Consciousness, Qualia and Internal Monologues
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- Опубліковано 25 чер 2023
- This is another video that breaks away from my usual topics a little bit. I realised that I didn't go very far into religious explanations of consciousness (unless you count panpsychism), because I don't know much about them - but in a 30-minute video I think there are only so many things you can cover! Thank you very much to everybody who comments, critically or supportively.
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I am 78 years old, which comes as a bit of a surprise to me. But I feel that my feeling of self and consciousness is the same as it ever was maybe even more intense. I live alone which may be a factor. I also have an intense and continual internal dialogue. The only time this breaks down is when on occasion I have really let rip at someone that has really upset me. I have on 2 occasions kept going for ten minutes without seemingly taking a breath and I am saying stuff I have never thought before, it just sort of streams direct from within. Both times it was my boss that took the blows. Sorry.
Don’t apologize to bosses.
They need to learn respect.
:)
Bosses are fair game - I completely agree with the previous response to your comment!
does It feel like a split in personalities? Or is it like a buildup of anxiety or stress? Mine led up to a series of psychotic episodes and derealizations. Alot of people thought i was on drugs during thoes times, it was basically an identity crisis. It wasnt about where im going to end up, finding "myself" and what I need to believe in. It was about what i physically am and what is actually going on in life and the reality of everything dying and religeon just being a mindless leap of faith cus it feels comfortable and everyone else is doing it.
To me age doesnt matter, it comes when it comes and its no control, but id imagine the older the age the more overwhelming it will be, and im sorry it is overwhelming. I dont even know if Im quite sure you expirience what im expiriencing. Once I expirienced panic attack after panic attack I eased my way into a more stable personality, one that I allow to be subjected to change at any point in my life so I can grow. But i fear Its a little dangerous to my mental state and its too much overanalizing and its making me literally mad, hence the derailizing and psychotic episodes ive been having. I dont think i will ever be the same and thats ok, but im also concerned that I may not feel comfortable with comfort. And i think ill just keep rapidly changing, ive accepted it and the panic attacks went away ever since.
My hour by hour changes in moods and personalities come off as manic and too much to handle but i have one life and im not going to be supressed by other peoples poor judgment on my personal development. I think lonliness is a trigger for this. I basically have 0 friends and i dont talk to my family and I just got out of homlessness where I met some scary people on the street and a few moments where I dont wanna know how close to death or being kidnapped i got (im 24 and ill willed people will take advantage of that). I doubt my worth of existance (when theres no longer any sense in that) and so stress and anxiety pile up, when i stay and hide in my basment and fear change i build up an anger or a sadness that eventually bursts into an episode. When i confront the reality of the situation and seek answers and leave my confortzones to areas where I normally wouldnt find myself, its difficult, but I definatly gain a sense of community with my fellow human speciese snd that is the ultimate factor that comforts me, the complexity of a humans history and how it has shaped and changed them, it goes beyone childhood. Its every moment that shapes you, its everything in this world that will shape you and it will be unique for every single person. If you can understand that you dont control what happens, where you go and the things we expirience, everyones behavior kinda just makes sense. My split behavior makes sense. Give everyone a much more complex label of more tham what they display and you can really get to know someone and really get them to open up. Evem the ugliest of people.
Im very straight forward and blunt but im mindfull of other people perspectives. I havent made much progess in it but its only been 3 months and im still very isolative because its honestly still a really scary thing to confront. i never really comform, I stay myself and hold tight and stand by my beliefes and opinions but I also need to blend in enviorments aswell, like the bar.
So if this sounds like your thing, im right here with you, id like to lern more and talk about it. If not, sorry to buf you with a wall of text lol
Everything about the creative force and abilities of a “god” can be remembered within you. We are all immortal spiritual beings with amnesia. Entering the light is a trap that will result in another round on earth, not necessarily in a human body. You are not a human. You are that which gives life to and animates it, hence why you don’t feel “older”. Your true self lies out with time and space, which are illusory tools.
@@joearnold6881 fat
When I indulge in an internal monologue, I actually tend to imagine someone I know listening to what I want to say most of the time. When I'm speaking out loud, the words usually come up spontaneously without any prior thinking.
For me it's opposite. I have detailed thoughts. Especially if im writing but if I speak it's hard for words to come or be spontaneous
As far as I'm aware, having an internal monologue is normal, and not verbalising thoughts isn't
@@mothball5425 it is normal, because I'm very nornal, and I have a constant internal monologue. It often reassures me as to how normal I am.
When my daughter was three, she said: "I know that 4 + 5 = 9 *, my nose tells me". She meant the voice in her head. I felt extremely reassured that it wasn't just me, before worrying that I'd passed on my disease!
*I don't remember the exact sum she did, but I'm going to pretend it was very advanced for a three year old, but not so advanced as to be boastful.
@@mothball5425 normal isnt the proper word. Maybe more common.
Ooh good to know it's more common. I noticed this recently and tried to ask my friends about that but they didn't share this experience. Or they just didn't realized.
An anecdote about qualia:
Some people have perfect pitch, meaning when they hear a note they know what pitch it is, without a reference, just like how when you see something red you just know it's red.
(If you know what perfect vs relative pitch is skip to the bottom)
This is special because for most people this isn't the case. If you play me a melody, wait a few minutes, and then shift all the frequencies by some factor (transpose the melody) and play that to me I wouldn't be able to tell the difference (I'm simplifying, it's more complicated than that), while someone with perfect pitch would know the difference.
From what I hear, they recognize it's the same melody, but for them there's the extra absolute knowledge.
An analogy would be that I wouldn't be able to tell apart an arrangement of red apple, yellow banana, cyan bottle, green leaf, from an arrangement of orange apple, green banana, blue bottle, cyan leaf, whereas someone with perfect pitch could.
My point is, it has been reported that people with perfect pitch, by the age of 50, their hearing shifts, so that what they once knew as A they now perceive as Ab, one semitone lower.
This is quite freaky, imagine that one day bananas would look orange to you, and oranges would look red.
You remember that a banana is yellow, and yet you look at it and it looks orange.
Their qualia of notes has shifted, moved a step down.
(the analogy isn't perfect, a semitone is like 5% change in frequency, orange to red is like 17%, but you get the idea)
These people have to deal with the fact that their qualia which they relied on is now different, and it bugs them a lot.
but is that a change in their qualia or just that their hardware has gone out of tune? come to think about it i can't imagine what physical change would make me see different hues
@@sidarthur8706 I've never heard of it happening in our sight. I just used it as an analogy
@MooImABunny i got that, i was using the same analogy to help me compare experiences i don't know with ones that i do. i've experienced changes in the brightness and intensity of colours but hue is constant as far as i can tell
@@sidarthur8706 oh cool cool
@@sidarthur8706Sorry, perhaps I've misunderstood the video completely, but: doesn't "their hardware has gone out of tune" logically imply that the qualia are different afterwards? I'm wondering whether your comparison there is meaningful.
One of the things I enjoy most about your videos is that I feel like you take your time with them and don't feel the need to cut constantly to keep viewers' attention. That, in fact, makes it *easier* to follow what you're saying and makes the videos far less overstimulating than much of the content on UA-cam. Thank you for that, and for "It's ok to not be very good at speaking sometimes." I feel like that's not said enough.
This is such a kind comment ❤ Thank you so much!
Overstimulation is horrible for ADHD. This actually held my attention during my endless binge scrolling
@@BBWahoo
Ditto
I actually only listened to it ...
Spot on about the quantum physics observation. This is one of my triggers...😜
This.
I find myself with something to contribute to the discussion of being able to revert to an earlier stage of consciousness of visual processing. I'm a painter, and this is by far and away the most taxing and difficult part of learning to draw or paint realism accurately, but it is entirely necessary. When you're learning it's a constant fight to force your focus onto the unprocessed shapes of colour that as Simon says "hit our retina". But as you get more and more accustomed to the state of mind it becomes almost trance like as the world flattens around you. There's more I could describe but it would become an essay. Thanks for the interesting content as ever!
I would argue that making naturalistic study is not as much of "reverting", as it is leaving the #symbolic processing of ideas behind, and focusing entirely on the tonal experience of light and its color, and the logistics of reproduction (pigments, brushes, stylus etc). Therefore, the problem is the autistic nature of human mind, for the Westeners. The experience on the #inside kind of "overrides" the perceived experience with symbols.
Another aspect of this real phenomena, is the human capacity to read words really fast. It is because the human #vision does not require a lot of information to retrieve the #symbolic engram or its associated symbolic connotations (meaning). In research, typical human only reads the first and the last letter of most words. That is how powerful this internal #symbolic mechanism is. Whatever one calls it? Am I making a reasonable argument here? Is there something important I didn't describe.
You raise a very valuable point that one must also forget what one is looking at to achieve this state of unprocessed seeing, but I do think there's more to it than JUST that, and I'm not entirely sure how it makes a functional difference from the process I was describing, it's all about switching off higher function.
@@ianhinley2794 Hey, your idea about how creating art can require a reversion to unprocessed perception, even taking-on something like a trance-like state, is interesting - after Simon mentioned the possibility of training or meditation as a way to see the world differently. I also thought immediately of drawing, as dabbling the tiniest bit in art made me realize the gulf between the symbols in my mind, versus how they actually appear (even to myself). If you want to describe more, as an essay here or not, others would probably enjoy it.
@@csmrfx I think also that leaving symbolisms behind, losing the sense of naming, and just studying the reality, is core in drawing.
I am interested in what Ian Hinley was saying. I'm not sure he's right, but the concentration needed to draw well can certainly feel like some intense twisting of the mind's reflexes.
I was confused by your used of the word autistic there.
Very interesting. The classic "Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards is all about learning to see things "the way they really are" as a prerequisite to accurately depict them, and has a set of exercises to achieve this. I don't think she describes it as "reverting to an earlier stage of consciousness" - for her it is about different parts ("sides") of the brain that deal with sensory experience in different ways - but your view of getting in touch with a sequentially earlier step in the mental process makes a lot of sense.
I think you would be interested to learn more about slime molds. Of all the organisms without any neurons, they exhibit the most complex decision making behaviour and can do things like trade off different food sources. For example, they like oats (which they can eat) but dislike light (because ithey live on the forest floor and hide from predators under leaf litter) so you the choice between dilute porridge in the dark and concentrated porridge in the light is a trade off you can present them with.
Another thing worth thinking about is a martial art like boxing or judo. Clearly when one trains one is very conscious of one's actions but if you stop to think in a fight, you lose. And you do so because any thinking involving conciosness seems to be very slow - but autonomic thoughts can be an order of magnitude faster. So you train until the actual combat behaviours are totally autonomous and the only concious involvement is something very high level like "fight now". On the other hand I often experience thinking cociously about some incident that just occured thinking "what should I have done differently". So perhaps conciosness doesn't do anything directly, it acts like an internal personal trainer for the bits of the brain that do stuff..
This is a super interesting idea, I proposed something similar in another comment, but I think you might be closer to the heart of it.
Does it feel to you, like it does to me, that consciousness can to some degree act as a slower version of a learned action? The 1000th time you switch on a computer you don't even think about it in a conscious sense, but the first time you have to employ consciousness because you haven't built up the innate knowledge of how to interact with that object yet?
I am fascinated by the concept of slime molds mimicking neurons themselves. I wonder if proto neurons could do something similar to slime molds.
a lot of things seem to embody some kind of process which optimises itself for max efficiency. evolution, now ai (and depending on definitions and who you listen to, capitalism) are all examples of this. i believe slime mold tends towards the most efficient route between food sources whilst taking into regard stuff like light which might make a route more costly.
@@maxlambie7788 What's really interesting about slime molds is not just that they try to optimise their access to food (who wouldn't?) but they make mistakes that are very similar to the sorts of 'irrationalities' that economists have identified in human behaviour. It is these mistakes that make me believe that they are, to some extent, 'thinking'..
@@rogerwitte This is fascinating. What are some examples of the mistakes they make?
There is nothing mysterious about concsciously thinking about stuff taking a longer time than acting automatically, it is just more processes going on and each process takes time. Increase the amount of processes going on and everything will slow down, just like a computer.
I don't feel "less conscious" at almost 40, but I remember feeling that way in my mid twenties.
My life is far happier and far less stressful than it was, then. I do spend a good deal of time creeping about looking at the wildlife on my farm, much as you do in your videos. That helps me remember that I am alive.
This is fantastic. As a 26 year old I have just found the simple joy of counting how many species of birds I can manage to see on a walk through the park. We hear ‘Living in the moment’ a lot but no one really says how
It's a promising feeling to hear this. I'm turning 24 in a couple of months and whilst I'm much more capable of handling negative emotions than when I was younger, there's a certain magic missing from the more positive emotions lately that I have had for my entire life until now. I don't want life to be beige.
@@joshuaboulton36 I know how you feel. Meditate, train your mind to focus, that will help.
Wildlife photographer here, I never feel more alive than when I'm out in the fields, camera in hand, looking for and observing and photogrpahing wildlife :)
I am 81 and I remember the consciousness of childhood, of the twenties and of the 40s. Now, after a long, difficult stage of leaving adulthood, I have entered a new consciousness. It is as simple and intense as when I was a farm child (like the poem Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas), but with adult maps and the great life-choices behind me. . I am deeply at peace and happy..
When I talk with another person, whether friend or stranger, now I am 100% present in a way I never could be before, and meet them deeply, soul-to-soul. But if I want to remember a word or name while in conversation, I cannot do it, because there is no separate "sub-self" to go down into my brain and retrieve it. My mind is becoming unified. As I lose the metabolic energy of youth, my brain seems to be absorbing sub-selves: the retrieval functions, the reminder-prompts and the oversight programs which are part of the adult brain. And the fear of what others might think. Even my shadow-self is becoming integrated -- making me more forgiving of others haha !
I believe when we enter our 20s we are evolved to divide our consciousness into sub-programs in order to meet the demands of adulthood. Person and persona, presentation of acceptable self. Reminder and prompter programs.. Diplomacy and the "onlooker" which instructs behaviour. This subdivision of the self could explain the feeling, at twenty, of being less aware than in childhood.
As someone in their early 20s, I resonate with what you were saying about feeling like you're less conscious of things going on. I had always associated these things with spending an increasing amount of time in front of screens and locked into quiet rooms, whereas my childhood was spent running around and interacting with the world much more immediately. I certainly feel as though I am less grounded and perhaps less present in the real world, and I think this has to do with a number of things perhaps including the lack of new sensations and experiences.
I have this too, but it's difficult to state how much of it is really in the realm of 'consciousness' itself and not the realm of processing or giving an emotional value to that consciousness IMO
Google mindfullness
@@jaunty_tunesI love that brain chip upgrade
The screens thing makes sense to me.
I always thought it was strange that people said we don’t know if animals feel emotions because we can’t gather data about their subjective experience.
We gather data on the subjective experiences of other people all the time. It is arguably one of our most specialized senses. Language makes it easier to understand the subjective experiences of others, but it is by no means necessary.
When we slap someone’s hand and they pull their hand away and recoil, we can reasonably say that they experienced pain or surprise. We can’t fully understand the quality of their pain or surprise, but we have experienced something similar enough to understand the idea of what they experienced. Similarly, when we see someone hug another person, we can make reasonable guesses about their subjective feelings toward each other.
Now imagine slapping, say, a cat’s paw. The cat would likely react in an analogous way to how a human would react. It would recoil in a way that, if a human were doing it, we would have no difficulty identifying as pain or surprise. Similarly, when a cat is physically close to another cat and they interact in ways similar to a human hug, can’t we make reasonable guesses about how those cats feel about each other? It’s possible that these guesses may not be as accurate, but isn’t it more parsimonious to conclude that cats have subjective feelings that are analogous to human ones? The alternative would be to say that these similar behaviors only look similar outwardly, but actually have a totally different internal mechanism and are experienced totally differently by cats that by people, which is possible, but seems much less likely than simply saying these experiences are analogous.
I agree. I think the idea that animals aren’t conscious is sort of a masochistic worldview. The world is a bit of a more interesting and colourful if animals have emotions and meaningful experiences, and I think some people have a certain attitude that tells them to reject such things as “too good to be true”. Or at least, I used to have this attitude
I think you hit the nail on the head that what's relevant is how similar a person/animal's is to our own experience. So if I slap my friend's hand and he moves it back and his face contorts into a grimace, I know (or at least think) that he is experiencing pain, because I can see that his reaction is similar to what mine would be like. It reminds me of my own experience (and reaction) to pain, and so I feel and recognise that he is experiencing pain. Importantly, there's also a level of pattern recognition. We see that over time, people tend to recoil their hand and grimace when they feel pain, and so we ascribe pain to that. But a newborn baby might not no that aswell, because he hasn't seen that happen enough to be able to totally understand that.
We do this as well to other animals. If I kicked a cat (I wouldn't obviously but for the sake of argument) I might hear him shriek, and see him run away, and that reminds me of similarish responses of my own (I would also run away if kicked) and so ascribe pain and fear. But this is because cats, as fellow mammals, are fairly similar to us in certain ways.
But as you get further and further away from similarity to us, it gets harder and harder for us to understand what it would be like for that creature to experience pain. A cockroach would not react in the same way - I can't see it's face, I can't hear it shriek out in pain. It might run away, but even the nature of this response is very different from mine. This would become even more so for say a tree or a virus. We cannot see these having any meaningful response similar to ours at all, and so we presume that they don't have a mind, don't experience things at all, and are just guided by innate mechanisms. It's easier for me to presume that other humans experience pain than it is for me to presume that cats (and subsequently a cockroach or a tree) do so because they're more similar to me and so I can presume they feel pain in the same way that I do.
In a philosophical sense, I don't actually know that you're are experiencing something anymore than I know whether a tree is experiencing. If I slapped you, I'm not experiencing you experience pain, I'm only seeing you respond in a way that I might respond when experiencing pain, and imagining what it feels like for me to experience pain in that situation. But we only know that we experience pain because we're experiencing it, and so because I can't experience you experiencing pain, I can't know that you actually do. It's not unreasonable for me to presume you do, but your experiences will always be empirically closed off to me, and I can never be certain that you have experiences. In that sense my presumption that you are experiencing might actually just be a very useful illusion created by evolution to help me to interact socially and therefore survive. In the end I continue to think it's reasonable to believe that you experience things, but I can't know that for sure. This is ultimately related to the "what is it like to be a bat" philosophical paper that Simon mentions at 20:19, which basically argues that we can know all the physical facts about a bat - it's shape, the activity of the neurons in it's brain, even it's behaviour, but even then we don't really know what it's like to be a bat, we don't really know what it's like to experience things through echolocation. Arguably (though I don't think Nagel himself argues this) the same applies to eachother.
I think a lot of people struggle with this due to our usage of animals for food. Most prefer to just not think about it, as ignorance is bliss. Changing one's entire diet, especially when nearly every restaurant around and every grocery store sells meat, is hard. It also causes people to question you, perhaps view you differently. Much easier to just dodge the question and ignore the cognitive dissonance.
@@franticranter personally I think that the “I think therefore I am” type of framework is a faulty starting point for gathering knowledge because of the exact thing we’re discussing. Your body looks similar to other human bodies. You communicate with other humans about things that relate to your experience. People say things about their own internal experience that are analogous to your own internal experience. Evidence from your senses and the senses of those around you indicates that you are one member of a species with many individuals who are mostly similar to you. It would be monumentally weird if, despite this, you were the only individual experiencing consciousness. Strictly speaking, you don’t know that other people have consciousness like yours, but there is overwhelming evidence that they do, and the only evidence that they don’t is that you can’t personally experience their minds with your own senses, merely the actions in their bodies that are caused by their minds.
animals express emotions in such beautifully simple ways. they probably think humans are the weirdos lol
something I always consider with consciousness is that every thought I have seems to be new. To me at least, even if I'm recalling a memory or the answer to a question I'm aware of, my self inside, is limited by time. I don't ever feel that what I'm thinking is a repeat. Even if it is a thought I've had before. Only deja vu FEELS like a repeat and is therefore disturbing. Everything that happens in the abstract place in my mind, feels novel.
I'm not sure if I have the same experience. Maybe it's just an afterthought, but then it is a well developed one: it just recognizes in a split second I've been here before mentally, and then I don't know what to do with that thought/sensation. I mean, it's probably why I tend to be somewhat bored lol :/
There's something very honest and self aware in these videos that I don't see often. It makes me want to reach out and say hi!
I am in my 60s, but I still remember the taste of the first pint of beer I drank as a 16-year old, and, unfortunately, I have never been able to re-experience that taste outside of my memory. You cannot re-experience the same unique and novel sensation again in the real world, and that would dull the experience if it were possible. Your subconscious mind adds a filter to your memories and qualia (been there, done that), but you can still dilate time and retain the delight that comes from novel situations by methodically stepping outside of your routine and by learning new skills. What I do find now in my conscious experience is that I see more of the connections that exist in the world, between people, between events, and the delicate balance of existence.
Wonderful discussion. I would certainly welcome more videos exploring this area of study!
Ditto! 🎉
Interesting turn towards the relationship between language, epistemology/onthology and philosphy of the mind. I used to love these subjects when I was taking my degree in Philosophy. Really glad you're exploring these subjects too. Would love to see more.
Just to relay a bit about my experience being a person with inner speech: For me, my monologue never stops. I've heard that other people think in words when they have to but have a silent head if you will the rest of the time. That's not the case for me- my brain always finds something to "talk about", even if I don't really perceive anything in particular, it still comes up with some topic to use words for. I can understand that, to a human that does not have inner thought that way, this sounds exhausting to have on a daily basis, but somewhat akin to the sound of your own blood stream, you ignore it since it's constantly there. This can become a problem when I'm mentally compromised though- in that case I don't register that inner voice as my own or a part of myself, but as a sovereign entity that sounds like somebody talking into my ear, which then just adds to the panick you could imagine. Hasn't happened that often and God keep it that way.
A really interesting thing about the monologue is that it seems to work in layers for me. I can only speak for myself, but there seem to be multiple voices that speak my thoughts, the loudest and clearest of them being my direct consciousness that I can control myself. It really works as an inner voice with nearly all traits of spoken language intact, so I can change the language that I am thinking in, I have to think about which words to use, I can think in different voices and moods and accents, and can even stumble over my words and mispronounce them. When I am trying to find the right words to think, that clear voice stops, but that doesn't mean my thoughts stop. It just means an underlying layer throws in a bunch of words and ideas and thoughts from other topics because my brain kind of has to be active at all times. These layers also act as commentators on my thoughts, so just as I think about what I say with my mouth and what I hear and attribute that with things like "well said", "badly put", "funny", "hypocritical" and so on, I do the same with my primary voice.
So if I were to record my inner monologue, it would be a real mess with constant switching of ideas and different layers of voices all blurting out different things but still referencing one another or even talking to each other.
What I find so marvelous is how our consciousness lets us imagine a continuity of identity over a lifetime of mental and physical changes. Feeling grass on your face first time is a big deal for child. 5 stars. But ones consciousness changes over time, along with the rest of the body. Hedonic adaptation means we can never feel that grass exactly like the first time. We grow, we find and enjoy new interesting things to experience (e.g., advanced education - also 5 stars). It's amazing we manage to maintain a coherent subjective experience over a lifetime
I recommend the podcast (and the book made from it) “The Anthropocene Reviewed” if you’re not already familiar with it; it is all about reviewing random things/experiences on a 5 star scale and I thought it was quite good.
That sense of continuity would necessarily go if you lost all your memories. With your memories intact, you retain a sense of continuity, but you are definitely not the same personality you were all those years ago. The same, but not the same.
Buddhism (especially the historical Buddha) talks a lot about this. He posits that we have no concrete self and are merely things conditioned by other things. Very gross misexplanation since when you realize “this” is when you achieve nirvana. It’s very hard for our brains to break down our identity
I recommend “What the Buddha Taught” as a starter for this. The Pali Canon talks about it heavily but philosophers like Nagarjuna go very, very deep into it
Only with magic mushrooms i have ever felt this 5 stars experiences again.
It never occurred to me that anyone could not have a constant internal monologue. Mine never stops. I'm either "speaking" to myself mentally, or I'm "listening" to music, a song, in my head (not one that I've made up, by the way, though I've experienced dreams where I'm pretty sure I'm composing music I've never before heard, and I'm not a composer). As for the age question, I'm 64 and, no, I do not think my consciousness nor my perceptions have changed at all since childhood. It's why I really don't feel any different as an adult - of course, I didn't know algebra as a child, nor had I ever heard, say, Kurt Cobain, but that's all just data that has been downloaded. The way I think and feel seems exactly the same to me. I can give an example: A few years ago, I found an old friend on the internet, quite by accident, and was able to resume conversation like I'd just spoken to him yesterday. Mind you, this was a childhood friend, someone I haven't seen or heard from in 50 years. My feelings, my idea of that person, hadn't changed a bit in all those decades, and I was able to converse as if neither of us had lived a moment beyond 1973. I quickly sensed that my familiarity, or perhaps comfort, with him was, to him, off-putting, a bit weird, so I dialed things down. It's happened to me more than once, and, yes, usually I can sense that the other person thinks it's strange. And by the way, this isn't about just having a good memory, i.e., an ability to remember details about people I haven't seen in decades. This is about having my feelings or perceptions of those people remaining unchanged or undisturbed, and accessible instantly.
I’m exactly the same way in everything that you said. It’s almost frightening how similar our experiences our.
i love music, but i cant listen to it in my head. i cant play it or mix it like i do on turntables. but i can feel it when i hear it and blend rhythms without thinking. i know it's structure and where to match it without counting. i know what i want to hear and where it is and i remember what i heard and where its gone. but i can not play a song inside my head.
similar experiences, I whistle a lot to air the ongoing composition - its quite melancholoy but hopeful. I sing in dreams, often to rouse people out of some craziness and help them survive or make peace.
Everyone has thoughts continuously, there's no way to not have internal monologue, bc it is just thoughts and thoughts don't stop even for a monk or saddhu (although they may have more space and time between thoughts therefore less thoughts
wow, very similar experiences to mine. Even the dream composing, but especially the never fading social 'bonds', and all.
That was very interesting. I started watching wondering if you were going to acknowledge aphantasia, and you did, very early on! My partner has quite marked aphantasia, he doesn't have an inner monologue or a mind's eye, but I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum, I can create a lot of experience in my head to the point of being problematic - at least it's hard for me to get bored because I'm good at entertaining myself 😀. One thing I notice about those inner experiences is that I can use them to manipulate my own emotions in various ways, and that's actually a good deal of what I'm doing a lot of the time.
If I were to make a bet about the nature of consciousness, which is basically what we're all doing, it would be that it serves a deep evolutionary purpose and has been around a long, long time - perhaps even evolving convergently multiple times. Animals definitely have consciousness, and the drive to deny it to them by some is a form of motivated reasoning.
I also think its purpose is not very "elevated." I think it relates to emotion and motivation. Like a bridge between the parts of the brain that build representations and interpretations and the limbic system 😂. Without consciousness, I think we'd have difficulty wanting and particular difficulty suffering. All creatures suffer, ergo, all creatures possess consciousness to facilitate suffering.
My guess would be that very often, animals that are not able to report on their conscious experience and are not as clever at solving problems as us are actually able to suffer more intensely than us under particular sets of circumstances - like when you leave a dog home alone it has no context tell it if you're going to be gone for ten minutes or ten hours, and I think it cannot readily use reasoning to alleviate its suffering. It just wants and is forlorn. It can't let go of wanting like we can. Because it doesn't have the tools to attenuate it's consciousness 😅
So to think about your final reflection, I've never had a perception of being "less conscious," I don't think that's real despite having practically just said that, just like I think the cessation of duhkha is actually impossible, because we have no access to pay attention to our actual senses, only a curated virtual reality very much subject to motivated reasoning and influenced by our desires. I do certainly experience things much less intensely, though, I've managed to switch from amplification to attenuation as I've gotten older, if that makes sense, which is absolutely a desirable state.
Personally I believe that some level of consciousness must be present in all organisms with a CNS. The autonomic nervous system creates our reflexes and impulses. It allows an organism to respond to stimulus basically automatically. In many complex organisms, definitively ranging from mammals such as human to mice, and likely to ""less complex"" and ""less important"" organisms such as invertebrates, the CNS allows executive control to inhibit a reflex response. I.e, a strong willful decision which also demonstrates a level of focus on a particular activity rather than a passive experience of the world.
On a much more fundamental level, the CNS is clearly what our own consciousness has arisen from. It allows us to understand and process our senses, such as sight, taste, sound. The feel of a loved one, the smell of home. Pain, safety, sleepiness, energy. It is essential for any complex organism to be aware of these things to survive. Think of a pig, playing happily with a toy, sleeping with its family in a clean nest, or finding a delicious truffle. They are relaxed and content and not to worried about their surroundings.
Compared to a pig in a slaughterhouse, which shakes, screams, and empties its bowls. They can tell that they are going to die, and are clearly afraid. It is easy to anthropomorphise these reactions because their presence in humans is unchanged. Its not because we are imposing our worldview on the pig, its that the pigs basic worldview is the same.
It is likely that a lot of our own "human" sensations are much simpler than we like to believe, and the level of intentional control over our actions is much more limited by our biology that we would like to admit.
A feral human is just as much of an animal. It is not our artificial traits of education, intelligence, skill, wealth, wisdom, social awareness that are important for the value that we place on a life. The only important thing is the experience of living
@@inspirednamehere6166 That's a very important point, and I think that people often get into difficulty because they compare sophisticated, educated humans to wild animals. The supposed qualitative distinction is much less clear if one compares a feral human with an animal which has, for instance, learned how to use words, delay gratification for the sake of a greater reward or develop a degree of theory of mind. Much of our human advantage is cultural.
Thank you for this wonderful video. I'd like to comment on your point about consciousness diminishing as we age. I'm 72 and I think I agree with your friends' idea that what is dimishing is our experience of new things. I have a new experience in seeing the sky since I moved to the mountains, where the sky seems 'closer' than when I lived at sea level. The sky is know a constant source of wonder to me in terms of colour and cloud shapes. Another reason for this may be that I have more leisure since retirement five years ago, and I return a lot to experiences in childhood that I had forgotten until now.
The passage of time is experienced according to the number of new experiences laid down apparantly. When you spend long periods where nothing much changes you don't notice the passage of time so much as when you are learning something new and having to think about it all the while. I am mere youngster of 67 but I am still open to new experience. I bought a saxophone recently, or rather the saxophone bought me, it was sort of inevitable that I would buy it never mind the illusion of decision making and of course never having played the saxophone before I am teaching myself to play.
I find something kindred in the way you are. Appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
Don't sell yourself short, you are a philosopher. Wonder dissolves boundaries.
I think the feeling of having an intense conscious experience of a past event comes from having access to a clearer stack of episodic memories of the said event. As we get older, we tend to spend more time working with things that require rational thought, which shifts our focus to the semantics leaving the episodic details out of the memory.
I say this because I still feel more conscious when I think about my random midnight strolls, but not so much when I think of the time I spent working or studying..
As to the final question, I actually disagree from my experience. I feel like when I was 6/7/8 I was actually only semi-conscious compared to my adult life (19 years old). When I was a child the experience of the world felt much more observer-based, as in I was an observer that just acted based on instinct while as I've grown up it almost feels like I've out-grown instinctual emotional processes and moved onto more logical processes. The behaviors that I have that are instinctual left are either so ingrained that I barely am conscious of them (such as the processes of walking) or things I've practiced to get the muscle memory of (such as skateboard tricks or playing guitar). I actually have somewhat of a more negative view of childhood, potentially because of this, (or it may be my negative view made this idea up), but that's in the sense that as a child I was far less in control of my actions and my thoughts, and understood them far less. I would never want to be brought back to a state of such primitive decision making. Consciousness has grown with age and that is a good thing.
An important thing to note is that I am technically on the autism spectrum, and especially when I was young my social consciousness and understanding of others was inhibited compared to others my age, though I've largely again grown out of these symptoms. It brings up the question, is the qualia of the experience neurotypicals significantly different from those with things such as autism, or bipolar disorder? Schizophrenia and psychosis would probably have a lot of that. I'm inclined to assume that yeah, it is meaningfully different in that if you suddenly woke up with an autistic brain, being a neurotypical, you would literally feel things differently, most particularly emotions. I definitely perceive language on what I think is a much deeper level than the average neurotypical who has little interest in language, as an example.
I remember some years ago going back to my primary school for a school fete and refreshments were being served in the old dining hall. I have vivid memories of the hall, but going into that hall it was nothing like the memories. Then I sat down, in the child sized seats and suddenly I recognised everything. My memories were constructed when I was a lot shorter than I am now. That hall existed in a different way to the teachers and staff from the children and I had never thought about that.
@@inregionecaecorum I totally get what you mean. It reminded me of how when I was a kid I would always have two distinct memories of my classrooms; the first being the way I remember it the first day of school, when I had never seen it before, and the second one the way I remembered it on all other days after that. For some reason when something was 'new' it genuinely felt like it was different, even though it wasn't really. I guess my brain just hadn't really mapped out the information of the room fully yet and so once it had it filed it into another 'bit' of memory.
@@swagmund_freud6669 When you think about the days at school, it is the ones that were different that stick out, but everything else from day to day merges into a sort of composite memory of perhaps what you were taught, although for me I can't even remember a lot of that though unless I am using it everyday. I am vaguely aware of what triganometry does for example, but no longer can recall exactly how to do it, as there is an app for everything these days. Likewise I remember slide rules and log books, but not how to use them. Certainly when these things were introduced to the maths class they were new.
@@swagmund_freud6669I experience something similar. For example, I have the “modern”, composite memory of my everyday commute route but occasionally I can access a childhood pov memory of it. Or I can look at it as I have never been here before. Feels a bit eerie.
what do you mean by perceiving language deeper?
I was diagnosed with epilepsy this year after having a few seizures, and one of the consequences has been an appreciable reduction to my memory. I’ve never had a great memory (as far as I remember) but after those episodes and the subsequent medication which itself is designed to reduce brain activity, I feel a significant difference in my ability to recall the past. Like holes have been punched through it, or something. Made me realize that I’d never really felt a significant alteration to the flow of my consciousness before. Fascinating how awareness can be as delicate and as resilient as biological tissue.
Have you ever heard of the phenomenon called terminal lucidity? Perhaps it isn’t as fragile as biological tissue as you think, perhaps you just don’t have access right now.
62 here and I don't feel in any way that my own conciousness has diminished in intensity although obviously I have no objective way of measuring this. I still sit and look at the leaves and branches of a tree blowing in the breeze, or my aquarium fish swimming in the tank and have a sense of wonder. I have to occupy my consciousness with many other things that I didn't as a child, more abstract concepts for example. My senses have definitely dulled and I am perhaps less aware of the physical environment around me but I am more aware of things like social justice issues, other people's feelings, and which bills need to be paid, all of which takes place in what I would call my conciousness. Meditation is a great way of bringing my consciousness down to a smaller focus.
Reading this and comments like it, I think I'm probably in the same boat - maybe I was conflating sensory intensity with consciousness too much! Although I feel less 'connected' to the outside world because I have a bit less awareness of it, the things you mention - more social and abstract things - have maybe replaced that awareness to some extent. I'm glad that you benefit from meditation, too! I've tried mindfulness meditation and got a lot from it, but I definitely need to set aside more time for it, or put more effort into practicing it while I'm doing other things. Thank you for sharing your perspective :)
@@simonroper9218 thank you very much for taking the time to reply.
I have experienced several significant “discrete” or “distinct” periods of mental health episodes in which my “consciousness” or “perceptions about the world and my place in it” have been distorted (along with the various tones and scripts used by my internal monologue). The altered states of consciousness I have experienced internally while remaining in the same objective external environment have given me greater empathy for the diversity of perspectives that all beings experience.
At 41 I feel more conscious than when I was a child. Thank you for this video, it was wonderful. You’ve got a new fan.
I thought it was interesting that he tied his feeling of being less conscious to his percepts whereas I tie my feeling of being more conscious to my development of concepts
as someone between 17 and 20, I can certainly say I am definitely more conscious today than I was just a few years ago. Everything I feel feels far realer now than it did then.
I feel the opposite, as if everything was more real when i was a child and as if i had more control over my actions.
Is there a field equation which describes your age when watching this video? If so, are 17, 18, 19, and 20 solutions? Or did you mean only that you are 18 or 19?
@@mike-0451 A field equation obvs. I'm a quantum particle.
Internal monologue guy + non native speaker of English here: For me, when I focus (focus is important here) on someone's speach I tend to say the exact same words in my head along with the speaker. It's usually in my internal voice, not the speaker's voice, so we make a little choir in my head. Sometimes, but usually in languages I don't know that well yet, my internal voice tries to translate the speach into Polish.
This video was a super interesting food for thought, thanks for that!
That's annoying. Maybe you should learn Polish to understand it.
@@MrCmon113 On the small chance you weren't joking - pretty sure he / she speaks Polish already. If you were joking - well done, my friend.
That last part is a fine example of not knowing what you're going to say until you say it!
Simon your videos are compelling viewing . Whatever topic you talk on it is always very stimulating and thought provoking.
Cheers for helping make youtube a more thoughtful and interesting place. Almost everything you investigate is done with a degree of care we really appreciate.
when i think in english, my tongue is completely still. but when i think in german, my tongue is always twitching slightly.
I'm in my early-30s and I spend a lot of time seeking novel experiences just to stay sane. Not just novel experiences that are materially new but new ways of shifting the qualia of normal experiences. You mentioned near the end of the video how you weren't as mobile as you were as a child. I particularly resonate with this. In fact, I trying to sit in a new place and do my usualy activities in different ways almost everyday. Results have been good.
Further, I am actively learning 3 non-english languages, this also helps me taste new experiences out of the bounds of my familiar linguistic frame. Today I've been trying to experience the notion behind "風雅" (Fūga): Translated as "wind elegance," from Japanese. Which I'm now translating as "Esthentus" (aesthesis + ventus) because "wind elegance" is hardly a match for the elegance of 風雅-an iceberg of a word crammed into two syllables.
Anyway, I get you. Your video was helpful. Thanks for sitting with me today Simon. ;)
A common observation about getting older is that time seems to pass more quickly. I am not sure how this relates to your idea that you are less conscious as you get older.
It’s interesting that this video comes at this time. I’ve just gone through a very nasty bout of anxiety and panic attacks, and I’ve only recently started to get better because I realized the relationship my inner dialogue has with it. For much of anxious period, I wouldn’t have any inner dialogue and that absence was the gap through which almost subconscious panic and negative thoughts would pour in. I was not consciously thinking this in my head, but I was almost aware of my brain doing things in the background which triggered panic at random times (outside usually).
I’ve only recently really come through by maintaining a very conscious inner dialogue. I make the effort to think speech aloud in my own head which is soothing and reassuring and engaged with the environment and/or my thoughts. It’s weird and it’s only partially related to the video, but this realization has been both relieving and fascinating. I’m generally someone with an active inner dialogue, but I’m capable of shutting that off and I’m usually more distressed and less engaged at the times in which it is off compared to the times in which I am making the effort to have inner dialogue.
As a meditator, I find what you have said here fascinating. I practice a type of meditation called 'shikantaza' in Japanese, which basically translates as 'Just Sitting'. Dogen zen-ji, the 'patron saint' if you like of Soto Zen in Japan, instructs us in the Shobogenzo (a sacred text; I think this is the correct reference!) to sit "neither trying to think, nor trying not to think". What this eventually leads to is a mind in which one's attention becomes profoundly stabilised and thereby open to the comings and goings of one's own conscious experience, thoughts, feelings and sensations all (including perhaps some quite extraordinary experiences at times, too), and a profoundly liberating discovery that one can indeed sit in the midst of it all and not be disturbed by it.
It struck me just how diametrically opposed to this was your practice of deliberate thought you do to assuage the feelings of anxiety, etc., that you described. It does, however, make sense from a meditative perspective; the thoughts provide a distraction from the difficult feelings. Thinking the thoughts overwhelms the feelings and keeps them at bay, for now at least.
My heart goes out to you. I am moved by your comment. I hope that you can find some peace in your practice. It is not for me to suggest that you stop it, even if it is very different to my own.
May I recommend that you explore meditation? I intend to do this with the utmost respect and sensitivity. I am not even recommending Zen per se; the same or very similar practices can be found in varying degrees of quality of transmission in many Buddhist traditions as well as Christian and Islamic ones, and more besides. And there is a growing body of secular thought on the practice, a fine example of which is James Austin MD who wrote 'Zen and the Brain', etc., and who appears in a great video here on UA-cam in which he gives a talk at Google for the employees there. I'll finish this response and find the link for you.
I'll end with the offer of some words that I found helpful long ago, words from Reverend Master Daishin, the former abbot of Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey in Northumberland, UK. "Turn towards the darkness, and sit in faith".
In gassho. 🙏
That is very interesting, as is NeilEvans' response. I've done some meditation and taught meditation classes a bit, and I've also worked as a therapist and had a good deal of therapy myself. I know from personal experience that there can be something very scary about sitting with the silence (or "the darkness") when we stop our chattering mind. I can still feel it now sometimes, although I've become much quieter in myself. (I still self-soothe with singing or whistling when I'm stressed.) I've also introduced several therapy clients to meditation who came back saying they couldn't do it because they got extremely anxious and had to stop. So I'd only suggest a very cautious approach, and maybe you (OP) are finding your own best way forward anyway. I'm particularly encouraged by the fact that you talk about the dialogue being "engaged with the environment and/or my thoughts" rather than disconnected with reality. I'm sometimes happy to have my little self-soothing habits, and we all need them, don't feel it's a fault, but if I'm stressed for a period of time, I get sick of my endless tra-la-las, and work at being quiet again - feeling the fear and doing it anyway, as the saying goes. Anyway, all the best, and thanks for sharing.
That’s interesting, because for many people it’s the inner dialogue that often triggers/maintains anxiety.
Simon, great stuff. And thank you for the introduction to Earl. Your consciousness isn't becoming dulled. It is just focusing on different things. Less interested in sensory input and more interested in thoughts and ideas. Keep asking questions. You are doing way better than a lot of recognized experts in the field.
Not knowing what you're about to say until you hear yourself say it is very surprising to me. I usually have an internal monologue going on inside my head, but even with this type of monologue I always know what I want to say before I say it. I am aware of some kind of process going on in my head, some kind of non-verbal "mind language" which is by far faster than the verbal one. I know what concepts I want to express long before I manage to put them into words, which is the hardest part. It feels like I'm translating my thoughts from this "mind language" into the normal verbal language, often being unable to find the right words.
I wasn't always conscious of this. I have a memory of the first time I noticed this process, don't exactly remember how old I was but I remember I was still a kid, maybe 12 years old or something like that. I thought about how my internal monologue seemed kind of redundant because I already knew exactly what I was going to say, so why am I bothering putting it into words? Since then I've realized it's easier to remember and organize your thoughts if you put them into words, so I concluded that must be the reason for internal monologue. It performs the same function for your thoughts as written words do for spoken words - it makes information easier to retain and organize.
As for your last question, I'm 26 and don't notice myself becoming less conscious over time. It might even seem like I'm becoming more conscious than before, but this could simply be a consequence of forgetting my exact thoughts and experiences from when I was younger. One thing I have noticed however is that I feel less and less, my emotions are generally duller than before and many emotions I regularly felt before are now largely absent. This isn't surprising though, as it could simply be that I'm used to the world around me and most of the experiences I experience nowdays are things I've already experienced before.
Your comment impresses me. Very few people stumble upon the translating articulations you describe. I spent my life attempting to put it to a communicable format but the book sits unpublished as Im a sensitive sort whom does not wish to upset readers who identify with this language as being typological identical to the formative thought . I don't have an inner monologue or cognitive imagery, and I describe myself as the slowest thinker in the universe because my brain differentiates non-axiomatically. I'm comfortable with being devolved , but I have learnt that humanity isn't as bothered by loneliness as I thought would be the case , which is a relief because being unable to differentiate in the usual expedient way means that I don't have the group identify and so spent my childhood saying "but but, why search for meaning? So many have lived and died without having a friend or being told they are meaningful " , zero motives just 100% terrified that people are lonely , but turns out that no one is as silly as me . I wish humans would not divide over "belief" though, I can show it is declarative but don't want to upset people, I just don't get common sense. Anyhows , as usual, I'm a little solipsistic , well I call it temporal solipsism, as you won't be able to think slowly enough to see anything other than nonsense here . I guess I'm thanking you for your comment, because people like me , my voice is hidden in that little bit you see before language and it's good to know there's a little connection still there in the fast lane (the expedient lexical format) I can instruct someone how to slow to the nearest format but nowhere near snail-me , and it seems to upset people when I offer a selection of indexing formats (mathematical languages which can be interpreted across the different formats... Because I'm slow my brain hasn't picked one , so when anyone seems excited by patterns I don't know how to be socially agreeableness rather than wonder why humans consider the band's of a rainbow to be illusionary but indexing formats to be descriptive , but I admit that I am the confounded one , mirrors don't even work for properly for me because my brain doesn't bother with it) . Sorry for the nonsense, feel free to ignore it. Normal humans say "time is illusion" , I cannot get my head around a spatial environment, I "measure" in time, not like your clock, that's still spatial , but in a way which would seem to be lunacy outside of a dream. I'm sorry , I don't know how to say it in dichotomies. Have a nice day/rotation .
wow, my experience of internal monologue is very close to how you describe it!
my "mind language" is like this faster and less "articulated" or less fleshed out form of language. My internal monologue or the thoughts i have before speaking are not super vivid or as precise as verbal language, but i do feel this "almost-language" processing thing going on while i do stuff or i think about something.
I already *know* what i'm thinking about, as abstract or vague or specific as it might be, and it's only organized by this very vague and fast "almost-language". Putting it into words helps consolidating that thought, or even understanding it more, but it's slower and it might even fail to translate all the nuances of it
Basically this is me. I suspect this might be how it works for most people as well.
This is one of the best presentation of complex ideas I've seen, thank you Simon. I learn so much from your work.
LOVE that you kept that bit at the end in
very interesting and highly thought provoking. great stuff!
Oh of the best videos on this subject I’ve seen! Great job!
As someone with OCD and intrusive thoughts, I found this vid interesting and definitely will rewatch it. Thank you,Simon. I wish I were not in debt,or I would definitely be helping on Patreon.
what a great video and style!
This has really got me thinking Simon, great video.
An Atrophied Consciousness? Interesting. I have so much shit I want to say about this it's unreal. I think stress takes up a lot of available processing power in the brain and makes us less aware/conscious of the outside world. I think as we get older our available new information is naturally constricted. I mean physical information. I think new textures, temperatures, colors, spaces, and all that keep someone's senses up. Like exercising them.
Do drugs
I've been reading and watching consciousness content for over a decade, and this is one of the very best pieces I have come across.
These are topics I'm fascinated by so it was very interesting to hear your thoughts!
This was a delightful video. Thank you for sharing your speculations. This was also really helpful to me in a way that I absolutely cannot put into words.
Simon, that was very fascinating. It made me think of things a bit differently. I hope you post more of your thoughts on consciousness and perception.
Wonderful video, and it came at the perfect moment for me. Thank you!
This is wonderful! I’ve always enjoyed coming to this cozy channel and this video was the most soothingly my mind has ever been blown. I’ve also said that I don’t have an internal monologue. I have some ideas about this subject to comment, but it’s July 4th in Texas and I’m too drunk to gather my thoughts. Another day! Thanks for the content
Brilliant video :) never stop being you , love this kinda content
Simon, I discovered your channel a while back as I am studying Old English, and I just want to say I absolutely adore everything about the videos you make. They're brilliant.
At 11:45 you talk about the ability to shift consciousness "up" a pathway of analysis to an earlier stage through meditation.
I wanted to say that whilst I've never heard of this being done with visual information, I have heard its possible with auditory sensations.
I meditate fairly regularly and occasionally practice a form of meditation in which one is encouraged to 'take in what is heard but not to separate or label it' - essentially to hear the birds outside the window but not think of them as birds, or separate from the cars on the road or the sound of the wind etc.
I'm told this is possible, but for me personally, it's something I really struggle to achieve.
Apologies for a bit of a rambling/unrelated comment - just thought it was kind of interesting.
Thanks again for these awesome videos. Keep up the great work! :)
I think that it's very interesting that our minds/consciousnesses can work in such subjectively different ways, and that we are generally entirely unaware of it unless we bring it up in conversation. I have no internal monologue, and no ability to form pictures in my mind. This is apparently at least somewhat uncommon, but I was mostly unaware of the difference until well into adulthood. The only difference I knew of from childhood is that other people could imagine colors and I could not. I just didn't realize that if someone said "imagine a house" that they meant the image of a house rather than the concept of one....
On the topic of consciousness fading over time, maybe it's my lack of ability to picture memories, but childhood and earlier adulthood seem very indistinct to me compared to the present.
Thank you so much for this, the puzzle of consciousness is an endless fascination. I was hooked from beginning to end. Years ago I read “I am a strange loop” by Douglas Hofstadter, which suggested that what creates the sensation of “I” is a kind of feedback loop caused by the physical particles and the abstractions created by our brain feeding back into each other - it sounds odd but felt very convincing - I must read it again.
The Ancestor’s Tale is another of my favourites - another one to re-read
Fabulous ideas, thanks, will follow more👏
Just getting into it; thank you for having the courage to explore and share your thoughts. I value that highly.
Really looking forward to seeing more in this format
I also just wanted to say you are the most interesting man I’ve ever listened to. Seriously. Thank you for your presence on this earth
I've had all those thoughts too. It's good to see more people are thinking about these sorts of questions.
Fascinating and thought provoking stuff as usual Simon. I’m particularly struck by your final thought that you just chucked in! The new experiences and age thing, as I’ve just been teaching my 4 year old to ride a bike today. I’ve often wondered how my kids perceive the world compared to me but I have a frame of reference in that I too was once their age, however I’ve never considered if they’re more conscious than me. I’ll have to ponder on that one.
Brilliant. Subscribed. I live for channels like yours.
UA-cam suggested this video to me and because I had no idea of the definition of "qualia" I added it to a playlist to watch a little later. After watching it today I am totally intrigued by the topics and ideas you have presented. I've also thoroughly enjoyed your presentation! I've become a new subscriber. Thank you so much for provoking my thoughts about these topics. I will be researching them more. ❤
thoroughly enjoyed this format with regard to exploring ideas with some links to knowledge. Quite often it feels everyone has a lot to say on a matter, which can be great, but these ponderings were very refreshing!
this is one of my favorite videos of yours
Loved the video! Such an interesting topic
That was cool
I was watching a different video of yours and got the notification for this one. Haven't had that happen before.
I love your openness and honesty in videos like this. it's the best way for any of us to learn about each other, and it's rare for people to be willing to make themselves that vulnerable.
I've always experience multiple layers of consciousness. At normal wakefulness, i have two verbal ones and five background channels which can be repurposed to an extent, though I can't usually manage to run more than three verbal ones at once. I'm a writer and I do politically sensitive human rights work, so I'm in the habit of picking my words consciously before expressing them, unless I'm really tired. I've been like this since at least the age of four, when I first explored it, and when I managed to turn off my thought for a little while only to discover afterwards that I had no memory of the intervening period. The same applied when I was in a level two coma for eight days at the age of 33, although I must still have been processing information somehow because hospital staff told me that I had made a fair effort to remove needles from my arms and undo the straps which they then decided to use to secure me. When I was nine i had double vision for a year in between eye surgeries, and since then i have been able to split my eyes (a technique taught to fighter pilots) and process what each one tells me separately. I watched this video with my left eye and processed the words with one part of my brain whilst doing some editing with my right eye and processing it with another (this has never led to complaints about my work). I find that approach helpful because otherwise the unoccupied part of my consciousness would be bored and would wander off on random distracting paths. All this isn't always as positive as it might sound, however. When I'm reading the left hand page of a book and my right eye wanders off and delivers spoilers from the right hand page, it's quite annoying.
Always remember memories fragment and change every time you access them. I really enjoyed this xx
Spot on with 'old things that you have already experienced'. That's why time seems to go faster now than when everything was new. In my nearly 69 years of experience, my senses haven't dulled - thankfully my ears are as good as they used to be and my glasses are wonderful - I just have to make a little more of an effort to see things in a new way. Every morning is different from the last one and seeing that helps with seeing things in a new way for the rest of the day! BTW I love your rambling videos and your language videos too!
Loved this video Simon, I'd forgotten that some people DON'T have a continuous internal monologue and experienced slight shock when you reminded me. I don't shut up internally, can't imagine any other way to exist. Consciousness... Being in physical jobs means continuously being aware of things around me but the nonstop internal monologue creates a split experience of detachment, bouncing back and forth between solid grounding and what is often mental folly. Nm. Sending much love to you and yours.
Everyone has thoughts continuously, there's no way to not have internal monologue, bc it is just thoughts and thoughts don't stop even for a monk or saddhu (although they may have more space and time between thoughts therefore less thoughts)
Amazing video, thank you very much
I've read almost all of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris and they have all changed my life in dramatic and measurable ways, for which I'm eternally grateful. Harris and Dawkins do a wonderful job of bringing the intellectual discourse into an arena, by which I can follow along pretty easily. With Dennett however, I must continuously, and without breakup, apply intense focus and concentration to understand each and every word. it's exhausting but most rewarding. Your video here, was very, very enjoyable and was very instrumental in helping me to understand many of these concepts which seem to be philosophical mandates, if we are to understand the world and out place in it. Well done, sir.
Love your work! ❤
I wouldn't say I became less conscious or that it has atrophied as I aged, but I do think that the 'intensity' of experience has diminished. And a lot of that might be because emotion has become less intense for me over the years, and the period in my life of massively accumulating, sorting, and storing new experience, strongly reacting to novel stimuli, making new and meaningful decisions, taking bigger and less well understood risks, and encountering truly new concepts is mostly behind me now.
For consciousness in particular, I find it now has more to do with introspection, reworking older (and perhaps what I thought were settled) tenets in my life, being less about reaction and decisions and more about revisiting, rethinking, even rejecting older positions. I'm less externally aware and reactive, more internally cognizant of myself and how I'm interfacing with everything that's around me. I may even be experiencing some separation of my consciousness from the rests of me and looking at myself in a more meta way.
I'm crap at explaining myself in such things, but that's the gist of it.
If everyone lived from the inside out like you the world would be a very good place 😅
I was thinking of the same exact stuff and you added onto parts of it, thanks!
I enjoyed this very much, thank you.
This is so refreshing to find that other people recognise the seriousness of studying consciousness. Delightful video
This was a great video and very exciting for me as I studied philosophy of mind last year and it was easily my favourite part of the course! There's so much to say but I feel like I should defend the Daniel Dennet school of thought and that type of distrust of qualia and even consciousness as a concept. An important thing to mention is the philosophical stakes of this: most of us with a scientific leaning think that the world is just made of matter and nothing else. Materialists like me or Dennet say this applies to everything, but for a lot of people qualia is the one exception. When we say our experience is special and there is something magical in our subjectivity we are making a massive claim. If qualia/consciousness is something separate from everyday matter there are so many questions you open yourself up to.
Evolution is one - at what point does conciousness emerge, and how is this possible? Evolution is very fuzzy with blurred lines between species that cross millenia- it's continuous data. But consciousness is discrete, you either have it or you don't: this implies there was some point in evolution when some early humans had conscious and others didn't yet... early people were philosphical zombies? I find it all implausible unless you accept panpsychism which is a whole other kettle of fish. A more fundamental question is how does something non-physical like qualia interact with the real world? We know that qualia has something to do with the real world- it seems to be caused by the real world but it can't create any changes to it because as far as we know everything can be explained by what is already in the world (conservation of energy). This leaves us asking what the point of qualia is- why we need something separate from everything else that doesn't actually do anything.
My suspicion is this is a post hoc explanation. It seems so clear to us that our experience is special that we need to invent a separate category for it. But our experience is special! The arrangement of matter that we find ourselves in is unthinkably unique. The complexity of our minds is something we can't comprehend. This is where I think people miss the point by saying experience is more than "just" data. We think of data as just numbers, pixels or ink. But when you experience it all together at once ---- that is the world, that's your mind.
Anyway, I've written a wall of text and probably got a bit defensive! I just find it fascinating how we can have such different perspectives on it all, never mind such different experiences. Thanks for the video
haven’t seen any of your vids before but this was great :) I’m very into philosophy and think you did a great job engaging with that stuff. I appreciate your caution with not wanting to talk too much on things you aren’t an expert on but it seems to me like you could go deeper into those ideas, which I would love to see
Hey, love the video. You mentioned near the end of the video that you feel like you are becoming less and less conscious as the years go by. I just wanted to mention that i have a somewhat similar and maybe connect feeling. Namely, i feel like as I've gotten older (I'm 19) I've become much worse at remembering unimportant information. The way i attempted to explain it to my girlfriend just a few days ago is as follows, I remember as a kid learning about some great stories from history, and remembering all kinds of pointless details that don't actually matter for my understanding of the history. For example to understand WW1 it is far more important to understand the geopolitical forces such as the great military alliances. then it is to remember the name of some random general that just so happened to be leading a army at the time. If you told me that story today chances are i would not remember the generals name (and in a way maybe not even perceive it) because my brain would categorize it as irrelevant. This ignoring of the particular and increased focus on the big picture and the abstract makes me a bit scared... I have always loved mathematics and that perhaps made me focus even harder on the abstract then i otherwise would have. What I mean by this is the fact that in math it is not really that important to know that 2 + 3 = 3 + 2 or that 7 + 9 = 9 + 7, but to realize that a + b = b + a.
I don't know what precisely I am trying to say but i thought there might just be a connecting there. For example after driving past millions of flowers my brain might have learned that flowers don't really do anything that interesting and has therefore decided to ignore them. By the way this relies on the idea that consciousness is energy expensive which can't be the case if some of the possibilities you talked about in your video are true. What i mean is that if it is both useless (doesn't actually do any processing or anything and instead just "shows us the world for no reason") and also expensive natural selection would have made it disappear a long long time ago.
Sorry for any grammatical or spelling mistakes but English is not my first language. By the way always love the videos and find them really interesting even though I am not usually at all interested in linguistics or even the humanities. Your voice, style and very intelligent way of presenting always makes them a joy to watch. Keep doing what yo're doing!
Thank you for this thoughtful comment! All of what you say makes sense to me. Although I'd never thought about it in that way before, I think I've noticed similar things while I've been an adult - I seem to struggle to remember details, even in situations where I'd like to. When I was a child I feel like I could explain things to people very well with all the detail intact, but nowadays even if I feel like I intuitively understand something someone's told me, when I try to re-explain it to somebody else I find I don't actually have enough detail to explain it properly. I'm not sure if that is related to what you've experienced, but it sounds like it could be.
A search for relevance - categorizing (most) all around us as irrelevant - becoming less conscious of the world, in detail, and yet maybe more conscious of life in general, seems good for survival and a natural occupation for anyone without a specific need or apparent goal. If we do want to become more aware of raw (irrelevant?) details, maybe we should feel a need for those details, by some training, via "Meditation" or just practicing any particular thing - like creating art or computer programming - once you need details, you pay attention.
On another note, seems we as children not only chose to get close to the world, physically, in playtime - we were also often stuck - in a classroom, in a car, in a house... with little control to change our environment, and being full of energy, we put our mind to work, in imagination, and in paying attention to the physical world nearby - since we couldn't escape. Heck, as a child, I had 3 television channels, usually not in my language, and no internet. Anyway, I'm rambling now, but I wonder about all that you and Simon have said here. Thanks for the ideas.
Excellent video!
losing consciousness right at the end after being so fluidly articulate for so long was this years artistic triumph and takes my onw personal turner prize.. the lights come on... teh lhgtits og ffo..
Great video on a topic that never gets old! Refreshing to see someone so immensely intelligent, but also humble. About feeling "less conscious" as we get older, I personally theorize that my experiences feel less vivid now that I am older because I can dissect and process my experiences better now, as opposed to when I was a child when I felt negative and positive emotions more strongly based on what was happening in my life, and I was more swayed by them. Also, as you heard from others, it could be that our brains intensify our conscious experiences more when we are younger because they are experiencing so much new information and need to slow down the process. Time also seems to pass by more quickly as I get older. A day felt so long when I was a small child.
When you said that you don’t know what you are going to say until it comes out of your mouth that blew my mind. Like I get saying something without really thinking about it before hand but I still gag the ability to think about what I’m going to say before it comes out of my mouth
Really fascinating video
In my high school years, I realized that I cannot think. I was looking a friend of mine who sits on his own and puts his head into his hands, and “thinks”. He was talking about it also, like “I thought of this and that…”. This video is the first time for me to find an explanation to my experience.
Amazing job!
Hi Simon, thank you for producing such a thought provoking video. In regards to a dulling of subjective consciousness I do believe that people can in effect fall in and out of consciousness in their life time. I know I certainly have, and it has taken certain life events to in effect 'shock' my conscious sensibilities back to life. One of these shock events was the imposition of lockdowns for me. I am now far more sentient, smell, taste, and hearing have never been more sensitive.
Genius work! Thanks 🤘😎😃👍
Hi. This video randomly popped up on my feed. Its very interesting - thank you!
My comments are:
Given that we experience objects, let's introduce a useful object: the Mind
Claim: Everything you have described is Mind, not Consciousness.
Mind is the umbrella term for thoughts, feelings, emotions, concepts, sense data, qualia, monologues, introspection etc etc.
Reasoning: Check your own experiential use of the word "I" in relation to Mind. There is a clear experience of separation between your use of "I" and Mind.
Food for Thought: When you say "I" that's a thought in the Mind. When you wordlessly cognize your own self-evident self-existence which witnesses the "I" that's a limited form of Consciousness.
Why limited? - is a vast discussion!
The variation in peoples internal monologue really surprised me when I learned of it. I have a very strong inner monologue, I'm always speaking to myself in my head or simulating conversations/events. I can think in images/video as well. When I need to react quickly I dont have time to think in words. To me I've always been able to simulate myself and my environment in my head without the need for external stimulation or action and I never considered the possibility that others might think differently than me. blew my mind
Thanks for the video Simon. Popped up in my recommends and earned an immediate like and sub. I love the photography!
That said, I ended up even more confused by what you mean by consciousness by the end of the video. It clicked for me at the end when you talked about the experience of feeling of less conscious as you age. It seemed like such an alien idea to me that conciseness could be either quantitatively or qualitatively described as less. I guess that puts me in the stone camp.
You made a great point early in the video about how different our personal experiences and understandings can be. I have aphantasia. It wasn’t till my mid twenties that I realised that other people really could create mental images in their head. Another twenty plus years later and I still can’t say I really understand what the experience must be like. So I guess want I’m saying is that I don’t understand what you are saying, not because you expressed your self incoherently (in fact the opposite), but because we are different.
I very rarely comment. But I did find this video beautiful to watch and thought provoking , even while I’m not sure I really understood it. Good stuff. I’ll check in for more.
Great video mate. Currently doing my undergrad thesis on the Mary’s room thought experiment in philosophy and this was really interesting food for thought.
Absolutely excellent video Simon. These ideas remind me of the masterpiece book by Julian Jaynes.
I also don’t typically think in words or images and I’ve never heard of anyone else so I was really pleased to hear from another person with this experience
Yeah, same. Never understood what people mean when they say they think in words. Surely, you think in thoughts!
This is why I like you Simon. Your quietness on the inside comes through your voice and face. I experience you as pure. It would be nice to sit quiet in a room with you and ride shotgun as witness to your uncluttered calm.
My mother didn’t speak to me as a child (mental illness). I was an immigrant child and didn’t speak English. I needed glasses (first grade) so the world was a solo adventure in delicious Monet painting of soft texture.
Now I work in a busy hospital, phones, patients, charts, relaying info, radiation beams, colleagues, critical info, collegial chitchat…
My 4 year old inner child longs for quietness and softness of a day. You remind me of that. Thanks Simon.
I think it's fairly obvious that we are more than physical beings. I fully believe that we will eventually discover that matter arises from consciousness and not the other way around.
Matter probably doesn't even exist, it's just the same as the matter you see in dreams, both mind created, although one is more stable and consistent than the other
even in a materialist setting, that is true. Physical things can give rise to emergent properties that are not present in any individual part of the system
That was really great. I wanna say more because I feel discussion about this stuff is really important, and kind of missing from my life, but honestly you voiced most of the thoughts I've had on the subject more articulately than I ever have, and added some new stuff too! So if nothing else I wanna say great vid :)
wrt your question at the end, as a kid (like pre-10) I remember nearly everything I experienced came with a unique, powerful, totally indescribable associated sensation, which I later came to understand as qualia, but which in my memories is way stronger than pretty much anything I feel today. I even remember losing that strength of feeling over just a few years, and kind of mourning it, probably around the time I was entering my teens.
Interestingly, and tbh happily, I think some of that powerful sensation has actually come back as I've been in my 20s, but definitely not like it was when I was 6. I do think it has to do with novelty, and also that you might be on to something in describing it as something like a decline in consciousness.
anyway ill be chasing the feeling of being at a friend's house playing pokemon for the first time for the rest of my life lol
I just turned 50 and things like stretching or a nice cup of tea feel so much better than ever. Maybe it’s because I ache more and really need the the comfort more of a cup of tea I don’t know. It feels like as you get older the simple things become much more enjoyable and you need less
Please do more videos like this!
shout out to internal radio for music that can never be heard or for songs stuck in your head. it does make the shower and bathroom nicer