The PHYSICS of CONSCIOUSNESS - Richard Dawkins & Brian Greene
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- Опубліковано 9 вер 2024
- What is the PHYSICS of CONSCIOUSNESS? Richard Dawkins & Brian Greene
Full discussion here: • Aliens, God & Evolutio...
#richarddawkins #briangreene #consciousness #physics
An Evening with Richard Dawkins & Brian Greene in NYC on Nov 1st 2018.
The awe-inspiring Dawkins sits down with Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene to talk all things science.
Full discussion here: ua-cam.com/video/7iQSJNI6zqI/v-deo.html
Sick to fucking death of this channel's bull shit. You guys did a handful of amazing discussions years ago and now all you do is post clips from those discussions with click bait titles like "for the first time ever!!".
Fuck right off.
They sound like they have two brain cells that never meet talking about something they LITERALLY know nothing about
How can water be wet when individual water molecules are not wet? What am I missing? Chalmer's hard problem seems to depend on a composition fallacy. Moreover, trying to achieve an understanding of consciousness starting with physics seems obtuse. I think we will be able to do that after we understand consciousness at a high level. Then we can work backward to the physics.
Exactly. The probllem here is that it is being treated like emergent properties are something we've never encountered before and can't comprehend.
I get the impression that it is essential to clearly define each concept. What do they mean when they name "consciousness", "self-consciousness", "subjective experience", etc.?
If one cannot precisely define the concept one wants to consider and analyze, then it will not be possible to consider and analyze it properly.
All these spiritualists and religious types don't understand that they are just using a cope. They can't handle our evolving brains. Everything is a cope, including enlightenment, meditation, prayer, and God. Keep on coping 😂
Making the claim for omniscient consciousness is just that, merely a claim. Consciousness is manifested in the brain. This doesn't negate the beauty of consciousness. This is just how the universe operates biologically.
Being lost in the intellect thinking that you know, is very different than experiencing the now and understanding life
Precisely
Life from bacteria or from anything physical is just physical life not life itself. It is life expressing through the physical or the elemental enabling it. Remove the life and it is dead.
Nah, that's merely another cope. All religions, meditations, and so-called enlightenment are copes for not understanding reality. You can't handle our evolving brain, so you cope. Everything is a cope.
@@allseeingeye1 It's all just a dysfunction of our evolving ape brains, and there is nothing that needs to be rectified. All just coping with the sensation of your frontal lobe trying to manage your limbic system.
Consciousness trying to understand consciousness. The wave cancels out. It's merely a dysfunction
Nah, it's an underdeveloped frontal lobe trying to rectify consciousness. It will take time/evolution. It's exactly why aliens have a huge frontal lobe. Keep coping
What's the big deal with this consciousness question?
How does a computer compute? How does this computing ability arise from individual transistors that can not compute?
To me consciousness is very similar to a runing computer program, it's a process.
The kernel that runs on the brain hardware, it has interfaces to the rest of the organs but can also run internal tasks.
Does this make sense or am I really stupid and simplistic?
This is a good way to think of it, and it's a start, but doesn't completely satisfy the hard problem. Computers have a screen which is analogous to the mind, but a screen is visible to everyone, while we find no such screen for consciousness. There certainly would be a way to see the mind with some future hypothetical device or experiment, but as of right now nobody knows what that would even look like hence the hard problem.
Facial expressions and hand signal can take the same function as the screen.
Saying that consciousness is the same as computers running an AI algorithm is a direct admission of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's an admission of not being a master of your own mind and thoughts, but rather you're thinking under the constraints of your cultural conditioning and group-think. What a dull existence.
@@stevehristovsky7244 they have similarities and differences.
Do rocks have experience? Most of us would think not. We have experience, for sure, but when you get down to it, we're made of atoms and molecules just like the rock. Atoms and molecules are "mechanical" things that don't have experiences, so how come we (and other living things) do have them? In the "old days", the answer was easy, we have souls. Souls are mixed in with the physical body somehow and the soul is the part that feels things. Dawkins and Greene and modern people generally don't believe that we have souls. So without having a soul to do the experiencing, how is it possible? That's the hard problem of consciousness as I see it.
Brian is one of the few people who I've seen who seems to actually grasp the "hard problem". While everyone talks about it, I don't think most people really get it.
Making the claim for omniscient consciousness is just that, merely a claim. Consciousness is manifested in the brain. This doesn't negate the beauty of consciousness. This is just how the universe operates biologically. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Prayer, meditation, enlightenment, and God are all just a cope.
@@ADUAquascaping I'm not sure if you are responding to my comment. If so, I don't see the connection between your observation and my comment. If you'd like to amplify...
All is one, there is not two.
You know it already, you know it’s true.
You can look and look but there’s nothing to find
The truth’s just been hidden by the chatter of your mind.
Oneness is here, now - not somewhere above
Oneness is All, oneness is LOVE.
See it and a smile on your face will appear
Your life filled with JOY and nothing to fear.
Thinking deeply about consciousness without properly define it first will leave us wandering in a seemingly endless maze.
just take the definition of qualia and you get it.
@@Anton_Sh. 'qualia' is meaningless. It's taking "I don't know" and putting it in a box and pretending the box now means something.
@@MichaelJohnson-kq7qg that just tells you don't understand what qualia is. I have observed this phenomenon - that some people really can't understand it.
@@Anton_Sh. no. it shows you've fallen into the trap of thinking the handwave is the answer.
@@MichaelJohnson-kq7qg no. it clearly show how you are not able to define qualia yourself.
Making the claim for omniscient consciousness is just that, merely a claim. Consciousness is manifested in the brain. This doesn't negate the beauty of consciousness. This is just how the universe operates biologically.
Non local domain quite proved in quantum physics now. Advaita Vedanta talks abt consciousness and how the world is a superimposition on that existing reality of consciousness.
Nah, it's an underdeveloped frontal lobe trying to rectify consciousness. It will take time/evolution. It's exactly why aliens have a huge frontal lobe. Keep coping
Consciousness is a feeling, like pain, colour, sound, etc, which evolved because it helped our ancestors survive and reproduce
Yeah, but why should a lump of mindless atoms feel anything?
Why should a lump of computeless transistors run gta 5?
@@JHeb_ atoms might be mindless but the bodies that molecules of DNA have built are not mindless. Minds are the product of billions of years of evolution. And evolution needs nothing more than the normal laws of chemistry.
@@kennethmarshall306
Well yes, that's clearly the case. This is one of the premises of the hard problem of consciousness. We clearly are conscious, but there's nothing conscious about the matter that makes our consciousness. So when does consciousness emerge? From chemical interactions? There's plenty of chemical interactions around me. Are all of them participating in my conscious experience?
@@JHeb_ we might never know exactly how and when consciousness emerged. It happened so long ago. It might well have been a very gradual thing just like evolution itself. It’s like asking who was the first human. No mother ever had a child and said “Oh! I have given birth to the first human. I’m not human but you, my child are.” It might be the same with consciousness - no being ever realised that it was conscious, but it’s immediate ancestor was not..
You don't need atoms or subatomic particles to have some form of consciousness for the brain to be conscious.
Consciousness isn't just one thing, it's a series of processes going on within the brain and body that causes consciousness to arise.
It also needs a consultant stream of information coming it all the time for it to come into being.
There are different levels of consciousness.
Consciousness doesn't, as some believe, exist outside of the brain and body!
When talking about how it " FEELS " to be you, remember, you are talking about chemicals interacting with the brain and body in such a way as to give you the sensation of feeling anything at all.
Of course, the brain has to interpret that as a feeling and that alone is a deep subject.
Consciousness can be explained and mapped out and I can say, it doesn't happen in one place in the brain in such a way as you can say " That's where it is " because it involves a great many processes.
Can a flower bend and look at itself and say or think or believe it knows what it is? We may be the same as humans like looking at ourselves we may just see the birds and bees buzzing around and the pollen falling around and not even see or understand ourself, our real self?
What if we discover what consciousness is and find out something we don’t like? It may flee from us or attack us? Or totally lose interest in itself.
We may go the other way of course fall in love and infatuation.
I do like life to remain magical and a mystery not just at the end but during the journey. Though I probably could answer it I’m not sure I should.
If I was deeply in love with my wife and in bed making love or kissing and felt sweetly embraced and felt romantic and like the clouds are opening and heaven is approaching then and maybe only then would I feel comfortable answering these questions not to a phantomic void like cyberspace.
I's all just a dysfunction of our evolving ape brains, and there is nothing that needs to be rectified. All just coping with the sensation of our frontal lobe trying to manage our limbic system.
Consciousness trying to understand consciousness. The wave cancels out. It's merely a dysfunction
I think 🤔 consciousness it not the burning point of the question, apart from vegetation most forms or species of life have it. But depending on other multiple physical attributes of the species as a collective whole determines what can be achieved by that species.
Funny that Descartes illuminated this very conundrum centuries ago and we're still struggling with it. Note: he wasn't a "dualist" by choice but because he couldn't find any other way out of the "hard problem".
Interesting how you bring up dualism. Personally I think dualism and strict materialism can be reconciled if we extend our definition of “real” to “can be reached by Turing-Completeness”. This allows another way to connect two systems other than causation, which explains why we can be so directly connected to abstract objects.
@@seanpierce9386Or it's all just a dysfunction of our evolving ape brains, and there is nothing that needs to be rectified. All just coping with the sensation of your frontal lobe trying to manage your limbic system.
Consciousness trying to understand consciousness. The wave cancels out. It's merely a dysfunction
Information and Local Realism:
To prove that information is locally real, we need to define what we mean by "information" in this context. Let's consider a definition:
Definition: Information is a measure of the state of a system that can be transmitted and received within the constraints of special relativity.
Theorem: Information, as defined above, is locally real.
Proof:
a) Consider two spatially separated events, A and B.
b) Let I_A be the information content at A, and I_B be the information content at B.
c) By the principle of causality and special relativity, any change in I_B due to A cannot occur faster than the speed of light.
d) Therefore, information respects locality.
e) The state of the system carrying the information (e.g., particles, fields) has definite values before measurement, satisfying realism.
f) Thus, information, as we've defined it, is locally real.
Surely it depends wholly on the quality and scope of the instruments being used to find that which has yet to be found.
Our brains being one.
I’m not so sure about that. I think on some level it’s like expecting that if one writes detailed enough prose, the story as written will literally become a movie.
@@OckersvinNah, it's an underdeveloped frontal lobe trying to rectify consciousness. It will take time/evolution. It's exactly why aliens have a huge frontal lobe. Keep coping
I have always liked Brian's ambiguity, unlike Dawkins
They easily get lost trying to explain it because they are not systems engineers. Its a flavor of Ryles Category Problem. In this case it is Skills Category or they are outside of their field of expertise. Also a classical case of how experts and authorities from one field "colonize" something outside of their field of expertise.
Agree. I listen and feel that it's not their field expertise and of course not philosophers... Like David Chalmers.
@@VolodymyrPankov Philosophy is based in the principles of argument just like politics. If you present the same premises to the constituents or "preach to the choir", the results are predicted and they draw viewers or sell books in the case of Dawkins.
@@nyworker Dawkins is not a philosopher. In the context of the question of the hard problem of consciousness, he stated that it's not his field of expertise. It's an honest answer. I find Richard Dawkins very interesting and quite adequate.
@@VolodymyrPankov True, but it's more amazing that an "expert" neuroscientists line Christoph Koch effuses the same idea that "it will never be solved". Pretty sad stuff.
Chalmers exaggerates the difficulty, because that guarantees he can talk about it forever. He, and others like him. The magic trick is to go from 1st person experience...
my experience and my experience of experience.... the infinite repeat of mirrors in mirrors; reflections in reflections... to the third person explanation - "what is it?"
is just a trick. The brain is aware of itself and provides a running report of what it is doing. A report to whom??? To itself. To the brain. The body is full of feedback loops and consciousness is a feedback loop to modify and clarify choosing. It's not a Hard Problem. And it cannot be instatiated in a computer. It can be simulated, which is Not The Same Thing.
Does the question still not stand, though? Why and how does a feedback loop of quantitative processes yield experiential states?
@@Ockersvin because it is aware of itself, in a way that insects are not (they are aware but not recursively),
There is an illuminated interface between experience and memory. Your computer does this too. Even David Chalmers is conscious, although less (or so it seems) than everyone else. So the experience remembers itself and calls it a qualia. Buddha and his followers sorted this out 2500 years ago.
They call it “conditioned arising “. No self, just experience and an organizing principle that calls it “myself “
We don’t have “rigour and description” for what is “going on inside our head”? Completely disagree. That is overlooking enormous amounts of importance knowledge that has come out of psychology, philosophy, religion.
Seems like imagination is what we need
I love materialism now renamed physicalism being stymied by consciousness: the hard problem. If consciousness is not elemental, did not emerge with quantum events then it must be fundamental and what does that mean for a materialism than cannot see past its nose which is elemental and likely had its origin as emerging with quantum events and not predating them as consciousness more than likely did.
Is Dawkins capable of understanding qualia , the crucial part for understanding the hard problem of consciousness?
I don't think so.
It always surprises me how such esteemed scientists (as these two are) seem so clueless and lacking in knowledge about one of the most serious challenges to science. They just don't seem bothered!
I wholly agree with your assertion. Dawkins rejects the notion that consciousness is metaphysical in origin.
@@audiodead7302 half-joke: they're just real philosophical zombies.
@@Anton_Sh. True. According to their own theory/understanding of consciousness, they are philosophical zombies.
Because 'qualia' is meaningless. It's not an answer to a question, it's a box that plugged-in in place of an answer.
I'm not advocating for any particular religious worldview (and maybe for none of them nessecarily) but the idea that matter, fields, and the laws of physics self emerged and self organized spontanteously has always seemed very, very naive almost laughably so. In fact, if they did, it would render them spectacular enough in my worldview to be transcendent in themselves.
It would not seem any more unlikely to suggest that it is consciousness which is the fundamental unit and that the rest is incidental to it not the opposite.
Brings to mind Rob Reiner reading a critic's review of "Spinal Tap": "On what day did God create Spinal Tap, and
couldn't he have rested that day?" Brian Greene is SO desperate to be Carl Sagan (Richard Dawkins) that it's
embarrassing to watch him waving his hands or in another instance prancing around the stage. When Amir Aczel
sat him down years ago and actually addressed his attention-starved ravings he jumped up and began
addressing only the audience. "The trouble with inferiority complexes is, the wrong people always get them"
You can't see quantum reality. If something seems laughable to you, perhaps it's time to remember that you are merely an evolved biological primate with a brain size of 1200 grams (average for the planet), along with genitals, and your logic, to put it mildly, is not ideal.
Consciousness is an illusion..it's only one big "while loop"..
All these spiritualists and religious types don't understand that they are just using a cope. They can't handle our evolving brains. Everything is a cope, including enlightenment, meditation, prayer, and God. Keep on coping 😂
Dawkins is an intellectual lightweight and he is elevated to this ridiculous position because he’s got a British accent.
Consciousness is supernatural, easy to prove.
Try again.
@@jraelien5798 a stone does not react to metaphysics, a mind does.
@Astrophile2345 What ? you read English text and react to it, that is metaphysics ... you react to drama, politics, ethics, aesthetics, diplomacy, etc etc ... even a lie, people react to lies !! would a stone react to a lie ?
@@jairofonseca1597 Metaphysics is not the same thing as the supernatural.
@@jraelien5798 it is ... su·per·nat·u·ral
/ˌso͞opərˈnaCH(ə)rəl/
adjective
(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.
Dawkins is kind of dumb.