Susan Greenfield - Is Consciousness Irreducible? 

Awareness is known by awareness alone; is the sole irreducible axiom of reality. To put forth a syllable to the contrary is but to concede.

I like the insight on variable levels of consciousness. I think children are also more conscious of the moment while adults are more conscious of hypotheticals.

I enjoyed this talk, great guest

Is there something to a traffic jam that can’t be explained by cars? Yes, but it’s not supernatural.

Robert was doing a great job guiding her to understand the real philosophical question and for a moment it seemed that she was finally getting what it's all about, but in the end she circles back to the neural correlates of consciousness and fell into the abyss of the explanatory gap

I’m grateful for these CtT videos. They are a great treasure on the internet. Thank you TLK. I’m sympathetic to Susan’s insistence that consciousness is natural, but the reducibility issue is different. The idea that reduction of consciousness to the physical states is a starting place, i.e., a stance, that needs to be fully explored before irreducibility should be accepted is in tension with her idea that the reduction could be beyond our conceptual categories but still be reduction. That’s true, but more than a starting place, it’s an a priori philosophical commitment that seems unfalsifiable.

A good conversation. I incline toward panpsychism myself, but I admired Ms Greenfield's honest scientific rigour: as a scientist she must assume that the brain is the cause of consciousness. This shows why philosophy is necessary: to ask the questions and entertain the speculations that are outside the bounds of science. What irritates me is when scientists promote a materialistic philosophy and call it science. Scientists study material processes. Philosophers speculate about the nature of reality. The two disciplines are not competing; they should work in an intimate two-step.

As a materialist who can't account for the immaterial nature of consciousness, she's the one who's pulling the get out of jail free card. It's called promissory materialism.

So much of what Greenfield espouses is based on materialist ontological/metaphysical assumptions. Rather than being arguments for materialism, most of what she says simply shows her unconscious bias for materialism. In philosophy, that's called 'begging the question'. Meaning that she's using the very thing in question as the foundation her argument. AKA circular reasoning. Let's keep in mind that there are no equations or experiments that provide substantial evidence for materialism, much less prove it. Yet she acts as if every other theory requires proof while materialism gets a pass, or in her terms, a get out of jail free card.

For all those saying that this woman missed the point, I disagree. She's fully aware of the Hard Problem of Consciousness and she understands that the arguments she's putting forth do not solve it. What she IS doing is elaborating on the real scientific research that can be done to actually investigate conscious states, which could then just MAYBE be used as a spring board in order to be able to begin to understand consciousness. If you believe that what she is saying is completely useless and could never IN PRINCIPLE begin to attack the Hard Problem, then you're effectively defining the problem as one that is IN PRINCIPLE unsolvable. Taking that view, you could be a philosopher, but you could not be a scientist, because you assuming a priori that the methods of science cannot solve the problem. It could very well be that the Hard Problem is unsolvable by the methods of science, but she is a scientist and assuming such things does nothing to help her reach her goal. In order to tackle the hard problem as a scientist, you must first assume that it is, in principle, solvable.

How is it that scientific explanation is spoken of as reduction? Is it that physical explanations are somehow considered as destroying what some want to be the magic of reality? If at some end point of understanding, where life is found to be just an evolved organic machine, the mystery would evaporate, and hence we as humans would no longer be special.

Matter is not subjective. There’s your first problem in reductionism.

I think she's right on both points: it would be unscientific to presume up front that consciousness is something we can't scientifically investigate or explain, AND that the path forward is to start measuring levels of consciousness. I'm also intrigued by the idea that other animals have consciousness, maybe at different levels...trying to measure and study that could tell us a lot too.

Twelve minutes, 58 seconds Vs. "We don't know enough to know"....

Wondering the schizophrenia, downsyndrome individu/patients consciousness/unconscious

Greenfield's "somehow translate into a subjective state" is equivalent to "then a miracle happens". She is saying nothing.

Brain and the mind are not the same thing. Maybe it's time for the scientists to expand their scope of what they are talking about. If you want to discuss something you need the comon ground for discussion. And how can you speak of my subjective if you do not now what fully it means for me? :-P

To say that there are degrees of consciousness is a step in the right direction, and I think it's even more complicated than that. There are multiple taxonomies or ways to categorize the different types of experiences, such as: (1) external vs. internal, (2) positive vs. negative, (3) "flavors" like red vs. blue, or chocolate vs. broccoli, (4) volitional vs. non-volitional. It gets even more complicated when you consider how our consciousness interacts with other parts of our brain like the hippocampus (memories) and prefrontal cortex (making decisions) and motor cortex (moving our bodies).

Dear Mr. Robert, thank you for this incredible interview. You are truly a gentleman and I apologize for my infinite ignorance clearly expressed in my opinions. As described by the interviewee, science must first do what it can. The science management process is what will prepare us for the inevitable. However, it may be important to remember that a radio is just a device for decoding a signal emitted by another device capable of capturing an individual's voice. Our brain is just a radio. At least that's how we know how to use it, in general. Consciousness is still far from that. Some arguments sound like asking an electronics technician while listening to the radio, to confirm whether someone is on the other side of the emitting device by turning it off. The same experience she mentions can also give us clues in the opposite direction. If I'm not mistaken, placebos worked for creatures that also didn't have a brain. Thank you very much for this interview.

The challenge is ......!? We appear to operate in the Conscious domain- BUT! We do not operate in “The Conscious Consciousness domain”!? Our awareness Quantum Perception is always from The Subconsciousness. So the brain is a transmitter/receiver of multiple data forms, operating information manipulation/exchange/language/dialogue...Subconsciously. All before we are Consciously Perception Aware Of it!? Then of course by then it is (Data fractionally but definitely)in the past!?

Susan is absolutely right. And I think the main reason is that we are mostly NOT conscious about just about everything that goes on in our bodies, brain or the world around us. So to consider ourselves (or other animals) as conscious beings is a bit meaningless, because we’re not. The fact that we have a tiny pineal of (fairly fleeting) consciousness seems almost an after-thought, like the occasional sparks in a fire that blink into existence and then are gone. The fire is what it’s all about, for humans, animals and perhaps even reptiles, insects and perhaps even plants. I think the question is: what makes these sparks somehow connected to each other (not necessarily as a unified whole, but little islands of connectivity) and with a duration (or “memory”) that outlives the individual sparks?

Nice try... but.. nope Her quantifying unconsciousness is like quantifying "cold" I admire, though, how very convinced she is that her hypotheses are correct

And in the end, we're back with a correlation, when the gap is in the logic. The way that we account for physical processes is always and necessarily from the perspective of an (idealized) external observer. Consciousness is a first-person perspective. Physicalist accounts are therefore logically barred from coming up with a mechanism that would account for consciousness. It's a category mistake to think such an account is possible. That's also why the "zombie" argument can work: if there existed a true materialist account of consciousness, the materialist would have a proof that the creature they're describing is not a "zombie". The problem is that materialism, being a dominant worldview among educated people nowadays, would foster attempts to define the problem away: We hereby declare that this assemblage, or whatever else, simply *is* consciousness. Subjective experience is declared irrelevant. Problem "solved". Philosophers of language tried to pull a similar trick with the notion of "meaning" (simply defining it, by fiat, to be identical to the truth conditions of a sentence, even if the resulting "meaning" would appear absurd to any normal language user). I suspect many such attempts will be made regarding consciousness.

Hmmm. Disagree with her on correlation and "seeing consciousness" in the types of brain activity we can capture today. Also don't agree with there being levels of consciousness. It's a bug, not a feature, of evolution. Our self-awareness doesn't come from some external ether or a manifestation of elementery "conscious" elements. We can't see our thoughts being made; only hear them as an echo once they are expressed, using the same wetware we use to understand the expressions of others. She is mostly correct on the feedback loop, between mind and body, but doesn't seem to have the full picture (I'd argue she is already a bit far down the reductionist ladder to see it). We have thoughts in our left hemisphere that trigger a reaction in our body that are "read" by the right hemisphere (root of subjective experience), and then those feelings get associated with those thoughts, leading to those "what it feels like" moments Chalmers and others will never find. This mind-body-mind loop is a kind of neo-dualism, sans the metaphysical and religious aspect.

Golly, someone who talks sense about consciousness! And doesn't leap to absurd consciousness-is-fundamental pronouncements, none of which have any credible scientific evidence tp back them up. But people just love making up stuff about things they don't fully grasp. I guess it makes them feel better. Personally, such maneuvers make me feel like a BS artist.

Imagine that your brain cells just like a group of synchronized birds, they are flying north, you are thinking quantum mechanics; they are flying south, you are playing piano; they are flying east, you are mowing the lawn; they are flying west, you are swimming in your pool, meanwhile some birds are still in north direction, you are partially still thinking about quantum mechanics! All the sync systems are spontaneous process which obey the second law of thermodynamics, mathematical description may not solve the problem: “How does order emerge out of chaos”. In reality, all sync systems are counterintuitive: order is disorder; disorder(chaos) is order. When sync is phase locked, energy is even, and entropy reaches maximum; when sync is phase unlocked, energy distribution is uneven, and entropy decreases. Your brain cells act just like school of birds and fish are in sync. All these sync systems obey the second law of thermodynamics, which entropy reached maximum. When brain cells are in sync, without any extra energy input, the sync will last as long as your life. Sync is energy conservative system which is spontaneous process as well as our memories, imagine some events happened in your childhood. So, let it go! Sync yourself!

I would reframe the zombie argument a little bit. Instead of stating a highly hypothetical philosophical zombie (which may very well be not be able to exist), i would just point out that every scientific explanation of the processes in the brain does not contain phenomenal experience in it's scientific description. Like you can't possibly conclude from that objective scientific approach alone that the brain must have phenomenal experiences. The only way you'll ever know that a brain can have phenomenal experience is by your own experience. But nothing about a purely objective, physical description of a brain tells you that it has phenomenal experience. It just doesn't follow from feedback loops, neuron assemblings and other physical processes, no matter how complex they are. Phenomenal experience just doesn't reveal itself from the purely objectiv, physical description of the brain, because you can understand all those processes completely without the presence of phenomenal experience. And i think the point of this argument is the same as the "philosophical zombie" argument, but it avoids the discussion of the possibility of philosophical zombies and instead gets straight to the point of the zombie argument.

This was interesting

How about when you're a youngster and you don't have self-consciousness? Only in pubescence when adult hormones express does one develop self-consciousness to the full effect. So it's hormone derived; these extraordinary molecules of evolution run the machine called Consciousness.

Is she saying, and people below, that the brain evolved (central nervous system) in order to protect the body? And hence these lines of communication between brain and body. The mind (self thinking / ego) I think is just an evolutionary process of the brain.

Why does he think "only 10,000 people are obsessed with consciousness"? ....I tend to doubt HE is. I think he's obsessed with his own obsessions, but he doesn't seem to learn anything unless he can be spoon-fed it...😅Sad.

We have to be very careful with structuralism now as everyone is aware. IM quantifiably a peko gram away from being a Different race or one of 72 genders. My body is almost another species where my consciousness dwells in many wolds theory quantifiable by mathematics lol. We dont want Dark qauntom underworlds as an arbitor of truth. Our relationship with subjective tools of approximation that have time and place application for a paradoxical world around must be pragmatic and taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes anti realism and realism has to be carefully reduced or measured in its owm right .

Why does he think "only 10,000 people are obsessed with consciousness"? ....I tend to doubt HE is. I think he's obsessed with his own obsessions, but he doesn't seem to learn anything unless he can be spoon-fed it...😅Sad.

The attempted refutation of SG’s model of consciousness using the “zombie” argument is invalid. There is a good reason besides being a tautology. Consciousness appears to require a very complex neurophysiological interaction between innate, hardwired drives and learned models of the world that enable us to adapt to maintain homeostasis - everything from body temperature to blood glucose to sex. It would be impossible to program a “robot” to emulate or respond the same way as any adult - say Elon Musk - at least at the current level of technology. Therefore the supposition that such a machine could be built and would not be conscious is untenable.

I liked this. It's interesting to see how painful it is for her bend in the slightest. She interrupts, gets agitated and twitchy. I don't have the answer, but let's try to keep calm ... :-D

Quantum information, Quantum entanglement, Are, fundamental, underlying of Reality. Quantum Mind emerge, Quantum Body emerge, Mind and Body entanglement.. Consciousness emerge. Spacetime emerge, Holographic principal.

Thanks

Very odd thought from this guest - a continuum of consciousness. Makes no sense. Sure, you can easily imagine different conscious entities being conscious of more or fewer feelings or states. You can in fact experience a single conscious entity being conscious of more or less feelings. However, i don't think it makes the slightest sense to consider a gradient of degrees of consciousness itself. Either an entity is conscious of something, anything at all, or it's not conscious. The fact it may be conscious of more or fewer things now than earlier or than some other different entity is or was is irrelevant to the presence of consciousness itself. She is muddling up what one is conscious of with whether or not it's conscious at all. She wouldn't understand or register my point though because she is assuming a-priori that consciousness itself is generated by the brain. If you assume that's true then yes, her statements make sense. If however you don't assume that's the case, as i don't, then you can easily see that while what she suggests might be true it certainly isn't necessarily the case AND you're open to some quite different hypotheses.

The very concept of the irreducible is interesting. Everyone knows, for example, what time is but it's notoriously difficult to define, could that be because it hasn't been reduced to smaller parts or attributes?

A very interesting conversation but one that in the end sheds very little light on the ultimate source and nature of consciousness. Notice the use of the term "get out of jail card" used twice by Susan Greenfield. It's a somewhat unfortunate phrase in that it infers any explanation of consciousness that posits its origination as something other than brain activity is an intentional avoidance of the hard work of empirical science in finding a materialistic brain based source of that consciousness. If we begin with a commonly heard assertion from a growing number of neuroscientists stating that "consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe" and then only consider the question of how our personal experience of consciousness is generated, we're discounting and as a result entirely missing an important aspect of this question. If it's true that consciousness is universal and present from the beginning it should manifest itself in empirically measurable ways and not only that but this "universal consciousness" should be intelligible and immediately recognizable as something akin to our own experience of consciousness. So the question is; do we see these tell tale hints of consciousness that are exhibited in the observable phenomenon at work in our cosmos? The answer is; we do. Opinions widely vary but so far, no other explanation can account for the uniformly observed tendency of matter to self organize into the emergent complexity of an evolved universe. If mind in the form of universal consciousness is not and never was present in our cosmos then empiricists like Susan Greenfield are tasked to explain how and more importantly what is driving the inexorable universal process of evolved emergent complexity. How could matter flawlessly self assemble into the structural complexity needed to produce animate life if consciousness was not present from its inception? If you take two heart cells and separate them on a microscope slide you'll see them pulsate as they normally would in the heart. As the heart beats, they also beat. They don't beat in sync until they touch. When this happens one cell delays its beat and then synchronizes its beat to match the other. For this to happen some form of energy and information must pass between the two cells. In other words some unseen organizing principle must be present to orchestrate this synchronicity, something conscious that has the power to change the behavior of matter at this level. Only a preexisting universal consciousness presently offers the best explanation for a universe that appears formulaic in its uncanny balance and inexplicably perfect design. The valuable contributions of neuroscientists like Susan Greenfield are essential in framing the unsolved questions about the source of "consciousness" but in the end all empirical answers to the mystery of where and how consciousness arises will reach the same dead end. Science, at least presently, is simply not capable of acknowledging the reality of something that lies beyond its empirical methodologies. To do so would be tantamount to an admittance that a transcendent agent might be at work in ordering the universe because if one accepts the notion of a "universal consciousness being at the heart of all existent reality then it strongly infers the presence of a supreme being and this is anathema to all empiricists because their particular form of group think looks askance at such "religious" considerations. One might say that "group think" doesn't take place because all rational inquiry is solely motivated by an objective search for truth but this is more of an ideal than a concrete reality. Every scientist is a part of a larger community of scientists and they tend to reflect commonly held attitudes about certain subjects and at the top of the list is any notion that an "ultimate reality" may be beyond their reductionist based methods of research.

Consciousness is not a "physical" property, it can not be reduced (sorry guys). Consciousness is the basis of this whole universe, we will never understand it because we are it. To understand something, you need perspective. We lack the necessary perspective to understand it be cause we are it.

human awareness reducible to brain matter, brain / matter reducible to energy, energy reduction to time, time reducible to consciousness?

Tired of “scientists” using “emergence” as explanation for phenomena. It’s just arrogance and hubris at this point

Emotional idiots trapped in their thinking mind. Feelings is the language of consciousness. She is just BS-ing to spend more research money!

Is unconsciousness reducible ? Can you be half unconscious ? I was three quarters gone the other night after drinking a bottle of whisky.

It seems that during her argument, the notion of Causation faded away and Correlation took its place. But Robert preferred not to pursuit the distinction and let the talk flow.

Are her “assemblies” the physical form of Dennett’s “multiple drafts”?

Neurosience doesnt know How figure out conscieuness so Far . She describes consciousness keep out neurosience proceedings. It is lacking emperism verification.

How can we make long plans for the future (if the assembly lasts only milliseconds)?

She's conscious that she doesn't really KNOW. She has some theories but no one really knows.

I can't explain the rules of chess. They are a complete mystery to me. Where did they come from ?

I wonder, is a clock greater than the sum of its mechanical parts? Do we have something emergent? Is consciousness more than the sum of the parts?

Once again zero progress on the subject. Not even a handle on the definition of consciousness.

*Panpsychism, cosmic consciousness, and souls don’t explain consciousness,* either. They have much bigger problems than brain-generated consciousness. If they ever address that on this channel , I have missed it. The assumption seems to be that if we cant explain brain-generated consciousness in great detail, then the explanation must be something we have almost no evidence for. It’s a false dichotomy fallacy.

No of course not, there was a time when there was no consciousness on this planet. We evolved from non-conscious life.

Dude, you have to interview Bernardo Kastrup.

Jones Jose Taylor Steven Thompson Susan

The anti-science of scientism in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.

I hate it when they talk about human philosophical zombies as if that could be a real thing. I'm glad she shut him down with that talk. You can't just make up some nonsense and then use it to make a point. In fact, all the AI that is being created today are indeed philosophical zombies and we see how limited they are. There has to be "someone in there" in order to have understanding, knowledge or intention. All the AI can do is be a clever simulation.

Did she just say ‘typically white men’ ?

She rejects a hypothesis without evidence.

I like how she said how great ideas like the one she had about continuously variable gradients of consciousness seem to happen when on holiday while relaxing by the pool. I believe Einstein also said that's how he came up with his General Theory of Relativity, while relaxing by the pool. 😂😂😂

Yes, consciousness is four paired optimizations And a wave function called Balsamic.

If it isn’t irreducible it is Ordained 😅

It's at 10:06 when we get to the meat of the matter...

What we know is that we start out being an unconscious single cell. That cell multiplies by dividing and cells start to differentiate. Gradually, consciousness develops, but it doesn't last long.

"Get out of jail free card". What the hell?

It’s simple. If the soul is quantum information then it can’t be destroyed. If we have a quantum mind then are thoughts and memories can never be destroyed. They will always exist in the spacetime quantum error correcting code. 💯💯

Neuroscience isn't about _explaining_ consciousness, and it's not even trying to (even if some brain scientists mistakenly think that it is). So I don't know what "get out of jail free" card she's talking about. And it doesn't matter if it doesn't help neuroscience to acknowledge that there's a legitimate "Hard Problem of Consciousness". Whether it helps them or not, there is in fact a Hard Problem. And most scientists and philosophers agree that there is a Hard Problem, even if many or most of them don't see the implications of this Hard Problem--namely that physicalism can't logically be true. IMHO, of course.

She's a great british scientist.

Silly question.

A little boring, but maybe the most important video I have seen on this topic. I get Greenfield's argument. We would not be acting the same (optimized for survival and reproduction) without the inner states. The inner states ARE the evolved, running processes of the brain.

Considering neuro-science and psychology and computer science and AI and AGI are making inroads into slowly understanding more and more on consciousness, it definitely seems like opposing panpsychism and dualism and idealism are becoming fashionable fads again. They will pass.

It’s certainly tricky to explain anything in terms of matter. Because we know that matter doesn’t actually exist. Zoom in and it just disappears.

Meaning is rereducible. The source of meaning? Demonstrable consistency or anomaly from subjects from consciousness? Subjects including Nature: animals, matter, flora, in all conscious forms; and theory from rational thought, reviewable by self-conscious ratiocination or linguistic definition or logic. Logic being the rereducible form of linguistic definition not by taxonomy but by pretext and rule.

Two minds trying to grasp the un-graspable..... Like trying to get your mind to understand infinity. Can't be done!

interesting !

The truth is nothing could be known to underlie consciousness like consciousness underlies material phenomena, by awareness animating our senses the senses, mind, and intelligence can perform their functions in relation to the self. But to perceive of an existence underlying consciousness is problematic since to perceive of such an existence would require that it would flow along the stream of consciousness or awareness for it to be known thus making it content within awareness rather than underlying it like awareness underlies material phenomena, thus such an existence is unrealizable.

Is irreducibility conscious?

Consciousness is a golden box that is better left empty than filled with newspaper clippings.

lastima. en ingles solamente. no video bibliography in spanish for this theme.

... 0:15 I try to encapsulate the problem if I can in one simple sentence and if I were to do that right now with you I'd say the fundamental question to understand our inner subjectivity that feeling of what it is inside is is it exactly the same as the brain in terms of some traslational effect or is there something about consciousness that has to be go beyond the brain something irreducible at least from the standpoint of brain science that that's my question 0:47 Susan: yeah. ... I think if we assume there is some element that's not tractable to science something that is irreducible then that's a get out of jail free card okay that means (well that was very clear I didn't say not not susceptible to science I said not susceptible to the brain ) okay ( that's a distinction?) okay nonetheless as a brain scientist 1:10 as a brain scientist I would regard that as a get out of jail for free card that is to say whatever I did whatever I showed you whatever experiments I did whatever theories I had in brain terms we could always have this get out of jail for free card say oh but there's the extra thing and this extra thing is the thing that really counts and this extra thing is something that we as brain scientists can't touch now I don't find that very helpful it reminds me of um a cartoon slide I often show when I give talks where you have these pgy male scientists of course stereotype male scientists 1:46

does the chicken come before the egg? does desire trigger the brain or does the brain trigger desire?

Robert I loved this episode what a great conversation!

Consciousness continues after the brain is dead and gone according to the Bible.

Some form of body is required for consciousness. If there is nothing to take in the experiences of said consciousness then how conscious could an entity be? Our senses being triggered is what gives us the "feelings" we experience. Without a body, what is having the experience? How is it having an experience? The brain and body working together is what makes us us.

Materialism is going nowhere when it comes to consciousness.

I LOVE it when Kuhn plays devil's advocate (although I think secretly and deep down he is a spiritualist) takes the "opposite" side of the materialist argument and win's easily! 😀

(2:30) *SG: **_"And this extra thing is something that we as brain scientists can't touch."_* ... A brain scientist who feels they can adequately explain the existence of consciousness would be like an oil paint manufacturer claiming to be able to explain the existence of Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Regardless of my opinion, I like how she communicates her position.

all matter is conscious. Simple beings that built us through evolution

She won't wait for the question to complete.

I admire her for saying a tautology doesn't make a real argument. It's very easy to fall into that trap. And from my academic years i know the use of repetition is often relied upon to convince us of truth. While truth follows no such pattern.

Consciousness to me reminds me of some of the Zen philosophy sayings like Consciousness is like a sword that can cut, but cannot cut itself....or an eye that can see but cannot see itself etc. ❤

lmao

Fascinating chat!

No.

If it is not Irriducile it is holographic in nature!

A case of 'when a door is closed there's less chance to find the exit'

The irony is she need us to allow her this one miracle: life from non-life to explain evolution to consciousness.

My question is how can those assemblies be invoked so that a primate other than human could be made conscious that matches a ten year old human.