There is no "buzzing around" for photons. They exist at the origin and the destination simultaneously without the passage of time...for the photon that is...no matter how far apart the origin and destination are.
@@DocSiders that seems not true. We know photon has a speed, fastest possible speed but still limited. So it takes time to travel through space, therefore, for example, a photon from sun takes about eight minutes to reach the earth; it can't be at the two places at same time. Isn't it?
Sorry but light (photons) only travel at the speed of light in vacuum, Space is not a vacuum. When light hits the planet a lot of it gets topped and turned into thermal energy. LEARN SOME BASIC SCIENCE PLEASE. Its bad enough with bullshit artists like, stephen hawking, brian greene, machio KUKU, all are doing all they can to damage science, Hawking no longer can damage science but his lunacy as already damaged science to the point it starting to look like religion. Some one who calls them selves a scientist and gets papers accepted that state "HOLES CAN HAVE MASS" ,is damaging science. Worm holes as they are described can not exist under the laws of the universe we know.
@@seeker9241 the reason it’s said they don’t experience time it’s actually because photons are massless (being massless is also the reason they’re traveling at the speed of light, but that’s another topic, although still related). Mass is intimately related to the passage of time.. I’d recommend you to watch some videos on this because it’s really a fascinating topic. Cheers! :)
What really gets me about this lecture (apart from believing that Chalmers is right and wrong on a few things) is that he gives this entire lecture without any apparent teleprompters or podium or index cards. Gotta say, I'm impressed. Was it all memorized? I'm sure parts were memorized, but the fact that he never flounders or makes clumsy transitions even in the relative small space of 20 minutes is impressive.
If he's talking about something that is not only a concept but that he has truly assimilated, there is no need for teleprompters. He can talk about it from his experience.
It's because his conciousness is at work, utilizing the intelligence, mind, and physical body (brain etc) to deliver his subjective experience...his passion into conciousness research. "Speaking from the heart".
Has anyone else felt this? I dunno exactly how I'm going to explain it, but here it goes... Its only happened to me a few times, but the feeling comes on when I'm thinking about my own consciousness, or maybe while starring at myself in a mirror, but I'll go into this state (I don't know what else to call it) and this state would make me realise I exist, and suddenly this strange feeling would come over me, like how weird it is that I'm me... lol, I don't know how to explain this without sounding ridiculous... But it really is a strange feeling, it only lasts a few seconds and then it passes.
As a philosophy teacher, I believe David Chalmers has advanced our thinking about consciousness greatly! Perhaps either his view that it is fundamental or his view that it is universal is correct.
I think he is taking us back to Classical Greece, when why questions were thought to be useful in our understanding. He ignores that in science and in every other method, strong correlations and causal relations are what we can observe ! He sounds like he never had a course on Philosophy of science!
Brother coppens, before insulting and disrespecting other views one must be knowledgeable and sensible about the true sense of the view. Here, I wanted to express that ongoing debate between material and spiritual scientists will help to explore a new dimension in human history through Consciousness studies.
I'm really disappointed by all the comments being made by my fellow science friendly atheists. you all are clinging to materialism like dogma. chalmers has not presented any arguments in this video, because it is a 20 minute TED talk; he has merely stated a possible worldview. yet, all of you- priding yourselves in rationality and objectivism- have dismissed him completely. you have claimed that he is irrational and assumption-ridden. on what grounds? you have no idea what the reasoning is behind his views. it appears that you all believe that if something is counter to materialism, then it is irrational by definition. certainly THAT is not rational. read chalmers' book 'the conscious mind'. if you can follow, his arguments are quite sophisticated and persuasive. contrary to the assumptions made in these comments, chalmers' view is completely consistent with current science, and does not require even a smidgen of faith.
Materialism has nothing to do with Methodological Naturalism (science). His comforting speculations fail to meet the demarcation standards of a scientific hypothesis, rendering his ideas pseudo philosophical. We have good reasons for using logic and the principles of Methodological Naturalism in our scientific frameworks. Without those tools we allow magical thinking to intrude in our epistemology ...and we are not in the dark ages any more. Such practices are unacceptable. This is how we do science. Stop trying to push your supernatural principles in an empirical evaluation system. Stop demanding from the academia to include your supernatural principles....this is the exact reason why science split from philosophy! Please go set up your own discipline of inquiry with your own set of principles and your own frameworks. Time will show if your ideas are able to produce accurate predictions and technical applications.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 methodological naturalism is the belief that there are no "super natural" explanations for natural phenomena. But if you look back in time, speculation about all kinds of things which we now accept as scientific fact would have been considered "super natural" explanations by today's standards. Nothing Chalmers proposed is fundamentally different from many of the ideas that were considered way outside the bounds of naturalism before they were discovered and explained, but which are now widely accepted as natural. Invisible fields of energy that give rise to space and time and all matter, haha, indeed. Supernatural nonsense, you drug addled hippy freak. See what I just did there.
@@yellowburger Unfortunately you are describing Philosophical Naturalism (that is a common error). Methodological Naturalism acknowledges the limitations of our methodologies to investigate nature. The Natural is all that we can observe, falsify, evaluate or verify, so we can not accept non naturalistic explanation . That is not because of our philosophical presuppositions but due to pragmatic necessity! We can not verify claims with supernatural causation, so we can not accept such claims in our explanations. -"But if you look back in time, speculation about all kinds of things which we now accept as scientific fact would have been considered "super natural" explanations by today's standards." -Not really, I do understand that this claim is the last hope of most super-naturalist , but that is not true at all. On the contrary. From the dawn of western philosophy with the Ancient Greeks, we constantly struggled to explain things by introducing mind properties in to the ontology nature.(Intention, purpose/teleology, god/creators etc). Claim after claim, our observations managed to discredit this supernatural idea of mind properties existing in addition to nature. So 2.300 years later, after we first posed those same question, we now have a huge epistemology that does not include the supernatural at all! There isn't A SINGLE CASE in our, descriptive frameworks that needs the supernatural as a necessary and sufficient explanation of an observable phenomenon. Name one scientific framework and you are the winner of this debate! -"Nothing Chalmers proposed is fundamentally different from many of the ideas that were considered way outside the bounds of naturalism before they were discovered and explained,, but which are now widely accepted as natural." -They are widely accepted as natural, because their principles are natural. Chalmers is projecting mind properties in addition to nature....by rejecting them to be a product of nature (biological brain). His principles are supernatural be definition. He is making an unfalsifiable, supernatural hypothesis well beyond the limits of a Null Hypothesis. That doesn't mean that his idea is wrong....only that is is irrational and epistemically or wisely useless. Invisible fields (means invisible to our eyes BUT NOT UNDETECTABLE) have OBSERVABLE effects on how the particles behave and interact. These are measurable , quantifiable properties which display empirical regularities!!!! They do not need supernatural principles to "exist". They are just natural fields with specific properties, without intention, purpose , biases, choice or any other mind property necessary to affect the basic blocks of matter. what you did is that you demonstrated your ignorance on the basic definitions of Methodological Naturalism, the Supernatural and you that you are unable to identify the differences between natural principles and new age super natural principles!
@@nickolasgaspar9660 How would you respond to the idea that methodological naturalism views the "natural" as only things that can be measured/observed, and the super-natural as explanations which involve things that cannot be measured/observed. If you agree with this definition, then I would argue that speculation about hypothetical causes which have yet to be discovered is a fundamental part of science, but this is basically using what are by definition "supernatural" explanations. They only become "natural" once empirical evidence of said causes has been observed. But science could hardly evolve if scientists didn't speculate about as yet unobserved causes. To restrict science to explanations that have only observed empirical causes would be to ignore how science is actually done and how it has progressed. Furthermore, Chalmers is not proposing "mind properties in addition to nature," he is speculating that mind properties might exist in nature outside of the brain, or perhaps outside of the strictly neural networking of the brain (in some aspect of the quantum particles and field which encompasses the physical substance of the brain, for example). The idea is that there might be some as yet unobserved "natural" quality in the material substance of the world which gives rise to our internal subjective states. Why does he speculate like this? Because attempts to reduce our internal conscious experiences to brain states have only succeeded in showing correlation, but not in explaining how we have the internal aspects of those experiences.
@@yellowburger I have to clarify some things before I respond to the idea you are presenting. Methodological Naturalism isn't just a "view". Its a description of our CURRENT abilities. This is what we can do with our current methodologies and this limits the ontological principles we can use in our hypotheses....if we are interested of course in the production of knowledge. Now the problem with your "definition" of the supernatural is that it doesn't explain anything. If you can not observe and quantify the cause of a process...then you are not justified to say anything about it because you don't have a way to evaluate your speculations. THis is why we don't use such principles in science and when we do so in philosophy we identify it as pseudo philosophy! "If you agree with this definition, then I would argue that speculation about hypothetical causes which have yet to be discovered is a fundamental part of science, but this is basically using what are by definition "supernatural" explanations." - You are conflating the unknown with the supernatural. Metaphysical speculations are essential in science...you are right. But you are missing a really important detail. Metaphysics in science are always based on Scientific Principles. It took us 2300 years to get rid of the supernatural causation and that led us to the run away success of science in epistemology as we know it. Now you are asking to introduce it back again , not because we have examples of how successful magical explanations are, but because we have some comforting ideas about our existential anxiety since our expiring biological body is not what defines the limits of our existence (according to Chalmers agenda)! A hypothesis DOESN"T become natural because it is empirically observed. This is not the criteria of evaluation of a hypothesis. You need to understand the differences between the supernatural, the metaphysical and the empirical knowledge. A metaphysical hypothesis is one that goes beyond our current knowledge (physika/science). So eg the claims of string theory are metaphysical, Chalmers' claims are metaphysical etc. The difference between those two is that string theory does not use supernatural principles while Chalmers's idea does. By excluding supernatural principles from science , we don't "restrict" our methodologies. We are only protecting our hypotheses from unjustified presumptions. Science has really strict standards when it comes to what it can be assumed. The starting point of our speculations is based on what we currently know and it extents in to the unknown. YOU SHOULD never accept the unknown as the basis of your presuppositions and extent even beyond that . And to be clear. We don't claim that Chalmers is WRONG. Not at all. He could be right about everything he says. What we point out is that he is IRRATIONAL to accept things that he doesn't know how possible they can be. He is practicing pseudo philosophy. "Furthermore, Chalmers is not proposing "mind properties in addition to nature," he is speculating that mind properties might exist in nature outside of the brain" -This is what "in addition to nature" means. He is arguing that it is possible(!!!) that a phenomenon that can only be observed by the functions of the brain, can manifest without the need of this biological structure.....as a substance on its own. First of all, we don't know what nature allows so its irrational to claim about such possibilities. To go further, if we accept that he is making the claim that an invisibly "cosmic brain" from matter is responsible for mind properties....then we need to accept so many assumptions that it becomes Unarsimonious and useless, plus its unfalsifiable. (and we ignore the value of a NULL HYPOTHESIS in logic!). 1. we need to demote the role of the brain without evidence. 2. we need to assume the existence of a field which interacts with the brain(matter)....but somehow we can quantify it or observe this interaction!(we need to throw all our physics out the window and Frank Wilzek's Core theory on what we can observe in nature!) 3. We need to assume a new type type of matter which our cosmic brain is made of...without evidence Lets stop here with these assumptions...... -" Because attempts to reduce our internal conscious experiences to brain states have only succeeded in showing correlation, but not in explaining how we have the internal aspects of those experiences." -Science CAN ONLY point out to STRONG CORRELATIONS between a phenomenon and a process. that is not new and its not special for the phenomenon of the mind. eg.- We only have correlation between mass and gravity...but we can always go beyond and talk about an external source (like Emergent Gravity hypothesis suggests!) - We can only show correlations between the shape of a fluid in a cup and the electromagnetic structure of the cup....We can never exclude a unobservable "cup soul" type of substance responsible for all fluids taking the shape of the cup. - We can re-assume phlogiston as the invisible catalyst of combustion...the enabler of the property known as chemical reaction...go test that!!!! WHERE DO WE STOP...and what are our criteria? We Humans tend to push our questions some steps beyond the observable in order to take care our ignorance on how things emerge. This is not science or philosophy.
Chalmers has been at the forefront of consciousness research for decades. He coined the term "the hard problem" to describe the mystery of insentient matter somehow giving rise to consciousness - an epiphenomenon which has yet to be explained by neuroscience, because a correlate of consciousness is not necessarily its causation. But just a quick glance at the comment section shows that the true experts on this topic are found not in labs and universities around the world, but on UA-cam - the sheer audacity of some people astounds me. You make no attempt to learn because you're convinced you already possess the answer. I find this kind of hubris in people to be utterly repugnant. When I was young my father would tell me that I had two ears and one mouth and that I ought to use them in the same proportion. Apparently your fathers made no attempt to instil that sort of wisdom in you.
what comes to my mind when i read the comments that maybe most ppl have had no experience to learn about their consciousness. maybe not even the opportunity to reflect about it outside of their own heads. i am quite certain most ppl will agree that consciousness is a fascinating topic. yet most ppl may only reflect on it within themselves. thinking they are experts on the topic because. and in a sense they are because it would seem that no one can know more about your own consciousness than yourself. seeing ppl react to this talk makes actually sense if you look at it from that kind of view.
sol exactly. as Chalmers mentioned in this talk, it is even impossible for you to tell if I or any other being for that matter is consciousness as well. ;)
Scott Douglas Bravo! Couldn't agree more. It annoys me to no end when people dismiss such questions as pointless or absurd. OF COURSE the answer will seem absurd and counter-intuitive. Have we learned nothing from the history of science? Whatever the right answer is....it's bound to be incredibly counter-intuitive, in the same sort of way that quantum non-locality is counter-intuitive. Dismissing these questions as "silly" strikes me as profoundly cynical and jaded. True geniuses(like Einstein) were not above asking the sort of questions usually only asked by children. If anything, children's naivety is a good starting point. Once a child grows into a cynical adult who thinks they've got it all figured out...real discovery and progress grind to a halt. It's beyond refreshing to hear someone tackling the "hard problem" with honesty. I read Dennet's "Consciousness Explained" and was left completely unimpressed. He explained the mechanics of consciousness to a T. But...never once addressed the real question. Sure, we can explain, in detail, how "I see a flower," for instance. But...we can only explain the SEEING....we never address the "I" that sees. Why doesn't the brain merely process input(like sight) and respond accordingly? Why is there a "self" watching all this...at all...when it's entirely unnecessary to explain the mechanism of seeing? Is there any question in science more alluring and fascinating? Personally, I can't think of a single one.
He is a pseudo philosopher. He bases his philosophy on useless why questions and he ignores our current scientific epistemology on purpose. He is a mystery promoter and of the idea that our brain ability to direct our focused attention to important stimuli is something special. That is an anti Copernican why of thought that fails to promote our understanding.
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." Max Planck, 1931
That is an argument from authority fallacy. Max Planck was not a Neuroscientist or a Cognitive Scientist. We know understand QM far better than people did in the days of Planck. We understand that consciousness has nothing to do with our quantum observations. Existence is primary because in order to be aware there must be something to be aware of. This debate is over many years ago. Pseudo philosophers like Chalmers insist in these idiotic claims.
@@stellarwind1946 no it's not. There are thousands and thousands of research taken place on this subject. You just lack knowledge and that doesn't mean that it does not exist.
@@stellarwind1946 Does it sound insane, that mass can change the time space and we call it gravity? For thousounds of years this was unknown eventhough the people experienced gravity in their daily life every day.
Well "what is consciousness" is a general question. Its an abstract concept of our ability to be aware of things and thoughts. "How we are conscious" is a question investigated by science. A specific part of our brain is responsible for it's arousal , allowing to direct it's attention to the stimuli and reflect on it by connecting the rest of the brain areas responsible for memory , reason, prediction, symbolic language heuristics etc.
@@miguelmmc5817 I am describing human consciousness (our). I hope everyone in here reading are of the same species. Every organism having a brain is conscious of his environment and it's self. Animals can be aware but the quality of their conscious states chances since the rest of their mind properties are not so advanced.
Consciousness is an illusion. Thinking is not consciousness. Thinking is just interpreting data your senses receive. Reality is just the illusion of light, just like a movie. Its just a picture light show the sun projects. All the universe is light and a deep knowing that extends from the sun. Your just a machine the sun manifest. Your thinking is just interpreting a previous picture light show projected buy the sun. Your consciousness is just your senses interpreting light. Everything from matter itself to sound and smell are just different frequencies and vibration of light. In that sense the reality we live in is a simulation. Physics will soon prove all this. The elites already know this. Like Jesus said God is light! Thats all we will know him as in this reality light. Its the creator of our universe. Thats is an example of a knowing. Knowledge is power!
This guy seems like the real deal to me. All the theories are in baby stages, but I think he's thinking about it in the right way. Figuring out consciousness must require some kind of paradigm shift or it's nothing. His ideas sound crazy but if you stop and think about it, anything that *really, actually* explained consciousness would sound crazy at first. We are in our infancy when it comes to understanding consciousness.
Some of us are yes, but others know exactly what consciousness is. Some of us know why we were placed on this planet, how many times we have reincarnated and what happens when we die.
This guy is brilliant, I ve seen him on- closer to truth. Even the host there, Robert, a very bright thinker and a leaning fundamental materialist was impressed with his theories.
I do not have theories, I have facts. It is your choice to accept or to reject them. We are all here for one reason, to earn our way back home to Heaven and a great teacher is needed....................Falun Dafa
Consciousness cannot be seen, imagined or conceptualized, but it is the only thing that is real, and without it nothing could be conceptualized or imagined.
I disagree on the notion that it can't be imagined. Though it might it might be my own consiousness, I can imagine a different person with a different consciousness then myself, but asking this question I have a question for myself, and you. Is this consciousness I imagine independent from my own consciousness. And if this consciousness I can imagine becomes popular through the masses. Would it still be the consciousness I orignally imagined?
Most of what your brain does is unconscious. There are literally billions of neurons and we are not aware of how they are all are interacting at any moment. Consciousness is that very small part of your neural experience that you are aware of and can report to others. For example when your visual system and brain respond to a certain spectrum of light, most of the processing is completely unconscious; we are only aware of the experience of seeing the color your brain assigns to that light spectrum (it's an "experiential label" that your unconscious neural machinery applies for you to be aware of), which is a minute portion of the overall processing that occurs. Consciousness has an evolutionary purpose for survival, which however does NOT include understanding the underlying neural mechanisms - that was not needed. Nonetheless, consciousness, as the part of your neural processing you are aware of and can report to others, is easy to imagine and conceptualize. But you might say, what about the part of me I know is there, that I can feel? Answer: that is your awareness of the mostly unconscious part of your brain that directs your mental focus. So if you decide to focus on that pretty girl across the street, most of what happens is then again unconscious, since the neural machinery is so incredibly complex. But you do have an awareness of redirecting the unconscious neural machinery, which gives you a feeling of a self with free will, or "consciousness". That feeling of a "conscious self" is also evolutionary enforced since it helps us value our life. Our conscious awareness, which models the neural process of attention in a simplistic way, does not clearly reveal itself to us, and that is indeed confusing when we try to explain it. But this awareness is nonetheless adequate for its purpose of modeling and control of the physiological process of attention. HOWEVER, what makes this even more confusing and hard to understand is that our models of what we perceive through our senses, such as the redness of the apple, are also based on unrevealed neural processes. That is, the perception or experience of redness is the brain's visual label (a visual hardwired modeling process) that it applies when a particular spectrum of light impinges on our visual system. The redness that we experience is simply the brain's shorthand, and highly adaptive, way of telling us about the spectral characteristics - it's a visual label (analogous to a verbal label, but applied unconsciously). As with the conscious awareness control of our attention neural processes, we do not perceive the underlying physiological processes that perform this visual labeling. So when our conscious awareness focuses on the redness of the apple, there are actually TWO types of parallel neuronal action that are hidden from us: 1) the hardwired labeling of the sensing process (e.g. experiencing red in response to a certain type of spectrum impinging on the eye) 2) the attention process that focuses our brain on this sensory experience. This double layer of unperceived "trickery" that our brain performs is therefore extremely counter intuitive.
To ParoMation: Read, or listen the audiobooks on youtube of Nissargadata, there is a level of consciousness that cannot be accessed by reflection. You are it, but cannot see it. I believe in translations of his work they call it "awareness". In this interpretation, awareness does not have an object. There is something beyond the imaginer and the imagened, that makes both of them possible, which itself cannot be imagined. If you would try to image it, you would again lapse back into this lower level of consciousness. The only way is to "be" it, and in it everything dissolves, including distinctions, memory, object and subjects. That is, what I think, Nis. would say. Approximately.
Even the salvation of the soul is in the consciousness that I cannot pass on to anyone: "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it" - Revelation 2:17.
@@andrewtaylor9799 classic. So, the concepts about consiosness is more valid then direct expirience of it? Odd logic. All you got is your consiosness, how does the concepts within it can be a stronger argument?
I like how this guy thinks. I think the problem with scientists looking at consciousness is that they are looking only from the perspective of it being an emergent property. Consciousness may actually be at the base abstraction of reality, observing every single interaction simultaneously. If this is correct, then it would be safe to assume that if you were to put atoms together in a particular order to create a brain, then that brain would inherently be conscious, rather than the consciousness being an emergent property created by the brain's existence. _EDIT: We used to view the effect of Gravity as being an emergent property that objects containing mass "created." Now we view Gravity as a field that mass simply interacts with. Viewing it as an emergent properrty didn't make much sense; Viewing it as a fundamental property does. Can't we also try to look at consciousness as a potential fundamental property of reality, then come up with scientific experiments to test that hypothesis? I don't see what the problem is with some of the people making comments on this video._ Autonomic, subconscious, cognitive functioning and self awareness are all emergent properties of the brain, however consciousness doesn't seem to fit with that model no matter how much we try to view it as such. There is still the observational phenomenon that is viewing the film that is created within the brain. It's akin to saying "we know how the viewer works because we are analysing the pixels on the television screen that the viewer is watching." It just doesn't make sense looking at neurons in the brain and saying "This is why consciousness exists." Science can only go so far as to say "This is what creates the whole image that is observed; But we still don't comprehend what is doing the viewing." Since everything is made out of space-time and exists in reality, consciousness must also be made of the same substance. Everything is connected at the base abstraction of reality. Consciousness (the observational phenomenon) has to be a fundamental property of reality, because it doesn't work viewing it as an emergent property the same as we view high abstraction neural networks in the brain.
Consciousness IS the label used to explain an emergent property of the brain Jim. In order to make a different classification, you will need something else called evidence. In science we can only evaluate a Null Hypothesis due to its falsifiability. Anything beyond the "Null" state is irrational and irrelevant to science.
Jim Griffiths SIMULTANEOUS! Fluid theory (Reproduction/Feed/Reasoning) decanted selfmultidimentionalover... The polydynamics of the movement generates pseudo-autonomy as material property, of the autogenous phenomenon; existing.(...) Simultaneous as my unidimensional variability... unidimensional variability = live-beings
Nickolas Gaspar Fluid theory (Reproduction/Feed/Reasoning) decanted selfmultidimentionalover... The polydynamics of the movement generates pseudo-autonomy as material property, of the autogenous phenomenon; existing.(...) Simultaneous as my unidimensional variability... unidimensional variability = live-beings
All we know for sure, is that we experience the world. With what do we experience the world?...consciousness. Thus consciousness is fundamental in everyone's experience and nothing could be confirmed to exist without it.
@@ubu6949 you thus assume that by committing suicide, you would end your subjective consciousness. I would offer that your consciousness continues, and numerous studies have been done to soft prove this. Either way, no one really knows. See you on the other side dude.
You're confusing the subjective with the objective. Of course consciousness is fundamental to everyone's subjective experience - that's true by definition. The idea Chalmers is discussing is the idea that consciousness could be a fundamental part of the Universe - the objective world - just like mass, spacetime, and charge.
@Electro_blob You're also confusing the subjectivd with the objective. Chalmers isn't talking about the idea that consciousness is a fundamental part of your subjective experience - that's a completely obvious tautology. He's saying that consciousness might be a fundamental part of the Universe. But it would be very strange if this is true because, as ubu pointed out, consciousness can be destroyed.
Hardcore materialists in the comments be all like "I understand consciousness perfectly, the brain can be explained with cognitive neuroscience and has been mapped." That's cool bro, now explain experience of the color blue.
We are part of a conscious universe. For some reason we seem to think we are separate from it and that causes confusion. We are connected to everything that we can see, touch feel or measure. We are consciousness.
@@MrMebigfatguy energy is consciousness it's why E=MC^2 if particles and molecular compounds are not conscious, how do they know a consistent way to interact with other particles and how to behave under different circumstances? How are they able to react to their surroundings without some form of awareness?
@@tinywillis that's not what consciousness means. There is no evidence that matter or energy is conscious. When your argument is "how could something be without. .." that is a logical fallacy
@@MrMebigfatguy Dave Brosius con·scious·ness /ˈkän(t)SHəsnəs/ noun the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings. the awareness or perception of something by a living being. the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world. So that's exactly what conciousness means. How could mass exist without energy How can hot exist without cold? Or, light without dark? Good without evil? How can space exist without a smallest length? (Max Plank) Want to tell me again its logical fallacy to make statements like that? Connection and exclusion is exactly how you solve logic puzzles. You are ignoring a logical and founded statement because you dislike the way that logic is framed that's willful ignorance. And You say there is no evidence, what experiment could one do as proof or disproof of the consciousness of a particle?
@@tinywillis I don't know what experiment one could do. But you can't make a claim without evidence. There is no evidence that matter or energy or particles of themselves are conscious..
@@jeffforsythe9514 I've sometimes thought, could it be that we are conscious when we are asleep and not dreaming, but the reason why we perceive ourselves as not being conscious is because we have no memory of it? In other words maybe it is our memory that stops working rather than consciousness when we are asleep and not dreaming.
@@jeffforsythe9514 So, you are saying here that; you ain't have your soul when you fall asleep. That is a contradictory statement for someone that have said here that when people die, their souls and conscience still exist and can be transferred through reincarnation.
Amazing talk...my intrigue was probably through the roof near the end there when he said the audience of the TED lecture could have a collective consciousness seperate from the consciousness of its each individual human members. Like a crowd could gather, and that crowd would not be aware of an invisible intelligence brought out of their conjunction that is somewhere, with a sum of the crowd's points of views, thinking by 'itself' until the crowd disperses. Pretty intriguing thought!
Its sad but that really is science in a nutshell - we have* to pretend it doesn't exist until we can quantify/measure and lock it away some place, that however is not the problem. The problem is the people who forget that this is just a strategic approach - these are the people who really suspect the world disappears when they shut their eyes. Great commend btw!
@Electro_blob Love science so I hate to sound like we are beating on it but the challenge is specifically where the greatest gains lie. I love the new crop of Scientist Practitioners who are emerging especially in the biomedical sciences - David Sinclair, Valter Longo, Peter Attia etc - these guys I think get it - that it doesn't become science when it enters the textbooks. For instance for generations cultures everywhere demanded - often for spiritual reasons - that people should fast. Then came science which ridiculed fasting as an adjunct in palliative care, prescribing and preferring pills instead; now the top labs are falling over each other telling us how wonderful fasting is - all I want to say is, when Grandma claimed it you said it was nonsense - now your reagents have changed color we should give you a Nobel? We all just need a little bit of humility for things that don't make sense to us initially is all.
@Electro_blob "the color blue is just a wave of light" spot on. Perfect example of how almost all of our reality is something those people are totally blind to. Some smart philosopher who is good with words could use it as a proof of how wrong they are.
The discussion around this problem is really fascinating because it is so contentious. Let me try to understand by summarizing, those who believe in the "explanatory gap" and those who dismiss it. First, the explanatory gap describes the problem that there is no scientific theory that can explain what causes subjective experience. Of course advanced neuroscience can very accurately predict what a test subject would report thinking or feeling - we have a very good understanding of the objective qualities of inner brain states, and the reported subjective effects they cause. What we don't have an explanation for, is how these brain states give rise to subjective experience. Dualism, panpsychism, etc., are speculations on what type of scientific hypotheses could account for subjective experience, as part of an overall theory of everything (ie, as part of a future physics). I can plainly see the explanatory gap is a valid problem. Now, is it the concern of science, or philosophy? I don't necessarily see why we need to understand this for any scientific purpose, unless we were trying to create artificial consciousness, which I think would give rise to many ethical questions. Although I respect the prerogative of philosophers like Chalmers to speculate on future physics, I am OK with this problem never being answered by physical science. It is enough to understand the neural correlates of consciousness for us to improve medicine, psychology, etc. I do have trouble understanding why people can't see that the explanatory gap is valid, even as a philosophical problem. Here is my attempt to make an argument for dismissing the explanatory gap: Scientific observations are based on objective phenomenon, but those phenomenon ultimately come as subjective qualia to a conscious observer. Only once objectified into phenomenon, and then synthesized with our current best model of the universe, do we have a scientific fact, which represents a part of nature (if the phenomena does not fit our model, we either have an observation error or need to update the model). Qualia therefore precede nature, and if we try to make a theory of that qualia itself, we are in a way necessarily theorizing "outside of nature" - which is why the illusionists and physicalists say that Chalmers' speculations are supernatural, even though he sees his project as an attempt to expand science with new fundamentals. I believe this argument is convincing that the explanatory gap is an invalid scientific problem, but not that it is an invalid philosophical problem. Along with logic and causation, a conscious observer is a prerequisite of science that can never be empirically demonstrated (is not falsifiable) but must simply be assumed.
I see your point, but science goes way beyond simply describing natural phenomena in other ways that are commonly acknowledged. Take string theory or the multiverse. Strictly speaking, consciousness is much closer to our daily reality and implementation of research than other observations, if you consider how much progress has been made on the development of AI in the last couple of decades, the trend towards designer babies and even with regard to our climate crisis and the implications for ethics and responsibility of using our crude scientific know-how for better or worse, because we have mastered everything but ourselves. Does consciousness really precede our mindscape in a way that is outside of the natural world or does that definition reflect our current limited horizon? what makes you think it's not measureable?
When you say science, what you really mean is phsics. Science doesn't need an objective viewer, just think of psychology. All the sciences come from the philosophy. Philosophy is a meta-science, so this topic is at exactly the right spot. The philosophy should build up a science of conciousness.
THANK YOU! Everything you've said is in the direction I've been desperately looking to find someone else going in, regarding consciousness. Excellent job with the argument against all these people (as brilliant and well-intended as they are) who require that consciousness submit to material science on at least some level. I would say that if a person has even begun to accept the nature of consciousness as they experience it, they would have the good sense to not be making any intellectual demands of it whatsoever. A large majority of the voices I've heard speak on the mystery of consciousness completely fail to define consciousness without sneaking in plenty of opportunity for material reduction. I think the reason for the mass avoidance we see may just be an existential anxious fear, which I can completely empathize with. If the nature of your own consciousness hasn't horrified you, I have to wonder if you've genuinely tried reconciling it with your understanding of what our universe is.
Seems like there are two opinions in this comment section. That consciousness really isn't as big a problem as we think it is, or it really is. I think the reason for this major disagreement in this issue is a misunderstanding. The people who don't see consciousness as a hard problem are the ones who are simply saying its probably a result of brain activity. They may be right as well, but thats not the actual problem that intellectuals have argued about for 2 millenia when it comes to consciousness. The actual problem is why. How do you explain consciousness through simple neural processes? If we knew exactly what the fundamental neural systems were that were at least necessary for the arise of some sort of consciousness, that wouldn't be the answer. Why is the question, so why is it that this series of chemical and electrical processes organized in a circuitry like fashion which is the brain give rise to consciousness, and not that slightly altered version of the brain where nothing is happening. Another thing about this is that as far as we know it, its impossible to measure whether or not something is conscious. We go off intuition. How do we know if extremely advanced artificial intelligence in the next decade is conscious, or just mimicing consciousness? Could you even attempt to mimic consciousness or would you always result in creating somehting that is conscious?
"Why is it that this series of chemical and electrical processes organized in a circuitry like fashion which is the brain give rise to consciousness, and not that slightly altered version of the brain where nothing is happening." The version of the brain where nothing is happening would leave its owner helpless to defend itself against nature and therefore would never propagate its DNA in the wild. In other words, we think because the thinkers are the ones who survived while all the others were wiped out long ago. "As far as we know it, its impossible to measure whether or not something is conscious." That's true, but don't forget that we know almost nothing about it, so the fact that we have no way to measure consciousness is a very poor indicator of whether it could be measured by people who know more than us. "Could you even attempt to mimic consciousness or would you always result in creating somehting that is conscious?" You certainly can mimic consciousness. The Watson computer is famous for having played Jeopardy and it sometimes answered questions as if it understood the questions and the answers it was giving, but sometimes it gives answers that make it clear that it does not actually understand what it is saying. Watson works by taking shortcuts and using tricks rather than being a fully thinking machine with understanding of everything it is hearing and saying. I see no reason why it might be impossible to create a machine with the full inner life of a human mind running somewhere in its software. That would be real consciousness, as opposed to a machine that is merely programmed to appear conscious.
The brain is not made of "simple neural" processes. The sheer number of neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters make the brain the most complex structure we know of in the entire universe. Consciousness is an emergergent property of this complex material brain. DC is dabbling in WOO Woo.
Yes and it's clearly obvious that this "why" question is both fundamental to our human sentience and an intrinsically non-empirical question. There is absolutely nothing you can do empirically to approach the "why" question. Your only option is that if you want to see what is beyond the senses and the mind, you will have to control the senses and the mind. Materialists are too attached to their bodily pleasures to take up any form of spiritual discipline, even as an experiment. Materialists are desperately holding onto the dogma because it props up their materialist identity. It's entirely about egos, and in fact has very little to do with genuine scientific inquiry. This is the sad situation for 99% of the population.
Another crazy idea: Consciousness is that in which the world (and science) appears. What if Consciousness is infinite, eternal and dimensionless, but all dimensions, forms and ideas appear in it, are made of it. Consciousness is not limited by fundamental or universal laws, time, space or mass. All of these are dependent on consciousness, however consciousness does not depend on them? Worth exploring?
Consciousness clearly happens in time. One thought appears after another. I don't know what a static consciousness would be like. Can the qualia of orange exist without time? Further consciousness seems to directly depend on our immediate circumstance. When there is a tree we might experience the qualia of it's smell. When a part of our brain is missing, the experience of sight might end altogether. I don't know what "dimensionless" is supposed to mean here.
This is BRILLIANT. So nice to see someone stand up and actually put it out there. I can't follow all the way to conscious computers, though. Not computers built the way we build them now. Maybe some future computer will be different. Here's one simple argument. When I am awake, I'm conscious. When I'm asleep, and not dreaming, I'm not conscious. But my body still works and so on. I put computers in that category. They're like the autonomous systems of the body that crank right along when we're not conscious and minding the store.
In this talk, he is talking about the need for “scientific understandings of consciousness.” But the entire field of science (biology, physics, chemistry and even psychology) involves gathering of information through our five senses followed by thinking (i.e., mostly visual observations followed by thinking). In other words, all ideas/theories we form about the world and the universe ultimately represent perceptions within our consciousness itself (some of this was explained in this talk). However, even generating theories of consciousness (that he talks about towards the end of this talk in terms of “understanding our relationship to nature”) happen within consciousness in the form of thoughts. Now, is it is possible for us to set up against our own consciousness and understand it independent of it? This might sound “crazy” to some, but ancient Buddhist teachings do exactly that. In these teachings, fully understanding consciousness is referred to as “enlightenment” or “seeing things just as they are.” This understanding is accomplished through mindfulness/meditation practices by each individual - through these practices one understands the nature of consciousness. The following article explains that ‘analyzing consciousness’ and ‘analyses conducted in science’ represent two very different “levels of analyses”: sgo.sagepub.com/content/5/2/2158244015583860
@@brucewayne-og8ro The Buddha was first influenced by Hindu teachers from whom he learned how to calm his mind and reach deep and very pleasant calm mind-states. However, he realized that simply reaching these calm mind states do not answer many questions he had. This lead him on a ‘quest for truth’ for which he strived for many years - this eventually lead him to understand the nature of the mind (consciousness) which he described in great detail in his teachings (recorded in the Pali Cannon). He taught the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, dependent origination, the three characteristics of existence, etc., that enables anyone to gradually reach enlightenment.
400 dislikes? As soon as I saw that, I had a strong feeling it's because so many people are either unfamiliar with or afraid of philosophy. Any philosophical line of reasoning sounds too 'abstract' and so is perceived to be frivolous, "Why not just explain how it works? What's with all the weird lingo?" Some even knee-jerk categorize anything marginally subtle in philosophical terms as 'woo'. Woo is a thing, and it is a problem, but it isn't everything that you don't understand because you haven't acquainted yourself with the principles of metaphysics, ontology, or psychology. Or maybe the dislikes are from the seemingly popular consensus view that Dennett is correct. It's such a silly thing. As soon as you say the hard problem doesn't really exist, you're left with the burden of explaining why. If that explanation is that it's a perceptual illusion, I'll remind you that no physical model which supports that has been experimentally validated sufficiently to be accepted by the majority. Therefore, you're left with the unfinished research into how that illusion is cast. Since it's unfinished, and apparently quite difficult, it returns to the category of the hard problem.
+James Hansen This is honestly the most masturbatory comment here, I think. And I'm going to pray to God that you did not mean Dennett's view is popular consensus among anyone but the New Atheist population of the internet.
Feeling, feelings is the key word here. Our conscience is composed of various feelings, and those chemical feelings affect the abstract logic we come to understand those feelings. What was the 'first" feeling that happened in evolution? what was the second, and then how to perceive a breakdown of a creature that only mixes those two? Gr8! Peace ☮💜
In my opinion this is the most unique and intruiging Ted talk I've ever listened to. I would love to watch a show with this guy and Elon Musk discussing this topic.
I'm a computer programmer. This give me a unique insight into the nature of consciousness. To me, consciousness is a very simple thing to understand. In my opinion, consciousness is an elementary process in the brain that always tries to resolve 2 questions. 1) What is going on? This is analogous to input(s). 2) What should I do? This is analogous to output(s). There are sub-processes in each stage but the sequence of these questions(stages) repeat continuously all the time while we live. Consciousness also continues while we sleep. The biggest difference between awake and sleeping is that the brain is deprived of most of our senses and the loop time of these two stages is much longer. On the first question "What is going on?", our brains try to make sense of all the available senses(touch, taste, etc.). The brain also uses it's memories and it's reasoning in this stage. On the second question "What should I do?", our brains try to form a response to the first question. One of the main sub-questions to be resolved in this stage is "what is most important at this time". A decision is made like rest or run or talk about something.
That's functionalism - the "easy problem" of consciousness. As you say, it was solved the day we discovered computers. It's about the flow and handling of data and inputs/outputs. No big deal. But that is not all consciousness is. You could have a robot handle all of the same information and yet "no one is home". There would be no "first person experience" of "what it is like" to be such an information processor. Some people have a hard time grasping qualia because they haven't experienced consciousness apart from the *contents* of consciousness. Yet, it is possible to experience consciousness even without thought, memory, sensation, or any other contents. It is the visceral experience of what it is like to be a being. Various forms of meditation or other altered states demonstrate the distinction clearly. Nothing about the functional handling of data explains that. In other words, why should *any* configuration of interacting atoms *ever* create the feeling of what it is like to be conscious? You could imagine such a structure knowing all about itself, its context, having goals, and making decisions - even reporting on its states and yet have no actual inner experience of itself that is being felt. A thermostat is built to report on what it detects and take action in response to it. But no one believes it is having an experience. So why should adding any more components, data, or complexity ever begin to produce that feeling? That is the "hard problem" of consciousness and computers can't address it, even in principle.
I personally agree that consciousness is fundamental and also very simple, no more complex then the most simple receiver able to read what it receives, this recognition being the basis of reality. For something to exist means that the existence of nothing is impossible, reality exists to validate it’s own existence through connection such as observation which closes a causality loop, it just depends on the nature of whats beings observed as to the complexity of the receiver. For example to observe a particle through two slits, this needs to be observed optically by an eye to close the feedback loop whether direct or indirect such as a recording which can be observed later, makes no difference. I also believe that it is all time dependant, causing reality to manifest from an otherwise quantised state until that exact moment. Until observation is present then reality cannot be validated, it’s like if nothing exists then nothing can exist then if something is sensed what can cause its existence in that very moment has to also existence but until then everything is quantised. Perhaps I have over explained myself already but I also believe consciousness is a physical object, at its most simple, a duality as nothing can exist alone. I also personally believe the complexity of the mind is just fancy processing and our ability to record information but also create feedback loops between the present, past recordings and even ideas of the future. I personally think the answer is far more eloquent then we might think, the complexity of our minds are because of these elusive feedback loops which could be compared even to magnetic induction through a wire loop, we can read the noise of the induction from the memory feedback loops etc and then assume consciousness is this “living” part of these processes when all it is is any simple receiver in use. I like to think about how what exists today might exist to validate conscious feedback loops that haven’t even occurred yet but will in the future. Remember Einstein’s views about time, how all time exist all the time, what we perceive as future and past is only from our perspective within it. I hope you enjoyed my thought process. I did :)
Everything that exists consists of matter, including thoughts. But the matter that makes up thoughts is many times smaller than quarks. But a great spiritual master can see this matter.....................falun dafa
if humans never came into existence how would consciousness ( even the word! ) be relevant or a thing ?... the cosmos would still be what it is until a possible expiration date without 'feeling '.....
@@johnkerr1113I'll try to explain. We live is the dimension of molecules and planets and when we look through a microscope we see that the particles get smaller and small but increase with energy. This decline in size happens a million times until the smallest of all particles, the human soul. In one particle of air there are a million universes, all different sizes that our technology cannot perceive. Each universe containing souls, conscious souls.
i find it amusing that even though consciousness is the only one thing we can be certain of to exist (since we are permanently trapped inside our brain, experiencing nothing but ourselves and the picture the brain draws for us), still consciousness is for whatever reason the one thing that the seemingly most intelligent people on earth try their best to get rid of.
@@rijpmajohan That doesn't make any sense. Consciousness not being what we think it is, is not the same as consciousness being an illusion. First of all, the entire CONCEPT of an illusion presupposes consciousness, so what are you talking about?
@@rijpmajohan Ok, if we take that and run with it, what exactly is having the illusion? What is being deceived? If you say that consciousness is an illusion in the sense that it's not real (which you don't seem to be doing, but a lot of people are) then I show you the door, but if all you're saying is that consciousness is not what we think it is, then you're not adding anything novel or relevant to the discussion. ''This is just a “useful fiction” for us to survive, that as a byproduct creates the illusion that there is a “thing” called consciousness that is different from everything that it is conscious of'' I don't know what you mean by this. Are you saying consciousness is not qualitatively distinct from everything else in the world, that our awareness and experience is not different from the outside world at all?
Happiness through the human life cycle: infancy- suckling, childhood- Christmas toys, teens- first kiss and or date and passing Algebra, young adulthood- purchase of first new car and perhaps matrimony, 30s- the family and house, 40s- divorce, 50s- finally have some savings, 60s- I can still take a walk and enjoy the smell of the ocean or flowers, 70s- thank God I had a bowel movement this morning!
My best guess - Consciousness had to evolve from the machinery that was available and molded by conditions. Brains developed for the purpose of evaluating the environment for the creatures that posses them. They do this by modeling the inputs from sense organs and continuously monitor and adjust the models to plan ahead and navigate for resources and reproduction. The images (models) we see in our "mind's eye", are only approximations of what our sense organs "see" and hear. The reasonable inference here, is that this constant, real time, evaluation and adjustment of the creature's self-position in space is what most likely produces the sensation of self. And why it mostly disappears (and plays re-runs) when the creature is sleeping and navigation is unnecessary.
I guess that shows that Chalmers wasn't clear enough. Consciousness, as imagined by the hard problem, is more basic than the self. It's experience in itself: The fact that red is red, pain hurts and so on. Why are we not empty information processing machines but actually have subjective experiences if we are made up of inanimate matter subject to the laws of physics? That's Chalmers' hard problem.
Panpsychism is certainly an intriguing concept. The idea that consciousness may be in some way universal could help to explain the origin of the mind. Perhaps the mind is a sort of fractal iteration of universal consciousness, or a bit like a child of it?
Effectively it could be a returning to a three part understanding of human experience. Expect instead of mind body and soul. It's mind, brain, and consciousness.
It's called TED. Technology, Entertainment and Design. Not every talk has to be about something scientific. The point in this talk was not to answer but to let questions arise.
Conor Baxter Because being a "thoughtful question" is insufficient. The question needs to be constrained by evidence. An answer needs to be at least in principle discoverable. I'm hardly the first to suggest that Chalmers is saying things which make no sense.
Matthew Prorok Science began with questions. Questions are vital for evidence to be gained. You don;t get evidence for something unless it is questioned. Who said that it is not discoverable. Many years ago what was above the sky was thought undiscovered. Until people questioned that. Questions are vital for discovery.
"Who said that it is not discoverable." Chalmers did! He wrote a whole book about it: "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory". He's an epiphenomenalist. The whole point of his idea is that consciousness is a separate property beyond the physical, which has no observable effect on physical properties.
@Chip Reuben The scope of scientific investigation is bound by the limits of the 'spacetime ruleset.' In a manner similar to how Godel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrates the limits of mathematics, the study of our universe from within has it’s self evident limitations i.e.. boundary conditions can only be “viewed” from one side. Before, after and adjacent remain practically inaccessible, other than by inference using available models.- hence evidentially unknowable. Maybe. See Tom Campbell's modelling of the hard problem at www.tomcampbell.info/
It's still interesting to read everyone's hypothesis on it, none of us really know but maybe one day someone will figure it out, that will only happen if we have a lot of people thinking about it and researching it :)
There is a guy here named Nicolas gaspar or something who believe is god. Strongly attached with his own dogma point of view “methodological naturalism blablablaaaaa”
A computer processes information. But when that information is processed, without a human being on the end of a monitor to interpret and use that information, it is useless. How are we different? How is it our brains process information, yet without anyone on the end to interpret it... we see it and understand it? It doesn't make sense. Who am "I", and how am I seeing this processed data from my brain? How can I even distinguish myself as a separate entity from my brain?
The reason you're confused is because everyone says computers process information, but they don't! They process *data*. Data doesn't become information until it's understood by a conscious mind. We convert information to data before entering it into a computer and then convert the data back into information when we retrieve it. Information is all about understanding, which is a conscious experience that computers have zero capacity for.
@@GumbyTheGreen1 You notice like me that people often step too easily over the meaning of the word "information". If a very simple system can be in state on or off than the information would be 1 or 0 but that kind of "information" is perhaps more accurate called "data" yes. A computer brain would need the same inborn filters humans have to decide what is information or else it would be all like massive noise coming in from the senses. I also think now about the signals our senses send to the brain. If you analyze those signals, it's not comparable to the signal a sensor sends and which is much more a translation of the actual stimulus but it's even not comparable to midi signals where the information of the sound is constructed locally. What has programmed those filters in the first place ? Evolution I guess but this all heavy stuff to think about as layman ;-)
To understand consicousness, we have to get out of it. To understand beauty, we have to see evil, to understand happiness, we have to experience sadness. There's no one without the other. I gaurantee that once you step out of it you're gonna find truly marvalous things.
NOPE. TRY BEING CONSCIOUS FIRST AND THEN RUN THOSE CONCEPTS BY UR MIND AGAIN, WHEN IT'S IN SANE MODE, NOT WHEN IT'S IN DUMBASS SATANIC MODE TRYING DESPERATELY TO MAKE PEOPLE THINK YOU HAVE TO HAVE NEGATIVE THINGS TO COMPREHEND GOOD THINGS
I think he has a point with his second "crazy idea" about consciousness, especially with elementary particles. A lot of the behavior of elementary particles is inexplainable, like the concept of charge. Why are photons positive and electrons negative? Why do they move the way that they do? Maybe they are, in some sense, conscious.
When you say "his second crazy idea", do you mean the idea he *called* the second one, or the actual second one? The first "crazy idea" he mentioned was Dan Dennett's idea. He then called the next crazy idea the first crazy idea, and the one after that, he called the second crazy idea. Really, they were the second and third "crazy ideas". An off by one error, and the most spectacular one I've ever heard of.
There can be no experience without consciousness. So technically in a way, you don't explain consciousness. Consciousness is the given, the basis. It is the beginning of everything else.
@@Kobe29261 But that "why" comes out of the consciousness. I have a feeling that this is all very much a psychological problem and not a physical sciences problem. If someone searching for consciousness changes his point of view he will just get it or stop needing to understand it. And that the scientists in that university world should have studied art and litterature first so they would have had a deeper understanding, or that they are slightly autistic so they can never see a bigger picture thats needed to understand. I have friend who has aspbergers syndrome and he just can never get it. It always comes down to reductionism for him, no matter the subject.
@@jaguillermol This is the genius of science though, the abrogation of necessity, your statement is avoidant reduction-ism -- you basically say 'you don't get it because you are not me' or that to understand consciousness we CANNOT begin by asking the question WHAT is consciousness? Except true as that might be science demands more and that answer is a dead-end. I'm wary of what you call 'a psychological problem' it often means we are unable or unwilling to enter deeper, to think harder. A man often says 'of course it ought to be so' about much that he's given little if any thought to. I don't think the so called 'hard problem of consciousness' is beyond physical science. Science has a way of crossing over from the mundane to the ethereal if a man is willing like Chalmers to probe deeper. Someday we'll be able to 'demonstrate' consciousness even to the autistic
@@Kobe29261 Well, i meant "a problem for psychology as a science," not a mental problem. Science as in "try it, and if it works repeat the experiment many times to see that you really did it right" can prove it, but not science as in the institutions and the dogmas. Materialism for example, is not science, but it is held up as a base for many sciences.
Great talk. Particularly like the idea of Consciousness as a fundamental element of life or panpsychism; is important to add that this is by no means a new idea, only a few new fancy names; Buddhism and Hinduism have been saying this since ever.
The idea of a universal consciousness is fairly logical. I am conscious, I'm also the primordial energy of the universe that for some mysterious reason decided to arrange itself temporarily in a specific structure (the human body). The question " Is the universe conscious ?" doesn't make much sense , does it ? That is , of course, unless anyone can find a way to draw the line and separate us from the universe. I've tried that and it didn't work. Therefore the inescapable conclusion is that not only that everything in existence is in fact the universe continuously changing shapes and structures but also a universe that manifests an infinite number of different levels of consciousness simultaneously.
Came here after listening to Vedanta Society New York's Swami Sarvapriyananda's Talks where he talks about "Hard problem of Consciousness" by David Chalmers.
That's very interesting. I always thought the we humans are conscious because of higher number of neurons in our brain, that consciousness happens after certain levels. I have never studied anything related to this and it was only my childhood belief. It's interesting to see what theories are out there, and I am gonna dive deeper into it
Yes but at what point would matter become conscious through evolution. It only makes sense that everything was always consciousness, and it just slowly got more complex.
Consciousness and the brain have nothing to do with each other. One is divine and the other is of the earth. Consciousness is simply your soul when you are awake.
You have a soul, what is so difficult to comprehend, now let us move on, why are we here? We are here to earn our way back to Heaven and Falun Dafa shows the Way.
@@rijpmajohan He does what science and philosophy used to do in their effort to explain "mysterious" phenomena. For Combustion they came up with "Phlogiston", for temperature...Caloric, for life... Ordic and Orgone Energy, for Diseases ....Miasma! For awareness he came up with a thing called "consciousness". People are acceptable to magical thinking resulting in creating agencies out from abstract concepts.
The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing! I love to think about those questions! I have a logical way of thinking that can explain those mysteries, it could give you a different perspective on what we see as consiousness. It’s a combination of science, filosofie, logic reasoning and abstract thinking. It explains consiousness, it explains if computers/animals have are can have a consiousness, brings together religion and science, reason of live, feelings,... I would love the have a conversation with someone like you (that knows a lot about these things) so I can see where my way of thinking comes up short. Kind regards Fabian Feyaerts.
He is a good philosopher with an open and clear mind that considers all of the following as plausible alternatives: 1) C is nothing but an illusion (Physicalism) 2. C is in everything (Panpsychism) 3. C is essential along with mass, energy, charge, spin, space, time, etc. (Dualism) Isn't it fascinating?
Just quiet your own mind to the point of calm silence and when that next thought arises from within recognize who is conscious of it. That consciousness that silently receives that next thought as a stimulus is the real you. We all have consciousness as our base of being. Consciousness is what we are. "I Am That!" Nisargadatta Maharaj.
he is talking to his own projections of consciousness, in the same way that I am writing these words to you, projections of my own consciousness. And you, reading these words, you are projecting your own consciousness into these letters. Our experience of consciousness is a fractal of the ultimate consciousness, which is all one.
Very interesting ideas I must say! It goes back to the incompleteness theorem of Kurt Gödel in which he shows that no theory can be at the same time internally consistent and complete. This has complications in math but it certainly has complications in us trying to make sense of the world. It tells us that there will always be things that can't be described with the set of suppositions that we are currently holding. So sometimes we must increase the set of fundamentals in order to better explain this crazy world that we live in and that we ourselves are...
@@jeffforsythe9514 So, you are saying that you ain't have your soul when you fall asleep. That is a contradictory statement for someone that says that when people die their souls and conscience still exist and can be transferred through reincarnation.
Both. It's profound because it's unlike anything we've ever studied in science, and is one of the largest mysteries that is unsolved. It's meaningless because who cares in the end really?
Why is it meaningless if it helps us understand our life and universe wich the scientists have been doing since the day we were curios. I think most outer space reaserches are kind of pointless when we will never ever reach there like to the black holes or distant stars but understanding the phenomenon of consciousness might bring clarity to our mysterious life and existence and perhaps may enlighten us on many topics like purpose of life and the existence of soul and/or God... Seems like atheists are more intrested in research with matters that are furthest away from them, but close matters like consciousness are out of their intrest for some reason. Intresting to see that most of the comments brush this notion away under the carpet thinking that it's boring or somehow useless to know about. I think "It's just not there cup of tea" as the English say..
1-Reality Why would you bring atheism/religion in this comment section? It had nothing to do with that. Dont try to bring your bias in every discussion.
Panos Provts. You took the words out of my mouth. 1-Reality appears to be stuck in his religious trap (I assume Islam, from the moon&star image). Everything is seen through that biased religious prism.
That is self contradictory. To be conscious means to be able as a thinking agent to be aware of things that exist. In order to be conscious of anything Something must first exist. Existence is primary in the universe (by definition) and conscious agents can observe and verify objectively what exists and what claims are either unfounded, wrong or unfalsiable.
@@jeffforsythe9514 A person with catastrophic brain damage is unconscious. On the other hand rats, like other animals, are believed to have some level of consciousness. Rats are capable of complex behaviors, such as problem-solving and learning, that suggest they have some level of cognitive and emotional processing. Studies have also shown that rats have neural activity patterns similar to those of humans in certain brain regions associated with consciousness, such as the neocortex. Soul is a human construct with no scientific evidence whatsoever.
Consciousness is the fundamental mechanism whereby we can accurately judge and experience the truth of reality. I believe that consciousness is the essence of what it means for human beings to have a soul.
Loved it! Fascinating, intriguing and radical. Would have really appreciated if there were hat tips to Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and the Indic Thoughts - various non theistic strains of Hinduism, like Vedanta, Sankhya etc. And another to Fritjof Capra. Scientists may choose to look into these texts and probably find some leads. All these thoughts came from fundamental questions from a time when there were no silos such as science and non science.
I eventually became a panpsychist via my philosophy of the mind I call "necessitism". I applied modality to the world of color, light, space, sound, smell, etc and solved the problem of other minds and external world skepticism. However it requires that outside your "private world" that there must(necessitation) be other events with their own properties outside your experience where they're correlated with your subjective experiences of the external world.
postulate this:We are a triune beings, We have three parts body,soul,spirit,:consciousness comes from the soul,if you are looking for it in your brain---your looking in the wrong place.this was well known over 2000 years ago.their minds refuse to face the conclution.
+Clark brian 16 years ago I left my body, but there was entanglement, my soul and some part of me, will, was still in my body. I saw with my physical/spiritual eyes that we are like a large wisp (ethereal form) comprised of smaller wisps. That's what I saw, many others testify we are this form, others see people/beings, others see us as light. I understood myself as God knows me and could see how God knows the future by knowing each of us so intimately that he knows now all choices we will ever make, and God knows the position of every molecule in the universe/multiverse. to advance your thinking everything comes from God. Love.
What you saw was but one aspect of your being,the reason,God wants you to know you do not need the body to live,He wants us to stop thinking like a body all the time,we are spiritual beings.
Clark brian That was my godmother, Jan, who gave me the gift of rapture. I really love her. It was really weird for me, I stopped reading the Bible for quite a few years, the experience of rapture is so beyond words or thoughts, but then I remembered Jan is a worship leader, and apostle. I think the former is where she developed this particular talent. It's good to find people we can agree with.
+Clark brian We are made up of parts, but is there a fundamental part? I see the soul as the program part, the body is also part of the program, the spirit is the computer that runs the program. When we leave the programming of this Universe, we can put on a different program. When NDEer leave this world into the next they shed the programming of who we are here and enter a different program mode. We perceive that we have free choice, free will, but that is just part of the programming. Our path is fixed. We cannot prove that one way or the other, but the available evidence points strongly in that direction. So says my program. LOL
My laws for consciousness: 1.) Defined & bounded by the senses. 2.) Cannot affect surroundings directly, at least not in an obvious and immediate way. 3.) Private or personal. No two entities may share, or switch, their consciousness. 4.) Outlook or interpretation is subjective. 5.) Shares a causal or co-dependent relationship with the mind. 6.) Both limitless and limited. Limitless in experience & theory, but limited by the "governors" of consciousness.
That sounds like a fair set of starting points. But two questions, 1 - what's the difference between consciousness and the mind, by your definition? (aren't they part + parcel of the same thing?), and 2 - "Defined and bounded by the senses" ....What about psychedelic drugs (like DMT) causing experiences that are *way* beyond anything previously perceived by the senses? In states like that, the subjective experience is that you're perceiving visual/auditory/telepathic information that comes from somewhere outside of what the senses can normally perceive. Those'd be my only two objections, though...lol Otherwise, pretty good set of laws I think.
@@465marko First of all, great observations. Regarding your first question, what is the difference between the mind & consciousness, I'd suggest the "inner dialogue" we experience is a fundamental part of consciousness; one which is correlated, yet separate, from the physical mind. For, some time ago, someone (I've forgotten their name, hope they will forgive me) performed an experiment in which he would electrically stimulate a persons brain, specifically and solely with the intention to create body movement. (The subjects/volunteers arm would raise, or extend, after receiving this electric charge.) Now, afterwards, when he questioned these people about the experience, they would most often respond, "You raised my arm," or "My arm was raised." For me, this is enough "proof" that consciousness and the mind have a very clear distinction. Now, as far as your observations regarding drugs such as Ayahuasca, I'm actually a bit perplexed. (A very thought-provoking observation, I've been sitting here thinking about this for over 60 minutes, lol.) I am extremely familiar with the types of "experiences" substances such as DMT induce, being as I've listened to, and read, many first-hand accounts. In other-words, I'm aware just how "powerful" and "unique" these experiences can be. I don't have an exact retort, but just a couple of short observations. 1.) It COULD be argued these experiences are still bounded within the senses, though they are senses ordinarily only used when someone is fast approaching death. (Assuming the literature I've read on DMT is correct.) Heavily manipulated senses? Absolutely. Strange and foreign in comparison to daily life? Indeed. But, still, bounded within the senses all the same. Similar to NDE's. 2.) Yet, I also believe you're right, and my "law" would need to be altered. Perhaps "Largely defined by the senses. Infrequently defined by other parts of the mind, specifically excluding the standard senses." (Or something like that.) In close, thank you for your remarks. They have led me to a great "session" of thought, conversation, and further (previously unknown to me) realizations.
@@mycommentpwnz Hey, thanks for such a great reply! I don't want to drag you further down the rabbit hole than you have time for, but... What you mentioned about the electrical brain stimulation is really interesting. So, when you say "the mind", you're talking the physical brain (?). Just as an aside, wouldn't it be strange if the result was slightly different; if instead of saying "my arm was moved", the people always said "I decided to move it"? Even though they'd been told to keep perfectly still, the electric impulse was enough to create the sensation of making the decision...as if they couldn't help "deciding" to move their arm every time? Not really adding anything by that, I just thought that would be an even weirder result! But I'm with you on the distinction between the mind and consciousness. That they're related, correlated, but distinct. Makes sense to me (sort of..!) As far as being bounded by the senses.. First, now I'm wondering what that actually means. Does it mean, consciousness can only "work with" the information it receives from the senses? So for eg....a brain that's never seen the colour blue *probably* couldn't conceive of blue (although it has seen other colours, so maybe it could extrapolate). But I'm back-tracking a little bit now on whether I fully get that concept. Also, NDE's - YES, absolutely. Perfect example of what I was getting at. Or even more mundane; dreams. Imagination, even? Maybe. But I take your point about senses ordinarily not available to us. That could absolutely be it. Although, to be fair, the whole "extra senses" idea probably sounds a bit crazy to most. I can get down with it, though. So that's fair. I guess what's "bugging" me is; of all the sensory input that enters a brain, how much ability does it have to imagine completely new/novel things? And it's difficult because, we can extrapolate from things that *have* entered via the senses. Then I was thinking, if you had a brain in a vat, alive but with no sensory input...(it would be a bit cruel), but...what would happen if you gave it ayahuasca? But no, I like your answers there. And I like that you didn't try and argue that NDEs or psychedelic experiences are just the brain spewing out variations of information that originally *was* perceived by the ordinary senses, stored, and then shuffled around and spat out during the experience. You realise how profound those things actually are. Anyway, thanks very much for your response!! Much appreciated.
Many more people take him seriously this way. It's why I wish the anti-aging researcher Aubrey de Grey would shave his beard and stop looking like Gandalf - and ironically much older than he actually is.
valar interestingly I received more respect when I had a beard. I choose not to grow a beard now. I don't worry too much of what others think. it's just their perspective.
How come, when people talk about "consciousness," they never talk about being awake vs. being asleep? That would be my starting point: what is the difference between the sleeping brain (which doesn't have it or barely has it) and the awake brain?
This is what neuroscientists do. They are looking for the so-called correlates of consciousness - areas or states of the brain that are active in the awake, but inactive in the sleeping. These include, for example, the gamma and beta frequencies of the cortex neurons. In sleeping people, these same neurons work at a lower frequency - delta, theta. But all this still does not answer the main question - why subjective experience exists in principle.
@@vkorc1 We do know (1) that it evolved in animals, and (2) that when they are awake they can coordinate their movements in response to their senses, in a way that uses a lot of information processing, to help do things like finding food and avoiding predators. When they're not awake, they can't do those things.
It is a curious thing to watch and hear individuals so tightly bound to intellect trying to wrap their brains around the simple idea of consciousness, as if they might capture it, put it in a bottle and take credit for adequately defining it. This is what happens when one becomes a slave to Ego. Over their heads like a roof!
Cosciousness explains Mathematics. Mathematics explains Physics, Physics explains Chemistry, Chemistry explains Biology, Biology explains Psychology and Psychology explains Consciousness. It seems like everything in the Universe comes down to Consciousness.
The Vedic tradition states that the source of creation from where all the laws of nature reside and are expressed is an unbounded, infinite field of consciousness (Sat, Chit, Ananda...absolute bliss consciousness). So...consciousness is preexisting and not a product of functioning organisms. Consciousness exists like other fields (i.e., electromagnetic field) and is reflected in objects to the degree that they are equipped to do so. The human nervous system, the Vedic Tradition says, is so highly evolved that it can reflect the infinite consciousness found at the source of creation. We have the ability to transcend the relative field of change and know the absolute reality of pure consciousness...the source of creation. So, while our nervous systems don't create consciousness, they act as receivers that perceive to whatever degree we can, degrees of consciousness. That degree is determined by how developed our nervous system is. The Vedic Tradition offers technologies to purify and develop the human nervous system and thereby gain increased ability to know deeper, more profound levels of consciousness.
and this is why we don't use the vedic tradition to do science. Science uses terms (like consciousness) as tags in order to identify and label observable phenomena. Magical explanations on the other hand make unfalsifiable claims about the invisible nature of an actual agent acting on nature. This ischildish god- like pseudo philosophy.
Jeffrey, what a lovely comment. It's funny, that we in the West, the USA, with our less-than-3-centuries of existence think to know so much more than those traditions dating back thousands of years. I wish I knew Sanskrit so I could read the Vedic teachings in their original form. What's amazing is how linear language - something so very relative - can manage to convey such depths & breadths. It helps so much to be Heart-centric rather than mind-centric to receive/perceive it. Heart's Knowing greatly transcends the more limited knowledge of the mind. ~♥~
@@sitarainbow8837 what we think we know is IRRELEVANT. Whether our epistemic methods are fruitful or not that is something that can be demonstrated and evaluated. The device and network you use to post your ideology against science.....is based on scientific knowledge. Your life in a heavily packed society is sustained by science (vaccines, antibiotics, painkillers, sanitation, access to basic needs without poisoning your self(water,food), your ability to commute, your ability to communicate....etc etc). Can you point to a single scientific framework which is based on an blindly accepted ancient Vendic traditional claim? I guess you can not...because there isn't one. And even if there was a similarity in a claim by chance, evidence is what rendered a statement...to be knowledge. What distinguishes knowledge from other claims is....empirical evidence....nothing more nothing less. As far as I know there isn't any other domain that uses a systematic empirical method as a tool to its evaluations.
6:25 "So far" is a key concept - these philosophers seem to overlook - 8:00 "Consciousness an anomaly" "need ideas that are crazy" - Ever think you're looking at it the wrong way, and asking the wrong questions? 10:50 - No you can't do science with metaphysics - all you have is philosophy because of you're dissatisfaction with current understanding. If consciousness is fundamental - where does that leave atoms, molecules, evolution and biological processes?
I like how Chalmers mentions Dennett's view in passing and then moves on to the serious ideas. He doesn't take the denial of the Hard problem seriously, and rightly so.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 Ok, can you please explain to me the brain functions, that give rise to consciousness? Surely you must be able to prove this, since your statement sounds like a fact. Right?
@@feathetstone7290 making scientifically ignorant questions which youtube fails to deliver through its broken notification platform do not qualify as "awesome comeback" mate.
@@simonjohnson3424 Sure Simon. I could explain to you the brain functions responsible for our ability to be conscious or how the rest of our brain modules produce the content of our conscious states....But it is better NOT to take my claims at face value but instead earn an education about the phenomenon from academic sources. Here is the paper where it contains our scientific definition of consciousness.
How would you personally sum up his views on the subject? I've listened to him for many happy hours but always end them with the feeling that he is exploring a given possibility that he himself is quite distant from. In fact the only parts of his talks that I feel were meant seriously are his jokes!
Consciousness is absolute (fundamental). Matter, time and space are appearance in consciousness. It like the river bed without which river (of time space matter and causation) cannot flow. Matter time space can be explained to be derived out of consciousness. All our subjective experience are that. Reverse that consciousness is derived out of time matter and space is difficult to explain and prove. -------Vedic Philosophy. 5000 year old. Chalmers is late Even Greek knew this.
I think Sankhya, Yoga and Buddhism and Advaita(Vedanta in General) comes as close as possible. They have said the same thing that's said in this video. That consciousness is a fundamental. Advaita goes further and says everything is consciousness and there is nothing apart from consciousness, and that matter comes from consciousness.
Consciousness is the self-contained, self perpetuating capacity to manifest and experience itself as real or imagined. Consciousness is not created in your brain; your brain tunes in to it. Consciousness doesn’t switch on and off; your brain tunes in and out of it. Your neural pathways determine your experience and awareness of consciousness. Even when the body dies, consciousness remains.
"Ah I'm always buzzing around at the speed of light, I never get to slow down.. smell the roses" ~Photons
There is no "buzzing around" for photons. They exist at the origin and the destination simultaneously without the passage of time...for the photon that is...no matter how far apart the origin and destination are.
@@DocSiders that seems not true. We know photon has a speed, fastest possible speed but still limited. So it takes time to travel through space, therefore, for example, a photon from sun takes about eight minutes to reach the earth; it can't be at the two places at same time. Isn't it?
Sorry but light (photons) only travel at the speed of light in vacuum, Space is not a vacuum. When light hits the planet a lot of it gets topped and turned into thermal energy. LEARN SOME BASIC SCIENCE PLEASE.
Its bad enough with bullshit artists like, stephen hawking, brian greene, machio KUKU, all are doing all they can to damage science, Hawking no longer can damage science but his lunacy as already damaged science to the point it starting to look like religion.
Some one who calls them selves a scientist and gets papers accepted that state "HOLES CAN HAVE MASS" ,is damaging science.
Worm holes as they are described can not exist under the laws of the universe we know.
@@seeker9241 the reason it’s said they don’t experience time it’s actually because photons are massless (being massless is also the reason they’re traveling at the speed of light, but that’s another topic, although still related). Mass is intimately related to the passage of time.. I’d recommend you to watch some videos on this because it’s really a fascinating topic. Cheers! :)
this is unironically a really beautiful quote
What really gets me about this lecture (apart from believing that Chalmers is right and wrong on a few things) is that he gives this entire lecture without any apparent teleprompters or podium or index cards. Gotta say, I'm impressed. Was it all memorized? I'm sure parts were memorized, but the fact that he never flounders or makes clumsy transitions even in the relative small space of 20 minutes is impressive.
I mean, he is a professor of philosophy. He is expert at doing lectures
It's a movie remember? Perhaps his brain is reading off an invisible (to the naked eye) teleprompter after all!
He is a bit different. He taught himself coding at 10 years old.
If he's talking about something that is not only a concept but that he has truly assimilated, there is no need for teleprompters. He can talk about it from his experience.
It's because his conciousness is at work, utilizing the intelligence, mind, and physical body (brain etc) to deliver his subjective experience...his passion into conciousness research. "Speaking from the heart".
Has anyone else felt this? I dunno exactly how I'm going to explain it, but here it goes... Its only happened to me a few times, but the feeling comes on when I'm thinking about my own consciousness, or maybe while starring at myself in a mirror, but I'll go into this state (I don't know what else to call it) and this state would make me realise I exist, and suddenly this strange feeling would come over me, like how weird it is that I'm me... lol, I don't know how to explain this without sounding ridiculous... But it really is a strange feeling, it only lasts a few seconds and then it passes.
You are your soul.........................................falundafa
you definitely do not sound ridiculous. I feel that at times as well
Yes. I remember feeling that feeling when I was very young, like 4, 5 or 6. Almost terrifying in a way. Like you realize you're a soul in a body
I have that feeling two or three times per year. It lasts a few seconds, and it is very unsetling. It is terrifying.
Yep. Me too
As a philosophy teacher, I believe David Chalmers has advanced our thinking about consciousness greatly! Perhaps either his view that it is fundamental or his view that it is universal is correct.
I think he is taking us back to Classical Greece, when why questions were thought to be useful in our understanding. He ignores that in science and in every other method, strong correlations and causal relations are what we can observe ! He sounds like he never had a course on Philosophy of science!
Consciousness study will add a new chapter to human history which will help to bridge between spiritual and meterial views .
@@Sbcommerceguru Rubbish!
Brother coppens, before insulting and disrespecting other views one must be knowledgeable and sensible about the true sense of the view. Here, I wanted to express that ongoing debate between material and spiritual scientists will help to explore a new dimension in human history through Consciousness studies.
@@Sbcommerceguru I am not your brother and I disrespect unscientific obscurantist rubbish!!!
I'm really disappointed by all the comments being made by my fellow science friendly atheists. you all are clinging to materialism like dogma. chalmers has not presented any arguments in this video, because it is a 20 minute TED talk; he has merely stated a possible worldview. yet, all of you- priding yourselves in rationality and objectivism- have dismissed him completely. you have claimed that he is irrational and assumption-ridden. on what grounds? you have no idea what the reasoning is behind his views. it appears that you all believe that if something is counter to materialism, then it is irrational by definition. certainly THAT is not rational. read chalmers' book 'the conscious mind'. if you can follow, his arguments are quite sophisticated and persuasive. contrary to the assumptions made in these comments, chalmers' view is completely consistent with current science, and does not require even a smidgen of faith.
Materialism has nothing to do with Methodological Naturalism (science). His comforting speculations fail to meet the demarcation standards of a scientific hypothesis, rendering his ideas pseudo philosophical.
We have good reasons for using logic and the principles of Methodological Naturalism in our scientific frameworks. Without those tools we allow magical thinking to intrude in our epistemology ...and we are not in the dark ages any more. Such practices are unacceptable.
This is how we do science. Stop trying to push your supernatural principles in an empirical evaluation system. Stop demanding from the academia to include your supernatural principles....this is the exact reason why science split from philosophy! Please go set up your own discipline of inquiry with your own set of principles and your own frameworks. Time will show if your ideas are able to produce accurate predictions and technical applications.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 methodological naturalism is the belief that there are no "super natural" explanations for natural phenomena. But if you look back in time, speculation about all kinds of things which we now accept as scientific fact would have been considered "super natural" explanations by today's standards. Nothing Chalmers proposed is fundamentally different from many of the ideas that were considered way outside the bounds of naturalism before they were discovered and explained, but which are now widely accepted as natural. Invisible fields of energy that give rise to space and time and all matter, haha, indeed. Supernatural nonsense, you drug addled hippy freak. See what I just did there.
@@yellowburger Unfortunately you are describing Philosophical Naturalism (that is a common error).
Methodological Naturalism acknowledges the limitations of our methodologies to investigate nature. The Natural is all that we can observe, falsify, evaluate or verify, so we can not accept non naturalistic explanation . That is not because of our philosophical presuppositions but due to pragmatic necessity! We can not verify claims with supernatural causation, so we can not accept such claims in our explanations.
-"But if you look back in time, speculation about all kinds of things which we now accept as scientific fact would have been considered "super natural" explanations by today's standards."
-Not really, I do understand that this claim is the last hope of most super-naturalist , but that is not true at all. On the contrary. From the dawn of western philosophy with the Ancient Greeks, we constantly struggled to explain things by introducing mind properties in to the ontology nature.(Intention, purpose/teleology, god/creators etc).
Claim after claim, our observations managed to discredit this supernatural idea of mind properties existing in addition to nature.
So 2.300 years later, after we first posed those same question, we now have a huge epistemology that does not include the supernatural at all! There isn't A SINGLE CASE in our, descriptive frameworks that needs the supernatural as a necessary and sufficient explanation of an observable phenomenon. Name one scientific framework and you are the winner of this debate!
-"Nothing Chalmers proposed is fundamentally different from many of the ideas that were considered way outside the bounds of naturalism before they were discovered and explained,, but which are now widely accepted as natural."
-They are widely accepted as natural, because their principles are natural. Chalmers is projecting mind properties in addition to nature....by rejecting them to be a product of nature (biological brain). His principles are supernatural be definition. He is making an unfalsifiable, supernatural hypothesis well beyond the limits of a Null Hypothesis.
That doesn't mean that his idea is wrong....only that is is irrational and epistemically or wisely useless.
Invisible fields (means invisible to our eyes BUT NOT UNDETECTABLE) have OBSERVABLE effects on how the particles behave and interact. These are measurable , quantifiable properties which display empirical regularities!!!! They do not need supernatural principles to "exist". They are just natural fields with specific properties, without intention, purpose , biases, choice or any other mind property necessary to affect the basic blocks of matter.
what you did is that you demonstrated your ignorance on the basic definitions of Methodological Naturalism, the Supernatural and you that you are unable to identify the differences between natural principles and new age super natural principles!
@@nickolasgaspar9660 How would you respond to the idea that methodological naturalism views the "natural" as only things that can be measured/observed, and the super-natural as explanations which involve things that cannot be measured/observed. If you agree with this definition, then I would argue that speculation about hypothetical causes which have yet to be discovered is a fundamental part of science, but this is basically using what are by definition "supernatural" explanations. They only become "natural" once empirical evidence of said causes has been observed. But science could hardly evolve if scientists didn't speculate about as yet unobserved causes. To restrict science to explanations that have only observed empirical causes would be to ignore how science is actually done and how it has progressed. Furthermore, Chalmers is not proposing "mind properties in addition to nature," he is speculating that mind properties might exist in nature outside of the brain, or perhaps outside of the strictly neural networking of the brain (in some aspect of the quantum particles and field which encompasses the physical substance of the brain, for example). The idea is that there might be some as yet unobserved "natural" quality in the material substance of the world which gives rise to our internal subjective states. Why does he speculate like this? Because attempts to reduce our internal conscious experiences to brain states have only succeeded in showing correlation, but not in explaining how we have the internal aspects of those experiences.
@@yellowburger I have to clarify some things before I respond to the idea you are presenting.
Methodological Naturalism isn't just a "view". Its a description of our CURRENT abilities.
This is what we can do with our current methodologies and this limits the ontological principles we can use in our hypotheses....if we are interested of course in the production of knowledge.
Now the problem with your "definition" of the supernatural is that it doesn't explain anything. If you can not observe and quantify the cause of a process...then you are not justified to say anything about it because you don't have a way to evaluate your speculations. THis is why we don't use such principles in science and when we do so in philosophy we identify it as pseudo philosophy!
"If you agree with this definition, then I would argue that speculation about hypothetical causes which have yet to be discovered is a fundamental part of science, but this is basically using what are by definition "supernatural" explanations."
- You are conflating the unknown with the supernatural. Metaphysical speculations are essential in science...you are right.
But you are missing a really important detail. Metaphysics in science are always based on Scientific Principles.
It took us 2300 years to get rid of the supernatural causation and that led us to the run away success of science in epistemology as we know it.
Now you are asking to introduce it back again , not because we have examples of how successful magical explanations are, but because we have some comforting ideas about our existential anxiety since our expiring biological body is not what defines the limits of our existence (according to Chalmers agenda)!
A hypothesis DOESN"T become natural because it is empirically observed. This is not the criteria of evaluation of a hypothesis.
You need to understand the differences between the supernatural, the metaphysical and the empirical knowledge.
A metaphysical hypothesis is one that goes beyond our current knowledge (physika/science). So eg the claims of string theory are metaphysical, Chalmers' claims are metaphysical etc. The difference between those two is that string theory does not use supernatural principles while Chalmers's idea does.
By excluding supernatural principles from science , we don't "restrict" our methodologies. We are only protecting our hypotheses from unjustified presumptions. Science has really strict standards when it comes to what it can be assumed. The starting point of our speculations is based on what we currently know and it extents in to the unknown. YOU SHOULD never accept the unknown as the basis of your presuppositions and extent even beyond that .
And to be clear. We don't claim that Chalmers is WRONG. Not at all. He could be right about everything he says.
What we point out is that he is IRRATIONAL to accept things that he doesn't know how possible they can be.
He is practicing pseudo philosophy.
"Furthermore, Chalmers is not proposing "mind properties in addition to nature," he is speculating that mind properties might exist in nature outside of the brain"
-This is what "in addition to nature" means. He is arguing that it is possible(!!!) that a phenomenon that can only be observed by the functions of the brain, can manifest without the need of this biological structure.....as a substance on its own. First of all, we don't know what nature allows so its irrational to claim about such possibilities. To go further, if we accept that he is making the claim that an invisibly "cosmic brain" from matter is responsible for mind properties....then we need to accept so many assumptions that it becomes Unarsimonious and useless, plus its unfalsifiable. (and we ignore the value of a NULL HYPOTHESIS in logic!).
1. we need to demote the role of the brain without evidence.
2. we need to assume the existence of a field which interacts with the brain(matter)....but somehow we can quantify it or observe this interaction!(we need to throw all our physics out the window and Frank Wilzek's Core theory on what we can observe in nature!)
3. We need to assume a new type type of matter which our cosmic brain is made of...without evidence
Lets stop here with these assumptions......
-" Because attempts to reduce our internal conscious experiences to brain states have only succeeded in showing correlation, but not in explaining how we have the internal aspects of those experiences."
-Science CAN ONLY point out to STRONG CORRELATIONS between a phenomenon and a process. that is not new and its not special for the phenomenon of the mind.
eg.- We only have correlation between mass and gravity...but we can always go beyond and talk about an external source (like Emergent Gravity hypothesis suggests!)
- We can only show correlations between the shape of a fluid in a cup and the electromagnetic structure of the cup....We can never exclude a unobservable "cup soul" type of substance responsible for all fluids taking the shape of the cup.
- We can re-assume phlogiston as the invisible catalyst of combustion...the enabler of the property known as chemical reaction...go test that!!!!
WHERE DO WE STOP...and what are our criteria? We Humans tend to push our questions some steps beyond the observable in order to take care our ignorance on how things emerge. This is not science or philosophy.
Chalmers has been at the forefront of consciousness research for decades. He coined the term "the hard problem" to describe the mystery of insentient matter somehow giving rise to consciousness - an epiphenomenon which has yet to be explained by neuroscience, because a correlate of consciousness is not necessarily its causation. But just a quick glance at the comment section shows that the true experts on this topic are found not in labs and universities around the world, but on UA-cam - the sheer audacity of some people astounds me. You make no attempt to learn because you're convinced you already possess the answer. I find this kind of hubris in people to be utterly repugnant. When I was young my father would tell me that I had two ears and one mouth and that I ought to use them in the same proportion. Apparently your fathers made no attempt to instil that sort of wisdom in you.
thank you for this clear articulation of thoughts i share!
what comes to my mind when i read the comments that maybe most ppl have had no experience to learn about their consciousness. maybe not even the opportunity to reflect about it outside of their own heads.
i am quite certain most ppl will agree that consciousness is a fascinating topic.
yet most ppl may only reflect on it within themselves. thinking they are experts on the topic because.
and in a sense they are because it would seem that no one can know more about your own consciousness than yourself.
seeing ppl react to this talk makes actually sense if you look at it from that kind of view.
sol exactly. as Chalmers mentioned in this talk, it is even impossible for you to tell if I or any other being for that matter is consciousness as well. ;)
Scott Douglas Bravo! Couldn't agree more. It annoys me to no end when people dismiss such questions as pointless or absurd. OF COURSE the answer will seem absurd and counter-intuitive. Have we learned nothing from the history of science? Whatever the right answer is....it's bound to be incredibly counter-intuitive, in the same sort of way that quantum non-locality is counter-intuitive.
Dismissing these questions as "silly" strikes me as profoundly cynical and jaded. True geniuses(like Einstein) were not above asking the sort of questions usually only asked by children. If anything, children's naivety is a good starting point. Once a child grows into a cynical adult who thinks they've got it all figured out...real discovery and progress grind to a halt.
It's beyond refreshing to hear someone tackling the "hard problem" with honesty. I read Dennet's "Consciousness Explained" and was left completely unimpressed. He explained the mechanics of consciousness to a T. But...never once addressed the real question. Sure, we can explain, in detail, how "I see a flower," for instance. But...we can only explain the SEEING....we never address the "I" that sees. Why doesn't the brain merely process input(like sight) and respond accordingly? Why is there a "self" watching all this...at all...when it's entirely unnecessary to explain the mechanism of seeing?
Is there any question in science more alluring and fascinating? Personally, I can't think of a single one.
He is a pseudo philosopher. He bases his philosophy on useless why questions and he ignores our current scientific epistemology on purpose. He is a mystery promoter and of the idea that our brain ability to direct our focused attention to important stimuli is something special. That is an anti Copernican why of thought that fails to promote our understanding.
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."
Max Planck, 1931
Who's this Max Planck guy?? Sounds like a total crank.
Yoan Dragiev
Some hippie I think.
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, FRS was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
That is an argument from authority fallacy. Max Planck was not a Neuroscientist or a Cognitive Scientist.
We know understand QM far better than people did in the days of Planck. We understand that consciousness has nothing to do with our quantum observations. Existence is primary because in order to be aware there must be something to be aware of. This debate is over many years ago. Pseudo philosophers like Chalmers insist in these idiotic claims.
Metho Natu The problem of consciousness was solved years ago? Wtf
The first minute of this is the most brilliantly explained definition of consciousness I have every heard.
no
@@stellarwind1946 no it's not. There are thousands and thousands of research taken place on this subject. You just lack knowledge and that doesn't mean that it does not exist.
@@stellarwind1946 what's to lol about?
@@stellarwind1946 lmao. You really are a sad person bro. Take care.
@@stellarwind1946 Does it sound insane, that mass can change the time space and we call it gravity?
For thousounds of years this was unknown eventhough the people experienced gravity in their daily life every day.
People always ask what is consciousness, but they never ask how is consciousness.
Well "what is consciousness" is a general question. Its an abstract concept of our ability to be aware of things and thoughts.
"How we are conscious" is a question investigated by science.
A specific part of our brain is responsible for it's arousal , allowing to direct it's attention to the stimuli and reflect on it by connecting the rest of the brain areas responsible for memory , reason, prediction, symbolic language heuristics etc.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 Thank you
@@nickolasgaspar9660 who is our? , what about animals, and so on...
@@miguelmmc5817 I am describing human consciousness (our). I hope everyone in here reading are of the same species.
Every organism having a brain is conscious of his environment and it's self. Animals can be aware but the quality of their conscious states chances since the rest of their mind properties are not so advanced.
Consciousness is an illusion. Thinking is not consciousness. Thinking is just interpreting data your senses receive. Reality is just the illusion of light, just like a movie. Its just a picture light show the sun projects. All the universe is light and a deep knowing that extends from the sun. Your just a machine the sun manifest. Your thinking is just interpreting a previous picture light show projected buy the sun. Your consciousness is just your senses interpreting light. Everything from matter itself to sound and smell are just different frequencies and vibration of light. In that sense the reality we live in is a simulation. Physics will soon prove all this. The elites already know this. Like Jesus said God is light! Thats all we will know him as in this reality light. Its the creator of our universe. Thats is an example of a knowing. Knowledge is power!
This guy seems like the real deal to me. All the theories are in baby stages, but I think he's thinking about it in the right way. Figuring out consciousness must require some kind of paradigm shift or it's nothing. His ideas sound crazy but if you stop and think about it, anything that *really, actually* explained consciousness would sound crazy at first. We are in our infancy when it comes to understanding consciousness.
Your consciousness is simply your soul when you are awake.
Some of us are yes, but others know exactly what consciousness is. Some of us know why we were placed on this planet, how many times we have reincarnated and what happens when we die.
Figuring out consciousness? What is so difficult, it is our soul, the part of you that is reading this right now.
@@jeffforsythe9514 Hup! There's that word.
@@jeffforsythe9514 Oh. Ok.
Excellent understanding..this stands the nearest to the ancient Indian Advaita understanding that any western mind has ever tried to articulate...
This guy is brilliant, I ve seen him on- closer to truth. Even the host there, Robert, a very bright thinker and a leaning fundamental materialist was impressed with his theories.
Came here after seeing that video.
I do not have theories, I have facts. It is your choice to accept or to reject them. We are all here for one reason, to earn our way back home to Heaven and a great teacher is needed....................Falun Dafa
@@jeffforsythe9514 The only truth is written in the Quran my friend.
I didn't know Mourinho like philosophy.
lol , he looks better with extra few pounds too lol !
Indeed) It's amazing how he got so much time - to successfully train football players and deal with consciousness.
😂😂😂😂
Puhaha hilarious. He misses Kane & Son.
😂😂😂
Consciousness cannot be seen, imagined or conceptualized, but it is the only thing that is real, and without it nothing could be conceptualized or imagined.
I disagree on the notion that it can't be imagined. Though it might it might be my own consiousness, I can imagine a different person with a different consciousness then myself, but asking this question I have a question for myself, and you. Is this consciousness I imagine independent from my own consciousness. And if this consciousness I can imagine becomes popular through the masses. Would it still be the consciousness I orignally imagined?
Most of what your brain does is unconscious. There are literally billions of neurons and we are not aware of how they are all are interacting at any moment. Consciousness is that very small part of your neural experience that you are aware of and can report to others. For example when your visual system and brain respond to a certain spectrum of light, most of the processing is completely unconscious; we are only aware of the experience of seeing the color your brain assigns to that light spectrum (it's an "experiential label" that your unconscious neural machinery applies for you to be aware of), which is a minute portion of the overall processing that occurs. Consciousness has an evolutionary purpose for survival, which however does NOT include understanding the underlying neural mechanisms - that was not needed. Nonetheless, consciousness, as the part of your neural processing you are aware of and can report to others, is easy to imagine and conceptualize.
But you might say, what about the part of me I know is there, that I can feel? Answer: that is your awareness of the mostly unconscious part of your brain that directs your mental focus. So if you decide to focus on that pretty girl across the street, most of what happens is then again unconscious, since the neural machinery is so incredibly complex. But you do have an awareness of redirecting the unconscious neural machinery, which gives you a feeling of a self with free will, or "consciousness". That feeling of a "conscious self" is also evolutionary enforced since it helps us value our life.
Our conscious awareness, which models the neural process of attention in a simplistic way, does not clearly reveal itself to us, and that is indeed confusing when we try to explain it. But this awareness is nonetheless adequate for its purpose of modeling and control of the physiological process of attention. HOWEVER, what makes this even more confusing and hard to understand is that our models of what we perceive through our senses, such as the redness of the apple, are also based on unrevealed neural processes. That is, the perception or experience of redness is the brain's visual label (a visual hardwired modeling process) that it applies when a particular spectrum of light impinges on our visual system. The redness that we experience is simply the brain's shorthand, and highly adaptive, way of telling us about the spectral characteristics - it's a visual label (analogous to a verbal label, but applied unconsciously). As with the conscious awareness control of our attention neural processes, we do not perceive the underlying physiological processes that perform this visual labeling. So when our conscious awareness focuses on the redness of the apple, there are actually TWO types of parallel neuronal action that are hidden from us: 1) the hardwired labeling of the sensing process (e.g. experiencing red in response to a certain type of spectrum impinging on the eye) 2) the attention process that focuses our brain on this sensory experience. This double layer of unperceived "trickery" that our brain performs is therefore extremely counter intuitive.
To ParoMation: Read, or listen the audiobooks on youtube of Nissargadata, there is a level of consciousness that cannot be accessed by reflection. You are it, but cannot see it. I believe in translations of his work they call it "awareness". In this interpretation, awareness does not have an object. There is something beyond the imaginer and the imagened, that makes both of them possible, which itself cannot be imagined. If you would try to image it, you would again lapse back into this lower level of consciousness. The only way is to "be" it, and in it everything dissolves, including distinctions, memory, object and subjects. That is, what I think, Nis. would say. Approximately.
Even the salvation of the soul is in the consciousness that I cannot pass on to anyone: "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it" - Revelation 2:17.
@@andrewtaylor9799 classic. So, the concepts about consiosness is more valid then direct expirience of it? Odd logic.
All you got is your consiosness, how does the concepts within it can be a stronger argument?
I like how this guy thinks.
I think the problem with scientists looking at consciousness is that they are looking only from the perspective of it being an emergent property. Consciousness may actually be at the base abstraction of reality, observing every single interaction simultaneously. If this is correct, then it would be safe to assume that if you were to put atoms together in a particular order to create a brain, then that brain would inherently be conscious, rather than the consciousness being an emergent property created by the brain's existence.
_EDIT: We used to view the effect of Gravity as being an emergent property that objects containing mass "created." Now we view Gravity as a field that mass simply interacts with. Viewing it as an emergent properrty didn't make much sense; Viewing it as a fundamental property does. Can't we also try to look at consciousness as a potential fundamental property of reality, then come up with scientific experiments to test that hypothesis? I don't see what the problem is with some of the people making comments on this video._
Autonomic, subconscious, cognitive functioning and self awareness are all emergent properties of the brain, however consciousness doesn't seem to fit with that model no matter how much we try to view it as such. There is still the observational phenomenon that is viewing the film that is created within the brain. It's akin to saying "we know how the viewer works because we are analysing the pixels on the television screen that the viewer is watching." It just doesn't make sense looking at neurons in the brain and saying "This is why consciousness exists." Science can only go so far as to say "This is what creates the whole image that is observed; But we still don't comprehend what is doing the viewing."
Since everything is made out of space-time and exists in reality, consciousness must also be made of the same substance. Everything is connected at the base abstraction of reality. Consciousness (the observational phenomenon) has to be a fundamental property of reality, because it doesn't work viewing it as an emergent property the same as we view high abstraction neural networks in the brain.
Consciousness IS the label used to explain an emergent property of the brain Jim. In order to make a different classification, you will need something else called evidence. In science we can only evaluate a Null Hypothesis due to its falsifiability. Anything beyond the "Null" state is irrational and irrelevant to science.
Damn same thing .bravo . Finaly someone with the same world view as mine
Jim Griffiths you're smart XD. That you went all the way in to get to this
Jim Griffiths SIMULTANEOUS! Fluid theory (Reproduction/Feed/Reasoning) decanted selfmultidimentionalover...
The polydynamics of the movement generates pseudo-autonomy as material property, of the autogenous phenomenon; existing.(...)
Simultaneous as my unidimensional variability...
unidimensional variability = live-beings
Nickolas Gaspar Fluid theory (Reproduction/Feed/Reasoning) decanted selfmultidimentionalover...
The polydynamics of the movement generates pseudo-autonomy as material property, of the autogenous phenomenon; existing.(...)
Simultaneous as my unidimensional variability...
unidimensional variability = live-beings
All we know for sure, is that we experience the world. With what do we experience the world?...consciousness. Thus consciousness is fundamental in everyone's experience and nothing could be confirmed to exist without it.
I could choose to commit suicide. So consciousness is not fundamental, from what I understand.
What does committing suicide have to do with anything?
@@ubu6949 you thus assume that by committing suicide, you would end your subjective consciousness. I would offer that your consciousness continues, and numerous studies have been done to soft prove this. Either way, no one really knows. See you on the other side dude.
You're confusing the subjective with the objective. Of course consciousness is fundamental to everyone's subjective experience - that's true by definition. The idea Chalmers is discussing is the idea that consciousness could be a fundamental part of the Universe - the objective world - just like mass, spacetime, and charge.
@Electro_blob You're also confusing the subjectivd with the objective. Chalmers isn't talking about the idea that consciousness is a fundamental part of your subjective experience - that's a completely obvious tautology. He's saying that consciousness might be a fundamental part of the Universe. But it would be very strange if this is true because, as ubu pointed out, consciousness can be destroyed.
Hardcore materialists in the comments be all like "I understand consciousness perfectly, the brain can be explained with cognitive neuroscience and has been mapped."
That's cool bro, now explain experience of the color blue.
***** that's like saying reality is clouded with mathematical and physics ideas.
***** anything at all can be referred to from a spiritual point of view. But there's no reason for a false explanation to work.
***** yes, exactly! But only from a broader view. Under scrutiny, bad explanations can be shown to collapse.
I hope your philosophy degree was worth this comment.
philosophy is what you study after physics fails.
We are part of a conscious universe. For some reason we seem to think we are separate from it and that causes confusion. We are connected to everything that we can see, touch
feel or measure. We are consciousness.
I have no reason to believe that
@@MrMebigfatguy energy is consciousness it's why E=MC^2 if particles and molecular compounds are not conscious, how do they know a consistent way to interact with other particles and how to behave under different circumstances? How are they able to react to their surroundings without some form of awareness?
@@tinywillis that's not what consciousness means. There is no evidence that matter or energy is conscious. When your argument is "how could something be without. .." that is a logical fallacy
@@MrMebigfatguy Dave Brosius con·scious·ness
/ˈkän(t)SHəsnəs/
noun
the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.
the awareness or perception of something by a living being.
the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.
So that's exactly what conciousness means.
How could mass exist without energy
How can hot exist without cold? Or, light without dark? Good without evil?
How can space exist without a smallest length? (Max Plank)
Want to tell me again its logical fallacy to make statements like that? Connection and exclusion is exactly how you solve logic puzzles.
You are ignoring a logical and founded statement because you dislike the way that logic is framed that's willful ignorance.
And You say there is no evidence, what experiment could one do as proof or disproof of the consciousness of a particle?
@@tinywillis I don't know what experiment one could do. But you can't make a claim without evidence. There is no evidence that matter or energy or particles of themselves are conscious..
16:00 I had to laugh delightfully out loud - respectfully - at the dilemma of what to eat.
Wonderful presentation! Thumbs up.
He is a brilliant man, good work! As an Indian who has been following vedic teachings for years all of this resonates very well with me
Reality at it's most fundamental level and consciousness are the most interesting things ever to me.
Your consciousness is simply your soul when you are awake.
@@jeffforsythe9514 I've sometimes thought, could it be that we are conscious when we are asleep and not dreaming, but the reason why we perceive ourselves as not being conscious is because we have no memory of it?
In other words maybe it is our memory that stops working rather than consciousness when we are asleep and not dreaming.
@@RPKGameVids Not at all. When we are asleep we are unconscious.
@@jeffforsythe9514 when i am asleep i dream. i have an experience similar to the waking world. consciousness doesnt seem to stop at any moment in time
@@jeffforsythe9514 So, you are saying here that; you ain't have your soul when you fall asleep.
That is a contradictory statement for someone that have said here that when people die, their souls and conscience still exist and can be transferred through reincarnation.
Amazing talk...my intrigue was probably through the roof near the end there when he said the audience of the TED lecture could have a collective consciousness seperate from the consciousness of its each individual human members.
Like a crowd could gather, and that crowd would not be aware of an invisible intelligence brought out of their conjunction that is somewhere, with a sum of the crowd's points of views, thinking by 'itself' until the crowd disperses. Pretty intriguing thought!
Consciousness is simply your soul when you are awake.
"Understanding consciousness is the very key to understand universe and ourself"
Not really. The first is a biological process while the second is a cosmological process
@@nickolasgaspar9660 🐒 🐒 monkey answer be like 😂
"I cant define or quantify consciousness... so it doesn't exist"
- The unconscious human
nice. nice. well said.
Its sad but that really is science in a nutshell - we have* to pretend it doesn't exist until we can quantify/measure and lock it away some place, that however is not the problem. The problem is the people who forget that this is just a strategic approach - these are the people who really suspect the world disappears when they shut their eyes. Great commend btw!
@Electro_blob Love science so I hate to sound like we are beating on it but the challenge is specifically where the greatest gains lie. I love the new crop of Scientist Practitioners who are emerging especially in the biomedical sciences - David Sinclair, Valter Longo, Peter Attia etc - these guys I think get it - that it doesn't become science when it enters the textbooks. For instance for generations cultures everywhere demanded - often for spiritual reasons - that people should fast. Then came science which ridiculed fasting as an adjunct in palliative care, prescribing and preferring pills instead; now the top labs are falling over each other telling us how wonderful fasting is - all I want to say is, when Grandma claimed it you said it was nonsense - now your reagents have changed color we should give you a Nobel? We all just need a little bit of humility for things that don't make sense to us initially is all.
LMAO ! :)
@Electro_blob "the color blue is just a wave of light" spot on. Perfect example of how almost all of our reality is something those people are totally blind to. Some smart philosopher who is good with words could use it as a proof of how wrong they are.
The discussion around this problem is really fascinating because it is so contentious. Let me try to understand by summarizing, those who believe in the "explanatory gap" and those who dismiss it.
First, the explanatory gap describes the problem that there is no scientific theory that can explain what causes subjective experience. Of course advanced neuroscience can very accurately predict what a test subject would report thinking or feeling - we have a very good understanding of the objective qualities of inner brain states, and the reported subjective effects they cause. What we don't have an explanation for, is how these brain states give rise to subjective experience. Dualism, panpsychism, etc., are speculations on what type of scientific hypotheses could account for subjective experience, as part of an overall theory of everything (ie, as part of a future physics).
I can plainly see the explanatory gap is a valid problem. Now, is it the concern of science, or philosophy? I don't necessarily see why we need to understand this for any scientific purpose, unless we were trying to create artificial consciousness, which I think would give rise to many ethical questions. Although I respect the prerogative of philosophers like Chalmers to speculate on future physics, I am OK with this problem never being answered by physical science. It is enough to understand the neural correlates of consciousness for us to improve medicine, psychology, etc.
I do have trouble understanding why people can't see that the explanatory gap is valid, even as a philosophical problem. Here is my attempt to make an argument for dismissing the explanatory gap: Scientific observations are based on objective phenomenon, but those phenomenon ultimately come as subjective qualia to a conscious observer. Only once objectified into phenomenon, and then synthesized with our current best model of the universe, do we have a scientific fact, which represents a part of nature (if the phenomena does not fit our model, we either have an observation error or need to update the model). Qualia therefore precede nature, and if we try to make a theory of that qualia itself, we are in a way necessarily theorizing "outside of nature" - which is why the illusionists and physicalists say that Chalmers' speculations are supernatural, even though he sees his project as an attempt to expand science with new fundamentals. I believe this argument is convincing that the explanatory gap is an invalid scientific problem, but not that it is an invalid philosophical problem. Along with logic and causation, a conscious observer is a prerequisite of science that can never be empirically demonstrated (is not falsifiable) but must simply be assumed.
I see your point, but science goes way beyond simply describing natural phenomena in other ways that are commonly acknowledged. Take string theory or the multiverse. Strictly speaking, consciousness is much closer to our daily reality and implementation of research than other observations, if you consider how much progress has been made on the development of AI in the last couple of decades, the trend towards designer babies and even with regard to our climate crisis and the implications for ethics and responsibility of using our crude scientific know-how for better or worse, because we have mastered everything but ourselves. Does consciousness really precede our mindscape in a way that is outside of the natural world or does that definition reflect our current limited horizon? what makes you think it's not measureable?
When you say science, what you really mean is phsics.
Science doesn't need an objective viewer, just think of psychology.
All the sciences come from the philosophy.
Philosophy is a meta-science, so this topic is at exactly the right spot.
The philosophy should build up a science of conciousness.
THANK YOU! Everything you've said is in the direction I've been desperately looking to find someone else going in, regarding consciousness. Excellent job with the argument against all these people (as brilliant and well-intended as they are) who require that consciousness submit to material science on at least some level. I would say that if a person has even begun to accept the nature of consciousness as they experience it, they would have the good sense to not be making any intellectual demands of it whatsoever. A large majority of the voices I've heard speak on the mystery of consciousness completely fail to define consciousness without sneaking in plenty of opportunity for material reduction.
I think the reason for the mass avoidance we see may just be an existential anxious fear, which I can completely empathize with. If the nature of your own consciousness hasn't horrified you, I have to wonder if you've genuinely tried reconciling it with your understanding of what our universe is.
Lo vi en una conferencia en una Biblioteca en Alberta, Canada. Es asombroso la forma que tiene de explicar su conocimiento.
Its a miracle what a haircut can do to someones appearance
Exactly my first thought.
He doesn't look badass anymore :(
Povilas Račkauskas Still the leather jacket so you know it's him.
***** Jackass.
+Povilas Račkauskas -- Imagine if he also bought some adult clothes.
Each of us is conscious. I was so keen to hear somebody say that.
We all have a soul............................falundafa
Seems like there are two opinions in this comment section. That consciousness really isn't as big a problem as we think it is, or it really is. I think the reason for this major disagreement in this issue is a misunderstanding. The people who don't see consciousness as a hard problem are the ones who are simply saying its probably a result of brain activity. They may be right as well, but thats not the actual problem that intellectuals have argued about for 2 millenia when it comes to consciousness.
The actual problem is why. How do you explain consciousness through simple neural processes? If we knew exactly what the fundamental neural systems were that were at least necessary for the arise of some sort of consciousness, that wouldn't be the answer. Why is the question, so why is it that this series of chemical and electrical processes organized in a circuitry like fashion which is the brain give rise to consciousness, and not that slightly altered version of the brain where nothing is happening. Another thing about this is that as far as we know it, its impossible to measure whether or not something is conscious. We go off intuition. How do we know if extremely advanced artificial intelligence in the next decade is conscious, or just mimicing consciousness? Could you even attempt to mimic consciousness or would you always result in creating somehting that is conscious?
"Why is it that this series of chemical and electrical processes organized in a circuitry like fashion which is the brain give rise to consciousness, and not that slightly altered version of the brain where nothing is happening."
The version of the brain where nothing is happening would leave its owner helpless to defend itself against nature and therefore would never propagate its DNA in the wild. In other words, we think because the thinkers are the ones who survived while all the others were wiped out long ago.
"As far as we know it, its impossible to measure whether or not something is conscious."
That's true, but don't forget that we know almost nothing about it, so the fact that we have no way to measure consciousness is a very poor indicator of whether it could be measured by people who know more than us.
"Could you even attempt to mimic consciousness or would you always result in creating somehting that is conscious?"
You certainly can mimic consciousness. The Watson computer is famous for having played Jeopardy and it sometimes answered questions as if it understood the questions and the answers it was giving, but sometimes it gives answers that make it clear that it does not actually understand what it is saying. Watson works by taking shortcuts and using tricks rather than being a fully thinking machine with understanding of everything it is hearing and saying.
I see no reason why it might be impossible to create a machine with the full inner life of a human mind running somewhere in its software. That would be real consciousness, as opposed to a machine that is merely programmed to appear conscious.
The brain is not made of "simple neural" processes. The sheer number of neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters make the brain the most complex structure we know of in the entire universe.
Consciousness is an emergergent property of this complex material brain.
DC is dabbling in WOO Woo.
quagmire444 Man you get this stuff... Thumbs up!
Yes and it's clearly obvious that this "why" question is both fundamental to our human sentience and an intrinsically non-empirical question. There is absolutely nothing you can do empirically to approach the "why" question. Your only option is that if you want to see what is beyond the senses and the mind, you will have to control the senses and the mind. Materialists are too attached to their bodily pleasures to take up any form of spiritual discipline, even as an experiment. Materialists are desperately holding onto the dogma because it props up their materialist identity. It's entirely about egos, and in fact has very little to do with genuine scientific inquiry. This is the sad situation for 99% of the population.
@@Ansatz66 I agree that we could create a machine that feels qualia. But how about free will? Or do you have to assume no free will?
i lost track of the number of times my brain veered off into daydreaming while listening to this.
I feel you haha
Another crazy idea: Consciousness is that in which the world (and science) appears. What if Consciousness is infinite, eternal and dimensionless, but all dimensions, forms and ideas appear in it, are made of it. Consciousness is not limited by fundamental or universal laws, time, space or mass. All of these are dependent on consciousness, however consciousness does not depend on them? Worth exploring?
Consciousness clearly happens in time. One thought appears after another. I don't know what a static consciousness would be like. Can the qualia of orange exist without time?
Further consciousness seems to directly depend on our immediate circumstance. When there is a tree we might experience the qualia of it's smell. When a part of our brain is missing, the experience of sight might end altogether.
I don't know what "dimensionless" is supposed to mean here.
This is BRILLIANT. So nice to see someone stand up and actually put it out there. I can't follow all the way to conscious computers, though. Not computers built the way we build them now. Maybe some future computer will be different. Here's one simple argument. When I am awake, I'm conscious. When I'm asleep, and not dreaming, I'm not conscious. But my body still works and so on. I put computers in that category. They're like the autonomous systems of the body that crank right along when we're not conscious and minding the store.
In this talk, he is talking about the need for “scientific understandings of consciousness.” But the entire field of science (biology, physics, chemistry and even psychology) involves gathering of information through our five senses followed by thinking (i.e., mostly visual observations followed by thinking). In other words, all ideas/theories we form about the world and the universe ultimately represent perceptions within our consciousness itself (some of this was explained in this talk). However, even generating theories of consciousness (that he talks about towards the end of this talk in terms of “understanding our relationship to nature”) happen within consciousness in the form of thoughts. Now, is it is possible for us to set up against our own consciousness and understand it independent of it? This might sound “crazy” to some, but ancient Buddhist teachings do exactly that. In these teachings, fully understanding consciousness is referred to as “enlightenment” or “seeing things just as they are.” This understanding is accomplished through mindfulness/meditation practices by each individual - through these practices one understands the nature of consciousness. The following article explains that ‘analyzing consciousness’ and ‘analyses conducted in science’ represent two very different “levels of analyses”: sgo.sagepub.com/content/5/2/2158244015583860
Buddhism has infact taken this interpretation from ancient Hindu philosophy called sankhya and vedanta
@@brucewayne-og8ro The Buddha was first influenced by Hindu teachers from whom he learned how to calm his mind and reach deep and very pleasant calm mind-states. However, he realized that simply reaching these calm mind states do not answer many questions he had. This lead him on a ‘quest for truth’ for which he strived for many years - this eventually lead him to understand the nature of the mind (consciousness) which he described in great detail in his teachings (recorded in the Pali Cannon). He taught the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, dependent origination, the three characteristics of existence, etc., that enables anyone to gradually reach enlightenment.
400 dislikes? As soon as I saw that, I had a strong feeling it's because so many people are either unfamiliar with or afraid of philosophy. Any philosophical line of reasoning sounds too 'abstract' and so is perceived to be frivolous, "Why not just explain how it works? What's with all the weird lingo?" Some even knee-jerk categorize anything marginally subtle in philosophical terms as 'woo'. Woo is a thing, and it is a problem, but it isn't everything that you don't understand because you haven't acquainted yourself with the principles of metaphysics, ontology, or psychology. Or maybe the dislikes are from the seemingly popular consensus view that Dennett is correct. It's such a silly thing. As soon as you say the hard problem doesn't really exist, you're left with the burden of explaining why. If that explanation is that it's a perceptual illusion, I'll remind you that no physical model which supports that has been experimentally validated sufficiently to be accepted by the majority. Therefore, you're left with the unfinished research into how that illusion is cast. Since it's unfinished, and apparently quite difficult, it returns to the category of the hard problem.
+James Hansen This is honestly the most masturbatory comment here, I think. And I'm going to pray to God that you did not mean Dennett's view is popular consensus among anyone but the New Atheist population of the internet.
I like how he uses the "crazy idea" phrase in its positive meaning. 🙂
Feeling, feelings is the key word here. Our conscience is composed of various feelings, and those chemical feelings affect the abstract logic we come to understand those feelings. What was the 'first" feeling that happened in evolution? what was the second, and then how to perceive a breakdown of a creature that only mixes those two? Gr8! Peace ☮💜
In my opinion this is the most unique and intruiging Ted talk I've ever listened to. I would love to watch a show with this guy and Elon Musk discussing this topic.
Your consciousness is simply your soul when you are awake.
@@jeffforsythe9514 Your comments are simply your written words.
I'm a computer programmer. This give me a unique insight into the nature of consciousness. To me, consciousness is a very simple thing to understand. In my opinion, consciousness is an elementary process in the brain that always tries to resolve 2 questions. 1) What is going on? This is analogous to input(s). 2) What should I do? This is analogous to output(s). There are sub-processes in each stage but the sequence of these questions(stages) repeat continuously all the time while we live. Consciousness also continues while we sleep. The biggest difference between awake and sleeping is that the brain is deprived of most of our senses and the loop time of these two stages is much longer.
On the first question "What is going on?", our brains try to make sense of all the available senses(touch, taste, etc.). The brain also uses it's memories and it's reasoning in this stage.
On the second question "What should I do?", our brains try to form a response to the first question. One of the main sub-questions to be resolved in this stage is "what is most important at this time". A decision is made like rest or run or talk about something.
That's functionalism - the "easy problem" of consciousness. As you say, it was solved the day we discovered computers. It's about the flow and handling of data and inputs/outputs. No big deal. But that is not all consciousness is. You could have a robot handle all of the same information and yet "no one is home". There would be no "first person experience" of "what it is like" to be such an information processor. Some people have a hard time grasping qualia because they haven't experienced consciousness apart from the *contents* of consciousness. Yet, it is possible to experience consciousness even without thought, memory, sensation, or any other contents. It is the visceral experience of what it is like to be a being. Various forms of meditation or other altered states demonstrate the distinction clearly. Nothing about the functional handling of data explains that. In other words, why should *any* configuration of interacting atoms *ever* create the feeling of what it is like to be conscious? You could imagine such a structure knowing all about itself, its context, having goals, and making decisions - even reporting on its states and yet have no actual inner experience of itself that is being felt. A thermostat is built to report on what it detects and take action in response to it. But no one believes it is having an experience. So why should adding any more components, data, or complexity ever begin to produce that feeling? That is the "hard problem" of consciousness and computers can't address it, even in principle.
That doesn't address the hard problem of c. at all
I personally agree that consciousness is fundamental and also very simple, no more complex then the most simple receiver able to read what it receives, this recognition being the basis of reality.
For something to exist means that the existence of nothing is impossible, reality exists to validate it’s own existence through connection such as observation which closes a causality loop, it just depends on the nature of whats beings observed as to the complexity of the receiver. For example to observe a particle through two slits, this needs to be observed optically by an eye to close the feedback loop whether direct or indirect such as a recording which can be observed later, makes no difference. I also believe that it is all time dependant, causing reality to manifest from an otherwise quantised state until that exact moment.
Until observation is present then reality cannot be validated, it’s like if nothing exists then nothing can exist then if something is sensed what can cause its existence in that very moment has to also existence but until then everything is quantised. Perhaps I have over explained myself already but I also believe consciousness is a physical object, at its most simple, a duality as nothing can exist alone. I also personally believe the complexity of the mind is just fancy processing and our ability to record information but also create feedback loops between the present, past recordings and even ideas of the future. I personally think the answer is far more eloquent then we might think, the complexity of our minds are because of these elusive feedback loops which could be compared even to magnetic induction through a wire loop, we can read the noise of the induction from the memory feedback loops etc and then assume consciousness is this “living” part of these processes when all it is is any simple receiver in use. I like to think about how what exists today might exist to validate conscious feedback loops that haven’t even occurred yet but will in the future. Remember Einstein’s views about time, how all time exist all the time, what we perceive as future and past is only from our perspective within it. I hope you enjoyed my thought process. I did :)
Everything that exists consists of matter, including thoughts. But the matter that makes up thoughts is many times smaller than quarks. But a great spiritual master can see this matter.....................falun dafa
I always wonder, would the universe exist without consciousness? It seems to me that consciousness is just everything in that sense
yknow it exists but at what cost lol
It wouldn't. Your consciousness is simply your soul when you are awake.
if humans never came into existence how would consciousness ( even the word! ) be relevant or a thing ?... the cosmos would still be what it is until a possible expiration date without 'feeling '.....
@@johnkerr1113I'll try to explain. We live is the dimension of molecules and planets and when we look through a microscope we see that the particles get smaller and small but increase with energy. This decline in size happens a million times until the smallest of all particles, the human soul. In one particle of air there are a million universes, all different sizes that our technology cannot perceive. Each universe containing souls, conscious souls.
@@jeffforsythe9514 thank you for your explanation..
i find it amusing that even though consciousness is the only one thing we can be certain of to exist (since we are permanently trapped inside our brain, experiencing nothing but ourselves and the picture the brain draws for us), still consciousness is for whatever reason the one thing that the seemingly most intelligent people on earth try their best to get rid of.
@@rijpmajohan That doesn't make any sense. Consciousness not being what we think it is, is not the same as consciousness being an illusion. First of all, the entire CONCEPT of an illusion presupposes consciousness, so what are you talking about?
@@rijpmajohan Ok, if we take that and run with it, what exactly is having the illusion? What is being deceived? If you say that consciousness is an illusion in the sense that it's not real (which you don't seem to be doing, but a lot of people are) then I show you the door, but if all you're saying is that consciousness is not what we think it is, then you're not adding anything novel or relevant to the discussion.
''This is just a “useful fiction” for us to survive, that as a byproduct creates the illusion that there is a “thing” called consciousness that is different from everything that it is conscious of'' I don't know what you mean by this. Are you saying consciousness is not qualitatively distinct from everything else in the world, that our awareness and experience is not different from the outside world at all?
💯 agreed
Thank you super nintendo chalmers
I’m learnding!
"A consciência é fenômeno mais fabuloso do mundo" - a consciência
AJJAJAJJA
Happiness through the human life cycle: infancy- suckling, childhood- Christmas toys, teens- first kiss and or date and passing Algebra, young adulthood- purchase of first new car and perhaps matrimony, 30s- the family and house, 40s- divorce, 50s- finally have some savings, 60s- I can still take a walk and enjoy the smell of the ocean or flowers, 70s- thank God I had a bowel movement this morning!
David Chalmers. Well said sir.
Consciousness is simply your soul when you are awake.
My best guess - Consciousness had to evolve from the machinery that was available and molded by conditions. Brains developed for the purpose of evaluating the environment for the creatures that posses them. They do this by modeling the inputs from sense organs and continuously monitor and adjust the models to plan ahead and navigate for resources and reproduction. The images (models) we see in our "mind's eye", are only approximations of what our sense organs "see" and hear. The reasonable inference here, is that this constant, real time, evaluation and adjustment of the creature's self-position in space is what most likely produces the sensation of self. And why it mostly disappears (and plays re-runs) when the creature is sleeping and navigation is unnecessary.
I guess that shows that Chalmers wasn't clear enough. Consciousness, as imagined by the hard problem, is more basic than the self. It's experience in itself: The fact that red is red, pain hurts and so on. Why are we not empty information processing machines but actually have subjective experiences if we are made up of inanimate matter subject to the laws of physics? That's Chalmers' hard problem.
Panpsychism is certainly an intriguing concept. The idea that consciousness may be in some way universal could help to explain the origin of the mind. Perhaps the mind is a sort of fractal iteration of universal consciousness, or a bit like a child of it?
Effectively it could be a returning to a three part understanding of human experience.
Expect instead of mind body and soul.
It's mind, brain, and consciousness.
Who is that on 4:48 Right-Bottom corner ? Tim Berners-Lee ?
It's called TED. Technology, Entertainment and Design. Not every talk has to be about something scientific. The point in this talk was not to answer but to let questions arise.
It's also supposed to be about "ideas worth spreading". Which this isn't.
Matthew Prorok Why is it not? It is a very thoughtful question. Why should this idea be pushed aside?
Conor Baxter Because being a "thoughtful question" is insufficient. The question needs to be constrained by evidence. An answer needs to be at least in principle discoverable. I'm hardly the first to suggest that Chalmers is saying things which make no sense.
Matthew Prorok Science began with questions. Questions are vital for evidence to be gained. You don;t get evidence for something unless it is questioned. Who said that it is not discoverable. Many years ago what was above the sky was thought undiscovered. Until people questioned that. Questions are vital for discovery.
"Who said that it is not discoverable."
Chalmers did! He wrote a whole book about it: "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory". He's an epiphenomenalist. The whole point of his idea is that consciousness is a separate property beyond the physical, which has no observable effect on physical properties.
To every comment on this thread that claims to understand ANYTHING about the nature of consciousness, I laugh in the face of your giant ego. HA!
Read again, old poster, I have solved YOU!
What if the edge of human understanding is knowing how consciousness is formed
@Chip Reuben The scope of scientific investigation is bound by the limits of the 'spacetime ruleset.' In a manner similar to how Godel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrates the limits of mathematics, the study of our universe from within has it’s self evident limitations i.e.. boundary conditions can only be “viewed” from one side. Before, after and adjacent remain practically inaccessible, other than by inference using available models.- hence evidentially unknowable.
Maybe. See Tom Campbell's modelling of the hard problem at www.tomcampbell.info/
It's still interesting to read everyone's hypothesis on it, none of us really know but maybe one day someone will figure it out, that will only happen if we have a lot of people thinking about it and researching it :)
There is a guy here named Nicolas gaspar or something who believe is god. Strongly attached with his own dogma point of view “methodological naturalism blablablaaaaa”
A computer processes information. But when that information is processed, without a human being on the end of a monitor to interpret and use that information, it is useless.
How are we different?
How is it our brains process information, yet without anyone on the end to interpret it... we see it and understand it?
It doesn't make sense.
Who am "I", and how am I seeing this processed data from my brain? How can I even distinguish myself as a separate entity from my brain?
"How can I even distinguish myself as a separate entity from my brain?"
My idea is: you simply cannot, you are your brain, no more, no less.
You are the present moment
The reason you're confused is because everyone says computers process information, but they don't! They process *data*. Data doesn't become information until it's understood by a conscious mind. We convert information to data before entering it into a computer and then convert the data back into information when we retrieve it. Information is all about understanding, which is a conscious experience that computers have zero capacity for.
@@GumbyTheGreen1 You notice like me that people often step too easily over the meaning of the word "information". If a very simple system can be in state on or off than the information would be 1 or 0 but that kind of "information" is perhaps more accurate called "data" yes. A computer brain would need the same inborn filters humans have to decide what is information or else it would be all like massive noise coming in from the senses. I also think now about the signals our senses send to the brain. If you analyze those signals, it's not comparable to the signal a sensor sends and which is much more a translation of the actual stimulus but it's even not comparable to midi signals where the information of the sound is constructed locally. What has programmed those filters in the first place ? Evolution I guess but this all heavy stuff to think about as layman ;-)
To understand consicousness, we have to get out of it. To understand beauty, we have to see evil, to understand happiness, we have to experience sadness. There's no one without the other. I gaurantee that once you step out of it you're gonna find truly marvalous things.
NOPE. TRY BEING CONSCIOUS FIRST AND THEN RUN THOSE CONCEPTS BY UR MIND AGAIN, WHEN IT'S IN SANE MODE, NOT WHEN IT'S IN DUMBASS SATANIC MODE TRYING DESPERATELY TO MAKE PEOPLE THINK YOU HAVE TO HAVE NEGATIVE THINGS TO COMPREHEND GOOD THINGS
Easy. Consciousness is the thing you don’t have when you go in a dreamless sleep every night.
UR STILL CONSCIOUS WHEN U DON'T DREAM U FUKCING IDIOT
Consciousness is the universe unfolding itself.
That's really thought provking. Ninja, are you still there? (somewhere) Do you recall what you meant by that, precisely?
I think he has a point with his second "crazy idea" about consciousness, especially with elementary particles. A lot of the behavior of elementary particles is inexplainable, like the concept of charge. Why are photons positive and electrons negative? Why do they move the way that they do? Maybe they are, in some sense, conscious.
You meant protons, not photons. Photons are neutral.
When you say "his second crazy idea", do you mean the idea he *called* the second one, or the actual second one? The first "crazy idea" he mentioned was Dan Dennett's idea. He then called the next crazy idea the first crazy idea, and the one after that, he called the second crazy idea. Really, they were the second and third "crazy ideas". An off by one error, and the most spectacular one I've ever heard of.
There can be no experience without consciousness. So technically in a way, you don't explain consciousness. Consciousness is the given, the basis. It is the beginning of everything else.
The thing you said its 'axiomaticity' is what he's trying to address. Everybody 'senses' it to be so but we don't know WHY it ought to be so!
@@Kobe29261 But that "why" comes out of the consciousness. I have a feeling that this is all very much a psychological problem and not a physical sciences problem. If someone searching for consciousness changes his point of view he will just get it or stop needing to understand it. And that the scientists in that university world should have studied art and litterature first so they would have had a deeper understanding, or that they are slightly autistic so they can never see a bigger picture thats needed to understand. I have friend who has aspbergers syndrome and he just can never get it. It always comes down to reductionism for him, no matter the subject.
@@jaguillermol This is the genius of science though, the abrogation of necessity, your statement is avoidant reduction-ism -- you basically say 'you don't get it because you are not me' or that to understand consciousness we CANNOT begin by asking the question WHAT is consciousness? Except true as that might be science demands more and that answer is a dead-end. I'm wary of what you call 'a psychological problem' it often means we are unable or unwilling to enter deeper, to think harder. A man often says 'of course it ought to be so' about much that he's given little if any thought to. I don't think the so called 'hard problem of consciousness' is beyond physical science. Science has a way of crossing over from the mundane to the ethereal if a man is willing like Chalmers to probe deeper. Someday we'll be able to 'demonstrate' consciousness even to the autistic
@@Kobe29261 Well, i meant "a problem for psychology as a science," not a mental problem. Science as in "try it, and if it works repeat the experiment many times to see that you really did it right" can prove it, but not science as in the institutions and the dogmas. Materialism for example, is not science, but it is held up as a base for many sciences.
Consciousness is like a postulate we know it’s true but we can’t prove it so we axiomatically say it’s true
I read Chalmer's book on this topic in the early 90s. It is so cool to finally see him in movement. I wish he had kept his locks, though.
Great talk. Particularly like the idea of Consciousness as a fundamental element of life or panpsychism; is important to add that this is by no means a new idea, only a few new fancy names; Buddhism and Hinduism have been saying this since ever.
Consciousness is the human soul awake, when asleep, unconscious.
2018, I saw the play “The Hard Problem (of Consciousness) by Tom Stoppard based on Chalmers’ work. Great stuff.
The idea of a universal consciousness is fairly logical. I am conscious, I'm also the primordial energy of the universe that for some mysterious reason decided to arrange itself temporarily in a specific structure (the human body). The question " Is the universe conscious ?" doesn't make much sense , does it ?
That is , of course, unless anyone can find a way to draw the line and separate us from the universe. I've tried that and it didn't work.
Therefore the inescapable conclusion is that not only that everything in existence is in fact the universe continuously changing shapes and structures but also a universe that manifests an infinite number of different levels of consciousness simultaneously.
Came here after listening to Vedanta Society New York's Swami Sarvapriyananda's Talks where he talks about "Hard problem of Consciousness" by David Chalmers.
That's very interesting. I always thought the we humans are conscious because of higher number of neurons in our brain, that consciousness happens after certain levels. I have never studied anything related to this and it was only my childhood belief. It's interesting to see what theories are out there, and I am gonna dive deeper into it
Yes but at what point would matter become conscious through evolution. It only makes sense that everything was always consciousness, and it just slowly got more complex.
Consciousness and the brain have nothing to do with each other. One is divine and the other is of the earth. Consciousness is simply your soul when you are awake.
You have a soul, what is so difficult to comprehend, now let us move on, why are we here? We are here to earn our way back to Heaven and Falun Dafa shows the Way.
@@jeffforsythe9514 Who is Falun Dafa? Are you high?
Lol@@julianmustermann1243
An absolute genius. Would love to work with him some days.
sure, he takes advantage of people's scientific ignorance and he promotes pseudo philosophical speculations as important intellectual material...
@@rijpmajohan He does what science and philosophy used to do in their effort to explain "mysterious" phenomena.
For Combustion they came up with "Phlogiston", for temperature...Caloric, for life... Ordic and Orgone Energy, for Diseases ....Miasma!
For awareness he came up with a thing called "consciousness".
People are acceptable to magical thinking resulting in creating agencies out from abstract concepts.
Consciousness is simply your soul when you are awake.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 bro seems like you don't believe in consciousness or soul, and that's sad.
The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing! I love to think about those questions! I have a logical way of thinking that can explain those mysteries, it could give you a different perspective on what we see as consiousness. It’s a combination of science, filosofie, logic reasoning and abstract thinking. It explains consiousness, it explains if computers/animals have are can have a consiousness, brings together religion and science, reason of live, feelings,... I would love the have a conversation with someone like you (that knows a lot about these things) so I can see where my way of thinking comes up short. Kind regards Fabian Feyaerts.
Your first sentence is nonsense. We all need a great teacher, that is all.................Falun Dafa
I couldn't agree more with this man's position and his rejection of the 'consciousness as epi-phenomenon' argument.
That was explanation...that explained nothing through a strawman fallacy!
Different kinds of consciousness would still be an emergent phenomenon though?
hardcore drinking game: a shot every time the guy sasys the word "consciousness" . No survivors
similarly deadly challenge: take a shot everytime Descartes writes 'I' in his meditations.
I’ve never heard anything like this, I find this speech fascinating! 💕
Why?
He is a good philosopher with an open and clear mind that considers all of the following as plausible alternatives:
1) C is nothing but an illusion (Physicalism)
2. C is in everything (Panpsychism)
3. C is essential along with mass, energy, charge, spin, space, time, etc. (Dualism)
Isn't it fascinating?
Just quiet your own mind to the point of calm silence and when that next thought arises from within recognize who is conscious of it. That consciousness that silently receives that next thought as a stimulus is the real you. We all have consciousness as our base of being. Consciousness is what we are. "I Am That!" Nisargadatta Maharaj.
No. Find a great teacher and get the show on the road................Falun Dafa
love this talk!! thank you 🔥
he is talking to his own projections of consciousness, in the same way that I am writing these words to you, projections of my own consciousness.
And you, reading these words, you are projecting your own consciousness into these letters.
Our experience of consciousness is a fractal of the ultimate consciousness, which is all one.
Very interesting ideas I must say! It goes back to the incompleteness theorem of Kurt Gödel in which he shows that no theory can be at the same time internally consistent and complete. This has complications in math but it certainly has complications in us trying to make sense of the world. It tells us that there will always be things that can't be described with the set of suppositions that we are currently holding. So sometimes we must increase the set of fundamentals in order to better explain this crazy world that we live in and that we ourselves are...
Everything can be explained by a great teacher. Consciousness is simply your soul when you are awake............falun dafa
That's so weird I watched a documentary on him last week had never seen or heard his name before and now you've mentioned him in this comment
To make total sense of this world one needs a great teacher......................Falun Dafa
@@jeffforsythe9514 So, you are saying that you ain't have your soul when you fall asleep. That is a contradictory statement for someone that says that when people die their souls and conscience still exist and can be transferred through reincarnation.
Wow! I'm three minutes into this and I haven't yet heard the words soul, spirit, divine, or god. I think I'll continue to watch.
Everything in existence as we know it is God's word, everything is a vibration or frequency. Conciousness is the breath of God.
@@danielmiller3967 Oh, ok.
I still can't decide if this talk about consciousness is really profound or really meaningless.
Both. It's profound because it's unlike anything we've ever studied in science, and is one of the largest mysteries that is unsolved. It's meaningless because who cares in the end really?
Why is it meaningless if it helps us understand our life and universe wich the scientists have been doing since the day we were curios.
I think most outer space reaserches are kind of pointless when we will never ever reach there like to the black holes or distant stars but understanding the phenomenon of consciousness might bring clarity to our mysterious life and existence and perhaps may enlighten us on many topics like purpose of life and the existence of soul and/or God...
Seems like atheists are more intrested in research with matters that are furthest away from them, but close matters like consciousness are out of their intrest for some reason.
Intresting to see that most of the comments brush this notion away under the carpet thinking that it's boring or somehow useless to know about. I think "It's just not there cup of tea" as the English say..
1-Reality Why would you bring atheism/religion in this comment section? It had nothing to do with that. Dont try to bring your bias in every discussion.
Panos Provts. You took the words out of my mouth. 1-Reality appears to be stuck in his religious trap (I assume Islam, from the moon&star image). Everything is seen through that biased religious prism.
ok then, since everyone has glasses to see things as Atanu has implied, do you guys have horse blinders by any chance?
I was waiting for his version of consciousness...At least thats what the title said!!!!
Thank you so much Sir. It is very nice and real presentation.I think , consciousness is the building blocks in our universe.
That is self contradictory. To be conscious means to be able as a thinking agent to be aware of things that exist. In order to be conscious of anything Something must first exist. Existence is primary in the universe (by definition) and conscious agents can observe and verify objectively what exists and what claims are either unfounded, wrong or unfalsiable.
@@nickolasgaspar9660 what.
Building blocks? It is the human soul.
No, consciousness is the soul.......................falundafa
@@jeffforsythe9514 A person with catastrophic brain damage is unconscious. On the other hand rats, like other animals, are believed to have some level of consciousness. Rats are capable of complex behaviors, such as problem-solving and learning, that suggest they have some level of cognitive and emotional processing. Studies have also shown that rats have neural activity patterns similar to those of humans in certain brain regions associated with consciousness, such as the neocortex. Soul is a human construct with no scientific evidence whatsoever.
Consciousness is the fundamental mechanism whereby we can accurately judge and experience the truth of reality. I believe that consciousness is the essence of what it means for human beings to have a soul.
I think you are confusing it with intelligence. What part of judgement requires qualia to exist?
Consciousness is fundamental
Reality = Information
The strawberries in my garden are ripe.
ahhhh you win. well played.
Loved it! Fascinating, intriguing and radical.
Would have really appreciated if there were hat tips to Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and the Indic Thoughts - various non theistic strains of Hinduism, like Vedanta, Sankhya etc. And another to Fritjof Capra.
Scientists may choose to look into these texts and probably find some leads. All these thoughts came from fundamental questions from a time when there were no silos such as science and non science.
The new practice of Falun Dafa explains everything concerning creation.
@@jeffforsythe9514 Yeah the new practice of Cupacabra explains everything concerning creation as well.
I eventually became a panpsychist via my philosophy of the mind I call "necessitism". I applied modality to the world of color, light, space, sound, smell, etc and solved the problem of other minds and external world skepticism. However it requires that outside your "private world" that there must(necessitation) be other events with their own properties outside your experience where they're correlated with your subjective experiences of the external world.
Consciousness is our soul and we’re just experiencing 1 form of it through a human body.
you are so right !!!.... in afterlife, consciousness is experienced through astral-energy and mental human bodies...
postulate this:We are a triune beings, We have three parts body,soul,spirit,:consciousness comes from the soul,if you are looking for it in your brain---your looking in the wrong place.this was well known over 2000 years ago.their minds refuse to face the conclution.
+Clark brian 16 years ago I left my body, but there was entanglement, my soul and some part of me, will, was still in my body. I saw with my physical/spiritual eyes that we are like a large wisp (ethereal form) comprised of smaller wisps. That's what I saw, many others testify we are this form, others see people/beings, others see us as light. I understood myself as God knows me and could see how God knows the future by knowing each of us so intimately that he knows now all choices we will ever make, and God knows the position of every molecule in the universe/multiverse. to advance your thinking everything comes from God. Love.
What you saw was but one aspect of your being,the reason,God wants you to know you do not need the body to live,He wants us to stop thinking like a body all the time,we are spiritual beings.
Clark brian That was my godmother, Jan, who gave me the gift of rapture. I really love her. It was really weird for me, I stopped reading the Bible for quite a few years, the experience of rapture is so beyond words or thoughts, but then I remembered Jan is a worship leader, and apostle. I think the former is where she developed this particular talent. It's good to find people we can agree with.
Yes
+Clark brian We are made up of parts, but is there a fundamental part? I see the soul as the program part, the body is also part of the program, the spirit is the computer that runs the program. When we leave the programming of this Universe, we can put on a different program. When NDEer leave this world into the next they shed the programming of who we are here and enter a different program mode. We perceive that we have free choice, free will, but that is just part of the programming. Our path is fixed. We cannot prove that one way or the other, but the available evidence points strongly in that direction. So says my program. LOL
In order to explore the secrets of consciousness we must study the power and effects of psychedelics.
No
definitely not lmao
My laws for consciousness:
1.) Defined & bounded by the senses.
2.) Cannot affect surroundings directly, at least not in an obvious and immediate way.
3.) Private or personal. No two entities may share, or switch, their consciousness.
4.) Outlook or interpretation is subjective.
5.) Shares a causal or co-dependent relationship with the mind.
6.) Both limitless and limited. Limitless in experience & theory, but limited by the "governors" of consciousness.
That sounds like a fair set of starting points. But two questions, 1 - what's the difference between consciousness and the mind, by your definition? (aren't they part + parcel of the same thing?), and 2 - "Defined and bounded by the senses" ....What about psychedelic drugs (like DMT) causing experiences that are *way* beyond anything previously perceived by the senses? In states like that, the subjective experience is that you're perceiving visual/auditory/telepathic information that comes from somewhere outside of what the senses can normally perceive.
Those'd be my only two objections, though...lol Otherwise, pretty good set of laws I think.
@@465marko First of all, great observations.
Regarding your first question, what is the difference between the mind & consciousness, I'd suggest the "inner dialogue" we experience is a fundamental part of consciousness; one which is correlated, yet separate, from the physical mind.
For, some time ago, someone (I've forgotten their name, hope they will forgive me) performed an experiment in which he would electrically stimulate a persons brain, specifically and solely with the intention to create body movement. (The subjects/volunteers arm would raise, or extend, after receiving this electric charge.) Now, afterwards, when he questioned these people about the experience, they would most often respond, "You raised my arm," or "My arm was raised."
For me, this is enough "proof" that consciousness and the mind have a very clear distinction.
Now, as far as your observations regarding drugs such as Ayahuasca, I'm actually a bit perplexed. (A very thought-provoking observation, I've been sitting here thinking about this for over 60 minutes, lol.) I am extremely familiar with the types of "experiences" substances such as DMT induce, being as I've listened to, and read, many first-hand accounts.
In other-words, I'm aware just how "powerful" and "unique" these experiences can be. I don't have an exact retort, but just a couple of short observations.
1.) It COULD be argued these experiences are still bounded within the senses, though they are senses ordinarily only used when someone is fast approaching death. (Assuming the literature I've read on DMT is correct.) Heavily manipulated senses? Absolutely. Strange and foreign in comparison to daily life? Indeed. But, still, bounded within the senses all the same. Similar to NDE's.
2.) Yet, I also believe you're right, and my "law" would need to be altered. Perhaps "Largely defined by the senses. Infrequently defined by other parts of the mind, specifically excluding the standard senses." (Or something like that.)
In close, thank you for your remarks. They have led me to a great "session" of thought, conversation, and further (previously unknown to me) realizations.
@@mycommentpwnz Hey, thanks for such a great reply! I don't want to drag you further down the rabbit hole than you have time for, but...
What you mentioned about the electrical brain stimulation is really interesting. So, when you say "the mind", you're talking the physical brain (?).
Just as an aside, wouldn't it be strange if the result was slightly different; if instead of saying "my arm was moved", the people always said "I decided to move it"? Even though they'd been told to keep perfectly still, the electric impulse was enough to create the sensation of making the decision...as if they couldn't help "deciding" to move their arm every time?
Not really adding anything by that, I just thought that would be an even weirder result!
But I'm with you on the distinction between the mind and consciousness. That they're related, correlated, but distinct. Makes sense to me (sort of..!)
As far as being bounded by the senses.. First, now I'm wondering what that actually means. Does it mean, consciousness can only "work with" the information it receives from the senses? So for eg....a brain that's never seen the colour blue *probably* couldn't conceive of blue (although it has seen other colours, so maybe it could extrapolate).
But I'm back-tracking a little bit now on whether I fully get that concept.
Also, NDE's - YES, absolutely. Perfect example of what I was getting at. Or even more mundane; dreams. Imagination, even? Maybe.
But I take your point about senses ordinarily not available to us. That could absolutely be it. Although, to be fair, the whole "extra senses" idea probably sounds a bit crazy to most. I can get down with it, though. So that's fair.
I guess what's "bugging" me is; of all the sensory input that enters a brain, how much ability does it have to imagine completely new/novel things? And it's difficult because, we can extrapolate from things that *have* entered via the senses.
Then I was thinking, if you had a brain in a vat, alive but with no sensory input...(it would be a bit cruel), but...what would happen if you gave it ayahuasca?
But no, I like your answers there. And I like that you didn't try and argue that NDEs or psychedelic experiences are just the brain spewing out variations of information that originally *was* perceived by the ordinary senses, stored, and then shuffled around and spat out during the experience.
You realise how profound those things actually are.
Anyway, thanks very much for your response!! Much appreciated.
CHALMERS WHY U SHAVE EPIC HAIR??????????
Many more people take him seriously this way. It's why I wish the anti-aging researcher Aubrey de Grey would shave his beard and stop looking like Gandalf - and ironically much older than he actually is.
valar I'm not sure who this Aubrey de Grey is, but with a last name like de Grey it is probably best he look like Gandalf lol
valar
interestingly I received more respect when I had a beard. I choose not to grow a beard now. I don't worry too much of what others think. it's just their perspective.
I thought the same thing when I clicked on the vid. I loved his long locks. He has't aged a day in 25 years, though.
He can't bring anything new to his "philosophy".... changing his hair was much easier...
Science sounds like it's catching up with some deep mystical truths.
Itzhak Bentov, wrote on this in the 70's.
problem is they dont build the measuring devices fast enough
This talk does not contain science, just bogus philosophy.
How so?
How come, when people talk about "consciousness," they never talk about being awake vs. being asleep? That would be my starting point: what is the difference between the sleeping brain (which doesn't have it or barely has it) and the awake brain?
This is what neuroscientists do. They are looking for the so-called correlates of consciousness - areas or states of the brain that are active in the awake, but inactive in the sleeping. These include, for example, the gamma and beta frequencies of the cortex neurons. In sleeping people, these same neurons work at a lower frequency - delta, theta.
But all this still does not answer the main question - why subjective experience exists in principle.
@@vkorc1 We do know (1) that it evolved in animals, and (2) that when they are awake they can coordinate their movements in response to their senses, in a way that uses a lot of information processing, to help do things like finding food and avoiding predators. When they're not awake, they can't do those things.
It is a curious thing to watch and hear individuals so tightly bound to intellect trying to wrap their brains around the simple idea of consciousness, as if they might capture it, put it in a bottle and take credit for adequately defining it. This is what happens when one becomes a slave to Ego. Over their heads like a roof!
it is strange that ted did not censor/ban this talk, ah i guess slip of an fingers
Why
Cosciousness explains Mathematics. Mathematics explains Physics, Physics explains Chemistry, Chemistry explains Biology, Biology explains Psychology and Psychology explains Consciousness.
It seems like everything in the Universe comes down to Consciousness.
Your first two steps don't make sense.
Yup consiousnes is energy inane energy is everything boom!
The Vedic tradition states that the source of creation from where all the laws of nature reside and are expressed is an unbounded, infinite field of consciousness (Sat, Chit, Ananda...absolute bliss consciousness). So...consciousness is preexisting and not a product of functioning organisms. Consciousness exists like other fields (i.e., electromagnetic field) and is reflected in objects to the degree that they are equipped to do so. The human nervous system, the Vedic Tradition says, is so highly evolved that it can reflect the infinite consciousness found at the source of creation. We have the ability to transcend the relative field of change and know the absolute reality of pure consciousness...the source of creation. So, while our nervous systems don't create consciousness, they act as receivers that perceive to whatever degree we can, degrees of consciousness. That degree is determined by how developed our nervous system is. The Vedic Tradition offers technologies to purify and develop the human nervous system and thereby gain increased ability to know deeper, more profound levels of consciousness.
and this is why we don't use the vedic tradition to do science.
Science uses terms (like consciousness) as tags in order to identify and label observable phenomena.
Magical explanations on the other hand make unfalsifiable claims about the invisible nature of an actual agent acting on nature.
This ischildish god- like pseudo philosophy.
Jeffrey, what a lovely comment. It's funny, that we in the West, the USA, with our less-than-3-centuries of existence think to know so much more than those traditions dating back thousands of years. I wish I knew Sanskrit so I could read the Vedic teachings in their original form.
What's amazing is how linear language - something so very relative - can manage to convey such depths & breadths. It helps so much to be Heart-centric rather than mind-centric to receive/perceive it. Heart's Knowing greatly transcends the more limited knowledge of the mind.
~♥~
@@sitarainbow8837 what we think we know is IRRELEVANT. Whether our epistemic methods are fruitful or not that is something that can be demonstrated and evaluated.
The device and network you use to post your ideology against science.....is based on scientific knowledge.
Your life in a heavily packed society is sustained by science (vaccines, antibiotics, painkillers, sanitation, access to basic needs without poisoning your self(water,food), your ability to commute, your ability to communicate....etc etc).
Can you point to a single scientific framework which is based on an blindly accepted ancient Vendic traditional claim? I guess you can not...because there isn't one. And even if there was a similarity in a claim by chance, evidence is what rendered a statement...to be knowledge.
What distinguishes knowledge from other claims is....empirical evidence....nothing more nothing less.
As far as I know there isn't any other domain that uses a systematic empirical method as a tool to its evaluations.
6:25 "So far" is a key concept - these philosophers seem to overlook - 8:00 "Consciousness an anomaly" "need ideas that are crazy" - Ever think you're looking at it the wrong way, and asking the wrong questions?
10:50 - No you can't do science with metaphysics - all you have is philosophy because of you're dissatisfaction with current understanding.
If consciousness is fundamental - where does that leave atoms, molecules, evolution and biological processes?
I like how Chalmers mentions Dennett's view in passing and then moves on to the serious ideas. He doesn't take the denial of the Hard problem seriously, and rightly so.
His cadence of speech reminds me of Jesse eisenberg. It's fast then cut off. He has interesting points just difficult to listen to
+inceptiondreamz He has a corrupted Australian accent.
+Steve Connolly Can he get arrested for that?
Reminds me of william shatner
It time to bring David Icke , he will bring down the house !
I think he talks in a way so that you have enough time to let what he is saying sink in.
consciousness is the "eternal now"
lol no. Consciouness is not a temporal designation. Its a mind property of our brain functions.t
@@nickolasgaspar9660 Ok, can you please explain to me the brain functions, that give rise to consciousness? Surely you must be able to prove this, since your statement sounds like a fact. Right?
that was awesome the kind of comeback where even the crickets are hearing crickets
@@feathetstone7290 making scientifically ignorant questions which youtube fails to deliver through its broken notification platform do not qualify as "awesome comeback" mate.
@@simonjohnson3424 Sure Simon. I could explain to you the brain functions responsible for our ability to be conscious or how the rest of our brain modules produce the content of our conscious states....But it is better NOT to take my claims at face value but instead earn an education about the phenomenon from academic sources.
Here is the paper where it contains our scientific definition of consciousness.
17:17 OK but who has that inner movie of the collective Ted consciousness that's distinct for the individual inner movies
Consciousness defines who we are on a personal level that goes beyond your physical self being.
I wish that Alan Watts were still alive to give a TED Talk on this same topic.
He did ted talks before ted talks existed :-)
Touché! At least we will always have his recordings and books.
Great thing is that on the wonderful internet, you can listen to endless hours of Alan Watts. I enjoy every minute of his talks.
How would you personally sum up his views on the subject? I've listened to him for many happy hours but always end them with the feeling that he is exploring a given possibility that he himself is quite distant from. In fact the only parts of his talks that I feel were meant seriously are his jokes!
Consciousness is absolute (fundamental). Matter, time and space are appearance in consciousness. It like the river bed without which river (of time space matter and causation) cannot flow.
Matter time space can be explained to be derived out of consciousness. All our subjective experience are that. Reverse that consciousness is derived out of time matter and space is difficult to explain and prove.
-------Vedic Philosophy. 5000 year old.
Chalmers is late
Even Greek knew this.
I think Sankhya, Yoga and Buddhism and Advaita(Vedanta in General) comes as close as possible.
They have said the same thing that's said in this video. That consciousness is a fundamental. Advaita goes further and says everything is consciousness and there is nothing apart from consciousness, and that matter comes from consciousness.
Consciousness is the self-contained, self perpetuating capacity to manifest and experience itself as real or imagined. Consciousness is not created in your brain; your brain tunes in to it. Consciousness doesn’t switch on and off; your brain tunes in and out of it. Your neural pathways determine your experience and awareness of consciousness. Even when the body dies, consciousness remains.
please explain how you know consciousness remains after the body dies?