David Chalmers - What Things are Conscious? 

My thoughts immediately turned to NWOBHM legends Saxon.

It's in his mind.

Same 😂😊

He is the lead singer of the band Zombie Blues.

😂😂😂😂😂😂

everyone heard that. so shutup because we dont need you to type it out Goof

What might the nature of that something deeper be? Also, I'm a bit confused: if there's some explanation other than nerve firings, why do nerves fire at all? Couldn't human beings be conscious and sentient with a second stomach rather than a brain if the brain isn't the mysterious cause of consciousness and sentience?

Well summarized

⁠@@declupNo one knows what that something deeper might be. There is a quote from Haldane, “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it’s queerer than we CAN suppose”. There are many theories of consciousness out there, so you may want to check them out. Some are pretty “queer”, but the fact is with all the great minds working on this problem no one, right now, has the answer. “Why do nerves fire?” Is the same as asking how firing nerves cause consciousness, and no one has a clue. I suspect, as Haldane said about the universe, (and after all, we are a part of the universe), the answer is queerer than we can suppose.

​​​​@@woofie8647 -- Are there any explanations you might discount? For example, magic or consciousness as a holographic projection of some higher-dimensional being's own consciousness? That is, invoking mystery as the explanation for consciousness may be an aesthetically appealing position, but it's not very practical. If mystical and unknowable things are what propel physical existence, what should people do to learn more about them? And how can people come to any agreement about what they are? For example, I could assert that tiny spectral elves use brain tissue as a cobbler shop and that consciousness is nothing more than their daily production of transcendental shoes. Others might ask that I justify my claim, and I could do so by pointing to the mysterious nature of the universe. Why can't we understand the cobblerdom of human consciousness? The universe is too queer for us ever to understand.

@@declup It’s not that there is (or needs to be) another explanation for what *causes* consciousness, it’s that even if “nerves firing” is the proximate cause of a given conscious state, it doesn’t tell us anything about the effect - I.e. the nature of consciousness itself. Something can cause something else, but understanding that cause doesn’t in and of itself explain the nature of the effect. If I blow out a candle and a puff of smoke spirals up from the wick, my blowing out the candle is the cause of the smoke, but tells us nothing about what the smoke actually is.

Ahhh yes but what about hallucinogens?

​@@maximusolivia9982gets trickier

I think hes german,in german culture you learn to make eyecontact when you speak with someone!

David lee Roth. LOL

@@cujimmy1366 What is DLR doing here....😀

​@@cujimmy1366 Good resemblance!

But while I can theoretically observe the physical correlates of consciousness, I can never observe consciousness itself except in myself. It is a first person phenomenon. And since I know absolutely that first person consciousness is real, physicalism and physical measurement fail to capture the most definite aspect of reality. Keep in mind that all of the physical stuff is contingent upon consciousness and appears within consciousness as images, sounds, and thoughts. Somehow, it seems more and more likely to me, consciousness creates (perhaps the illusion of) a very convincing physical reality. Scary, but logical.

Chalmers goes to 11.

Amazing isn’t it? And the smaller we go into the material world, measurement breaks down at 10^-33 meters. Take that further, space time breaks down, so no space time is not fundamental, only consciousness.

@@HeavyMetal45thanks now I won’t sleep tonight.

@@sokunine so?

@@sokunine it’s still fundamental, you can’t deny that it doesn’t exist. Idk if it exists for you but it definitely exists for me :)

@@sokunine look into Donald Hoffmanns work regarding consciousness, he’s definitely onto something.

Me parece excelente la explicación de una función cerebral dual. Y como médico radiólogo comprendo que pueden haber dos fenómenos físicos al mismo tiempo. Y yo si creo que la consciencia se comporta como un fenómeno de tipo electromagnético que se produce en forma alterna. Como resultado secundario de las funciones de ciertas partes específicas de la conducción neuronal.

The difference being that you can observe the conductor, and you can observe an electric field. They are both defined by observation, third person observation. Whereas with consciousness, you only observe the neural network, you never see the consciousness. It is not observable from the third person perspective. There are no apt analogies for consciousness within the physical world.

@@frankjspencejr It is not observable from the third person perspective. Not everything is observable directly. Nobody ever observed the, ice age for example. But we can see evidence of the ice age's previous existence. Consciousness is observable through the proxy of a simple question. Are you conscious? People answer yes. The question becomes what to make of a machine that might be conscious, also answering yes.

But of course, the ice age is defined by the physical findings, by the observations. Whereas when you describe the neural correlates of consciousness, do you feel like you have actually captured all there is about consciousness or is something still missing? And are you saying that if a machine said they were conscious then you would accept that as a fact without question?

@@frankjspencejr If we accept we cant measure consciousness then the next best thing is to understand what creates consciousness. If we allow ourselves to postulate panpsychism or similar, then we shut off that possibility and ignore what we do know which is consciousness is tied to brain activity. As I said, many people want that to be true because they want some part of them to go on for eternity and to be with their loved ones after death. If a machine running a neural network was asked whether it was consciousness, and it said yes, how would you know whether it was or wasn't? My opinion is that while the neural network is running it just could be experiencing consciousness but it probably wouldn't be anything like what we experience. We only know human consciousness.

See my response for one explanation

Can I ask, do you think that when the computer s/w algorithms fail to function properly -- when we intentionally disrupt the computer h/w -- is then proof that the computer s/w is just the h/w? Of course not. Can I ask, do you think that a malfunctioning person by way of disrupting the brain (with LSD, or whatever) is somehow proof that conscientiousness is just the brain? If the brain and mind are distinct aspects of reality, yet dependent on one another, and neither causing the other, then would your proposed example make any sense? The computer h/w vs computer s/w, is maybe a useful analogy. The computer h/w, no matter how ordered and complex, will never cause s/w to emerge. The h/w is meaningless without the arrival (not to be confused with emergence) of s/w. And the s/w, without the appropriate h/w, is pointless. And yes, inject failures in the h/w and don’t be surprised if the system gives diminished s/w behavior.

@@steve_____K307 I think based on your other reply, looks like you are a computer professional like me. We can talk shop :) In the end I do think software is instructions (stored as physical dots on HD or gate states in SSD), which are loaded into the hardware and make the hardware change its states. That is what is the execution of the program is. And yes if hardware is disrupted it may interrupt the ability to execute the loaded instructions and then we call that program failed. Software is our convenient way to talk about hardware stored instructions. What a particular program does and its meaning, spreadsheet number crunching vs image processing vs chat - the software and hardware do not understand its meaning. We impose the meaning on what the program does. Hardware is programmable, and software simply is a mechanism to make the programmed h/w do things. But in the end the code actually runs as a modification of the state of the hardware. And sure a badly written program for example a while(true) loop may make CPU heat up and eventually fail due to heat. But that is because the electrons are racing thru the transistors/gates in the CPU very fast generating heat. That is why we need cooling when the gaming computers hires graphics. Human body is programmable in terms of walking, jumping, running, squatting. The Brain is making the body (legs) do different things, it does not mean that walking is a separate thing from the brain or body. Think of digestion and stomach, when you think of consciousness and brain. Brain is the organ for conscious processes among many other things. I do not think there is anything other than the dynamic electrochemistry of the brain and it's state in terms of historical connections in the neurons and in my example sub-systems of type S2 in working condition is what we call consciousness. "malfunctioning person by way of disrupting the brain (with LSD, or whatever) is somehow proof that conscientiousness is just the brain" yes to that because when the drug effect recedes the functions of S2 subsystem comes back. And if the damage is severe and permanent, specific function of the consciousness can never come back with today's technology. Sure, there is some plasticity in the brain to recover some function. And you will notice that plasticity is a physical concept. Hope this helps to clarify my position. I think next gen LLMs may exhibit true consciousness some day (you may disagree but - but surprisingly David think this will happen some day) that day physical-ism will be proven because we know that we do not sprinkle magic dust on LLMs or their descendant. It is true that we may not practically know deep down in the neural-net what is the captured state. In fact we exploit that many billion parameter value interaction to capture the complex process of token prediction.

​@@SandipChitale Well, I think we both agree that in similar fashion (if the analog holds) that the computer h/w and computer s/w are distinct entities, neither causes the other to emerge into existence, and both are dependent on the other, and in like fashion, something very similar could well be at play with the relationship between brain and mind. A damaged brain resulting in impaired expression of consciousness might be very similar to how damaged computer h/w impairs the expression of the intended s/w algorithms. It by no means proves that one “is” the “other”. Also, I think we both agree there are a number of ways that a person might inappropriately call upon magic dust as a way to support an otherwise [as yet] unsupported speculation. Cheers.

You started with a false premise, making everything you said thereafter moot. Here's why: we cannot detect or measure consciousness itself but only the neural correlates of consciousness. Therefore to say that consciousness requires a brain is a whopping leap of faith that I cannot take and neither should any respectable scientist. Science is based on empirical evidence, which is at the current time not available for consciousness.

@@steve_____K307 Actually I don't :). Software is specific hardware with stored set of instruction when static and instructions to modify states of CPU gates and memory gates when executing. In fact both a program and an image is stored similarly on the HD/SSD. What to do with it is coded in the hardware of Bios which boots OS which runs programs. IMO software is a convenient way to talk about stored executing hardware instructions.

I agree, except I don't think feedback loops are necessary, just randomness and complexity.

I think consciousness is the basic building block of all matter on the sub quantum level and everything is actually one. We are fractal beings off this one main consciousness.

@@charlespancamo9771 That has always been my theory (in fact I wrote a book about it). Consciousness is inherent.

Why would that occur in a universe where entropy dominates?

@@kenknight5387 Entropy prevails in the non organic realm. In the organic realm, there is a prevailing tendency towards order, complexity, evolution, intelligence and consciousness.

Great question!

You are not alone in thinking that.

Rocks and sand are also conscious?

And what proof do you have that a rock is conscious?

"Proto-consciousness is an inherent property of all substance." According to what science?

@@BenjaminGoose According to no science. Panspychism is a philosophical doctrine.

​@@jareknowak8712i dont think thats what he is saying. The observer effect and quantum entanglement show everything might be connected. That connection could very well be consciousness. We don't at all understand what consciousness is or does yet.

Yes but this is not actually a question of knowledge. It's a question of experience. A computer can store knowledge, can compute conclusions to make new knowledge, but that doesn't mean it experiences anything at all. What part of it would experience something , and how? We start with the sekf-evident fact - the most and only truly absolute self-evident fact of all - that we are experiencing something. We may not know why, and we certainly don't know how - but we are. We know that the brain impinges on and affects that experience, and can even reduce it to a catatonic state that is barely aware at all, but that doesn't alter the great mystery of how consciousness can occur when it does.

His hair knows right from wrong? His hair is His moral compass?

I have had a few blackout experiences. I think I must have been conscious during them because I accomplished activities that must have required sensation. My guess is that I was conscious but not able to form a memory of what went on.

HaHaHa, no kidding, I was thinking the exact same thing!

We aren't several hundred years away. Elon Musk has already figured it out. The Cia also has its just that they keep knowledge like that hidden from the rest of humanity

It's just the clips that come from old interviews

Perhaps the two "hard problems" are 2 facets of the same mysterious thing.

Yes at least a few years

What are mental brain properties?

@@declup purpose is one of them...

​@@r2c3 -- That's an interesting answer, but I'm not sure I understand it. By "purpose" do you mean desire or goal-seeking or something like desire or goal-seeking? In your view, since you call purpose a "mental brain property", what do these have to do with the brain?

@@declup more like intelligence or meaning...

​@@r2c3-- I'm even more confused now. You've given three different words: 'purpose', 'intelligence', and 'meaning'. Would you mind clarifying how you consider these to be related and how they're "mental brain properties"?

Closer to Truth episodes on what is consciousness are the most compelling topically and the least satisfying intellectually...the smartest of us can barely even scratch out a theory

it must have always been there

Eliminative materialism or illusionism need not equal insanity. Suppose that a given organism is a (very) complex physical system that behaves in complicated ways. One of the ways it behaves is by generating a model of a world and of the organism itself within that world. The model that the organism generates might model the organism as a non-physical entity with non-physical properties and powers (such as consciousness and contra-causal libertarian free will). The organism modeling itself that way might provide useful advantages in terms of enhancing fitness even though the way the organism is modeled is, strictly speaking, false. Consciousness and free will might be useful fictions. Similarly, models of the world might include supernatural gods, and the model containing such beings might have pragmatic usefulness even though the universe is thoroughly material (non-supernaturalistic)

@@bgalbreath Thank you for your well considered response but I can see a central flaw in your very first sentence - suggesting that consciousness can be an illusion. An object of consciousness can be an illusory, of course, as in the case of our seeing a straight line as a curved one. But illusionism cannot _explain_ consciousness since only beings that have real consciousness can be subject to illusions. To be subject to an illusion just is to be in a real conscious, intentional, mental state. No real, intentional conscious mental state (useful or otherwise) - no illusion. So you are putting the cart before the horse. As for the remainder of what you say, I think you raise many issues (many of which simply presuppose physicalism) but I they are at least a tad tangential to the basic issue at play in the video. I say a 'tad' tangential because I am of the view that anything that can properly be called a mental state necessarily involves consciousness somewhere in a basic and foundational position - but I am aware that an adequate defence of this would require a whole lot more careful exposition and argument. For now, I will say that I don't think any of them is inconsistent with consciousness being perfectly real. As for supernaturalism, I do indeed think that this is implied at a further stage of argument but I do not have to rely on it to show that there is a deep problem with any attempt to accommodate consciousness (or kick it out) with any naturalistic view that is based on its exclusion from the start.

@@theophilus749 Thanks to you as well Theophilus. I have spent some time today trying to grapple with what you say and find myself somewhat at a loss, but I will share it nevertheless. As you suggest, it seems that any being who is subject to an illusion must be conscious. I see a mirage in the desert because I am very thirsty and this makes me prone to interpret ambiguous perceptions as indications that there is water nearby. The hot sands in the distance cause air currents that reflect the sky above in a shimmering way, and that along with my fervent desire to find water, produce the illusion that water is about a mile away. It seems that I could not fall prey to that illusion unless I were having conscious experiences (of my interoception being very thirsty and my exteroception of shimmering air currents). Both the interoception and the exteroception could be mistakes. Maybe I am well hydrated and merely afraid of dying from thirst and my anxiety gets misinterpreted as real physiological dehydration. I mistake my seeing the air currents for seeing water. But if I were not conscious at all, I could not make these mistakes. Or, at least, so it seems. Consider a physical system that we have no reason to believe to be conscious, for example a fairly simple computer chess program. I play chess against the program, but does the program play chess against me? I have intentions. I move my black pieces and try to trap the white pieces. The computer program seems to move the white pieces in ways that avoid my traps while seeming to set traps of its own for me. Even though I am almost irresistibly drawn to attributing intentions (it is trying to capture my queen) or beliefs (it thinks that I will move to a particular square and seeks to prevent that by threatening that square with a piece of its own), I also recognize that the computer program has no intentions or beliefs at all, but is merely simulating being a chess player. Actually, it is just executing pre-programmed mathematical instructions in an ultimately mechanical way. It simulates a chess playing opponent so well that we are caused to almost reflexively attribute intentions and beliefs to it. Could the chess playing program come to mistakenly attribute intentional attitudes to itself? It could be functionally identical to a system that did that. It could be programmed to produce a running commentary about what it was trying to do and about what it “thought” I was trying to do. It could output the words, “I see that you are trying to fork my rook, but I don’t think you see that my bishop will move to block your plan.” Imagine a very sophisticated chess program, one that not only output words about what it was doing and planning to do, but who was functionally identical with an actual chess player. If the human chess player was moved to speak about her beliefs about how the game was going, so would the robot chess player also be moved, and for the same reasons. We suppose that the robot chess player was like a philosophical zombie that acted exactly like a human chess player in every way, but that the human player had phenomenal consciousness of its beliefs about how the game was going and the robot lacked such phenomenal consciousness. The robot would present the illusion to others of being conscious just as much as we present to others the impression that we are conscious. If I present to myself the impression that I am conscious, so too would the robot so present things to itself. Would it be correct to say that the robot suffers from an illusion that it is conscious? If so, then something can suffer from an illusion that it is conscious when it is not. This would conflict with the claim that to be a subject of an illusion is impossible without being genuinely conscious of something. A friend invites me to watch a television program with her. We sit on her couch and the program begins. Later the program ends, and my friend asks me how I liked it. I say that it was OK. She then tells me that I fell asleep in the middle, to the point that I was snoring. I react with surprise. I do not recall any lapse in what I recall as an unbroken period of consciously watching the program, yet I accept what she says and conclude that there was, in fact, a break and that my impression of having been conscious throughout the program is an illusion. Turning from memory to the (more or less) present, I can sincerely say that I am now visually experiencing the world around me in a 180 degree panoramic way, in full color. Yet, if I fixate on a spot in front of me and pick up a playing card with my arm outstretched to the far right and move it gradually forward it has to get quite far before I can identify what card it is, or even what color, proving that my apparently direct experience of the panoramic display was an illusion. When I go to bed at night, I lie for a while with my eyes closed thinking about various things and then, without noticing the change, I lose consciousness. This seems like a tremendous change in state, but I never notice it happening, or whether it happens suddenly or whether what I call “my consciousness” diminishes by degrees. Naive realism about the external world is out of fashion, but belief in naive realism about phenomenal experiences and about consciousness itself remains nearly universal. This leads some of us to say, while we might suffer from (say) visual illusions, we cannot be mistaken about whether we are currently conscious, or at least not when conditions are ideal enough (good lighting, no drugs, not distracted). Maybe so. Or maybe our conception of what consciousness is is so far off the mark that we never in fact manage to have what we believe we have.

@@bgalbreath Gosh ! This is long and full and I guess you know the literature. Never mind, so do I but properly framed reply will take a little time so I will get back to you when I have some. Cheers Theo

@@theophilus749 Take your time. Your remarks have stimulated me to try to pull my own ideas together, and it's very much a work in progress that I'm not sure hangs together. I supplemented what I already sent you with an additional couple of paragraphs. Please do not feel under any obligation to reply further, or even to read my groping thoughts. If I am a self, a subjective experiencer, then I may have experiences that are illusory. For example, if I am a dreaming self, I may experience being on a trip to Europe with my grandmother. If I am in fact asleep in bed in the US and if my grandmother has in fact died over 20 years ago, then the dreaming self is having illusory experiences that may seem non-illusory until I have woken up. When awake, I might say that I was conscious while I had been asleep, conscious of illusory events in the dream that, in the dream, I could not detect were illusory. I had a disturbance of consciousness and of reality testing, but the consciousness itself was not an illusion, even though the content of my consciousness was illusory. Who was the one who was conscious during the dream? When I report the dream after awakening, I say, “I was in Europe with my grandmother.” I wasn’t in Europe, but was I even “I”? I was in bed. So, not only was the dream content an illusion, but so (at least to some extent) was the seeming subject of that illusion. It wasn’t me because I was in bed asleep and not walking around sites in Europe. The dream self is not the same “me” as my waking self. Not only was the dream contents an illusion, but the purported subject of those contents was also an illusion. Suppose that the self I habitually take myself to be is a fictional character. In that case, both the subject and the object of phenomenally conscious experiences are illusions, an at-best virtual self seeming to have what turn out to be virtual experiences. Some schools of Buddhism teach that there is no substantial self. But, outside of that religious context, thinkers such as Daniel Dennett also argue that the self is a virtual entity, a narrative center of gravity. If I were a non-virtual self, an actual self that exists fully in the world, then it would be true that even if I had a conscious yet illusory experience it would nevertheless be true that I had an experience. My conscious experience might be defective or disordered, but the consciousness itself would not be an illusion, and the critic of illusionism would be right. But if neither I nor the experience existed in any strict sense, illusionism would remain as a viable hypothesis. There would remain work to be done in accounting for my illusion of being a particular conscious being as well as having particular seemingly conscious experiences. For example, to whom or what does the experience seem to happen?

You've missed a class or two, huh?

Actually, space time is not fundamental. It breaks down at the Planck length.

​@@HeavyMetal45 Dont mix Physics/Math with Reality.

@@jareknowak8712 then why are physicists starting to say spacetime is not fundamental?

@@HeavyMetal45 There is a slightl difference between untestable theory and working reality.

Great, absolutely right. I often say "I experience therefore I am". I think therefore I am doesn't work, just look at AI.