Just finished this course and it was definitely the greatest learning experience I’ve ever had ... I learned so much from the lectures but the material was set up perfectly for periodic deep dives into certain regions or networks. Thanks again!
Thanks so much for the kind words! It is because of people like you that truly enjoy learning that I do what I do. On top of a very busy life, I'm hoping to put out some new content soon! I hope you'll enjoy all of that as well.
This whole research of subliminally priming someone (here with the girl and the cake) confuses me because in this case there seems to be a real effect on a conscious decision later on but everyone also always talks about how the "quickly showing a coke ad during a movie" marketing is a myth and doesn't actually work soo... how can one be true and the other not?
Sentience and consciousness are two separate things. Sentience is the real-time use of emotions to prioritize inputs and responses to events in your life. Consciousness is a series of feedback loops that compare direct perception of the senses against a model of reality that uses real-time memory to generate a realistic probability of transpiring events. Sentience is a node (sub-process) within the larger flowchart/process of consciousness. Emotional feelings are nodes within the sentience process.
I agree except with "compare [...] against a model of reality thay uses real-time memory", It is real time and total memory. A model of reality or "worldview" is the total amount of memories (pieces of context or pieces of reality perceived by senses). I agree that it is "updated" in real time, but not by comparison. Comparison is too complex and is much broader as an abstract operation, especially for a whole worldview or a whole model of reality. In your definition of consciousness as the larger system composed of feedback loops or nodes, of which one is sentience with real time reactivity with emotions (emotions as in all the input and outputs from the limbic system). The problem is we (animals with nervous systems) don't use our whole model of reality (or all of our memories) at all times, we only use some at a time, we process each new information after we filter it first (inhibition). We update by adding, removing or modifying memories/registered information. Example: when you watch youtube, does your brain makes a comparison to what you know all the time? Or does it take info by info, process it in language/audio, visual, mathematical etc information (sometimes all at once), and then this info stays in memory, short or long term, according to its importance (decided by your brain as important, usually by your limbic system aka emotions). If an information you feel is extremely important for your survival, you will keep it, and you won't even have to try "consciously" (here I mean with effort), you will just remember. Its rare for someone to forget how to eat with forks and knives or ride a bike, but its easy to forget how to do differential equations or what hapenned in 1789.
Wonderful presentation . When you talk about Anatomy of Consciousness , and speak about Medula Oblangata , a lesion here, will "cut off" conciousness , firstly i am no brain science student or even closely qualified to comment on technicalities, but when normally looking at many such scenarios around us, many a times, a modem, or a phone receives RF signals and is active , why can we not simplistically approach this as brain "Receiver" or manifesting consciousness already around us. It is primarily only enabling our sentient (qualia) , and registering these to form a continued experience (umwelt) . the bigger question is what happens when we "physically, clinically die" and the so many OBE experiences that has been researched, so these continued experiences from previous body continue on ??? to achieve what ?
I think its hard here to provide a coherent answer because of the lack of a formal definition for conscious experience. I really like your intuition about consciousness being pervasive in the universe and that our brain is a receiver of sorts but as a scientist I have no clear way to test those implications. I look forward to a day though when we can understand those processes at a deeper level, albeit if that is even possible.
@@thecellularrepublic9844 Totally amazing: i seem to have gone down an electrotonic rabbit hole... Do you have anything that deals with neural harmonics and/or electrotonic flows? Cheers!
I am a physicist and I will provide solid arguments that prove that consciousness cannot be generated by the brain (in my youtube channel you can find a video with more detailed explanations). Many argue that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but it is possible to show that such hypothesis is inconsistent with our scientific knowledges. In fact, it is possible to show that all the examples of emergent properties consists of concepts used to describe how an external object appear to our conscious mind, and not how it is in itself, which means how the object is independently from our observation. In other words, emergent properties are ideas conceived to describe or classify, according to arbitrary criteria and from an arbitrary point of view, certain processes or systems. In summary, emergent properties are intrinsically subjective, since they are based on the arbitrary choice to focus on certain aspects of a system and neglet other aspects, such as microscopic structures and processes; emergent properties consist of ideas through which we describe how the external reality appears to our conscious mind: without a conscious mind, these ideas (= emergent properties) would not exist at all. Here comes my first argument: arbitrariness, subjectivity, classifications and approximate descriptions, imply the existence of a conscious mind, which can arbitrarily choose a specific point of view and focus on certain aspects while neglecting others. It is obvious that consciousness cannot be considered an emergent property of the physical reality, because consciousenss is a preliminary necessary condition for the existence of any emergent property. We have then a logical contradiction. Nothing which presupposes the existence of consciousness can be used to try to explain the existence of consciousness. Here comes my second argument: our scientific knowledge shows that brain processes consist of sequences of ordinary elementary physical processes; since consciousness is not a property of ordinary elementary physical processes, then a succession of such processes cannot have cosciousness as a property. In fact we can break down the process and analyze it step by step, and in every step consciousness would be absent, so there would never be any consciousness during the entire sequence of elementary processes. It must be also understood that considering a group of elementary processes together as a whole is an arbitrary choice. In fact, according to the laws of physics, any number of elementary processes is totally equivalent. We could consider a group of one hundred elementary processes or ten thousand elementary processes, or any other number; this choice is arbitrary and not reducible to the laws of physics. However, consciousness is a necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrary choices; therefore consciousness cannot be a property of a sequence of elementary processes as a whole, because such sequence as a whole is only an arbitrary and abstract concept that cannot exist independently of a conscious mind. Here comes my third argument: It should also be considered that brain processes consist of billions of sequences of elementary processes that take place in different points of the brain; if we attributed to these processes the property of consciousness, we would have to associate with the brain billions of different consciousnesses, that is billions of minds and personalities, each with its own self-awareness and will; this contradicts our direct experience, that is, our awareness of being a single person who is able to control the voluntary movements of his own body with his own will. If cerebral processes are analyzed taking into account the laws of physics, these processes do not identify any unity; this missing unit is the necessarily non-physical element (precisely because it is missing in the brain), the element that interprets the brain processes and generates a unitary conscious state, that is the human mind. Here comes my forth argument: Consciousness is characterized by the fact that self-awareness is an immediate intuition that cannot be broken down or fragmented into simpler elements. This characteristic of consciousness of presenting itself as a unitary and non-decomposable state, not fragmented into billions of personalities, does not correspond to the quantum description of brain processes, which instead consist of billions of sequences of elementary incoherent quantum processes. When someone claims that consciousness is a property of the brain, they are implicitly considering the brain as a whole, an entity with its own specific properties, other than the properties of the components. From the physical point of view, the brain is not a whole, because its quantum state is not a coherent state, as in the case of entangled systems; the very fact of speaking of "brain" rather than many cells that have different quantum states, is an arbitrary choice. This is an important aspect, because, as I have said, consciousness is a necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrariness. So, if a system can be considered decomposable and considering it as a whole is an arbitrary choice, then it is inconsistent to assume that such a system can have or generate consciousness, since consciousness is a necessary precondition for the existence of any arbitrary choice. In other words, to regard consciousness as a property ofthe brain, we must first define what the brain is, and to do so we must rely only on the laws of physics, without introducing arbitrary notions extraneous to them; if this cannot be done, then it means that every property we attribute to the brain is not reducible to the laws of physics, and therefore such property would be nonphysical. Since the interactions between the quantum particles that make up the brain are ordinary interactions, it is not actually possible to define the brain based solely on the laws of physics. The only way to define the brain is to arbitrarily establish that a certain number of particles belong to it and others do not belong to it, but such arbitrariness is not admissible. In fact, the brain is not physically separated from the other organs of the body, with which it interacts, nor is it physically isolated from the external environment, just as it is not isolated from other brains, since we can communicate with other people, and to do so we use physical means, for example acoustic waves or electromagnetic waves (light). This necessary arbitrariness in defining what the brain is, is sufficient to demonstrate that consciousness is not reducible to the laws of physics. Besides, since the brain is an arbitrary concept, and consciousness is the necessary preliminary condition for the existence of arbitrariness, consciousness cannot be a property of the brain. Based on these considerations, we can exclude that consciousness is generated by brain processes or is an emergent property of the brain. Marco Biagini
I'm glad you think so! If you enjoyed this then consider checking out our newest episode of "The Social Brain" in the live section of the channel or on any podcast service. We dive deeper into some of the prevailing theories of consciousness.
Thank you for sharing! I'd really like to read up more on the subliminal bias tests that you discussed at around the 54 minute mark, could you point me in the right direction? Thank you.
I'm glad that you enjoyed the lectures! This isn't my field of expertise but I found a good paper that gets into some of the theories and you can follow the citation trail to see what kind of follow up work has been done since this paper was released. I hope this helps! www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810003000515
First 10 mins is all mental masturbation. Awereness of existence ... Its not a problame of words but definitions: What are you asking exactly when you say awareness of existence? (Or awareness of self experience etc). Most of these questions are stupid, not because of what they are trying to ask but what they fail to ask first. Consciousness as most people see it is a dumb and dated concept. We know so much about what makes experience of existence work that it is just stupid to ever ask such a question. It's not something we don't know or something mysterious, it's just a failure of language: communication: someone in the interaction failed at it (Most people with not enough knowledge about neuropsychology or the brain or even basic psychology).
