I think he’s one of the clearest speakers (and thinker) around, whether or not one agrees with him. If nothing else, he leaves one with a better understanding of the matter in question.
Yes, if you buy the idea that you can make consciousness by putting cells together in a particular orientation, after presumably making them in a lab, good luck with that, it might be easier to create a time machine and hope that they got this figured out a billion years from now. But then the question arises "why is this orientation so specific and important?" And "would the created brain lose its consciousness if you interchanged the positions of two neurons? Why?" Not to mention how fraught the idea of a person losing his or her consciousness with a brain injury, as if there can be no internal experience or voice.
@@jeffreyanderson6021 our inability to create consciousness only points to our limitations, not necessarily our explanation of how consciousness is being produced. If there are biological factors (brain damage, anesthesia…) that impact the state of our conscious experience, to me that only reaffirms the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of brain processes.
@@michael-4k4000 Let me explain it to you. Terence Howard is a nutter. And he is not even a doctor with a religion doctorate, such as another notorious "Doctor" nutcase, Billy Graham. Howard never attended SCSU, and SCSU does not confer doctorates in chemical engineering. Instead, Howard was awarded an honorary degree of "Doctorate of Humane Letters" (DHL) from SCSU after speaking at its commencement ceremony in 2012. LOL.
Kuhn made some very strong points. Sean was way more relaxed in his responses, Kuhn seemed a bit rattled and shaky with his questions and points, but still posed very cogent challenges to the "absoluteness" of Sean's position. Bottom line for me in all of the discussion of consciousness is that we'll probably not figure it out any time soon. By far the most animated CTT I've ever seen.
I think that Kuhn has been sufficiently convinced by non-physicalists after all these years and, like me, can’t believe that someone as smart as Sean would be such a fundamentalist in this regard.
@@cloud1stclass372 Non-physicalism is incoherent. It begins with Kant's mind-body problem and argues the "solution" is to throw out the existence of the physical "body." The direct result of this is that we would all be trapped "in our own minds," i.e. solipsism (subjective idealism). This view is incoherent because you cannot even define the concept of "I" without a reference to "Thou," in the same way darkness makes no sense without light. The word "I" would also become meaningless in a truly solipsistic framework, which then _should_ lead you to also abandon this as an _a priori_ concept, and just treat experience as not a property of "I" or "Thou" but just _reality itself,_ and then you can easily recover materialism and realism consistently. Yet, what happens in practice is that subjective idealists either spin themselves into logical pretzels trying to explain how it makes sense to argue "I" is _a priori_ but somehow "Thou" is not, or they devolve into the even worse _objective_ idealism, where they propose we are all part of an "objective mind," but this mind has precisely the same properties as Kant's own _noumenon,_ i.e. all objective idealist philosophies always reproduce the mind-body problem in its precise logical form.
@@cloud1stclass372 But Sean's position is scientifically and practically sensible since the material-physical is all we can perceive and all we have to work with.
This was brilliant. I've not heard someone talk so well about a physicalist position on consciousness. It was kind of funny watching Robert Kuhn respond from an irresistible dualist position, although Carroll perhaps set him up for that by agreeing with the idea of being able to "upload yourself". His explanation of the detail refutes that, at least as it relates to how that expression is usually thought of (because it is inherently dualistic, suggesting that there's an entity, "your self", that is put somewhere else). With that bubbling around in Kuhn's unconscious, he can then start imagining that the new copy being "identical" must mean it has Carroll's unique personhood, hence he's confused because then he thinks there are two Sean Carrolls. If he just thought about disassembling an apple molecule by molecule, yet copying each into a new apple, he'd not argue that the two apples being "identical" are therefore just one apple in two places. They're necessarily made of different actual atoms; only their type and arrangement are identical. So really, you can't "upload yourself" because you have no "self", but you can copy the physical state to create a facsimile. Actually, all the neurons isn't enough, since a brain unsupported by a body will die immediately, and one without any senses won't have a similar conscious experience, so the whole body would need to be copied. And immediately, it would begin having different experiences.
As I understand physiology, neurons are dynamic in the sense of forming new structures. Without this dynamic process there could be no “perception” and no memory. As soon as the copy is made, and given that it must exist is a different physical location from the copied being, then it would evolve differently. The time taken to duplicate aside, there would be two beings with different perspectives that share much memory. They would be different, though, because of the difference in perception which in turn would invoke different memories.
Starting as identical to the original, the copied consciousness would diverge, but in a manner that the original would diverge as it continues its life. If they are truly identical, the new consciousness could be inserted into the life of the original consciousness, and there would be no difference.
11:00 I love how Robert is struggling with this so hard, and Sean just doesn't understand the nature of the issue Robert is stuck on, and this is so funny and beautiful.
Yes I don't know if Robert doesn't or refuses to understand. To me it's simple. If an exact copy of someone is made at that moment there are two separate/independent identical persons and consciousnesses. As time passes the persons and their consciousnesses will gradually diverge. This seems obvious to Sean but not Robert apparently.
@@ExistenceUniversity I'll try to illustrate with something more simple. Say there's a physical document like a memo printed on paper. That memo is copied and distributed to different people. The different copies will be in different situations so will diverge. Some might just sit on someone's desk, others might have coffee spilled on them or be recycled. They started as exact or nearly exact copies but will diverge with time. While the process is more complex the same principle would apply to copied humans. If someone made an identical copy of me (or anyone else) we and our consciousnesses would only be identical momentarily. As time passed we would be in different situations and have different experiences so our consciousnesses would diverge. Commonalities would persist but divergence would increase with time.
@alankoslowski9473 well we have split brain patients. This procedure leaves 2 distinct hemispheres both having the conscious experience. So, are they 2 totally different conscious entities in the brain? What if we recombined them again? Do they split from 1 to 2 then back to 1? Or does the continuous stream of consciousness fork then merge but all the while remaining one?
I think I can elaborate a bit on Sean's position. Each moment in time is another you, having a different "now" experience. All "now" moments have state (i.e the configuration of the universe in that moment) that is consistent with that moments "now" state being related to a prior moments "now" state, as described by a transformation permitted by the laws of physics. You could imagine that like a jigsaw puzzle, all these moments, like puzzle pieces, were all cut together in one stroke. Therefore one did not derive from another, they were all derived together to be consistent with the laws of physics. You are experiencing one "now" moment. The order thing called time you are experiencing is just that this is the only thing we can derive from any given now moment that we find ourselves experiencing. If the universe jumped between states of you being a baby, and then you being an adult, you would know nothing of this jump; in both instances you would be aware of being a baby with complete set of memories and state consistent with that experience; and likewise for the instant where you are an adult yod have the memories of a lifetime consistent with that experience. So what does it mean if your brain was uploaded into a computer? Your set of "now" moments where you were a human are all possible experiences. Another set of "now" moments for the conciousness happening in the computer is abother set. In fact in anything where conciousness arises - this adds to the set of "now" moments that can be experienced. This set now includes me, and you and everyone we have ever met. So why am I feeling like I am me right "now" and not "you" or my brain uploaded into the "computer"? Well.. how can we be so sure we are not also those things - we can only ever experience a "now" moment, I have no idea who I was experiencing a moment ago. According to this "now" moment I am presently writing a youtube comment. I have memories consistent with this. I feel like I have been sat here 10 minutes.. but so would you if you were experiencing this "now" moment. Who is to say you are not? Language lets me down here because terms like "you" and "I' are ambiguous. The total set of all "now" moments for concious being will be experienced, and when they are, that experience will result in something that thinks its an entity with an identity that is flowing in time.
I think the issue here isn't the understanding of the experience of consciousness, it's the attachment to who we think we are. If there's a replica of me that will live forever inside a computer, because what that replicas experiences going forward will be separate, to say that you can upload or replicate your consciousness when the original body's consciousness will eventually die, the person only sees themselves as the person in the original body, and the replica as a sort of violation of the originals identity. I'm not saying that's something I'm concerned about, but seems to be the issue that's being discussed. Personally, if I were to die but I could replicate myself and that version would live on, I would do it. I would be sad that the experience that I'm having would come to an end, but the important thing generally is that what was important to me and what would be important to it would be the same. In the same way, we are all mortal, but we will live on in the bodies of others by the things we've given of ourselves to them.
@micahgmiranda "replicating" to live on, is what the "the selfish gene" is doing when we procreate. It currently relies on evolutionary and biological processes though which have certain problems. The next leap imho would be, we transfer the responsibility of "solving for persistence" from the level of evolutionary biology, to the the level of technological design. - Designing new "artificial bodies" as vehicles for persistence, to house our "brains" / minds in. Incrementing on that design. This will let us make leaps in design that biological evolution cannot make, and at the rate of technological innovation, e.g bodies that are fault tolerant, physically more capable etc etc. - the need for genes goes away - your eye colour is programmed and updatable. Why constrain it? Genes are replaced by knowledge put in by the designer. - Genes were acquiring knowledge via evolution for us. Now that we don't depend on evolution to aquire this knowledge, we should have a measurably superior way to aquire this knowledge. - This is morally superior to evolution - we can iterate and test new artificial bodies before "rollout". With evolution, every person is a live test subject. If we were physically transplanting our brains into such bodies, most would accept that "you are still you". However this would become the next problem.. how to procreate and end up in the desired body without undergoing such an invasive procedure. I think one answer to that might be - We migrate to AGI, i.e an Artificial mind is created in these artificial bodies. From that point onwards, biological organisms become obsolete - an AGI can create its own descendants, transferring any "mind" in as a software update. Being able to increment on itself at the pace of technological innovation will far outpace evution. This will be a fundamentally new "lifeform" not coupled to evolution but highly coupled to advanced technology. Still, as it will be a superior replicator, from an evolutionary perspective it will be like a superior human, or super-human.
In Robert’s neuron copy scenario: by what Robert means by “you”, the original dies. By what Sean means by “you”, it lives on in the copy. I’m a physicalist, and it’s hard even for me to not talk dualistically about “self”. Sean seems to have mastered it.
But that feels disingenuous. I'm confident Sean has a very clear idea of himself. Self-awareness is fundamental to the idea of consciousness. To keep saying that there's no you or no me just isn't a credible argument. Does Sean have a sense of himself? Of me? If he didn't, we'd consider him to be mentally damaged in some way.
@@camdenbarkley1893 Sean keeps saying that Kuhn is putting to much emphasis on "you" or reifying "you." Sean seems to want to dismantle Kuhn's point by dismantling identity. But I'd be very skeptical if Sean does no believe in identity.
@@timoexwhat’s very interesting to me is that I don’t hear Sean denying the existence of identity, but it appears you are hearing him deny it. Sean still believes in the existence of continuous wind, even though he knows that when you look closer it’s just discrete air molecules bumping into each other; none of which could on their own be considered wind. In the same way, Sean still believes in continuous identity, even though he knows that when you look closer it’s just discrete configurations of neurons flowing from one to the next; none of which on their own could be considered conscious. I too would bet that Sean feels the fundamental “me” that I think you are getting at. But I would also bet that Sean, like me, doesn’t consider that feeling to be a very useful data-point when trying to figure this out.
@@timoex I think Sean's point is every person is experiencing consciousness separately. In that sense if an exact copy of ourselves were made its 'you' be just as important and valid to itself as our 'you' is to ourselves. Every individual experiences a separate consciousness so our clone would to.
From the moment the new Sean is activated, it becomes a completely separate conscious entity. Initially, its responses may closely mirror those of the original Sean, but over time, their experiences will diverge, leading to distinct consciousnesses. This is because consciousness is shaped by individual experiences and interactions, which cannot be identically replicated. Understanding that each consciousness is unique, even if they share an origin, is key to grasping this concept. The divergence is inevitable as each entity encounters different stimuli and processes them independently.
If the new consciousness is identical it will diverge in the same manner as the original consciousness if all the experiences were identical. Let’s say two identical consciousnesses existed, and no one knew which was which. Even if their experiences differed, there would be no way to tell the original from the copy.
Sean is a dedicated physicalist and an accomplished physicist. I believe that the concept of 'consciousness' may not be within his area of expertise. It's similar to hearing a cardiologist discuss sports nutrition. Consciousness is a profoundly intricate phenomenon that surpasses simplistic explanations. Moreover, the central question remains: what triggers the onset of consciousness, by what mechanism? As of now, science has not provided a definitive explanation for this. Hence, this conversation delves into the realm of the unknowable.
There are two separate questions about consciousness: 1. Who is the thinker, and who is the observer? The thinker is purely physical, while the observer is consciousness, a phenomenon that remains enigmatic and beyond full explanation. This enigma may stem from its inherent connection to questions about the nature of divinity. Consulting a physicist on this subject is akin to seeking insights from a plumber; while either may offer valuable perspectives, the definitive answers are elusive.
@@marcusantebi4896 I'm with you almost all the way minus the analogy to God. Consciousness is truly the only self-evident fact in the Universe. It's obvious we have some inner subjectivity. But to ask Physicist how it arises or how to distinguish a philosophical zombie from a conscious entity is about as fruitful as asking a Physicist about God. If that's what you meant I agree.
But we have a lot of physical evidence of what "triggers the onset of" consciousness. We know particular bits of the brain that are required to be active. We have all manner of evidence about different states and contents of consciousness that can be elicited by physical means, from drugs to electrical and magnetic stimulation, to damage and disease. Furthermore, as a physicist, he is an expert on the fair assessment (not absolute fact) that it's unlikely there's any missing ingredient in the physical models. Even if there was something missing to explain consciousness outside of normal physics, it's well understood from philosophy that if we invoke some other mental stuff that isn't physical, we've an additional problem of how two entirely different substrates could influence each other. A simple way to understand "physicalism" is that it just describes the stuff we've evidence of. If we find "mind stuff" it's part of physics. If it's not part of physics, we haven't measured it, and hence have no evidence it exists. The thing we struggle with - in my view - is comprehending that physical things can be conscious. We have an unexamined assumption that consciousness has to be non-physical, which is called "begging the question". All the evidence (and there's a lot) is that physical things (brains, or brains-in-bodies in particular states) ARE conscious, they don't create "mind".
If you have a copy of the same program on two devices, which one is the "real one"? Consciousness is just sort of a program. If there are identical copies of the same consciousness they would be working independently from each other but in similar way until they diverge over time.
Exactly. This sense of identity carried on over time is just that, a sense, and is just a useful high-level construct. But if feels so real most people can't make that leap, apparently.
@@marceltorretta Well each normal individual consciousness it real to the person experiencing it. But it's not objectively special or special to anyone else.
This speaks of conscousness only in terms of awareness. It seems to entirely miss the idea of consciousness as something that can contemplate, create, plan for, avoid, wonder and do philosophy. That seems a lot more complex than just being sort of a program. No?
@@timoex Yes it's sort of like a complex, continuously evolving program. The brain is sort of like a highly complex, inefficient computer being continuously programmed by experience.
I think the movie “The Prestige” gives an interesting take on this. The surviving clone always is the one who never experienced their own death. It doesn’t matter if consciousness does not “jump”, it doesn’t need to- as the survivor will have the continuous subjective experience that includes everything up to the branch.
i forget the title but there is a sci fi story about a guy who jumps into the future and he finds that every time he jumped a duplicate appears, he eventually finds himself in a time that is entirely populated by himselfs, all claiming to be the original.
Carroll is great at explaining everything with pure materialism without actually explaining how it works. (He does the same in cosmology in pushing multiple universes, a theory that most physicists believe is non-provable.) No one has a clue how the color red is experienced, yet here he basically says it's "materialism" as he sails right by it. He takes the easy way out so does not have to do the hard work to prove his beliefs.
Limitations of language that don't allow us to describe experiences from other senses accurately or without metaphor doesn't mean we don't know the experience of seeing red. Our optic nerve is a pathway to information being communicated just as language is (for humans). And we use them both, not independently (if we are normal sighted and non-mute people). The philosophical (not scientific) example of the experience of seeing red not being communicable says something about limitations of language and nothing else.
@@eximusic What we want to do is explain how we experience the color red, but what we are lacking is not the language to do this but the actual concept of how this process works. Without the concept, language, which is only descriptive, cannot help. The fact remains that the "actual experience of redness" is currently beyond our ability to conceptualize. The word "Redness" is no more than vibrations in the air or, in this case, strange squiggles on a computer monitor that we call "letters". The actual experience of redness is beyond all words and language. Without a conceptual framework language is useless.
Carroll does this with his belief that he has free will, too. He believes in the laws of physics, he believes in special relativity, he believes in determinism, and he believes that his conscious experience of the world is generated purely by his brain, and yet he also clearly believes that his thoughts are in some magical way not subject to these things. Carroll believes in the laws of physics, he just doesn't believe that they apply to _him._
@@joedoe3688 We’re not talking “God” or “Magic”. There are many things about the world we do not understand. I have always loved the quote “The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we CAN imagine”. It allows for the fact that we are perhaps not as intelligent as we believe, and that there is much more to learn than we think.
Doesn’t this thought experiment beg the question by presupposing some kind of dualism? If they are physically identical to humans in every way, then they will necessarily have the same physical properties such as consciousness. If you have two identical people separated by spacetime, they will necessarily have different conscious experiences. If they are not separated by spacetime, then they’re indistinguishable from a single person. What am I missing?
You are correct that the experiment begs the question. By postulating the existence of philosophical zombies, they are essentially saying "given that dualism is true, then...". But that's really the interesting question - is dualism true. Note that you can't assume functionalism either, which you did when you used the word "necessarily" 😊
@@brandon1357 it was an honest comment. I put the smiley because the functionalist position makes sense to me, but this doesn't make it true. We have yet to demonstrate some form of artificial consciousness and some rigorous theory behind it.
@@degigi2003 Fair. I just strongly oppose dualism and think it's an antiquated way of thinking. It may have worked when people didn't know about germs and thought epileptic seizures were demonic possessions, but to be a dualist in 2024 is a position I cannot take seriously. I could be wrong, but logically and empirically, I see no reason why we need to invoke supernatural explanations here any more than we have for other things in the past. Those kinds of explanations have historically never been a good place to hang your hat and I see no reason this should be any different, nor have I heard any good arguments beyond "But I FEEL special."
@@Jacob-Vivimord Poorly worded on my part. I like the way he tries to find the simplest explanation, even if it doesn't make sense to us. I like the way he speaks confidently about his views but he's far from dogmatic.
@@monty3854 I'm not so sure about that. He equated physicists who think consciousness may be more fundamental than quantum stuff with climate change deniers.
may be there is no such definition we are not rigid metal bodies. The more evolved you are the more conscious you are. fish--> dog--> elepant--> monkey --> chimp --> humans and even among humans different people with different levels of consciousness. The world consciousness is vague and leads to lot of confusion
I think we've all learned from Dennett that if a person *really* wants to dig in and deny qualia, there's not really any further, uncomfortable consequence of that they have to accept. Once you've 'bitten the bullet' on denying qualia (and the possibility of 'zombies'), everything else is quite easy. Indeed, that's (in a sense) at the core of the mystery (and frustration) of the 'Hard Problem' for those of us who do accept the existence of qualia: they add absolutely nothing to a complete 3rd-person description of the world.
There is no single stream of unbroken universal metaphysical consciousness anyway. It gets shutdown whenever we sleep and aren’t in a REM state, or when we’re put under for an operation. If I fell asleep, and some duplication machine made a copy of me, swapped the “original” for the “copy” in bed, and then humanely destroyed the original. Then the copy would just wake up as I normally do without any knowledge of it ever happening, just as I do every day. Going on thinking of itself as “I” or “me”. For all I know it could already have happened, and “I” would feel or notice no different, and will think of myself as always being here.
Jean nailed the conscious wooo woo in my opinion and in the opinion.. it’s clearly an evolutionary advantage ( and as many evolutionary advantages also have not so good side effects) .. I have no portion thinking I’m different from yesterday and still a evolution of me
It's frustrating how very few people seem to ever read books on philosophy who get engaged in this discussion. Kuhn literally references Kant and his notion of the thing-in-itself in some of his discussions, and here he talks about consciousness as "a person looking at a screen," things which are multiple century old conceptions which have been heavily criticized and largely moved beyond in a lot of contemporary realist philosophy.
Dualism is natural because of the complexity of our brain. The car you own is a vehicle for your convenience that takes you from point A to point B. It is also an assembly of parts which unmysteriously know how they work. Brain and Mind are still .mysterious. We know how muscle cells, kidney cells interact etc. How neurons interact to form their function is still being theorized by the Chalmers school. Dennett hinted at the hard problem but ignored it saying it would eventually reveal itself after future investigation like many other phenomena.
i think mister closer to is making more of this than needs be. as sean says if you make a copy, even a "perfect copy" you now have two seans, both different people. i don't see why he's going on and on about this? does he want to say there is still one person? or brains should communicate telepathically or what, cos from T0 onward they have different experiences.
But I don't think that was the point of the line of questioning. The point of the line of questioning began with the question "can your consciousness be uploaded." And the implication of being uploaded is that your conscious experience would be essentially substrate independent, and you might fall asleep and then awake in a new substrate. And from that point, you'd still consider yourself yourself. But Sean initially said "yes" to the question of could he be uploaded but then shifted by saying but it wouldn't be me. It would be a separate entity. Which changes his original answer to no, he could not be uploaded.
@@timoex Yes that's interesting to consider. I'm inclined to think 'uploading' our consciousness into an artificial network would be another form of copying since our literal brain would still exist independently of the network. Like creating an exact biological-physical duplicate of ourselves there would be 2 identical but separate consciousnesses that gradually diverge over time.
I think Sean made one mistake. He chose one of the copies to be "him". That implies there's something special about the him that's in his brain. If you're a pure materialist, the feeling of individuality is produced by the brain. Each copy would feel itself to be him, but it wouldn't be a shared feeling, and each copy (in a purely materialist viewpoint) would be correct. Our memories are key to who we feel we are. Any brain imbued with an exact copy (to date) of every memory we have stored in our brains would sidle those memories with the consciousness it produces, and in turn, believe themselves to be us, but that's purely an internal feeling held by every copy, as well as the original. All of them would be a separate "you".
One of them wouldn't be a copy, it would be the original him, though as you say they would be identical. I just watched it again, and he talks about all the same things you wrote about above. Two apples can be identical, but they are still different apples, if you cut one in half the other remains intact.
A massive non-sequitur: "if you choose something as a reference point, it must have a magical property to let you choose it!" No, things are chosen as reference points purely for utility. When I measure the velocity of an object, the entire concept of velocity does not make sense without something being chosen as the reference point, and I choose me purely for convenience. I could easily speak of the velocity of an object in relation to some inanimate object, such as a rock. Choosing a reference point is not something magical. The universe is inherently context-dependent and so nothing can be spoken of coherently without specifying its context, and we choose contexts based on convenience, not because there is some magical property that lets us choose one context over another, because we could speak of the world without our presence. The very concept of "I" is a convenient abstraction.
This was one of my favorite conversations. The question I wish had been asked to Sean was : if we uploaded your consciousness, would the location of the upload house the phenomenal experience you are having in your current physical state? Or would it be another consciousness, as in the clone thought experiment? A separate "thing" experiencing its own consciousness.
What you are describing is all biologicals life ability to survive historically, present and future. You cannot survive without being aware or conscious that's just a pure fact of bio logical life.
One of the epistemological limits of many physicists is the incommensurability of first-person experience, that is, of consciousness. However, an absolute description of reality needs to be able to account for first-person experience because, in fact, it exists, that is, it occupies a "space" within reality. What many physicists find difficult to accept, however, is that such "space" is not, in itself, physical. Maybe Kabbalah could help.
Of course consciousness is not physical. It's a coarse grained description of an emerging phenomenon, like a storm, or a stock market, or money. For example money is not physical, yet it is not something supernatural.
@@degigi2003 it’s a concept loaded with assumptions in order to avoid admitting that a phenomenon is beyond the scope of science Usually there’s some ambiguous idea of “complexity” So at some undefined threshold is surpassed, oh well now this magic thing happens and this phenomenon emerges from that complexity That sort of thing.
Curious, if you were to then interview the exact copy of Sean, would he remark that his POV remains intact and unbroken? In other words, would the exact copy of Sean just assume he was now sitting to the side of you, unbeknownst of the Sean sitting across from you? In this thought experiment, each Sean would then diverge as individuals but I would ask them, “which one of you is…you?”
@@simonhibbs887Gotcha! I’m probably overthinking it. Totally get they would be the same. Guess I’m wondering about the continuity of ‘self’ through the many copies of ourselves we traverse (past, present and potential future). We retain our identity somehow. So in the thought experiment, re: the POV of the copy of Sean now sitting next to the interviewer, would he remark “i remember I was sitting across from you and now I find myself sitting next to you”?
@@davekochanski Yep, petty much. Bear in mind we're not always conscious. It's an activity, something we sometimes do, and sometimes we don't do it. If we're moved when we fall asleep we wake up somewhere different. What links episodes of consciousness is memory.
Per his way of thinking (and mine) both Seans would have equal claim to being Sean. His position is that Sean at 1:00 p.m. and Sean at 1:01 p.m. aren't really exactly the same individual in any absolute sense. Over that minute, lots of cells and neurons and whatnot have been shed or moved around or are in different configurations or have died off. And even the constituent parts of those cells and neurons may have changed some, with atoms and molecules being traded around. 1:00 Sean and 1:01 Sean are very similar, and 1:01 Sean has memories built upon those of 1:00 Sean. It's a useful abstraction to think of them as one identity with a continuity, with a persistence through time. But if you compare them carefully, you find they aren't exactly the same thing. If you create a perfect duplicate of Sean at 1:02, for a very brief moment, they're identical to either other. But neither of them are identical to Sean from 1:00 or 1:01. They both have the same right to consider themselves as continuity of Sean 1:00/1:01's identity -- the same right to employ that abstraction. It's no more or less true for one or the other. It's as useful for each to think of themselves as continuations of the OG Sean. Similarly (and he mentions this briefly), Sean believes in a many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, which has reality branching off to all sorts of variations in every moment. and all the variations being equally true but cut off from one another (well, in a sense, that's an abstraction, too, but a very useful way to think about it). And in all those realities, there are Seans who share a common history from before any given branching, who all justifiably think of themselves as Sean --- and who all are, but none of whom are identical to the Seans that existed in any moment of their past.
@@LouisHochmanTheJourno A very thoughtful reply and I agree - I think at the moment mentioned in the interview, 't-zero', the copies would be identical but would immediately begin to diverge as separate individuals. As you stated, his position was that our bodies are essentially completely different moment-to-moment anyway...the hiccup with this thought experiment is that Sean in this case isn't replaced (or continues onward in a forked parallel universe) but continues to exist in the same universe in the seat across from himself. Each copy, I assume, would then see each other as a separate individual? Eventually, I'd imagine that'd be the case, but during the 1st minute I wonder if it'd be like experiencing a 3D sentient reflection of yourself...recognizing your 'you' identity as you would when looking into mirror, but seeing yourself stare back at you from behind someone else's eyes. Mind bending!
2:10 they are talking about 2 different things, Sean Carroll talks about the physical way consciousness works, while the interviewer talks about why we feel those molecules the way we do, which is yet not explainable and is somekind a "soul of the universe"
Two cloned brains' states of consciousness would not be the same a day after they were set apart. After a month, even their initially identical memories would be different.
Yeah, they would branch off from the moment the exact copy would be finished, and differences would grow. But both would say "it's me" and both would be, equally, right.
The derogatory use of the word radical in front of physicalist shows Robert's prejudice. I am very happy to see Sean own it. Let us hear Robert use the word radical in front of pan-psychist or theologian.
Good day. Robert is trying to make the show more fun I think, bringing a little bit of contention between the differing parties, as he himself is more of a materialist. Calling out the religious side as radical might not be taken so easily by those believers.
@S3RAVA3LM Exactly. Why are the feelings of believers more important than truth seeking. Especially by definitions believers believe because of faith which by definition means without evidence. And this is on a channel named CTT. In any case, Sean held up well, and as such it is not a worry for science as by definition it will revise its theories if sound counter arguments or data are presented so I guess bring it on.
@stellarwind1946 It is possible, but why did the other poster reply saying the believers will not like it. He took it the same way. In any case, let us see Robert use radical for a theologian next time. It is just a benign word, right? And they call Richard Dawkins, a mild-mannered scientist, a shrill. Some will take my comment as lacking sense of humor and drama, and this is a free world as Sean quipped in one of the videos, but we shall see the sense of humor of believers, when their believers are simply questioned. I made the above comment because Robert has used similar aggressive language in another CTT clip, like calling Sean''s comment glib, when Sean was simply stating his position. In almost all videos Sean says one way or the other that as a scientists he is never sure of any theory 100% - that is humility of science and many scientists. The confidence of scientists in their language (which is well justified IMO because technology - which is applied science - runs our modern societies) is taken as arrogance by the opponents. Science as a good track record.
I stopped watching these videos because the host doesn’t seem to make any progress, he just likes talking about the few big questions that he likes the best (which isn’t to say he doesn’t have some good points, it’s just repetitive). Big fan of Dr Carroll. Today our host seems hung up on the definitional claim that in so far as you can define two things as separate, they are not the same thing.
I agree to an extent. My issue is that a number of the interviewees are not good at explaining their thoughts on the subject at hand, or talk around it without enlightening us in any way.
I still don't know which camp I belong to, although I'm slightly leaning to metaphysical. That said, I think you missed an opportunity to argument Sean when he was talking about the "redness of red", it's not about the color as a physical interpretation in our brain, it's the fact that I and anyone else can like or dislike the color red. If i had to draw the line I'd say that that's where consciousness starts.
Believing in solipsism is one thing but believing you yourself don’t exist is something else entirely. Are you not experiencing yourself right now? Sean is saying you don’t, it’s just an illusion. But you would need an observer in the first place for the illusion to take place, it’s complete nonsense! It seems like psychopathy to me, the unwillingness to believe conscious being exist, it is not science , maybe he had a bad shrom trip lol
It is a physical copy. What about qualia? He says that would be completely different person, and avoids talking about what gives him his own qualia. If it is a purely physical thing, then exact copy should reproduce his own consciousness, no? That should also be him, but he denies it. You can't compare making a copy of a cup. This is your own consciousness we are talking about here
@@milannesic5718 the difference between a cup and consciousness is that a cup is in a fixed state while consciousness is ever changing. The copy would be different in the same way as your own consciousness is different today than it was yesterday (or even a moment ago). That is why a copy will not remain the same as the original.
@@edwardprokopchuk3264 There is a big difference there. I can still feel and experience. I am still alive, even if I am completely different person. While if you copy me, I would not be alive in that other body. That will be someone else. This time for real someone else. Now you can remove original ME, and I don't exist anymore. It is contradicting
@@milannesic5718 I believe that was the point that was made. The copy (that was YOU) will go on becoming someone else by gaining different experiences than “you”. But you will also be becoming someone else than you are now. “You” tomorrow will be a different “you” from today, therefore it is not really “you” (from today) anymore in the same way as the copy that really was you at the moment, but is not you anymore. Whatever it was that was you at that particular moment would be another you at that moment and experience the exact you (however you define yourself).
I think Sean makes a strong argument that it's not somehow special to "you." But does that negate the value and remarkableness of this weird emergent property? Even if it doesn't have an impact on the wave function, it's still a crazy amazing phenomena. I, for one, would love to be able to create consciousness in a non-biological structure.
A question I've been wrangling with: Does MYCELIA have its own consciousness??? Might it provide a sounding board for the evolution of biological life? Thank you for the inspirational education!!! ;-)
I love Sean Carroll. He looks you in the eye and says what you refuse to believe is true. Aliens? ‘No’, Copenhagen? ‘No’, Consciousness? ‘Look at me… NO’
@@obiwanduglobi6359 It’s denying the problem as the way to pretend to solve it. Saying the earth is flat is silly-this is like saying the earth doesn’t have a shape at all. It’s denying our very existence, which is nonsensical. IMO!
Because if consciousness is weakly emergent then it has no causal power independent of the laws of physics as we currently understand them (deterministic and probabilistic). I.e. no free-will. This would mean that we're not actually rational beings able to construct logical arguments and create mental models then go out and freely choose experiments to test them. That means we have no reason to trust any of the scientific models we've created/discovered, because we didn't create/discover them: they're just the direct result of unthinking, unconscious, irrational deterministic/probabilistic fundamental forces. They might be right, they might be wrong but we have no way to test them to decide because "we" are not free to intervene in the universe to do so. But, if that's the case, then we just lost any reason to question the "reality" of conscious free will. We're back to square one and can build up our knowledge again, until we end up back where we are in Sean's metaphysics as described above. I.e. Sean's metaphysics creates a paradox. The paradox means his metaphysics is wrong. Its akin to the maths of GR blowing up into infinities indicating that something is wrong with the model. If Sean were better at philosophy (or, more likely if he were honest about his real opinions) he would admit that his metaphysics must be incorrect. But Sean can't do that. Sean has research programs to bid for funding for and books to sell and the intellectual structure behind both endeavours requires this metaphysics to remain internally consistent and convincing enough to persuade customers. It's a sad thing to watch very intelligent and capable people (much more so than I) waste their gifts on nonsense like this because they can't admit that they just can't imagine any satisfying alternatives. It's even sadder to see such intellectuals cynically try to persuade colleagues and the public of such ideas simply to keep their careers and social status intact. But unfortunately that's the world we live in. Perverse incentives drive perverse activities. What goes around comes around.
@@MikeWiest There is no "eliminativism" Carol is simply pointing out that consciousness comes from matter, that its more than the sum of the parts of neurons in the brain. How that eliminates consciousness I have no clue. No one is arguing that
First person experience? I think what Robert not hearing or seeing here is what Sean is saying over and over again. I can only guess what is the obstacle in Robert case/understanding. Is this what religion/ faith do to cloud understanding or misinterpret information? Interesting.
Yes I like that Robert is polite and respectful but he seems to almost sanctify consciousness as more significant than it probably is. If consciousness is produced by the brain as evidence shows, if we make an exact duplicate of someone there will be 2 people with identical consciousnesses that gradually diverge as time passes.
@@alankoslowski9473What evidence shows that? I think you are assuming the evidence will show that and as strictly materialistic that would be the case. However, the argument so far is that one day we will find this and be able to explain consciousness via materialism. Thus far we don't have that evidence. First even define consciousness so we can be on the same page as to what we are talking about. And until we have working definitions we certainly cannot say well it is here in this part of the brain, or there in that part. Or that it is in this or that neuron. Which we know is not the truth in either of those cases. Or we could say it is an emergent phenomenon from the interactions of neurons. Which I think brings us closer to the truth but you need to follow that path down to its ultimate logical conclusions starting with a clear definition first. It may lead to a weirder understanding of consciousness than first expected.
I think the point he's making is "what's a zombie"? If I copy paste myself atom for atom, is the second one a zombie? What's your definition of a zombie here?
@@jean-philippegrenier120 no theres 2 different examples in this case, the zombie in general and the clone. Clone is impossible, and even if possible, it would be a different observer, say we dont kill the original, they both exist. They must have their own independent perspective not 1 consciousness in superposition . Secondly, what nobody truly understands is zombies. It is supposedly absolutely the same in terms of physical but it has no awerness. I don't know if such zombie is possible but , possible or not, it doesn't change the fact that Consciousnes is something truly extra over the brain. Charmlers argument is why Consciousnes really exists, why aren't we just a brain without awerness and experience. It should make sense physically. Zombies and clones are mostly irrelevant in this case
Plus Consciousness isn't Computation as you can't shut it down it works 24/7 no matter you're sleeping or on anesthesia so saying that there's nothing special about consciousness is total BS!
I think this guest pretty much nailed it...good explanation. Why cant people realise that consciousness is simply an emergent property of brain biology. I wish this wasnt true but I think it is!
No empirical evidence of consciousness being an emergent property of brain biology. Subsequently, you could infer that consciousness interacts with the brain similar to WiFi interacting with the memory of a computer.
He did quite a good job. Sometimes I think the essence of experience seems too profound to emerge from matter. But having given the "why is there is something and not nothing" question some thought lately, the very existence of something is incomprehensible in and of itself, so why should an emergent phenomenon within that reality be a certain way.
yes, it is, but this conversation, just as your and my key strokes exist only in our conscious experience of it. there is no way for us to know reality other than through our consciousness. may be ai will know reality differently, but it too would be in its own artificial consciousness. thus one cannot make definitive conclusions which Sean is making. frankly, this is poor science and promoting such deterministic views is not beneficial in teaching public.
@@edwardtutman196 Yes but why should our key strokes have any other existence? You and I make the key strokes independently and experience them in a personal way. The way I experience them is simply a biological response to the mechanical process of the act of making key strokes.
It may be an emergent property of physical brain functions, but what we want to know is how it works. His beliefs explain nothing. He simply believes everything is material or physical. How do physical processes allow us to see the color red? Now that is science, and he seems to want to ignore that question.
I never expected Sean Carroll to be so clear-headed. Kuhn seems to be a bit defensive that his beliefs can be so simply challenged with an alternative explanation.
I am not going to accuse Carroll of incoherence for equating the continuity of consciousness over time with the continuity of identity between spatially separated clones because I think he was pressured into this position without fully thinking it through. He was pushing back against Kuhn's framework and ended up saying things he didn't entirely mean. He could have done better, given enough time. Instead, I accuse him of being intellectually dishonest, by pretending the intuition that consciousness has a certain irreducibility to every other known thing, process, or property is not the natural default position. He framed it as Kuhn's metaphysically magical view, when in fact, it IS the default view of basically all humans (including Carroll himself when not philosophizing), and the only people who claim otherwise are a few radical, out of touch physicalists who earn respect by having the audacity to claim the most ridiculous things.
Dishonesty is perhaps too strong of an accusation. At most you can accuse him of laziness. Instead of hand waving the default position as magic, he could have brought more evidence for his own position, e.g. from neuroscience, split brain research, or computer science.
@@bdnnijs192 I'm a builder, not a philosopher of mind. And yes - it's very obvious hard physicalism is completely incoherent. If consciousness isn't causal and we have no free-will how can we trust any of our science which all depends on the experimenter being free to choose the variables to experiment with? Hard physicalism is a dead-end. Get over it.
Robert should have asked Sean "Why are you so confident that consciousness is just a physical property of brains, if you don't have a clue how the brain produces the first-person experience of qualia?"
The answer to that is: Because the brain explanation is the best game in town. We don't know of anything that can't be described in physical terms ... and what would it mean if we did? As long as something has some sort of qualities, is defined by some sort of structure, can interact with the world, then it's still definitionally physical and subject to laws of physics. It just may be that our concept of "physical" needs to expand to incorporate and account for it (wouldn't be the first time!). Someone being open-minded enough could concede that it's possible consciousness something other than the brain, or something in addition to the brain -- that it could be best thought of as the result of the brain's interaction with all sorts of other internal and external systems, that it could have significant components in other part of the body, that it could even be the product of something being beamed into us from elsewhere. But we sure do have a lot of science saying most or all of the activity that seems important to mind and consciousness is based in the brain, and our best understanding is that's where the action is. I think it's also probably unfair to say we, collectively, don't have a CLUE how the brain produces a first-person experience. I think we have lots of clues. We don't have a definitive understanding, but we have lots of fruitful ideas about it based on interesting and good indications in neuroscience and biology.
>LouisHochmanTheJourno : It's a fallacious form of "induction" to say that since everything _else_ appears to be physical, we can be very confident that consciousness is too. Like the chicken that's carefully tended each day by the farmer, which has no reason to expect the farmer will one day bring an axe instead of food. You may be right that that's the explanation of Sean's confidence. The video fails by not eliciting his reasoning... just like so many "Closer to Truth" videos fail. There's a little-known variant of Dualism in which consciousness is a passive experiencer of (some of) the brain's activity, and it doesn't affect the brain's activity. You're only making an assumption where you wrote that it "can interact with the world." It's fair to say "no one has a clue" how the brain produces qualia (David Chalmers' "hard problem") due to the explanatory gap that no one has been able to bridge (yet). I acknowledge that neuroscience is still a young science, so I'm not claiming the hard problem will _never_ be solved. But my understanding is that currently there aren't any hypotheses for how the gap could be filled. It's still like the comic that shows a scientist at a chalkboard containing complex diagrams & equations, saying "and then a miracle happens."
The question as to whether if you could make an identical duplicate of a person and whether they would (a) share a single consciousness, or (2) each have their own, is easy to resolve. Consider first that we are not “conscious” 100% of the time, even when we are awake. Sometimes you have a train of thought and you follow that thought, but you are are not conscious in the usual sense, as when someone asks you a question and you have to think about it very carefully. Sometimes you are just on autopilot until you realize you are not really aware of what you were doing. Then you are conscious. But you are still the same “person” in both cases. The difference is self-reflection - using your short-term memory to remember what you were just doing. So in a sense, there are two yous, one that is “not” conscious, and one that is, but they are the same person. So if consciousness can come and go, is it something that would be transferred when you duplicate someone? No! It’s a function of the brain. When you are in deep sleep, or anesthetized, you are clearly not conscious, and furthermore can’t remember anything. When asleep you can only remember your dream because that is a different state of sleep and your short-term memory is working, which is why you can remember a dream right when you wake up. If you don’t remember it right away, it will disappear. So consciousness is not a constant state of being. It comes and goes, and is only the same in terms of the person who is conscious. We all relate to consciousness the same way, because it is the same process in all of us. It doesn’t depend on the contents of our thoughts, but rather in fact that if you reflect on what is in your mind, you realize you were thinking or feeling or sensing something different a few moments ago, yet YOU are still “here”, so that thread of brain activity seems to provide a sense of constancy, which you intrpret as your “self”. Clearly this is quite paradoxical, yet it makes sense - upon reflection!
Even if one spaces out, sleeps, goes under anesthesia, there is a feeling that that consciousness that spaced out…is continuous with the consciousness of before. We are conscious of being the consciousness that spaced out and came back.
@@ivanobar1 There is only one reality and that is the only consciousness you can know. The consciousness you had yesterday does not exist. You remember lots of things about yourself from yesterday and conclude that you were conscious. And you are definitely not conscious during general anesthesia because you don't remember anything during that period. You can remember a "lucid" dream because you were conscious during the dream (by definition). You can remember your last minute or so of a dream just after you wake up because the dream is still in your working memory - which is the memory of the last minute or 2 of your experience. Thus even though you might remember a dream just after you "awaken" (and become conscious) does not mean you were conscious during that dream. (Working memory is inactivated during general anesthesia.) Finally, people that have anterograde amnesia (and cannot form new memories) are conscious and have intact working memory - but that memory is not "saved"). So working memory is necessary for consciousness, and your "feeling" that you "were" conscious yesterday is because you remember yesterday just like it was (in some respects at least) yesterday or even last year. People with anterograde amnesia cannot rmember if they were conscious yesterday!
If I know I am going under anesthesia, and wake from it, there is continuity. As far as “reality/being in the moment,experiencing the now” that’s another issue. You seem to make a distinction between logical awareness and consciousness. A dog is conscious without the complex awareness of a human, yet it is still conscious. Even after anesthesia, it awakes and feels like it is the same thing that went to sleep and is now awake. If you’re saying that the only reality is the present moment, sure. But even then, because one experiences the external world in the past; light (causality, the fastest we can receive a signal) is experienced through time and space; it has already happened by the time our brain registers the phenomena. There is a distinction between the “experience” of the present and memory. I’d argue that memory (real or planted, as in sci fi) are necessary for continuity, and therefore consciousness. Every animal has some memory, short it may be, and they have some awareness, though filtered through the structure of a brain particular to its species.
If Sean had made his point about consciousness being an emergent physical property existing only in this MOMENT OF TIME they could have avoided 10 minutes of arguing. This issue of what actually makes me ME or you You has got to be the most perplexing and fundamental in philosophy or science. I know it's been argued for thousands of years, but if someone made an atom for atom copy of me and then destroyed the original no one would notice. But I would be dead, right? Or not?
Someone making the exact copy of you atom by atom, and YOU naturally changing moment to moment the same way, is the exact same thing. So, explain to us, how come when you naturally change, you continue to live in every instance of your body. You are different, but you still exist. While if someone make the exact copy of you artificially, then you don't exist in that body. You are dead if original is destroyed. It is the exact same thing. In natural copies, original of you gets destroyed, and the next moment new copy is made. But you are alive and exist. There is a sense of continuity, Carrol claims that artificially made copy is no longer yourself. It is contradicting because it is the exact same thing as naturally made copy
@@milannesic5718 Good point. And yet it seems that if the original is destroyed, that individual would be dead, even though an exact copy lives on. Carroll is saying that's what happens moment by moment as we change through time. (And I believe every 5 years or so all the material in our bodies DOES get replaced). But then, as you say, he contradicts himself with the artificial copy hypothetical. I want to believe "I" would live on in the copy of myself - but what if 5 copies were made? Mind-bending.
I think too many people got confused. The interviewer played the ignorant fool, and Sean tried his best to reply to sensibility. The biggest point Sean made was irregardless of the copies and the deletion of the original. There are two separate conscious's, and deleting the original does not matter to the copy after it is made. This is just a sifi movie. Sean starts with truth and works out a theory not the other way around.
@@runningwildttv3648 No, Sean was the one avoiding the question about how matter can have inner feelings, because it is very hard to answer. Kuhn tried to rephrase the question multiple times, but Sean played confident and dodged it. And our conversation here is about how come when we you make a copy artificially there are 2 consciousness, but when it happens naturally to you moment, by moment every day, the same consciousness persist? It is exactly the same thing. It does not matter if you artificially make another me. Same thing happens every moment according to Sean, yet, it is only one consciousness that persist
Sean's contention here is that the you that exists at any moment in time doesn't have any more inherent connection to the you that existed a moment ago than a copy would. Both experience a continuity and relationship to moment-ago-you by building on their memories and only being slightly different in their composition. But he doesn't buy that there's some sort of inherent continuity that the "original" maintains and that the "copy" doesn't. That thinking likely comes easily to him because he's already used to thinking of the universe splitting into many worlds ad infinitum as the wave function evolves, and a bajillion Seans across the multiverse sharing the history of a precursor Sean. The argument would be that even though we experience a persistence of identity, it's just an abstraction, not a fundamental aspect of reality. So now-me and now-copy-me both get to claim before-me as our past self with the same validity. We're both entitled to work with the same abstraction.
1- While I agree that the hard problem of consciousness ought to be solved by purely materialistic means, I think the hard problem of consciousness is very much a thing.. and after years I still find the philosophical zombie argument very compelling.. Today we have LLMs.. If it starts talking _exactly_ like a human would, does that equate to consciousness? No! On the issuenof identity that they got tangled, I think Sean is spot on. I find it interesting that even intelligent thinkers like Kuhn cannot see identity for what it is, a higher level concept, extremely useful for humans, yes, but nowhere to be found on fundamental reality.. We have no problem thinking of a duplicated river, or cloud, also higher level constructs, but then most people can't make the leap and see that what you call "you" is not fundamental, but rather just as much as a higher level useful construct. As Sam Harris puts it, there is no thinker of thoughts, experiencer of experiences, there are just the thoughts and the experiences.
You could argue that without a quantitative complement * , there's no either emergent, nor not emergent, consciousness. * The complement of one in list one two is two.
The first one would have continuous experience, supported by the remaining set of biological neurons at a given point in time, and the replicant wouldn't. That is, the transistors that are in place in the original during transition are being updated while the ones in the replicant aren't? So memories (conscious or otherwise) wouldn't be the same and that might define identity.
Thanks! This hard struggling between you and your opponent about cloned person, boils down to the fact that person and his body is not the same thing. See, the tree has visible part and invisible, which holds the visible. I'm talking about the root. No one is impressed by it (no one sees it), but it is the most important part. When the tree is chopped down, everyone forgets about it, until.. grows a new body from the same spirit
carroll says consciousness is "another (higher level) way of talking about things" the "other ways of talking about things" incl the ways we talk about physics, viz, as objective phenomena but we can only talk about physics bc we are conscious so the "other ways" contain the same problem of conscious experience, only the problem is implicit and is (almost) never explicitly "talked about" when talking about physics ie, carroll's "another way" doesn't explain conscious experience bc the "other ways" don't explain conscious experience they just take conscious experience for granted
I agree with carroll that consciousness is not a precondition of reality it emerges as a physical phenomenon (in animals) but it is a precondition of talking - and theorizing - about reality a precondition that is so necessary we seldom acknowledge it and take it as given as carroll does here
re uploading one's consciousness, it's impossible using the computing paradigm of software running on hardware the best such computers could do is simulate consciousness by running a mathematical model of the brain but a mathematical model is already a symbolic abstraction the numerical solution of the model is a further numerical abstraction as well as a discrete approximation of the continuous equations what theory of consciousness would survive such abstractions and approximations?
the best one could hope for is a model that correctly computes physical processes and simulates cognitive products, like thoughts and emotions, but without any accompanying experience of having thoughts or emotions ie, a zombie like chat-get and other llms ie, zombie brain models = ai
@@rossw1365 Of course sometimes we are zombies. When we are in deep dreamless sleep, or under deep sedation, or sleepwalking. We are not always consciously aware. It's an activity, something we sometimes do, and sometimes we don't do it. Buddhists and other practitioners of meditation talk about transcending the self, and finding on introspection that there is no inner unitary self. Ot's a model of ourselves that our mind constructs so that it can reason about it.
Look at your phone. Where is the software that runs on it located? Let's be even more specific - where is the UA-cam app you are using right now located?
@@degigi2003 the software along with the memory of my phone is made of ones and zeros, all which attached to, and work by physical stuff. Similar to the conscious mind. but where is the unconscious mind and the human memory stored?! where does all that unconscious mental processing occur?
@@MarkPatmos at the bottom line, I think the whole space-time is an illusion-like world made by the mind, and everything material is a manifestation of the mind, and the mind is something beyond space and time.
The fallacy of studying consciousness via the modalities of reductionist scientism was made immediately apparent to me when, post-LSD trip, I was asked by a reputable psychedelic scientist, "On a scale of 1-10, how ephemeral was your experience?". At that point, I realised it was pure folly to keep probing consciousness through the narrow lens of modern materialist dogmatism.
Here is MY Mathamatical formula for consciousness: C= A(i 5f+O5f)c2 I= inside output electrical pattern f= feeling O =outside input electrical pattern A= awareness 5= senses C2= speed of light squared Here is my take on mysterious consciousness: Physical body and Brain is like a TV 📺 and Consciousness is the electrons flowing through wires creating images and voices on TV. Without flow of electrons TV is like a dead person. With web cam it can analyze the surroundings. Consciousness is little more than electrons. Chain of mitochondria arranged in brain 🧠 nerves that have ATP and phosphorous of ATP is similar to phosphorous of TV screen. When the TV is turned on, the phosphor coating absorbs high-energy electrons that are directed at them by a device inside of the TV. Some day, Consciousness could very well be 5th dimension. Just for fun 🤩 It is too disconcerting to think deep about it and so I stopped analyzing it.
A good philosopher of mind ought to take Sean under his or her wing and initiate him into the history of this conversation, as he's clearly motivated and making a good effort towards participating in the discussion. I think for example he should be pressed on the differences between physicalism and functionalism, since e.g., he often takes the stance of a hard physicalist (which classically does not allow consciousness in non-neural media, since it's the exact identity physics of neurons or some processes that are necessary, depending if it's token or type) but actually talks as if he's a functionalist (which classically does allow it, and it's not an identity relation), and then he equivocates between them, which is what a good philosophical training helps one tease apart. Kuhn actually does a good job trying to catch him. Not many are seriously denying that there's a physical substrate at the base of consciousness. Even property dualists and some panpsychists (if read the right way) don't deny that. If that's the only thing Sean is trying to say (sort of like Sapolsky on free will) then it's kind of a straw man argument. The argument is what's the nature of the relationship between the conscious and the physical substrate, identity, type, token, higher level organization but then what level and what organization, etc.? Classical physicalism is very strictly, it can only be neurons of brains, arguably only primate brains, and functionalism is a lot more nuanced about it (it's the information processing, not the physics primitives per se), but that also has a lot of things to explain. Sean (like Sapolsky) needs to bumped up to that higher-level discussion to actually be participating in the field. I'm a big fan of his efforts to initiate non-specialists into the basics of theoretical physics, so that's what I'm thinking about would also be great to see in the other direction.
My guess is that Sean wouldn't say for sure consciousness can be reproduced in non-neural media, but that he just doesn't see anything so special about neural media that he'd assume it's the only way to get there, that it has some "other" property that makes it different from the ordinary organization of matter. And then he grants for the sake of a thought experiment the idea of being uploaded or duplicated in other media. I'd bet if pressed, he'd say he doesn't know enough (and supposes no one knows enough) about neurobiology to know if consciousness can only exist in vehicles like the ones we're aware of, or if it can be substrate independent so long as the higher-level organization is up to the job. Kuhn gets pretty hung up on the idea that the upload isn't a transfer, but a duplication, and for a moment seems confused about whether Sean sees a distinction between the computer upload and the neuronal duplication. But ultimately Sean's argument is that any sense of continuity between self in any two moments is just a useful abstraction anyway,. Sean seems largely unconcerned, for the sake of the discussion, whether he's talking about being uploaded to a computer or reproduced neuron by neuron in some other process -- it just didn't seem like the point of focus. He seems to be granting that so long as it's an effective recreation of one's self, you can continue the discussion to ask if it's the same person or another ... but then also argues that's moot.
The relationship is survival of structure or material object by being in time or conscious Behaviour of material in a survival disposition correlates to the need to be aware for participation in survival of self by interaction with environment which is behaviour compressed into evolution over time scales.
@@LouisHochmanTheJourno I more or less agree with your take. I'm just saying in the philosophical literature that's closer to functionalism, not what falls under the label "physicalism". He sounds agnostic on the actual physical mechanism, only that there's a physical base, so weak physicalism.
@@cademosley4886My (possibly wrong) perception is that he's just not all that concerned for the purpose of this discussion about whether it's very tied to a particular medium or whether it's more about higher-level organization. He seems to grant it at least could be the latter, for the purpose of the thought experiment, but I don't know whether he's making a claim that it probably is. He seems much more interested in where Robert tries to take him, asking once you have a duplicate that we agree is a meaningfully real duplicate, where does the continuity of consciousness live. And Sean's answer to that is that continuity of consciously isn't what we usually think of it to be, but rather just us noticing the similarity to our past-selves' state of being. And from that perspective, both the duplicate and the "original" have equal claims on being a continuation of the past self.
Sean Carroll's explanation of consciousness (if you can call it that) is very unconvincing. He's essentially saying that matter produces consciousness albeit highly evolved matter. If this is true please tell me the answer to this riddle. When two heart cells are placed on a microscope slide we can see them beat, yes heart cells actually pulsate in regular beats separate from the heart until they die. When these two cells are close enough to touch, one delays it's beat and then beats in sync with the other. These are not neurons, or brain cells yet something akin to energy and information passes between them. The ability for them to combine and increase their level of energy is intentional and directed by some form of consciously applied action, because it takes a physical action to stop one cell and then coordinate and start simultaneous beats. How else could they achieve this unitary result? At 4:40 Sean Carroll makes the statement that "zombies" provide the most compelling argument for his position. The problem is "zombies" are mythical and don't exist. Whenever this unfortunate analogy comes up confusion results because any imaginary creature or "zombie" can be ascribed as having any mental quality one might choose. The only reference point we have in discerning the origin of consciousness is our thoughts, observations of the physical world, and speculative imagination. All we see in our universe strongly infers that consciousness is a fundamental property of the cosmos and not an emergent phenomenon. What is an emergent phenomenon is the human capacity to experience that preexisting consciousness, emergent because it took the evolutionary development of our large brains to grow into the ability to directly experience that consciousness. A physical explanation of consciousness is hopelessly inadequate in explaining a fine tuned universe and the ubiquitously observed phenomenon of evolved emergent complexity, because these well observed characteristics of the cosmos have been present long before the emergence of human experience, and observation. This narrow and highly speculative point of view is in many respects similar to solipsism in that it can never be refuted, not because it's valid, but because adherents to this questionable idea can always retreat into a subjective position of skepticism and outright denial. We see this toward the end of the interview when Mr Carroll repeatedly says to Mr Kuhn that he's imbuing the concept of "you" with a metaphysical connotation. The problem with this answer is it seems to deny the first person subjective experience that each of us undeniably have. If one says to this "well how do we know that all of us have this experience of being self aware?" Once this one way interrogatory door is opened, any notion or belief is suspect. This line of thinking ends with the extreme and hopelessly subjective world of solipsism that denies all external reality, and it can never be disproved. There's an unspoken back story here that's not evident. The question of the origin of consciousness has very powerful theological implications that skeptics like Mr Carroll are not comfortable with and they're obvious. If consciousness is universal it must have a transcendent source and this means a supreme being. Mr Carroll frequently and justifiably rails against the dogma of traditional religion. Religion and the existence of God are two totally different subjects. I join those who excoriate the silly, backward and intellectually harmful practices of traditional religion, because religion and it;s dogma are poison to the human mind. I'm also thoroughly convinced that an eternal, supervening, "nonphysical" reality created our universe, governs and sustains all existent reality. Universal consciousness is an omniscient expression of this supreme reality.
>The ability for them to combine and increase their level of energy is intentional and directed by some form of consciously applied action, because it takes a physical action to stop one cell and then coordinate and start simultaneous beats. How else could they achieve this unitary result? That's just feedback loop synchronisation. We can do this with cyclical electrical circuits, when you couple them together they synchronise with each other. No consciousness required and we undrstand how and why it occurs.
@@simonhibbs887 I don't think your analogy is applicable. Your phrase "feedback loop synchronization" can be used to describe why two separate tributaries combine with other tributaries to form a river. You are describing process which is always mechanical and bound by the laws of physics. Organic systems are far more complex than the electrical circuits you mention. We might say that matter coalesces with other matter because of gravity and we would be correct, but this doesn't begin to explain why that matter then evolves into emergent complexity. In any attempt to explain why, not how, but why matter behaves as it does empiricists never get past the circular reasoning of seeing "process" as the reason why matter and our universe is the way it is when in fact "process" can only tell us how and not why reality is constituted as it is. Science and empirical observation richly describe the physics and chemistry of the natural world and very accurately, but are not equipped to answer questions beyond function and process. Let's return to the analogy of the two heart cells that beat independently on a microscope slide, but beat in unison once they touch. We grant that once the chemical trigger is present a number of chemical reactions cascade into the eventual result of the two cells pulsing in unity. Science can describe in physical terms what happens once the trigger is active but if we go deeper into this question we come to a point where we have a set of precedent conditions that entail no change in the cells behavior and then a physical action occurs, a physical action that from the perspective of the beating cell is comprehensive and irresistible. All the subtle complexity that follows the initial change must begin with something that governs the behavior of the two cells, something that "responds" to the new "set of conditions" namely the contiguous presence of another beating heart cell. If we keep peeling the onion back, at some point we come to a place in the heart cells interior chemistry where all that exists is a set of conditions and potential outcomes that will be subsequently expressed in how the cell looks and behaves. Let's now assume we know every chemical and molecular value in that cell. We would see nothing in that cell to indicate any change until a triggering event takes place and the source of this trigger is a mystery. It seems obvious but in order for the heart cell to be reprogrammed to work in sync with its counterpart atoms and their much larger derivative structures molecules must be physically moved. This movement is fundamentally different than the normal functioning action of the cell in a condition of stasis. All observations so far, very strongly suggest that something separate and independent of the cells internal structure triggers a new behavior or adaptation in order to preserve itself. You can take process down to the micro level and have a complete knowledge of how matter and energy work and still, you will never know the source of what triggers matter to behave in novel ways. Something physical, or rather something that governs and modifies the physical is emerging from something nonphysical. The only sensible answer that explains more than any competing line of thought is that "universal consciousness" is the governing reality of our universe. Consciousness governs all, and it's the reason why heart cells behave as they do.
@@michaelmckinney7240 >You are describing process which is always mechanical and bound by the laws of physics. Organic systems are far more complex than the electrical circuits you mention. Right, but we know for a fact that physical systems with periodic behaviour can synchronise with each other through entirely physical processes. Therefore when we see another example of such systems synchronising we do not need to assume any non-physical influence. Just because it’s complicated doesn’t make it magic. There are many, many examples I can give of physical systems that harmonise their periodicity trough physical feedback mechanisms. You go deeper into that later in your comment, but don’t add anything substantive. Physical cyclic systems tend to synchronise with each other, and heart cells are physical cyclic systems. >in fact "process" can only tell us how and not why reality is constituted as it is. I’m not claiming I know why the universe is the way it is at a fundamental level, but the fact is many of the phenomena we observe are the result of the behaviour of underlying phenomena. The behaviour of elementary particles can be explained in terms of quantum fields. The behaviour of atoms and electrical components can be entirely explained by the behaviour of elementary particles. The behaviour of a flip-flop circuit can be entirely explained by the activity of electrical components. There is a hierarchy of causal processes and behaviours that we understand very well. Some phenomena we don’t yet understand very well, and one of them is consciousness, but not understanding it now does not imply that it is not comprehensible. >Science and empirical observation richly describe the physics and chemistry of the natural world and very accurately, but are not equipped to answer questions beyond function and process. I agree, which is why I think analysing consciousness in terms of information processing is the best way to go. After all everything about consciousness is informational. Our senses respond to signals with informational content, consciousness is about things, it models other systems and makes predictions about them, it is representational, it is self-referential, it acts recursively, it modifies it’s own behaviour. All of these are properties and activities of information systems that we understand. I think we just need to figure out how they compose together to form self-aware consciousness. >In other words something physical emerges from something nonphysical. That’s an inference or assertion, but it’s not an observation. You have no evidence of anything happening in those cells that isn’t entirely explicable in physical terms.
@@simonhibbs887 Thank you Simon for your engaging reply. It's clear you've given these questions serious thought. Let me start with your last comment and proceed to your general rebuttal. You Say; "That’s an inference or assertion, but it’s not an observation. You have no evidence of anything happening in those cells that isn’t entirely explicable in physical terms." Yes this is true, but you are doing the same thing when you "assert" the contrary. When you suggest there's nothing happening in those cells that can't be "entirely" as you say, explained in physical terms you are making a statement based on a supposition. Your assumption and the assumption of all empirical science is; if any particular phenomenon, including hypothetical phenomenon can't be observed, or measured in some way it has no possibility of being real. Strict empiricism agrees with you that reality can and must be, as you say "entirely explicable in physical terms." This point of view is valid in a Newtonian world where simple "cause and effect" provided adequate and reliable models of how the natural world works, but begins to break down when confronted with modern physics an the advent of quantum mechanics. The "observer effect" in the split screen experiment clearly demonstrates when a consciously observing participant inserts himself in the process, the behavior of matter and energy is altered. How does one explain this in purely physical terms? You also say; "which is why I think analysing consciousness in terms of information processing is the best way to go. After all everything about consciousness is informational. Our senses respond to signals with informational content, consciousness is about things, it models other systems and makes predictions about them, it is representational, it is self-referential, it acts recursively, it modifies it’s own behaviour. All of these are properties and activities of information systems that we understand." You are describing cognition, not consciousness. Processing information, whether through perception or memory is not consciousness. All cognition is medium dependent and based entirely on brain function. All thought is cognitive and information based as you say, but not consciousness. Consciousness precedes cognition and makes cognition possible. Cognition is an emergent property while consciousness is not. One might then ask "what is consciousness?" Here's my answer to this difficult question and I use an analogy to help explain. If we walk into a movie theater filled with people we can sense an air of expectation as all in the auditorium settle in for what they expect will be a new and novel experience and when the lights go out the audience is hushed and ready. Anticipation palpably hangs in the air and a readiness for what's coming like runners poised to start a hundred yard dash waiting for the pistol shot. Moments before the presentation starts minds are eager and receptive but there's more in that auditorium than curiosity and expectation. There's an enhanced degree of "consciousness" also in the theater and the "experience" of seeing this new presentation whether it's humorous or dramatic takes place within a supervening reality of consciousness that renders the experience meaningful and intelligible. Consciousness is a universal backdrop within which all cognition is made possible. Cognition derives from consciousness, not the reverse. You also say; "Just because it’s complicated doesn’t make it magic. There are many, many examples I can give of physical systems that harmonise their periodicity trough physical feedback mechanisms." I am not saying that something magical is governing the behavior of matter. I'm saying that once we accept the idea that consciousness does govern the behavior of matter and energy questions like why we live in a "fine tuned" universe or the "observer effect" in quantum mechanics become clearer and more discernible. As far as physical systems being self resonant goes, yes I agree with you, they are, but what is it that makes them so? You say it's entirely physical. I say only the observable, and measurable is physical, and at the heart of all reality whether seen or unseen, whether measured or not is universal consciousness.
@@michaelmckinney7240 >…you are making a statement based on a supposition. …if any particular phenomenon, including hypothetical phenomenon can't be observed, or measured in some way it has no possibility of being real. I think we can agree that consciousness has physical effects in the world because we make conscious decisions and act on them in the world. These actions in the world are observable. Therefore the effects of consciousness in the world must be observable and therefore measurable. >The "observer effect" in the split screen experiment clearly demonstrates when a consciously observing participant inserts himself in the process, the behavior of matter and energy is altered. This was a supposition by some physicists in the early days of quantum mechanics but nowadays this idea has been discarded. It’s not compatible with what we know about quantum decoherence. The ‘observer effect’ is a measurement effect, not anything specifically to do with conscious observers. >You are describing cognition, not consciousness. No, I’m talking about consciousness. It’s also true about cognition because cognition is also an informational process. Name any aspect of consciousness that does not pertain to information. >Processing information, whether through perception or memory is not consciousness. I didn’t say it is. I said consciousness is processing information. Consciousness is in the class of information processes, not the other way around. >Consciousness precedes cognition and makes cognition possible. We have cognitive function when we are not conscious. >There's an enhanced degree of "consciousness" also in the theater and the "experience" of seeing this new presentation… This is because humans are social beings and a large part of our awareness is devoted to interpreting and responding to the mental states of others in our group. There’s nothing supernatural about that, it’s a feedback loop as we all observe and respond to the behaviour of the others, and through our responses stimulate their behaviour and responses in turn. It’s a self-reinforcing behavioural cycle. >I say only the observable, and measurable is physical, and at the heart of all reality whether seen or unseen, whether measured or not is universal consciousness. This is why I previously talked about the hierarchy of causation and effects caused by underlying phenomena. When we get down to the bedrock of the most fundamental phenomena we are aware of then we can’t say much meaningful beyond that. Energy, quantum fields, spacetime, beyond those we cannot see. However the phenomena caused by space, time, energy, etc can be fully explained in terms of those phenomena. I think consciousness is most likely explicable in that way. I take it you’re an idealist. I have no particular problem with idealism, it’s a reasonable opinion to hold. We simply put the order of causation in a different series, you put consciousness at the bottom (with causation running upwards) where I put it somewhere at the top.
No its fundamental to survival especially humans or more complete structures. A need not want or requirement for real life survival you cant survive without it or it is what it is.
Right after Robert asked the question about consciousness the universe splitted and Sean Carroll started preaching why God is necessary in human existence.
Your consciousness is very unique , for it has its own space-time volume making it so. Any clone of you will be in its own space-time volume and therefore cannot be you. I know your own volume changes from moment to moment but that flow is your own unique river.
Each individual structure is unique but it all has one thing in common, survival of self. The conscious 'Behaviour' is just another variant or expression or extension of survival in bio logical life. Its why AI wont be conscious or aware because it has no survival history.
@@degigi2003 Exactly? Don't forget that each particle within you is under gravitational influence from the whole universe. For your clone, things would feel very slightly different. Also, the energy surging through your body would immediately, have a different acceleration to that of the clone, which would affect your thoughts, feelings and perceptions. Also, if the 'Many-Worlds' interpretation of quantum physics, is true, your clone may be present in a different number of branches than you, causing a multitude of different feelings throughout the 'Realm'.
Many years ago I wrote down some thoughts whether or not there was a “purpose” to the existence of the Universe.The existence of consciouness is a puzzle, only if you ignore Emergence. The Emergence of consciousness, at its roots, may simply be the inevitable result of the evolution of complexity inherent to the interactions of the Fields within the Wave Function of the Universe as it travels, and evolves, through Time on the playing field of Spacetime. We exist as entities at some point on that evolutionary path set down at the BB.The creation of the Wave Function of the Universe which began its journey at the BB, now travels that path. Its journey will ultimately play out on playing field governed by rules we barely comprehend. But it should surprise no one that over some immense Time period the random complex interactions taking place gave rise to some complex result which we now define as consciousness. We, who carry this consciousness, now question the very notion of existence itself. We are not unlike some version of AI which now seeks to answer the question of “why” it exists.
He doesn't understand the hard problem. The point is that under the view that 3rd person physics controls everything, we should all be zombies. Zombies are perfectly conceivable. It's the non-zombies that are the mystery.
@@degigi2003 The zombie is not convinced of anything, because for the zombie, there is nothing that it is like TO BE convinced. That's what makes it a zombie!
I disagree with Sean's take on the uploaded copy of his neurons. If you think of the neurons as the data on a computer, and you copy that to something else, all you would have is a record of your experiences, but there's something missing. It's missing the production of thoughts, feelings, hopes and forward thinking. Those things may be what gives you consciousness and a soul.
Obviously, once you "upload" the neurons to a computer, you will also have to give them input (sight, touch, smell, etc) and some output (a body to control), and let them do their thing by running the simulation.
No soul or spirit chief that's survival only and my territory. The disposition is survival of self or structure and is automatically attached to life and probable other entities smaller objects. Otherwise your going to have tom postulate souls or spirits to all complex biological life historically, present and future including first consciousness creatures and make room for them in the after life based on behaviour. It is not man oriented but all biolife which must be considered. This means that because the after life is eternal and humans are later editions to evolution we would also be later editions to the after life but you would still need to rely on old lingo of souls and spirits which Im afraid Ive already owned.
Most transhumanist thinkers say it would be a seperate stream of consciousness, even including Kurzweil, though he holds to a seperate theory of identity . Your best hope for “true” immortality would be biological through LEV, which Aubrey de Grey gives a 50% chance of happening in the next 15 years, though I haven’t read him that closely.
Not sure much was discussed on emergence from this discussion. A pump emerges from a specific structure of heart cells. Does consciousness emerge from simple Darwinian sub-directives? Why exist at all unless emergence is more in control than chaos? My interest "emerges" w these discussions. Thx.
Sean Carroll not understanding the zombie argument is pretty rich stuff, extremely telling of the level of thought pop physicalists operate at. If, hypothetically, Sean, there actually exists a p-zombie, it does not mean that we can't know if we ourselves are not zombies. We don't figure out if other people have consciousness in the same way we figure that we ourselves are conscious. We don't think we are not zombies because we say the words "I am not a zombie" like the zombie would, we think we aren't zombies because we know there is something it is like to be us. It is not an inference we make, but something that is immediately given to us before inferences can start being made. If you reject this, then you reject phenomenality exists and are an eliminativist. But let's not use misunderstandings of epistemology to reach that position.
"Sean Carroll not understanding the zombie argument is pretty rich stuff" He not only understands it, he debunked it completely. It's pretty rich stuff that you could watch this entire thing and not understand that. I guess it's telling of the level of thought youtube commentors operate at.
Think he understands it perfectly well, better than the people who came up with the experiment, he just rejects it as confused. If you accept that physically identical things cannot differ in their properties, then the thought experiment never gets off the ground--they either both have consciousness or neither or them does, depending on your take. I don't think the p zombie idea is a coherent at all, personally. It's a difference made by pure stipulation, and I would say we have a lot more evidence for the physicalist view than we do for the idea that these things can come apart. Those who think the p zombie idea is meaningful conflate the fact that consciousness on the one hand and matter/structure on the other are conceptually distinguishable with the idea that they must be, in principle, metaphysically or ontologically distinguishable. But just because we can imagine it, doesn't make it possible. And the burden of proof for its plausibility lies with those who champion it, not those who challenge it, imo.
Well I think from a physicalist's perspective, the p-zombie would act and look like a human but would have a different internal arrangement of atoms that denied it the first person experience, if they were aligned in a certain way, it would start to have an internal experience. Which is why he seems to believe consciousness is substrate independent. In a sense I meet p-zombies every time I go to sleep. But they are my dreams. Why is how a hypothetical p-zombie acts or looks to an outside observer (conscious) relevant to how it actually is? My intuition does still tell me that the "strange loop" being like something at all, is not definitive, and is certainly unsatisfying, I'm not sure if that is because it is incomplete or missing the prime ingredient, or just because the abstractions made imagining it are misleading.
I think we need to change some of the language we use in QM that are not quite appropriate to what is going on or at least distinguish between different processes. One of those Terms is measurement. If you could make measurement without interfering with the system than that could indeed be called measurement but if the act of measurement involves purturbing the state then that is not just measurement. Then we can quantify how much puturbation a specifics state can tolerate before it is affect the state. This will involve some real quatification and then extrapolation. What happens when a wave turn Ms into a particle. Do they really exist concurrently or simultaneously, or oscilating between one and the other. The whole language needs to be reviewed. The language is not concise enough and leads to unnecessary misunderstanding. You often find philosophical inconsitancies that are risen linguistically. A lot physicists are blasai about the language they use. Natural language are notoriously fluid. Words change meanings from place to place, time to time and in translation. The people who have been most aware of that Included the German philosopher Heidigger and the French psychologist Lacan. Of course there was a time when linguistic was part of psychology. Maybe there was a reason for using Latin in science. If the exact meaning can not be translated then it shouldn't be or a whole new term needs to be used with a scientific dictionary kept rigourously Update. Public lectures are often Places where lazy terminology takes root and before you know it it has crept into the classrooms and the scientific papers.
Great episode. I really like Sean Carroll and watch his channel regularly. But I think RKL has him in a corner in this episode. I also find many worlds interpretation and life devoted to the quantum wave equation uninspiring. It just cannot be THE explanation of life and everything. Consciousness points in one direction for me…
Sean Carroll is presenting a version of reality that I feel is closest to truth because it doesn't fall victim to a subjectivity bias. Our brain is a computer that composes what we call consciousness by way of the totality of the electric impulses transmitted every moment. Thinking that consciousness is some magical property of the universe is in my opinion quite arrogant considering how complex we know the brain is. Why should we need anything else to explain experience than such an enormously vast network of interconnected neurons?
subjectivity bias is not necessarily false bias, just because something is subjective doesn't mean its less real, imagine a case of a man with eyes living among the blind, more real things are experienced by the man with eyes but all his experience are subjective among the blind. Consciousness isn't even truly subjective atleast for human beings as all human beings agree to experiencing it and most likely are saying the truth, the problem with it is its difficult to demonstrate outside of your body. Lets assume that sean carroll is right that consciousness is just an emergent phenomena which occurs from connection of neurons, then the question comes up how does this network of neuron experience things as one entity, when by themselves individually they have no clue of anything other than signals from their neighboring neurons, what should happen is each neuron should be experiencing itself as separate entity, its almost impossible to describe this oneness by breaking it down into sequence of computations done by individual neurons another reason why we assume a computer chip isn't conscious though we would never know if it was, its not as easy as sean carroll is trying to make it look, its a very hard problem which probably is unsolvable, certainly not as simple as saying its all computation of brain.
One simple thought experiment that came to my mind years ago, which resulted in me giving up chasing consciousness within causal deterministic or computational systems was this… Let’s assume the brain is a causal, computational system. Now, let’s get a pen and paper and start computing exactly what the brain was executing at the time of me feeling great pain, happiness or anger. As I compute the algorithm execution with my pen and paper, is it the pen or the paper that “experiences” the emotion? The substrate of a computation that is causal and deterministic shouldn’t impact the outcome of the algorithm; as such the motions carried out during the algorithm shouldn’t have impact or results produced outside the material substrate either, so what’s going on? To elaborate, many say consciousness is an illusion; so going off this path, a causal deterministic algorithm is executed, yet something independent of that material substrate “experiences” the effects of that computation without being able to impact it. This assumes that this something is capable of “experiencing” to begin with, yet it has no place within the material substrate itself. Its existence is pointless within the framework of this line of thought and the only evidence we have of its existence is that we ourselves are not zombies or robots.
This has to be the craziest one yet! Consciousness is "a way of talking about the physical world....." That doesn't even make sense. Consciousness is your experience of the world, since all you have is your experience (and your thoughts about that experience), it makes sense to trust your experience. Why would you trust the thoughts in your head about your experience over your actual experience? That is like saying that someone's five minute description of an event is the same as experiencing the event. Who would ever think that? I guess Sean Carrol and his materialists.
Sean Carroll's position is religious in nature. Just like those folks saying consciousness is an illusion. It's about time we call out this ridiculousness for what it is. These guys are worse than flat earthers.
This is reductionism to physics. When he mentions emergence, he means it in a non-literal sense or in a weak sense. That's not what emergentists/non reductionists mean by emergence. Per emergentism those higher level descriptions are not just useful constructs, but rather they correspond to reality. Reality comes in different levels, irreducible to lower levels. An emergent phenomenon is not deducible from knowledge of the lower-level domain from which it emerged and this non-deducibility is in principle a consequence of an ontological distinction. I don't see any good motivation behind reductionism. As a naturalist but a non-reductionist I think reductionism robs reality/nature of its beauty and complexity.
One thing we can see about consciousness through technology is a development... One upon a time the analog signal on your TV was blowing your minds when we were watching documentaries back in the '90s. Thin HD came along in 720p. Looked great. Then 2K came along and that made 720p look bad. Now we have TVs on the market that are 8K resolution and 4K is starting to look a bit average. This is an example of how technology is growing our consciousness and how now when you look back at analog signals or even 720p it's almost unrecognizable compared to what the brain used to comprehend it as before. It had been heightened by technology. So this might give us a clue on how consciousness works
Whatever gave Robert the notion that an "uploaded consciousness" is more than just a copy... a separate second mind? The copy might be effectively immortal (depending on the technology of its physical substrate), but the original consciousness would remain "trapped" in its mortal body. Vanity would be the main incentive to have a copy created, not the desire to personally live forever. (Unless a person's mind is such a useful resource that society doesn't want to lose it.) To personally live forever, one would need to be like the ship of Theseus... gradually replacing old neurons & neuronal connections with functionally identical copies (as discussed in the video).
Wow! Thank you Robert for speaking to a closed wall which to me is a lesson to many. It’s dogma , not an open science-based or open logic-based dialog. You can tell that in his mind, he’s figured out what he considers a brute fact that he needs to defend because of the missing proof of anything non-physical. Quantum fields and all other forms of energy, including other potential energies existing in other dimensions and the laws that orchestrate their interactions must all be physical in nature according to that perspective. Hope you got some rest after that tiring battle of looking for cracks in his armor.
Maybe Sean's requirement for the physical is precisely because there is no evidence for the non-physical. So, wouldn't it be "dogma" instead to insist on the existence of something for which there is no evidence?
@@guaromiami I don’t think so. Particle physicists already have formed a foundation of the physical out of what I’d consider non-physical-natured fields, ie fields moving an invisible and unmeasurable media , ie “the ether”, not space per se. Mathematics has imaginary numbers that speak to something “real” yet not. Humility, to me, is accepting that as we as humans have limitations which mean that concepts like infinity and other concepts are necessarily unintuitive and not “perceivable” directly. I think the truths we find are sign posts for direction, not some fully graspable by us or AI, although I’m sure AI will help get us closer.
@@brianlebreton7011 your drivel about "infinity" doesn't help in the least to gaining a better understanding of how brain activity produces conscious experiences.
Interesting conversation but it still doesn't answer whether consciousness is emergent or fundamental. Even the described 'clone' thought experiment wouldn't answer it. You could duplicate every atom in your body and your resulting clone may have your stored memories but it doesn't definitively prove it would also be conscious. And even if it was, it still wouldn't be proof that consciousness was emergent; You could make an exact copy of your television but it still wouldn't prove that the tv shows were generated from within it.
Gotta love a paradox. 😂 He cant say which one is me. But has to admit that one of them is me...or not. Identical twins and/or siamese twins would be the best people to interview.
Not what happened. Sean's argument is that there is no continual stream of connected consciousness from any moment to the next. forget entirely about the copy, his argument is that you now are a different consciousness than you were the previous second. You did not continue through time. So it wouldn't matter how many copies you make, literally NONE of them would be the you that you are now.
@@fullyawakenedAnd yet your conscious experience remains in the original. It never jumps into the copy or exists in both at the same time. What in the brain accounts for that? Carroll doesn’t know because both brains are the same.
@@RuneRelic At any given moment our consciousness exists, but it's a process, and of course sometimes such as in deep dreamless sleep or deep anaesthesia, it stops. It's an activity. Sometimes we do it, and sometimes we don't.
@@simonhibbs887 Sometimes the heartbeat and breathing stops too I guess. Oh wait. No its doesnt, as people die. You are ascribing the choice of not to dream as involuntary. Anaesthesia. Oof do you really want to go there with the latest quantum research from the microtubules in the cells, and Penrose' arguments ? He is arguing that the past or future does not exist (causality) and that only the present exists without any chain/history. If they do not exist then inertia does not exist. If inertia does not exist then physics does not exist. That puts him out of a job. Existance is a stream, not a moment. For a physicist to say otherwise is a cake and eat it moment IMHO.
I think I know what you mean but it's not so much an issue of specialness since I think most of us think our own experience is special. But it's not nearly as significant has Kuhn seems to think. It's just a product of the brain. If person is duplicated (including their brain) there will be 2 identical, separate people and 2 identical, separate consciousnesses that will gradually diverge as time passes.
In order to really understand if “consciousness” is solely a subjective phenomena experienced at separate and distinct points in time vs. being an objective phenomena shared by all all beings who have attained consciousness, we must do scientific experiments to determine where ideas come from. When an idea or thought enters your conscious mind, is it solely the culmination of biology, chemistry and physics or is there some type of external input. Maybe we haven’t invented the technology to measure consciousness yet….just like we needed to invent electron microscopes to see molecules.
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How come all our conversations are not like this. I could listen to these two talk all day.
Because many aren’t honest. The magic proponents.
Don't you enjoy listening to these guy's verbally thrash out their differences,so much passion!!
😂
not in this case mister closer to doesn't seem to grok that there are two people having new experiences. it's not even neuroscience.
And respect this is how politics should sound like
@@HarryNicNicholasSean Carrol does not live in reality. U can tell he bases his conclusions on his worldview.
I really enjoy listening to Sean Carroll. He can take a seemingly complex subject and relate it to the viewer in simple understandable terms.
I think he’s one of the clearest speakers (and thinker) around, whether or not one agrees with him. If nothing else, he leaves one with a better understanding of the matter in question.
This was actually pretty comprehensive and one of the better and simpler conversations about consciousness.
Why is science ignoring Dr. Terrance Howard?
@@michael-4k4000 I imagine because he's just a guy and at least one thing he says sounds bonkers. 1 times 1 equals 2? That seems obviously wrong.
Yes, if you buy the idea that you can make consciousness by putting cells together in a particular orientation, after presumably making them in a lab, good luck with that, it might be easier to create a time machine and hope that they got this figured out a billion years from now.
But then the question arises "why is this orientation so specific and important?" And "would the created brain lose its consciousness if you interchanged the positions of two neurons? Why?" Not to mention how fraught the idea of a person losing his or her consciousness with a brain injury, as if there can be no internal experience or voice.
@@jeffreyanderson6021 our inability to create consciousness only points to our limitations, not necessarily our explanation of how consciousness is being produced.
If there are biological factors (brain damage, anesthesia…) that impact the state of our conscious experience, to me that only reaffirms the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of brain processes.
@@michael-4k4000 Let me explain it to you. Terence Howard is a nutter. And he is not even a doctor with a religion doctorate, such as another notorious "Doctor" nutcase, Billy Graham. Howard never attended SCSU, and SCSU does not confer doctorates in chemical engineering. Instead, Howard was awarded an honorary degree of "Doctorate of Humane Letters" (DHL) from SCSU after speaking at its commencement ceremony in 2012. LOL.
The waitress comes over and says: "ok, I'ma have to ask you to leave"
😂😜👏👍
Kuhn made some very strong points. Sean was way more relaxed in his responses, Kuhn seemed a bit rattled and shaky with his questions and points, but still posed very cogent challenges to the "absoluteness" of Sean's position. Bottom line for me in all of the discussion of consciousness is that we'll probably not figure it out any time soon. By far the most animated CTT I've ever seen.
I think that Kuhn has been sufficiently convinced by non-physicalists after all these years and, like me, can’t believe that someone as smart as Sean would be such a fundamentalist in this regard.
@@cloud1stclass372 Non-physicalism is incoherent. It begins with Kant's mind-body problem and argues the "solution" is to throw out the existence of the physical "body." The direct result of this is that we would all be trapped "in our own minds," i.e. solipsism (subjective idealism). This view is incoherent because you cannot even define the concept of "I" without a reference to "Thou," in the same way darkness makes no sense without light. The word "I" would also become meaningless in a truly solipsistic framework, which then _should_ lead you to also abandon this as an _a priori_ concept, and just treat experience as not a property of "I" or "Thou" but just _reality itself,_ and then you can easily recover materialism and realism consistently. Yet, what happens in practice is that subjective idealists either spin themselves into logical pretzels trying to explain how it makes sense to argue "I" is _a priori_ but somehow "Thou" is not, or they devolve into the even worse _objective_ idealism, where they propose we are all part of an "objective mind," but this mind has precisely the same properties as Kant's own _noumenon,_ i.e. all objective idealist philosophies always reproduce the mind-body problem in its precise logical form.
@@cloud1stclass372 But Sean's position is scientifically and practically sensible since the material-physical is all we can perceive and all we have to work with.
This was brilliant. I've not heard someone talk so well about a physicalist position on consciousness. It was kind of funny watching Robert Kuhn respond from an irresistible dualist position, although Carroll perhaps set him up for that by agreeing with the idea of being able to "upload yourself". His explanation of the detail refutes that, at least as it relates to how that expression is usually thought of (because it is inherently dualistic, suggesting that there's an entity, "your self", that is put somewhere else). With that bubbling around in Kuhn's unconscious, he can then start imagining that the new copy being "identical" must mean it has Carroll's unique personhood, hence he's confused because then he thinks there are two Sean Carrolls. If he just thought about disassembling an apple molecule by molecule, yet copying each into a new apple, he'd not argue that the two apples being "identical" are therefore just one apple in two places. They're necessarily made of different actual atoms; only their type and arrangement are identical.
So really, you can't "upload yourself" because you have no "self", but you can copy the physical state to create a facsimile. Actually, all the neurons isn't enough, since a brain unsupported by a body will die immediately, and one without any senses won't have a similar conscious experience, so the whole body would need to be copied. And immediately, it would begin having different experiences.
As I understand physiology, neurons are dynamic in the sense of forming new structures. Without this dynamic process there could be no “perception” and no memory. As soon as the copy is made, and given that it must exist is a different physical location from the copied being, then it would evolve differently. The time taken to duplicate aside, there would be two beings with different perspectives that share much memory. They would be different, though, because of the difference in perception which in turn would invoke different memories.
Starting as identical to the original, the copied consciousness would diverge, but in a manner that the original would diverge as it continues its life. If they are truly identical, the new consciousness could be inserted into the life of the original consciousness, and there would be no difference.
11:00 I love how Robert is struggling with this so hard, and Sean just doesn't understand the nature of the issue Robert is stuck on, and this is so funny and beautiful.
Yes I don't know if Robert doesn't or refuses to understand. To me it's simple. If an exact copy of someone is made at that moment there are two separate/independent identical persons and consciousnesses. As time passes the persons and their consciousnesses will gradually diverge. This seems obvious to Sean but not Robert apparently.
@alankoslowski9473 Now what part makes it obvious? Seems impossible to me
@@ExistenceUniversity I'll try to illustrate with something more simple. Say there's a physical document like a memo printed on paper. That memo is copied and distributed to different people. The different copies will be in different situations so will diverge. Some might just sit on someone's desk, others might have coffee spilled on them or be recycled. They started as exact or nearly exact copies but will diverge with time.
While the process is more complex the same principle would apply to copied humans. If someone made an identical copy of me (or anyone else) we and our consciousnesses would only be identical momentarily. As time passed we would be in different situations and have different experiences so our consciousnesses would diverge. Commonalities would persist but divergence would increase with time.
@alankoslowski9473 well we have split brain patients. This procedure leaves 2 distinct hemispheres both having the conscious experience. So, are they 2 totally different conscious entities in the brain? What if we recombined them again? Do they split from 1 to 2 then back to 1? Or does the continuous stream of consciousness fork then merge but all the while remaining one?
@DaneWheeler-ni2qj Popscience has done you dirty
I think I can elaborate a bit on Sean's position. Each moment in time is another you, having a different "now" experience.
All "now" moments have state (i.e the configuration of the universe in that moment) that is consistent with that moments "now" state being related to a prior moments "now" state, as described by a transformation permitted by the laws of physics.
You could imagine that like a jigsaw puzzle, all these moments, like puzzle pieces, were all cut together in one stroke. Therefore one did not derive from another, they were all derived together to be consistent with the laws of physics.
You are experiencing one "now" moment. The order thing called time you are experiencing is just that this is the only thing we can derive from any given now moment that we find ourselves experiencing. If the universe jumped between states of you being a baby, and then you being an adult, you would know nothing of this jump; in both instances you would be aware of being a baby with complete set of memories and state consistent with that experience; and likewise for the instant where you are an adult yod have the memories of a lifetime consistent with that experience.
So what does it mean if your brain was uploaded into a computer?
Your set of "now" moments where you were a human are all possible experiences. Another set of "now" moments for the conciousness happening in the computer is abother set. In fact in anything where conciousness arises - this adds to the set of "now" moments that can be experienced. This set now includes me, and you and everyone we have ever met.
So why am I feeling like I am me right "now" and not "you" or my brain uploaded into the "computer"?
Well.. how can we be so sure we are not also those things - we can only ever experience a "now" moment, I have no idea who I was experiencing a moment ago. According to this "now" moment I am presently writing a youtube comment. I have memories consistent with this. I feel like I have been sat here 10 minutes.. but so would you if you were experiencing this "now" moment. Who is to say you are not? Language lets me down here because terms like "you" and "I' are ambiguous. The total set of all "now" moments for concious being will be experienced, and when they are, that experience will result in something that thinks its an entity with an identity that is flowing in time.
I think the issue here isn't the understanding of the experience of consciousness, it's the attachment to who we think we are. If there's a replica of me that will live forever inside a computer, because what that replicas experiences going forward will be separate, to say that you can upload or replicate your consciousness when the original body's consciousness will eventually die, the person only sees themselves as the person in the original body, and the replica as a sort of violation of the originals identity. I'm not saying that's something I'm concerned about, but seems to be the issue that's being discussed. Personally, if I were to die but I could replicate myself and that version would live on, I would do it. I would be sad that the experience that I'm having would come to an end, but the important thing generally is that what was important to me and what would be important to it would be the same. In the same way, we are all mortal, but we will live on in the bodies of others by the things we've given of ourselves to them.
@micahgmiranda "replicating" to live on, is what the "the selfish gene" is doing when we procreate. It currently relies on evolutionary and biological processes though which have certain problems.
The next leap imho would be, we transfer the responsibility of "solving for persistence" from the level of evolutionary biology, to the the level of technological design.
- Designing new "artificial bodies" as vehicles for persistence, to house our "brains" / minds in. Incrementing on that design. This will let us make leaps in design that biological evolution cannot make, and at the rate of technological innovation, e.g bodies that are fault tolerant, physically more capable etc etc.
- the need for genes goes away - your eye colour is programmed and updatable. Why constrain it? Genes are replaced by knowledge put in by the designer.
- Genes were acquiring knowledge via evolution for us. Now that we don't depend on evolution to aquire this knowledge, we should have a measurably superior way to aquire this knowledge.
- This is morally superior to evolution - we can iterate and test new artificial bodies before "rollout". With evolution, every person is a live test subject.
If we were physically transplanting our brains into such bodies, most would accept that "you are still you". However this would become the next problem.. how to procreate and end up in the desired body without undergoing such an invasive procedure. I think one answer to that might be
- We migrate to AGI, i.e an Artificial mind is created in these artificial bodies. From that point onwards, biological organisms become obsolete - an AGI can create its own descendants, transferring any "mind" in as a software update. Being able to increment on itself at the pace of technological innovation will far outpace evution. This will be a fundamentally new "lifeform" not coupled to evolution but highly coupled to advanced technology. Still, as it will be a superior replicator, from an evolutionary perspective it will be like a superior human, or super-human.
Sooo much fun. Put a smile on my face, literally and figuratively.
In Robert’s neuron copy scenario: by what Robert means by “you”, the original dies. By what Sean means by “you”, it lives on in the copy. I’m a physicalist, and it’s hard even for me to not talk dualistically about “self”. Sean seems to have mastered it.
But that feels disingenuous. I'm confident Sean has a very clear idea of himself. Self-awareness is fundamental to the idea of consciousness. To keep saying that there's no you or no me just isn't a credible argument. Does Sean have a sense of himself? Of me? If he didn't, we'd consider him to be mentally damaged in some way.
@@timoex Sorry it’s been awhile, though I do remember this video, but does Sean say there’s no you? I dont recall what part you are referring to.
@@camdenbarkley1893 Sean keeps saying that Kuhn is putting to much emphasis on "you" or reifying "you." Sean seems to want to dismantle Kuhn's point by dismantling identity. But I'd be very skeptical if Sean does no believe in identity.
@@timoexwhat’s very interesting to me is that I don’t hear Sean denying the existence of identity, but it appears you are hearing him deny it.
Sean still believes in the existence of continuous wind, even though he knows that when you look closer it’s just discrete air molecules bumping into each other; none of which could on their own be considered wind. In the same way, Sean still believes in continuous identity, even though he knows that when you look closer it’s just discrete configurations of neurons flowing from one to the next; none of which on their own could be considered conscious.
I too would bet that Sean feels the fundamental “me” that I think you are getting at. But I would also bet that Sean, like me, doesn’t consider that feeling to be a very useful data-point when trying to figure this out.
@@timoex I think Sean's point is every person is experiencing consciousness separately. In that sense if an exact copy of ourselves were made its 'you' be just as important and valid to itself as our 'you' is to ourselves. Every individual experiences a separate consciousness so our clone would to.
From the moment the new Sean is activated, it becomes a completely separate conscious entity. Initially, its responses may closely mirror those of the original Sean, but over time, their experiences will diverge, leading to distinct consciousnesses. This is because consciousness is shaped by individual experiences and interactions, which cannot be identically replicated. Understanding that each consciousness is unique, even if they share an origin, is key to grasping this concept. The divergence is inevitable as each entity encounters different stimuli and processes them independently.
If the new consciousness is identical it will diverge in the same manner as the original consciousness if all the experiences were identical. Let’s say two identical consciousnesses existed, and no one knew which was which. Even if their experiences differed, there would be no way to tell the original from the copy.
Robert: “What happens to you??”
Sean: “You becomes us.”
Robert: 🤯
Sean is a dedicated physicalist and an accomplished physicist. I believe that the concept of 'consciousness' may not be within his area of expertise. It's similar to hearing a cardiologist discuss sports nutrition. Consciousness is a profoundly intricate phenomenon that surpasses simplistic explanations. Moreover, the central question remains: what triggers the onset of consciousness, by what mechanism? As of now, science has not provided a definitive explanation for this. Hence, this conversation delves into the realm of the unknowable.
There are two separate questions about consciousness:
1. Who is the thinker, and who is the observer? The thinker is purely physical, while the observer is consciousness, a phenomenon that remains enigmatic and beyond full explanation. This enigma may stem from its inherent connection to questions about the nature of divinity. Consulting a physicist on this subject is akin to seeking insights from a plumber; while either may offer valuable perspectives, the definitive answers are elusive.
@@marcusantebi4896 I'm with you almost all the way minus the analogy to God. Consciousness is truly the only self-evident fact in the Universe. It's obvious we have some inner subjectivity. But to ask Physicist how it arises or how to distinguish a philosophical zombie from a conscious entity is about as fruitful as asking a Physicist about God. If that's what you meant I agree.
@@mountainair
But we have a lot of physical evidence of what "triggers the onset of" consciousness. We know particular bits of the brain that are required to be active. We have all manner of evidence about different states and contents of consciousness that can be elicited by physical means, from drugs to electrical and magnetic stimulation, to damage and disease.
Furthermore, as a physicist, he is an expert on the fair assessment (not absolute fact) that it's unlikely there's any missing ingredient in the physical models. Even if there was something missing to explain consciousness outside of normal physics, it's well understood from philosophy that if we invoke some other mental stuff that isn't physical, we've an additional problem of how two entirely different substrates could influence each other. A simple way to understand "physicalism" is that it just describes the stuff we've evidence of. If we find "mind stuff" it's part of physics. If it's not part of physics, we haven't measured it, and hence have no evidence it exists.
The thing we struggle with - in my view - is comprehending that physical things can be conscious. We have an unexamined assumption that consciousness has to be non-physical, which is called "begging the question". All the evidence (and there's a lot) is that physical things (brains, or brains-in-bodies in particular states) ARE conscious, they don't create "mind".
Duh
If you have a copy of the same program on two devices, which one is the "real one"? Consciousness is just sort of a program. If there are identical copies of the same consciousness they would be working independently from each other but in similar way until they diverge over time.
Exactly. The two independent consciousnesses would only be momentarily identical. The more time passes the more they would diverge.
Exactly. This sense of identity carried on over time is just that, a sense, and is just a useful high-level construct. But if feels so real most people can't make that leap, apparently.
@@marceltorretta Well each normal individual consciousness it real to the person experiencing it. But it's not objectively special or special to anyone else.
This speaks of conscousness only in terms of awareness. It seems to entirely miss the idea of consciousness as something that can contemplate, create, plan for, avoid, wonder and do philosophy. That seems a lot more complex than just being sort of a program. No?
@@timoex Yes it's sort of like a complex, continuously evolving program. The brain is sort of like a highly complex, inefficient computer being continuously programmed by experience.
I think the movie “The Prestige” gives an interesting take on this. The surviving clone always is the one who never experienced their own death. It doesn’t matter if consciousness does not “jump”, it doesn’t need to- as the survivor will have the continuous subjective experience that includes everything up to the branch.
predestination comes at it from the opposite direction, someone who is their own mother and father in a time loop.
i forget the title but there is a sci fi story about a guy who jumps into the future and he finds that every time he jumped a duplicate appears, he eventually finds himself in a time that is entirely populated by himselfs, all claiming to be the original.
@@HarryNicNicholasapple tv series called Dark Matter.
Carroll is great at explaining everything with pure materialism without actually explaining how it works. (He does the same in cosmology in pushing multiple universes, a theory that most physicists believe is non-provable.) No one has a clue how the color red is experienced, yet here he basically says it's "materialism" as he sails right by it. He takes the easy way out so does not have to do the hard work to prove his beliefs.
Limitations of language that don't allow us to describe experiences from other senses accurately or without metaphor doesn't mean we don't know the experience of seeing red. Our optic nerve is a pathway to information being communicated just as language is (for humans). And we use them both, not independently (if we are normal sighted and non-mute people). The philosophical (not scientific) example of the experience of seeing red not being communicable says something about limitations of language and nothing else.
@@eximusic What we want to do is explain how we experience the color red, but what we are lacking is not the language to do this but the actual concept of how this process works. Without the concept, language, which is only descriptive, cannot help. The fact remains that the "actual experience of redness" is currently beyond our ability to conceptualize. The word "Redness" is no more than vibrations in the air or, in this case, strange squiggles on a computer monitor that we call "letters". The actual experience of redness is beyond all words and language. Without a conceptual framework language is useless.
just because you don't know, doesn't make it "magical", there is no God of the gaps.
Carroll does this with his belief that he has free will, too. He believes in the laws of physics, he believes in special relativity, he believes in determinism, and he believes that his conscious experience of the world is generated purely by his brain, and yet he also clearly believes that his thoughts are in some magical way not subject to these things. Carroll believes in the laws of physics, he just doesn't believe that they apply to _him._
@@joedoe3688 We’re not talking “God” or “Magic”. There are many things about the world we do not understand. I have always loved the quote “The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we CAN imagine”. It allows for the fact that we are perhaps not as intelligent as we believe, and that there is much more to learn than we think.
Doesn’t this thought experiment beg the question by presupposing some kind of dualism?
If they are physically identical to humans in every way, then they will necessarily have the same physical properties such as consciousness.
If you have two identical people separated by spacetime, they will necessarily have different conscious experiences. If they are not separated by spacetime, then they’re indistinguishable from a single person.
What am I missing?
You are correct that the experiment begs the question. By postulating the existence of philosophical zombies, they are essentially saying "given that dualism is true, then...". But that's really the interesting question - is dualism true. Note that you can't assume functionalism either, which you did when you used the word "necessarily" 😊
@@degigi2003I cannot tell if that last bit is intended to be passive aggressive or not. It could go either way with the smiley lol
@@brandon1357 it was an honest comment. I put the smiley because the functionalist position makes sense to me, but this doesn't make it true. We have yet to demonstrate some form of artificial consciousness and some rigorous theory behind it.
@@degigi2003 Fair. I just strongly oppose dualism and think it's an antiquated way of thinking. It may have worked when people didn't know about germs and thought epileptic seizures were demonic possessions, but to be a dualist in 2024 is a position I cannot take seriously. I could be wrong, but logically and empirically, I see no reason why we need to invoke supernatural explanations here any more than we have for other things in the past. Those kinds of explanations have historically never been a good place to hang your hat and I see no reason this should be any different, nor have I heard any good arguments beyond "But I FEEL special."
@@brandon1357 Agreed 👍
I love listening to Sean. I don't always agree but he seems so sure.
That's not a positive.
@@Jacob-Vivimord Poorly worded on my part.
I like the way he tries to find the simplest explanation, even if it doesn't make sense to us. I like the way he speaks confidently about his views but he's far from dogmatic.
@@monty3854 I'm not so sure about that. He equated physicists who think consciousness may be more fundamental than quantum stuff with climate change deniers.
@@Jacob-Vivimord Could you point me to where he said that? I must have missed it.
@@monty3854 2:57
13:15 sums it up quite nicely: "Me now is not the same as me in five days!" Well put ... there is no self, it is just an illusion! 😁
Would help to agree on a definition of consciousness before going into arguments
Correct the definition is survival of consciousness not soul or spirit of survival.
may be there is no such definition we are not rigid metal bodies.
The more evolved you are the more conscious you are.
fish--> dog--> elepant--> monkey --> chimp --> humans and even among humans different people with different levels of consciousness.
The world consciousness is vague and leads to lot of confusion
@@munish259272 There is no such thing as "more evolved," everything is equally "evolved."
@@amihartz Correct.
@@amihartzhow are bacteria, which are genetically very close to LUCA, as evolved as humans?
Robert: Can’t get enough of your interactions with Sean.
I think we've all learned from Dennett that if a person *really* wants to dig in and deny qualia, there's not really any further, uncomfortable consequence of that they have to accept. Once you've 'bitten the bullet' on denying qualia (and the possibility of 'zombies'), everything else is quite easy. Indeed, that's (in a sense) at the core of the mystery (and frustration) of the 'Hard Problem' for those of us who do accept the existence of qualia: they add absolutely nothing to a complete 3rd-person description of the world.
It just might be because we are both the user of the computer and the computer itself, a magical sense of self is born from the duality of it.
I don’t always agree with Sean, but he really is a great physicist and a fabulous speaker.
There is no single stream of unbroken universal metaphysical consciousness anyway. It gets shutdown whenever we sleep and aren’t in a REM state, or when we’re put under for an operation.
If I fell asleep, and some duplication machine made a copy of me, swapped the “original” for the “copy” in bed, and then humanely destroyed the original. Then the copy would just wake up as I normally do without any knowledge of it ever happening, just as I do every day. Going on thinking of itself as “I” or “me”.
For all I know it could already have happened, and “I” would feel or notice no different, and will think of myself as always being here.
But it would be a different subjective consciousness. That's Robert's point
Jean nailed the conscious wooo woo in my opinion and in the opinion.. it’s clearly an evolutionary advantage ( and as many evolutionary advantages also have not so good side effects) .. I have no portion thinking I’m different from yesterday and still a evolution of me
Well that was frustrating.
It's frustrating how very few people seem to ever read books on philosophy who get engaged in this discussion. Kuhn literally references Kant and his notion of the thing-in-itself in some of his discussions, and here he talks about consciousness as "a person looking at a screen," things which are multiple century old conceptions which have been heavily criticized and largely moved beyond in a lot of contemporary realist philosophy.
@@amihartz Robert is a man who is wishing and hoping to find dualism true and a supernatural deity true.
The Buddha figured all of this out 2500 years ago. Form is emptiness is form.
Dualism is natural because of the complexity of our brain. The car you own is a vehicle for your convenience that takes you from point A to point B. It is also an assembly of parts which unmysteriously know how they work. Brain and Mind are still .mysterious. We know how muscle cells, kidney cells interact etc. How neurons interact to form their function is still being theorized by the Chalmers school. Dennett hinted at the hard problem but ignored it saying it would eventually reveal itself after future investigation like many other phenomena.
i think mister closer to is making more of this than needs be. as sean says if you make a copy, even a "perfect copy" you now have two seans, both different people. i don't see why he's going on and on about this? does he want to say there is still one person? or brains should communicate telepathically or what, cos from T0 onward they have different experiences.
But I don't think that was the point of the line of questioning. The point of the line of questioning began with the question "can your consciousness be uploaded." And the implication of being uploaded is that your conscious experience would be essentially substrate independent, and you might fall asleep and then awake in a new substrate. And from that point, you'd still consider yourself yourself. But Sean initially said "yes" to the question of could he be uploaded but then shifted by saying but it wouldn't be me. It would be a separate entity. Which changes his original answer to no, he could not be uploaded.
@@timoex Yes that's interesting to consider. I'm inclined to think 'uploading' our consciousness into an artificial network would be another form of copying since our literal brain would still exist independently of the network. Like creating an exact biological-physical duplicate of ourselves there would be 2 identical but separate consciousnesses that gradually diverge over time.
I think Sean made one mistake. He chose one of the copies to be "him". That implies there's something special about the him that's in his brain. If you're a pure materialist, the feeling of individuality is produced by the brain. Each copy would feel itself to be him, but it wouldn't be a shared feeling, and each copy (in a purely materialist viewpoint) would be correct. Our memories are key to who we feel we are. Any brain imbued with an exact copy (to date) of every memory we have stored in our brains would sidle those memories with the consciousness it produces, and in turn, believe themselves to be us, but that's purely an internal feeling held by every copy, as well as the original. All of them would be a separate "you".
One of them wouldn't be a copy, it would be the original him, though as you say they would be identical. I just watched it again, and he talks about all the same things you wrote about above. Two apples can be identical, but they are still different apples, if you cut one in half the other remains intact.
A massive non-sequitur: "if you choose something as a reference point, it must have a magical property to let you choose it!" No, things are chosen as reference points purely for utility. When I measure the velocity of an object, the entire concept of velocity does not make sense without something being chosen as the reference point, and I choose me purely for convenience. I could easily speak of the velocity of an object in relation to some inanimate object, such as a rock. Choosing a reference point is not something magical. The universe is inherently context-dependent and so nothing can be spoken of coherently without specifying its context, and we choose contexts based on convenience, not because there is some magical property that lets us choose one context over another, because we could speak of the world without our presence. The very concept of "I" is a convenient abstraction.
This was one of my favorite conversations. The question I wish had been asked to Sean was : if we uploaded your consciousness, would the location of the upload house the phenomenal experience you are having in your current physical state? Or would it be another consciousness, as in the clone thought experiment? A separate "thing" experiencing its own consciousness.
What you are describing is all biologicals life ability to survive historically, present and future. You cannot survive without being aware or conscious that's just a pure fact of bio logical life.
No need for spirits, souls, or consciousness what you need is survival of conscious awareness.
His answer would be "yes" to your question.
Why is science ignoring Dr. Terrance Howard?
Tat Tvam Asi.
One of the epistemological limits of many physicists is the incommensurability of first-person experience, that is, of consciousness. However, an absolute description of reality needs to be able to account for first-person experience because, in fact, it exists, that is, it occupies a "space" within reality. What many physicists find difficult to accept, however, is that such "space" is not, in itself, physical. Maybe Kabbalah could help.
Ironically, these guys actually assume the physical, whatever that is
Of course consciousness is not physical. It's a coarse grained description of an emerging phenomenon, like a storm, or a stock market, or money. For example money is not physical, yet it is not something supernatural.
@@degigi2003 emergence is an arbitrary value judgment. It’s not reality.
@@deanodebowhat do you mean that emergence is not reality, and what follows from that?
@@degigi2003 it’s a concept loaded with assumptions in order to avoid admitting that a phenomenon is beyond the scope of science
Usually there’s some ambiguous idea of “complexity”
So at some undefined threshold is surpassed, oh well now this magic thing happens and this phenomenon emerges from that complexity
That sort of thing.
Kirk: “Beam me up Scotty!”
[molecular copy, delete, Kirk dies, molecular paste on the Enterprise]
Scotty: “Did it work?”
Kirk: “Yep!”
Curious, if you were to then interview the exact copy of Sean, would he remark that his POV remains intact and unbroken? In other words, would the exact copy of Sean just assume he was now sitting to the side of you, unbeknownst of the Sean sitting across from you? In this thought experiment, each Sean would then diverge as individuals but I would ask them, “which one of you is…you?”
They are each them.
@@simonhibbs887Gotcha! I’m probably overthinking it. Totally get they would be the same. Guess I’m wondering about the continuity of ‘self’ through the many copies of ourselves we traverse (past, present and potential future). We retain our identity somehow. So in the thought experiment, re: the POV of the copy of Sean now sitting next to the interviewer, would he remark “i remember I was sitting across from you and now I find myself sitting next to you”?
@@davekochanski Yep, petty much. Bear in mind we're not always conscious. It's an activity, something we sometimes do, and sometimes we don't do it. If we're moved when we fall asleep we wake up somewhere different. What links episodes of consciousness is memory.
Per his way of thinking (and mine) both Seans would have equal claim to being Sean.
His position is that Sean at 1:00 p.m. and Sean at 1:01 p.m. aren't really exactly the same individual in any absolute sense. Over that minute, lots of cells and neurons and whatnot have been shed or moved around or are in different configurations or have died off. And even the constituent parts of those cells and neurons may have changed some, with atoms and molecules being traded around. 1:00 Sean and 1:01 Sean are very similar, and 1:01 Sean has memories built upon those of 1:00 Sean. It's a useful abstraction to think of them as one identity with a continuity, with a persistence through time. But if you compare them carefully, you find they aren't exactly the same thing.
If you create a perfect duplicate of Sean at 1:02, for a very brief moment, they're identical to either other. But neither of them are identical to Sean from 1:00 or 1:01.
They both have the same right to consider themselves as continuity of Sean 1:00/1:01's identity -- the same right to employ that abstraction. It's no more or less true for one or the other. It's as useful for each to think of themselves as continuations of the OG Sean.
Similarly (and he mentions this briefly), Sean believes in a many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, which has reality branching off to all sorts of variations in every moment. and all the variations being equally true but cut off from one another (well, in a sense, that's an abstraction, too, but a very useful way to think about it). And in all those realities, there are Seans who share a common history from before any given branching, who all justifiably think of themselves as Sean --- and who all are, but none of whom are identical to the Seans that existed in any moment of their past.
@@LouisHochmanTheJourno A very thoughtful reply and I agree - I think at the moment mentioned in the interview, 't-zero', the copies would be identical but would immediately begin to diverge as separate individuals. As you stated, his position was that our bodies are essentially completely different moment-to-moment anyway...the hiccup with this thought experiment is that Sean in this case isn't replaced (or continues onward in a forked parallel universe) but continues to exist in the same universe in the seat across from himself.
Each copy, I assume, would then see each other as a separate individual? Eventually, I'd imagine that'd be the case, but during the 1st minute I wonder if it'd be like experiencing a 3D sentient reflection of yourself...recognizing your 'you' identity as you would when looking into mirror, but seeing yourself stare back at you from behind someone else's eyes. Mind bending!
2:10 they are talking about 2 different things, Sean Carroll talks about the physical way consciousness works, while the interviewer talks about why we feel those molecules the way we do, which is yet not explainable and is somekind a "soul of the universe"
Two cloned brains' states of consciousness would not be the same a day after they were set apart. After a month, even their initially identical memories would be different.
That's true, but they would still claim to be the same person who existed before the cloning. And they would be both right 😅
Correct
Yeah, they would branch off from the moment the exact copy would be finished, and differences would grow. But both would say "it's me" and both would be, equally, right.
Difference between the experience, and a description of the experience
Does phisycs explain why matter believes in a purpose or questions it? That's what bloggles my mind.
A lot of things seem to have emerged on their own according to materialist understanding of our reality
@@MarkPatmos indeed. Our philosophical approach of life seems so unmaterialistic, though.
That is a key question. Why should matter matter to matter?
@@linardsjansons9875 I think Darwin answered that one a while ago.
interesting conversation that truly exposes our limitations to knowing consciousness.
Academics love intellectualism because no matter how wrong you’re, you will sound right
The derogatory use of the word radical in front of physicalist shows Robert's prejudice. I am very happy to see Sean own it.
Let us hear Robert use the word radical in front of pan-psychist or theologian.
Good day.
Robert is trying to make the show more fun I think, bringing a little bit of contention between the differing parties, as he himself is more of a materialist. Calling out the religious side as radical might not be taken so easily by those believers.
@S3RAVA3LM Exactly. Why are the feelings of believers more important than truth seeking. Especially by definitions believers believe because of faith which by definition means without evidence. And this is on a channel named CTT.
In any case, Sean held up well, and as such it is not a worry for science as by definition it will revise its theories if sound counter arguments or data are presented so I guess bring it on.
Agreed! Thought that was weird.
So by ‘Radical Physicalist’, you mean physicalist.
I don’t think he was using the word radical in a derogatory manner.
@stellarwind1946 It is possible, but why did the other poster reply saying the believers will not like it. He took it the same way.
In any case, let us see Robert use radical for a theologian next time. It is just a benign word, right? And they call Richard Dawkins, a mild-mannered scientist, a shrill.
Some will take my comment as lacking sense of humor and drama, and this is a free world as Sean quipped in one of the videos, but we shall see the sense of humor of believers, when their believers are simply questioned.
I made the above comment because Robert has used similar aggressive language in another CTT clip, like calling Sean''s comment glib, when Sean was simply stating his position.
In almost all videos Sean says one way or the other that as a scientists he is never sure of any theory 100% - that is humility of science and many scientists. The confidence of scientists in their language (which is well justified IMO because technology - which is applied science - runs our modern societies) is taken as arrogance by the opponents. Science as a good track record.
I stopped watching these videos because the host doesn’t seem to make any progress, he just likes talking about the few big questions that he likes the best (which isn’t to say he doesn’t have some good points, it’s just repetitive). Big fan of Dr Carroll. Today our host seems hung up on the definitional claim that in so far as you can define two things as separate, they are not the same thing.
I agree to an extent. My issue is that a number of the interviewees are not good at explaining their thoughts on the subject at hand, or talk around it without enlightening us in any way.
He is just trying to make money of his videos like everybody else on youpupe
@@woofie8647 Maybe on purpose. They could simple say these three words. God. One. Love.
@@woofie8647 Or that they are just wrong.
I still don't know which camp I belong to, although I'm slightly leaning to metaphysical. That said, I think you missed an opportunity to argument Sean when he was talking about the "redness of red", it's not about the color as a physical interpretation in our brain, it's the fact that I and anyone else can like or dislike the color red. If i had to draw the line I'd say that that's where consciousness starts.
Sean's mission in this world is to advance nihilism to the max. Just like Marx successfully did.
Believing in solipsism is one thing but believing you yourself don’t exist is something else entirely. Are you not experiencing yourself right now? Sean is saying you don’t, it’s just an illusion. But you would need an observer in the first place for the illusion to take place, it’s complete nonsense! It seems like psychopathy to me, the unwillingness to believe conscious being exist, it is not science , maybe he had a bad shrom trip lol
I've never seen someone's brain melt in real time as they learn about the concept of making a copy of a thing. Hilarious.
It is a physical copy. What about qualia? He says that would be completely different person, and avoids talking about what gives him his own qualia. If it is a purely physical thing, then exact copy should reproduce his own consciousness, no? That should also be him, but he denies it. You can't compare making a copy of a cup. This is your own consciousness we are talking about here
@@milannesic5718 the difference between a cup and consciousness is that a cup is in a fixed state while consciousness is ever changing.
The copy would be different in the same way as your own consciousness is different today than it was yesterday (or even a moment ago).
That is why a copy will not remain the same as the original.
@@edwardprokopchuk3264 There is a big difference there. I can still feel and experience. I am still alive, even if I am completely different person. While if you copy me, I would not be alive in that other body. That will be someone else. This time for real someone else. Now you can remove original ME, and I don't exist anymore. It is contradicting
@@milannesic5718 physical copies are impossible due to the no cloning theorem. Qualia cannot be perfectly cloned thus
@@milannesic5718 I believe that was the point that was made. The copy (that was YOU) will go on becoming someone else by gaining different experiences than “you”. But you will also be becoming someone else than you are now. “You” tomorrow will be a different “you” from today, therefore it is not really “you” (from today) anymore in the same way as the copy that really was you at the moment, but is not you anymore.
Whatever it was that was you at that particular moment would be another you at that moment and experience the exact you (however you define yourself).
I think Sean makes a strong argument that it's not somehow special to "you." But does that negate the value and remarkableness of this weird emergent property? Even if it doesn't have an impact on the wave function, it's still a crazy amazing phenomena. I, for one, would love to be able to create consciousness in a non-biological structure.
Why do you want to create new conscious entities?
A question I've been wrangling with:
Does MYCELIA have its own consciousness???
Might it provide a sounding board for the evolution of biological life?
Thank you for the inspirational education!!! ;-)
Of course it does. What it doesn't have is the capacity to experience consciousness.
I love Sean Carroll. He looks you in the eye and says what you refuse to believe is true. Aliens? ‘No’, Copenhagen? ‘No’, Consciousness? ‘Look at me… NO’
He’s reasonable regarding the philosophical identical copy questions. But the eliminativism regarding consciousness is incoherent.
Why should it be incoherent? What's your argument?
@@obiwanduglobi6359 It’s denying the problem as the way to pretend to solve it. Saying the earth is flat is silly-this is like saying the earth doesn’t have a shape at all. It’s denying our very existence, which is nonsensical. IMO!
Because if consciousness is weakly emergent then it has no causal power independent of the laws of physics as we currently understand them (deterministic and probabilistic). I.e. no free-will.
This would mean that we're not actually rational beings able to construct logical arguments and create mental models then go out and freely choose experiments to test them.
That means we have no reason to trust any of the scientific models we've created/discovered, because we didn't create/discover them: they're just the direct result of unthinking, unconscious, irrational deterministic/probabilistic fundamental forces.
They might be right, they might be wrong but we have no way to test them to decide because "we" are not free to intervene in the universe to do so.
But, if that's the case, then we just lost any reason to question the "reality" of conscious free will. We're back to square one and can build up our knowledge again, until we end up back where we are in Sean's metaphysics as described above.
I.e. Sean's metaphysics creates a paradox. The paradox means his metaphysics is wrong. Its akin to the maths of GR blowing up into infinities indicating that something is wrong with the model.
If Sean were better at philosophy (or, more likely if he were honest about his real opinions) he would admit that his metaphysics must be incorrect.
But Sean can't do that. Sean has research programs to bid for funding for and books to sell and the intellectual structure behind both endeavours requires this metaphysics to remain internally consistent and convincing enough to persuade customers.
It's a sad thing to watch very intelligent and capable people (much more so than I) waste their gifts on nonsense like this because they can't admit that they just can't imagine any satisfying alternatives.
It's even sadder to see such intellectuals cynically try to persuade colleagues and the public of such ideas simply to keep their careers and social status intact.
But unfortunately that's the world we live in. Perverse incentives drive perverse activities.
What goes around comes around.
@@MikeWiest There is no "eliminativism" Carol is simply pointing out that consciousness comes from matter, that its more than the sum of the parts of neurons in the brain. How that eliminates consciousness I have no clue. No one is arguing that
@@radscorpion8 Hm. That's how it seemed to me...maybe I'll rewatch...
First person experience?
I think what Robert not hearing or seeing here is what Sean is saying over and over again.
I can only guess what is the obstacle in Robert case/understanding.
Is this what religion/ faith do to cloud understanding or misinterpret information?
Interesting.
Yes I like that Robert is polite and respectful but he seems to almost sanctify consciousness as more significant than it probably is. If consciousness is produced by the brain as evidence shows, if we make an exact duplicate of someone there will be 2 people with identical consciousnesses that gradually diverge as time passes.
@@alankoslowski9473What evidence shows that? I think you are assuming the evidence will show that and as strictly materialistic that would be the case. However, the argument so far is that one day we will find this and be able to explain consciousness via materialism. Thus far we don't have that evidence. First even define consciousness so we can be on the same page as to what we are talking about. And until we have working definitions we certainly cannot say well it is here in this part of the brain, or there in that part. Or that it is in this or that neuron. Which we know is not the truth in either of those cases. Or we could say it is an emergent phenomenon from the interactions of neurons. Which I think brings us closer to the truth but you need to follow that path down to its ultimate logical conclusions starting with a clear definition first. It may lead to a weirder understanding of consciousness than first expected.
Sean is insanely patient here. Holy crap
Hearing yourself saying nonsense all the time indeed needs a lot pf patience.
A zombie THINKS it is comscious....
I think the point he's making is "what's a zombie"? If I copy paste myself atom for atom, is the second one a zombie? What's your definition of a zombie here?
@@jean-philippegrenier120 no theres 2 different examples in this case, the zombie in general and the clone. Clone is impossible, and even if possible, it would be a different observer, say we dont kill the original, they both exist. They must have their own independent perspective not 1 consciousness in superposition .
Secondly, what nobody truly understands is zombies. It is supposedly absolutely the same in terms of physical but it has no awerness. I don't know if such zombie is possible but , possible or not, it doesn't change the fact that Consciousnes is something truly extra over the brain. Charmlers argument is why Consciousnes really exists, why aren't we just a brain without awerness and experience. It should make sense physically. Zombies and clones are mostly irrelevant in this case
Sean is talking total nonsense so i doubt he's patient
Plus Consciousness isn't Computation as you can't shut it down it works 24/7 no matter you're sleeping or on anesthesia so saying that there's nothing special about consciousness is total BS!
Upload. Does that include memory?
I think this guest pretty much nailed it...good explanation. Why cant people realise that consciousness is simply an emergent property of brain biology. I wish this wasnt true but I think it is!
No empirical evidence of consciousness being an emergent property of brain biology. Subsequently, you could infer that consciousness interacts with the brain similar to WiFi interacting with the memory of a computer.
He did quite a good job. Sometimes I think the essence of experience seems too profound to emerge from matter. But having given the "why is there is something and not nothing" question some thought lately, the very existence of something is incomprehensible in and of itself, so why should an emergent phenomenon within that reality be a certain way.
yes, it is, but this conversation, just as your and my key strokes exist only in our conscious experience of it. there is no way for us to know reality other than through our consciousness. may be ai will know reality differently, but it too would be in its own artificial consciousness. thus one cannot make definitive conclusions which Sean is making. frankly, this is poor science and promoting such deterministic views is not beneficial in teaching public.
@@edwardtutman196 Yes but why should our key strokes have any other existence? You and I make the key strokes independently and experience them in a personal way. The way I experience them is simply a biological response to the mechanical process of the act of making key strokes.
It may be an emergent property of physical brain functions, but what we want to know is how it works. His beliefs explain nothing. He simply believes everything is material or physical. How do physical processes allow us to see the color red? Now that is science, and he seems to want to ignore that question.
I never expected Sean Carroll to be so clear-headed. Kuhn seems to be a bit defensive that his beliefs can be so simply challenged with an alternative explanation.
I am not going to accuse Carroll of incoherence for equating the continuity of consciousness over time with the continuity of identity between spatially separated clones because I think he was pressured into this position without fully thinking it through. He was pushing back against Kuhn's framework and ended up saying things he didn't entirely mean. He could have done better, given enough time.
Instead, I accuse him of being intellectually dishonest, by pretending the intuition that consciousness has a certain irreducibility to every other known thing, process, or property is not the natural default position. He framed it as Kuhn's metaphysically magical view, when in fact, it IS the default view of basically all humans (including Carroll himself when not philosophizing), and the only people who claim otherwise are a few radical, out of touch physicalists who earn respect by having the audacity to claim the most ridiculous things.
Dishonesty is perhaps too strong of an accusation. At most you can accuse him of laziness. Instead of hand waving the default position as magic, he could have brought more evidence for his own position, e.g. from neuroscience, split brain research, or computer science.
I'll accuse Sean of dishonesty. I think it's a deliberate schtick and he doesn't believe a word of it.
That or he's a philosophical zombie 😂
@@adamsawyer1763
"My position is obvious and who disagrees is dishonest" - philosophers of mind apparently
@@bdnnijs192 I'm a builder, not a philosopher of mind. And yes - it's very obvious hard physicalism is completely incoherent. If consciousness isn't causal and we have no free-will how can we trust any of our science which all depends on the experimenter being free to choose the variables to experiment with?
Hard physicalism is a dead-end. Get over it.
@@adamsawyer1763
If. Let's first fo us on getting to that point.
fyi Some people consider mo ing goalposts dishonest
Robert should have asked Sean "Why are you so confident that consciousness is just a physical property of brains, if you don't have a clue how the brain produces the first-person experience of qualia?"
The answer to that is: Because the brain explanation is the best game in town.
We don't know of anything that can't be described in physical terms ... and what would it mean if we did? As long as something has some sort of qualities, is defined by some sort of structure, can interact with the world, then it's still definitionally physical and subject to laws of physics. It just may be that our concept of "physical" needs to expand to incorporate and account for it (wouldn't be the first time!).
Someone being open-minded enough could concede that it's possible consciousness something other than the brain, or something in addition to the brain -- that it could be best thought of as the result of the brain's interaction with all sorts of other internal and external systems, that it could have significant components in other part of the body, that it could even be the product of something being beamed into us from elsewhere.
But we sure do have a lot of science saying most or all of the activity that seems important to mind and consciousness is based in the brain, and our best understanding is that's where the action is.
I think it's also probably unfair to say we, collectively, don't have a CLUE how the brain produces a first-person experience. I think we have lots of clues. We don't have a definitive understanding, but we have lots of fruitful ideas about it based on interesting and good indications in neuroscience and biology.
>LouisHochmanTheJourno : It's a fallacious form of "induction" to say that since everything _else_ appears to be physical, we can be very confident that consciousness is too. Like the chicken that's carefully tended each day by the farmer, which has no reason to expect the farmer will one day bring an axe instead of food.
You may be right that that's the explanation of Sean's confidence. The video fails by not eliciting his reasoning... just like so many "Closer to Truth" videos fail.
There's a little-known variant of Dualism in which consciousness is a passive experiencer of (some of) the brain's activity, and it doesn't affect the brain's activity. You're only making an assumption where you wrote that it "can interact with the world."
It's fair to say "no one has a clue" how the brain produces qualia (David Chalmers' "hard problem") due to the explanatory gap that no one has been able to bridge (yet). I acknowledge that neuroscience is still a young science, so I'm not claiming the hard problem will _never_ be solved. But my understanding is that currently there aren't any hypotheses for how the gap could be filled. It's still like the comic that shows a scientist at a chalkboard containing complex diagrams & equations, saying "and then a miracle happens."
The question as to whether if you could make an identical duplicate of a person and whether they would (a) share a single consciousness, or (2) each have their own, is easy to resolve. Consider first that we are not “conscious” 100% of the time, even when we are awake. Sometimes you have a train of thought and you follow that thought, but you are are not conscious in the usual sense, as when someone asks you a question and you have to think about it very carefully. Sometimes you are just on autopilot until you realize you are not really aware of what you were doing. Then you are conscious. But you are still the same “person” in both cases. The difference is self-reflection - using your short-term memory to remember what you were just doing. So in a sense, there are two yous, one that is “not” conscious, and one that is, but they are the same person. So if consciousness can come and go, is it something that would be transferred when you duplicate someone? No! It’s a function of the brain. When you are in deep sleep, or anesthetized, you are clearly not conscious, and furthermore can’t remember anything. When asleep you can only remember your dream because that is a different state of sleep and your short-term memory is working, which is why you can remember a dream right when you wake up. If you don’t remember it right away, it will disappear. So consciousness is not a constant state of being. It comes and goes, and is only the same in terms of the person who is conscious. We all relate to consciousness the same way, because it is the same process in all of us. It doesn’t depend on the contents of our thoughts, but rather in fact that if you reflect on what is in your mind, you realize you were thinking or feeling or sensing something different a few moments ago, yet YOU are still “here”, so that thread of brain activity seems to provide a sense of constancy, which you intrpret as your “self”. Clearly this is quite paradoxical, yet it makes sense - upon reflection!
Even if one spaces out, sleeps, goes under anesthesia, there is a feeling that that consciousness that spaced out…is continuous with the consciousness of before. We are conscious of being the consciousness that spaced out and came back.
@@ivanobar1 There is only one reality and that is the only consciousness you can know. The consciousness you had yesterday does not exist. You remember lots of things about yourself from yesterday and conclude that you were conscious. And you are definitely not conscious during general anesthesia because you don't remember anything during that period. You can remember a "lucid" dream because you were conscious during the dream (by definition). You can remember your last minute or so of a dream just after you wake up because the dream is still in your working memory - which is the memory of the last minute or 2 of your experience. Thus even though you might remember a dream just after you "awaken" (and become conscious) does not mean you were conscious during that dream. (Working memory is inactivated during general anesthesia.) Finally, people that have anterograde amnesia (and cannot form new memories) are conscious and have intact working memory - but that memory is not "saved"). So working memory is necessary for consciousness, and your "feeling" that you "were" conscious yesterday is because you remember yesterday just like it was (in some respects at least) yesterday or even last year. People with anterograde amnesia cannot rmember if they were conscious yesterday!
If I know I am going under anesthesia, and wake from it, there is continuity. As far as “reality/being in the moment,experiencing the now” that’s another issue.
You seem to make a distinction between logical awareness and consciousness. A dog is conscious without the complex awareness of a human, yet it is still conscious. Even after anesthesia, it awakes and feels like it is the same thing that went to sleep and is now awake.
If you’re saying that the only reality is the present moment, sure. But even then, because one experiences the external world in the past; light (causality, the fastest we can receive a signal) is experienced through time and space; it has already happened by the time our brain registers the phenomena.
There is a distinction between the “experience” of the present and memory. I’d argue that memory (real or planted, as in sci fi) are necessary for continuity, and therefore consciousness. Every animal has some memory, short it may be, and they have some awareness, though filtered through the structure of a brain particular to its species.
This is great--thanks for uploading
If Sean had made his point about consciousness being an emergent physical property existing only in this MOMENT OF TIME they could have avoided 10 minutes of arguing. This issue of what actually makes me ME or you You has got to be the most perplexing and fundamental in philosophy or science. I know it's been argued for thousands of years, but if someone made an atom for atom copy of me and then destroyed the original no one would notice. But I would be dead, right? Or not?
Someone making the exact copy of you atom by atom, and YOU naturally changing moment to moment the same way, is the exact same thing. So, explain to us, how come when you naturally change, you continue to live in every instance of your body. You are different, but you still exist. While if someone make the exact copy of you artificially, then you don't exist in that body. You are dead if original is destroyed. It is the exact same thing. In natural copies, original of you gets destroyed, and the next moment new copy is made. But you are alive and exist. There is a sense of continuity, Carrol claims that artificially made copy is no longer yourself. It is contradicting because it is the exact same thing as naturally made copy
@@milannesic5718 Good point. And yet it seems that if the original is destroyed, that individual would be dead, even though an exact copy lives on. Carroll is saying that's what happens moment by moment as we change through time. (And I believe every 5 years or so all the material in our bodies DOES get replaced). But then, as you say, he contradicts himself with the artificial copy hypothetical. I want to believe "I" would live on in the copy of myself - but what if 5 copies were made? Mind-bending.
I think too many people got confused. The interviewer played the ignorant fool, and Sean tried his best to reply to sensibility. The biggest point Sean made was irregardless of the copies and the deletion of the original. There are two separate conscious's, and deleting the original does not matter to the copy after it is made. This is just a sifi movie. Sean starts with truth and works out a theory not the other way around.
@@runningwildttv3648 No, Sean was the one avoiding the question about how matter can have inner feelings, because it is very hard to answer. Kuhn tried to rephrase the question multiple times, but Sean played confident and dodged it. And our conversation here is about how come when we you make a copy artificially there are 2 consciousness, but when it happens naturally to you moment, by moment every day, the same consciousness persist? It is exactly the same thing. It does not matter if you artificially make another me. Same thing happens every moment according to Sean, yet, it is only one consciousness that persist
Sean's contention here is that the you that exists at any moment in time doesn't have any more inherent connection to the you that existed a moment ago than a copy would. Both experience a continuity and relationship to moment-ago-you by building on their memories and only being slightly different in their composition. But he doesn't buy that there's some sort of inherent continuity that the "original" maintains and that the "copy" doesn't.
That thinking likely comes easily to him because he's already used to thinking of the universe splitting into many worlds ad infinitum as the wave function evolves, and a bajillion Seans across the multiverse sharing the history of a precursor Sean.
The argument would be that even though we experience a persistence of identity, it's just an abstraction, not a fundamental aspect of reality.
So now-me and now-copy-me both get to claim before-me as our past self with the same validity. We're both entitled to work with the same abstraction.
1- While I agree that the hard problem of consciousness ought to be solved by purely materialistic means, I think the hard problem of consciousness is very much a thing.. and after years I still find the philosophical zombie argument very compelling.. Today we have LLMs.. If it starts talking _exactly_ like a human would, does that equate to consciousness? No!
On the issuenof identity that they got tangled, I think Sean is spot on. I find it interesting that even intelligent thinkers like Kuhn cannot see identity for what it is, a higher level concept, extremely useful for humans, yes, but nowhere to be found on fundamental reality.. We have no problem thinking of a duplicated river, or cloud, also higher level constructs, but then most people can't make the leap and see that what you call "you" is not fundamental, but rather just as much as a higher level useful construct. As Sam Harris puts it, there is no thinker of thoughts, experiencer of experiences, there are just the thoughts and the experiences.
Sean Carroll, always the voice of reason
You could argue that without a quantitative complement * , there's no either emergent, nor not emergent, consciousness.
* The complement of one in list one two is two.
Robert fired up. Sean expressed a view and articulated. Not sure why Robert was so personally (ha) invested in the challenge.
Because all views should be hard challenged. It is all speculation. You can't just agree. You need to shake everything
The first one would have continuous experience, supported by the remaining set of biological neurons at a given point in time, and the replicant wouldn't. That is, the transistors that are in place in the original during transition are being updated while the ones in the replicant aren't? So memories (conscious or otherwise) wouldn't be the same and that might define identity.
that was good 20 years ago at the apex of new materialism ... Now is an obsolete conversation.
Oh the hard problem of consciousness was solved, I missed that!
@@paulrussell1207 exactly, pretending to explain consciousness as "neurons firing" today is, at least, pretentious. 20 years ago was mainstream.
@@francesco5581 It still holds true. Only the details have not been worked out.
@@rckflmg94 no, there is not ONE model about the production of consciousness from neurons. We dont even know where to start.
@@francesco5581 who is "we"? Neuroscientists all over the world are researching it as we type.
Thanks! This hard struggling between you and your opponent about cloned person, boils down to the fact that person and his body is not the same thing. See, the tree has visible part and invisible, which holds the visible. I'm talking about the root. No one is impressed by it (no one sees it), but it is the most important part. When the tree is chopped down, everyone forgets about it, until.. grows a new body from the same spirit
carroll says consciousness is "another (higher level) way of talking about things"
the "other ways of talking about things" incl the ways we talk about physics, viz, as objective phenomena
but we can only talk about physics bc we are conscious
so the "other ways" contain the same problem of conscious experience, only the problem is implicit and is (almost) never explicitly "talked about" when talking about physics
ie, carroll's "another way" doesn't explain conscious experience
bc the "other ways" don't explain conscious experience
they just take conscious experience for granted
I agree with carroll that consciousness is not a precondition of reality
it emerges as a physical phenomenon (in animals)
but it is a precondition of talking - and theorizing - about reality
a precondition that is so necessary we seldom acknowledge it and take it as given
as carroll does here
re uploading one's consciousness, it's impossible using the computing paradigm of software running on hardware
the best such computers could do is simulate consciousness by running a mathematical model of the brain
but a mathematical model is already a symbolic abstraction
the numerical solution of the model is a further numerical abstraction
as well as a discrete approximation of the continuous equations
what theory of consciousness would survive such abstractions and approximations?
the best one could hope for is a model that correctly computes physical processes and simulates cognitive products, like thoughts and emotions,
but without any accompanying experience of having thoughts or emotions
ie, a zombie
like chat-get and other llms
ie, zombie brain models = ai
btw, a consequence of the above is consciousness is prima facie evidence we don't live in a simulation
"cogito ergo sum"
- descartes
@@rossw1365 Of course sometimes we are zombies. When we are in deep dreamless sleep, or under deep sedation, or sleepwalking. We are not always consciously aware. It's an activity, something we sometimes do, and sometimes we don't do it. Buddhists and other practitioners of meditation talk about transcending the self, and finding on introspection that there is no inner unitary self. Ot's a model of ourselves that our mind constructs so that it can reason about it.
Amazing argument!
I would ask Sean "where is the mind located?" And then push this question so hard!
Look at your phone. Where is the software that runs on it located? Let's be even more specific - where is the UA-cam app you are using right now located?
@@degigi2003 the software along with the memory of my phone is made of ones and zeros, all which attached to, and work by physical stuff. Similar to the conscious mind.
but where is the unconscious mind and the human memory stored?!
where does all that unconscious mental processing occur?
@@ghaderpashayee8334I answered your original question. What are you trying to get at with this question?
@@degigi2003A phone is designed. Are you arguing human mind is designed?
@@MarkPatmos at the bottom line, I think the whole space-time is an illusion-like world made by the mind, and everything material is a manifestation of the mind, and the mind is something beyond space and time.
The fallacy of studying consciousness via the modalities of reductionist scientism was made immediately apparent to me when, post-LSD trip, I was asked by a reputable psychedelic scientist, "On a scale of 1-10, how ephemeral was your experience?". At that point, I realised it was pure folly to keep probing consciousness through the narrow lens of modern materialist dogmatism.
Sounds to me like the near death experience ppl have. Nothing special.
Considering the
Unfolding Conscious Actuality of ...Phenomenology, Metaphysics and Conscience.... coming forth and going forward.
Why has this resurfaced now? Isn’t it an old video?
I think one must define “world” first. What is existence and what created the first laws of motion kind of questions
I don’t think there is a threshold for consciousness, as exemplified by the current American condition.
Yes... we are aiming to excel.
@@Ekam-Sat Making American great again! A bad joke and cannot happen. On the retrograde.
Here is MY Mathamatical formula for consciousness:
C= A(i 5f+O5f)c2
I= inside output electrical pattern
f= feeling
O =outside input electrical pattern
A= awareness
5= senses
C2= speed of light squared
Here is my take on mysterious consciousness:
Physical body and Brain is like a TV 📺 and Consciousness is the electrons flowing through wires creating images and voices on TV. Without flow of electrons TV is like a dead person. With web cam it can analyze the surroundings. Consciousness is little more than electrons. Chain of mitochondria arranged in brain 🧠 nerves that have ATP and phosphorous of ATP is similar to phosphorous of TV screen. When the TV is turned on, the phosphor coating absorbs high-energy electrons that are directed at them by a device inside of the TV.
Some day, Consciousness could very well be 5th dimension. Just for fun 🤩
It is too disconcerting to think deep about it and so I stopped analyzing it.
What are the units of all these variables, and particularly consciousness?
@@simonhibbs887 In case you are unaware, he made this up!
@@thomabow8949 Sure, but then all ideas are made up.
I like how you wrote MY in caps
Yah I made this up for fun. Isn’t it good 😊
A good philosopher of mind ought to take Sean under his or her wing and initiate him into the history of this conversation, as he's clearly motivated and making a good effort towards participating in the discussion.
I think for example he should be pressed on the differences between physicalism and functionalism, since e.g., he often takes the stance of a hard physicalist (which classically does not allow consciousness in non-neural media, since it's the exact identity physics of neurons or some processes that are necessary, depending if it's token or type) but actually talks as if he's a functionalist (which classically does allow it, and it's not an identity relation), and then he equivocates between them, which is what a good philosophical training helps one tease apart.
Kuhn actually does a good job trying to catch him. Not many are seriously denying that there's a physical substrate at the base of consciousness. Even property dualists and some panpsychists (if read the right way) don't deny that. If that's the only thing Sean is trying to say (sort of like Sapolsky on free will) then it's kind of a straw man argument. The argument is what's the nature of the relationship between the conscious and the physical substrate, identity, type, token, higher level organization but then what level and what organization, etc.? Classical physicalism is very strictly, it can only be neurons of brains, arguably only primate brains, and functionalism is a lot more nuanced about it (it's the information processing, not the physics primitives per se), but that also has a lot of things to explain. Sean (like Sapolsky) needs to bumped up to that higher-level discussion to actually be participating in the field.
I'm a big fan of his efforts to initiate non-specialists into the basics of theoretical physics, so that's what I'm thinking about would also be great to see in the other direction.
My guess is that Sean wouldn't say for sure consciousness can be reproduced in non-neural media, but that he just doesn't see anything so special about neural media that he'd assume it's the only way to get there, that it has some "other" property that makes it different from the ordinary organization of matter. And then he grants for the sake of a thought experiment the idea of being uploaded or duplicated in other media. I'd bet if pressed, he'd say he doesn't know enough (and supposes no one knows enough) about neurobiology to know if consciousness can only exist in vehicles like the ones we're aware of, or if it can be substrate independent so long as the higher-level organization is up to the job.
Kuhn gets pretty hung up on the idea that the upload isn't a transfer, but a duplication, and for a moment seems confused about whether Sean sees a distinction between the computer upload and the neuronal duplication. But ultimately Sean's argument is that any sense of continuity between self in any two moments is just a useful abstraction anyway,. Sean seems largely unconcerned, for the sake of the discussion, whether he's talking about being uploaded to a computer or reproduced neuron by neuron in some other process -- it just didn't seem like the point of focus. He seems to be granting that so long as it's an effective recreation of one's self, you can continue the discussion to ask if it's the same person or another ... but then also argues that's moot.
The relationship is survival of structure or material object by being in time or conscious
Behaviour of material in a survival disposition correlates to the need to be aware for participation in survival of self by interaction with environment which is behaviour compressed into evolution over time scales.
@@LouisHochmanTheJourno I more or less agree with your take. I'm just saying in the philosophical literature that's closer to functionalism, not what falls under the label "physicalism". He sounds agnostic on the actual physical mechanism, only that there's a physical base, so weak physicalism.
@@cademosley4886My (possibly wrong) perception is that he's just not all that concerned for the purpose of this discussion about whether it's very tied to a particular medium or whether it's more about higher-level organization. He seems to grant it at least could be the latter, for the purpose of the thought experiment, but I don't know whether he's making a claim that it probably is.
He seems much more interested in where Robert tries to take him, asking once you have a duplicate that we agree is a meaningfully real duplicate, where does the continuity of consciousness live. And Sean's answer to that is that continuity of consciously isn't what we usually think of it to be, but rather just us noticing the similarity to our past-selves' state of being. And from that perspective, both the duplicate and the "original" have equal claims on being a continuation of the past self.
Sean Carroll's explanation of consciousness (if you can call it that) is very unconvincing. He's essentially saying that matter produces consciousness albeit highly evolved matter. If this is true please tell me the answer to this riddle.
When two heart cells are placed on a microscope slide we can see them beat, yes heart cells actually pulsate in regular beats separate from the heart until they die. When these two cells are close enough to touch, one delays it's beat and then beats in sync with the other. These are not neurons, or brain cells yet something akin to energy and information passes between them. The ability for them to combine and increase their level of energy is intentional and directed by some form of consciously applied action, because it takes a physical action to stop one cell and then coordinate and start simultaneous beats. How else could they achieve this unitary result?
At 4:40 Sean Carroll makes the statement that "zombies" provide the most compelling argument for his position. The problem is "zombies" are mythical and don't exist. Whenever this unfortunate analogy comes up confusion results because any imaginary creature or "zombie" can be ascribed as having any mental quality one might choose.
The only reference point we have in discerning the origin of consciousness is our thoughts, observations of the physical world, and speculative imagination. All we see in our universe strongly infers that consciousness is a fundamental property of the cosmos and not an emergent phenomenon. What is an emergent phenomenon is the human capacity to experience that preexisting consciousness, emergent because it took the evolutionary development of our large brains to grow into the ability to directly experience that consciousness.
A physical explanation of consciousness is hopelessly inadequate in explaining a fine tuned universe and the ubiquitously observed phenomenon of evolved emergent complexity, because these well observed characteristics of the cosmos have been present long before the emergence of human experience, and observation.
This narrow and highly speculative point of view is in many respects similar to solipsism in that it can never be refuted, not because it's valid, but because adherents to this questionable idea can always retreat into a subjective position of skepticism and outright denial. We see this toward the end of the interview when Mr Carroll repeatedly says to Mr Kuhn that he's imbuing the concept of "you" with a metaphysical connotation. The problem with this answer is it seems to deny the first person subjective experience that each of us undeniably have. If one says to this "well how do we know that all of us have this experience of being self aware?" Once this one way interrogatory door is opened, any notion or belief is suspect. This line of thinking ends with the extreme and hopelessly subjective world of solipsism that denies all external reality, and it can never be disproved.
There's an unspoken back story here that's not evident. The question of the origin of consciousness has very powerful theological implications that skeptics like Mr Carroll are not comfortable with and they're obvious. If consciousness is universal it must have a transcendent source and this means a supreme being. Mr Carroll frequently and justifiably rails against the dogma of traditional religion. Religion and the existence of God are two totally different subjects. I join those who excoriate the silly, backward and intellectually harmful practices of traditional religion, because religion and it;s dogma are poison to the human mind. I'm also thoroughly convinced that an eternal, supervening, "nonphysical" reality created our universe, governs and sustains all existent reality. Universal consciousness is an omniscient expression of this supreme reality.
>The ability for them to combine and increase their level of energy is intentional and directed by some form of consciously applied action, because it takes a physical action to stop one cell and then coordinate and start simultaneous beats. How else could they achieve this unitary result?
That's just feedback loop synchronisation. We can do this with cyclical electrical circuits, when you couple them together they synchronise with each other. No consciousness required and we undrstand how and why it occurs.
@@simonhibbs887 I don't think your analogy is applicable. Your phrase "feedback loop synchronization" can be used to describe why two separate tributaries combine with other tributaries to form a river. You are describing process which is always mechanical and bound by the laws of physics. Organic systems are far more complex than the electrical circuits you mention.
We might say that matter coalesces with other matter because of gravity and we would be correct, but this doesn't begin to explain why that matter then evolves into emergent complexity. In any attempt to explain why, not how, but why matter behaves as it does empiricists never get past the circular reasoning of seeing "process" as the reason why matter and our universe is the way it is when in fact "process" can only tell us how and not why reality is constituted as it is.
Science and empirical observation richly describe the physics and chemistry of the natural world and very accurately, but are not equipped to answer questions beyond function and process.
Let's return to the analogy of the two heart cells that beat independently on a microscope slide, but beat in unison once they touch. We grant that once the chemical trigger is present a number of chemical reactions cascade into the eventual result of the two cells pulsing in unity. Science can describe in physical terms what happens once the trigger is active but if we go deeper into this question we come to a point where we have a set of precedent conditions that entail no change in the cells behavior and then a physical action occurs, a physical action that from the perspective of the beating cell is comprehensive and irresistible. All the subtle complexity that follows the initial change must begin with something that governs the behavior of the two cells, something that "responds" to the new "set of conditions" namely the contiguous presence of another beating heart cell. If we keep peeling the onion back, at some point we come to a place in the heart cells interior chemistry where all that exists is a set of conditions and potential outcomes that will be subsequently expressed in how the cell looks and behaves. Let's now assume we know every chemical and molecular value in that cell. We would see nothing in that cell to indicate any change until a triggering event takes place and the source of this trigger is a mystery.
It seems obvious but in order for the heart cell to be reprogrammed to work in sync with its counterpart atoms and their much larger derivative structures molecules must be physically moved. This movement is fundamentally different than the normal functioning action of the cell in a condition of stasis. All observations so far, very strongly suggest that something separate and independent of the cells internal structure triggers a new behavior or adaptation in order to preserve itself.
You can take process down to the micro level and have a complete knowledge of how matter and energy work and still, you will never know the source of what triggers matter to behave in novel ways.
Something physical, or rather something that governs and modifies the physical is emerging from something nonphysical. The only sensible answer that explains more than any competing line of thought is that "universal consciousness" is the governing reality of our universe. Consciousness governs all, and it's the reason why heart cells behave as they do.
@@michaelmckinney7240 >You are describing process which is always mechanical and bound by the laws of physics. Organic systems are far more complex than the electrical circuits you mention.
Right, but we know for a fact that physical systems with periodic behaviour can synchronise with each other through entirely physical processes. Therefore when we see another example of such systems synchronising we do not need to assume any non-physical influence. Just because it’s complicated doesn’t make it magic. There are many, many examples I can give of physical systems that harmonise their periodicity trough physical feedback mechanisms.
You go deeper into that later in your comment, but don’t add anything substantive. Physical cyclic systems tend to synchronise with each other, and heart cells are physical cyclic systems.
>in fact "process" can only tell us how and not why reality is constituted as it is.
I’m not claiming I know why the universe is the way it is at a fundamental level, but the fact is many of the phenomena we observe are the result of the behaviour of underlying phenomena. The behaviour of elementary particles can be explained in terms of quantum fields. The behaviour of atoms and electrical components can be entirely explained by the behaviour of elementary particles. The behaviour of a flip-flop circuit can be entirely explained by the activity of electrical components. There is a hierarchy of causal processes and behaviours that we understand very well.
Some phenomena we don’t yet understand very well, and one of them is consciousness, but not understanding it now does not imply that it is not comprehensible.
>Science and empirical observation richly describe the physics and chemistry of the natural world and very accurately, but are not equipped to answer questions beyond function and process.
I agree, which is why I think analysing consciousness in terms of information processing is the best way to go. After all everything about consciousness is informational. Our senses respond to signals with informational content, consciousness is about things, it models other systems and makes predictions about them, it is representational, it is self-referential, it acts recursively, it modifies it’s own behaviour. All of these are properties and activities of information systems that we understand. I think we just need to figure out how they compose together to form self-aware consciousness.
>In other words something physical emerges from something nonphysical.
That’s an inference or assertion, but it’s not an observation. You have no evidence of anything happening in those cells that isn’t entirely explicable in physical terms.
@@simonhibbs887 Thank you Simon for your engaging reply. It's clear you've given these questions serious thought. Let me start with your last comment and proceed to your general rebuttal. You Say;
"That’s an inference or assertion, but it’s not an observation. You have no evidence of anything happening in those cells that isn’t entirely explicable in physical terms."
Yes this is true, but you are doing the same thing when you "assert" the contrary. When you suggest there's nothing happening in those cells that can't be "entirely" as you say, explained in physical terms you are making a statement based on a supposition. Your assumption and the assumption of all empirical science is; if any particular phenomenon, including hypothetical phenomenon can't be observed, or measured in some way it has no possibility of being real. Strict empiricism agrees with you that reality can and must be, as you say "entirely explicable in physical terms."
This point of view is valid in a Newtonian world where simple "cause and effect" provided adequate and reliable models of how the natural world works, but begins to break down when confronted with modern physics an the advent of quantum mechanics. The "observer effect" in the split screen experiment clearly demonstrates when a consciously observing participant inserts himself in the process, the behavior of matter and energy is altered.
How does one explain this in purely physical terms?
You also say;
"which is why I think analysing consciousness in terms of information processing is the best way to go. After all everything about consciousness is informational. Our senses respond to signals with informational content, consciousness is about things, it models other systems and makes predictions about them, it is representational, it is self-referential, it acts recursively, it modifies it’s own behaviour. All of these are properties and activities of information systems that we understand."
You are describing cognition, not consciousness. Processing information, whether through perception or memory is not consciousness. All cognition is medium dependent and based entirely on brain function. All thought is cognitive and information based as you say, but not consciousness. Consciousness precedes cognition and makes cognition possible. Cognition is an emergent property while consciousness is not. One might then ask "what is consciousness?" Here's my answer to this difficult question and I use an analogy to help explain.
If we walk into a movie theater filled with people we can sense an air of expectation as all in the auditorium settle in for what they expect will be a new and novel experience and when the lights go out the audience is hushed and ready. Anticipation palpably hangs in the air and a readiness for what's coming like runners poised to start a hundred yard dash waiting for the pistol shot. Moments before the presentation starts minds are eager and receptive but there's more in that auditorium than curiosity and expectation. There's an enhanced degree of "consciousness" also in the theater and the "experience" of seeing this new presentation whether it's humorous or dramatic takes place within a supervening reality of consciousness that renders the experience meaningful and intelligible.
Consciousness is a universal backdrop within which all cognition is made possible. Cognition derives from consciousness, not the reverse.
You also say;
"Just because it’s complicated doesn’t make it magic. There are many, many examples I can give of physical systems that harmonise their periodicity trough physical feedback mechanisms."
I am not saying that something magical is governing the behavior of matter. I'm saying that once we accept the idea that consciousness does govern the behavior of matter and energy questions like why we live in a "fine tuned" universe or the "observer effect" in quantum mechanics become clearer and more discernible.
As far as physical systems being self resonant goes, yes I agree with you, they are, but what is it that makes them so? You say it's entirely physical. I say only the observable, and measurable is physical, and at the heart of all reality whether seen or unseen, whether measured or not is universal consciousness.
@@michaelmckinney7240 >…you are making a statement based on a supposition. …if any particular phenomenon, including hypothetical phenomenon can't be observed, or measured in some way it has no possibility of being real.
I think we can agree that consciousness has physical effects in the world because we make conscious decisions and act on them in the world. These actions in the world are observable. Therefore the effects of consciousness in the world must be observable and therefore measurable.
>The "observer effect" in the split screen experiment clearly demonstrates when a consciously observing participant inserts himself in the process, the behavior of matter and energy is altered.
This was a supposition by some physicists in the early days of quantum mechanics but nowadays this idea has been discarded. It’s not compatible with what we know about quantum decoherence. The ‘observer effect’ is a measurement effect, not anything specifically to do with conscious observers.
>You are describing cognition, not consciousness.
No, I’m talking about consciousness. It’s also true about cognition because cognition is also an informational process. Name any aspect of consciousness that does not pertain to information.
>Processing information, whether through perception or memory is not consciousness.
I didn’t say it is. I said consciousness is processing information. Consciousness is in the class of information processes, not the other way around.
>Consciousness precedes cognition and makes cognition possible.
We have cognitive function when we are not conscious.
>There's an enhanced degree of "consciousness" also in the theater and the "experience" of seeing this new presentation…
This is because humans are social beings and a large part of our awareness is devoted to interpreting and responding to the mental states of others in our group. There’s nothing supernatural about that, it’s a feedback loop as we all observe and respond to the behaviour of the others, and through our responses stimulate their behaviour and responses in turn. It’s a self-reinforcing behavioural cycle.
>I say only the observable, and measurable is physical, and at the heart of all reality whether seen or unseen, whether measured or not is universal consciousness.
This is why I previously talked about the hierarchy of causation and effects caused by underlying phenomena. When we get down to the bedrock of the most fundamental phenomena we are aware of then we can’t say much meaningful beyond that. Energy, quantum fields, spacetime, beyond those we cannot see. However the phenomena caused by space, time, energy, etc can be fully explained in terms of those phenomena. I think consciousness is most likely explicable in that way.
I take it you’re an idealist. I have no particular problem with idealism, it’s a reasonable opinion to hold. We simply put the order of causation in a different series, you put consciousness at the bottom (with causation running upwards) where I put it somewhere at the top.
Consciousness: important and useful, and Not fundamental (necessarily), (perhaps) emergent
No its fundamental to survival especially humans or more complete structures. A need not want or requirement for real life survival you cant survive without it or it is what it is.
Wow. My head is spinning. A simpler explanation please.
Right after Robert asked the question about consciousness the universe splitted and Sean Carroll started preaching why God is necessary in human existence.
Your consciousness is very unique , for it has its own space-time volume making it so.
Any clone of you will be in its own space-time volume and therefore cannot be you. I know your own volume changes from moment to moment but that flow is your own unique river.
Each individual structure is unique but it all has one thing in common, survival of self. The conscious 'Behaviour' is just another variant or expression or extension of survival in bio logical life. Its why AI wont be conscious or aware because it has no survival history.
Yes, the copy won't be you, but will feel exactly like you.
@@degigi2003 Exactly? Don't forget that each particle within you is under gravitational influence from the whole universe. For your clone, things would feel very slightly different. Also, the energy surging through your body would immediately, have a different acceleration to that of the clone, which would affect your thoughts, feelings and perceptions. Also, if the 'Many-Worlds' interpretation of quantum physics, is true, your clone may be present in a different number of branches than you, causing a multitude of different feelings throughout the 'Realm'.
Many years ago I wrote down some thoughts whether or not there was a “purpose” to the existence of the Universe.The existence of consciouness is a puzzle, only if you ignore Emergence. The Emergence of consciousness, at its roots, may simply be the inevitable result of the evolution of complexity inherent to the interactions of the Fields within the Wave Function of the Universe as it travels, and evolves, through Time on the playing field of Spacetime. We exist as entities at some point on that evolutionary path set down at the BB.The creation of the Wave Function of the Universe which began its journey at the BB, now travels that path. Its journey will ultimately play out on playing field governed by rules we barely comprehend. But it should surprise no one that over some immense Time period the random complex interactions taking place gave rise to some complex result which we now define as consciousness. We, who carry this consciousness, now question the very notion of existence itself. We are not unlike some version of AI which now seeks to answer the question of “why” it exists.
It infuriates me when Sean says "the zombie *thinks* it's conscious".
He doesn't understand the hard problem. The point is that under the view that 3rd person physics controls everything, we should all be zombies. Zombies are perfectly conceivable. It's the non-zombies that are the mystery.
His point is that zombies are just as convinced that they are not zombies, as the non-zombies. So what's the difference?
@@socraplatotleusSo does the zombie.
@@degigi2003 The zombie is not convinced of anything, because for the zombie, there is nothing that it is like TO BE convinced. That's what makes it a zombie!
@@Jacob-Vivimordhow do you know that? You have never been a zombie.
I disagree with Sean's take on the uploaded copy of his neurons. If you think of the neurons as the data on a computer, and you copy that to something else, all you would have is a record of your experiences, but there's something missing. It's missing the production of thoughts, feelings, hopes and forward thinking. Those things may be what gives you consciousness and a soul.
Obviously, once you "upload" the neurons to a computer, you will also have to give them input (sight, touch, smell, etc) and some output (a body to control), and let them do their thing by running the simulation.
No soul or spirit chief that's survival only and my territory. The disposition is survival of self or structure and is automatically attached to life and probable other entities smaller objects. Otherwise your going to have tom postulate souls or spirits to all complex biological life historically, present and future including first consciousness creatures and make room for them in the after life based on behaviour. It is not man oriented but all biolife which must be considered. This means that because the after life is eternal and humans are later editions to evolution we would also be later editions to the after life but you would still need to rely on old lingo of souls and spirits which Im afraid Ive already owned.
Survival is missing from consciousness that's why you go missing once you don't have it.
Please have a guest telling us how far off this up-loading of individual consciousness is. For some of us, time is running out. 😢
If it makes you feel better time is running out for all of us.
It will be in the tPhone 25
i specialise in the study of consciousness and the actual physics of consciousness
@@arabellathais ok so?
Most transhumanist thinkers say it would be a seperate stream of consciousness, even including Kurzweil, though he holds to a seperate theory of identity . Your best hope for “true” immortality would be biological through LEV, which Aubrey de Grey gives a 50% chance of happening in the next 15 years, though I haven’t read him that closely.
Not sure much was discussed on emergence from this discussion. A pump emerges from a specific structure of heart cells. Does consciousness emerge from simple Darwinian sub-directives? Why exist at all unless emergence is more in control than chaos? My interest "emerges" w these discussions. Thx.
Sean Carroll not understanding the zombie argument is pretty rich stuff, extremely telling of the level of thought pop physicalists operate at.
If, hypothetically, Sean, there actually exists a p-zombie, it does not mean that we can't know if we ourselves are not zombies. We don't figure out if other people have consciousness in the same way we figure that we ourselves are conscious.
We don't think we are not zombies because we say the words "I am not a zombie" like the zombie would, we think we aren't zombies because we know there is something it is like to be us. It is not an inference we make, but something that is immediately given to us before inferences can start being made.
If you reject this, then you reject phenomenality exists and are an eliminativist. But let's not use misunderstandings of epistemology to reach that position.
"Sean Carroll not understanding the zombie argument is pretty rich stuff"
He not only understands it, he debunked it completely. It's pretty rich stuff that you could watch this entire thing and not understand that. I guess it's telling of the level of thought youtube commentors operate at.
@@fullyawakened What is your issue with the substance of my comment then? What is the mistake I’m making?
Think he understands it perfectly well, better than the people who came up with the experiment, he just rejects it as confused. If you accept that physically identical things cannot differ in their properties, then the thought experiment never gets off the ground--they either both have consciousness or neither or them does, depending on your take. I don't think the p zombie idea is a coherent at all, personally. It's a difference made by pure stipulation, and I would say we have a lot more evidence for the physicalist view than we do for the idea that these things can come apart. Those who think the p zombie idea is meaningful conflate the fact that consciousness on the one hand and matter/structure on the other are conceptually distinguishable with the idea that they must be, in principle, metaphysically or ontologically distinguishable. But just because we can imagine it, doesn't make it possible. And the burden of proof for its plausibility lies with those who champion it, not those who challenge it, imo.
@@fullyawakened what’s your issue with how I’ve explained him being wrong?
Well I think from a physicalist's perspective, the p-zombie would act and look like a human but would have a different internal arrangement of atoms that denied it the first person experience, if they were aligned in a certain way, it would start to have an internal experience. Which is why he seems to believe consciousness is substrate independent. In a sense I meet p-zombies every time I go to sleep. But they are my dreams. Why is how a hypothetical p-zombie acts or looks to an outside observer (conscious) relevant to how it actually is? My intuition does still tell me that the "strange loop" being like something at all, is not definitive, and is certainly unsatisfying, I'm not sure if that is because it is incomplete or missing the prime ingredient, or just because the abstractions made imagining it are misleading.
I think we need to change some of the language we use in QM that are not quite appropriate to what is going on or at least distinguish between different processes.
One of those Terms is measurement. If you could make measurement without interfering with the system than that could indeed be called measurement but if the act of measurement involves purturbing the state then that is not just measurement.
Then we can quantify how much puturbation a specifics state can tolerate before it is affect the state.
This will involve some real quatification and then extrapolation.
What happens when a wave turn Ms into a particle. Do they really exist concurrently or simultaneously, or oscilating between one and the other.
The whole language needs to be reviewed.
The language is not concise enough and leads to unnecessary misunderstanding.
You often find philosophical inconsitancies that are risen linguistically.
A lot physicists are blasai about the language they use.
Natural language are notoriously fluid.
Words change meanings from place to place, time to time and in translation.
The people who have been most aware of that Included the German philosopher Heidigger and the French psychologist Lacan.
Of course there was a time when linguistic was part of psychology.
Maybe there was a reason for using Latin in science.
If the exact meaning can not be translated then it shouldn't be or a whole new term needs to be used with a scientific dictionary kept rigourously Update.
Public lectures are often Places where lazy terminology takes root and before you know it it has crept into the classrooms and the scientific papers.
Great episode. I really like Sean Carroll and watch his channel regularly. But I think RKL has him in a corner in this episode. I also find many worlds interpretation and life devoted to the quantum wave equation uninspiring. It just cannot be THE explanation of life and everything. Consciousness points in one direction for me…
Sean Carroll is presenting a version of reality that I feel is closest to truth because it doesn't fall victim to a subjectivity bias.
Our brain is a computer that composes what we call consciousness by way of the totality of the electric impulses transmitted every moment.
Thinking that consciousness is some magical property of the universe is in my opinion quite arrogant considering how complex we know the brain is. Why should we need anything else to explain experience than such an enormously vast network of interconnected neurons?
subjectivity bias is not necessarily false bias, just because something is subjective doesn't mean its less real, imagine a case of a man with eyes living among the blind, more real things are experienced by the man with eyes but all his experience are subjective among the blind. Consciousness isn't even truly subjective atleast for human beings as all human beings agree to experiencing it and most likely are saying the truth, the problem with it is its difficult to demonstrate outside of your body. Lets assume that sean carroll is right that consciousness is just an emergent phenomena which occurs from connection of neurons, then the question comes up how does this network of neuron experience things as one entity, when by themselves individually they have no clue of anything other than signals from their neighboring neurons, what should happen is each neuron should be experiencing itself as separate entity, its almost impossible to describe this oneness by breaking it down into sequence of computations done by individual neurons another reason why we assume a computer chip isn't conscious though we would never know if it was, its not as easy as sean carroll is trying to make it look, its a very hard problem which probably is unsolvable, certainly not as simple as saying its all computation of brain.
What spiritually calls a soul; physics calls consciousness. The ghost in the machine.
Survival in the structure.
One simple thought experiment that came to my mind years ago, which resulted in me giving up chasing consciousness within causal deterministic or computational systems was this… Let’s assume the brain is a causal, computational system. Now, let’s get a pen and paper and start computing exactly what the brain was executing at the time of me feeling great pain, happiness or anger. As I compute the algorithm execution with my pen and paper, is it the pen or the paper that “experiences” the emotion? The substrate of a computation that is causal and deterministic shouldn’t impact the outcome of the algorithm; as such the motions carried out during the algorithm shouldn’t have impact or results produced outside the material substrate either, so what’s going on? To elaborate, many say consciousness is an illusion; so going off this path, a causal deterministic algorithm is executed, yet something independent of that material substrate “experiences” the effects of that computation without being able to impact it. This assumes that this something is capable of “experiencing” to begin with, yet it has no place within the material substrate itself. Its existence is pointless within the framework of this line of thought and the only evidence we have of its existence is that we ourselves are not zombies or robots.
This has to be the craziest one yet! Consciousness is "a way of talking about the physical world....." That doesn't even make sense. Consciousness is your experience of the world, since all you have is your experience (and your thoughts about that experience), it makes sense to trust your experience. Why would you trust the thoughts in your head about your experience over your actual experience? That is like saying that someone's five minute description of an event is the same as experiencing the event. Who would ever think that? I guess Sean Carrol and his materialists.
Sean Carroll's position is religious in nature. Just like those folks saying consciousness is an illusion. It's about time we call out this ridiculousness for what it is. These guys are worse than flat earthers.
There's a Star Trek The Next Generation episodes with two Rykers that addresses this quite well. Worth watching.
This is reductionism to physics. When he mentions emergence, he means it in a non-literal sense or in a weak sense. That's not what emergentists/non reductionists mean by emergence. Per emergentism those higher level descriptions are not just useful constructs, but rather they correspond to reality. Reality comes in different levels, irreducible to lower levels.
An emergent phenomenon is not deducible from knowledge of the lower-level domain from which it emerged and this non-deducibility is in principle a consequence of an ontological distinction.
I don't see any good motivation behind reductionism. As a naturalist but a non-reductionist I think reductionism robs reality/nature of its beauty and complexity.
but reductionism makes you look cool with all the nerd teenagers ...
One thing we can see about consciousness through technology is a development... One upon a time the analog signal on your TV was blowing your minds when we were watching documentaries back in the '90s. Thin HD came along in 720p. Looked great. Then 2K came along and that made 720p look bad. Now we have TVs on the market that are 8K resolution and 4K is starting to look a bit average. This is an example of how technology is growing our consciousness and how now when you look back at analog signals or even 720p it's almost unrecognizable compared to what the brain used to comprehend it as before. It had been heightened by technology. So this might give us a clue on how consciousness works
Without consciousness nothing exists
simple because what you define as "exist" is just a human concept
Whatever gave Robert the notion that an "uploaded consciousness" is more than just a copy... a separate second mind? The copy might be effectively immortal (depending on the technology of its physical substrate), but the original consciousness would remain "trapped" in its mortal body.
Vanity would be the main incentive to have a copy created, not the desire to personally live forever. (Unless a person's mind is such a useful resource that society doesn't want to lose it.)
To personally live forever, one would need to be like the ship of Theseus... gradually replacing old neurons & neuronal connections with functionally identical copies (as discussed in the video).
The question is, once all of your neurons have been replaced, is it still you 😅 How is that different from copying and destroying the original?
>degigi2003 : The difference is the continuity. This was briefly mentioned during the video, but not adequately emphasized.
Wow! Thank you Robert for speaking to a closed wall which to me is a lesson to many. It’s dogma , not an open science-based or open logic-based dialog. You can tell that in his mind, he’s figured out what he considers a brute fact that he needs to defend because of the missing proof of anything non-physical. Quantum fields and all other forms of energy, including other potential energies existing in other dimensions and the laws that orchestrate their interactions must all be physical in nature according to that perspective. Hope you got some rest after that tiring battle of looking for cracks in his armor.
Maybe Sean's requirement for the physical is precisely because there is no evidence for the non-physical. So, wouldn't it be "dogma" instead to insist on the existence of something for which there is no evidence?
Humanity will not be around long enough to experience the answers to these questions me thinks...🇮🇪
@@guaromiami I don’t think so. Particle physicists already have formed a foundation of the physical out of what I’d consider non-physical-natured fields, ie fields moving an invisible and unmeasurable media , ie “the ether”, not space per se. Mathematics has imaginary numbers that speak to something “real” yet not. Humility, to me, is accepting that as we as humans have limitations which mean that concepts like infinity and other concepts are necessarily unintuitive and not “perceivable” directly. I think the truths we find are sign posts for direction, not some fully graspable by us or AI, although I’m sure AI will help get us closer.
@@brianlebreton7011 your drivel about "infinity" doesn't help in the least to gaining a better understanding of how brain activity produces conscious experiences.
Interesting conversation but it still doesn't answer whether consciousness is emergent or fundamental. Even the described 'clone' thought experiment wouldn't answer it. You could duplicate every atom in your body and your resulting clone may have your stored memories but it doesn't definitively prove it would also be conscious. And even if it was, it still wouldn't be proof that consciousness was emergent; You could make an exact copy of your television but it still wouldn't prove that the tv shows were generated from within it.
Gotta love a paradox. 😂
He cant say which one is me. But has to admit that one of them is me...or not.
Identical twins and/or siamese twins would be the best people to interview.
Not what happened. Sean's argument is that there is no continual stream of connected consciousness from any moment to the next. forget entirely about the copy, his argument is that you now are a different consciousness than you were the previous second. You did not continue through time. So it wouldn't matter how many copies you make, literally NONE of them would be the you that you are now.
@@fullyawakened So he doesnt exist.
@@fullyawakenedAnd yet your conscious experience remains in the original. It never jumps into the copy or exists in both at the same time. What in the brain accounts for that? Carroll doesn’t know because both brains are the same.
@@RuneRelic At any given moment our consciousness exists, but it's a process, and of course sometimes such as in deep dreamless sleep or deep anaesthesia, it stops. It's an activity. Sometimes we do it, and sometimes we don't.
@@simonhibbs887 Sometimes the heartbeat and breathing stops too I guess.
Oh wait. No its doesnt, as people die. You are ascribing the choice of not to dream as involuntary.
Anaesthesia. Oof do you really want to go there with the latest quantum research from the microtubules in the cells, and Penrose' arguments ?
He is arguing that the past or future does not exist (causality) and that only the present exists without any chain/history. If they do not exist then inertia does not exist. If inertia does not exist then physics does not exist.
That puts him out of a job.
Existance is a stream, not a moment. For a physicist to say otherwise is a cake and eat it moment IMHO.
Why is this so hard for Kuhn to understand. He's not special, Sean isn't special, I'm not special. Consciousness is not special..
Get over it
Not special to whom?
I think I know what you mean but it's not so much an issue of specialness since I think most of us think our own experience is special. But it's not nearly as significant has Kuhn seems to think. It's just a product of the brain. If person is duplicated (including their brain) there will be 2 identical, separate people and 2 identical, separate consciousnesses that will gradually diverge as time passes.
Damn a lot of hate for Sean in the comments. He’s just right about this. All other explanations are just massively flawed.
In order to really understand if “consciousness” is solely a subjective phenomena experienced at separate and distinct points in time vs. being an objective phenomena shared by all all beings who have attained consciousness, we must do scientific experiments to determine where ideas come from. When an idea or thought enters your conscious mind, is it solely the culmination of biology, chemistry and physics or is there some type of external input. Maybe we haven’t invented the technology to measure consciousness yet….just like we needed to invent electron microscopes to see molecules.