"I think that you can tell a nice scientific story when the stuff in the environment hits the heat sensors, it sends a story up the optic nerve, and something happens in the brain, and some neurons wiggle up there and so on, and then you said, the last step: 'and therefore we feel it'."
I have been chewing unsuccessfully on this problem since I was 12 years old. At this point I think the approach we should take is just presume consciousness is yet another thing, like space, time, or mass, then see if you can invent a machine to measure its intensity that correlates with subjective estimate.
This has been a question that has always puzzled me. Too often those of us who question this are dismissed by philosophers. It's good to know that there are some philosophers out there who seem to get it.
Did you even watch the video? The point was that no matter how well we understand the inner workings of the brain, even if we learn to implement artificial brains out of beer cans and tennis balls to compose symphonies and write poetry, that says nothing about why it is even possible to have a first-person perspective anywhere in the universe.
Fair enough. (I don't entirely agree that they're not contiguous, but I'm not going to try to carry out that fairly subtle conversation in UA-cam comments. Been there, done that.) However, your original comment suggested that you thought something had been misrepresented. David Chalmers is a philosophy professor, and it says so under the upload.
I don't know Chalmers outside this video. I said, "IF you can't understand the difference..." The scientific method is great for what it's great at. Perhaps it will eventually reveal the nature of both consciousness and experience. Maybe. In the video, he was talking about subjective experience. Since the beginning of the scientific revolution, there has been great progress in explaining the mechanisms of the human brain, and essentially zero progress in explaining subjective experience.
I think that maybe there is a level of consciousness, in say an organism like bacteria, that may be slightly less aware than full self awareness, but still aware enough to perform tasks like, the struggle for survival along with basic survival functions like looking for food. To look for food may be a slightly higher form of consciousness because it implies that the organism had a plan for catching it's prey, as in hunting, ambushing prey. This would require a greater level of consciousness.
I think the tendency to avoid the topic of consciousness is, largely, a result of the philosophical East-West divide that has existed for some time. Consciousness is central to Eastern Philosophies, (although it's always had relevance in the West, as well) and therefore many in the Western world choose not to contribute to it.
To be honest. When you start to dig deeper in physics you find all kinds of these "problems" where we have no idea why something is the case, all we know is we observe it to be such and such. A great proponent of this observation was Richard Feynman. Coincidentally this kind of reasoning tends to lead people down the path of connecting quantum physics to consciousness, which is what Chalmers does nowadays.
If consciousness isn't real then how is it that the mouth even bothers to speak of it? If there is no consciousness even if there is consciousness what is really amazing is that the brain can actually contemplate consciousness in it's neurons. How do neurons hook up to consciousness? They definitely do that because not only are we aware but we are able to talk about being aware. Awareness therefore has an impact on physical reality every time we talk about it.
the absurdity of Science ignoring consciousness has always baffled me, as creating a solid-state environment for it would immediately solve every social and environmental problem on earth, about which scientists supposedly care.
"the absurdity of Science ignoring consciousness has always baffled" they can't study what they can't even define. You cannot quantify love, some things can't be measured or weighed. Some atheist is sure to respond "sure you can" and proceed to dribble their brains all over themself, quite unaware they are spouting drivel that makes zero sense. Then you see how important consciousness is and how intractable the hard problem is. If it were so simple, we would lack the intelligence to grasp the explanation, so round and round we go., the secret sits in the middle and already knows.
Helium has a point. Of course without consciousness we could talk and think about things but in a world where there is no consciousness, why would any intelligent being have any reason to question the existence of such a thing. I've often wondered if those who think that neurological processes can fully explain consciousness really have consciousness itself. After all, when you discuss this topic with them it's almost impossible to get them to understand what you mean by consciousness.
If he was right then, he is right now. So? Physicalists are saying the same stuff they say now - including the notorious "soon we can explain, trust us guise" - since at the very least over a decade
If you are alert to the present when you are meditating, then the subject remains. The unconditioned consciousness that one becomes while meditating is a subject. I think Chalmers is asking the question, "Who (or what) is this subjective consciousness?" which remains even when the mind is still and rooted in the present moment. The Ego is the conditioned subject, and our true identity, consciousness, is the unconditioned subject; the one ultimate universal subject in all beings.
If consciousness is the result of information being exchanged from matter to matter, then without their being prior consciousness to create information to imbed into the matter or create the matter all together? Also isn't information something that if it can be imbedded into matter to be exchanged, has to have some sort of physical structure it's self to be able to be manipulated, like being put into language as symbols to communicate. I'm lost I think.
There are no riddles, there are no whys. Rather, the only riddle is "that", not "why" the world exists. Everything else is "description" of "what" and "how" the world is.
That may be (or, more likely is not) how a child's brain achieves a state of first-person, subjective experience, but it doesn't explain what subjective experience is. I'm not convinced that non-human animals, or pre-linguistic humans don't experience a first-person perspective. To call it an 'illusion' presupposes a firs-person perspective, to be fooled into a first-person perspective.
Remember that really bad movie from the 80s called "Young Einstein"? I feel like this is an outtake from a movie they'll make someday called "Young Chalmers".
What, according to Searle, is involved in understanding the words and sentences of a language? Does Searle succeed in showing that computers cannot understand anything in this sense?
the point is that the neuron's activity inside the brain does not philoshophically imply we feel it. we 'feel' it is not even well define but what is? whenever we define something we need another definition and so forth... in the end there is always an unexplained undefined termed, an unexplained nature that we cannot put into words. what is this unexplained nature? is it what Kant referes to as 'the-thing-in-itself'? is it a sequence of fundamental intuitions?
yea...thats why i said IF you agree with him. and chalmers actually does make a claim about subjective experience, he believes that consciousness is inherently mysterious/non-physical.
we ARE our minds/brains, trying to give a flawlessly complete theory of the mind is like trying to crack a safe from the inside, pretty fucking hard work...maybe impossible.
David Chalmers, the Hard problem of consciousness. This is my life question since I was a little kid. He (and Descartes) gave a ultimate shit to the humanity and the world,,, in a good way ;)
@Akhenaten2011 Ahem! what way are these electrical signals used in order to create this seemingly coherent illusion of conciousness? that's the problem. somehow it was arranged from disparate parts of ourselves that have evolved to the point where we can talk about this. not exactly like a machine with components in place to drive or enable it, but more like music, bringing a coherency and a harmony from different instruments...in the brain, that create it?
@petemh consciousness is a complex and high level model of responses and stimuli arising from emergent behaviour of numerous neuronal systems and subsystem interactions.
the problem is that consciousness is non materialistic so it reacts instentaniously but you can not mesure it directly because of it's nature :-) everything flows out of that :-)
this leaves out the point that science has established methods and procedures which lead to make their point plausible through falsification, objectively so under very general circumstances on our planet
The philosophical move to make our conscious point-of-view the philosophical starting point, it is not on to suppose one has an obligation to defend consciousness, or anything, "from a scientific point of view." If the "scientific p.o.v" is considered authoritative, it is so because we create the institution that says, "To accept anything as believable about reality, it must be from a third-paty p.o.v." Stop that. What's needed is a conscious theory to explain the possibility of science.
I think Dennett is probably smarter but I would rather hang out with Chalmers. Much more engaging and interesting. There's something cold about Dennett that's off putting.
Consciousness itself is secondary, not primary. How experience gives rise to consciousness cannot be understood without understanding 'evolution'. Evolution is the result of a program of the designer, you call 'naturalistic dualism', that leads to variety and beauty, and consciousness is the byproduct of evolution.Like the bacteria, eating and reproducing, which are conscious activity.
***** What is difficult to prove is the existence of 'primary' consciousness, which requires what Hegel called 'dialectical idealism', which is a 'program' for evolution to produce 'secondary consciousness' which is easy to understand (observable and verifiable). I believe Hegel's 'Laws of dialectics' propels evolution, although not easy to see. It can be understood by considering the highly complicated 'genome', based on which all animal and plant life evolve (involving trillions of bits of information stored in the genome). But before life evolved, the inorganic world of stars and galaxies evolved, with a simpler genome (defined by the standard model of particle physics, beautifully explained by Lee Smolin) producing elements, molecules, compounds, organic molecules, proteins, cells that replicates, leading to life, and consciousness -!!!. The relation between the 'universal consciousness' with the secondary consciousness of animals and plants are beautifully expressed by a 11,000 year old prayer of the Jadu people: I adore Him [Vishnu]; who is the one conjoined essence of both meditative wisdom and active virtue [Karma] .... who with the three qualities,is the cause of the evolution [!] of the world [universe] ...May the unborn and eternal Hari, bestow upon all mankind that blessed state that knows neither birth nor decay-! [Translated by H.H.Wilson- Vishnu Purana]
@blahbl4hblahtoo Read his book and you'll know that what you said is wrong. He does not essentially believe that the mind is something outside the physical, rather he takes the position of defending that premise, in order to point out that there is an explanatory gap, and that subjective qualia NECESSARILY must be explaned metaphysically, as subjective knowledge holds no place in science. He's talking about science having to change, if it wants to take consciousness serious.
@StefanMarkovski In what way is consciousness matter?And what is your education,since you are saying this?Because DAvid Chalmers is a philospher,and he (among hundreds of others)Is telling you that it is a hard porblem.But if you know something new,please tell the world!
Perhaps if you try to think of a mind as having a bunch of fences with heights of different proportions and so forth. Then imagine some given location that has some access to its neighbor (i.e. due to proximity), but doesn’t have much access to other demarked areas, probably due to distance or some other variable… My assertion is that a brain of this sort is bound to have ideas that run counter to each other. This won't make much sense unless you're familiar with neuroanatomy applications.
I see from Google that the mullet has a long and varied history. HAHA! One page took me back to the Sphinx (hmmm ... yeah, I see it). But it looks as if it peaked in popularity in the 1980s.
@Scofield0085 "he is quite intelligent and coherent, yet 'somehow' just can't quite get over the fence of mysticism." Dont understand what you mean by that phrase 'the fence of mysticism' - sounds like you're accusing him of something?
youre telling me chalmers looked like this 😭😭 let me just divert, i was not expecting him to look like sweet charming chalmers hehe giving rock and roll vibes frbahahaha
>"if you agree with Chalmers then it just shows your lack of faith in the scientific method." 'Faith' in the scientific method? If you can't tell the difference between agreeing with a guy and understanding what he just said... In the video, Chalmers makes no claim about the nature of subjective experience. He says that understanding everything about how a brain or other conscious system works brings us no closer to understanding the phenomenon of subjective experience.
In reply to fiveredpears. My computer would not let me reply to you, fiveredpears. I think Daniel Dennett's expression seems colder but I think it is superficial and does not reflect his personality. Cheers - Mike.
Describe the physical process happening in the brain that causes pain to be felt. Show me, starting with the laws of physics, how pain ends up being felt. "Interprets it as pain" is not an answer. Describe the physical process that ends with the subjective experience of pain.
@kasaduhallo how about this...he keeps referring to consciousness as something greater than the sum of its parts. If you have to start with the argument that science shouldn't get rid of the subjective...you have just defined consciousness as something that can't be measured. By making it magic...and not a by product of the mechanism...you can never make any progress in explaining it. mr. tie dye t-shirt wants it to be something outside the physical.
I personally would have thought that, composing a scientific model of somethings as irrational, as absurd and fluid as our interiority would be rather obsolete. Using the domain of science to map out the uncharted depths of something as formless as consciousness could never work to a tee, in my opinion. It could help tease apart certain aspects perhaps, but never a 'full' empirical theory. Perhaps, not an empirical theory at all. Consciousness resides within and 'looks out' -consciousness has 'looked out' to discern the universe utilizing all our manifested mediums throughout history. We will always move through the nexus of mysteries that consciousness lays out, and, we will always remain an enigma to ourselves. I would sincerely fear a complete model of consciousness, how drab that would be! Why would the philosophers get out of bed if the mystery has been highjacked by a judicious paradigm. Engineering new ways and techniques of pioneering 'inner-space' and gaining empirical data 'somehow' to bring to the collectivity might be the only way. Science pertains to the rational. The psyche, consciousness is also necessarily balanced out by irrationality. In the same way the uncertainly principle, singularities, so and so forth have exposed the absurd and irrational characteristics of the cosmos once our rationalistic eyes cut deep enough into the heart of matter with its intricately sharpened, linearic knife. Please someone shut me down, if you strongly oppose, i would love to hear everybody's ideas. (:
I think it is legitimate to raise such questions, and try and answer them: the latter of which, Chalmers has failed to do, even to try, in all these years. The main contribution Chalmers has made is to demonstrate in principle how one could philosophically still entertain the idea of dualism in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. Recognising that physicalism and causation are hard to overcome, the best he has been able to offer us is property dualism. But not even science would deny that the mechanisms of biology are not identical to the mechanisms of quanta. The sleight of hand in Chalmer's magic show is this: to point over there while everyone is looking over here. In other words, to jump straight from quantum mechanics to brain states and declare "There is a Mystery Here!" without filling in the gap with all the intervening steps.
Yes, one is conjecture (playing with thought) and one is verifiable and testifiable. Lets break them down, "science" is Latin for knowledge. Given. Philosophy is Greek, "Philo" meaning love, and "Sophy" meaning knowledge/to think. The love of thought. No, philosophy and science are not interchangeable, not since Galileo.
My friends and I were talking about this yesterday. We were talking about how all living things used to be just bacteria and how they live and reproduce and die within minutes, their population doubles almost every minute. And as far as we know, bacteria don't really have a conscious, they just know two things: eat and reproduce. But now we are here, and we have hundreds of things flowing through our heads at once: what am I going to do today? When am I going to go to bed? What's that smell? Is that something burning? I wonder how my friends are doing. I wonder what time it is. I wonder if anything good is on TV. I wonder if the store is open today. When should I buy more food? It goes on and on. We came to the conclusion that the conscious mind is destroying evolution. Humans have made all these medical advances in the past years and all they are doing is stopping nature from completing its natural selection. Look 50 years into the future, we are all going to be weak little fucks relying on medication to keep us alive. We are evolving slower and slower because we are questioning so many things. The question is, is that good or bad? Is there even and answer?
Single cell paramecium eat, breed, they are capable of learning, trap them in a test tube and they escape, trap them again and they escape faster. But they don't have a single neuron. They exhibit sentience. All the things you ponder are the collective consciousness of all those single cells that make up a human in a symbiotic arrangement. A sea anemone colony will repel intruders, such as a lobster, yet they don't have a single brain between them. Or do they? Think back to when you were 9 yrs old, there isn't a single atom in your body today that was present when you were 9. So what are you?
You're a bunch of replicating cells that know how to behave. All know how to listen to the neurons in your head. Its really not a big mystery, you're not the exact same physical matter but you don't look at an amputee that has a prosthetic arm and say "so what are you?" Different cells but still copies.
jonesgerard "Think back to when you were 9 yrs old, there isn't a single atom in your body today that was present when you were 9. So what are you?" Damn, I didn't know that was true. That's crazy
billdsafdsad Yeah its true that you're made of different cells, In fact its the stuff you've eaten used to create more of you. The fact is if you took every cell and replaced it with a perfect clone you'd still have the same thing. Just different materials.
This is a really fascinating thought. After all, it seems mental illness is just around the corner no matter where you turn. There is a lot of information or qualia flowing through our minds. I don't know how we can make a value claim to distinguish that it is ruining evolution. How would you know that? How do you study that empirically? Perhaps consciousness, at this point, is dangerous because of the massive flow of information that is interacting with a brain that simply cannot handle it. Perhaps, it is the questioning that is harsh for us, not because it slows the process (how do you measure the speed of the process?), but simply because the background noise is not operable by our brains. In other words, imagine a computer running windows 8, but with a CPU chip of only 0.8 to 1.0 ghz turbo clock. The information is going to disrupt a lot of items in your computer, and the operating system will function slower and slower. Imagine that you end up installing new software. That software of course is up to date with the current information and processing requirements, yet your processor cannot handle running that software. What I'm trying to illustrate is simply that our current physiological state may not be able to process the increasingly fast pace flow of information. Its overloading our CPU. I don't know if this adds, agrees, or disagrees with your discussion. I hope to just add to it, I think I see how I could agree with what you are saying, just in different ways.
Chalmers says that he's sure that he's not a zombie because he experiences his consciousness first hand. Will he concede, then, that he's a zombie when asleep?
@StardustSpaceMonkey @AegeanKing yeah, ok, well if youre serious about the subject at all you will read consciousness explained by dennett. if you want to have a serious conversation on the subject im willing, but nothing about this conversation allows for brevity when dealing with the uninitiated. Try this concise argument on for size: would you say its unknowable that your personal experience of the color red is likely to be radically different from either of your parents? cont...
@Scofield0085 Chalmers 'thinks the way he does' because he has correctly identified the point at which our current understanding falls short of explaining what consciousness is, how it comes about and why it is subjectively experienced the way it is. I see no evidence of any sort in the clip of ideas that run counter to each other. Or of mysticism for that matter. I think you've got the wrong end of the stick
How do you understand something that isn’t operationalized at least in some primitive way? There is nothing other than ‘language routines’ that David Chalmers is competent at with respect to the phenomena of consciousness (namely there are no (non- representational) routines that David Chalmers is competent at that is either genuinely operant or respondent with respect the phenomena of consciousness)- Ergo he knows as much about it as my 2 year old daughter does.
Not to insult Chalmers, but I somewhat agree with you. I may as well be as ignorant as a two year-old. However, assuming I were to taught to read, write, and communicate, my education as a child in the later 1980s (as I would have been two-years old, then) would have stopped in 1988. However, I doubt that I could have understood our human interpretation of reality based on quantum mechanics. And as of this year, I've come to further understand and realize what it's about. Hypothetically, if there was a time traveller, could I understand quantum mechanics as a two-year old? I doubt it. As a nine-year old? More likely so. I was in gifted school by this time for having a good sense with mathematics. However, it is still conceptual. It was not until age 6 or so that I learned to count, but my reading skills were quite good (as I can recall my reading skills myself). I think at age 9, you could have attempted to get me to understand quantum mechanics on a conceptual level. So, maybe at best, I'm only a nine-year old. Then again, as you've mentioned, human language may not necessarily represent reality. And if you're going to fold the system of mathematics and language down and say it's invalid and does not represent reality, then yes, I'm going to say you're right. We all may as well be two-year olds. I will counter with something, however. And if you've studied Eastern philosophy you may understand this. If we've learned something as humans throughout our years of living (well past the age of 2), then we've learned what reality is NOT rather than IS. So, we've eliminated things.
What folly of humans, to have created an imaginary line between something they call "the internal world" and "the external world", and using the word "Experience" as if it were completely general. In life, we only say we have certain types of experiences. Dragging in the brain in trying to account for what are actually grammatical misconceptions is of no help.
Surely that the detection of heat that tells us that something is hot is a mechanical reaction ... consciousness is just the higher brain (captain of the ship) making sure we operate in the best way to maintain our life... you make it seem like we have god like insight into the workings of the universe..
I like what Chalmers is trying to do and applaud his attempts to call attention to the fact that we don't understand how physical processes give rise to mental ones. However, sadly, Chalmers does not distinguish between mind and consciousness. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations all arise IN consciousness, but they are NOT consciousness in and of themselves. That our world's foremost authority on consciousness fails to be clear on this distinction does not bode well for his work. Just saying.
"Consciousness" seems to explain the admiration I have for these teachers and for the sense of gratitude I feel for YTube
Chalmers is a great thinker of our times.
"I think that you can tell a nice scientific story when the stuff in the environment hits the heat sensors, it sends a story up the optic nerve, and something happens in the brain, and some neurons wiggle up there and so on, and then you said, the last step: 'and therefore we feel it'."
"How does he water of the brain turns into the wine of consciousness? " N1ce
love that quote
I hope they create a Mishflix so that all of these fantastic interviews can be collected into one place.
I have been chewing unsuccessfully on this problem since I was 12 years old. At this point I think the approach we should take is just presume consciousness is yet another thing, like space, time, or mass, then see if you can invent a machine to measure its intensity that correlates with subjective estimate.
He looks like Isaac Newton...
+Pisstake you have no right to speak you piece of shit, now somebody say that to me and let's see if we can generate an infinity an break the Internet
vincentmack37 Shit of speak piece you no to right you have! Next...
He certainly thinks more like Descartes than Newton.
He looks a bit like Descartes
You have an unhealthy obsession with him.
I think that Chalmers has it right. Qualitative experience is as much a part of the cosmos as quantitative existence.
experience is the only validator of existence
+SoulRoh Indeed
💯🎯
like he said, the scientific method needs to be extended before it will even be possible to start answering what consciousness is
What was he 18 when this was recorded?
Dave Mustaine is a damn genius!
Incredible! Thanks so Much Jeff
This has been a question that has always puzzled me. Too often those of us who question this are dismissed by philosophers. It's good to know that there are some philosophers out there who seem to get it.
mullet of the gods.
Except it's not a mullet.
Except you have no head, so you're clearly not even conscious.
Did you even watch the video?
The point was that no matter how well we understand the inner workings of the brain, even if we learn to implement artificial brains out of beer cans and tennis balls to compose symphonies and write poetry, that says nothing about why it is even possible to have a first-person perspective anywhere in the universe.
People seem to have a problem understanding what the hard problem is. They don't seem to get it.
Fair enough. (I don't entirely agree that they're not contiguous, but I'm not going to try to carry out that fairly subtle conversation in UA-cam comments. Been there, done that.) However, your original comment suggested that you thought something had been misrepresented. David Chalmers is a philosophy professor, and it says so under the upload.
I don't know Chalmers outside this video. I said, "IF you can't understand the difference..."
The scientific method is great for what it's great at. Perhaps it will eventually reveal the nature of both consciousness and experience. Maybe. In the video, he was talking about subjective experience. Since the beginning of the scientific revolution, there has been great progress in explaining the mechanisms of the human brain, and essentially zero progress in explaining subjective experience.
I think that maybe there is a level of consciousness, in say an organism like bacteria, that may be slightly less aware than full self awareness, but still aware enough to perform tasks like, the struggle for survival along with basic survival functions like looking for food. To look for food may be a slightly higher form of consciousness because it implies that the organism had a plan for catching it's prey, as in hunting, ambushing prey. This would require a greater level of consciousness.
I think the tendency to avoid the topic of consciousness is, largely, a result of the philosophical East-West divide that has existed for some time. Consciousness is central to Eastern Philosophies, (although it's always had relevance in the West, as well) and therefore many in the Western world choose not to contribute to it.
To be honest. When you start to dig deeper in physics you find all kinds of these "problems" where we have no idea why something is the case, all we know is we observe it to be such and such. A great proponent of this observation was Richard Feynman. Coincidentally this kind of reasoning tends to lead people down the path of connecting quantum physics to consciousness, which is what Chalmers does nowadays.
Well? What does one conclude from it?
That's the fraud pensroses idea not chalmers. The former is an overrated hack.
If consciousness isn't real then how is it that the mouth even bothers to speak of it? If there is no consciousness even if there is consciousness what is really amazing is that the brain can actually contemplate consciousness in it's neurons. How do neurons hook up to consciousness? They definitely do that because not only are we aware but we are able to talk about being aware. Awareness therefore has an impact on physical reality every time we talk about it.
the absurdity of Science ignoring consciousness has always baffled me, as creating a solid-state environment for it would immediately solve every social and environmental problem on earth, about which scientists supposedly care.
"the absurdity of Science ignoring consciousness has always baffled"
they can't study what they can't even define.
You cannot quantify love, some things can't be measured or weighed.
Some atheist is sure to respond "sure you can" and proceed to dribble their brains all over themself, quite unaware they are spouting drivel that makes zero sense.
Then you see how important consciousness is and how intractable the hard problem is.
If it were so simple, we would lack the intelligence to grasp the explanation,
so round and round we go., the secret sits in the middle and already knows.
Who’s fuckin up some D-boy chalmers in 2019 😤✊🏽💯 #🐐
Helium has a point. Of course without consciousness we could talk and think about things but in a world where there is no consciousness, why would any intelligent being have any reason to question the existence of such a thing.
I've often wondered if those who think that neurological processes can fully explain consciousness really have consciousness itself. After all, when you discuss this topic with them it's almost impossible to get them to understand what you mean by consciousness.
20 years later he is saying the exact same thing
If he was right then, he is right now. So? Physicalists are saying the same stuff they say now - including the notorious "soon we can explain, trust us guise" - since at the very least over a decade
If you are alert to the present when you are meditating, then the subject remains. The unconditioned consciousness that one becomes while meditating is a subject. I think Chalmers is asking the question, "Who (or what) is this subjective consciousness?" which remains even when the mind is still and rooted in the present moment. The Ego is the conditioned subject, and our true identity, consciousness, is the unconditioned subject; the one ultimate universal subject in all beings.
A young Chalmers.
If consciousness is the result of information being exchanged from matter to matter, then without their being prior consciousness to create information to imbed into the matter or create the matter all together? Also isn't information something that if it can be imbedded into matter to be exchanged, has to have some sort of physical structure it's self to be able to be manipulated, like being put into language as symbols to communicate. I'm lost I think.
Great stuff. Thanks so much for uploading it! :-)
ooo, never saw chalmers this young
There are no riddles, there are no whys. Rather, the only riddle is "that", not "why" the world exists. Everything else is "description" of "what" and "how" the world is.
Hey, look!
Isaac Newton with an Australian accent.
Can you formally state the boundary line between one and the other?
That may be (or, more likely is not) how a child's brain achieves a state of first-person, subjective experience, but it doesn't explain what subjective experience is. I'm not convinced that non-human animals, or pre-linguistic humans don't experience a first-person perspective.
To call it an 'illusion' presupposes a firs-person perspective, to be fooled into a first-person perspective.
no, the mind/body problem. it's mentioned in the first few seconds.
Remember that really bad movie from the 80s called "Young Einstein"? I feel like this is an outtake from a movie they'll make someday called "Young Chalmers".
What, according to Searle, is involved in understanding the words and sentences of a language? Does Searle succeed in showing that computers cannot understand anything in this sense?
the point is that the neuron's activity inside the brain does not philoshophically imply we feel it. we 'feel' it is not even well define but what is? whenever we define something we need another definition and so forth... in the end there is always an unexplained undefined termed, an unexplained nature that we cannot put into words. what is this unexplained nature? is it what Kant referes to as 'the-thing-in-itself'? is it a sequence of fundamental intuitions?
yea...thats why i said IF you agree with him. and chalmers actually does make a claim about subjective experience, he believes that consciousness is inherently mysterious/non-physical.
we ARE our minds/brains, trying to give a flawlessly complete theory of the mind is like trying to crack a safe from the inside, pretty fucking hard work...maybe impossible.
@JamesTR4 Not to mention proteins unfolding / de-naturing. Compounds oxidising, ionisation, phase transitions....
David Chalmers, the Hard problem of consciousness. This is my life question since I was a little kid. He (and Descartes) gave a ultimate shit to the humanity and the world,,, in a good way ;)
@Akhenaten2011 Ahem! what way are these electrical signals used in order to create this seemingly coherent illusion of conciousness? that's the problem. somehow it was arranged from disparate parts of ourselves that have evolved to the point where we can talk about this. not exactly like a machine with components in place to drive or enable it, but more like music, bringing a coherency and a harmony from different instruments...in the brain, that create it?
Thank you
@Scofield0085 No doubt, but what do you mean by the phrase 'the fence of mysticism'? it sounds at best meaningless.
@petemh consciousness is a complex and high level model of responses and stimuli arising from emergent behaviour of numerous neuronal systems and subsystem interactions.
the problem is that consciousness is non materialistic so it reacts instentaniously but you can not mesure it directly because of it's nature :-) everything flows out of that :-)
this leaves out the point that science has established methods and procedures which lead to make their point plausible through falsification, objectively so under very general circumstances on our planet
Zombie Says: Take a Breath Dave! David Chalmers is to Dan Dennett as Phlogiston Theory is to the Standard Model.
The philosophical move to make our conscious point-of-view the philosophical starting point, it is not on to suppose one has an obligation to defend consciousness, or anything, "from a scientific point of view." If the "scientific p.o.v" is considered authoritative, it is so because we create the institution that says, "To accept anything as believable about reality, it must be from a third-paty p.o.v." Stop that. What's needed is a conscious theory to explain the possibility of science.
I like David Chalmers! Didn't he play in the kids' show..."The Bugaloos?"
How many years ago was this filmed?
I think Dennett is probably smarter but I would rather hang out with Chalmers. Much more engaging and interesting. There's something cold about Dennett that's off putting.
Thanks!
Wow 10 years later. Still good
@Scofield0085 maybe you are just imagining those fences because your mind has a fence that prevents you from understanding what he is saying......
Consciousness itself is secondary, not primary. How experience gives rise to consciousness cannot be understood without understanding 'evolution'.
Evolution is the result of a program of the designer, you call 'naturalistic dualism', that leads to variety and beauty, and consciousness is the byproduct of evolution.Like the bacteria, eating and reproducing, which are conscious activity.
***** What is difficult to prove is the existence of 'primary' consciousness, which requires what Hegel called 'dialectical idealism', which is a 'program' for evolution to produce 'secondary consciousness' which is easy to understand (observable and verifiable). I believe Hegel's 'Laws of dialectics' propels evolution, although not easy to see.
It can be understood by considering the highly complicated 'genome', based on which all animal and plant life evolve (involving trillions of bits of information stored in the genome). But before life evolved, the inorganic world of stars and galaxies evolved, with a simpler genome (defined by the standard model of particle physics, beautifully explained by Lee Smolin) producing elements, molecules, compounds, organic molecules, proteins, cells that replicates, leading to life, and consciousness -!!!.
The relation between the 'universal consciousness' with the secondary consciousness of animals and plants are beautifully expressed by a 11,000 year old prayer of the Jadu people:
I adore Him [Vishnu]; who is the one conjoined essence of both meditative wisdom and active virtue [Karma] .... who with the three qualities,is the cause of the evolution [!] of the world [universe] ...May the unborn and eternal Hari, bestow upon all mankind that blessed state that knows neither birth nor decay-! [Translated by H.H.Wilson- Vishnu Purana]
Wrong.
Newton was a natural philosopher with a focus on alchemy.
It seems to me this is going around in circles; why is it so.
gosh this is a cool guy.
An incarnated soul has consciousness--unconsciosness is not death.
What year is this?
Brilliant.
@blahbl4hblahtoo Read his book and you'll know that what you said is wrong. He does not essentially believe that the mind is something outside the physical, rather he takes the position of defending that premise, in order to point out that there is an explanatory gap, and that subjective qualia NECESSARILY must be explaned metaphysically, as subjective knowledge holds no place in science. He's talking about science having to change, if it wants to take consciousness serious.
@StefanMarkovski In what way is consciousness matter?And what is your education,since you are saying this?Because DAvid Chalmers is a philospher,and he (among hundreds of others)Is telling you that it is a hard porblem.But if you know something new,please tell the world!
Allen who? What does Consciouss1 has to say?
Perhaps if you try to think of a mind as having a bunch of fences with heights of different proportions and so forth. Then imagine some given location that has some access to its neighbor (i.e. due to proximity), but doesn’t have much access to other demarked areas, probably due to distance or some other variable…
My assertion is that a brain of this sort is bound to have ideas that run counter to each other.
This won't make much sense unless you're familiar with neuroanatomy applications.
What year was this ? Early 90s ?
yeah
What year was this made?
I see from Google that the mullet has a long and varied history. HAHA! One page took me back to the Sphinx (hmmm ... yeah, I see it). But it looks as if it peaked in popularity in the 1980s.
@Scofield0085 "he is quite intelligent and coherent, yet 'somehow' just can't quite get over the fence of mysticism." Dont understand what you mean by that phrase 'the fence of mysticism' - sounds like you're accusing him of something?
@Scofield0085 You can't put down Chalmers by using that kind of derogatory terms!Give a serious argument as to why he is wrong!
youre telling me chalmers looked like this 😭😭 let me just divert, i was not expecting him to look like sweet charming chalmers hehe giving rock and roll vibes frbahahaha
His philosophy is dense and mostly precise but he doesn't seem to have done much original work since his 1996 effort, more's the pity.
In the human perspective, that is.
They do a fantastic job of explaining the question. But when it comes to the answer........nothing!
There’s never a true answer
Good to see Chevy Chase getting involved.
@fishybishbash Not really accusing him. Just trying to give an account (a bio-physiological perspective) of why he thinks the way he does.
>"if you agree with Chalmers then it just shows your lack of faith in the scientific method."
'Faith' in the scientific method? If you can't tell the difference between agreeing with a guy and understanding what he just said...
In the video, Chalmers makes no claim about the nature of subjective experience. He says that understanding everything about how a brain or other conscious system works brings us no closer to understanding the phenomenon of subjective experience.
@JamesTR4 Precisely. :)
In reply to fiveredpears.
My computer would not let me reply to you, fiveredpears.
I think Daniel Dennett's expression seems colder but I think it is superficial and does not reflect his personality.
Cheers - Mike.
I think dennett is a pompous, conceited ass. I watch all of his lectures, and I own most of his books, but the truth is the truth.
I am sorry for you. You waste s so much time of you life. Denett is a joke.
Describe the physical process happening in the brain that causes pain to be felt. Show me, starting with the laws of physics, how pain ends up being felt.
"Interprets it as pain" is not an answer. Describe the physical process that ends with the subjective experience of pain.
this doesn't really hit upon the issue, because the workings of the mouth can be triggered by simple mechanistic neuron firings
Good
@kasaduhallo how about this...he keeps referring to consciousness as something greater than the sum of its parts. If you have to start with the argument that science shouldn't get rid of the subjective...you have just defined consciousness as something that can't be measured. By making it magic...and not a by product of the mechanism...you can never make any progress in explaining it. mr. tie dye t-shirt wants it to be something outside the physical.
@Akhenaten2011 An illusion of what?
I personally would have thought that, composing a scientific model of somethings as irrational, as absurd and fluid as our interiority would be rather obsolete. Using the domain of science to map out the uncharted depths of something as formless as consciousness could never work to a tee, in my opinion. It could help tease apart certain aspects perhaps, but never a 'full' empirical theory. Perhaps, not an empirical theory at all. Consciousness resides within and 'looks out' -consciousness has 'looked out' to discern the universe utilizing all our manifested mediums throughout history. We will always move through the nexus of mysteries that consciousness lays out, and, we will always remain an enigma to ourselves. I would sincerely fear a complete model of consciousness, how drab that would be! Why would the philosophers get out of bed if the mystery has been highjacked by a judicious paradigm. Engineering new ways and techniques of pioneering 'inner-space' and gaining empirical data 'somehow' to bring to the collectivity might be the only way.
Science pertains to the rational. The psyche, consciousness is also necessarily balanced out by irrationality. In the same way the uncertainly principle, singularities, so and so forth have exposed the absurd and irrational characteristics of the cosmos once our rationalistic eyes cut deep enough into the heart of matter with its intricately sharpened, linearic knife. Please someone shut me down, if you strongly oppose, i would love to hear everybody's ideas. (:
Sorry that's mumbo jumbo.
@StardustSpaceMonkey @AegeanKing i could go on and on, but id encourage you to read the well established arguments if youre actually interested.
I think it is legitimate to raise such questions, and try and answer them: the latter of which, Chalmers has failed to do, even to try, in all these years. The main contribution Chalmers has made is to demonstrate in principle how one could philosophically still entertain the idea of dualism in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. Recognising that physicalism and causation are hard to overcome, the best he has been able to offer us is property dualism. But not even science would deny that the mechanisms of biology are not identical to the mechanisms of quanta. The sleight of hand in Chalmer's magic show is this: to point over there while everyone is looking over here. In other words, to jump straight from quantum mechanics to brain states and declare "There is a Mystery Here!" without filling in the gap with all the intervening steps.
Read his books.
@cybermone absolute zero what?
Yes, one is conjecture (playing with thought) and one is verifiable and testifiable. Lets break them down, "science" is Latin for knowledge. Given. Philosophy is Greek, "Philo" meaning love, and "Sophy" meaning knowledge/to think. The love of thought. No, philosophy and science are not interchangeable, not since Galileo.
considering the brain and consciousness is just as understood today as galileo understood astronomy then, i think you make your point redundant
My friends and I were talking about this yesterday. We were talking about how all living things used to be just bacteria and how they live and reproduce and die within minutes, their population doubles almost every minute. And as far as we know, bacteria don't really have a conscious, they just know two things: eat and reproduce. But now we are here, and we have hundreds of things flowing through our heads at once: what am I going to do today? When am I going to go to bed? What's that smell? Is that something burning? I wonder how my friends are doing. I wonder what time it is. I wonder if anything good is on TV. I wonder if the store is open today. When should I buy more food? It goes on and on. We came to the conclusion that the conscious mind is destroying evolution. Humans have made all these medical advances in the past years and all they are doing is stopping nature from completing its natural selection. Look 50 years into the future, we are all going to be weak little fucks relying on medication to keep us alive. We are evolving slower and slower because we are questioning so many things. The question is, is that good or bad? Is there even and answer?
Single cell paramecium eat, breed, they are capable of learning, trap them in a test tube and they escape, trap them again and they escape faster. But they don't have a single neuron. They exhibit sentience.
All the things you ponder are the collective consciousness of all those single cells that make up a human in a symbiotic arrangement.
A sea anemone colony will repel intruders, such as a lobster, yet they don't have a single brain between them.
Or do they?
Think back to when you were 9 yrs old, there isn't a single atom in your body today
that was present when you were 9. So what are you?
You're a bunch of replicating cells that know how to behave. All know how to listen to the neurons in your head. Its really not a big mystery, you're not the exact same physical matter but you don't look at an amputee that has a prosthetic arm and say "so what are you?" Different cells but still copies.
jonesgerard "Think back to when you were 9 yrs old, there isn't a single atom in your body today
that was present when you were 9. So what are you?"
Damn, I didn't know that was true. That's crazy
billdsafdsad Yeah its true that you're made of different cells, In fact its the stuff you've eaten used to create more of you. The fact is if you took every cell and replaced it with a perfect clone you'd still have the same thing. Just different materials.
This is a really fascinating thought. After all, it seems mental illness is just around the corner no matter where you turn. There is a lot of information or qualia flowing through our minds. I don't know how we can make a value claim to distinguish that it is ruining evolution. How would you know that? How do you study that empirically? Perhaps consciousness, at this point, is dangerous because of the massive flow of information that is interacting with a brain that simply cannot handle it. Perhaps, it is the questioning that is harsh for us, not because it slows the process (how do you measure the speed of the process?), but simply because the background noise is not operable by our brains. In other words, imagine a computer running windows 8, but with a CPU chip of only 0.8 to 1.0 ghz turbo clock. The information is going to disrupt a lot of items in your computer, and the operating system will function slower and slower. Imagine that you end up installing new software. That software of course is up to date with the current information and processing requirements, yet your processor cannot handle running that software. What I'm trying to illustrate is simply that our current physiological state may not be able to process the increasingly fast pace flow of information. Its overloading our CPU. I don't know if this adds, agrees, or disagrees with your discussion. I hope to just add to it, I think I see how I could agree with what you are saying, just in different ways.
Chalmers says that he's sure that he's not a zombie because he experiences his consciousness first hand. Will he concede, then, that he's a zombie when asleep?
@StardustSpaceMonkey @AegeanKing yeah, ok, well if youre serious about the subject at all you will read consciousness explained by dennett. if you want to have a serious conversation on the subject im willing, but nothing about this conversation allows for brevity when dealing with the uninitiated. Try this concise argument on for size: would you say its unknowable that your personal experience of the color red is likely to be radically different from either of your parents? cont...
cool
@Scofield0085 Chalmers 'thinks the way he does' because he has correctly identified the point at which our current understanding falls short of explaining what consciousness is, how it comes about and why it is subjectively experienced the way it is. I see no evidence of any sort in the clip of ideas that run counter to each other. Or of mysticism for that matter. I think you've got the wrong end of the stick
How do you understand something that isn’t operationalized at least in some primitive way? There is nothing other than ‘language routines’ that David Chalmers is competent at with respect to the phenomena of consciousness (namely there are no (non- representational) routines that David Chalmers is competent at that is either genuinely operant or respondent with respect the phenomena of consciousness)- Ergo he knows as much about it as my 2 year old daughter does.
Not to insult Chalmers, but I somewhat agree with you. I may as well be as ignorant as a two year-old. However, assuming I were to taught to read, write, and communicate, my education as a child in the later 1980s (as I would have been two-years old, then) would have stopped in 1988. However, I doubt that I could have understood our human interpretation of reality based on quantum mechanics. And as of this year, I've come to further understand and realize what it's about. Hypothetically, if there was a time traveller, could I understand quantum mechanics as a two-year old? I doubt it.
As a nine-year old? More likely so. I was in gifted school by this time for having a good sense with mathematics. However, it is still conceptual. It was not until age 6 or so that I learned to count, but my reading skills were quite good (as I can recall my reading skills myself). I think at age 9, you could have attempted to get me to understand quantum mechanics on a conceptual level. So, maybe at best, I'm only a nine-year old.
Then again, as you've mentioned, human language may not necessarily represent reality. And if you're going to fold the system of mathematics and language down and say it's invalid and does not represent reality, then yes, I'm going to say you're right. We all may as well be two-year olds.
I will counter with something, however. And if you've studied Eastern philosophy you may understand this. If we've learned something as humans throughout our years of living (well past the age of 2), then we've learned what reality is NOT rather than IS. So, we've eliminated things.
What folly of humans, to have created an imaginary line between something they call "the internal world" and "the external world", and using the word "Experience" as if it were completely general. In life, we only say we have certain types of experiences. Dragging in the brain in trying to account for what are actually grammatical misconceptions is of no help.
Surely that the detection of heat that tells us that something is hot is a mechanical reaction ... consciousness is just the higher brain (captain of the ship) making sure we operate in the best way to maintain our life... you make it seem like we have god like insight into the workings of the universe..
You don't even understand the problem. Some people don't. Maybe some are zombie.s
I like what Chalmers is trying to do and applaud his attempts to call attention to the fact that we don't understand how physical processes give rise to mental ones. However, sadly, Chalmers does not distinguish between mind and consciousness. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations all arise IN consciousness, but they are NOT consciousness in and of themselves. That our world's foremost authority on consciousness fails to be clear on this distinction does not bode well for his work. Just saying.
Does a rock have experience? You're made of matter... the same stuff... why does a human feel pain and a rock doesn't?