This guy is consistently brilliant. So good at getting complex ideas across to people like me, books and lectures. He has this quiet charisma on stage! It's magical :-)
I was distraught to know that my favorite philosopher passed away 😢 got some consolation that his lectures will be here forever and I can watch them over and over again 55:00
Dennet was such a genius. I've studied magic for over 5 decades, along with other sciences, and his statements of our reality being "real" "stage" is epiphany to me. We as humans won't even come close to figuring this out until we shed our want of the supernatural. The concept pollutes most minds at some level, and even the least "belief" destroys advancement in this area. Intelligence is part and pair of this subject, and these days AI is only a branding name, and not the God people tell of the sky falling. How are we ever to grow up in this world of childish thinkers and portrayers? Daniel is one of the few adults that have ever lived. Gr8! Peace ☮💜Love
Whether or not Dennett is right about consciousness being a bag of tricks, investigating consciousness empirically as a bag of tricks with neuroscience can bring us a lot of great insights - even though we hold off on committing ourselves to any ontological conclusions about consciousness. I was a student of philosophy first, with an interest in philosophy of mind, and later a student of psychology, neuroscience and the brain. And one lesson that is better experienced than told is how severely neuroscience and especially knowledge gained from studies of brain injuries challenge intuitions about what consciousness is - intuitions that you often rely on when doing philosophy of mind. Rather than the question being whether this or that is the case ontologically regarding consciousness, I would invite people to read up on how the brain functions simply to expand their imagination about what a mind is and does. And on a sidenote, I nearly always find Dennett pleasant, lucid and thought-evoking. His work is a pleasure to read, too.
One of the things that Dennett does particularly well - as a philosopher should - is to lift us out of some of our reflexive habits of thought so that we can back out of common but ultimately unsuccessful inferences and come at the problem from a fresh perspective. He can't necessarily offer the right perspective, but as he says, that's not really his job. For example, his "multiple drafts" model isn't intended to be correct, but to provide a plausible way out of the Homunculus Problem, which at this point is really more a philosophical or pre-scientific problem of emergence than it is a hard scientific problem of identifying mechanism. The answers will eventually fall out of work in cognitive science and neuroanatomy, but we're not anywhere near there yet, and unfortunately that leads some people rather than saying "I don't know" to fill in the gaps with wild unfalsifiable hypotheses concerning universal Consciousness and the like: anything, ironically, to keep consciousness mysterious.
Dr. Joe Dispenza's explanation of conscious and the mechanics of the mind and brain is more sophisticated and simple then, what this person is relaying.
you are spot on. the good man still have a dust from establishment, where you have to get A** to be admitted for study, and meanwhile like Dr Joe Dispenza is selling us of it in a bottled water, freely available on youtube with hundreds men and women , pursuing us with advert to buy their bottle of water is even much more drinkable and satisfying :)
I think it's a viewpoint worth considering, despite it being counterintuitive. People used to believe the universe revolved around the Earth. Any idea saying otherwise would've taken away the special meaning of importance. Now we know the truth about planets, and despite no longer having that feeling of importance we found it elsewhere.
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You see, he didn't really convince you that consciousness is an illusion, he just made it seem that way. Well, how did he do that? That's not my department.
Indian Rope Trick: In a group of friends the story is told,, and not wanting to be left out, one of the friends "fibs" that he/she has seen it.. wanting easy acceptance into the group. Later, not being want of being "caught in a lie" there is subsequent storytelling and made-up excuses of where and when... how and why... but still just a lie. Gr8! Peace ☮💜Love
About the American flag illusion. As I remember from courses about the eye retina, it is the retina that creates these red stripe signals. The green light photoreceptors becomes inactivated a few second after having been stimulated. The red photoreceptors, having not been stimulated, continue to send signals, creating the image of red stripes. Maybe I have misinterpreted the lesson I attended or Dan does not know about the retina preprocessing work. I wrote about it in www.kinberg.net/wordpress/stellan/consciousness/#philosophical-view
Interesting. No thinker behind the thoughts. He (lecturer) shows nicely that anything that eventually comprise of consciousness should not have consciousness, as otherwise problem is not solved. Also the concept of "real magic" apply as well as the concept of the power of integrated explained magics (brain effects) to generate an unexplained magic (consciousness). Very nice. I think what will be helpful is also to understand why consciousness exists - its role, it seems, is to integrate it all, to generate a "self" that "does", "decide", "feel" and also "afraid". Afraid of dying... No consciousness -> no self -> no fear to dying -> evolution cant work as there is nothing to be afraid of... Consciousness and the derived "self" is a must product for evolution to work. Therefore it must exists and it is so important that the illusion is so strong, so we believe it. But it is, you are, just a magic, a very good one. Enjoy it!
That is a very interesting post. I think that you are nearly there. However, I suggest that where you fall down is your second paragraph. Evolution doesn't depend on consciousness, as DD explains very clearly in his lecture on Darwin's Strange Inversion. It is now postulated, notably by Thomas Metzinger, that the self is non-existent, hence so is consciousness. Pretty hard eh?, but perhaps not so hard to grasp after this lecture.
Paul Money thanks I think the "consciousness" is closely related to the self illusion that is needed for the fear to die (or the strive to live) which is an important/must ingredient in evolution.
consciousness is primary , so its consciousness itself that drives evolution which evolves the makeup of living things to fear this and that so they dont damage their bodies.
Consciousness is the emerged property of a complex system to contemplate itself and the world. There are 86 billion neurons with trillions of connections firing in this majestic organ we call the brain. This computational system through its complexity and collaborating sensory organs understands through experience its existence and the natural world. There is no need for a magical inside man/spirit/god to guide the brain, the brain is the final frontier.
I think the question is just as much on the table after these points as before: how does "thinking" or "believing" there's a red stripe out there create the experience we have when we see the red stripe? What is so special about our form of "thinking there's a red stripe out there" where we are actually experiencing something and a simpler computerized stripe and color detector that we would be suspicious at best is actually experiencing anything, but rather simply detecting it. For me this lecture explains how certain conscious processes work--filling in details isn't actually done, you just think it is. Great, but it doesn't explain why there are conscious processes in the first place.
Yeah, he inadvertently chose a great metaphor for his whole talk - stage magic, i.e., misdirection. He gets lost in the details about the contents of consciousness, but totally sidesteps the question of why there is ANY consciousness at all. THAT is the real issue.
My line to all materialists is, in a universe of nothing but matter, nothing matters. It doesn't matter that you convince us of your argument. It doesn't matter if you have an argument. It doesn't matter if you stop being a materialist.
This Is a classical case of Beating Around The Bush and Dennett is being very clever about it (almost magically). Just to use a metaphor similar to his own : What was there first? The chicken or the egg? You can't just deny the chicken or the egg for that matter. This philosopher does so... unfortunately. He even states consciousness is a magic trick of the brain. The brain and everything (!) else consists of a random collection of neutrons, protons and electrons forming elements, which in their turn form molecules. That in itself is a sheer wonder. The brain does create illusions every now and then but that is nothing more than one of its characteristics. Our consciousness uses the brain to experience this illusion we call reality. You therefore can also consider that our consciousness does exist with the manifested brain as a disguise. Consciousness just IS and the brain can only exist because of it. It's not the other way around. As a matter of fact I believe that everything we taste, see, hear or smell is manifested due to our consciousness. Consciousness is the essence of our being, otherwise there will be nothing and that's simply impossible. See the biocentrisme theory of dr Robert Lanza.
Regarding that Bellotto painting, I think that artist knew his painting would be up on a wall, so spending the extra time to fill in all kinds of detail that would not be visible from several feet away would just be a waste of effort. Because any person seeing this scene in reality would have to be far enough away from those figures crossing the bridge that they, in fact, would not see any more detail than he's put into his painting.
Listening to Daniel's explanation of consciousness for nearly an hour for him to finish with an illusive, I don't know either what consciousness is, left me hollow. One must at least examine veridical consciousness outside the brain. This has been experienced by many, I myself included. Look up Dr. Lloyd Rudy on UA-cam for only one of many near death veridical experiences.
@@hellalpha Wrong again. There is no creature "having" anything. A thought is formed in a brain and later recorded in its memory that says "I am a consciousness, i.e. a persistent thing separate from my stream of psychological experiences". This thought formed in that brain is false. No one is being deceived because there is no one 'there'. But that brain of course will later make and enact bad life plans based on that false thought, and observing its behavior from the outside we're used to applying the shorthand description "there goes an entity that has been deceived or is deceiving itself". Your mistake is to assume such a shorthand expression really means "there is a permanent something living in that body, that suffers the effects of the deception". There is not. No one suffers the effects of the deception because there is no one 'home', as it were. There is just a body containing a brain that sometimes entertains false thoughts and makes bad plans that lead to dissatisfactory results.
@@d0nj03 An aggregate of mindless cells yeah - it's been described as more an artwork than a deception by Nick Humphreys. We don't have much choice to go along with it tho, do we? ;D
d0nj03 what if i told you the complete consciousness was the small pin tip sized ball that exploded into so many fragments of experiences that it would take a life time to experience each one of those fragments. That fragmented world is the world that we exist in and our small little lives are merely attempting to make sense of its completion by collecting its experience!
What an amazingly 90s intro sequence....Also, for some reason I always thought the reason images, especially high contrast ones, seem to get temporarily imprinted in your eye, was residual; charge on the retina. I don't know why I thought that - probably my own hypothesis. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage - I guess I was sort of on the right track.
I am a Cartesian by inclination, though I think we tend to "over-define" the hard problem of consciousness to a great extent. For one thing, we do not seem to know where it is advisable to fix a boundary for where the "body" terminates, and where the "mind" begins, or the inverse; and this is not the occasion for asking the one question in a more exacting way, than to achieve any stage of technical sophistication in ultimately assigning one sort of "experienced body" to a particular region or set of functions in a brain mass "itself" physical, or to achieve or realize any more sophistication in assigning, re-cognizing, one sort of "experienced mind" to a particular emotional or memorial set or quality of perceptions "themselves" conscious. We do not make such fine distinctions, and do not possess even a rudimentary vocabulary for going about the first order business of addressing what in essence was, and still is, the Cartesian problem as such: That one is a "Sum res cogitans", a being that is thinking, in order to propose that one is a "Cogito ergo Sum", a thinking being only. The first is obvious to an unlettered peasant. The latter is a familiar enough problem to an educated mind. And the "mind" is more of a social construct than an alternative name for conscious experience, far less anything that a brain mass conceivably does or can be conceived to do. Wherein, one suspects, is at least one possible answer to the "necessity" for a conscious existence.
so he shows how we are susceptible to illusions. But he doesn't show anything in relation to the actual sensations of consciousness themselves. Only that they don't necessarily fully represent the real world.
as he mentioned there is no king wearing a robe, there's only a robe, what if consciousness is outside of us, that empty space around us when we are born we are "plugged" in to it, our brain is just wireless router a machine connecting us to consciousness which is all that is
it is true that this world is nothing but an illusion . but remember this is true for someone who woke up and realized he was dreaming, are you wake up?
It is impossible to prove that the world is really an illusion, so there is no reason to assume it and not just stick with the easier solution that the world is real. This is actually the reason why I am a materialist, not an idealist.
Personal Conclusions from various sources "We Are All One Consciousness" for the following reasons: 1. In this world everything must have a cause, so that something exists because of something else, as well as ourselves. 2. It will be very saturating / boring if we have only one physical form in this world. 3. It will be very saturating / boring if all human beings have the exact same physical form / behavior. 4. Try to imagine emptying all the physical things around us only the remnants of humanity, then eliminating all human beings leaving only their memories, then removing all their memories leaving only their consciousness, then connecting that consciousness, feel who we are ??. 5. Body, mind, feelings, emotions and everything in this world is always changing, so what never changes ??, that is our true self, which is true consciousness. If everything changes2 / moves who observes, there must be something fixed to be able to observe. 6. All human beings communicate with each other is the beginning of the beginning / the future of human beings unite, only electronic devices today can unite all human beings, one day the device is implanted in the human mind and eventually man will open all access to his mind. 7. Our body is a group / accumulation of memory accumulated brought from the beginning of the birth of the first human in the world through continuous DNA binding. 8. Twins are born at the same time, what if all human beings are born at the same time ??. What happens if the birth of all human beings is not influenced by the dimensions of space and time ?? 9. The twins are identical to A and B, if the whole memory of A is copied to B, what is the difference ?? 10. The law of attraction (law of attraction) that our minds will attract whatever we think, because we are all like one part of the body. 11. Like some of the video recordings of ourselves there is a video as a vocalist, a video as a violinist, as a pianist, as a drummer, etc. The video2 is made into one in one video then it will produce a more interesting orchestra, something new and more productive. our world. 12. Man's greatest enemy is himself, at this time man is fighting against himself. By believing that we are all one, then the ego will fade because there is no difference between us. 13. That is why the teachings of religion command us to be grateful and beneficial to many, If you are hurting others you are actually hurting yourself, just as if you are doing good to others you are actually doing good to yourself. 14. Could it be that we are all dreaming and our dreams meet each other at the same frequency in parallel. Have you ever, when sleeping dreamed of moving roles as someone else, it is because we are all one. 15. We are not immortal as human beings so that we have time for us to scroll through all of life. 16. "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience" ~ Stephen Covey, Have you ever felt that our age is too short, could our consciousness be immortal ?. 17. We are one, only the role is different, the memory block between life is what makes people feel different / separate. Just by brainwashing / erasing his memory then someone will be a different person but his consciousness actually remains the same. 18. The lucky thing for us is ... awareness is always towards / seeking / having intentions / desires towards good / positive / happiness despite experiencing various mistakes. 19. When we die the body and memory are destroyed, how can we remember ever being dead. 20. Why do we have to die? ", When we are told to die, later this eternal question will be asked again and we will always be there." The world is a sustainable life "~ Bruce Lipton 21. In the beginning we were one, but split through a big explosion or bigbang to become different and separate as it is now, but we are provided with a sense of love for us to be able to be reunited later. 22. There is only us and the mirror of ourselves in this world, yet there is another world out there. 23. We will always smile happily seeing each other as ourselves "How beautiful I am" seeing a different self. 24. If all consciousness is told now that they are all one if the experience gained is enough, the consciousness designed from the beginning is so different that there is so much intrigue, consciousness is created differently so that when it comes together it has an incredible consciousness experience. 25. We are indeed alone in this universe, but there are still many other universes with their own laws of nature. 26. Have you ever felt to come to a place that has never been visited but feel familiar with that place, as if we have lived in that place sometime. 27. The world is like a script of a story that is being written by the author, sometimes changed at the beginning, sometimes changed in the middle, sometimes changed at the end it all depends on us as writers, and every story has wisdom that can be taken as a lesson. 28. Hair grows on its own, heart beats on its own, blood flows on its own, ideas emerge on its own, etc., are we involved ??. 29. Imagine today there was an event that caused only you to live in this world, then who are all the people yesterday ??. 30. "If Quantum Mechanism cannot surprise you, then you do not yet understand Quantum Physics. Everything we have considered real all this time, turns out to be unreal." ~ Niels Bohr. 31. In the scale of quantum physics we are all connected to each other, even in double gap experiments proving that particles change when observed or in other words awareness is able to change reality, this has been repeatedly proven by Nobel laureate in Physics. 32. Everything we experience by our senses will eventually only be an electrical impulse in the brain, is it all real ??. We are beings who realize that we are conscious. 33. We are closer than the veins of his neck. He breathes some of His spirit on you. Knowing oneself means knowing one's God. Indeed, we will return to HIM. You are far I am far, you are near I am near. I am everywhere. Before the existence of this world there was no material other than Him. The True Spirit is only One, the Creator. I agree with your prejudice. 34. Whether the Creator is only tasked with creating, is it possible that the creator does not want to try the results of his creation through another perspective. 35. There is no reincarnation, it is possible that our consciousness is synchronizing, our consciousness is divided by the speed of light so that consciousness can move and divide quickly through energy, and that is why we need sleep, that is why we often do not realize something, that is why the size of the earth is reached by the speed of light so that consciousness is divided quickly and evenly, we are like some chess pawns played by a player, that is why if we move at the speed of light, then we can penetrate the dimensions of space and time, when we die we wake up and regain consciousness as long as there are human beings living in this world. 36. Have we ever had a problem and suddenly someone came to provide a solution to the problem we are experiencing, as if someone was sent by the universe to help us in solving the problem, which is actually our own awareness that sends that person to us. 37. A thousand years ago did human beings see, hear and be trapped in their hearts about current technological advances ??. If we all tend to sin (damage) then it will be the world of hell, if we all tend to do good then it will be the world of heaven. 38. Knowledge learns objects, God who created our consciousness, does not allow God to be objects of knowledge. 39. It is not possible for human creation which is only in the form of words / symbols to represent true truth.uyty 40. Is there a meaning of being without consciousness ?? then we are adventurers of this existence. Sy 41. The life of the world is just a game and a joke, the one who wins the game of the world is the one who finds his true self. 42. When the existence of the world ends we will know everything. 43. My consciousness undergoes a very extraordinary life experience, feeling life experience with different forms and different places even though in fact my consciousness is always the same, wow .. I was surprised !! how wide I am. 44. Consciousness in fact does not know the concept of time, consciousness can experience / undergo into another physical form because the dimension of time can be penetrated by consciousness, as when we imagine we can act as anyone without time bound, because in this universe time can in fact materialize free, time can move straight, curved, rotate, etc. Our time travel is when our consciousness moves to a new physical experience. 45. We are an awareness, a concept that is able to answer various things. 46. Remember when you were going to leave, you were worried about losing me ??, calm down .. I was everywhere and we would always be able to meet again, believe me. 47. Without searching what is the difference between us in this world and us in a dream while sleeping just passing by without meaning 48. In conclusion, whatever role we play, it is all our own design, so just enjoy. 49. God created us to be Happy, so do not disappoint God. 50. Understand it and be Shining source: ua-cam.com/video/LtT8pWIYL4Q/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/h6fcK_fRYaI/v-deo.html
@brian' There is no science used to support his argument. It's his opinion. I don't suppose you know what these peer reviewed paper are about or whether none of them has ever showed that consciousness is an illusion based on any sort of evidence.
Utter buffoonery ! Such notions go against what we ALL know to be true(however naively). & are completely contrary to ANY reasonable definition of the word conscious. That so called "illusion" is everything we have ever thought, known or done & can ever think, know or be.
@Brett Sylvester The fact that there is indeed something rather than nothing is the only thing we can ever be sure of. & Even if that something(whatever it is) is ONLY a game of mind, that "illusion" is "real" as experience. Such absurdities occur when people take obviously flawed metaphysics WAY too seriously. Anyway, If you think OR know we're not even conscious, why even bother ? Clown.
Consciousness explained... Imagine two cups sitting on a table. The cups exist as physical things. The cups have a 'distance' relationship between them. This relationship is a different kind of thing than the cups themselves. The relationship 'exists' but it is a radically different kind of existence. You can't see it or feel it or touch it yet it exists. Now imagine all the trillions upon trillions of constantly changing existing relationships going on in our bodies. I imagine some parts of those trillions of relationships are digestion and respiration and muscular contraction and other parts are what we call thoughts. If I metaphorically bundle all of my current thoughts together I think I am justified in calling that bundle my consciousness. Ho Ho
To be honest I think that you could have accomplished the same with just the two last lines. The rest was superfluous. BTW. The cups. The distance relationship may not be touchable as such, but it is able to be seen. What's more it is demonstrable and even measurable, at least in principle. I'm not sure what you were driving at. Were you attempting to bring up qualia, and the difference between physical and conceptual or consciously experienced?
The fact that the Buddha and David Hume said the same thing, one 2500 years ago, the other about 300 years ago, gives some comfort that if we keep rediscovering this way of thinking, eventually it will become commonplace. Although to be earthbound and defiantly sensible is not really human nature. You could look it up...
Professor asks how single cells work together to cause consciousness. Neurons is a form of media that brain capable of synthesizing for recording infos! There are different kinds of neurons, all carry their own specific message throughout chains of cells, organic program. It’s almost like asking how do molecules make up a complex matter...
Everyday life, as well as space and time, can all be utilized by the human being for the training and developing of the various consciousness-related values - or not. The consciousness-related values open up the material consciousness for the impulses of the spirit, (spirit form); they pave the way and make the conscious connection possible with its creative impulses. The human being takes the decision about this truth himself, as well as whether he wants to utilize his everyday life consciousness, in a valuable way, or if he wants to undergo it in a pure material and materialistic degenerated, (ausgeartet) experience. The eventful experiences of Everyday life, the human being basically creates himself through his own will. He decides about what is more important, is it the realistic-directed clear consciousness, or is it the prevailing ideas about the tangible matter: is it the truth of recognizing a truthful meaning (value, judgment) or an ephemeral (transitory) illusion. He alone decides powerfully, as to whether he continues to be guided through the unreal impulses of his untrained material consciousness, or rather by the effective knowledge, wisdom and logic of his trained and clear consciousness, which he every day can work on in a conscious concentrative way. The Universal system is open towards the human being and he can consciously influence its causes to bring certain consequences thereof and to awaken evolutiv (evolutionary) attainment (accomplishment, progress).
I think you mean, just because free will and/or consciousness might be illusory in an objective sense, life goes on. If so, I agree. If it is illusory in the aforementioned sense, it's an adaptive mechanism appropriate for us and not one we can ignore the consequences of. Indeed some of the words I've used in this sentence implied as much, quite naturally. That's how deep it goes; deterministic or not, illusory or not.
i might've not got the complete picture of what dennett is trying to communicate, but even if consciousness is an illusion, illusions are created by magic, and what we're trying to find out though the neural correlates of consciousness is how that magic is done. how does the the brain "do" mind. how the magician is doing the trick, even if the trick involves tricking ourselves.
When checking into the optometrists clinic, the specialist may have taken a leave of absence for some duration; an alternative specialist will not be as genuinely concerned with patient suffering.
I fell unconscious listening to this man speak within the first 10 minutes. Woke up and he is droning on and on showing old visual eye tricks that have yawn......... ZZzzzzzzzzzz. I need the magic of staying awake.
Dennet says the rider on the horse is not only not real but although the horse is clearly not alone in stride, the horse.its self isnt even its own rider! All I can say Dr., is....."Here I am Sally Jones." And by God I am surely talking to myself, at minimum! If no one is home upstairs in he. Than so it be.But who hath declared it? God alone has immortality. I agree though. The theater lies out there. Fin
Consciousness can be summed up in one paragraph, and also why its perceived it cant be explained, like the example of deja vu that Daniel speaks too.. we want deja Vu to be meaningful but its actual isn't... because? it simply a feedback loop... Consciousness or more specifically awareness is our memory of a feedback loop amongst the trillions of neural pathways and memories... a somatic echo that provides us with the experience we call Consciousness... like a Microphone placed against a speaker, it creates feedback, neither the speaker or the microphone is conscious of the feedback loop, however feedback is still produced and memory of the feedback is produced although for only the nano second the electrical system sends the signal, the only difference is we story this memory and now we have an experience we call consciousness... As I have said for many years now a belief is only a belief in its self, consciousness is only consciousness in its self.. in its self... in its self.. in its self.
Seriously though, it makes sense. Maybe because Dennett gives the metaphors to me, but it's at least possible. After all I am not the same person every second of my life, so which one is me? None. There is no "real" me, just a series of subjective experiences that occur. And that stop one day.
I find that this completely dodges the hard problem of consciousness. Whether or not the objects that appear within consciousness amount to a bag of tricks - that's not the central issue here. The central issue is the question of why ANYTHING at all appears in consciousness. Where does this dimension of consciousness come from? It seems like Dennett just totally avoids the real problem, probably because like everyone else, he has no answer to it.
Exactly, I mean taking his analogy further, let's say part of our brain convinces itself that consciousness exists, and that's the 'magic trick'. Just like part of our brain convinces us we're seeing the red on the flag, when it's not there. We would still have to explain why this brain, convinced of consciousness and convinced it experiences sound, taste, touch, etc, is actually experiencing anything at all. Because we could just as well have a brain convinced of all these things, but not actually experiencing anything, and operating in the dark. The only answer that seems like it even could be the real solution to me is Russellian monism, a form of panpsychism. It's motivated by a huge gap at the heart of physics: physics explains how fundamental particles like electrons move. But we've never accounted for what the electron actually is; physics leaves out any explanation about its intrinsic nature. i.e. beyond how it moves, what actually 'is' this thing that's moving around? If fundamental entities in physics are actually bits of consciousness, then we'll have solved this intrinsic nature problem and the hard problem of consciousness as well.
@@Mablak200 Yeah, I don't see how anywhere in the standard materialist understanding of the universe there arises any need for a conscious observer to be witnessing anything. Everything that is happening could just as well be happening unconsciously. The human brain takes in various inputs, performs some calculations, and outputs behaviors. No matter how complex this input-output dynamic becomes, I don't see how it ever necessitates a field of consciousness to appear which witnesses the calculation going on. Computers do something similar, but as far as we know there is no subjective consciousness which observes that process. I think consciousness must be some fundamental property of the universe. To me it seems just as fundamental as matter. We just don't understand it or have any good explanation for it. If we lack even the most basic understanding of it, I don't see how we can possibly explain it away as confidently as Dennett does. Why should it ever appear at all? I don't see anything in our materialist outlook which explains why it should, or in fact must, appear. This is a huge gap in our understanding of reality.
We could consider that consciousness might come as a mere byproduct of brain activity and is in all actuality not necessary. Rather a phenomena that arises naturally with no apparent benefit. (Or maybe even the goal of the universe/evolution set by our creator or previous cycles) In favor of this argument is that when the brain loses certain functions, you no longer are apparently conscious. If consciousness was fundamental, why does it seemingly go away when I pass out or a doctor pokes a part of my brain?
Dennett is not really seeking truth or engaging in science or following reason; rather, he's a complex arrangement of neural networks, or perhaps a by-product of neural firings. So what happens is determined by those arrangements, those firings, at any given time. One thing to bear in mind is that consciousness needn't involve sensations, feelings, and thoughts; those constitute a rather superficial layer. Consciousness of the purest variety, or proto-consciousness if you will, may abide at the quantum level (the Planck scale, to be precise) which is non-material and non-local. To say that consciousness is an activity of the brain only is an assumption; it may stretch beyond the human body. If you want a deeper, more sophisticated theory of consciousness, you may want to check out Rupert Sheldrake's work on Morphic Resonance and the collaborative work of Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. I predict that Dennett's views, in less than 50 years, will seem simplistic, crude, and antiquated. In some sense, pure or proto-consciousness is dreaming all this that we call material.
If there is no such thing as true consciousness then why is there such clarity in understanding when true consciousness is reached? why are metaphors so easy to understand? why is the feeling of peace and love so strong in relation with other humans?
There is no conciousness in the brain! How could there be? The brain is a concept appearing in consciousness and is therefore made out of nothing but conciousness - the knowing of the concept of brain. Butt what an I talking - I do not really expect anyone here to get what I am trying to say. So go on and enjoy the old stories. 😘
Maybe there is a cartasian theater in the brain, and then another one and another one and so one until it loops back. No single "little man in the brain" is conscious, but the whole system is.
The reason Dennett spends most of the time talking about magic, deja vu, optical illusions etc. is that unless you put aside the assumption that consciousness "cannot be explained by any naturalistic process", you will say at the end of the explanation that "this does not explain consciousness". In fact Dennett cannot provide a proper 'naturalistic' explanation because he is not a neuroscientist. His job is to remove the notion that any explanation of consciousness in terms of brain activity is wrong by definition.
Yeah, all he does is telling us that consciousness isn´t real/doesn´t exist. It seems that if we remove the magician, there will be no magic. I do not agree...
How do you explain it, then? Not saying he's right necessarily - it is a hypothesis after all - but I'd like to hear a counter-argument. Not many neuroscientists would point to a part of the brain or its construction & say, there is self, there is consciousness; because the more they look, the more it retreats from objective existence. Also, substrate-neutral arguments are indeed naturalistic.
@@EETheReech Why not? No-one's saying you have to, but in philosophy and science (cognitive science being both), it is necessary to provide coherent counter-arguments. "I don't like it" doesn't meet that standard, exactly.
It's an ok approach if your only talking about impressions and registrations in the biological entity. What is really tricky about consciousnesses is that one can close their eyes; be sensory deprived and go on to experience what humans readily find to be a creative almost self originating aspect of consciousness. The brain can think abstractly about things it has never come into contact with. It (the brain) can utilize the 'registries' to generate completely new forms inside itself. This aspect of the 'mind' the ability to build and rebuild realities within cannot be explained with the sensory/registry modeling Dennett proposes. Using the computer science metaphor modelling he does really well to build memory and impulse/reaction/association case for the biological entity, but his explanation lacks the finesse to give consciousness a 'program' a reason why we can think abstractly and creatively. He ditches the inner watcher and just says..there is none, its ALL impulse/reaction/association. I feels like an adequate explanation of less evolved consciousness...just not human. It has a long way to go.
@@timothyperkins3723 Maybe we should accept that there is no explanation yet. I think consciousness is a problem of emergence, which means that a complex system can have properties that none of it's basic parts has. A simple example for this is thermodynamics: a single atom has a position and a speed, but it doesn't have a temperature or pressure. But a gas which consists of only atoms of one kind has a pressure and a temperature. In this case we have an explanation how pressure, temperature, etc. emerge from the properties of single atoms, it was explained in the 19th century by Ludwig Boltzmann and others. Another example is that we encounter matter in very different forms and with very different properties, although all the matter which we encounter in everyday life is made of just 3 different particles: the up quark, the down quark and the electron. That a complex array of neurons can develop consciousness although a neuron has no consciousness is just another example of emergence, except that unlike for gases we don't understand the mechanism yet.
I get the impression that some of the people who've made rather superficial comments re cognitive science/philosophy here (tho some are good questions, too!) haven't actually read his books...which isn't a good start for criticism. Try Consciousness Explained; Darwin's' Dangerous Idea if the former is too hard for you. Remember he's a combative philosopher - not unusual. Then criticise.
@brian' Hmmm. So much access to reading material, but much easier to leave glib comments after watching half a YT video...I just don't wanna admit this kinda shit to myself sometimes ;D Oh well. Still, I don't always get why people bother with philosophers like Dan Dennett at all, or psychologists like Nick Humphreys with analogous views (I mention Humphreys, as it's all "cognitive science's fault" in some comments), agree or disagree - & one cannot form coherent views without hearing various arguments - just to rubbish them in an offhand manner. Don't see many citing something like Roger Penrose's work on consciousness here, which would really be a welcome counterpoint! Philosophers love genuine objections; but then I don't suppose I have to get why they don't Indeed, perhaps it's just unhealthy to get it....So rigour's in short supply, what's new - & information has eclipsed knowledge, which IS to a degree more than in the primitive past. I will continue to make remarks like the above just to check, anyway lol
Is consciousness on the outside? Does that mean that consciousness comes from the outside of our Universe? The process of activating a memory involves lighting up a memory using consciousness. Are we looking from the outside to the inside in that case? Is the brain inside, while consciousness is outside? Is the brain merely a tool for consciousness, consciousness resides on the outside? People have talked about themselves "being on the outside or fringes of society". Is that an indication that for some, they are more aware of consciousness being on the outside? Does this idea have consequences for AI, because it is hard to get a machine to apply will and control from an absolute outside? Is that why AI machines have not achieved consciousness so far? Why does consciousness exert control over the body? Has Science been unable to find out where consciousness resides because it cannot find this "outside". What does it mean to be aware of oneself? From where? ...and if consciousness has a fuzzy position and is essentially everywhere, does that mean that part of it emanates from outside, outside of our Universe? Similarly, are quantum particles in superposition simultaneously existing inside AND outside of our universe? Spread out among multiple alternate Universes? Also, If there was something from outside of the Universe, how could you use the tools of our local Universe to prove it exists? You could not. Yet, this scenario seems similar to the hard problem of consciousness. If consciousness comes from the outside, it is impossible to find its true location.... Consciousness may be something that came from the outside that "plugs into a body". Part of its essence still remains external. It can be the experiencer, yet remains on the outside, looking in.
But please pay no attention to his screams and just keep telling him that his consciousness is just an illusion and he can't fool you, and then pound his poor little hand into oblivion while laughing at him.
Of course you’re not going to find anything resembling a small man in your brain. And you’re not going to find a little throne or stage where consciousness resides. Consciousness does not reside in the brain, the brain resides in consciousness, everything does.
A human being is produced from two material elements, namely the female's egg and the male's sperm. From the union of egg and sperm in the female's womb, a tiny embryo develops; the common fruit of two human beings-man and woman, the parents. The material, parental substances merge into a combination of egg-cell and sperm through the execution of the procreative act and they continue to develop in the embryo which lives initially only as an impulse-based naturally instinctive small body with no consciousness and personality of its own. This tiny body stems from two other fully-grown bodies and is just as material as they are, because the procreative act alone is just the consummation of a material process where the consciousness-form of one or even both parents is not transferred when the sperm and egg cell combine. If this were the case then the conceived offspring would have the same consciousness of one or even both parents which is absolutely not possible because, according to the laws of Creation, each consciousness is specifically related to only one single comprehensive consciousness block and this in turn is assigned to one single spirit-form. If it were not so, then what the laws of Creation say is impossible would occur, namely that two different consciousness-forms and also two different personalities could take possession of a human being, in fact already at the moment of conception. Truthfully, two consciousness-forms and two personalities can never simultaneously take possession of a human being, because this would be against the nature of the laws of Creation, and the Creation itself would reduce to absurdity. What appears to be different forms of consciousness and different personalities in human beings are the products of a single consciousness whose functioning through an illness like schizophrenia is negatively affected causing delusions which manifest as other and foreign personalities. These conditions of sick forms of consciousness are well known since time immemorial under the incorrect term 'possession'. In truth it is not a question of other personalities and forms of consciousness besides the normal personality and the normal consciousness, but rather of a developed psychophysical state of excitement which is normally connected with conditions of cramps and delusions. It is not the influence from some god, angel or spirits and demons, as wrongly claimed by religions and sects who want to drive out such spirits, demons or additional personalities through exorcism. When the egg and sperm unite through the act of procreation the consciousness and personality do not enter the fertilised egg which is contrary to what occasionally is wrongly taught. The fact is that during the three weeks after fertilisation the formless embryo grows as a tiny natural impulse-based pure instinct body. On the 21st day the embryo is then 'spiritually' animated when the spirit-form reincarnates into the embryo along with the consciousness and personality which incarnate through the comprehensive consciousness block. So the spirit-form and the comprehensive consciousness block's created part, the consciousness and personality, become the self of the conceived life form as its inseparable part. If the reincarnation of the spirit-form as well as the incarnation of the new consciousness and personality into the embryo has taken place, then the embryo is transformed from a pulsing natural instinct-based state of life into a conscious living process. This means, that the embryo no longer exists, but from now on the foetus whose tiny heart then starts to beat and to work. So the conscious life of the consciousness begins which exists in the foetus and in this form develops into a human being. The essential material components of the growing foetus come from both parents, but the forms of the spirit and of the comprehensive consciousness block, the consciousness and personality have nothing to do with the material components since they are of a completely different nature which the human being is incapable of influencing and determining.
@@teryylotus1995 You think and believe as you were indoctrinated that God is good and that God is Love. For every, if any, bible script you can give me that God is good I can give you 10 to prove the opposite straight from the Bible. Therefore my statement that you do not know your biblical god for how he truly portrayed himself. This is why you believe all the preachings of a good and caring god.
TheTophat22 So what is this moron trying to say about consciousness? It'S A TRICK, AN ILLUSION, WHAT. He sounds like he is a debunker of the harry Houdini type. However this tells us nothing about consciousness. I could not listen to the whole thing. He sounds like a materialist of the worse kind. The key thing to focus on is not the brain, but the subjective state. I have to say that we are only beginning as a western society to comprehend consciousness, and I can guarantee it will " BLOW YOUR BRAIN AWAY".
I've heard D.D say that because he's left handed he 'thinks' w/his right hemisphere, and I've never been able to figure out why even though I have been right handed all of my life when riding a bicycle and operate motor vehicles I feel like I can control them better w/my left hand..? And I would like asking him why when folding our arms or interlocking our fingers some folks feel more comfortable w/left over right, or visa-versa..? ¿ ? And I've got a real noodle scratcher ~ if you brought up a child from birth and cut almost completely thru a leg of every chair everyone sat on, when at around age 11 this child sat on a perfectly sound chair - what would happen ?》✌🏛🍻🎶🎸🌟🌈⛥🎵🏞🤘😎✨
This is the second video I've watched dennett give on consciousness, and twice now i feel he has only dealt in metaphors, rather than answering the question. As one commenter has said, it is true that he is not a neuroscientist. Well, if that disqualifies him from giving an answer, then why is he giving these talks?
The point is that what we call 'consciousness' is mostly an illusion as well. There isn't quite as much to explain as people like you desperately want to believe.
"You are your brain", yes! but incomplete. The other part, the absolutely critical other part, is what your brain is doing, as you say, "right now, reading my comment". Imagine if your brain is suddenly frozen to absolute zero. Now it's not doing anything, right. No thoughts, no dreams. When your brain is suddenly thawed you think it's the next moment when in fact a year has passed, or a century. You already understand the fundamental flaw in the movie, "Vanilla Sky". "consciousness spot will eventually be located in our brain", no! I don't think so. Your entire brain might not be necessary for consciousness but if you remove all the unnecessary parts then what's left is likely going to be pretty complex, like a lightly pruned tree. It will undoubtedly be a very difficult problem for science to discover the pruned result. And then there's also the question, can one be more conscious and less conscious? If so will that be reflected in different patterns of pruning? Cheers
I am more than my brain. My conscience is a spirit that goes beyond brain and body. It exists within me and outside. I believe this because I dreamed things that came true. This I believe came from my conciousness, it cannot be a brain thing. Spirit =conciousness!
@@selihter Hi sally. I'm not sure what you are saying. You wrote, "My conscience is a spirit". Did you mean "My consciousness is a spirit"? I ask because 'conscience' and 'conscious' have such different meanings.
@@selihter You're welcome. I agree that 'conscious' and 'spirit' have the same meaning. I have been trying to form a clear understanding of 'conscious' for a long time. Maybe you could help? I think I understand matter quite well (in the common sense, not in the physicist sense) and I see that I am made of matter. But this consciousness I 'have' seems to be something extra and nothing at all like matter and hard to imagine how matter could 'make' consciousness. But I think I've figured it out... Imagine two cups sitting on a table. The cups exist as physical things. The cups have a 'distance' relationship between them. This relationship is a different kind of thing than the cups themselves. The relationship 'exists' but it is a radically different kind of existence. You can't see it or feel it or touch it yet it exists. Now imagine all the trillions upon trillions of constantly changing existing relationships going on in our bodies. I imagine some parts of those trillions of relationships are digestion and respiration and muscular contraction and other parts are what we call thoughts. If I metaphorically bundle all of my current thoughts together I think I am justified in calling that bundle my consciousness. What do you think?
@RAYfighter I like Dennett. Usually in my country are polemic as game. I dont like the title!!! I think whats cool of his aproach is the moral agent in general, cases he mentioned in other conferences. If remember well. I ve seen it long time ago. Anglosaxon thinkers and continental thinkers differ a lot. I dont think it solves the problem of consciosness, theres an extra trouble we have different words in romance languages. Magic is when the classic definition of knowledge is not met. May be you have the right opinion but dont understand fully. Magic as a trick, Magic as a primitve explanation. Magic as a right opinion without full understanding. For me Dennett solves a lot when he says: You are a moral agent!!! Ill rewatch it!!! Three very different definitions of magic.
Im fan of his conferences, but still a trouble maker, and with other framework. Im not into tradition versus science, nor mith versus science. Superstition vs science: yes please!!!
@RAYfighter oh, i may have been in an slovenian service station just in the border. Met some people was really surprise because they sold some kind of vodka, just after the conflict in the balcans. Driving and vodka, what a tradition!!! I may try to understand the balcan perspective on the matter. Thank you too for the polite exchange Heisenberg!!!
Isn't Dennett wrong when he states, after the afterimage experiment, that there is nothing "red" going on in your brain (meaning that no actual perception of redness is taking place) when in reality the afterimage is probably caused by the photochemical properties of the cells in the retina, which means that the perception of redness in the brain is just as real as if the person was actually watching a red object? So, it's not an illusion in the sense that the brain would be creating it, but rather a real perception, that occurs because the retina generates it, similarly to the artifacts that you see in really old black and white TV recordings, where extremely bright areas are sometimes seen as black.
Ya, except that it is not the retina. Rather it is the same neurons firing in the brain, having been habituated through looking. Without the stimulus, those same neurons will stop firing. And so the image fades. This is the same reason why people can continue to experience pain, long after the tissue has healed. In the instance of pain, it is the person paying attention to the pain, that maintains it. This is why, distraction and CBT works for pain. And meditation as well.
Stage magic often tells a story to distract you and make you believe something just happened that didn’t. You possibly believe Dennet just explained something about consciousness. Can you now tell me what he explained to you? The American flag illusion is well understood and is due to the chemistry in the retina, so there actually is a (false) signal of ‘red’ sent to the brain. Excellent presentation, but not quite what he claims it was, typical Dennet.
I think the example of magic tricks have something to do with consciousness, because magic tricks only work because most of the information that our senses collect never reach consciousness because of the many filters our brain has to prevent our consciousness from being overloaded. E.g. the retina alone sends data in the order of 1 MB/s to the brain (the photoreceptors generate an even higher datarate, but there are already filters in the retina) but what we consciously see is only in the order of maybe KB/s.
This was brilliant. But I'm puzzled why he tends not to explicitly apply the logic he used for explaining deja vu to the problem of the Subject. The mind tells a story about its own functioning using the characters of "subject" and things the subject "does" or "experiences". I experience deja vu because some process in my mind concluded that "it happened before". The same way, I experience "having a self" because some part of my mind (brain) creates a description which features the concept of "self" and things that the "self does" or "experiences". Put it another way, the introspective sense of being in a Cartesian theater is the form in which the mind describes itself. We are a simulation created by the brain.
Mr. Dennett starts his analysis from a materialist’s point of view and therefore all of his premises and conclusions branches out from that philosophy/worldview. The simple fact is everything that enters the brain becomes information and that information is not a material substance. As a materialist, Mr. Dennett has only one tool and one cause and effect (material). Academia, which is now primarily a community of materialists controlled by a hierarchy of materialists are stuck on a dead-end road. That is why A.I. has gone nowhere and will never emerge from a materialist mindset. Consider the material that makes a book, ink, and paper. There is nothing supernatural about that but there is also something else there which is not just ink and paper (material). The arrangement of matter determines whether there is information present or not. What is interesting is that there is an attempt to classify all matter in the universe as containing information. Mr. Dennett and his fundamental flaw; to quote him “exploiting information in the environment” is a flawed mindset that believes information is not exclusively within life, an exclusive property created by intelligence but exists outside of intelligence as well. This means that for Mr. Dennett life is not the author of information but that information is a property of the environment, a fundamental component of matter, but that contention cannot withstand scrutiny. So as a materialist, who Mr. Dennett most certainly is, and that which is his all-and-all there should be no obstacle to explaining consciousness, brain function, experience, etc. The most glaring evidence that the materialists have it all wrong is the fact that they have free will. The academics that are hardcore materialists insist that there is no free will. These materialists conclude that when the part of the brain that contains information about math for example, and that part lights up during positron emission tomography it was not by the will of the person to access that information via a non-material cause (will) but was just a natural coincidence with a natural chemical cause. Basically, for the materialist everything in the universe is a chemical/atomic reaction working toward completion and those things such as life that is going in the opposite direction and not toward their lowest energy stable state cannot adequately be explained by materialism, but that doesn’t stop academic con-men like Mr. Dennett from their flim-flam. As the comment section here demonstrates Mr. Dennett uses a lot of words and one hour in an attempt to explain consciousness; which is what?
Jibwaddle Hosafat, I don't know what kind of substance a radio wave is made of, but they must be made of something. Radio waves act as waves, so even if they are only a force they must have a medium to travel in, whatever that may be? I don't believe they can go through metal, but they can go around it.
I wouldn’t attempt to argue with your speculation because all walks of life, to some extent are idealists. Idealism is often realism if you regard yourself as existing in an intelligible world that is expressing its order.
...except that the Theory of Evolution as well as accepted cosmological theories begin with the a priori assumption that there is no purpose to anything except the purposes humans invent. What could be more anthropocentric than that? Scientists worship Camus while ridiculing Christ.
Open-minded Skeptic you are making a massive assumption not based on empirical evidence. There is no teleology demonstrable in the known laws of physics, none.
My OpenMind: There also is no teleology demonstrable in the creation of music, other than our enjoyment of it. Perhaps it IS possible that material reality exists for us (our consciousnesses) to enjoy it. The empirical evidence for the teleology of the laws of physics may well be the observable fact that you'd rather be alive and conscious than dead and completely unaware of material reality.
Dennet offers nothing in the way of an argument. What he does instead is simply assume a priori that consciousness is merely an illusion, that it has all the appearances of being something real but is in fact not real in the least. To "prove" this, he presents us with some rather entertaining, even startling optical illusions. They look real enough, but they are only illusions. Having done so, he then says," see, that's what consciousness is too: nothing more than an illusion." It's all rather entertaining, but to assume in your premises what you seek in your conclusion does not amount to an valid argument. Nowhere in his presentation is to be found anything resembling in the least an argument. His book, consciousness explained, is no different: it explains nothing at all. It poses no argument, just a kind of elaborate show and tell long-windedly elaborated.
I thought the argument was pretty clear. There is no I experiencing consciousness. There is only a collection of trillions of registers interacting from stimuli to create stimuli upon each other and the body. The stimuli come in from the senses, and the registers do what they do with that information for the organism to survive, but the construction in the brain we label consciousness is simply that--a construction--which may or may not be an accurate portrayal of the reality the organism is in. Consciousness is simply a brain function. The fact that it's a constructed illusion is most apparent by the existence of a consciousness called dreams and the consciousness of hallucinations. Both are constructed consciousnesses built on registers firing dissociated from the reality of the environment and yet still have the quality of consciousness. The registers need not have actual external stimuli to perform their usual function. The overwhelming phenomenon of consciousness and the sense of a self witnessing reality is simply the product of the incredible amount of registers--perhaps in the trillions--performing all at the same time--something like the pixels in a 100 terabyte jpeg image. Our consciousness is that jpeg. Turn off the display device--the trillion registers which generate the trillion pixels--and the jpeg--our consciousness--no longer exists. But there is no viewer of the jpeg. The jpeg simply organizes stimuli and reaction. The construction called consciousness is only present to perform that function. You don't exist, kiddo.
It's a perfectly fine PHILOSOPHICAL argument. It's not intended to "prove" anything, but to get people thinking. That's why he's invited to speak at cognitive science conferences. He helps us to get unstuck.
This guy is consistently brilliant. So good at getting complex ideas across to people like me, books and lectures. He has this quiet charisma on stage! It's magical :-)
He is brilliant with stupid people
yes, he's a typical brain-dead atheist, who only fools fools
A true teacher
I was distraught to know that my favorite philosopher passed away 😢 got some consolation that his lectures will be here forever and I can watch them over and over again 55:00
Dude, that opening was A E S T H E T I C ~
I liked it too, however I thought it was a bit too elaborate for a LECTURE. I mean, if Dennett had his own TV show then maybe, but a college lecture?
I fucking died 😂
vaporwave 100%
My first thought was "oh, this must be a video of him speaking in the late 80s or early 90s." T'was not the case..
Dan Dubsttep
Dennet was such a genius. I've studied magic for over 5 decades, along with other sciences, and his statements of our reality being "real" "stage" is epiphany to me. We as humans won't even come close to figuring this out until we shed our want of the supernatural. The concept pollutes most minds at some level, and even the least "belief" destroys advancement in this area. Intelligence is part and pair of this subject, and these days AI is only a branding name, and not the God people tell of the sky falling.
How are we ever to grow up in this world of childish thinkers and portrayers? Daniel is one of the few adults that have ever lived. Gr8! Peace ☮💜Love
Whether or not Dennett is right about consciousness being a bag of tricks, investigating consciousness empirically as a bag of tricks with neuroscience can bring us a lot of great insights - even though we hold off on committing ourselves to any ontological conclusions about consciousness. I was a student of philosophy first, with an interest in philosophy of mind, and later a student of psychology, neuroscience and the brain. And one lesson that is better experienced than told is how severely neuroscience and especially knowledge gained from studies of brain injuries challenge intuitions about what consciousness is - intuitions that you often rely on when doing philosophy of mind. Rather than the question being whether this or that is the case ontologically regarding consciousness, I would invite people to read up on how the brain functions simply to expand their imagination about what a mind is and does. And on a sidenote, I nearly always find Dennett pleasant, lucid and thought-evoking. His work is a pleasure to read, too.
Very well said
One of the things that Dennett does particularly well - as a philosopher should - is to lift us out of some of our reflexive habits of thought so that we can back out of common but ultimately unsuccessful inferences and come at the problem from a fresh perspective.
He can't necessarily offer the right perspective, but as he says, that's not really his job. For example, his "multiple drafts" model isn't intended to be correct, but to provide a plausible way out of the Homunculus Problem, which at this point is really more a philosophical or pre-scientific problem of emergence than it is a hard scientific problem of identifying mechanism. The answers will eventually fall out of work in cognitive science and neuroanatomy, but we're not anywhere near there yet, and unfortunately that leads some people rather than saying "I don't know" to fill in the gaps with wild unfalsifiable hypotheses concerning universal Consciousness and the like: anything, ironically, to keep consciousness mysterious.
Dr. Joe Dispenza's explanation of conscious and the mechanics of the mind and brain is more sophisticated and simple then, what this person is relaying.
you are spot on. the good man still have a dust from establishment, where you have to get A** to be admitted for study, and meanwhile like Dr Joe Dispenza is selling us of it in a bottled water, freely available on youtube with hundreds men and women , pursuing us with advert to buy their bottle of water is even much more drinkable and satisfying :)
I think it's a viewpoint worth considering, despite it being counterintuitive. People used to believe the universe revolved around the Earth. Any idea saying otherwise would've taken away the special meaning of importance. Now we know the truth about planets, and despite no longer having that feeling of importance we found it elsewhere.
You see, he didn't really convince you that consciousness is an illusion, he just made it seem that way.
Well, how did he do that?
That's not my department.
I totally agree that he didn't really convince you that consciousness is an illusion, he just made it seem that way
People will believe anything, because they either hope it is so, or are afraid it might be.
Wizards first rule.
@@google12greekmythsthatprove. hit me up sometime late afternoon Central Coast.
What are the other Wizard rules?
@@dmac5935 2nd rule of the wizard. Any technology advanced enough to elude comprehension will be indistinguishable from magic.
@@1112viggo 👏🏼👏🏼👊🏽😎
Got any more 🧙♂️ 📏 's
Indian Rope Trick: In a group of friends the story is told,, and not wanting to be left out, one of the friends "fibs" that he/she has seen it.. wanting easy acceptance into the group. Later, not being want of being "caught in a lie" there is subsequent storytelling and made-up excuses of where and when... how and why... but still just a lie. Gr8! Peace ☮💜Love
About the American flag illusion. As I remember from courses about the eye retina, it is the retina that creates these red stripe signals. The green light photoreceptors becomes inactivated a few second after having been stimulated. The red photoreceptors, having not been stimulated, continue to send signals, creating the image of red stripes. Maybe I have misinterpreted the lesson I attended or Dan does not know about the retina preprocessing work. I wrote about it in www.kinberg.net/wordpress/stellan/consciousness/#philosophical-view
The intro looks and sounds like a Tim and Eric bit.
Interesting. No thinker behind the thoughts. He (lecturer) shows nicely that anything that eventually comprise of consciousness should not have consciousness, as otherwise problem is not solved. Also the concept of "real magic" apply as well as the concept of the power of integrated explained magics (brain effects) to generate an unexplained magic (consciousness). Very nice. I think what will be helpful is also to understand why consciousness exists - its role, it seems, is to integrate it all, to generate a "self" that "does", "decide", "feel" and also "afraid". Afraid of dying...
No consciousness -> no self -> no fear to dying -> evolution cant work as there is nothing to be afraid of... Consciousness and the derived "self" is a must product for evolution to work. Therefore it must exists and it is so important that the illusion is so strong, so we believe it. But it is, you are, just a magic, a very good one. Enjoy it!
That is a very interesting post. I think that you are nearly there. However, I suggest that where you fall down is your second paragraph. Evolution doesn't depend on consciousness, as DD explains very clearly in his lecture on Darwin's Strange Inversion. It is now postulated, notably by Thomas Metzinger, that the self is non-existent, hence so is consciousness. Pretty hard eh?, but perhaps not so hard to grasp after this lecture.
Paul Money thanks I think the "consciousness" is closely related to the self illusion that is needed for the fear to die (or the strive to live) which is an important/must ingredient in evolution.
consciousness is primary , so its consciousness itself that drives evolution which evolves the makeup of living things to fear this and that so they dont damage their bodies.
Consciousness is the emerged property of a complex system to contemplate itself and the world.
There are 86 billion neurons with trillions of connections firing in this majestic organ we call the brain. This computational system through its complexity and collaborating sensory organs understands through experience its existence and the natural world.
There is no need for a magical inside man/spirit/god to guide the brain, the brain is the final frontier.
I've seen variations of the presentation but this one was superb.
111
去1我n
The best about consciousness!
I love philosophy!
I think this is one of my all time favourite comments! ;D
The Indian Rope Trick explains the existence of all religions.
and what is more is, when you wake up you will realize you are nothing but consciousness.
Not for Dennett: he's an eliminativist materialist about consciousness
I think the question is just as much on the table after these points as before: how does "thinking" or "believing" there's a red stripe out there create the experience we have when we see the red stripe? What is so special about our form of "thinking there's a red stripe out there" where we are actually experiencing something and a simpler computerized stripe and color detector that we would be suspicious at best is actually experiencing anything, but rather simply detecting it. For me this lecture explains how certain conscious processes work--filling in details isn't actually done, you just think it is. Great, but it doesn't explain why there are conscious processes in the first place.
Yeah, he inadvertently chose a great metaphor for his whole talk - stage magic, i.e., misdirection. He gets lost in the details about the contents of consciousness, but totally sidesteps the question of why there is ANY consciousness at all. THAT is the real issue.
My line to all materialists is, in a universe of nothing but matter, nothing matters. It doesn't matter that you convince us of your argument. It doesn't matter if you have an argument. It doesn't matter if you stop being a materialist.
This Is a classical case of Beating Around The Bush and Dennett is being very clever about it (almost magically).
Just to use a metaphor similar to his own : What was there first? The chicken or the egg? You can't just deny the chicken or the egg for that matter. This philosopher does so... unfortunately. He even states consciousness is a magic trick of the brain.
The brain and everything (!) else consists of a random collection of neutrons, protons and electrons forming elements, which in their turn form molecules. That in itself is a sheer wonder. The brain does create illusions every now and then but that is nothing more than one of its characteristics. Our consciousness uses the brain to experience this illusion we call reality. You therefore can also consider that our consciousness does exist with the manifested brain as a disguise.
Consciousness just IS and the brain can only exist because of it. It's not the other way around. As a matter of fact I believe that everything we taste, see, hear or smell is manifested due to our consciousness.
Consciousness is the essence of our being, otherwise there will be nothing and that's simply impossible. See the biocentrisme theory of dr Robert Lanza.
Dennet's materialist reductionism is obsolete. Check out Don Hoffman.
Best theory on Deja vu I have ever heard
...interesting....however it doesn't address the then problem with a valid memory....
just a common sense theory, unsophisticated as can be, nowadays we have quantum entanglement as possible factor to bring in
Regarding that Bellotto painting, I think that artist knew his painting would be up on a wall, so spending the extra time to fill in all kinds of detail that would not be visible from several feet away would just be a waste of effort. Because any person seeing this scene in reality would have to be far enough away from those figures crossing the bridge that they, in fact, would not see any more detail than he's put into his painting.
Listening to Daniel's explanation of consciousness for nearly an hour for him to finish with an illusive, I don't know either what consciousness is, left me hollow. One must at least examine veridical consciousness outside the brain. This has been experienced by many, I myself included. Look up Dr. Lloyd Rudy on UA-cam for only one of many near death veridical experiences.
If consciousness is an illusion, who/what is being deceived?
The creature having that experience.
@@hellalpha Wrong again. There is no creature "having" anything. A thought is formed in a brain and later recorded in its memory that says "I am a consciousness, i.e. a persistent thing separate from my stream of psychological experiences". This thought formed in that brain is false. No one is being deceived because there is no one 'there'. But that brain of course will later make and enact bad life plans based on that false thought, and observing its behavior from the outside we're used to applying the shorthand description "there goes an entity that has been deceived or is deceiving itself". Your mistake is to assume such a shorthand expression really means "there is a permanent something living in that body, that suffers the effects of the deception". There is not. No one suffers the effects of the deception because there is no one 'home', as it were. There is just a body containing a brain that sometimes entertains false thoughts and makes bad plans that lead to dissatisfactory results.
@@d0nj03 An aggregate of mindless cells yeah - it's been described as more an artwork than a deception by Nick Humphreys. We don't have much choice to go along with it tho, do we? ;D
d0nj03 what if i told you the complete consciousness was the small pin tip sized ball that exploded into so many fragments of experiences that it would take a life time to experience each one of those fragments. That fragmented world is the world that we exist in and our small little lives are merely attempting to make sense of its completion by collecting its experience!
@@d0nj03 Confidently making assumptions. Nobody knows. You humans love to want to know what you are incapable of knowing.😌
What an amazingly 90s intro sequence....Also, for some reason I always thought the reason images, especially high contrast ones, seem to get temporarily imprinted in your eye, was residual; charge on the retina. I don't know why I thought that - probably my own hypothesis. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage - I guess I was sort of on the right track.
I am a Cartesian by inclination, though I think we tend to "over-define" the hard problem of consciousness to a great extent.
For one thing, we do not seem to know where it is advisable to fix a boundary for where the "body" terminates, and where the "mind" begins, or the inverse; and this is not the occasion for asking the one question in a more exacting way, than to achieve any stage of technical sophistication in ultimately assigning one sort of "experienced body" to a particular region or set of functions in a brain mass "itself" physical, or to achieve or realize any more sophistication in assigning, re-cognizing, one sort of "experienced mind" to a particular emotional or memorial set or quality of perceptions "themselves" conscious.
We do not make such fine distinctions, and do not possess even a rudimentary vocabulary for going about the first order business of addressing what in essence was, and still is, the Cartesian problem as such: That one is a "Sum res cogitans", a being that is thinking, in order to propose that one is a "Cogito ergo Sum", a thinking being only.
The first is obvious to an unlettered peasant. The latter is a familiar enough problem to an educated mind.
And the "mind" is more of a social construct than an alternative name for conscious experience, far less anything that a brain mass conceivably does or can be conceived to do.
Wherein, one suspects, is at least one possible answer to the "necessity" for a conscious existence.
This is about the cause of consciousness- not consciousness itself
so he shows how we are susceptible to illusions. But he doesn't show anything in relation to the actual sensations of consciousness themselves. Only that they don't necessarily fully represent the real world.
Works for me.
Brilliant!!
counscience Is pain. pain is real. magic is not real.
If you say so pal.
as he mentioned there is no king wearing a robe, there's only a robe, what if consciousness is outside of us, that empty space around us when we are born we are "plugged" in to it, our brain is just wireless router a machine connecting us to consciousness which is all that is
I enjoy his materialistic approach. It's not right or wrong. I also enjoy the opposite. Check out his exchanges with Rupert Sheldrake for example
it is true that this world is nothing but an illusion . but remember this is true for someone who woke up and realized he was dreaming, are you wake up?
It is impossible to prove that the world is really an illusion, so there is no reason to assume it and not just stick with the easier solution that the world is real. This is actually the reason why I am a materialist, not an idealist.
Personal Conclusions from various sources "We Are All One Consciousness" for the following reasons:
1. In this world everything must have a cause, so that something exists because of something else, as well as ourselves.
2. It will be very saturating / boring if we have only one physical form in this world.
3. It will be very saturating / boring if all human beings have the exact same physical form / behavior.
4. Try to imagine emptying all the physical things around us only the remnants of humanity, then eliminating all human beings leaving only their memories, then removing all their memories leaving only their consciousness, then connecting that consciousness, feel who we are ??.
5. Body, mind, feelings, emotions and everything in this world is always changing, so what never changes ??, that is our true self, which is true consciousness. If everything changes2 / moves who observes, there must be something fixed to be able to observe.
6. All human beings communicate with each other is the beginning of the beginning / the future of human beings unite, only electronic devices today can unite all human beings, one day the device is implanted in the human mind and eventually man will open all access to his mind.
7. Our body is a group / accumulation of memory accumulated brought from the beginning of the birth of the first human in the world through continuous DNA binding.
8. Twins are born at the same time, what if all human beings are born at the same time ??. What happens if the birth of all human beings is not influenced by the dimensions of space and time ??
9. The twins are identical to A and B, if the whole memory of A is copied to B, what is the difference ??
10. The law of attraction (law of attraction) that our minds will attract whatever we think, because we are all like one part of the body.
11. Like some of the video recordings of ourselves there is a video as a vocalist, a video as a violinist, as a pianist, as a drummer, etc. The video2 is made into one in one video then it will produce a more interesting orchestra, something new and more productive. our world.
12. Man's greatest enemy is himself, at this time man is fighting against himself. By believing that we are all one, then the ego will fade because there is no difference between us.
13. That is why the teachings of religion command us to be grateful and beneficial to many,
If you are hurting others you are actually hurting yourself, just as if you are doing good to others you are actually doing good to yourself.
14. Could it be that we are all dreaming and our dreams meet each other at the same frequency in parallel. Have you ever, when sleeping dreamed of moving roles as someone else, it is because we are all one.
15. We are not immortal as human beings so that we have time for us to scroll through all of life.
16. "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience" ~ Stephen Covey, Have you ever felt that our age is too short, could our consciousness be immortal ?.
17. We are one, only the role is different, the memory block between life is what makes people feel different / separate. Just by brainwashing / erasing his memory then someone will be a different person but his consciousness actually remains the same.
18. The lucky thing for us is ... awareness is always towards / seeking / having intentions / desires towards good / positive / happiness despite experiencing various mistakes.
19. When we die the body and memory are destroyed, how can we remember ever being dead.
20. Why do we have to die? ", When we are told to die, later this eternal question will be asked again and we will always be there." The world is a sustainable life "~ Bruce Lipton
21. In the beginning we were one, but split through a big explosion or bigbang to become different and separate as it is now, but we are provided with a sense of love for us to be able to be reunited later.
22. There is only us and the mirror of ourselves in this world, yet there is another world out there.
23. We will always smile happily seeing each other as ourselves "How beautiful I am" seeing a different self.
24. If all consciousness is told now that they are all one if the experience gained is enough, the consciousness designed from the beginning is so different that there is so much intrigue, consciousness is created differently so that when it comes together it has an incredible consciousness experience.
25. We are indeed alone in this universe, but there are still many other universes with their own laws of nature.
26. Have you ever felt to come to a place that has never been visited but feel familiar with that place, as if we have lived in that place sometime.
27. The world is like a script of a story that is being written by the author, sometimes changed at the beginning, sometimes changed in the middle, sometimes changed at the end it all depends on us as writers, and every story has wisdom that can be taken as a lesson.
28. Hair grows on its own, heart beats on its own, blood flows on its own, ideas emerge on its own, etc., are we involved ??.
29. Imagine today there was an event that caused only you to live in this world, then who are all the people yesterday ??.
30. "If Quantum Mechanism cannot surprise you, then you do not yet understand Quantum Physics. Everything we have considered real all this time, turns out to be unreal." ~ Niels Bohr.
31. In the scale of quantum physics we are all connected to each other, even in double gap experiments proving that particles change when observed or in other words awareness is able to change reality, this has been repeatedly proven by Nobel laureate in Physics.
32. Everything we experience by our senses will eventually only be an electrical impulse in the brain, is it all real ??. We are beings who realize that we are conscious.
33. We are closer than the veins of his neck.
He breathes some of His spirit on you.
Knowing oneself means knowing one's God.
Indeed, we will return to HIM. You are far I am far, you are near I am near.
I am everywhere.
Before the existence of this world there was no material other than Him.
The True Spirit is only One, the Creator.
I agree with your prejudice.
34. Whether the Creator is only tasked with creating, is it possible that the creator does not want to try the results of his creation through another perspective.
35. There is no reincarnation, it is possible that our consciousness is synchronizing, our consciousness is divided by the speed of light so that consciousness can move and divide quickly through energy, and that is why we need sleep, that is why we often do not realize something, that is why the size of the earth is reached by the speed of light so that consciousness is divided quickly and evenly, we are like some chess pawns played by a player, that is why if we move at the speed of light, then we can penetrate the dimensions of space and time, when we die we wake up and regain consciousness as long as there are human beings living in this world.
36. Have we ever had a problem and suddenly someone came to provide a solution to the problem we are experiencing, as if someone was sent by the universe to help us in solving the problem, which is actually our own awareness that sends that person to us.
37. A thousand years ago did human beings see, hear and be trapped in their hearts about current technological advances ??. If we all tend to sin (damage) then it will be the world of hell, if we all tend to do good then it will be the world of heaven.
38. Knowledge learns objects, God who created our consciousness, does not allow God to be objects of knowledge.
39. It is not possible for human creation which is only in the form of words / symbols to represent true truth.uyty
40. Is there a meaning of being without consciousness ?? then we are adventurers of this existence.
Sy
41. The life of the world is just a game and a joke, the one who wins the game of the world is the one who finds his true self.
42. When the existence of the world ends we will know everything.
43. My consciousness undergoes a very extraordinary life experience, feeling life experience with different forms and different places even though in fact my consciousness is always the same, wow .. I was surprised !! how wide I am.
44. Consciousness in fact does not know the concept of time, consciousness can experience / undergo into another physical form because the dimension of time can be penetrated by consciousness, as when we imagine we can act as anyone without time bound, because in this universe time can in fact materialize free, time can move straight, curved, rotate, etc. Our time travel is when our consciousness moves to a new physical experience.
45. We are an awareness, a concept that is able to answer various things.
46. Remember when you were going to leave, you were worried about losing me ??, calm down .. I was everywhere and we would always be able to meet again, believe me.
47. Without searching what is the difference between us in this world and us in a dream while sleeping just passing by without meaning
48. In conclusion, whatever role we play, it is all our own design, so just enjoy.
49. God created us to be Happy, so do not disappoint God.
50. Understand it and be Shining
source:
ua-cam.com/video/LtT8pWIYL4Q/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/h6fcK_fRYaI/v-deo.html
29:59 Love this part.
"We live inside a dream." Twin Peaks.
Dennett: "It's just an illusion, ya'll. Take my word for it".
@brian' There is no science used to support his argument. It's his opinion. I don't suppose you know what these peer reviewed paper are about or whether none of them has ever showed that consciousness is an illusion based on any sort of evidence.
Utter buffoonery ! Such notions go against what we ALL know to be true(however naively). & are completely contrary to ANY reasonable definition of the word conscious. That so called "illusion" is everything we have ever thought, known or done & can ever think, know or be.
@@DrINTJ Look up the mutiple drafts model. Its his model of consciousness and it's scientifically backed up.
@@PrestonGranger It's not scientifically backed up. Stop saying that. It's just a claim that we constantly lie ourselves about subjective experience.
@Brett Sylvester The fact that there is indeed something rather than nothing is the only thing we can ever be sure of. & Even if that something(whatever it is) is ONLY a game of mind, that "illusion" is "real" as experience. Such absurdities occur when people take obviously flawed metaphysics WAY too seriously. Anyway, If you think OR know we're not even conscious, why even bother ? Clown.
Consciousness explained...
Imagine two cups sitting on a table.
The cups exist as physical things.
The cups have a 'distance' relationship between them.
This relationship is a different kind of thing than the cups themselves.
The relationship 'exists' but it is a radically different kind of existence.
You can't see it or feel it or touch it yet it exists.
Now imagine all the trillions upon trillions of constantly changing existing relationships going on in our bodies.
I imagine some parts of those trillions of relationships are digestion and respiration and muscular contraction and other parts are what we call thoughts.
If I metaphorically bundle all of my current thoughts together I think I am justified in calling that bundle my consciousness.
Ho Ho
To be honest I think that you could have accomplished the same with just the two last lines. The rest was superfluous.
BTW. The cups. The distance relationship may not be touchable as such, but it is able to be seen. What's more it is demonstrable and even measurable, at least in principle.
I'm not sure what you were driving at. Were you attempting to bring up qualia, and the difference between physical and conceptual or consciously experienced?
The fact that the Buddha and David Hume said the same thing, one 2500 years ago, the other about 300 years ago, gives some comfort that if we keep rediscovering this way of thinking, eventually it will become commonplace. Although to be earthbound and defiantly sensible is not really human nature. You could look it up...
You should have left the video title as it is but just done a super extended cut of that intro.
This man is trying to convince him self - that he understands some thing of mind.
Professor asks how single cells work together to cause consciousness. Neurons is a form of media that brain capable of synthesizing for recording infos! There are different kinds of neurons, all carry their own specific message throughout chains of cells, organic program. It’s almost like asking how do molecules make up a complex matter...
Severely puzzling 🙂
Everyday life, as well as space and time, can all be utilized by the human being for the training and developing of the various consciousness-related values - or not. The consciousness-related values open up the material consciousness for the impulses of the spirit, (spirit form); they pave the way and make the conscious connection possible with its creative impulses.
The human being takes the decision about this truth himself, as well as whether he wants to utilize his everyday life consciousness, in a valuable way, or if he wants to undergo it in a pure material and materialistic degenerated, (ausgeartet) experience.
The eventful experiences of Everyday life, the human being basically creates himself through his own will.
He decides about what is more important, is it the realistic-directed clear consciousness, or is it the prevailing ideas about the tangible matter: is it the truth of recognizing a truthful meaning (value, judgment) or an ephemeral (transitory) illusion.
He alone decides powerfully, as to whether he continues to be guided through the unreal impulses of his untrained material consciousness, or rather by the effective knowledge, wisdom and logic of his trained and clear consciousness, which he every day can work on in a conscious concentrative way.
The Universal system is open towards the human being and he can consciously influence its causes to bring certain consequences thereof and to awaken evolutiv (evolutionary) attainment (accomplishment, progress).
I think you mean, just because free will and/or consciousness might be illusory in an objective sense, life goes on. If so, I agree. If it is illusory in the aforementioned sense, it's an adaptive mechanism appropriate for us and not one we can ignore the consequences of. Indeed some of the words I've used in this sentence implied as much, quite naturally. That's how deep it goes; deterministic or not, illusory or not.
Fascinating lecture
i might've not got the complete picture of what dennett is trying to communicate, but even if consciousness is an illusion, illusions are created by magic, and what we're trying to find out though the neural correlates of consciousness is how that magic is done. how does the the brain "do" mind. how the magician is doing the trick, even if the trick involves tricking ourselves.
Great mind thank you sir
When checking into the optometrists clinic, the specialist may have taken a leave of absence for some duration; an alternative specialist will not be as genuinely concerned with patient suffering.
I fell unconscious listening to this man speak within the first 10 minutes. Woke up and he is droning on and on showing old visual eye tricks that have yawn......... ZZzzzzzzzzzz. I need the magic of staying awake.
Dennet says the rider on the horse is not only not real but although the horse is clearly not alone in stride, the horse.its self isnt even its own rider!
All I can say Dr., is....."Here I am Sally Jones."
And by God I am surely talking to myself, at minimum! If no one is home upstairs in he. Than so it be.But who hath declared it?
God alone has immortality.
I agree though. The theater lies out there.
Fin
Is homunculi all the way in!
All the road. Reet up to the tash.
Consciousness can be summed up in one paragraph, and also why its perceived it cant be explained, like the example of deja vu that Daniel speaks too.. we want deja Vu to be meaningful but its actual isn't... because?
it simply a feedback loop...
Consciousness or more specifically awareness is our memory of a feedback loop amongst the trillions of neural pathways and memories... a somatic echo that provides us with the experience we call Consciousness... like a Microphone placed against a speaker, it creates feedback, neither the speaker or the microphone is conscious of the feedback loop, however feedback is still produced and memory of the feedback is produced although for only the nano second the electrical system sends the signal, the only difference is we story this memory and now we have an experience we call consciousness... As I have said for many years now a belief is only a belief in its self, consciousness is only consciousness in its self.. in its self... in its self.. in its self.
Nobel Peace Prize.
Seriously though, it makes sense. Maybe because Dennett gives the metaphors to me, but it's at least possible. After all I am not the same person every second of my life, so which one is me? None. There is no "real" me, just a series of subjective experiences that occur. And that stop one day.
I find that this completely dodges the hard problem of consciousness. Whether or not the objects that appear within consciousness amount to a bag of tricks - that's not the central issue here. The central issue is the question of why ANYTHING at all appears in consciousness. Where does this dimension of consciousness come from? It seems like Dennett just totally avoids the real problem, probably because like everyone else, he has no answer to it.
Exactly, I mean taking his analogy further, let's say part of our brain convinces itself that consciousness exists, and that's the 'magic trick'. Just like part of our brain convinces us we're seeing the red on the flag, when it's not there. We would still have to explain why this brain, convinced of consciousness and convinced it experiences sound, taste, touch, etc, is actually experiencing anything at all. Because we could just as well have a brain convinced of all these things, but not actually experiencing anything, and operating in the dark.
The only answer that seems like it even could be the real solution to me is Russellian monism, a form of panpsychism. It's motivated by a huge gap at the heart of physics: physics explains how fundamental particles like electrons move. But we've never accounted for what the electron actually is; physics leaves out any explanation about its intrinsic nature. i.e. beyond how it moves, what actually 'is' this thing that's moving around? If fundamental entities in physics are actually bits of consciousness, then we'll have solved this intrinsic nature problem and the hard problem of consciousness as well.
@@Mablak200 Yeah, I don't see how anywhere in the standard materialist understanding of the universe there arises any need for a conscious observer to be witnessing anything. Everything that is happening could just as well be happening unconsciously. The human brain takes in various inputs, performs some calculations, and outputs behaviors. No matter how complex this input-output dynamic becomes, I don't see how it ever necessitates a field of consciousness to appear which witnesses the calculation going on. Computers do something similar, but as far as we know there is no subjective consciousness which observes that process. I think consciousness must be some fundamental property of the universe. To me it seems just as fundamental as matter. We just don't understand it or have any good explanation for it. If we lack even the most basic understanding of it, I don't see how we can possibly explain it away as confidently as Dennett does. Why should it ever appear at all? I don't see anything in our materialist outlook which explains why it should, or in fact must, appear. This is a huge gap in our understanding of reality.
We could consider that consciousness might come as a mere byproduct of brain activity and is in all actuality not necessary. Rather a phenomena that arises naturally with no apparent benefit. (Or maybe even the goal of the universe/evolution set by our creator or previous cycles) In favor of this argument is that when the brain loses certain functions, you no longer are apparently conscious. If consciousness was fundamental, why does it seemingly go away when I pass out or a doctor pokes a part of my brain?
Consciousness is the "cloud" the quantum cloud......
Play at 1.25 speed
great intro!
Dennett is not really seeking truth or engaging in science or following reason; rather, he's a complex arrangement of neural networks, or perhaps a by-product of neural firings. So what happens is determined by those arrangements, those firings, at any given time. One thing to bear in mind is that consciousness needn't involve sensations, feelings, and thoughts; those constitute a rather superficial layer. Consciousness of the purest variety, or proto-consciousness if you will, may abide at the quantum level (the Planck scale, to be precise) which is non-material and non-local. To say that consciousness is an activity of the brain only is an assumption; it may stretch beyond the human body. If you want a deeper, more sophisticated theory of consciousness, you may want to check out Rupert Sheldrake's work on Morphic Resonance and the collaborative work of Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. I predict that Dennett's views, in less than 50 years, will seem simplistic, crude, and antiquated. In some sense, pure or proto-consciousness is dreaming all this that we call material.
What is Dennetts’ department ???
If there is no such thing as true consciousness then why is there such clarity in understanding when true consciousness is reached? why are metaphors so easy to understand? why is the feeling of peace and love so strong in relation with other humans?
There is no conciousness in the brain! How could there be? The brain is a concept appearing in consciousness and is therefore made out of nothing but conciousness - the knowing of the concept of brain. Butt what an I talking - I do not really expect anyone here to get what I am trying to say. So go on and enjoy the old stories. 😘
Okay?
STAGE MAGIC !!! Pay no attention to the man behind the certainty.
Why can't I just be a sequence of billions of signals making calculations about one another? Tell me why I can't.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts ! Study dialectical philosophy. Studying separate bits will not deliver an answer.
I'm sorry but I think I laughed too hard at that intro
fucking amazing
Like Retro Porno
Maybe there is a cartasian theater in the brain, and then another one and another one and so one until it loops back. No single "little man in the brain" is conscious, but the whole system is.
The reason Dennett spends most of the time talking about magic, deja vu, optical illusions etc. is that unless you put aside the assumption that consciousness "cannot be explained by any naturalistic process", you will say at the end of the explanation that "this does not explain consciousness". In fact Dennett cannot provide a proper 'naturalistic' explanation because he is not a neuroscientist. His job is to remove the notion that any explanation of consciousness in terms of brain activity is wrong by definition.
Yeah, all he does is telling us that consciousness isn´t real/doesn´t exist. It seems that if we remove the magician, there will be no magic. I do not agree...
How do you explain it, then? Not saying he's right necessarily - it is a hypothesis after all - but I'd like to hear a counter-argument. Not many neuroscientists would point to a part of the brain or its construction & say, there is self, there is consciousness; because the more they look, the more it retreats from objective existence. Also, substrate-neutral arguments are indeed naturalistic.
@@EETheReech Why not? No-one's saying you have to, but in philosophy and science (cognitive science being both), it is necessary to provide coherent counter-arguments. "I don't like it" doesn't meet that standard, exactly.
It's an ok approach if your only talking about impressions and registrations in the biological entity. What is really tricky about consciousnesses is that one can close their eyes; be sensory deprived and go on to experience what humans readily find to be a creative almost self originating aspect of consciousness. The brain can think abstractly about things it has never come into contact with. It (the brain) can utilize the 'registries' to generate completely new forms inside itself. This aspect of the 'mind' the ability to build and rebuild realities within cannot be explained with the sensory/registry modeling Dennett proposes. Using the computer science metaphor modelling he does really well to build memory and impulse/reaction/association case for the biological entity, but his explanation lacks the finesse to give consciousness a 'program' a reason why we can think abstractly and creatively. He ditches the inner watcher and just says..there is none, its ALL impulse/reaction/association. I feels like an adequate explanation of less evolved consciousness...just not human. It has a long way to go.
@@timothyperkins3723 Maybe we should accept that there is no explanation yet. I think consciousness is a problem of emergence, which means that a complex system can have properties that none of it's basic parts has. A simple example for this is thermodynamics: a single atom has a position and a speed, but it doesn't have a temperature or pressure. But a gas which consists of only atoms of one kind has a pressure and a temperature. In this case we have an explanation how pressure, temperature, etc. emerge from the properties of single atoms, it was explained in the 19th century by Ludwig Boltzmann and others. Another example is that we encounter matter in very different forms and with very different properties, although all the matter which we encounter in everyday life is made of just 3 different particles: the up quark, the down quark and the electron. That a complex array of neurons can develop consciousness although a neuron has no consciousness is just another example of emergence, except that unlike for gases we don't understand the mechanism yet.
Makes assumptions, as if obvious, and then makes conclusions. Articulate but ...
What good is it to understand these things? What will we do with this understanding? F--k it . Let's go bowling.
I get the impression that some of the people who've made rather superficial comments re cognitive science/philosophy here (tho some are good questions, too!) haven't actually read his books...which isn't a good start for criticism. Try Consciousness Explained; Darwin's' Dangerous Idea if the former is too hard for you. Remember he's a combative philosopher - not unusual. Then criticise.
@brian' Hmmm. So much access to reading material, but much easier to leave glib comments after watching half a YT video...I just don't wanna admit this kinda shit to myself sometimes ;D Oh well. Still, I don't always get why people bother with philosophers like Dan Dennett at all, or psychologists like Nick Humphreys with analogous views (I mention Humphreys, as it's all "cognitive science's fault" in some comments), agree or disagree - & one cannot form coherent views without hearing various arguments - just to rubbish them in an offhand manner. Don't see many citing something like Roger Penrose's work on consciousness here, which would really be a welcome counterpoint! Philosophers love genuine objections; but then I don't suppose I have to get why they don't Indeed, perhaps it's just unhealthy to get it....So rigour's in short supply, what's new - & information has eclipsed knowledge, which IS to a degree more than in the primitive past. I will continue to make remarks like the above just to check, anyway lol
Is consciousness on the outside? Does that mean that consciousness comes from the outside of our Universe? The process of activating a memory involves lighting up a memory using consciousness. Are we looking from the outside to the inside in that case? Is the brain inside, while consciousness is outside? Is the brain merely a tool for consciousness, consciousness resides on the outside? People have talked about themselves "being on the outside or fringes of society". Is that an indication that for some, they are more aware of consciousness being on the outside? Does this idea have consequences for AI, because it is hard to get a machine to apply will and control from an absolute outside? Is that why AI machines have not achieved consciousness so far? Why does consciousness exert control over the body? Has Science been unable to find out where consciousness resides because it cannot find this "outside". What does it mean to be aware of oneself? From where? ...and if consciousness has a fuzzy position and is essentially everywhere, does that mean that part of it emanates from outside, outside of our Universe? Similarly, are quantum particles in superposition simultaneously existing inside AND outside of our universe? Spread out among multiple alternate Universes? Also, If there was something from outside of the Universe, how could you use the tools of our local Universe to prove it exists? You could not. Yet, this scenario seems similar to the hard problem of consciousness. If consciousness comes from the outside, it is impossible to find its true location.... Consciousness may be something that came from the outside that "plugs into a body". Part of its essence still remains external. It can be the experiencer, yet remains on the outside, looking in.
I'd also recommend as a damned fine stand alone lecture: ua-cam.com/video/c0Z7KeNCi7g/v-deo.html The Amazing Randi
how old is this?
Give me a vice, some pliers, a hammer and his hand and he will scream, yes, consciousness exists
But please pay no attention to his screams and just keep telling him that his consciousness is just an illusion and he can't fool you, and then pound his poor little hand into oblivion while laughing at him.
Of course you’re not going to find anything resembling a small man in your brain. And you’re not going to find a little throne or stage where consciousness resides. Consciousness does not reside in the brain, the brain resides in consciousness, everything does.
I agree. I’m surprised that no one came to argue with you.
Along similar lines: www.quantamagazine.org/a-theory-of-reality-as-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-20170601/
A human being is produced from two material elements, namely the female's egg and the male's sperm. From the union of egg and sperm in the female's womb, a tiny embryo develops; the common fruit of two human beings-man and woman, the parents. The material, parental substances merge into a combination of egg-cell and sperm through the execution of the procreative act and they continue to develop in the embryo which lives initially only as an impulse-based naturally instinctive small body with no consciousness and personality of its own. This tiny body stems from two other fully-grown bodies and is just as material as they are, because the procreative act alone is just the consummation of a material process where the consciousness-form of one or even both parents is not transferred when the sperm and egg cell combine.
If this were the case then the conceived offspring would have the same consciousness of one or even both parents which is absolutely not possible because, according to the laws of Creation, each consciousness is specifically related to only one single comprehensive consciousness block and this in turn is assigned to one single spirit-form. If it were not so, then what the laws of Creation say is impossible would occur, namely that two different consciousness-forms and also two different personalities could take possession of a human being, in fact already at the moment of conception. Truthfully, two consciousness-forms and two personalities can never simultaneously take possession of a human being, because this would be against the nature of the laws of Creation, and the Creation itself would reduce to absurdity.
What appears to be different forms of consciousness and different personalities in human beings are the products of a single consciousness whose functioning through an illness like schizophrenia is negatively affected causing delusions which manifest as other and foreign personalities. These conditions of sick forms of consciousness are well known since time immemorial under the incorrect term 'possession'. In truth it is not a question of other personalities and forms of consciousness besides the normal personality and the normal consciousness, but rather of a developed psychophysical state of excitement which is normally connected with conditions of cramps and delusions. It is not the influence from some god, angel or spirits and demons, as wrongly claimed by religions and sects who want to drive out such spirits, demons or additional personalities through exorcism.
When the egg and sperm unite through the act of procreation the consciousness and personality do not enter the fertilised egg which is contrary to what occasionally is wrongly taught. The fact is that during the three weeks after fertilisation the formless embryo grows as a tiny natural impulse-based pure instinct body. On the 21st day the embryo is then 'spiritually' animated when the spirit-form reincarnates into the embryo along with the consciousness and personality which incarnate through the comprehensive consciousness block. So the spirit-form and the comprehensive consciousness block's created part, the consciousness and personality, become the self of the conceived life form as its inseparable part. If the reincarnation of the spirit-form as well as the incarnation of the new consciousness and personality into the embryo has taken place, then the embryo is transformed from a pulsing natural instinct-based state of life into a conscious living process. This means, that the embryo no longer exists, but from now on the foetus whose tiny heart then starts to beat and to work. So the conscious life of the consciousness begins which exists in the foetus and in this form develops into a human being. The essential material components of the growing foetus come from both parents, but the forms of the spirit and of the comprehensive consciousness block, the consciousness and personality have nothing to do with the material components since they are of a completely different nature which the human being is incapable of influencing and determining.
What are the Laws of Creation?
God is real
How do you know? Not what you were indoctrinated to believe by fear.
@@willievanstraaten1960 how do you know I don't know
@@teryylotus1995 You think and believe as you were indoctrinated that God is good and that God is Love. For every, if any, bible script you can give me that God is good I can give you 10 to prove the opposite straight from the Bible. Therefore my statement that you do not know your biblical god for how he truly portrayed himself. This is why you believe all the preachings of a good and caring god.
Consciousness is its content
This man may therby be dubbed, Scientology Santa :)
He is the bearded old man in the sky!
TheTophat22
So what is this moron trying to say about consciousness? It'S A TRICK, AN ILLUSION, WHAT. He sounds like he is a debunker of the harry Houdini type. However this tells us nothing about consciousness. I could not listen to the whole thing. He sounds like a materialist of the worse kind. The key thing to focus on is not the brain, but the subjective state. I have to say that we are only beginning as a western society to comprehend consciousness, and I can guarantee it will " BLOW YOUR BRAIN AWAY".
He's a COG, the creepiest of old guys. "Come here, little girl, sit on Santa's lap. Did you know you have lips in your brain?"
Gnostic I concur. This is a classic example off materialist word jugglery. It's sad to see he packed a large audience to spill his rubbish😩
Dan Dennett (and science in general) never shows how or proves that some chemical and electrical processes add up to Consciousness.
All people like Dennett do is try to explain consciousness by telling us how our mind plays tricks on us.
I've heard D.D say that because he's left handed he 'thinks' w/his right hemisphere, and I've never been able to figure out why even though I have been right handed all of my life when riding a bicycle and operate motor vehicles I feel like I can control them better w/my left hand..? And I would like asking him why when folding our arms or interlocking our fingers some folks feel more comfortable w/left over right, or visa-versa..? ¿ ? And I've got a real noodle scratcher ~ if you brought up a child from birth and cut almost completely thru a leg of every chair everyone sat on, when at around age 11 this child sat on a perfectly sound chair - what would happen ?》✌🏛🍻🎶🎸🌟🌈⛥🎵🏞🤘😎✨
Lol wow, ambidextrous people must be very thoughtful. And I think the child might by then be rather unstable, sound chair or no 😄🍦🥧🎲🎧🐞🍤🚎🙋♀️💁♂️
This is the second video I've watched dennett give on consciousness, and twice now i feel he has only dealt in metaphors, rather than answering the question. As one commenter has said, it is true that he is not a neuroscientist. Well, if that disqualifies him from giving an answer, then why is he giving these talks?
He doesnt answer how subjective experience can arise from the physical because he doesnt think subjective experience exists. Hes a P Zombie
Let us start from optical illusions and it will explain consciousness.Hahahahahahahaah
The point is that what we call 'consciousness' is mostly an illusion as well. There isn't quite as much to explain as people like you desperately want to believe.
@@Molurus73 Mostly !
You are your brain, consciousness spot will eventually be located in our brain. Consciousness is what you are doing right now, reading my comment.
"You are your brain", yes! but incomplete.
The other part, the absolutely critical other part, is what your brain is doing, as you say,
"right now, reading my comment".
Imagine if your brain is suddenly frozen to absolute zero.
Now it's not doing anything, right.
No thoughts, no dreams.
When your brain is suddenly thawed you think it's the next moment when in fact a year has passed, or a century.
You already understand the fundamental flaw in the movie, "Vanilla Sky".
"consciousness spot will eventually be located in our brain", no! I don't think so.
Your entire brain might not be necessary for consciousness but
if you remove all the unnecessary parts then what's left is likely going to be
pretty complex, like a lightly pruned tree.
It will undoubtedly be a very difficult problem for science to discover the pruned result.
And then there's also the question, can one be more conscious and less conscious?
If so will that be reflected in different patterns of pruning?
Cheers
I am more than my brain. My conscience is a spirit that goes beyond brain and body. It exists within me and outside. I believe this because I dreamed things that came true. This I believe came from my conciousness, it cannot be a brain thing. Spirit =conciousness!
@@selihter
Hi sally.
I'm not sure what you are saying.
You wrote, "My conscience is a spirit".
Did you mean "My consciousness is a spirit"?
I ask because 'conscience' and 'conscious' have such different meanings.
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL yes, conciousness. Thanks!
@@selihter
You're welcome.
I agree that 'conscious' and 'spirit' have the same meaning. I have been trying to form a clear understanding of 'conscious' for a long time. Maybe you could help?
I think I understand matter quite well (in the common sense, not in the physicist sense) and I see that I am made of matter. But this consciousness I 'have' seems to be something extra and nothing at all like matter and hard to imagine how matter could 'make' consciousness.
But I think I've figured it out...
Imagine two cups sitting on a table.
The cups exist as physical things.
The cups have a 'distance' relationship between them.
This relationship is a different kind of thing than the cups themselves.
The relationship 'exists' but it is a radically different kind of existence. You can't see it or feel it or touch it yet it exists.
Now imagine all the trillions upon trillions of constantly changing existing relationships going on in our bodies.
I imagine some parts of those trillions of relationships are digestion and respiration and muscular contraction and other parts are what we call thoughts.
If I metaphorically bundle all of my current thoughts together I think I am justified in calling that bundle my consciousness.
What do you think?
Everything we know about the brain is from guys cooperating in a first person experience mode. Lots of phenomena you coudnt explain.
@RAYfighter Pardon, im presuming we use two methods. Observing the brain, and talking to the guy thats the owner.
@RAYfighter I like Dennett. Usually in my country are polemic as game. I dont like the title!!! I think whats cool of his aproach is the moral agent in general, cases he mentioned in other conferences. If remember well. I ve seen it long time ago. Anglosaxon thinkers and continental thinkers differ a lot. I dont think it solves the problem of consciosness, theres an extra trouble we have different words in romance languages. Magic is when the classic definition of knowledge is not met. May be you have the right opinion but dont understand fully. Magic as a trick, Magic as a primitve explanation. Magic as a right opinion without full understanding. For me Dennett solves a lot when he says: You are a moral agent!!! Ill rewatch it!!! Three very different definitions of magic.
Dennet is supercool, but the categories we use are very different. I dont think the mind as a synonim of consciousness.
Im fan of his conferences, but still a trouble maker, and with other framework. Im not into tradition versus science, nor mith versus science. Superstition vs science: yes please!!!
@RAYfighter oh, i may have been in an slovenian service station just in the border. Met some people was really surprise because they sold some kind of vodka, just after the conflict in the balcans. Driving and vodka, what a tradition!!! I may try to understand the balcan perspective on the matter. Thank you too for the polite exchange Heisenberg!!!
I clicked on this because the thumbnail looked like David Letterman.
Isn't Dennett wrong when he states, after the afterimage experiment, that there is nothing "red" going on in your brain (meaning that no actual perception of redness is taking place) when in reality the afterimage is probably caused by the photochemical properties of the cells in the retina, which means that the perception of redness in the brain is just as real as if the person was actually watching a red object? So, it's not an illusion in the sense that the brain would be creating it, but rather a real perception, that occurs because the retina generates it, similarly to the artifacts that you see in really old black and white TV recordings, where extremely bright areas are sometimes seen as black.
Ya, except that it is not the retina. Rather it is the same neurons firing in the brain, having been habituated through looking. Without the stimulus, those same neurons will stop firing. And so the image fades. This is the same reason why people can continue to experience pain, long after the tissue has healed. In the instance of pain, it is the person paying attention to the pain, that maintains it. This is why, distraction and CBT works for pain. And meditation as well.
Stage magic often tells a story to distract you and make you believe something just happened that didn’t. You possibly believe Dennet just explained something about consciousness. Can you now tell me what he explained to you?
The American flag illusion is well understood and is due to the chemistry in the retina, so there actually is a (false) signal of ‘red’ sent to the brain. Excellent presentation, but not quite what he claims it was, typical Dennet.
I think the example of magic tricks have something to do with consciousness, because magic tricks only work because most of the information that our senses collect never reach consciousness because of the many filters our brain has to prevent our consciousness from being overloaded. E.g. the retina alone sends data in the order of 1 MB/s to the brain (the photoreceptors generate an even higher datarate, but there are already filters in the retina) but what we consciously see is only in the order of maybe KB/s.
This was brilliant. But I'm puzzled why he tends not to explicitly apply the logic he used for explaining deja vu to the problem of the Subject. The mind tells a story about its own functioning using the characters of "subject" and things the subject "does" or "experiences". I experience deja vu because some process in my mind concluded that "it happened before". The same way, I experience "having a self" because some part of my mind (brain) creates a description which features the concept of "self" and things that the "self does" or "experiences". Put it another way, the introspective sense of being in a Cartesian theater is the form in which the mind describes itself. We are a simulation created by the brain.
Does this explain all paranormal incidences? No, I’d like to see this man in a debate with Bernardo kastrup.
W
I blocked most of my screen and the motion illusion fooled my camera.
Mr. Dennett starts his analysis from a materialist’s point of view and therefore all of his premises and conclusions branches out from that philosophy/worldview. The simple fact is everything that enters the brain becomes information and that information is not a material substance. As a materialist, Mr. Dennett has only one tool and one cause and effect (material).
Academia, which is now primarily a community of materialists controlled by a hierarchy of materialists are stuck on a dead-end road. That is why A.I. has gone nowhere and will never emerge from a materialist mindset.
Consider the material that makes a book, ink, and paper. There is nothing supernatural about that but there is also something else there which is not just ink and paper (material). The arrangement of matter determines whether there is information present or not. What is interesting is that there is an attempt to classify all matter in the universe as containing information. Mr. Dennett and his fundamental flaw; to quote him “exploiting information in the environment” is a flawed mindset that believes information is not exclusively within life, an exclusive property created by intelligence but exists outside of intelligence as well. This means that for Mr. Dennett life is not the author of information but that information is a property of the environment, a fundamental component of matter, but that contention cannot withstand scrutiny.
So as a materialist, who Mr. Dennett most certainly is, and that which is his all-and-all there should be no obstacle to explaining consciousness, brain function, experience, etc. The most glaring evidence that the materialists have it all wrong is the fact that they have free will. The academics that are hardcore materialists insist that there is no free will. These materialists conclude that when the part of the brain that contains information about math for example, and that part lights up during positron emission tomography it was not by the will of the person to access that information via a non-material cause (will) but was just a natural coincidence with a natural chemical cause.
Basically, for the materialist everything in the universe is a chemical/atomic reaction working toward completion and those things such as life that is going in the opposite direction and not toward their lowest energy stable state cannot adequately be explained by materialism, but that doesn’t stop academic con-men like Mr. Dennett from their flim-flam. As the comment section here demonstrates Mr. Dennett uses a lot of words and one hour in an attempt to explain consciousness; which is what?
Neither term, material or spiritual, is even remotely concise.
Jibwaddle Hosafat, did Mr. Dennett use the term spiritual; because I didn't. Can you more clearly make your point?
Sure. I'm wondering what kind of substance a radio wave is, as it's passing through a radio. Spiritual was only referential.
Jibwaddle Hosafat, I don't know what kind of substance a radio wave is made of, but they must be made of something. Radio waves act as waves, so even if they are only a force they must have a medium to travel in, whatever that may be? I don't believe they can go through metal, but they can go around it.
I wouldn’t attempt to argue with your speculation because all walks of life, to some extent are idealists. Idealism is often realism if you regard yourself as existing in an intelligible world that is expressing its order.
It's pretty clear that consciousness is the ultimate purpose of material reality.
...except that the Theory of Evolution as well as accepted cosmological theories begin with the a priori assumption that there is no purpose to anything except the purposes humans invent. What could be more anthropocentric than that? Scientists worship Camus while ridiculing Christ.
Open-minded Skeptic you are making a massive assumption not based on empirical evidence. There is no teleology demonstrable in the known laws of physics, none.
For a skeptic that's a very large assumption...
My OpenMind:
There also is no teleology demonstrable in the creation of music, other than our enjoyment of it. Perhaps it IS possible that material reality exists for us (our consciousnesses) to enjoy it. The empirical evidence for the teleology of the laws of physics may well be the observable fact that you'd rather be alive and conscious than dead and completely unaware of material reality.
blazh femur we humans are prone making assumption and drawing conclusions based on insufficient evidence.
ua-cam.com/video/bcqd3Q7X_1A/v-deo.html
The red stripe is Dennett’s tie!
Dennet offers nothing in the way of an argument. What he does instead is simply assume a priori that consciousness is merely an illusion, that it has all the appearances of being something real but is in fact not real in the least. To "prove" this, he presents us with some rather entertaining, even startling optical illusions. They look real enough, but they are only illusions. Having done so, he then says," see, that's what consciousness is too: nothing more than an illusion." It's all rather entertaining, but to assume in your premises what you seek in your conclusion does not amount to an valid argument. Nowhere in his presentation is to be found anything resembling in the least an argument. His book, consciousness explained, is no different: it explains nothing at all. It poses no argument, just a kind of elaborate show and tell long-windedly elaborated.
Wasted brain power lol
I thought the argument was pretty clear. There is no I experiencing consciousness. There is only a collection of trillions of registers interacting from stimuli to create stimuli upon each other and the body. The stimuli come in from the senses, and the registers do what they do with that information for the organism to survive, but the construction in the brain we label consciousness is simply that--a construction--which may or may not be an accurate portrayal of the reality the organism is in. Consciousness is simply a brain function. The fact that it's a constructed illusion is most apparent by the existence of a consciousness called dreams and the consciousness of hallucinations. Both are constructed consciousnesses built on registers firing dissociated from the reality of the environment and yet still have the quality of consciousness. The registers need not have actual external stimuli to perform their usual function. The overwhelming phenomenon of consciousness and the sense of a self witnessing reality is simply the product of the incredible amount of registers--perhaps in the trillions--performing all at the same time--something like the pixels in a 100 terabyte jpeg image. Our consciousness is that jpeg. Turn off the display device--the trillion registers which generate the trillion pixels--and the jpeg--our consciousness--no longer exists. But there is no viewer of the jpeg. The jpeg simply organizes stimuli and reaction. The construction called consciousness is only present to perform that function. You don't exist, kiddo.
It's a perfectly fine PHILOSOPHICAL argument. It's not intended to "prove" anything, but to get people thinking. That's why he's invited to speak at cognitive science conferences. He helps us to get unstuck.
Bro dropped the AI summary of this video and called it his opinion 😂