😂😂😂😂

😂

Your red or my red? I don't believe you will be able to fight in that condition, buddy.

@@user-zn4pw5nk2v fair point

@@user-zn4pw5nk2v eh, I assume both of our brains bleed red if they are cut open ;)

Nice to hear! Remember that living a life with other things than religion is just as valuable, moral and beautiful, in the case you are not into religion anymore.

That's great .

I escaped the CBGC

Crazy, similar experience here. Something about pondering consciousness is so comforting these days.

Sadly Alex doesnt read comments

Heh, I was just about to make the same engine analogy. You wouldn't cut up a motor in search of the motion it produces at the wheels - it is the functioning whole of the motor from which the motion emerges.

Well, we do know that the original signal we interpret as red is derived from the red cone cell. If you google 'protanopia visuals' assuming you have normal eyes, you can see that if you lack the red cone cell you simply cannot see red. If we ever built a computer that's powerful enough to simulate every atom in a human brain, you could isolate that red cone cell signal and what happens to it inside the brain. But then of course even if you did manage to trace it through the brain all the way until an experience happens, I imagine just as you say we would find ourselves at the same dead end. The hard problem of consciousness is something I doubt we'll ever solve to be honest, that thing is just fucked to think about.

But I don't think a materialist would say that the concept of something "functioning" is _real_ in a way that elementary particles or forces are. At the end of the day, the materialist would never even have to use the word "function" to fully describe an engine: Like everything else, it's just a bunch of particles or waves behaving according to some natural laws. Qualia however seems to be a "real" thing. It's not a concept a materialist could simply discard like he did with the concept of "functioning". Of course he could call it an emergent property, which it probably is, and describe the complex interactions between the neurons that cause the experience of redness, but he can never describe redness itself in terms of materialistic categories.

I think the reason qualia is so baffling, even against your analogy, is that we can assume motion would exist without an observer, but redness would not.

Agreed. More broadly, it can be like calling a verb a noun. That might not always be the case, though. But then context and usage matters, in some cases allowing for identical spellings, at least in English (British or American). Misunderstandings abound. Which is why Alex kept clarifying his points repeatedly. If you say that the parts of speech are not in the same category of a philosophical or scientific inquiry into questions about redness, I would agree. Still, I see enough similarities to make some tentative predictions. Disciplines often overlap.

Perfect analogy. Our consciousness is an emergent property of our brains. Now a lot of us have lost our beliefs in magical thinking, like religion. We became to understand that there is a very high probability that everything that is, doesn't reach beyond the materialistic. But we still have an innate fear of death. Something we evolved with and that exists inside of our ego. This is why we still have the propensity to try and find solutions toward the problem of non existence after death. I believe our consciousness doesn't continue after breaking down. And I have for a long time now believed that we also probably don't have true free will. Still I'm not afraid (anymore) and I live like I do have free will. What helps me accept my own non existence is realising that after death my state will be exactly the same as it has been for billions of years, before I was born. No state. Just try to do your best, try to be grateful for as much as you can and try to live for others as much as you are capable off. Enjoy, accept and experience ❤.

​@youssefalaoui4286 our experience/consciousness of our world/reality is never the same as the world/reality that's supposedly there. It's always s a very tiny interpretation of what is there. Filtered through our senses, biases, filters and preconceived notions. This is why we have different experiences, different opinions of those experiences and why my red might not be the same as yours. These things are mere concepts and emergent capabilities of the fleshy thing made up of billions of neurons.

@@youssefalaoui4286 no. The neurons are real (as far as we know). The experiences that emerge from them, are subjective however. I think you've missed my point. Maybe someone else can explain it better than I'm able to.

But those binary states ultimately can be traced materially if we sat down and went through every signal, to the pixels appearing in on the screen. And that’s a picture of the little Mario figure. Alex is not saying that hes gonna actually see the color red somewhere deep in the neurons for the brain (experiencing the color red is redness), but that if we traced those neuronal pathways and its connection to the occipital lobe through the eyes, there is no conceivable or possible physical explanation of what redness is. Positing that we can see something represented physically in another form (transistor states rather than neuronal potentials) through our own conscious subjective experience is not an explanation of how conscious subjective experience arises from physical phenomena, it only delays the hard problem.

But we can identify the qualitative properties of Mario as present in a particular location on the screen. However, when it comes to qualitative aspects of mental images such as geometric structure and colour, the same cannot be done.

“There is no hard problem of consciousness.”

4:24

But if you imagine "red" without actually seeing it, then what makes that "redness experience"? There isn't any red, but you are still able to create "redness experience".

That was my exact reaction to that as well. Just as imagination or entire dreams aren't going to be found when you cut open a brain, it's explained by exactly what he articulated. The mind obviously doesn't materialize objects into the brain when we think, it's purely experience caused by brain chemistry.

@@GospodinStanoje You would be recollecting the redness you interpreted from light. This example of redness is an obtuse way to just talk about the hard problem itself, as how you get from any type of brain activity to an experience is a complete mindfucker.

Correct - it's a category error to think of 'consciousness' as an object. It's also an idea that's decades out of date in psychology and neuroscience. We're talking early to mid-20th century ideas, like the search for the 'engram', which were abandoned in about the 1950s when people like Donald Hebb figured out how neurons work together within the brain. Unfortunately, many 'philosophers of mind' (let alone journalists, like Andrew Gold here) seem to be a century or so behind the science.

"a shadow"

I agree. I come from the embodied cognition camp, where mind and selfhood are processes of constitution. It's guys like Alex that haven't really read much of the literature and thus are stuck in outdated Cartesian-physicalism dialectics, based on flawed mechanistic metaphysics.

​@@evangelium5376 Indeed, since the formulation of the hard problem of consciousness, which involves locating qualities such as 'redness' and other products of consciousness either in a physical place or assuming an irreducible stance from the material to the platonic, numerous criticisms and approaches have emerged attempting to address these issues. For example, from the perspective of systems and process philosophy, these products are considered emergent constructs in multivariate processes. Obviously, when you open a brain, you do not see 'redness', but through techniques like CT scans, it is possible to observe the neural networks executing the 'redness' process. This process is the result of emerging memory and nervous interactions forming ideas and images in the brain. Why do we see images that do not exist in reality? Because they exist as memory processes where we remember them or even 'draw' them mentally in an emerging neural process. It's like an old video game cartridge: someone asks where Mario is, jumping and defeating mushrooms. Opening the cartridge reveals no Mario, no mushrooms; even dismantling each chip and examining them under a magnifying glass, none of this is found. However, we know they exist. Of course, their existence is manifested only during the game process with the console, and it's viewed on the TV. It is the sum of those parts and does not exist in a Platonic universe; it is simply the emergence of a material process. To see it would mean interpreting the language and processes that emerge from the interaction of all parts.

@@Grim_Beard To that I can only say that the subjective experience of red is OBVIOUSLY the experience of a THING, not a “process”. There’s a visual component of my subjective experience, and THAT component, which IS red, is a thing, not a process. Just like the round components of, say, a billiard game are objects, not processes. A process would be for my experience of red to turn into an experience of blue (or of sound, or pain, for that matter), by SUCH processes couldn’t BE RED even in principle: they could be fast or intricate, but not colored - so to call a process “red” is the actual category mistake. Colors are indeed properties of objects.

I get his point I just disagree with his conclusion. He uses the “redness” problem to illustrate it but for me it falls apart in the same way trying to “find” love does. We cannot define what love actually IS as it’s also a concept or collective of processes. We can talk about love in many ways and experience it even if it’s “unfindable” in the sense that we cannot cut open the brain and see it. We know a lot about how the brain processes information and how those processes can be altered through physical manipulation which seems like ample evidence that the mind is simply the term we use for the end result of brain activity.

Consciousness is simple. I wasn't conscious of what you wrote till I looked and read, then I was. There is no mystery to it. Primary thought is what we call sense, the rest stem from this original. Where did redness come from ... sense experiences.

i dont think many people miss his point, more like they ignore it becouse they subconciusly considered it and came to a conclusion. that being it doesnt hold its weight in reality. there is absolutly no reason to assume that the mind is anything more then neurons firing, given all the science and experiments we can alredy do to actively alter the "Mind". therefore this question gets perfectly answerd by people explaining the origins of "redness" in patterns of neurons. Assuming there is anything more to it and then using said asumption as proof that the mind is anything more then neuron patterns is a circular argument and not worth considering. now if we instead argue a mind exist and the proof is a subjective interpretation of the same reality, then we are back at the "redness" question but it disproves the existence of the mind, since against its easily and reliably explained by neurological patterns. so we are back to square one.

Exactly what Advait vedant says. It's an ancient sect in Hinduism.

@@vaibhavyadav9912 99% sure he's being sarcastic. This is literally what science says our brain is.

I pity every single human being who hasn’t studied complex biology, neuroscience and endocrinology…etc, oh my god life would’ve been waaay less interesting

@@necromancer6405 Wrong. Brain experiments show the brain holds memories and thoughts the same way a cd does. Holographically. Mind isn’t in the brain. The brain is a radio and signals don’t exist inside radios.

@@necromancer6405 What's sarcastic about it? What he says is true. It's our mind and senses that makes up our world around us. Every being sees the world differently. So who's seeing the truth? No one is. Our mind and senses dumb down the True Reality so that we can work, interact and perform action. The phenomenon of local realism which was thought to be true, was proven false in 2022 by a group of scientists. Who also got Nobel for it. Which essentially means no property of matter is absolute. It is us, the seer, who gives property to matter. It is only you, the seer, who's absolute. Check out Dr Donald Hoffman for more. And then if you want to understand how everything fits, check what Advait vedant says.

Precisely. If I were to see a picture on a computer (local), and then I cut open the computer, and (presumably in some magical safe way), look at the combinations of electrons then I would, be able to see the sequence, then reproduce that same sequence somewhere else to see the same image. Could you, take specific electrons stored in electrochemical charges in the brain, to reconstruct in a different context to see the same image?

You are not seeing/remembering Tower Bridge, you are seeing/remembering a certain interpretation of various light wavelengths hitting your sensory organs in a certain way. Those interpretations are not inherent to Tower Bridge. We seem to know, for example, that a dog would interpret the exact same object in a different way. The question is: where do the interpretations themselves exist? We know that the image in our mind -- our mental cinema -- exists. It is, in fact, one of the most imminently knowable things available to us, as close to us as our own thoughts. We cannot doubt its existence. Even a hallucination cannot be doubted qua the hallucination itself. You really did see that talking mushroom. There may be no mushroom in itself, but the image, the sound etc of said hallucination did exist at one point in space and time. Yet, we cannot locate it in space-time. Basically, we seem to have found things in existence that lack any form of material extension. How does that gel with our biological understanding of the brain? In short, it seems we have established the existence of some sort of metaphysical thing. That metaphysical may or may not depend entirely or in part on the physical, but that is beside the point. In itself, the experience of redness, Tower Bridge or that hallucinated talking mushroom cannot be reduced down to something physical, even if they are entirely dependent on the physical.

@@thebrahmnicboy Yes, it's been done with music.

@@andresgarciacastro1783 i heard about a new research on generated images and videos too

​​@@thebrahmnicboyhow do I put this...yes. if you actually had the imaging and stimulation tools necessary, you could trigger the same pathways to get the same response in the person. I've found it weird for a while now that we call that beyond the physical or somehow not fully physical.

Yes, but redness is an experience facilitated by software, not hardware. A computer without software can't produce anything like 'red', it's just a mechanism. You have to load software onto it before its processing power can lend itself to the 'redness project'. Just as with consciousness, a therapist or other professional can delve into your psyche and discover your 'redness experience', whilst a technician can query the software and understand how it processes redness, and where it stores the 'redness' files. However, if the brain is consciousness, which is to say the mechanism is the software - there is no duality - then we should be able to investigate the brain and find the redness cell, or cellular machine which is responsible. Alex is pointing out that on the basis of current investigations, no such topography is even remotely suspected.

He's talking about subjective conscious experiences or "qualia". The software analogy doesn't work unless the software produces subjective conscious experiences (i.e., if your computer is conscious).

​@@willquinn8993This is a wonderful explanation - thank you.

@@willquinn8993 This relies on the assumption that creating a model for the colour red is an any way different from the generic model creation process that takes place within the brain, interpreting all the senses for improvement of the world model. If someone was to supply me with some foul tasting medicine tomorrow I expect I would be able to add it to my personal model of the world and re-imagine the experience. I suspect I would have no cell or cellular mechine dedicated to the colour, smell, taste, or after effects of this medicine. I find it far stranger that we have a personal learning process for sensory inputs and still have inherited memory that makes us alarmed when babies cry, for example.

I totally agree - Alex is confusing levels here, as explained in great depth by Douglas Hofstadter in his 1979 book "Godel Escher Bach". "Redness" is an emergent property of complex neural and hormonal activity in the brain, just as a photo on a computer is an emergent property of the microprocessor, operating system, image processing software and image file specifications. The distinction between software and hardware is totally irrelevant here: when software is run, it is encoded by material states in the computer's memory, just as the microprocessor itself is encoded by material connections on the microchip. What causes the phenomenon of the photo exist on the computer is the complex interactions between all of these underlying processes, not any one of them in particular.

You make a good point, however we have a clear understanding of how water molecules, en masse, produce the quality of wetness, through their physical and chemical qualities and interactions. We have no such understanding of how neuronal activity produces consciousness, nor why some such neuronal activity produces redness and not chocolateyness or any other quality of perception. My point: you’re assuming consciousness is an emergent phenomenon resulting from neuronal activity, yet we have no clue how this could possibly come about. (Hard problem of consciousness). This leaves open the possibility - perhaps likelihood - that consciousness is not an emergent property of neuronal activity.

not in a specific way, thats just what it does, it does not contribute to some "extension" of itself, otherwise if you could simulate the brain theres no need to have a brain in the first place, why would you wanna create 2 versions of the exact same thing only one is real and the other is just an idea in your head.

The mystery is how would you come to terms with thoughts being material when you apparently cannot locate these within the brain. *"Redness" is just a thought or an idea* is what is challenging to the material idea here

Yes, exactly, a rabbit can feel hunger and you cannot cut it open to find the experience. That’s exactly his point. Where does the experience itself take place.

Consciousness is just what brain chemistry looks like from the inside.

The problem is that you can't find that exact thing in your brain, and the more you get into an explanation you get to an immaterial one, like it is in your brain produced by the collitions of these neurons etc, but it is not, seemingly "matter".

@@comment6449 Why not matter? I don't see why it can't reduce to matter.

And now you see many such heads talking in the comments. Maybe we should replace redness with blackness?

Have you read "Godel Escher Back" by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) ?

@@johnjameson6751 I had. I also have read all of Dennett’s books. And “the redness thing” goes over Hofstadter’s and Dennett’s heads as well.

Maybe I can learn from you then, as you understand about level distinctions, category errors and emergent phenomena. So for example you understand that in sand dunes, grains of sand do not know what is a dune, and no ant in a colony understands its emergent beheviour. Why is "redness" different?

@@johnjameson6751 I don’t get your attempt at an analogy here. Sure, grains of sand don’t _understand_ what is a dune (nor a dune understands what are the grains that compose it), as neither grains nor dunes have minds and intelligence for understanding. That’s just obvious and has nothing to do with reductionism or emergence. That said, a dune can be _reduced,_ ontologically, to the grains that compose it, meaning: the existence of the dune doesn’t imply the existence of anything over and above the grains that compose it. That point, true as it is, has nothing to do with “understanding”. So that’s why I’m confused by what you mean with “why is ‘redness’ different?”? I will suppose you are talking about just emergence, not “understanding” in that odd way I didn’t get, so your question would really be: _why can a dune be reduced to grains of sand, but not the mind (or “redness”, which is an example of a mental property) to neurons? Why is the mind (“redness”) different from a dune?_ It should just be OBVIOUS that they are different. We can intuitively see how grains of sand can compose a big group of such grains, called “dune”. We can even intuitively see, _in the exact same way,_ how neurons and synapses can compose a big structure called “brain”, for a brain is a physical object that is nothing but such smaller physical components. But it’s just as obvious that something like _the subjective mind_ (where “redness” exists) is totally another kind of thing; it’s kinda “virtual”, for lack of a better word, and not a piece of matter composed of smaller parts. It doesn’t exist in the tridimensional space that matter occupies, it _couldn’t_ exist in that way, for to exist _as pain_ (or red) is to exist _as a representation being experienced in first person_ and NOT as a physical structure located in public space _and btw independently of being experienced._ Either you understand this and therefore will consider it fully obvious and undeniable (literally, just as obvious as to say that abstract numbers can’t be made up of physical matter, or vice-versa), or you just don’t get it at all.

Indeed, since the formulation of the hard problem of consciousness, which involves locating qualities such as 'redness' and other products of consciousness either in a physical place or assuming an irreducible stance from the material to the platonic, numerous criticisms and approaches have emerged attempting to address these issues. For example, from the perspective of systems and process philosophy, these products are considered emergent constructs in multivariate processes. Obviously, when you open a brain, you do not see 'redness', but through techniques like CT scans, it is possible to observe the neural networks executing the 'redness' process. This process is the result of emerging memory and nervous interactions forming ideas and images in the brain. Why do we see images that do not exist in reality? Because they exist as memory processes where we remember them or even 'draw' them mentally in an emerging neural process. It's like an old video game cartridge: someone asks where Mario is, jumping and defeating mushrooms. Opening the cartridge reveals no Mario, no mushrooms; even dismantling each chip and examining them under a magnifying glass, none of this is found. However, we know they exist. Of course, their existence is manifested only during the game process with the console, and it's viewed on the TV. It is the sum of those parts and does not exist in a Platonic universe; it is simply the emergence of a material process. To see it would mean interpreting the language and processes that emerge from the interaction of all parts

i‘ve spent some time with this question and here‘s a reframing of the issue that might help you: there seem to be first person experiences that are completely inaccessible to anyone but ourselves (as opposed to third person attributes that can be accessed by anyone). Even if my brain was scanned and every neuron was monitored, if I feel an itch or see red no one knows what the experience is like, unless I describe it and they can remember having had a similar experience. There‘s an example of a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the human eye, colors and brain interpretation, but the scientist is blind and so will never truly know what it is like to experience redness f.e. So there seems to be something beyond third person attributes that seems to emerge when things with third person attributes are combined in the right way, but how? What changes about a dust cloud f.e. if I add more dust particles and swirl them around in one way instead of another that could create a new category of attribute? It’s a construction problem. In the same way that it doesn‘t matter how much wood I have, I can‘t make a marble house, it‘s just not the right material. But maybe there is a way to add up things with purely third person attributes to something with first person attributes, or maybe there‘s a foundation of first person attributes beneath even the simplest particles which allows them to combine in such a way. If we manage to answer the “how it‘s possible“, we‘ll still have to wrestle with “why it happened“. I don‘t think there‘s any reason why evolution should prefer a conscious creature over a philosophical zombie that acts in just the same way but lacks any first person sensibilities. I honestly think it‘s with pretty good reason that some philosophers look at these questions and just toss the idea of personhood alltogether.

@@RojirigoDinteresting example. I‘d reply that I can point you exactly to where mario is - on the TV (and no where else). If we examine the cartridge closely we can actually find the code written on it and none of it involves “mario“, but some of it involves direction to place pixels at certain spots on a screen. There is no additional “mental image“ of the game within the cartridge that is inaccessible to us, as far as we know. There is nothing that it is like to be a game cartridge, we assume. If I waved a wand and turned myself into a Super Mario N64 cartridge I would not see the game running, instead I wouldn‘t have any experience whatsoever. In that sense I actually feel like this example helps to illustrate the problem very well, but doesn‘t provide an answer to it

​@@RojirigoD I think this kind of misses the point. It's not so much about locating redness within the brain, the question is: can we describe subjective experience in physical terms, even in principle? If I could enhance my brain to make it perceive a 4-th color, what would it feel like? Would it map onto something I can already experience or be totally new? Would the experience be determined by the physical nature of this information or by the structure of the neural network or actiavtion patterns that represent it, and in what way?

​@@AlexanderShamov It begins by recognizing how we are talking about an emergent process, not a magical thing floating in a neuron but "emergence" as a result of interactions, we are talking about a systemic neuronal process. Neurons in different parts of the brain do not work in isolation; instead, they integrate information from multiple sensory sources to create a unified perception. This happens through networks of neurons that cross various regions of the brain. At the same time, past experiences, stored in memory, play a role in how we interpret and give meaning to information. The hard problem would simply be a technical challenge of mapping and understanding these processes, rather than a deep ontological mystery. ​"can we describe subjective experience in physical terms, even in principle?" Although it is possible to describe subjective experience in physical terms, this does not mean that it is a simple or directly intuitive process. Subjective experience are probably emergent properties of the complex interaction of neural systems. This means that although the basic components are physical (neurons and their connections), the way they combine and interact gives rise to something that is not easily understood only with the language of this mapping. We are talking about a complex mapping processes of this neural networks in the brain. It's similar to describing Mario jumping and killing a mushroom if we sees electrical currents reading bits from the console to the monitor, but we don't have the monitor yet, just the electrical currents and we see how the bits interact between the microchips. We can see which electrical currents in which parts of the bits are executing Mario's jump, which parts are processing the jump, but without the monitor it is just a technical problem not to see this process graphically, although we are seeing it in a way if we observe the currents and bits processing on the chips. Although we are still in progress understanding how physical processes are accurately interpreted in subjective experience, the constant advancement of neuroscience and technology promises to make this understanding better. The video game analogy mentioned above illustrates that, although we do not yet have "the monitor" to directly visualize how neural activity translates into subjective experience, we do have access to "the currents and the bits" (neural activity) and are learning how interpret these signals.

I think I probably lean that way.

if you are able to "know that a mind is experiencing redness" that doesn't answer the question of where the canvas that the "experience of redness" is painted on.. the "internal world" of the brain, so to speak. we know it's tied to the brain, we can observe changes to it brought about by prodding the brain, technology may evolve enough to be able to display a video on a screen of the image of a red object that you see in your mind's eye through a helmet scanning your brain activity, but none of those contributes to understanding if all of these phenomena that we can interact with and affect, actually exist or not.

A counter argument would be that you are relying on a belief that science “will eventually” find physicalist explanations for qualia, which is a belief that you cant justify with current science. Current science provides no explanation for why or how we have these subjective experiences at all.

I disagree, I think qualia arguments are extremely convincing. The world doesn't look like, taste like, smell like, or sound like anything unless there is an agent there to see it, taste it, smell it or hear it. Such things don't "exist "in" the world" yet we know they exist by direct experience. I believe this makes it impossible to reduce things to "material composition" because in order to be "made of something" it must exist in the material world. Qualia and other mental phenomena like thoughts, have no material composition. You cannot show me the location or mass of the thought of an apple for example.

I'll try to explain. The general idea behind the problem is that, if we suppose our minds are basically like really complicated computers, we would expect them to act kind of like input-output machines just like computers. Our brains would take inputs, do complex operations on those inputs, maybe use some data from the memory, and then spit out outputs. To take a simple real-life example of this, consider the pain reflex. Nerves of the skin detect a hot surface, the signal travels to the spinal cord and then back to the muscles which react to pull you away from the surface. Input = hot surface, output = muscle reflex. This particular event works nicely with our current understanding of computation. What this model does not seem to explain is any step in the middle between the input and output, in our own "inner" world, of qualia or consciousness. When we see red, that's not an "output" per say, because it's an entirely "inner" experience. It's simply not in the realm of possibility, not even in the vocabulary, of computer engineers to make something in the "inner world" of a computer (with our current knowledge and capabilities, that is). Of course it is possible to argue that we simply need to learn more in order to be able to explain how, physically, the experience of "redness" could be created. I think, however, that this new understanding would have to be something very radical, not just along the lines of what we've discovered previously, because as I explained, our current understanding can be distilled down to inputs -> computation -> outputs, which leaves no room for an inner world.

Sign of the Omnipresent Universal Consciousness

@@theunclejesusshow8260 no lol

@@theunclejesusshow8260 why do we worship Jesus, Jesus was a F4ggot

The problem is that we have yet to find even one single way of creating experiences. We don't know what they're made of, we simply know that they have something to do with brains. So can we make a sensor and a software that recognise red electromagnetic waves? Totally. Can we create redness (the experience) with those components? Nope. That system can only predict when our mind will create redness when exposed to the recognised wavelengths, but it can't create it. So what is redness? We have 0 idea.

@@tacitozetticci9308it’s evolution it’s there for survival omg

The computer doesn't experience its applications. We do experience red - or pain.

I can't use my eyes to see what's in my mind.

But how is a computer screen actually interpreting pictures? This doesn't make sense to me, it's just representing them. Or do you think the computer screen has actually subjectiv perception?

agreed. This may be the worst take Alex has ever had lol. Smoked too much weed when he made this take

@@tollictollic3610 Even if you don't know the details of how a digital camera works that does not mean it is reasonable to assume that the pictures are not in the camera, in the same way, even if you don't know about the details of how the brain works, that does not mean it is reasonable to assume that redness and other subjective experiences are not in the brain. You could have a camera that doesn't store the pictures inside but uploads them to the cloud, in that case, you can test that hypothesis and place the camera in different locations, in some locations you would have access to your pictures while not in others. The same test can be made with a brain, to my knowledge, all tests so far point to a mind located in the brain. I would be glad to know if you have evidence to the contrary.

@@MC-ep8cu you don't understand the problem of consciousness - which is a riddle that loads of scientists work on, not Alex' stupid idea

Basically, when someone 'visualizes' redness in their imagination, on what is that being projected?

@@Kobriks1 We didn't design the hard drive and we barely understand how it works. This is like someone in the 16th century being given a hard drive, told it contains music, and when they cut it open they don't find it. Of course they won't. They don't understand how the physical material inside the hard drive stores and communicates the song.

@@Kobriks1 And what is that hard problem?

@@pawelstuglik4737 Alex is talking about subjective conscious experiences or "qualia". The computer drive analogy doesn't work unless the movies or songs stored in it are subjective conscious experiences of the computer drive (i.e., if the computer drive is conscious). Now, if computer drives are in fact conscious, then that brings up a lot of interesting ethical questions: can computer drives suffer? Is it immoral to store things in a computer drive that they experience as painful? Should laws be enacted to protect the conscious well-being of computer drives? Of course, if computer drives lack consciousness, these questions are non-sensical, but then your analogy would also be non-sensical.

@@Kobriks1 I think what th3walrus said makes sense. You asked since we know how neuron works down to the level of atoms themselves, but nothing about these atoms say anything about what is being experienced? You need a whole infrastructure to interpret these signals. In the computer, it's the CPU and GPU computing, interpreting and rendering these bits of information (which are just 1s and 0s really, on their own). In humans, the brain is the infrastructure that interprets these signals according to a set of rules that was taught to it before (if you can experience "redness", or close your eyes and "recall" this redness, it's because you were taught as a baby that the experience of the lightwaves in this band of frequency is associated with the concept of the color red). But this infrastructure is more than just the CPU & GPU in computers, and more than just the brain in humans. You're a biological machine that has millions of sensors and actuators (inputs and outputs). When your optical nerves in your eyes were hit with a certain kind of information (the color red, for example), the signal is sent to the brain to interpret it and contextualize it to make it your experience. Similarly, the computer has keyboard and mouse inputs for example, which are giving the whole system bits of electrical signals, which would be interpreted as letters typed. If you press R-E-D on your keyboard, and the word shows up on screen, or the color shows up on screen (i.e. an output device), the information shown to you was heavily interpreted. You think it's "a terrible analogy that just obscures the essence of hard problem". I think it's a great analogy that pointed out the ridiculousness of expecting to see interpreted information (conceptual redness in the brain, or movies or music in the computer) independent of the infrastructures (the entire human nervous system, or all of the components connected to a computer) that was used to interpret the raw data (bits in computers, or biochemicals and bioelectrical signals in a human body).

@@spiritrealminvestigator6342I was talking more about the idea of "immaterial things" like redness having a physical representation. Whether we're talking about subjective experiences or a book, song, whatever. These qualia are what happens when you stimulate the brain a certain way (or simulate that stimulation). They don't exist beyond that. I don't see anything mysterious here.

so we just need better brain chips to read our mind and problem solved

But that's not true. We are tempted to think that when we look at a red rose, our mind or brain generates an 'inner picture' of the rose - which is what we perceive. Where is this picture? Where is this experience?

​@james1098778910 in all good faith: what do you mean by "where"? If you mean physically where, well in several places. It's precisely the location of the material that stimulates your perception of whatever it is you are perceiving. I really don't understand why it can't be explained by the particulars of perception, surely you don't think perception is infallible? I mean your brain could be mistaken and actually be interpreting something that is blue, this is just as equally the "location" of the phenomena as something you are soberly percieving

We can find the brain circuits associated with redness, but they don't have the property of redness themselves. Just like a photon has a wavelength associated (by humans) with redness but not the property itself.

recall does not explain the experience of redness

⁠​⁠@@silverstorm819 what are you doing here, youtube is for people who are 13+ years old. Go and play with gravel or something.

⁠​⁠@@silverstorm819 what are you doing here? youtube is for people who are 13+ years old. Go and play with gravel or something.

​@@silverstorm819what could *possibly* go wrong?

As someone who is interested in the mind I am sure he'll be tempted. Whether he will or not, who knows. I very much doubt he'd be up front about it (at least initially) as he'd have to gauge his audience's reaction to it.

Just DON'T mention it around Hitchens

After reading some of those comments I sure hope so. People are so clueless on this topic.

I sometimes think that mind is to brain what picture is to monitor. A picture is an emergent property of some monitors that fulfil a certain set of requirements. But I wouldn't say that the "whole" of a functioning monitor is bigger than the sum of its physical parts. The emergent property "picture" is fully contained in the physical state of the monitor at the given time. As in, if you know where every electron "is" inside the monitor, you know what color and intensity each pixel is as well. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this analogy.

@@bluevayero Please bear with me. For the monitor is to picture analogy, yes the whole is the same as the sum of its parts, because the monitor along with all the tiny pixel lightbulbs are just as much material. There is no picture emerging, only the monitor firing up different permutations of tiny lightbulbs. The thing about the brain is that when it fires up different permutations of neurons, beyond just that, the perception of redness emerges. It is one thing to register and translate photons and vibrating air molecules, this is what the physical device or physical organ does. It is an additional thing to PERCEIVE light and sound, which implies the presence of a conscious mind.

I second this, that would be great! Although I am afraid he isn't doing interviews any more?

@@james1098778910 There's a slim chance. It's just frustrating how widespread these confused ways of thinking and speaking are now, and how people are approaching things from completely the wrong starting-point. All one needs to see through these questions is to realize that "mind" and "consciousness" do not denote entities at all, and that 'redness' is by definition a property of physical things (so it cannot be 'in' anything).

This is pretty much what I was thinking on that redness part

Your just saying that because you've never experienced true redness.

Fine, so how is this pattern finding mechanism accompanied by / or identical to conscious experience? What makes information so magical as to generate conscious experience?

@@moonAwake247 its clearly a joke

Immaterial in what way? It's still a thing that physically exists.

Immaterial maybe, but so is gravity. So what? It's still physical.

It is mental. Your mind can pretty much create that.

Generally yes, the visual cortex is active while vividly imagining sight. Anecdotally, not everyone seems capable of this.

@@dalebewan Thanks for that. While I do have a difficult time imagining colors, I have a much easier time picturing objects in space and viewing them from multiple perspectives which has helped a ton with learning human anatomy. Do you know what area of the brain that might correspond to?

A fellow Lehar reader.

@@Drkon6 Good to hear! That man really opened my eyes to what perception is and isn't-allusory though it may be. Some may be mere illusions, but that doesn't make them any less real.

Where in the brain does this process occur? Demonstrating the production process doesn't necessarily pinpoint the location of the final product. The brain triggers chemical and nerve reactions to generate an image, but where does the concept reside once the image is formed? The red can only be experienced subjectively by the person, but how and where it is processed remains a mystery. It's akin to a house where you can see and hear a party but can never enter to see and experience it.

Alex explains that he isn't talking about the connections of our neurons in our brains, or the wavelength of the light, but the experience itself. You are misunderstanding.

​​@@philippegauthier5922 I've rewatched and you're right, but I'm more confused now. I honestly can't imagine beyond that. It's far easier for me to put a parallel with ANNs, and even if we can probe to check everything that goes through them, sometimes it's hard to pinpoint where (or how) they decide that something is a cat and not a dog. But as they don't experience consciousness, it probably is not a fair comparison.

@@ghsinoara You're confused because you're trying to interpret what was said based on your knowledge of the brain and computers. But Alex is referring to your experience, which you knew about before any of that other stuff. Just look at your own experience and you'll see directly what Alex means by 'red'.

But there js no red square in the computer monitor. The red square is in your subjective translation of the wavelength of the screen

It’s extremely difficult to get people to escape from the conceptual illusions that they’ve been subject to for ages and which are constantly being reinforced to them by 99% of people who discuss philosophy of mind. It’s just such a shame that people like Peter Hacker don’t get more publicity, and people who spread conceptual confusions get enormous publicity (e.g. this very channel and countless other thinkers). Needless to say, few people will be convinced in comment sections.

It appears to be more than that. You can have AI models that learn to predict certain patterns way better than humans, yet still have no subjective awareness at all.

Okay. How do these sequence of electrical signals in the brain allow you to perceive the colour red in the way that you perceive it. I don’t think he articulated his point very well but I think it was a good one.