Thanks! One of the clearest and fairest discussions about the Hard Problem out there. Could you share your opinion on this (only if you've got nothing better to do)? Is trying to explain how experience is possible in purely physical terms possible, or is it a category error? Seems like a category error to me. _At the very least,_ there must be some property of matter that we don't understand or know about--although I don't think that's what's going on...
@@BugRib In case you are not only interested in Jeffrey Kaplans answer: It is not a category error, since systems can have emergent/higher features/functions. An example would be the fluidity of water, which cannot be observed in a single H2O-molecule. In abstract: A system can perform functions, that none of its parts can on their own. Therefor, no single neuron has to be or even can be conscious on its own.
@@petermeyer6873 - But wetness or fluidity is just a coarse-grained description of the behavior of zillions of H2O molecules. The same is true of every other weakly “emergent” phenomenon, including life. Even if we can’t currently explain the “emergence” of a particular phenomenon, there’s no reason in principle that it can’t be explained in terms of its parts. But experience isn’t like that. The way “red” appears to me, or the way pain feels, can’t be derived even in principle from the behavior of a bunch of parts. For one thing, any physical system can in principle be exhaustively described in purely quantitative terms, at least according to standard physicalism. But it’s logically impossible to derive the purely qualitative way that “red” appears to us in experience in purely quantitative terms. No mathematical operation will ever spit out the pure quality of experienced red. This is one reason (there are others) why experience cannot be explained in terms of weak (i.e. non-magical) emergence. This is also the reason why lots of philosophers and scientists seriously (claim to) believe that these experiential qualities literally don’t exist at all. I agree with philosopher Galen Strawson on this: That is the silliest claim ever made with a straight face by an intelligent person. When physicalism forces one to take a position like that, it’s probably time to give up physicalism. IMHO.
@@BugRib Im not in the least referring to emergence as something, that appears unexplainable from the features of the parts forming a system - quite the contrary! I totally agree with your analogue continuation of the water example. Im just pointing out, that emergent features of a system sometimes are hard to foresee and thus pose a problem to understanding in the way that they might not be intuitive and therefor may be "hard" to accept. (And frankly this is exactly what I suspect for Chalmers to be the "hard" in his definition of the hard problem: He has a hard time accepting the simplicity of the answer to his question) Thus emergent appearance of features often might be kind of rejected at first glance. It just sometimes feels that emergence cant be a complete explanation for some features and something "more" is still expected and felt to have been overlooked, even when there is simply nothing to be added to it. I think consciousness is just such a case of overexpectations of some, who are not satisfied by the most obvious explanation that the current status of science points to. With what you call "qualitative" experiences (Id rather call these "subjective") it seems to me to be the same. And by the way, I dont see so much Philosophers going so far denying, that these exist, but rather claiming that these are not as much stand alone features as they seem, but more the other side of the allready known, same coin (the subjective, much reduced experience of an objective world through senses). I also dont see such a sharp division between what you call qualitative and quantitative features: First, if I remember correctly from university decades ago, there is more cathegories than only these 2 and second any quantitative feature is also a qualitative one. In sum I have to disagree with your statement on experience: The way red appears to you or the way pain feels to you can be derived exactly the same with all physical parts that make, feed info to and support your personal nervous-system. Also any simulation of these parts forming that system - if it could only be carried out, would show that. Your experiences are no doubt quite subjective and therefor unique, with that uniqueness deriving from the sheer complexity of your system, but there is nothing Ive come across, that even just points out to experience beeing in need of something supernatural/magical to exist or be explained. And you so far have not given any hint to why that should be either. You have just expressed ( and an expression is not an explanation) how counter-intuitive ( "...the silliest claim ever...") it seems to you, that what you experience subjectively could be just an emergent function of your nervous system. Lets try another analogy, even so Im sure it wont work well, as there is allmost nothing that consiousness can be compared to: Todays passenger cars have evolved (by intentional design) to be a good means of transporting humans along streets. The human brain and consciousness have evolved (by natural evolution = unintentional design) to be a good means of solving problems humans come across during their struggle through life. The passenger car can also transport other beeings as passengers and some dead stuff quite well to a certain extend. The human brain and consciousness have prooven enormously capable at solving problems far beyond the scope of what humans encountered during their developement from wild up to today. A passenger car fails at transporting another passenger car as a passenger, as it was never designed for that recursive task. Consciousness has a "hard" time understanding consciousness, as it was never designed for that recursive task.
@@profjeffreykaplan They are very good except some zionist ant......hite frankfurt school proselytising against europeans. But you can't help that because you are jewish.
What value in a clever clear-thinking teacher. I'm not the shiniest penny in the till but while Kaplan's presentation is less than 30 minutes, he was able to get across a complex topic even I could grasp. No mean feat.
Thank you for a clear explanation of the hard problem. There is an explanation that “solves” it though (please bear with me). Here is a brief summary: 1) First person subjective consciousness is the one irrefutable fact of reality. Remember, illusions are also 1st person subjective experiences. 2) Objective phenomena (world, others, even self) are appearances within consciousness. They may or may not have reality outside of consciousness, outside of appearance. 3) Objective (physical) reality is a closed system, and thus has no apparent use and no apparent explanation for subjective consciousness. 4) Therefore, the most logical explanation for reality is a form of idealism in which the stuff of realty is experience, and objective phenomena are law-governed appearances or illusions. There are definitely esthetic concerns with this explanation ( for example, it’s not obvious how more than one actual subject is involved. “Others” in this scenario are “just “ appearances also. So much more to discuss, but that’s the basic idea, and I’d love to hear logical objections to it.
Those categories are weird and illogical. Dualism makes no sense. If there's some paralel "dimension" of spiritual phenomena - it's still a part of physics, we just don't know how to poke it yet. So you still have to decide between optimistic reductionism or mysterianism. And latter sounds like a scientific wrapper for religion. Why would something that objectivelly exists be absolutely incomprehensible?
But if Epiphenomenalism is true, how come we’re able to describe that we’re conscious? If consciousness has no way of interacting with your physical brain, why does your physical brain know that you are conscious? How is it able to contemplate consciousness and talk about it with others when, if epiphenomenalism is to be believed, the physical brain itself does not experience or even know it is conscious. To experience is to interact, for us to know the existence of anything we must be able to interact in any way with it, including conscious. If consciousness really was a byproduct that never interacted with the physical world, we’d still feel stuff but the brain would never have a reason to talk about consciousness. You may say that it’s a coincidence that the physical brain believes itself to be conscious but it’s a very unlikely coincidenceness. The idea of consciousness occurring to an unconscious brain would be like the colour red occurring to a brain that can’t process red. And how is it able to accurately talk about consciousness? As if it’s experienced it itself.
Guys, these problems are very old and I am amazed that one can talk about them without referring to the past, as if we moderns and American researchers and academics were the smartest guys ever who did philosophy. Did you know that in Buddhism, a religious psychology and philosophy that arose in the fifth century BC, the number of types of consciousness (called "dharmas") varies from 8 to no less than 89? You probably don't. That's how narrow and oblivious of other traditions this whole thing is! Chalmers is a Harvard version of Descartes, i.e. philosophy without the beauty of sixteenth-century French and Latin prose. A very important distinction since philosophy is artistry, too. The parallelism or correspondence between physical phenomena and consciousness resembles arguments made by Spinoza or Leibnitz mutatis mutandis. The easy problems of consciousness are related with what Aristotle calls the material and efficient (be)causes; the hard problem has everything to do with the other two (be)causes: the definition and final purpose of consciousness. Obviously, given the nature (you can call it it a "bias", one that is rooted in philosophy by the way, although most scientists would deny it) of present Western scientific inquiry, the last two questions can never be answered satisfactorily. On the one hand, scientists are telling us they have observed some physiological phenomena related with brain activity and WHICH THEY CONSIDERS TO BE THE COMPLETE CAUSE OR EXPLANATION of consciousness (what about simple correlation or just necessary condition, huh? who says light would not be light without an eye to see it?)) and then they go on to say that consciousness is nothing but a subjective apprehension of sensory data. I mean, talk of being BLIND to what one is doing because one has hidden assumptions one is unwilling or incapable to examine! When scientists say the physiological processes explain consciousness are they observing the explanatory nature of the aforesaid processes? Are they actually perceiving the causality? Not at all. This is a very biased, incomplete and hasty conclusion. It is a CONCEPTUAL INTERPRETATION of SOME sensory data. But scientists treat those scientific observations, the shock and pony show of chemical and electric reactions, as if they transcended mere subjectivity and were capable by themselves to explain the brain. Then, oblivious of the activity of analyzing the data, they blithely explain consciousness WITHOUT referring to its conceptual activity at all. That won't do, sorry; and the fact that we accept such errors so easily and unquestioningly is a testament to the deeply entrenched prejudices we harbor in our minds ever since science and its slavish philosophical progeny of empiricism, rationalism and critical idealism have had the final word on everything. All the hard problems of consciousness come from the naive realistic view, one Hume and Kant adopted without examining it, that the knower is a separate entity from the known, that the observer and the observed are and can never be one. The truth is knowledge is immediate, not transcendent. Here is the solution to all the futile paradoxes and unnecessary riddles.
I don't immediately understand how that should resolve any problem... you are saying that the observer and the observed are the same... so consciousness is a thing that tricks us to not realize that? I feel as if the redness of red is being observed... not as if I am that too... so?? please explain how it is that this explains (in some factual sense) consciousness. Thank you
.I dont think it would be too dogmatic to clearly differentiate between the natural sciences-physics maths chemistry biology - and the Social Sciences-psychology Philosophy sociology etc. In trying to understand/explain "conciousness", the natural sciences are less speculative, based as they are on evidence, testing, experimentation etc- what is called the scientific method . .
Simply explained! The "Hard Problem" of Consciousness - Why We Misunderstand It 🧠 Introduction: A seemingly unsolvable puzzle Imagine biting into a juicy lemon. You will immediately experience the intense sour taste. But why does it feel that way? Why do we have conscious experiences at all? This question is referred to in philosophy as the "difficult problem of consciousness". 💡 The apparent riddle: "How do the electrical signals in our brain give rise to conscious experiences such as the taste of a lemon, the color red or the feeling of joy?" Many philosophers and scientists consider this problem to be insoluble. They argue that no matter how well we understand the activity of the brain, we can never explain why conscious experience arises from it. But is that really true? Or are we making fundamental mistakes when thinking about the problem? 🔍 The three big errors in thinking 1. The Layer Error Imagine you're watching a movie. You can describe it in two ways: • Technical: "Pixels in different colors shine on the screen" • Content: "An exciting chase through Paris" Both descriptions are correct - they describe the same event on different levels. It would be nonsensical to ask: "But how do the pixels become the chase?" ⚠ First error in thinking: We confuse different levels of description of the same process and construct an apparent riddle from it. 2. The Perspective Error Think of a football match: • From the outside perspective, you can see 22 players running after a ball • From the inside perspective of a player, you experience effort, tactics and team spirit Again, both perspectives describe the same event. The question "How do the feelings arise from the running players?" is misleading. ⚠ Second error in thinking: We mix the outside and inside perspectives and wrongly expect that one would have to explain the other. 3. The definition error "Why does red feel red?" This question is like "Why is water wet?". We define water precisely by its wetness. In the same way, we define "red" by our experience of color. ⚠ Third fallacy: We ask questions that are already circular by our own definitions. 📝 A Better Approach Instead of getting caught up in these errors of reasoning, we should ask: • How does consciousness develop in biological systems? • What role does it play for organisms? • How does it enable us to navigate the world? 🤔 Frequently Asked Questions Q: Does this mean that consciousness is not mysterious? A: Consciousness is fascinating and complex, but it is not an unsolvable mystery. We just need to investigate it in the right way. Q: Does this approach explain why we feel anything in the first place? A: It shows that this question is wrongly posed. It's like asking, "Why is a circle round?" - experience is part of the definition of consciousness. Q: What does this mean for the exploration of consciousness? A: We can focus on the actual mechanisms and functions of consciousness instead of getting caught up in philosophical pseudo-problems. 📌 Key Points • The "serious problem" arises from errors in thinking • We confuse different levels of description • We mix different perspectives • We ask circular questions • A Better Approach Examines the Biological Development and Function of Consciousness
I think you are confusing sensorial experience with consciousness, if you limit consciousness to sensorial experience then there is no mystery at all it is just interpretation of sensitive information. I would argue that consciousness is more about the delimitation of oneself
@@wolfgangstegemann9375 Unlike simple sensations, consciousness involves a level of reflection and self-awareness. Human consciousness allows us to reflect on what it means to feel pain, to ask why we feel pain, and even to question the very nature of that sensation. This type of metacognition goes beyond sensory experience and is an important aspect of consciousness. We have a continuity of identity that allows us to distinguish between past, present, and future experiences, helping to form a sense of "self" over time. This conscious "self" is not merely a collection of sensory experiences but something that interprets and organizes them.
For me, consioussness doesn´t seem like an epiphenomenon and it looks like subjective experience does have some causality over the phisical world. For instance, there wouldn´t be philosophers phisically talking and writing about the hard problem of consciusness if consciousness didn´t exist, it would be too much coincidence for zombies to talk so coherently about something never experienced. Thanks for the videos! I found the channel today and it really deserves much more subscribers, nice clarity and rythm, saludos de argentina.
@@goldie6634 but I only know I'm not a zombie because I know of my consciousness. But how could my zombie body also be aware of this if my conscious being wasn't physically interacting with it in some way? Like he said, if you throw out all physical connection it's just a coincidence. this is why I don't agree with epiphenomenon or even dualism. I guess I must be mysterionist according to these definitions.
@@HopUpOutDaBed it’s your zombie body that’s “aware” of it in the first place. Even a simple AI can be “aware” of a fact in that sense. Your conscious experience merely reflects that awareness. It doesn’t actually affect the awareness, it only mirrors it.
There wouldn't be philosophers talking about the existence of God if God didn't exist. Or unicorns, or Atlantis. We make these words, we give them meaning, in fact consciousness is just a "sensation" we cannot really describe. And the cool thing about the brain is that it experiences whatever we believe in, that's its purpose, adapt, believe whatever it takes to survive. If consciousness is outside of physical reality, why do we need sleep? Why do chemicals affect our perceptions? Why do genetics play a role in our view of the world? Can we say that a human without any sense of perception of the outside reality is conscious? Conscious of what? The problem with the "hard problem of consciousness" is that it detaches the two realms and puts consciousness into a magical box. It poses the problem by already defining an answer. All these thought experiments make it seem as if we know more about the world than scientists who dedicated decades studying the merely "physical" reality. And it makes their job that much harder by mystifying our sense of consciousness.
@@rayremnant.u the existence of philosophers taking about the existence of god or unicorns or Atlantic or consciousness does NOT mean any of these things have any physical existence. It only means they exist as concepts.
I think that trying to solve the hard problem gives rise to the hard problem. We're trying to look for reasons why and how consciousness emerges. But the why and how ARE physical, objective reasons for something which clearly is not physical. Consciousness is to the brain what a story is to a book. Or a law is to a piece of legislation (or legal document). The story itself is not physical but the book contains physical elements that describe it and express it. But how does the stuff of the book impact the story? It doesn't. The story is independent of the book. The book is only a holder/container for the story. And there can be multiple copies of books which project the story. The story itself exists on it's own. It is a an abstract conceptual thing. Only when matter comes to influence and interact with the story can it be experienced.
The story exists on its own? How so, why do you believe this, and what evidence can you provide to demonstrate that it exists independent of physical hardware (a 🧠)? Consciousness has only ever been found to exists in brains. Doesn’t mean it cannot exists elsewhere, but simply means we don’t have reason to believe it does.
Appreciated breakdown ^^ The Hard Problem seems like 1) unfalsifiable to differentiate and 2) requiring committal to its existence despite any number of suggestion that consciousness is emergant, regardless if otherwise.
I do agree with Chalmers that consciousness seems to be a property of reality. But I would not call that view dualism and say that it’s completely separate of the physical world, because we have to remember that changes in the physical world, like the touch of the molecules of ice in the molecules of my hands, do affect my conscious state by creating a subject feeling of cold, for example. So there’s has to be a connection between conscious and the physical world. They must be, at the end, all properties of a single and connected reality.
I hear you but a dualist view presents itself AS a connected reality. No one can deny that the function of consciousness MUST be able to interact with the physical world (in this example, I THINK to move my arm and a bunch of physical stuff happens and my arm moves. One connected reality.
@@denniscalero9396 that’s true. This is a fascinating topic, maybe the most fascinating of all. I didn’t use the example of the other way around because there’s some research that claims that you decide to move your arm, neurologically speaking, even before you are conscious about it. What amazes me, as someone that work with artificial intelligence, is the existence of a subject experience. I think it’s completely possible to build a program that can mimic a human in every way, and yet the subject experience would not be necessary for that. Like in the zombie argument. Nonetheless, the consciousness is the most certain aspect of reality. Like in Descartes doubt, it is our starting ground to understand the world, it’s what’s left when we cut everything that might not be real, and yet it’s the aspect of reality that we understand less, to not say that we don’t understand nothing about it.
@@alaor6782 a dualist phenomenon would explain that too: your mind, separate from the brain, decides to move the arm, and the movement starts before the decision to more is registered in that portion of the brain. Weird right?
@@denniscalero9396precisely! This explains the puzzle of how baseball or cricket players are able to decide whether to swing at the ball in a fraction of a second, well within the 1 to 2 second time to decide scientists have measured.
NAVOMITTO: A New Approach to the Hard Problem The "hard problem" of consciousness refers to the mystery of subjective experience: how something physical like the brain can give rise to interior, conscious qualities like the redness of red or the painfulness of pain. Philosophers have struggled for centuries to solve this puzzle. The NAVOMITTO framework offers a novel approach to solving the hard problem. At its core, NAVOMITTO sees reality as composed of illusory dimensions and perspectives that differentiate across clarions. It's this process of differentiation across clarions that gives rise to consciousness and qualia. Clarions are the key to the solution. Lower clarions contain relatively undifferentiated perspectives that likely correspond to primitive forms of awareness. As perspectives differentiate into more parallel perspectives across higher clarions, richer conscious experiences emerge. Consciousness "scales up" as clarions increase. Subclarions within each clarion also play an important role. Subclarionic dynamics contain the finely differentiated information processing that grounds our qualia. Though embedded within a given clarion of consciousness, subclarions may bridge the gap to neural processes. The vocabulary of NAVOMITTO - illusion, dimensions, perspectives, clarions, subclarions - provides new conceptual tools for understanding how consciousness arises. Traditionally, philosophers framed the problem in terms of physical substances - like neurons - that seemed fundamentally separate from subjective experience. But clarions reframe the debate in a more fertile way. While NAVOMITTO presents only a high-level solution at this point, it points to a promising new direction for tackling the hard problem. Consciousness may emerge as an inevitable byproduct of the differentiation and integration of perspectives across clarions and subclarions - a product of the illusory structure of reality itself. In this way, NAVOMITTO offers a potential answer to the hard problem: consciousness arises through the process of differentiation across clarions, grounded and textured by subclarionic dynamics, and made possible by the illusory nature of reality. With further development and refinement, NAVOMITTO's novel conceptual tools may finally help philosophers crack the mystery of consciousness. NAVOMITTO: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Understanding Reality Nothingness and existence are two sides of the same coin Illusion 1-there is Illusion. Reality is made of Illusion. Illusion is the whole coin of nothingness-existence. Illusion is all aspects of reality from zero (nothingness) to infinity (existence at its most actualized form). Illusion is the paradox itself. Illusion can be seen in different clarion through the process of differentiation. Dimension (Universal) 2-there is Dimension. each Dimension describe a concept or property or quality or quantity or relations or changes or process or anything else. each Dimension is unique in its own way but it can be seen as an interaction of infinite other Dimensions. in other way each Dimension is entangled with Illusion and All Dimensions are emergent from Illusion. Dimension exists in different Clarions and different Perspective. Illusion can be seen as infinite Dimentions. Perspective (Particular) 3-There is perspective. The set of perspectives in different clarions makes the dimension. Any conscious or unconscious entity can only pass through successive perspectives in different clarions. It is not possible for an entity to pass to parallel perspectives. Each perspective contains unique information that describes the dimension in that clarion. Each perspective manifests its own unique qualia. Clarion 4-there is Clarion. Clarion determines how many Perspective exist in that particular Clarion (in a specific Dimension). Clarion can be any number from Zero to Maxima. Differentiation (enamation) 5-There is Differentiation. Differentiation is the process of enamation that involves separation of superimposed information (at previous lower clarion) into more clear information (at next higher clarion) that leads to increase in clarity, But losing of information's. Differentiation creates Reciprocal Hierarchy Structure of Dimentions. (For example: At a lower Clarion , you may have a Perspective that contains information about red and green (Particular red-green). There is no green or red in this lower Clarion Perspective but there is only red-green. Through the process of differentiation, the information in this Perspective (Perspective red-green) can be separated into 2 simpler, more clear Perspectives at next clarion (Perspective red + Perspective green). red Perspective is the parallel Perspective of green and red-green is the parent Perspective at lower Clarion. So if you move from red-green Perspective to red Perspective you will gain clarity but at the same time you lose information of green Perspective) Nothingness 6-there is Clarion 0. Clarion Zero contains no Perspective. Clarion 0 is nothingness. Clarion 0 contains all of illusion as potential. Nothingness is the result of superimposition of all Dimentions. All Dimensions are common in Clarion Zero. Clarion 0 is the only simple. Existence 7-there is Clarion 1. At Clarion one, there is one Perspective in Dimention. The information in Clarion 1 includes the superimposition of all Perspectives in Clarion 2. Clarion One contains all information found in Dimention, but in an undifferentiated form and looks simple because it is viewed from the perspective of Clarion One. Clarion One means Dimention in the most uncertain state. Inflectia 8-Between Clarion Zero and Clarion Maxima, there is an intermediate Clarion that has the largest amount of Parallel Perspectives. From clarion zero to inflectia, the number of Parallel Perspectives for each clarion increases, and from inflectia to clarion maxima, the number of Parallel Perspectives for each clarion decreases. Perspectives at Inflectia has the most complexity while Perspectives at Clarion 1 and Platonica has the minimum Complexity. Platonica 9-there is Clarion (Maxima-1). In Clarion (Maxima-1), Dimention needs another Differentiation to reach Clarion Maxima. Platonica means Dimention in the most certain state. each perspective at Platonica contains the last bit of information in that Dimention. In Platonica, with One differentiation, existence is destroyed and nothingness remains. Platonica is formed from the superimposition of Nothingness in clarion Maxima. Maxima (Infinity) 10-there is Clarion Maxima. In Clarion Maxima, there is no superimposition, and all causes have already occurred, with no change left to be made. In Clarion Maxima, there can be no further differentiation, and there is nothing left to differentiate. Therefore, paradoxically, Clarion Maxima, represent Clarion 0. Maxima can be any number from zero to infinity. Formulas: 11-The number of Parallel Perspectives in Clarion C is calculated through the binomial coefficient with the following formula: N=P!/(C!(P-C)!) In this formula: N=number of Parallel Perspectives in Clarion C P=Platonica Clarion 12-Despite the existence of multiple perspectives in the upper clarions, for a perspective in the lower clarion it is only possible to enter P-C+1 number of perspectives from the upper clarions (for 0
Ty for the excellent presentation. It was recommended by a teacher of advaita vedanta who has referred to Chalmers in a lecture about Consciousness and a logical flaw in The Hard Problem approach.
I'm immensely entertained by the way you introduce deeply complex and cutting edge material and immediately drop "whatever" afterwards, because the details aren't meaningfully informative upon the thing being considered and it's exactly the point at which my brain is coming to that conclusion.
*_You Are Your Brain & Your Brain Is You_** ;* We have yet to find evidence that it's possible, for a _"conscience thinking mind"_ to exist, without a _"living functioning brain"._ If your memories & personality are separate from your brain, _(in a soul),_ then *they would not be effected by damage to the brain.* _(but they are)_ Even though we don't know the exact process by which consciousness arises, it is still _undeniable that it is a brain process that can't occur, separate from the brain._
Even then, the only way to study the effect of brain damage on the _subjective experience_ of a memory is with the cooperation of the experiencing subject. Otherwise, it would remain completely obscure to us. You can correlate it, sure, but it's a correlation derived from the view from within (the experience of a memory) with the observer's view from without (MRI scans, for example), not the other way. So even if we have the entire brain mapped out in the future, it would be _impossible_ to know if there is a problem with a memory without the report of the subject.
1. The brain is a prediction machine. At multiple levels. 2. Most of what the brain 'does' is 'emergent behaviour', (that is it is unintuitively different than the sum of its inputs). 3. Therefore, my brain is constantly having to predict what I am going to feel and do next. 4. As my brain gets better at predicting me, it also gets better at predicting others, which in a social species is highly adaptive. 5. "What it's like" to be doing this all the time gives rise to the internal monlogue, the story telling, and ultimately the impression that mind feels like a separate thing. So it's Optimistic Reductionism, if we can work out how to work backwards from emergent behaviour to underlying cause, and Mysterianism, if we can't.
I like to think that the brain is an abstraction machine. A processor connected to a sensory apparatus. The sensory apparatus includes input and output as well as storage and is all an abstraction of the interaction experience. Without the extraction of the sensory apparatus structure the processor function could not work as there would be no data. Cognative function only begins when the initial sensory stimuli is received. This function begins building sets based on experiences and abstraction of comparative elements. The abstraction of these sets continues to build models to understand and interact with the stimuli. This is the begining of conciousness. There are many model sets being built, allowing the sophistication of an intellect and personality of the individual to grow. There is a plataeu based on requirement of abstraction the individual needs in their enviorment, habit of abstraction and interest in learning or discovering things. This seems to reflect in an individual based on the regular interactive cohorts they keep, and activities they take part in or not. So change the enviorment change the mind. This may not remain my theory if I get feedback that helps me move to a better model or reconcille it to somewhere inbetween. I just think it seems to fit quite well as a process. It is something that came to me when pondering Rene Descartes 'I think therefore I am', and applying concepts of everything being a function to a non well founded universal set model. The idea was how cognition begins, how sets would be formed. I concluded that whilst the thinker could not be sure of anything about themselves they could be sure of the following. That any cognition that occurs would require an abstraction apparatus regardless of form, that any cognition receiving data could gain enough sophistication to identify the 'function set model'. That all ideas sit in the universal set model and that includes the well founded set models. That the reality of the situation must exist as a set model, even if the thinking mind can not find it. That the mind can abstract a model adequate enough to be a non well founded set within the reality set model they are experiencing with some well founded sets inside that greater model. That this is adequate enough for the interactions the mind perceives are taking place, provided the mind continues the quest for understanding.
Thank you for laying out so clearly Chalmer's article, must admit he was brilliant creating the circular reasoning in positing the hard problem and proposing a dualist solution so that the hard problem will forever remain hard and "unsolved", a gordian knot.
@Luigi Simoncini It isn't circular, though. The hard problem is, indeed, a hard problem, and no-one has even come close to offering a physicalist solution to it. You are welcome to suggest one.
@@Brian.001 I believe Dennett has offered a defensible materialist position regarding the subjective experience, as have earlier comments on this show. Disagreeing with one's position is not evidence of the validity of another's, nor is incredulity, imho.
@@ruthoglesby1805 OK, but what do you mean by 'defensible'? If the question is 'how can subjective experience arise within a material brain?' and someone replies that subjective experience is nothing more than objective processes, they might conceivably turn out to be right - who knows - but they haven't in any way explained how this can be the case.
@@Brian.001 I think Dennett's example of a graphic user interface is illustrative. But, it may still be missing your point. My question then is what definition of subjective experience captures the 'essence' beyond the physical?
@@ruthoglesby1805 Well, I think that question carries a presupposition that the essence is, indeed, 'beyond the physical', but I am not claiming that to be the case. I don't know whether subjective experience actually goes beyond the physical. Rather, I know what subjective experience is, from having it, and then my question is 'how can this be a physical phenomenon?' I claim that we do not need a definition of subjective experience. I know that I am in pain, for example, before I even begin to think about definitions. We all know the subjective experience of being in pain - but how can that be nothing other than the firing of C-fibres in the brain? I don't have a clue, and I don't think Dan has either.
As a cognitive scientist, I find myself squarely in the camp which finds the "hard problem" argument unconvincing. The argument is unconvincing for the same reason that many otherwise interesting discussions of consciousness also end up going in circles. We can't seem to reach an agreement on what consciousness is, and as a result many approaches conflate properties of consciousness with properties which are not conscious at all. Confusion is inevitable. Perhaps then it would be useful to begin by thinking about what consciousness ISN'T. I propose that it isn't part of the spectrum of cognitive processing that ranges from the simplest responses of unicellular life to its environment at one end of the spectrum, and goes on to increasingly elaborate neuroanatomical function at the other end. Spiders, fish, mice, mammals: they and we are all functioning in essentially the same way, responding to internal signals that are representations of our environment. What is it "like" to respond in this way? Ask your fingertip when it touches a hot surface. It's a meaningless question. A purely neuroanatomical description will suffice. We don't suppose that there is some homunculus down there at that level of expression, an "experiencer" capable of greater things but fated to the menial toil of relaying the information on to the rest of the organism. There is, as far as we know scientifically, absolutely no evidence of such an awareness at this level. Nor is it needed in any way. When we come to it, consciousness is a very minor recent cognitive feature which seems to manifest for sure in only one species on this entire planet, and arguably not often even then. We may persuade ourselves that most of our cognitive activities are conscious, but nothing could be further from the truth. Even as I'm writing this, almost all of what I'm doing is not being consciously chosen. If you were to hide the keyboard from me, for example, I could probably only locate half of the keys by a conscious exercise of memory, yet my fingers find the positions accurately and without any deliberate assembly of motions. Even my casual intention to type "motions" produced an entire unconscious cascade of appropriate neural activity. Most of my ability to assemble ideas into plausible sequences of inference has thorough long practice become unconscious. The initial practice was indeed deliberate and conscious, but eventually I no longer need to focus my attention on it. I've trained my unconscious mind to do the work. And my unconscious mind has no idea what it's "like" to be an unconscious mind. This is not a hard problem. There's no philosophical conundrum to it. It is undoubtedly a process that runs in human neuroanatomy. The thin layer that I have of introspection and theory of mind and ability to frame abstract propositions and arguments, well, it's half unconscious also. Still, I can knowingly access and manipulate scraps of it, which is amazing, and I can knowingly refuse to do so, which is equally amazing. However, I don't propose that I could recognize what makes this sort of process neurologically distinct from an unconscious process of comparable complexity. Likewise, I wouldn't expect to look at the zeroes and ones inside a computer and be able to infer what processes might be taking place there. It's very cool that we can think about thinking. That requires some capacity for symbolic abstraction, which I strongly suspect requires language - and not just the literal representations of a language such as arithmetic but of a higher order equivalent to algebra. Several species can perform simple arithmetic tasks such as detecting differences between small integer sums. Solving an algebraic equation calls for manipulating abstract symbols whose meaning has yet to be determined. And this degree of cognitive ability seems essential before we can think about abstractions such as thinkers, thoughts, possibilities, impossibilities, and so on. Even then, all this could and often does proceed unconsciously. It took the course of most of human evolution to achieve this much. I can solve simple integrals in my sleep, and compose music, for example. Even, once in a rare while, I'll have a dream in which I wonder whether I'm dreaming, and carry on regardless. I can't exactly tell you what this skilful dreaming is "like," though I can tell you what it's like to awaken with a memory of it. There is a homunculus, and it's me, and it seems to tangibly and smoothly emerge from these other, distinctly unconscious, capabilities as well as reaching down into them a short distance. How is this sort of emergence a "hard" problem? It's just one thin layer of capability. Don't conflate it with all of cognition, because then you'll be obliged to account for all of cognition as if it were conscious, and that sort of overreach is entirely unjustified. It's how we get ridiculous claims such as "the universe must be conscious" or "consciousness requires a quantum substrate."
Jeffrey doesn’t venture into the realm of Idealism because he would probably endanger his professorship for doing so, given the paradigmatic stranglehold of scientific materialism on the dogmatic foundational presumptions that are enforced in our institutions of higher learning-but the fact is there is important work being done that this lecture fails to consider. The deeply flawed presumption that there is such a thing as an objective observer is the most glaring example of such dogma. Science is based on that presumption. It is a 3rd person illusion that presumes that there is a “me” that can find out about “it” without “it” being affected by “me”. even though the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to this notion. Nobody ever proved Berkeley wrong, because you can’t within the auspices of 3rd person science and that, by Karl Popper’s falsifiability principle anyway, means that it isn’t science. Fair enough, but that doesn’t mean what he said wasn’t true that if nobody heard the tree fall, it didn’t make a sound. Just because Einstein was bothered by the idea that if nobody is looking at the moon, it does not exist doesn’t mean he was right. He was also very bothered by “spooky action at a distance” and went to his grave not buying it. Then John Bell came along. It might very well be that the Advaitists were correct all along and that existence and consciousness are the same thing, and that it is also Blissful! This is in fact provable via 1st person Science, so-called by the Advaitists, of course you would have to actually perform the experimentation, which is subjective and contemplative, but this is anathema to 3rd person scientists because it violates their fundamental methodology.
Roger Penrose spoke about this lack of knowledge about consciousness. He mentioned a few things we know about. For instance that we know how to turn it off with sedatives and that it seems to originate on the surface of neurons.
There's also the "semi-hard" problem of consciousness: the diversity of qualia. From the outside we see the brain's various electrical signals, and though they have different frequencies, amplitudes, etc. they're the same essential thing. From the inside, we aware of qualia that are entirely different from each other: colors, sounds, tastes, feels, smells.
I'd say that's the hard "hard problem" of consciousness 😅 The "hard problem" (or "easy hard problem" as I like to call it) could be removed by idealism, but the hard "hard problem" remains a mystery.
@@MeRetroGamer Point well taken. A better "semi-hard" problem might be: If epiphenomenonalism is true, why do our sensations correspond so closely to the real world? After all, if there's no causation from the mental to the physical, natural selection would have no interest in shaping mental phenomena. It's as if the smoke coming out of the train's smokestack formed a scale model of the train. Also, why do we experience meaning when words are said? It's one thing for the physical brain to do its thing in response to a sound signal, but why would there be any warrant for us to extract meaning (since again, the metal according to epi, does not influence the physical.)
@@gregsimay7379 That's one of the many reasons why I think epiphenomenalism (and dualism in general) is flawed. Another reason is that abstractions do actually influence lower layers of reality (just think of what engineering is). There's plenty of evidence of top-down causality in nature, and mostly in biology. Modeling the world around us and making algorithms to reorganize the lower layers of reality for the sake of some abstract purpose is just an undeniable fact that surrounds our entire lives! So I'm pretty convinced that there's plenty of wrong assumptions both in physicalism and dualism. Nevertheless, I think that there's no body/mind problem at all, that they're both the same fact, the same acting of nature, just that somehow, due to the complexity of our biological system and its ability for multi-layered reflection, we can see those events in two different contexts (physical and mental), but they're just two different ways of experiencing and knowing about the same thing/process/phenomena/whatever.
@@MeRetroGamer I've wondered if thinking about consciousness is prone to slipping into the masked man fallacy. ("I recognize who my father is, but I don't recognize who this masked man is, therefore the two men must be different people.) But I do think Chalmers has a point with his philosophical zombie; that is, how do you distinguish between an unconscious zombie who perfectly mimics conscious behavior, and a conscious human being? I don't think that consciousness involves extra energy, which could be one way of telling a zombie from a human. It seems that once you have the right, complex patterns of matter, consciousness arises. But that would mean that consciousness per se is a property that is independent of energy--and therefore mass, and therefore spacetime. If this property dualism is correct, then under certain conditions, consciousness might be able to become untethered from the spacetime location of the brain producing it (taking the physicalist point of view.) Assuming that remote viewing is real, this feature of consciousness could provide a way to explain it.
@@gregsimay7379 To me, it seems that the mystery of consciousness is at the same level than the mystery of existence. I don't entertain any more the idea of any unqualified (or "no phenomenological") kind of existence. Experience is the main reality, and the forms of nature (matter) and its complexity (forces and relations) arise as the symbols and relations in those experiencial events. There's no experience without its symbols, and there's no symbol that could exist in the absence of experience.
The hard answer could be to give up CALLING the edges of consciousness (“where” it necessarily connects with our atoms in or around our brain cells) on names like “oscillation” or “particles”, and give up pretending that they predictably exist in our observable universe. The way we should picture this event horizon, between what we can perceive and what we can’t, should rather be a smooth verlauf from existence to non-existence (where predictability starts to be increasingly limited). This would automatically explain things like quantum weirdness because particles are never in complete existence in our observable universe - the smaller they are the less they exist, given we define existence as predictability of measurable attributes and their changes after an interaction or other event (plus we consider them being fully independent, separate and different from other existing things). What official science currently models as waves (of energy) or vibration (of matter) - that can fully be defined as a combination of, mostly meaningless and random, different amplitude-frequency data pairs - is actually the soft edge of our predictable (existing) world, where Kansas go bye-bye from our viewpoint.
@DavidVonR Yes, it would be pretty short-sighted to think that a subatomic particle has a full set of precisely detectable attributes (like size, weight, speed, momentum, whatever) the way atoms, molecules and larger things have. The level of existence of particles is never 0 (does not exist) nor 1 (exists) but always a value between these two. They can “somewhat” exist in our observable universe. And, their dual nature is the source (or manifestation) of some kind of fundamental intelligence (or information). Particles tend to carry an information package which disappears when the information is delivered, I suppose - that’s why the wave function seems to “collapse” in the double slit experience when an observer (recipient of the information) reads out data. Or, in other words, a decision is made whether the electron/photon/etc is detectable matter, rather than a package of energy. I currently assume that information is just as “real” as the entity that contains it. I even sometimes think that our entire observable universe might be a subset of a larger reality created by the combination of 3 dual/unreal conceptions: energy-matter, space-time, and information-intelligence (where this latter determines even things like axioms and universal constants).
@14:56 Offering up a theory, the neurons are repeating a pattern of complex sensory experience. For the structure of the individual brain there is a semi variable pattern of how the brain experiences sensory data, depending on the stage of neuron reproduction. This shows in structural variablility within the larger fixed structure in individual brains. So one sensory experience has multiple elements within that experience. The brain processing elements of experience attempts to repeat the partial abstract experience of the greater pattern. The brain when thinking can replicate elements from different patterns to form new patterns. The growth of experience is the growth of pattern vocabulary. So thinking is determined by both apparatus and experienced enviorment. A brain is an situational adaptor through these abstractions and can only improve through experience and reflection. Experience of a pattern can degrade as the brain replicates the pattern less often and this is why memory is imperfect. Brain damage results in a change of thinking because it prevents replication of patterns of experience. The structure of the brain is changed even in healing and may become unable to fully complete the experienced pattern or find a new experience adaptation.
How do you prove that you have consciousness? By interacting with the world using your body You have your body. How can you interact with the world around you with your body? You do it naturally by being conscious. The world exists. Within that world are items that are separate from each other. How? Because there cannot be two things occupying the same place and time. Space and time exist. If we use things in certain space and time, to the best of our conscious ability, these are our own things. Basically what i'm saying is that you own stuff. Can you own that stuff and is it yours or not is purely up to law you subjects yourself to. And law is created by consciousness. So yeah we do own something more than just consciousness, because we specifically have consciousness even if we are not capable of experimenting with it in any meaningful way.
And yet, most human thinking and reacting and decision making is *_unconscioius._* Neurologists have estimated that the proportion of brain cells which are related to consciousness, to those which are not, is about a ratio of 1:100,000,000. Meaning that only about 0.000001% of your brain is conscious. The other 99.999999% of your brain is doing most of your sensing and thinking and feeling and intuiting and reacting and decision-making, and only the final results pop into your consciousness. So I'm afraid that your statement is only about 0.000001% true.
Experiments in the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research department showed there is some crossover/overlap between the conscious & physical worlds, although small. This would tend against dualism/epiphenomenalism, rather supporting panpsychism or panprotopsychism.
The philosophical reasoning presented by the speaker is flawed in the way he leads us back to dualism. There is only a need to explain consciousness as a separate but necessary adjunct to physics if it manifests downward causation, and that is not merely unproven, but as our AI implementations being increasingly humanlike it must seem more and more indefensible as a claim. In reality, it is not possible for any person A to prove their consciousness to person B. Ergo it has no physical existence at all. It exists only as a complex dynamic abstraction (like a song or a poem) made out of the interactions of lower level abstractions (like memories beliefs and ideas). So it’s a purely informational thing. The end of this chain of reasoning is that conscious experience is really just an informational shadow of some kinds of physical data processing system that are constructed to maintain an awareness of themselves. Being an abstraction, that shadow doesn’t really exist in the real world at all, and it doesn’t affect anything that does, so there’s no need to amend or supplement physics.
My thoughts almost exactly. One cannot see a movement in a microscope. One can only see things moving. Movement is abstract and is the foundation of all abstractions like for examples thoughts and the being-conscious-process.
In order to understand anything, one must be able to define it. If you cannot define it, you cannot study it. This is why the study of “consciousness” is so difficult. And yet, we have a sense of consciousness, as argued by Thomas Nagel in “What it is like to be a bat”. Everyone understands what the term “consciousness” refers to; generally in the context of “what something is like”. That is how we think - by comparing this to that: our memories of bats, knowledge of hearing and echo-location, etc. The neurophysiology of understanding the brain mechanisms underlying those processes is the “easy” problem - the “whatness” of consciousness. Consciousness itself can be considered as the “field” of those comparisons. Consider riding in a train, looking out the window, seeing people, houses, cows, whatever. Consciousness is just looking out the window. When you realize you are conscious it is because you recognize something, say a car. Your brain has compared what you see to your memory and decided either you know what it is or you don’t. What has happened is you have “split” your mind into 2 parts - a recollection (comparison with some stored memories) versus a current perception. That process results in an event that is neither past nor present; it cannot be defined, yet the result is definitely an experience. But while you may remember the result, you do not remember experiencing the result: thus the experience of recognition is not defineable. That doesn’t mean we can’t call it something. We call it “consciousness”. You can know what you know, and you can know what you don’t know, but you can’t know what you can’t know. What you can’t know is consciousness.
I came across some neurological research that demonstrated that we make decisions and have thoughts long before we become aware of them. We have the impression that we willed these thoughts and decisions into existence “consciously” but this is not actually the case. This should lead us to a conclusion along the lines that we are not really conscious at all, but we become aware of the results of our subconscious thinking and believe them to be our “consciousness”. It’s very difficult to get to grips on this concept. An easy example is our (conscious) experience of vision. Subconsciously, we see everything upside down and erratically (with two blind spots) and as two almost indistinguishable separate images. Yet our “conscious” experience is an upright, steady and complete whole image of the world. It’s a complete fabrication. What we experience “consciously” doesn’t exist as we see it, and we are totally unaware that it may be derived from a sea of unconscious experiences. Nothing “parallel” about it. Out brains present us with a “conscious” showing of its internal activities, and yet we have no idea that even this has occurred! :o
That doesn't imply that we aren't conscious, only that there are brain processes that we're not conscious of. Some of our conscious experiences do have an illusory aspect -- for example, visual experience seems continuous even though there are blind spots. That doesn't mean the experiences aren't conscious.
@@richarddoan9172 Yes, true. It's difficult to know where "consciousness" begins, though, and how conscious one can actually be. Take driving, for instance. You're certainly conscious of driving and of the surroundings and the traffic, etc. But you must have experienced arriving at your destination without having any memory or awareness of how you get there. This came home to me one day when I was driving along the M25 around London, on my way to Birmingham. The turnoff to the M1 is a major, impossible to miss turnoff with giant sign posts to tell you where to come off the M25 at the gyratory. I happened to be chatting to a client on my handsfree phone. At one point, I realised that I had missed the turnoff. How was that possible? So I turned round at the next turnoff, about 10 miles further on and made sure to keep a watchful eye for the M1 signs. I somehow missed the turnoff again. So 10 miles later, another U-turn, I'm making an extra special effort to focus on looking out for the M1 gyratory. Could I have been mistaken about how big and obvious it was? I missed it yet again! This time, I hung up the phone and made the final U-turn. When I reached the M1 turnoff, this time no longer distracted by the conversation, I saw that the signs were indeed huge and impossible to miss. It was very frightening to realise that I was completely oblivious to the act of driving or my surroundings, even while looking "consciously" and deliberately at the road while driving. What if something unexpected had occured, like someone ahead stopping suddenly or someone overtaking suddenly in front of me or whatever? I might have "woken" up into consciousness in such a situation, who knows? Or I might have had a serious accident simply because of being unconscious while driving the car with my eyes wide open! :o
I’ve heard of this research anecdotally as well. Very interesting stuff. My question would be “how did they determine at what point the decision was made and at what point the person became aware?” The best they could have done is looked at the portion of the brain they associated with decision and looked at the part they associated with awareness, but that doesn’t really tell us if subjective decision occurs before subjective awareness. Taking a step back, how are they correlating one part of the brain with decision and one part with awareness? Awareness seems particularly problematic.
Referencing your section on "experience of vision". Very true. Every sensory perception we ever had, have now, or will have is entirely a product of imagination, evolved over millenia to enable quick 'best estimate' response to danger.
Another excellent and non-judgmental discussion of some relevant topics in philosophy. From my view, Daniel Dennett makes short work of Chalmer's perspective by reminding us of the myriad ways our sensory organs pre-process data, with the resultant understanding that none of these processes are simultaneous nor are they fed into a single mental entity called "consciousness." Regardless of my personal perspective-your lectures are absolutely superb! I look forward to seeing more of them! Thanks!
It feels like some of the arguments against the optimistic theory of consciousness are defining consciousness as the non-physical element, which you'll know when you see it. And then they use that to explain that consciousness can't be explained by physical processes.
There maybe a 4th possible way to "explain" the hard problem. It's almost like #3 dualism but it goes a bit further. Well maybe a lot further. We can start by questioning dualism. The first question follows from #3 is this: Which one comes first, consciousness or physical reality? By all indications and experiences consciousness comes first. I won't go into the details here why I personally think so, but there are very good experimental and personal proofs of this, and zero evidence suggesting that it's the other way around. So #4 is that physical reality as we experience it is merely the product of the particular configuration of consciousness we currently posses. There is no such a thing out there as an absolute physical reality in which somehow consciousness arises. It's rather that we collectively as humans believe that there is such a thing as physical reality because of our way of experiencing consciousness.
So, what Chalmers calls the easy versus the hard problem could be reduced to the explanations of conscious activity that are possible or doable and those that are not possible or impossible because of the subjective nature of consciousness and these latter can be boiled down to two: the How and the Why does consciousness emerge as an observable phenomenon. I agree that these latter are harder than the former because we still haven't worked them out, but disagree that we can't. Susan Greenfield's research is already touching on this. The problem Chalmers has, I think, is that he confuses consciousness with self-awareness because many animals we know are conscious and that doesn't seem to bother him as a hard thing. . Susan's research points to the critical mass reached with cluster assemblies of neurons that seem to indicate the difference between both, so the question isn't that hard. What is hard is to come to terms with the realisation, the Eureka moment of realising that we exist, but that isn't that different from the surprise of seeing after having been blind. A surprise that you get used to. Also, it being a very slow process from learning to identify yourself (some animals can already do that) to discuss philosophy, it is something we slowly take in as a fact. It is only retrospectively that we wonder at the magic of acquiring self awareness at the age of two. Nobody remembers exactly when they began to realised they exist.
Love your classes 👏 It would be great if you reviewed this lecture to include Kastrup and Hoffman’s theory of Analytic Idealism which substantially advances metaphysics aligning it with new quantum theories and geometries
'The Observer Effect' in quantum physics is not mentioned by Chalmers (per this overview), which does allow an interface between dualistic consciousness and phenomena.
There is no observer effect, it's not related to an observer, only to measurement. Regardless of the consciousness or lack thereof of the measurement maker.
Isn't there another option besides physicalism and dualism? What about idealism - the theory that consciousness is fundamental and physical bodies are illusory? I'm thinking of the Analytic Idealism proposed by, for example, Bernardo Kastrup.
The fundamental problem here is that the language game that comprises the natural sciences is not comprehensive enough to describe subjectivity at all. This is a design choice and indeed a feature - the whole point of the scientific project is to try and generate objective explanations of phenomena that do not require or contain any references to subjective experience. This is reflected even on a very basic grammatical level: scientific statements (natural laws, predictions derived from theories, even raw empirical data) are written in third person only, as if they were written by an ideal observer that himself is fundamentally separate from the things he describes. So scientific language is a deliberately reduced sub-set of whatever natural language it is phrased in. The language of subjectivity, on the other hand, is grammatically and semantically complete. All its sentences can be phrased as first-person descriptions of the narrator's subjective experience, and this experience can contain second and third person statements, including all possible scientific statements. In subjective language, sentences like "I believe that / I understand that / I perceive that [third-person statement about a set of perceived external objects or components of a scientific model]" are well-formed and common. So subjective language has a way to reference and encompass scientific or "objective" language, whereas the inverse is not true, by design of the latter. For a subjective speaker to make an objective statement X is to imply a subjective statement of the form "I believe that X is true, and I think anyone else should also believe that." If that implied statement wasn't subjectively true, the subjective speaker would not be making the objective claim X in the first place. Again, no such requirement exists in the inverse, since it is perfectly possible to make subjective statements that do not imply reference to an objective reality. Finally, subjective conscious experience necessarily is epistemologically prior to any contents that unfold in it, including the formulation and understanding of scientific or objective statements. Epistemologically, subjectivity is fundamental, whereas objectivity is a derived category. Subjectivity cannot be doubted, since the act of doing so is identical to the subjective experience of it, but objectivity is merely a concept that you can doubt or disbelieve in in a (phenomeno)logically consistent way. So all these observations lead me to the conclusion that the reductionist approach is precisely backwards: instead of reducing the subjective to the objective, which is linguistically, epistemologically and as of now practically impossible without loss of information, the correct course of action seems to be to reduce the objective to the subjective. This is precisely what Eastern (Hindu/Buddhist) philosophy has been doing all along, and I think Western philosophy, despite its impressive achievements in other fields, has still not even begun to understand this approach to any real extent. I think the solutions to many problems in the theory of mind have probably already been formulated some 4000-ish years ago in some footnote of some commentary to the Upanishads or such. It's just that we still lack the conceptual instrumentarium to translate these solutions into anything that can be handled by modern-era Western philosophy.
The only person ive ever seen actually attempt to do "science" on mental space, thats is; the inside subjective consciousness, is Shinzen Young. I highly recommend his book; the science of Enlightenment.
So are you saying that epiphenomonon is part of dualism? My reaction a moment earlier when it was revealed that he must be a dualist, is that he had not considered emergence or epiphenomonon. Why wouldn't those be reductionalist? We understand "wetness" and how it is caused by the interaction of molecules, even though it is not a property of fundamental particles. We understand the properties of crystals as arising from the interactions of atoms, but don't apply to atoms. I don't see emergence as a "different kind of thing" separate from physics, but as the normal kind of chunking or hierarchical organization that we've done to go from quantum mechanics -> particle physics -> atomic physics -> chemistry -> biochemistry.
Dualism is in danger of becoming a bit like creationism. "You can't explain this, therefore God/Spirit.". We have really only had the tools needed to explore the brain for the last 20-30 years so the first steps are to get a clear understanding of the basics, which is ongoing. The "hard" problem may not be so hard, once that is understood. BTW No-one has ever actually found this other "stuff" of consciousness. That is a problem, perhaps philosophers could tell us where and how to look? Also why is it always associated with bodies?
Yes and a good place to begin is with a thorough investigation into the meaning of the word 'analogous'. (Which is, to my way of thinking, the foundation of the conscious).
It's as simple as this. A true clone of your subjective consciousness would need to operate from both bodies simultaneously, you would need to now see, hear and feel from two seperate locations. Obviously, our intuition alongside many related studies suggests that this would not be the case given an exact physical reconstruction of our bodies and dna atom-by-atom. We suspect that the clone might be us in every way except the main way, it would have our memories and behave like us, but we would still know that the real "us" is still confined to only one location, inhabiting only one body. From this we can confidently state that there is either a problem with materialisms current understanding and definition of matter, that each particle of the same type is in no way different from any other, that every proton is the same as every other proton; OR, we need to make an ammendment to it. Either by weaving-in the significance of time and space, the continual verification (blockchain) of information stored and communicated by biology, or we need to include a new particle or field, which matter can engage with. This may seem way too hypothetical of an example to take seriously, so consider this, if the universe is infinte in either time or space, this isn't just possible for a clone of you to be created, it's inevitable! In other words, the most popular view of materialism forces reincarnation to happen. What we're trying to explain, is how does something as eternally unique as the repeated real-time recognition of ourselves and the deep sense of finiteness come from something which can be reproduced without any error, without any discernable difference we can deliniate.
1:40 Already a problem here. Why would I smile? Clearly I smile because of a value of mine is visible. A value? Yes, a value, meaning my perceptual or conceptual consciousness identified a thing which benefits my life. Consciousness is already present, the brain alone portion of the quote is already over and gone
OK, I just watched this after making my previous comment on Frank Jack's argument on Mary's room. So I did not know what to call my argument against it but now see it is optimistic reductionism that would argue against Mary's room, so you taught me a new term. Thanks in that seems to be a good term to have in ones vocabulary! But that argument that physics needs only physics to totally describe it is not at all held by modern physics in that the quantum word can only be described statistically and not deterministically! So if one says something happens by change one is admitting one does not know the cause of it (or at least all the factors that cause it albeit one might know some. And to say no one is looking at the hard problem is not quite true for (albeit indirectly) I am, though maybe one might say I am a nobody, and maybe they would be right. But in my exploration of how to create a visual ontology modeling language I sort of accidentally(in that was not what I was trying to do) came up with a method that might not explain consciousness but at least might be able to model it. So (and I am trying to make this as short as I can but maybe am not doing all that good a job of doing that in this is a buit long) but here goes anyway: What I was trying to do was to come up with a way to just show (graphically) to a ontology model viewer just the things that they "cared about" at that moment and hide everything else. Thus say one has a model with 10 billions pieces of information and at a given moment one actually is only caring about say 5 to 10 of those 10 billion so that the model would just show those 5-10 9and maybe a bit more for context) and hide all the rest. And as such perhaps this is some way models consciousness, i.e. it is the thing that draws form all we know and reduces it to what we just need to care about a the the moment. It is not all that different than when we use a computer with billions of pieces of information stored on hard drives and we load a portion of that into RAM only that it is more dynamic and fluid and is continuously doing that and really fact at that. Thus we have two processes at work, one that hides and unhides the relevant data and the other that uses that data to do whatever needs to be done with it. Actually, the model that seems best to me I get from the Bible, though once again a bit by accident in that we read The Spirit of the LORD will rest on Him, The spirit of wisdom and understanding, The spirit of counsel and strength, The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. Isa 11:2 Thus we see two groups of three, one the one side (say the left side for arguments sake) we have knowledge, counsel, and wisdom and the other side (the right) fear of the LORD, Strength or power, and understanding. So one might construct a model (which actually it seems Aquinas did just that, almost in his Summa Theologica) where the left side is the intellect and the right side is the will. Only he put understanding with the intellect. But if one takes truth to be the proper subject of the intellect (i.e. to assess what is true vs what is false) while goodness (or how best to obtain it) as the proper subject of the will then one can argue that understanding is a goodness measure and not a truth measure in that one does not so much have a true understanding but rater a good understanding of a thing, the later being that one can (rightly) answer any relevant question about any subject that one has a good understanding. But Aquinas also says truth and goodness are convertible which perhaps by that he means one can say is it true something is good or good that it is true. And BTW, in this context fear of the LORD means that one does not hold that all outcomes are equally desirable but that to live is preferable over dying, easting is preferable over starving, etc. and that all these preferences as a whole is what we call goodness. And there is this center (7th) thing that one might call the heart where one holds their core beliefs and such. So using that model one might ask where does consciousness fit in? Well it seems to be a power so it might go with the spirit of power/strength (along with say moral virtues and such). But that spotlight as to what is at present relevant might fit under the spirt of counsel. For a counselor does not tell one what to do but what one might do and what that might entail. So I say all this (and yes it is a bit long) just to point out that no, there might be some (and not just me for all I know0 that are thinking about the hard problem, but maybe they all too are no bodies given that they may not be all that well known. Also, as an aside I have made a bunch of videos on this and upload them to my UA-cam channel under the banner of UniML (Universal Modeling Language) not to be confused with UML (Unified Modeling Language) albeit that none of them are all that good in that I am still trying to figure this out. .. and as you say, this is the hard part, or at least related to the hard part in that UniML attempts to model how one thinks... or something roughly equivalent, which leads to the idea of reductionism. But since the comment is already way too long let me end here other than to say that if something is emergent can it really be reduced to some thing lese when there can be an infinite number of other things that it also could be reduced to, just as say a computer program could be reduced to an infinite number of different computer hardware implementations. Thus even thou any of these can produce that emergent behavior that emergent behavior seems to exist independent of them jsut as say FORTRAN code does not care what computer in runs on (so long as it has a complier to make it work on that computer).
Consciousness has replaced heaven, or the soul. It's just "god of the gaps" stuff. Oooh a vivid blue! There are people in the world so highly trained in recognizing exact colours, they can identify a colour without context, within incredibly narrow bands of accuracy. THAT is a deep experience of colour. The reason "blueishness" is so inexplicable to some, is not that it's oh so vivid, it's that's it's oh so vague. Imagine your favourite photo of your favourite person. Is your imaginary version as clear as if you looked at the photo? No. So why is the vague imagined experience deemed "hard" and special, but the much clearer physical experience deemed "easy" and mundane? There's still no person there, you know it's only a photo. In effect, you're imagining the person both times. Consciousness is just a word for how we describe the experience of mental interpretation of physical things. How thoughts make us feel. It's complex and vague and unique to every person. But it's not supernatural. It's natural. I love your videos dude. This one even inspired a rant! Please make more.
Chalmers ignores a fourth possibility which is being explored actively. That is holistic rather than reductionist science, the idea that consiousness is an emergent property of a complex dynamic system, the brain. This area of research uses Systems Dynamics and Agent Based Modelling and is an active area of research aimed at solving the 'hard' problems of science.
Quasi-panpsychism. Electrical fields are conscious or a certain configuration or interaction of electrical fields are conscious. Consciousness is the tension or superimposed difference between two different electrical states, that is - potential difference or resultant voltage. Voltage is consciousness. Consciousness is voltage.
... 4) Ignorabimus Optimistic Relationism has got a weak point: there are no tools (yet?) to analyze subjective experience in an intersubjective way. Mysterianism has got at least one good supporting argument: it is possible to alter, or even switch off the consciousness just using chemical substances.
the thing is, if processes are tied to the physical systems in our brain in some way that we continue to discover, that makes them a part of the physical system. erasing dualism potentially.
Watching these videos on the nature of consciousness, I can't help thinking we might have it the completely wrong way around. What if there is only mental stuff and the physical aspects of the world is just an illusion or projection? Like the world is actually completely psychic rather than physical.
As one who was raised in Christian Science, I’ve always been partial towards the idealistic view of reality. One can have a sense of love, humility, gratitude, fairness, compassion, appreciation of natural and artistic beauty, and a sense of self. It is nonsensical to believe that the experience of these intangible qualities arises from firing neurons. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face…” I tend to believe that consciousness is fundamental; it just is. What we perceive as a physical universe is a mental construct, an extremely limited and distorted view of what actually exists.
I don't agree that the work on synchronised firings of neurons in different parts of the brain and how they relate to the brain's ability to appreciate an entity from its constituent phenomena (colour, shape, smell) does nothing to contribute towards the hard problem. On the contrary, it seems to me that the qualia emerge from further synchronisations of neurons (pleasure from endorphins binding to neurons associated with certain visual or auditory sensations, for example). Consciousness is generally considered to be an emergent phenomenon which is entirely dependent on a functioning brain (cf unconsciousness), so I don't see why it can't eventually be explained by the studies cited.
17:20 .. Not necessarily disagreeing with anything else, but I think Chalmers is wrong about this specific point. He seems to contradict himself when he says that Hameroff / Penrose are saying consciousness arises from certain quantum phenomena, but then he says that even if they are right about that, then they are still not addressing how consciousness arises. But, they _are_ trying to address it, speculating that it arises through quantum processes in microtubules, etc. Please correct me if I'm mistaken. I feel like I must be. But, this is how I interpret it, purely just from what's presented here. As always, thank you for all of the excellent classes.
He is not writing backward. The image we see is inverted. If you notice he appears to be writing with his left hand and his watch and wedding ring appear to be on his right hand which is exactly what you would see in an inverted image like in a mirror. Absent inversion of the image we see, his writing would appear backward to our view although he would be writing with his right hand and his watch and ring would be on his left side as is normal.
The problem with physicalism is that it begins with its own presumption--that "reality" consists entirely of "physical" processes--and then tries to assign "physical" explanations to every experience of "reality," even where it doesn't fit. In other words, in the end such speculation is based on circular reasoning.
I feel like more recent fMRI studies seem to imply that consciousness is essentially a storyteller that stitches together experiences into a (semi) coherent story with "I" as the protagonist. This actually follows logically from the firmly deterministic nature of the universe that physics implies.
I don't think you need an fmri study to say that consciousness stitches experiences together with an "I". I'd say that's basically a characterization of an aspect of the notion of consciousness as it's generally understood -- it's a given.
As an applied math grad student I learned physics DOES NOT imply a deterministic universe. Some good research and theory on quantum tunneling at the synapse even in warm and wet environment. Take some physics (advanced classes). The fMRI machinery is blood redistribution and the correlate of the BOLD is electrical SCP and this is low frequency hum of the brain as a background and a lot of issues on computation issues. But fMRI graphics can suggest a lot. Makes a good story tho
@James Kirk my father is a world renowned physicist in his field (space plasma physics) - and he doesn't care much for determinism - however, he also feels I've read far more on the subject that he has - so. I'd recommend the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's UA-cam videos on determinism for a good start to the subject.
I recently read Faggin’s book “Irreducible”. Actually, it is really interesting, trying to connect consciousness to quantum states. What do you think about that? Many thanks for your brilliant lectures.
Consciousness is subjective. Humans try to label consciousness instead of looking at interconnected events or between 2 or more as a consciousness in itself. Interconnection is a prerequisite. Now you have the whole EMF spectrum just to start working I/O functions solo or in plural to create a consciousness in your image if you choose.
"gives *us* experiences at all", "*our* brain", "*we* think", "*it* (brain) processes", could "we" use a different machine to "think" besides the brain? YES. You see, throughout your lecture both you and Chalmers differentiate between the mechanics and the mechanic, the architecture and the architect, the means of production and the producer, affirming, in your language, these are NOT the same. And we intimately KNOW this; where one can fully describe a motor, a building, a widget through physical laws, we cannot describe the "who" that desired them. I submit, this blindness of materialistic atheism precludes, a priori, the obvious, there is a supernatural agent managing the machine and matter. Where we can trace the history of Mount Rushmore, each and every atom, back to the origin of the Universe, and explain every single interaction of these particles into that rock formation (The easy problem), we cannot do the same with the Faces carved on it (The hard problem). Their creation is from a WHOLY other production source; necessity vs desire. Because this is true, that source cannot, itself, be explained through physical means. The reality of this, necessarily folds into our language, our descriptions, our prose and poetry, and it's so close to us, so common, so ubiquitous, that it becomes invisible, and for some, intentionally so.
The point being to know if the "mental stuff" can exist if the "physical stuff" ceases to function/exist/etc. If it can't, doesn't it mean it's only a sub-product of the physical one?
At some point Jeffrey says there are two possible ontological explanations materialism, or dualism, Materialism obviously simply dismisses the problems it can’t solve and dualism produces more questions than it answers There is a third option which seems to go under the radar which is immaterialism which rather than viewing conciousness or mind as an emergent phenomenon from matter regards matter as an emergent property of mind Hence the paradox of the double slit experiment In this view mind is irreducible and precedes all other phenomena I am puzzled why he doesn’t mention this option
For some, only humans possess Consciousness. There are others who think that not only humans, but also other animals, or even plants, possess consciousness. I am one of the first, and as such I consider that Consciousness makes us different from other living beings. Certainly, that Consciousness makes us different does not prevent us from recognizing how much we have in common with other living beings. Explaining what Consciousness is requires explaining what makes us different from humans. Hence, it is not necessary to explain the paradigm of mental states with qualia, a common phenomenon in living beings with a brain.
Considering how little we know about how the brain works, it seems premature to make conclusions about the biological processes of self aware consciousness and the implications thereof. It's rather like having Ben Franklin's understanding of physics and drawing conclusions about quantum theory. We have a huge obstacle when it comes to such research because it would not be ethical to subject children to constant brain wave monitoring, beginning in utero, in order to study when and how their consciousness develops. It may be that we don't become full conscious until between 2 and 3, which would explain why memory of life before that age is nearly nonexistent in all people. Many kids don't have an existential crisis until the teen years, if they ever have one at all. How self aware are other animals? I think the mirror test is an interesting experiment in that regard
The solition to consiousness is very simple. It is done by the brain to focus. We simply cannot be aware of too much that is happen both internally and externally. Neuro(bio)logy has a clear view more and more on how consiousness functions. But a lot is still to discover. It is just that in certain academic disciplines, such as certain types of philosophy, there is a tendency towards thinking in the wrong direction and making things endlessly complex. Often based on intuition and narrow reasoning as well. Perhaps for a part due to the urge of keeping yourself busy, academically. But the factual solution is very simple. And keep thinking in vague, complex directions will only be useless. Rather think in complex directions that actually mean something in the real world.
Yeah but Philosophy isn't the subject to solve that, that is for Science, philosophy's job is to answer the unanswerable, it is the art of contemplation, not the solution. Science tells us what things are and their causes. Philosophy is the inquisition of our human experience of the world. A lot of these topics are merely mediums of logical thought, they aren't making things endlessly complex for no reason.
i would recommend that you read up on "attention schema theory", a view very similar to what you are outlining here. Some accessible proponents include Joscha Bach, Michael Graziano.
If option 1 is Optimistic Reductionism, then he should have called option 2 Pessimistic Reductionism. Same basic premise (its all going on in there but understanding how it works is too hard). Option 3 is just mysticism. All his thought is going on in his physical brain unless he believes that there is something unembodied. Of course, that is called religion. He (and you) take a dismissive attitude to the 'easy problems' without any evidence that these states of mind, synchronisations, quantum effects are NOT what he is experiencing as consciousness. Apart from passing a Turing test, can he prove that he is conscious? And If he believes the Mary's room thought experiment, passing a Turing test is no evidence of 'understanding' and consciousness. And he ends with the (unproven) assertion that consciousness CAN NOT be derived from physical laws. That does not have to be option 3 but could be option 2.
*Consciousness* is an *emergent phenomenon* of the brain, *resulting* from the communication of information across all its regions and cannot be reduced to something residing in specific areas that control for qualities like attention, hearing, or memory.
@@ofarah7902 There is many studies pointing to this, even though there is not one proving it completely by now. Of course, if there had been one, we most probably wouldnt have listened to this specific YT-vid.
That again is at best a very vaguely worded way of solving an easy problem. All you are saying here is that the phenomenon of conscious experience is in some way correlated to a physical mechanism that involves the whole brain rather than individual parts of it. There is no reason in there for why that correlation might exist.
@@ofarah7902 No. The answer is that there is not nor has anyone to this date in 2023 come up with a way to test this idea. This idea is essentially an ILLUSIONIST idea that consciousnesses doesn't actually exist. It's a STRRRRRREEEEETCCCHHHYY idea made by physicalists who are so afraid dualism might be right, that they just start making up ridiculous word salad. In 50 years we may have figured out how to reduce conscousness to a purely physical function, but this is just vague nonsense.
@@ofarah7902it makes the fewest assumptions and accounts for the entire range of conscious experience If you want examples in practice, optical illusions, brain damage leading to loss of senses when the organ still functions, synesthesia overlap of the senses, lobotomized individuals losing executive and cognitive functions, memory loss and traumatic flashbacks from blunt force trauma victims and psychologically traumatized individuals
Chalmers contradicts his response to the hard problem with his further speculation. If consciousness is totally apart from what physics can touch or explain then that necessarily means that consciousness cannot have any effect on physical functions of the body. And yes, there would be no way for science to study the hard problem, but why would we expect it to once we write consciousness off as non-physical and outside of physical laws?
I think it’s dangerous to get bogged down in considering sense-perception as being part of consciousness. This is the line of thinking that gives rise to people saying that AI could never be conscious because it has no senses. 😑 I’d even go so far as to say that sense-perception has nothing to do with the essence of consciousness. This is because one can have senses doing their job unconsciously, like in the case of reflexes. Also, it seems plausible that some organisms with simple brains have advanced systems of sense-perception but no consciousness. The key ingredient is self-awareness… As for the mechanisms of how this self-awareness might be achieved, that’s a separate topic, not a different theory of the definition of consciousness.
It's so easy to keep falling into the trap of explaining it in terms of matter. And perhaps that is the way, though if it were we would need to recognise that no two particles are identical. If we claim we know how to build my consciousness for example from lots of the same fundamental building blocks, then we will have a problem explaining why there might still be a difference, why they might be two me's with two separate points of view rather than one me seeing from two points of view. One side of this has to be false, and I've got a feeling the latter could not be true. Though having said this, that can simply be explained for the fact that they weren't physically connected, as there have been plenty of medical phenomena recorded to suggest a physical connection could make a 2-bodied single-consciousness possible. But there's something which seems completely one-off about consciousness, something like the "us" correlating with our unique supply of the electromagnetic field or our unique positions in space. I believe attempting to upload consciousness onto even the correct substrate (if we knew how) could simply corrupt me and create a clone of me instead which could fool everyone it was the real me in every situation, but it wouldn't actually be me. Rather that I am more body than mind. Or that I am the continuouation of undisturbed electronic feedback loops, a potential (but not necessary) face of the electromagnetic spectrum.
How do we initially define consciousness is key. It might not be a single phenomenon. If it were to be more complex than the simple feeling of experience, than Chalmers’ dichotomous view of the consciousness problem would be biased. Indeed, each component explaining consciousness would be perceived as reductionist and placed in the easy problem. The entire construct is based on a subjective initial feeling that consciousness is a single process that is inevitably more than what we can explain of it. What if consciousness was a set of mental constructs designed to help us predict our interactions with our environment? What if consciousness was not as amazing as we feel it to be but different neurological functions made to help us conceive ourselves as a person and to function as one? Then, the hard problem would not be a problem… there could simply be no single consciousness!
I wonder why we can accept with ease that neurons in the brain can react to visual inputs (the reactions of rods and cones in the eyes) or to aural signals (the reaction to vibrations in the fluid of the inner ear) -- but not accept that perhaps there are simply neurons whose job it is to monitor and react to other neurons, rather than to anything outside. Consciosness, it seems to me, might simply be feedback loops of the brain watching itself.
Isn't the position of consciousness not affecting/creating events in physical reality a moot point? It's known, through experimentation, which has shown that conscious thoughts/conscious intent...products of consciousness...directly affects &/or changes physical reality. I read of an experimental study* that used "a trained deep empath" through different forms of conscious intent documented changes in DNA (within some form of vacuum container). *I can't recall the name of the journal, sorry, but it was definitely academically peer reviewed journal.
Materialism gets things backward. Consciousness creates the material world, not vice versa. Years ago the physicist Amit Goswami wrote a book titled The Self Aware Universe -- How consciousness creates the material world. Others like Rupert Sheldrake have posited the same ideas in different ways. Much of materialist science consists of bad philosophy disguised by bad math. The proponents can get away with it because everyone learns as children to believe whatever people in authority tell them and few people know even basic math. The ideas of physical "laws" doesn't withstand scrutiny, for example the idea of physical constants, which only works because "scientists" agree on figures, even when they don't match observation. The idea of epiphenomena creating thought amounts to jargon, not science, much like epigenetics, a word coined to explain what genetic theory cannot. Kurt Vonnegut, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, stated the problem in a ditty: "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly, man got to wonder, why, why, why. Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land, man got to tell himself he understand." When in fact we don't understand much.
Consciousness may well be but the subjective experience of negotiating without an algorithm between the dueling infinities of arithmetic: addition where infinity is a meaningless extent, or multiplication where infinity is a meaningful finitude, governed by the appearances of the sequential differences of prime values.
Good Stuff, I'm finally glad to see someone at least addressing this question in a scientific approach, which I feel is right, that what we call the soul is sort of a matrix of polarities of sub atomic particles whatever, and that the only current way to even deal with it is through religious and mystical pursuits. One thing I'm very curious about though, in your video which is well presented, how to you write backwards so well?
He wrote normally then inverted the video. It shows him writing left-handed, but he's actually right-handed (presumably). Also, his shirt buttons are on the left side of his shirt, but they should be on the right, as is true for men's shirts.
The modern philosophical study of consciousness doesn't really have anything to say about the religious tradition surrounding the concept of a soul. Consciousness is not equated with a soul. Philosophers of mind would not say that religion or religious practices are ways to understand consciousness, even the dualists like Chalmers. (Truth be told, most modern philosophers are atheists and don't have interest in the idea of a soul.)
Are you sure it makes sense for "souls" (if they exist) to be a structure of orientations of of electrons and protons? I mean, from what I understand of the concept, the very essence of functionality of a "soul" would be to act as an objective identity marker (my "soul" makes me distinctly me) and any type of structureing of matter/particles is something that could be replicated. Wouldn't that mean that there could be someone else who is also me, given that we have the same soul?
Question. Does epiphenomenalism say that consciousness is irreducible? It feels like it says that consciousness is reducible to physical events. As you explained it is a by-product of physical events. But Chalmers is saying that consciousness is fundamental and irreducible. So how is it the same as epiphenomenalism?
I might be wrong, but I think the distinction is the term 'fundamental ' and all that would entail. Non-dualists, notwithstanding panpsychism variants, would most likely disagree that. consciousness
Ockham's Razor would suggest that consciousness arises from physical phenomena in the brain. No need for dualism at this point (until there's some evidence of the existence of consciousness outside of the brain).
If consciousness exists commensurate with, and a result of, some hard-coded law(s) of the physical universe, then optimistism about sussing out substantive understandings of it are blown asunder...are they not? Similarly, such arguments and sentiments expressed by Chalmers on consciousness also can be carried over to physics...a 'hard problem of physics'...if you will. While we certainly can mathematically model quantum fields, doing so still never touches upon how (and from what) the fields necessarily manifest...not to mention the impossibility of trying to understand the manifestation of a rubric that served to establish quantum fields as but one of many baseline, hard-coded core items embedded in our universe. In the end, it seems our best effort leaves us with just a pile of fundamental laws and/or constants that are simply beyond our ability to probe. And therein, forever, dragons lie. But it's still an impressive pile...is it not?
Consciousness is mysterious and all, sure. But how you're able to write backwards from your perspective is what really blows my mind!
You are not the first to ask this question. Here is the answer: ua-cam.com/video/6_d44bla_GA/v-deo.html
Thanks! One of the clearest and fairest discussions about the Hard Problem out there.
Could you share your opinion on this (only if you've got nothing better to do)?
Is trying to explain how experience is possible in purely physical terms possible, or is it a category error? Seems like a category error to me.
_At the very least,_ there must be some property of matter that we don't understand or know about--although I don't think that's what's going on...
@@BugRib In case you are not only interested in Jeffrey Kaplans answer: It is not a category error, since systems can have emergent/higher features/functions. An example would be the fluidity of water, which cannot be observed in a single H2O-molecule. In abstract: A system can perform functions, that none of its parts can on their own.
Therefor, no single neuron has to be or even can be conscious on its own.
@@petermeyer6873 - But wetness or fluidity is just a coarse-grained description of the behavior of zillions of H2O molecules. The same is true of every other weakly “emergent” phenomenon, including life. Even if we can’t currently explain the “emergence” of a particular phenomenon, there’s no reason in principle that it can’t be explained in terms of its parts.
But experience isn’t like that. The way “red” appears to me, or the way pain feels, can’t be derived even in principle from the behavior of a bunch of parts.
For one thing, any physical system can in principle be exhaustively described in purely quantitative terms, at least according to standard physicalism. But it’s logically impossible to derive the purely qualitative way that “red” appears to us in experience in purely quantitative terms. No mathematical operation will ever spit out the pure quality of experienced red. This is one reason (there are others) why experience cannot be explained in terms of weak (i.e. non-magical) emergence.
This is also the reason why lots of philosophers and scientists seriously (claim to) believe that these experiential qualities literally don’t exist at all. I agree with philosopher Galen Strawson on this: That is the silliest claim ever made with a straight face by an intelligent person. When physicalism forces one to take a position like that, it’s probably time to give up physicalism.
IMHO.
@@BugRib Im not in the least referring to emergence as something, that appears unexplainable from the features of the parts forming a system - quite the contrary! I totally agree with your analogue continuation of the water example. Im just pointing out, that emergent features of a system sometimes are hard to foresee and thus pose a problem to understanding in the way that they might not be intuitive and therefor may be "hard" to accept. (And frankly this is exactly what I suspect for Chalmers to be the "hard" in his definition of the hard problem: He has a hard time accepting the simplicity of the answer to his question) Thus emergent appearance of features often might be kind of rejected at first glance. It just sometimes feels that emergence cant be a complete explanation for some features and something "more" is still expected and felt to have been overlooked, even when there is simply nothing to be added to it. I think consciousness is just such a case of overexpectations of some, who are not satisfied by the most obvious explanation that the current status of science points to.
With what you call "qualitative" experiences (Id rather call these "subjective") it seems to me to be the same. And by the way, I dont see so much Philosophers going so far denying, that these exist, but rather claiming that these are not as much stand alone features as they seem, but more the other side of the allready known, same coin (the subjective, much reduced experience of an objective world through senses).
I also dont see such a sharp division between what you call qualitative and quantitative features: First, if I remember correctly from university decades ago, there is more cathegories than only these 2 and second any quantitative feature is also a qualitative one.
In sum I have to disagree with your statement on experience: The way red appears to you or the way pain feels to you can be derived exactly the same with all physical parts that make, feed info to and support your personal nervous-system. Also any simulation of these parts forming that system - if it could only be carried out, would show that. Your experiences are no doubt quite subjective and therefor unique, with that uniqueness deriving from the sheer complexity of your system, but there is nothing Ive come across, that even just points out to experience beeing in need of something supernatural/magical to exist or be explained. And you so far have not given any hint to why that should be either. You have just expressed ( and an expression is not an explanation) how counter-intuitive ( "...the silliest claim ever...") it seems to you, that what you experience subjectively could be just an emergent function of your nervous system.
Lets try another analogy, even so Im sure it wont work well, as there is allmost nothing that consiousness can be compared to: Todays passenger cars have evolved (by intentional design) to be a good means of transporting humans along streets. The human brain and consciousness have evolved (by natural evolution = unintentional design) to be a good means of solving problems humans come across during their struggle through life.
The passenger car can also transport other beeings as passengers and some dead stuff quite well to a certain extend. The human brain and consciousness have prooven enormously capable at solving problems far beyond the scope of what humans encountered during their developement from wild up to today. A passenger car fails at transporting another passenger car as a passenger, as it was never designed for that recursive task. Consciousness has a "hard" time understanding consciousness, as it was never designed for that recursive task.
I deeply enjoy your presentations! Thank you for explaining so thoroughly and, when possible, visually, these notoriously difficult topics!
You're very welcome! Glad you are enjoying them.
@@profjeffreykaplan They are very good except some zionist ant......hite frankfurt school proselytising against europeans. But you can't help that because you are jewish.
What value in a clever clear-thinking teacher. I'm not the shiniest penny in the till but while Kaplan's presentation is less than 30 minutes, he was able to get across a complex topic even I could grasp. No mean feat.
Thank you for a clear explanation of the hard problem. There is an explanation that “solves” it though (please bear with me). Here is a brief summary:
1) First person subjective consciousness is the one irrefutable fact of reality. Remember, illusions are also 1st person subjective experiences.
2) Objective phenomena (world, others, even self) are appearances within consciousness. They may or may not have reality outside of consciousness, outside of appearance.
3) Objective (physical) reality is a closed system, and thus has no apparent use and no apparent explanation for subjective consciousness.
4) Therefore, the most logical explanation for reality is a form of idealism in which the stuff of realty is experience, and objective phenomena are law-governed appearances or illusions.
There are definitely esthetic concerns with this explanation ( for example, it’s not obvious how more than one actual subject is involved. “Others” in this scenario are “just “ appearances also.
So much more to discuss, but that’s the basic idea, and I’d love to hear logical objections to it.
Who else thinks a better name for "mysterianism" might be "pessimistic reductionism"?
Right with you!
I giveupism.
Pessimistic reductionism sounds like it's going to be very hard to reduce it instead of it being plainly impossible
@@ruthoglesby1805 😂😂 hahaha
Those categories are weird and illogical. Dualism makes no sense. If there's some paralel "dimension" of spiritual phenomena - it's still a part of physics, we just don't know how to poke it yet. So you still have to decide between optimistic reductionism or mysterianism. And latter sounds like a scientific wrapper for religion. Why would something that objectivelly exists be absolutely incomprehensible?
But if Epiphenomenalism is true, how come we’re able to describe that we’re conscious? If consciousness has no way of interacting with your physical brain, why does your physical brain know that you are conscious? How is it able to contemplate consciousness and talk about it with others when, if epiphenomenalism is to be believed, the physical brain itself does not experience or even know it is conscious. To experience is to interact, for us to know the existence of anything we must be able to interact in any way with it, including conscious. If consciousness really was a byproduct that never interacted with the physical world, we’d still feel stuff but the brain would never have a reason to talk about consciousness. You may say that it’s a coincidence that the physical brain believes itself to be conscious but it’s a very unlikely coincidenceness. The idea of consciousness occurring to an unconscious brain would be like the colour red occurring to a brain that can’t process red. And how is it able to accurately talk about consciousness? As if it’s experienced it itself.
Guys, these problems are very old and I am amazed that one can talk about them without referring to the past, as if we moderns and American researchers and academics were the smartest guys ever who did philosophy. Did you know that in Buddhism, a religious psychology and philosophy that arose in the fifth century BC, the number of types of consciousness (called "dharmas") varies from 8 to no less than 89? You probably don't. That's how narrow and oblivious of other traditions this whole thing is! Chalmers is a Harvard version of Descartes, i.e. philosophy without the beauty of sixteenth-century French and Latin prose. A very important distinction since philosophy is artistry, too. The parallelism or correspondence between physical phenomena and consciousness resembles arguments made by Spinoza or Leibnitz mutatis mutandis.
The easy problems of consciousness are related with what Aristotle calls the material and efficient (be)causes; the hard problem has everything to do with the other two (be)causes: the definition and final purpose of consciousness. Obviously, given the nature (you can call it it a "bias", one that is rooted in philosophy by the way, although most scientists would deny it) of present Western scientific inquiry, the last two questions can never be answered satisfactorily.
On the one hand, scientists are telling us they have observed some physiological phenomena related with brain activity and WHICH THEY CONSIDERS TO BE THE COMPLETE CAUSE OR EXPLANATION of consciousness (what about simple correlation or just necessary condition, huh? who says light would not be light without an eye to see it?)) and then they go on to say that consciousness is nothing but a subjective apprehension of sensory data. I mean, talk of being BLIND to what one is doing because one has hidden assumptions one is unwilling or incapable to examine! When scientists say the physiological processes explain consciousness are they observing the explanatory nature of the aforesaid processes? Are they actually perceiving the causality? Not at all. This is a very biased, incomplete and hasty conclusion. It is a CONCEPTUAL INTERPRETATION of SOME sensory data. But scientists treat those scientific observations, the shock and pony show of chemical and electric reactions, as if they transcended mere subjectivity and were capable by themselves to explain the brain. Then, oblivious of the activity of analyzing the data, they blithely explain consciousness WITHOUT referring to its conceptual activity at all. That won't do, sorry; and the fact that we accept such errors so easily and unquestioningly is a testament to the deeply entrenched prejudices we harbor in our minds ever since science and its slavish philosophical progeny of empiricism, rationalism and critical idealism have had the final word on everything.
All the hard problems of consciousness come from the naive realistic view, one Hume and Kant adopted without examining it, that the knower is a separate entity from the known, that the observer and the observed are and can never be one. The truth is knowledge is immediate, not transcendent. Here is the solution to all the futile paradoxes and unnecessary riddles.
yes very well said.
I agree strongly as someone who has been studying mahayana buddhism for a number of years
I don't immediately understand how that should resolve any problem... you are saying that the observer and the observed are the same... so consciousness is a thing that tricks us to not realize that? I feel as if the redness of red is being observed... not as if I am that too... so?? please explain how it is that this explains (in some factual sense) consciousness. Thank you
.I dont think it would be too dogmatic to clearly differentiate between the natural sciences-physics maths chemistry biology - and the Social Sciences-psychology Philosophy sociology etc. In trying to understand/explain "conciousness", the natural sciences are less speculative, based as they are on evidence, testing, experimentation etc- what is called the scientific method . .
Simply explained!
The "Hard Problem" of Consciousness - Why We Misunderstand It
🧠 Introduction: A seemingly unsolvable puzzle
Imagine biting into a juicy lemon. You will immediately experience the intense sour taste. But why does it feel that way? Why do we have conscious experiences at all? This question is referred to in philosophy as the "difficult problem of consciousness".
💡 The apparent riddle: "How do the electrical signals in our brain give rise to conscious experiences such as the taste of a lemon, the color red or the feeling of joy?"
Many philosophers and scientists consider this problem to be insoluble. They argue that no matter how well we understand the activity of the brain, we can never explain why conscious experience arises from it.
But is that really true? Or are we making fundamental mistakes when thinking about the problem?
🔍 The three big errors in thinking
1. The Layer Error Imagine you're watching a movie. You can describe it in two ways:
• Technical: "Pixels in different colors shine on the screen"
• Content: "An exciting chase through Paris"
Both descriptions are correct - they describe the same event on different levels. It would be nonsensical to ask: "But how do the pixels become the chase?"
⚠ First error in thinking: We confuse different levels of description of the same process and construct an apparent riddle from it.
2. The Perspective Error Think of a football match:
• From the outside perspective, you can see 22 players running after a ball
• From the inside perspective of a player, you experience effort, tactics and team spirit
Again, both perspectives describe the same event. The question "How do the feelings arise from the running players?" is misleading.
⚠ Second error in thinking: We mix the outside and inside perspectives and wrongly expect that one would have to explain the other.
3. The definition error "Why does red feel red?" This question is like "Why is water wet?". We define water precisely by its wetness. In the same way, we define "red" by our experience of color.
⚠ Third fallacy: We ask questions that are already circular by our own definitions.
📝 A Better Approach
Instead of getting caught up in these errors of reasoning, we should ask:
• How does consciousness develop in biological systems?
• What role does it play for organisms?
• How does it enable us to navigate the world?
🤔 Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Does this mean that consciousness is not mysterious? A: Consciousness is fascinating and complex, but it is not an unsolvable mystery. We just need to investigate it in the right way.
Q: Does this approach explain why we feel anything in the first place? A: It shows that this question is wrongly posed. It's like asking, "Why is a circle round?" - experience is part of the definition of consciousness.
Q: What does this mean for the exploration of consciousness? A: We can focus on the actual mechanisms and functions of consciousness instead of getting caught up in philosophical pseudo-problems.
📌 Key Points
• The "serious problem" arises from errors in thinking
• We confuse different levels of description
• We mix different perspectives
• We ask circular questions
• A Better Approach Examines the Biological Development and Function of Consciousness
I think you are confusing sensorial experience with consciousness, if you limit consciousness to sensorial experience then there is no mystery at all it is just interpretation of sensitive information. I would argue that consciousness is more about the delimitation of oneself
@@diegocolli860:08 Sensory experience is consciousness, or do you experience pain unconsciously?
@@wolfgangstegemann9375 Unlike simple sensations, consciousness involves a level of reflection and self-awareness. Human consciousness allows us to reflect on what it means to feel pain, to ask why we feel pain, and even to question the very nature of that sensation. This type of metacognition goes beyond sensory experience and is an important aspect of consciousness.
We have a continuity of identity that allows us to distinguish between past, present, and future experiences, helping to form a sense of "self" over time. This conscious "self" is not merely a collection of sensory experiences but something that interprets and organizes them.
For me, consioussness doesn´t seem like an epiphenomenon and it looks like subjective experience does have some causality over the phisical world. For instance, there wouldn´t be philosophers phisically talking and writing about the hard problem of consciusness if consciousness didn´t exist, it would be too much coincidence for zombies to talk so coherently about something never experienced.
Thanks for the videos! I found the channel today and it really deserves much more subscribers, nice clarity and rythm, saludos de argentina.
Each person knows that they themselves is not a zombie, thus clearly other people also have conscious experience.
@@goldie6634 but I only know I'm not a zombie because I know of my consciousness. But how could my zombie body also be aware of this if my conscious being wasn't physically interacting with it in some way? Like he said, if you throw out all physical connection it's just a coincidence.
this is why I don't agree with epiphenomenon or even dualism. I guess I must be mysterionist according to these definitions.
@@HopUpOutDaBed it’s your zombie body that’s “aware” of it in the first place. Even a simple AI can be “aware” of a fact in that sense. Your conscious experience merely reflects that awareness. It doesn’t actually affect the awareness, it only mirrors it.
There wouldn't be philosophers talking about the existence of God if God didn't exist. Or unicorns, or Atlantis.
We make these words, we give them meaning, in fact consciousness is just a "sensation" we cannot really describe.
And the cool thing about the brain is that it experiences whatever we believe in, that's its purpose, adapt, believe whatever it takes to survive.
If consciousness is outside of physical reality, why do we need sleep? Why do chemicals affect our perceptions? Why do genetics play a role in our view of the world? Can we say that a human without any sense of perception of the outside reality is conscious? Conscious of what?
The problem with the "hard problem of consciousness" is that it detaches the two realms and puts consciousness into a magical box.
It poses the problem by already defining an answer.
All these thought experiments make it seem as if we know more about the world than scientists who dedicated decades studying the merely "physical" reality. And it makes their job that much harder by mystifying our sense of consciousness.
@@rayremnant.u the existence of philosophers taking about the existence of god or unicorns or Atlantic or consciousness does NOT mean any of these things have any physical existence. It only means they exist as concepts.
I think that trying to solve the hard problem gives rise to the hard problem. We're trying to look for reasons why and how consciousness emerges. But the why and how ARE physical, objective reasons for something which clearly is not physical.
Consciousness is to the brain what a story is to a book. Or a law is to a piece of legislation (or legal document). The story itself is not physical but the book contains physical elements that describe it and express it. But how does the stuff of the book impact the story? It doesn't. The story is independent of the book. The book is only a holder/container for the story. And there can be multiple copies of books which project the story. The story itself exists on it's own. It is a an abstract conceptual thing. Only when matter comes to influence and interact with the story can it be experienced.
The story exists on its own? How so, why do you believe this, and what evidence can you provide to demonstrate that it exists independent of physical hardware (a 🧠)? Consciousness has only ever been found to exists in brains. Doesn’t mean it cannot exists elsewhere, but simply means we don’t have reason to believe it does.
Without consciousness the book contains no story.
Neat idea. And yes, the same book with the same letters and still it's a different story for everybody.
But that goes against a fundamental belief that many, many people aren't willing to abandon.
Appreciated breakdown ^^ The Hard Problem seems like 1) unfalsifiable to differentiate and 2) requiring committal to its existence despite any number of suggestion that consciousness is emergant, regardless if otherwise.
I do agree with Chalmers that consciousness seems to be a property of reality. But I would not call that view dualism and say that it’s completely separate of the physical world, because we have to remember that changes in the physical world, like the touch of the molecules of ice in the molecules of my hands, do affect my conscious state by creating a subject feeling of cold, for example. So there’s has to be a connection between conscious and the physical world. They must be, at the end, all properties of a single and connected reality.
I hear you but a dualist view presents itself AS a connected reality. No one can deny that the function of consciousness MUST be able to interact with the physical world (in this example, I THINK to move my arm and a bunch of physical stuff happens and my arm moves. One connected reality.
@@denniscalero9396 that’s true. This is a fascinating topic, maybe the most fascinating of all. I didn’t use the example of the other way around because there’s some research that claims that you decide to move your arm, neurologically speaking, even before you are conscious about it.
What amazes me, as someone that work with artificial intelligence, is the existence of a subject experience. I think it’s completely possible to build a program that can mimic a human in every way, and yet the subject experience would not be necessary for that. Like in the zombie argument.
Nonetheless, the consciousness is the most certain aspect of reality. Like in Descartes doubt, it is our starting ground to understand the world, it’s what’s left when we cut everything that might not be real, and yet it’s the aspect of reality that we understand less, to not say that we don’t understand nothing about it.
@@alaor6782 a dualist phenomenon would explain that too: your mind, separate from the brain, decides to move the arm, and the movement starts before the decision to more is registered in that portion of the brain. Weird right?
@@denniscalero9396precisely! This explains the puzzle of how baseball or cricket players are able to decide whether to swing at the ball in a fraction of a second, well within the 1 to 2 second time to decide scientists have measured.
NAVOMITTO: A New Approach to the Hard Problem
The "hard problem" of consciousness refers to the mystery of subjective experience: how something physical like the brain can give rise to interior, conscious qualities like the redness of red or the painfulness of pain. Philosophers have struggled for centuries to solve this puzzle.
The NAVOMITTO framework offers a novel approach to solving the hard problem. At its core, NAVOMITTO sees reality as composed of illusory dimensions and perspectives that differentiate across clarions. It's this process of differentiation across clarions that gives rise to consciousness and qualia.
Clarions are the key to the solution. Lower clarions contain relatively undifferentiated perspectives that likely correspond to primitive forms of awareness. As perspectives differentiate into more parallel perspectives across higher clarions, richer conscious experiences emerge. Consciousness "scales up" as clarions increase.
Subclarions within each clarion also play an important role. Subclarionic dynamics contain the finely differentiated information processing that grounds our qualia. Though embedded within a given clarion of consciousness, subclarions may bridge the gap to neural processes.
The vocabulary of NAVOMITTO - illusion, dimensions, perspectives, clarions, subclarions - provides new conceptual tools for understanding how consciousness arises. Traditionally, philosophers framed the problem in terms of physical substances - like neurons - that seemed fundamentally separate from subjective experience. But clarions reframe the debate in a more fertile way.
While NAVOMITTO presents only a high-level solution at this point, it points to a promising new direction for tackling the hard problem. Consciousness may emerge as an inevitable byproduct of the differentiation and integration of perspectives across clarions and subclarions - a product of the illusory structure of reality itself.
In this way, NAVOMITTO offers a potential answer to the hard problem: consciousness arises through the process of differentiation across clarions, grounded and textured by subclarionic dynamics, and made possible by the illusory nature of reality. With further development and refinement, NAVOMITTO's novel conceptual tools may finally help philosophers crack the mystery of consciousness.
NAVOMITTO: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Understanding Reality
Nothingness and existence are two sides of the same coin
Illusion
1-there is Illusion. Reality is made of Illusion. Illusion is the whole coin of nothingness-existence. Illusion is all aspects of reality from zero (nothingness) to infinity (existence at its most actualized form). Illusion is the paradox itself. Illusion can be seen in different clarion through the process of differentiation.
Dimension (Universal)
2-there is Dimension. each Dimension describe a concept or property or quality or quantity or relations or changes or process or anything else. each Dimension is unique in its own way but it can be seen as an interaction of infinite other Dimensions. in other way each Dimension is entangled with Illusion and All Dimensions are emergent from Illusion. Dimension exists in different Clarions and different Perspective. Illusion can be seen as infinite Dimentions.
Perspective (Particular)
3-There is perspective. The set of perspectives in different clarions makes the dimension. Any conscious or unconscious entity can only pass through successive perspectives in different clarions. It is not possible for an entity to pass to parallel perspectives. Each perspective contains unique information that describes the dimension in that clarion. Each perspective manifests its own unique qualia.
Clarion
4-there is Clarion. Clarion determines how many Perspective exist in that particular Clarion (in a specific Dimension). Clarion can be any number from Zero to Maxima.
Differentiation (enamation)
5-There is Differentiation. Differentiation is the process of enamation that involves separation of superimposed information (at previous lower clarion) into more clear information (at next higher clarion) that leads to increase in clarity, But losing of information's. Differentiation creates Reciprocal Hierarchy Structure of Dimentions.
(For example: At a lower Clarion , you may have a Perspective that contains information about red and green (Particular red-green). There is no green or red in this lower Clarion Perspective but there is only red-green. Through the process of differentiation, the information in this Perspective (Perspective red-green) can be separated into 2 simpler, more clear Perspectives at next clarion (Perspective red + Perspective green). red Perspective is the parallel Perspective of green and red-green is the parent Perspective at lower Clarion. So if you move from red-green Perspective to red Perspective you will gain clarity but at the same time you lose information of green Perspective)
Nothingness
6-there is Clarion 0. Clarion Zero contains no Perspective. Clarion 0 is nothingness. Clarion 0 contains all of illusion as potential. Nothingness is the result of superimposition of all Dimentions. All Dimensions are common in Clarion Zero. Clarion 0 is the only simple.
Existence
7-there is Clarion 1. At Clarion one, there is one Perspective in Dimention. The information in Clarion 1 includes the superimposition of all Perspectives in Clarion 2. Clarion One contains all information found in Dimention, but in an undifferentiated form and looks simple because it is viewed from the perspective of Clarion One. Clarion One means Dimention in the most uncertain state.
Inflectia
8-Between Clarion Zero and Clarion Maxima, there is an intermediate Clarion that has the largest amount of Parallel Perspectives. From clarion zero to inflectia, the number of Parallel Perspectives for each clarion increases, and from inflectia to clarion maxima, the number of Parallel Perspectives for each clarion decreases. Perspectives at Inflectia has the most complexity while Perspectives at Clarion 1 and Platonica has the minimum Complexity.
Platonica
9-there is Clarion (Maxima-1). In Clarion (Maxima-1), Dimention needs another Differentiation to reach Clarion Maxima. Platonica means Dimention in the most certain state. each perspective at Platonica contains the last bit of information in that Dimention.
In Platonica, with One differentiation, existence is destroyed and nothingness remains. Platonica is formed from the superimposition of Nothingness in clarion Maxima.
Maxima (Infinity)
10-there is Clarion Maxima. In Clarion Maxima, there is no superimposition, and all causes have already occurred, with no change left to be made. In Clarion Maxima, there can be no further differentiation, and there is nothing left to differentiate. Therefore, paradoxically, Clarion Maxima, represent Clarion 0. Maxima can be any number from zero to infinity.
Formulas:
11-The number of Parallel Perspectives in Clarion C is calculated through the binomial coefficient with the following formula:
N=P!/(C!(P-C)!)
In this formula:
N=number of Parallel Perspectives in Clarion C
P=Platonica Clarion
12-Despite the existence of multiple perspectives in the upper clarions, for a perspective in the lower clarion it is only possible to enter P-C+1 number of perspectives from the upper clarions (for 0
Thought this was some neuroscience research framework, turns out it's some schizopost
Ty for the excellent presentation. It was recommended by a teacher of advaita vedanta who has referred to Chalmers in a lecture about Consciousness and a logical flaw in The Hard Problem approach.
I believe you're talking about Swami Sarvapriyananda. A veritable lighthouse in a swamp full of spiritual charlatans.
I'm immensely entertained by the way you introduce deeply complex and cutting edge material and immediately drop "whatever" afterwards, because the details aren't meaningfully informative upon the thing being considered and it's exactly the point at which my brain is coming to that conclusion.
A neurobiologist who lives in southern California...but whatever. He won the Nobel prize for the structure of DNA.
*_You Are Your Brain & Your Brain Is You_** ;*
We have yet to find evidence that it's possible, for a _"conscience thinking mind"_ to exist, without a _"living functioning brain"._
If your memories & personality are separate from your brain, _(in a soul),_ then *they would not be effected by damage to the brain.* _(but they are)_
Even though we don't know the exact process by which consciousness arises, it is still _undeniable that it is a brain process that can't occur, separate from the brain._
Even then, the only way to study the effect of brain damage on the _subjective experience_ of a memory is with the cooperation of the experiencing subject. Otherwise, it would remain completely obscure to us. You can correlate it, sure, but it's a correlation derived from the view from within (the experience of a memory) with the observer's view from without (MRI scans, for example), not the other way. So even if we have the entire brain mapped out in the future, it would be _impossible_ to know if there is a problem with a memory without the report of the subject.
1. The brain is a prediction machine. At multiple levels.
2. Most of what the brain 'does' is 'emergent behaviour', (that is it is unintuitively different than the sum of its inputs).
3. Therefore, my brain is constantly having to predict what I am going to feel and do next.
4. As my brain gets better at predicting me, it also gets better at predicting others, which in a social species is highly adaptive.
5. "What it's like" to be doing this all the time gives rise to the internal monlogue, the story telling, and ultimately the impression that mind feels like a separate thing.
So it's Optimistic Reductionism, if we can work out how to work backwards from emergent behaviour to underlying cause, and Mysterianism, if we can't.
I like to think that the brain is an abstraction machine. A processor connected to a sensory apparatus. The sensory apparatus includes input and output as well as storage and is all an abstraction of the interaction experience.
Without the extraction of the sensory apparatus structure the processor function could not work as there would be no data.
Cognative function only begins when the initial sensory stimuli is received. This function begins building sets based on experiences and abstraction of comparative elements.
The abstraction of these sets continues to build models to understand and interact with the stimuli. This is the begining of conciousness. There are many model sets being built, allowing the sophistication of an intellect and personality of the individual to grow. There is a plataeu based on requirement of abstraction the individual needs in their enviorment, habit of abstraction and interest in learning or discovering things.
This seems to reflect in an individual based on the regular interactive cohorts they keep, and activities they take part in or not. So change the enviorment change the mind.
This may not remain my theory if I get feedback that helps me move to a better model or reconcille it to somewhere inbetween. I just think it seems to fit quite well as a process.
It is something that came to me when pondering Rene Descartes 'I think therefore I am', and applying concepts of everything being a function to a non well founded universal set model. The idea was how cognition begins, how sets would be formed. I concluded that whilst the thinker could not be sure of anything about themselves they could be sure of the following. That any cognition that occurs would require an abstraction apparatus regardless of form, that any cognition receiving data could gain enough sophistication to identify the 'function set model'. That all ideas sit in the universal set model and that includes the well founded set models. That the reality of the situation must exist as a set model, even if the thinking mind can not find it. That the mind can abstract a model adequate enough to be a non well founded set within the reality set model they are experiencing with some well founded sets inside that greater model. That this is adequate enough for the interactions the mind perceives are taking place, provided the mind continues the quest for understanding.
Thank you for laying out so clearly Chalmer's article, must admit he was brilliant creating the circular reasoning in positing the hard problem and proposing a dualist solution so that the hard problem will forever remain hard and "unsolved", a gordian knot.
@Luigi Simoncini It isn't circular, though. The hard problem is, indeed, a hard problem, and no-one has even come close to offering a physicalist solution to it. You are welcome to suggest one.
@@Brian.001 I believe Dennett has offered a defensible materialist position regarding the subjective experience, as have earlier comments on this show. Disagreeing with one's position is not evidence of the validity of another's, nor is incredulity, imho.
@@ruthoglesby1805 OK, but what do you mean by 'defensible'? If the question is 'how can subjective experience arise within a material brain?' and someone replies that subjective experience is nothing more than objective processes, they might conceivably turn out to be right - who knows - but they haven't in any way explained how this can be the case.
@@Brian.001 I think Dennett's example of a graphic user interface is illustrative. But, it may still be missing your point. My question then is what definition of subjective experience captures the 'essence' beyond the physical?
@@ruthoglesby1805 Well, I think that question carries a presupposition that the essence is, indeed, 'beyond the physical', but I am not claiming that to be the case. I don't know whether subjective experience actually goes beyond the physical. Rather, I know what subjective experience is, from having it, and then my question is 'how can this be a physical phenomenon?' I claim that we do not need a definition of subjective experience. I know that I am in pain, for example, before I even begin to think about definitions. We all know the subjective experience of being in pain - but how can that be nothing other than the firing of C-fibres in the brain? I don't have a clue, and I don't think Dan has either.
Thank you so much. I really like how you explain things
You're welcome. Glad it was helpful!
As a cognitive scientist, I find myself squarely in the camp which finds the "hard problem" argument unconvincing.
The argument is unconvincing for the same reason that many otherwise interesting discussions of consciousness also end up going in circles. We can't seem to reach an agreement on what consciousness is, and as a result many approaches conflate properties of consciousness with properties which are not conscious at all. Confusion is inevitable.
Perhaps then it would be useful to begin by thinking about what consciousness ISN'T. I propose that it isn't part of the spectrum of cognitive processing that ranges from the simplest responses of unicellular life to its environment at one end of the spectrum, and goes on to increasingly elaborate neuroanatomical function at the other end.
Spiders, fish, mice, mammals: they and we are all functioning in essentially the same way, responding to internal signals that are representations of our environment. What is it "like" to respond in this way? Ask your fingertip when it touches a hot surface. It's a meaningless question. A purely neuroanatomical description will suffice. We don't suppose that there is some homunculus down there at that level of expression, an "experiencer" capable of greater things but fated to the menial toil of relaying the information on to the rest of the organism. There is, as far as we know scientifically, absolutely no evidence of such an awareness at this level. Nor is it needed in any way.
When we come to it, consciousness is a very minor recent cognitive feature which seems to manifest for sure in only one species on this entire planet, and arguably not often even then.
We may persuade ourselves that most of our cognitive activities are conscious, but nothing could be further from the truth. Even as I'm writing this, almost all of what I'm doing is not being consciously chosen. If you were to hide the keyboard from me, for example, I could probably only locate half of the keys by a conscious exercise of memory, yet my fingers find the positions accurately and without any deliberate assembly of motions. Even my casual intention to type "motions" produced an entire unconscious cascade of appropriate neural activity. Most of my ability to assemble ideas into plausible sequences of inference has thorough long practice become unconscious. The initial practice was indeed deliberate and conscious, but eventually I no longer need to focus my attention on it. I've trained my unconscious mind to do the work.
And my unconscious mind has no idea what it's "like" to be an unconscious mind. This is not a hard problem. There's no philosophical conundrum to it. It is undoubtedly a process that runs in human neuroanatomy.
The thin layer that I have of introspection and theory of mind and ability to frame abstract propositions and arguments, well, it's half unconscious also. Still, I can knowingly access and manipulate scraps of it, which is amazing, and I can knowingly refuse to do so, which is equally amazing. However, I don't propose that I could recognize what makes this sort of process neurologically distinct from an unconscious process of comparable complexity. Likewise, I wouldn't expect to look at the zeroes and ones inside a computer and be able to infer what processes might be taking place there.
It's very cool that we can think about thinking. That requires some capacity for symbolic abstraction, which I strongly suspect requires language - and not just the literal representations of a language such as arithmetic but of a higher order equivalent to algebra.
Several species can perform simple arithmetic tasks such as detecting differences between small integer sums. Solving an algebraic equation calls for manipulating abstract symbols whose meaning has yet to be determined. And this degree of cognitive ability seems essential before we can think about abstractions such as thinkers, thoughts, possibilities, impossibilities, and so on.
Even then, all this could and often does proceed unconsciously. It took the course of most of human evolution to achieve this much. I can solve simple integrals in my sleep, and compose music, for example. Even, once in a rare while, I'll have a dream in which I wonder whether I'm dreaming, and carry on regardless.
I can't exactly tell you what this skilful dreaming is "like," though I can tell you what it's like to awaken with a memory of it. There is a homunculus, and it's me, and it seems to tangibly and smoothly emerge from these other, distinctly unconscious, capabilities as well as reaching down into them a short distance.
How is this sort of emergence a "hard" problem? It's just one thin layer of capability. Don't conflate it with all of cognition, because then you'll be obliged to account for all of cognition as if it were conscious, and that sort of overreach is entirely unjustified. It's how we get ridiculous claims such as "the universe must be conscious" or "consciousness requires a quantum substrate."
Jeffrey doesn’t venture into the realm of Idealism because he would probably endanger his professorship for doing so, given the paradigmatic stranglehold of scientific materialism on the dogmatic foundational presumptions that are enforced in our institutions of higher learning-but the fact is there is important work being done that this lecture fails to consider.
The deeply flawed presumption that there is such a thing as an objective observer is the most glaring example of such dogma. Science is based on that presumption. It is a 3rd person illusion that presumes that there is a “me” that can find out about “it” without “it” being affected by “me”. even though the evidence is overwhelmingly contrary to this notion. Nobody ever proved Berkeley wrong, because you can’t within the auspices of 3rd person science and that, by Karl Popper’s falsifiability principle anyway, means that it isn’t science. Fair enough, but that doesn’t mean what he said wasn’t true that if nobody heard the tree fall, it didn’t make a sound.
Just because Einstein was bothered by the idea that if nobody is looking at the moon, it does not exist doesn’t mean he was right. He was also very bothered by “spooky action at a distance” and went to his grave not buying it. Then John Bell came along.
It might very well be that the Advaitists were correct all along and that existence and consciousness are the same thing, and that it is also Blissful! This is in fact provable via 1st person Science, so-called by the Advaitists, of course you would have to actually perform the experimentation, which is subjective and contemplative, but this is anathema to 3rd person scientists because it violates their fundamental methodology.
Ah! Daniel Dennett; aman unafraid to ask the truly hard questions.. and then answer a much simpler, adjacent question.
That was awesome. Thank you for making such efforts to educate people. Would love to hear more about David Chalmers and Dualism.
Roger Penrose spoke about this lack of knowledge about consciousness. He mentioned a few things we know about. For instance that we know how to turn it off with sedatives and that it seems to originate on the surface of neurons.
There's also the "semi-hard" problem of consciousness: the diversity of qualia. From the outside we see the brain's various electrical signals, and though they have different frequencies, amplitudes, etc. they're the same essential thing. From the inside, we aware of qualia that are entirely different from each other: colors, sounds, tastes, feels, smells.
I'd say that's the hard "hard problem" of consciousness 😅
The "hard problem" (or "easy hard problem" as I like to call it) could be removed by idealism, but the hard "hard problem" remains a mystery.
@@MeRetroGamer Point well taken. A better "semi-hard" problem might be: If epiphenomenonalism is true, why do our sensations correspond so closely to the real world? After all, if there's no causation from the mental to the physical, natural selection would have no interest in shaping mental phenomena. It's as if the smoke coming out of the train's smokestack formed a scale model of the train. Also, why do we experience meaning when words are said? It's one thing for the physical brain to do its thing in response to a sound signal, but why would there be any warrant for us to extract meaning (since again, the metal according to epi, does not influence the physical.)
@@gregsimay7379 That's one of the many reasons why I think epiphenomenalism (and dualism in general) is flawed.
Another reason is that abstractions do actually influence lower layers of reality (just think of what engineering is). There's plenty of evidence of top-down causality in nature, and mostly in biology. Modeling the world around us and making algorithms to reorganize the lower layers of reality for the sake of some abstract purpose is just an undeniable fact that surrounds our entire lives!
So I'm pretty convinced that there's plenty of wrong assumptions both in physicalism and dualism.
Nevertheless, I think that there's no body/mind problem at all, that they're both the same fact, the same acting of nature, just that somehow, due to the complexity of our biological system and its ability for multi-layered reflection, we can see those events in two different contexts (physical and mental), but they're just two different ways of experiencing and knowing about the same thing/process/phenomena/whatever.
@@MeRetroGamer I've wondered if thinking about consciousness is prone to slipping into the masked man fallacy. ("I recognize who my father is, but I don't recognize who this masked man is, therefore the two men must be different people.) But I do think Chalmers has a point with his philosophical zombie; that is, how do you distinguish between an unconscious zombie who perfectly mimics conscious behavior, and a conscious human being? I don't think that consciousness involves extra energy, which could be one way of telling a zombie from a human. It seems that once you have the right, complex patterns of matter, consciousness arises. But that would mean that consciousness per se is a property that is independent of energy--and therefore mass, and therefore spacetime. If this property dualism is correct, then under certain conditions, consciousness might be able to become untethered from the spacetime location of the brain producing it (taking the physicalist point of view.) Assuming that remote viewing is real, this feature of consciousness could provide a way to explain it.
@@gregsimay7379 To me, it seems that the mystery of consciousness is at the same level than the mystery of existence. I don't entertain any more the idea of any unqualified (or "no phenomenological") kind of existence.
Experience is the main reality, and the forms of nature (matter) and its complexity (forces and relations) arise as the symbols and relations in those experiencial events.
There's no experience without its symbols, and there's no symbol that could exist in the absence of experience.
The hard answer could be to give up CALLING the edges of consciousness (“where” it necessarily connects with our atoms in or around our brain cells) on names like “oscillation” or “particles”, and give up pretending that they predictably exist in our observable universe. The way we should picture this event horizon, between what we can perceive and what we can’t, should rather be a smooth verlauf from existence to non-existence (where predictability starts to be increasingly limited). This would automatically explain things like quantum weirdness because particles are never in complete existence in our observable universe - the smaller they are the less they exist, given we define existence as predictability of measurable attributes and their changes after an interaction or other event (plus we consider them being fully independent, separate and different from other existing things). What official science currently models as waves (of energy) or vibration (of matter) - that can fully be defined as a combination of, mostly meaningless and random, different amplitude-frequency data pairs - is actually the soft edge of our predictable (existing) world, where Kansas go bye-bye from our viewpoint.
Existence itself can be on a continuum. It's not a binary on or off type of quality.
@DavidVonR Yes, it would be pretty short-sighted to think that a subatomic particle has a full set of precisely detectable attributes (like size, weight, speed, momentum, whatever) the way atoms, molecules and larger things have. The level of existence of particles is never 0 (does not exist) nor 1 (exists) but always a value between these two. They can “somewhat” exist in our observable universe. And, their dual nature is the source (or manifestation) of some kind of fundamental intelligence (or information). Particles tend to carry an information package which disappears when the information is delivered, I suppose - that’s why the wave function seems to “collapse” in the double slit experience when an observer (recipient of the information) reads out data. Or, in other words, a decision is made whether the electron/photon/etc is detectable matter, rather than a package of energy. I currently assume that information is just as “real” as the entity that contains it. I even sometimes think that our entire observable universe might be a subset of a larger reality created by the combination of 3 dual/unreal conceptions: energy-matter, space-time, and information-intelligence (where this latter determines even things like axioms and universal constants).
@14:56 Offering up a theory, the neurons are repeating a pattern of complex sensory experience. For the structure of the individual brain there is a semi variable pattern of how the brain experiences sensory data, depending on the stage of neuron reproduction. This shows in structural variablility within the larger fixed structure in individual brains.
So one sensory experience has multiple elements within that experience. The brain processing elements of experience attempts to repeat the partial abstract experience of the greater pattern. The brain when thinking can replicate elements from different patterns to form new patterns. The growth of experience is the growth of pattern vocabulary. So thinking is determined by both apparatus and experienced enviorment. A brain is an situational adaptor through these abstractions and can only improve through experience and reflection.
Experience of a pattern can degrade as the brain replicates the pattern less often and this is why memory is imperfect.
Brain damage results in a change of thinking because it prevents replication of patterns of experience. The structure of the brain is changed even in healing and may become unable to fully complete the experienced pattern or find a new experience adaptation.
Consciousness is all we really have. Without it there is no us
How do you prove that you have consciousness? By interacting with the world using your body
You have your body.
How can you interact with the world around you with your body? You do it naturally by being conscious.
The world exists.
Within that world are items that are separate from each other. How? Because there cannot be two things occupying the same place and time.
Space and time exist.
If we use things in certain space and time, to the best of our conscious ability, these are our own things.
Basically what i'm saying is that you own stuff.
Can you own that stuff and is it yours or not is purely up to law you subjects yourself to. And law is created by consciousness.
So yeah we do own something more than just consciousness, because we specifically have consciousness even if we are not capable of experimenting with it in any meaningful way.
And yet, most human thinking and reacting and decision making is *_unconscioius._* Neurologists have estimated that the proportion of brain cells which are related to consciousness, to those which are not, is about a ratio of 1:100,000,000. Meaning that only about 0.000001% of your brain is conscious. The other 99.999999% of your brain is doing most of your sensing and thinking and feeling and intuiting and reacting and decision-making, and only the final results pop into your consciousness. So I'm afraid that your statement is only about 0.000001% true.
loved this, so insightful!
writing on glass is brilliant as it stops what tecahers always did at school - turning their back on you when they wrote on the board behind
Experiments in the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research department showed there is some crossover/overlap between the conscious & physical worlds, although small. This would tend against dualism/epiphenomenalism, rather supporting panpsychism or panprotopsychism.
The philosophical reasoning presented by the speaker is flawed in the way he leads us back to dualism. There is only a need to explain consciousness as a separate but necessary adjunct to physics if it manifests downward causation, and that is not merely unproven, but as our AI implementations being increasingly humanlike it must seem more and more indefensible as a claim.
In reality, it is not possible for any person A to prove their consciousness to person B. Ergo it has no physical existence at all. It exists only as a complex dynamic abstraction (like a song or a poem) made out of the interactions of lower level abstractions (like memories beliefs and ideas). So it’s a purely informational thing.
The end of this chain of reasoning is that conscious experience is really just an informational shadow of some kinds of physical data processing system that are constructed to maintain an awareness of themselves. Being an abstraction, that shadow doesn’t really exist in the real world at all, and it doesn’t affect anything that does, so there’s no need to amend or supplement physics.
My thoughts almost exactly.
One cannot see a movement in a microscope.
One can only see things moving.
Movement is abstract and is the foundation of all abstractions
like for examples thoughts and the being-conscious-process.
“All is mind” - The Kybalion. I.e. monism
i love hearing this in my right ear
In order to understand anything, one must be able to define it. If you cannot define it, you cannot study it. This is why the study of “consciousness” is so difficult. And yet, we have a sense of consciousness, as argued by Thomas Nagel in “What it is like to be a bat”. Everyone understands what the term “consciousness” refers to; generally in the context of “what something is like”. That is how we think - by comparing this to that: our memories of bats, knowledge of hearing and echo-location, etc. The neurophysiology of understanding the brain mechanisms underlying those processes is the “easy” problem - the “whatness” of consciousness. Consciousness itself can be considered as the “field” of those comparisons. Consider riding in a train, looking out the window, seeing people, houses, cows, whatever. Consciousness is just looking out the window. When you realize you are conscious it is because you recognize something, say a car. Your brain has compared what you see to your memory and decided either you know what it is or you don’t. What has happened is you have “split” your mind into 2 parts - a recollection (comparison with some stored memories) versus a current perception. That process results in an event that is neither past nor present; it cannot be defined, yet the result is definitely an experience. But while you may remember the result, you do not remember experiencing the result: thus the experience of recognition is not defineable. That doesn’t mean we can’t call it something. We call it “consciousness”. You can know what you know, and you can know what you don’t know, but you can’t know what you can’t know. What you can’t know is consciousness.
I came across some neurological research that demonstrated that we make decisions and have thoughts long before we become aware of them. We have the impression that we willed these thoughts and decisions into existence “consciously” but this is not actually the case. This should lead us to a conclusion along the lines that we are not really conscious at all, but we become aware of the results of our subconscious thinking and believe them to be our “consciousness”.
It’s very difficult to get to grips on this concept. An easy example is our (conscious) experience of vision. Subconsciously, we see everything upside down and erratically (with two blind spots) and as two almost indistinguishable separate images. Yet our “conscious” experience is an upright, steady and complete whole image of the world. It’s a complete fabrication. What we experience “consciously” doesn’t exist as we see it, and we are totally unaware that it may be derived from a sea of unconscious experiences. Nothing “parallel” about it. Out brains present us with a “conscious” showing of its internal activities, and yet we have no idea that even this has occurred! :o
@Learn Thai
Do you have a reference to that research? How can we have a thought, not be conscious of it, and it still be a thought?
That doesn't imply that we aren't conscious, only that there are brain processes that we're not conscious of. Some of our conscious experiences do have an illusory aspect -- for example, visual experience seems continuous even though there are blind spots. That doesn't mean the experiences aren't conscious.
@@richarddoan9172 Yes, true. It's difficult to know where "consciousness" begins, though, and how conscious one can actually be. Take driving, for instance. You're certainly conscious of driving and of the surroundings and the traffic, etc. But you must have experienced arriving at your destination without having any memory or awareness of how you get there.
This came home to me one day when I was driving along the M25 around London, on my way to Birmingham. The turnoff to the M1 is a major, impossible to miss turnoff with giant sign posts to tell you where to come off the M25 at the gyratory. I happened to be chatting to a client on my handsfree phone. At one point, I realised that I had missed the turnoff. How was that possible? So I turned round at the next turnoff, about 10 miles further on and made sure to keep a watchful eye for the M1 signs.
I somehow missed the turnoff again. So 10 miles later, another U-turn, I'm making an extra special effort to focus on looking out for the M1 gyratory. Could I have been mistaken about how big and obvious it was?
I missed it yet again! This time, I hung up the phone and made the final U-turn. When I reached the M1 turnoff, this time no longer distracted by the conversation, I saw that the signs were indeed huge and impossible to miss. It was very frightening to realise that I was completely oblivious to the act of driving or my surroundings, even while looking "consciously" and deliberately at the road while driving. What if something unexpected had occured, like someone ahead stopping suddenly or someone overtaking suddenly in front of me or whatever? I might have "woken" up into consciousness in such a situation, who knows? Or I might have had a serious accident simply because of being unconscious while driving the car with my eyes wide open!
:o
I’ve heard of this research anecdotally as well. Very interesting stuff.
My question would be “how did they determine at what point the decision was made and at what point the person became aware?”
The best they could have done is looked at the portion of the brain they associated with decision and looked at the part they associated with awareness, but that doesn’t really tell us if subjective decision occurs before subjective awareness.
Taking a step back, how are they correlating one part of the brain with decision and one part with awareness? Awareness seems particularly problematic.
Referencing your section on "experience of vision". Very true. Every sensory perception we ever had, have now, or will have is entirely a product of imagination, evolved over millenia to enable quick 'best estimate' response to danger.
Another excellent and non-judgmental discussion of some relevant topics in philosophy. From my view, Daniel Dennett makes short work of Chalmer's perspective by reminding us of the myriad ways our sensory organs pre-process data, with the resultant understanding that none of these processes are simultaneous nor are they fed into a single mental entity called "consciousness."
Regardless of my personal perspective-your lectures are absolutely superb! I look forward to seeing more of them! Thanks!
It feels like some of the arguments against the optimistic theory of consciousness are defining consciousness as the non-physical element, which you'll know when you see it.
And then they use that to explain that consciousness can't be explained by physical processes.
There maybe a 4th possible way to "explain" the hard problem. It's almost like #3 dualism but it goes a bit further. Well maybe a lot further. We can start by questioning dualism. The first question follows from #3 is this: Which one comes first, consciousness or physical reality? By all indications and experiences consciousness comes first. I won't go into the details here why I personally think so, but there are very good experimental and personal proofs of this, and zero evidence suggesting that it's the other way around. So #4 is that physical reality as we experience it is merely the product of the particular configuration of consciousness we currently posses. There is no such a thing out there as an absolute physical reality in which somehow consciousness arises. It's rather that we collectively as humans believe that there is such a thing as physical reality because of our way of experiencing consciousness.
So pretty much the matrix
@@YHShinVH LOL, but not really.
So, what Chalmers calls the easy versus the hard problem could be reduced to the explanations of conscious activity that are possible or doable and those that are not possible or impossible because of the subjective nature of consciousness and these latter can be boiled down to two: the How and the Why does consciousness emerge as an observable phenomenon. I agree that these latter are harder than the former because we still haven't worked them out, but disagree that we can't. Susan Greenfield's research is already touching on this. The problem Chalmers has, I think, is that he confuses consciousness with self-awareness because many animals we know are conscious and that doesn't seem to bother him as a hard thing. . Susan's research points to the critical mass reached with cluster assemblies of neurons that seem to indicate the difference between both, so the question isn't that hard. What is hard is to come to terms with the realisation, the Eureka moment of realising that we exist, but that isn't that different from the surprise of seeing after having been blind. A surprise that you get used to. Also, it being a very slow process from learning to identify yourself (some animals can already do that) to discuss philosophy, it is something we slowly take in as a fact. It is only retrospectively that we wonder at the magic of acquiring self awareness at the age of two. Nobody remembers exactly when they began to realised they exist.
Love your classes 👏 It would be great if you reviewed this lecture to include Kastrup and Hoffman’s theory of Analytic Idealism which substantially advances metaphysics aligning it with new quantum theories and geometries
'The Observer Effect' in quantum physics is not mentioned by Chalmers (per this overview), which does allow an interface between dualistic consciousness and phenomena.
There is no observer effect, it's not related to an observer, only to measurement. Regardless of the consciousness or lack thereof of the measurement maker.
Isn't there another option besides physicalism and dualism? What about idealism - the theory that consciousness is fundamental and physical bodies are illusory? I'm thinking of the Analytic Idealism proposed by, for example, Bernardo Kastrup.
Technically, dualism fails to answer hard problem same as physicalism. Only subjective idealism remains.
Spectacular presentation.
The fundamental problem here is that the language game that comprises the natural sciences is not comprehensive enough to describe subjectivity at all. This is a design choice and indeed a feature - the whole point of the scientific project is to try and generate objective explanations of phenomena that do not require or contain any references to subjective experience. This is reflected even on a very basic grammatical level: scientific statements (natural laws, predictions derived from theories, even raw empirical data) are written in third person only, as if they were written by an ideal observer that himself is fundamentally separate from the things he describes. So scientific language is a deliberately reduced sub-set of whatever natural language it is phrased in.
The language of subjectivity, on the other hand, is grammatically and semantically complete. All its sentences can be phrased as first-person descriptions of the narrator's subjective experience, and this experience can contain second and third person statements, including all possible scientific statements. In subjective language, sentences like "I believe that / I understand that / I perceive that [third-person statement about a set of perceived external objects or components of a scientific model]" are well-formed and common. So subjective language has a way to reference and encompass scientific or "objective" language, whereas the inverse is not true, by design of the latter.
For a subjective speaker to make an objective statement X is to imply a subjective statement of the form "I believe that X is true, and I think anyone else should also believe that." If that implied statement wasn't subjectively true, the subjective speaker would not be making the objective claim X in the first place. Again, no such requirement exists in the inverse, since it is perfectly possible to make subjective statements that do not imply reference to an objective reality.
Finally, subjective conscious experience necessarily is epistemologically prior to any contents that unfold in it, including the formulation and understanding of scientific or objective statements. Epistemologically, subjectivity is fundamental, whereas objectivity is a derived category. Subjectivity cannot be doubted, since the act of doing so is identical to the subjective experience of it, but objectivity is merely a concept that you can doubt or disbelieve in in a (phenomeno)logically consistent way.
So all these observations lead me to the conclusion that the reductionist approach is precisely backwards: instead of reducing the subjective to the objective, which is linguistically, epistemologically and as of now practically impossible without loss of information, the correct course of action seems to be to reduce the objective to the subjective.
This is precisely what Eastern (Hindu/Buddhist) philosophy has been doing all along, and I think Western philosophy, despite its impressive achievements in other fields, has still not even begun to understand this approach to any real extent. I think the solutions to many problems in the theory of mind have probably already been formulated some 4000-ish years ago in some footnote of some commentary to the Upanishads or such. It's just that we still lack the conceptual instrumentarium to translate these solutions into anything that can be handled by modern-era Western philosophy.
Have you spoken about Churchland’s arguments? Im trying to find a défense for physicalism for my essay, any help? Thank you!
I hope your essay went well
The only person ive ever seen actually attempt to do "science" on mental space, thats is; the inside subjective consciousness, is Shinzen Young. I highly recommend his book; the science of Enlightenment.
So are you saying that epiphenomonon is part of dualism?
My reaction a moment earlier when it was revealed that he must be a dualist, is that he had not considered emergence or epiphenomonon. Why wouldn't those be reductionalist? We understand "wetness" and how it is caused by the interaction of molecules, even though it is not a property of fundamental particles. We understand the properties of crystals as arising from the interactions of atoms, but don't apply to atoms. I don't see emergence as a "different kind of thing" separate from physics, but as the normal kind of chunking or hierarchical organization that we've done to go from quantum mechanics -> particle physics -> atomic physics -> chemistry -> biochemistry.
Alas, what about idealism among optimistic reductivism and dualism
My right ear would have enjoyed this, thankfully mono audio is a ubiquitous option
Very enjoyable. Do you want to try free will vs determinism?
Dualism is in danger of becoming a bit like creationism. "You can't explain this, therefore God/Spirit.". We have really only had the tools needed to explore the brain for the last 20-30 years so the first steps are to get a clear understanding of the basics, which is ongoing. The "hard" problem may not be so hard, once that is understood.
BTW No-one has ever actually found this other "stuff" of consciousness. That is a problem, perhaps philosophers could tell us where and how to look? Also why is it always associated with bodies?
Yes and
a good place to begin is with a thorough investigation into
the meaning of the word 'analogous'.
(Which is, to my way of thinking, the foundation of the conscious).
It's as simple as this. A true clone of your subjective consciousness would need to operate from both bodies simultaneously, you would need to now see, hear and feel from two seperate locations. Obviously, our intuition alongside many related studies suggests that this would not be the case given an exact physical reconstruction of our bodies and dna atom-by-atom. We suspect that the clone might be us in every way except the main way, it would have our memories and behave like us, but we would still know that the real "us" is still confined to only one location, inhabiting only one body.
From this we can confidently state that there is either a problem with materialisms current understanding and definition of matter, that each particle of the same type is in no way different from any other, that every proton is the same as every other proton; OR, we need to make an ammendment to it. Either by weaving-in the significance of time and space, the continual verification (blockchain) of information stored and communicated by biology, or we need to include a new particle or field, which matter can engage with.
This may seem way too hypothetical of an example to take seriously, so consider this, if the universe is infinte in either time or space, this isn't just possible for a clone of you to be created, it's inevitable! In other words, the most popular view of materialism forces reincarnation to happen.
What we're trying to explain, is how does something as eternally unique as the repeated real-time recognition of ourselves and the deep sense of finiteness come from something which can be reproduced without any error, without any discernable difference we can deliniate.
1:40 Already a problem here. Why would I smile? Clearly I smile because of a value of mine is visible. A value? Yes, a value, meaning my perceptual or conceptual consciousness identified a thing which benefits my life. Consciousness is already present, the brain alone portion of the quote is already over and gone
OK, I just watched this after making my previous comment on Frank Jack's argument on Mary's room.
So I did not know what to call my argument against it but now see it is optimistic reductionism that would argue against Mary's room, so you taught me a new term. Thanks in that seems to be a good term to have in ones vocabulary!
But that argument that physics needs only physics to totally describe it is not at all held by modern physics in that the quantum word can only be described statistically and not deterministically! So if one says something happens by change one is admitting one does not know the cause of it (or at least all the factors that cause it albeit one might know some.
And to say no one is looking at the hard problem is not quite true for (albeit indirectly) I am, though maybe one might say I am a nobody, and maybe they would be right.
But in my exploration of how to create a visual ontology modeling language I sort of accidentally(in that was not what I was trying to do) came up with a method that might not explain consciousness but at least might be able to model it. So (and I am trying to make this as short as I can but maybe am not doing all that good a job of doing that in this is a buit long) but here goes anyway:
What I was trying to do was to come up with a way to just show (graphically) to a ontology model viewer just the things that they "cared about" at that moment and hide everything else.
Thus say one has a model with 10 billions pieces of information and at a given moment one actually is only caring about say 5 to 10 of those 10 billion so that the model would just show those 5-10 9and maybe a bit more for context) and hide all the rest.
And as such perhaps this is some way models consciousness, i.e. it is the thing that draws form all we know and reduces it to what we just need to care about a the the moment.
It is not all that different than when we use a computer with billions of pieces of information stored on hard drives and we load a portion of that into RAM only that it is more dynamic and fluid and is continuously doing that and really fact at that.
Thus we have two processes at work, one that hides and unhides the relevant data and the other that uses that data to do whatever needs to be done with it.
Actually, the model that seems best to me I get from the Bible, though once again a bit by accident in that we read
The Spirit of the LORD will rest on Him,
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and strength,
The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
Isa 11:2
Thus we see two groups of three, one the one side (say the left side for arguments sake) we have knowledge, counsel, and wisdom and the other side (the right) fear of the LORD, Strength or power, and understanding.
So one might construct a model (which actually it seems Aquinas did just that, almost in his Summa Theologica) where the left side is the intellect and the right side is the will. Only he put understanding with the intellect.
But if one takes truth to be the proper subject of the intellect (i.e. to assess what is true vs what is false) while goodness (or how best to obtain it) as the proper subject of the will then one can argue that understanding is a goodness measure and not a truth measure in that one does not so much have a true understanding but rater a good understanding of a thing, the later being that one can (rightly) answer any relevant question about any subject that one has a good understanding.
But Aquinas also says truth and goodness are convertible which perhaps by that he means one can say is it true something is good or good that it is true.
And BTW, in this context fear of the LORD means that one does not hold that all outcomes are equally desirable but that to live is preferable over dying, easting is preferable over starving, etc. and that all these preferences as a whole is what we call goodness.
And there is this center (7th) thing that one might call the heart where one holds their core beliefs and such.
So using that model one might ask where does consciousness fit in?
Well it seems to be a power so it might go with the spirit of power/strength (along with say moral virtues and such).
But that spotlight as to what is at present relevant might fit under the spirt of counsel. For a counselor does not tell one what to do but what one might do and what that might entail.
So I say all this (and yes it is a bit long) just to point out that no, there might be some (and not just me for all I know0 that are thinking about the hard problem, but maybe they all too are no bodies given that they may not be all that well known.
Also, as an aside I have made a bunch of videos on this and upload them to my UA-cam channel under the banner of UniML (Universal Modeling Language) not to be confused with UML (Unified Modeling Language) albeit that none of them are all that good in that I am still trying to figure this out. .. and as you say, this is the hard part, or at least related to the hard part in that UniML attempts to model how one thinks... or something roughly equivalent, which leads to the idea of reductionism.
But since the comment is already way too long let me end here other than to say that if something is emergent can it really be reduced to some thing lese when there can be an infinite number of other things that it also could be reduced to, just as say a computer program could be reduced to an infinite number of different computer hardware implementations. Thus even thou any of these can produce that emergent behavior that emergent behavior seems to exist independent of them jsut as say FORTRAN code does not care what computer in runs on (so long as it has a complier to make it work on that computer).
Amazing stuff. I wish I was one of your students. Have you published any work I could read?
Consciousness has replaced heaven, or the soul. It's just "god of the gaps" stuff. Oooh a vivid blue! There are people in the world so highly trained in recognizing exact colours, they can identify a colour without context, within incredibly narrow bands of accuracy. THAT is a deep experience of colour. The reason "blueishness" is so inexplicable to some, is not that it's oh so vivid, it's that's it's oh so vague. Imagine your favourite photo of your favourite person. Is your imaginary version as clear as if you looked at the photo? No. So why is the vague imagined experience deemed "hard" and special, but the much clearer physical experience deemed "easy" and mundane? There's still no person there, you know it's only a photo. In effect, you're imagining the person both times.
Consciousness is just a word for how we describe the experience of mental interpretation of physical things. How thoughts make us feel. It's complex and vague and unique to every person. But it's not supernatural. It's natural.
I love your videos dude. This one even inspired a rant! Please make more.
Chalmers ignores a fourth possibility which is being explored actively. That is holistic rather than reductionist science, the idea that consiousness is an emergent property of a complex dynamic system, the brain. This area of research uses Systems Dynamics and Agent Based Modelling and is an active area of research aimed at solving the 'hard' problems of science.
Quasi-panpsychism. Electrical fields are conscious or a certain configuration or interaction of electrical fields are conscious. Consciousness is the tension or superimposed difference between two different electrical states, that is - potential difference or resultant voltage. Voltage is consciousness. Consciousness is voltage.
... 4) Ignorabimus
Optimistic Relationism has got a weak point: there are no tools (yet?) to analyze subjective experience in an intersubjective way.
Mysterianism has got at least one good supporting argument: it is possible to alter, or even switch off the consciousness just using chemical substances.
the thing is, if processes are tied to the physical systems in our brain in some way that we continue to discover, that makes them a part of the physical system. erasing dualism potentially.
Watching these videos on the nature of consciousness, I can't help thinking we might have it the completely wrong way around. What if there is only mental stuff and the physical aspects of the world is just an illusion or projection? Like the world is actually completely psychic rather than physical.
As one who was raised in Christian Science, I’ve always been partial towards the idealistic view of reality. One can have a sense of love, humility, gratitude, fairness, compassion, appreciation of natural and artistic beauty, and a sense of self. It is nonsensical to believe that the experience of these intangible qualities arises from firing neurons.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face…”
I tend to believe that consciousness is fundamental; it just is. What we perceive as a physical universe is a mental construct, an extremely limited and distorted view of what actually exists.
I don't agree that the work on synchronised firings of neurons in different parts of the brain and how they relate to the brain's ability to appreciate an entity from its constituent phenomena (colour, shape, smell) does nothing to contribute towards the hard problem. On the contrary, it seems to me that the qualia emerge from further synchronisations of neurons (pleasure from endorphins binding to neurons associated with certain visual or auditory sensations, for example). Consciousness is generally considered to be an emergent phenomenon which is entirely dependent on a functioning brain (cf unconsciousness), so I don't see why it can't eventually be explained by the studies cited.
I am interested in your opinion about Gazzaniga work. I read The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind
17:20 .. Not necessarily disagreeing with anything else, but I think Chalmers is wrong about this specific point. He seems to contradict himself when he says that Hameroff / Penrose are saying consciousness arises from certain quantum phenomena, but then he says that even if they are right about that, then they are still not addressing how consciousness arises. But, they _are_ trying to address it, speculating that it arises through quantum processes in microtubules, etc.
Please correct me if I'm mistaken. I feel like I must be. But, this is how I interpret it, purely just from what's presented here. As always, thank you for all of the excellent classes.
He is not writing backward. The image we see is inverted. If you notice he appears to be writing with his left hand and his watch and wedding ring appear to be on his right hand which is exactly what you would see in an inverted image like in a mirror. Absent inversion of the image we see, his writing would appear backward to our view although he would be writing with his right hand and his watch and ring would be on his left side as is normal.
You're very good at this. 👍
The problem with physicalism is that it begins with its own presumption--that "reality" consists entirely of "physical" processes--and then tries to assign "physical" explanations to every experience of "reality," even where it doesn't fit. In other words, in the end such speculation is based on circular reasoning.
I feel like more recent fMRI studies seem to imply that consciousness is essentially a storyteller that stitches together experiences into a (semi) coherent story with "I" as the protagonist. This actually follows logically from the firmly deterministic nature of the universe that physics implies.
I don't think you need an fmri study to say that consciousness stitches experiences together with an "I". I'd say that's basically a characterization of an aspect of the notion of consciousness as it's generally understood -- it's a given.
As an applied math grad student I learned physics DOES NOT imply a deterministic universe. Some good research and theory on quantum tunneling at the synapse even in warm and wet environment. Take some physics (advanced classes). The fMRI machinery is blood redistribution and the correlate of the BOLD is electrical SCP and this is low frequency hum of the brain as a background and a lot of issues on computation issues. But fMRI graphics can suggest a lot. Makes a good story tho
@James Kirk my father is a world renowned physicist in his field (space plasma physics) - and he doesn't care much for determinism - however, he also feels I've read far more on the subject that he has - so. I'd recommend the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's UA-cam videos on determinism for a good start to the subject.
I recently read Faggin’s book “Irreducible”. Actually, it is really interesting, trying to connect consciousness to quantum states. What do you think about that? Many thanks for your brilliant lectures.
Consciousness is subjective. Humans try to label consciousness instead of looking at interconnected events or between 2 or more as a consciousness in itself.
Interconnection is a prerequisite. Now you have the whole EMF spectrum just to start working I/O functions solo or in plural to create a consciousness in your image if you choose.
"gives *us* experiences at all", "*our* brain", "*we* think", "*it* (brain) processes", could "we" use a different machine to "think" besides the brain? YES. You see, throughout your lecture both you and Chalmers differentiate between the mechanics and the mechanic, the architecture and the architect, the means of production and the producer, affirming, in your language, these are NOT the same. And we intimately KNOW this; where one can fully describe a motor, a building, a widget through physical laws, we cannot describe the "who" that desired them. I submit, this blindness of materialistic atheism precludes, a priori, the obvious, there is a supernatural agent managing the machine and matter.
Where we can trace the history of Mount Rushmore, each and every atom, back to the origin of the Universe, and explain every single interaction of these particles into that rock formation (The easy problem), we cannot do the same with the Faces carved on it (The hard problem). Their creation is from a WHOLY other production source; necessity vs desire. Because this is true, that source cannot, itself, be explained through physical means. The reality of this, necessarily folds into our language, our descriptions, our prose and poetry, and it's so close to us, so common, so ubiquitous, that it becomes invisible, and for some, intentionally so.
The point being to know if the "mental stuff" can exist if the "physical stuff" ceases to function/exist/etc. If it can't, doesn't it mean it's only a sub-product of the physical one?
Good work!
At some point Jeffrey says there are two possible ontological explanations materialism, or dualism,
Materialism obviously simply dismisses the problems it can’t solve and dualism produces more questions than it answers
There is a third option which seems to go under the radar which is immaterialism which rather than viewing conciousness or mind as an emergent phenomenon from matter regards matter as an emergent property of mind
Hence the paradox of the double slit experiment
In this view mind is irreducible and precedes all other phenomena
I am puzzled why he doesn’t mention this option
For some, only humans possess Consciousness. There are others who think that not only humans, but also other animals, or even plants, possess consciousness. I am one of the first, and as such I consider that Consciousness makes us different from other living beings. Certainly, that Consciousness makes us different does not prevent us from recognizing how much we have in common with other living beings.
Explaining what Consciousness is requires explaining what makes us different from humans. Hence, it is not necessary to explain the paradigm of mental states with qualia, a common phenomenon in living beings with a brain.
Considering how little we know about how the brain works, it seems premature to make conclusions about the biological processes of self aware consciousness and the implications thereof. It's rather like having Ben Franklin's understanding of physics and drawing conclusions about quantum theory. We have a huge obstacle when it comes to such research because it would not be ethical to subject children to constant brain wave monitoring, beginning in utero, in order to study when and how their consciousness develops. It may be that we don't become full conscious until between 2 and 3, which would explain why memory of life before that age is nearly nonexistent in all people. Many kids don't have an existential crisis until the teen years, if they ever have one at all. How self aware are other animals? I think the mirror test is an interesting experiment in that regard
The solition to consiousness is very simple. It is done by the brain to focus. We simply cannot be aware of too much that is happen both internally and externally. Neuro(bio)logy has a clear view more and more on how consiousness functions. But a lot is still to discover.
It is just that in certain academic disciplines, such as certain types of philosophy, there is a tendency towards thinking in the wrong direction and making things endlessly complex. Often based on intuition and narrow reasoning as well. Perhaps for a part due to the urge of keeping yourself busy, academically. But the factual solution is very simple. And keep thinking in vague, complex directions will only be useless. Rather think in complex directions that actually mean something in the real world.
Yeah but Philosophy isn't the subject to solve that, that is for Science, philosophy's job is to answer the unanswerable, it is the art of contemplation, not the solution. Science tells us what things are and their causes. Philosophy is the inquisition of our human experience of the world. A lot of these topics are merely mediums of logical thought, they aren't making things endlessly complex for no reason.
i would recommend that you read up on "attention schema theory", a view very similar to what you are outlining here. Some accessible proponents include Joscha Bach, Michael Graziano.
thats a why, not a how
If option 1 is Optimistic Reductionism, then he should have called option 2 Pessimistic Reductionism. Same basic premise (its all going on in there but understanding how it works is too hard). Option 3 is just mysticism. All his thought is going on in his physical brain unless he believes that there is something unembodied. Of course, that is called religion. He (and you) take a dismissive attitude to the 'easy problems' without any evidence that these states of mind, synchronisations, quantum effects are NOT what he is experiencing as consciousness. Apart from passing a Turing test, can he prove that he is conscious? And If he believes the Mary's room thought experiment, passing a Turing test is no evidence of 'understanding' and consciousness. And he ends with the (unproven) assertion that consciousness CAN NOT be derived from physical laws. That does not have to be option 3 but could be option 2.
all of your videos are great
My right ear enjoyed this
What is consciousness is the fundamental basis of reality and everything else is derivative?
*Consciousness* is an *emergent phenomenon* of the brain, *resulting* from the communication of information across all its regions and cannot be reduced to something residing in specific areas that control for qualities like attention, hearing, or memory.
any studies showing this? Or is that the natural conclusion from a physicalist perspective?
@@ofarah7902 There is many studies pointing to this, even though there is not one proving it completely by now. Of course, if there had been one, we most probably wouldnt have listened to this specific YT-vid.
That again is at best a very vaguely worded way of solving an easy problem. All you are saying here is that the phenomenon of conscious experience is in some way correlated to a physical mechanism that involves the whole brain rather than individual parts of it. There is no reason in there for why that correlation might exist.
@@ofarah7902 No. The answer is that there is not nor has anyone to this date in 2023 come up with a way to test this idea. This idea is essentially an ILLUSIONIST idea that consciousnesses doesn't actually exist. It's a STRRRRRREEEEETCCCHHHYY idea made by physicalists who are so afraid dualism might be right, that they just start making up ridiculous word salad. In 50 years we may have figured out how to reduce conscousness to a purely physical function, but this is just vague nonsense.
@@ofarah7902it makes the fewest assumptions and accounts for the entire range of conscious experience
If you want examples in practice, optical illusions, brain damage leading to loss of senses when the organ still functions, synesthesia overlap of the senses, lobotomized individuals losing executive and cognitive functions, memory loss and traumatic flashbacks from blunt force trauma victims and psychologically traumatized individuals
Chalmers contradicts his response to the hard problem with his further speculation. If consciousness is totally apart from what physics can touch or explain then that necessarily means that consciousness cannot have any effect on physical functions of the body. And yes, there would be no way for science to study the hard problem, but why would we expect it to once we write consciousness off as non-physical and outside of physical laws?
I think it’s dangerous to get bogged down in considering sense-perception as being part of consciousness. This is the line of thinking that gives rise to people saying that AI could never be conscious because it has no senses. 😑
I’d even go so far as to say that sense-perception has nothing to do with the essence of consciousness. This is because one can have senses doing their job unconsciously, like in the case of reflexes. Also, it seems plausible that some organisms with simple brains have advanced systems of sense-perception but no consciousness. The key ingredient is self-awareness… As for the mechanisms of how this self-awareness might be achieved, that’s a separate topic, not a different theory of the definition of consciousness.
It's so easy to keep falling into the trap of explaining it in terms of matter. And perhaps that is the way, though if it were we would need to recognise that no two particles are identical.
If we claim we know how to build my consciousness for example from lots of the same fundamental building blocks, then we will have a problem explaining why there might still be a difference, why they might be two me's with two separate points of view rather than one me seeing from two points of view. One side of this has to be false, and I've got a feeling the latter could not be true. Though having said this, that can simply be explained for the fact that they weren't physically connected, as there have been plenty of medical phenomena recorded to suggest a physical connection could make a 2-bodied single-consciousness possible. But there's something which seems completely one-off about consciousness, something like the "us" correlating with our unique supply of the electromagnetic field or our unique positions in space. I believe attempting to upload consciousness onto even the correct substrate (if we knew how) could simply corrupt me and create a clone of me instead which could fool everyone it was the real me in every situation, but it wouldn't actually be me. Rather that I am more body than mind. Or that I am the continuouation of undisturbed electronic feedback loops, a potential (but not necessary) face of the electromagnetic spectrum.
How do we initially define consciousness is key. It might not be a single phenomenon. If it were to be more complex than the simple feeling of experience, than Chalmers’ dichotomous view of the consciousness problem would be biased. Indeed, each component explaining consciousness would be perceived as reductionist and placed in the easy problem. The entire construct is based on a subjective initial feeling that consciousness is a single process that is inevitably more than what we can explain of it. What if consciousness was a set of mental constructs designed to help us predict our interactions with our environment? What if consciousness was not as amazing as we feel it to be but different neurological functions made to help us conceive ourselves as a person and to function as one? Then, the hard problem would not be a problem… there could simply be no single consciousness!
I wonder why we can accept with ease that neurons in the brain can react to visual inputs (the reactions of rods and cones in the eyes) or to aural signals (the reaction to vibrations in the fluid of the inner ear) -- but not accept that perhaps there are simply neurons whose job it is to monitor and react to other neurons, rather than to anything outside. Consciosness, it seems to me, might simply be feedback loops of the brain watching itself.
so a movie camera in front of a mirror recording itself is self aware.
Interesting observation Allen.
Isn't the position of consciousness not affecting/creating events in physical reality a moot point?
It's known, through experimentation, which has shown that conscious thoughts/conscious intent...products of consciousness...directly affects &/or changes physical reality.
I read of an experimental study* that used "a trained deep empath" through different forms of conscious intent documented changes in DNA (within some form of vacuum container).
*I can't recall the name of the journal, sorry, but it was definitely academically peer reviewed journal.
Materialism gets things backward. Consciousness creates the material world, not vice versa. Years ago the physicist Amit Goswami wrote a book titled The Self Aware Universe -- How consciousness creates the material world. Others like Rupert Sheldrake have posited the same ideas in different ways. Much of materialist science consists of bad philosophy disguised by bad math. The proponents can get away with it because everyone learns as children to believe whatever people in authority tell them and few people know even basic math. The ideas of physical "laws" doesn't withstand scrutiny, for example the idea of physical constants, which only works because "scientists" agree on figures, even when they don't match observation. The idea of epiphenomena creating thought amounts to jargon, not science, much like epigenetics, a word coined to explain what genetic theory cannot. Kurt Vonnegut, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, stated the problem in a ditty: "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly, man got to wonder, why, why, why. Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land, man got to tell himself he understand." When in fact we don't understand much.
Consciousness may well be but the subjective experience of negotiating without an algorithm between the dueling infinities of arithmetic: addition where infinity is a meaningless extent, or multiplication where infinity is a meaningful finitude, governed by the appearances of the sequential differences of prime values.
Good Stuff, I'm finally glad to see someone at least addressing this question in a scientific approach, which I feel is right, that what we call the soul is sort of a matrix of polarities of sub atomic particles whatever, and that the only current way to even deal with it is through religious and mystical pursuits. One thing I'm very curious about though, in your video which is well presented, how to you write backwards so well?
He wrote normally then inverted the video. It shows him writing left-handed, but he's actually right-handed (presumably). Also, his shirt buttons are on the left side of his shirt, but they should be on the right, as is true for men's shirts.
The modern philosophical study of consciousness doesn't really have anything to say about the religious tradition surrounding the concept of a soul. Consciousness is not equated with a soul. Philosophers of mind would not say that religion or religious practices are ways to understand consciousness, even the dualists like Chalmers. (Truth be told, most modern philosophers are atheists and don't have interest in the idea of a soul.)
Are you sure it makes sense for "souls" (if they exist) to be a structure of orientations of of electrons and protons?
I mean, from what I understand of the concept, the very essence of functionality of a "soul" would be to act as an objective identity marker (my "soul" makes me distinctly me) and any type of structureing of matter/particles is something that could be replicated. Wouldn't that mean that there could be someone else who is also me, given that we have the same soul?
If 'thought' is physical, then might it still be, that our five senses are still unable to perceive it ?
Enjoyable presentation. Thank you. Have you read Dr. Johnjoe McFadden's latest paper?
Question. Does epiphenomenalism say that consciousness is irreducible? It feels like it says that consciousness is reducible to physical events. As you explained it is a by-product of physical events. But Chalmers is saying that consciousness is fundamental and irreducible. So how is it the same as epiphenomenalism?
I might be wrong, but I think the distinction is the term 'fundamental ' and all that would entail. Non-dualists, notwithstanding panpsychism variants, would most likely disagree that. consciousness
In some of my previous comments, I might have been disrespectful for which I would like to apologise! But I do have reasonable doubt.
Ockham's Razor would suggest that consciousness arises from physical phenomena in the brain. No need for dualism at this point (until there's some evidence of the existence of consciousness outside of the brain).
But any “evidence” you find will be colored by your previous metaphysical claims
If consciousness exists commensurate with, and a result of, some hard-coded law(s) of the physical universe, then optimistism about sussing out substantive understandings of it are blown asunder...are they not? Similarly, such arguments and sentiments expressed by Chalmers on consciousness also can be carried over to physics...a 'hard problem of physics'...if you will. While we certainly can mathematically model quantum fields, doing so still never touches upon how (and from what) the fields necessarily manifest...not to mention the impossibility of trying to understand the manifestation of a rubric that served to establish quantum fields as but one of many baseline, hard-coded core items embedded in our universe. In the end, it seems our best effort leaves us with just a pile of fundamental laws and/or constants that are simply beyond our ability to probe. And therein, forever, dragons lie. But it's still an impressive pile...is it not?