Note that this video should be seen as an introduction into consciousness. Many of the talking points, such as artificial intelligence, Turing tests, animal cognition, ethics… etc., are fascinating enough to warrant a video of their own. Part of my goal for this video was therefore to probe for subjects for future videos, so did anything in particular caught your interest that you would like me to dig into in more detail? Let me know!

This. Is. Brilliant. I really have nothing else to say. You literally do the best literary criticism on KZfaq my friend :)

I think the debate surrounding the ethical treatment of other beings of "lesser consciousness" is the most interesting as it makes me feel the most unease when I really sit down to think about it. Your Okja video was especially unnerving and made me question many things I took for granted. Thank you for your great analysis as usual.

Thank you for existing. You make critical thinking not just cerebral but emotional and romantic. An approach to the study of the world, humanistic and sensitive devoid of prejudices, absolutely necessary in the planet in which we live. A greeting from Spain Sorry for my English I do not speak it.

I purchased Ernest Becker / Denial of Death thanks to you. Your videos are very important because it’s bringing knowledge that isn’t mainstream to the masses.

Saw a clip of Annihilation in the video. Maybe do a video about it since it was a very cerebral movie about self-destruction and the concept of life's meaning. Other than that great video about consciousness!

I really love Frans de Waal's work, and I strongly recommend getting acquainted with it to anyone interested in the subjects mentioned in this video. He deserves more recognition. And yes, people treat consciousness as something dogmatic. My Postgrad supervisors (specializing in social psychology!) had never heard of him before I introduced his ideas and showed no enthusiasm about them afterward. Great vid as always.

Regardless of what your decide to speak on, your videos always leave me with goose bumps. You always manage to distill a sense of how a topic /feels/. It's brilliant. Please keep it up!

You should do a video about HBO's Westworld.

There have been so many great sci-fi movies in recent years.

Wonderful video! I've done a lot of work studying whales and dolphins over the past few years. Working with these animals leaves no doubt in my mind that these animals have a significant capacity for conciousness. I would even argue that it rivals our own. They celebrate birth and mourn death. They are immensely social, astoundingly intelligent and honestly I'm not sure such a lifestyle would be even possible without conciousness. We humans are less alone than we think we are!

OH MY GOD WHY IS THIS VUDEO SO GOOD WHO ARE YOU?

The question is not what consciousness is, but [what is] that which we think we’re conscious of.

You’ve elevated the video essay to levels I’ve never seen before. Your topics are so lateral. I can see the grounding of your talent in an appreciation for archetypes and narratives. Do you find that you learn a lot through the production of these essays? I’m inspired man - keep at it

Awesome work. I always get goosebumps after watching your videos.

In what concerns consciousness i think you can take a lot of interesting ideas in the tv show Westworld. Keep up the good work ;)

Your videos are always incredibly well written and edited and so interesting to watch. You put words on what I have been reflecting on, consciously or not sometimes, while watching these movies Thank you very much for your extraordinary work ! (From a French fan 😄)

Beautiful. Truly beautiful. I must say I deeply envy your ability to so masterfully phrase your ideas and thoughts into a comprehensive essay.

Bro, I don't know how you think of these videos, much less how you make them, but they're amazing. Keep up the great work!

When I watch your videos, I always want to close my eyes and concentrate on the beautiful narration, but then i'd miss out on the equally amazing editing hahaha thanks so much for continuing to make these amazing film analyses

Your videos are something I look forward too and I like to challenge myself with important questions afterwards

Have you thought of looking into the Buddhist definition of consciousness? It's actually quiet powerful because it is well defined. It is "that which is clear and knowing", and so we speak of instances of consciousness that are consciousness of something (as is the case in phenomenology). From this perspective, there is no consciousness independently from instances in time and apprehended object.

Great insight on the evolution of consciousness and how we are constantly expressing ourselves the desire to venture further always seeking for adventure and new limitations to overcome, learning and discovery... As always, looking forward to your videos.. amazing work.. :)

This is a truly special channel. You keep doing what your doing. Im going to be coming to this channel for a long time.

Some random person in comment section recommended me your channel. I am very lucky with this discovery. Magnificent channel.

I appreciate how well refined this video is. You clearly put a lot of work into editing it, as it's all insightful. Keep it up.

I loved this sentence: ... the undeniable elephant in the room is animal agriculture.

Another awesome and brilliant video essay. i am in awe of your perception and perspicacity over a wide range of subjects. Simply wonderful. thank you a million times LSOO

Your videos LITERALLY just keep getting better.

Yesss, I love that you are into the same things I am! Makes me so happy to see you churning out excellent content.

I am forever inspired and fascinated by the analysis, detailed research, themes and observations that you share within these amazing videos. I am always excited when you post new content and I hope you keep these great videos coming....😊

I always love your videos, and this one is amazing - well done! ❤️

There are a lot of things you can explore in next videos about this subject, but one, in particular, is what interesting me more: language. How it's related with conscious. Thank for the video always good

Time after time you never cease to impress me. Can you do a video essay of the process of making a video essay?! Your research and insightfulness from various perspectives about our humanity and culture/art leaves me in awe.

Great Video, I appreciate your respect of science, and also expressing the humility that should be present in us if we truly respected the method of science. You are counted among the thinkers and we need more of you. Thank you.

As always your videos are simply sublime and a true pleasure for me. Keep it up sir!

Amazing video! And I just started reading Frans de Waal's book which is also amazing, even when I already knew the concept matter by heart. Frans de Waal is my hero :D

I don’t comment on KZfaq normally, however you are the only person I subscribe to. I throughly enjoy the philosophical analysis you apply to movies through the medium that you see fit. I take a lot of the lessons in which you enlighten, and reinforce a lot of which I have read in my on readings (specifically Camus and Aurelius) on a daily and thoroughly basis and apply it through my own life. One of the movies that I wish I could see you do would be saving Private Ryan I have my own analysis of it but I would very much bey happy to see yours.

Thank you for all of your regular insight, encouragement and thus understanding to assist my voyage to becoming increasingly consciously perceptive not to mention spiritually connected.

I Love your Videos. The way they are presented, narrated is exceptional. Big Kudos, this Channel is a rare Gem.

Brilliant! love your work and always return to it, thank you for your patience!

Glad I found these, you're a great content creator, with an eye both for impactful visuals and ideas that gives a layer of polish that I must say is impressive. I think you should do some stories of nature, the ones our universe has crafted through chance: These serve to show us what we are because we always identify with whom or what we came from. Our journey of understanding the universe is like a GPS, as you must first have a starting point to do any traveling and it can take you to countless places on the way to one destination.

I'm so glad I support you on Patreon! This was good!

Your video essays are brilliant, your insight is astounding and terrifying at the same time. Please develop a lecture series or textbook, you're a genuine master of behavioural philosophy!

Your voice reminds me Werner Herzog. I could listen to you all day. Perhaps one day you'll make a feature length documentary? I think you have everything to produce outstanding documentaries.

I love this channel, thanks for all the hard work.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE your videos. You are so insightful!

Amazing and enlightening as always!

Good job with the video, keep up the good work.

Dude, I love these videos! Philosophy through cinema, it's brilliant.

A brilliant video narrated with an awesome voice.

Truly beautiful and inspiring message! Your videos are going to have an impact on the studies that some young people begin. I wonder, how are consciousness and metacogitation related? Does consciousness require metacognition?

The quot at the end of the video holds so much more weight than we realize. Thank you for this.

I would love to see an individual video on Annihilation. The film itself serves as a platform for self-destruction and would make for a fascinating study.

Great video, amazing channel thank you. Consciousness is such a difficult topic to talk about as there is so many opinions and views on the subject and Our view are so influenced by our fundamental beliefs.

Fantastic, as always!

Please don't change the thumbnail. It looks great. And the subject matter is really big, I don't know how could you keep the video under 10 minutes.

"Ultimately, moving away from our human-centered approach to consciousness will help us better understand other consciousness in their own self-centered world." I think that will be a long way off, actually. Many of us do that already, but mostly out of pity, or a sense of wonder, or impending loss. These are self-centered concepts too. When it comes to conservationism, it is no wonder the panda is the poster-child, not the rare Himalayan Yak-flea. When we want to promote a vegan lifestyle, we tend to do it by showing the excess of the bio-industry, not the interesting tale of a local artisanal butcher. "The weak are meat, and the strong do eat", is only useful as a plot-device when it is attributed to an 'evil' character in Cloud Atlas who sees his fellow-humans as its' prey, not when it is the modus operandi of every non-human predator in the history of the planet Earth. In short: there is a large group of humans who feel, not entirely without reason, resentment when confronted with some aspects of human behavior. Perhaps this is worth exploring further, too. Bottom line: I sympathize with all concepts you try to tackle here, but the subject-matter is large and so full of calthrops that I seriously doubt anyone can get anything worthwhile from it. But I admire you taking on the challenge, and I for one can't wait to see where you will take this. Thanks, Tom!

As i am studying philosophy, i´ve seen this topics and they are very interesting and deep. I recommend you, as my opinion, to do videos about AI, turing Test, and the possibility of the machines to think, thats a great and exciting theme. In addition, another issue you mentioned is the limit of consciousness, where the text by Andy Clark (Extended Mind) (I like this particular vision) is very interesting and surprising, how far we can place the conscience. It would be great if you treated these in yur videos. Greetings, and good video!

Hey, new to this channel and I love it already!! I was thinking - is it possible that you could make one for 'Into the Wild' at some point? If you think there is enough in there to analyse and discuss of course. But that is just one of my favorite films, which contains a few messages, and explores the innate desire of abandoning everything you've ever known in search of a meaning or a seemingly better purpose in life. :)

fantastic video!

I would love to suggest something but whatever you do I'll be impressed... This quality of film is rare on KZfaq these days... Thanks :)

Love it. Definitely interested in a consciousness series.

Looking forward to future videos on the subject. As a human being, I'm obviously very fascinated with it... As any human would be. And yes, I am totally a human being. I received high marks in being human. Carry on, please.

WOW !!! JUST WOW!!! I LOVE YOU MAN!!!! THIS IS EPIC !!!

Very inspiring

I put few videos onto my favourites playlist on KZfaq. This one deserves to be one of them for being beautiful beyond comprehension and having made me cry tears of awe. I've already been vegan and transhumanist prior to watching this, but I'd suppose this outstanding video is sure to make a lasting impression by planting a seed in many people who watch this who haven't given veganism and transhumenism much thought beforehand.

I"m not sure if it was mentioned before but two movies that intelligently talks about consciousness is both Ghost in the Shells and Ghost in the Shell Innocence. Definitely worth a good nod here I think.

Good channel. Congratulations!

Great video. Thank you.

Outstanding video as usual.

This is amazing!!!

all these videos are so great!!!!!

Always excited when you post a new video and this is one of my favorite topics. So is consciousness born from language or did language develop consciousness?

Brilliant intro !

Nicely done. I would argue that true empathy is fundamentally selfish, it is putting oneself in the shoes of another. However compassion is removing oneself from the equation. The terms are often used interchangeably. But I believe compassion is doing the right thing and being considerate from a more pragmatic perspective. I would recommend the writings of Paul Bloom on the subject, particularly his book Against Empathy.

You're a master editor, presenter. Somone should give a you a contract.

PART 1 Here's another view of consciousness. It's in a book entitled "The Origins of Consciousness in the break down of the Bicameral Mind. by Julian Jaynes. His theses is that humans started out with about the same intelligence level as higher animals but evolved to where we are today through the development of language. But the following excerpt from a book review goes into much better for those interested. In Jaynes' view the first humans had a consciousness much like the higher animals. There was a perceptual arena to be sure, but not any sort of recursive evaluation of it. As humans began to communicate with more sophisticated languages, languages with some grammer and structure, consciousness evolved with those changes not into today's version of it, but rather into a situation where decisions faced in novel situations were made based on the linguistic expressions of hallucinated voices. Such voices told people how to act, not in common everyday circumstances but when faced with novel situations. As human beings came together into larger groups teaching themselves to farm and domesticate animals (presumably with the help of their voices), this mechanism evolved along quite sophisticated lines into "the gods" of old speaking to everyone, but with higher gods represented in the voices of leaders, kings, priests, etc. All the idols of antiquity were not merely superstitious projections, the people, all people, actually heard them talking! As language evolved this mechanism became sophisticated enough to support major civilizations like Sumer, Babalyon, and early Egypt, likely also similar developments in India and China. Eventually however, advancing language and more sophisticated social requirements became too much for the mechanism and it began to break down. Even so it did not disappear over-night and evolved into various oracular sorts of phenomena that we find in Greece, Egypt, and elsewhere as history progresses though the last millenium BC. Jaynes traces all of this later evolution through the nature of literature as it appears from the earliest books of the Illiad, the Old Testament, and many other sorts of documents. He points out that the notion of a self-reliant or recursive self is simply not mentioned in the earliest literature and speculates that this is not because people had no words for it, but rather that they had no words for it because they didn't experience it! If all of this seems rather odd, it seems less odd as Jaynes applies his ideas to modern phenomena like hypnotism, schizophrenea, and the imaginary companions of some children. Jaynes here is not suggesting that schizophrenics (to take one example) are simple reversions to a human consciousness of 4000 or more years ago, because in those contexts, what was heard and how it was treated were not pathological conditions but the normal stuff of everyday life! But he does claim that the same physiological mechanisms are at work and that his theory puts such modern phenomena in a more meaningful context than other theories. As crazy as it sounds, I found myself agreeing with him as I got further along in the history and especially into the psychology. Starting out an extreme skeptic I came away at least convinced of the theory's reasonableness. If it should turn out to be true, we are not yet at the end of the story. Consciousness as we presently find it is in great part a product of language as we presently have it along with social context. Looking back from another thousand or two thousand years in the future, it is quite possible we will not recognize ourselves.

Great vid as always! Would love to hear you talk about "Silence" and the paradox of faith & our never ending grapple with the elusiveness/silence of God

This is the only channel where I watch the videos in the normal, 1x speed.

Excellent excellent video as usual. Have you watched westworld? Season 1 is very much consciousness orientated and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic

My new favorite channel

I was struck by what you said about not making humanity the measure of all things.... I've worked with severely disadvantaged communities and we talk about how the "Golden Rule" was applied ... Do unto others as you would have done unto you .... this is familiar to Christians, but it also has a significance in colonialism and how minority groups were treated.... the rule which we used instead was the Platinum Rule: do unto others as THEY would have done unto them. The Platinum Rule in this case is also applicable to animals, and understanding other consciousness...treat animals how they might want to be treated, not how we perceive they want to be treated. Thanks :)

Great video, but I wish you had gone deeper into the full meaning of Umwelt. It's a complicated concept about the subjective experience of the world based on an individual organism's unique perceptions. Anyway your content is excellent and I can't wait to see more of it.

You have a new subscriber. 😊 I'm very intrigued by the idea of machine consciousness and how it would interact with the minds of us biological beings. How would your world view be determined if you saw through different apparatus? If physical pain was not a thing? It's fascinating.

Fabulous!

There is nothing beyond the human imagination. Whatever "new" info we acquire will then become another aspect of mind at large.

Crying here. Beautiful clip.

Echt heel erg mooi

A great source of information for this topic is the work of Jaak Panksepp. He argues for the presence of 7 circuits inside our brains that are involved in the creation of affect. A lot of scientists ignored the role emotions play in the of consciousness. These 7 circuits are present in all mammals and some species birds and reptiles.

Bravo Tom!! Bravo!

awesome!

If consciousness isn’t something higher, granted to you as a person then why do you wake as the same person? Why the continuity? Think hard about that profound question. (As a follow-up to this, i have a second question for you: if you don’t believe animals are conscious how are you sure any other person is?)

As I see it, the critical problem with attempting to form a definite description of consciousness is assuming it is a single thing. The likelihood of achieving understanding must begin with an accurate problem statement. There are many forms of consciousness. Are we talking about waking human consciousness? I think one of the best yet under-discussed is the attempt at description and decontruction by Julian Jaynes in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind where part of his description entails our ability to form metaphor. I agree to some extent but do not limit consciousness to language even though that is a significant complainant. Not just language to communicate things about the environment - animals do that - but to speculate and create fantasy. No indication animals have that ability...or curse. We need to consider different levels of consciousness. Frequencies, if you will. Based upon experiments we appear to be the only species that are aware of our own personal mortality - something William James expands upon. We are also conscious of being conscious that is at least being the locus of perception in a place and time. These are both characteristics we have not found in animals. We can also moralize which is an ability without which there could not be civilization. Without this ability of self reflection then other forms of consciousness must be more or less automatic in there response to being. Is the person who goes through an entire life never questioning their actions, never viewing them from the perspective of those they affect, never contemplating what happens after death, is this person fully conscious in a significant way or simply the product of learned responses to stimuli with the sole purpose of survival? Is this an animal? We may be hamstringing our inquiry by thinking we are looking for some thing called consciousness when in fact it is a continuum like the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. We can expand our perception of reality or contract it based upon choice; and it is this offer of choice which sets us apart. "I am. I have choices. What am I going to do about that?"

Great as always :) Could you sometime do a video on the Matrix Trilogy many fascinating subjects there :)

I love all your videos. Please do "It's all about love" 2003

Beautiful

Love the new video! Would it be possible for you to do an analysis of the 80s movie "Say Anything"? It's a beautifully and underrated romance movie that I'd love if you could analyse

but the question is, are we even conscious ourselves? Take for example a perfect robot. That robot would be able to feel, smell, taste, see ect... just like any human being, and it would also reacts to such inputs in the exact same way a human would. Would that make it conscious? Does a robot reacting to things in the same way a conscious being does, make it conscious? I don't think so, we attribute consciousness to something more deeply built within ourselves, where the robot would just copy the "input=>output" of a conscious being. With that in mind, can we really say we are conscious? How are we different? We take pride in thinking we are conscious but isn't "I think I am conscious" just the output to the input "are you conscious" that a robot would choose to make the other person think it is conscious? Are we conscious, or do we only think we are conscious? Is consciousness just something we invented to put ourselves above other beings such as animals, just like we believed for centuries that we were at the center of the universe, in a preferenced frame of reference? PS: great video as usual, but now I can't sleep, I'm thinking too much

What an erudite contribution this video is, thank you.