You are absolutely right. The modern view of the mind is that is actually a collection of different intelligences that all talk to each other. And that's why we struggle to control our own minds and feelings. It's why we do stupid things when we panic.
Finally, something reasonable, observable, testable and intuitively spot on, needing no magic or unobserved factors/forces. I totally agree with his take on qualia, which I further attribute to the two-way nature of the peripheral nervous system, which not only provides vibrant experience but allows for its playback using memory (extending to the physical imagination of potential experiences). Note that his take is very friendly to evolutionary biology, and implies consciousness of a sort in animals.
Absolutely! Added bonus for debunking Chalmers ' zombies, it's too easy to concoct thought experiments without any basis and then use them to prove your theory (see also Mary's colors, Chinese room, brains in vats...)
Basically arguing about the outside world sensory/motor system which I call secondary awareness, can not exist without first aguing about the internal sensory/motor system which I call primary awareness. But here we get into the issue of the relationship between the subcosconsious and conscious mind as well as the autonomous system under control of that subconscious mind. The conscious mind is the at best the second layer of the onion.
6:03 Experience is very different from reactivity. A billiard ball does not 'experience' the impact of another. A billiard ball simply reacts to the impact and it does not and cannot remember the event. Experience, on the other hand, is the manifestation of content and events in the conscious field of a conscious self and the committing of that content to memory where, in conjunction with subsequent thinking, become roughly what is meant by 'the lessons of experience'. Surely?
I recently learned of Capgras syndrome. It was suggested that in forming memories, processing by the emotional part of the brain is an essential part in that if we do not have a 'feeling' for what a thing is, we believe it is a fake. Wouldn't zombies suffer from this delusion? It suggests to me that the emotional aspect is large in what consciousness is. A lot of it may simply be us having feelings about everything we experience. Thanks.
Consciousness is the internal activity always receiving information through vibrations, and awareness is external activities being organized into common sense for different input output information by the body of five senses. My understanding of all living things are not in control because everything is set in order and we are living inside of a design maze controlled by something through light and vibrations.
Computers don't have to manage attention. They can simultaneously track hundreds of thousands of objects in three dimensions, each with different trajectories and speeds, continuously in real time. It's just not a problem for them. So it may be that consciousness evolved for us to help manage the inherent limitations of our neural network based cognitive architecture.
*"Computers don't have to manage attention. They can simultaneously track hundreds of thousands of objects in three dimensions, each with different trajectories and speeds, continuously in real time."* ... I can track hundreds of people at an outdoor event. I can also single out who may pose a threat to me out of the hundreds of potential adversaries through my understanding of human nature. Without a "human" to train (or program) your computer on that particular aspect of human nature, how would it ever be able to determine which one is a threat?
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC You can see them, but you can't track them all in detail simultaneously the way a computer can. During testing on Saturday I was working on a system that was 'only' handling a relatively light test load of a hundred thousand messages a second. My point is not that computers are better than humans. They're better at some things such as millions of calculations per second, and worse at others. It's that they may not have the problems that our consciousness evolved to solve. >"Without a "human" to train (or program) your computer on that particular aspect of human nature, how would it ever be able to determine which one is a threat?" I think we've covered this before, but we now have a thorough ground up account of how intentional behaviour can develop through natural evolutionary mechanisms, driven by environmental factors. Behaviour evolves in exactly the same way that physical adaptations do. So we know for sure that design is not necessary for the development of intentional, goal seeking behaviour. Even if we didn't have that though, does the way a system came about actually change what it is and what it's doing? Surely what a thing is, how it works and what it does is what's important about it's nature?
Kuhn: "free will, which is a philosophical concept, now being studied by neuro-" It's also a practical application or capacity.... one that can be applied moment to moment in various ways.
What good is maths if it cant do braile? If i deleted the background of a boat on water. No sky, island, birds, houses etc. And the water and boat was the only thing in the picture. Id want the blanked out bits to at least hint that the object mass is a boat and the object mass is water. One is not the same mass qualities as the other.
1:09, 5:09 ... the trick seems to be related to whether we start with a 'volition to experience' or by 'experiencing a volition'... they're both sound, nonetheless :) ...
@MichaelSilvertonwhat if we switch the 'observer' with an 'experience' and formulate 'the experience is the experienced'.... it seems as 'experience' provides aditional exposure to an interactive process/event in the same shared conditions between the interactive .participants...
Finally, a rational approach to consciousness. When the organism is dead, or consciousness is suppressed through medication, there is no supernatural consciousness, like some people seem to imply.
There's nothing "rational" about any of this, it's idiotic drivel with zero basis in reality. From the get-go, Tse starts talking about consciousness "evolving", but we know for a fact that consciousness cannot possibly have evolved (see e.g. the articles by Kastrup demonstrating that), and so everything following that is just meaningless nonsense. Tse doesn't even understand what consciousness even is.
@@hoon_sol Imho, Kastrup's proposal is essentially identical to religious magic nonsense. I am conscious not because my mind has been pinched off from a magic cloud but because my eyes evolved to allow the world to paint a representation on the living process of my self. My self is the representation, the thought, that is about its self unlike every other thought that is about something else. It is my self that is central to the being conscious process. It's fairly trivial to understand how neural discharge patterns are able to encode the representations we call thoughts and that the self thought is synaptically modulated by other thoughts in a process that is what 'being conscious' means. I am conscious. 'Consciousness' is not a 'something' that I have. Conscious is what I am. I am conscious. I am conscious of this and conscious of that but when I am conscious of nothing I am neither conscious nor existent.
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL: What's hilarious here is that you literally couldn't be more wrong; the claim that what Kastrup points out and explains is somehow "religious" is the diametric opposite of the truth, because it's the claim that consciousness evolved which is truly religious nonsense when you consider the actual quality of consciousness (something you clearly never have done for long enough). The fact that you keep repeating the exact foolish nonsense Kastrup even explicitly refutes makes it obvious that you haven't even read what he's saying, let alone thought about it deeply yourself. Parroting idiotic statements like "my eyes evolved, therefore I'm conscious of what they register" is the exact completely fallacious non sequitur that not just Kastrup points out, but myriad other metaphysicians worth their salt, including Chalmers. What's most hilarious of all however is how you hand-wave the leap from neural activity to consciousness as "trivial" despite how even all the world's leading neuroscientists admitting that this is completely beyond the scope of science as we know it (which is correct). In your last paragraphs you're actually making more sensible statements (not quite though, such as the totally fallacious idea that not being conscious means not existing); too bad they're at complete odds with the rest of your dumb drivel.
Sadly this argument for free will totally ignores the philosophical and physical problem of free will that goes back at least to Hume. We may be able to choose to divert our attention to whatever we will, but there is no explanation here for being able to will what we will. That brings us back to the will as some duality that exerts downward causation, possibly from influencing quantum processes by consciousness, or we are stuck with the billiard ball pre-determinism of classical physics. Free will is closely tied to consciousness, and that is still a hard problem for both philosophy and science.
>"there is no explanation here for being able to will what we will." AI research has the concept of terminal and instrumental goals. Terminal goals are end objectives, so for living beings it is to pass on our genes to future generations. All our other goals are instrumental goals which we pursue in order to achieve our terminal goal. Eating, keeping healthy, attracting a mate, etc. Our cognitive processes have evolved in order to select, prioritise and achieve instrumental goals that lead towards our terminal goals. Exactly the same process occurs in AI systems. We develop or evolve them with the intention that they have terminal goals that align with our purpose for the system, the problem is that this is very difficult. It’s called the alignment problem. With advanced neural network based AIs we can’t program in behaviour like if-then-else code, instead we need to work out training and evolutionary methodologies that we hope will lead to the AI having terminal goals that align to our intentions, but also that it does not develop instrumental goals that would be harmful to us. Hence the thought experiment of the paperclip manufacturing AI that has the terminal goal of making as many paperclips as possible, and ends up killing us to harvest the iron in our blood and turn into paperclips. The point is that the Ads we have nowadays such as AlphaZero, ChatGPT and such have terminal goals, and they can develop strategies that select instrumental goals in order to achieve them. This is intentional behaviour, and in the case of many fo these systems these goals are evolved from scratch in training and simulation environment in the same way that natural organisms learn and evolve behaviours in their environments, without any procedural programming or explicit coding of goals or even behaviours.
The way i see it is there is no free will overall given the physics of the universe, but there is merit to defining free will to be something like the weather of your minds attention. All of your past and your genetics come into determining how the weather of your mind typically plays out given some specific stimuli, so you have to simplify it down to this high level perspective to try to describe the moment to moment evolution. So for me, free will, or the weather of your mind as I prefer, is this specific process of which I hope neuroscience dives deep into where a broad network in the brain can train itself to process external stimuli and so it deeply tied to what it means to experience something. I particularly like this phrasing of free will since it easily broadens for what we will soon consider the free will of AI. Of course there will have to be a bit of a reckoning between the AI and the Neuroscience community as future developments on the complex process that underlies free will unfold.
We are over thinking and making things complicated for no reason. The living are conscious they will die but as for the dead they have no consciousness at all.
Anybody else annoyed by the blur at the opening? I learned a new word. Volition. Free will defined as moving according to its limits. Ex. Fish in water. Free will is evolving to have an omnipresent ability.
Maybe. Just maybe we can learn something from the mystery of dark matter when it comes to consciousness (when that mystery one day resolves through some means - maybe by many important future findings). "Something" is assumed to exist because it makes visible and highly important changes that we can measure (indirect measurement). But what that "something" REALLY is remains a mystery both when it comes to dark matter and consciousness. It's absolutely fascinating that we don't have any superior ideas or theories about this. Because it's almost like the long long time before we discovered such a thing as DNA. IF our DNA at least partially has the blueprint for our consciousness... where is the other part of that blueprint located? Because we can try all day long to inject "a little happiness" or "a happy thought" OR "a complex thought" in our brain through a direct line of serotonin (and/or similar ways) but we already know that it's not THAT simple. Then... how complex is it really? Well. It seems to be at least as complex as solving the dark matter problem. That's for sure. Maybe it's 10 times more difficult to solve. EDIT: I find the very ending lines of Peter Tse very interesting.
i thought the explanation of the intentional tracking as an absent feature in zombies was lackluster. what proof does he have that zombies don't exist or couldn't exist in this way? it seems likely that computer s will develop the capacity to track and have an "awareness" based on thresholds, so why is he so sure that we are so much different?
Although this interview did help to categorize some concepts involving consciousness, I feel like it didn’t make any revelations about consciousness, feelings or experience. I think that science will one day accept that the best it can do is to map out what happens, where, what, when and how in the brain, when we experience conscious, feelings, choosing, deliberating, etc. But establishing all the parameters still doesn’t fully capture the fundamental sense of being or existing. The “I am” I believe is the seed of life that is given and that everything else is built upon it. All of our bipolar concepts and rainbow concepts applied to the concept of existence:non-existence are not being studied or debated. To me, “closer to truth” should also be “closer to existence”. Descartes got it down to I think therefore I am relying on our innate sense of rationality, but still never defined the I am. Can anything that truly exists, cease to exist? We’ve agreed that energy cannot be created or destroyed? Is the I am the fundamental or underlying energy that is always conserved? So many questions that science may tackle and never reveal. Is science fundamental or emergent?
If consciousness is the domain of percepts, and volition just ranks those percepts according to experiential percepts informed by qualia, all you are really discussing is a deterministic model of perception, slave to causation. However the perceptive will understand in order to be slave to causation one would need to be separate from it, which one however never is.
Consciousness can’t be emergent from the brain because it has causal efficacy on the brain through structural plasticity. Emergent properties can’t have causal efficacy on the systems they emerge from. For instance, water isn’t wet. Wetness emerges when a solid comes in contact with a liquid. So your clothes get wet or sand on a beach gets wet. Wetness doesn’t have causal efficacy on water or water molecules. Things like learning and memories have causal efficacy on the connections in the brain. So consciousness emerges from fundamental awareness when fundamental awareness interacts with the brain.
I don't think Robert was quite buying it. Nor was I. Peter's argument that philosophical zombies couldn't function didn't persuade me. Even if could be argued that consciousness gives an evolutionary advantage, it still doesn't explain how inanimate matter can create 'experience'.
>"it still doesn't explain how inanimate matter can create 'experience'." Maybe comparably to the way it performs mathematical calculations, simulates weather, beats us at Chess or Go, and develops new intentional behaviours from evolutionary mechanisms.
@@simonhibbs887 But none of these things you have described (chess computer, etc) experience consciousness. They can all be explained in terms of the behaviour of atoms. The 'experience' of the colour red is hard to explain in terms of the behaviour of atoms.
@@audiodead7302 >"They can all be explained in terms of the behaviour of atoms." How ChatGPT can synthesise original explanations of scientific and mathematical concepts is hard to explain, so is how AphaZero evolved the ability to play Chess without ever being programmed with the rules or instructed how to make moves. In the past such feats would have been considered definite evidence of intelligence. Now we understand how those function all the way from atoms up to innovative strategic game play. >"The 'experience' of the colour red is hard to explain in terms of the behaviour of atoms." The above were considered hard to explain that way, even impossible within my lifetime, but we explained them and transitioned those explanations from theory to practical engineering. Problems being hard hasn't stopped us in the past. Historically the fact we haven't solved a problem so far has not been a reliable indicator that we would not be able to do so. Betting against our ability to figure things out and explain them hasn't been a winning strategy.
Free will concerns the essence of the difference between form and function. Form is the source of the notion that "the will" is not free. A thermos cannot change its form so its only function is to keep warm liquids warm, right? Can a thermos be used another way? A way outside its own function but not outside its own form? I suppose one can use it as a hammer 🔨, but that requires another user: a God of another image.
Does discriminatory awareness predicate the requirement for memory ...ie a lookup of past events, with which to establish the notion of 'importance/relevance' and thus consequential 'focus' ? Any living organism needs to allocate/ascertain threat/benefit tags to memories or past experience as a series of freeze frame or sensory patterns and/or sequences of sensory patterns. I guess that kind of requires a fractal lookup basis of pattern recognition and association. Regardless, the mind has control over such sensory/motor equipment as a requirement to focus senses and isolate aspects/areas, as well as move. It must learn how to control such equipment before it can make any use of it. Thus to me, the human body is merely an avatar of consciosness as we are not born with control over it. Which then begs the question, does the subconscious mind dictate the development process of the human body and structure it develops as a function of that interface control process ?
A zombie with no subject could only use its objects (i.e. its programming/algorithms) to _process_ other objects (i.e. visual, auditory stimuli or inputs). But it does not havev the capacity to _experience_ what it gets through its inputs and what it processes.
The WILL to choose to believe in Supernatural God is solid proof that human's conscious mind is NOT a slave to natural physical laws but free... In other words, Consciousness is NOT physical matter because the freedom to believe in spiritual unnatural existence has nothing to do with Physics that governs it... ..and free will can not be programmed in a computer that only executes the program driven by switches beyond its control, not free...
>"The WILL to choose to believe in Supernatural God is solid proof that human's conscious mind is NOT a slave to natural physical laws but free..." Humans have evolved two different ways to cognitively model activity in their environment. One models simple cause and effect processes such as an object falling, a thrown rock arcing through the air, or something moving when it is pushed. The other system models the intentional behaviour of other creatures, such as the way Lions reason about the behaviour of prey in order to trick them into an ambush, or how social animals reason about the knowledge and intentions of others in their social group. Complex phenomena such as weather, floods, volcanoes, etc were too difficult for our ancestors to model in terms of physical cause and effect, so instead they applied the modelling system that reasons in terms of intentions and goals. This lead to animist beliefs which imagine natural phenomena to have minds, desires and emotions and that can be appeased or reasoned with. Later this evolved into more sophisticated systems of religion, but still misapplying the intentional model of reasoning to natural phenomena, and ultimately to the universe itself.
@@simonhibbs887 Natural evolution is an INVOLUNTARY PROCESS according to your basic science... ...and the fact that we can freely choose to volunteer to reason out, to choose to believe or not believe in UNNATURAL SPIRITS or GOD, to choose to model, etc., clearly proves that we are not driven by INVOLUNTARY NATURAL PROCESSES of evolution.. ...in addition, we are also free to volunteer to delay, postpone, or terminate making choices unlike programmed robots that just execute whatever nature or program drives it to do beyond its control.. Again, humans' free will is NOT slave to involuntary natural processes the way you want us to be...... This is one of the ugly consequences of schools telling generations that BIG BANG is the origin that has given rise to Darwin's Evolution of Apes to humans, trashing faith in the Creator.... ...and now, we have Godless wild apes running this world with no fear of doing evil for greedy selfish ends.
@@evaadam3635 It’s true evolution is an involuntary process, but it leads to intentional behavioural patterns. Speculative beliefs are just predictions. Computers make predictive deductions all the time. ChatGPT expressed beliefs about the world, mostly they are correct, sometimes they are mistaken. Everything you say humans do is completely explainable in naturalistic terms, and in fact most of it is already behaviour we can program or evolve. I’m not trying to persuade you out of your religion. It’s fine. However you’re making factual statements about the world and human behaviour that we know are probably false.
@@simonhibbs887 ,,, whether you are persuading me, or not, out of my sensible belief does not affect me at all... I'm fine..so, go ahead.. ..your idea, that an "involuntary process of natural evolution is producing matter that can now volunteer", is not only uttering opposite things both sides of your mouth but very funny as well... Why would you even think that your funny idea can threaten my sensible faith? When you reject a sensible belief, you may lose your good senses completely, so, beware...
@@evaadam3635 I the idea that an evolved physical system, with no imperative programming or human written code directing its actions, could exhibit intentional goal seeking behaviour so preposterous that it would contradict your faith? Warning, danger ahead.
6:20 “I don’t think zombies can exist blah blah blah” 👈that sounds exactly like what a zombie would say in order to keep the illusion of a non-alive consciousness alive. 🧟♂️ 😂😂 Hell, I know that’s how I would program MY zombies to speak if some pals (👽👽👽…🐰👈lead pal) and I created a simulation with conscious beings in order to run some superly-duperly important tests etc etc and extra “crazy” stuff like that ;)
*Second Attempt:* "Free Will" is the _default state_ that nature presents to us. When you choose chocolate over vanilla, the *observable action* is that you've just made a decision. All claims to the contrary (or that your decision was just an illusion) require an unnecessarily complex argument to which Ockham's razor could easily chop to bits. The reason why free will exists is because Existence is never satisfied with the status quo. After dealing with ten billion years of redundant Newtonian physics, "Existence" evolved into something new that was able to break the redundancy. For the first ten billion years, a particle's trajectory *determined* whether or not it would collide with another particle. Now that same particle must deal with particles that can *freely choose* to either _"take the hit"_ - or -_"get out of the way."_ ... That's the power of evolution, my friends!
@MichaelSilverton *"For instance, in this case, FMRI experiments that show how an experimenter with the right equipment can know which "choice" a person has made, prior to the subject themselves!"* ... And I'm sure you believe that has some type of relevance to the "free will" vs. "hard determinism" debate, but unfortunately it doesn't. I don't need a single piece of high-end computer technology, nor any electronic devices, no certified, licensed laboratory experiment monitors, nor any pneumographs, nor galvanographs, nor cardiosphygmographs, nor any outside assistance whatsoever to decide between chocolate and vanilla. ... I simply _"make my choice"_ and enjoy my ice cream!
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC That's a description entirely in terms of actions though. AlphaZero makes a choice when it moves the Bishop instead of the Knight, and no human ever told it to do that. It's behaviour was entirely evolved from randomised neural weights, in the same way that organisms evolve their intentional behaviour. Evaluating logic, performing calculations, evolving new heuristics, proving theorems, introspection and self-modification. These are all things computers can already do, and they've been able to do most of them for 50 years or more. Choosing between options is a solved problem, a well understood physical process.
@@simonhibbs887 *"That's a description entirely in terms of actions though."* ... I see no correlation between what you've written here and what has already been written by others. Too ambiguous. *"AlphaZero makes a choice when it moves the Bishop instead of the Knight, and no human ever told it to do that. It's behaviour was entirely evolved from randomised neural weights, in the same way that organisms evolve their intentional behaviour. "* ... In order for AlphaZero to 'choose" between a Bishop and a Knight it must first know each chess piece's capabilities, how the game is played, and the goal of playing the game. Thus, *HUMAN INTELLECT* was required to plug all of this information into AlphaZero's interface. ...You always seem to forget that part, don't you? *"It's behaviour was entirely evolved from randomised neural weights, in the same way that organisms evolve their intentional behaviour."* ... Automobiles have evolved from simplicity to complexity in the same way that many organisms have evolved, but automobiles are obviously nothing like living organisms. You're going to need a far more substantive argument than how these "human-programmed" AI's supposedly evolve to solidify your argument. I know that your _core belief_ really wants these AI programs to _"settle the argument"_ once and for all, and your carefully worded descriptions of how you perceive AI's operate speak to this fact. However, you're never going to offer me an AI program that doesn't have *human intellect* infused somewhere along its evolutionary timeline. To remain consistent, are you prepared to also claim that all living organisms have an "outside intelligence" that got them started on the right track - _just like we did with AI?_ ... I'm sure many theists would LOVE to read your response on that! *"These are all things computers can already do, and they've been able to do most of them for 50 years or more."* ... Put your physicalist reputation on the line and state whether or not any computer that has ever existed can knowingly believe in God, feel actual pain, contemplate an afterlife, or have subjective knowledge and understanding of other abstract constructs such as love, perseverance, and forgiveness. ... Will you do that for me, please? *"Choosing between options is a solved problem, a well understood physical process."* ... Your "physical processes" never seem to be able to say who the "agent hiding behind the curtain" is that's supposedly making all of my decisions for me that I naively "think" I'm making for myself. Shouldn't you be able to produce that _secret agent_ before declaring it all a "solved problem?" And don't respond with _"Well, you actually are making decisions, just not in the way that you think you are."_ because that's the same weak, baseless dodge that Hard Determinists like to use. ... It's no different than when a theist says the reason why you haven't heard the voice of God is because you haven't been listening.
@@simonhibbs887right. Same redundant description that there are similarity but different approach, I like just be simply being aware is a highest form of evolution, whatever move to choose they are all subjects from any kind of condition from an outside observer. We do not want to attach from what is variable.
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC >”… In order for AlphaZero to 'choose" between a Bishop and a Knight it must first know each chess piece's capabilities, how the game is played, and the goal of playing the game. “ Actually no, it was never programmed with any of the rules of the games it learned. They created a thousand or so copies of the neural network with randomised neural weights and thus random behaviour. Pairs of these were set moving Chess pieces and moves randomly against each other, the ones that achieved the highest scores were selected. Then randomly permuted copies of them were created for the next round and the process was repeated. So this was purely random behaviour, with random variations between generations, and environmental selection where the environment was a chess board. It evolved behaviour the same way an organism evolves behaviour in an environment. After 4 hours of this, they had a system that could beat a grandmaster, or any other existing chess program with no procedural programming or human directed behaviour. They did the same with Go and various other games. The same basic approach has been used for maze solving, drone racing, and lots of other problems. There is no procedural code in the behaviour of these systems. >”state whether or not any computer that has ever existed can knowingly believe in God, feel actual pain” Now you’re just moving the goal posts. Computers make choices, that’s just a fact. You’re using a computer that uses information to select between options thousands of times a second right now. They don’t make the same choices as us for the same reasons, but that’s just because they are different from us. >’… Your "physical processes" never seem to be able to say who the "agent hiding behind the curtain" is that's supposedly making all of my decisions for me that I naively "think" I'm making for myself. Shouldn't you be able to produce that secret agent before declaring it all a "solved problem?”’ The concept of a separate self that chooses, or an inner self that is aware, is not coherent. It’s a basic misunderstanding of the nature of self awareness. The self is what we are aware of. The self is also that which is aware. They are one and the same, there is no agent hiding behind the curtain. Suppose that there were. It would be aware of it’s own existence, and it would have a mental state it was aware of right? So it must have an inner self that is aware. And that inner self would have a mental state that it is aware of, etc, etc. It’s an infinite regression. The only coherent account is that self awareness is genuine self-referentiality. >’And don't respond with "Well, you actually are making decisions, just not in the way that you think you are." ‘ I don’t think you, or any of us, actually have any idea how we make most of our decisions. most of our choices emerge fully formed from our subconscious. Only with very great effort can we consciously evaluate options in terms of all the pros and cons, assign weights to different factors, reason about up sides and down sides. It’s an excruciatingly slow and inefficient process, that usually requires us to resort to external aids like lists. The vast majority of the time we let our automatic subconscious systems do whatever evaluation they do, with a quick conscious check on the decision in case we opt for a last minute veto before going ahead.
Why not imagine consciousness to be the underlying absolute domain, and we are becoming aware of it in higher degrees depending on our evolution. So, what we call "our consciousness" is rather a partial awareness, similar to glasses that are cleaned to perceive what is real. And no, experience is not what can be attributed to zombies.
Consciousness sits on top of Mind, Memory, Intelligence, Ego/Identity and Brain. Consciousness is beyond just volition or attention. And consciousness is different from Awareness. Just being awake is not Consciousness. Consciousness is not just experience.
Anyone who holds that consciousness has an evolutionary purpose is confusing consciousness for the faculty of reason, or that of emotion, or of memory, or the faculties of thought and perception. For these sufficiently explain any and all evolutionary functionings of the mind-brain, and a conscious awareness of decisions, thoughts, memories, emotions, and perceptions are not necessary to any survival goals. Seen from outside, to a witness, any automaton with a level 5 consciousness similar to me should be indistinguishable from me. To say that an agent’s behavior can reveal if they have consciousness is to make a claim in excess of evidence presented. To claim that consciousness is needed for evolution is to claim (without it having been shown) either that the capacities of mind-brain (reason, emotion, perception, memory, & thoughts, etc., all of them essentially, if not necessarily, "insentient") are insufficient for evolutionary ends, and it is to claim that we can establish who else, other than ourselves, is sentient. Both these claims are unsupported in fact and reason.
>Anyone who holds that consciousness has an evolutionary purpose is confusing consciousness for the faculty of reason, or that of emotion, or of memory, or the faculties of thought and perception. I think self awareness has an evolutionary purpose. It allows us to observe and reason about the effectiveness of our own reasoning processes. We can evaluate emotional responses that were counterproductive and we need to control better, identify gaps in our knowledge, skills we need to improve and how to do it. So the ability to reflect on and modify our own cognitive functions means we can self modify our mental processes. I think it’s likely that qualitative experience is simply a consequence of this sort of rich, deep introspective self awareness.
@@simonhibbs887 I’d recommend reading Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey for a good argument against what you’re claiming here - not saying I necessarily agree with his conclusions but it’s very interesting nonetheless. Also recommend, if you haven’t read already, Keith Frankish’s paper Illusionism as a theory of consciousness; illusionism seems more or less to be your position in the comment above ^
@@eimaJMcman I’ve not read the book, but I’ve read a review and seen an interview with Humphrey. As I understand it he doesn’t object to the view of the utility of self awareness I gave, but thinks qualitative experience is a separate phenomenon related to motivational behaviour. Something like that? One thing we know about organisms is that pretty much every system in the body gets used in multiple different functions. Evolution recruits everything it has available that can further a goal into action. Self awareness, qualia experiences, subjectivity, consciousness, they’re all overlapping and intertwined phenomena. I’d be surprised if any of them had only one single specific function. Hardly anything in our bodies does.
@@simonhibbs887 Apologies, I lazily mistook your comment as coming from the original commenter somehow! I suppose my comment was primarily meant to be directed at the original commenter, although my bit on illusionism was related to the last sentence of your comment. You’re right, I think, that your view is not contradicted by Humphrey’s evolutionary theory of sentience, if anything I’d say it’s very closely aligned; Humphrey distinguishes between perception and sensation (interchangeably referred to as phenomenal consciousness/ qualia/ sentience), which is informed by his research into blindsight in which patients have no sensation of seeing but nonetheless act, under certain circumstances, as if their sight is intact - in other words, their body still perceives and processes light stimuli on some level, but they have no conscious awareness of this and are utterly convinced they’re completely blind. He then builds a pretty compelling theory (the ‘ipsundrum’ theory) for why such sensation evolved, which if I had to very crudely summarise (using the book and my notes) might go something like: 1) simple cell organisms respond reflexively to external stimuli in such a way that increases its survival (e.g. moves away from destructive high temperature), 2) slightly more complex organisms evolve to be more flexible by representing to itself what is happening to it, which is done by monitoring it’s own reflexive responses at the site of the stimuli. Humphrey calls this an ‘efference copy’. The crucial evolutionary benefit of doing this is that an organism can become more adaptable to its environment if it is able to choose not to express a particular reflexive response in certain instances - instances where it is no longer an adaptive response. 3) However, by this point the organism is already relying on the reflexive response, which it monitors, to build an accurate representation of what is happening to it. It therefore evolves to ‘privatise’ the reflexive response without enacting bodily changes. This way it a) retains the useful information of responding to stimuli, enabling accurate self-representation, and b) is able to inhibit an actual body response when it is adaptive to do so. This internalised response is, more-or-less, a rudimentary form of phenomenal consciousness (a literal internal representation of how its body would respond to the present stimuli, therefore necessarily harbouring the quality of ‘feel’ or ‘what it is like’). 4) This internalising of the response enables the possibility of feedback looping (think of a microphone placed near a corresponding speaker) which enables sensation to be drawn out in time. 5) This further enables the possibility of sensation settling into what Humphrey calls an ‘attractor’ state, where a complex pattern repeats and sustains itself recursively. 6) A self-sustaining attractor state can be improved on and refined by other incoming signals, developing in complexity and ultimately forming what we perceive as human phenomenal consciousness - a dense amalgamation of ‘what it is like’(s). Humphrey calls this self-sustaining, privatised attractor state the ‘ipsundrum’. He then goes on to describe how such an attractor state is all-or-nothing as it either settles into a recursive, self-sustaining loop, or doesn’t - there is no middle-ground. He then uses this insight to justify his belief that only mammals, birds and some other warm-blooded animals are sentient. It’s a fascinating theory and hopefully time will tell just how accurate it is. It also challenges in a very comprehensive way the common assertion, as expressed by the original commenter, that a perfectly functional human can exist without phenomenal sensation (or, in other words, consciousness) and that it therefore has nothing to do with evolution. I’ve enjoyed the excuse to try and summarise it!
Every time I listen to Tse I am unimpressed. As the interviewer points out a computer could easily pick different things to 'track' from all the things going on and regarding problem solving, innumerable times the process has occurred in my brain while asleep or in the shower, and it is the answer that I become aware of, not the process of figuring it out.
How can we talk about consciousness, free will, when Donald Hoffman has proposed, as per his scientific research, that reality itself isn't what it seems. Shouldn't we start there and work towards some sense/form of "objective truth"?
It's hard to take this series seriously when Kuhn can't distinguish between consciousness and will, which are two completely different things, and when Tse starts with the typical "consciousness evolved" drivel even after people like Kastrup has made it blatantly obvious that consciousness cannot possibly have evolved. People like Tse don't even remotely understand what consciousness even is.
It doesn’t mean that at all. If anything, it means that consciousness arose out of biology, with biology or as part and parcel of biology. Nothing “pre-existing” about it at all.
“Consciousness evolved for …” thanks for disqualifying your own knowledge with your very first words. Now I don’t have to listen to the rest of the program.
Robert says he's been obsessed with consciousness his entire life. Then it would be a sin to not reflect upon these 3 specific books here below. And know, the Upanishads isn't a book, it's a mirror, of thy Soul. 1. Upanishads, translated by Nikhilananda's 4 volume set, and 18 principal Upanishads translated by Radhakrishnan 2. Vivekacudamani, by Sankara, translated by Madhavananda 3. Upadesa Sahashri, by Sankara, translated by Jagadananda
My mind has a mind of its own.
*"My mind has a mind of its own."*
... Then does your mind's mind also have a mind of its own?
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLCYou're missing the point
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC No
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLCmaybe...
You are absolutely right. The modern view of the mind is that is actually a collection of different intelligences that all talk to each other. And that's why we struggle to control our own minds and feelings. It's why we do stupid things when we panic.
The mathematics behind the relationship between human and god @Jeffrey Lang..we are here to grow and learning about god
Finally, something reasonable, observable, testable and intuitively spot on, needing no magic or unobserved factors/forces. I totally agree with his take on qualia, which I further attribute to the two-way nature of the peripheral nervous system, which not only provides vibrant experience but allows for its playback using memory (extending to the physical imagination of potential experiences). Note that his take is very friendly to evolutionary biology, and implies consciousness of a sort in animals.
your post is probably too grounded with too much common sense
Absolutely! Added bonus for debunking Chalmers ' zombies, it's too easy to concoct thought experiments without any basis and then use them to prove your theory (see also Mary's colors, Chinese room, brains in vats...)
My cat pays attention to me when I get her food ready. Amazing!!!
Basically arguing about the outside world sensory/motor system which I call secondary awareness,
can not exist without first aguing about the internal sensory/motor system which I call primary awareness.
But here we get into the issue of the relationship between the subcosconsious and conscious mind as well as the autonomous system under control of that subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is the at best the second layer of the onion.
6:03
Experience is very different from reactivity.
A billiard ball does not 'experience' the impact of another.
A billiard ball simply reacts to the impact and
it does not and cannot remember the event.
Experience, on the other hand,
is the manifestation of content and events
in the conscious field of a conscious self and
the committing of that content to memory where,
in conjunction with subsequent thinking,
become roughly what is meant by 'the lessons of experience'.
Surely?
I recently learned of Capgras syndrome. It was suggested that in forming memories, processing by the emotional part of the brain is an essential part in that if we do not have a 'feeling' for what a thing is, we believe it is a fake. Wouldn't zombies suffer from this delusion? It suggests to me that the emotional aspect is large in what consciousness is. A lot of it may simply be us having feelings about everything we experience. Thanks.
Consciousness is the internal activity always receiving information through vibrations, and awareness is external activities being organized into common sense for different input output information by the body of five senses. My understanding of all living things are not in control because everything is set in order and we are living inside of a design maze controlled by something through light and vibrations.
Great job, Peter! Explaining to linear thinkers the non-linear consciousness is an impossible task...
Wow. Great dialog.
Computers don't have to manage attention. They can simultaneously track hundreds of thousands of objects in three dimensions, each with different trajectories and speeds, continuously in real time. It's just not a problem for them. So it may be that consciousness evolved for us to help manage the inherent limitations of our neural network based cognitive architecture.
*"Computers don't have to manage attention. They can simultaneously track hundreds of thousands of objects in three dimensions, each with different trajectories and speeds, continuously in real time."*
... I can track hundreds of people at an outdoor event. I can also single out who may pose a threat to me out of the hundreds of potential adversaries through my understanding of human nature. Without a "human" to train (or program) your computer on that particular aspect of human nature, how would it ever be able to determine which one is a threat?
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC You can see them, but you can't track them all in detail simultaneously the way a computer can. During testing on Saturday I was working on a system that was 'only' handling a relatively light test load of a hundred thousand messages a second. My point is not that computers are better than humans. They're better at some things such as millions of calculations per second, and worse at others. It's that they may not have the problems that our consciousness evolved to solve.
>"Without a "human" to train (or program) your computer on that particular aspect of human nature, how would it ever be able to determine which one is a threat?"
I think we've covered this before, but we now have a thorough ground up account of how intentional behaviour can develop through natural evolutionary mechanisms, driven by environmental factors. Behaviour evolves in exactly the same way that physical adaptations do. So we know for sure that design is not necessary for the development of intentional, goal seeking behaviour.
Even if we didn't have that though, does the way a system came about actually change what it is and what it's doing? Surely what a thing is, how it works and what it does is what's important about it's nature?
Kuhn: "free will, which is a philosophical concept, now being studied by neuro-"
It's also a practical application or capacity.... one that can be applied moment to moment in various ways.
What good is maths if it cant do braile? If i deleted the background of a boat on water. No sky, island, birds, houses etc. And the water and boat was the only thing in the picture. Id want the blanked out bits to at least hint that the object mass is a boat and the object mass is water. One is not the same mass qualities as the other.
1:09, 5:09 ... the trick seems to be related to whether we start with a 'volition to experience' or by 'experiencing a volition'... they're both sound, nonetheless :) ...
@MichaelSilvertonwhat if we switch the 'observer' with an 'experience' and formulate 'the experience is the experienced'.... it seems as 'experience' provides aditional exposure to an interactive process/event in the same shared conditions between the interactive .participants...
Is attentional tracking inside of our awareness or not? And if it is, then consciousness is something different of conscious experience.
Finally, a rational approach to consciousness. When the organism is dead, or consciousness is suppressed through medication, there is no supernatural consciousness, like some people seem to imply.
There's nothing "rational" about any of this, it's idiotic drivel with zero basis in reality. From the get-go, Tse starts talking about consciousness "evolving", but we know for a fact that consciousness cannot possibly have evolved (see e.g. the articles by Kastrup demonstrating that), and so everything following that is just meaningless nonsense. Tse doesn't even understand what consciousness even is.
@@hoon_sol
Imho,
Kastrup's proposal is essentially identical to religious magic nonsense.
I am conscious
not because my mind has been pinched off from a magic cloud but
because my eyes evolved
to allow the world to paint a representation
on the living process of my self.
My self is the representation, the thought, that is about its self
unlike every other thought that
is about something else.
It is my self that is central to the being conscious process.
It's fairly trivial to understand how neural discharge patterns
are able to encode the representations we call thoughts and that
the self thought is synaptically modulated by other thoughts
in a process that is what 'being conscious' means.
I am conscious.
'Consciousness' is not a 'something' that I have.
Conscious is what I am.
I am conscious.
I am conscious of this and conscious of that but
when I am conscious of nothing
I am neither conscious
nor existent.
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL:
What's hilarious here is that you literally couldn't be more wrong; the claim that what Kastrup points out and explains is somehow "religious" is the diametric opposite of the truth, because it's the claim that consciousness evolved which is truly religious nonsense when you consider the actual quality of consciousness (something you clearly never have done for long enough).
The fact that you keep repeating the exact foolish nonsense Kastrup even explicitly refutes makes it obvious that you haven't even read what he's saying, let alone thought about it deeply yourself. Parroting idiotic statements like "my eyes evolved, therefore I'm conscious of what they register" is the exact completely fallacious non sequitur that not just Kastrup points out, but myriad other metaphysicians worth their salt, including Chalmers.
What's most hilarious of all however is how you hand-wave the leap from neural activity to consciousness as "trivial" despite how even all the world's leading neuroscientists admitting that this is completely beyond the scope of science as we know it (which is correct).
In your last paragraphs you're actually making more sensible statements (not quite though, such as the totally fallacious idea that not being conscious means not existing); too bad they're at complete odds with the rest of your dumb drivel.
Sadly this argument for free will totally ignores the philosophical and physical problem of free will that goes back at least to Hume. We may be able to choose to divert our attention to whatever we will, but there is no explanation here for being able to will what we will. That brings us back to the will as some duality that exerts downward causation, possibly from influencing quantum processes by consciousness, or we are stuck with the billiard ball pre-determinism of classical physics. Free will is closely tied to consciousness, and that is still a hard problem for both philosophy and science.
>"there is no explanation here for being able to will what we will."
AI research has the concept of terminal and instrumental goals. Terminal goals are end objectives, so for living beings it is to pass on our genes to future generations. All our other goals are instrumental goals which we pursue in order to achieve our terminal goal. Eating, keeping healthy, attracting a mate, etc. Our cognitive processes have evolved in order to select, prioritise and achieve instrumental goals that lead towards our terminal goals.
Exactly the same process occurs in AI systems. We develop or evolve them with the intention that they have terminal goals that align with our purpose for the system, the problem is that this is very difficult. It’s called the alignment problem. With advanced neural network based AIs we can’t program in behaviour like if-then-else code, instead we need to work out training and evolutionary methodologies that we hope will lead to the AI having terminal goals that align to our intentions, but also that it does not develop instrumental goals that would be harmful to us. Hence the thought experiment of the paperclip manufacturing AI that has the terminal goal of making as many paperclips as possible, and ends up killing us to harvest the iron in our blood and turn into paperclips.
The point is that the Ads we have nowadays such as AlphaZero, ChatGPT and such have terminal goals, and they can develop strategies that select instrumental goals in order to achieve them. This is intentional behaviour, and in the case of many fo these systems these goals are evolved from scratch in training and simulation environment in the same way that natural organisms learn and evolve behaviours in their environments, without any procedural programming or explicit coding of goals or even behaviours.
The way i see it is there is no free will overall given the physics of the universe, but there is merit to defining free will to be something like the weather of your minds attention. All of your past and your genetics come into determining how the weather of your mind typically plays out given some specific stimuli, so you have to simplify it down to this high level perspective to try to describe the moment to moment evolution. So for me, free will, or the weather of your mind as I prefer, is this specific process of which I hope neuroscience dives deep into where a broad network in the brain can train itself to process external stimuli and so it deeply tied to what it means to experience something. I particularly like this phrasing of free will since it easily broadens for what we will soon consider the free will of AI. Of course there will have to be a bit of a reckoning between the AI and the Neuroscience community as future developments on the complex process that underlies free will unfold.
We are over thinking and making things complicated for no reason.
The living are conscious they will die but as for the dead they have no consciousness at all.
Anybody else annoyed by the blur at the opening? I learned a new word. Volition. Free will defined as moving according to its limits. Ex. Fish in water. Free will is evolving to have an omnipresent ability.
How is it voluntary attention, there are so many examples where it does not apply.
Maybe. Just maybe we can learn something from the mystery of dark matter when it comes to consciousness (when that mystery one day resolves through some means - maybe by many important future findings).
"Something" is assumed to exist because it makes visible and highly important changes that we can measure (indirect measurement). But what that "something" REALLY is remains a mystery both when it comes to dark matter and consciousness.
It's absolutely fascinating that we don't have any superior ideas or theories about this. Because it's almost like the long long time before we discovered such a thing as DNA. IF our DNA at least partially has the blueprint for our consciousness... where is the other part of that blueprint located? Because we can try all day long to inject "a little happiness" or "a happy thought" OR "a complex thought" in our brain through a direct line of serotonin (and/or similar ways) but we already know that it's not THAT simple. Then... how complex is it really? Well. It seems to be at least as complex as solving the dark matter problem. That's for sure. Maybe it's 10 times more difficult to solve.
EDIT: I find the very ending lines of Peter Tse very interesting.
i thought the explanation of the intentional tracking as an absent feature in zombies was lackluster. what proof does he have that zombies don't exist or couldn't exist in this way? it seems likely that computer s will develop the capacity to track and have an "awareness" based on thresholds, so why is he so sure that we are so much different?
Although this interview did help to categorize some concepts involving consciousness, I feel like it didn’t make any revelations about consciousness, feelings or experience. I think that science will one day accept that the best it can do is to map out what happens, where, what, when and how in the brain, when we experience conscious, feelings, choosing, deliberating, etc. But establishing all the parameters still doesn’t fully capture the fundamental sense of being or existing. The “I am” I believe is the seed of life that is given and that everything else is built upon it. All of our bipolar concepts and rainbow concepts applied to the concept of existence:non-existence are not being studied or debated. To me, “closer to truth” should also be “closer to existence”. Descartes got it down to I think therefore I am relying on our innate sense of rationality, but still never defined the I am. Can anything that truly exists, cease to exist? We’ve agreed that energy cannot be created or destroyed? Is the I am the fundamental or underlying energy that is always conserved? So many questions that science may tackle and never reveal. Is science fundamental or emergent?
If consciousness is the domain of percepts, and volition just ranks those percepts according to experiential percepts informed by qualia, all you are really discussing is a deterministic model of perception, slave to causation. However the perceptive will understand in order to be slave to causation one would need to be separate from it, which one however never is.
Consciousness can’t be emergent from the brain because it has causal efficacy on the brain through structural plasticity. Emergent properties can’t have causal efficacy on the systems they emerge from. For instance, water isn’t wet. Wetness emerges when a solid comes in contact with a liquid. So your clothes get wet or sand on a beach gets wet. Wetness doesn’t have causal efficacy on water or water molecules. Things like learning and memories have causal efficacy on the connections in the brain. So consciousness emerges from fundamental awareness when fundamental awareness interacts with the brain.
I don't think Robert was quite buying it. Nor was I. Peter's argument that philosophical zombies couldn't function didn't persuade me. Even if could be argued that consciousness gives an evolutionary advantage, it still doesn't explain how inanimate matter can create 'experience'.
>"it still doesn't explain how inanimate matter can create 'experience'."
Maybe comparably to the way it performs mathematical calculations, simulates weather, beats us at Chess or Go, and develops new intentional behaviours from evolutionary mechanisms.
@@simonhibbs887 But none of these things you have described (chess computer, etc) experience consciousness. They can all be explained in terms of the behaviour of atoms. The 'experience' of the colour red is hard to explain in terms of the behaviour of atoms.
@@audiodead7302 >"They can all be explained in terms of the behaviour of atoms."
How ChatGPT can synthesise original explanations of scientific and mathematical concepts is hard to explain, so is how AphaZero evolved the ability to play Chess without ever being programmed with the rules or instructed how to make moves. In the past such feats would have been considered definite evidence of intelligence. Now we understand how those function all the way from atoms up to innovative strategic game play.
>"The 'experience' of the colour red is hard to explain in terms of the behaviour of atoms."
The above were considered hard to explain that way, even impossible within my lifetime, but we explained them and transitioned those explanations from theory to practical engineering. Problems being hard hasn't stopped us in the past. Historically the fact we haven't solved a problem so far has not been a reliable indicator that we would not be able to do so. Betting against our ability to figure things out and explain them hasn't been a winning strategy.
Free will concerns the essence of the difference between form and function. Form is the source of the notion that "the will" is not free. A thermos cannot change its form so its only function is to keep warm liquids warm, right?
Can a thermos be used another way? A way outside its own function but not outside its own form? I suppose one can use it as a hammer 🔨, but that requires another user: a God of another image.
Does discriminatory awareness predicate the requirement for memory ...ie a lookup of past events, with which to establish the notion of 'importance/relevance' and thus consequential 'focus' ?
Any living organism needs to allocate/ascertain threat/benefit tags to memories or past experience as a series of freeze frame or sensory patterns and/or sequences of sensory patterns.
I guess that kind of requires a fractal lookup basis of pattern recognition and association.
Regardless, the mind has control over such sensory/motor equipment as a requirement to focus senses and isolate aspects/areas, as well as move.
It must learn how to control such equipment before it can make any use of it.
Thus to me, the human body is merely an avatar of consciosness as we are not born with control over it.
Which then begs the question, does the subconscious mind dictate the development process of the human body and structure it develops as a function of that interface control process ?
He is speaking of evolvment of mind, not consciousness. What comes from mind is still mind.
Why does closer to truth never seem to get there?
A zombie with no subject could only use its objects (i.e. its programming/algorithms) to _process_ other objects (i.e. visual, auditory stimuli or inputs). But it does not havev the capacity to _experience_ what it gets through its inputs and what it processes.
Consciousness evolved in biology. Can it evolve in machines?
There is no free will
It does seem that way doesn't it. I wish someone could formulate a cogent argument for its existence.
The WILL to choose to believe in Supernatural God is solid proof that human's conscious mind is NOT a slave to natural physical laws but free...
In other words, Consciousness is NOT physical matter because the freedom to believe in spiritual unnatural existence has nothing to do with Physics that governs it...
..and free will can not be programmed in a computer that only executes the program driven by switches beyond its control, not free...
>"The WILL to choose to believe in Supernatural God is solid proof that human's conscious mind is NOT a slave to natural physical laws but free..."
Humans have evolved two different ways to cognitively model activity in their environment. One models simple cause and effect processes such as an object falling, a thrown rock arcing through the air, or something moving when it is pushed. The other system models the intentional behaviour of other creatures, such as the way Lions reason about the behaviour of prey in order to trick them into an ambush, or how social animals reason about the knowledge and intentions of others in their social group.
Complex phenomena such as weather, floods, volcanoes, etc were too difficult for our ancestors to model in terms of physical cause and effect, so instead they applied the modelling system that reasons in terms of intentions and goals. This lead to animist beliefs which imagine natural phenomena to have minds, desires and emotions and that can be appeased or reasoned with. Later this evolved into more sophisticated systems of religion, but still misapplying the intentional model of reasoning to natural phenomena, and ultimately to the universe itself.
@@simonhibbs887 Natural evolution is an INVOLUNTARY PROCESS according to your basic science...
...and the fact that we can freely choose to volunteer to reason out, to choose to believe or not believe in UNNATURAL SPIRITS or GOD, to choose to model, etc., clearly proves that we are not driven by INVOLUNTARY NATURAL PROCESSES of evolution..
...in addition, we are also free to volunteer to delay, postpone, or terminate making choices unlike programmed robots that just execute whatever nature or program drives it to do beyond its control..
Again, humans' free will is NOT slave to involuntary natural processes the way you want us to be......
This is one of the ugly consequences of schools telling generations that BIG BANG is the origin that has given rise to Darwin's Evolution of Apes to humans, trashing faith in the Creator....
...and now, we have Godless wild apes running this world with no fear of doing evil for greedy selfish ends.
@@evaadam3635 It’s true evolution is an involuntary process, but it leads to intentional behavioural patterns.
Speculative beliefs are just predictions. Computers make predictive deductions all the time. ChatGPT expressed beliefs about the world, mostly they are correct, sometimes they are mistaken. Everything you say humans do is completely explainable in naturalistic terms, and in fact most of it is already behaviour we can program or evolve.
I’m not trying to persuade you out of your religion. It’s fine. However you’re making factual statements about the world and human behaviour that we know are probably false.
@@simonhibbs887 ,,, whether you are persuading me, or not, out of my sensible belief does not affect me at all... I'm fine..so, go ahead..
..your idea, that an "involuntary process of natural evolution is producing matter that can now volunteer", is not only uttering opposite things both sides of your mouth but very funny as well... Why would you even think that your funny idea can threaten my sensible faith?
When you reject a sensible belief, you may lose your good senses completely, so, beware...
@@evaadam3635 I the idea that an evolved physical system, with no imperative programming or human written code directing its actions, could exhibit intentional goal seeking behaviour so preposterous that it would contradict your faith? Warning, danger ahead.
6:20 “I don’t think zombies can exist blah blah blah” 👈that sounds exactly like what a zombie would say in order to keep the illusion of a non-alive consciousness alive. 🧟♂️ 😂😂
Hell, I know that’s how I would program MY zombies to speak if some pals (👽👽👽…🐰👈lead pal) and I created a simulation with conscious beings in order to run some superly-duperly important tests etc etc and extra “crazy” stuff like that ;)
*Second Attempt:* "Free Will" is the _default state_ that nature presents to us. When you choose chocolate over vanilla, the *observable action* is that you've just made a decision. All claims to the contrary (or that your decision was just an illusion) require an unnecessarily complex argument to which Ockham's razor could easily chop to bits.
The reason why free will exists is because Existence is never satisfied with the status quo. After dealing with ten billion years of redundant Newtonian physics, "Existence" evolved into something new that was able to break the redundancy.
For the first ten billion years, a particle's trajectory *determined* whether or not it would collide with another particle. Now that same particle must deal with particles that can *freely choose* to either _"take the hit"_ - or -_"get out of the way."_
... That's the power of evolution, my friends!
@MichaelSilverton *"For instance, in this case, FMRI experiments that show how an experimenter with the right equipment can know which "choice" a person has made, prior to the subject themselves!"*
... And I'm sure you believe that has some type of relevance to the "free will" vs. "hard determinism" debate, but unfortunately it doesn't.
I don't need a single piece of high-end computer technology, nor any electronic devices, no certified, licensed laboratory experiment monitors, nor any pneumographs, nor galvanographs, nor cardiosphygmographs, nor any outside assistance whatsoever to decide between chocolate and vanilla. ... I simply _"make my choice"_ and enjoy my ice cream!
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC That's a description entirely in terms of actions though. AlphaZero makes a choice when it moves the Bishop instead of the Knight, and no human ever told it to do that. It's behaviour was entirely evolved from randomised neural weights, in the same way that organisms evolve their intentional behaviour. Evaluating logic, performing calculations, evolving new heuristics, proving theorems, introspection and self-modification. These are all things computers can already do, and they've been able to do most of them for 50 years or more. Choosing between options is a solved problem, a well understood physical process.
@@simonhibbs887 *"That's a description entirely in terms of actions though."*
... I see no correlation between what you've written here and what has already been written by others. Too ambiguous.
*"AlphaZero makes a choice when it moves the Bishop instead of the Knight, and no human ever told it to do that. It's behaviour was entirely evolved from randomised neural weights, in the same way that organisms evolve their intentional behaviour. "*
... In order for AlphaZero to 'choose" between a Bishop and a Knight it must first know each chess piece's capabilities, how the game is played, and the goal of playing the game. Thus, *HUMAN INTELLECT* was required to plug all of this information into AlphaZero's interface. ...You always seem to forget that part, don't you?
*"It's behaviour was entirely evolved from randomised neural weights, in the same way that organisms evolve their intentional behaviour."*
... Automobiles have evolved from simplicity to complexity in the same way that many organisms have evolved, but automobiles are obviously nothing like living organisms. You're going to need a far more substantive argument than how these "human-programmed" AI's supposedly evolve to solidify your argument.
I know that your _core belief_ really wants these AI programs to _"settle the argument"_ once and for all, and your carefully worded descriptions of how you perceive AI's operate speak to this fact. However, you're never going to offer me an AI program that doesn't have *human intellect* infused somewhere along its evolutionary timeline.
To remain consistent, are you prepared to also claim that all living organisms have an "outside intelligence" that got them started on the right track - _just like we did with AI?_ ... I'm sure many theists would LOVE to read your response on that!
*"These are all things computers can already do, and they've been able to do most of them for 50 years or more."*
... Put your physicalist reputation on the line and state whether or not any computer that has ever existed can knowingly believe in God, feel actual pain, contemplate an afterlife, or have subjective knowledge and understanding of other abstract constructs such as love, perseverance, and forgiveness. ... Will you do that for me, please?
*"Choosing between options is a solved problem, a well understood physical process."*
... Your "physical processes" never seem to be able to say who the "agent hiding behind the curtain" is that's supposedly making all of my decisions for me that I naively "think" I'm making for myself. Shouldn't you be able to produce that _secret agent_ before declaring it all a "solved problem?"
And don't respond with _"Well, you actually are making decisions, just not in the way that you think you are."_ because that's the same weak, baseless dodge that Hard Determinists like to use. ... It's no different than when a theist says the reason why you haven't heard the voice of God is because you haven't been listening.
@@simonhibbs887right. Same redundant description that there are similarity but different approach, I like just be simply being aware is a highest form of evolution, whatever move to choose they are all subjects from any kind of condition from an outside observer.
We do not want to attach from what is variable.
@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC >”… In order for AlphaZero to 'choose" between a Bishop and a Knight it must first know each chess piece's capabilities, how the game is played, and the goal of playing the game. “
Actually no, it was never programmed with any of the rules of the games it learned. They created a thousand or so copies of the neural network with randomised neural weights and thus random behaviour. Pairs of these were set moving Chess pieces and moves randomly against each other, the ones that achieved the highest scores were selected. Then randomly permuted copies of them were created for the next round and the process was repeated. So this was purely random behaviour, with random variations between generations, and environmental selection where the environment was a chess board. It evolved behaviour the same way an organism evolves behaviour in an environment. After 4 hours of this, they had a system that could beat a grandmaster, or any other existing chess program with no procedural programming or human directed behaviour. They did the same with Go and various other games.
The same basic approach has been used for maze solving, drone racing, and lots of other problems. There is no procedural code in the behaviour of these systems.
>”state whether or not any computer that has ever existed can knowingly believe in God, feel actual pain”
Now you’re just moving the goal posts. Computers make choices, that’s just a fact. You’re using a computer that uses information to select between options thousands of times a second right now. They don’t make the same choices as us for the same reasons, but that’s just because they are different from us.
>’… Your "physical processes" never seem to be able to say who the "agent hiding behind the curtain" is that's supposedly making all of my decisions for me that I naively "think" I'm making for myself. Shouldn't you be able to produce that secret agent before declaring it all a "solved problem?”’
The concept of a separate self that chooses, or an inner self that is aware, is not coherent. It’s a basic misunderstanding of the nature of self awareness. The self is what we are aware of. The self is also that which is aware. They are one and the same, there is no agent hiding behind the curtain. Suppose that there were. It would be aware of it’s own existence, and it would have a mental state it was aware of right? So it must have an inner self that is aware. And that inner self would have a mental state that it is aware of, etc, etc. It’s an infinite regression. The only coherent account is that self awareness is genuine self-referentiality.
>’And don't respond with "Well, you actually are making decisions, just not in the way that you think you are." ‘
I don’t think you, or any of us, actually have any idea how we make most of our decisions. most of our choices emerge fully formed from our subconscious. Only with very great effort can we consciously evaluate options in terms of all the pros and cons, assign weights to different factors, reason about up sides and down sides. It’s an excruciatingly slow and inefficient process, that usually requires us to resort to external aids like lists. The vast majority of the time we let our automatic subconscious systems do whatever evaluation they do, with a quick conscious check on the decision in case we opt for a last minute veto before going ahead.
Why not imagine consciousness to be the underlying absolute domain, and we are becoming aware of it in higher degrees depending on our evolution. So, what we call "our consciousness" is rather a partial awareness, similar to glasses that are cleaned to perceive what is real. And no, experience is not what can be attributed to zombies.
Consciousness sits on top of Mind, Memory, Intelligence, Ego/Identity and Brain. Consciousness is beyond just volition or attention. And consciousness is different from Awareness. Just being awake is not Consciousness. Consciousness is not just experience.
Anyone who holds that consciousness has an evolutionary purpose is confusing consciousness for the faculty of reason, or that of emotion, or of memory, or the faculties of thought and perception. For these sufficiently explain any and all evolutionary functionings of the mind-brain, and a conscious awareness of decisions, thoughts, memories, emotions, and perceptions are not necessary to any survival goals. Seen from outside, to a witness, any automaton with a level 5 consciousness similar to me should be indistinguishable from me. To say that an agent’s behavior can reveal if they have consciousness is to make a claim in excess of evidence presented. To claim that consciousness is needed for evolution is to claim (without it having been shown) either that the capacities of mind-brain (reason, emotion, perception, memory, & thoughts, etc., all of them essentially, if not necessarily, "insentient") are insufficient for evolutionary ends, and it is to claim that we can establish who else, other than ourselves, is sentient. Both these claims are unsupported in fact and reason.
>Anyone who holds that consciousness has an evolutionary purpose is confusing consciousness for the faculty of reason, or that of emotion, or of memory, or the faculties of thought and perception.
I think self awareness has an evolutionary purpose. It allows us to observe and reason about the effectiveness of our own reasoning processes. We can evaluate emotional responses that were counterproductive and we need to control better, identify gaps in our knowledge, skills we need to improve and how to do it. So the ability to reflect on and modify our own cognitive functions means we can self modify our mental processes. I think it’s likely that qualitative experience is simply a consequence of this sort of rich, deep introspective self awareness.
@@simonhibbs887 I’d recommend reading Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey for a good argument against what you’re claiming here - not saying I necessarily agree with his conclusions but it’s very interesting nonetheless. Also recommend, if you haven’t read already, Keith Frankish’s paper Illusionism as a theory of consciousness; illusionism seems more or less to be your position in the comment above ^
@@eimaJMcman I’ve not read the book, but I’ve read a review and seen an interview with Humphrey. As I understand it he doesn’t object to the view of the utility of self awareness I gave, but thinks qualitative experience is a separate phenomenon related to motivational behaviour. Something like that?
One thing we know about organisms is that pretty much every system in the body gets used in multiple different functions. Evolution recruits everything it has available that can further a goal into action. Self awareness, qualia experiences, subjectivity, consciousness, they’re all overlapping and intertwined phenomena. I’d be surprised if any of them had only one single specific function. Hardly anything in our bodies does.
@@simonhibbs887 Apologies, I lazily mistook your comment as coming from the original commenter somehow! I suppose my comment was primarily meant to be directed at the original commenter, although my bit on illusionism was related to the last sentence of your comment. You’re right, I think, that your view is not contradicted by Humphrey’s evolutionary theory of sentience, if anything I’d say it’s very closely aligned; Humphrey distinguishes between perception and sensation (interchangeably referred to as phenomenal consciousness/ qualia/ sentience), which is informed by his research into blindsight in which patients have no sensation of seeing but nonetheless act, under certain circumstances, as if their sight is intact - in other words, their body still perceives and processes light stimuli on some level, but they have no conscious awareness of this and are utterly convinced they’re completely blind. He then builds a pretty compelling theory (the ‘ipsundrum’ theory) for why such sensation evolved, which if I had to very crudely summarise (using the book and my notes) might go something like: 1) simple cell organisms respond reflexively to external stimuli in such a way that increases its survival (e.g. moves away from destructive high temperature), 2) slightly more complex organisms evolve to be more flexible by representing to itself what is happening to it, which is done by monitoring it’s own reflexive responses at the site of the stimuli. Humphrey calls this an ‘efference copy’. The crucial evolutionary benefit of doing this is that an organism can become more adaptable to its environment if it is able to choose not to express a particular reflexive response in certain instances - instances where it is no longer an adaptive response. 3) However, by this point the organism is already relying on the reflexive response, which it monitors, to build an accurate representation of what is happening to it. It therefore evolves to ‘privatise’ the reflexive response without enacting bodily changes. This way it a) retains the useful information of responding to stimuli, enabling accurate self-representation, and b) is able to inhibit an actual body response when it is adaptive to do so. This internalised response is, more-or-less, a rudimentary form of phenomenal consciousness (a literal internal representation of how its body would respond to the present stimuli, therefore necessarily harbouring the quality of ‘feel’ or ‘what it is like’). 4) This internalising of the response enables the possibility of feedback looping (think of a microphone placed near a corresponding speaker) which enables sensation to be drawn out in time. 5) This further enables the possibility of sensation settling into what Humphrey calls an ‘attractor’ state, where a complex pattern repeats and sustains itself recursively. 6) A self-sustaining attractor state can be improved on and refined by other incoming signals, developing in complexity and ultimately forming what we perceive as human phenomenal consciousness - a dense amalgamation of ‘what it is like’(s). Humphrey calls this self-sustaining, privatised attractor state the ‘ipsundrum’. He then goes on to describe how such an attractor state is all-or-nothing as it either settles into a recursive, self-sustaining loop, or doesn’t - there is no middle-ground. He then uses this insight to justify his belief that only mammals, birds and some other warm-blooded animals are sentient. It’s a fascinating theory and hopefully time will tell just how accurate it is. It also challenges in a very comprehensive way the common assertion, as expressed by the original commenter, that a perfectly functional human can exist without phenomenal sensation (or, in other words, consciousness) and that it therefore has nothing to do with evolution. I’ve enjoyed the excuse to try and summarise it!
@@eimaJMcman Thank you very much, that was very informative.
Every time I listen to Tse I am unimpressed. As the interviewer points out a computer could easily pick different things to 'track' from all the things going on and regarding problem solving, innumerable times the process has occurred in my brain while asleep or in the shower, and it is the answer that I become aware of, not the process of figuring it out.
How can we talk about consciousness, free will, when Donald Hoffman has proposed, as per his scientific research, that reality itself isn't what it seems. Shouldn't we start there and work towards some sense/form of "objective truth"?
It's hard to take this series seriously when Kuhn can't distinguish between consciousness and will, which are two completely different things, and when Tse starts with the typical "consciousness evolved" drivel even after people like Kastrup has made it blatantly obvious that consciousness cannot possibly have evolved. People like Tse don't even remotely understand what consciousness even is.
notice the use of his expression "evolved"... implying that Consciousness is a Pre-Existent state that was there forever 😊
It doesn’t mean that at all. If anything, it means that consciousness arose out of biology, with biology or as part and parcel of biology. Nothing “pre-existing” about it at all.
“Consciousness evolved for …” thanks for disqualifying your own knowledge with your very first words. Now I don’t have to listen to the rest of the program.
You seem angry but not sure what your point is. I would guess you are upset by the word "evolved".
Robert says he's been obsessed with consciousness his entire life.
Then it would be a sin to not reflect upon these 3 specific books here below. And know, the Upanishads isn't a book, it's a mirror, of thy Soul.
1. Upanishads, translated by Nikhilananda's 4 volume set, and 18 principal Upanishads translated by Radhakrishnan
2. Vivekacudamani, by Sankara, translated by Madhavananda
3. Upadesa Sahashri, by Sankara, translated by Jagadananda
Beautiful books from the days when we knew so little.
I love these discussions, but there is an ultimate purpose.
We all know what he's trying to do, little by little.
Convert everybody to Christianity.