Mindscape 71 | Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere
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- Опубліковано 27 тра 2024
- Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
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The human brain contains roughly 85 billion neurons, wired together in an extraordinarily complex network of interconnected parts. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t understand the mind and how it works. But do we know enough about our experience of consciousness to suggest that consciousness cannot arise from nothing more than the physical interactions of bits of matter? Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness, or at least some mental aspect, is pervasive in the world, in atoms and rocks as well as in living creatures. Philosopher Philip Goff is one of the foremost modern advocates of this idea. We have a friendly and productive conversation, notwithstanding my own view that the laws of physics don’t need any augmenting to ultimately account for consciousness. If you’re not sympathetic toward panpsychism, this episode will at least help you understand why someone might be.
Philip Goff received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Reading. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham. His new book, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, is being published on Nov. 5. - Наука та технологія
Philosopher: “Mass, charge, and spin are forms of consciousness.”
Scientist: “Can you explain what the hell that means?”
Philosopher: “..........No.”
kasterborous As a philosopher I don't know why panpsychists need to phrase it that way. Those are obviously objective features of physical things. Those are obviously quintifiable.
Right but the inverse point is also unaddressed -- Sean has no good answer to how he knows, on materialism, that he's not talking to a philosophical zombie, or what the distinction is (physically) between a philosophical zombie and a conscious being would even be.
@@Young.Supernovas In my opinion, the philosophical zombie argument is seriously flawed. The way I see it, believing that one of two perfectly identical humans could lack the property of consciousness (whatever that is) is like believing that one of two perfectly identical pieces of iron would no be attracted to magnets but the other one would. You can conceive of a piece of iron that lack ferromagnetism but that doesn't mean it can exist in the real world.
This is how Peter Godfrey-Smith explains the flaws of this argument his excellent paper "Evolving Across the Explanatory Gap" (petergodfreysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Godfrey-Smith-Explanatory-Gap-published-RC1.pdf)
Chalmers’s argument against materialism is that we can conceive of an exact physical duplicate of a conscious human, where this duplicate lacks consciousness (qualia). From our ability to conceive of this scenario, we can infer that it’s metaphysically possible. But if the mental is truly no more than the physical, then it’s not metaphysically possible for this “zombie” duplicate to exist. From the possibility of the zombie, then, we can infer the falsity of materialism. The reply I draw on uses a view about different kinds of imagination, introduced by Nagel in a footnote (1974) and fleshed out by Chris Hill and Brian McLaughlin in a response to Chalmers (1999). The anti-materialist argument is based on the appearance of separability of the mental and physical, the fact that we can “conceive” of one without the other. Nagel suggests that this appearance is the product of the structure of the human imagination, especially the relation between what he calls perceptual and sympathetic forms of imagination. To imagine something perceptually, we induce in ourselves a mental state that resembles a state we would be in if we were perceiving that thing. When we imagine something sympathetically, we induce in ourselves in a mental state that resembles the thing we are imagining. This second method can only be used to imagine mental states and processes, either our own or someone else’s. We can also freely separate and recombine, in our minds, the products of these two kinds of imagining. We then find “that we can imagine any experience occurring without its associated brain state, and vice versa. The relation between them will appear contingent even if it is necessary, because of the independence of the disparate types of imagination”In Chalmers-type cases, we don’t have a situation where points of view differ across agents, or within an agent across times, but one where different points of view are reflected in different kinds of imagination. We are invited to consider a situation where there is a putative subject, A By means of sympathetic imagination, we can imagine A having a point of view as a subject. We can also imagine the same subject as seen from another point of view-we perceptually imagine A’s body, or brain, or the chemicals that make it up. To do this is to imagine having the point of view of another subject, B. We then find that we can freely recombine the products of these imaginative acts. We can switch off either the first imagining, and have everything “dark,” or switch off the second, and have a disembodied soul. But this does not show a real separability of mental and physical, as it can be explained as an artifact of the relations between different points of view as they figure in different forms of imagination.
@@raduantoniu yea but it sounds like u r just agreeing with panpsychism then because you assume that consciousness (the ability to have subjective experiences) is shared by all humans. A panpsychist simply says that there is some property of matter that allows for such experiences to take place. TBH its not clear what even distinguishes panpsyschism from physicalism other than semantics. Unless the physicalist is going to be an eliminativist an say consciousness isnt a real property, which doesnt make any sense since clearly humans have subjective experiences. You (the subject) clearly exist and clearly experience what it's like to be you and interact with the world. You clearly have feelings, sensational experiences, intentional states etc. that arent equivalent to brain states. You have brain states, yes, but you can have a third person experience of seeing neurons and chemicals, or you can experience the actual qualia that is the result of those brain states. If i were to see a photon hitting your cones and sending a signal to the brain. i am not seeing red, but merely the physical state that produces the experience of red in the subject you are observing
@@raduantoniu Your magnetism example misrepresents the consciousness problem, because there is a test for magnetism, and it's physically understood. Chalmers's point (not that I agree or disagree with -- I'm in the space of "I don't know on this one) is that, even if the physical underpinnings of consciousness are understood to the degree that magnetism is, that still wouldn't tell you whether the brain in question has a subjective experience the way that your brain does. Nothing can tell you that -- the only subjective experience that you have access to is your own.
What I love about this podcast: you can tell Sean and Philip are having fun because you can "hear" that they are smiling at points. It's rare to hear two people enjoying their disagreement. This was a great episode, thank you.
Long ago, I was visiting the Lizzadro museum of Lapidary Art, in Elmhust, Illinois (the have since moved). I had in my possession some very powerful ceramic magnets, and a understanding of eddy current... however... it wasn't until the a friend showed me the interaction of the magnets with the large copper/silver nugget they had outside that I experienced the true nature of eddy currents for the first time.
Knowing something in your head isn't the same as experiencing interaction with it.
I know there are blueish colors I can't quite see because my cornea filters them out, some day when I'm older, I might have to have my corneas replaced... at which time I would then be able to see these new hues... the knowledge and the experience are different.
None of this implies that there is something special and non-physical about the recorded sensations and changes to the knowledge stored in my brain.
I wish Sean could invite Robert Sapolsky and talk a bit about determenism in biological structures and free will.
Sapolsky and Kahneman
omg yes two guys with amazingly beautiful voices and speaking skills
Unless Sapolsky died recently, Sean could invite him. 😑
Kinda seems like a waste of a wish. 🤔
@@lucasthompson1650 I hope it is some kind of a bad joke.
Idunno if you've been keeping up, but; Sean brought Dr. Sapolsky onto the show, about a month ago :-)
Prof. Carroll, on the case of Mary, I believe you have missed a critical point: Whether she actually looks at red or uses a machine to stimulate her neurons in the same way, we already agree that she would get the information if she's out into that state. The hard problem IS whether or not she can read something out of a black and white book that would put her into that state of experience. A better example IMO is whether you can teach something to a blind person to make them "see".
Man this was great. You guys hit pretty hard while still keeping it friendly. I wish every opposing viewpoint could be like this.
I agree. If physicists can posit dark matter to explain 85% of the universe then is it such a stretch to allow Schopenhauer concept of the will to the philosophers for consciousness? Something deeply hidden, indeed.
This was great. I love the Philosopher discussions. Just a message to all potential Philosophers who could be interviewed here; it's great to hear the perspectives explained in a setting with enough time to make sense of the position. I want more.
funny thing i came to realise that Sean could very well invite a total buffoon and i will still listen to the whole episode and like the video
Sean's argument was that laplace's demon could describe the mental state by looking at the physical state. This answers the question of "why this experience and not a different one" but not "why any experience at all"
But it cannot describe what the experience is; only that it is distinct. It can say "Alice is seeing red, and Bob is seeing blue." But it doesn't know what it is _like_ for Alice or Bob to see those colours.
@@happyfase I tend to think that "what it is like" is entirely structural. The reason you can't know what it is like to be a different person is because if you were one, you would cease to be yourself. Somehow having their subjective experience in your memory will not suffice: the way Alice experiences red is entirely dependent on her whole subjective experience, it is impossible to isolate it. So the only way you can know what it is like to be another person is to be that person, but that is impossible. This is an epistemic limitation, not an ontological one.
A core issue here is the meaning of empirical observation. There is no way to independently verify the existence of one's own or another's internal/subjective experience, so this phenomenon (philosophical consciousness) is not within the bounds of the empirical method. We can map a correspondence between independently verified physical/neural reality
and what a biological agent tells/communicates as their internal experience (sight/smell/taste/sound/feel/etc). Moreover, based on the philosophical assumption of non-reductive physicalism (a correspondence between observables and internal experience), we can arguably map a correspondence between the agent's internal experience and physical/neural reality - "the neural correlates of consciousness".
Yet this does not provide an explanation/purpose of internal experience, because its existence and mapping was taken for granted axiomatically. The physical (observed) system can be perfectly described to behave according to the laws of physics, without the need for such assumptions (mental properties and their mapping to physical properties). This invokes what is known as the problem of "overdetermination" in non-reductive physicalism - mental properties appear functionally useless, being indistinguishable from epiphenomena.
Likewise the question arises, if such mental properties exist, and they are mapped to particular functional subsets of the physical system, what defines when they arise? (leaving their qualitative nature aside). Why do we presume to think that only particular complex physical subsystems give rise to internal experience? Panpsychism is a naturalistic answer to this question (as opposed to teleological explanations; e.g. it was designed/simulated that way). It does however suffer from "the combination problem"; specifically how and why Quiddities (elemental forms of matter/consciousness) combine to form coherent centres of consciousness like intelligent conscious agents.
richardbrucebaxter perfect explanation thank you
A possible simple answer for you question "What defines when they arise?" Well, evolution did. Just as some organisms developed vision and others didn't, some organisms developed consciousness and others didn't. Now it would be weird to infer from the fact that some organisms have vision, that all elementary particles must have vision in some fundamental way. It's just as weird to infer the same regarding consciousness.
@@vergissmeinnicht8525 Evolution certainly defined when organisms developed a belief in immaterial consciousness (being adaptive for an intelligent agent to view itself as something immaterial with feelings/value). Whether this belief corresponds to reality is not granted by evolution (it is functionally irrelevant; the organism will evolve and behave identically), nor is it preconditioned by the natural laws of the universe as presently construed.
Philip is essentially saying, 'An eye can't see itself, therefore it must be very different than the rest of the universe.'
Sean's response, 'One day science will figure a way to observe the eye (like a mirror) and we'll see it's a physical thing like the rest of the universe.'
Given the history of human knowledge, Sean's reasoning is more convincing.
We can't explain it. Therefore it must be God or spirits or some non-physical entity.
That is a very superficial way to describe the current problem that consciousness poses.
panpsychism differs from physicalism only in semantics. Both the physicalist and the panpsychist would agree that consciousness exists (unless you are an eliminativist, which is obviously an absurd position, since we clearly have first person experiences that are not identical to the brain states producing them). A panpsychist just posits that there is something fundamental about matter that allows for consciouse subjects to exist and have qualia. And perhaps that even seemingly non-living entities, like stars and planets, may have subjective experiences, the nature of which will remain obscure until we have more rigorous mathematical models of consciousness (like the ones proposed by donald hoffman in this paper www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577/full
@@dogsdomain8458 Rocks do not have consciousness. There is no evidence to think they might. Panpsychism is, like any religious mumbo-jumbo, fantasy rather than a substantive idea.
@@aaron2709 we dont have any reason to suspect anyone but ourselves is conscious without appealing to some physical fact about the person that makes it necessary that he be conscious. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_other_minds
I don't think materialism is cold or bleak at all. The emergent properties that form our reality are incredibly beautiful.
Agree, from the very big and the extremely small.
Consciousness not a huge problem will be solved by computer scientists and robotics.
@@TheReferrer72 ok
But, but I want to be a immortal spirit that exists forever, in many different forms and am joined by some of my most loved spirits on a journey through space and time, and at the end of each trip through the broom cupboard, all the memories and experiences are stored somewhere. I have been listening to much recently to Sean, Harris, Dawkins and Tyson. These smarty pants Atheists, are making me depressed *Tears
That was the point that his argument was completely lost for me. It's not about how you feel. It's about what is fact. Also anthropomorphism should not be a requisite for empathy or importance. There are plenty of things in this world that are nothing like us that we should defend and preserve.
@@mattinoleggero2707 of course you do! And of course you will! When you die you go to a magical Disneyland in the sky and you float around and you float around! Don't let anybody take away your Disneyland in the sky, or your magical powers, your a magical magical magical magical creative Jubilee
let's say consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon of normal physics (which i think it is)
i think it's interesting that even if you have a theory of everything, physics still wouldn't even hint at the existence of consciousness.
because consciousness doesn't interact with anything, therefore physics is blind to it. if we weren't conscious ourselves, we'd never discover it.
makes you wonder if there's other things like consciousness that physics can't discover.
Farzher Excellent summary!
I am sry emergence of conscious from unconscious is just akin to saying it's just magically happens ...it is as absurd as the many worlds intrepertation
What do you mean it doesn't interact with anything?
@@mrcollector4311as opposed to what? I feel like by this logic, you could say any answer was "magic"
I understand playing devil's advocate in order to maximum the value of a conversation. You do it well Sean, to the point that it becomes perhaps disingenuous. It matters not if Mary's experience comes from seeing actual colors or merely from stimulating the same neural firing pattern. The take away is that when Mary has this subjective experience, she gains knowledge that was never available until that point. There are no facts about colors that gives her the information gleaned from her experience of them, regardless of how she comes across that experience.
The only information Mary gained is about her subjective experience. It's not any kind of information applicable objectively or to others, and it doesn't apply to colour itself, just to Mary.
@@futureboy7653 Yet, our entire reality is defined by our subjective experiences. To deny the information of the subjective is to deny the very fundamental aspect of reality whole cloth. Subjective isn't a bad word, it's not antithesis to science. It's just that science has nothing to say about it, so it doesn't. That's fair, and at the same time somehow shoehorns it into a category of 'lesser'. It's not lesser, your preference for black coffee over coffee with cream. The sensation of swimming in the ocean for the first time. Your ability to gaze down the barrel of a telescope and be inspired by the universe behind it. All of these things are information, everything is. Yet, it's not information that can be obtained with any measuring device we've yet to develop.
@@ronking5103 aren't you just saying that our models and descriptions of things are different than the things in themselves?
I mean obviously when we model the Sun and learn about the Sun that is different than the sun itself!
So if you have a book that describes how the Sun works and has equations and pictures and all sorts of descriptions noone is going to expect that book to produce heat and light and solar flares!!!
But still that book is very valuable in that it can predict the future of the Sun and aspects of the Sun and give us some understanding of the Sun!!!
It could also maybe predict solar eclipses and the position of the planets and relationship to the Sun... and give us all sorts of understanding of how the future will play out in relationship to the bodies in the solar system!!!
So in other words that's just what science and knowledge and description are!!! they just processes where we learn about other things by giving shorthand accounts and models of them!!!
It seems your whole argument rests on the fact that obviously our models are different than the things in themselves and just like a model of the sun will provide no heat and light!! a model of the human organism won't provide feelings and any sort of experiential knowledge (which is basically the way an organism learns and adapts to its environment and becomes different)!!!
@@origins7298 It goes a step further than that Chris. Consider the Sun for a moment since it's a great example of this. When you peer up into the daytime sky, using appropriate protective gear of course; Are you seeing the Sun? That giant yellow ball in the sky that we take for granted? Is it *the* Sun? No. We're absorbing photons that have traveled 8 light minutes. The Sun is 94M miles away from us. We're only seeing the effects of it. When you talk with your friend on facetime. Their image on your screen isn't them. Even when you're having a conversation face to face with that same friend; what you see, *still* isn't your friend. You're only seeing the light reflected off your friend. These are all examples of information that go beyond just books, or minds. This is information that exists in our fabric of reality. QM is showing us more and more that physical reality is a very flimsy thing. Philosophy of consciousness, has told us that since at least Plato and perhaps Zhuang Zhou. We can even drag in everyone's favorite destroyer (sarcastic) of objective measurement and claim that Godel created a mathematical theorem (Incompleteness) that tells us fundamentally the same. Systems cannot be proven from within. That goes for our brain, and the reality that exists from our perspective, only within it.
@@ronking5103 I think people are collections of atoms and certain collections of atoms produce certain things
So the collection of atoms that is the sun produces heat and light
The collection of atoms that is a human organism produces feelings and a sense of self
All of these realities are fleeting and transient
Anyway this is a much simpler explanation, we get a much simpler explanatory framework by just understanding people as a collection of atoms
It is the people who mistake words such as consciousness or mind for real phenomena that needs to be explained in addition to the atoms and molecules that make up a person
People are collections of atoms and atoms recombine into all sorts of different configurations
As part of being a collection of atoms we can often say words and hear words and then repeat these words and so on
That doesn't mean there's a real thing that needs to be explained
Just as you would probably grant that we understand when a doctor hits a person's knee and produces a reflex that we understand that fully
What you are calling subjective experience is just a more complicated version of that it is just more complicated reflexes
This is such a great episode, I really enjoyed this conversation a lot
It's a privilege to listen to such dialogue -- enriching experience
I really enjoy this series. To make these more accessible, you can take the transcript from your blog and copy + paste it into your manual UA-cam transcribe field and, and presto, you have synced captions for no additional cost.
A journey into consciousness. Cheers, Sean!
I always learn something from Mindscape and Sean keeps it both intellectual and entertaining!
Great one!! I love this type of "debate" where tow people explain their positions and agree to disagree.
Some of this seemed like "I can't conceive of how X can be explained mathematically/quantitatively. Therefore, it will not ever be explained in that language."
I think that a thing which has not been quantized/mathematized has not been truly explained yet. Qualitative explanations can be useful in many ways, but I think of them as stepping stones to a more complete understanding. They are typically (always?) too vague to allow reliable replication and engineering.
I think we don't have to wait on this, we can see that there's no way for experience to be explained in terms outside of experience. There's no equation, description, etc, we could write on a piece of paper that could explain the experience of redness, even in principle. Sean essentially admits this; the only way his version of Mary can know about red is if she experiences it herself, he's simply counting this experiencing as a form of learning. But this is basically cheating, because we should only be talking about Mary doing a certain kind of learning, i.e. studying descriptive statements, videos, models, etc.
The best we can do is experience red, and unless we incorporate experience into language (like communicating directly, brain-to-brain), then there's no way language or written symbols alone can explain that experience.
@@Mablak200 "There's no equation, description, etc, we could write on a piece of paper that could explain the experience of redness, even in principle."
Of course, a piece of paper is a static, relatively simple medium that cannot adequately convey the incredibly complex system that is our brain. A dynamic and computational media could, and if you were to hook up a perfect simulation of an experience to your own neurons somehow you could convey it without personally experiencing it yourself. That might be so difficult as to be practically impossible, but it is a potential way to explain experience outside of experience. It's just a very very very complex thing arising out of fundamental physics. That doesn't cheapen consciousness or make it any less wonderful.
@@GurtTarctor The issue here is that by doing this, you'd be violating the starting premise of the thought experiment, which is that Mary is not shown the color red, but merely left to learn about it. If we're hooking her up to a VR experience machine and giving her experiences of redness, then you're really just showing her the color red, contrary to the starting assumption.
Or on the other hand if you mean she's just learning a hell of a lot about the brain, well, she's still going to have an extremely new piece of knowledge hit her when she actually sees red, i.e. an experience she's never had anything close to.
@@Mablak200 Sure, learning abstractly about something won't give you the same experience as experiencing it firsthand, probably because the effect of seeing red is so neurologically complex that it can't be described in any way that our minds can process and internalise. This doesn't mean it can't ever be explained, it just means we can't understand it, at least not without rewiring all our neurons. And just because we can't understand something, doesn't mean that there must be additional properties outside of our physical material world.
Qualitative experience is a phenomena that emerges from an extraordinarily complex amount of 'stuff', that can be reduced down into something you could describe quantitatively.
It reminded me of an audiophile enthusiastically explaining why records inherently sound better than digital audio.
Thank you so much prof Carroll! One of the few academics with whom one can comfortably agree to disagree
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At 1:21 it sounds like Sean hasn't quite got the zombie argument. Zombies *appear to* think they're conscious, but as Philip might have put more forcefully, a zombie doesn't think anything at all - that what makes it a zombie, by stipulation, if you accept that "thinking" is a necessarily conscious process. I think it's absurd to say thinking doesn't require consciousness - if we say a computer program "thinks it should stop" we're using a metaphor, not talking literally. A computer program that passes the Turing test is like a zombie - it could appear to think, but it doesn't since it isn't conscious. Thoughts, like perceptions, are the contents of human consciousness; a more basic form of animal consciousness probably has only perceptions and emotions, and no thoughts
Sure you can account for everything observable with a physical theory, and then including in consciousness (whether by panpsychism or otherwise) doesn't seem to add anything - because consciousness isn't observable to anyone except the subject. Consciousness drives us to whacky ideas like panspychism because our physical theories don't provide an explanation for stuff to which a single subject has privileged access - Goff calls this "qualitative" stuff, or we could say stuff that only exists "subjectively" rather than being "objectively" observable.
I quite like some of the arguments for panpsychism, but all it's really doing is offering a no-more-palatable alternative to strong emergence. Strong emergence has an explanatory gap (how does objectively observable matter bring into existence qualitative or subjective stuff?), but panspychism's combination problem is no easier to solve. Personally, I'd rather stomach strong emergence and follow John Searle in saying that consciousness is "a state that the system is in".
I respect Sean greatly. He has a beautiful mind and an amazing ability of conveying challenging concepts in a natural manner. Yet, you're spot on here, to the point that I think he's just taking an antagonistic position for the sake of argument. He did the same with Chalmers. It's difficult to accept that in our modern world people fail to understand the concept of a machine that is capable of performing every single task a human can (including the claims that it was human, aware and conscious), all while doing so with absolutely no actual awareness of itself or consciousness.
@@ronking5103 Absolutely, I'm a big fan of Sean's and really enjoy hearing him speak on philosophy. However, with Chalmers (who I also admire), when he said "how do I know I'm not a zombie?" I did find that extremely annoying! Because of your first person experience that no one else can access, that's how Sean, and you know it. At least Dennett just outright denies that consciousness exists, but Sean makes all the sensible noises of a realist with respect to consciousness and then comes out with this! What a little tinker.
Thanks for doing this guys. Such amicable debates are so scarce these days!
I like panpsychism because at least it attempts to combine naturalism and dualism
Ditto
The flaw here seems to be in assuming that those need to be combined...
Everytime you guys fought about who's side gailieo would be on made me chuckle 😅
Thank you so much for these.
Good one buddy! Way to put the heat on. Loved it
This is just my first introduction to it but Panpsychism seems to just be a theory on where to start constructing a map between physical processes and conscious experience.
Here. This is simple. Try to do anything in this world without conciousness. Without having experience. Without being able take information inside and interpret it.
It almost sounds like given more data, they will end up coming to a similar worldview but from slightly different initial starting points.
The time to believe in this extra property of matter is when it can be actually demonstrated to exist. This is Bertrand Russell's teapot to a T (tea? See what I did there? :p)
I suspect he would claim that his first person subjective experience is all the demonstration he needs, but I disagree. His "explanation" lacked any actual grounding in reality and AFAICT he made no testable predictions.
Frustrating guest at some points to be honest but I really enjoyed his contribution and the conversation at a whole
Hardly frustrating. When Goff said that an electron's mass, charge, and spin ARE the awareness - that is the moment I realized it made perfect sense, and that panpsychism perfectly resolves our place in the universe as subjects.
You could almost call it a conversion moment! I have spent all my life as a die hard materialist and had always been puzzled about subjectivity before this.
@@kfurgie999 To me it was more a way of making consciousness completely pointless as a topic. If everything that is is conscious, what's the point of discussing it? Why not just say that "it is" instead of "it is conscious"?
I'm gonna listen to this a thousand times.
me, three!
@@jameswelch5636 :DD
Buster Wranks I’m only 20 minutes but I’ve listened for at least 60 from the amount of times I’ve skipped back
Hello Mr.Sean i bought your book but i cant really understand how law of conservation of momentum refute Prime Mover idea of Aristotl. On 3rd chapter of your book "Big Picture" you say this. Can you elaborate this a bit further? I mean if a body travels with a fixed velocity, in absence of friction and drag, it continues to move with same velocity. Ok i understand this but doesn't it necessisate an originator of the 1st impulse to this moving body? I mean did it start to move with that velocity by itself?
Imagine two equal-sized objects perfectly still in space, 0 velocity each. The combined momentum of the system is 0. Now, time starts ticking and we measure the velocities of the objects - they are equal and opposite. Why? Because of gravity. In this case, there is no first mover, yet the objects are in motion towards each other, and the momentum of the system is still 0 (Object 1 has positive momentum, object 2 has negative momentum; adding up the momenta of these two objects is still 0).
Thank you Sean..see you on the 22/01 😊
My main issue with panpsychism is it claims that consciousness is something unexplainable by currently known physics without any proof. What "is" consciousness? I have no reason to believe it's any more complicated than simply the set of senses we have, and the "computational" aspect of our brain that processes those senses, recognizes patterns, and allows us to think. In principle, how is this different than an extremely powerful computer with a set of measurement devices to give it "senses"? If we gave a robot the computational power of a brain and all the logic needed to give it a sense of self, it would think it's conscious as well. Therefore, true consciousness is indistinguishable from simulated consciousness by the observer, and so how can we assume for sure that our own consciousness isn't simulated? Believing consciousness is real is definitely a healthy way to live and, of course, I suggest everyone live that way, but using it as the basis of a model of the universe? This isn't justified at all.
I think that we, as people, treat consciousness as something special without any evidence that it's deserved. Especially Sean's guest, he calls electric charge a "form of consciousness". What? It really sounds like we arrive at this conclusion because of axiomatic reasoning, that "consciousness is not possible with currently known properties of matter" therefore "all particles must have some property related to consciousness". Wouldn't it be simpler to believe that consciousness is possible given the currently known laws of physics because... if there were any more we'd observe them? I don't want to suggest that people have tunnel vision and to never think outside of the box, but it's not exactly convincing to jump into a world view that has no evidence for it.
if a claim/model doesn't have a predictive utility or a way to falsify it... it's just one of the countless useless claims people come up with.... and most likely we'll be waiting forever for panpsychics do produce anything like predictions or a way to falsify it or anything useful at all
I'm not a panpsychist but all the same Goff's take on panpsychism is basically pretty close to - even identical - to idealism and I was surprised that wasn't brought up. So Philip ought to at least have made it clear for listeners that panpsychism can take many forms and has done so - such as matter having qualia as an extra attribute alongside other properties. Or it taking the form of a kind of "qualia-dust". plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
I tend to agree more with SC on the idea that consciousness emerges from the physical interaction of stuff. However I feel like it should be allowed happen at different scales, or with varying degrees of complexity or levels of recursion (like our 'collective consciousness' emerges from the social interactions of our individual consciousnesses, which emerge from physical interactions). That makes it harder to say there cannot be any form of consciousness for objects other than brains, which could range from very simple groups of particles to very large and complex systems.
Yeah, it's a difficult problem. I think a lot of the issues arise from the lack of differentiation between consciousness and self-awareness. It seems more coherent to explain consciousness (in the most very rudimentary sense) as something inherent in the laws of physics and information theory, wheras self-awareness, a consciousness of consciousness, as a sort of recursive process that can emerge high complexity and densely connected systems.
Will there be an episode about the “Mind over Matter” aspect of the initiation of Action Potential in our Neurons to perform specific and desirable tasks? Because the process of Action Potential is well known and understood. But I haven’t found a lot of hard evidence of how the conscious brain is able to start these cascading events. I would love to get a neuroscientist’s input on the subject and how it can be tested scientifically.
Well, we really have no idea how that works, tbh. A recent review of the neuroscience of volition basically concluded: we know a lot about the puppet and the strings, but nothing about the "puppeteer". In other words, we know what areas of the brain light up in the fMRI machine when a person makes an action, but nothing about how those processes come to be, and where volition first enters the picture.
There is no puppeteer. Only the illusion of one.
@@daithiocinnsealach3173 explain the experience of choice, and then you can make definitive statements. Since no one has (not to mention it being one of the most fundamental mysteries in all of nature/science) we will have to wait.
The materialist point of view is that the brain is like the British Empire. Asking how the mind makes a certain neuron fire is like asking how the British Empire makes one of its ship captains give a certain order. In both cases, "make" is too strong a word, the captain/neuron might be trained or selected for their role, but once in place, they just do what they do - the Empire/mind is not a self-puppeting puppet master directing its full faculties toward each of its components.
@@charliesteiner2334 Nice metaphor.
The discreet unit of consciousness is the collapse of the wave function, a defined location in spacetime.
Great podcast! I love these podcasts which have opposing views, even though I thoroughly disagree with Philip.
I also don't get his distinction between causation and correlation in relation to neuroscience experiments. If we can measure a neuron X and it happens to fire at or before the moment of experience Y, AND if we can excite that same neuron X and it will also produce experience Y, doesn't that prove that there is a causal relation? How else would one prove causation empirically?
Or is he saying that experiments like those haven't been done or have been inconclusive?
Yes: he’s using a reductionist argument about neural correlates. He’s kinda right, but he’s really trivializing what neuroscience & cognitive science are discovering and arguing that the hard problem remains and seeing it as a foot in the door for panpsychism.
Great discussion. Thanks for doing it. At the 107 min mark "We make bets..." has a surprising Pascalian feel to it.
Oh, i see it's that part of the evening, welcome back.
Just a minor point on the introductory segment of the episode, which you touch on but don't quite fix: Philip actually doesn't think that Galileo made an error. He thinks the general view derived from his work leaves out some important qualifications about the epistemic scope of formal mathematics. (I guess that'd have made a far les sexy book title, though).
absolutely loved this! would love to hear more philosophy of physics conversations and things related/branching off from it...
I wish I had more patience for this dude. All I keep hearing is, "ya but, how can you DESCRIBE how a FEELING FEELS?"
Same here. It's extremely irritating how heavily he relies on bare intuition and how he insists on his intuitive "starting point" as if it weren't full of contentious assumptions. For example, when he says that the reality of consciousness is the thing we can be most certain about and then jumps to the conclusion that it must be something fundamentally/intrinsically subjective and not amenable to normal scientific explanation, he's assuming that introspection is a reliable source of knowledge about what the medium of conscious thought is, which is an idea that has come under pressure for some time now (the most notable example in the recent literature probably being Eric Schwitzgebel's work on how misleading introspection can be).
And then, irony of ironies, we have to hear him complain that physicalists are assuming what they are trying to establish when they say that contemporary cognitive sciences are well equipped to explain consciousness and that there's nothing else but the entities and relations described by these sciences. All I usually feel like saying in response to this is that if that really is assuming an important point of dispute, at least physicalists have much better inductive grounds to trust their assumption than anti-physicalists who rely mainly on intuition do, considering that reliance on intuition is a methodology with a very poor track record. We have all sorts of examples of ideas that philosophers at some point have taken to be intuitively obvious and impossible to be false that later have been empirically undermined (one of my favorite examples is how relativity theory has put to rest the Kantian metaphysics which elevated Newtonian mechanics to the status of a metaphysical necessity).
You don’t have any patience for him because your have biases that are embedded in a material world. You fell to realize that everything cannot be measured or computed. Some qualities of reality are intrinsic.
Excellent conversation! Dear Sean, I would love that “you” would incorporate in your explanations and thoughts concerning conciousness, the fact that most if not all animals have a simplified version of a human conscious. There is no doubt that our human level of consciousness is the result of a very slow evolution process. No time and space to go into the details here, but the qualitative nature of qualia can be explained by integrating all quantitative data after processing by our brain.
Perhaps a little late to react to this podcast, but when I was listening to it, something Goff said triggered me. At 21:33 he mentions the idea that consciousness is something the produces. Then he goes on to say that if that is true, then conscious is "this extra stuff". But I think there is another way of thinking about it. The brain produces consciousness in the same way that a car "produces" movement. It is not stuff the brain produces, but an activity. Consciousness is one of the things the brain DOES.
take a moment. consciousness and conscience relationship. consciousness is awareness of oneself. is it conscience is the qualities of oneself which enables us to tell right from the wrong culminated over one's lifetime and social moral standards over history of cultural development. l,m getting dangerously close confused.
but can't resist to continuing. thanks for the great discussion and keep up with the good work.
from Hker worldwide
Sean, get Christoph Koch on here !
We know the world through our experiences (internal) and nothing can explain that. There no way physic can explain so far our subjective experience in first person.
Exactly. Nothing means anything if there is no subjective person to experience it
When Carroll talked about changing brain states he basically conceded the whole argument, I'm curious if people will recognize that
Exactly, he's not getting it. Reminds me of Sean Carrol trying to explain to Sam Harris that you can't get ought from is :P
larsalager I’ll be listening for this
Timestamp please?
@@dylan9966 The way I read it is that Carroll concedes that there are things about the universe left unknown when you have exhausted all empirical descriptions. In the example, Carroll states that the woman would need to experience the color through manipulating her brain state before knowing all there is about the subject
Have you made a podcast discussing Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? Interesting ramifications for the conversation
When all you have is a hammer all the world presents as a nail. Materialists seek to explain everything as derivative of interactions of stuff though this too is a philosophy. Physicists can’t explain how the interaction of this stuff produces the phenomenon of conscious awareness. They are on equal ground since neither can prove or disprove the origins of consciousness. There is a fluidity to consciousness that allows it to leak outside the physical world and escape some of the limitations with regard to time as an example.
Precognition for example. Precognition has been studied at SRI International and other labs. The US military used something called remote viewing for 20 years to project consciousness to a blind set of coordinates unknown to the participants. One of the obstacles to overcome was determining the timeframe the images received were taking place. Those of us who use out of body experiences to explore this reality free of the physical form have no doubt that “mind” is lot solely phenomenon of the brain. I can understand that Sean holds this perspective because he has no other point of reference or experience that might shake up his POV. It’s like a fish in the ocean not questioning that the ocean is the universe. We believed that the world was flat because our ability to observe objective reality and returned that information to our senses.
My memory has dredged up this fact that in brain plasticity a device gave blind and deaf people a perceptive feel of what was around them, by stimulating three points on a person's wrist. If the partial neural programming from birth can be stimulated. The person can build a physical map. I remember the blind person, who used to use a white stick, was walking around without any help within a few minutes.
Sean, I applaud your patience. I was struck by the irony that Phillip believes there's a problem that we cant describe the intrinsic nature of something other than comparing it to something else or describing its behavior. Yet when questioned about panpsychism, he can only attempt to describe it in terms of something else - not qualitative, not materialism, not science, etc.
Old Dungeons and Dragons Handbooks used to describe the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom as the difference between identifying it's raining and knowing to go inside so you don't get wet. In many ways, I look at consciousness as processing information. Does experiencing "redness" give you more new information, or is it simply a matter of processing the current information in relation to other information stored in our memories?
This whole argument feels like it's incredibly ego-centric. Since humans are conscious, that must mean consciousness is fundamentally special, therefore everything has to be understood for its intrinsic nature and therefore everything needs to be conscious. Secondly, this seems to be a problem with language. I started to have a physical reaction every time Phillip said "Qualitative, not Quantitative". Sure we can't accurately capture an experience with equations. But what is clear to me after listening, is we cant do that with regular English language as well. And it's a pretty far leap to say, we cant accurately describe something, so something must be missing, and...therefore by the properties of "redness" and qualities...everything is conscious.
Yes language also has that problem. But Panpsychism is not necessarily saying we can’t describe experiences well enough. It points to that fact that regardless of how good your description of an experience is, another person will never themselves experience that first person subjective experience.
Also Panpsychism is not saying everything has human-like consciousness, but that everything is encompassed by consciousness. In the hardware/software metaphor, consciousness is actually the hardware that the material universe (software) runs on.
@@colliemon I had to listen again, and yup, it's still damn frustrating 7 months later. Perhaps it's that in this interview Philip is just shit at getting his point across. All he seems to be saying is that science (neuroscience) is the language of materialism and it's quantitative. Consciousness is a subjective experience that provides new information that's qualitative. And since a quantitative language can't explain these subjective qualities of consciousness, boom panpsychism is real and materialism isn't all there is.
Then it's "mass is a form of consciousness", "it's not that there's consciousness and something else, there's just consciousness," "everything has components or the physical realities that underlie has a conscious evolving nature." I get that panpsychism isn't saying everything has human-like consciousness. But you have to bridge that gap. You can't say consciousness is a qualitative experience, experiencing the redness of red and pain, and then say mass and spin are consciousness as well.
As for the metaphor. I thought there was a difference between panpsychism and idealism. Where in panpsychism, the natural world exists, and consciousness is a fundamental property that is in everything in that physical world. Where in idealism, all there is, is consciousness, it's the most fundamental, and reality doesn't exist without it. In your computer metaphor, the software wouldn't exist without the hardware.
@@brotherman2823 Yeah thanks for clarifying that for me. Maybe reality is not “realized” without consciousness, but who’s to say whether it would exist or not without consciousness if we don’t have knowledge of that circumstance?
@@brotherman2823 Also I agree Philip gets a bit confusing with calling mass consciousness with little detail. I feel like we can still have those objective measures, but the whole experience of measuring such things would not be realized without it sprouting from consciousness.
Try Bernardo kastrup bro
I don't understand how Sean can dismiss the "hard problem" of consciousness while at the same time insisting that there must be an *interpretation* of quantum physics. If it's enough to determine a theory that predicts in one domain, then finding the theory that predicts in a different domain should be enough.... and vice versa.
“Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously."
“We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it."
"The material - mind concept creates an unnecessary duality that we can not experience.." - "The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist."
Erwin Schroedinger (1887-1961), 'The Oneness of Mind'
In terms of "intrinsic properties/natures" . There's a difference between saying that *things* are inter-defined and saying that they're interrelational. That is, the definition of some words may indeed end up being circular (as Philip Goff suggests). However, Sean Carroll is emphasising (causal) interrelations and interactions. That is, mass is a matter of its interrelations and interactions with things which aren't mass. This, on the surface at least, has nothing to do with "circular definitions", as Goff has it.
When Sean Carroll says that he "doesn't care about intrinsic properties" and that he can therefore "bypass" them, then that's not a philosophical position. ("Shut up and calculate!") And perhaps that's at the heart of this dispute! That is, Goff is well aware that most physicists *don't care* about intrinsic properties. However, he believes that they should care - or at least some of them should care.
When we start to formulate thoughts and questions about consciousness, it is a very evasive concept. Take this "color red" problem! How can we characterize and describe the sensation of seeing red? I see that sensation as an innate representation of that visual input. It is part of an inborn language, created by the evolution before human languages had evolved, distinguished from human languages by being impossible to transmit untranslated to other human beings. It is like an internal variable inside an advanced calculator, say the internal counter activated when we ask the calculator to add all primes less than one thousand. We might dissect and analyze the calculator but are not able now to do the same with the brain, but besides that, the concepts seem to possess a similar nature. So the ability to have an internal representation of the color red is not necessarily connected to consciousness at all.
Everything is consciousness, God loves you all
Right exactly. This physical stuff has no value without someone to play with it. Observe it. Make sense of it
Well tackled
If you can tell me what the wave of potentiality really is I’ll be happy to call myself materialist. The fact that we explain the matter as a wave of potentiality makes human science look trivial. The closest truth I can get to is that we don’t know anything real about us or the environment. Let’s not give too much credit to our DNA for existence of consciousness, but consciousness for the existence of DNA. 😊
On Mary's room, what's clear is this: no amount of writing or studying symbols on paper or through multimedia will give her knowledge of the experience of red; there aren't any *mere descriptions* that will give her this knowledge. Sure, she could alter her brain chemistry and induce the experience of red while in the room, but this would be going beyond studying or learning descriptive knowledge.
As Philip implied, if descriptive knowledge is all it takes to understand everything about redness, then it should be fine for us to stick to the version of Mary lacking Sean's electrode treatment, since she's equally capable of learning all descriptive facts about redness (why wouldn't she be?). Since she would still have more to learn here when she exits the room--namely the actual experience of redness--descriptive knowledge isn't sufficient!
I think Mary's room, actually highlights a naive of understanding by on what learning is, long term memory is physical changes in the neuron structure. So to learn 'everything' about red would have to build the equivalent neuron structure(Sean's electrode treatment). Without Sean's electrode treatment, the thought experiment would more accurately be "If Mary leaned half of what is known about Red then ...." because that is what we are being asked to evaluate under the guise that she knows everything. It is just an ill-informed experiment.
If the neuron structure did not develop because of the room, likely when she exits the room she will be colour blind, and she may or may not be able to develop the neuron structure to see red.
Dan Dennet makes a point, if you are a novice wine drinker, basically there is the white stuff and the red stuff, when you go for wine appreciation course you can learn how to express the subtleties, and by being able to express the subtleties your ability to taste the subtleties also gets enhanced. It is a feedback loop. That part of your brain containing your "wine neurons" make more connections with your olfactory organs. Enhancing your 'Qualia'.
@@truthseeker2275 We should phrase it like this: the premise of the thought experiment shouldn't be that Mary is supposed to be learning everything about redness while in the room, but she is supposed to be learning everything she can about redness from mere descriptions, propositions, etc, without being shown the experience of redness. Clearly that's not enough, and the actual experience of redness is what's needed to understand redness.
If we try to suggest she really can learn about redness from really detailed descriptions, I think this is clearly mistaken. It doesn't matter how detailed the description is, she'll learn something dramatically new when she exits the room and experiences red for the first time.
Under physicalism, consciousness must be a physical interaction because that's all there is according to the ontology. And let's assume Mary doesn't see colors when she leaves the room. I think the key distinction is whether, under physicalism, every physical interaction has a formal description. And whether understanding the formal description, if it exists, wholly accounts for all features of the physical interaction. As for the first question, if physicalism isn't wholly formalizable, then Mary's room doesn't refute physicalism it seems, because the physicalist can just say that something physical happens when you experience red, but it has no formalization so it cannot be transmitted through dialogue to Mary. But if every physical interaction has a formal description, the question then becomes whether the physical description wholly accounts for all the features of the interaction. If it doesn't then once again the physicalist has an escape hatch, because he/she can just say, yes, but there's more to the picture than the formalization. But if the formalization DOES wholly account for all features of the interaction, then Mary not seeing colors disproves physicalism.
Sean says the entire universe is a wave function, so he seems to opt for both the universe having a formal description for each physical phenomenon AND for the formal description being wholly encompassing. But then why does a machine have to be hooked up to Mary? If the formalization is simply the brain configuration conducive to seeing red, can't this be understood using the formal language of neuroscience? Why does the brain itself have to take up this configuration rather than just representing it in an alternative way?
The only way I see to escape this is to pose formalization on two levels. First there's mathematical formalization, which is neuroscience, and how the information would be transmitted to Mary. Then there's the formal ontology of the world (Sean's wave functions), which is isomorphic to the mathematical formalization, but not equivalent. You could totally understand one without complete insight into the other. But that's either substance or property dualism, but Sean doesn't seem to advocate for those.
@@Mablak200 ( www.philosophy-index.com/jackson/marys-room/ ). The experiment states P1 "she has never directly experienced colour in her entire life, though she is capable of it.", and P2 "Mary learns everything there is to know about the perception of colour in the brain".
The statements are either incomplete as is or misleading if someone insists on not completing it.
The meaning of "though she is capable of it" is open to wide and ambiguous interpretation.
More complete would be P1: "she has never directly experienced colour in her entire life, though the neural structure in her brain is as though she has had normal colour experience." In this experiment, the answer is clearly Yes she would see colours.
And If you insist P1: "she has never directly experienced colour in her entire life, and the neural structure in her brain is *not* as though she has had normal colour experience." then the answer is clearly NO, she would not see colours.
In reality, we know children deprived of sensory inputs, find it hard (or impossible) to later develop those skills, because in the early growth phase the neural structure grows rapidly and is most adept at laying down neurons needed for those skills.
The actual purpose of learning (in all modes) is the formation of neural structure, You cannot simply say she has learned and ignored half of what forms her neural structure.
It is an outdated experiment, honestly, I don't understand why it is still a thing.
@@TeDaYMoNgU Why does a formalization have to be transmitted by dialogue for it to be valid? Today we have many complex formalizations that are almost impossible to appreciate by dialogue only. Take for example the image of the black hole, it is not a real photo, it a composition of the data into something even the most naive could comprehend. So no we don't need "macro" and "micro" formalization. We just understand some formalization cannot be done by language alone. And even if no human can fully comprehend a formalization at all (like n-dimensional manifolds) we can still understand it at a meta-level.
I’m only gonna get a half hour of this on my lunch break 😭
1.5x speed, listen faster
Mega Kunt good point
Does it make sense to say an electron has an "intrinsic nature"?
The "redness" problem also seems like an odd choice of example to me because we know that there is a physical reason why our senses are sensitive to the visible light spectrum and not to other wavelengths. Why is no one talking about the Wifi-ness of Wifi? or the gamma-ness of gamma radiation? Surely the "redness" of red is not intrinsic to the wavelength and only makes sense in the context of both the wavelength and the receptors that sense it ? And if the inner experience is generated by the brain in response to that stimuli, then the idea of "red" as opposed to just some wavelength must also be created by the brain - again in response to that stimuli. One would surely have exactly the same experience of "redness" if those same neurons were activated regardless of whether or not there was something red out in the real world. The thing to be explained is what we've always been puzzled by, how the firing of those neurons produces this whole inner experience. I don't think "neurons are a bit conscious therefore lots of neurons = lots of consciousness" is a compelling explanation. Besides the lack of any mechanism or actual explanation, you're still left with explaining how matter is conscious in the first place. Too hand-wavy. Too wishy-washy. Too lacking in actual explanation and predictive capability.
So, redness is something we can describe with objective facts? Wavelengths and stimuli responses? Yet even if we collected every possible fact of the color red and gave them to a man blind from birth, he'd still have no understanding of what the redness of red is correct? Yet, he'd have every fact about it. That's the subjective experience of redness, and facts cannot convey that. No more than telling your friends about your favorite flavor of icecream would convey the taste you experienced, Objective measures do not add up to subjective experience. That's the redness problem.
you may not be able to completly explain these things, atleast not for now, however I and many others believe you can experience this. Non dual states of mind are good examples.
Eat some mushrooms bro 🍄
you will probarly have a direct of what he is talking about, it will all make sense.
I don't see why Goff never brought up that Carroll was begging the question the entire time: He was assuming the premise of the very thing in question. Of course everything Sean believes and everything that materialism says about reality will align, because the paradigm has been materialist the from the start. Sean's arguments always start with materialist assumptions that he seems blind to. But the whole point, imo, is that materialism isn't the starting point, consciousness is. Consciousness is fundamental to reality, not matter. In that context, Occam's razor defends panpsychism, not materialism. Sean and other materialists assume that materialism is the starting point; but it's only the starting point because the paradigm erroneously started by assuming materialism in the first place, and then built the rest of the paradigm off of that assumption. Materialism is a tautology. Much like geocentrism and the flat earth, materialism started with the what the occular-centric understanding of the world told us, based on how it appears to our five sense, mostly our eyes, which are very limited as far as understanding reality at greater levels.
It sounds like Goff is restricting his definition of "materialism" to eliminative materialism. I'm not sure if that is correct.
The subjective and the intersubjective form a dichotomy. Science requires intersubjectivity, but the subjective, though objectively real ("cogito ergo sum"), cannot be analyzed in intersubjective terms. Objectivity therefore transcends intersubjectivity. Scientific truth is just a part of a larger truth. 😃
A summary of Goff’s argument “the redness of red”
erictko85 It is sufficient
1:11:51Lamenting that electrons' intrinsic consciousness doesn't present in the laboratory seems to ignore the double-slit evidence of those same electrons in determining whether or not they have been observed? It's not just the act of observing, but then the subsequent response of the observed.
Feels like evidence to me!
Forgive my ignorance, but I’ve listened to this Goff guy twice now. First time he was talking to a woman scientist who was also a theist - it led me here and I’ve listened fairly intently again.
His assertion is that literally every “thing” has some degree of consciousness right?
And I may have missed it, but I can’t recall him present any evidence FOR that assertion at all?
I think it is even worse, he seems to claim it is the properties we already know of that is the consciousness. So there would be noting for him to provide evidence for, we already have the "evidence", somehow we need to stitch it into consciousness.
As far as I understand it, it's basically no different from your usual God of the gaps argument. It's just an unfalsifiable assertion to arbitrarily fill a gap where there's currently an absence of knowledge. And really, like Caroll, I don't even think there is a real gap to begin with.
so how about this vector thingy is consciousness?
i've been flicking back and forth between this and his talk with tom jump (cos i wasn't sure of my own position on this) and i have to say it's hard to tell which is which, and i'm still not sure what he's trying to say, but whatever it is, he must go over this script in his head a lot. a lot.
For Christ's sake. Mary has compromised experience simply because she's never seen red, but has always had the ability to see it, and subsequently, "experience it for the first time" So, she's never smelled garlic until she was 40 years old. It's simply a new experience while the potential had already evolved in her brain. Terrible argument against materialism! Did I miss something in that argument?
The fact is you could manipulate the brain so that the colour red looks blue and blue looks red , you could manipulate many parameters of any cognitive process. We have mapped the brain fairly well it’s just we don’t fully understand it’s complexity, and perhaps we are still far away from a complete description of how it works. This is because an evolving complex system will eventually grow into something difficult to quantify , especially when it’s given 17 billion years to materialise . So consciousness has to be a material process in the brain . We may feel special given our comprehensive abilities , but we are still animals and it’s just that we feel special because we have evolved intelligence snd become self aware of the nature of reality .
Also on free will, to build off my last entry. If F (C) = Consciousness (Sub-Consciousness) (Jung's Archetypes) what is the ratio to each. Obviously, I have some input, and I have no choice who or what I am. A man, located here (My house) at 8:08 PM, some of my past builds the sub-conscious. This formula along with the archetypes forms an underlying belly for the equations unique to me, but even past all my biases. The small or large ratio that is me, the very little I that picks what to do with the input Dimensions of Environment, past, social life, work, knowledge. All give me a multi-dimensional trajectory, to my place in space-time. The many dimensions argument to free will, a soft deterministic argument.
*Death pretty much answers this debate!* When you have a living system and then it dies, quite often you will have the exact same configuration of matter! In other words the stuff is still the same! So you can have a person who is living and experiencing and thinking and feeling. .. and then they have a heart attack and they died and none of that is happening anymore! *So clearly the fact that they were experiencing is not based on any property of their physical being, of their body.* Rather it happens because of the movement of electrical impulses, of the exchange of ions, and so on. *Life is a process created by the orderly interactions of physical matter.* anyway I couldn't wait maybe Sean makes this point at some point in the video but it seems like an understanding of life Cuts to the Chase and gets rid of any of these games of language type arguments
You don't even need to go as far as death. Slam a non-lethal dose of Propofol into someone and watch the consciousness fade away and then come back, in real time.
Or just go to sleep.
@@karmabeast yeah exactly! I guess Sean is sort of being a good host and trying to have a nice conversation but man I mean
Basically his guest was saying why isn't a picture of something the same as doing something? I mean obviously to have a picture of something, a mathematical description, or however the thing is modeled or replicated in some way, and all other forms of scientific representations.... I mean obviously those are different than the real thing.... This has nothing to do with materialism it's just with the nature of how we learn and how we communicate...
I just thought a discussion of life and what living systems are would have really cut through a lot of the ambiguities here.
Sam Harris and his Wife covered this topic recently on the Waking Up podcast. Sam is a neuroscientist, and seems to support a certain type of panpsychism. They covered the topic in a much better way than Mr. Goff does. The way Philip describes it sounds like woo. The Harris account breaks it down in a more rational way, by saying that consciousness still arises from unconscious processes, but exists on a more fundamental level than the complexity of the human brain. They might things like split brain patients having two conscious minds, where you can literally separate a single conscious mind into two separate ones, with different qualitative experiences. They don't seem to believe that a rock has it's own consciousness, but things like cells, could possibly have a type of experience, and collections of conscious systems form more complex types of consciousness.
The problem with panpsychism is that one aspect can't tell you anything about the other aspect. No amount of acknowledgement of first-person-perspective is going to tell you what structure to reproduce to create it. So humans have consciousness. Great. Now what specific part of their brain do we have to expose to gas to turn it on and off?
Or, hey, we made a computer we made that gives off all the behaviors of a human. Does it have an inner life?
I have yet to hear panpsychism project anything into the future or make a prediction.
And I think that's a major problem. In both materialism and panpsychism, you will need neuroscience to explain how to do stuff to consciousness.
But then panpsychism adds stuff to it. Occam's razor.
@@vampyricon7026 Yeah. I mean, one can conceivably believe that panpsychism is ontologically correct, eg: human brains have dual aspects while being a monism. But you can't do any WORK with that model of understanding.
Mary example answered: clearly learning about nutrition and actually eating food are completely different! Completely different physical systems involved. As Sean said you could theoretically duplicate some sort of experiencing by stimulating neurons excetera potentially but. The simple answer is that they're incredibly different physical systems
when you talk about someone learning something and processing information with parts of their brain as compared to other experiences of actually being exposed to things like food water light, electromagnetic energy, all sorts of other stimuli... these are just different physical systems. So again showing someone a picture of food or informing them about nutrition is an incredibly different physical system that actually feeding someone.
In my humble opinion, the only thing you've done here is rearrange the physical circumstances without addressing how our why there is a subjective experience at all (in the case you've offered.. what it's like to eat, chew, taste, swallow, decide if we enjoy or dislike, feel satisfied etc etc). You can change the physical scenario into anything you like but the results will be the same.
I can explain with mathematical precision how the sun produces radiation that travels and impacts on my skin, excites the nerve endings which sends electro-chemical signals to my brain, which processes those signals as actionable stimuli and activates other subsystems in the brain that will produce a wide array of responses.
But that does nothing to explain the subjective phenomenon of what it feels like to be warm, to have memories revisited of warm days of the past, and so on.
I can set a digital thermometer in the sun and describe how the same physics results in the thermometer producing a digital readout indicating that it's a particular temperature. Would you equate the digital display reading 98° with the subjective experience of feeling the warmth of the sun on your face and all the other qualitative observations?
Consciousness, as the lens through which we observe reality, taints everything we know about the world around us, and that discrepancy should be accounted for rather than dismissed with the incomplete idea that it is simply an emergent property of physical processes. If we want to use that phrase as a placeholder until we know more, than I'm fine with that... Much like the ambiguous labels "dark energy" and "dark matter" are also placeholders for our lack of understanding.
@@joshuacornelius25 *but really you're talking about the Mystery of Life*
Consciousness is a vague word that means many things
*In other words you seem to be saying that there's a mystery to life to how matter becomes animated and demonstrate the property of living systems*
Again Consciousness is a vague word that's used in many different contexts
Yes we don't know exactly why living systems are able to form, or have an exact understanding of abiogenesis, but all the evidence indicates that they are an arrangement of physical matter... *but in this sense, we do know the how of life! Just like we know the how of most phenomena on Earth and in our solar system...*
*You seem to be getting at a fundamental difference in science between why and how*
Living systems are composed of basic Atomic properties just like all the matter around us
_Just like a table and a computer and a desk and a chair are composed of atoms obeying the laws of physics so are living systems_
This is what all the evidence indicates
You mentioned Consciousness in the same breath as dark matter and Dark Energy
*Dark matter and dark energy are in some sense linguistic placeholders. But that is in the context of a world of particle physics and cosmology that has been shown to fit into a larger scheme of science*
_There is no evidence that positing some sort of magical energy such as a life force, Chi, Prana, a mystery of consciousness, life vital,... There is no indication that any such terms add to the scientific understanding or fit into any Theory of science_
Again dark matter and dark energy do fit into theories and there's good indications for what they might be in
*Dark energy is probably the vacuum energy of space. We understand this to some degree. We have a equations and theories that predicts the vacuum energy of space and dark energy in this context*
Dark Matter may very well just be particles similar to neutrinos. They might be non interacting massive particles. If that is the case then there is no real mystery here and it is not analogous to saying that Consciousness is a mystery
Again there's really no explanatory problem with the experience of consciousness
*In other words there was a time where lightning was not understood. We Now understand why we have lightning and all sorts of meteorological phenomena*
Lightning is not a mystery to us
*Living systems are not a mystery to us*
We Understand biochemistry, the building blocks of life, metabolism and so on
And with this we understand the evolution of complex living systems like people
So I ask you, in light of this, what do you think is not being explained???
To just say subjective experience is some sort of mystery that defies science. I don't buy that!
I would say it's like saying that yeah they'll always be some basic mystery about why there the universe we find ourselves in, is the way it is!
*It seems they'll be some limit to knowledge. And at this limit we can say why are things that way?*
So yes I think they'll always be a place to say but why, but why?
But once you accept they'll always be some fundamental limit to knowledge and science. You have to ask yourself what are the questions we really can't explain and what seems pretty well understood
Again I don't think there's anything about living systems that is not basically understood
Yes there are details to be worked out
But the same way we know the general shape of the Earth, we know the general building blocks of living systems
Just like lightning you can always ask even though we understand the principles of lightning and electricity but why is it that way? But I don't really think that is going to add anything meaningful
_At some point it becomes clear that knowledge will always be descriptive. This is just the nature of the reality we find ourselves in. Until there is some fundamental revolution in the nature of the way we are meshed in the world, until that time we have a pretty robust description of scientific understanding of the world_
@@joshuacornelius25 curious to hear your reply, you seem like a thoughtful person!
One of Sean Carroll's best lines is, we have a equations that predict how the moon revolves around the Earth! We could add that possibly the Moon is inhabited by angels that guide the moon exactly in accordance with Newtonian mechanics
But there's no need to take such an idea seriously because it is superfluous
Likewise we have incredibly strong Frameworks to explain human physiology and functioning
We can look at human functioning and see how it changes through drug intoxication, trauma to the brain, stress excetera excetera
We can understand consciousness very specifically and see how it is affected by all sorts of biochemical and neurological factors
If we stimulate neurons, we can stimulate certain experiences
Now yes you can posit the idea of some sort of magical force of consciousness. Some as of yet undiscovered physical underpinning
But just like with the angels in the Moon. There is no need to take such an idea seriously. It doesn't give a better explanatory framework. And it seems to Bear all the Hallmarks of the common human penchant for Superstition and magical thinking. Clearly people have made up all sorts of fanciful ideas.
*This is the great thing about people we are very creative thinkers.* and we should certainly celebrate our creativity. But clearly our creativity is not always an accurate Guide to the Fine points of reality
@@origins7298 lol... I don't think I've ever uttered even remotely that consciousness is either magical or supernatural... And I do think it's funny that when naturalist are challenged with the idea that consciousness may be more fundamental than what they may know, they automatically try to strawman the supposition into the whimsical. On the contrary, I consider myself to be even more materialist than most who claim to be and have never disputed the intrinsic link between the physical substrate and the subjective experience. In fact, I attempt to reduce consciousness down even past what most would accept in proposing that the continuity of consciousness is an illusion (see my explanation in my other post so I don't have to make this one longer than it has to be). I am an atheist materialist myself who abhors fantastical woo woo, but at the same time am willing to admit that human consciousness is woefully inadequate to discern the full set of facts about the physical world. Even the senses we have at our disposal in which to interact with the world were specifically designed by evolution to hide but only that information we need to survive and reproduce successfully. In other words, we were not meant to understand reality but in the extremely low-res interpretation that our brains produce. I do not attribute any lofty supernatural status to consciousness (i don't even buy into this panpsychism as I'm guessing you might have wrongly assumed is my belief), but to deny its importance and influence on how we perceive and interact with the world is self-imposed naivete.
I think consciousness is a by-product of the evolutionary process... a product of the neurological structures of our brains that produce a feedback loop that helps the brain check whether its interpreting and processing the stimuli correctly and if it is producing accurate predictions of the future for the purpose of choosing the proper actions to facilitate survival. As the substrate and its structures become more sophisticated over time, the more capable and higher the level of consciousness becomes, allowing it a greater range of ability to interact with its environment in space and time. As we study and understand consciousness more, we will understand how abstract concepts, which cannot be described soley by the physiological structures that house them, help to expand the boundaries of consciousness of a being and the greater levels of success in survival and advancement that may be achieved.
Now, consciousness becomes even more fundamental (but no more mysterious or ethereal) in the many worlds interpretation and the many realities of the wave function... But that's another story. (the short version is that some realities are conducive for high level consciousness, while some are not... But the realities that do harbor consciousness require the phenomenon to exist as a fundamental property of the wave function as a whole. In other words, because of the deterministic nature of the wave function, if a reality can harbor consciousness, it will harbor consciousness and we, as far as I can tell, are in one of those.)
@@origins7298 here is a description of consciousness that I offered in another post that might help dispel any notion that my perspective is purely fantastical... I apologize for the long posts, but this a complicated topic.
One problem is the defining what it means to "see the color red" as there are many more complications than just the photons hitting the retina and corresponding neurological activity... There is also the numerous other subsystems that are activated and contribute to the quality of the experience... Memory and past experiences tied to the specific hue, current psychological status and physiological conditions, the environment, the predictions about the future that the brain is producing among who knows how many other variables all contribute to the experience. I would believe that no two experiences, no matter how carefully they are replicated even in the same system, would be exactly the same and are actually impossible to reproduce due to the fundamental nature of the wave function.
I also think that the illusion of continuity with consciousness creates a lot of these philosophical problems. Our brains produce "frames" of consciousness at a frequency that, from the subjective perception of consciousness, it appears to be one continuous uninterrupted stream. This sense of continuity can easily be demonstrated to not be true with observing the brain under anesthesia. There is no consciousness in the brain under those conditions but the brain will eventually start producing consciousness again after the drug is sufficiently metabolized (and others conditions such as dreamless stages of sleep, or being knocked unconscious with a well placed right hook). The fact that the brain has access to memory, the current stimuli by the body's senses, and a predictive function about the future in order to activate useful responses to the environment, it gives our consciousness a false sense of a past, present, future linear timeline and continuity when in reality it is a series of frames stitched together at a particular frame rate.
Would lucid dreaming provide a counter-example to the notion that qualitative experience is different from descriptive experience? If I'm dreaming that I see the color red and I'm lucid and can say to myself, "Hey, I'm seeing something that is red", then it seems to me that I could claim that I'm having the qualitative experience of redness; however, I wouldn't actually be seeing something red, but rather my brain would be creating the experience. Provided I have had the experience of redness before and can say while in my dream, "Yup, I'm seeing the color red", then is that not an argument for the qualitative experience of redness originating in the brain?
Sure, but there's still an explanatory gap - namely, why is anything red? Why is red the way that it is, rather than it not existing at all in our perception? I don't think anybody denies that our sense perceptions are stored in the brain - the real controversy is how they can exist considering there is nothing we've identified in the physical world that's really red.
I am not afraid to admit that was difficult to follow. But it was enjoyable even though difficult. I am a total materialist/naturalist or whatever you want to call it. I have a hard time contemplating how anything can be explained in terms other than the physical. Maybe it is just a lack on my part.
Pan-psychism is very silly. I've now listened to two discussions with this particular philosopher, and I still don't know why anyone would take this seriously.
Really hope to see Lee Smolin on here some day.
I don't think I've ever yet seen a discussion on consciousness and materialism that takes into account the fact that the entirety of materialist science is ITSELF a part of conscious experience. Every science experiment ever performed has been not a study of 'the' world, but of how consciousness presents the world to us. The failure to recognise that there is no third party perspective on consciousness...that you cannot pose materialist science as existing in some realm outside of conscious experience...is the real issue and the true heart of the 'hard problem'. Discussions that skirt around this are utterly futile and fruitless.
Exactly! So few people realize this. It's like asking fish about water, and the fish saying, "What water?!" We're so immersed in consciousness that we don't even realize that it's the ocean we swim in. We can be CERTAIN of consciousness, and "electrons" and "molecules" are real to us only as ideas & experiences (aspects of consciousness).
@@ModernPlague Yes, even as a hard determinist, I ask myself how is it even possible to think or to think about thinking...it seems bizarre.
I think it is like seeing a mirage in the distance, I say it is not water, you say it must be water. We see the same thing, but I don't think it is what we see.
@@ModernPlague It's the true nature of the problem. Sean Carroll's materialist science is not something that stands apart from consciousness and 'views' consciousness. It is part of that consciousness. Scientists these days may laugh at naive realism....and yet every argument in which one is presented with a third party observer viewing a brain from some exterior position is presented precisely as a naive realist spacetime perspective.....and way too many philosophers fail to tackle scientific materialism with that in mind.
Really enjoyed the colour scientist discussion in particular. The question for me is that is the extra information that Mary is meant to be able to learn when she comes out of the room able to be tested in some way? If you can't use this new information to do some kind of test that the person without the information can't do it's not clear to me that you really have learned anything. However, for all the tests I can think of, it would be easy for Mary to be able to perform those tests from within the room. Can anyone suggest a test that she couldn't perform?
Why should information have to be testable to exist? The qualities of experience may not be testable but I see no logic in claiming that they therefore don’t exist.
@@Sam-hh3ry I was suggesting that maybe if its not testable then it doesn't qualify as information. Do you have any counter examples? If the label 'information' is to mean anything then the things to which is applies need to be similar but this so called 'red experience' information seems very different to other types of information and I suggest that maybe it actually isn't really information at all.
However, that doesn't necessarily mean that 'something' doesn't exist, only that it doesn't count as information. Perhaps what Mary gains when she sees red is a false belief that she learned something new. Does that count as information?
On the other hand, I've heard discussions about this before (can't remember if it was in this video or not) where the 'red experiences' are described as *not* Mary learning new information but gaining new abilities. If that's true then I guess it would be testable. The example was that you might know everything there is to know about shooting a free throw but that doesn't mean you can shoot one in. In Mary's case maybe she gains the ability to sort red things by colour faster than she could by just learning the information about red.
@@nickmorris2250 It’s not information in the physical sense but it’s information nonetheless in the sense of being something Mary has learned about the world. To deny this seems ideological to me. It would be nice if the only kind of information in the world was physical and quantifiable, but our direct experiences tell us that it is not. I don’t think the qualities of experience have to earn their place next to measurable, physical properties before being acknowledged as part of the world. They are a datum of existence that require explaining in their own right, even if the normal scientific tools don’t enable us to do that.
I don’t think the ability analogy holds for a couple reasons. Most importantly, it seems to me that the acquisition of a new skill does require learning about new phenomenal states. You can’t learn how to ride a bike from reading a book because you don’t know what it feels like to apply X amount of force in X direction at a certain time, etc. You have to learn what it feels like to do so.
@@Sam-hh3ry The problem with something that's untestable is that you have no way to tell if it exists or not.
I agree that it certainly feels like something is learned when Mary leaves the room. I have the same intuition... but how do you tell the difference between an intuition that points to truth and one that doesn't if testing is off the table?
In any case, I'm just speculating. There's experts on both sides so I don't think its fair to call it 'ideological.'
As physics has already allowed us to simulate the brain of simple organisms, there is no reason to believe that it will not allow us to simulate more complex ones. Philip Goff seems to believe that the human brain is somehow a fundamentally different object, which strikes me as blindingly anthropocentric.
That said, Goff's arguments would be somewhat reasonable under the assumption that we forbid the use of invasive techniques to convey information to the brain. In that case, the only way we would have to probe and modify someone's brain would be through sensory inputs, like by talking to them. It would then be reasonable to think that sensory inputs are not sufficient to convey the full experience of what it is to see red, e.g., or feel unconvinced by Goff's arguments.
The issue is, if we simulate the human brain, there is a variable "redness" in memory somewhere, and it seems that the variable itself has no "experience" of being red. There is a "feeling" that comes with the variable, which if you think hard about it, seems impossible to implement in code or silicon.
We DO observe ourselves.
I can’t help but think about Madonna’s Material Girl whenever “Material” gets mentioned.
🎵Because we’re living in a Material world🎵
Madonna has this all figured out
Even if panpsychism is true how does it explain anything relating to the hard problem? How can you possibly explain the "redness of red" to take Goff's example by aggregating atomic forms of consciousness that would be, as Goff says, radically unlike our own forms of consciousness?
There are really 2 parts to the hard problem: how does consciousness emerge from physical phenomena, and why is it the way it is (redness of red). It resolves the first part but doesn't approach the second. It doesn't even explain how the "qualitative" side to things arises at all: by so blandly reducing consciousness to unimaginably simple components it's not at all a solution to how we get the variety of experiences/qualities we're actually wondering about
@nach lras You could say "it just is" to any question, with or without panpsychism. How does that help? So now all qualities have their own ontological status? So how many brute facts and things is panpsychism going to needlessly introduce into the universe before explaining a single thing? I don't see how this theory does anything useful: it just posits that consciousness was always there and that qualities just are the way they are and explains exactly zero phenomena.
@nach lras I understand what you're saying but the whole point is to offer a satisfying explanation of phenomenal consciousness. To just say it's there and that's that, no reason, just is, is not satisfying and doesn't "explain". It just proclaims. If there were scientific reasons for thinking it were true, well, fine. That's not satisfying, but ok. But there, as far as i know, no scientifically sound reasons for saying this. It's just that we're mystified by consciousness so we give up and say it's just a brute fact. Asking why certain features of the physical world (light waves/brain states) correspond to redness as opposed to blueness as opposed to nothing or some radically different form of consciousness is not a meaningless question. It's fundamental and not addressed by panpsychism. Nothing really is.
Thing is is language in general can not explain experience how in words coule you translate hearing taste sight or touch they are sensations. Do but tht logic consciousness will never be understood
good debate
17:38 Philip Goff "I'm what Galileo would have involved into"
Sean's laugh afterwards :) :) awesome
you built your house, you gotta live in it!
Did Galileo philosophise at all about these issues? For example, did he make that qualitative/quantitative distinction which Philip Goff keeps on stressing? More relevantly, did he have a notion of consciousness (regardless of using that actual word in the 17th century)?
Don't get me wrong - Galileo was a great scientist. But he didn't really need to be a philosopher too. If he did philosophise about these subjects (as Goff suggests), then in which published works did he do so?
You should invite Frank J. Tipler on the podcast.
Great podcast. Love hearing Sean breaking a philosopher's mind.
Try turning the volume up on your hearing aid.
I must have missed that part of the podcast.
You didn't hear any such thing.
Excellent! I love expanding views beyond our own!!