Why is Consciousness So Mysterious? | Episode 103 | Closer To Truth 

Background audio is too loud, the dialogue can't be heard

It would be lovely to fix the audio issue and re-upload the video. Thanks for such great videos.

Audio Mixing seems severely messed up on this video

Most interesting video unfortunately the voiceover is virtually inaudible....still much of value to be inferred!

Loud music trumps consciousness.

The audio makes this an incredibly frustrating experience...

Why's the background sounds so loud

The audio, in the last several installments, has been poor. Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon, or is it just my computer?

Even if consciousness is just an emergent phenomena it's still fascinating and remarkable that a collection of matter could be self-aware.

Good episode...EXCEPT, the audio of the non-interview segments is way too low for Dr. Kuhn with the background music being much louder than his audio and the interview segments are louder still. The audio mixer was mixed up. Also, as another commenter pointed out interview, dates would help as some episodes are rather dated.

Tip: turn on subtitles to be able to understand the inaudible commentary.

Robert, the sound of your voice when coming simultaneously with music is almost superseded completely by music’s volume

I don't claim to fully understand John Searle's take, but his makes the most sense to me. My favorite topic.

Very interesting topic, I am following this channel since 2 or 3 years now! Very good content, I would say Unique! Unfortunately this video is so hard to hear! The music is too loud, and the voice over is also badly mastered. But I will re-watch it, with subtitles next time (later today). Again, very good content! Thank you for the channel Mr. Kuhn!

Great episode, the editing has certainly improved storywise. I don't mind the low commentary voice volume, but can be increased certainly a notch. But having a difference between interviewer and narrater function is applauded by me, it's good that you're trying. I've found these last episodes very watchable I noticed :) relaxing Also John Searle is making a lot of sense and resonating with me, that the focus is a biological one and not a physical quantum mechanical superuniverse one, I like listening to him as the voice of the 'normal majority' of reason However since I've seen the electrical effect of cells on each other in Michael Levin's work all bets are off right now for me. It could be waves, electromagnetical interactions, who knows: and not magical woowoo, but just interactions between biological matter and fields in a communicating way we don't yet understand. Fascinating stuff

I love listening to this channel, I just wish they would get their sound fixed. So much background noise or music louder than the actual interviews.

Its funny how I agree with the first explanation of consciousness until I hear the second explanation of consciousness 🤔 Love this channel.

This is ep. 103, and CTT is up to well over one thousand now, I just wish they would put the actual interview dates in them to gain context.

Consciousness permeates the universe and is expressed through the material world in all its forms. Humans, animals, plants, the matter of the universe is all a manifestation of creative intelligence.

What's happened to the audio?

Who edits the audio of some of these videos? Music is too loud!

It is an amazing video but the music competes with your voice in the background! Thank you for your efforts.

I am reminded of Sri Nisrgadatta Maharaj - Can fire ever know heat? Can water ever know dampness? You cannot know it (consciousness), you can only be it.

Good video Robert 👍

The Buddhist concept of consciousness vs. karma is very interesting. Typically karma is described as including past experiences in the present as well as former lives. At it’s simplest, even if only one’s present lifetime is included, consciousness comprises the moment-to-moment experience of reality, with “karma” being the “embodiment” of those experiences into memory,. Consciousness then is both current experience of external reality, or experience of past memories, including our actions and reactions to past situations, including emotional reactions. Karma could also be extended to include our genetic predisposition to react in certain ways - e.g. by “ancestry” and evolution. IMO past “personal” lives do not exist, because personal conscious dies with our brains. On the other hand, our experiences also live on in many ways in the minds of other conscious and reflective “sentient” beings.

Very good discussion. Thanks 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

Daniel Dennett's view makes the most sense.

Consciousness is absolutely reducible. It starts off with awareness, then collides with abstract subjectivity and the physical world (space-time) to produce personal experience in thought and action/inaction. Consciousness is enmeshed with spacetime and physical matter making it the 5th dimension.

Hello. Is there anybody out there?

Recently, I can't hear what's being said between the interviews because the background sound is muffling the voices. Can it be fixed?

This is one of the best episodes of CTT so far. Thanks, Robert.

Please repost with corrected audio. Thank you!

I hope in future we will explore consciousness more and have welcoming communities

Another great one. What is the Celtic sounding soundtrack at the end around 24:40? Beautiful!

The problem as I see it is in the use of the word 'exist'. We are so attached to the 'thingyness' of reality that we that we dismiss as unreal that that is not objectively real. One way to put this is 'consiousness is real but it does not exist'. If we cannot get our heads around this we will forever be stuck with the 'problem' of consciousness. The following is an analogy, or really an example, that we can all understand. A tune is greater than the sum of its constitiuent notes, but is not accessable to reductionism. The tune is not quantitatively greater but qualitatively greater than its notes. The tune only 'exists' as a conscious experience. The reductionist reply to this would be to point to the detectable NCCs and state that that this IS the experience. To understand this we have to go in the opposite direction of reductionism, that is, synthesis where we will find 'wholes' that are qualitatively greater than the sum their parts. Consciousness and biology are interdependent and co-emergent. Which means...no biology - no consciousness and no consciousness - no biology. Most will see this as dualistic but they would be mistaken . 2:3, 1:2, 3.1415 : 1 are ratios, and therefore dual. But 0:1 or infinity: 1 are not because there is no-'thing on the left side of the :. This error or seeming limitation is understandable as we have evolved to operate in a world of 'things'. But the time has come for us to see through this limitation.

Mr. Kuhn, I am enjoying these videos very much. May I make a production suggestion? Pay more attention to the audio quality, as many RU-vidrs say it is even more important than the video. E.g. 0:40 the bell seems to be as loud the word 'commonplace', which means your background music is too loud.

Please lower the music volume so you can hear you.

"The reality we perceive is the function of the consciousness we are.". Very well said. I have the same conviction, too.Somehow I think all other people don't exist at all. They, including their consciousness are just part of my consciousness. This can be applied to anyone.

What if we've got the dimensions wrong and the 1st dimension is consciousness(awareness, abstract subjectivity, free will all interacting with the physical world) the 2nd is a dot, the 3rd is a line, the 4th is a depth/volume, the 5th is space-time and they are all relative to each other?

I love David's hair, so unruly and carefree. 🤣👍🏻😆

@ Daniel Dennett : CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED ? ! WOW . . . . . PLEASE EXPLAIN IT TO ME, DANIEL. I Have Been Wanting To Know Since I Was 7 Years Young In MINEO / SICILY / ITALY. I Am Now 77 Years OLD In Melbourne / Australia. Thank You, Daniel. I Can't Hardly Wait To Hear From You.

Knowing, understanding and experiencing of TOTALITY is Consciousness…

I don't know what conciousness is but there is some real truth that we don't know.

I just wonder if you realise that the music is too loud sometimes, and I can't hear the presenters voice?

❤ Very good 👍🏼

Loving these insights but please can the audio be one consistent level right through.

The background music is louder than the narrative throughout the video, can you please fix the audio and upload the corrected video? Thanks!

It Would be nice if the audio could be redone. Cc couldn't even catch everything that was said because it's so quiet

In the following, I'll give a definition of consciousness. Consciousness is what always emerges whenever an autopoietic system (which is the definition of a living organism) exists embedded in an environment that provides the resources for that autopoietic system to continue to exist (the latter being the definition of life). Consciousness is the result of a complexity reduction (of the arbitrary complex environment) that the autopoietic system generates by interacting with and filtering the environment using its internal processes. In other words, consciousness is a simplified reproduction/simulation of the arbitrary complex environment/reality (that includes the autopoietic system itself), simplified in a sense that the simulation only contains those aspects of the environment/reality that are relevant for the survival of the autopoietic system. In this sense, any autopoietic system of any size or complexity has consciousness, be it a biological cell, a society, an anthill, an ant, a brain, or a Bénard cell. There you have it, this is the definition of consciousness.

Love your videos, but I do have to say that lately, your background audio is turned up enough to drown out Mr Kuhn's voiceover too much. Turn that background audio down more (or the voiceover UP more) please. :-)

Is there a way to measure how time effects the brain? Some things people say about consciousness sounds like could have to do with time

I think each one of these people he interviews make great points. Chalmers puts it most succinctly philosophically; his zombie conjecture underscores the epistemic. As an engineer I can better see where they all miss it.

Closer to truth but further from a good audio mix

Ultimately because we seem to be conscious of something that we don’t know what it is, where it came from, and why not Nothing.

Every great puzzle takes time

Could not hear Robert’s summation because of sound problems.

Unlike in Mainland China, In USA all religions flourish to the ultimate point. These clerics from different faiths come up with interesting n illuminating explanations to the questions on what consciousness is in their faiths.

You becoming up date, it took exacly 2 decay boosting intelligence and bring intense feeling= love 😎

Is consciousness immortal?

Possibly a new digital editor who accidently made the background sound effects more dominant than the narrator's voice and hasnt had time to do a fix before upload time :D

recently the sound is awful on the recent uploads of Closer to Truth. it is hard to concentrate...

Mystery (i.e., undecidability) forms the “transformational structure” of the universe.

I think the problem is that we look for consciousness in one place as if we can point and say ' There it is ' but i don't think that's the case. Now i'm not saying that i believe that it's something magical or outside of the mind because i simply don't see that as something possible or that makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. If i think about myself, my thoughts what do i think and feel? I can see things, describe them, my hands can feel them. I can hear things around me, the wind, people talking etc. I also have feelings within which i know is chemical in nature but also interpreted in the brain. These things happen in a very short amount of time and we can only consciously focus on one at a time, one after another. I wonder if because of the speed of such things and the feelings that connect to those moments, if we maybe view it as a single thing that we call consciousness rather than it being many different things, including but not limited to, feelings, emotions, chemical interactions etc. I guess you could say that consciousness is what's left after the brain has filtered out our senses so that we aren't overloaded with information. We know the brain filters much of the information it receives every second of every day and what's left is what we perceive as consciousness,

One thing I'm convinced of... ANIMALS... are way more conscious than we give them credit for!!! This fact ought to be worked into our morality!!! Who's with me? 🤗

All this before freewill as been finaly given😎

@RobertKuhn just curious if you could find some answers from South Indian Vedic astrology. It has such great predictive power and accuracy that would make you rethink some of these assumptions about the physical world

Consciousness is no more mysterious than any other brute fact. In other words, it is deeply mysterious.

Audio is stuffed between the interviews, can't hear anything thing

The "between the interviews" commentary audio volume is way too low on this otherwise excellent episode.

Maybe consciousness as we experience it is a material, smoothing-out function in the brain that makes our sense perceptions seem continuous and fills in the gaps when there are some (like optical illusions). The interruptions we could "experience" would be anesthesia, coma, and to a lesser extent , sleep disorders. Also the realm of severe mental illness where a medication or electric shock can in some cases provide immediate reversal.

Consciousness is like a cd 💿 , or the old time records discs , CAnt see the musics 🎼 🎵 but they’re there . We’re not man made , which is why those things are complicated to us .

Where does he always find this piano music with this tuning? It's always off, in every video. He has a very specific preference for tuning, it is very interesting. Never heard anything like it, the tuning is always off. Very mysterious

👉📣 Consciousness driving us in the days at it's will and treating our souls in the same manner when we sleep = Closer to the Truth 🤔

The music is louder than the voice!

The background music should be kept at a lower level, it interferes with what Kuhn is saying.

This is what you do. While thinking about consciousness you always reach the same wayside cross. There you always chose the same path. After ending lost somewhere deeply in the woods you return to your starting point and repeat. Like it's groundhog day. As long as you always think about the brain you will never be able to ... "get closer to truth".

It's been a conundrum for nearly a century, but only for materialists who insist that metaphysics is a quaint way of looking at things. Eben Alexander, MD survived an attack by bacteria on his brain, putting him in a coma for a week, providing this trained scientist with his own experience of life after death. On recovery he sat in on the medical discussion about what had happened to him in which he could analyze the consciousness he had experienced in view of what medical science understands. All explanations required a functioning brain, especially a neocortex, which, in his case was being eaten by microbes. He wrote "Proof of Heaven" to share what he had learned from his Near-Death Experience. "I understood how blind to the full nature of the spiritual universe...I had been, who had believed that matter was the core reality. p. 57. I explored this revelation in "Surviving the Micronova."

I cant hear the soundtrack properly because of some talking in the background,

This audio needs to be remixed for this video. The narrative parts aren’t loud enough.

conscioness is everything , all reality is informational .

The 1st thing one needs to ask is why so many have a need for consciousness to be something beyond the realm of biological processes in the brain. What is the need fulfilled by this kind of thinking? We can see, in all of Kuhn's episodes, his personal need to believe, believe in a god, believe in some mysterious force we call consciousness as a prime motivator & actor, he's not shy about admitting that. What we missed here is the perspective of how human neuropsychology might generate this need for an entirely understandable & natural reason, ie survival. In this piece, that scientific perspective was not explored. Presuming anything beyond a biologically generate 'consciousness' may well be pure illusion created by a nature driven need. We presumed gods in human antiquity to answer questions we had no answers for, especially those that caused us to fear & tremble. We now desire to presume a universal consciousness to satisfy our need to some how cheat death, to be us forever, for our selves to survive physical death. In all the questions we've answered since we 1st invented gods there has been nothing to suggest there is anything beyond life simply being life and the human species would be better served to get that through their thick heads. Being here now is all we need to focus on.

Very interesting but I cannot hear above the music and background noise. I totally missed at least 20%. Of the words.

With all due respect but has the person responsible for the sound hearing issues? The sound as always is so bad. Not the quality, but the level and the mix. The music is higher than the voice, and as always, the level on Mr. Kuhn's voice changes a lot from interview to interview. I have stopped watching because it is frustrating to have to adjust the volume several times during a video. Is it so difficult to have the same level of volume from the beginning to the end of a video? (Rhetorical question - I know it is very easy).

Hard to hear first Pat Volume varies too much

Background music too loud. Hard to hear the commentary.

Make counciousness in the lab and lots of these questions will be answered !! In my opinion !!

Consciousness seems to operate on the level of quantum mechanics. Modern research on Near Death Experience by Raymond moody, reincarnation memories by Ian Stevenson/Jim trucker and past lives regression by Brian Weiss all independently but coincidentally show that our consciousness survive death, we live many lives and our thoughts and actions matter in the hereafter. So be kind and helpful to others, be virtuous, meditate and cultivate ourselves to higher spiritual levels. Cheers.

Consciousness Agent is an unseen entity.

Please next time lower the volume on the background music and voices and raise the volume of the narrator so it is easier to hear and understand without distracting noise.

Susan Blackmore forgot a little fundamental detail: What forces animates that porridge mass in there? 🤔🧠🤔

In a way the question is wilfully dense. How can we NOT have a consciousness? Why would we care about anything, how could we act? A kitten couldn't learn by imitating its mother if it didn't understand itself and the mother as sovereign beings. Our experience is complicated by language. After all our earlier, very strenuous, efforts to hear and speak abstract language, we have lost our original consciousness and live in our "personal narrative". We only notice something once we have "told ourselves about it" . Deep learning of skills and "genius" consists of growing new "brain circuits" that operate independently of our narartive selves.

@ Lawrence Kuhn : When It Comes To NEUROSCIENCE MATTERS, John Searle Is My Hero. I Place Him ABOVE ALL OTHERS, Including Baroness Susan Greenfield. tom di-grazia / Doncaster / Melbourne / Australia.

Did the audio guy get shot half way thru!?

I'm hearing two voices and music at the beginning

I'm conscious that this video's audio sucks. It might be an illusion, but then, that illusion is consciousness.

The "background" music obscures some of the dialog.

Check out Thomas Campbell's MBT and the Larger Consciousness System at the CENTER of it all.

To perceive physical information from the world with mathematical description, can the brain recohere quantum fields as mind from neuron energy?

Is mind Harowitz, piano or music?

The music is so loud I can never understand the dialogue