The Neuroscience of Consciousness
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- Опубліковано 21 вер 2024
- Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE, is a British scientist, writer, broadcaster and member of the House of Lords. Specialising in the physiology of the brain, Susan researches the impact of 21st century technologies on the mind, how the brain generates consciousness and novel approaches to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
You'll never find "consciousness" in the brain , just as you won't find music in a radio. Consciousness is the listener, the one who hears the music , which is why its so difficult to explain. Its who you are , a conscious human being,
Her introduction is quite long. I’m not complaining, I’m just impressed by how much she has done! Imagine having coffee with this woman! My god!
Shout out to the guy falling asleep at 38:21
He is still fighting it at 51:27
+pat mcd I'm laughing incredibly hard at this
"Em uh I wasn't sleeping I was just er....doing experiments in consciousness...yeah"
HAHAHA! Yes!
hahahaa
Great to see such an eloquent and articulate speaker make such a complex subject easier to understand . High energy and engaging throughout her presentation. May we continue to see more female professors in the currently male dominated world of academia. Well done Professor Greenfield.
You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think, just kidding, I couldn't stop myself
What a hypnotic speech, all put together with a lot of precision and tactics! It was hitting the exact cords with my brain. It's amazing.
Now for the facts. The brain is exactly like the cockpit of an aircraft and the pilot is the soul
@@jeffforsythe9514 lol good luck with that bs here
@@DreadedEgg I always thought that an open mind was a good thing, the word maybe is much more truthful than definately in so many cases. You do not believe me, but I received God's Divine Blessing 17 years ago and the only reason that I am here is to try to help people. It was not an illusion or a hallucination, it was real.
@@jeffforsythe9514 -
"The brain is exactly like the cockpit of an aircraft and the pilot is the soul"
Is the pilot an automaton or is the pilot conscious?
If the pilot is conscious does that mean
the pilot's body is like a smaller plane and
there is a smaller pilot sitting in its smaller cockpit?
Your soul is you, the part that is reading this, aware and conscious. The brain simply moves the body where you tell it to go. What is so difficult to understand?
Superb symposium of knowledgable minds.
Well done, Barroness. I would enjoy hearing an updated lecture...to see what revelations and insights discovered in the interim decade.
Dr Jill Bolte Taylor, Neuroscientist, did a TEDTALK, March, 2012, explaining in detail what she experienced while having a stroke before and after she identified it as a stroke. Fascinating video. Try to watch it.
It is indeed a great talk....even better is the book her talk is based on. "My Stroke of Insight" does indeed offer a wealth of valuable insights worth considering.
Thank you for your hint
This I think is a 2008 version of the same talk: ua-cam.com/video/UyyjU8fzEYU/v-deo.html
I only understood like 30% of this, and I still really enjoyed this!
this is so good. it basically explains a big big piece of neuroscience in just 1.5 hours :) thank you very much!
Wow this was very powerful and had my full attention. I only wish it could have been longer. It's such a blessing to have been blessed with this video. I'm really In a state of awe..... God bless you all and I'm currently reading the human mind explained by Susan Greenfield. It's a great book. I was unaware of her genius mind... she's totally an inspiration for me. Please continue to do all that you do. Thank U 😊 and God bless
I really like the editing and camera work with respect to the audience. A very interesting body language dialogue, ambiguous at best, is going on; as interesting as the lecturer's topic.
Ms. Greenfield's only weakness is that she comes at her audience like a locomotive. But, obviously,her focus is on the material and not show business... and that is as it should be.
At 1.5 hours, a little show business would have helped the audience keep up with her.
" I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going...There is no question about it. "
What an absolutely brilliant presentation. Thanks so much for preparing it.
I was once wiggling a broken molar while I had a few days to wait for my appointment to get it removed. It was painful with that constant bad toothache that nothing non-prescription really helps with. The pain seemed to lessen while it was being moved about. You see where this is going.... I only felt a deep pain at the point of breaking out the main last bit of root but it was still a lesser pain than the toothache. The relief was instant and then the endorphin + dopamine high was about the same as getting a fair size tattoo. It was just an unconscious reaction messing with the tooth reduce the pain I was in, and the thought to bust it out was also a very casual thought. It was as if my brain had decided without letting me know to remove the source of pain and then guided my actions in a state of lesser awareness. It was a very strange one-off that has always made me think that what we experience is what our brains think we need to experience.
L
Surfaces well and wonderfully scratched by a brilliant scientist that leaves us more knowing that we do not know and understanding that we do not understand. The panel and the moderator were great as well. Thanks!
I really like this woman! Can we hang out & have some tea, sometime? Thank you, Baroness Greenfield, for this wonderful lecture.
+CaptianKeyz You are a rare bread of my kind of (good) people with the best of intentions to put out good vibes...:)
I'd want a bit more than tea, and yes, I do mean biscuits.
Great to hear a scientist who does not talk down to the audience. "Let us assume the null hypothesis."
Many thanks for this lecture.
How to define consciousness. The operational definition given in this lecture is good enough for me. It's what we experience when we first wake up.
The significance of the distinction between consciousness and self consciousness interests me. A child is conscious for many months before being able to recognize herself in a mirror, an indication of self-consciousness. Some animals can and others cannot recognize themselves in mirrors. Consciousness is a pre-condition for self-consciousness. But absence of self-consciousness is not evidence of the absence of consciousness.
After following the literature on primates for 20 years, I find it hard to accept that consciousness is unique to humans. There is too much evidence from animal studies to the contrary. I recently read Franz de Waal's book The Bonobo and the Atheist and drew from his observations that the key may be empathy, a point mentioned in the Scientific American article (reference below),
"Based on results with Western children, psychologists have linked the age humans start passing the mark test with other milestones that happen around the same time, such as development of empathy."
(I cannot find the precise source Maggie Koerth-Baker used for her statement.)
Koerth-Baker, M, Kids (and Animals) Who Fail Classic Mirror Tests May Still Have Sense of Self, Scientific American Nov. 2010
www.scientificamerican.com/article/kids-and-animals-who-fail-classic-mirror/
The following is the study mentioned in the Scientific American article:
Broesch, T., Callaghan, T., Henrich, J., Murphy, C., & Rochat, P. (2010). Cultural variations in children’s mirror self-recognition. Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology, 1-13.
Full text: tinyurl.com/p8dmt3d
Rochat P, Broesch T and Jaynea K, Social awareness and early self-recognition (2012),
doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.04.007
Full text: student.cc.uoc.gr/uploadFiles/179-%CE%9A%CE%A8%CE%92364/early%20self-recognition.pdf
I have saved this lecture as a video to watch again and extracted an audio file which I will put on my mobile phone to listen to more carefully. Software: Pazera Free Audio Extractor v.2.9.
Many thanks.
She's very smart and funny. We need more like her. Her approach to quantifying consciousness is worth while. However the Hard Problem wasn't touched here at all. Consciousness is much like gravity, even though Isaac Newton gave a good explanation of how it work. He didn't know what gravity really is. It wasn't until Einstein's paradigm shift and the notion of space-time curvature that we understood gravity.
+LPArabia She's totally crap.
+Deipatrous Glad someone else can see it. She started off strong but her ideas were really loose and never strung together coherently. They also never touched on the hard problem even tangentially. Than her biases came out pretty hard when she started taking about abortion for reason unknown to me and shot down drugs as being mindlessly scummy. Drugs themselves present a unique situation in that they produce strong changes in neuronal patterns that directly correlate with the users state of mind. I think being in the business of studying consciousness that might be something of intense interest. She also, as im finding is almost pathological amoung neuroscientists refuses to address awareness and perception in any of her arguments. Simply pointing to spikes of activity and trying to base a theory around that. Thats hopelessly half assed and ignores the minds unity as a system. How can you even begin to scratch at it with that style of approach?
Gravity is an illusion. What keeps us here on this planet is karma. No karma and we would then be able to return home to Heaven. Too heavy for you? Get it, heavy?
Well, everything is like gravity where nothing is really known about anything. The best we have about anything is the apparent cause and effect at best. Using space and time is about as void of substance as one can really get.
@@jeffforsythe9514 The obscure by the even more obscure. Well done.
This video has been up over two years and I think it is brilliant; and is just as brilliant now in 2015 as it was in the fall of 2012. I'm one of those folks who thinks of this problem from the computational / mathematical side of things. I think of this in terms of models, so I thought that Professor Greenfield made a very good point about models. If we could construct one that did a 'perfect' job of modeling consciousness then we would truly be 'done-and-done'.
My ideas about consciousness and models are more on the level of not how the mind works but instead what the mind does. And when you leave off the how and concentrate on the what is is pretty easy to say that the mind is 'at-the-very-least' an engine that takes the sensory inputs of an organism and constructs a model that when run dictates the actions of the organism.
So in the case of motile organisms this, "model-making" is used to predict what the next sensory inputs will be so that the organism can successfully negotiate its environment.
I think that consciousness as an attribute that humans and other 'conscious' organisms have will come to be seen as a completely emergent attribute of this 'model-making-mind' and the 'amount/level' of it will be tied to the 'size/complexity' of the brain itself. Additionally I think that consciousness and intelligence can also be thought of as an emergent property of an organisms ability to communicate, or to be a 'social' organism.
Also, when we fully account for the only tool we have to explore these ideas is our own minds then the importance of self and consciousness will not seem quite as important as we now take it to be. This downgrading of importance will certainly be a byproduct of the advent of A.I. when and if we manage to create such a thing.
If the brain generates consciousness then how do people have experiences as if they’re out of the body? I’m asking because I’ve had at least one experience like that where I was able to see what literally happened 3000 miles away on the other side of the United States on a matter that I wasn’t even thinking about. Yet it was confirmed by a friend who rented an area in that building. My experience is not unique. I’ve known many who have had these kinds of experiences. But they don’t talk about it because they’re afraid of being stereotyped and marginalized.
Einstein summarised quantum dynamics as "spooky action at a distance ",whereby two atoms are linked across any distance, so,incredibly, your experience touches upon "consciousness and !,the as yet unfathomable solution of quantum dynamics, the two seem to have a relationship..incredible...
I wrote a diary reporting all aspects of my obes, we can’t talk to people that never had such experiences… science doesn’t understand that, same about consciousness.
You are hallucinating. A lot of people who have hallucinations and delusions say it was “confirmed by a friend”
There are practically an unlimited amount of good ways of testing this. Find another person, preferably multiple people (preferably subjects that have as little information as possible to avoid tainting the final analysis of the test). Have each subject setup a very specific set of circumstances that are outside of your awareness (example: a peice of paper that you don't know the contents of or have them play music that they aren't allowed to tell you about ahead of time that you can easily describe). Attempt to go to where they are using astrial projection or whatever you want to call it. Meet up with them in person and attempt to recite what they did, the music they played, what show they were watching, etc.
If you are actually able to pull this off then you might want to record your results and show them to a bunch of people if you wish to be taken seriously. Otherwise extreme skepticism of claims like these is very warrented. People can lie, people can hallucinate, people can misremember or completey manufacture memories after an event has taken place. I wouldn't take anyone at their word about claims like this, no matter how many people make them. There needs to be more to show in order to be belivable. Otherwise it remains indistinguishable from delusion to everyone else, even if it isn't.
You have experienced hypnopompic phenomenons. This is a well known kind of hallucination. I know what I ‘m talking about because I experienced it myself.
I appreciate the clear manner in which the initial premises of this talk have been presented. It's honest and very much to the point. But I'm also inclined to dispute a couple of them, which leads to somewhat different conclusions.
1) Consciousness can't be clearly defined or classified. It fails to be captured by either referral or operational definitions.
Well, yes it can, if we're prepared to distinguish it quite particularly. If we only give a hand wave to something so broad as to be necessarily ineffable and mysterious, then of course that would be difficult to define. But what if we were to qualify consciousness more narrowly?
Consider consciousness as a rarely found function of a more general category named cognition. (This is clearly a definition by referral.) Cognitive function spans anything neurological really, from the simplest neural response to stimuli to simple internal state which models and learns from experience, and thence to more general memory and planning functions based on state, and so on. None of this requires consciousness, but it represents ever more elaborate cognitive machinery as we move up the evolutionary scale from simple to complex organisms. It may take place in neurological hardware, or in the software of neural connections or other dynamic state. I don't think that's definitionally of concern, though technically there is the additional challenge that software is very hard to understand by inspecting hardware.
Consciousness, as I'd like to define it, has particular features which distinguish it from general cognition. Most importantly, the internal model is to some degree interrogable. (This is clearly a definition by operation.) Without this feature, we have only "unconscious" general cognition: something entirely sufficient to account for a gradient of simple to complex behavior in all sorts of species. With the evolutionary development of this one simple feature, we could, for the first time, notice what it is that we're doing not just with our hands, say, but also with our thoughts.
This may by itself have been enough to bootstrap the development of our present apparatus of consciousness, or that may have had to await some other features such as language or theory of mind. It may require some additional features of language such as abstraction, or perhaps basic interrogability or introspection is instead a cognitive precursor to abstraction. We don't know at present, but these are in principle falsifiable hypotheses.
2) Consciousness is inherently a hard problem because of both the emergence of subjective experience and the difficulty of correlating subjective experience with objective measurables.
This is a subtle fallacy of composition, made worse because we tend to conflate the investigation of unconscious general cognition with the very specialized features of consciousness.
Why do we do this? Well, first because it's very hard to deduce the architecture of software if we can only look at the hardware. The neurological approach to consciousness has some limitations here. But the introspective approach is hardly better. Our consciousness itself is the problem here. Because we can only introspect consciously, the rest of our cognitive activity appears mysterious. It's like being in a vast darkened room with a small flashlight (and a short attention span.) Everywhere we look with the flashlight appears real and substantial at a given moment, but falls out of reckoning when we look elsewhere.
3) Metacognition (introspection) is to be excluded from consideration in developing a treatment of consciousness.
This is a profoundly questionable choice. In my view it is very nearly this specific distinction which makes the hard problem of consciousness tractable, because we're then no longer conflating two qualitatively distinct capabilities and becoming baffled because they don't seem to add up.
Most of our cognitive functioning is unconscious, there's no dispute about that. In other species, even more is unconscious, perhaps all. So we don't have to account for consciousness as an underlying imperative, a substrate to all of cognition. It's a very specialized feature, and it specifically has to do with introspection and the entire new internal field of attention which that in turn facilitates. Without it, we literally can't begin to say that there is something called consciousness. And we are not in fact conscious until we know that we are. Prior to that moment we're passengers on the train with no idea that there is a driver, much less that we are at least potentially that driver. From this perspective, the problem of consciousness is very straightforward.
tl:dr fan boys blind themselves and should die in their snowblind tundras
I remember becoming conscious as me as a separate person, separate from my environment and from other people. I may have been 2 years old, old enough to walk. I was walking with my dad, and all of a sudden it was like coming out of a fog, some blotches becoming colorful and I realized that yes, there was my dad, but I realized there was me as something, someone separate from what I had been seeing all along. This experience stuck in my mind, because it was like an aha moment.
You can experience it again ) Try some LSD ,DMT and Acid )) It is truly a wonderful experience)
I remember the first time I tasted chocolate. I was only a year and a half, but I knew at that moment that I was a singular, pleasure-seeking being.
@@КонстантинКругляков-г1у
'LSD' (Lysergic acid diethylamide) and 'Acid' are the exact same thing.
I believe this process of being self aware and identifying as separate from a parent is called individuation. Consciousness begins when we are a fetus, a few weeks old. ultrasound pictures of babies sucking their thumb in the womb, and responding to music or voices by kicking their legs (eg on mums bladder like my twins would do when I sang), shows they have consciousness. Those that believe in reincarnation (ie half the people on earth) usually believe the soul (ie consciousness) enters the body of a fetus in the first trimester of pregnancy.
@@КонстантинКругляков-г1у your experiencing it now you just don't know it obviously.
Consciousness cannot be separated from its contents. Without contents, consciousness is just an abstraction, a concept, a word, a bit of jargon.
consciousness separates itself from its contents - that's its experiential nature.
Dream on bro!
51:27 - heading toward the semi-conscious state.
She is only dealing with the soft problem of consciousness not the hard problem of consciousness.. This is quite easy for me to understand.
That was phenomenal.How well structured a presentation of such a complex issue.
Fabulous! Hope the algorithm gives me more up to date progress on her research or similar.
There is a difference between studying brain and studying consciousness. In the first case we can apply third-person approach (we are here, while our object of study is out there), while when studying consciousness, we have to apply first-person approach. I mean that we have to use our exemplar of consciousness simultaneously as an object of study and a tool of studying.
Neurophysiology applies third-person approach, therefore it studies brain, but it does not study consciousness. To formalize brain, we apply decompositional approach and physical models. It is the same as we investigate how the wall clock works: we disassemble it into parts and then see how these parts work when being put together. So, we can count the number of brain's parts, weight and measure their size, and determine their spatial locations.
However, to study consciousness we have to apply the informational models, which means that such concepts as spatial location, weight, size, etc. have already no sense. Therefore, the question where consciousness sits is not correct in principle.
I see your point, and indeed I don't think this approach objective is to study consciousness itself. The goal here is to find the neural correlates to consciousness that may have important implications (think about the medical or the forensic field). I do believe that we can in principle do that, but nonetheless this will not tell us anything more about the nature of consciousness and how it arises from these biological structures.
*****
The problem is that most of people think that to understand consciousness is as easy as to understand how the wall clock works. If we think that by collecting neurophysiologic data we some day would come to understanding the mysteries of consciousness, then we are living in fool's paradise. It is because of the unparalleled complexity of the object of study.
Is there somebody who believes that we can understand how iPad works just by observing the lights in the windows of Apple Corporation's office? I don't think so. Is there anybody who think that the brain is less complicated than iPad? No, as I hope. But why Neurophysiology tries to persuade us that we can learn how the brain works just by observing/scanning it? To the point, correlations are not explanations.
@@sergepatlavskiy1530 If you go on a walk is your brain taking your consciousness, or is your consciousness taking your brain for the walk? Of course assuming they're 2 different things.
@@arthurjackson8302 "...or is your consciousness taking your brain for the walk?" Question: who is "me"?
@@sergepatlavskiy1530 " who is me "? A person who wants to know " what am I " ?
I am not a scientist but i like the music of science and this lady is a great musician I love her music.
A great look into the hard problems of consciousness with special attention to the mid level area of neuronal assemblies, all described with a sense of humor. How rare and rewarding, indeed!
Other things to consider are...
1. The theory that consciousness is a product of brain computation has major explanatory gaps
2. Repeated studies showing that *manipulating consciousness with consciousness influences "hardwired" biological processes* (i.e., _gene expression, brain activity, blood pressure, heart rate, skin conductance,_ etc). The literature for this is already substantial and continues to accumulate.
3. The observation that consciousness can operate even when the brain is in a quiescent state, as demonstrated in a recent study done in England at Professor David Nut's lab.
4. For more updates on the lastest science concerning consciousness-brain dynamics, search *_hameroff on singularity consciousness_*
Fill the gaps with gods before someone else does!
Where does cold end and hot begin on a thermometer? 100% agree consciousness is some type of gradient.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing, i also think that consciousness will come in a gradient (or perhaps gradients of various parameters). But i can definitely see possibility in a definite threshold between unconscious and conscious. Thermometers indeed don’t discern between hot and cold, that’s not their job, but we do have a fundamental sign post at -273 Celsius. It’s possible that there’s a similar thing for consciousness.
Such interesting topic. I'd like to hear Baroness Susan Greenfield CBE talk with Dr. Jack Kruse.
i did enjoy this very much
Fascinating Panel Discussion - excellent framing of the discussion of an intriguing framing of areas begging consideration in attempting to solve "the hard problem." Thank you.
This is a great presentation yet it shows just how much we don't know about our own brain and consciousness. I look forward to seeing how our progress with AI influences our interpretation of actual consciousness in our lifetime.
Our progress with AI informs absolutely zero about human consciousness. In order for us to get anywhere really interesting with so-called 'AI' we will need to throw out of the window practicially everything we think we know and start again. With the current generation of 'AI' systems (impressively capable software, to be sure) there is no actual intelligence in any of it, let alone consciousness.
This is fascinating…so are the public comments. I want to keep this video to play in the comments. Ty.
This is so thought provoking and enlightening. Thank you very very much.
new subscriber
One's consciousness is one's soul. The same soul that is reading this comment right now.
Belief starts even before you are born, the vibration of your parents voice has a foundation stone that can be a smooth rhythm and energy that develops a balanced brain, or it can be a destruction of these wavelengths that tips the balance of the brain being developed through the conciousness, that will be there for the rest of their lives.
It seems to be the case now that modulating consciousness (i.e., subjectivity) can/does affect biological and neurological functions in significant and measurable ways. That's an interesting scientific discovery. I wonder what else we'll learn about the nature of consciousness. Maybe it's not even being generated by the brain at all.
Consciousness is the ability to look and understand and predict and reject and say "No!". Consciousness is also objective and subjective, an infinite regress of subjectivities. Consciousness itself is a subject of consciousness.
Engineers know that a problems that appear as complex are actually a combination of many simple problems. For example, when a software seems to behave erratically in some random time, the solution often is caused by a few subtle mistakes, some of which are benign as is but contribute to hide the root cause.
Consciousness is a word with many distinct meanings... about 26 according to one of the panelist in a different video on the subject. Once we take time to define each clearly which meaning we want to explain, the solution is much more easy to find.
Interesting questions discussed by Baroness Susan Greenfield is: when does consciousness appear in human. After birth? When the egg is fertilized?
The answer she gave is very elegant. She said that consciousness is not a binary number, it is not just "All there" or "completely absent". It is more like a dimmer than a ON?OFF switch (even though dimmers are made with TRIACS which are really just ON?OFF switch with capacity to turn ON at sub-millisecond precision).
Consciousness can only exist when a large collection of neuron exist, so, an embryo with only the neural tube is clearly unable to think or be conscious. A jelly fish with a few hundreds neurons is only conscious of day light and gradient of nutrients.
The mammals with their frontal cortex are more conscious then other species without this advanced structure. It is still possible that Octopus with their distributed computing model, birds and other animals developed nonetheless some form of consciousness.
Adult humans in good health presumably rank very high on the scale. Unfortunately, when diseases, strokes or accident damage the brain, they may not be the same person anymore since "my memory is me, if it get erased I die" as said the robot Number 5 in the second movie Short Circuit.
yet even my memory somehow gets erased, I would still be conscious. Memory is not consciousness, isn’t it amazing?
We have much to achieve in Neuroscience and just like astronomy, it is an endless science but as long as we exist on this Earth Neuroscience always has progress to be attained.
I LOVE HER LECTURING SKILLS SHES SO ENTERTAING AS A LECTURER
I highly suggest studying Professor Antonio Damasio's Theory of Consciousness especially the Three Layers of Consciousness (Proto Self, Core Consciousness, and the Extended Self).
truly thank you!
To that I would add the works of Bernado Kastrup.
Look also into the studies related to the new field of transpersonal psychology conducted by serious scientists with a PhD attached to their names. This lady has no idea what consciousness is and does, and as a result, she has a poor, reductionist understanding of the nature of being human.
13:17 priceless static face!
+Optimus6128 21:47 as well
+Optimus6128 I think he was frozen, waiting for her response to the ether question. Fortunately, she called bull-shit (rather politely) & moved on.
+Optimus6128 13:17 priceless Atheist face. She admits Neuroscience is a field which only admits Atheists, who reject any theories of a soul, under the weak assertion that it can't be measured or proven. Well, at least she admits Consciousness can't be defined, which is the key to understanding its probable relationship to the soul
+PaladinswordSaurfang 51:00 as well: her dance making fun of mindless Rave kids techno techno techno
+Optimus6128 He seems to have quite a strong emotional response when Falmer's theories are mentioned.
Consciousness is the awakened state of knowing, (subjectively) that you exist in a world of duality and that drawing a line between the two poles is our purpose.
@@kimbanton4398 but for everything in that reality, there are highs and lows, hot/cold, far/near etc and you find yourself between it all. If you are between anything, you're in a duality.
Phenomena = plural
Phenomenon = singular
Why is this so difficult to get?
What exactly is it that makes it *not* difficult? Are there perhaps Greek rules for singular & plural that "everyone" just *knows* ? I don't think so.
Consciousness is when you yourself exist in your model of the world. Self awareness is consciousness.
Very good! Consciousness is also the ability to look and understand and predict and reject and say "No!". Consciousness is also objective and subjective, an infinite regress of subjectivities.
Ask three questions from yourself after waking from a dream.
1. The observer of my dream was conscious or unconscious?
2. The observer of my dream was in my dream or in the universe?
3. Is the observer of my dream still conscious? If so then where?
Answers of these questions will enable us to understand that consciousness exists independent of brain.
Err: *You* are waking up from the dream. Still you, still your dreams, still your stream of consciousness (using memory).
If you died in your sleep, can't really ask if you were dreaming ... Leads one to think consciousness needs a body and can't be just reasoned away (hidden assumptions get smuggled in, like thinking something other than you dreamed).
If it's still unclear: I watch my dog dream. She woofs, she kicks, she's dreaming. I don't assume there's something else besides her dreaming. If she weren't there, I wouldn't be seeing evidence of dreaming. Body required.
Yogendra Gupta stupidity.
@@LordXain nevertheless that the brain is responsible for dreaming is not the explanation for why the ocean or the people in the dream seemed so real when the dream was going on, the mysterious is still there, dont deceive yourself
@@vl.kh.5548 hes not stupid, hes wise, and his mind is on the right track
@@janetbludwig6000
It seemed so real because it was *you* dreaming it. Not watching a movie or reading a book, but you, your creation from your brain. You underestimate the power of the brain and I think are neglecting the fact that the brain can outright hallucinate and its person wouldn't even know it...we call it schizophrenia.
BUT, No Brain, no creation. *No tool to dream with.*
What happens to your Windows operating system when you turn off the computer? Is it still running? With no power? Now...what if the computer circuits degraded after being turned off so the computer couldn't be resuscitated? That's the human body. You're running software in your head. Your operating system needs to cycle every night to clear out its buffer. And it feels real because it's the job of the brain to literally feel, not because there is something outside your machinery doing the feeling.
She rushes through a lot of interesting things near the end of the lecture (58:00) but otherwise she explains and reasons very well, easy to understand even for a non-neurologist. I'd love her to correlate "hard problem: awake vs dreaming" with "hard problem: alive vs dead" problems, because life (or should I say "alive-ness") also seem to be on a gradient.
Off topic, I find the dress distracting. But then, this is a good lecture, logically and communicatively superb!
Why on earth is a theologian commenting on neuroscience???
Job security???
J Segal the philosophical talk about consciousness
J Segal I believe the theologians deserve a place alongside the philosophers, for all their subjective babel was ultimately worth on this particular subject. Just because their particular field of study is, to you, not a respectable one, does not mean it is devoid of perspective.
Maybe some key element of the hard problem will be born from a trinity perspective of reality born from Catholicism. The only thing we know based on evidence is that, as with all Darwinian systems, diversity is key.
I would prefer to hear the data from the scientist. The theologian only wants to claim it to prop up his myth, which is dishonest and uninformative.
There are three schools of thought in neuroscience. The dualistic, naturalistic and functionalists. The dualistic is where the theologians are, and some religious scientists are. The naturalistic is where most science is, and the one that goes into labs and do more experimental analysis. The functionalists are also together with the naturalist, but they are atheist radicals that just want to say that humans are just robots, and are just trying to disprove free will.
Susan Greenfield was so articulate, loved it.
Only problem I have with this and just about all other ideas about consciousness, is that people treat is as if it's a real thing. Something you can point out and say, look thats consciousness.
All consciousness is, is the constant stream of experience of our surroundings, feeling your body, the cool air, breathing in and out, chemical reactions causing emotions, reading this text in your head. It's the brain examining, measuring, analyzing. Thats all it is. it's not it's own separate thing. it's just your body and mind working.
Imagine being in a void, total blackness, nothingness, no body, no pain, no feelings, just your thoughts. What would you think? whats happened? I can't move, I can't see, I can't feel. all I can do is hear my own thoughts. total darkness, no sound nothing.
That voice in your head would very soon stop, it would have nothing to react off of, nothing to analyze, nothing to think about. no feelings to be happy or sad about, it would just stop. And then "you" would be gone.
Without the world around us we are nothing, our consciousness is us reacting to the world. We are just like Bactria floating around reacting to our environment. Only difference is we are complex enough to see what we are doing. We are able to analyze ourselves.
*"Imagine being in a void, total blackness, nothingness, no body, no pain, no feelings, just your thoughts. What would you think? whats happened? I can't move, I can't see, I can't feel. all you can do is hear your own thoughts. total darkness, no sound nothing. That voice in your head would very soon stop, it would have nothing to react off of, nothing to analyze, nothing to think about. no feelings to be happy or sad about, it would just stop. And then "you" would be gone."*
Actually, what you say here has already been tested and found to be false some decades ago. Researchers used sensory deprivation tanks to block all sensory data from entering conscious awareness. The idea was to test to see if consciousness would become unconsciousness on account of being deprived of sensory data. At the time it was generally believed that consciousness depended on sensory information in order to be conscious. But in reality, results speak for themselves, and what the researchers discovered was that consciousness didn't become unconscious on being having sensory inputs blocked. Instead it remained conscious and active. I hope this clears things up for you.
Ngati Leprechaun so they totally removed the persons brain from their body? I know they didn't by simple logic.
sensory deprivation tanks don't block the awareness of your body, also even if they do, do that, (take the brain out) the person would still have emotions, memorys.
That test doesn't show anything.
saiyaniam
That's the thing - it's not necessary to remove the persons brain from their body in order to remove sensory inputs to the brain. That's why the floatation tanks are so useful in this regard. What they found was that you can actually create an environment free from sound, free from light, free from temperature perception, and free from gravity perception, and then study the brain under these conditions leads to some very interesting conclusions, such as the fact that consciousness doesn't disappear when you remove physical sensory perception of the afformentioned variables (light, sound, gravity, temperature). You can think of it as a kind of sandbox for the brain by which one can more readily study consciousness and how the brain responds when placed in a senory deprived environment.
Have a look at this playlist..
playlist?list=PLVPS7Jgd2zRjCZhk88XjT3Fdtl7K3Uxhc
saiyaniam
Yes, you still have mental phenomenon in the float tank, but not the physical sensory input that use up so much of our brain's resources. So basically you can do things in their like experimenting with subjective processes like meditation to see how that affects the brain inside a sensory isolated environment, and that's pretty interesting in itself.
Ngati Leprechaun heartbeat, breathing, intestinal movement/function, pains in the body, the feel of muscle contracting, memorys, emotions = not sensory deprivation. far far from it.
the video has this incredibly annoying high pitch sound ALWAYS playing on the background.
Glad I´m not the only one who notices these things.
Yeah, it's a good talk but the noise it annoying
I removed it here: ua-cam.com/video/Ph6VH7_AJ64/v-deo.html
@@fridaythe14th24 Thanks
I wish all my instructors spoke this quickly and cogently.
How about Microtubules quantum vibration being the seat of consciousness?
Great speaker - I liked the attention to how we use the word and the distinctions made. It was refreshing to me to hear the subject discussed without reference to 20th century philosophy.
19:05min What about the process of reactivating the brain. At what point in waking up from sedation consciousness, and self-consciousness begin to arise? Those seem to be legit questions.
Susan Greenfield’s claim on unique experience rather meanswhat she can describe may not be the same as someone else may describe. While this is true of a point-of-view - since no 2 people can be in the same place at the same time, and everything is in a continuous state of evolution - it is not necessarily true to say we cannot share the same experience as another person.
I know my experience of agreement is shared by my daughter, Kandy, and I know she would agree. Now this shared agreement does of course include external observations, but it is not limited or confined by external observation or spatial location - she is in New York, I am in the UK - it does relate to understanding the nature and substance of agreement. I know, as a fiddle-player that I can and do share the same experience of appreciation as my tutor, as and when I am ‘in-tune’ with him, and reading the score truly, not just the dots. By the same token, my experience is enhanced far more than when I play alone; which validates my claim that two-or-more in agreement enables greater performance potential to be realised than is possible in isolation. I’m sure that is at
least one valid reason why we are not alone.
The question is: Is intelligence the factor which leads us to this answer ;-)
I
Iii
I
No .. love and peace would do .
I concede: also...
Consciousness is being aware of matter, concepts and events. It is riding on the cloud of flowing time.............
You should see the short video " WTF Bending A Mans Mind " Great social psychology video.
Consciousness is the awareness of soul!
Is my soul located in my left foot or my right shoulder?
@@lepidoptera9337 You are not sure?
@@leebarry5686 Could be that mole on my back. It's sometimes itchy.
@@lepidoptera9337 no, thats because you need to take a bath
@@leebarry5686 Will that cleanse my soul?
".....how the brain generates consciousness''. It doesn't. The brain acts as a receiver and filter of consciousness.
It doesn't produce consciousness.
I find her very astute and well spoken, as to the substance, I don't know enough to take a position on what "mind" is.
1:15:20 "Should we develop a drug for a normal person to increase their memory?" It is a hard to believe that anyone should even pose this question (let alone someone who supposedly knows something about the brain) given the massive evidence for neuroplasticity of the last 30 years or so. It is proven that certain methods (see the work of Barbara Arrowsmith and Norman Doidge for example) prove beyond all doubt improve memory and other abilities. The only reason that humanity en masse doesn't know about this is because the pharmaceutical industry makes bucket loads of money selling us their drugs. Teaching people natural methods to enhance their memory and many other skills wouldn't be in the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. That is why they will have no interest in the above mentioned studies (of Arrowsmith, Doidge, Mezernich etc.). Please anyone who doubts this take a look at these authors. I am angered that despite this knowledge having been around for some time hardly anyone knows about it.
Memory has nothing to do with consciousness. Both her and you are on the wrong side of the conversation.
We give too little SCIENTIFIC (in a widened sense) focus onto the conciousness being more fundamental than matter (brain). We waste a lot of time for development but sure learn a lot for the present mechanics of elongate and improve our biological (material) existance. Makes some of us happy(er) for some time.
theres a guy passing out 51:28
He is having some real fun
Lol.....I enjoyed the speech actually.
And also at 1:27:03
Losing consciousness at a lecture about consciousness.
He might as well be getting into a 'super-conscious' state by observing the rising and fading of bodily sensations more closely, truly and more exactly. Thus experiencing a higher degree of consciousness and simultaneously being aware of the impermanence of those sensations😊.
Consciousness is a survival skill. It is present in many creatures as we all know, the only difference we have is words. We have a voice to go with the pictures, other creatures speak to themselves in pictures with their noises and calls still attached. You've all seen a dog/cat/bird dreaming? You hear them "talking" in their sleep. Anyway, its a survival tool/skill. Clearly our constant any varied forms of competition and conflict drove the human consciousness to the N'th degree.
"The problem is... you have a bunch of pretty scans of the brain, and they think it tells you about behavior.... it doesn't" - Dr. Carl Hart in 2014, neuroscientist and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Columbia University school of Medicine
At 26.45. This neural spark, the spikes on the chart are the same waveform as John Bedini uses in his very efficient battery charger/motor. A wheel passes a magnet over a coil, it is the collapsing magnetic field, the inductance of the coil, turned to 'back emf' which provides the spike. Its very efficient, no heating, it de-sulphates batteries from the dead. Seemingly keeps people from being dead too.
Bedini is calling it Radiant Energy, as Nicola Tesla did, or longitudinal. It is the linear momentum component, the square root, of scalar charge. See Tetryonics and be at the front of the wave.
Not a single mention of Tononi's Phi, or perhaps she thought she touched on it by mentioning "pan-psychism."
A year ago I had a major knee repair surgery after I ripped my tendon clean from the bone. I told my anesthesiologist that as an algorithm engineer I did my graduate work in applied math in computational neuroscience and I don't want her to rely on a bi-spectrum metric from frontal eeg. to determine if I am feeling this. After the surgery I told her of the intense dream I had of being in a waiting area that was like a bar. It was not blank. I think we deal with mind activity just not being recorded so we lose the stream. I see this when I wake from intense REM where I have the dream and it slowly fades as wake state takes over. I think wake is like a code and REM is a different code and they don't merge. My proof is that when I fall asleep and in that early hypnogogic state the previous REM dream kind of comes back. That stream is still alive.
If you're going to push the idea that _consciousness emerges from the brain_, then, as a minimum, you will have to bring a biological definition of consciousness to predicate that idea. If you don't, then it means you're trying to talk about consciousness/subjectivity as a physical-material phenomenon without defining it in physical or biological terms.
Brain is definitely involved with consciousness. But it's a pretty big leap to then jump to the conclusion that the brain _does_ consciousness. The thing to keep in mind is that the materialist view doesn't provide a biological definition of consciousness that would explain how you get subjectivity out of chemicals/matter, nor do they provide any observations (or make predictions) showing where subjectivity emerges from matter.
Consciousness does not emerge from the brain, it is a function, or a feature, of our brains - specifically neural activity. Like water used to be naively defined as a clear, colorless tasteless liquid, consciousness is simply all that you experience from the moment you wake up to when you go to sleep. Whereas we now have a more sophisticated definition of water as H2O, we do not have a similarly sophisticated or nomologically deductive definition of the brain function(s) we use the term consciousness to describe.
You could do well to read your John Searle.
Patrick Kennedy
*"Consciousness does not emerge from the brain, it is a function, or a feature, of our brains - specifically neural activity"*
So you're saying that consciousness doesn't emerge from the brain at all, but that is really is just a _feature_ that pops out from neural activity. Ahh, it all makes sense now. lol This is just word-play. The key issue is about what causes consciousness/subjectivity/qualia. And as far as science goes, there's no evidence to show that it is the result of brain computation. No one in A.I. or singularity is even able to make a prediction as to how much computation will be required to even produce a conscious entity.
Your best bet is to watch *Hameroff on singularity consciousness* for most latest updates on the consciousness-brain dynamic.
Not quite. It would be a mistake to say you misunderstand my post, you simply mis-read it. You could do well to distinguish syntax from semantics especially as your confusion is grammatical - tho I suspect a metaphysical agenda on your part. To re-iterate: neither the brain nor neurons "pop out" consciousness. Consciousness is a feature, or a function, of neuronal activity in the brain. Consciousness is to the brain as digestion is to the stomach. Lastly, Hameroff and Penrose make the same grammatical errors which you have demonstrated here.
Best.
Patrick Kennedy
Regardless of what grammatical errors you think others are making, the fact is that brain computation doesn't explain the emergence of consciousness, since it doesn't account for subjectivity.
Best.
Patrick Kennedy
"I suspect a metaphysical agenda"
?? and from your spiel, one can easily detect a materialistic agenda.., but so what? The question I'm interested in is, _how_ do you know that consciousness (thoughts, emotions, awareness, etc) are a "function" of neuronal activity? Where's the empirical evidence for that statement?
My take on this lecture is that the brain, whether it be human or animal, is the motherload of collective consciousness. Questions arise, such as "does consciousness require a brain to exist or does it exist in all living things?". Furthermore, "does consciousness cease when the brain dies? ". I must say that this lecture has ignited some deep philosophical thinking.
A.I. scientists who are working on a way to integrate A.I. with the human brain have come to the conclusion that consciousness transcends the body and is not located in the brain. They were forced to conclude this when they had to admit that they thought they knew enough about the brain...yet they could not find a way to read people's thoughts.
@@markanthony3275
You do realise that they simply came to a conclusion. It doesnt mean that its true. It's not even testable.
Consciousness CAN be defined, how about:
"Existence exists, and something (consciousness) exists to make that observation".
That's it, now lets move on!
With respect and admiration for Prof. Greenfield.
I LOVE her! Consciousness is not the most stimulating subject for a talk.
It's definitely not! Whenever I "attempt" to talk about it with people it immediately gets rejected. 😆
She has an ego which is surprising since she's a supposed well established neuroscientist. At 3:49 she mentions that she was "really proud of" being made an honorary Australian of the year. As a neuroscientist, she should realize that she cannot be 'proud' of anything she did. This is because everything is just happening by itself all causally driven. Causally driven either deterministically, randomly or both. As such, free will does not exist. If she really understood this, then how could she be proud of anything she did?
If, in the ages of time, I find myself here and conscious. I can only conclude that I am, at least often, if not always, 'here' and conscious.
I'm not sure if the actual question of conciousness has been identified in this talk. You may like to describe in minute detail what conciousness is, but it would be difficult to communicate what it is actually like to be another person. This is not experience per se that we aim for but the experience of experience, which is a more difficult problem. I think though that all of this eventually falls flat on its face by hard determinism. If one thinks (and I see no evidence for anything else) that all things in the universe are linked by a causal relation then it must follow that we (whatever that is) have absolutely no choice on what we do OR what we think. If on the other hand true randomness happens in some proportion in the universe, this also means that we have no control over our actions and what we think. The unfortunate concequence of this is that we shall remain forever prisoners of this existence - and discussions about anything at all must be resigned to entertainment purposes only. I don't think that even the cleverest people stop to ponder the concequences of determinsm, otherwise they would give up any serious persuit that involves reaching any conclusions on reality as being utterly futile.One might say "well look, our thinking and methodology seems to make great benefits for us - take for example advances in medince, we must be geting something right because we can see the real effects'. I would say to this - 'well you would think that wouldn't you as you have no choice.'
Never seen such a diverse audience at a lecture on consciousness
Watch ----"The Battle for Your Mind: Neuroscience Technology/AI & the OODA Loop"
51:25
Oh no, a gentleman losing consciousness!
To the Point:
1. Consciousness is not a center. Why?
2. It's a System. The System uses "Focus".
The Fundamental Point:
1. The brain uses the ANS for Consciousness. The brain can be held in your hand.
2. "The Mind" can not be held in your hand.
Note:
This is why neuroscience says the brain is the Mind.
It's a rut expression. But it's the best neuroscience can do.
Love the Difference,
Peter
51:27 .... that guy is definitely not in a state of couciousness.
To answer the question of what is consciousness, I like this simple reference. Once it was said that only a human will finish another 's sentence, and this describes consciousness. Then the reminder comes that the brain will automatically search it's memory for the completed form of the sentence and of coarse, deliver it at the next chance, therefore it is not a good description of consciousness. Yes, I see...then it must me NOT finishing the sentence, that describes it best......
The guy sleeping at 0:51:31
You are Amazing!!!! Hope everything can realize they need to be vegan for so many reasons!!!
and don't forget to wash your hands too.
Oh my... this is so narrow a view, it could hardly represent consciousness!. :)
How is it a "system" ? A system is a reductive series of processes that needs to be designed for a specific purpose / task.
That is definitely not consciousness.
Consciousness just is. It's the medium in which you do all your focussing in.
But it's still there when you're not focussing.
It inspires me.. simply is. I should like to relate consciousness to a concept of the Zen master Thich Nath hanh "INTER BE"
there is no Be without the outer world. We all inter be.. ! This phenomen of inter be could be called consciousness ... ?
This is not the place for religious pseudo buddhist opinions.
@@chamade166 While I'd agree with you in principle, in terms of consciousness I'd be careful excluding any information from any source.
U
I am very interested in this talk but there's an high pitched noise there that makes it hard to focus
Very clever woman, but who the hell let her buy that dress?
The same person who gave you access to a keyboard.
Hi, you mention in the video that processing of visual and auditory stimuli follow the same pathways but seem to be differentiated in space and time, and you were looking for some physicists to help model it. I don't think this is what you need. I would strongly suggest you look into how time is modeled in artificial neural networks, for example by having sequences of networks strung along a time dimension. This allows neurons to be calibrated not just to other present-moment neurons, but to affect and be affected by the past and future time-slices. If you're interested in modeling this, you should try to find some neural network designers, maybe in robotics where the time dimension is big deal. There are also books on how to add time dimensions to neural networks.
Theologian on the panel? where's the witch doctor, Scientologist and voodoo practioner, I want to hear there views too.
AHAHAAHAH!! :DD
Fool, maybe if you didn't have your head so far up Richard Dawkins ass you would see that the organizer's of this lecture recognize that understanding reality requires a perspective greater than the tiny scope that empiricism has, having alternative philosophy (which doesn't necessarily have to a theological one, but perhaps more rationally an idealist one) is important towards formulating a holistic theory that might even incorporate empiricism.
DominusDeus
Tell us more /s
I have seen a study that showed a child under the age of three is conscious but not self aware. They placed children in front of a mirror with a piece of tape on their face and the majority of children under 3 years of age did not recognize their faces as being theirs.
In the future we will be able to download our consciousness onto a usb memory stick.
Probably not the kind of USB sticks we have today, but something not a whole lot different from them.
Nexus Theory i hope it happens in our time .
Hope not to reply on any technological device, rather tap myself into the Source.
phoenix rising It will probably be technology that will enable you to do that too.
Nexus Theory Why would I use a device if I don't need any? I don't believe in 'quick fixes' and miracle tools. It all comes from within...
This scientist said she has agonized over how to explain something to a Martian. Also she wants to spend some rather intimate deep communication with a physicist. And raves have something to do with better understanding consciousness. Great talk. Life is sensational!
Here's the difference between the scientist's attitude and the theologian's...the scientist says "we don't know" and the theologian says "oh yes as expected we all have souls" and goes on to make other unsupported conclusions...wait when did the scientist say we have souls? when is humanity going to wake up?
+Nikan RT
I agree that science is neutral. Scientists on the other hand, can be just as belief driven as fundamentalists. For example, many scientists believe that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity in the brain. Besides being a magical explanation, there is zero evidence for this view, and no logical reason to default to such a position. I suspect that people will not wake up until we have a paradigm shift away from obsolete 19th century materialist philosophy.
+AnduinX BYM , Evidence that conciousness is emergent from the brain lay in the facts that we are all separately cognitive persons coupled with the fact that we all can watch other persons grow into conciousness through the rapid brain development years of small children/toddlers and the reduction of conciousness in the elderly who are afflicted with diseases of the brain ... not to mention the fact that conciousness ebbs and flows on a daily basis around sleep patterns and can be manipulated overtly through pharmacology.
This alone should make it obvious that the default position would be that conciousness emerges and decays inside the brain.
Outside some form of spiritual belief, I don't see evidence to the contrary.
Anonymous Tyger
_"Evidence that conciousness is emergent from the brain lay in the facts that we are all separately cognitive persons coupled with the fact that we all can watch other persons grow into conciousness through the rapid brain development years of small children/toddlers and the reduction of conciousness in the elderly who are afflicted with diseases of the brain ... not to mention the fact that conciousness ebbs and flows on a daily basis around sleep patterns and can be manipulated overtly through pharmacology."_
Separation is not evidence that consciousness is a function of the brain. The idealist position that I take views the brain as the image of a self-localizing process of mind. We are simply dissociated processes of consciousness in mind-at-large.
Under idealism, what you think of as a material object is reduced to the experience of the object. The object exists as an experience in mind, much like you might view an object in a dream. The brain is no exception to this, it exists as an experienced object. It is not our brains that are having experience. it is consciousness that is experiencing the brain.
I do not think that it can be stated that consciousness ceases during periods of presumed unconsciousness. Absence of memory does not show absence of experience. If you drink too much you may remember none of what you did the prior night, but this does not mean that you had no experience during this time. All that can be said with certainty is that you had no memory of experience.
Pharmacology does not conflict with idealism. If I say that our experienced universe happens within mind, then what is a drug? The drug is part of the experienced universe. It is reduced to a process of consciousness (an experienced object). The ability of one process of consciousness (the drug) to interact with another process of consciousness (your brain) is not problematic to the idealist. To the idealist this is just an interaction in consciousness, just like when your thoughts influence your emotions. The whole chain of events still happens within mind.
+AnduinX BYM "Separation is not evidence that consciousness is a function of the brain. " - yes it is. We can at least say that it is one of the factor.
" It is not our brains that are having experience. it is consciousness that is experiencing the brain." - this is Ok
"If I say that ...... within mind" - i think no one is objecting this!
staraet
_"yes it is. We can at least say that it is one of the factor"_
Under idealism the experience of separation is explained as dissociation. It does not require anything outside of mind.
The Brain determines our reality and thus wither you are conscience or not... British sense of humor is aggravating.
Take home message: Oxford is a good university. Whatever she is saying is credible because she is smarter then you.
I know right???...LMFAO!!! good comeback Frank...
Than*
She is smarter _than_ you.
+kooky Maybe +Goat Man did a funny. Goat Boy is dead. A new goat is born. Long live Goat Man! Otherwise good catch - the keys are close on my board.. so maybe a subconscious will to create beautiful, fractal irony crystals. The knowledge that i'll never know...well now i'm certain the irony crystals were laced with something... oh no. I've gotta go.......
It's kind of refreshing to see a neuroscientist talking about consciousness for a change. Listening to a physicist talking about consciousness is kind of like hiring a circus clown to try an fix your car, ha ha!