David Chalmers - Is the 'Soul' Immortal? 

He hasn't rocked that look in over ten years. This video is over ten years old.

@@b.g.5869 He may no longer be rocking that look, however, there was, and still is, beneath that hair, a magnificent mind with a super abundance of brain cells to rub together!

@@normaodenthal8009 Definitely!

Eh, I don't think I should live forever.

@@davidchalmers2504 Why not? In the clip you did say: “I would love it if there was an immortal soul because …I want to live forever.” I had merely wished for you what you wished for yourself. On reflection, it would depend on the finer details of living forever. Returning to a reanimated, cryogenically frozen corpse really wouldn’t do, and I don’t particularly relish the idea of existing as a disembodied consciousness that has been uploaded onto some sort of super computer. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Perhaps even the best of circumstances would become tiresome if they had to be endured forever. But then, it’s difficult to know exactly what those circumstances might be. As Hamlet put it: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Guess that leaves us with the question: to be, or not to be. Anyway, if living forever is no longer to your liking, may you live long and prosper! As someone who is always one L short of normal, I appreciate waywardness. It’s definitely the way to go. Best of luck with your new book. 👍

He's slain hundreds by the sword.

@@b.g.5869 Indeed. I was fortunate enough to sit in on a few Chalmers lectures when he returned to Australia in the early 2000s. A very humble and gentle person, but certainly not lacking in confidence (or talent).

If i was rich I’d pay to have him trained. We could crowd fund it.

How do you know he can't use a sword?

@@PetraKann I would die to be in your place.

You young pup. I liked Ike in my youth.

If you won't remember this life in your next one, then how will it be you?

Through continuity

Who teaches that? Not the Buddha.

I think every reasonable person wishes that

@@MelindaGreen Memory and memories are not who you are. The deeper you, the true you, is pure consciousness (atman) it is that subjective awareness that is aware of both memory and memories.

That was nice of him.

It's so close I have to check now. Thanks a lot

I'm just glad he made it through this without needing to beat the interviewer to death with his own shoes.

@@Odeeyu He tried to, they just don't show it.

Kind of disappointed. Nondualism in Eastern philosophy is very different than nondualism in Western philosophy, and does not pose an obstacle to phyics or neuroscience. The most advanced form of Buddhist philosophy, and the only one that withstands everything you can throw at it (including the other Buddhist schools), is pure nondualism of mind, body and external world - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhyamaka

Did you watch this video? Are you sure?

Why does somebody accepting dualism make your day? You don't know whether dualism is true or not, so why would it "make your day'" if someone else subscribes to that belief. Why not just follow the evidence, wherever it leads independent of the beliefs of others

If I read you, in _"mathematical patterns in the physical world",_ you are describing a _rational_ Universe. - Which implies Design of INTELLIGENCE. ( Yes, one of _those._ ) Plan of order, reason and intent behind patterned structured-formation, governed by discoverable LAWS. - Woven with HARMONY of numbers, as by music COMPOSITION. Evidence of Mind-CREATION! Which you, like too many, may utterly reject. The overlooked MISSING DIMENSION, as great 20th Century-educator referred to it, from which ALL material-existence springs. Perhaps there lies Key to unlock the door to the ultimate _"Unified Field Theory"._ Probably a _perfectly_ BEAUTIFUL-graceful term of expression, or precise elegant-formulation. As fine-cut diamond made by jeweler's skilled-hand, guided by keen-intelligent mind. 💎

It is precisely because the colors and pain are mathematical patterns, that you are unable to describe them. They are numbers on different feature dimensions. And yes, if you stimulate the correct zone in the brain to generate a number on the color axis, you will experience a new color 🙂

well you dont know the programming language of the brain right? If you did you would not sound like a school child.

You can do that for about 10 bucks in San Fransico baby- just watch what you step in along the way.

I say Anything that is immaterial is abstract. Some examples of the abstract are movement and time and pattern and process. All abstractions are entirely dependent on a material substrate for their abstract existence. Changing the arrangement of the substrate affects the nature of the dependent abstractions including in some cases their very existence. e.g. Write a meaningful sentence in the sand and watch a wave obliterate it. All the involved sandy atoms persist but the meaningful sentence doesn't.

Whenever something in our brain changes, our mind and conscious experience change as well. If we have something eternal within us, what would it be ? I can only see changing properties in me. If there is a very slight eternal thing in me in addition to all this changing and mortal parts, I cannot accept it to be me. So maybe something in me is eternal, but I am not.

​@@w0tch I concur. I think it's possible for consciousness to be a fundamental property of the universe... And yes, that means consciousness can technically "exist in a vacuum" so to speak, but sadly this doesn't mean your soul is immortal. The closest thing I can map "soul" to is the self. And the self is constructed by conscious materials. As this structure breaks down, so does the soul/self. It's like demolishing a building. All you've done is broke it down in constituent parts. From the stars we come, into the void we go.

@chetsenior7253 What’s funny about proverbs is they are either a pithy way to condense something complex in reality into something shorter that essentially summarizes and maintains its meaning, or to say nothing at all. The irony of what you quoted is that it is a metaphysical claim by someone who obviously doesn’t understand the “first science”, and so attempts to proverbially mock metaphysics, but only succeeds in mocking himself.

@@ScarredRomeo hey man if you don’t mind me asking, where did you learn your philosophy from? Sounds like Feser but curious if maybe you went to TAC or one of these other schools.

Gibberish no different than Freud

What's most likely: Every atom in the material substrate busy maintaining the neural discharge frequency encoded memory may be replaced but the neural discharge frequency encoded memory persists because the pattern is unaffected. The memory dwells in the dynamic pattern, not the matter per se. If the structure and/or function of the material substrate changes then the memory is affected in proportion. If change is excessive then no memory whatsoever will remain. What is a mind with no memory whatsoever? Non existent.

@@REDPUMPERNICKEL This is enlightening: "neural discharge frequency encoded memory persists because the pattern is unaffected. The memory dwells in the dynamic pattern, not the matter per se." - Wow. Profound concept. Immediately, I feel this is right. FREQUENCY the key word here. To the heart of the matter! Thanks!

@@MichaelDembinski You're welcome. It's interesting to note that FREQUENCY is an abstract notion (and imho, one of the foundational reasons why thoughts and minds and being conscious have their famous immaterial flavour).

@@REDPUMPERNICKEL Great stuff - the idea of matter coming in and out of existence because of frequency - the Cosmic clock. Penrose posits the idea that at the heat-death of the universe, when the last atom reaches absolute zero and ceases all motion - there's no more frequency, no more time - no time = no space, so we have another Big Bang. Conformal Cyclic Cosmology

@@REDPUMPERNICKELWhat is a computer without electrical charge? Is the electrical charge non-existent? No, just withdrawn.

He hasn't looked like that in over ten years. This video is old as dirt.

he probably has a strat and a homemade tube amp knows music theory and play great,,...... Jimmy Paige is his uncle

There is a Closer To Truth video where Kuhn provides quotes from Chalmers in different states of his hairdo (presumably 2000s or maybe late 90s when he had an even more impressive look, then around 2010 like in this video and finally current (short hair). Fascinating to watch.

@@pliubumas Yeah unfortunately he's not aging well. He's just 55 but looks 65. But just 20 years ago he looked very young for his age

He is/was in a rock band, according to Wikipedia.

I really do suspect the electromagnetic field is a medium that the physical brain has figured out how to use, and that the contents of consciousness are intricate complexes of wave patterns which our neurons project into the field.

“At least he is scientifically truthful” Well said!! The fact is that it is rational to believe in things that can not be proven, justified or grounded in the “natural sciences” such as conscious observers, “truth” empiricism (sensory data/science itself), not to mention the prescriptive laws of logic and values such as morals and ethics. The fact is that these are all metaphysical presuppositions that are rational to believe and yet they can not be proven, justified or grounded in a strictly reductive materialism, atheism or philosophical naturalism that clearly excludes metaphysical realities. So what do we do? Throw away reality and rationality or persist with a materialistic paradigm that is clearly incoherent when it comes to the fundamental nature of reality because it is obviously on the threshold of exceeding its sell by date.

Anaesthetics/Psychedelics are the tools that will confirm this hypothesis.

And what is the authority for your assertations?

@@TheGuiltsOfUs And what gives “authority” to the “authorities”? What criteria qualifies as authority? Repeatable “scientific” experimentation? Anecdotal reports of experiencers do not qualify, even when they are statistically consistent between observers? You must be evading something for personal reasons. Atheists adopt a negative hypothesis because if one can prove it wrong, then there is likely support for the corollary hypothesis. So, what criteria for proof could be offered to you? Your own NDE, or OBE?

the soul is spiritual, the consciousness is material

@@FrancisMetal sure I can totally see how that makes sense, but honestly from having many out-of-body experiences I realized that consciousness is the soul. So when I do Astral Projection I have experienced what part of our mind, thoughts, emotions etc shifts out of the body during Projection. What we perceive as consciousness is what shifts out.

Then it is impermanent

ISKCon fool alert... 🐟 06. CONSCIOUSNESS/AWARENESS: Consciousness means “that which knows” or “the state of being aware”, from the Latin prefix “con” (with), the stem “scire” (to know) and the suffix “osus” (characterized by). There is BOTH a localized knowing and a Universal Awareness, as explicated in the following paragraphs. Higher species of animal life have sufficient cognitive ability to know themselves and their environment, at least to a measurable degree. The brain is merely a conduit or TRANSDUCER of Universal Consciousness (i.e. Brahman), explaining why the more intelligent the animal, the more it can understand its own existence (or at least be aware of more of its environment - just see how amazingly-complex dolphin behaviour can be, compared with other aquatic species), and the reason why it is asserted that a truly enlightened human must possess a far higher level of intelligence than the average person. See Chapter 17 to understand the distinction between enlightenment and mere awakening. Three STATES of awareness are experienced by humans and possibly all other species of mammals: the waking state (“jāgrata”, in Sanskrit), dreaming (“svapna”, in Sanskrit), and deep-sleep (“suṣupti”, in Sanskrit). Beyond these three temporal states is the fourth “state” (“turīya” or “caturīya”, in Sanskrit). That is the unconditioned, eternal “state”, which underlies the other three. The waking state is the LEAST real (that is to say the least permanent, or to put it another way, the farthest from the Necessary Ground of Existence, or to put it another way, the farthest from the Ground of Existence, as explained towards the end of this chapter). The dream state is closer to our eternal nature, whilst dreamless deep-sleep is much more aalogousnalogous to The Universal Self (“brahman”), as it is imbued with peace. So, in actual fact, the fourth state is not a state, but the Unconditioned Ground of Being, or to put it simply, YOU, the real self/Self, or Formless Awareness (“sacchidānanda”, in Sanskrit). Perhaps the main purpose of dreams is so that we can understand that the waking-state is practically indistinguishable to the dream-state, and thereby come to see the ILLUSION of this ephemeral world. Both our waking-state experiences and our dream-state experiences occur solely within the mental faculties (refer to Chapter 04 for an elucidation of this phenomenon). If somebody in one of your dreams were to ask your dream-state character if the dream was real, you (playing the part of that character) would most likely say, “yes, of course this is real!” Similarly, if someone were to ask your waking-state character if this world is real, you would almost undoubtedly respond in kind. An apt analogy for Universal Consciousness is the manner in which electricity powers a variety of appliances and gadgets, according to the use and COMPLEXITY of the said device. Electricity powers a washing machine in a very simple manner, to drive a large spindle for laundering clothes. However, the very same electrical power may be used to operate a computer to manifest an astonishing range of outputs, such as playing audiovisual tracks, communication tasks and performing extremely advanced mathematical computations, depending on the computer's software and hardware. The more advanced/complex the device, the more complex its manifestation of the same electricity. Using the aforementioned computer analogy: the brain is COMPARATIVELY equivalent to the computer hardware, deoxyribonucleic acid akin to the operating system working in conjunction with the memory, the intellect is equivalent to the processing unit, individuated consciousness is analogous to the software programme, whilst Universal Awareness is likened to the electricity which enlivens the entire computer system. A person who is comatosed has lost any semblance of local consciousness, yet is being kept alive by the presence of Universal Consciousness. So, then, one could complain: “That's not fair - why can only a genius be enlightened?” (as defined in Chapter 17). The answer is: first of all, as stated above, every species of animal has its own level of intelligence on a wide-ranging scale. Therefore, a pig or a dog could (if possible) ask: “That's unfair - why can only a human being be enlightened?” Secondly, it is INDEED a fact that life is unfair, because there is no “tit for tat” law of action and reaction, even if many supposedly-great religious preceptors have stated so. They said so because they were preaching to wicked miscreants who refused to quit their evil ways, and needed to be chastized in a forceful manner. It is not possible to speak gentle words to a rabid dog to prevent it from biting you. There is evidence of Consciousness being a universal field, in SAVANT SYNDROME, a condition in which someone with significant mental disabilities demonstrate certain abilities far in excess of the norm, such as superhuman rapid mathematical calculation, mind-reading, blind-seeing, or astounding musical aptitude. Such behaviour suggests that there is a universal field (possibly in holographic form) from which one can access information. Even simple artistic inspiration could be attributed to this phenomenon. The great British singer-songwriter, Sir James Paul McCartney, one day woke with the complete tune of the song, “Yesterday”, in his mind, after hearing it in a dream. American composer, Paul Simon, had a similar experience when the chorus of his sublime masterpiece, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, simply popped into his head. In recent years, the term “CONSCIOUSNESS” has been used in esoteric spiritual circles (usually capitalised) to refer to a far more Homogeneous Consciousness (“puruṣa”, in Sanskrit), due to the fact that the English language doesn’t include a single word denoting the Universal Ground of Being (for instance “Brahman”, “Tao”, in other tongues). The word “Awareness” (capitalized) is arguably a more apposite term for this concept. The typical person believes that the apparatus which knows the external world is his mind (via the five senses), but more perceptive individuals understand that the mind itself is cognizable by the intellect. Wise souls recognize that the sense of self (the pseudo-ego) is the perceiver of their intellects, whereas awakened persons have realized that the true self/Self is the witness of ALL these temporal phenomena. The true self is synonymous with Consciousness, or with Infinite Awareness, or the Undifferentiated Unified Field (“Brahman”, in Sanskrit). The Tao (The Reality [lit. The Way, The Path, or The Road]) which can be expressed in language is not the REAL Tao. All concepts are, by nature, relative, and at most, can merely point to the Absolute. That explains why some branches of theology use the apophatic method of discerning The Infinite (“neti neti”, [not this, not that], in Sanskrit). Also known in Latin as “via negativa” or “via negationis” theology, this philosophical approach to discovering the essential nature of Reality, gradually negates each description about Ultimate Reality, but not Reality Itself. Ultimate Reality (“Brahman”, in Sanskrit) alone is real - “real” in the sense that it is the never-mutable substratum of ALL existence. The wisest of the philosophers of ancient India distinguished the “real” from the “unreal” (“sat/asat”, in Sanskrit) by whether or not the “thing“ was eternal or ephemeral (cf. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1:3:28, Bhagavad-gītā 2:16, et altri). Gross material objects (such as one's own body) and subtle material objects (such as thoughts) are always changing, and therefore not “real”. REALITY is clearly seen by those self-realized persons who have experienced spiritual awakenings (which occur either spontaneously, or after a gradual process over many months or years), yet only intellectually understood by those who have merely studied spiritual topics (that is, those who have practiced one of the four systems of religion described in Chapter 16 but have yet to awaken to their essential nature). “If you remain as you are now, you are in the wakeful state. This is abolished in the dream state. The dream state disappears, when you are in deep sleep. The three states come and go, but you are always there. Your real state, that of Consciousness itself, continues to exist always and forever and it is the only Reality.” ************* “All there is is Consciousness, not aware of Itself in Its noumenal Subjectivity, but perceived by Itself as phenomenal manifestation in Its objective expression. If this is understood in depth, there is nothing more to be understood.” Ramesh S. Balsekar, Indian Spiritual Teacher. “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Spirit. This Spirit is the matrix of all matter.” ************* “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 Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, German Theoretical Physicist.

@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices what do you mean by isckon fool alert? Your lengthy paragraph is boring😂

@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices I appreciated reading what you wrote and appreciate the time and effort that you put into it. Yet with all of is depositions... there is only one thing that I can add or extend to this the would simplify or cover everything that you have stated... One may or may not believe in this, but here it is as food for thought... Just read Ecclesiastes Chapter 1. It's all right there!

@@skilz8098 Are you a THEIST? 🤔 If so, what are the reasons for your BELIEF in God? 🤓

anattā - Buddha

Being conscious is a process and what's being processed is information in the form of frequency encoded analogies. Frequency encoded analogy is just another way of saying thought. The more one knows about sense organs, neurons, synapses and how language works, the more likely it is that one will discover a satisfactory theory explaining the relationship between mind and matter. IMHO naturally.

He sold out.

There is no immortal part of anything, impermanence marks all things.

@@TheGuiltsOfUs " truth " being the property of consciousness alone and not of inert matter is a ever-persisting thing that knows no change.

Chalmer said mass and charge just as I read it in your comment. Synchronization of thought consciousness. And he just said consciousness as I was writing consciousness. Weird...or is it?

@@charlesgallagher1376 Honesty I can not hear a word of what Dave is saying, all I hear is ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0jgrCKhxE1s.html

Greatest HMB? That's a tough one, but the greatest song is easy. Holy Wars, obviously.

I'd just say, when the evidence is incomplete, it is unlikely to compel. So, maintain the default position, "I don't know", and keep your eyes and mind open..

The evidence is never complete. The point is, you must accept what the currently existing evidence compels you to accept. New evidence can always compel you to accept something different. That's how science works.

@@markoshun There's no such thing as "complete evidence". Broadly speaking, there are two categories of evidence, anecdotal (which is inconclusive), and compelling. Anecdotal evidence doesn't compel you to accept anything. Non-anecdotal evidence always has implications you are compelled to provisionally accept.

​@@b.g.5869 Agreed that complete evidence or perfect certainty is impossible. Reasoning under uncertainty is the name of the game. But I'd also say that at least beyond a certain point, discrete categories like "compelling", "conclusive", "weak", "circumstantial" ... fall apart - quality of evidence is a continuous scale and depends on the hypotheses being tested. Hypotheses (models of how the world works) make predictions about what data you expect to collect. If the data you did end up collecting is likely to have occured in a world where hypothesis A is true, but less likely in a world where it isn't, that is _Bayesian evidence_ for A, and you are compelled to raise your credence (probability) in A. While this abstract framework does away with the need to make up ontologically distinct categories of evidence, note that this easily explains why a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of RCTs should be able to dramatically change your beliefs, while an anecdote you heard from a friend of a co-worker generally should not. Or why a precise scientific theory that gives you lots of obvious opportunities how it could be falsified can become orders of magnitude more likely than a vague narrative that can be adapted to any new facts ("God works in mysterious ways", conspiracy theories...).

The evidence is most likely incomplete, given that there’s an incompleteness theorem.

Will? Or simply biology interacting with the environment? Lots of evidence for the latter. None for the former.

Infantile nonsense

Count me in 🙂

same way you study the object: study other subjects and apply introspection, some indeterminacy applies, like in quantum physics

It is the cry of our egos in the face of their inevitable erasure.

we dont know any such thing. what we do know is that the brain does not create consciousness. any damage to specific parts of your tv set can completely change what your screen depicts. yet the signal that your tv set is transforming does not emanate from your tv. this is an exact analogy to demonstrate why your logic is incorrect

@@jimmybrice6360 Making a poor analogy to a TV set which gets its energy from a tv is not at all the same to a human brain. Try again.

@@blakelandry it is an absolutely perfect analogy to your failed logic. because both arguments use the exact same logic. of course you would have to understand logic, first.

@@jimmybrice6360 Ouch, you got me. Good way to use the ad hominem fallacy to prove your point. Well played.

the the the the the

@@b.g.5869 thanks for correcting 😅

I am flabbergasted that you can make the assertion that assertions are ontologically distinct from the physical.

​@@PetraKann You can even assert that assertions don't exist. You know, assertions of any kind ultimately mean nothing, it's just about how they can change your way of thinking about reality, and if it is a good and productive way of thinking or not. We can only aspire to try to make accurate models about some specific patterns of nature, that then we call "axioms". But the truth is that you'll never have a true model of reality, because a map never is (neither can be) the territory. Anyway, wild speculation is a dangerous path to take, so we should stick with this paradigm (science) at least until we find something better, but this doesn't mean that we should take this kind of knowledge as something guaranteed. *We shouldn't loose track of what science is about so we don't fall in the sin of making it into dogma.* Also, even if many physicists claim to be disconnected from philosophy, they ultimatelly can't. Because you always need a set of assertions in order to make logic, and mathematics is an extension of language logic, and assertions can only be made from our experiences and/or other assertions or derivations like materialism or idealism (our two fundamental rivalizing metaphysical pathways) So, you always must start with some assertion or subjective experience in order to make logic or science in any way, that's our limitation, and so we shouldn't be claiming any model to be "true", mostly if we have evidences that doesn't fit into that model (which we've had in every single model until now). Then, it's not bad to make assertions, but we should be always aware of the fact that they're just vain assertions. Farewell.

@@PetraKann Lol. Me too

Rather it is YOU who needs to demonstrate the authority of your assertions!

@@MeRetroGamer Unless they are rooted somewhere beyond us, which is the big question, like in the Logos of the Greek philosophers. One of the overlooked reasons christianity took off in the ancient world was because the book of John gave a genuinely novel answer in the debate that have been happening for 500 years in Greece: did the One, the Creator or creative, also create the Logos (the laws of physics, order, representational meaning, and more, if not Greek it takes awhile just to know this word), and then use it to create the rest of the universe, or is the logos somehow inherent as part of any reality and rules/Ways by which the universe came into being. For John, or arguably probably his teacher, to assert in John that they are one entity, like my arm is part of me, was truly a new concept. (Note that “the Word” is a very limited English translation of the Greek word logos)

Gibberish

@@TheGuiltsOfUs Just because you don't understand a statement doesn't mean it's "gibberish." Your personality is something you construct throughout your lifetime, like an author or an actor creating a character, but what is the "you" that does this? What is the self that possess these characteristics?

@@vitus.verdegast "What is the self that possess these characteristics"? All thoughts are about something other except for the unique thought which is about itself, that is self referential. Your self is that thought. That thought is the "you" and is immensely complex. Being a thought is of course what permits other thoughts to change you. When one learns how sense organs, neurons and muscles function one acquires an understanding of how matter is able to serve as the substrate of thoughts and the thinking process.

Rene DeRock

"The soul" is a mental construct.

@@dspondike A mental construct like your date of birth, or a mental construct like trees or death?

@@kallianpublico7517 : Poor analogies. There is actual evidence for those other things. No evidence for a soul other than as a mental construct.

@@dspondike What evidence is there of death? I mean all you have is an inanimate body that is no longer growing. What is that evidence of? "Absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence"? When the soul leaves the body the body dies, doesnt it? Or is death evidence of lack of intelligence? Though the brain is still there.

@@kallianpublico7517 : That is bassackwards logic and a misuse the the absence of evidence argument. Pretzel Logic!

Microtubules.

Why don't you explain "the new possibilities" to me?

Not a mullet. That’s 80’s Metal hair.

@@charlesgallagher1376 Right. A mullet is much more obnoxious. It'd be like if Robert Kuhn's hair was as it is except long in the back.

Not sure if that qualifies as a mullet but definitely epic lol

@@jonc3214 Ok. Care to explain?

You might be surprised to learn, that definition basically-fits the biblical definition for the "soul": THE PHYSICAL BIOLOGICAL BODY, or Hebrew word from which it is translated: nehfesh! See my comment here, for elaboration.

@@jonc3214 Ok, I guess you can't. Thanks for playing.

We need to distinguish between 'soul' (as in mind) and pure consciousness or, as it is known in Sanskrit the atman, which means the true self, the real 'I'. It is this atman, or true self, which is the pure subjective consciousness that is aware of the mind.

because physical processes predetermined and nothing can emerge from least action principle for example

Well, what emerges, and how? Just saying "It's an emergent property of the system" and nothing else doesn't explain much, let alone make testable predictions. Don't get me wrong, I think the answer lies in that direction, but it needs to be fleshed out to be meaningful - without doing that, it can't be far ahead of all the competing theories. *What kind of thing is it that emerges?* Is it like anything else we already understand better? Can it play a causal role, or is it just a side effect without consequences? Can you explain the processes underlying it without the higher level of abstraction? *Under which conditions does it emerge? What is the mechanism?* Is it about information processing, complexity, self-reference, self-modeling, universal computation & Gödelian incompleteness, reinforcement learning, embodiment, encoded representations of the environment, entropy gradients, quantum entanglement, ...? *Are there fundamentally different kinds of consciousness than our own, or is it simply "more" or "less"?* Is degree of consciousness continuous, or are there sudden phase transitions? And the interesting consequences: *What is the simplest conscious system?* An average four year old human? An artificial neural net with a million nodes? A nematode? A thermostat? An electron? *What abilities can systems have without becoming conscious?* Could you build AGI that isn't conscious? I think these are all important questions, and having an answer to even just one of them would be a huge step. Theories need to take stances on them, and there are attempts to build theories that actually make testable predictions, but I think there's still a long way ahead. So yeah, that's the most interesting answer to your question I know. Another is that apparently some people have this desire to be something more intuitively understandable or flattering than being a side effect of the regulation needs of apes, as implemented on meat computers, which in turn arose as local maxima in the competition between molecular replicators to harvest negentropy more efficiently from the surface of some rock floating in space? But that's a different story... :^)

@@nibblrrr7124 consciousness is just status of algorithm execution. This way everything is conscious. As world is algorithms based.

@@nibblrrr7124 Consciousness emerges. It's just the interaction of all these physical things. It's just the interaction. The point is, you don't need to posit some kind of dualism just because there isn't sufficient explanation for everything on what we see as physical. If someone wants to have a physicalist position, they can. Not everything is explained on some kind of idealism either. Not everything is explained from any single perspective. But to say that consciousness is some other kind of thing, also without giving some sort of explanation of what that thing is, isn't doing anything more than the physicalist who is talking about consciousness as an emergent property in the way of the interactions.

@@cloudoftime You both make interesting and valid points. It seems to me that any theory of consciousness is by its very nature untestable. Consciousness being supremely subjective, only the experiencer can say that the experience is occurring, and if the lights go out, as it were, there is no one to report the results.

Your subject consciousness is the soul.

@johnbornjohnborn: If your views are aligned with particular religious beliefs that might be the case. Outwith that domain, however, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the existence of a non-physical, immortal soul. It’s purely a faith-based position.

If we think of a video game world, the objects that interact with eachother only appear to interact causaly, and an observer within the world would only be able to observe from the perspective that the objects are acting causaly upon eachother in a closed system. In reality, the underlying software and hardware is at work generating the game world and keeping up the appearance of a causaly closed system. This is also what is occurring in a dream world within our own minds when we sleep. If we were to say that this world is a "dream" within a "higher mind," we could begin to understand how this "conciousness property" has causal impact while it does not appear as such to us from our perspective "within the dream."

There is a huge problem with terms in this video and in the discussion of "consciousness" in general. They both use the same words but clearly have vastly different meanings for them. The term consciousness carries so much anthropomorphic baggage it is almost useless if you want concision. I agree that it is an emergent phenomenon. It is also a continuum, from rudimentary awareness, like the awareness an atom has for the valences of other atoms, through to full sentience. But I see no case for consciousness being a pre-existing condition nor for an immortal soul.

@@con.troller4183 I actually don't agree that conciousness is an emergent phenomenon. I take it to be the fundamental non-dual substance of existance. I do agree that there is an immense confusion and variety of the way the term is used. In my view, the universe is itself "conciousness," an innately "intelligent" (another word which carries anthropomorphic baggage) matrix or field which gives rise to both matter and mind. I don't reject materialism, instead I reject dualism of mind and mody as well as a distinction between materialism and idealism similar to the German Idealists within the Western intellectual tradition.

@@pug9431 I replied at length to you in a separate thread. Not sure if we can consolidate in one or the other, LOL. I will let you read that rather than reiterate here.

@@con.troller4183 Oh! My bad, I thought this was still that thread lol.

if you destroy sand castle - it is still sand, but not castle anymore.

He didn't say that consciousness exists after the death of the body. Watch the video again.

Consciousness is the subject-object dualism of the mind, a split.

@@messenjah71 Agree. Subject and object both made of awareness. Or, as they used to say, of spirit

How so?

@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices because before him dualism was considered a taboo by science and consciousness in general was really downplayed by the reductionist materialism of the 60s and 70s. Also thanks to him consciousness is (more) free to AI silly comparisons and we have a boom of theories.

@@francesco5581 🐟 06. CONSCIOUSNESS/AWARENESS: Consciousness means “that which knows” or “the state of being aware”, from the Latin prefix “con” (with), the stem “scire” (to know) and the suffix “osus” (characterized by). There is BOTH a localized knowing and a Universal Awareness, as explicated in the following paragraphs. Higher species of animal life have sufficient cognitive ability to know themselves and their environment, at least to a measurable degree. The brain is merely a conduit or TRANSDUCER of Universal Consciousness (i.e. Brahman), explaining why the more intelligent the animal, the more it can understand its own existence (or at least be aware of more of its environment - just see how amazingly-complex dolphin behaviour can be, compared with other aquatic species), and the reason why it is asserted that a truly enlightened human must possess a far higher level of intelligence than the average person. See Chapter 17 to understand the distinction between enlightenment and mere awakening. Three states of awareness are experienced by humans and possibly all other species of mammals: the waking state (“jāgrata”, in Sanskrit), dreaming (“svapna”, in Sanskrit), and deep-sleep (“suṣupti”, in Sanskrit). Beyond these three temporal states is the fourth “state” (“turīya” or “caturīya”, in Sanskrit). That is the unconditioned, eternal “state”, which underlies the other three. So, in actual fact, the fourth state is not a state, but the Unconditioned Ground of Being (or to put it simply, YOU, the real self/Self, or Formless Awareness). Perhaps the main purpose of dreams is so that we can understand that the waking-state is practically indistinguishable to the dream-state, and thereby come to see the ILLUSION of this ephemeral world. Both our waking-state experiences and our dream-state experiences occur solely within the mental faculties (refer to Chapter 04 for an elucidation of this phenomenon). If somebody in one of your dreams were to ask your dream-state character if the dream was real, you (playing the part of that character) would most likely say, “yes, of course this is real!” Similarly, if someone were to ask your waking-state character if this world is real, you would almost undoubtedly respond in kind. An apt analogy for Universal Consciousness is the manner in which electricity powers a variety of appliances and gadgets, according to the use and COMPLEXITY of the said device. Electricity powers a washing machine in a very simple manner, to drive a large spindle for laundering clothes. However, the very same electrical power may be used to operate a computer to manifest an astonishing range of outputs, such as playing audiovisual tracks, communication tasks and performing extremely advanced mathematical computations, depending on the computer's software and hardware. The more advanced/complex the device, the more complex its manifestation of the same electricity. Using the aforementioned computer analogy: the brain is COMPARATIVELY equivalent to the computer hardware, deoxyribonucleic acid akin to the operating system working in conjunction with the memory, the intellect is equivalent to the processing unit, individuated consciousness is analogous to the software programme, whilst Universal Awareness is likened to the electricity which enlivens the entire computer system. A person who is comatosed has lost any semblance of local consciousness, yet is being kept alive by the presence of Universal Consciousness. So, then, one could complain: “That's not fair - why can only a genius be enlightened?” (as defined in Chapter 17). The answer is: first of all, as stated above, every species of animal has its own level of intelligence on a wide-ranging scale. Therefore, a pig or a dog could (if possible) ask: “That's unfair - why can only a human being be enlightened?” Secondly, it is INDEED a fact that life is unfair, because there is no “tit for tat” law of action and reaction, even if many supposedly-great religious preceptors have stated so. They said so because they were preaching to wicked miscreants who refused to quit their evil ways, and needed to be chastized in a forceful manner. It is not possible to speak gentle words to a rabid dog to prevent it from biting you. There is evidence of Consciousness being a universal field, in SAVANT SYNDROME, a condition in which someone with significant mental disabilities demonstrate certain abilities far in excess of the norm, such as superhuman rapid mathematical calculation, mind-reading, blind-seeing, or astounding musical aptitude. Such behaviour suggests that there is a universal field (possibly in holographic form) from which one can access information. Even simple artistic inspiration could be attributed to this phenomenon. The great British singer-songwriter, Sir James Paul McCartney, one day woke with the complete tune of the song, “Yesterday”, in his mind, after hearing it in a dream. American composer, Paul Simon, had a similar experience when the chorus of his sublime masterpiece, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, simply popped into his head. In recent years, the term “CONSCIOUSNESS” has been used in esoteric spiritual circles (usually capitalised) to refer to a far more Homogeneous Consciousness (“puruṣa”, in Sanskrit), due to the fact that the English language doesn’t include a single word denoting the Universal Ground of Being (for instance “Brahman”, “Tao”, in other tongues). The word “Awareness” (capitalized) is arguably a more apposite term for this concept. The typical person believes that the apparatus which knows the external world is his mind (via the five senses), but more perceptive individuals understand that the mind itself is cognizable by the intellect. Wise souls recognize that the sense of self (the pseudo-ego) is the perceiver of their intellects, whereas awakened persons have realized that the true self/Self is the witness of ALL these temporal phenomena. The true self is synonymous with Consciousness, or with Infinite Awareness, or the Undifferentiated Unified Field (“Brahman”, in Sanskrit). Cont...

The Tao (The Reality [lit. The Way, The Path, or The Road]) which can be expressed in language is not the REAL Tao. All concepts are, by nature, relative, and at most, can merely point to the Absolute. That explains why some branches of theology use the apophatic method of discerning The Infinite (“neti neti”, [not this, not that], in Sanskrit). Also known in Latin as “via negativa” or “via negationis” theology, this philosophical approach to discovering the essential nature of Reality, gradually negates each description about Ultimate Reality, but not Reality Itself. Ultimate Reality (“Brahman”, in Sanskrit) alone is real - “real” in the sense that it is the never-mutable substratum of ALL existence. The wisest of the philosophers of ancient India distinguished the “real” from the “unreal” (“sat/asat”, in Sanskrit) by whether or not the “thing“ was eternal or ephemeral (cf. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1:3:28, Bhagavad-gītā 2:16, et altri). Gross material objects (such as one's own body) and subtle material objects (such as thoughts) are always changing, and therefore not “real”. REALITY is clearly seen by those self-realized persons who have experienced spiritual awakenings, yet only intellectually understood by those who have merely studied spiritual topics (that is, those who have practiced one of the four systems of religion described in Chapter 16). “If you remain as you are now, you are in the wakeful state. This is abolished in the dream state. The dream state disappears, when you are in deep sleep. The three states come and go, but you are always there. Your real state, that of Consciousness itself, continues to exist always and forever and it is the only Reality.” ************* “The ego is the identified consciousness. When the impersonal Consciousness identifies itself with the personal organism, the ego arises.” ************* “The only true meditation is the constant impersonal witnessing of all that takes place in one’s life as mere movements in the universal Consciousness.” ************* “Consciousness must first be there, before anything else can BE. All inquiry of the seeker of truth, must therefore, relate to this consciousness, this sense of conscious presence, which as such, has no personal reference to any individual.” ************* “Insofar as you keep watching the mind and discover yourself as its witness, nothing else can project itself on the screen of consciousness. This is so, because two things cannot occupy the attention, at the same moment.
Therefore, delve within and find out where thoughts arise. Seek the source of all thought and acquire the Self-knowledge, which is the awakening of Truth.” ************* “Just as the difference between the space in a pot and the space outside it disappears when the pot is demolished, so also does duality disappear when it is realized that the difference between the individual consciousness and the Universal Consciousness does not in fact exist.” ************* “All there is, is, is consciousness. That is the Source from which the manifestation has come. ...And the mind is merely a reflection of that Consciousness.” ************* “All there is is Consciousness, not aware of Itself in Its noumenal Subjectivity, but perceived by Itself as phenomenal manifestation in Its objective expression. If this is understood in depth, there is nothing more to be understood.” Ramesh S. Balsekar, Indian Spiritual Teacher. “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Spirit. This Spirit is the matrix of all matter.” ************* “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 Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, German Theoretical Physicist.

@@francesco5581 Dualism remains more in the realm of philosophy than science (Chalmers is a philosopher), and will remain so until someone comes up with a testable hypothesis. What had changed is that ideas like dualism and panpsychism has become respectable in academic circles whereas or used to be taboo.

You are on point. Philosophy and science are intimately connected. Philosophy drives research

Well said!!

“He never engaged the serious work” Fair points!! His standard of evidence seemed a bit biased as he commits the special pleading fallacy. Because he was happy to admit that things exist that can not be “proven” using the “natural sciences” such as consciousness so it is clearly immaterial but then suggests that the soul requires “physical evidence” for it to be a rational belief. Seems a double standard to me? I’m not question begging but doesn’t the fact that it is rational to believe in things such as consciousness even though it is immaterial and can not be proven, doesn’t this speak volumes regarding the limitations of a closed system! We can’t even empirically prove that the only things that exist are those things that can be proven using materialism as your grounding philosophy. The fact is that you can not prove, justify or ground metaphysical presuppositions such as absolute “truth”, consciousness, empiricism (sensory data/science itself), not to mention the prescriptive laws of logic and values such as morals and ethics in a strictly reductive materialism, relativism, atheism or philosophical naturalism that clearly excludes metaphysical realities. The irony is that we are all on equal footing under relativism as everything is arbitrary and ad hoc. We can all be arbitrary and ad hoc!! Equally, according to the expert linguist and brilliant cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky… “There are only two ways of looking at eliminative materialism (the idea that all things reduce to solid substance). One is that it is total gibberish until someone tells us what matter is. Until someone tells us what eliminative materialism is there can’t be such a thing as eliminative materialism and no one can tell us what matter is”. (Noam Chomsky). Furthermore, I’m not making any appeals to authority, but on the cognitive level Albert Einstein utilised a more nuanced approach and demonstrated that “matter” is nothing more substantive than the curvature of space and time which is why he completely rejected atheism for the belief in the fundamental nature of mind and consciousness. That is Einstein completely rejected atheism for the nuanced God of Spinoza/deism/panentheism. Similarly, Einstein’s closest friend Michelle Besso, who Einstein stated “was the greatest sounding board in Europe”, completely rejected atheism for the belief in the fundamental nature of mind and consciousness/monotheism (Christianity). I’m not making any appeals to authority but reality and existence and in particular the qualities of experience aren’t made of “matter” they are made of (what matters) and as I pointed out already under relativism we are all on equal footing at the very least. This is basic analytical philosophy and modal logic!!

He didn't say that. He said it may be attached to that stuff, but it is its own thing.

It's the other way around: space, matter, time, the physical is a result, product or byproduct of energy - Sound and Light... the Physical Realm became manifested by Consciousness, by Voice, by Sound when Light came into Being! The Physical Realm is a Product of Sound and a Byproduct of Sound and Light... E = mC^2. ... And God said, let there be light, and there was light...!

@@skilz8098 "In the beginning was the word". It's in language you will find the answer to the meaning of the word 'conscious'. Check out bicameral theory to get a better understanding.

@@REDPUMPERNICKEL I know John 1:1-5. It's one of my favorite passages. But thank you for the notion of "bicameral theory", I'll check that out.

@@REDPUMPERNICKEL I've read it, and I can't fully agree with that. God said, "Let Us make man in Our Image and after Our Likeness... We are like God. God is Pure Consciousness. He Spoke and things came to be. In Genesis 1 it states "... And the Spirit of God moved across the waters..." In Hebrew the word for Spirit is Ruach. It literally means spirit, breath or wind. In other places throughout scripture where this word is used basically means the same, but in some contexts it has also been used to mean, sound, voice, mind. And here Consciousness which is all of those as well as self awareness, decision making, etc... is literally tied to the Spirit. It is the Spirit that Creates the Physical. Not the other way around. Our Physical Bodies does not create the mind. When the physical body dies and the heart stops beating, and the lungs stops breathing and the mind stops working, that spirit, that breath, that wind, leaves your mortal flesh body. Now, just because you are dead in the flesh, does not mean that Your Mind, Your Voice, Your Consciousness ceases to exist. This plane of existence is temporal, meaning it is temporary. The Spirit Plane, the Heaven(s) are above the earthly plane. And even in scripture the current Heavens and Earth will burn, perish and be destroyed, but A New Heavens and Earth will be born or created. The 7 days event or a weekly calendar to God is like unto 7,000 years to us. He worked and created everything in 6 Days, and Rested the 7th. It is on the 7th Day from the fall of Adam until he returns. When that Day is over, it'll all be destroyed and rebuilt. In Genesis 1 within the 6th day, God said to Man "Now be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it..." Here the word replenish is used. Replenish means to Fill Again and in terms of people or humans it would be to Repopulate. Notice he didn't say plenish or to fill or to populate, no, he said to do it again. So, this entire 7 day even, 6 days of work and 7th day of rest is a single work week of God, and they repeat. This is not the 1st Heavens and Earth and it will not be the Last. God is Eternal always has been and always will be. This is the Eternal Cycle. God is the Ultimate Consciousness. He does as he pleases and He is Perfect In All His Ways. He Speaks and it Becomes. John 1:1-5. God's word is more than just his words. It is also his Spirit and his Lifeforce and He gave us his Gift of Life! He doesn't need Us but He Wants Us to Choose Him and He Lives Within Us. Ever had that feeling like you've been here before? Some have others haven't and many call it deja vu. Maybe because we already have been here before...

Being conscious is the analogy of the body in the same way that a painting of a tobacco pipe is an analogy of a tobacco pipe.

Relationships between physical objects be abstract/immaterial entities but what becomes of them when the physical objects they relate cease to exist?

Science is limited to our tools.

@@yakidin6330 No - it is not limited - except by the stupidity of god-believers...

@@briendoyle4680 of course its limited. can you hear the same frequencies as a dog or a bat ? so does that mean those frequencies don't exist ?

@@yakidin6330 Childish - try proving a god... need some chuckles today... ahhaha

@@briendoyle4680 we can't because He isn't in our dimension. we can only prove things that are in our dimesion.

Patterns and processes are metaphysical. It's within such things one will find the meaning of the word conscious. Sentences are meaningful. The meaning is encoded in the pattern, not in the atoms.

I always thought the soul is consciousness lol.

“More like, what’s a soul and how do you measure and quantify it” Well said!! The fact is that like consciousness and values such as morals and ethics you can’t measure and quantify what we mean by “soul” without reaching an absurdity otherwise it wouldn’t be a “soul” . It’s the same with the belief in an absolute ontological ground of truth, value, reality, existence and experience. If you could quantify, weigh and measure an absolute “soul” using materialism or the natural sciences” then it wouldn’t be absolute or it wouldn’t be (God) if you prefer. “That of which nothing greater can be conceived”/God (Anselmo d’Aosta). Because the measure you used to quantify and reduce it to would be greater. Furthermore, this is what’s known in philosophy as the category error fallacy. Equally, the brilliant mathematician Kurt Godel put the final nail in the coffin for logical positivism and pointed out that if you believed that you had proven the “soul” or God using the “natural sciences” then it wouldn’t be God.

@@euginium1539 “I always thought the soul was consciousness” Me too to be honest!! And you are right to point out that consciousness is obviously a property of “soul” but the fact is that David was equivocating and actually committed a special pleading fallacy here because he accepts the reality and rationality of believing in an immaterial consciousness despite the fact that it is clearly irreducible to matter (immaterial) and can not be “proven” using the “natural sciences” but then doesn’t even define what he means by a “soul” but suggests that it’s most likely that the “soul” doesn’t exist as there is no naturalistic evidence or physical explanation. Its pretty obvious that (immaterial consciousness) is understood by the majority of philosophers and scientists as a property of the concept of a “soul”. The circles that strictly reductive materialists, atheists or philosophical naturalists will run around to avoid the inevitable beggars belief!! The strictly reductive materialist, atheist or philosophical naturalists commitment to the gods of determinism and automatism condemns their myths to hollowness. All the best to you and your family and keep safe ❤️

Basically, yes. Most dualists believe in some causal connection between the physical and the mental universes ("substances"). The weakest form is *epiphenomenalism,* where all mental events (e.g. thoughts) are caused by physical events, but can have no physical consequences - the mind is just a side effect of physical processes in the brain, but still a separate thing, unlike with physicalist monism. But classically you'd want the connection to go both ways *(interactionism)* - that the mind can also cause physical things - which is e.g. necessary for libertarian definitions of free will. That raises a whole lot of issues, though: How is this interaction is supposed to happen? Where & when in the chain of causation do we cross from mental to physical? Is physics not causally closed, or can something have both a physical and a mental cause at the same time (overdetermination)? etc. ... Some few dualists deny any direct causal connection between the realms - e.g. Leibnitz believed they only appear to causally linked by a pre-established harmony, like two perfect clocks synchronized once and then continuing to tick in sync. Apparently there's also *occasionalism* in Islamic and Christian theology, but I don't know anything about it. (I hope I haven't misrepresented any of the dualist positions, I'm a hard determinist physicalist myself.)

@@nibblrrr7124 Thanks for reply. Although an epiphenomenalist would say that the material world has thanked you and a consciousness is aware of this.

Everything of which your self is conscious has been synthesized by your thinking process whose inputs are your sense organs and your memories. Your self is conscious in a dream but your thinking process does not run as usual. Dreams are, I suspect, a side effect of a process in which all of your brains neural discharge frequency encoded analogies are attempting to conciliate via the logic of the synapses. In other words to reach a new balance that accommodates the days input. Theoretically speaking, naturally.

Nailed it. Except for "Just have to wait and see."

No. God exists. What science did, to its credit, was not to prove the non-existence of God, but to provide a new way of regarding the world, as something essentially mechanical, and something whose nature and behaviour could ( , according to this belief which "infused man with scientific curiosity", ) be understood and made apprehensible to the human mind, through (the means of) scientific study and explanation. And so, at least a number of phenomena, for example thunder and lightning, formerly attributed to hypothesized gods, such as Zeus, the principal god in the pantheon of gods of the Ancient Greeks, were now given an alternative, god free explanation. And explanations better than the simple "because God made it so", where sought and found, for an every increasing catalog of natural phenomena. And where for example it had once been the responsibility of God to hold the moon up in the sky, now the Copernicean model of our solar system and Newton's theory of gravity provided our understanding, and with the progress of science, our technology and ability to control and modify the natural world rapidly increased. In a sense, the notion of God was antithetical to scientific inquiry and thought, and the "scientific outlook" favored an atheistic perspective (although many of the greatest scientists were theists, and did believe in a monotheistic God). But perhaps most notably, the theory of Darwinian evolution and the discovery of dinosaur fossil records, shook the Christian community that had believed in the biblical account of creation. The fossil records proved (or at least seemed to prove) that the biblical account must be wrong. And there where newspaper headlines announcing the death of God. And the romantic philosopher Frederick Nietzche also announced the death of God. Darwin evolution offered an alternate creation story. And astronomical observation that distant stars were racing away from us faster than nearer stars, lead to the big bang theory, which, along with the ("well established ") theory of Natural Selection and Darwinian Evolution, together seemed to offer us a "God free" explanation our existence, and how everything, it seemed, had come about, from nothing. And Existentialism and Nihilism, the "philosophical outlook" that nothing lasted for ever and everything was, ultimately meaningless, more or less became the modern world view. And of course, at least according to this line of thinking, God did not exist. After the development of computers and the science of complexity and computation, we did, eventually, (well, actually most "Darwinist's" did not seem terribly interested or troubled by this, but) questions as to how, natural selection and randomness could possibly account for the complexity we observe, given the measly 15 billion years of existence for our universe. If you look at things closely enough from a computation perspective, then assuming there wasn't at least hundreds of thousands of bits of information, like some kind of "program" that the big bang started off with, then the probability that complex might have emerged (even with the computational "solitution methods" of "genetic programming" and or natural selection) are astronomically low. The most popular solution to this problem of mathematicsl likelihoods was, and basically remains, the idea that we're not simply the result of a single spontaneous big bang, which occurred as a random event, but are instead embedded within a multi-verse of an astronomically large number of alternate or "parrallel" universes. But in any event, to what is still probably a minority of thinkers, who are comfortable with thinking about the whole universe, or multi-verse as a giant computation ( not as a program, being run of some gigantic computer external to our universe, but as a system, more resembling John Conway's game of life, or biological computation, where the "software"/program and hardware/computer are blended together) then, from this perspective, where everything, including every conscious brain, is all part of one gigantic algorithmic computation / information flow, "God" suddenly reappears. Of course "all that is (and was and ever will be)" is not a candidate that many would admit as suitable for being God. And so, the argument goes, recognize this "all encompassing mind / consciousness" as God, UNLESS a more suitable candidate for God exists, in which case, recognize this more suitable candidate, or rather the most suitable candidate, as God. Cheers, Love, Peace and Solidarity.

Absolutely, 100%

What do you mean? Do you mean who is the recipient of conscious awareness or what we are aware of? I can identify many other puzzles in any case.

@@caricue read the Bhagavad Gita, it’s got answers to this questions and practical methodology

If dualism is correct then any genetic/physical damage wouldn't affect consciousness if consciousness continues after body death

Duality doesn't entail immortality.

@@b.g.5869 why did he bring up immortal souls after accepting duality?

@@gr33nDestiny Chalmers addressed immortal souls only because he was specifically asked about it. Duality doesn't say anything about immortal souls one way or another so there's no reason why Chalmers' saying he accepted duality would be reason to ask or not ask him about it. However, it makes sense that Kuhn would ask since if someone is open to the idea that there's consciousness is non-physical, it's natural to wonder if they're also open to the idea that consciousness might be immortal. Neither Chalmers nor Kuhn believe in immortal souls however. Kuhn doesn't even believe in dualism.

Christians call that crucifying the flesh

Ernest Szeto, I think they are flailing around because long ago Life was declared to be totally understood as organic chemistry and so "nothing to see here". All they did was move the mystery up one step to consciousness. Chalmers can't say that Life is a mystery or he will be called a Vitalist. He is willing to talk about souls rather than face that accusation.

@@caricue For some reason, he reminds me of Sir Issac Newton. Something about his hair ...

But yeah, property dualism is _sort of_ a weaker form of dualism (in the logic sense of being an superset that is easier to defend). "Substances" is indeed the classical framing by Descartes. He was all about natural science, e.g. dissecting animals and finding their organs are basically just elaborate machines, but thought that human consciousness (the most immediately accesible fact to him) cannot be explained that way, so he posited that beside the material, physical stuff like rocks and brains, there's also souls which are just a completely different _substance._ Chalmers argues there is only one substance (physics), but not all properties of that substance are physical properties - a position sometimes also called "non-reductive physicalism", AFAIU... (I'd guess he's probably also an epiphenomenalist - the mind is entirely a side effect of neurological processes, and cannot cause anything in the physical world - physics is causally closed.) He says that non-physical properties are still necessary to explain the facts of our subjective experiences and to develop a scientific theory of consciousness, and that it also avoids the most glaring problems with interactionist substance dualism, esp. with a modern understanding of science.

Not sure if (secular) philosophers are still talking much about "substances" - AFAIU most modern arguments are phrased in terms of "events" (kinda similar to "processes"?) and "causes"? "Systems" has a bit of a cybernetics vibe (

@@nibblrrr7124 I realize Joscha Bach is using a computer metaphor. Actually, his main agenda is to build a sentient AGI. He realizes it won't quite be the same as human consciousness, or intelligence. Just some analog version of it. Or it maybe its own thing. But the attempt to build it can be illuminative, as there is an active cross pollination between the fields of "AI" (machine learning), and neuroscience. Dr. James Cooke's "Living Mirror" theory is another approach. It's more biologically based. It draws somewhat for Dr. Karl Friston's theory of life, with thermodynamic principles, certain structures enabling "interiority" and "exteriority".