The Illusion of Consciousness | Fractured Reality | BBC Earth Science 

As an amnesiac I have had to suffer with identity and existential dread on a deeper level than most. I have gone through this videos journey already and I have some things to add. You are three things simultaneously. First you are your body. the body can change and die, but without the death of the three you are alive. Second you are the electro-chemical reactions going on inside your brain. As long as these are remembered by the body you will live. Third you are who you remember yourself to be. This part of myself has died. But thanks to the help of my family and friends I was able to resurrect parts of me within myself and remember who I am. Memory is temporary and forgetting isn't a bad thing. Forgetting is the brains solution to immortality, age is a disease. You are a hive-mind. Protect your body. It is your colony. Your super advanced bacterial puddle created you. You are a program made from the collective of many. The many being connected to the whole, and the whole connected to us all.

My favorite LOTR quote: Tom Bombadil put to Frodo: “Who are you alone, yourself, and nameless?”

i'll confess something a little weird that i do. sometimes, when i'm super upset over something, stressed, or angry, i animate a character and talk to it. I leave all my rational thoughts to the character, and dive into the emotions myself. I vent to the character, while the character tries to comfort me and to make me see objective reason. it's SUPER easy to visualize how stupid you're being through the eyes of the character, and to give yourself advice on how to get out of it, because deep down you already know, you're just presenting it to yourself in an easier to absorb way that is untainted by emotion. Using this method, i get over things that would otherwise have me in the dumps for a week in just half an hour. I started doing this as a fail safe when covid started and i realized i could lose everyone i loved. I made the character to be something to help me cling to sanity in the worst case scenario. actually, it's really similar to wilson, the volley ball from that one movie, come to think of it. thankfully, the worst case scenario never came, but i still think it was one of the best ideas i've ever had and i'm going to keep doing it to the day i die.

Brilliant and relevant. Brillivant!

These thoughts used to terrify me when I was younger. Existential ideas terrified me, like do I have free will, do we live in a simulation, am I real,. One day I heard a wonderful quote on the television show Westworld, it was "If you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?"

I'm starting to really like this presenter. It's taken me a couple of posts to get more into his mind, so to speak. But this one was very interesting. I'll be indulging in the illusion of consciously thinking about it...

I have long waited for a video like this.

I wonder how living without ever seeing yourself in mirrors or photos would affect your sense of self 🤔

Another question I ask myself a lot is when we are awake, are we living our real lives and when we are asleep dreaming, is that when we are really living??

I prefer the idea that the idea of ourselves is the collection of experiences we've had to make the brain full of experiences and memories that influence the processes that make us. Our brain is like an artificial intelligence that just collects more data to deeper influence and build the mine that we call ourselves. Our personality that stems from our mind which is built upon the experiences we had throughout our life. Those experiences that influence and build the mind are what make you you. It may not always be 100% consistent with who you were the day before but it is up to you to help shape the course of your life that will continue to shape who you are and will become. AKA holism

This was great

We’re absolutely unwitting slaves to our unconscious. We like to think decisions we make are based on conscious logical analysis. But we’re ruled by our fears and desires that lie hidden from us, while we justify our actions to convince ourselves that the opposite is true. What primitive creatures we really are!

While my attention was taken up in guarding against one fault I was often surprised by another, habit took advantage of inattention, inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. -Ben Franklin There is perhaps not one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive. Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility. - Ben Franklin

0:06: 🤔 The concept of self and identity is complex and can be influenced by various factors. 2:19: 🧠 Consciousness and self-awareness may be located in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) of the brain. 4:57: 🤔 The sense of self is an illusion and we are just our thoughts. 7:59: 🧠 The video discusses the phenomenon of split-brain patients who have different perspectives and impulses in each hemisphere of their brain. 10:33: 🧘 Switching from an egocentric self-perspective to someone else's perspective can reduce the emotional impact of problems, as supported by neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy. Recap by Tammy AI

This video make me feel something I can’t understand

we are the communication of neurons, if we cut a brain in half we can have 2 seperate consciousnesses, we can also fuse brains together to create one. While we talk to friends we also communicate with them, it kind of is a very bad connected single consciousness while we have a conversation, but only connected through the conversation, not directly over neurons. if we could communicate directly via neuons we would probably be able to fuse the consciousness together, I mean even now we are just a mess of communicating braincells which give us a noise which we interpret as consciousness I am pretty sure about this

Also: it's not bad that it's not real, because if it's not real, we can't really die, we don't experience something we can't experience so we are immortal from our own perspective, we can't ever "be" dead, since we require to be alive in order to "be". Also not even a god could know if it has a free will or not, or if there was another god for the god etc, so our consciousness is as real as reality or logic allows us to be which is great

Truth in just a few minutes.

I’ve been thinking about it recently too

I exist. Because I need to. I experience meaning passively. Because to analyse reality is to deconstruct and disassemble it and I will no longer experience linearity. Thought is not a computation but a linear interpretation of meaning applied to a continuous perception of existence. To not have a sense of self is to lose the position you inhabit within a linear and 3 dimensional space and you would effectively cease to exist.

Awesome, so interesting and thinking that BUDDHA Gautama taught about the not-self, like 2,600 years ago

Self awareness comes from language. No language no self!

"a relationship is the price you pay for the anticipation of it"

ever consider to include all 3 brain mass centers.?

How very utilitarian

So interesting I started thinking about episode of Yugioh where the pharaoh had a maze in his mind that’s all of us just a mystery of things

If the world is a simulation then the self is little more than a mouse cursor, an illusory mechanism for navigating around the world, a composite of pixels and colours that once removed vanish into nothingness.

Personality is actually mostly fixed through your life

i like when videos like this come out because it helps me explain my worldview to people who have never thought beyond the surface level. to me, what we think we "me" is just a collective, a construct. The individual is actually our DNA. We, as in what we think of ourselves, are just a meat gundam for our own dna to give itself a better chance of replicating further. basically, we are not the person, we're the city they live in.

Very fascinating thought experiment. Hinduism also agrees with the idea of false self much like Buddhism. Observing/Assessing oneself and their actions in third person is quite a powerful idea indeed.

Can somebody explain me what «the I needed a me» means? To me both mean the same. In fact, in most of the languages I speak both would be the exact same word...

If you want some insight into "you" don't try hard to think about it, try less, in fact don't try at all. Just clear your mind and watch.. when you experience thoughts do so without judgment, analysis or contemplation. It will take a while to get the hang of it.. just watch.

if you think about your other systems having their own brain then perhaps there would be more of you but since there's only one brain that manages everything, the systems and its individual parts can't speak for themselves because they don't have their own channels for communication like a designated mouth or hand. instead, we have nerves that run through our body and gather signals then sends them to the spinal cord and to the brain to be processed forming you.

You are not the watcher of thoughts. You are thought itself.

Great video! But is 'The Illusion of Self' not a better title for it?

I'm mistaken, not conscious.

Me? I am the output of my corpus collosum after it has sifted out all the "non-me".

I am who i am, exactly. Meyaphysician philosopher

🙂

Ok

While I agree with a lot of the contents of the video, I take issue with the title of the video - the self being an illusion and consciousness being an illusion are not the same. Unless by "The Illusion of Consciousness", what is meant is "The Illusion Created by Consciousness".

My interpretation of this is we are both alution and magician We are the magician creating the alution of us and the alution allowing us to change the perspective of the reality around us

An illusory self is not the same as a simulation. The word simulation has a long computational history and should not be tainted.

Nice Radiohead tattoo

Well I suppose this all means that we have no soul, correct?

You are not in your brain. According to my latest findings in meditation, you seem to be an awareness that is emanating from the right side of your chest. This is very difficult to see, because you have to let go of the mind in order to see it. But, regardless, this is empirically verifiable. That said, I’m not saying that my finding is final; there may be deeper levels to this than what I have discovered.

You are the intelligent awareness of the universe.

How about this: the awareness that you and I exist is the same “thing” experiencing itself. The universe has a fundamental property of self awareness that the brain can harbour and shift. The fundamental ‘thing’ that your brain is projecting it’s senses, memories and thoughts onto is this universal consciousness. This isn’t necessarily to say that this universal consciousness can share thoughts between minds; your brain is still insular and can only generate thoughts through interactions with itself. But the end result is being projected to the exact same universal place for all of us. Also, I and others have had experiences where the thoughts DO start to sync. But it’s all too anecdotal and speculative for this comment.

Just a small point: you keep referring to Buddhist philosophy and beliefs, but these all come from Hinduism, i.e. they are not original ideas to Buddhism.

,,😂😂😂 I also thought about this theory

Noam Chomsky's universal grammar theory was the idea that there must be some inbuilt preprogrammed a priori or knowledge that humans were born with to understand language. He was wrong and it was proven that our brains are simply so powerful that we were able to learn language so quickly without much information due to just the sheer performance of our brain. Self awareness, I think, is similar. It is the sheer size and strength of the computing part of our brain which is able to recognise its own performance and limitations so that it can become aware of itself. Animals don't have that computing power.

The thinking here assumes that the material universe is primary, and accordingly, the brain creates what we perceive to be consciousness. But what if consciousness is primary, and the brain is like a television receiving signals from elsewhere? Primitive people would look at a TV and assume that there are little people in the TV itself. But no. Physicalists may be making the same mistake.

Consciousness lies in the space between atoms

Talk to me personally.

what a hot presenter guy 😮

I am that which is not.

No one can better explain the illusion of slef than sam Harris. Great video👍🏻

Some familiar concepts from a video I did a few years back: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-zQkY93vDds8.html I attempt to pinpoint consciousness, what it is, why you're you.

Or you take like about 50000 steps back and realise that you are the whole thing, not just a little man in it.

Its mean this video is also an illusion so we dont have to trust it

all this issue has such an obvious agenda....

I understand the effort, Scientology etc, if you face me will you give me the term primate?

The less civilized a people, the less disciplined their intricacies.

our consciousness isn’t in our brains, it’s in our hearts. our thoughts and feelings are derived from experiences we feed off of growing up, our experiences shape our hearts and feed into our habits and perceived rights and wrongs.

2:43 Pretty surely ants and other "creatures" are aware of their "self" too...eheh

It’s nice that western science has finally discovered self inquiry 😂

With connecting to God and being positive will improve our personally no matter who you are

I've read a lot about psychology and consciousness and this video is little bit painful to watch. It muddies the waters in order to create a fun "thought experiment". This isn't educational. This is "content".

Modern day psychology appears to agree with what the Buddha said over 5000 years ago. “We are what we think. All that we are comes from our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.”

There is a chink in this hypothesis: I am self-aware, that is I have consciousness, but that doesn't help get sex. In fact, quite the opposite