Marvin Minsky - Is Consciousness Entirely Physical? 

Lol

Well said!

I was going to say the same thing

that comment was funny. LOL

Ralph Latham facts

Lmao!!! Kkkkkkkk

Minsky would never get drowned by sudden tsunami.

When he's asked about AIs having 1st person experiences he replies that someday robots will report that they have experiences. In other words when specifically given a durect question about the 1st person perspective, he answers with a 3rd person prediction. This is very telling. He simply cant speak durectly to qualia, even when asked point blank.

@@cloudlessrainvisions3264 Or perhaps he believes them to be illusory as he discussed and implied. Here's an interesting article discussing this perspective: aeon.co/essays/what-if-your-consciousness-is-an-illusion-created-by-your-brain

The idea that consciousness could possibly be an illusion is the most stunningly delusional assertion in human history. If someone can't see why that is logically impossible, I have to seriously question whether they're conscious. Yes, I'm serious.

@@BugRib The point is that having illusions requires possessing consciousness.

@@BugRib philosophical zombie here, how could consciousness be an illusion when consciousness is the mechanism through which illusion is perceived? Do androids dream of electric sheep?

It seems to be a common character flaw in these pseudo-intellectuals. If you want to behold true genius, check out CTMU from Chris Langan

Daniel Joseph watch more episodes of this these subjects are addressed if not tackled.

@@mycount64 they aren't tackled in any sense

Nobody says that concepts like math are physical. but you need a physical machine to give effect to these concepts. Concept of addition exists even if no physical world existed, but you won't be able to do additions if some physical entity wasn't performing it. The claim in this video is that Knowing you exist (self consciousness) though a concept and not a physical thing, you need a physical machine to execute this concept, and a soul is neither sufficient nor necessary for reaching self consciousness. In summary, claiming that a physical brain is all you need to sense consciousness is not the same as claiming that concepts like math or self consciousness are physical.

Lol what

Winston Chang Late to the party, but this can be explained in terms of variability of cells within the eye, which we find in all parts of the human body. This is different however from the claim that everyone sees different colours - an extreme idealist position which tries to get out of materialism.

by adding 'not actually life', it is now logically coherent.

actually, if you follow me mindfully, you might have found i wanted to say more than that in between the sentences. when i have taken 'we' are 'designed' as 'machine'. you must interpret all the terms to figure out the entire sense of the argument. according to materialism, 'we' are nothing more than 'brain's material status ,that is, bio-chemical functionality,' and our brain can be treated as a designed machine on the basis of the system of the co-ordinated functionalities. that was my point.

however, how do you define specifically in your understanding the terms mentioned in my original statement? what is meant by 'we' by 'designed', by 'machine'? what do you think, can our brain be defined as some thing more than only a dead-weight matter? or as a bio-functional computational-data processing and analyzing robotic system, as a matter of fact? sorry my English is not good enough.

Evolution is the engineer. We are what we are because we evolved that way. This begs the question, who created evolution? But, that's not the real question, is it? The question is, can something come from nothing? I'll tell you now, that is impossible to answer. No matter what you're looking at, you can always ask was there something before this. For this reason alone, both atheists and believers are both RIGHT. They can both be absolutely correct because definitions dissipate when you get too abstract. Here's a thought experiment: Imagine a smooth, featureless white sphere floating in infinite black space. Now, stick a flag into the side of it. Now, if you see the flag rotating to the right, around and around the sphere, is the sphere spinning? Or are you rotating around the sphere? With no other defining features to be seen, the answer is BOTH. This is the problem with abstract ideas, definitions are constrained by details. Without details, there are no definitions. Here is the question that keeps me up at night, though: Is God 'the abstract'? Like, fundamentally? Is this why he can't be 'seen'? If there's no way to define high level abstractions, then God can't BE defined. Maybe, there was nothing that existed but abstraction, and the abstraction itself 'defined' something and, boom, the universe? I wonder...

you are assuming physics is deterministic.

I don't think he is. Exactly the same argument applies if it is non-deterministic - there is still no "I" that deserves any credit for what - inevitably - happens.

Ha Ha I know, probably we just need a little bit less of self-infatuation and more fatuousness,as expressed.

@@user-ol2gx6of4g Physics is deterministic. I think you are thinking of hard determinism that says every event in the universe is already pre-determined with no chance of free will.

@@adrianaselena14 I don't think you understand what "deterministic" means ... certainly you're provided no indication of how it differs from "hard determinism". And by quantum mechanics physics is not deterministic, at least not on a small scale. It may be that, due to coherence, it is deterministic on a large scale. In any case, physics leaves no room for "free will" (other than the sort of crypto free will promoted by compatibilists like Dan Dennett).

Why would you suppose you are "supposed to do" anything in particular?

@@bobaldo2339 do what u want, but I foresee philosophical suicide. this is all meaningless to begin with......

Facts

LOL

Don't discount the idea that Marvin is engaging in humor.

Eric Michel Because we're scared of being right, since we are humans like you, who like feeling emotions, whether good or bad, and fear leaving them once and for all

You are both right, for different kinds of people.

Eric Michel This is why the rate of suicide among senior citizens (at least in the west) high. For a long time in our life regardless of our belief we feel like we a contributing to some greater goal (materialist or otherwise) at some point in time that starts to diminish and we eventually realize that other than some little sphere of influence (again diminishing over time) evaporates. There are exceptions.

There are other major reasons, like social isolation, loss of status among others and chronic illness. It used to be that seniors were more respected because there were fewer of them and their knowledge was more prized when it was less easier to access knowledge and their help was useful. In a tribe, for instance, seniors' knowledge of animal migration or weather patterns could be of life-or-death importance and they were also important for childcare.

Minsky was the exact opposite of "doing nothing". Amateur psychology does not help understand science.

I'm not sure why that is such a radical notion. Everything we see in nature is either animated or inanimate. It would be useless to say that inanimate matter had consciousness. Only a living thing can be conscious, which is an active process, not reactive.

"For a machine to be conscious, the prerequisite is that it should have life in it" No! Conscious is not a material substance, it is a process. It matters not at all what the substance is made of so long as that substance can support the process of being conscious. Obviously. "Did we not feel hungry and pain as soon were born?" Don't you remember? I don't. I have absolutely no memory of my first six months. In fact, my first memory is of me sitting in a pushchair in a bakery, which means, as in 99% of cases, I must have been six months or older. If one looks microscopically at living and at dead tissue, one discovers they contain exactly the same set of atomic types, chemically reactive according to the nature of the type, but in all cases the atoms are not living, nor the molecules, nor the small structures either. So what distinguishes the living from the dead? You already know! Dead things don't move as much as the living, neither the entity as a whole or the parts within it. The parts in 'living matter' are engaged in many different kinds of the most extraordinarily complex dynamically patterned energetic chemical processes. What's going on in non living matter is very slow and boring in comparison. The structure of the rock in the wall that surrounds my garden is today pretty much identical to its structure yesterday, a hundred years ago and ten thousand. When these many processes in living matter cease, every atom of the matter continues to exist but the living ceased the moment that the processes did. No process, no life, that's it, quite simple. By the way, 'living matter' is just a manner of speaking. It's not the matter that is living. It's the matter *plus* the collectivity of processes going on within. Yes, the existence of matter is *prerequisite* for the being of the processes but both must be present for a thing to be living. There is no magic spark that distinguishes the living from the dead. (Which is what I firmly believed before I learned about photosynthesis, Kreb's cycle, Brownian motion, etc).

@@REDPUMPERNICKEL It's easy enough to just dismiss life as "mere chemistry", but while many of the processes involved in a living cell have been detailed, there isn't even a solid definition for life. Like you said, either it moves or it doesn't. That's exactly what animate and inanimate mean, so we haven't made any progress at all. I don't believe in magic, but the organizing principles that cause matter to behave and act are so deep and subtle that we haven't even begun to figure it out. This is why I maintain that the basis of consciousness and the subjective is a living organism. Even a single cell organism has to have basic awareness. It must be able to tell inside from outside, self from non-self. It must seek food and avoid danger. Many single cell organisms can detect light and make basic decisions. As cells become part of a larger organization, there are new functions that become possible, all the way up to thinking and detailed memory, but these are layered onto the base, so you can't just take brain functions like cognition and emotions and ignore the base of living cells that are the physical organism, or that which experiences.

@@caricue Seriously: Are you in conversation with any cell of the one hundred trillion or so that constitute your body? Do you imagine that any one of them is aware of Steve C in the way that Steve C is aware of Steve C? Do you imagine that their individual immaterial awareness processes mysteriously congeal like some metaphysical cloud into an immaterial whole in a way that constitutes your conscious mind? Or have I misread what you are saying completely?

@@REDPUMPERNICKEL I'm just speculating, but if this view is true, then the question would be, how does a single unified consciousness get organized? Do only brain cells act as this central conscious structure? Is this why pain hurts so much? Are the peripheral cells transmitting their feelings? It does sound pretty crazy, but it would be totally biological and material, nothing immaterial or metaphysical. In a material world, everything is material at some level, so there has to be a substrate of matter that is alive and feeling. It would also explain why people feel a "cosmic consciousness" when they meditate. Maybe they are feeling the rest of the multitude that makes up a multi-cellular organism. And no, individual cells would only be aware of their immediate environment. Knowledge and thinking could only happen at the highest levels of brain function.

I agree. It seems obvious to me that we will have a full scientific description of consciousness at some point.

@@Valdrex Don't hold your breath.

@@GarryBurgess right? It seems Minskey believes that once the easy problem is figured out that the hard problem will just fall into place. Easy way to sidestep the question

His response was that if a machine can do it, and we can then understand it, we will admit there is nothing special about the experience of being.. even if the machine doesn't have it and we do (or maybe he is implying that the machine would have it also... he didn't say). I'm not convinced at all. The interviewer did try to bring it up again, but then the strawmanning started about dualism and invisible forces and such. This ignores panpsychism, dual aspect monism, and other theories. Minsky may well be right here, but we don't know, and the fact that he goes so quickly to "invisible forces" tells me that he doesn't want to admit he doesn't know.

@@arletottens6349 You mean invisible forces like magnetic fields, dark matter, quantum entanglement, time relativity effects, whatever caused there to be something instead of nothing, etc. right? As to what is and is not physical, I challenge you to give a clear and exhaustive definition. Any time you talk about something as being fully understood before it is in fact fully understood, this is neither science nor philosophy.

@@arletottens6349 Are you aware of the problem of induction? Prove to me that you can predict anything such that it is not possible that you are wrong. Perhaps there is nothing that fits your definition here.

@@arletottens6349 "And that interaction can be studied with our instruments" Perhaps jumping to conclusions is both more boring and also vastly more limiting. Have you heard of subjectivity? What do you think of it? Does it matter what you think about it? What kind of measurement is occurring when you measure your thoughts on the matter (pun intended)? Most physicalists who take their position seriously end up denying that consciousness exists at all. So perhaps what you think about this is entirely irrelevant, based on your intellectual commitments. Einstein comes along and shows how wrong scientist were about something so seemingly absolutely basic and undeniable as the rate of time passing, but a few years pass and you have people like you trying to cram everything into presumptions of past experimentation again. I supposed if you are in the camp that humans understand 99.9% of everything and there are just a few sweeps on polish to go, that might make sense. The problem is that both physics and cosmology are getting worse, rather than better, at dealing with the big questions at the moment.

out of interest why ?

It always amazes me that some people think they're right because the opposing argument doesn't have an answer. It's like claiming that a found wallet is yours because nobody else claimed it. So the person who threw his hands up and said "I don't know! it must be due to something we don't see and is not physical and there is no way to detect it but I know it's there" is right because the guy working on finding the real answer hasn't worked out an answer yet!!!

First, this is ad hominem and an argument from authority. Second, that's *not* what Penrose "speculates"; he's a physicalist through and through, but he doesn't think Turing Machines can be conscious, and instead appeals to quantum mechanics. His arguments have been widely criticized on logical grounds--which is what matters, not who is "arguably" a better mathematician. Your own terms like "arguably" and "speculate" undercut your already specious argument from authority. And Penrose is not humble in this regard--his self-admitted motivation is that he doesn't want to believe that he's "just" a machine. And if he were humble he would give more credence to arguments from people like Minsky or various neuroscientists who have spent decades studying cognitive processes--the fields of physics and mathematics really aren't relevant. And "Minsky is only defensive" is nonsense and projection--the defensiveness comes from people who aren't willing to accept that consciousness is physical.

@@JimBalter accept the appeal to authority. But saying minsky worked for decades doesn't have to mean whatever conclusion hes come to is right. Penrose is a physicalist, i agree. Penrose doesn't have to be "humble" in just accepting Minsky's "authority". Penrose not wanting to be a machine also doesn't make him not "humble". "Minsky is defensive" is my observation on this interview. That being a "projection" of people who wont accept consiousness is physical is actually not an argument at all, its your speculation, also useless.

​@@aishwariyasweety2433 I strongly disagree. Minsky is one of the greatest cognitive scientists of all time and he has a very well thought out opinion on this

Joshua Nicholls the physical exists outside of us we only interpret it vaguely through our senses.

On the contrary, consciousness is entirely emergent from the physical.

But nothing exists in the material world that is not instantiated in matter or carried my modulated energy. Thoughts only exist in brains, ideas on paper or electronic media. If a thing is not contained in the physical, then how would you access it?

His ego doesn't let him see

First word of your username describes where your mental development stopped.

@@abhishekshah11 - No son, your ego will not let you learn. If you work your ass off the rest of your life, you will never hold a candle to Marvin Minsky. Now say you are sorry!

If you want to see the effect of the fatalism that Minsky is lampooning, just come to India and see for yourself what thousands of years of priestly fatalism have done to its people.

@@vinayseth1114 - India does not have a monopoly on supernatural nincompoops.

Exactly

uhhh... yes? that's how it is

well, so far that line of reasoning worked way better than looking for answers in a book written by goat shepherds thousands of years ago, or in the guts of dead animals, or asking the dead

He understands, quite obviously, what people "actually" mean by consciousness. He just wishes to dispel that notion.

If he was not capable of understanding what philosophers mean by consciousness, he would not have been interviewed by the program.

possible Zombies

Dom you are Very Polite !!!!! proof you ARE part of "a GOD Thing"..... i understand how crazy it is to accept an idea like that AND do science..... trust that its possible.

Science is not about believing things, neither is real spirituality.

I can see no other explanation for the existence of god than meta-god. Ad-infinitum. Turtles all the way down

ahahahh yeah; that's very interesting and often it happens with materialists who seem selfless and immersed in their science that they actually get immersed in their own self; guess there's nothing to cling on when you shatter all gods and everything not materialistic; probably the reason why Minsky was such a believer in eternal life and why his brain or body is frozen and waits for some nicer times

You're silly for calling anything silly . And i might be silly for calling you silly .

Monistic Idealism the entire western philosophical enterprise is built on universal dualism, not to mention the big three monotheisms which have been around for millennia - if one thinks they are able to simply jettison that double apparatus of metaphysics and just wade in a frictionless medium devoid of any traditional ideological latency, in exchange for another worldview, then they are fooling themselves and the joke is on them. Real or apparent, this theistic western syncretic tradition has seeped into everything, suggests itself everywhere. If one wishes to challenge it then one must grant respect for its ideas and engage them point by point rather than glibly dismissing it.

@@achraf844 You're silly for calling him silly. And I'm also silly calling you silly. What a silliful world.

@@vovos00 XD cycle of life

there are ppl with so little intellectual honesty that they can say everything is physical cos mind is an illusion and pretend they've explained how physicality can produce illusions of subjectivity or illusions at all as though this is not exactly as problematic as the hard problem of consciousness ie. the hard problem of illusions

@@backwardthoughts1022 What's intellectually dishonest here is declaring that everyone who doesn't agree with you is intellectually dishonest. In his book Society of Mind, Minsky makes a good case for how physicality can produce illusions of subjectivity.

A machine can be built so it will be aware of (most of) its internal processes, on the other hand are you aware of some of yours (your inconscious thoughts, your current glucose level in the blood, the number of iron atoms in your red blood cells...)?

@@LuigiSimoncini "A machine can be built so it will be aware of (most of) its internal processes" Really? If you have any evidence that any constructed machine was ever actually _aware_ of _anything_ , you should publish it. You'd probably win a Nobel Prize.

I think you missed all of Minsky's points that consciousness is not anything special, just a sense that you are separate from the world outside of you. And that can possibly be an unavoidable consequence of anything that has a certain threshold of analytical abilities. Once we make a machine that can think, and then the machine undoubtedly analyzes that it is reacting to an outside world, then that machine has reached self awareness. The other important point was that we all believe we know us from the inside better than anyone, but what we know about ourselves is a very small part of who we are and how we operate.

Minsky doesn't claim that he built machines that are aware ... he said that *if* we built machines that have all the subsystems that human brains have (and we don't yet know the details of those), *then* those machines would be aware in the same way we are. Also, you are using the word "aware" is a way that begs all the relevant questions by assuming that it's some magical mystical epiphenomenal essence. But even a thermostat is "aware" of the temperature, and certainly an amoeba is "aware" of food particles nearby via chemical sensing.

Right on. The doubters here make me want to throw up. I think that it is so obvious that were are all physically driven. It is just a hard problem.

On the contrary, emotions are some of the most primitive aspects of humans

How so? Can you elaborate further?

rich monk, I like that he specified that biology was the prerequisite for consciousness. I'm not sure why he capitulated on AI being conscious, unless it was a living machine.

@Erick we didn't ask you, when talking about scientific and unscientific stuff we prefer listening to people with a scientific track record, like Minsky

​@@LuigiSimoncini This is an appeal to authority (and old guard, at that) and in this case it is fallacious (there is no sure answer or reason to trust established opinion - if you think there is, you don't understand the issue yet nor the history of science). Obviously, if this is how you think it is a sign of close-mindedness. But given the benefit of the doubt, I'll just add that the problem boils down to there being something about experience itself, such as the experience of color or any other, which cannot be in principle, apparently, described as a composite, in the way Marvin describes; it is just "there". Yes, the way we experience things is entirely human, biological and evolved; but the substance, the "stuff" of experience is real. It is the only thing we can claim to know first-hand that anything is actually made of. Whatever it "is".

Exactly this.