Episode  

Since you mentioned it, yes, I have actually listened to all 179 episodes. Some I have listened to more than once. Thank you for your awesome work!

Been listening to your work since the pre-socratic days. Just wanted to say I really appreciate your work and hope you continue to make such great content. It has been super helpful in my journey with philosophy

There is a "zombie" that matches the description in that thought experiment. It's my reflection in a mirror. It looks like me, does and reacts to everything as I do, yet does not have a conciousness of its own. Btw thank you for making this show, I've so far listened to around 40 episodes and it really brings a lot of joy to my life.

i have also listened to every single episodes and some more than once. absolutely my favorite podcast ever.

The book 'the hidden spring' has some great insight into this

Notes for this video, btw I think it would be really helpful if either some citations are made for further reading or just in general giving us some keywords for us to look more into this topic cause obv a 30 min video can't cover the nuance of the concept: Why is consciousness something worth talking about? Why do we study consciousness in philosophy? Is consciousness in Science not enough? Science gives us empirical data and tells us what the world is, but philosophy tells us how to interpret that reality. Access and phenomenal consciousness. The former is the area of our conscious experience that allows us to access information from the external world that is then used by our cognitive systems. People also call the latter as qualia. They are the individual, subjective qualities or properties of conscious experiences. These are the "what it's like" aspects of our mental states. For example, the redness of an apple, the taste of chocolate, the feeling of warmth, or the sensation of pain all have distinct qualia associated with them. Qualia are the unique, intrinsic qualities that make each conscious experience different. Philosophers think neuroscience can never explain the correlates of parts of the brain that give rise to these experiences. How do we have subjective experiences that are not themselves physical but they seem to arise from purely physical states of matter in the brain Thought Experiment: Imagine somebody standing next to you that from the outside appears to be an exact copy of you. This copy behaves exactly as you'd behave. It reacts to everything exactly how you'd react but it doesn't have internal subjective experience. We call this a zombie. Do you think that the existence of something like this zombie is possible? Is it possible for something to look entirely conscious from an outside perspective but not actually be feeling anything like we feel in a phenomenal stream of consciousness where it feels like something to be me. The implication is that we don't know at what point animals or AI need to be given certain moral protections. From a moral perspective what we're trying to protect is that subjective experience of being a thing that is in conscious torment something's going on against our will. We don't want other conscious beings to have to go through it either. There was a monkey experiment where scientists removed a monkey’s visual cortex, but the monkey was still able to dodge obstacles as if it were still able to visually see objects. There are two main pathways where the eyes connect to the brain one of them the usual one we think about goes up to the cortex which the monkey had removed and the other is an ancient one that's descended from the visual system system used by fish frogs and reptiles. This is also why we too process information based on instincts and intuition that are not immediately conscious to us. This is an example that proves how animals can appear to act consciousness from the outside but don’t necessarily have to be for their evolution to take place. Oftentimes we project our human experience onto animals like monkeys, presuming it has all the inner subjective experiences we have. This affects discussions of abortion where then it’s not where life begins but where phenomenal Consciousness begins.

This dude has awakened my passion for philosophy and I will be ever thankful for this. Thank you my dear creator

I appreciate you putting these up on youtube. I enjoy having the sub-titles even though i dont necessarily read them at every moment.

The hypothetical world you described with a hierarchy of consciousness bears a lot of similarity, materially speaking, to this one

Also I'm super interested in panpsychism and I'm excited that you're doing an episode on it!!

Very interesting episode. Keep it up

Now that is a title i can get behind

Thanks man for another great video on another great topic. I personally find Canadian philosopher/theologian Bernard Lonergan's theory of consciousness with its four levels (attention, intelligence, reason, responsibility) fascinating. His interpreters add "being in love" as a fifth state of consciousness or the "apex of the soul" as medieval philosophers used to call it. I wonder if AI's, even if they become self-conscious, would be capable of human feelings of love and altruism.

Looking forward to episode 180 about embodied cognition :)

Thank you Stephen. Could be interesting to consider Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism.

I've been listening to philosophise this on Spotify for a couple of years and am always eagerly awaiting the next episode. I didnt know they were available earlier on here (Spotify is still showing ep #178 two weeks after #179 was released on RU-vid). Now I know, I'll come here first!

Fascinating content. Thank you for this. For those interested in this subject, I would recommend checking our Bernardo Kastrup's theory of analytic idealism which elegantly resolves the hard problem of consciousness as long as you buy into the idea that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality.

The description of the society utilizing a consciousness hierarchy describes our society pretty well. Good job; very insightful approach

These ideas are what solidified veganism as the right way to live for me a few years ago. Panpsychism is an interesting thought. If panpsychism holds water in reality, I hope that suffering is not a universal concious experience.

The question is its own answer. OMG!!!

Fascinating

Great episode 👍👍

Thanks. Now eating chicken will give me a guilty conscience 🤔

If I look at my computer and it looks back at me I know it’s conscious. As I’m writing this I feel nothing from my I Pad. No consciousness. It can’t see me. It can’t make me feel seen.

Thank u

Please do an episode on Nick Land

a video on key differences between "Ethics", "Morality" and "law" ? that would be great

You can't talk about conciousness without talking about the viewpoint of alan watts and eastern philosophy! This I really missed there.

I believe consciousness is closely related to suffering. If something doesn't ever actively avoid intense pain, it cannot be conscious. That's what makes animals conscious. I think we need to think of consciousness as closely related to biology, if something has no biological makeup, how can it hope to generate consciousness.

Rupert Sheldrake ? Maybe an episode?

Why would I care what consciousness is ? Whatever I may come up with, will not change anything about my experiences anyway. It is only interesting to figure out, how do I understand/classify my experiences and what do I do with them !!

It seems to me that its the word "You" that makes you think there's a you. Besides that, it seems to me there's just sights and sounds going into eyes & ears and combining with memories to make thoughts and actions. And each person thinks "I'm me" and only has access to their memories. There could be more to it, but that seems like whats happening in my head :/

😇

Man's innate aggression and irrational behavior will bode ill for any "relationship" it creates with an AI it has brought into existence. I don't see a future utopia at all.

Philosophy is necessary to help us define what we mean by “consciousness”. I think subjective experience is too vague to be operational, as we’re relying on self-report. How the brain functions is interesting to me but anyone else’s subjective experience is about the least interesting thing to me. Qualia doesn’t exist in my view; big fan of Dan Dennett, who has debated Chalmers many times. The hard problem doesn’t exist and is neither hard nor a problem. Like most paradoxes, the problem is a badly conceived question.

Are you planning on doing a series on Ted Kaczynski?

I don't agree whatsoever. Now to watch the video to see if I'm right. I should also probably read the video title.

A belief in consciousness is either arrogance or ignorance 😤

Bravo...(⁠•⁠‿⁠•⁠)

philosophy is de most interesting of history and psychology. Fortunately, science overshadows it. Philosophy is mainly a political tool these days.

TL;DR : it isn't 😭

Finally a new topic, the last few episodes were boring

First maybe?

If humans had consciousness and not animals, if China made a half-human half-pig hybrid with Crisper, would they have half a consciousness. We share ancestors with animals, it seems like they have a pretty similar life process/consciousness to me :/