow us to. And maybe it even evolved to allow it self to not be detected?
@@samat5199
Brain scan also show a lot of brain activity during stage 4 sleep.
Being sedated/chemical coma is the most the brain can really be "shut down" and still survive.
And during this we really perceive nothing. Its like you just jump cut. Meaning experience, consciousness, could be completely cut off. Or our memory of things being entirely wiped/ not recorded.
The Royal Institution, consciousness is unprovably true.
@@TheRainHarvester All discourses on the topic of "consciousness" have so far been founded upon and rooted in anthropoceintic assumption. Unless the possibility that humans have not yet experienced consciousness is considered then no progress can be made in the study.
Furthermore, anyone seeking to make such progress will first have to reclaim proper use of langue in order to formulate the most precise models of consciousness possible. Finally, consciousness must first be defined and described as and in the context of a universal constant.
For a second there I thought this was Ted Ed.
Great video!
We are taking that as a compliment. Thank you!
@@TheRoyalInstitution it is a compliment. This is a quality video 👍
The mistake this video makes, in my opinion, is confusing the "consciousness" with "self".
You can still be conscious with almost no sense of self. Consciousness is just the phenomena of experience. Nothing more.
Self is a collaboration of awareness of a single conscious experience tied with memories that also seem attached to this continuing experience of "self". You can also throw in the experience of volition to this, although I am not sure if this is essential. But the first two definitely are. In my opinion, memory is the biggest contributor to "self". Whereas consciousness, plain and simple, is just awareness. A deaf and blind person can still be conscious without a single thought in their head.
It could be easier to say, there are many times in your life don't remember, but you were still consciously experiencing at that time despite the lack of memory. Yet a computer could have a memory storage of everything that has ever happened to it with zero experience of any of those events.
I apologise for the repeating and rambling 😂
That sounds right. Memories are necessary for a sense of self -- a sense of a history of events that have occurred to and have been done by this entity that I call my self. Long-term memories, furthermore, seem to depend upon the achievement of a particular level of language skills. I have no memories at all of my life before I was two years and eleven months old. My two adult sons have no memories before a similar point in their lives. As their father, I noticed that, when my sons were around that age, their language skills had improved to the point at which they could speak in short narratives -- this happened, then that, and finally the last thing. I think that long-term memories -- and a sense of self -- begins to be formed when the child has the language skills to form, and store, narratives. Once those skills have been achieved, a person can have a narrative that spans decades. A long story starring the self as a protagonist.
Fascinating! I used to be in the duelist camp, but science has converted me to a materialist. Science > Faith.
Dualism can still be a theory within materialism. In essence, although consciousness is a completely materialistic mechanism, the phenomena of it is still "separate" from the "true" universe. The only experience is fed from processed sensations from limited senses. Thus, in a technicality; there is a bridge between consciousness and the material universe. To paraphrase Kant; we can only experience the phenomenon of sensation, not the thing in itself.
How do you think life came about?
@@20july1944
Well, for life to exist, it has to be a fundamental of the universe. Thus, under the correct conditions it has to arise.
Although, the exact mechanism of how you get raw data, I.e "chemical soup", to a program, I.e life. Is still unknown. Its not argued in science that it has to be a fundamental, that too with the phenomenon that is consciousness.
Knowledge is better than love, but you already know that.
@@ROFLPirate_x What do you mean "a fundamental of the universe?"
Operational Definitions Simplify
- If input from sensors is acted upon, that is awareness.
- If records of actions are kept, that is memory.
- If such memory is analyzed to improve performance, that is self-awareness (consciousness).
- If operations are guided by rules (vs ANN), that is reasoning.
- If rules are augmented as a result of self-awareness (above), that is linguistic-based learning.
- If actions are produced using ANN, that is a kind of instinct or muscle-memory.
- If ANN are modified as history (memory) accumulates, that is a kind of evolution. (resembles DNA gene activation in effect if not in structure).
====
Emergence theory is no explanation because it is only in our minds that things "emerge" (like the property of wetness, or the appearance of a cloud from droplets of water). So it won't give any explanation about the nature of consciousness itself.
Emergence explains it just fine.
We can see examples in the way life has evolved from the simplest examples of neurological sensors to organization into arrayed nerve fibers able to generate a complex reaction to stimulus... to structures that become more than just photosensitive spots that can only detect changes in light level, to organized arrays that can detect shadows and motion...
Each accidental increase in advantage becoming the next emergent clade in evolutionary development.
Emergence isn't a uniquely perceptual phenomenon and water is wet because of the interactions between molecules, not a property of the molecule singly.
Complexity is what results of an open thermodynamic system that is constantly out of equilibrium...
Life, and apparently consciousness are what organic chemistry get up to when left to the ordinary chemistry they do with small fluctuations in heat.
Emergent properties are evident even at the scale of subatomic particles... The stability of some particles differs significantly from its supposedly equal and opposite anti particle... Which is apparently why we have a matter universe rather than none.
So... no. Emergence isn't just something we perceive as the result of expectation bias.
Hmm - different but interesting and nicely made.
Thumbs up for creativity.
My approach for measuring consciousness is super simple:
**Consciousness in general gets defined as the ability to model reality internally, at some number of dimensions.** (Modeling is essentially fractal copies of larger systems. All of this is just randomness (a deterministic mathematical one as seen in Pascal's triangle), aka, entropy, so yes, it is emergence.)
Levels of consciousness increase with the number of dimensions that can be modeled:
0D - preconsciousness - simple matter "models" only itself, it's internal state is its internal state (1:1 modeling). It's not really conscious, but it is "aware" of itself in a sense, at the moment, so it's sort of the fetal stage of consciousness.
1D - physical consciousness - a single celled organism (and maybe plants?) models itself, now, plus a future state, or an outside state. It can have a goal state in mind, essentially, or be aware that "there's something I like/dislike out there". Current, linear, computers are at this level as well I think. They have a current state and a goal state, and try to move from point A to point B.
2D - emotional consciousness - a simple brain and similar things can model both its own current and goal state along with a current and goal state of another individual (animal, vegetable, mineral, etc.) and see where they both intersect for more complex, non-linear, problem solving.
3D - intellectual consciousness - a social animal has the ability to model things logically, by looking at a whole group of individual perspectives (current state to goal state) starting with the self, and moving outward from there in an "objective" space where problems can be solved by triangulating the intersection point of the three different paths.
4D - philosophical consciousness - a mature human brain can model all four dimensions of time and space for a model that can problem solve for "me, you, and everyone else, now and into the future" all in one impressive go (neuroscience, and some funny math, suggests this starts coming online around age 40, when the two sides of the prefrontal cortex start functioning in parallel instead of only one at a time).
You can't reference ideas with matter only. Real materialist bias
So the answer is: "We don't know yet, however, we managed to troll you with some eye catchy animation LOL"
Oh, so you are watching a video on YT to find the answer to "what is consciousness"? and you expect it to give you the answer? the answer that no one has even come close to? Seriously? These videos are meant to introduce different ideas and get you interested. You can then go learn more, do more research and you might be the one who finds the answer.
@@hojjat5000 Thank you, your comment really opened my third eye. I'm quitting my job right away, leaving my family and going to Antarctica to start the research process. Wish me another furious good luck!!
@@sicfxmusic, Good luck. Hope you find consciousness in Antarctica. Stay warm.
Well this video was unbelievably biased towards materialism. Considering everything we know about the link between consciousness and the brain, we have a bunch of correlation especially in observation of the brain. Sadly, materialists will ignore the utterly confusing existence of consciousness as we know it and simple see how closely the brain reflects how the mind interacts with the brain and say they are the same. Perhaps that is because dualism is not a pretty or clean, or perhaps believing in something more than the physical makes them uncomfortable? Strictly speaking, there is no adequate answer for consciousness, and although we know quite a bit about how brain functions generally, none of it can at this moment can have the slightest hope of understanding where our thoughts come from and go, or why you thought one thing and not another. We understand consciousness much better because we ourselves live as conscious than any of the mist in-depth study of the brain has revealed about it. On that fact alone, and the fact the we experience our lives with quite a handsome amount of disconnection from the brain we call our own, only being able to have a say in very few functions the body takes part in and seemingly less control over our brain itself, it is still fair to say that consciousness is not in our brains but separate.
i hope you do realize how biased you are?
Operational Definitions Simplify
- If input from sensors is acted upon, that is awareness.
- If records of actions are kept, that is memory.
- If such memory is analyzed to improve performance, that is self-awareness (consciousness).
- If operations are guided by rules (vs ANN), that is reasoning.
- If rules are augmented as a result of self-awareness (above), that is linguistic-based learning.
- If actions are produced using ANN, that is a kind of instinct or muscle-memory.
- If ANN are modified as history (memory) accumulates, that is a kind of evolution. (resembles DNA gene activation in effect if not in structure).
There is no magic.
@@Thomaaasooo You cannot really explain how consciousness did show up as the natural selection and evolution are not a logical argument, in order to explain consciousness, you should actually know what matter is , and matter doesn't really seem to have consciousness, but if it does, well, then comes the questions, how does matter can generate consciousness, or have consciousness attached to it, its impossible to answer
My best guess: Consciousness had to evolve from the machinery that was available and molded by conditions. Brains developed for the purpose of evaluating the environment for the creatures that posses them. They do this by modeling the inputs from sense organs and continuously monitor and adjust the models to plan ahead and navigate for resources and reproduction. The images (models) we see in our "mind's eye", are only approximations of what our sense organs "see" and hear. The reasonable inference here, is that this constant, real time, evaluation and adjustment of the creature's self-position in space is what most likely produces the sensation of self. And why it mostly disappears (and plays re-runs) when the creature is sleeping and navigation is unnecessary.
Nobody knows.😏😏😏😏😏😏😏😏😏
Throw out the human guesswork:
The brain is incapable of seeing Electrical signals, as it is an automatic process running in an "Encoded" format. Complexity doesn't produce Awareness. Consciousness is external of the brain, residing in what is known as "The Processing System of LIFE". Consciousness is the Observer. There is No observer in the brain nor is there any "Decoding System" within the brain. The "Decoding" takes place in a Processing System Outside of the environment of the brain, in "The Processing System of LIFE", which is permanently in your vision and EASY to see, if you know what you are looking for or recognise. There are numerous methods that can be used, to make the Construct of "The Processing System of LIFE" stand out more, or observe the Processing System operating, using other methods.
Consciousness as such is not a phenomenon, emergent or otherwise. A phenomenon (literally, in Greek, "that which appears") is something appearing before consciousness. When you speak of phenomena you already take consciousness for granted. There's a TED talk by philosopher David Chalmers, where he correctly states that this "movie" of conscious experience you have in your head, so to say, is not quite accounted for by anything. There's no reason for that movie to exist at all. And that's true, but this is only the second-hardest problem of consciousness. The *really* hard problem of consciouness is not to explain how come the movie exists; it's to explain how come there is somebody actually watching it. That requires a whole logical leap from an account entirely couched in terms of events observed from an external vantage point to the appearance of an internal, first-person, perspective. If you think of it a bit, you'll see that the problem of consciousness is strictly intractable as specified.
Consciousness is that thing that let's you know you're depressed 😄
Yup. Its a curse that we can overcome through hard work, focus and study. Once you can immerse yourself in the flow of your work, the curse is temporarily lifted. Get to work. Good luck.
"one molecule of water is not wet, yet put many molecules together, and wetness emerges" 🤔
This theoretical exploration does suggest that consciousness (like wetness) is a subjective and created phenomena that is built from "code in the game". If true, we could potentially change the code, to create all sorts of cool and fun consciousness stuff. "I" could inhabit all sorts of consciousness states. both independent of other life, and grouped with other life forms.
Consciousness is simply the base of reality (which base we all experience as 'I am', in other words self awareness) outside of which nothing can exist.
In Christian terms, the name of God is 'I am'', therefore we are all one consciousness, one God.
So a bunch of waves and particles are the eseential reality .
But on the Mariscopic level , the waves interact with each other, the waves start forming a pattern , the waves start trying to change other waves , the waves figure out what they actually are , but still the waves are bound by laws , but who defines laws ? Why do waves behave as they do ? Do the tools of reason and logic work in the esate of understanding the language in which the laws were written ?
Mathematics is the language of the program called the creation , but what is the language in which mathematics is written ? Can it be changed ? Can we edit the language of creation ? Is Mathematics an absolute limit ? Is there no flaw or bug in this language of creation? Is there any loophole ?
Since science involves phenomena that everyone can point to and measure, and also the problem of other minds remains unsolved (and unsolvable), then consciousness itself can't be measured, validated, verified. It is not fully scientific to even discuss it. After you face this, then there is a large science-ish area you can explore these questions within. It's not clear how much any of this philosophy salon regarding consciousness could ever contribute to the advancement of science proper.
Felling of I is result of pseudo entity created by consciousness through mind. Consciousness is far beyond feeling of I, or it can be experienced only in the moment that happens on it’s own and feeling of I ceases. No one can experience I and consciousness both at one time. So if one person is still bound by I then he cannot experience consciousness. It is beyond our power to explain it through any means. We can only create situation in which it can be experienced. My blog site for more about the ways that situation can be created.
Seems like people like to reduce everything to either/or. Either quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, organs make consciousness, or, consciousness is a separate phenomena. What if a more pure form of intelligence, one that has no form, has no conscious of, no deliberate thoughts or sense of self, is the source of quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, organs which give rise to consciousness that does have form, sense of I, perceptions and thoughts?
Consciousness, like eyesight, is a product of evolution. It's that simple.
Consciousness does not need a human to be aware; and so neither a mind nor brain. IT is aware that it is aware all to its' own. Once that it is 'truly' understood...videos like this become obsolete.
Consciousness is such a rubber term: If one defines it, the other one will declare its not what he means by consciousness.
What is Consciousness? The only question man many never answer....and be the lesser for it.
Iphone think,
Iphone am.
lol
..is spirit...reason of everything... ..
177th comment , 999th like !
I am Alive .
Best part Iphone think then Iphone am :') ..
Wait, did the Ri really make a reference to a meme? 🤨
Best video I've seen in a while, good job!
FREE ASSANGE!!!
This world doesn't deserve good people sacrificing themselves. Sadly he's going to be made example of, USA and the UK (new and old Satans) will shred him to pieces.
Apparently the world already had one guy named Jesus, and if He was real, will the world ever learn? @@HatRSol
1:24 thank you for your donation
This doesn’t make any sense to me
This is bad. I feel like I'm on the entertainment channel. All the questions heavily direct a viewer towards a philosophical fantasy-like perception of consciousness, while pointlessly throwing scientific terms like quarks and thermodynamics to make it all sound credible to the naked eye.
Are we exploring the question in the title? Or are we collecting clicks by giving viewers something cool to watch? If it's the first, I'd suggest to try a biological perspective. Try understanding the difference between something primitive like Physarum polycephalum (a brainless collection of single-cell organisms that shows conscious collective decision making solving mazes along the way) and a complex organism like an animal or a human. Try zooming into a human down to a microscopic level and watch proteins interacting with each other, cells taking functional roles, cells having disagreements and economy, and watch how perception of the outside world is sensed, passed through neural networks, interpreted, stored, retrieved and so on... Try to understand the benefits of consciousness and why organisms evolve(d) to have it, compared to an alternative of being a passive organism.
You know you live in a crappy apartment when you dream you are living somewhere else and it's much better than your own place...
Every time!
Does anyone know what kind of art style this animation is? Or any related phrases I could google to find more things that look like this?
Very trippy
The last thing this video is about, is what consciousness ‘is’. It’s just brain morphology hype and animations.
Great my guts is a furries
Now explore lucid dreams, which we often know are not real, and compare/contrast these with 'normal' dreams, in which we typically assume mere thoughts are reality. - j q t -
could it be, a dream is what sub-consciousness is playing tricks.
bs
No, the mind is definitely not separate from the brain. You may have noticed that your consciousness is quite intermittent. A number of ways that consciousness can be made to stop are, as mentioned, deep non-REM sleep, but also anesthesia, concussion, brain damage, ingestion of certain chemicals, and death. Consciousness depends on the brain's execution of the thalamocortical cognition cycle (TCC) which has a base frequency of 40 Hz. Stop that cycle, conscious no more!
What I believe is happening, is that the brain is executing a cyclic simulation algorithm that, during wakefulness is driven by the senses and continually associated with stored past experience. The extent to which that simulation matches external reality determines our effectiveness in dealing with it. Dream states are explained by the simulation algorithm running without external drive, freewheeling along largely at random. This would also explain disorders such as schizophrenic hallucinations as well as those derived from taking psychoactive drugs, for example.
Qualia, incidentally, are nature's way of making measurements of the various sensory perceptions in order to register relative magnitudes. There are numerous ways to wreak havoc with that system as well.
Therefore, I posit that the TCC simulation algorithm lies at the very core of our being and our ability to imagine, to dream, and to anticipate and plan, along with the entirety of creativity that we are endowed with.
That's very interesting and I did learn something, but here's the big inevitable "but"... All this relies on the presupossition that consciousness can arise just like that, through neurons firing in a certain way. You being sure it's explainable through the mechanisms of the brain, is no better than me claiming it seems we can't detect the source, because neither of us are able to point to what consciousness actually is. Yes, you know how to modify and cancel it, but this doesn't mean anyone is closer to cracking the nut, really.
@@ekner That's a good point and I've thought about the "hard problem" of consciousness myself a great deal. Here is what I am led to:
Most of the time, while going about our day to day business and conscious (aware/awake/not-sleeping) existence, you aren't particularly concerned with the fact of your own existence and sentience. You are just dealing with whatever you happen to be focused upon in the moment. That is the default state of any conscious entity (which include most animals), and is what consciousness is for; to be able to anticipate moment to moment what to do and how to react in whatever situation such entity finds itself within.
It is only when that sentience looks in the mirror of the mind's eye, so to speak, and notices its own existence and awareness; that's when it seems kind of strange, even weird, and we start asking why that is and how can that be? In that instance and moment, the TCC reality simulator is trying to derive a solution for its own existence and trying to deal with it. The feedback loop that arises results in a kind of mental singularity for which evolution has developed a compensating mechanism to deal with and not allow an out of control situation that compromises the sentient entity's ability to function and ultimately, its existence.
That mechanism is what gives us our identity and sense of uniqueness and self-importance. That is ultimately what I believe our perception of "consciousness" to actually be.
Wonderful Animation~!! Deep philosophy with Fun~!
I get the general impression that what we call consciousness, is a phenomena that applies to all living things. It's like a layer of thought that self learn in an attempt to survive/ protect the host. A self feeding loop necessary to adapt in world full of dangers, needs and things to be learned. What we see in our dream is a simpler approach to the things we realise during the awake time of our life. The process of dreaming would be the remapping of the brain necessary to be more apt at living the next day. We need that off time to store the information because the brain seem not able to learn and store this information simultaneously.
Operational Definitions Simplify
- If input from sensors is acted upon, that is awareness.
- If records of actions are kept, that is memory.
- If such memory is analyzed to improve performance, that is self-awareness (consciousness).
- If operations are guided by rules (vs ANN), that is reasoning.
- If rules are augmented as a result of self-awareness (above), that is linguistic-based learning.
- If actions are produced using ANN, that is a kind of instinct or muscle-memory.
- If ANN are modified as history (memory) accumulates, that is a kind of evolution. (resembles DNA gene activation in effect if not in structure).
Emergent phenomenon. Seems correct. The color green is not the same as light of X nm wavelength. One is a conscious perception, the other a physical entity.
when im not thinking - am I still I?
There is no single You, so no; that was a different perturbation in the energy gradient of the universe.
yes
You cannot ever "not" think. That is a state Buddhist monks try to achieve after years of hard practices. Even when you think you are not thinking, you are thinking, period.
@@konnektlive You are wrong. You can stop thinking and there are different ways to do it. Even if its for few seconds you stopped it. The quickest way is to become acutly aware of your sense perceptions. If you are fully conscious - you know what it is you are looking at, you hear and know what are the sound you are listening to or you know what you are touching without labeling everything, only experiencing, your thinking must be absent. Try it out.
Or i have diffeeent approuch. Ask yourself : Im curious what will be next thought which will come to my mind?
and be very alert to catch it when it comes. Like cat waiting for the smallest movement from mouse's hole. ;)
Sure you are, you are just sleeping with your eyes open
gravity of the psychic minds
MORE INFO @ www.reddit.com/r/neuronaut
Interesting but inconclusive and a bit disappointing. That depends on the intended audience of course. Consciousness, I think, is learned. It is not a given from birth. I think that the process that we go through from the get go is not just absorbing the inputs of the senses we have, it is collating a coupling between them and working out what we do with that information, more importantly the association. I do not like comparing the brain to a computer as that is digital, but it can be modelled by a computer with just memory and I/O (but very sophisticated I/O of course). Pattern matching occurs across all senses. The brain remembers pain, sensation and comfort. As we get older these sensations become more detailed and sensitive. Sleeping is one way in which the brain collates the inputs and its responses to build the network of connections we use primarily to survive.
Operational Definitions Simplify
- If input from sensors is acted upon, that is awareness.
- If records of actions are kept, that is memory.
- If such memory is analyzed to improve performance, that is self-awareness (consciousness).
- If operations are guided by rules (vs ANN), that is reasoning.
- If rules are augmented as a result of self-awareness (above), that is linguistic-based learning.
- If actions are produced using ANN, that is a kind of instinct or muscle-memory.
- If ANN are modified as history (memory) accumulates, that is a kind of evolution. (resembles DNA gene activation in effect if not in structure).
Not a fan of an equation describing me......................not to mention I'm rubbish at math!
Don't worry, it takes a rather large number of equations.
And many of them are non-linear differential equations.
If you prefer, they can be integral equations.
42 & U
A question science can’t seem to answer
It took science a long long time to answer the question "what is fire made of". Have patience my dude.
Do you know that blue is blue from knowledge of the spectrum of wabelengths? I doesn't seem to be to do with scientific understanding to me.
the experience of blue comes under the word qualia, I'm of the opinion that qualia is an emergent property of information, but hay i sell beds for a living what do i know, lols
Is consciousness a form of intelligence?
Excellent attempt.. thanks 🙏
incredibly made
Consciousness is a characteristic of our universe. All systems with a certain level of complexity will invariably become conscious of it's surroundings. Be that galaxy super-clusters or human heads.
The problem is that scientifically speaking, there are many cases that unimaginably complex systems (as we define "complexity" in our language) never reached to the level that we can observe it to be conscious. In fact, how can we "know" for sure something, someone or anything is conscious with certainty other than our own subjective conscious experience? The problem is that our definitions are always anthropocentric, relative and binary whereas nature (again as we define and imagine "nature" in the language) does not give a F about our interpretations of itself.
The best best is that consciousness is primary and all else (if there is anything else remaining...) as secondary.
@@konnektlive Watch some tom campbell interviews and read his book called ''my big toe'' as well, you can also watch some christof koch, giulio tononi's videos, they are neuroscientists who took consciousness as something not directly produced by the brain, but something fundamental to the universe,enjoy!
I dream, therefore I am a dream.
Diana ai facut o treaba fantastica. Bravo!
Feel that the approach was flawed and wrong beyond repair, the question is how can the brain realtime model environments never seen, add to that the speed is much faster then realtime in dreams.
You walk in to a room and its prerendered when you step in with paintings carpets, walk into a wood and its prerendered into the smallest detail, no that process do not take place in brain. You can have stunning experiences with 3D scenes that simply could not be rendered into a computer because the lens needed simply do not exist in reality, so noone would come up with the idea to try to simulate it. You can dream about realtime flights over scenery that is unimaginable flying in a cardboard box.
And **THE WEIRD THING** there is no model pregenerated, and it is all rendered ***ON THE FLY*** stepping in to a room, looking out the window. All the paintings you see on the wall, the carpet the wallpaper pattern "and it is never any wallpapar i have seen" one would think that the brain would use familiar paintings and wallpapers from home. Never not even dreaming walking in to your own home. Its there rendered for you on the fly, new settings, new perspectives that would be hard to model if not impossible.
The brain is both slow and underdimensioned from a storing point view to hold the data, no the rendering takes place elsewhere ***AND THAT IS A FACT***, but one can wonder what it is that we tap into when dreaming and is it always with us even in awake state.
Consciousness is just thoughts and senses, but there seem to be more. I am not sure that is part of consciousness.
But accepting the thought that something can prerender "a reality driven context on the fly", may be a bit worrying because one can start to question if not reailty isn't just a concensus of all awoken minds. But what about all the animals and biological life, well was they really there before we discovered them. What about good luck bad luck and carma if all just is dreamed up, what about sickness well your guess is as good as mine. I am not sure prerendering needs a plan i am not sure that consciousness need one either. I like Solaris by Stanislav Lem because you must question the dream world and if it is aware about its decisions.
You should do one on selfreflection, that is a more subtle subject then conciousness. Machines do not need selfrefliction, AI's do, the idea of an entity that can reflect upon its actions. What is the "I" without awareness?
Does the I exist without being aware and selfreflective to be able to reflect upon ones actions seem to serve selfpurpose among higher organisms, but simpler organisms also make choices, but there are not aware of them so a choice without awareness is just an instinct?
If a gepard hesitate attacking its prey dependent on distance does that mean the gepard aware, does it make a thought thru choice, was it selfreflection?
Is selfreflection only a mirroring of ones choices outcome in the mind, does it require awareness, does it require a thought process. Or is that also instinct?
How could we separate choices made by instinct from choices made by selfreflection?
Is selfreflection just a feedback loop with some options?
I suggest you go and check out what has been happening in neuroscience over the past decade or two.
Simply going off how you eel how how you think or assume you think is really NO way to get to any underlying understanding.
From what you say you have some fundamental misunderstandings regarding the brain and activity, and what we have discovered and demonstrated.
All the nonsense about a room being pre rendered is just wrong, entirely. That is not how we see things, that is on basic level not how we perceive what is in front of us. Just because you assume that is what you see is no reason to think that is valid. Your brain builds the idea of the perception of the full scene, before you actually see it in it's entirety. Our sight is just not that good or reliable. In fact none of our senses are.
If our eyes were so good, there would be no need of glasses. We would also NOT have optical illusions. An optical illusion merely shows the problems and shortcomings of our senses.
You also think about something BEFORE you are actually aware of thinking about it. Which has some consequences on free will, depending on how you view it.
Check out Doc RV Ramachandran. He is damn good, he is also pretty engaging.
Something politicians are lacking.
*sigh*
The Sufi mysticist Idries Shah had an interesting proposal about just what consciousness is. We might only be antennae, or vessels, for some external omniprescent "field" which we conceptualize as consciousness. In his words, albeit paraphrased, consciousness is merely the universe observing itself. Because we, through the scientific method, aren't making much progress in finding the source of consciousness within ourselves, might it not be plausible that it's an external phenomenon?
The "antenna" theory definitely makes the most sense to me, way more sense than the materialist view of consciousness. We're just picking up some kind of larger "signal." The really interesting part is... what is this signal? Where'd it come from? What generates and sustains it, and why? What are its capabilities?
If I damage the brain, I damage a persons ability to remember, speak, even think. So I think it's clear whatever's making conciousness is directly tied to the brain, and not some external thing.
The issue with the mystic ideas is they're not falsifiable, they don't make testable predictions.
@@Mandragara I don't think the dividing line between conscious and not conscious is that easy to draw. Consciousness isn't exclusive to healthy brains - it's clear to see that someone suffering from alzheimers is conscious and "themselves" for a long time as the illness hollows out their brain.
No. None of that makes any sense at all. It is simply speculation of the the most baseless sort. Indeed, flights of Fancy.
To be a receiver would mean one would be receiving something. What exactly? There simply is no reason we re receiving anything externally in such a manner.
This supposedly makes more sense than a materialist view? What makes any sense regarding dualism?
Are dogs concious? Are dogs simply material, or they receiving this incredibly vague mysterious and unknown; I suppose we would need call it energy, too? Are dogs also mysteriously dualist or merely meat machines?
How about cat's? Mice? Magpies? Beatles? Worms? Bacteria?
What exactly separates us from the other lifeforms? Where do you draw the line? Why are we apparently special?
Can you answer any of this remotely reasonably and logically, without resorting to the kind of wishful, arrogant, anthropocentrically human centred special position nonsense, baseless assertion and special pleading that would be fitting in the most smug of typical religions, or hairy fairy woo woo claptrap of the well practised Deepak Chopra type charlatan.
I have yet to hear anything remotely like reason or an argument to consider anything more than natural processes. Any evidence absolutely cannot point any other way. Unless someone has now just lately discovered how the supernatural could be detected, discovered or demonstrated.
Very often the argument proffered is simply a classic argument from incredulity or ignorance.
@@Mandragara
The brain certainly seems to play a role, but again, it seems far more plausible to me that its role is that of "receiver" rather than source. To me, the phenomenon of consciousness is much more vast and far-reaching than the individual human brain. Whatever consciousness is, it is not reducible to a lump of physical matter between our ears. I suppose this is probably the main question that has been vexing us since mankind could even think of such things: what is the relation of mind to matter? Are they separate? Which is a more fundamental reality? And despite all of our scientific know-how and technological prowess, we're still basically no closer to knowing the answer to these truly fundamental questions.
Nice!
So, what is consciousness?
3 blue cats
It isnt something because you can be conscious of something. It isnt nothing, it is present and counscious so it cannot be nothing. You cant know it in a subject object relationship because it is always a subject in whatever you find. Consciousness is you on your deepest level, because you are conscious.
Upanishads (Hinduism) says consciousness is not confined to your head. It is infinite with no boundaries and the source of time, space, and matter. It is the God of Hinduism also known as formless impersonal spirit or Brahman. Its nature is existence-consciousness- bliss (sat-chit-ananda). It is reflected in our minds as the "I" sense. It's a rational approach to spirituality. I know I exist. Nobody can deny their own existence. Look up NDE of Georgia Rodonia on UA-cam. He was a scientist who was assassinated by the KGB yet he found out his consciousness existed outside his body! An amazing NDE account for sure.
This content should be post somewhere else. A bit out of place here IMO.
When you want to know what consciousness and life is, and you really interested in those question, well, maybe you should read something about the substance DMT and maybe give it a try for yourself.
It is something different as you expected and yet, if you experience it, there is the big feeling that you knew it all the time.
You have seen it before and it knows who you are.
There is a great book from Rick Strassman - DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
Just read it and maybe you have a clue what is going on here.
Great video, but I think you nailed it at the end there, consciousness is an emergent property, that comes from memory, how memories are formed and replayed is getting closer to what consciousness actually is
The mistake this video makes, in my opinion, is confusing the "consciousness" with "self".
You can still be conscious with almost no sense of self. Consciousness is just the phenomena of experience. Nothing more.
Self is a collaboration of awareness of a single conscious experience tied with memories that also seem attached to this continuing experience of "self". You can also throw in the experience of volition to this, although I am not sure if this is essential. But the first two definitely are. In my opinion, memory is the biggest contributor to "self". Whereas consciousness, plain and simple, is just awareness. A deaf and blind person can still be conscious without a single thought in their head.
It could be easier to say, there are many times in your life don't remember, but you were still consciously experiencing at that time despite the lack of memory. Yet a computer could have a memory storage of everything that has ever happened to it with zero experience of any of those events.
I apologise for the repeating and rambling 😂
Shouldn't we consider consciousness as a virtual reality running on a physical hardware that is the brain. From inside this virtual world (i.e. the first person point of view), virtual doesn't appear virtual at all, but real, while it's only an appearance. Under this interpretation, feelings, sensations, the self etc. are entities that only exist in this virtual world. They don't exist as such in the physical world. The only thing that exist in the "real" world is a brain made of neurons. Asking the question of how can neurons "create consciousness" is making a fundamental error. When we say that the brain "exists" and our feelings, the self, qualia "exist", the meaning of "exist" in these two cases are completely different. (Existing in the real world vs existing in a virtual world running on a real world hardware). Most people trying to solve the mystery of consciousness don't seem to grasp this rather basic dichotomy.
We should get back to Emmanuel Kant and his distinction between a "phenomenal" world (i.e. the virtual reality running on the brain's hardware) and a "noumenal" world (i.e. the real, physical world). If you consider this distinction, it's quite easy to understand that everything that "exists" in the phenomenal world does not necessarily "exist" in the noumenal world.
Operational Definitions Simplify
- If input from sensors is acted upon, that is awareness.
- If records of actions are kept, that is memory.
- If such memory is analyzed to improve performance, that is self-awareness (consciousness).
- If operations are guided by rules (vs ANN), that is reasoning.
- If rules are augmented as a result of self-awareness (above), that is linguistic-based learning.
- If actions are produced using ANN, that is a kind of instinct or muscle-memory.
- If ANN are modified as history (memory) accumulates, that is a kind of evolution. (resembles DNA gene activation in effect if not in structure).
Very beautifully made!!!
I have a few remarks/questions, though.
Consciousness: it has several meanings
- Consciousness is sometimes used as the opposite of unconsciousness. It refers to whether I’m aware of it or not.
- Consciousness as awareness of the self is something different.
The I that experiences the world around me: the awareness of the world around me and the image my mind builds. That is something different. Research by Steven Laureys (Coma Science Group at Université de Liège, Belgium) revealed that different regions get activated. You have one region for the “inner world” (more the awareness of being) and one region for the “outer world” (the internal construction of an image based on data from the senses)
“The images have been conjured up in my mind’s eye. None of it was real.”
- Is it proven it is conjured up in my mind’s eye? Everything with dreams is still a big mystery. Maybe there are different kinds of dreams?
- What is real? You mean rather: it was not in this universe as we know it when we are awake. (And we still know very little about our universe. And what we perceive is only a very limited projection. It is very different from what’s in the universe)
Sensation of the cats vs neurons firing. It’s not proven that neurons generate the sensation of the cat? There is a correlation. Our brain works could also work like receiver.
Blue of the sky, sensation of cats, …: the image of a (real) cat is also the result of the processing of data from our eyes. Each eye has 3 BW cameras, one is more sensitive to green, the 2nd one is more sensitive to red and the 3rd one is more sensitive to blue. It is remarkable how this data is converted into something we experience as colour. And with each colour we also can associate emotions. It could have been possible that we saw the three BW images as one image where every colour feels like three intensities of a different kind. It’s remarkable that we perceive things in a hue, saturation, intensity space rather than in a Red, Green, Blue space.
Also what I experience what’s a square, a circle or… a cat. Our brain makes an inner image of an environment based on the scanning data from our eyes. The image is always a construction by our brain and/our consciousness.
“I think therefore I am” - people with lots of experience with meditation can stop their thinking. Personally I also have the feeling in some conditions that I can stop my thinking. This was written in an era when people think that it is impossible to stop thoughts. I think with the newest knowledge, we might consider “I am therefore I am.” Where the first “I am” refers to the fact of being aware of having a self.
“The idea that the mind is separate from the brain is what Descartes called dualism.”
Dualists vs materialists
If you’re a real scientist, then you’re not in one of the two camps. If you’re in a camp you must be aware that you BELIEVE in a theory that is not proven yet.
You even have the “sceptics” who say they don’t believe in any paranormal/parapsychological/… thing. They are the die-hard materialists. They must be aware that they believe in a dogma. Research by dr Kris De Meyer (King’s College London, maker of the documentary film “Right Between Your Ears”) reveals that the same regions in their brain are activated as for people who believe that the earth is flat.
Modern brain imaging techniques are todays telescopes: that’s right. But like with telescopes we only see very little. We’ve never taken a picture of another star but the sun. Even the closest star is only one pixel. With the modern brain imaging techniques, we can observe activity in regions. But the resolution is still very very low. We’ve never observed a thought or an emotion.
Is it sure we don’t dream? After doing some exercise I have the feeling that the dreaming starts from the moment I’m in bed. Only I remember the last scenes of a sleep cycle. I discovered that I remember the 2 last scenes of my dream when I wake up. But when I don’t write it down immediately, the memory of the before last scene gets lost immediately. And the last scene fades away from my memory as well.
Can my gut be conscious?
As long as we have no clue what consciousness is, closing doors is never a good idea. Science works better without dogmas. Maybe it plays a role. Maybe exploring the idea alone may help us to find a bigger theory.
“We’re lots of electrons and quarks put together to make a human being.”
The human BODY exists of electrons and quarks. Whether a human BEING equals a human BODY is only theory. And for some it’s a dogma. There is not even the beginning of the proof of this theory.
Remember. Our knowledge of the world around us is still very elementary. It may be equivalent of the upper atom and the whole iceberg.
- In 1900 we were not sure whether atoms existed
- In the early 1900’s we discovered electrons
- The name quark is only invented in 1963
How do you get consciousness?
It is still the subject of a very challenging research. The proposed ideas can lead to the answer.
- Maybe there’s a magical ingredient
- Maybe there’s an ingredient in each basic building block in the universe (in each electron, quark… or string)
- To explain gravity, Einstein put the world vision upside down. Gravity was the result of the bending of spacetime. Maybe our material world is the result of consciousness.
The option that our universe is the result of consciousness gets lots of opposition. It amazes me very much. As a scientist, I’d expect nothing less than an open attitude.
Consciousness is your soul.
Consciousness is a fundamental force but because they do not understand what consciousness is they continue to dismiss it
Electrical activity is the easiest way to explain consciousness!
And perhaps most ignorant way as well
Consciousness.
It is a pattern that linked with parts of cognition.
You're babbling, no sense.
I collapse my own wave function therefore I am
liked it, also so water ISN'T wet
But "wetness" is a concept of consciousness.
Without something to be conscious of it, water is just water.
Without something to be conscious of it where do you find water??
@@kolarz2128 It doesn't need to be "found". It exists as what it is.
Whether our perception of it bears much connection to it's actual "form" is a matter for debate, but whatever "water" is, it would be doing whatever it does whether anything was watching it or not.
@@ParedCheese i meant something else. Water no matter in what form cannot exist without counsciousness which percieves it. Without counsciousness whats evidence for existance of whatever? If something exist it means you are counsciouss of it doesnt it?
@@ParedCheese all i say is - nothing can exist independent of our counsciousness. Not our mind which percieves in its own limitations but counsciousness in which it exists.
@@kolarz2128 No. "Things" exist outside consciousness.
*Our perception* of their existence is a product of our consciousness, but the things themselves have an independent existence.
Your suggestions imply that the world around you would cease to exist if you closed your eyes.