The Latest Research on Consciousness 

I'm team Christof Koch but I'm impressed with Michael Shermer cause he not only kept a healthy dialogue but considered many of Christof's points. Great dialogue and a topic that truly hits at the deepest questions of existence.

This is great, the world needs to communicate more like this 😊

Mr Shermer i suggest Edward Frenkel as your guest, is a VERY interesting person to listen and one of the top mathematicians around

Traditionally, logic, math, and physics have been approached from a third-person, objective standpoint. They aim to describe the universal, mind-independent structures and laws that govern reality, without reference to any particular subjective viewpoint. In this sense, they strive for a kind of "view from nowhere," a perspective that transcends any individual's specific location or experience. However, as you point out, we don't actually live in this third-person realm. Our experience of reality is inherently first-person, grounded in our individual perspective and subjective awareness. We encounter the world not as a detached, objective observer, but as an embodied, situated agent, navigating a landscape of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. From this view, metaphysics could be seen as the attempt to understand the deep structure of reality from this first-person standpoint. Rather than trying to step outside of our subjective experience, it would seek to dive deeply into it, to uncover the fundamental categories, principles, and relationships that shape our encounter with the world. This first-person approach to metaphysics would not necessarily reject the insights of logic, math, and physics, but rather reinterpret them through the lens of subjective experience. It would ask how these abstract, third-person descriptions of reality translate into the concrete, lived reality of the first-person perspective. For example, the logical principle of non-contradiction - that a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time - could be understood not just as an abstract rule, but as a deep feature of how we experience the world. The fact that we cannot simultaneously affirm and deny the same proposition would be seen as a fundamental structure of our cognitive and perceptual apparatus, a necessary condition for coherent thought and action. Similarly, mathematical concepts like number, shape, and pattern could be investigated as basic categories of subjective experience, the ways in which we carve up and make sense of the blooming, buzzing confusion of sensory input. And physical laws and constants could be understood not just as objective features of an external world, but as the stable regularities and constraints that shape our embodied interaction with our environment. The key advantage of this first-person approach to metaphysics would be its grounding in the actual, lived reality of human experience. By starting from the irreducible fact of subjectivity, it would aim to construct a framework that is faithful to the way the world actually presents itself to us, rather than an abstract, idealized model that may or may not correspond to our direct experience. Moreover, as you suggest, this first-person perspective could potentially help to avoid some of the paradoxes and contradictions that arise from a purely third-person, objective stance. By recognizing the ineliminable role of the subject in constituting reality, it would provide a more complete and integrated picture, one that doesn't try to separate the observer from the observed in an artificial or absolute way.

Idealism has finally reached the Western world 👍fabulous 💯👌

I'm a skeptic but I'll have to side with Dr Cristof on many of the topics they discussed. Especially about the world just being stuff without a conscious animal to define it. I look forward to reading his new book!

I love what Koch has become. Open,to the wonder of consciousness. I think we are entering in a new age of "less materialistic" science. And it's for the better, of science and discoveries too.

Koch needs more Kastrup. Shermer needs more Sheldrake. Go Idealism!

I appreciated Dr. Cristof and Michael Shermer thoroughly addressing consciousness, mind-body relations, AI limitations, anomalous experiences, memory, identity and survivability. Their insightful back-and-forth highlighted complexities while still pushing for empirical yet open-minded inquiry into life's most elusive phenomena.

Totally in agreement with Koch. We are on the threshold of a collective quantum leap to a spiritual consciousness which is more integrated than the previous material consciousness.

There are qualities of experience, the color blue, the taste of chocolate, and there’s the scientific description of it, there’s a massive gap between the two.

I really appreciate Koch’s honesty and humility concerning his own failures, or the failure of some of his previous ideas. He clearly seems to put his quest to understand consciousness above the desire to be right that is evident in some other well-known researchers.

I’m loving this more holistic and inclusive approach to science and philosophy and spirituality and mysticism. I feel we have a movie, and a behind the scenes making of, and both are necessary for a full life. The subconscious realm is mysterious and fascinating, as is the mystery of quantum field theories and our origins, both the universe, and metabolising life.

Consciousness is all that actually exists. Everything else we experience is Perception In Consciousness. This is what Max Planck meant, I proffer, when he said "matter is derivative from Consciousness."

If someone says that mind is not physical (not forces flowing thru structures and loops of neural pathways), then they need to explain how the implied interface/boundary between 'soul' and the physical world communicates forces to and from the physical world, and how mind participates in cause and effect.

It amazes me now that I understand Ideolism and "The Direct Path" from Vedanta, how I could have ever been a materialist?! You only know when you know (and clinical death 3 times, flatlined) before returning as well as having experienced countless NDE's and mystical experiences over my EXTREMELY traumatic 17 years with the 2 x most painful and horriffic Autoimune Disseses a human being can possibly aquire. Once you have directly experienced the Spirit Realm you don't need to believe... You 'know!' 🙏 No need for faith or religion when you have "knowing" with direct lucid experiences. Great podcast and YES! ITS ALL CONNECTED!! ✨️💫

For being a skeptic Shermer sure does like to quote Deepak Chopra a lot

Priceless look on Shermer's face at 13.40. And he's still stoically clinging on to his beloved materialism, occasionally enquiring if Koch thinks there might be something more (42.50). People see themselves and what is occurring in the room from a position out and above their physical bodies when their brains are not working. What else other than a separate consciousness (substance dualism) could this possibly be? The only response from Shermer would be that it didn't really happen like that, but it actually really did and continues to do so. If sceptics are going to keep denying the data, they will of course never get to the truth ...have another drink of tea, Michael and think about that

21:26 I think when Berkeley wrote 'esse est percipi' he really meant it: because, and only when sth is perceived, it exists. But as Koch explains, he does not argue against an existence of things (i. e. matter, physical reality) independent from the observer.

I love flowing into nature too!!

Keep going Christof!

It's funny, even I have had the "without an observer, would anything truly exist" idea. (Basically, the old philosophical question of whether a tree falling in the forest when no one is around makes a sound...just like Koch goes on to say.) Or the idea that things only exist as they appear to us in our minds. Interesting stuff, but some of it does sound dangerously close to something Deepak Chopra would come up with. (You can spot Koch making a face when Shermer mentions Chopra!)

Any theory of conciousness has to start with identifying what conciousness is. Nobody has succeeded in that. Anil Seth, mentioned in the discussion, punts on this, which seems a bit weasilly, but I fully understand why he does it. It allows him to move on and analyse things which are clearly related to whatever conciousness is, and maybe that will eventually allow a proper definition to be formed. Free will is another difficult area in a similar vein. That is much more definable, but people have long discussions about whether we have or lack free will, without any effort to define what they mean by free will.

I prefer listening to Koch more and more as he gets closer and closer to the answers of IIT founder Giuili Tononi, which is really scientific theory. I like to see you talk with Tononi.

The identity of consciousness, to me, is that which reads the neural patterns. Basically, the neural correlates are the neural patterns. What then "reads" them has to be outside these neural process, ie. can not vibrate as do the neurons.

Min 1:04 "Consciousness is about being, while intelligence is about doing."

27:45, the distinguishing element is that sound is a subjective media of sensing the world humans and human consciousness possess which requires the sensing agent, however the vibrations, the phenomenon is happening either way

I "feel" that my inner voice is like in the middle of my brain somewhere. Pretty sure that doesn't help at all :D When I think in my head has a different feeling then when I speak out loud. Its also really hard or almost impossible to count out loud and think the alphabet or visa versa.

'Nullius in verba' makes me think of Wittgenstein 😮😂😂

How do we know that someone else, or a unicellular organism, or a future, very advanced robot is having a conscious experience? The reason that philosophers like Chalmers are so interested in the philosophical zombie idea is that it asks us how we could possibly know the answer to that question. It’s related to the Turing Test. The advent of increasingly powerful computers and narrow AI, and the possibility of AGI are making us consider the question more carefully. In my opinion, we can never know. We make an inference based on the outward behaviour of the entity we are observing. In our everyday life it is something that we conventionally assume about other human beings and we probably learn this when we are children. However, since we only view our own experience from the inside and that of everything else from the outside we can only infer that the two things are the same.

“The kingdom of god is inside you” could be a metaphor for the universe within, accessed by the psychedelic breakthrough” meaning that all reality bleeds out of mind??

👍 Michael, now please Talk to Prof Michael Levin

Talk to Nir Lahav about his Relativistic Theory of Consciousness

Methinks we just don’t have the cognitive ability too understand Humility ….

consciousness is faster than chemistry, faster that electricity or neurons,, it's faster than we can explain, perhaps quantum consciousness is instant enough.

They may mention it later but I'm sure they're familiar with the case of Phineous Gauge. He was a railway worker back in I believe the early 30th century and due to an accident he had a railroad spike get shot through the bottom of his jaw, through his brain and out the top of his head. He survived the ordeal but it was said that his personality had been totally changed. He became rude, aggressive and surly when before he was polite and gregarious. I'd been trying to understand exactly what I and the rest of us are as fat as are we just meat machines or is there more to us. I'd been mulling over that story for a decade along with looking at the questors from opposite sides. It's what made me decide that yes, we are just biological machines. If my character and personality can be altered by simply removing or rearranging some of my neurons then that's where "I" am. I forget who wrote it but there was a passage from a book questioning the existence of a soul. It went down the line and asked if my soul could see, could speak, could hear, could taste, could move or could think. The answers to those are all no and the conclusion was "If it can't do any of those things then what use is it"? All of those things take place in the physical space of your brain. If you alter your brain then you change the way those things function and can stop them altogether, so absolutely everything I think I am is in my brain. I became a material reductionist at that point. However there was something nagging me from a place I couldn't locate and I couldn't reason with. So some years passed and I'd put the question of if I'm a physical being or a spiritual being to rest and I was pretty happy. I just lived without wrestling with those deep questions, but again there was something tugging at me to come back and keep looking. I got into reading trip reports and the DMT reports in particular. They now muddied the waters because even though I've never done DMT (I did quite a bit of acid, mescaline and shrooms along with pretty much all the categories of other drugs while in my late teenage years and most of my twenties, but never DMT) aspects of the reports seemed familiar somehow. Long story short I've now revered my position and I don't think the brain creates consciousness, I think it's the other way around. Yes, it creates what I am here, a human, but it doesn't create what I'm pretty sure is the most fundamental "thing" to exist, and that's the feeling of '"I am". You can trick a brain into thinking all manner of events are taking place and you can alter them by altering the brain but there's one thing you can't do that with. You cannot "trick" someone into being aware that they exist. Schizophrenics have a variety of delusions that are objectively not real but they know they exist no matter what. Sure people who are mentally ill or on some type of drug can say ",I don't feel like I exist" but that's the ego breaking. The thing they're saying doesn't exist is the identity that's been built,.but strip that away and they still know they exist, just not how they thought they did. You must exist to be able to think that you don't exist. Look I have no idea how the ',I am" aspect creates matter, but I'm pretty sure it does. You can't fake it and you can't break it down to any constituents parts. It's fundamental I n the most literal sense.

Do black holes exist to worms? It takes the critter to think for anything else to exist to that critter. Like we hear sounds, but there are all sorts of wavelengths we can't hear, and many we actually can see, and many more we can't see or hear. Yes, those wavelengths have existed before, but without eyes/ears and a brain to process it, they weren't sound or light. We convert those waves into sound and images.

Both are likable and based in sientific thinking

We will never know

@26:00:00 Consciousness = meaning

1) In "The Tao of Physics," Fritjof Capra describes a profound mystical experience he had while sitting on a beach. According to his own words, he experienced a sense of unity with the cosmos, where he perceived the rhythmic dance of waves, the sparkling of water, and the flow of energy in the ocean as interconnected and harmonious. He describes it as follows: > "I 'saw' cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses. I 'saw' the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy. I felt its rhythm and I 'heard' its sound. At that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshiped by the Hindus." In this moment, Capra felt a deep realization of the interconnectedness of all things, resonating with the principles of Eastern mysticism and modern physics, particularly quantum mechanics. This experience was a key inspiration for his exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern philosophies, which he elaborates on throughout "The Tao of Physics." 2)Christof Koch, in his book "The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed," describes an experience of profound oneness and connection while on a beach in Brazil. According to Koch: > "I lay on the beach and felt one with the universe, overcome by a profound sense of connectedness. The waves and the sky, the sand and the sea, all seemed to be part of a greater whole of which I was an integral part." In this moment, Koch felt a sense of unity with the world around him, similar to the mystical experiences described by other thinkers. This experience deeply influenced his views on consciousness, leading him to explore the nature of subjective experience and the sense of self in relation to the universe. The BEACH experiences of Fritjof Capra and Christof Koch share several key similarities: Sense of Unity with the Universe Capra: Describes experiencing a "cosmic dance of energy," where he perceived the interconnectedness of all things and felt a deep unity with the cosmos. Koch: Describes feeling "one with the universe" and a profound sense of connectedness with everything around him. Mystical and Transformative Nature Capra: His experience was mystical, leading him to a realization of the interconnectedness of particles and energy, which he equated with the Dance of Shiva from Hindu mythology. Koch: His experience was also mystical and transformative, providing him with a profound sense of being an integral part of a greater whole. Connection to Nature Capra: Felt the rhythm and energy of the ocean, seeing the waves and particles as part of a larger cosmic dance. Koch: Felt connected to the natural elements around him-the waves, the sky, the sand, and the sea-as parts of a unified whole. Inspiration for Intellectual Pursuits: Capra: This experience inspired his exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism, leading to his seminal work "The Tao of Physics." Koch: This experience influenced his views on consciousness and the nature of subjective experience, which he explores in his scientific and philosophical inquiries. Deep Emotional Impact: - Both authors describe their experiences as deeply emotional and life-affirming, leading to a sense of awe and wonder about the universe and their place within it. Conclusion : Both Fritjof Capra and Christof Koch had experiences on a beach that led to a profound sense of unity with the universe, inspiring their respective intellectual and philosophical explorations. Their descriptions highlight the powerful impact that such mystical experiences can have on one's understanding of the world and one's place in it.

Every living thing depends on Magnetoreception.

The real difference between AI and robots versus human thought ? Machine 'thinking' occurs in finite and descrete pathways (digital, even if extremely high resolution). Whereas human thought is BOTH continuum of forces (analog, causal and random) AND simultaneously forces flowing through structures of pathways and dendrites (analog forces within finite 'digital' structures). What will be truly scary is if 'MRI' (Machine Realistic Intelligence) is in a continuum substrate, such as a quantum computer or wetware like our brains.

The physicality or matter will still be there, but the semantics or epistemic projection of what it is to be that thing will be gone. I like to imagine the childrens book Frindle, what is stopping anyone from changing the name of a Pen to the name Frindle? The world is an emergent property, where there is physical matter but there is a emergent property given rise from semantic meaning which stems from consciousness or mind stuff.

Christof went from one end to the opposite. Most likely, however, things are less twisted than he (we) think. The contrasty nature of the reality is the basis how this reality became possible in the first place. People need to jump out of the human centric view to understand better about what is consciousness.

Death is a mystery noth new here, but there is smth in us that goes beyond that process. Call it energy, consciousness, soul but we dont just dissappear in the eternal darkness and void. But then again i might be wrong. Ill let you know when i die 😂

💗🍃🙏🏻

You should bring dave farrina. He is beating the shit out of the people from discovery institute. He has some valid points. He says that most of the gullible people believe in things posted by discovery institute. He says they dont have any new idea and only thing we see them posting is about the complexity of life. You are an atheist but you are not so agressive.

It sounds as if something is rubbing against the microphone when he speaks. The sound quality is pretty bad as well.

Id suggest to look into why you need consciousness to exist or why you need consciousness to survive . If dinosaurs had consciousness then what else before dinosaurs had consciousness and what is its function or purpose for existing if not to survive. If all extensions of matter are related to survival or for the purpose of survival or survival in essence like the brain the heart lungs and blood then consciousness itself is survival but as an abstract composition of survival. What one needs is to participate in the survival process itself or matter needs to be part of the survival process to which then evolution may occur to build upon survival itself so that complexity may occur or increases in consciousness. Survival the force is first protocol of substance or living systems then evolution then complexity, if all extensions of matter are survival oriented in there disposition then consciousness itself must be for and for the need to survive to promote survival itself or to make that system more relevant in the need or process to survive. If all complexities are survival in form of matter on earth or have this natural disposition of survival as first protocol then all subsequent evolutions are branches or relations to survival itself except that with consciousness it is the abstract version of it created by the brain to promote survival or you could say that without consciousness the human would first struggle to survive or exist then not exist at all. If the opposite of survival is death then and you need consciousness to survive then it is a branch or survival in essence but it is abstract disposition coupled with material substrates. In a more complex structure like a human the abstract is more pronounced as our brain is complex so it has the ability to form abstract versions of survival or projections of itself to survive. The need to be conscious correlates to the need to survive and it creates more relevance in the ability to survive but it is much stronger that also. This is why all creatures with complexity have consciousness dinosaurs. lions, giraffes so that it may choose what to do to survive in its habitat. Without a conscious ability this is reduced the ability to survive so survival in system becomes less relevant, but in a more complex system it actually becomes survival itself or the abstract idea or notion of survival from mind because of focus and evolution or time spent surviving. Its a character of survival or survival as abstraction force by subtraction of consciousness measured against the ability of that system or entity to survive in its habitat. You could say that consciousness itself is a mode of survival in abstraction terminology. If it is required for survival or without it death is likely or relevant then it becomes its opposite translation .

Koch comes across a bit like Deepak Chopra in some of his rhetoric 😔

The question that we are trying to answer here is , who’s looking? In a physical universe how does the subject arise from the object? That’s a myth.

Determinism is very blackpilling

Aliveness states are always before consciousness ,

52:07 gahhhhhhhhh........ "terminal lucidity" and stuff like that, to the extent that it exists, comes from DEEPER in the brain! Not somewhere "out there"! 🙄🙄🙄

WHY IDEALISM SHOULD BE THE DEFAULT POSITION 1. Your mind exists 2. Other minds apart from your own also exist 3. Things independently exist outside minds 4. Things outside minds can generate minds A true sceptic realises that materialism violates Occam's razor and concludes that idealism provides the simplest and most effective, metaphysical explanation of reality. Materialism, or physicalism, requires all these four statements to be true. Idealism only requires the first two to be true. As you can see, materialism requires more leaps of faith than idealism. The only statement that one can be sure of is number one, but in order to avoid the problem of solipsism and pragmatically uphold the theory of mind, both metaphysics must consider that statement number two must be true: other minds exist apart from one's own. This is the only leap of faith required of idealism-and it is a small one since we already know, from personal experience, that a mind can and does exist. It's easy to extrapolate from what is already known and posit the existence of a plurality of the same kind of phenomenon, namely, the conscious perception of other sentient beings. Materialism requires statements three and four in addition, and both are bigger leaps of faith, since we can never truly confirm that a world exists outside of consciousness without being aware of it in the first place, and we have no evidence nor the slightest idea of how anything unconscious could ever give rise to consciousness. As the scientist Bernardo Kastrup pointed out, '...everything you can ever know comes into consciousness the moment you know it, so the belief that there are things outside consciousness is an abstraction beyond knowledge.' So now consider how bad the last statement is as it postulates that things whose existence you cannot verify are responsible for the only thing you can be absolutely sure to exist: your own consciousness. Statement number four runs counter to the natural direction of inference, which is, the unknown is inferred from the known, not the other way around. Materialism isn't empirically deduced from the scientific process, it is a belief born out of medieval propaganda to politically subvert the power and influence that ancient religious dogma had over people. It began with the heretical rebellion of the Middle Ages as religion stood in the way of freedom and progress. Materialism isn't just false, it's untenable. The only reason we have come to believe in the last two statements with the advent of the age of reason is that we seem to share a common world. After all, two different individuals can describe the same surroundings and come to a mutual agreement based on what they observe simultaneously. But idealism is congruous with this observation without requiring huge leaps of faith like materialism. Metaphysical idealism doesn't require solipsism to be true as we have already established. Different conscious observers can agree on a shared mental construct that makes up an ostensibly external reality apart from their egoic minds. One can have one's private dreams as well as share a collective dream, as it were. At the moment, as human beings, we experience a narrow and limited perspective of reality, but without our anthropic avatars, we are, in theory, unbounded consciousness. We are both the part and the whole as access to other states of awareness, including a primordial and pristine cognition, is available to us through certain types of meditation. The interactive holarchy described in the alumnus Cosmin Visan's idealist theory of consciousness-which was brought to my attention recently-aligns well with subjective as well as ostensibly objective, verified facts about reality.

2 things on NDE's: 1. The biggest research into NDE's was done at Southampton University in the UK with over 1,000 participants and headed by a theist. With one exception (not considered worthy of further investigation), NDE's were found to occur before actual death i.e. were live brain manifestations not involving any actual "floating over the bed" or similar. 2. Studies show rat's have NDE's (even the one that don't believe in gods). Whilst I understand the concepts of "conscious" and "unconscious" I'm not sure consciousness, based on the premises we research it (beyond simply biological), exists at all.

What I understand in this , relations and ratios ..etc are the objects of consciousness and have no physical counter part. You have to be conscious for existence to be in terms of differentiation without which there is no boundaries no relations no causality no ontology at all. It then possible that quala in the mind is nothing more than ontological in nature a kind of first order ontology. I believe LLMs are first order ontologies

16:44 not 19th century introspection! 21st century introspection! 🤪

Christof Koch and Shermer were both on Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.

Choose your words wisley.. Michael really got to pay for using the word "relaxing"😂

What came first? (25:30)... The tree or the seed.

Christof is particularly bad at explaining what he has understood. He arrived at the right conclusion, but he didn't explain it well to Michael. The world we see is obviously created by our minds. There is no tree, house, river or planet in the actual quantum substrate. If you break up the components far enough, there is no space. We have no access to the actual substrate. We only have access to what we (as patterns on the substrate) model the rest of the substrate to be. Christof should have just told Michael that the substrate has the same relationship with the world you see that a computer chip has with the graphics of a videogame. And tour brain is a particular subset of transistors on the chip.

The idea that "really smart people can be very good at self deception" comes to mind when listening to Dr Koch

In few words, if I send you an email saying your hair is on fire, you have acquired information. If I set your hair on fire, you will instead EXPERIENCE qualia of various sorts. They both communicate the same thing, but are nevertheless VERY different things.

Irritated by the folks at Johns Hopkins who are obviously motivated by a desire to produce a product or a patent. There's one cohort whom they conspicuously overlook in their research, and that is people just like me who both experimented with psychedelics _and_ also experienced summa samadhi/beatific vision/long weekend with Jesus - what ever you want to call it. We will tell you that the one is in no sense equivalent to the other. Johns Hopkins doesn't really want to hear that.

I guess Christof is describing the matrix.

Sorry no, the physical world exists even without a consciousness to experience it. The molecular patterns that we categorize as tree leaves exist even if no intelligence categorize them into "leaves". There is a naive hubris in saying things only exist if you perceive them. It may just be stuff, but the qualities we use to distinguish "stuff" from other "stuff" are qualities of real stuff.

We are all one eternal consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there’s no such thing as death, life is a dream in which we are the imagination of ourselves, here’s Tom with the weather. - hicks

The universe as we experience it is not made of objects, it’s made of information, the hard problem of consciousness is a reduction to absurdity of the materialist postulates.

is a tree falling if conscious people exist but nobody sees it falling?

No brain - no mind - no consciousness! Great show - thanks Michael!

Some people say or wonder if this is all a simulation. If the Big Simulator In The Sky is asking itself if this is all a simulation, the confused identity-crisis Simulator needs to get Real. 😅

Was interesting till Christof told us that if all humans disappeared all things in the universe disappear into fundamental particles lol. Thanks for pushing back on this Michael.

this guy a quack. come on shermer

Did Liverpool just get beaten 15 -0 by Everton And klopp age by 10 years

Michael did not really understand donald hoffman nor does he want to accept christophs view of reality and stuff, nor does the current physics Orthodoxie accept that conscious is primary, all mystical traditions know this, we will need to learn and accept this new consciousness paradim, it will take a few decades till it becomes common.

A imaginary thinking ethereal being that can pass through most structures we as humans experience as solid surfaces but cant pass through certain types of gas and only percieves the world in line with this. What would this being think off as real things?

You have to really understand why a lion or dinosaur is conscious of its surroundings and compute or measure the need to survive. What correlation or frequency or disposition or common traits do the y have what is the goal of consciousness or its reason to exist and what its used for in terms of evolution or survival of values.. Or is it a requirement of existence to actually 'Stay alive' or at a minimal to help survival in constituents. Without it what is the likely hood of that entity surviving? A common mistake is this, to class the conscious agent as a soul as you then have to assume that all entities have soul and then must be available to go to heaven if they were good souls not just a conscious agent. This deforms the reality quite substantially or what I refer to as is obvious delusion. One must not merely exist in space time but one must survive in space time and. Every structure built up from the small to the complex every extension or biological extension or attribute is survival itself in essence from the heart to the brain to the eyes to the teeth to the abstract of consciousness all are extensions of survival itself with the exception of consciousness to the power of abstract cognition. If you break down each specific piece or structure of what constitutes a human you will find that every piece has this survival purpose or disposition, the conscious state is no different except it survives as a free agent in abstract realm but coupled or connected to the material as it stems from material itself without the material it cannot realise its character or disposition or it cannot survive or realise its true nature. The basic composition or nature if you need clarification or definition is that consciousness itself is required to exist in a complex structure as survival agent or entity if it is indeed coupled with the need to exist or survive with survival being a process or disposition and existence is not by participation but as stationary compared to survival itself. If you can survive without it then it is not survival or if you can still partake in survival it is not so if it is a requirement or necessity to be alive or survive then it is indeed in relation to it if not the same quality but different in its mode or character which is abstract disposition of survival in space time. If you ask why it exist consciousness rather than what is it then you can correlate better and get to a reasonable definition of it to which then understanding can be greater than. What is its function in correlation to survival and evolution and why it would exist rather than not. Coupled with the need to survive then ask why does Dinosaur need to be conscious of its environment in relation to survival. You could search for a million years and still not understand it or be able to define it to a satisfactory realm. you could have the answer and not even realise it unless you get a correlation from its use.

"If we all died then all the physical stuff would still be here" -Except that quantum mechanics has been telling us for about 80 years that particles which make up the universe do NOT have standalone existence until we measure/observe them.

Time to have Sam Harris back on to wash off the metaphysics....

Gotta laugh when someone wonders if the moon would exist if moon observers didn't exist. Kinda like a child thinking that his being born and becoming aware of any object makes that object exist, ignoring that people saw the moon before he was even conceived. It's a good thing that things exist whether we are aware of them or not, or we would all be the center of the universe. 😅

I turned off when Christof says we don't know some stuff, like dark matter, so consciousness might magic?! Ahhhh no. No Woo Woo allowed.

Names, and the ability to identify anything, IS IMPORTANT. Otherwise, God would not have set man to the task. The Bible says: “And out of the ground Jehovah God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: and whatever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field” (Genesis 2:19-20).

Nothing "new" or "latest" here at all. I *want* something like IIT to be true, i've been following koch and listening to inerviews like this for years- decades - so *where on earth* was the "LATEST" in this interview? What on earth has he been doing at the Allen Institute for the last five years? IIT related or not? this was disappointing and underwhelming. Just a tiny bit in the last three or so minutes here. GIVE ME A BREAK!!!

Micheal is stuck on this idea that a moon can exist without at mind to render it. It’s a reasonable intuition, but one that breaks down after a while. It’s like thinking GTA 5 is on the disk, whether there is a console to play it or not. It’s 1’s and 0’s

There is no heaven or hell.

everything talked about was already discovered 1000s of years ago in yoga science ...

Michael I love you but you saying DMT is supposed to be “relaxing”. Lol. That is wildy incorrect. Read the book by Rick Strassman, dmt the spirit molecule. Thats not to say it is bad, its just not relaxing. Exhilarating and profound are much better terms.

For the better for science and discoveries... Um... Can you name literally ANY science or "discoveries" of I guess any noteworthy value that doesn't fit into the materialist reductionist paradigm? Like literally what are you talking about?

Is everyone here some sort of PhD? These comments make me feel so dumb.

@29:07 Kristof clears up the confusion. If all humans disappear, then the human specific CLASSIFICATIONS of objects disappear with us. The universe remains, of course. If another thinking creature evolves, it might be sufficiently different from us such that it will not classify things in the same way as we did. To them, the concept of "moon" for example might be incomprehensible and perhaps even illogical in their perfectly adequate understanding of their world. To them, moons might not exist as a "thing". So who is right? The conclusion is that neither is right EXCLUSIVELY if both mental frameworks are equally useful in dealing with survival in the universe.

the ex-pope of church physicalism who gave up physicalism next stop, stop spending billions on neural correlates and spend some on actual methods of actually rigorously observing it of you want to learn something about it.

Dieu est dans l'ORDRE DE L'Univers ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_82nnwx1OCc.htmlsi=UkGxiaCqZW3jzLOL Sabine a raison. Einstein a raison.

Kristof, the fact that you take a chemical and it changes your conscious experience MEANS that your conscious experience IS CHEMICAL! 100% physical. I feel sorry that you have spent your whole life wrestling with consciousness and you’re still so terribly confused about it.