I was walking out of the park with a neighbour and our dogs, and as we got nearer the gate, my dog on a leash became more excited leaping in the air, almost somersaulting. My neighbour asked why was he doing that?. I believed that he wanted to go back in her car, but she explained that she had not brought the car with her this time, and we were walking back home. At the gate, my dog turned towards where the car would have been parked, and once he was satisfied that her car was not there, he turned back towards our homes. How many times before had he had a lift from the park back home? Twice. Consciousness? anticipation? joy?, resignation and acceptance? My dog showed all these then and does daily. I don't see consciousness as special, nor particularly human, either.
my dad had a right hemisphere stroke two years ago. his spatial neglect has definitely improved but initially it was quite severe. for whatever reason i never thought of it as a disorder of consciousness, only of perception. i’m actually a neuroscientist and find this fascinating! i’ll have to find some of your work
Have you seen that they have found quantum effects happen with microtubules of our cells? Penrose basically believes consciousness emerges as/through a quantum wave collapse.
This is the most exiting interview I have ever heard. I had to listen many statements two or three times because of their high impact on the understanding of ourselves. I must read your books.
This was great to listen to! Some time ago I studied philosophy of mind or consciousness and this took me right back. 😊 Would it be possible for you to make another on this subject? There are many interesting researchers out there, Susan Blackmore being one. Thank you! 🙏🏻
The development of the social human is a part of the research of Sarah Hrdy, who writes about how children learn to respond to different caregivers in different ways as infants, to get the attention and food they need.
Brilliant theory of evolution but it doesn’t add much to the explanatory gap. One approach I was hoping for is to explain the evolution reasoning behind consciousness and it might lead to the “how” of the gap. Moving into AI doesn’t seem to help because if we can’t explain the gap in human terms how can we really expect to do it with machines.
I love thinking about the hard problem of consciousness because it seems to me that it exists beyond what science is capable of investigating. We don’t even really have a way to prove consciousness exists outside of our own experience. I cannot prove that you are conscious and you cannot prove that I am. The idea that we aren’t conscious we just imagine we are works perfectly well for everyone else but I am having an experience (even if it’s imaginary - cogito ergo sum- it is literally the only thing I can be sure of!)
Here is the secret of consciousness in a few sentences. It is basically what Michael is alluding to but from a slightly different perspective. Consciousness is not a stream - it is a whirlpool. A fundamental aspect of brain activity is working memory - information that starts with some mental activity, and that activity tends to return a short time later in a slightly different context, and that is how we solve problems by examining information from different perspectives. And the center of the funnel is not the explanatory gap, but the “explanatory funnel”, around which a mixture of new and old information circulates. That is the process of consciousness, and is the essence of self-reflection (our self-model) as well as how we continually compare our memory (our mind) with the outside world (our our body) and reconcile the two. Consciousness explains how we can can be in two places at once when we’re not anywhere at all (e.g. neither mind nor body). This process is how we generate ideas, and consciousness is just one of those ideas.
Aside from not explaining qualia or value or the different 'distinguishmen' of qualia to give different sensory feels their 'feels' or abstract thinking (memory to sensation vs memory to memory durations) or falsification amongst other aspects ... I agree. Fundamentally there is a unity which is inherently similar, same enough to cohere, different enough to distinguish. Organisms assimilate existence and experience differently through same body, same body assinlates time differently through same self, concepts and perception are derivative assimilations
@@notmyrealpseudonym6702 Well you have to start somewhere. What few ever discuss is the role of memory in consciousness or qualia for that matter. The first time you experience a color, say red, is that a “qualia”? But if you’re told it’s red, then the next time you see a red apple, you can say, “oh that’s red”. If that’s what defines ‘qualia’, e.g. recognition, then that requires memory. So you can have the sensation of seeing something red consciously, but if you recognize it as red, they your brain is making associations with information in your memory, which is a different kind of experience. Every person’s experience of consciousness is different, yet we all know what is meant by the term. Consciousness is not a thing in the usual (material) sense, it’s an idea - which could be considered a “thing”, but very nebulous.
I don't pretend to have any answers, but here's a few quick questions. • If primates are more conscious than other animals, or simply if consciousness is a product of evolution, then it must logically follow that "regular" primates are _more_ conscious than "irregular" ones. In other words, you must be more conscious than a person with Down syndrome... this just doesn't make any sense to me. • If consciousness arose in almost all, or indeed _all,_ animals of a certain complexity relatively early in the evolutionary process, then how did nature _know_ to share what must have been a pretty expensive piece of kit across such a widely diverse range of substrate-dependent creatures? And yes, of course, evolution doesn't "know" anything! • If conscious awareness arose for us to "focus attention" on specific problems to solve them, then why is it demonstrably the case that we perform more poorly when we are conscious of a task than we undertake it auto-somatically? • And, lastly, if primate consciousness is the epoch of some highly-refined - and so one would also assume highly complex - brain structure, then why is it the case that patients who have undergone split-brain surgery apparently suffer no loss of conscious awareness, despite the brain now having to do twice the work with half the resources at its disposal? I'll readily admit that none of these issues are in any way proscriptive for the process that Michael has outlined here. But for those still holding out hope that their phenomenological experience may still be somehow, well... magical... it's something.
People with some kinds of brain damage often DO lose some consciousness; that's a fact. The same is true with genetic issues, if they limit the functioning of the consciousness forming portions of the brain (which is only some parts of your gray matter). Dogs are less conscious than humans, and ants are only conscious in the most rudimentary possible way, if at all. If you stopped trying to be politically correct, you'd have the answer.
With all due respect, human intellect has its limitation. Though it is good at problem solving but using intellect to study consciousness is like measuring the depth of the ocean using a foot scale.
An amoeba is experiencing that it needs food and that there is food in the environment to be had. This is consciousness. So consciousness doesn't come from brains. Self-consciousness, meta-consciousness such as human brains generate are merely elaborations on this fundamental experiencing of all organisms.
That's a massive assumption and already shows the whole problem with this approach to consciousness. The one thing we actually do know is that perceptions are appearing in consciousness. Evening else is a theory about these appearances😊
I don't think it's a problem. We can still use solid logic to solve problems. That's like saying a brain cannot understand itself, though we can and DO understand how our brains work, at least partially (and we're getting better at it every day).
Yes and no. It´s an old joke that in a meeting of 3 scientists/phylosophers you get 20 definitions of consciousness. We actually don´t know what it is, hence we are in trouble to get a good definition.
This was a fantastic interview. I love it. Does this channel have a patreon or any kind of donation or support structure? Can you get him back to go into even more detail please.
My argument starts with that we’re using the wording wrong. In my definition, consciousness is EVERYTHING that the sensory perception system does-plus whatever else is going on in the brain. What the common use of the term consciousness refers to is actually--out of all that consciousness information that's constantly coming into the brain--the very very narrow amount of information that is engaged in by the executive function that the brain creates that we call the self. It also includes any generated emotions, and any retrieved stored information that is being regurgitated by the self. This common use of the term consciousness is actually a very tiny part of the body's consciousness. In common parlance, the self refers to all of us, the whole body, and for some, a spirit, a soul. The self is actually just a wiring combination in the brain that serves a function. It is not the whole body. This self function in the brain has evolved to focus on a map of the environment that the brain constructs for the self from all that information coming in from the senses. Most animals have consciousness, and many, if not most, probably have some amount of development of a self because the self coordinates responses to the environment which most moving organisms in the environment require. It’s how the brain constructs the self and the map of the environment that is the big puzzle. The environment is all out there but our conception of it is all in the brain created by the interaction of the brain's self construct and its environment map construct. What we "see" is not our environment, it is the brain's presentation to the self of its interpretation of the environment. "We" exist in our brain, not in our external environment. Our body exists in the external environment, but "we/ourself" and our "self's'" "environment" only exist in brain activity. The self and the map-one does not exist without the other. There is no living unconscious. Only the dead are unconscious. There are times of unself like during dreamless sleep which is also the time of unmap--no self, no map--no map, no self. A dream is a map of a psychological environment for the self that is generated out of the information in the cortex during a time when the self is somehow mostly disconnected from the usual flow of information coming from a map of the real environment (and yes, there is a real environment). The brain, thus, can create different maps, as any psychologist can confirm. The brain's construct of the self/map sychronicity is what we need a term for. Not the theater of the mind, but rather the theater of the self, inside the brain, a very small part of the massive consciousness activity system in the body. All other arguments about consciousness are generated mostly from an emotional insistance that "I" exist, and the emotional response to the knowledge of the death of others and the knowledge of the certain future death of "myself." You cannot prove that "we" transcend. You've only got anecdotal evidence for that, and a long history of emotional stories.
The brain and the nervous system interacts with the environment and this interaction creates "qualia", our subjective experiences that maybe are our consciousness, but I still can´t see "who" is experiencing those qualia. It seems there is no self (according to Hood´s book "The self deception" for example),at least not a permanent one, but still...
You should read “the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” by Julien Jaynes, and doesn’t evolution require death? So it’s more like we changed to a conscious state rather than evolved with or into having one.
I'm really only been able to think of consciousness as something with the knowledge of good and evil. Though I say that, I'm not even claiming they exist, just that we know them.
I wonder whether the evolution of complex spoken language was a precursor to the human development of a state of consciousness with all the attributes Graziano enumerates. Or if a precursor then possibly a necessary co-evolution.
Theory of mind is strongly contested in various disciplines, and the Idea that the 'brain builds models of itself' problematic conjecture, at best an imprecise way of talking. This discussion fails to clarify it's subject matter - 'consciousness' - and rehashes a collection of philosophically naive perspectives and assumptions. It also overlooks a considerable body of work - phenomenology - that provides a plethora of meaningful insights and clarifications into the nature of lived subjective experience, or again, consciousness and subjectivity. Such insights have already provided a valuable starting point for neurologically oriented research into the relationship between life, mind and body (see Varela, Thompson).
To "sense" this reality is to sense an existence of being "conscious" of it's "physical" existence. Not one's personal existence, but of one's existence of this reality. ALL living creatures are "conscious" of this reality in one way or the other.
Humans become aware of self and self in relation to external entities beginning at birth and developing from there. It comes from the senses, and the sensations develop into concepts. There you go, that consciousness. It’s not difficult.
How does the brain create a Hologram inside the mind that displays the outside world to the mind’s eye? Do we all share the same Hologram? Much obliged.
Well, nobody knows the answer to your first question, but the short answer to your second question is no, the world that you see is not the same world that anybody else sees... It's probably very similar, but no two people's worlds are the same.
@@simesaid < but if I can't examine the hologram inside of your brain, how can I know if it's different from the hologram inside my brain? For example, if you and I are watching the same TV show, I know the image on both screens is identical.
This is possibly an unanswerable question (in the absence of a whole lot more actual knowledge about how the consciousness phenomenon emerges from animal brains, rather than just speculative belief - however "informed"). The "hologram" at this point is little more than an analogy...
You do happen to know that people like me (with more severe aphantasia) doesn't really have a (visually versatile) "mind's eye"?! Who said there is a "hologram" in anybody's brain?
Studying consciousness, other than the riveting reductionist scientific approach, is like trying to guess the shape of your face, the colour of your eyes without the aid of an other person or any reflecting surface...
A very good presentation. I have two questions. Do animals have consciousness? If consciousness has evolved over time, it should have evolved in animals too.How instinct in animals is different from our Consciousness? In other words what separates the man from the animal, as the gene map is almost the same, in Primates. We trying to understand the other, by observing them, which falls under predictive behavior, as most of the animals too follow that pattern. Religion and spirituality are the exclusive domains of humans and are not useful for continuation of our species. Consciousness, which I feel is a protective layer exclusively for the humans for the higher order of learning led to creativity, speech, music, writing and other skills. The Quantum Physics may have an answer for the description of the Consciousness. It can probably be described by Quantum Field Theory, as the measurements can be through, Chemical exchanges, Electrical Impulses or Sub-atomic distribution of Fundamental particles. The Artificial Intelligence cannot replicate a brain, it can only do the connections faster. The Generative AI can be considered as truly evolved, when the AI raises its own question and not fed from us, even with a single Byte. I rest my case.
I own his rather short "Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience" - just to get a little bit into the subject. I'm more interested in the history and universal application of Evolutionary theory - but think anyone studying the subject should look into all the different fields of the life sciences. Another interesting interview...always high quality here. Thanks for what you do with this channel.
in terms of "evolutionary theory" googlescholar the phrase "biological annihilation" - we are accelerating into a "Mass extinction of species" crisis worse than ever seen in the 4.6 billion years of life on Earth.
Consciousness is an anthropomorphic construct. Consciousness is a response to a stimulus. No more and no less. The integration of matter and energy manifests consciousness. Thus, all matter is conscious. Furthermore, consciousness is fractal. The ontological self is the subjective conscious inferring its hierarchical domain within the objective Consciousness. The cosmos.
He does not appear to know that the split between the lineages leading to synapsids ( to which mammals belong) and archosaurs (to which dinosaurs/birds belong) happened deep in the Carboniferous, which is about 350MYA, and not 200MYO as he (erroneously) states. This has deep implications upon the time scales in which complexity evolves. Apart from that his concepts are spot on and useful to frame scientific rather than ideological questions: circling aroudn the questions how these 'little models' that brains make of their own modus operandi emerge and then evolve.
Graziano does not clarify that distinction between the temporal type of consciousness which we share with other animals and he calls state of alert and the state of self-awareness which the human species seems to have developed to a higher degree than other primates.
@@jacobe.1651 being able to feel emotions and our many senses, plus creating a hologram of the world inside of our brain based on the data we receive from the outside world. computers don't do that
"Neuroscientists are beginning to see the hard problem of consciousness and the question of an explanatory gap as inhibiting" Well yes, an unanswerable question would be inhibiting!
Місяць тому
there's nothing hard about it. consciousness is just an organism's subjective experience of its environment.
Its the organism's subjective experience that is the hard problem of consciousness. Its "subjective experience that many philosophers, neuroscientists and other intellectuals sweep under the rug. They will deny that they do this but its true. Obviously, not all of them. I have some very basic education in the philosophy of mind so I put myself in the group of philosophers, (although I only have a BA in it). Anyway I will end this comment with a question; "What do you mean by the subjective experience of an organism?".
it's not about the development of consciousness. Dogs and cats are conscious. It's about the development of higher cognitive functions that I have, that my cat lacks.
Our five senses are naturally occurring. Where there is light and dark some way to perceive the difference will evolve. Consciousness arrived in evolution when life forms obtained two senses. They needed a way to coordinate the inputs.
I find it interesting how some western academics ignore eastern thought and the level of intuitive knowledge developed over thousands of years on how we construct reality.
One fascinating insight might be the pervasive existence of sleep. I like to consider even primitive forms of consciousness as “coordinated postures” To present the animal body as a uniform identity many of its systems muscles, nerves, organs must flex or support themselves against it opposed to each other or in specific coordination to each other, as do the systems of the mind. The “posture” of consciousness would naturally cause stress points, like standing for hours or holding your arm up. Here the jellyfish and human share a commonality, expression of the self requires coordinated effort, and effort is not perpetually maintainable lest complication ensue. Thus the identity or unique posture of the self must rest , both the jellyfish and human relax their expression and both sleep. Universal sleep in animals indicates that the self is a collective posture of the body, including mind. To be you, you must flex you into the “you” shape.
Graziano uses the word intentionality in a different, and perhaps misleading, sense attributed to it by its originators, Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl and the phenomenologists.
It's remarkable to me that he thinks the ideas of consciousness start with James. It's literally been the primary philophical concern of eastern religions for millenia
There are no system of information signals that can interpret itself. So. You always need an interpret to handle information signals. If the output of that interpreter are new information signals, then you need another to interpreter this signals. If the brain is an information interpreeter, or the system of neurons are, you never find consisness inside our brain 😊
The self model can not be consciousness because cosciousness knows it has self models and frameworks used for constructing a self that our consciousness can identify with and we use different models for different people and situations while consciousness remains the same and separate from them all. A single celled organism can react to outside stimulae without a self model so was it's reaction consciousness and life has evolved around consciousness to the point that we can talk about our consciousness? I know in my experience I have remained the same consciousness while my self model has been hammered, shaped and moulded by life.
My thoughts exactly. All of our models exist within our experience. You cannot reduce experience to the objects of experience. He may be describing something but it isn't consciousness in the way the east understands it
We just developed senses to experience light. We are interacting with fields and light. Consciousness isn't a thing. If someone was blind and deaf and mute, they wouldn't really have a conscious experience would they. Our senses are what we call consciousness. Without any senses, we can't experience.
Slippery thinking, goes from talking about the subjective inner experience to talking about "models" constructed by the neuronal activity of the brain as a machine. With this type of "slippage" instead of actually trying to grasp the essence of the subject experiencing those models, we go to talking about "models" which are qualia of consciousness but do not explain anything about the existance of a subject and its consciousness. Again and again scientists manage to start talking about something else but not about consciousness.
At ten minutes in there is a reference to 'magic' which I think is a bit of a challenge to the discussion. I get the word is used for stuff happening that has no explanation, but the word, magic, is very problematic to use for ignorance. It's questionable and leave it that.
I am a set of a’ priori modes, not a body of limbs and organs. We need to move beyond the notion of “We”. Human is a loose notion at best. In essence, the body/conduit has no fixed predicate in the abstract lens so the premise is incorrect. What is it of us, that knows this? Until we know more, we are a set of a’ priori modes trying to stabilise our line in an ocean of dissipating variables. We should define ourselves in this manner. We are a set of modes that allow for systematic alignment. A set synthesised with realities structures and stresses. Understanding this is the next step. Everything else is tied up in a field of inverted axioms and that path is a dead end. Human is not part of the way I think. I’m beyond it. I don’t know what I am only that I am not the body. I am a set of modes as I said and until I know more…
So, did we start wearing clothes because we got sick of getting sand in certain places or because we realized we were naked? I don't see how you're going to answer those kinda questions studying monkeys
Clothes are a tool. Our unique human brain structures allow our imagination to put together elements of our environment in novel and useful ways. Other animals can't by far to the extent we can.
I find it intriguing that the professor uses the presence of a self model to define consciousness and limits it to vertebrates that have certain brain anatomy. When I think of other forms of life, i.e., invertebrates, eucaryotes and protists, one can imagine that they take in sensory information, integrate it and compare it with past experience and make decisions on what to do next in the field of action. This is a from of consciousness too, maybe less sophisticated than in vertebrates but none the less real. I don't understand the need for a semantic distinction between the two process as they are both part of a biological function that arose hundreds of millions of years ago for making life decisions. Maybe the vertebrates can be said to have a higher kind of consciousness, but it seems unlikely that it did not evolve de novo. I think of consciousness as the experience of living which you can only understand if you are living. The mechanisms in the brain that are involved are not the same as the experience itself. thats what stumps efforts using a strictly intellectual definition.So, do machines feel?
According to Prof. Graziano, consciousness is the sense of ourselves deriving from the model of ourselves fabricated by the brain itself. Well, where, why and from what does the brain fabricate such a model, he doesn't have the answer and we're stuck with the exact same problem and consciousness is still a total mystery.
I was literally thinking this. It answers nothing. How can a machine think it's conscious? He really should look into eastern philosophy on the subject before trying to reduce consciousness to blind mechanism
Trying to explain Qualia by appeal to "mental models" or computational terms hasn't gone anywhere. throwing deep neural networks at the hard problem is just more of the same - but more opaque.
Why are there zero scientists investigating consciousness as a sixth sense? Consciousness is a property of the universe and we’d be closer to this fact if scientists ate some good mushrooms.
What? Science has already determined that higher consciousness in humans came from evolution, experience on planet earth. It's frightening that social media flock believes what it does, in all these mystical hodge podges.
It is good sign that many people with critical mind are now taking interest in this topic. However, they will never be able to understand it accurately unless they study the ancient Eastern Psychology.
I was just thinking this. The idea it started with William James blows my mind... it's been on the minds of Eastern philosophers and religion for millenia
Not a lot of discussion on the essence of consciousness, but rather how the human brain works with it. The whole tangent about modeling just shows the purpose of the cortex, especially the frontal cortex, which functions, among other functions, to store information which the self can utilize, and which can be conveyed to others. He doesn’t mention much the development of language and how our wonderful cortex enables the accumulation of signified and signifiers which enable language, and which allow us to actually tell others what is on our minds. This is all the evolution of the human brain rather than the evolution of consciousness.
The very first modern human was Adapa. We are the product of genetic engineering. The geneticist Enki created us 300.000 years ago. Read The Lost Book of Enki, a translation from 800 sumerian tablets.
My opinion everything is related and cause of MEMORY. memory especially large amounts of memory is the result of so called CONSCIOUSNESS. BRAIN. Without brain NO consciousness....
22:29 this is unfortunately what also gives us the herd mentality of go along to get along but don't make waves which brings you things like cancel culture and Nazis. When must never do something that would risk causing them to be rejected by The Herd which would have been a certain death sentence to your ancestors. Some genetic baggage that once served us very well (like the ability to store fat to make it through a long harsh winter) but is now the very thing that just might kill us.
The prof seems blissfully unaware that beliefs in spooky unseen and imaginary agency are at the root of the darker and most terrifying aspects of human behaviour, past and present. I for one am grateful that we have become rational enough at least to, albeit optimistically, call ourselves _Homo sapiens_ and to reject a term like _spiritualis_ as the definitional basis for the species.
Every vessel with a gut has areal awareness, consciousness, modem-like from the fungal, bacterial sod below. Capacity to absorb is the limit. Can't really take the animated vessel out of its environment and get good measurements.
Literally can’t believe he said “the brain reflecting on itself”… it’s the homunculous problem. Theres no “little man” in the brain viewing the brain. If there is, who is viewing that? Makes zero sense. Remember that we can intricately describe our experience that neuroscience shows is individual cortical neurons or “feature detectors”. Thats the real issue. No one gets the questions and so they don’t have answers.
Consciousness didn't evolve, we evolved to receive it. Consciousness is all pervading, it's always there, it needs a receiver to perceive it. All sentient beings have access to it. It's your degree of training or lack there of that allows you to either make the most of it or ignore it & allow base material emotions & desires run you.
You're conflating auto-somatic responses with emotive responses with phenomenological experience with normative judgements with "free will". You're confused.
That was logical fallacy among other things. Like theists, New Ager’s conflate science terms in an effort to be a big fish in a little pond. They make backward nonsensical claims that answer nothing. Just supernatural claims.
@@humblemonkm61 None of that matters no matter who makes the supernatural claim. We live aware of our own life experiences. Our consciousness emerges as we do. And will therefore go when the means to collect, store and recover it is gone. Human consciousness is brain dependent.
@@simesaid Said like a true materialist, by your definition you are your body & when it stops functioning you believe You stop functioning. Yes, at some point your flesh bag will cease operating as a physical being, but You (Consciousness) never cease existing. Your understanding as put forward in your response is referring to the state of being conscious, which is not Consciousness. Unfortunately this can not be validated by locating it & measuring it like you being conscious. You can only through sincere meditative practice come to realize You never cease, You simply shift form from a physical material existence into another non-physical non-material existence. Auto-somatic & emotive responses, phenomenological experiences & normative judgements are results of Consciousness moving through a physical body. They are physical manifestations triggered by the presence of Consciousness. You require a physical body with sense organs in order to exist in a physical/material world, but Consciousness has nothing to do with the material physical world it simply moves through it, around it, & activates it, as it exists outside of the material/physical realm. There are countless examples of spiritual teachings that validate this point. Let me stipulate that I am not proselytizing nor am I a Christian, the point is to demonstrate that those who work diligently with a sincere meditative practice share this point of view of Consciousness across all spiritual practices. Even in Buddhism where there is no God looking to judge & punish & reward it's subjects, they recognize that there is a Higher Self, which they teach all reconnect with it just as a drop of rain (the individual self) joins back into the ocean (God/Consciousness). So even in a philosophy of "no God" there is a Higher Consciousness that permeates & exists eternally & is not affected by physical/material things, instead it is the Source & the impetus for all material things & when that physical thing wears out, breaks down, & dies only the conveyance (the vehicle) dies not the driver or operator of the physical vehicle. God (which can be a loaded word for some, so attempt to consider G-O-D as "good-orderly-direction" that means a pointed & fixed mind on the Higher Self as that is God, You are God, I am God, every sentient being & every thing manifest & non-manifested is God/Consciousness, which is One Existence or One Consciousness. The Christians have their Messiah Jesus who taught that all who know God will never die, yes their flesh will die, but they will have everlasting life. Refer to John 11:25-26, Jesus is talking to Martha, the sister of the man who’s in the grave. "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die." Now here’s aother verse. This one is even more precise, Jesus says in John 5:24, "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life." The Hindus (Sanatan Dharma) have their teachings from the Vedas & the Upanishads (commentary's on the Vedas). In the Rig Veda is included the "Song of Creation" that states, "In the beginning there was neither existence nor non-existence; there was no atmosphere, no sky, and no realm beyond the sky. What power was there? Where was that power? Who was that power? Was it finite or infinite? There was neither death nor immortality. There was nothing to distinguish night from day. There was no wind or breath. God alone breathed by his own energy. Other than God there was nothing. In the beginning darkness was swathed in darkness. All was liquid and formless. God was clothed in emptiness. *(Pay particular attention to this next verse referring to "the seed" being the "bond between existence & non-existentence," which can only be discovered through sincere meditative practice such as the kind that Sages perform) Then fire arose within God; and in the fire arose love. This was the seed of the soul. Sages have found this seed within their hearts; they have discovered that it is the bond between existence and non-existence. (Notice the word "discovered" One must search in a meditative state for that seed/bond in order to Self-Realize for one's self to comprehend this understanding of Consciousness/God/You/I as it can't be taught or proven in a physical or material fashion. It is a personal & very intimate experience that one must be dedicated to uncovering. Never take anyone's word for Spiritual Truth as only personal experience can teach & make One comprehend Truth.) The verse continues: "Who really knows what happened? Who can describe it? How were things produced? Where was creation born? When the universe was created, the one became many. Who knows how this occurred? Did creation happen at God’s command, or did it happen without his command? He looks down upon creation from the highest heaven. Only he knows the answer - or perhaps he does not know." (Rig Veda 10:129.1-7) Unlike the Christians & other spiritual practices the Hindus or practitioners of Santana Dharma do not preach or teach or pretend to know what only God knows as they recognize the point of God/Consciousness is beyond our limited human capability to fully comprehend, at best we might with our peripheral vision get a glimpse of these Truths while still physical. This sets Hindus apart from other belief systems because they teach the importance of having a personal experiencial experience. Meaning once you connect to these Truths you can no longer deny that You are immortal. (The capital "Y" You indicates your Higher Self/Consciousness/God outside of your small "y" physical mortal self) I know this was a long missive, but my intention is to illustrate that you are coming from a materialistic way of compression & there is another viewpoint to consider, but alas only can decide for yourself to undertake the long & arduous journey to discover your Path towards a higher knowledge that exists outside of the physical sense organs used to navigate the material world. Your sense organs will not serve you in your search, you must quiet the mind & the body with its senses & master them & go within to discover the Eternal. You don't have to believe me, it matters not, I simply need you to understand that, to quote Shakespeare from Hamlet, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Peace be upon you Brother.
Absolutely riveting! One of your best shows. Important insights/understandings on this huge topic.
😊😊😊😊p p⁰😊
I was walking out of the park with a neighbour and our dogs, and as we got nearer the gate, my dog on a leash became more excited leaping in the air, almost somersaulting. My neighbour asked why was he doing that?. I believed that he wanted to go back in her car, but she explained that she had not brought the car with her this time, and we were walking back home. At the gate, my dog turned towards where the car would have been parked, and once he was satisfied that her car was not there, he turned back towards our homes. How many times before had he had a lift from the park back home? Twice.
Consciousness? anticipation? joy?, resignation and acceptance? My dog showed all these then and does daily. I don't see consciousness as special, nor particularly human, either.
Are animals enlightened?
@@thesane_riderwhat do you mean by enlightened?
Depends on what you mean by special?
my dad had a right hemisphere stroke two years ago. his spatial neglect has definitely improved but initially it was quite severe. for whatever reason i never thought of it as a disorder of consciousness, only of perception. i’m actually a neuroscientist and find this fascinating! i’ll have to find some of your work
The evolutionary advantages of emergent consciousness are made clear here…this kinda makes sense as a REALLY great adaptation.
Have you seen that they have found quantum effects happen with microtubules of our cells? Penrose basically believes consciousness emerges as/through a quantum wave collapse.
This is the most exiting interview I have ever heard. I had to listen many statements two or three times because of their high impact on the understanding of ourselves. I must read your books.
This was great to listen to! Some time ago I studied philosophy of mind or consciousness and this took me right back. 😊 Would it be possible for you to make another on this subject? There are many interesting researchers out there, Susan Blackmore being one. Thank you! 🙏🏻
The development of the social human is a part of the research of Sarah Hrdy, who writes about how children learn to respond to different caregivers in different ways as infants, to get the attention and food they need.
Any book recommendations?
Brilliant theory of evolution but it doesn’t add much to the explanatory gap. One approach I was hoping for is to explain the evolution reasoning behind consciousness and it might lead to the “how” of the gap. Moving into AI doesn’t seem to help because if we can’t explain the gap in human terms how can we really expect to do it with machines.
The discussion on "attention" changed the way I think about this topic. Good stuff!
I love thinking about the hard problem of consciousness because it seems to me that it exists beyond what science is capable of investigating. We don’t even really have a way to prove consciousness exists outside of our own experience. I cannot prove that you are conscious and you cannot prove that I am. The idea that we aren’t conscious we just imagine we are works perfectly well for everyone else but I am having an experience (even if it’s imaginary - cogito ergo sum- it is literally the only thing I can be sure of!)
"When do self models emerge?" sounds very promising. In psychology its critical to how self-perceptions drive behavior.
This is fascinating. Thank you.
I loved this conversation! Thank you!
Absolutely outstanding .
Feels like words can't thank enough for one best talks on one of mine favourite subjects .
John Searle talks about the social awareness of others as intersubjectivity, using the term from Husserl and others.
Here is the secret of consciousness in a few sentences. It is basically what Michael is alluding to but from a slightly different perspective. Consciousness is not a stream - it is a whirlpool. A fundamental aspect of brain activity is working memory - information that starts with some mental activity, and that activity tends to return a short time later in a slightly different context, and that is how we solve problems by examining information from different perspectives. And the center of the funnel is not the explanatory gap, but the “explanatory funnel”, around which a mixture of new and old information circulates. That is the process of consciousness, and is the essence of self-reflection (our self-model) as well as how we continually compare our memory (our mind) with the outside world (our our body) and reconcile the two. Consciousness explains how we can can be in two places at once when we’re not anywhere at all (e.g. neither mind nor body). This process is how we generate ideas, and consciousness is just one of those ideas.
Aside from not explaining qualia or value or the different 'distinguishmen' of qualia to give different sensory feels their 'feels' or abstract thinking (memory to sensation vs memory to memory durations) or falsification amongst other aspects ... I agree.
Fundamentally there is a unity which is inherently similar, same enough to cohere, different enough to distinguish. Organisms assimilate existence and experience differently through same body, same body assinlates time differently through same self, concepts and perception are derivative assimilations
@@notmyrealpseudonym6702 Well you have to start somewhere. What few ever discuss is the role of memory in consciousness or qualia for that matter. The first time you experience a color, say red, is that a “qualia”? But if you’re told it’s red, then the next time you see a red apple, you can say, “oh that’s red”. If that’s what defines ‘qualia’, e.g. recognition, then that requires memory. So you can have the sensation of seeing something red consciously, but if you recognize it as red, they your brain is making associations with information in your memory, which is a different kind of experience. Every person’s experience of consciousness is different, yet we all know what is meant by the term. Consciousness is not a thing in the usual (material) sense, it’s an idea - which could be considered a “thing”, but very nebulous.
I don't pretend to have any answers, but here's a few quick questions.
• If primates are more conscious than other animals, or simply if consciousness is a product of evolution, then it must logically follow that "regular" primates are _more_ conscious than "irregular" ones. In other words, you must be more conscious than a person with Down syndrome... this just doesn't make any sense to me.
• If consciousness arose in almost all, or indeed _all,_ animals of a certain complexity relatively early in the evolutionary process, then how did nature _know_ to share what must have been a pretty expensive piece of kit across such a widely diverse range of substrate-dependent creatures? And yes, of course, evolution doesn't "know" anything!
• If conscious awareness arose for us to "focus attention" on specific problems to solve them, then why is it demonstrably the case that we perform more poorly when we are conscious of a task than we undertake it auto-somatically?
• And, lastly, if primate consciousness is the epoch of some highly-refined - and so one would also assume highly complex - brain structure, then why is it the case that patients who have undergone split-brain surgery apparently suffer no loss of conscious awareness, despite the brain now having to do twice the work with half the resources at its disposal?
I'll readily admit that none of these issues are in any way proscriptive for the process that Michael has outlined here. But for those still holding out hope that their phenomenological experience may still be somehow, well... magical... it's something.
You are very biased 👍🏻 you know the answer you’re just ignoring it
very good questions
There is evidence that many higher primates like chimpanzees are more conscious than most very young infants.
there is no such thing as "more conscious", just like there is no such thing as "more evolved".
People with some kinds of brain damage often DO lose some consciousness; that's a fact. The same is true with genetic issues, if they limit the functioning of the consciousness forming portions of the brain (which is only some parts of your gray matter).
Dogs are less conscious than humans, and ants are only conscious in the most rudimentary possible way, if at all.
If you stopped trying to be politically correct, you'd have the answer.
Brilliant.
With all due respect, human intellect has its limitation. Though it is good at problem solving but using intellect to study consciousness is like measuring the depth of the ocean using a foot scale.
Good day. In fact, we are studying consciousness with our consciousness.
With our consciousness we can study electromagnetism with our scientific tools and theories so we are not as limited as you're implying.
An amoeba is experiencing that it needs food and that there is food in the environment to be had. This is consciousness. So consciousness doesn't come from brains. Self-consciousness, meta-consciousness such as human brains generate are merely elaborations on this fundamental experiencing of all organisms.
Amazing ❤ ty so much... "souls"... of course!... and morality/religion being 1a and 1b...
the "hard" problem is that we are trying to observe and explain our consciousness using our very same consciousness which gets us in a loop.
who is us? consciousness is an organism's awareness of its environment. Any other definition is special pleading.
Our internal experience _is_ consciousness. I think that explains why we can't explain it better than "it just is."
That's a massive assumption and already shows the whole problem with this approach to consciousness. The one thing we actually do know is that perceptions are appearing in consciousness. Evening else is a theory about these appearances😊
I don't think it's a problem. We can still use solid logic to solve problems. That's like saying a brain cannot understand itself, though we can and DO understand how our brains work, at least partially (and we're getting better at it every day).
Yes and no. It´s an old joke that in a meeting of 3 scientists/phylosophers you get 20 definitions of consciousness. We actually don´t know what it is, hence we are in trouble to get a good definition.
It is fascinating, and there are lots of new ideas to absorb. Thanks
Awesome thank you
This was a fantastic interview. I love it. Does this channel have a patreon or any kind of donation or support structure? Can you get him back to go into even more detail please.
Thanks so much; currently only ads and the shop help run the show, but we are looking into Patreon as a possibility.
This is the typical non-explanation given by psychologists and neuroscientists.
no explanation is needed. "consciousness" is the subjective experience of organisms. That's all.
nailed it!!!
Loved the video ❤🙏🏻
My argument starts with that we’re using the wording wrong. In my definition, consciousness is EVERYTHING that the sensory perception system does-plus whatever else is going on in the brain. What the common use of the term consciousness refers to is actually--out of all that consciousness information that's constantly coming into the brain--the very very narrow amount of information that is engaged in by the executive function that the brain creates that we call the self. It also includes any generated emotions, and any retrieved stored information that is being regurgitated by the self. This common use of the term consciousness is actually a very tiny part of the body's consciousness.
In common parlance, the self refers to all of us, the whole body, and for some, a spirit, a soul. The self is actually just a wiring combination in the brain that serves a function. It is not the whole body. This self function in the brain has evolved to focus on a map of the environment that the brain constructs for the self from all that information coming in from the senses. Most animals have consciousness, and many, if not most, probably have some amount of development of a self because the self coordinates responses to the environment which most moving organisms in the environment require.
It’s how the brain constructs the self and the map of the environment that is the big puzzle. The environment is all out there but our conception of it is all in the brain created by the interaction of the brain's self construct and its environment map construct. What we "see" is not our environment, it is the brain's presentation to the self of its interpretation of the environment. "We" exist in our brain, not in our external environment. Our body exists in the external environment, but "we/ourself" and our "self's'" "environment" only exist in brain activity. The self and the map-one does not exist without the other. There is no living unconscious. Only the dead are unconscious.
There are times of unself like during dreamless sleep which is also the time of unmap--no self, no map--no map, no self. A dream is a map of a psychological environment for the self that is generated out of the information in the cortex during a time when the self is somehow mostly disconnected from the usual flow of information coming from a map of the real environment (and yes, there is a real environment). The brain, thus, can create different maps, as any psychologist can confirm.
The brain's construct of the self/map sychronicity is what we need a term for. Not the theater of the mind, but rather the theater of the self, inside the brain, a very small part of the massive consciousness activity system in the body. All other arguments about consciousness are generated mostly from an emotional insistance that "I" exist, and the emotional response to the knowledge of the death of others and the knowledge of the certain future death of "myself." You cannot prove that "we" transcend. You've only got anecdotal evidence for that, and a long history of emotional stories.
The brain and the nervous system interacts with the environment and this interaction creates "qualia", our subjective experiences that maybe are our consciousness, but I still can´t see "who" is experiencing those qualia. It seems there is no self (according to Hood´s book "The self deception" for example),at least not a permanent one, but still...
You should read “the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” by Julien Jaynes, and doesn’t evolution require death? So it’s more like we changed to a conscious state rather than evolved with or into having one.
Excellent
I'm really only been able to think of consciousness as something with the knowledge of good and evil. Though I say that, I'm not even claiming they exist, just that we know them.
I wonder whether the evolution of complex spoken language was a precursor to the human development of a state of consciousness with all the attributes Graziano enumerates. Or if a precursor then possibly a necessary co-evolution.
Theory of mind is strongly contested in various disciplines, and the Idea that the 'brain builds models of itself' problematic conjecture, at best an imprecise way of talking. This discussion fails to clarify it's subject matter - 'consciousness' - and rehashes a collection of philosophically naive perspectives and assumptions. It also overlooks a considerable body of work - phenomenology - that provides a plethora of meaningful insights and clarifications into the nature of lived subjective experience, or again, consciousness and subjectivity. Such insights have already provided a valuable starting point for neurologically oriented research into the relationship between life, mind and body (see Varela, Thompson).
To "sense" this reality is to sense an existence of being "conscious" of it's "physical" existence. Not one's personal existence, but of one's existence of this reality. ALL living creatures are "conscious" of this reality in one way or the other.
Wouldn't survival Instinct be a direct sign of consciousness?
How can self-preservation exist without a sense of self?
Humans become aware of self and self in relation to external entities beginning at birth and developing from there. It comes from the senses, and the sensations develop into concepts. There you go, that consciousness. It’s not difficult.
How does the brain create a Hologram inside the mind that displays the outside world to the mind’s eye? Do we all share the same Hologram?
Much obliged.
Well, nobody knows the answer to your first question, but the short answer to your second question is no, the world that you see is not the same world that anybody else sees... It's probably very similar, but no two people's worlds are the same.
@@simesaid < but if I can't examine the hologram inside of your brain, how can I know if it's different from the hologram inside my brain? For example, if you and I are watching the same TV show, I know the image on both screens is identical.
This is possibly an unanswerable question (in the absence of a whole lot more actual knowledge about how the consciousness phenomenon emerges from animal brains, rather than just speculative belief - however "informed").
The "hologram" at this point is little more than an analogy...
You do happen to know that people like me (with more severe aphantasia) doesn't really have a (visually versatile) "mind's eye"?!
Who said there is a "hologram" in anybody's brain?
@@Littleprinceleon < mental mirage, simulated virtual reality, mental hallucination? -but whatever it is, it's rather amazing that we all have one.
Studying consciousness, other than the riveting reductionist scientific approach, is like trying to guess the shape of your face, the colour of your eyes without the aid of an other person or any reflecting surface...
So attention is based on the uncertainty principle. Right?
Great video, thank you very much , note to self(nts) watched 37:43
Is it possible that the magical essence lies within the conversation between the two sides of the brain? Have you done research on the split brain
....theory of mind, applied to ourselves... Wow, just, wow.
Confusion is a Paleolithic survival emotion.
A very good presentation. I have two questions. Do animals have consciousness? If consciousness has evolved over time, it should have evolved in animals too.How instinct in animals is different from our Consciousness? In other words what separates the man from the animal, as the gene map is almost the same, in Primates. We trying to understand the other, by observing them, which falls under predictive behavior, as most of the animals too follow that pattern. Religion and spirituality are the exclusive domains of humans and are not useful for continuation of our species. Consciousness, which I feel is a protective layer exclusively for the humans for the higher order of learning led to creativity, speech, music, writing and other skills.
The Quantum Physics may have an answer for the description of the Consciousness. It can probably be described by Quantum Field Theory, as the measurements can be through, Chemical exchanges, Electrical Impulses or Sub-atomic distribution of Fundamental particles. The Artificial Intelligence cannot replicate a brain, it can only do the connections faster. The Generative AI can be considered as truly evolved, when the AI raises its own question and not fed from us, even with a single Byte. I rest my case.
I own his rather short "Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience" - just to get a little bit into the subject. I'm more interested in the history and universal application of Evolutionary theory - but think anyone studying the subject should look into all the different fields of the life sciences. Another interesting interview...always high quality here. Thanks for what you do with this channel.
in terms of "evolutionary theory" googlescholar the phrase "biological annihilation" - we are accelerating into a "Mass extinction of species" crisis worse than ever seen in the 4.6 billion years of life on Earth.
Consciousness is an anthropomorphic construct.
Consciousness is a response to a stimulus. No more and no less.
The integration of matter and energy manifests consciousness.
Thus, all matter is conscious. Furthermore, consciousness is fractal.
The ontological self is the subjective conscious inferring its hierarchical domain within the objective Consciousness. The cosmos.
lines 3 - 4 non sequitur
Woo-woo nonsense. Not one of these statements is even true.
Line 1 non sequitur
@@adon2424 "all matter is consciousness" is a rote assertion unsupported by any evidence or analysis.
He does not appear to know that the split between the lineages leading to synapsids ( to which mammals belong) and archosaurs (to which dinosaurs/birds belong) happened deep in the Carboniferous, which is about 350MYA, and not 200MYO as he (erroneously) states. This has deep implications upon the time scales in which complexity evolves. Apart from that his concepts are spot on and useful to frame scientific rather than ideological questions: circling aroudn the questions how these 'little models' that brains make of their own modus operandi emerge and then evolve.
Graziano does not clarify that distinction between the temporal type of consciousness which we share with other animals and he calls state of alert and the state of self-awareness which the human species seems to have developed to a higher degree than other primates.
The problem with studying consciousness is that nobody can define it.
I’m pretty sure we can define it
It's very well defined
Well then give us that definition guys 😂
@@jacobe.1651 being able to feel emotions and our many senses, plus creating a hologram of the world inside of our brain based on the data we receive from the outside world. computers don't do that
@@m.dgaius6430wrong. In fact, it is an invented word.
There is no accurate definition available in the West?
1:10 I think it's likely that Consciousness exists very far back or we would not have divided brains which spans the animal kingdom
"Neuroscientists are beginning to see the hard problem of consciousness and the question of an explanatory gap as inhibiting" Well yes, an unanswerable question would be inhibiting!
there's nothing hard about it. consciousness is just an organism's subjective experience of its environment.
Its the organism's subjective experience that is the hard problem of consciousness. Its "subjective experience that many philosophers, neuroscientists and other intellectuals sweep under the rug. They will deny that they do this but its true. Obviously, not all of them. I have some very basic education in the philosophy of mind so I put myself in the group of philosophers, (although I only have a BA in it). Anyway I will end this comment with a question; "What do you mean by the subjective experience of an organism?".
it's not about the development of consciousness. Dogs and cats are conscious. It's about the development of higher cognitive functions that I have, that my cat lacks.
Was one of his fiction books " The Evolution of Consciousness"? Yeah ?
Our five senses are naturally occurring. Where there is light and dark some way to perceive the difference will evolve.
Consciousness arrived in evolution when life forms obtained two senses. They needed a way to coordinate the inputs.
So can a single cell be conscious? A plant?
I find it interesting how some western academics ignore eastern thought and the level of intuitive knowledge developed over thousands of years on how we construct reality.
"I am a strange loop" by Douglas Hafsteader
One fascinating insight might be the pervasive existence of sleep.
I like to consider even primitive forms of consciousness as “coordinated postures”
To present the animal body as a uniform identity many of its systems muscles, nerves, organs must flex or support themselves against it opposed to each other or in specific coordination to each other, as do the systems of the mind.
The “posture” of consciousness would naturally cause stress points, like standing for hours or holding your arm up.
Here the jellyfish and human share a commonality, expression of the self requires coordinated effort, and effort is not perpetually maintainable lest complication ensue.
Thus the identity or unique posture of the self must rest , both the jellyfish and human relax their expression and both sleep.
Universal sleep in animals indicates that the self is a collective posture of the body, including mind.
To be you, you must flex you into the “you” shape.
Graziano uses the word intentionality in a different, and perhaps misleading, sense attributed to it by its originators, Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl and the phenomenologists.
It's remarkable to me that he thinks the ideas of consciousness start with James. It's literally been the primary philophical concern of eastern religions for millenia
There are no system of information signals that can interpret itself. So. You always need an interpret to handle information signals. If the output of that interpreter are new information signals, then you need another to interpreter this signals. If the brain is an information interpreeter, or the system of neurons are, you never find consisness inside our brain 😊
You two have much to learn. Keep up your studies.
The self model can not be consciousness because cosciousness knows it has self models and frameworks used for constructing a self that our consciousness can identify with and we use different models for different people and situations while consciousness remains the same and separate from them all.
A single celled organism can react to outside stimulae without a self model so was it's reaction consciousness and life has evolved around consciousness to the point that we can talk about our consciousness?
I know in my experience I have remained the same consciousness while my self model has been hammered, shaped and moulded by life.
My thoughts exactly. All of our models exist within our experience. You cannot reduce experience to the objects of experience. He may be describing something but it isn't consciousness in the way the east understands it
@@asherphoenix5584 yes :-) and we know we are not our objects of experience because we can observe them and free ourselves from them 🙂
We just developed senses to experience light. We are interacting with fields and light. Consciousness isn't a thing. If someone was blind and deaf and mute, they wouldn't really have a conscious experience would they. Our senses are what we call consciousness. Without any senses, we can't experience.
Lots of intelligent questions….
Slippery thinking, goes from talking about the subjective inner experience to talking about "models" constructed by the neuronal activity of the brain as a machine.
With this type of "slippage" instead of actually trying to grasp the essence of the subject experiencing those models, we go to talking about "models" which are qualia of consciousness but do not explain anything about the existance of a subject and its consciousness.
Again and again scientists manage to start talking about something else but not about consciousness.
Does consciousness emerge? Highly important question with AI
AI doesn't have our biochemical electric reactions nor our brain structures.
Faith ❤
MIT is in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Boston is a city 3 million large because it's Greater Metropolitan Area includes Cambridge.
loved this video . such a deeply thought provoking subjected . thanks .
Glad you enjoyed it!
At ten minutes in there is a reference to 'magic' which I think is a bit of a challenge to the discussion. I get the word is used for stuff happening that has no explanation, but the word, magic, is very problematic to use for ignorance. It's questionable and leave it that.
Scientists quantifying consciousness is like music journalists dancing about architecture, to borrow a brilliant phrase from Frank Zappa…
Love your shirt , where can I get one?
I am a set of a’ priori modes, not a body of limbs and organs. We need to move beyond the notion of “We”. Human is a loose notion at best. In essence, the body/conduit has no fixed predicate in the abstract lens so the premise is incorrect. What is it of us, that knows this?
Until we know more, we are a set of a’ priori modes trying to stabilise our line in an ocean of dissipating variables. We should define ourselves in this manner. We are a set of modes that allow for systematic alignment. A set synthesised with realities structures and stresses. Understanding this is the next step. Everything else is tied up in a field of inverted axioms and that path is a dead end.
Human is not part of the way I think. I’m beyond it. I don’t know what I am only that I am not the body. I am a set of modes as I said and until I know more…
So, did we start wearing clothes because we got sick of getting sand in certain places or because we realized we were naked? I don't see how you're going to answer those kinda questions studying monkeys
Clothes are a tool. Our unique human brain structures allow our imagination to put together elements of our environment in novel and useful ways. Other animals can't by far to the extent we can.
❤
I find it intriguing that the professor uses the presence of a self model to define consciousness and limits it to vertebrates that have certain brain anatomy. When I think of other forms of life, i.e., invertebrates, eucaryotes and protists, one can imagine that they take in sensory information, integrate it and compare it with past experience and make decisions on what to do next in the field of action. This is a from of consciousness too, maybe less sophisticated than in vertebrates but none the less real. I don't understand the need for a semantic distinction between the two process as they are both part of a biological function that arose hundreds of millions of years ago for making life decisions. Maybe the vertebrates can be said to have a higher kind of consciousness, but it seems unlikely that it did not evolve de novo. I think of consciousness as the experience of living which you can only understand if you are living. The mechanisms in the brain that are involved are not the same as the experience itself. thats what stumps efforts using a strictly intellectual definition.So, do machines feel?
There is no "hard problem of consciousness". Its the last bastion of anthropocentrism!
According to Prof. Graziano, consciousness is the sense of ourselves deriving from the model of ourselves fabricated by the brain itself. Well, where, why and from what does the brain fabricate such a model, he doesn't have the answer and we're stuck with the exact same problem and consciousness is still a total mystery.
Yeah. Reductionist nonsense.
I was literally thinking this. It answers nothing. How can a machine think it's conscious? He really should look into eastern philosophy on the subject before trying to reduce consciousness to blind mechanism
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FISH?
Its our brain
Trying to explain Qualia by appeal to "mental models" or computational terms hasn't gone anywhere. throwing deep neural networks at the hard problem is just more of the same - but more opaque.
Ok. And what about of unconscious ?...
Why are there zero scientists investigating consciousness as a sixth sense? Consciousness is a property of the universe and we’d be closer to this fact if scientists ate some good mushrooms.
What? Science has already determined that higher consciousness in humans came from evolution, experience on planet earth.
It's frightening that social media flock believes what it does, in all these mystical hodge podges.
It is good sign that many people with critical mind are now taking interest in this topic. However, they will never be able to understand it accurately unless they study the ancient Eastern Psychology.
I was just thinking this. The idea it started with William James blows my mind... it's been on the minds of Eastern philosophers and religion for millenia
The explanation of consciousness is ultimately unknowable. It can never be solved . It’s impossible to know for 100% certain how consciousness arises
Amen.
If man were meant to fly, he’d have wings.
Not a lot of discussion on the essence of consciousness, but rather how the human brain works with it. The whole tangent about modeling just shows the purpose of the cortex, especially the frontal cortex, which functions, among other functions, to store information which the self can utilize, and which can be conveyed to others. He doesn’t mention much the development of language and how our wonderful cortex enables the accumulation of signified and signifiers which enable language, and which allow us to actually tell others what is on our minds. This is all the evolution of the human brain rather than the evolution of consciousness.
♪♫♥ - Very Interesting, thank you for sharing this - 𒀭
The very first modern human was Adapa. We are the product of genetic engineering. The geneticist Enki created us 300.000 years ago. Read The Lost Book of Enki, a translation from 800 sumerian tablets.
Did he actually say, "slowly growing computer technology"? Oops. I'd love to ask him if he could take that one back.
My opinion everything is related and cause of MEMORY. memory especially large amounts of memory is the result of so called CONSCIOUSNESS. BRAIN. Without brain NO consciousness....
22:29 this is unfortunately what also gives us the herd mentality of go along to get along but don't make waves which brings you things like cancel culture and Nazis.
When must never do something that would risk causing them to be rejected by The Herd which would have been a certain death sentence to your ancestors.
Some genetic baggage that once served us very well (like the ability to store fat to make it through a long harsh winter) but is now the very thing that just might kill us.
If there is no consciousness in your mind that you believe in what part of people are people falling in love with
Maybe the universe is conscious and I am not.
Good way of putting it. My unconscious is conscious and my so called conscious is unconscious. Therefore I am unconscious of the consciousness.
The prof seems blissfully unaware that beliefs in spooky unseen and imaginary agency are at the root of the darker and most terrifying aspects of human behaviour, past and present. I for one am grateful that we have become rational enough at least to, albeit optimistically, call ourselves _Homo sapiens_ and to reject a term like _spiritualis_ as the definitional basis for the species.
The Bible says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. That is what I believe
How do you know the Bible is true?
Every vessel with a gut has areal awareness, consciousness, modem-like from the fungal, bacterial sod below. Capacity to absorb is the limit. Can't really take the animated vessel out of its environment and get good measurements.
Ego are alive, they can't be killed, they immortal event if the body are death.
Literally can’t believe he said “the brain reflecting on itself”… it’s the homunculous problem. Theres no “little man” in the brain viewing the brain. If there is, who is viewing that? Makes zero sense. Remember that we can intricately describe our experience that neuroscience shows is individual cortical neurons or “feature detectors”. Thats the real issue. No one gets the questions and so they don’t have answers.
Consciousness didn't evolve, we evolved to receive it. Consciousness is all pervading, it's always there, it needs a receiver to perceive it. All sentient beings have access to it. It's your degree of training or lack there of that allows you to either make the most of it or ignore it & allow base material emotions & desires run you.
You're conflating auto-somatic responses with emotive responses with phenomenological experience with normative judgements with "free will". You're confused.
That was logical fallacy among other things. Like theists, New Ager’s conflate science terms in an effort to be a big fish in a little pond. They make backward nonsensical claims that answer nothing. Just supernatural claims.
I absolutely agree, consciousness is fundamental
@@humblemonkm61 None of that matters no matter who makes the supernatural claim.
We live aware of our own life experiences. Our consciousness emerges as we do. And will therefore go when the means to collect, store and recover it is gone. Human consciousness is brain dependent.
@@simesaid Said like a true materialist, by your definition you are your body & when it stops functioning you believe You stop functioning. Yes, at some point your flesh bag will cease operating as a physical being, but You (Consciousness) never cease existing. Your understanding as put forward in your response is referring to the state of being conscious, which is not Consciousness.
Unfortunately this can not be validated by locating it & measuring it like you being conscious. You can only through sincere meditative practice come to realize You never cease, You simply shift form from a physical material existence into another non-physical non-material existence.
Auto-somatic & emotive responses, phenomenological experiences & normative judgements are results of Consciousness moving through a physical body. They are physical manifestations triggered by the presence of Consciousness. You require a physical body with sense organs in order to exist in a physical/material world, but Consciousness has nothing to do with the material physical world it simply moves through it, around it, & activates it, as it exists outside of the material/physical realm.
There are countless examples of spiritual teachings that validate this point. Let me stipulate that I am not proselytizing nor am I a Christian, the point is to demonstrate that those who work diligently with a sincere meditative practice share this point of view of Consciousness across all spiritual practices. Even in Buddhism where there is no God looking to judge & punish & reward it's subjects, they recognize that there is a Higher Self, which they teach all reconnect with it just as a drop of rain (the individual self) joins back into the ocean (God/Consciousness). So even in a philosophy of "no God" there is a Higher Consciousness that permeates & exists eternally & is not affected by physical/material things, instead it is the Source & the impetus for all material things & when that physical thing wears out, breaks down, & dies only the conveyance (the vehicle) dies not the driver or operator of the physical vehicle.
God (which can be a loaded word for some, so attempt to consider G-O-D as "good-orderly-direction" that means a pointed & fixed mind on the Higher Self as that is God, You are God, I am God, every sentient being & every thing manifest & non-manifested is God/Consciousness, which is One Existence or One Consciousness.
The Christians have their Messiah Jesus who taught that all who know God will never die, yes their flesh will die, but they will have everlasting life. Refer to John 11:25-26, Jesus is talking to Martha, the sister of the man who’s in the grave.
"I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die."
Now here’s aother verse. This one is even more precise, Jesus says in John 5:24, "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life."
The Hindus (Sanatan Dharma) have their teachings from the Vedas & the Upanishads (commentary's on the Vedas).
In the Rig Veda is included the "Song of Creation" that states, "In the beginning there was neither existence nor non-existence; there was no atmosphere, no sky, and no realm beyond the sky. What power was there? Where was that power? Who was that power? Was it finite or infinite?
There was neither death nor immortality. There was nothing to distinguish night from day. There was no wind or breath. God alone breathed by his own energy. Other than God there was nothing.
In the beginning darkness was swathed in darkness. All was liquid and formless. God was clothed in emptiness.
*(Pay particular attention to this next verse referring to "the seed" being the "bond between existence & non-existentence," which can only be discovered through sincere meditative practice such as the kind that Sages perform)
Then fire arose within God; and in the fire arose love. This was the seed of the soul. Sages have found this seed within their hearts; they have discovered that it is the bond between existence and non-existence.
(Notice the word "discovered" One must search in a meditative state for that seed/bond in order to Self-Realize for one's self to comprehend this understanding of Consciousness/God/You/I as it can't be taught or proven in a physical or material fashion. It is a personal & very intimate experience that one must be dedicated to uncovering. Never take anyone's word for Spiritual Truth as only personal experience can teach & make One comprehend Truth.)
The verse continues:
"Who really knows what happened? Who can describe it? How were things produced? Where was creation born? When the universe was created, the one became many. Who knows how this occurred?
Did creation happen at God’s command, or did it happen without his command? He looks down upon creation from the highest heaven. Only he knows the answer - or perhaps he does not know." (Rig Veda 10:129.1-7)
Unlike the Christians & other spiritual practices the Hindus or practitioners of Santana Dharma do not preach or teach or pretend to know what only God knows as they recognize the point of God/Consciousness is beyond our limited human capability to fully comprehend, at best we might with our peripheral vision get a glimpse of these Truths while still physical.
This sets Hindus apart from other belief systems because they teach the importance of having a personal experiencial experience. Meaning once you connect to these Truths you can no longer deny that You are immortal. (The capital "Y" You indicates your Higher Self/Consciousness/God outside of your small "y" physical mortal self)
I know this was a long missive, but my intention is to illustrate that you are coming from a materialistic way of compression & there is another viewpoint to consider, but alas only can decide for yourself to undertake the long & arduous journey to discover your Path towards a higher knowledge that exists outside of the physical sense organs used to navigate the material world. Your sense organs will not serve you in your search, you must quiet the mind & the body with its senses & master them & go within to discover the Eternal.
You don't have to believe me, it matters not, I simply need you to understand that, to quote Shakespeare from Hamlet, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Peace be upon you Brother.