So true And compare it to brain less religious fights around the globe!!

Well, you're half right. At least we know that the host is intelligent.

This convo in its entirety is a bit over my head if I can be honest.

Agreed.

Hoffman would insist noumenal, not phenomenal. If the universe is conscious as he asserts then there are no phenomena, all experience consists of thoughts of thoughts, consciousness of consciousness.

I also agree. The fact that I can agree with you means I’m conscious of your statement, does it not? How can it be said that consciousness does nothing? What is there without it?

_I_ concur! Dilly, dilly!

I'm gonna tell you this just one time, stay off the drugs.

The only soul have has is on my shoes.

I have 3 souls 2 in reserve if one brakes.

What if the brain only acts like it creates the consciousness?

Sounds interesting, but there's a lot of Hoffman material out there now. Do you have a link or even just part of the title?

There are more and more indications arising that this would be the case. I do believe we are limited to understand it completely. But I really believe that the brain only plays a role in a anchoring a fraction of the larger consciousness system into a physical body, and the brain isn’t the generator of consciousness, it only conditions it.

Evidence for that?

jimbo33 the problem is most of the interpretation is done by factors outside of our control so you can't say consciousness DOES anything. Consciousness is only that which experiences, that's it's only property and you cannot derive any control being done in the act of perception. It does not take a conscious human observer to collapse quantum waves

​@@redwaldcuthberting7195 Quantum Entanglement.

@@khaledyasser8293 how do you know it doesn't require an observer? The probability wave does not collapse unless it is observed or recorded for observation later.

@fynes leigh Thanks, but I'm not sure I want to know more about philosopy. (Useful) Philosopy of Science is as far as I go.

@fynes leigh Thanks for the Jim Baggott Concept of Mass link.

"I agree with this although I cannot point to any scientific evidence to support it." Do you also believe in fairies?

I disagree, think of a colony of ants or a hive of bees, there is very little or no individuality, each ant or bee works and lives for the survival of the colony or hive. Also plants, trees flowers fungi, these organisms also have very little to no consciousness

It really depends on the kind of organism to assess the levels of individuality within that group

Even with consciousness, we still get eaten. And other things without consciousness, or animals with less consciousness don’t get eaten that much. What about tigers, for example? Consciousness is definitely not a perquisite for not getting eaten.

Yep. From whence our thoughts? From the unconscious. What better home for the unconscious could be imagined than a brain, merely matter in process?

To assert all that is is conscious is to drain all meaning from the word.

Interesting ideas. I think 'universal consciousness', is a reality, proved by the fine tuning (FT) of the parameter space, of the Standard Model, explaining the 'self-organizing property of matter', hence Intelligent Design/er. However, I am not quite sure of 'conscious death', which might be programmed into fine tuning itself. A ten mile rock may hit us today or a million years later extinguishing all life. Yet one is destined to hit us every 200-250 million years, giving opportunity for evolution of new and improved species, like dinosaurs gave way to mammals. FT eliminates randomness/chance.

Consciousness wants to die so it live, when it live it don't want to die.. lol

Charles Brightman Calm your tits, this video wasn't about some primordial entity, dare I say, GOD

So?

Matthias your comment is pointless

I suppose what he means is that you as conscious being can writer programs for a computer without consciousness to work??

@fynes leigh I've honestly got no idea, I've subsequently realised I don't know anything about consciousness. My brief acquaintance with philosophy of mind and psychology gave me a case of the Dunning-Kruger Effect :)

"Consciousness is not a being, or a thing, or a state... It is not space, or time, or matter, or force, or any God. It is independent of all these, but they and everything else depend upon Consciousness. It cannot be changed, qualified, affected, divided, destroyed, improved, weighed, or measured. There are no degrees of Consciousness. It has no attributes, no properties, no qualities, no states." Yes to that. No to the rest. Conscious being is a Process, a Process of being, abstract, neither noumenal or phenomenal. Process is not a being, or a thing, or a state... It is not space, or time, or matter, or force, or any God. Process is not matter, it is only of matter and cares not at all about the nature of matter. This particular Process cannot be changed, qualified, affected, divided, destroyed, improved, weighed, or measured. There are no degrees to this Process. It has no attributes, no properties, no qualities, no states. But this process can stop processing and when it does we call it sleep, or death.

What is described is not consciousness... it is awareness, which is even more base level than consciousness.

@@REDPUMPERNICKEL A process implies time and other particles of a system. In such a case, consciousness isn't ultimate reality.

@@hetornhetorn Miscellaneous thoughts: Yes, process implies an assemblage of moving elements, pattern, inputs and outputs. Process is a notion, an abstract notion, a conception, a synthetic product of minds. Process is no 'thing', it is an immaterial existent like movement and pattern and time. Yes, time too is a notion, an abstract notion, a conception, a synthetic product of minds. You know there IS no past and you know there IS no future. There IS only: things... moving. If this is unclear see Carlo Rovelli for a good explanation: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hNiaeaiQt8qWf4U.html Consciousness is the process going on in human beings which enables us to cooperate with each other well enough to make society much more fecund than our UNconscious ancestors could manage (in obedience to evolution's prime directive, replicate). We have started to explore the details of the conscious process only very recently, Psychology, Economics, Sociology, Linguistics, etc. "consciousness isn't ultimate reality" Quite so, because ultimate reality is inconceivable. Every content of the conscious process is strictly an idea and an idea is not the thing that the idea is about. An idea is merely a fantastically topologically transformed encoded reflection. Easy to imagine for those of the opinion that a brain has something to do with thinking. For those who think otherwise I'd very much like to read their theory outlining how it works. ttyl

@fynes leigh -- Words cannot describe entering into The Real. And one must ne'er cast pearls before swine (especially on line). Do you know what is REAL KNOWLEDGE? You obviously did not read, nor comprehend the excerpt of H.W. Percivals 'definition' which I posted. AND THAT's fine.

The interview as necessary works backwards from conclusions to thesis. It may very well be the case that consciousness is the easiest most appropriate fittest way for a being to survive and reproduce or at least that consciousness arises from innumerable but reasonable evolutionary mutations. It's not clear that it is or how. Let's reverse however. We can know that our subjective experience exists (else we must doubt exactly everything). An objective world outside of our subjective experience, or that our subjective experience is a representation of objects are both assumptions. Even if we pressume a material objective world beyond our senses, it can be demonstrated that perception is not accurate. Further it can be proven statistically that a model optimized for fitness rather than accurate representation would always evolve. Three unanswered questions emerge: how far from accurate representation has our perception evolved? Can we even observe objective reality? Does objective reality exists? Once we seriously consider these questions and realise their presummed answers are thus far groundless, we realize that that natural sciences are back on the table. They deserve a fundamental rethink.

6:40 Don I don't agree with this line of logic. There seems to be much more at play with wave/particle duality than just our ability to measure; some "higher" explanation based on more complex behaviors at the quantum level. in my opinion humanity just hasn't adapted to enough novel stimuli in within the universe to be able to break down all behaviors in the universe. Taking an approach through cognition instead of physics I would suggest that since our brains produce our individual realities based on our subjective experience and environment, this limits the amount of reality we can possibly create for ourselves, since we have to arrive at potentially new forms of perception or viewing reality through some level of exposure and being able to realize that exposure. What I'm arriving at is that wave/particle duality is an example of the human organism (all of us together) unable to grasp a complex behavior through an inability to measure it with the tools that we currently have at hand.

7:38 Yes I agree with your models! the overall accuracy of information within humanity is one based on fitness & survivorship, rather than on truth. I'd warrant humans cooperatively communicating in large and/or more complex groups can come up with much more complex rationalizations of phenomena and behavior that may not be accurate on the individual level, but overall give an positive trajectory for that group's survival

It's not a noun. There is no such thing as consciousness. It is a verb and the verb is process. To be conscious is to be a process. Process is immaterial, abstract. You can't see Process or feel Process or weigh Process . You only see and feel and weigh matter. It is the movement of the matter that is the process, not the matter itself. This is why and how being conscious has an immaterial flavor.

So you're saying that whenever a mouse is presented with a predator, it would somehow modify its DNA so that its offspring will have the coat of the colour of its environment? In that case, I could put it in a blue box and scare it, and its offspring would have blue coats.

It's not that complicated. It is assumed that there are already some mice in the population with dark fur. The ones that are more easily detected (the ones with light fur) are killed off, leaving more of the ones with dark fur to continue their genes. Evolution isn't some external entity, it's just the process by which members of a species are narrowed down- much like contestants on a reality show.

No one born without a brain functions. I welcome some supporting evidence for the assertion that there are people born without brains who function normally. Anencephaly is not the absence of a brain. It is an incomplete brain. A brain stem, portion of a limbic brain and some portion of a cortex can function more or less normally if there are not other conditions impairing metabolism. That is not a complete brain, but it is not the absence of a brain.

Just animals.

Another way of saying: In the absence of conscious being only unimaginable nothing?

Doug G by allowing an understanding of time . Our consciousness allows us to perceive the future .

My cat is conscious, people are smart. But he may see that the other way around.

If this was the case we would have been extinct. Obviously it works. Being able to communicate and cooperate at higher level, or what eddie said about predicting future, creativity and many more outweights the "bugs" in sporadic suicides.

wow...

His point is simply that problems in the environment can be solved without consciousness. The same applies for every species.

@@joblakelisbon hoffman is stating that because a computer program can solve novel problems without the use use of consciousness, that our consciousness did not evolve to solve something novel. i dont know about the conclusion. but i think the premise is incorrect. he forgot to mention that the computer program was designed by a conscious being. one could argue that it was our consciousness that played a role in our ability to make computers and write programs, in the first place. i am not being condescending, when i ask if you have studied logic. if you havent, you may not be aware of what i am about to say. but correctness is not the same thing as being logical. logic is a means by which one uses facts and/or assumptions, to derive a conclusion that can be based upon these facts and/or assumptions. and in this case, hoffman is incorrect with his logic. whether his conclusion is correct or not, i dont know. but i can have a completely correct conclusion by simply guessing. if it is a true or false question, i have a 50% chance of being correct, without the use of logic. he is overstepping, in order to justify something that he has biased opinions about - it is a very common mistake.

And we experience this illusion in consciousness.

That seems far fetched. Give me one example of a problem in everyday life that our consciousness solves, but that can’t be solved through computation.

@@Madoc_EU research Penrose and Godel

Sergio If you have a good point, just state it. I know about Gödel‘s incompleteness theorem, and I am not aware of any process that happens in the brain or the mind that would require solutions to non-computable predicates. Which ones do you know that would fit in this category, and that are solved by human minds? I only know Penrose from physics, but I am not aware that he claims the human brain solves this kind of problems. What exactly do you mean? So again, instead of giving me two author’s names and basically telling me to study their complete works because someone on the internet told me so, just state your point directly, right here. I could also ask you to study Hofstadter, but that wouldn’t help in any way.

@@Madoc_EU there's a video with Penrose talking about tiling, conciousness, and quantum mechanics. Look it up, I don't have the time.

Sergio Instead of referring to some unnamed video, could you please simply point out which kind of process the human mind does that requires the solution of a non-computable problem? Please stop referring me to other sources, just make your point directly.

The problem with panpsychism is that it explains nothing about consciousness. It just poses new questions, so if we follow Occam’s razor, it would be wiser not to assume panpsychism. There is a parallel between panpsychism and the belief in god. If we answer the question about the origin of the universe with “God did it!”, that explains nothing and only introduces new questions. A similar thing happens if we answer the question about the origin of consciousness with panpsychism. Nothing is explained, and new questions arise. Where did the universal consciousness come from? Why does it exist? Since it does some form of information processing without a substrate, how does it do that? Et cetera. So panpsychism just replaces some open questions with a mystical black box. I don’t think this has the power to change scientific canon.

@@Madoc_EU Yes. Let me augment with a more direct arg... Ape Urson: I don't 'have' consciousness, rather, I am conscious. I AM conscious. But sometimes, when I am asleep or passed out, I am NOT conscious. This is an indubitable fact and true of all of us. Thus panpsychism cannot be the case because there are definitely billions of elements in the universe that are nightly not conscious. To suggest that a rock is conscious because it expands as it is warmed by the morning sun is to confuse the meaning of the word 'conscious' with the meaning of the word 'reactive'. Yes?

@@REDPUMPERNICKEL We both agree in the assumption that panpsychism is not the favorable position, given what we know. So I am on the same page with you when it comes to the rejection of panpsychism. However, in your additional rebuttal of panpsychism, I get the impression that your view of panpsychism is too narrow. That means, I believe that the view you reject is not the common view of panpsychism, so I regard your line of reasoning as dangerously prone to the strawman fallacy. Here is why: Maybe some proponents of panpsychism argue that a rock is conscious because it reacts to its environment in the way you described. Probably there is someone out there who thinks that this is the case for panpsychism. But this is not the view that I got from panpsychism. My source is the book "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind" by Annaka Harris, plus some interviews that Sam Harris did where the topic was also touched. (This is not a recommendation to you for reading the book, I just want to cite my sources. The book is not bad and contains some food for thought, but I regard it as fundamentally incomplete and not fully thought through.) Rather, panpsychism is an answer to the question why subjective experience exists at all. Why do we have the strong impression that there is one centralized locus in which all of our thoughts, feelings and experiences flow together? We could easily imagine a being that is capable of everything that humans do, without the need for there being a centralized experiencing of oneself. Neither philosophy, nor evolutionary biology, nor psychology have yet come up with an explanation that shows the necessity of subjective experience the way we experience it. What is not necessary must be denied, according to Occam's razor. And herein lies a paradox of sorts: We cannot deny our subjective experience, because we definitely know that we experience it. I am not a philosopher myself, so please take this with a grain of salt: As far as I know, in philosophy this problem is known as the "hard problem of consciousness" (see Wikipedia article with the same title). Even though the problem persists in some shape since the ancient Greeks, it is yet unsolved. Usually, consciousness is viewed as an emergent phenomenon of our mind, which is produced by our nervous system. (I would also subscribe to this view.) But this view poses the hard problem of consciousness. Panpsychism tries to evade this problem by denying consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. Rather, it posits that consciousness is a fundamental property of the physical universe. Just like every particle has mass, spin, charge and other properties, it also has the physical basis of consciousness. When particles are combined in complex patterns, their properties also combine, in ways described by the laws of physics. Similarly, panpsychism argues, our consciousness arises as the way that the myriads of consciousness-bearing particles interact in our nervous system, in a way that is yet to be figured out by physics. At least, this is my understanding of the argument. In that case, a stone would not be conscious because it reacts to its surrounding thermodynamics, but because it consists of particles that all bear a teeny-tiny micro bit of fundamental consciousness. To the human mind, if we somehow could magically experience what a stone "experiences", we would likely not call it "consciousness" at all. In fact, we would most likely not even be able to recognize the "experience" of a stone as such, or as anything at all, because we are so used to our comparatively gigantic experience, which consists of so much more complexity than what happens in a stone. It would be similar to try to detect the motion of a few atoms on your skin. That is impossible, because your skin is used to so much bigger forces. Still, it would be foolish to deny the motion of individual atoms on that basis. That said, I have to say that I still do not follow the path of the panpsychists. Still, I think it is good to know the position that you reject. In the worst case, I just misunderstood you. In the best case, either I gave you new information, or you can show me where my understanding is wrong, so I get to learn something from this exchange.

@@Madoc_EU The panpsychists seem, like many people, to hold that there is some actually existing 'thing' that IS consciousness in just the way early scientists invented phlogiston in their initial attempts to explain combustion. When I was young and foolish I laughed at them because I had no appreciation for the challenge that levitation presents to a world in which the best available tools were boot straps. Unt zo, in appropriate humility, It seems to me... there are two grand realms constituting the totality of being. These are... The Material and the Abstract. Further, its seems to me inevitable that problems will arise if one takes denizens of one realm to be native to the other. Take the word 'process' for example. At first glance one might suppose it to belong to the Material realm. But a few moments contemplation drives one to the realization of its pure abstract nature. There is no 'thing' in the material universe that IS a process. But at the same time there can be no process in the absence of the material realm. A process is always 'of' something. When one investigates the ketchup factory one sees the bottles moving along the conveyors and being filled in the carousel and so on. That is what one sees. The process of the factory on the other hand is synthesized by the mind out of the experience of watching the behavior of all of those disparate elements. The process in the brain in the body in the tank of liquid helium has halted. The body is not conscious because it is the process of the body that is what conscious is. And process is abstract. Conscious is abstract. That's why it feels ephemeral. That's why beer and LSD which alter the behavior of the matter (behavior, another pure abstract denizen) change conscious experience. It's getting late so the ending there is a little rushed but I believe there's enuf to get the gist of my thrust. Yes?

@@REDPUMPERNICKEL I think I see what you are aiming at. What you call "the material" and "the abstract" is better known to me as "physical existence" and "conceptual existence". Physical existence is for things as the keyboard I am typing on, my liver and a chair in my kitchen. Conceptual existence is for concepts, such as the number 7, the quadratic function or the golden ratio. While I would be inclined to go along with you for most of what you wrote, I do not think that your reasoning is a proper response to the hard problem of consciousness (and maybe you also didn't try that). Consider this: There is something that it is like to be me right now, paraphrasing Nagel. In every moment, I am experiencing the enormous collage of all of my thoughts, feelings and impressions, all at once. There is a very distinct and hard to explain feeling to this. This is what I would call "subjective perspective" or "experiencing". The way I see it, the contents of subjective experience is the momentary contents of my consciousness, as experienced by me, right now. And this is not abstract. My subjective experience is not like the number 3, or the property of a number to be a prime. I wouldn't go as far as the panpsychists and say that consciousness is best explained as a fundamental property of physics, but it rather appears to be an emergent phenomenon of the activity of my brain. Still, I could easily imagine a human being that does everything that I do, but without any subjective experience. It mystifies me to some degree why my experience exists at all, but I am quite positive that this will be explained by science some day, purely on a materialistic basis, without any need for esoteric or supernatural beliefs.

You don't need conscious for that.Just the input that petting a lion=death would be enough

There is a difference between consciousness and awareness

@@xenphoton5833 Are you saying that an unconscious person would still be aware that petting a lion would be dangerous? I think you're mistaken.

@@brud1729 have you heard of what a philosophical zombie is?

But the intellect of course does not want to admit it, it's a very hard thing to swallow for it. The thing is that if one looks sincerely at this, humans are still considering themselves center of the universe conceptually speaking, even though this has been disproven from the physical standpoint.

Seekthetruth3000 Nobody knows exactly why a certain traffic jam forms, and what happens to its essence after it dissolves. Yet, it would still be unjustified to believe in an afterlife for traffic jams.

Matthias J. Déjà A traffic jam does not have experiences

jzonkel Still, when we die, there is no reason to assume that consciousness goes on. That’s just wishful thinking.

Matthias J. Déjà I didn't say it did go on. I said they aren't comparable.

Matthias J. Déjà I'm saying consciousness is fundamentally qualitatively different from everything else in the world by virtue of it having experiences, being a WINDOW in which the universe (matter and energy) is LOOKING at itself.

Interesting... What are your beliefs?

what about challenging survival-related deepest fears? As long as somebody goes on in the usual robotic mode, indeed volition is dictated by physicality (unconsciousness, subconsciousness). But as you defy your most inherent instincts (what can only happen when you scent that there is another framework determining reality, and it has to do with beliefs), then you make choices that contradict basic instincts and the commands of physicality, denying your own physical feelings and your tendencies to certain choices. There are several layers of events of choice to be explored before coming to such a simplistic conclusion that we're just byproducts of a physical body. But these layers have to be explored within oneself. One has to be corageous though.

John Morris his name is Bernardo Kastrup.

i agree. It is hard to put an accurate definition on consciousness. I think that I know at least what it's not: 1) a byproduct of the brain 2) necessary for survival purposes. I really believe the brain plays a role in a anchoring a fraction of the larger consciousness system into a physical body, but the brain isn’t the generator of consciousness, it only conditions it.

...he would NEVER interview Bernado..never...

Donald Hoffman is actually staunchly secular, which makes his investigation all the more honest. It's refreshing to see a nonspiritual person be concerned with the problem of consciousness and point out that it needs to be accounted for. We've made great strides in biology, chemistry, neurology, and physics over the last several centuries but when we get to the nature of consciousness it falls on deaf ears, brushed away, trivialized, and ignored.

So maybe it's because ... I dunno

My farts have consciousness too!

@@GeoCoppens Mine are too! They even follow me around sometimes!😮

Dark matter could be the key

@@DaleSteel Rubbish!

@@GeoCoppens soz Steven hawkins

Because there's no such thing as "human consciousness".

?

GeoCoppens read Penrose

Surely Human Consciousness is kinda necessary for running a global civilization with 8 billion members?

What kind of awareness though? Awareness differs vastly from one species to the next. Hoffman doesn't claim to have written programs that create aware species - but he does show very clearly in both observable biological life and computer simulations that life does not evolve to see external reality as it is - life evolves to identify fitness points in the environment. This is a stunning realisation in of itself - his work on consciousness is actually less interesting than his work on evolutionary game theory which is likely to become the standard model of understanding perception in living beings.

@@joblakelisbon what is so mysterious? you can't see it because you are it.

Not really - he publishes his work in academic journals - they are available for other scientists to debate, improve upon and disprove. He is merely taking a novel approach to the hard-problem of consciousness by attempting to reverse the order in which the problem is addressed. If you look at his proofs on human perception and evolutionary game theory, they're extremely persuasive.