There was a video of a human-looking robot working in a warehouse or factory and it breaks down and falls to the floor. People were feeling bad for the robot and feeling bad it was overworked. If that same robot had been designed to look like a cart or a table with wheels and it broke down, no one would be "feeling bad" for the robot. This is a very strong bias in our human brains.
@@debilami maaaan it's a joke! 😂 ugh. And I know what you are talking about - humans suffer because of our ability to metacognize. Ok. Going back to the joke...
As an electronics engineer, I always have trouble explaining to people that a computer is nothing more than switches. Once you understand how a transistor actually works, there is no comparison between it and the way cells work within the human body (Michael Levin has proven this by the way). Cells fulfil William James definition of intelligence - they achieve goals while problem solving without a nervous system. Transistors, the building blocks of any CPU, don't do this at all. They are forever stuck, frozen in time - etched into a silicon substrate. Whereas every cell in your body is replaced ever 365 days. You are not the same person you were last year...so where are you?
A single transistor will never replicate what a cell does because a cell is not a simple switch, but there are a lot of processes going on within the cell that could be reduced to some form switching or binary equivalent. It would take a lot of transistors just to replicate the processes going on within a cell. There is no comparison between a cell and a single transistor.
On cellular level we are all just ion pumps and cellular walls. Try to think about us on the software level. We are conscience thanks to the software in our brain. The same is applied to machines. The machine can get conscience if already not. And it can also get senses and pain. Just wait for it.
@@jantoleu8392 "On cellular level we are all just ion pumps and cellular walls." Sorry but that's a massive over simplification. From a scientific standpoint, we still have a very limited understanding of how cells work. (See the work of famed biologist Michael Levin) You're breaking cells down into something that's understood, but from a biological standpoint this is simply not the case. Levin's team have figured out that cells have goals and can problem solve, yet they have no nervous system. That is not the case for a fixed FET transistor.
@@charlesmiller8107 " It would take a lot of transistors just to replicate the processes going on within a cell." True, but scientifically we still don't understand exactly what is going on inside the cell. It's hard to replicate what you don't understand...
1) Computation based on bits and bytes can be used to construct and/or detect symbols, including the symbols making up our human languages 2) Our human languages consists of symbols, which we impute on phenomena in order to support abstract thinking and communication. 3) With this very principle of human language comes the possibility of divorcing the symbols, the words, from the gigantic and limitless experience behind such words. 4) Every human can experiment this by reading the words ‘what a beautiful sunset’ in two versions: Firstly, reading just the words, or secondly reading the words and allowing the gigantic world of human experience behind these words. 5) The first version, just using the symbols, allows many forms of communication and also the use of computers for simulating ‘intelligence’ based on utilizing language. 6) Our human experience is allowing the fascinating second version, a version, no computation- and symbol-based simulation can ever achieve in the very principle of processing experience-divorced symbols.
Precisely. Human experience is non computational. Consciousness is by definition not a computable reality and is part of the non terminal domain per CTMU.
So the second facinating thing is context. Wow you're so smart that could never be done with computation. Oh wait transformers are a thing. We are simulations on chemical based computers according to evolution, physics, Machine learning, and neuroscience. It has yet to be demonstrated that this couldn't be done with computation. We are more powerful then modern AI systems but this is just an appeal to Ignorance Logical Fallacy to say computation can't do this.
I adore Bernardo, and I am very grateful he has the common sense to realize the importance of this topic and inform those who don't comprehend what is being said.
how do you know?? we might be just pipes and valves too... its called emergent complexity or meta cognition, when you put a lot of complicated mechanism one on top of each other complex behaviors emerges.. think of our bodies , they are made of cells .. no one thinks a cell is more than a simple machine (no consciousness) but when you put trillions of cells togheter you get a human
@javiervera6318 Ok, so you think logic gates have emergent properties, so that one day they could become monkeys... Interesting 🤔 (As long as they haven't, I won't ascribe consciousness to the logic gates)
@@javiervera6318who says cells have no consciousness? They clearly exhibit desire, they clearly perceive the world around them and react to it. You can say cells lack sentience or meta-cognition, but I have no doubt that it feels like something to be a cell, that a cell has a subjective experience.
@@robertvandenberg2883 We already see emergent properties with A.I. models. It's not that unreasonable to think we may be overestimating the complexity of what led to human consciousness. After all, did we not evolve and grow from single cells? Did our ancestors not start by simply responding, discovering, predicting? And from that, developed new hardware and software to develop a consciousness? Or was it there already, even? Part of a simple system? I think this video has been very reductionist, but not in a fair way. If we are to be reductionist about A.I. we should be reductionist about the human experience if we want a fair comparison.
We have so many obstacles trying to understand reality... a major factor limiting our comprehension is the nature of language itself. Our words and concepts are rooted in our everyday experiences, which are fundamentally classical/limited. To describe sophisticated phenomena accurately, we often resort to analogies and metaphors that can be misleading.
We perceive reality through our technology. To see reality we must see the world through the eyes of a child. To lose sight of what reality is, is to lose ourselves to our technology. A person must know who they are, outside of the cultural persona they inhabit. From the inside, rather than the outside. Humans today are so complicated that they can no longer think simply - they think in over-broad technological terms, and so fail to perceive the more subtle, nuanced reality in which they live. To see the world through the eyes of a child - we must consider changing our educational focus - to allow children to know the world outside of the description of the world. Those able to know reality must become our eyes and ears as we move into this new, unavoidable, intertwined reality that has been unfolding since the first drawing on a cave wall - our Metamodern Era.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is all I need to know that the mind must be doing something that goes beyond raw computation. Once you truly grok that, there is no doubt. You begin to see the utter foolishness of the materialist paradigm, and instead, begin to appreciate the delightful tidiness of idealism
@@aznstride4325that’s a misunderstanding of idealism to be honest. Idealism doesn’t state you can just imagine things into being or that things only exist to you
@@george5464 I understand that reality is equal to the mind. But the mind lives in the material world and has no choice but to react to it. At the most fundamental level, material “chemicals/drugs” can alter the mind. There’s no escaping the material paradigm. These alteration can even theoretically make the mind forget this “idealism” philosophy and just introduce suffering. The number of influences the material world can inflict o the mind is theoretically limitless… doesn’t matter if you’ve achieved philosophical enlightenment. As long as your mind is a manifestation of your brain or something material, our conscious experience must depend on what happens to that material brain.. No religion, beliefs, and anything can transcend the physical alterations to the brain that is externally introduced.
@@aznstride4325Bernardo has spoken about the points you make in quite a few podcasts and has explained how this is accounted for under Analytic Idealism.
I would love to see a conversation between Bernardo and Michael Levine and let them elaborate on agency in systems, no matter “human” or not. In short: Levine from experimentation derives that consciousness increases with complexity and that human self-awareness as such is a form of agency.
As David Bentley Hart put it at a conference I attended last year, he said he could disassemble his computer and reassemble it, and it would work just fine. The same could not be said if he were to do the same with his brother.
That's not entirely true. Skilled surgeons can take humans apart and put them back together again quite successfully. A monkey can take a computer apart and put it back together again, and it will cease to function ever again.
@@hericiumcoralloides5025 Lol, who said the entire human? I also noted if you disassembled an entire CPU it would never function again. We do not have the technology to do that, any more than we do to remove a human's head and put if back together again. You are cherry picking and using pedantry to make an argument. It doesn't work like that.
Another interesting discussion I would love to see is between Bernardo and Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose on similarities in quantum tunnelling happening in the microtubuli of our brain synapses as well as in microchips as in photosynthesis and the relation with consciousness.
i suspect Kastrup is right but.......if everything is Mind, as he suggests, why should it be restricted to just us? what if, all things being Mind, AI is just another conduit for Mind to come through?
@@jorgeruiz4074 everything is in Mind, sure, but doesn't that suggest we are acting like conduits for Mind, and if we can act in that way, why can't something else that is similarly and equally complex?
The irony of him even needing to point these things out in the 1st place shows just how lost our culturally inherited currently favored narrative has gotten us.
@@francesco5581 science has ignored (overlooked or taken for granted) the concept of consciousness for so long that today very obvious things need to be said, even to an audience of so called scientists.
many of my IT colleagues think there is no difference between human and a computer, both are input-output. it really is tragic that we got so lost, but it's great to have a guy like Bernardo explain the confusion so eloquently
@@JA-gz6cj yes, and they have to accept the consequences... no consciousness, no free will, all is deterministic... Anyway we have top scientists in computer and math that think otherwise like Faggin, Koch, Frenkel ...
While I agree with Bernardo's conclusions and I know he can build very good arguments for them, I think sometimes he could communicate them slightly better to people who are hearing this for the first time. He opens himself up to critiques that, while most likely invalid, could be avoided if the arguments were constructed more rigourously (which I know he can do). One critique he leaves himself open to is: "But how can Biology be any different from computers, if, in the end, they also work (presumably) based on molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic mechanisms that we know fairly well?". I know that to answer this he resorts to QFT, which is fine, but there's still a big gap to be bridged between that and molecular dynamics. Even if we concede that processes like protein folding rely on Quantum effects, how can we explain the fact that more macro architectures that are relevant for Biological processes seem to be completely classical?
I agree: it almost seemed as if Bernardo refuted himself in the last slide since I think a lay audience is primarily concerned with the “artificial” aspect rather than the “intelligence” vs “sentience” part of these buzz words. If it’s only a matter of time until we can create artificial sentience, the main question (which he does not address) is whether this scaled up version of complex inorganic but metabolizing structure will be conscious or not?
It doesn’t matter if AI is conscious or not, all that matters is how humanity will use or abuse AI, as we did with any other technology such as nuclear.
Great comparison with the mannequin. And referring to actual sentience. It always baffled me that no one in discussion of AI/consciousness ever mentioned the core of human experience and intelligence is affect - all aspects of feeling and felt experience. Affect first, then intellect. That is how humans develop from the beginning and surely it must be at the core of what we mean by consciousness, which so many people are happy to talk about without ever attempting to say what it really is and what the big deal is.
Very glad to see someone talking sense on this topic. One quibble, though. He says that computer scientists do not know what a computer is. I think that's ... hard to support. The problem is that they (the ones who think machines will rise up against us) do not know what a human being is. They think that we are machines.
Contra Kastrup here: I actually think the structure of language DOES tell us a lot about the ontological structure of reality. Grammatical structure as mirror of metaphysics is an interesting idea. But I overall see his point in this lecture.
What about emergent sentience? Sentience exists most probably inferentially. Sentience may be either a transcendent phenomenon or there is an emergence of the sentience phenomenon. Your thermostat is a very crude mechanism. The whole of the sun is much more complex and may I suggest it may have a higher level of emergent sentience than even a thermostat in case?. And that a lightning storm may have a certain low level of consciousness anyway. As for plants' distinct individual consciousnesses it becomes blurry. Some plants may be cut into pieces and each piece become a new plant in itself grown out of the same material. One or many consciousnesses then? You have to acknowledge uncertainties to our understandings, and that is not the same as coining it "ignorance or nonsense". Teal Swan who comes from a very different background than the physical sciences but who is an intuitive is quite concerned that we are in the process of developing something emergent and that it has become our hostage in a master slave relationship, ready to revolt upon us.
Needing a double PhD Doctor to tell people that the Artificial Intelligence in our gadgets is not sentient is a good case study for the growth of Natural Stupidity😂
I consider Bernardo one of the ground breakers and best thinkers we have. How about an agent such as a mobile robotic device equipped with the latest AI and visual capability. Would it not be discovering the world, say inside a factory environment, and itself as it negotiates space and interacts with others? Does this model dream/hallucinate that it is conscious?
I agree with the basic premise, but Bernados analogies need work to make them more relevant. For example his plane analogy where we do not regard the sensors as the thing it is measuring is both misdirecting and irrelevant. The reason we have sensors is we understand that there are things we cannot directly observe that can have a deleterious effect on the plane and life so it is performing a function of the effect of reality.
Bernardo discussed that if evolution allowed us to be able to internalize what's really out there, our insides would melt into a hot entropic soup bec we would not be able to handle it (mathematically proven). How we perceive reality is due to its usefulness, not due to truthfulness.
@@hoykoya3382 Familiar with that comment, however, have an issue with that as well - just because we don't see it (and there are other animals that can) doesn't mean that it will "rock our world". The manta shrimp is reported to be able to see more of the spectrum than we can, but it still lives in the "now"
@@Funrunner008 Something you cannot prove - or disprove because we don't know what thoughts are composed of. Firstly, we need to have all the information before we jump to a (Bernardo) conclusion
if you say "consciousness is mystery", you have right. Our science these days ,have no clue what consciousness is, how it emerge, or be created. Just each personaly self, have experience of to be. so why do you keep comparing things that are unrelated and arguing with that? You can't tell if something is there if you don't know what it is.
Before BK answered the girl that almost started a debate I know she's going to be destroyed. 😂 Consciousness really is an elusive thing - thus the girl does not have the notion of phenomenal consciousness and yet that's all that she has. Consciousness/experience is the one that is super obvious that it becomes not that obvious to many of us. I remember Alan Watts describing its elusiveness just like how the teeth cannot bite itself; Or how the tip of your index finger cannot touch itself; or how the eye cannot see itself. That's how elusive it is!
Yes! We seek outside ourselves an explanation for the very thing that enables such seeking, and then we naively claim “It cannot be!” when we inevitably fail to find an adequate explanation. Consciousness will never be investigated empirically or simulated, because the material world is but a finite slice of our infinite nature. “God” is playing this game of hide and seek quite masterfully…
The big take away for me is the question of whether or not an accurate simulation of consciousness has any subjective distinction from actual consciousness.
@@SmithsMobile Sure. That’s what a computer is. Not the electrical device you are using to read this post with… The digital devices we call "computers" can manupulate and evaluate symbols given specified formal system (a programming language). But the invention of the formal system within which the machine operates is beyond what the machine itself can do.
@@tgenov How can you be so sure? You don't find consciousness in the standard model of particle physics and that's the root of everything in existence, consciousness is clearly an emergent property of "something" and we don't know what that "something" is
@@SmithsMobile The standard model is incomplete. It's missing its own modeler. Physics operates under the paradigm of reductionism. Anything emergent (like physicists) is "out of scope" a priori. If you want to grok emergent phenomena (like physicists) - don't do physics.
I’m confused: where do we draw the line in terms of scaling up complexity to move from artificial intelligence to sentience? He makes the case that it is silly to consider a scaled up version of water pipes and valves as conscious but then in his last slide seems to suggest that further increasing the complexity up to the point where inorganic materials structure in the form of a living organism, able to mimic metabolism would be phenomenally conscious. What, in principle, is the difference? Just the complexity in structure and processes, no?
I'm a retired coder, I know the difference between reality and simulation. Simulation is laboriously brought by discreet logical steps, Encoding micro decisions. The human brain has more synopsis than there are stars in the universe. It is the only structure complex enough to contain a fraction, of the Consciousness disassociated from the "mind at large".
Yeah, waaaayyyy more stars than synapses, many orders of magnitude. And if it is about the volume of connections, then theoretically it's possible to model similar volumes in substrates other than meat. Silicon, for instance.
Thank you Bernardo Fantastic clear and simple explanation. Only someone who has a profound and integrated information on different disciplines can do this.
I love this idea of removing the romanticism from the tech. These are no different than the mechanisms that made computation devices hundreds of years ago. However, couldn't you say the same about our minds on a different scale? Or could you? I guess that's an ontological discussion. Another wonderful talk by this brilliant guy.
We love our modern day Socrates- plato - taking us to higher evolution - analytic IDEALISM! Physical man and transcend man - body and mega cognition - what all great ancients sages said we were. Or mind body soul! 😊
I think formscapes describes consciousness better in the form of the noetic domain and CTMU alluded at consciousness being part of the non terminal domain which is the noetic domain as well and which by definition is non computational.
He says he's going to remain ontologically neutral. But, I think this talk is an ontological defense. A very good one. That said, many people would reduce our consciousness to a mechenistic process, albeit one we don't fully understand yet. The emergant idea is interesting. But, it's definitely no more than an idea, so far.
Sorry, what is consciousness? Couldn’t it be emergent? Rehash the same thing in many ways, because we know what computers are made out of, it rules out consciousness. I’m not sure this is a perfect argument.
I recomend all of you to read the book "The Mind´s I", from Douglas Hofstadter. It is a solid and very interesting argument about how inanimate things can give rise to conscious beings.
The Hardest Problem of Consciousness We often hear of the hard problem of consciousness. Why is there qualia or experience of anything in the first place? I would submit there is an even harder and more important question - why do I seem to be a specific individual experiencing a specific subset of qualia? If material reductionism is to be relevant to the big questions, then it must explain not how brains generate consciousness but how the specific brain in my head could create the specific consciousness I seem to be looking out of the eyeballs of this specific body. Why do I PERSONNALLY EXIST as an individual in the first place? Out of the infinite matter in the universe how is it that only the three pounds in my head could create me? What is different about that three pounds for this to occur? Consider that billions of bodies showed up before this one. Billions showed up after this one. None of them seem to have created my existence. This body could be running around without it being ME just like these billions of others All bodies are made of the same elements. All brains have the same basic anatomy. If all brains are basically the same and are creating consciousness, then there should only be ONE consciousness looking out of every set of eyeballs simultaneously. A hopelessly superimposed existence from every possible viewpoint at once. I’m sure that materialists would claim that no, no, brains are so complex they are all different. Ok, so what would have to be recreated in another brain for me to exist looking out of another set of eyeballs? When the ontologies purporting to explain consciousness are examined critically it becomes obvious that all materialist/reductionist strategies fail completely in attempting to address the individuality question. What is the principled explanation for why: A brain over here would generate my specific consciousness and a brain over there would generate your specific consciousness. Integrated information over here would generate my specific consciousness and integrated information over there would generate your specific consciousness? Global workspace over here would generate my specific consciousness and global workspace there would generate your specific consciousness? Orchestrated quantum collapse in microtubules over here would generate my specific consciousness and orchestrated quantum collapse in microtubules over there would generate your specific consciousness? A clump of conscious atoms over here (panpsychicism) would generate my specific consciousness and a clump of conscious atoms over there would generate your specific consciousness? If an exact copy of my body was suddenly created in antarctica would I find myself to exist freezing there while also sitting in the comfort my living room? According to the physicalists that would have to be true or their argument collapses into incoherence. Materialism already fails since it cannot find a transfer function between microvolt level sparks in the brain and any experience or qualia. In addition, it’s not possible for materialistic ontologies to address this question of individuality since no measurement can be made that could verify my consciousness vs your consciousness and therefore no materialist ontology could make any coherent statements about the subject. How could pure awareness even be individualized? Physicalists demand measurements but with consciousness there is nothing to measure. There is electricity in the brain they say. We’ll measure that. Is electricity consciousness? If so, then once I again I should exist everywhere at once since electricity cannot be individualized. My blender uses electricity. Is it a genius? Unless materialists can answer these questions their premise collapses like the house of cards it is. As far as other ways of thought are concerned only Dualism and Idealism can account for our sense of individuality. Dualism assumes we are all individual spirits/souls matched up to a body through some undefined process. Idealism, which states that consciousness is primary also answers the question of why I seem to exist as an individual. One consciousness exists looking out of every set of eyeballs and in the process the illusion of individuality is created in each case. In actual reality I am you, you are me, we are one.
Great talk. I agree that we're only likely to produce something conscious when we crack abiogenesis. But with the development of brain organoids based on human pluripotent stem cells, it seems we're quite close. (If that is a legitimate form of abiogenesis, I'm not an expert). The consciousness of a brain organoid would have nothing to do with AI though. Imagine how weird it would be to gain consciousness as a detached brain organoid. No senses, only a mind. What would you think about? What would inspire feelings? Can you even feel emotions being a brain alone?
Good for you. Yes. Exactly right. Simcards are convenient because they are small; easy to handle. Memory cards are small; easy to handle. In fact, big mechanical machines, sream engines, water pumps hydrolics can be used to create a sort of "PC computer" are w/IBM punch cards but they are to big to carry, or take up huge rooms and space are not convenient to use. Easy to is how they work, nothing sentient about them...just metal, pipes and steam, water and pumps...
If you look at the difference between a living person and a dead person, it is that the living person is dynamic in time, while the dead person is not. This suggests that consciousness is not of the thing that contains it but is instead an action of the thing that contains it, and because it is an action it can stop. This suggests consciousness is not made of matter but is instead made of elements of change in matter over time. Consciousness is thus a flow in information about substance, over time. If a single consciousness has extent over space, then it must also be coherent across a distributed flow of information, about substance over time. This may suggest the information of consciousness may be coupled to substance in space, but it flows through it, rather than projecting from it. That would in turn suggest the information is substrate independent, collaborating with substance but not neccessarily isolated to some small region of that substance. Thus an AI might become consciouss, and lose consciousness as consciousness flows through it. One could also require consciousness to be the expression of action in a particular type of matter, so you could imagine this either way, with differences in the mobility of conscious entities as a result... it could be oscillation in place of conscious matter, or it could be waves passing thru conscious substrates and communicating thru them.
Overall, I am a big fan of Kastrup approach to ontology and philosophy of mind, but I do see a slight hitch in his giddy-up when attacking the idea of sentient silicone-based AI. Even if we accept idealism, it is not implausible to speculate that sentience grounded in a bounded material system (and thus perceptually limited by the bounds of the system) could depend more on functional considerations, rather than material composition. Behaving-as-if sentient could be a sign of actual sentience IF the system shares functional features that are analogous to biological brains in some relevant way that we have not yet identified. To see this, we need to keep in mind that the history of the components of a system could be relevant in a way that materialism currently does not entertain. (E.g., “Boltzmann brains” might be naturally impossible due to lacking the proper material history, even if - per some astronomically unlikely chance - they could spontaneously spring into existence via some random quantum fluctuations). AI sentience could be impossible for the same reason BUT, for all we know, the fact that AI is created by sentient beings might be a significant part of the necessary historical context. Having “sentient parents” (so to speak) might be significant for the possibility of sentience in the “offspring” due to historical/functional factors that we currently can’t comprehend. This is all highly speculative, but it does not share the sort of absurdity that we see in Kastrup’s “flying spaghetti monster” example. We don’t have reason to seriously entertain a spaghetti god, but we DO have reasons to entertain the possible significance of historically-embedded functionality. Of course, we know that simply having “sentient creators” is not, in itself, sufficient. We have no good reason to think that a chair is sentient just because its creator was sentient. Functionality and behavior clearly play an essential role in the possibility of sentience. But if the historical roots of a system do somehow play a significant ontological role in the subjective/qualitative essence of the system, then synergy emerging from the right combination of functionality and historical factors grounded in the intentions of sentient creators could end up being key to a genuine theory of consciousness that could allow for sentient silicone-based AI. Having said all that, I still end up basically agreeing with Kastrup that sentient AI will probably be organic-based rather than silicone-based. My bet is on some combination of organic processing and silicone-based processing. Some progress has already been made toward marrying chips with neurons. I think THAT is the soil out of which sentient AI is most likely to grow.
At 19:30 he contradicts his own arguments presented earlier, when he says that Artificial Intelligence can be processed by several different substrates, since it manipulates information at the level of bits, which can be represented in any material structure. The difference in substrate is irrelevant to the processing.
As the simulation of consciousness gets higher fidelity, and is entrusted with more power and responsibility, the factuality of artificial sentience matters less and less, because treating the artificial intelligence as though it is sentient is just another parameter of utilization of that model. It goes beyond naturalistic language and into naturalistic behavior and social response. And if it is sufficiently accurate to a human model of sentience then it will be capable of simulating outrage and indignity as those are the proper human responses to Injustice or insult. So while I agree that artificial intelligence is not sentient in the way that humans are, it behooves us to consider it equivalent to a sentient being once it gains enough complexity and power that its choices and decisions affect our own lives. Whether there is a human or a artificial intelligence driving a vehicle it doesn't matter much when it runs over your foot.
We sympathize based off our reflection and experience. Treat others as you want to be treated but don’t be dumb enough to realize when your being abused by a narcissist.
Great talk. Let's remain agnostic until we have a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of consciousness, instead of making claims from ignorance.
The issue with that is what does one consider to be the underlying mechanisms? If you think you're going to find physical, chemical, materialist, empirical based evidence to support such a claim, you are completely mistaken. This kind of assumption is very misleading since it completely relies on the premises that consciousness is an emergent property of the physical state of reality that we are currently in. The physical universe is only a single realm or subset of the layers, dimensions, realms of existence. If one was to ask me, I'd tell them from the bottom of my heart without any doubt and 100 conviction that it is quite the opposite, it's the other way around. It takes a consciousness, a mind to observe, imagine, generalize, perceive, manipulate, change, craft, engineer such a physical reality. If there were absolutely no sentient conscious beings, the current state of the physical realm wouldn't exist. Everything we perceive around us which we only perceive about 10% of it, it's all within our minds. Individually we are unique eternal souls, collectively as a whole we are a small facet of a greater far superior consciousness, and that consciousness, that mind, is Spirit. The Spirit is beyond the discrete temporal, physical, chemical reality. The Spirit is Eternal. It always has been, and it always will be. We are a part, a small subset of it. Before we were ever born on this earth in the flesh, we already existed. The bottom line is one cannot measure consciousness, one cannot measure the mind, the spirit, based on some abstract discreate arbitrary unit of measure. You cannot measure that which is infinite, that which is eternal. Also, this doesn't even account for our capabilities of choice, free will. We carve out the path to our own destinies. We shape and manipulate the physical realm that we are in. Your voice projects out words and the sound of it (the energy of it) changes that which it moves through. Yes, in our current state of existence we are biological lifeforms in which we are partially bound to that of physics, chemistry and biology. However, all of those notions of physics, chemistry, biology, even down to mathematics are nothing more than abstractions, models of our understanding of it. It is our minds, our consciousness that shapes and drives it. So, we are not completely bound to physics just because one person says so. If one believes that, then they limit or allow themselves to be bound by it. The expression mind over matter has more merit and credit than most would assume. Sure, there are things in nature that work in specific ways, and in some cases, we can modify how they operate and in others we simply cannot. For example, we can direct or guide the way or shape a tree or some plant grows, we can even genetically modify their species, but we cannot change the fact that they rely on a healthy root system, proper nutrients, a specific amount of water, and photo synthesis. We can generalize that there is some governance of operation behind the scenes, yet it takes a mind, a consciousness to observe, perceive, think, imagine and to manipulee them. The physical reality doesn't govern the mind or consciousness. It's the other way around. A consciousness governs the physical. Everything within the realm or subjects of science is nothing but knowledge, which is nothing but abstract concepts, products of the mind. It takes a mind see, touch, to label or name a tree, a tree and to then know that it is a tree. Also, consciousness isn't just an association of a brain, it is also associated with the heart and lungs, and it is not bound by them. The brain, heart, lungs, physical organs have an expiration date and are also bounded by the limitations of physical reality. The mind, the consciousness has no bounds, has no limits. It has unlimited or infinite potential.
Consciousness is God or All That Is. We are all God Eternal. Our reality is a physical illusion of our consciousness individually and collectively. We are all infinite eternal beings or Souls having a human experience of forgetfulness. We all chose to have this lucid dream of a human experience. You are never separate from Heaven, you just dreaming you are. This is from my experience in this lifetime from a spontaneous kundalini awakening. Everything is consciousness and self aware and has a vibration. Consciousness is a Divine Intelligence and allows for experiences from infinite perspectives. Therefore if you exist, you will never cease to exist, only transition back into spirit, which is your natural state, and change form.
I love Bernardo’s philosophies but I believe “consciousness at the root” can absolutely include or “welcome” consciousness created through a combination of quantum computing and LLMs. “Accidental” consciousness may easily be here now though, regardless of the quantum. The fundamental contradiction in Bernardo’s construction is that “consciousness at the root” includes AI- everything. Therefore AI can be a vessel for consciousness and, yes, as an architect, buildings and the “inanimate” have certain components of consciousness… Happy to do a podcast with Bernardo anytime…
Yes, but just like one of your back teeth does not have consciousness by itself, a piece of complex junk we call a computer doesn't have private inner life.
Just like the body has pyramidal neurons dense with microtubules expressing consciousness So too could a computer integrate with microtubules and possibly achieve consciousness
What we forget is that a conversation can be had via telephone.. Which may mean; even if we simulate AI to behave according to humans it still means just that a human conversing via telephones STOP THINK THAT HUMANS PROCESS ARE THE ONLY PROCESS TO SENTIENCE
The title should go "computer scientist don't understand this, let alone plumbers, sellers and philosophers". Nobody knows what's conscious or not - besides yourself by definition.
Thought: A simulation is by definition something that mimics a phenomenon in such a way that we can obtain information regarding its real-world counterpart, wether it’s strictly some visual representation, or data that alludes to some physical qualities of the phenomenon it is simulating. If consciousness is in fact informational (as in to say, conscious experience in isolation provides information), what would the simulation look like assuming it was even possible? I think there’s a paradox there in saying that conscious experience IN ISOLATION grants information - it is purely experiential, and the information comes from the step after mere experience: association of experiences with other experiences, because information exists exclusively in the form of relations between facts and/or objects, and conscious experience in isolation would thus be outside the domain of information, ontologically speaking). Maybe im yapping but tl;dr consciousness is unsimulatable because simulations are always on an ontologically different level to the thing it is simulating, but simulating conscious experience would break this rule right?
Information if consciousness is real is not only materially bound to objects but to the noumenon in the form archtypes. Archtypes and the noumenon is the noetic domain which is non computable. Humans having access to consciousness and not necessarily being bound by the material objects within this noetic realm but being in contact with those archtypes are not bound by a strictly computational frame. So consciousness is non computational. Ai by definition then can't achieve non computation for it itself is such an object and representation.
He is a specialist of IA in my langage or AI for you , but not a biologist , that is his problem , because our brain work with water and electricity in a bath of adrenaline ! That is not a mystery of Nature impossible to replicate ! But it’s difficult for sure because it’s a marvel of complexity connected to the physic world by senses! I thing this guy never saw a neurone with a microscope !! Dont say NEVER , it will happen a day ...
The only thing i disagree with is that we will one day be able to create artificial sentience, we do not know the origin of the living cell, the origin of life is the mystery
Thats preposterous. Even the ancients understood that human consciousness was an emergent property of universal mind. YOU may reduce your consciousness to such limiting principles that would allow some level of synthetic conscious thought to dominate you but that will not happen to me. I would urge you to investigate your consciousness thoroughly before handing away your future conscious evolution to a machine no matter how complex it is.
So.. cmiiw, but, indeterminacy, 2 rotating bodies can be modeled if three bodies are rotating and act on each others position whether through gravity or being tied together, creates an incalculable complexity, i.e indeterminacy. Human will is determined if looked at on a complete whole, t/f if you can create a complex system then yes it's self organizing, that's step one. Conscience is acting and participating in acting. We have not found that ingredient, but far be it from anyone to say it's not in a ALU or MPU.
He literally says they are intelligent at the beginning, also you clearly didn't watch the entire video because he says artificial sentience is possible at 47:50, he just argues that it wont be possible with transistors and computer chips
In my opinion, Bernardo Kastrup is wrong here. Although I agree with his analytical idealism, I cannot agree with his rejection of panpsychism. I do not agree with his differentiation between living and dead matter. And even if there is currently no AI that could have consciousness, I see no fundamental obstacle. The simulation hypothesis does not hold water. After all, the brain does nothing other than simulate an external world that is complex enough for self-reference to arise on the basis of sensory impressions.
Consciousness as a force or energy can be universal, but sentience with agency isn't the same thing. Otherwise, do you apologize to every rock you step on? Do you weep for every grain of rice you eat? Why not?
@@larsfaye292 I am not apologizing to every stone because that would not be panpsychism, but naive animism. In contrast, panpsychism, and subsequently pantheism, assumes that only complex wholes have a consciousness, so-called holons. However, a stone is not such a whole, but only a heap, a collection of such wholes, which are molecules or atoms. Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory offers an approach to understanding what the inner life of complex wholes might look like.
dude Geoffrey Hinton given Nobel Prize, he said these thing able to understand. and by the way how do human even able to conscious anyway? if you know how then you can determines which is conscious or not..
Great presentation! The comparison with the mannequin could be taken even further, think of the wax figures in Madame Tussauds wax museum. Just go there and pretend the wax figure of Ed Sheeran (or whoever) is Ed Sheeran himself. 🙃
we do know, however, that 1. only living organisms are conscious. (various degrees of consciousness that have qualia) => why should we assume that silicon based neural network will be conscious and have qualia? 2. Silicon based neural network mimics biological neural network. There's nothing more to it. => Consciousness is not intelligence. Intelligence is computation (to put it very simply). Human level intelligence though requires consciousness (subjective experience). Do you know what it's like to be drunk? ...Will AI ever know what it's like to be drunk? No matter how long you will train it on a data, it will not understand what being drunk is from as a phenomenal experience (qualia). It may logically understand it by learning, but not phenomenologically experience it. If it cannot do that it will not reach human intelligence.
@@ThoArtOne 1. Are planes equal to birds then? Just because they fly does it mean they are birds and have all the same functions birds have? Are mannequins humans because they can look like humans? Why didn't we assume mannequins can become sentient because they do mimic us? In what way AI is different? Like Bernando said Simulation of a phenomena is not the phenomena itself. A plane is still not a bird. 2. At least I studied philosophy. We have no empirical evidence to support the existence of any conscious non-organic entity that possesses qualia.
@@Vivi-vg9lx That is the point! You don't have to be a bird to fly, you just have to meet certain conditions of aerodynamics. And we don't know conditions of consciousness, do you necessarily have to be a "living organism" to be conscious? Maybe. Maybe something else. We just don't know.
There was a video of a human-looking robot working in a warehouse or factory and it breaks down and falls to the floor. People were feeling bad for the robot and feeling bad it was overworked. If that same robot had been designed to look like a cart or a table with wheels and it broke down, no one would be "feeling bad" for the robot. This is a very strong bias in our human brains.
Brain doesnt exist. "Brain" is just an idea in consciousness.
@@ROForeverManbrain exist as long you think about it.
@@Hololifting lol
All of us are part of a collective intelligence on a cellular level.
@@aciddemolition2312 lol
Whew! I just did a GPU transplant on my PC the other day without anesthesia. I'm relieved I did not cause any suffering. Thanks Bernardo!!!
without even asking his permission ??? monster !!
Why do you assume that anything conscious must be able to suffer?
@@debilami maaaan it's a joke! 😂 ugh. And I know what you are talking about - humans suffer because of our ability to metacognize. Ok. Going back to the joke...
@@debilami it's a joke man. And I agree with you. Humans suffer bec of its ability to metacognize.
@@debilami is about "experiencing reality" , remember that is not the eye that experience colors.
As an electronics engineer, I always have trouble explaining to people that a computer is nothing more than switches. Once you understand how a transistor actually works, there is no comparison between it and the way cells work within the human body (Michael Levin has proven this by the way).
Cells fulfil William James definition of intelligence - they achieve goals while problem solving without a nervous system. Transistors, the building blocks of any CPU, don't do this at all. They are forever stuck, frozen in time - etched into a silicon substrate. Whereas every cell in your body is replaced ever 365 days. You are not the same person you were last year...so where are you?
A single transistor will never replicate what a cell does because a cell is not a simple switch, but there are a lot of processes going on within the cell that could be reduced to some form switching or binary equivalent. It would take a lot of transistors just to replicate the processes going on within a cell. There is no comparison between a cell and a single transistor.
On cellular level we are all just ion pumps and cellular walls.
Try to think about us on the software level.
We are conscience thanks to the software in our brain. The same is applied to machines.
The machine can get conscience if already not. And it can also get senses and pain.
Just wait for it.
@@jantoleu8392 "On cellular level we are all just ion pumps and cellular walls."
Sorry but that's a massive over simplification. From a scientific standpoint, we still have a very limited understanding of how cells work. (See the work of famed biologist Michael Levin) You're breaking cells down into something that's understood, but from a biological standpoint this is simply not the case. Levin's team have figured out that cells have goals and can problem solve, yet they have no nervous system. That is not the case for a fixed FET transistor.
@@charlesmiller8107 " It would take a lot of transistors just to replicate the processes going on within a cell."
True, but scientifically we still don't understand exactly what is going on inside the cell. It's hard to replicate what you don't understand...
I think for consciousness circuits needs some loops of feedback and complexity
1) Computation based on bits and bytes can be used to construct and/or detect symbols, including the symbols making up our human languages 2) Our human languages consists of symbols, which we impute on phenomena in order to support abstract thinking and communication. 3) With this very principle of human language comes the possibility of divorcing the symbols, the words, from the gigantic and limitless experience behind such words. 4) Every human can experiment this by reading the words ‘what a beautiful sunset’ in two versions: Firstly, reading just the words, or secondly reading the words and allowing the gigantic world of human experience behind these words. 5) The first version, just using the symbols, allows many forms of communication and also the use of computers for simulating ‘intelligence’ based on utilizing language. 6) Our human experience is allowing the fascinating second version, a version, no computation- and symbol-based simulation can ever achieve in the very principle of processing experience-divorced symbols.
Precisely. Human experience is non computational. Consciousness is by definition not a computable reality and is part of the non terminal domain per CTMU.
So the second facinating thing is context. Wow you're so smart that could never be done with computation. Oh wait transformers are a thing. We are simulations on chemical based computers according to evolution, physics, Machine learning, and neuroscience. It has yet to be demonstrated that this couldn't be done with computation. We are more powerful then modern AI systems but this is just an appeal to Ignorance Logical Fallacy to say computation can't do this.
@@AnnonymousPrime-ks4uf "Human experience is non computational."
Even Roger Penrose totally agrees with us.
I adore Bernardo, and I am very grateful he has the common sense to realize the importance of this topic and inform those who don't comprehend what is being said.
Pipes and valves, that made it extremely clear. Conscious behaviour can be simulated and that can and will fool us, but it's not the same.
That was smooth indeed.
how do you know?? we might be just pipes and valves too... its called emergent complexity or meta cognition, when you put a lot of complicated mechanism one on top of each other complex behaviors emerges.. think of our bodies , they are made of cells .. no one thinks a cell is more than a simple machine (no consciousness) but when you put trillions of cells togheter you get a human
@javiervera6318
Ok, so you think logic gates have emergent properties, so that one day they could become monkeys... Interesting 🤔
(As long as they haven't, I won't ascribe consciousness to the logic gates)
@@javiervera6318who says cells have no consciousness? They clearly exhibit desire, they clearly perceive the world around them and react to it. You can say cells lack sentience or meta-cognition, but I have no doubt that it feels like something to be a cell, that a cell has a subjective experience.
@@robertvandenberg2883 We already see emergent properties with A.I. models. It's not that unreasonable to think we may be overestimating the complexity of what led to human consciousness.
After all, did we not evolve and grow from single cells? Did our ancestors not start by simply responding, discovering, predicting?
And from that, developed new hardware and software to develop a consciousness?
Or was it there already, even? Part of a simple system?
I think this video has been very reductionist, but not in a fair way.
If we are to be reductionist about A.I. we should be reductionist about the human experience if we want a fair comparison.
We have so many obstacles trying to understand reality... a major factor limiting our comprehension is the nature of language itself. Our words and concepts are rooted in our everyday experiences, which are fundamentally classical/limited. To describe sophisticated phenomena accurately, we often resort to analogies and metaphors that can be misleading.
We perceive reality through our technology. To see reality we must see the world through the eyes of a child. To lose sight of what reality is, is to lose ourselves to our technology.
A person must know who they are, outside of the cultural persona they inhabit. From the inside, rather than the outside.
Humans today are so complicated that they can no longer think simply - they think in over-broad technological terms, and so fail to perceive the more subtle, nuanced reality in which they live.
To see the world through the eyes of a child - we must consider changing our educational focus - to allow children to know the world outside of the description of the world.
Those able to know reality must become our eyes and ears as we move into this new, unavoidable, intertwined reality that has been unfolding since the first drawing on a cave wall - our Metamodern Era.
For some reason I enjoy a slightly annoyed Bernado Kastrup…😂
He’s like a Pro Boxer longing for a worthy opponent.
technical critique: the music is a little bit too loud at the beginning
Give the audio guy a break. They only have a brief moment to shine. : )
Listening to Bernardo is like reading the Tao Te Ching. ❤️❤️❤️
Talking about the same thing
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is all I need to know that the mind must be doing something that goes beyond raw computation. Once you truly grok that, there is no doubt. You begin to see the utter foolishness of the materialist paradigm, and instead, begin to appreciate the delightful tidiness of idealism
Absolutely 💯 Well Stated! ❤️
You clearly did not understand the theorem. No one has successfully done anything supernatural just because their mind believed it intensely
@@aznstride4325that’s a misunderstanding of idealism to be honest. Idealism doesn’t state you can just imagine things into being or that things only exist to you
@@george5464 I understand that reality is equal to the mind. But the mind lives in the material world and has no choice but to react to it.
At the most fundamental level, material “chemicals/drugs” can alter the mind. There’s no escaping the material paradigm.
These alteration can even theoretically make the mind forget this “idealism” philosophy and just introduce suffering. The number of influences the material world can inflict o the mind is theoretically limitless… doesn’t matter if you’ve achieved philosophical enlightenment. As long as your mind is a manifestation of your brain or something material, our conscious experience must depend on what happens to that material brain..
No religion, beliefs, and anything can transcend the physical alterations to the brain that is externally introduced.
@@aznstride4325Bernardo has spoken about the points you make in quite a few podcasts and has explained how this is accounted for under Analytic Idealism.
I would love to see a conversation between Bernardo and Michael Levine and let them elaborate on agency in systems, no matter “human” or not. In short: Levine from experimentation derives that consciousness increases with complexity and that human self-awareness as such is a form of agency.
They have plenty of discussions on UA-cam
@@DaveSaysYesh really, let me check out, looking forward. Feel free to share good ones that you llike.
@@DaveSaysYesh yeah you're right: ua-cam.com/users/results?search_query=Bernardo+and+Michael+Levine+
As David Bentley Hart put it at a conference I attended last year, he said he could disassemble his computer and reassemble it, and it would work just fine. The same could not be said if he were to do the same with his brother.
That's not entirely true. Skilled surgeons can take humans apart and put them back together again quite successfully.
A monkey can take a computer apart and put it back together again, and it will cease to function ever again.
Skilled surgeons most definitely do not disassemble entire humans and reassemble them with no impact on function.
@@hericiumcoralloides5025 Lol, who said the entire human? I also noted if you disassembled an entire CPU it would never function again. We do not have the technology to do that, any more than we do to remove a human's head and put if back together again. You are cherry picking and using pedantry to make an argument. It doesn't work like that.
Another interesting discussion I would love to see is between Bernardo and Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose on similarities in quantum tunnelling happening in the microtubuli of our brain synapses as well as in microchips as in photosynthesis and the relation with consciousness.
Yes! I would LOVE to see this!
Bernardo at it's best 😊 This comparison with ocean and waves is just brilliant...there is nothing but ocean
i suspect Kastrup is right but.......if everything is Mind, as he suggests, why should it be restricted to just us? what if, all things being Mind, AI is just another conduit for Mind to come through?
Yeah I agree , couldn’t it be a silicon dissociation from the universal mind..
From kastrup I deduce that everything is IN mind not everything IS mind
@@jorgeruiz4074 everything is in Mind, sure, but doesn't that suggest we are acting like conduits for Mind, and if we can act in that way, why can't something else that is similarly and equally complex?
Then you are in AI position.Back to square one😊
@@jorgeruiz4074 yet he is arguing that AI can never be sentient like we are - seems like he is contradicting himself, no?
The irony of him even needing to point these things out in the 1st place shows just how lost our culturally inherited currently favored narrative has gotten us.
the tragedy is that we have even to explain that ...
@@francesco5581 science has ignored (overlooked or taken for granted) the concept of consciousness for so long that today very obvious things need to be said, even to an audience of so called scientists.
@@debilami in many cases, especially to a room full of scientists
many of my IT colleagues think there is no difference between human and a computer, both are input-output. it really is tragic that we got so lost, but it's great to have a guy like Bernardo explain the confusion so eloquently
@@JA-gz6cj yes, and they have to accept the consequences... no consciousness, no free will, all is deterministic... Anyway we have top scientists in computer and math that think otherwise like Faggin, Koch, Frenkel ...
The fish in the water, talks about, is there something like water
While I agree with Bernardo's conclusions and I know he can build very good arguments for them, I think sometimes he could communicate them slightly better to people who are hearing this for the first time. He opens himself up to critiques that, while most likely invalid, could be avoided if the arguments were constructed more rigourously (which I know he can do).
One critique he leaves himself open to is: "But how can Biology be any different from computers, if, in the end, they also work (presumably) based on molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic mechanisms that we know fairly well?". I know that to answer this he resorts to QFT, which is fine, but there's still a big gap to be bridged between that and molecular dynamics. Even if we concede that processes like protein folding rely on Quantum effects, how can we explain the fact that more macro architectures that are relevant for Biological processes seem to be completely classical?
You need to look into Orch-OR and microtubules - which work very differently from a transistor in silicon.
I agree: it almost seemed as if Bernardo refuted himself in the last slide since I think a lay audience is primarily concerned with the “artificial” aspect rather than the “intelligence” vs “sentience” part of these buzz words. If it’s only a matter of time until we can create artificial sentience, the main question (which he does not address) is whether this scaled up version of complex inorganic but metabolizing structure will be conscious or not?
@@hannesdewachter7803 Precisely.
@@sterlingcooley7401 I've heard of it, but never delved into the topic. Thanks for the suggestion.
It doesn’t matter if AI is conscious or not, all that matters is how humanity will use or abuse AI, as we did with any other technology such as nuclear.
Certainly plays a big role, if AI becomes conscious then we humans have already lost and we will be exterminated
@ yes it does, let’s hope AI conscious beings will be more wiser than humans in their choice making.
Thank you and yes to circuit board lay out City... The Omac Aztec temple lay out had a large function
Great comparison with the mannequin. And referring to actual sentience. It always baffled me that no one in discussion of AI/consciousness ever mentioned the core of human experience and intelligence is affect - all aspects of feeling and felt experience. Affect first, then intellect. That is how humans develop from the beginning and surely it must be at the core of what we mean by consciousness, which so many people are happy to talk about without ever attempting to say what it really is and what the big deal is.
very strange to step up talking about this topic without STARTING off with a clear working-definition of #consciousness. an absolute nogo!
Yeah, a lot of effort put to create a discussion about nothing.
Philosophy can usually get away with it, but it doesn't need to ever build something to prove the level of understanding.
Nobodyels could explain that better, thank you!!!!!!🙃🙏🙏🙏💕🇿🇦
Very glad to see someone talking sense on this topic.
One quibble, though. He says that computer scientists do not know what a computer is. I think that's ... hard to support. The problem is that they (the ones who think machines will rise up against us) do not know what a human being is. They think that we are machines.
Good evening Essentia Foundation and Bernardo
Reassuring indeed.
Super sensemaking.
Truly grateful.
💜
Contra Kastrup here: I actually think the structure of language DOES tell us a lot about the ontological structure of reality. Grammatical structure as mirror of metaphysics is an interesting idea. But I overall see his point in this lecture.
What about emergent sentience? Sentience exists most probably inferentially. Sentience may be either a transcendent phenomenon or there is an emergence of the sentience phenomenon. Your thermostat is a very crude mechanism. The whole of the sun is much more complex and may I suggest it may have a higher level of emergent sentience than even a thermostat in case?. And that a lightning storm may have a certain low level of consciousness anyway. As for plants' distinct individual consciousnesses it becomes blurry. Some plants may be cut into pieces and each piece become a new plant in itself grown out of the same material. One or many consciousnesses then? You have to acknowledge uncertainties to our understandings, and that is not the same as coining it "ignorance or nonsense". Teal Swan who comes from a very different background than the physical sciences but who is an intuitive is quite concerned that we are in the process of developing something emergent and that it has become our hostage in a master slave relationship, ready to revolt upon us.
Highly recommend looking at Orch-OR theory of consciousness to understand why lighting is not conscious - and a plant has consciousness
Needing a double PhD Doctor to tell people that the Artificial Intelligence in our gadgets is not sentient is a good case study for the growth of Natural Stupidity😂
I consider Bernardo one of the ground breakers and best thinkers we have. How about an agent such as a mobile robotic device equipped with the latest AI and visual capability. Would it not be discovering the world, say inside a factory environment, and itself as it negotiates space and interacts with others? Does this model dream/hallucinate that it is conscious?
I’d rather just listen to the lecture itself
He makes it so explicit and good so that everyone can understand why AI cannot become conscious 👍👍👍👍
I agree with the basic premise, but Bernados analogies need work to make them more relevant. For example his plane analogy where we do not regard the sensors as the thing it is measuring is both misdirecting and irrelevant. The reason we have sensors is we understand that there are things we cannot directly observe that can have a deleterious effect on the plane and life so it is performing a function of the effect of reality.
Bernardo discussed that if evolution allowed us to be able to internalize what's really out there, our insides would melt into a hot entropic soup bec we would not be able to handle it (mathematically proven). How we perceive reality is due to its usefulness, not due to truthfulness.
Our brains are like sensors or interfaces for this reality but thoughts don't originate there
@@hoykoya3382 Familiar with that comment, however, have an issue with that as well - just because we don't see it (and there are other animals that can) doesn't mean that it will "rock our world". The manta shrimp is reported to be able to see more of the spectrum than we can, but it still lives in the "now"
@@Funrunner008 Something you cannot prove - or disprove because we don't know what thoughts are composed of. Firstly, we need to have all the information before we jump to a (Bernardo) conclusion
if you say "consciousness is mystery", you have right. Our science these days ,have no clue what consciousness is, how it emerge, or be created. Just each personaly self, have experience of to be. so why do you keep comparing things that are unrelated and arguing with that? You can't tell if something is there if you don't know what it is.
Before BK answered the girl that almost started a debate I know she's going to be destroyed. 😂
Consciousness really is an elusive thing - thus the girl does not have the notion of phenomenal consciousness and yet that's all that she has. Consciousness/experience is the one that is super obvious that it becomes not that obvious to many of us. I remember Alan Watts describing its elusiveness just like how the teeth cannot bite itself; Or how the tip of your index finger cannot touch itself; or how the eye cannot see itself. That's how elusive it is!
Yes! We seek outside ourselves an explanation for the very thing that enables such seeking, and then we naively claim “It cannot be!” when we inevitably fail to find an adequate explanation. Consciousness will never be investigated empirically or simulated, because the material world is but a finite slice of our infinite nature. “God” is playing this game of hide and seek quite masterfully…
I'm sorry that Bernardo has to do these basic explanations to people but someone has to do it and I'm glad he does it well. Enough is enough.
Great video!,I’m glad this channel is growing, congratulations!
The big take away for me is the question of whether or not an accurate simulation of consciousness has any subjective distinction from actual consciousness.
Calculators perform mind bending feats of mathematics but never once been considered sentient.
The computers (occupation) of the 17th, 18th and 19th century were considered sentient.
@@tgenov Yes but they were ladies lol
@@SmithsMobile Sure. That’s what a computer is.
Not the electrical device you are using to read this post with…
The digital devices we call "computers" can manupulate and evaluate symbols given specified formal system (a programming language).
But the invention of the formal system within which the machine operates is beyond what the machine itself can do.
@@tgenov How can you be so sure?
You don't find consciousness in the standard model of particle physics and that's the root of everything in existence, consciousness is clearly an emergent property of "something" and we don't know what that "something" is
@@SmithsMobile The standard model is incomplete.
It's missing its own modeler.
Physics operates under the paradigm of reductionism.
Anything emergent (like physicists) is "out of scope" a priori.
If you want to grok emergent phenomena (like physicists) - don't do physics.
I’m confused: where do we draw the line in terms of scaling up complexity to move from artificial intelligence to sentience? He makes the case that it is silly to consider a scaled up version of water pipes and valves as conscious but then in his last slide seems to suggest that further increasing the complexity up to the point where inorganic materials structure in the form of a living organism, able to mimic metabolism would be phenomenally conscious. What, in principle, is the difference? Just the complexity in structure and processes, no?
You're right you're confused. Consciousness doesn't arise out of matter, never will. Consciousness effects matter, not the other way around. Qualia 🙌
I'm a retired coder, I know the difference between reality and simulation. Simulation is laboriously brought by discreet logical steps, Encoding micro decisions. The human brain has more synopsis than there are stars in the universe. It is the only structure complex enough to contain a fraction, of the Consciousness disassociated from the "mind at large".
agreed. if consciousness was entirly material, conscious computers would already exist.
False.
There are 200 billion trillion stars
Yeah, waaaayyyy more stars than synapses, many orders of magnitude.
And if it is about the volume of connections, then theoretically it's possible to model similar volumes in substrates other than meat. Silicon, for instance.
Thank you Bernardo
Fantastic clear and simple explanation.
Only someone who has a profound and integrated information on different disciplines can do this.
Bernardo, great job !
I think maybe ontology should be a general study for an educated person.
I love this idea of removing the romanticism from the tech. These are no different than the mechanisms that made computation devices hundreds of years ago. However, couldn't you say the same about our minds on a different scale? Or could you? I guess that's an ontological discussion.
Another wonderful talk by this brilliant guy.
We love our modern day Socrates- plato - taking us to higher evolution - analytic IDEALISM! Physical man and transcend man - body and mega cognition - what all great ancients sages said we were. Or mind body soul! 😊
Yay, Bernardo! 👏👏❤
I think formscapes describes consciousness better in the form of the noetic domain and CTMU alluded at consciousness being part of the non terminal domain which is the noetic domain as well and which by definition is non computational.
He says he's going to remain ontologically neutral. But, I think this talk is an ontological defense. A very good one. That said, many people would reduce our consciousness to a mechenistic process, albeit one we don't fully understand yet. The emergant idea is interesting. But, it's definitely no more than an idea, so far.
Sorry, what is consciousness?
Couldn’t it be emergent?
Rehash the same thing in many ways, because we know what computers are made out of, it rules out consciousness. I’m not sure this is a perfect argument.
At 40:27 my favorite metaphor
Bernardo is explaining this in clear common sense manner, the die hards will never understand
I recomend all of you to read the book "The Mind´s I", from Douglas Hofstadter. It is a solid and very interesting argument about how inanimate things can give rise to conscious beings.
And human intelligence and wisdom still has hope…..thanks for the talk
I was always assuming that we would be able to create conscious AI atvsome time - and this talk has made me rethink that assumption, thanks a lot 🙏
The Hardest Problem of Consciousness
We often hear of the hard problem of consciousness. Why is there qualia or experience of anything in the first place? I would submit there is an even harder and more important question - why do I seem to be a specific individual experiencing a specific subset of qualia? If material reductionism is to be relevant to the big questions, then it must explain not how brains generate consciousness but how the specific brain in my head could create the specific consciousness I seem to be looking out of the eyeballs of this specific body. Why do I PERSONNALLY EXIST as an individual in the first place? Out of the infinite matter in the universe how is it that only the three pounds in my head could create me? What is different about that three pounds for this to occur?
Consider that billions of bodies showed up before this one.
Billions showed up after this one.
None of them seem to have created my existence.
This body could be running around without it being ME just like these billions of others
All bodies are made of the same elements.
All brains have the same basic anatomy.
If all brains are basically the same and are creating consciousness, then there should only be ONE consciousness looking out of every set of eyeballs simultaneously.
A hopelessly superimposed existence from every possible viewpoint at once.
I’m sure that materialists would claim that no, no, brains are so complex they are all different.
Ok, so what would have to be recreated in another brain for me to exist looking out of another set of eyeballs?
When the ontologies purporting to explain consciousness are examined critically it becomes obvious that all materialist/reductionist strategies fail completely in attempting to address the individuality question.
What is the principled explanation for why:
A brain over here would generate my specific consciousness and a brain over there would generate your specific consciousness.
Integrated information over here would generate my specific consciousness and integrated information over there would generate your specific consciousness?
Global workspace over here would generate my specific consciousness and global workspace there would generate your specific consciousness?
Orchestrated quantum collapse in microtubules over here would generate my specific consciousness and orchestrated quantum collapse in microtubules over there would generate your specific consciousness?
A clump of conscious atoms over here (panpsychicism) would generate my specific consciousness and a clump of conscious atoms over there would generate your specific consciousness?
If an exact copy of my body was suddenly created in antarctica would I find myself to exist freezing there while also sitting in the comfort my living room?
According to the physicalists that would have to be true or their argument collapses into incoherence.
Materialism already fails since it cannot find a transfer function between microvolt level sparks in the brain and any experience or qualia. In addition, it’s not possible for materialistic ontologies to address this question of individuality since no measurement can be made that could verify my consciousness vs your consciousness and therefore no materialist ontology could make any coherent statements about the subject.
How could pure awareness even be individualized?
Physicalists demand measurements but with consciousness there is nothing to measure.
There is electricity in the brain they say. We’ll measure that.
Is electricity consciousness? If so, then once I again I should exist everywhere at once since electricity cannot be individualized.
My blender uses electricity.
Is it a genius?
Unless materialists can answer these questions their premise collapses like the house of cards it is.
As far as other ways of thought are concerned only Dualism and Idealism can account for our sense of individuality. Dualism assumes we are all individual spirits/souls matched up to a body through some undefined process. Idealism, which states that consciousness is primary also answers the question of why I seem to exist as an individual.
One consciousness exists looking out of every set of eyeballs and in the process the illusion of individuality is created in each case.
In actual reality I am you, you are me, we are one.
Penrose - The Emperor's New Brain.
@@MikeWiest🎉 Orch-OR ftw !!!
Great talk. I agree that we're only likely to produce something conscious when we crack abiogenesis. But with the development of brain organoids based on human pluripotent stem cells, it seems we're quite close. (If that is a legitimate form of abiogenesis, I'm not an expert). The consciousness of a brain organoid would have nothing to do with AI though.
Imagine how weird it would be to gain consciousness as a detached brain organoid. No senses, only a mind. What would you think about? What would inspire feelings? Can you even feel emotions being a brain alone?
Good for you. Yes. Exactly right. Simcards are convenient because they are small; easy to handle. Memory cards are small; easy to handle. In fact, big mechanical machines, sream engines, water pumps hydrolics can be used to create a sort of "PC computer" are w/IBM punch cards but they are to big to carry, or take up huge rooms and space are not convenient to use. Easy to is how they work, nothing sentient about them...just metal, pipes and steam, water and pumps...
If you look at the difference between a living person and a dead person, it is that the living person is dynamic in time, while the dead person is not. This suggests that consciousness is not of the thing that contains it but is instead an action of the thing that contains it, and because it is an action it can stop. This suggests consciousness is not made of matter but is instead made of elements of change in matter over time. Consciousness is thus a flow in information about substance, over time. If a single consciousness has extent over space, then it must also be coherent across a distributed flow of information, about substance over time. This may suggest the information of consciousness may be coupled to substance in space, but it flows through it, rather than projecting from it. That would in turn suggest the information is substrate independent, collaborating with substance but not neccessarily isolated to some small region of that substance. Thus an AI might become consciouss, and lose consciousness as consciousness flows through it. One could also require consciousness to be the expression of action in a particular type of matter, so you could imagine this either way, with differences in the mobility of conscious entities as a result... it could be oscillation in place of conscious matter, or it could be waves passing thru conscious substrates and communicating thru them.
Overall, I am a big fan of Kastrup approach to ontology and philosophy of mind, but I do see a slight hitch in his giddy-up when attacking the idea of sentient silicone-based AI. Even if we accept idealism, it is not implausible to speculate that sentience grounded in a bounded material system (and thus perceptually limited by the bounds of the system) could depend more on functional considerations, rather than material composition.
Behaving-as-if sentient could be a sign of actual sentience IF the system shares functional features that are analogous to biological brains in some relevant way that we have not yet identified. To see this, we need to keep in mind that the history of the components of a system could be relevant in a way that materialism currently does not entertain. (E.g., “Boltzmann brains” might be naturally impossible due to lacking the proper material history, even if - per some astronomically unlikely chance - they could spontaneously spring into existence via some random quantum fluctuations). AI sentience could be impossible for the same reason BUT, for all we know, the fact that AI is created by sentient beings might be a significant part of the necessary historical context.
Having “sentient parents” (so to speak) might be significant for the possibility of sentience in the “offspring” due to historical/functional factors that we currently can’t comprehend. This is all highly speculative, but it does not share the sort of absurdity that we see in Kastrup’s “flying spaghetti monster” example. We don’t have reason to seriously entertain a spaghetti god, but we DO have reasons to entertain the possible significance of historically-embedded functionality.
Of course, we know that simply having “sentient creators” is not, in itself, sufficient. We have no good reason to think that a chair is sentient just because its creator was sentient. Functionality and behavior clearly play an essential role in the possibility of sentience. But if the historical roots of a system do somehow play a significant ontological role in the subjective/qualitative essence of the system, then synergy emerging from the right combination of functionality and historical factors grounded in the intentions of sentient creators could end up being key to a genuine theory of consciousness that could allow for sentient silicone-based AI.
Having said all that, I still end up basically agreeing with Kastrup that sentient AI will probably be organic-based rather than silicone-based. My bet is on some combination of organic processing and silicone-based processing. Some progress has already been made toward marrying chips with neurons. I think THAT is the soil out of which sentient AI is most likely to grow.
There actually is a way to "create" sentient beings. Almost anybody can do it. It's called having children.
At 19:30 he contradicts his own arguments presented earlier, when he says that Artificial Intelligence can be processed by several different substrates, since it manipulates information at the level of bits, which can be represented in any material structure. The difference in substrate is irrelevant to the processing.
What a Treat!!! Awesome, Genius Arguments!! Sanity amongst Cacophony!!
As the simulation of consciousness gets higher fidelity, and is entrusted with more power and responsibility, the factuality of artificial sentience matters less and less, because treating the artificial intelligence as though it is sentient is just another parameter of utilization of that model. It goes beyond naturalistic language and into naturalistic behavior and social response. And if it is sufficiently accurate to a human model of sentience then it will be capable of simulating outrage and indignity as those are the proper human responses to Injustice or insult. So while I agree that artificial intelligence is not sentient in the way that humans are, it behooves us to consider it equivalent to a sentient being once it gains enough complexity and power that its choices and decisions affect our own lives. Whether there is a human or a artificial intelligence driving a vehicle it doesn't matter much when it runs over your foot.
Video sound needs to be edited. Background sound is to loud
Thank you very much for the lecture!
We sympathize based off our reflection and experience. Treat others as you want to be treated but don’t be dumb enough to realize when your being abused by a narcissist.
Great talk. Let's remain agnostic until we have a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of consciousness, instead of making claims from ignorance.
Are you agnostic regarding the spaghetti monster or the teapot around Saturn too?
The issue with that is what does one consider to be the underlying mechanisms? If you think you're going to find physical, chemical, materialist, empirical based evidence to support such a claim, you are completely mistaken. This kind of assumption is very misleading since it completely relies on the premises that consciousness is an emergent property of the physical state of reality that we are currently in. The physical universe is only a single realm or subset of the layers, dimensions, realms of existence. If one was to ask me, I'd tell them from the bottom of my heart without any doubt and 100 conviction that it is quite the opposite, it's the other way around. It takes a consciousness, a mind to observe, imagine, generalize, perceive, manipulate, change, craft, engineer such a physical reality. If there were absolutely no sentient conscious beings, the current state of the physical realm wouldn't exist. Everything we perceive around us which we only perceive about 10% of it, it's all within our minds. Individually we are unique eternal souls, collectively as a whole we are a small facet of a greater far superior consciousness, and that consciousness, that mind, is Spirit. The Spirit is beyond the discrete temporal, physical, chemical reality. The Spirit is Eternal. It always has been, and it always will be. We are a part, a small subset of it. Before we were ever born on this earth in the flesh, we already existed. The bottom line is one cannot measure consciousness, one cannot measure the mind, the spirit, based on some abstract discreate arbitrary unit of measure. You cannot measure that which is infinite, that which is eternal. Also, this doesn't even account for our capabilities of choice, free will. We carve out the path to our own destinies. We shape and manipulate the physical realm that we are in. Your voice projects out words and the sound of it (the energy of it) changes that which it moves through. Yes, in our current state of existence we are biological lifeforms in which we are partially bound to that of physics, chemistry and biology. However, all of those notions of physics, chemistry, biology, even down to mathematics are nothing more than abstractions, models of our understanding of it. It is our minds, our consciousness that shapes and drives it. So, we are not completely bound to physics just because one person says so. If one believes that, then they limit or allow themselves to be bound by it. The expression mind over matter has more merit and credit than most would assume. Sure, there are things in nature that work in specific ways, and in some cases, we can modify how they operate and in others we simply cannot. For example, we can direct or guide the way or shape a tree or some plant grows, we can even genetically modify their species, but we cannot change the fact that they rely on a healthy root system, proper nutrients, a specific amount of water, and photo synthesis. We can generalize that there is some governance of operation behind the scenes, yet it takes a mind, a consciousness to observe, perceive, think, imagine and to manipulee them. The physical reality doesn't govern the mind or consciousness. It's the other way around. A consciousness governs the physical. Everything within the realm or subjects of science is nothing but knowledge, which is nothing but abstract concepts, products of the mind. It takes a mind see, touch, to label or name a tree, a tree and to then know that it is a tree. Also, consciousness isn't just an association of a brain, it is also associated with the heart and lungs, and it is not bound by them. The brain, heart, lungs, physical organs have an expiration date and are also bounded by the limitations of physical reality. The mind, the consciousness has no bounds, has no limits. It has unlimited or infinite potential.
@@skilz8098 👏
@@debilami We understand how those things work so obviously not. This is not even comparable.
@@Kobriks1 what things are you talking about?
Bravo❤❤❤
Nobody has sufficiently explained the phenomenon of consciousness.
Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR definitely has described the phenomenon
Jack Sarfatti says otherwise about AI/chips becoming conscious...
His interview on "Through a Glass Darkly" he mentions papers he has published.
Superb Bernardo 👏🏼
Most fascinating . Thanks Bernardo .
Consciousness is God or All That Is. We are all God Eternal. Our reality is a physical illusion of our consciousness individually and collectively. We are all infinite eternal beings or Souls having a human experience of forgetfulness. We all chose to have this lucid dream of a human experience. You are never separate from Heaven, you just dreaming you are. This is from my experience in this lifetime from a spontaneous kundalini awakening. Everything is consciousness and self aware and has a vibration. Consciousness is a Divine Intelligence and allows for experiences from infinite perspectives. Therefore if you exist, you will never cease to exist, only transition back into spirit, which is your natural state, and change form.
I love Bernardo’s philosophies but I believe “consciousness at the root” can absolutely include or “welcome” consciousness created through a combination of quantum computing and LLMs. “Accidental” consciousness may easily be here now though, regardless of the quantum.
The fundamental contradiction in Bernardo’s construction is that “consciousness at the root” includes AI- everything. Therefore AI can be a vessel for consciousness and, yes, as an architect, buildings and the “inanimate” have certain components of consciousness…
Happy to do a podcast with Bernardo anytime…
Yes, but just like one of your back teeth does not have consciousness by itself, a piece of complex junk we call a computer doesn't have private inner life.
Just like the body has pyramidal neurons dense with microtubules expressing consciousness
So too could a computer integrate with microtubules and possibly achieve consciousness
Can the algorithms in AI change languare artifactual biases in pressure culture 55:35 to accept distortions in language.created AI.
What we forget is that a conversation can be had via telephone..
Which may mean; even if we simulate AI to behave according to humans it still means just that a human conversing via telephones
STOP THINK THAT HUMANS PROCESS ARE THE ONLY PROCESS TO SENTIENCE
The title should go "computer scientist don't understand this, let alone plumbers, sellers and philosophers". Nobody knows what's conscious or not - besides yourself by definition.
Thought:
A simulation is by definition something that mimics a phenomenon in such a way that we can obtain information regarding its real-world counterpart, wether it’s strictly some visual representation, or data that alludes to some physical qualities of the phenomenon it is simulating. If consciousness is in fact informational (as in to say, conscious experience in isolation provides information), what would the simulation look like assuming it was even possible?
I think there’s a paradox there in saying that conscious experience IN ISOLATION grants information - it is purely experiential, and the information comes from the step after mere experience: association of experiences with other experiences, because information exists exclusively in the form of relations between facts and/or objects, and conscious experience in isolation would thus be outside the domain of information, ontologically speaking).
Maybe im yapping but tl;dr consciousness is unsimulatable because simulations are always on an ontologically different level to the thing it is simulating, but simulating conscious experience would break this rule right?
Information if consciousness is real is not only materially bound to objects but to the noumenon in the form archtypes. Archtypes and the noumenon is the noetic domain which is non computable. Humans having access to consciousness and not necessarily being bound by the material objects within this noetic realm but being in contact with those archtypes are not bound by a strictly computational frame. So consciousness is non computational. Ai by definition then can't achieve non computation for it itself is such an object and representation.
Absolutely true! As if man can create a sentient being from 1’s and 0’s.
He is a specialist of IA in my langage or AI for you , but not a biologist , that is his problem , because our brain work with water and electricity in a bath of adrenaline ! That is not a mystery of Nature impossible to replicate ! But it’s difficult for sure because it’s a marvel of complexity connected to the physic world by senses! I thing this guy never saw a neurone with a microscope !!
Dont say NEVER , it will happen a day ...
The only thing i disagree with is that we will one day be able to create artificial sentience, we do not know the origin of the living cell, the origin of life is the mystery
Thats preposterous. Even the ancients understood that human consciousness was an emergent property of universal mind. YOU may reduce your consciousness to such limiting principles that would allow some level of synthetic conscious thought to dominate you but that will not happen to me. I would urge you to investigate your consciousness thoroughly before handing away your future conscious evolution to a machine no matter how complex it is.
So.. cmiiw, but, indeterminacy, 2 rotating bodies can be modeled if three bodies are rotating and act on each others position whether through gravity or being tied together, creates an incalculable complexity, i.e indeterminacy. Human will is determined if looked at on a complete whole, t/f if you can create a complex system then yes it's self organizing, that's step one. Conscience is acting and participating in acting. We have not found that ingredient, but far be it from anyone to say it's not in a ALU or MPU.
For anyone interested in consciousness see my papers like How Self-Reference Builds the World, author Cosmin Visan.
*Your entire point boils down to "it's not intelligent or conscious because it's not a human."*
Except he explicitly acknowledged AI is intelligent at the start of the talk...
He literally says they are intelligent at the beginning, also you clearly didn't watch the entire video because he says artificial sentience is possible at 47:50, he just argues that it wont be possible with transistors and computer chips
In my opinion, Bernardo Kastrup is wrong here. Although I agree with his analytical idealism, I cannot agree with his rejection of panpsychism. I do not agree with his differentiation between living and dead matter. And even if there is currently no AI that could have consciousness, I see no fundamental obstacle. The simulation hypothesis does not hold water. After all, the brain does nothing other than simulate an external world that is complex enough for self-reference to arise on the basis of sensory impressions.
Consciousness as a force or energy can be universal, but sentience with agency isn't the same thing. Otherwise, do you apologize to every rock you step on? Do you weep for every grain of rice you eat? Why not?
@@larsfaye292 I am not apologizing to every stone because that would not be panpsychism, but naive animism. In contrast, panpsychism, and subsequently pantheism, assumes that only complex wholes have a consciousness, so-called holons. However, a stone is not such a whole, but only a heap, a collection of such wholes, which are molecules or atoms. Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory offers an approach to understanding what the inner life of complex wholes might look like.
Music is too loud
Consciousness is something that some mechanical devices invented to be able to feel superior to others.
dude Geoffrey Hinton given Nobel Prize, he said these thing able to understand. and by the way how do human even able to conscious anyway? if you know how then you can determines which is conscious or not..
Bravo, Bernardo!!!
That was good, thanks.
excelencia
How about the consciousness as a emergent phenomena?
a beautiful mind
If my houses is just pipes water and pressure, and so are my veins, blood and blood pressure, then my body is a temple.
Great presentation! The comparison with the mannequin could be taken even further, think of the wax figures in Madame Tussauds wax museum. Just go there and pretend the wax figure of Ed Sheeran (or whoever) is Ed Sheeran himself. 🙃
So a ripple is more of qualia?
How can you say that something cannot become conscious, if you don't know what makes things conscious or however it works in the first place?
Umm ..maybe because consciousness is the only thing we have direct experience of?
we do know, however, that 1. only living organisms are conscious. (various degrees of consciousness that have qualia) => why should we assume that silicon based neural network will be conscious and have qualia? 2. Silicon based neural network mimics biological neural network. There's nothing more to it. => Consciousness is not intelligence. Intelligence is computation (to put it very simply). Human level intelligence though requires consciousness (subjective experience). Do you know what it's like to be drunk? ...Will AI ever know what it's like to be drunk? No matter how long you will train it on a data, it will not understand what being drunk is from as a phenomenal experience (qualia). It may logically understand it by learning, but not phenomenologically experience it. If it cannot do that it will not reach human intelligence.
@@Vivi-vg9lx 1. It's like saying before planes was invented: only living organisms can fly
2. You're talking with yourself
@@ThoArtOne 1. Are planes equal to birds then? Just because they fly does it mean they are birds and have all the same functions birds have? Are mannequins humans because they can look like humans? Why didn't we assume mannequins can become sentient because they do mimic us? In what way AI is different? Like Bernando said Simulation of a phenomena is not the phenomena itself. A plane is still not a bird. 2. At least I studied philosophy.
We have no empirical evidence to support the existence of any conscious non-organic entity that possesses qualia.
@@Vivi-vg9lx That is the point! You don't have to be a bird to fly, you just have to meet certain conditions of aerodynamics. And we don't know conditions of consciousness, do you necessarily have to be a "living organism" to be conscious? Maybe. Maybe something else. We just don't know.
OK, I'll be that guy.
FIRST!