I’m just beginning to realize what you are trying to do here. Amazing. Thank you for sharing your work freely.

This channel is a miracle for platforming these important questions. I thank you! Don't give up! Your work is not vain at all.

Consciousness does not require an explanation. It is the explanation.

This is so great, so many opposing and carefully thought out ideas put on table. Thank you so much for the great material

It's amazing how much we know and how much more we still need to learn. I love when intellectuals are humble enough to say "I don't know." It seems a difficult thing to do for some.

Love this show, hits at the deepest questions in life, Colin McGinn and Dean Radin have good take on this subject.

One of your best ones yet! Bravo!

These are my absolute favorite videos!!

Materialism is probably the single biggest obstacle in understanding consciousness.

I am deeply touched by the video -- the question, the right protecting, the curiosity. But there was one thing that was really missing for me, and that I never heard really addressed. It's this: That not only is it clear that consciousness exists, but furthermore, it is clear that consciousness has voice.

Great video, thanks.

Kuhn is incredibly well versed, dude has hung in the convo with sooo many pov's

Great content as always. Sound is off a little though. Watching on my TV as I work I find I have to turn up the volume when Kuhn narrates and turn it down when he interviews (so I don't upset the neighbours).

Oh hell yeah, I didn't see this before I commented on the other video. This is great, the differentiation of consciousness and behavior. Perfect.

One of the best sites on the net, thank you :)

many time in the past consciousness has been likened to the relationship between a radio station broadcasting and a radio receiver where conscious awareness is the successful tuning of the receiver IE the ACT of tuning the receiver is consciousness and what is received is...'what it feels like'..and by extension the development of conscious awareness is the refining of the tuning process

"The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine." -Sir James Jeans, English physicist, astronomer and mathematician

In truth, only consciousness explains consciousness since only consciousness is a self-explanatory reality. Because I know myself I know other things so knowledge of objective things depends on our subjective reality.

Colin was most impressing!! His knowledge and understanding is astonishing ;) Personally , I agree with Dean. It really would make the most sense that basically everything is just ONE thing. Great interviews!! Thanks, one oft the best :)

I liked the comment that we don’t really understand matter, or space/time, let alone consciousness! I’m puzzled why RLK rejects Extended Materialism in his final comments. Unless we come to reject Materialism altogether (eg. for some form of Idealism), some extended version of Materialism is going to be necessary (even if it’s only to include an experiential dimension as in Panpsychism). I think some version of Dean Radin’s Dual Aspect Monism might be the kind of synthesis that embraces both consciousness and Physics in a single ontology.

Talk about stretching a term unnecessarily. All that we know is the physical/material, and all claims for another reality have either been falsified or are unfalsifiable. So, why the perseveration over something that is probably not real? How is the mystery of consciousness different than the mystery of life? Both are “hard problems”, but there’s much less scientific controversy regarding the latter. Is it because we seem to be getting closer to understanding the origin of life?

If we regard the quantum field, or strings, or whatever is at the base, as, in essence, 'reified raw existence' then we can presuppose there are other forms of 'raw existence' (that aren't simply higher-level combinations thereof) that express dramatically differently than the reified physical form. Of course this different expression would be consciousness or "souls". My mind state is near-infinitely different from a material thing like a rock, but it definitely exists, just like the rock. It's like how we separate ice and water mentally into two different things even though they are the same expressed dramatically differently.

If you picture consciousness as described below (an enlarged materialism), you can integrate it with the rest of your mind: Sensory inputs and memories cause neurons to fire. Chemoelectric signals are generated in the synapses. Consciousness manifests when a critical mass of neurons are generating chemoelectrical signals. As these electrical signals travel on the axons, electromagnetic waves are produced that radiate short distances. When multiple neurons fire simultaneously, a complex field is created by these intersecting EM waves. Feed back loops and resonances of some waves occurs and becomes regulated by an emergent brain property, consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to focus and regulate these feed back loops.

When everything is energy and energy is vibration then I suspect that consciousness has its vibration as well. I just think ... gives something vibrations or are they vibrations .. Anyway, I don't know but if vibrations can be measured then consciousness too ..?

17:02 Haha, that smile says it all :'D

It would be interesting to approach the subject from Gustavo Bueno's Philosophical Materialism. His Materialistic Special Ontology is a good example of an "extended materialism".

The starting point is qualia. And the question is . . . what causes qualia? What causes red, sound etc. However, because we are locked inside the realm of qualia it is impossible to know what is outside the realm of qualia. Every hypothesis about what is outside of qualia is impossible to verify from inside qualia. All the external data gets converted into qualia in the process of experiencing it (assuming there is external data). Hence we are trapped within. Exploring outside of qualia is impossible and therefore an adventure we will never undertake. We are locked in a conundrum.

Could consciousness in brain be matter changing into energy and back again to produce inner subjective feeling?

You are doing great work I think perception of each person is different due to past experience and memories You may argue that why new born child behave differently because may be there is no past memory but there is biological memory that make difference So human body is a chemical factory And consiousness rare product of it

I think that consciousness is simply what causation looks like. To take a classic example, what happens when a pool cue hits a ball? What causes the ball to roll across the table rather than simply sitting still? I think it's perfectly legitimate to say that the ball is conscious of the stick's causal action and acts accordingly. In this way, the ball possesses the sort of proto-consciousness mentioned in the video. This viewpoint has the added benefit of answering Hume's objection to the nature of causality itself. Conscious is universal because causation is universal, and the two things are one and the same.

I would really love to see Annaka or Sam Harris on this series!

If consciousness is a sort of substance that differs in refinement would that mean that consciousness is not isomorphic? The level of consciousness a human has is more refined than that of a moth. Can consciousness get any more refined than the human consciousness?

One of the special properties of consciousness is that the interpretation is very reflective of the person trying to understand it. You can't voice a belief on consciousness without it reflecting oneself. Unless you are similar to the person in a certain respect, that explanation won't feel right. If we ever get our answer we could all understand, far more people are going to think they were right all along than we expect. For example, evolution theory to me offers a powerful explanation in the sense of understanding how it forms, as imo the best way to try and grapple with what it could be. But it lacks phenomenology. If consciousness is comprehensible, it loses part of its substance, and so for those where that missing substance is the most important part, the view isn't valued.

"Everything disappears into clouds and waves"....exactly or makes perfect sense that position and location, or materialism emerges....not a problem...but a process......VP

The area under the curve?

Another wonderful investigation of the mystery of consciousness. I've read some of Colin McGinn's work, so it was great to see him talking in a video. I especially enjoyed Ken Mogi's perspective on things. But please, Robert, stop teasing us with all this dancing around the issue and just... GIVE US THE ANSWER! 😀

"Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind." - Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Great, careful and humble discussion on a pressing topic as usual. Thanks. I’m puzzled why you hold on to such a shibboleth as “materialism” when all your interlocutors carefully explained how etiolated this idea has become in modern physics. Your own ideas seem to be: only the material is real; the material is what physics studies (the physical). But when contemporary physics suggests you have to give up the comfortable certainties of traditional materialism you take fright, withdraw from discussion and proclaim, “I’m not convinced”. We’d be closer to the truth if we considered without anxiety some aspects of the monism on offer.

Can't hear the words over the music

I like that 1 thing theory. Makes sense. Very versatile indeed!

Even if perfect materialism models were produced to demonstrate consciousness, something tells me there would still be no scientific consensus. It would turn into an epistemological ontological argument, like asking “what is the size of infinity?”.

The Rainbow, mirrors our Life- and Consciousness-structure, six parts of our body-structure, six Conscious-Abilities, the physical body, and the five Night-Bodies, (Deep-Sleep) > Instinct, - Gravity, - Feeling, - Intelligence, - Intuition, - Memory, > The Circuit-Principle, > All Life-Units have the same Eternal Size, Micro- Medio- and Macro-Cosmos, have to do with the Perspective-Principle.

Aatmiya DIVINITY Be Blessed HARE KRSNA Materialism can never ever explain Consciousness. On the contrary Consciousness only Consciousness enables to know, learn, understand and recognise matter. Very respectfully Loving ❤️ ING You One and All DIVINE ❤️

"can materialism explain consciousness?" We have to figure out how to explain materialism first

I love your show, very interesting and educational. Consciousness existed in a pure form before the brain was developed, like in an embryos a fetus or a new born. As the brain grows and ages, Consciousness grows and intensify as knowledge, intentions and actions are created. Every philosopher And scientists have this backwards, Consciousness is not born in the brain or the gift or a bonus in order for our creation to be autonomous, the brain is the gift. By the way, order for a car to be autonomous, it needs a brain not consciousness.

There is an underlying presumption here that human understanding is sufficient to answer these kinds of questions. But just as goldfish can't grasp certain concepts that humans easily can, it's entirely plausible to assume that there are some things not even the most sophisticated human minds are capable of understanding. The riddle of consciousness, the true nature of matter, the origin of the universe, etc., may just be beyond the power of our cognitive apparatus to comprehend.

That will prove the material basis

What if consciousness is the effect of a dual hemisphere brain. Or in general multiple neural systems working together to be conscious. One being the part of us that operates body functions and one being the part of our brain that observes and correlates the inputs from our senses with memory. If we were only this we would be a biological machine but we have a second system in us. The one that observes the status and inputs of the body system. The higher brain function that serves as the observer of our body system is what we call consciousness. To be conscious you must have a way to process input from the world and a way to store memory and a higher brain function that is the observer that has access to all subsystems of the brain

17:24 he saved the best for last.

An enlarged materialism can be pragmatically useful but cannot explain qualities parsimoniously. A physics of internal mental states can be useful. But ultimately, awareness is, and isn't matter, the regularities of phenomenality. Consciousness and qualities could be selectively applied to "internal matter", but that's dualism.

The truth we are trying to get to should have some beauty to it, something deeply satisfying, or why should we even bother pursuing these lofty ideas? Just get on with living a happy life if none of this matters. One hopes the truth about our reality is ultimately simple and explainable. The mathematical idea that we spring from an underlying symmetry connects philosophically to the Teilhardian Omega Point, and my video that starts with "We Start With a Point" is an exploration of where we can go from there. The last one hundred years have seen a suppression of the idea that the mathematics of quantum mechanics, relativity, gravity, light, and the infinitely scalable electromagnetic waves of our observed reality, all fit together at the fifth dimension. There has also been a push towards "science is the only truth" and "religion is delusion" over the past 100 years, a viewpoint embraced by many. Thankfully, that is changing now that we have a Nobel laureate supporting these same ideas. In his book The Science of Interstellar, Kip Thorne explains how an observer in the fifth dimension is able to see the different possible worldlines of Everett's Universal Wavefunction as the different 4D worldlines (or "world tubes" as Thorne calls them) stretching away from them in the writhing geometries of the tesseract. Christopher Nolan's cinematic genius allowed us to see this idea on the big screen. The truth we are getting closer to must resolve this conflict between science and spirituality because the truth must ultimately be right in the middle, in that Omega Point that we come from and go to "before" and "after" the existence of the universe we are observing. Welcome to the fifth dimension! It's where we've been all along, observing it one Planck frame after another, as we ride Wheeler's Self-Excited Circuit. Mathematically and as consciousness, we are the universe observing itself. And we are all observing the same wavefunction, there are not multiple wavefunctions. So in that sense we are all one, how about that! Because we are all observing the same thing, the current solution to Everett's equation.

Can energy be non-dualistic real mind stuff?

Kuhn is actually taller than Radin!

Consciousness 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."

The theme music is jarring to my ears. As a muscian, I wouldn't change a thing. The topics are jarring too. Nice fit.

If enlarged materialism explain consciiousness, would one be able to measure consciousness, either at level of person or universe / cosmological level?

Okay, one question. what is matter? answer that and then lets go on to materialism.

Trying to understand something immaterial with empirical data seems like a bad start.

What does he mean by "physical"? It seems that no one defines the term in any way other than to give a few synonyms.

Also known as materialism of the gaps.

It's physical but it is alive so Consciousness emerges out of this materialism because it is alive. Another words is active.

It can in principle

I take issue with your primary definition of consciousness ...'what it feels like..." this is a blatant mis-interpretation consciousness ISN'T what it feels like (description)..it is the process of feeling (act/action)... what one chooses to be conscious of is 'what it feels like'..

Consciousness resides in the past. We cannot know the future and everything that is not the future has to be the past. Our brains create a now from our experience of the past. We don’t have a problem watching a film we know was made in the past. We watch it like it “is” happening “now”. Science doesn’t tell us what “is” it tells us what our perception of material “was”, remove the “now” and this discussion looks a whole lot different. The present is a paradox, Zeno was on to that one 2.000 years ago!

imho - the problem seems to be; coming to terms with the fact there are two 'realities' sharing the same space. By that I mean, the world of the incredibly small (quantum) and the world WE operate in have two completely differing sets of physics rules. For example, the issues with observing the very small (quantum) causing what is being observed to be 'disrupted' from its field by the observation process itself (skewing/falsifying the results seen). All because the Quantum doesn't play well with our forms of observation (used in our reality). These physics rules seem so radically opposed to one another. So we are currently scratching our heads trying to come to terms with that fact. And, that their 'opposed' positions are needed for existence to be. Scientists are having fun trying to explain it too ..when the current 'goal posts' are forever shifting :-) I'm guessing the explanations will only get harder to formulate (and also transfer to the layman), especially as computers do more and more of the complex work. It would be nice if it boiled down to a two digit number, but I got the feeling it might be harder to grasp. I'm still trying to understand the theory that the universe could be an 'event' caused by two energy waves colliding together (like two walls of water hitting one another), causing a new universe. Then (due to this 'event'), the two fields are pushed a part. Finally, after many trillions of 'our' years (after the universe has dissipated), they are attracted back together again where another 'event' occurs (rinse and repeat).

Between closer to the truth, spirit science, are many other things, we have only begun to scratch the surface.

A compromise between materialism and dualism? Does that guy at the end believe in 1.41 entities??

So much speculation, worth noting that no-one can have a factual approach yet. We clearly need to develop better tools. There is a theme of assumption here - that our conscious experience is the genesis of our mind's logical processes. If anything, neurological evidence indicates that the conscious experience follows and post-rationalises (to the same 'conscious' system, as a feedback loop) the actual decisions made by, and the actions resulting from, the rest of the brain. I have personally come to view consciousness as the 'emotional post-processing' of the mind. An adaptation for successfully navigating the ultra-complex social environment of humanity; with the illusion of 'experience' as a by product.

I cannot understand what else could be there except what is actually there. It is all material to me.

Read "My big TOE" of Thomas Campbell

Consciousness is an irreducible feature of particular persons, is not a simple idea, so cannot be captured by objective generalization. It may suit our interests to identify an apple or a space ship as and entity that can be captured descriptively (by words) as a concept, but this can be done only by capturing the idea of apple as a member of the set of apples by cutting away all properties that individuate particular apple. If you try to force consciousness into a simple concept, you trim away what is most important about it: the properties that make it a feature of a particular. Brains are material, but matter today includes energy. As an aspect of a living thing, energy is a life involved quantity that is required to make matter alive; physical sensors in our bodies sense when energy is getting low and the pain it signals we learn is associated with hunger and we learn how to respond to that discomfort; the mother presents her breast and the baby "learns" to link hunger with ways of doing away with that frightening feeling of disorder, or whatever the feeling is. Babies who associate hunger-pain satisfaction with sucking may be diverted with a pacifier until the hunger feeling mounts to a higher level. Being at the nexus of a material bodily sense of energy change and the state of energy expenditure, physical mass thus causes the signaling that calls for the learned physical response of the constructed mind.

The principal reason we cannot currently understand consciousness is due to the very simple and easily demonstrated, but fortunately easily rectified, fact that we do not presently have a correct identity/definition of ‘information’ itself as a phenomenon in its own right & not just what any of it ‘says’ or ‘means’. Hint - it’s not ‘digits’ no matter how many of them one may have at one’s disposal nor how cleverly arranged they are, nor how large, powerful and globally interconnected are the machines operating on them. As George Gilder points out in ‘Life After Google’ all such digit-using machines are nothing more than glorified abacuses - massively miniaturised, user-friendlied, vastly accelerated, electronically automated devices, yes, but for all that nothing more than glorified abacuses and as such completely unable to ‘think’ (which ‘thoughtfulness’ can be accomplished only via the use of real information, not digits), let alone think intelligently. Now I’m not going divulge ‘information’s’ correct ontological identity here in this KZfaq comment (but you’ll be able to find it in the up-coming FQXi Essay Contest fqxi.org/community/essay/rules) but I can confidently assure you that once we have it - once we have ‘information’s’ correct ontological identity - under our belt, no great methodological nor conceptual difficulty attends the exercise of further establishing that of all of the directly information-related phenomena such as ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘consciousness’ - to far less than exhaust the list. Indeed, building on both ‘information’ itself in its corrected identity status, along with that of all of the newly defined, directly information-related phenomena to boot, no great difficulty further attends the additional exercise of newly establishing, or more properly clarifying, the ontological identities of everything else here inside of our Universe - time, space, matter & energy. (Although it must be noted, this ‘corrected’ line of investigation no more elucidates anything ‘outside’ of our universe - presumably that external realm where the creator of it all resides, along with its means, methods & madnesses for so doing - than does any other extant worldview.) One of the many epochal findings spotlighted by this corrected-information-based line of inquiry is the understanding that we live in a panpsychic Universe, that is to say one in which some very certain kind & amount of fully measurable ‘sentience’, or ‘consciousness’ exists as the pen-ultimate quintessence of all matter. Matter is simply congealed sentience.

The dean guy is right

Consciousness is the mother of materialism, matter is a byproduct of imagination,built on a memory of the past, with our thoughts and imagination,we are the creators, this cell phone we use to share this video and and comment section was once someone’s imagination from the past,the Buck Rogers of the 40s,,the scientists have the hard job, they have to do the math

Urghh. When you really know,you'll be able to communicate clearly without stuttering over nothing.

Yeah I never bought that nihilist idea that consciousness, free will and soul are an illusion. This epiphenomenon is, by definition, the base for all empirical observation and experience

I am a fundamentalist YEC Christian. I believe our consciousness is entirely dependent on the brain. That is their is no conscious agent without the brain, atleast in the case of the created humans who descend from Adam and Eve some 6000 years ago. I believe the bible actually teaches, or atleast suggests this. This is part of the incredible glory of Gods majestic, creative genius.

So wind isn’t real; how about shadows?

The brain is matter that is determined by causal laws. Mind is what happens when the brain serves us in our experiential development and in our experience in every moment. The brain, being causally determined, is a third person entity that is not experienced as such and which is principally the same in humans in general. Mental development is experience and first-person in nature; it is not accessible as experience to others; we experience nothing but experience and others experience our behaviors said to be a product of our experience in the largest sense. The experience of things is empirical; the experience of experience itself may be phenomenal, but it is is empty of objective content, and, as Wittgenstein suggested, cannot be fixed in language, in propositions. There is nothing that it's like to be a bat: a bat has no experiences of itself that can be objectively compared to anything else.

Activation of the neurons is the effect, not the cause.

??

We are created in the imagination of a greater conciseness manifest in gravity.

When he said that science didn't seriously consider vibrations as fundamental I thought of those poor string theorists

Computers compute rather than actually think. Humans think rather than simply and solely compute.

Is information "Material"? If you read this comment, nothing "material" passes from my brain to yours. Yet you are aware that I just asked that question. Similarly, when you watch this video, nothing material travels from the KZfaq server to your brain. KZfaq could delete this video from the server, not by removing any "material" but by using energy to simply re-arrange some magnetic molecules. So before launching into consciousness, consider that question. "Is information "material"?

17:23 "But to explain the whole ediface of reality by vibrations is not taken seriously by modern science." Oops!, String Theory is rather orthodoxy in today's physics.

A bunch of waves having a complicated conversation about how one day they will be able to explain how ripples produce water without invoking anything mystical, magical or theological such as 'The Ocean'.

we maybe know how to build a car, but we never know how it is to be the car... hah!

Cool that the guy cannot hide his point of view. He stares at his own hands with a sense of awe. And smiles at the possibility that asian polytheism is nothing but something western philosophy surpassed. Think I'd have the same expressions.

Idealist, monist, dualist, materialist, computationalist, behaviorist......but in the end the eliminitivist will prove them all and disprove them all. Since we don't fully understand the brain deep enough into the neurons, we float in this philosophical soup.

Define consciousness. Is a plant conscious? Is it only humans?

Let's just try to understand Quantum Mechanics first 😆

Materialism enlargement pills - absolute state of science 😂

I don't think consciousness is in all matter.or even in certain organisms. I don't assume that a rock has consciousness or even a bacteria. Why or how would consciousness. experience such things?

A house is not a home.

What a dog's breakfast of attempted explanations.

See Brian Greene response on question about quantum physics and consciousness kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Ztico6yg0K6Uk5c.html . Deepak Chopra please do not coopt quantum physics.

"Real" for whom? Define "real"

"Can Enlarged Materialism Explain Consciousness? Where are the headquarters of ENLARGED materialism? This question goes Closer to Moronicism!

If all biological forms share same quantum mechanism, than why can't we talk to plants and other animals, maybe even to bacteria? Should be simple, we don't need to know what they think and how they observe self and the world, just feel what they feel, by merging our mind with their neurons somehow. Except we can't do that, brain is a part of a body and works only in appropriate environment. One thing is how brain is constructed and branched between other cells, another thing is voltage, electric charge necessary for healthy functions. Maybe we could transfer human brain in monkey body, but it wouldn't work, our organ need more sugar to operate and control each cell. I wouldn't say plants are conscious, there's no need for expanded mind if you are rooted to the ground, but most animals definitely are, so we must talk processor power here also. Still i believe times will come when humanity will share global awareness with another kind of consciousness, if not aliens, somebody will make a monkey or a dog able to talk and teach their younglings about their culture. And it will not stop with one species, once we know how to induce consciousness to another species, many animals will became civilized and we will also talk with artificial intelligence.