Pet rock owners will be vindicated.

@epicbehavior

Жыл бұрын

Rocks don’t have an objective boundary, just like everything else. That’s what nonduality means.

@brennan353

Жыл бұрын

LOL!

@letsomethingshine

Жыл бұрын

Well, they might say that the fundamental elements of the rock are conscious, if not the rock itself.

@epicbehavior

Жыл бұрын

@@letsomethingshine The atoms of the rock are _made of consciousness_

@goodquestion7915

Жыл бұрын

I'm all for pet rocks. They have more interesting ideas than panpsychism.

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

@turgidturbitity7415

Жыл бұрын

I get all my contemporary philosophy from Simpsons references like all respected scholars

@holynder3181

7 ай бұрын

Mind and matter both exist only in the physical plane if reality.

@dylanevartt3219

3 ай бұрын

​@@holynder3181as opposed to what?

@PhilSophia-ox7ep

Ай бұрын

​@@holynder3181Substantiate that claim.

This episode was super interesting because Alex was the proper level of confrontational, forcing the other side to explain better his point (and failing to really convince me, but that is a different point). You could really see the difference with respect to other episodes, like the one with WLC, where Alex was just a mouthpiece asking questions to WLC in the same order in which they are answered in his book. You could really see that Alex in this case was asking questions he was curious about, and in the WLC episode he was asking the questions WLC needed to complete the argument. As audience, this was much more interesting (even if the topic itself was not particularly interesting to me).

@domenico26752

Жыл бұрын

I totally agree. I would really appreciate if at some point Alex also made a video about validating or disproving the controversial points brought up by WLC, because some of his statements felt a bit over the top (e.g. Jesus' existence accepted by the entire community of that field). But I fear this will not happen, for the same reason he did not challenge him: for some reason he respects him a lot, in almost a reverential way, exactly like he did with Richard Dawkins before he stopped respecting him as a debater.

@deschain1910

Жыл бұрын

Are you saying that consciousness as a topic isn't interesting to you? It's always surprising to me when people say something like that, because it seems so mysterious...

@NeutralMjolkHotel

Жыл бұрын

Do you feel WLC would be as happy to make a return appearance if Alex were more confrontational? He seems to have a level of admiration for Alex but I don’t know Craig’s character so well beyond that.

@domenico26752

Жыл бұрын

​@@deschain1910 I cannot speak for Bobon, but at least for me the problem is more related to the concept of panpsychism, while I appreciate discussions about consciousness, I really cannot relate to panpsychism. So I would not assume that bobon does not appreciate discussions regarding the consciousness.

@HaidukeNT

Жыл бұрын

who is WLC

As one of Goff’s students I can assure you that we have just as many queries with panpsychism as this comment section does

@bellumthirio139

Жыл бұрын

Also Goff has very lucid views on religion and God, would have been nice if you had asked him about it

@daddyleon

Жыл бұрын

I would become mad if I was his student or I would surely be his least-liked student. I think his ideas (from what I've heard over the years) are infuriatingly ridiculous. And I just cannot understand why he'd believe it and why he often gives such "well it's a mystery but I still believe that something is there"-answer and expect others to take that serious.

@sibyloftexas

Жыл бұрын

@@daddyleon I can accept that all life has consciousness and all life is made of the same matter of the universe but to argue that all matter has consciousness seems a bit of a stretch.

@daddyleon

Жыл бұрын

@@sibyloftexas The latter part seems obviously absurd. The first part...I'm not entirely sure about. How would plant consciousness be then, could it even be?

@sibyloftexas

Жыл бұрын

@@daddyleon even though plants can't move, they still communicate with each other. Trees are well known to do so. There's a book about it called The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben. Even one-celled archaens communicate. And we wouldn't be alive without the ones in our cells we call mitochondria. Consciousness is in my opinion what distinguishes the organic from the inorganic.

Loved this discussion. My father and I debated and discussed these issues thirty years ago. Great to see more and more scientists seriously examining panpsychism. David Chalmers has a lot to say on the subject, too. Once a young zen student wanted to go on a pilgrimage. His zen teacher said; "Ok, you must first answer a question. Do you see the rock outside the window?" Student answers; "Yes." The teacher asks; "Is the rock inside your mind or outside?" The student replied: "According to Buddhism, all things are within mind. So, I say the rock is inside my mind." The teacher said; "Well then, you'd better get a good night's rest before your journey, it will be a difficult trip carrying that rock around in your head." To realize the true mind is not an idea, belief, or philosophy...even panpsychism.

@MinimaAmoralia

Жыл бұрын

It’s actually a funny one. But for the sake of precision, in philosophy, people who argue that X is inside one’s mind, do not necessarily mean that there is nothing outside of it

@mmhmm9271

Жыл бұрын

The meaning of that story is just that the "mind" in "all things are within mind" is not one's own individual subjectivity, but universal consciousness. Was it meant to be the basis for the next thing you said, or were the two things not related?

@nyworker

Жыл бұрын

Once a young student started college to study philosophy and consciousness. His father said, "Do you see that tuition bill on my desk?"

@CharlotteNiceAndNot

Жыл бұрын

​@@nyworker 😂

I feel like the question might approach my intellectual limit, because after watching the first 20 minutes my intuition is (to use their analogy) that "what chess pieces are made of" is not an interesting question since they can be made of anything and still be fundamentally just the chess pieces. The deep meaning behind what they are is only expressed through what they do. I'd like to hear pf. Goff give an example of what the answer could theoretically sound like to the question of "what "x" is?" Edit: At 1:26:00 mark I've changed my perspective. I don't see how this view offers any explanatory power. The objection of "you can't smash together two consciousnesses and get one, so how particles can produce consciousness in us" is just one. But as I understood it, pf. Goff defined what electron is by saying "it's something conscious that plays a role of electron"... That's just defining a thing in terms of what it does and adding consciousness for no good reason. I don't want to dismiss a view some smart people are clearly working on out of hand, so of course I assume there's more to it, but that's my perspective so far.

@philipgoff7897

Жыл бұрын

You don't really offer an argument for your claim that there's no good reason to postulate something conscious that plays the role of the electron. The good reason is that this allows us to account for the truths of physics in terms of underlying facts about consciousness, and thus account for the whole of reality in terms of the one thing we have certain knowledge of. A wonderfully parsimonious theory!

@DenysBuryi

Жыл бұрын

@philipgoff7897 I may be out of my debth here, but I don't quite see how there's a need to account for truths in physics in terms of anything. As I understand it, physics tries to get at the best available for us approximation of how the universe works. I don't see any philosophical questions there. There's consciousness on the other hand, which we don't quite understand. But I haven't seen anything so far pointing against consciousness being a side effect of some kind of interaction between cells (maaaybe particles but that's a big maybe). Taking this not quite fully understood side effect and putting it in the basement of the whole universe? You might see it as beautiful, I see it as ugly. Beauty is subjective of course, but I only can find hypothesis beautiful if it works and is beautiful. If it has problems "connecting" it to reality on every point you try.. it may be beautiful, but it no longer is a hypothesis or much less a theory. It's a piece of literature and should be presented as such. All this being said, I always try to remember I don't know shit and may be missing a lot. If you feel like having an extended discussion with me on this topic, I'd love it because currently on this kind of thing I am in some ways in an information bubble. All my friends have similar ways of thinking so I try listening to people whose position I have a problem with.

@phlabass

Жыл бұрын

Yeah. Also "radical"...meh, dunno. Sounds really like Plato reloaded

@serversurfer6169

Жыл бұрын

@@philipgoff7897 "this allows us to account for the truths of physics in terms of underlying facts about consciousness" a) What does that mean? 🤔 b) How does this accomplish that? 🤷‍♂

@DenysBuryi

Жыл бұрын

@@serversurfer6169 I agree, I don't see how this works either. I'm happy Alex questioned pf. Goff a bit on it, though not as hard as I'd like. Because I feel like he never answered this question straight up. What does it mean for consciousness to "ground" mathematical basics of physics. The sentence sounds nice but how do you do it? Just by stating it? Why, then, do you not ground the physics in God for example? Lots of people swear they know it exists as concretely as they know their consciousness exists.

Who would’ve thought the “hard problem” would’ve been solved by recognizing rocks as conscious.

@repentantrevenant9776

Жыл бұрын

It shows how deep the problem of consciousness goes. Views that were once considered utterly ridiculous are now considered more sensible than a simple atheist materialism.

@repentantrevenant9776

Жыл бұрын

@queerdo 💯

@repentantrevenant9776

Жыл бұрын

@queerdo you can especially see this in atheists like Daniel Dennett, who, in efforts to save materialism, end up denying the existence of consciousness altogether. "Eliminativism says 'I have a model of reality... and here's a phenomenon [consciousness]... which doesn't fit the model.' Reason, scientific rigor, philosophical rigor would usually say that if you have a phenomonenon that doesn't fit the model then you eliminate the model. However, if the model is the picture of reality to which you've committed yourself come hell or high water, then you've got to eliminate the phenomenon. And in this case it's a hell of a task, because this phenomenon is phenomality as such. It's the entirety of all experience and all of its discernable properties." - David Bentley Hart

@vhawk1951kl

11 ай бұрын

Particularly when they fell at the fence of defining conscious or consciousness or just refused it. The trick would be to identify whatever is capable of knowledge or knowing, given that all English words with 's c i' in them are derived from the Latin infinitive sciere to know, and or its first person singular scio I know, and are thus words having to do with knowledge or knowing as in science conscience or conscious or with_knowledge the Latin for with -con, plus know or knowledge thus conscious- with_knowledge. What is there in a rock or stone that*can* know?For some reason the mercan savages call stones rocks.

@emptycloud2774

5 ай бұрын

If that is your take away, I am certain you did not listen to the actual argument.

What I would want from this consciousness theory is a demonstration of its ability to predict things. He was never able to overcome the challenge that his theory is just an assertion. He just kept stating that no one else has a complete answer and that his theory answers all the questions.

@APaleDot

Жыл бұрын

Metaphysical theories are not able to form testable predictions. If they were able to, they would be empirical science, not philosophy. Physicalism can't produce predictions either, any more than panpsychism can.

@glenecollins

Жыл бұрын

A position he shares with young earth creationists and flat earthers

@mrbungle2627

Жыл бұрын

Either you’re trolling or I think you guys missed the conversation completely They both described how science’s value is reliably predicting behavior, but not explaining what things are (because what things are aren’t always based on behavior and empiricism). They beat this point like a dead horse. So, he gave an explanation that is meant to be an assertion. He’s not trying to map behavior. He’s attempting to explain what things ARE because what you’re asking (demonstrable outcomes) is what science has been doing to describe how things behave. Not what things are. There’s undeniable subjective experiences that we all consistently have but can’t be described through behavior. He’s attempting another method that has explanatory power outside of empiricism. I’m not sure if the comment section is smart enough to follow this video - or you’re just dying on the hill of empiricism being the only valued metric.

@GreyGreenGod

Жыл бұрын

@@mrbungle2627 just because you question if our current method of deduction can even account for the experience of consciousness doesn’t mean you get to just make claims Willy nilly. We need something we can test against reality.

@glenecollins

Жыл бұрын

@@GreyGreenGod you can make wild claims, what do you think he was doing for most of the interview? 😜. Telling a philosopher they aren’t allowed to indulge in wild speculation and then asset it as fact is pretty much like telling them not to breathe.

Bernardo Kastrup has such concrete and fascinating responses to so many of Alex's best questions.

@jacksonharrison6871

Жыл бұрын

YEA

@jacksonharrison6871

Жыл бұрын

“Idea of the World” is one of the beat defenses of idealism i’ve ever read. I think Alex would love it

@vampyricon7026

Жыл бұрын

As fascinating as they are wrong.

@benaregai9416

Жыл бұрын

​@@vampyricon7026 why do you say so?

@OneEmanation

Жыл бұрын

@@vampyricon7026 what holes do you see in his model?

I've had so many thoughts on this specific concept, so excited to listen rn.

@cameron4332

Жыл бұрын

what are your thoughts?

@frede1905

Жыл бұрын

Me too. Physics is my main subject. But I think quite a lot about certain philosophical questions too, like about consciousness (or, more specifically, qualia). After having thought about it quite a lot, I've come to the conclusion that physics all on its own can't, even in principle, explain qualia. Qualia isn't reducible solely to elementary particles and the laws governing how they behave and interact. Presumably qualia relies on some entirely different quality of reality, in addition to these particles and laws (because the close correlation between qualia and brain activity tells us that these particles and laws must have something to do with the emergence of qualia too).

@TheVeganVicar

Жыл бұрын

@@frede1905 CONSCIOUSNESS DEFINED: Consciousness means “that which knows”, or “the state of being aware”, from the Latin prefix “con” (with), the stem “scire” (to know) and the suffix “osus” (characterized by). To put it succinctly, consciousness is the SUBJECTIVE component in any subject-object relationship. There is both a localized knowing (within the cognitive faculty of vertebrates) and a Universal Awareness, as explicated in the following paragraphs. Consciousness is essentially impersonal, yet it can be expressed via a personal agent, such as many species of animals, including we humans. Higher species of animal life have sufficient cognitive ability to KNOW themselves and their environment, at least to a measurable degree. Just where consciousness objectively begins in the animal kingdom is a matter of contention but, judging purely by ethological means, it probably starts with vertebrates (at least the higher-order birds, reptiles and fishes). Those metazoans that are evolutionarily-lower than vertebrates do not possess much, if any, semblance of intellect, necessary for true knowledge, but operate purely by reflexive instincts, notwithstanding certain notable exceptions to this rule, such as octopuses. For instance, an insect or a jellyfish does not consciously decide to seek food but does so according to its base instincts, directed by its idiosyncratic genetic code. Even when an insect (such as a cockroach) flees from danger, it is not experiencing the anxious emotions that a human or other mammal would experience. See Chapter 11 regarding the concept of will. SENTIENCE EVOLVES INTO TRUE CONSCIOUSNESS: Undoubtedly, the lower species of animals alluded to above, embody, if not true consciousness, varying degrees of SENTIENCE, depending on how many senses it possesses and how complex is its nervous system. Very few would consider a blind worm to be more sentient than a frog! Plants are also sentient but use lower-level mechanisms for their perceptions. To give just a couple of examples, both land-based and water-born plants respond to sunlight (as witnessed by the opening of flowers upon the rising of the sun), and some carnivorous plants can detect arthropods crawling on their leaves. Therefore, when carnists claim that “plants have feelings too!”, they may be justified according to some sense of the term, so the most logical reason for being vegan is not because plants are completely insentient, but simply due to the fact that humans are an herbivorous species. Furthermore, fruit trees indirectly benefit from the consumption of its fruit, since their seeds are spread. Recently, consciousness has become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, involving fields such as philosophy of mind, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroscience. Many such researchers have seen evidence that the brain is merely a conduit or a TRANSDUCER of consciousness, explaining why the more intelligent the animal, the more it can understand its own existence (or at least be aware of more of its environment - just see how amazingly-complex dolphin and whale behaviour can be, compared with other aquatic species), and the reason why it is asserted that a truly enlightened human must possess a far higher level of intelligence than the average person (See Chapter 17 re: the distinction between enlightenment and mere awakening). The processor of a supercomputer must necessarily be far larger in size, more complex, and more powerful than the processing unit in a pocket calculator, obviously. Therefore, it seems logical to extrapolate that the scale of discrete (localized) consciousness is chiefly dependent on the brain capacity of a specific animal. So, then, in response to the assertion made in the previous paragraph, one could complain: “That's not fair - why can only a genius be enlightened?” (as defined in Chapter 17). The answer is: first of all, as stated above, every species of animal has its own level of intelligence, on a wide-ranging scale. Therefore, a pig or a dog could (if possible) ask: “That is unfair - why can only a human being be enlightened?” Secondly, it is INDEED a fact that life is unfair, because there is no “tit for tat” law of action and reaction, even if many supposedly-great religious preceptors have stated so. They said so because they were preaching to wicked miscreants who refused to quit their evil ways, and needed to be chastized in a forceful manner. It is not possible to speak sweet and gentle words to a rabid dog to prevent it from biting you. THE THREE STATES OF AWARENESS: Three STATES of awareness are experienced by humans, and possibly all other species of mammals, as well as many kinds of reptiles and birds: the waking state (“jāgrata”, in Sanskrit), dreaming (“svapna”, in Sanskrit), and deep-sleep or dreamless-sleep (“suṣupti”, in Sanskrit). Human dreaming occurs mostly, but not exclusively, in the state known as “REM” (rapid eye movement) sleep. During this phase, the electrical activity in the brain is more like waking than sleeping. That is why this state is often called “paradoxical sleep.” Scientists have discovered that most non-human animals - mammals, birds, reptiles, and most recently, fish - experience REM sleep, too. The electrical activity found in the brains of these creatures during rapid eye movement sleep is similar to that of humans while they dream, suggesting that animals may dream. Some cognitive psychologists may claim that there are TRANSITIONAL states between waking, dreaming, and deep-sleep, but these states are just that - transitory states between the three main states, in the same way that sunrise, daytime, and sunset have transitional states. Furthermore, there exists the well-known phenomenon of lucid dreaming, where the subject is aware of the fact that a dream is taking place. Beyond these three temporal states of waking, dreaming, and deep-sleep, is the fourth “state” (“turīya” or “caturīya”, in Sanskrit). That is the unconditioned, timeless “state”, which underlies the other three, and is therefore completely transcendental to any temporal state whatever. The waking state is the LEAST real (that is to say the least permanent, or to put it another way, the farthest from the Necessary Foundation of Existence, as explained towards the end of this chapter). The dream state is closer to our eternal nature, whilst dreamless deep-sleep is much more analogous to The Universal Self (“Brahman”), as it is imbued with peace. Rather than being an absence of awareness, deep-sleep is an awareness of absence (that is, the absence of phenomenal, sensual experiences). So, in actual fact, the fourth state is not a state, but the Unconditioned Ground of Being, or to put it simply, YOU, the real self/Self, or Existence-Awareness-Peace (“sacchidānanda”, in Sanskrit). Perhaps the main purpose of dreams is so that we can understand that the waking-state is practically indistinguishable to the dream-state, and thereby come to see the ILLUSION of this ephemeral world. Both our waking-state experiences and our dream-state experiences occur solely within the mental faculties (refer to Chapter 04 for an elucidation of this phenomenon). If somebody in one of your dreams was to ask your dream-state character if the dream was real, you (playing the part of that character) would most likely say, “yes, of course it is real!” Likewise, if someone was to ask your waking-state character if this world was real, you would almost undoubtedly respond in a similar fashion. THE THREE COMPONENTS OF EXPERIENCE: There are three COMPONENTS of experience (or perception) - the experiencer/perceiver (or the seer, known as “dṛk” or “draṣṭā”, in Sanskrit), the experience/perception (or the process of seeing, known as “dṛṣṭi”, in Sanskrit), and the experienced/percept (or the seen, known as “dṛṣyam”, in Sanskrit). This “Seer-Seeing-Seen” triad is a more complete extension of the subject-object dichotomy. One who is self-realized (“brahma-jñāna”, in Sanskrit) has come to understand that this triad is, in fact, singular, since all three components are located solely within one’s own consciousness. That is to say, the aforementioned tripartite process can never be fundamentally separated, and understanding this fact is the basis for genuine knowledge of reality. Please refer also to Chapter 04 of “F.I.S.H” in regard to the ideation of phenomena. In recent years, the term “CONSCIOUSNESS” has been used in esoteric spiritual circles (usually capitalized) to refer to a far more Homogeneous Consciousness (“puruṣa”, in Sanskrit), due to the fact that the English language doesn’t include a single word denoting the Universal Ground of Being (for instance “Brahman”, “Tao”, in other tongues). The word “Awareness” (capitalized) is arguably a more apposite term for this concept. Cont...

@famster2422

Жыл бұрын

​@@frede1905 My main realization is that body speaks about consciousness and believes its conscious. Then on top of that, it turns out that I actually am conscious! I've gone through all the possibilities and honestly I believe it has to be intentional design aka God.

@frede1905

Жыл бұрын

@@famster2422 Why does it have to be "intentional design"? My view is that qualia must be based on some entirely new feature of reality. But that is "just" another feature of reality, in addition to all the features of reality we already know - I don't see why it has to have anything to do with some concept of a God.

I love it. Alex went vicious (British style) on Philip at 1:01:21

@animalsarebeautifulpeople3094

Жыл бұрын

What's the point of any of this when he himself now pays for unwatchable violence against fellow sentient beings for his mere convenience?

@markgallemore8856

Жыл бұрын

Thank you,now I don’t have to eat so much word salad 🥗 before I can get the good stuff.

@dionysis_

Жыл бұрын

@@animalsarebeautifulpeople3094 You guys are everywhere. Stop being so judgy, this kind of arrogance is the reason people have associated vegans and vegetarians with insufferable moralising.

@shwedoo-6035

Жыл бұрын

@@animalsarebeautifulpeople3094 You are not any better with your entitled self gratifying morality. We'll give you a cookie, congrats.

@PauLtus_B

Жыл бұрын

@@dionysis_ Vegans do justified insufferable moralising.

Please get Rupert Spira on. ‘Everything is conscious’ seems incorrect to me. I would describe it as ‘everything is made of consciousness’ or ‘everything is a manifestation within consciousness’ similar to how a movie is a manifestation upon a screen but the screen is the fundamental underlying reality that remains constant. Instead of accepting that consciousness, the one thing that we know for certain exists, is the fundamental substratum of reality, we posit the existence of a substance that exists outside of consciousness called matter and then posit that consciousness springs from this substance which has never been observed outside of consciousness, which seems odd to me. Nothing has ever been observed or could ever be observed outside of the field of consciousness. Again, please get Rupert Spira on

@OneEmanation

Жыл бұрын

You know it!! We wanna see Spira :) I think they would have such a fruitful conversation.

I have so many concerns about this form of panpsychism (and related points made in this video), many of which have been mentioned in this discussion. 1) I don't think consciousness is clearly defined in a useful way. It's presented as something like "how it feels to experience something" with references to redness or taste, emotions, etc. Then we are asked to consider animals with smaller brains, that we assume have simpler forms of consciousness if any at all, to then infer that even simpler things such as fundamental particles have even simpler consciousness, which is then said to be equivalent to their properties (mass, charge, etc.) in some way. This seems to be a distinction without a difference, at least mechanistically. Just ends up with a "solution" to how I am conscious at the cost of everything else also being kinda sorta conscious. I say "I" because, as they addressed, the only consciousness that we tend to be able to confirm on an evidentiary basis is our own, and we assume it for others (based on testimony traditionally, or behavioural similarities in neuroscience). 2) The "solution" comes off as a "just so" story. Comparing this to Maxwell is very poor, if I understand the reference. Maxwell's equations took information that was empirically understood about how electricity and magnetism interacted, and generated testable hypotheses about how they would behave more generally. But they did not try to present some form of ontological basis of what these were. Panpsychism gives no form of prediction about what we can expect, and requires not that materialism is false, but only that one aspect of reality (the apparent consciousness that some humans experiences) is unexplainable by whatever fundamental relations exist between whatever makes up physical reality. AND it also requires that fundamental objects have some form of consciousness (the central assertion of panpsychism as far as I can tell), which apparently is undetectable. 3) This seems to come down to (in part) being unsatisfied with not knowing what things are fundamentally. I like the chess analogy. Given the rules of chess (constructed), you can understand how it works by identifying the pieces and the state of the game. The other properties have no significance on anything we need to understand chess. In systems theory, we have inputs, outputs, and internal states. The internal states may be affected by inputs or by each other, and the outputs are determined by inputs or states. Some internal states can be determined (at least with some probability) by observing outputs over a period of time. Others may have no effect at all on the outputs. These can be disregarded since they provide no information about the system besides their own value. The information we would receive by knowing them is completely trivial. Analogous to knowing that the chess pieces are made out of oak, and carved by Ethyl Popolo in 1987. It has no impact on how anything we are discussing works, although it might satisfy some irrelevant curiosity you have. 4) How does this explain why some things seem more easily dismissed as being less conscious than others? Materialism would at least suggest something along the lines of "all observable things interact, either with themselves or others (basically tautological). Under some arrangements, these things can receive inputs, which affect internal states (some of which can be detected by the object itself), and this results in outputs. The exact mechanisms are not fully understood, but many objects have some way to detect and interact with their internal states, such as computers, robots and brains. At least we have an understanding of how physical systems interact to produce such outputs. And neural networks do an excellent job of mimicking how inputs can be combined to provide an evolutionarily advantageous internal model of surroundings that would have selection pressure due to its significant ability to handle more complicated decision-making or behaviour-altering processes.

@Iaotle

Жыл бұрын

Honestly, it seems like the whole discussion they talk about how 'impossible' it is for something to develop a consciousness because of complexity and then Alex eloquently demonstrates the counterexample - atoms don't have a color. Plenty of things develop new properties as you reshape the matter they are made of. It seems odd to say modern physics doesn't tell us what things are, then explain it away with the fundamental particles being 'conscious', as if that describes anything better (you yourself point out how there is basically no definition for it and the guest seems intent on avoiding the question). He really seems to suggest that having a bad explanation is better than having no explanation. Flawed logic imo.

@hankchinaski_

10 ай бұрын

listen to some McKenna, then I propose formulating a definition that meets your own experience, knowledge and logic. Give it a try.

@pesilaratnayake162

10 ай бұрын

@@hankchinaski_ you might have to be more specific. A Google search of McKenna came back with several different results. If they mentioned it in the video, it's been months and I don't remember.

@Joe-lb8qn

9 ай бұрын

@@IaotleYep. Only a few hundred years ago "life" was thought to be a special property not explainable by science so i dont find it convincing when someone says "i don't see how consciousness could arise from particles/fields so there must be some special explanation" as its essentially the same argument and no doubt the same arguments were made. "There is a life force, so that explains life. No need to invest any more effort looking for an explanation"

@mads2357

Ай бұрын

@@Joe-lb8qnexactly. If someone who never knew of computers were to figure out how a chatbot worked on a purely physical level, I would expect it to take time and start with finding correlations between input/output and the measurable state of the components. That consciousness isn’t easy to just figure out is frankly to be expected.

Beautiful. Just returned from visiting the Amazon, Brazil... The indigenous people that I met explained a view of the trees as conscious, absolutely consicous and to be directly communicated with person to tree. The trees were to be asked for assistance and for parts taken. The trees were to be thanked in formal ways. Standing there, I'm just going to say, it made far more sense than a materialist view. I was emmersed in the green ( and other colors) of those trees. That green was in my brain and doing way more than electrical signals.

This reminds me of the parable of the man looking under a lamppost for his keys because that's where the light is.

I think this conversation too casually jumped over the definition of consciousness and experience. I literally cannot fathom what he means by a particle having consciousness. I heard no reason to believe that consciousness is possible without a brain... Maybe this comes up later?

@sterlingarcher606

Жыл бұрын

How I see it, consciousness is experience, and experience is subjective, so what if experience is just something intrinsic to the universe? rocks aren't alive, by our definition of life, but amoebas are; in their own simple way, they experience. who's to say their organelles don't have an even simpler... experience? How about the proteins, and other macromolecules that make up those organelles? Maybe rocks don't experience circumstance as a collective of their chemical compounds, but perhaps their atoms, in an incomprehensible way, experience. Does that mean everything is alive?

@epicbehavior

Жыл бұрын

He’s not quite explaining it in an easy-to-understand way. It’s possible that the entire universe is conscious, but what’s undeniable is that physical reality is _made of consciousness_ … is it your personal consciousness or the infinite mind of God (the real meaning is God, not organized religion). God is the infinite mind from which all of reality manifests. So atoms are literally made of consciousness… and perhaps consensus reality is God’s mind, and individual human minds are localized nodes of perspective. If you take psychedelics inanimate objects can come to life, but the question is, where is that being sourced from and how does the infinite mind (God’s mind) relate the individual human minds.

@koenigcochran

Жыл бұрын

​@@sterlingarcher606 you have to define experience. My definition of experience presupposes consciousness, so talking about experiences doesn't mitigate the problem

@MCReboot-MCSkyscraper-MCSouth

Жыл бұрын

To me consciousness is often skewed from a human centric perspective, humanity loves to simplify things.

@MCReboot-MCSkyscraper-MCSouth

Жыл бұрын

To humanity everything is limited in tight knit 🧶 comforting correlations that supposedly “make sense” like consciousness can “only” exist with a brain present.

incredible questions Alex. I watched a couple of interviews with Philip, and this was by far the best.

Thanks Alex. You've developed a great interview style. Most time I thought of a question you seemed to ask it. Most enjoyable. Getting me to listen to this much about panpsychism is an achievement in it's own!

I think Alex hit the nail on the head; it's a god of the gaps style argument. As well, science doesn't explain the unfalsifiable by design, so occam's razer doesn't always apply.

@darkninja___

Жыл бұрын

At the same time, postulating that consciousness emerges only after significant enough complexity does nothing to explain why it happens in the first place. Panpsychism postulating that consciousness is a fundamental property avoids that problem.

@vc7816

Жыл бұрын

@@darkninja___ Could I ask what your thoughts on Panpsychism and consciousness are?

@darkninja___

Жыл бұрын

@@vc7816 I am agnostic about panpsychism but I wouldnt be surprised if it was true. And I dont know if fundamental particles “are” consciousness or not or if it is just one of their properties. It could also be an emergent property of their interactions, not a properly of one alone. That last one is the one that makes the most sense to me which im not sure counts as panpsychism, but the main benefit of panpsychism is it gives a counterargument to the idea that nothing we can’t be sure has consciousness definitely doesnt have it. We’ve never observed the subjective state of anything besides our self and have only assumed an inner state of things with a brain and nervous system like ours but when you ask when this all started and emerged it is not an easy thing to answer, but if panpsychism is true it is less daunting to answer because it is fundamental.

@famster2422

Жыл бұрын

All knowledge is "of the gaps"

@Im_alex_h

Жыл бұрын

Philosophical materialism or physicalism is a “god of the gaps” style argument as well. It isn’t that materialism/physicalism is the default, neutral position and panpsychism is the the only positive assertion. If you want to be agnostic on it, go ahead, but if you believe in in materialism/physicalism, you are making an inference to what you perceive to be the best explanation. Personally, I find panpsychism to be the more parsimonious position.

I also would love to see a conversation with Bernardo Kastrup about analytical idealism! I think he would be able to answer a lot of these questions you are posing to Philip.

@christopherhamilton3621

11 ай бұрын

It would be more intellectually rigorous, certainly…

If you can get Bernardo Kastrup on here, THAT would be interesting.

You did so well, Alex! Great podcast!

I found your channel on Morgan's show, I wanted to hear more from you speaking and I was disappointed to see how many times he was interrupting you, I am glad you have found you here, and you seem to have amazing content that I can enjoy

This has been what I’ve been looking for for years- it is so helpful for my thinking. It’s made a huge difference to my life. Thank you so much

@JasperWilliams42

5 ай бұрын

As in I am attracted to them

@JasperWilliams42

5 ай бұрын

Romantically and sexually

I have flown straight through panpsychism and landed on full metaphysical idealism on the other side

@sigigle

Жыл бұрын

Me 2. I never found panpsychism necessary. It seems to add more assumptions to the equation than idealism without providing any more explanatory power.

@vhawk1951kl

10 ай бұрын

Perhaps your karma ran over your dogma, as we hippies used to say in another millenium.

This was a new one for me. I fully felt Alex saying that the first time hearing these ideas it all seems crazy. Will rewatch. But not sure if I’ll be convinced. Who knows. Maybe in 100 years people will be looking back on us just now grappling with these ideas when it all seems so simple to them.

@koenigcochran

Жыл бұрын

I doubt it. This was a load of bologna lol

@cashglobe

Жыл бұрын

If you’re interested in actually grasping these ideas intuitively, check out Bernardo Kastrup. He’s an Idealist, so he thinks consciousness is all there is. He has many objections to panpsychism, mainly the combination problem. If you listen to him and give it a chance, his arguments are as good as any I’ve heard. these ideas are quite intuitive once you understand them. consciousness first ontologies are the most parsimonious, require the least amount of assumptions and there is plenty of evidence to support them: psychedelic neuroimaging, NDEs, mathematical models (Donald Hoffman), evolution by natural selection, etc. materialism, on the other hand, makes SO many assumptions and abstractions and has led philosophers and scientists to many insoluble problems, such as the hard problem of consciousness.

@Some_Deist

Жыл бұрын

@@koenigcochran You’re doing the same thing theists do

@koenigcochran

Жыл бұрын

@@Some_Deist what... doubt?

@Some_Deist

Жыл бұрын

@@koenigcochran Whining about something you don’t agree with.

What an episode! Truly fascinating, thank you

Would be great to hear you talk with Sam Harris about consciousness!

@yetanotheryoutuber4271

Жыл бұрын

Or his wife.

@SinHurr

Жыл бұрын

No

Great stuff!!! We beg you to chat with Bernardo Kastrup. His response to panpsychism is robust and interesting. His grasp of modern QM interpretations is very useful in his core arguments for analytical idealism.

@vampyricon7026

Жыл бұрын

His grasp of QM interpretations is about as tenuous as a severe schizophrenic's on reality. He makes many, many errors repeatedly and even after being corrected many times, which makes me think the only possibility is that he is being intellectually dishonest.

@SinHurr

Жыл бұрын

@@vampyricon7026 Or he's loony.

@OneEmanation

Жыл бұрын

@@vampyricon7026 can you give some examples?

@rooruffneck

Жыл бұрын

@@vampyricon7026 He's not for you! I get that. I've noticed that even the most reputable QM theorist are accused of getting simple things wrong all the time by other smart researchers who think their theory is nonsense. This is common, to be expected, and just part of the process. You sound like a person who knows the truth.

@vampyricon7026

Жыл бұрын

@@rooruffneck You seem to miss my point. It's not that his style of presentation is jarring, though that ia true as well. My major issue with him is that he misrepresents all other positions to make his favored one seem like the best. He lies, he cheats, and then he has the audacity to accuse others of doing so.

13:12 oh man…a Brit describing paprika as spicy…no wonder their food is so bland…

@radioactivedetective6876

Жыл бұрын

😂 ikr

Alex, I really like the way you probe and challenge your guests on their beliefs. You do it with a very logical and level angle, and are quick to point out when someone didn't actually answer your question. Personally I felt like Philip Goff's arguments were weak as they were very "god of the gaps"-like and often appealed to emotion. Great job Alex as always!

I decided to study Chalmers and Goff for Philosophy of Mind at university 5 years ago, which lead me to exploring the analytical argument for panpsychism. What was the most profound for me, was not accepting or rejecting panspsychism, it was finding serious challenges to the more materialist explanations for consciousness, that in my judgement, were more absurd than panpsychism. Positions like eliminativism, identity theory and functionalism. While my journey on this topic ended on the combination problem, I have had amusement watching leading neurobiologists and theoretical physicists trying to explain consciousness through equations and correlations, never actually reaching a conclusion on how something like qualia is even possible from the standard model view.

Pan-psychism comes off to me as anthropocentrism run amok. The steps to get to it feel very self-focused. "I'm unsatisfied with an explanation of a fundamental particle that only describes what it does, so I'm going to provide that explanation in terms of what I personally can understand." Given how the workings of the universe routinely defy our expectations, intuitions, and desires, it's a mode of thinking that has a high probability of ending in disappointment.

@philipgoff7897

Жыл бұрын

It's the opposite of anthropocentric. There's nothing special about human consciousness, it's just a highly evolved form of what exists in the universe quite generally. In any case, what you're offering are just vague sentiments about the destiny of science. I gave an argument for the probable truth of panpsychism. If you have a precise view as to where that argument goes wrong, I'd be interested to hear :)

@goodquestion7915

Жыл бұрын

I couldn't agree more.

@goodquestion7915

Жыл бұрын

​@philipgoff7897 the Essence of what @zugabdu1 says is "self-focused"; starting from "I am precious, therefore my consciousness must be magical" and ending at "I assert Consciousness is universal and fundamental, otherwise I AM purposless and the universe did not intend or plan to produce ME". Where Panpsychism fails is on its incapacity to explain changes OF (not IN) consciousness. What happens to ME when I'm asleep, drunk, anesthetized, or dead? Panpsychism cannot explain the oniric state or the death state; other than saying that Consciousness "is still there, somewhere". The Materialistic explanation is: I AM diminished, I AM malfunctioning, I AM turned off and I AM no more (on this one I can't say it, others say it referring to their memory of ME). A Panpsychist Medical Doctor may doubt that anesthesia is useful - if consistent with their assertions, because the patient is as conscious with or without it. A Materialistic MD, can explain and predict what happens with anesthesia.

@zugabdu1

Жыл бұрын

@@philipgoff7897 First of all, thanks for engaging and responding, professor. Bear in mind, that I'm a random, non-philosopher making an off-the-cuff remark on KZread, so adjust your expectations accordingly. That said, I did want to provide a bit more to my remarks (which I stand by). 1) The remark about this feeling excessively anthropocentric is rooted in your remarks at 1:15:50, where, if I can paraphrase, you state that because our own consciousness the only thing that we can know to exist, postulating simple forms of consciousness is the most parsimonious explanation for natural phenomena. As far as I can tell, the starting point for this entire explanation for the nature of reality is rooted in our own experience. If that's not extremely anthropocentric, I don't know what is. 2) Relatedly, to your question as to where the argument doesn't connect for me, I think parsimony is the problem, at least as I've seen you present it here (as a layman who has only heard about you from this interview, I realize my own understanding of the full scope of your arguments is necessarily incomplete. That said, if one sees consciousness as a complex emergent phenomenon of the physical properties of the brain and body, to posit that, say, an electron has consciousness when it doesn't have the properties that generate consciousness in humans or other animals, you're left with a lot more to explain - how does that consciousness get into the electron? It feels to me like you already have to agree with panpsychism to find it parsimonious. To me, panpsychism is parsimonious in the same way God of the Gaps arguments are, and I'm not persuaded by those arguments either. 3) I'm not persuaded by the idea that panpsychism is a mirror image of a hypothetical, satisfactory materialist explanation of consciousness 1:04:30. Such a materialist explanation to be accepted by from a materialist standpoint, would probably have gotten to that point by making testable claims that survive rigorous experimentation - that's what tends to make things satisfactory from a materialist standpoint, and it's something that, I think by your own admission, panpsychism can't do. 4) It's true that my remark "workings of the universe routinely defy our expectations, intuitions, and desires, it's a mode of thinking that has a high probability of ending in disappointment" doesn't refute your argument; I don't claim it does. And it's certainly not some sort of scientific or universal law. I do think that when an argument has a "feel good" quality, as this one does, that counsels caution, and I haven't heard anything in this podcast episode that convinces me that caution is unjustified. Again I appreciate that you took the time to go above and beyond and respond directly. Thanks for participating in this interesting episode!

@APaleDot

Жыл бұрын

@@zugabdu1 Panpsychism is precisely the claim that we are _not_ special. I don't think it has a "feel good" quality, in fact I think the universe would be much simpler and easier to understand if it were only physical. That's honestly the reason people gravitate towards physicalism, because it's simple and conforms to our intuitions about the world. The only problem is that it conflicts with our experience. Personally, I think experience is the ultimate judge of truth, and so I have to accept that physicalism, at least, isn't true. Panpsychism is the next most plausible option.

It is fascinating to think about what else is conscious to what degree or in what sense. Our experiences in consciousness are directly tied to the senses that our biology evolved and the ways in which we process information and think is similarly directly tied to the structures of the information processing in our brain. The only way we can really assume that other people and other non-human animals (typically with a central nervous system) are also consciousness is by comparing our similarities (which are products of evolution) but also largely by the behaviour we perceive. We aren’t dogs so we can’t in a sense relate but we observe their emotive and motivational behaviour as quite similar to ours. But since we don’t know what about our biology specifically maps or gives ride to consciousness - what other “things” are aware and what is it like to be them given that their awareness is flavoured by utterly alien sensory inputs. What is it like to be a chameleon that can process and perceive two separate visual fields - one with each eye? Or what is it like “see” the world through sound like bats do. What is it like to see through 16 types of photoreceptors like the mantis shrimps (we have 3)? What is it like to have our smell be the dominant sensory experience like dogs? I don’t really see the a discontinuity in this approach. What is it like to sense your environment via chemoreceptors like mushrooms and other plants and simple cellular organisms? After all mushrooms have vast networks that process chemical and electrical signals like our brain does. Does an awareness arise from that kind of information processing and integration of sensory I put? Why our brains but not that? Maybe both? Maybe everything? I don’t think the core of this is with consciousness matter. I think the fundamental nature of reality is conscious activity and these structures of our experience that we describe with our physical laws are the way the behaviour of the natural mind or universal consciousness unfolds/evolves. In this view our brain and the structures we associate with conscious phenomena is the image of what localised awareness looks like to itself. But that central question of why the brain is the image of a localised awareness and what about that image of the brain is what is correlated with a localised experience of “isness” is the ultimate question here.

@philipgoff7897

Жыл бұрын

A panpsychism and a dualist would agree on all of this. It's neutral data between all of the philosophical options.

@OneEmanation

Жыл бұрын

@@philipgoff7897 sorry what do you mean by neural data?

Physics builds models and most physicists will remind people not to mistake the model with reality. The statement that it doesn't matter what the chess pieces are made of is accurate. However if you are going to make the claim that fundamentally they are made of consciousness then you need strong evidence to support that.

excited to listen to this conversation!!

@glenecollins

Жыл бұрын

I wasn’t and I was still disappointed

@tognah6918

Жыл бұрын

​@@glenecollins melt

@glenecollins

Жыл бұрын

@@tognah6918 ?

@adrianseanheidmann4559

Жыл бұрын

@@glenecollins You're supposed to melt under the heatlamp of sheer dissapointment. MELT!

@glenecollins

Жыл бұрын

@@adrianseanheidmann4559 not quite that disappointed. Does that happen to you or something?

I'm reminded of an episode of Peep Show. Jeremy: ...[W]e're going to be taking some magic mushrooms. Mark: Magic mushrooms? Jeremy: Yes, and we're gonna smash down the doors of perception so we can see all the stuff that... Mark: Isn't really there. Jeremy: That is really there but we don't normally see because we're so transfixed on... Mark: The stuff that is really there. Jeremy: Oh, it's so simple for you, isn't it? But the truth that you're so scared of hearing is that in fact reality and fantasy are exactly the same thing. So yeah, philosophy can take all the facts we know about reality from the physical sciences, AND some word salad, and synthesize those into a single unified theory of reality.

@anonxnor

Жыл бұрын

Have you ever done psychedelics?

@ronwiesel5120

Жыл бұрын

The thing is that while in the psychedelic state, the impression you get is a unified, all-encompassing understanding, that is glaringly obvious to you, and you feel stupid for having forgotten this. Not all experiences are like this, but certainly the transcendental ones. But when you come back to your waking state (which at least feels much less awake), you are no longer able to truly understand. Now you are only you. And this individuated you doesn't posses the means to convey these perceiced truths, even to yourself. We do not doubt our consciousness. So how should you doubt the consciousness, that is bigger than you, which you were at that point? It all seems self-evident. Which doesn't mean that it necessarily is, but you need to take it seriously. At the very least for the study of consciousness itself. I mean, how would you go on studying consciousness, if not with consciosness? And what better way to test it, than by exploring its limits? You can then go on to relate the phenomena to brain states, or check whether theories would predict these experiences and formulate new, precise theories

@deschain1910

Жыл бұрын

It's just an objective truth that reality and fantasy are the same thing, because what we experience is never anywhere near to what reality actually is (just a soup of quantum energy fields as far as we know). All of our perceptions and experiences are things that manifest inside our brains because of extremely limited stimuli from the outside. Even from a purely scientific perspective, it's kind of silly to act like reality and our experiences are very tightly bound, so when you mix in philosophy (a world in which we can't even rule out that we're just brains in vats) you're bound to arrive at a place where there is really no meaningful descriptive border between "reality" and "fantasy."

@Al-ji4gd

Жыл бұрын

What are these ''facts'' we know about the physical sciences?

@crab0traps0now

Жыл бұрын

@@Al-ji4gd It is not relevant; both sides of this discussion stipulate that we are able to learn something about reality from the physical sciences, call it X. Goff then claims that there is also this attribute Y (something along the lines of "the essential nature of a thing," distinct from a description of what the thing does) that is not explained by X. Goff says that X + "particles are conscious" or X + "particles are made of consciousness" explains X and Y. I am saying that it has not been demonstrated that Y exists. And if Y does exist, one only has to ask what the nature of Y is to get to the special pleading that Y doesn't need an explanation like that.

I feel panpsychism is getting to the point but still holds on to the dualist paradigm. There still seems to be the notion that there is a physical world outside of our experience that just happens to be made or conscious stuff to explain our experience. I think to be empirically sound - that is to be in line with what can be verified scientifically, I.e., through experience since we’ve established that science just describes how what we experience behaves, is to say that no- we have no good reason to posit that there is a dead matter world beyond our experience. Our starting point should be that there is only a experience - consciousness - and science describes how our shared dream evolves. After all, EVERYTHING we can know simply arises in consciousness. Id love to see you talk to Bernardo Kastrup and or Rupert Spira about this!!!

What is highlighted here is the age old mistake of filling gaps in our knowledge with other things we don't know. The fear of not knowing has lead us to so many false conclusions. Hence science.

@JaneDoe-zk4uk

3 ай бұрын

Materialism does that too. If science measures behaviours objectively and is not concerned about the subjective experience of an object then this isn’t a matter for science. Science, by its very own nature, will never be resolved and a foregone conclusion because it can’t see the whole picture.

It does make sense that perhaps consciousness is simply fundamental in all things. Not that all things are conscious in the way we are, but that the fundamental building blocks are there and in appropriately complex arrangements it will take shape. It fills a gap that the concept of a soul would normally fill and gives some explanation to how we can not just exist but also "be".

@vhawk1951kl

11 ай бұрын

What do you suppose consciousness to be and what experience have you of it?How can dreaming machines experience with_knowledge? First address what is knowledge.

Amazing, I think this is the best episode so far

Haven’t watched the video yet but I hope they talk about the emergence of not just life, but death as well. Elements have always come together and then fallen apart, but there’s no life span on a molecule. Then, suddenly, the eternal end of something emerges when the first living thing ceases to exist as it did just a moment before.

So glad to see a conversation on cosciousness on this channel. I think Bernardo Kastrup would be a great guest - at first sight his position seems radical but he has very good arguments to back it up

The subjective experience of, say the colour red is simply the experience of that frequency of light interacting with your brain, nothing more, nothing less.

@christopherlin4706

Жыл бұрын

yeah but the brain doesn't have to generate the subjective experience of what is commonly called redness...

@David34981

Жыл бұрын

@@christopherlin4706 it doesn't have to, but it does, because it is advantageous to the individual's / species's survival to be able to.

@christopherlin4706

Жыл бұрын

​@@David34981 then you'd be agreeing that the individuals ability to survive is not primary, but strangely dependent on being able to develop faculties capable of organizing rational and emotional input into a sense of self with all its intricacies, depth of understanding, and aesthetic nuances that seem superfluous to merely scraping by. You would be, in this case, proving that conscious experience of its properties is what matter is inherently trying to discover, and survival is simply a necessity to continue this self-discovery

@TheTrickGuru

4 күн бұрын

Or put another way: The subjective experience of, for example, the colour red, is simply the subjective experience of a specific frequency of light, that when interacting with your brain, produces the subjective experience we call red. True in the same sense that a bachelor is an unmarried man. But not particular enlightening.

Todays my birthday! Loving the episode so far btw!

@bigol7169

Жыл бұрын

Happy birthday! 🎉

@philipgoff7897

Жыл бұрын

Happy birthday!

@whelperw

7 ай бұрын

Happy Birthday, ah wait...

I think a fundamental issue with talking about the "evidence" for Pan-Psychism is that our typical notion of evidence requires objective measurement. However, the nature of consciousness avoids this definition of evidence perfectly.

@SinHurr

Жыл бұрын

Seems like a really good reason to discard pan-psychism out of hoof, then. At least until its supporters get better measuring tools. Always be willing to reconsider!

@christopherhamilton3621

7 ай бұрын

@@SinHurrAgree. Avoidance in this case is NOT a good thing…

I love seeing people who are good at thinking, even when I struggle to follow. Thank you! Not sure quite what consciousness MEANS, to thr panpsychist, but I could at least understand sone of the Occam's razorish "we know consciousness exists directly", "we do not know anything else directly" so therefore....consciousness is the most likely explanation for....everything? I think I took a wrong turn somewhere.... Still it is fascinating. Thanks again.

@dinospumoni5611

Жыл бұрын

it's just what-it's-like-to-be stuff exists, consciousness is what it's like to be the stuff

@thinkingaboutreligion2645

Жыл бұрын

I think you and I got the same impression. I am open to any argument, but I ended up back in my naturalistic camp. And that arguments are not evidence.

@bmerlin376

Жыл бұрын

All things stem from awareness. Consciousness is those things, and it is the awareness.

@Some_Deist

Жыл бұрын

@@thinkingaboutreligion2645 Theres no evidence that naturalism/materialism is true

@thinkingaboutreligion2645

Жыл бұрын

@@Some_Deist so... No evidence that matter and nature exist? And no evidence that matter influences consciousness? Ok, if that is how you see the world, fine. Maybe you would want to read a book on traumatic brain injury.

Oh oh here comes the next Matt Walsh documentary “what is an electron” 😂😂

It seems to me that the fundamental problem is with thinking of redness or consciousness as "things." I can't go to a store and buy a photosynthesis. Redness and consciousness are not things. They are processes. Photosynthesis is the word we use to describe a particular sequence of chemical reactions that convert solar energy into chemical energy. Redness is a word for the sequence of chemical reactions that take place in your brain when you see something that reflects wavelengths of light around 700 nm. If you do not have cones for red wavelengths then these chemical reactions do not occur and you do not experience "redness." We may not fully understand every chemical step in that process, but it is a process.

@philipgoff7897

Жыл бұрын

I'm happy to call it a process, but that doesn't bring us any closer to explaining that process in terms of physical processes (whereas we know how to explain physical process in terms of consciousness processes). Your stab at an explanation ignores the quality exemplified in the conscious process, a quality which cannot be fully articulated in the purely quantitative vocab of physical science.

@Arunava_Gupta

Жыл бұрын

Redness is not a process, it's a feeling, requiring a conscious experiencer. It's your own materialist philosophy that is leading you to (mis) brand it as a process. The brain is simply a network of neurons which conduct and propagate signals in the manner of wires. The wires themselves cannot act as the feeler or conscious experiencer as they only supply the sense data (in the form of signals). An extra-encephalic entity transcendent to these neurons is therefore necessary which would receive these signals, integrate them and experience them. This is the conscious subject that is beyond the brain albeit connected to it.

@mikolmisol6258

Жыл бұрын

​@philipgoff7897 But it does do just that. Explaining consciousness as an emergent property of the brain enables us to explore which parts of the brain are responsible for which parts of our subjective experience - that's what we've been doing for decades now. What you are essentially saying is, as I understand it, that photosynthesis can not be reduced to the set of enzymes, coenzymes, and other molecules that form it.

@Seraphous

Жыл бұрын

@@Arunava_Gupta What exactly do you think "feelings" are? Feelings are physical processes. People are depressed? We give them SSRIs, or dopamine stimulators. Alcohol amplifies people's emotions making some people giggly and happy while making people who are already angry down right abusive. If consciousness is not a physical process, then why is it so easy to impact and even remove your consciousness with so many chemicals? We don't need to completely understand how the cornucopia of chemical reactions that result in "consciousness" work together to dismiss a non-material explanation anymore than we did to dismiss the miasma theory.

@Seraphous

Жыл бұрын

@@optimisticdeterminist2291 If I'm not there to observe it, does photosynthesis not happen? You seem to misunderstand how qualitative and quantitative relate to each other. If I say something is heavy, that is a qualitative statement. What does heavy mean? I could also say something weighs 500 Kg. The qualitative is now quantitative. There is no reason to think that any qualitative property can't be explained quantitatively just because we don't currently have the math to do it. We describe things qualitatively either because it's easier or we don't understand it...yet.

I pressed the like button because that’s how like buttons operate. But what is a like button? It only makes sense to posit an abstract substance of likeness, that underpins all material, obviously!

@Iaotle

Жыл бұрын

underrated

Panpsychism seems to me to be the most plausible position. For anyone who would like to explore more, I would highly recommend Emerson Green and his Walden Pod podcast. He’s a panpsychist who, quite adequately I believe, defends the position and answers the most common objections to it.

This just feels like saying "we have no idea what the underlying system could be, therefore I can invent whatever system we feel like." I listened to this for 2 hours and he hasn't given a single point about why he puts stock in this theory

Halfway through and I'm really struggling with the reasoning here. Magic has absolute explanatory power for everything. Explanation and demonstration are 2 different things. Hope the latter becomes somewhat clearer in the second half.

@nickrhodes9031

Жыл бұрын

Remained unclear.

@glenecollins

Жыл бұрын

@@nickrhodes9031 well it still sounds exactly like proposing magic or miracles (or a dreaming dragon or whatever) to me what was unclear?

physics has a bunch of qualitative concepts. it just has mathematical underpinnings. it is, to me, a HUGE redflag when a philosopher has clear little familiarity with what is right adjacent to what they are talking about. which is fine, the idea of panpsychism is indeed enticing. It would just be a bit better to explore the ideas of science a little more than "an equation cannot describe color". that is a fairly caricaturistic view of science. not that it is completely wrong

@lucasheijdeman2581

Жыл бұрын

What are the qualitative concepts you allude to?

Consciousness is just like life. It is hard to define exactly where life starts but at some level it just does

the split brain phenomena might shed some light to the combination problem: if a consciousness unity can be split, I guess it could also be combined (in theory)

I'm 60 seconds n and my first thought is "this is unfalsifiable and therefore basically meaningless", so now I'm going to watch it and see how that impression holds up. I used to be into kashmiri Shaivism when i was a lad of 22 or so and that held that inanimate objects also contained some form of consciousness or experience. I think it's nonsense now. revisiting this now, yea i'm fine with the assertion that materialism is lacking, but my first impression was still spot on, he addressed the idea of it being untestable by admitting that it's unscientific and concludes that none of these ideas can be proven scientifically. Consciousness as an emergent phenomenon of having a brain and central nervous system is more the mainstream position rather than materialism asserting that consciousness doesn't exist because it's not quantitatively measurable, i felt this was a bit stawmann-y. Nobody posits that a sea cucumber or say a jellyfish that has no brain has no consciousness, this idea of striated layers of consciousness is not precluded by a materialist position. The conclusion that pan psychism "*could be*" interchangeable with any other intrinsic property we don't know about or how to measure I think does a pretty good job of dismissing this argument altogether as being a meaningful approach. Absolutely fascinating discussion, love the stuff you're posting.

@Iaotle

Жыл бұрын

it's really a "x of the gaps" argument. "science doesn't explain it, and I'm conscious, therefore everything is made out of consciousness"

That shirt is youtube compression's worst nightmare

@memeswillneverdie

Ай бұрын

You know I admire the thought that went into that and that the fact you didn’t get a tonne of likes just shows how broken the rating systems are in general with the public

@MyName-vg8yu

Ай бұрын

@@memeswillneverdie i appreciate the compliment and being seen. But yea the system is broken. Probably in large part due to the fact that 90% of users on the internet are bots

“Physics describes what things do, not what they are.” What if the difference is purely semantic and things simply are what they do?

@zinedinosmanovic5192

2 ай бұрын

You are what you do!

I've never liked the idea that properties somehow cannot come from parts that don't have that property. There's a species of butterfly with blue wings, but there's no blue pigment in them at all. On the microscopic level there are structures that scatter incoming light and reflect only the blue light back. These structures are not themselves blue, and if the wings get wet they change colors since light scatters differently in liquid than air So the blue property arises entirely from structures that are not blue.

Interesting! I didn’t really agree with a lot of what he said but it’s certainly an interesting thought experiment.

'Pancolourism' ......Loved it Alex. Makes as much sense as Panpsychism.😄

CONSCIOUSNESS DEFINED: Consciousness means “that which knows”, or “the state of being aware”, from the Latin prefix “con” (with), the stem “scire” (to know) and the suffix “osus” (characterized by). To put it succinctly, consciousness is the SUBJECTIVE component in any subject-object relationship. There is both a localized knowing (within the cognitive faculty of vertebrates) and a Universal Awareness, as explicated in the following paragraphs. Consciousness is essentially impersonal, yet it can be expressed via a personal agent, such as many species of animals, including we humans. Higher species of animal life have sufficient cognitive ability to KNOW themselves and their environment, at least to a measurable degree. Just where consciousness objectively begins in the animal kingdom is a matter of contention but, judging purely by ethological means, it probably starts with vertebrates (at least the higher-order birds, reptiles and fishes). Those metazoans that are evolutionarily-lower than vertebrates do not possess much, if any, semblance of intellect, necessary for true knowledge, but operate purely by reflexive instincts, notwithstanding certain notable exceptions to this rule, such as octopuses. For instance, an insect or a jellyfish does not consciously decide to seek food but does so according to its base instincts, directed by its idiosyncratic genetic code. Even when an insect (such as a cockroach) flees from danger, it is not experiencing the anxious emotions that a human or other mammal would experience. See Chapter 11 regarding the concept of will. SENTIENCE EVOLVES INTO TRUE CONSCIOUSNESS: Undoubtedly, the lower species of animals alluded to above, embody, if not true consciousness, varying degrees of SENTIENCE, depending on how many senses it possesses and how complex is its nervous system. Very few would consider a blind worm to be more sentient than a frog! Plants are also sentient but use lower-level mechanisms for their perceptions. To give just a couple of examples, both land-based and water-born plants respond to sunlight (as witnessed by the opening of flowers upon the rising of the sun), and some carnivorous plants can detect arthropods crawling on their leaves. Therefore, when carnists claim that “plants have feelings too!”, they may be justified according to some sense of the term, so the most logical reason for being vegan is not because plants are completely insentient, but simply due to the fact that humans are an herbivorous species. Furthermore, fruit trees indirectly benefit from the consumption of its fruit, since their seeds are spread. Recently, consciousness has become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, involving fields such as philosophy of mind, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, neuropsychology and neuroscience. Many such researchers have seen evidence that the brain is merely a conduit or a TRANSDUCER of consciousness, explaining why the more intelligent the animal, the more it can understand its own existence (or at least be aware of more of its environment - just see how amazingly-complex dolphin and whale behaviour can be, compared with other aquatic species), and the reason why it is asserted that a truly enlightened human must possess a far higher level of intelligence than the average person (See Chapter 17 re: the distinction between enlightenment and mere awakening). The processor of a supercomputer must necessarily be far larger in size, more complex, and more powerful than the processing unit in a pocket calculator, obviously. Therefore, it seems logical to extrapolate that the scale of discrete (localized) consciousness is chiefly dependent on the brain capacity of a specific animal. So, then, in response to the assertion made in the previous paragraph, one could complain: “That's not fair - why can only a genius be enlightened?” (as defined in Chapter 17). The answer is: first of all, as stated above, every species of animal has its own level of intelligence, on a wide-ranging scale. Therefore, a pig or a dog could (if possible) ask: “That is unfair - why can only a human being be enlightened?” Secondly, it is INDEED a fact that life is unfair, because there is no “tit for tat” law of action and reaction, even if many supposedly-great religious preceptors have stated so. They said so because they were preaching to wicked miscreants who refused to quit their evil ways, and needed to be chastized in a forceful manner. It is not possible to speak sweet and gentle words to a rabid dog to prevent it from biting you. THE THREE STATES OF AWARENESS: Three STATES of awareness are experienced by humans, and possibly all other species of mammals, as well as many kinds of reptiles and birds: the waking state (“jāgrata”, in Sanskrit), dreaming (“svapna”, in Sanskrit), and deep-sleep or dreamless-sleep (“suṣupti”, in Sanskrit). Human dreaming occurs mostly, but not exclusively, in the state known as “REM” (rapid eye movement) sleep. During this phase, the electrical activity in the brain is more like waking than sleeping. That is why this state is often called “paradoxical sleep.” Scientists have discovered that most non-human animals - mammals, birds, reptiles, and most recently, fish - experience REM sleep, too. The electrical activity found in the brains of these creatures during rapid eye movement sleep is similar to that of humans while they dream, suggesting that animals may dream. Some cognitive psychologists may claim that there are TRANSITIONAL states between waking, dreaming, and deep-sleep, but these states are just that - transitory states between the three main states, in the same way that sunrise, daytime, and sunset have transitional states. Furthermore, there exists the well-known phenomenon of lucid dreaming, where the subject is aware of the fact that a dream is taking place. Beyond these three temporal states of waking, dreaming, and deep-sleep, is the fourth “state” (“turīya” or “caturīya”, in Sanskrit). That is the unconditioned, timeless “state”, which underlies the other three, and is therefore completely transcendental to any temporal state whatever. The waking state is the LEAST real (that is to say the least permanent, or to put it another way, the farthest from the Necessary Foundation of Existence, as explained towards the end of this chapter). The dream state is closer to our eternal nature, whilst dreamless deep-sleep is much more analogous to The Universal Self (“Brahman”), as it is imbued with peace. Rather than being an absence of awareness, deep-sleep is an awareness of absence (that is, the absence of phenomenal, sensual experiences). So, in actual fact, the fourth state is not a state, but the Unconditioned Ground of Being, or to put it simply, YOU, the real self/Self, or Existence-Awareness-Peace (“sacchidānanda”, in Sanskrit). Perhaps the main purpose of dreams is so that we can understand that the waking-state is practically indistinguishable to the dream-state, and thereby come to see the ILLUSION of this ephemeral world. Both our waking-state experiences and our dream-state experiences occur solely within the mental faculties (refer to Chapter 04 for an elucidation of this phenomenon). If somebody in one of your dreams was to ask your dream-state character if the dream was real, you (playing the part of that character) would most likely say, “yes, of course it is real!” Likewise, if someone was to ask your waking-state character if this world was real, you would almost undoubtedly respond in a similar fashion. THE THREE COMPONENTS OF EXPERIENCE: There are three COMPONENTS of experience (or perception) - the experiencer/perceiver (or the seer, known as “dṛk” or “draṣṭā”, in Sanskrit), the experience/perception (or the process of seeing, known as “dṛṣṭi”, in Sanskrit), and the experienced/percept (or the seen, known as “dṛṣyam”, in Sanskrit). This “Seer-Seeing-Seen” triad is a more complete extension of the subject-object dichotomy. One who is self-realized (“brahma-jñāna”, in Sanskrit) has come to understand that this triad is, in fact, singular, since all three components are located solely within one’s own consciousness. That is to say, the aforementioned tripartite process can never be fundamentally separated, and understanding this fact is the basis for genuine knowledge of reality. Please refer also to Chapter 04 of “F.I.S.H” in regard to the ideation of phenomena. In recent years, the term “CONSCIOUSNESS” has been used in esoteric spiritual circles (usually capitalized) to refer to a far more Homogeneous Consciousness (“puruṣa”, in Sanskrit), due to the fact that the English language doesn’t include a single word denoting the Universal Ground of Being (for instance “Brahman”, “Tao”, in other tongues). The word “Awareness” (capitalized) is arguably a more apposite term for this concept. Cont...

I've just watched an half of hour on spotify, and I feel like it's one of better episodes so far. I had to come here to comment that.

I do feel somewhat favorably disposed toward panpsychism, but there are still some issues that give me pause. Forgive me for rambling, but I'll be thinking as I write so what follows may not be fully poignant. I have no difficulty positing that something akin to consciousness may exist at a fundamental level, but it feels unwarranted to call that thing consciousness itself. What we currently think of when we talk about consciousness seems to me to be made up of three fundamental parts: we must have an "entity" (brain/self) which is categorically complete (although the physical parameters of this completeness are not currently established), this entity must receive information (nerve impulses/sense data/thoughts) caused by interaction with reality, and the entity must react to or process that information somehow. Consciousness itself would therefore seem to be an emergent property that arises when all three criteria are met. At the most fundamental level physics has so far identified, matter seems to be made of packets of energy. When two particles interact we have an entity (particle) receiving information (second particle or energy field) and there is a reaction which depends somewhat on the types of particles involved. So, did consciousness occur? Uhh, maybe. But here consciousness isn't the fundamental thing; it is a process that the fundamental things engage in. This is how my understanding processes the idea, but this description feels very different from how it is discussed in the interview. This makes me wonder if we are even thinking among the same lines. Maybe I'm not as favorable to the idea as I thought......

@timreyes2179

Жыл бұрын

Maybe our entire universe is just energy leaking out of a next level universe. Like drag in a hydraulic cylinder. That's where the vacuum energy comes from its the eddie stabilizing back to flatness. The consciousness is surely there all it is is a vague awareness of things happening.

@sigigle

Жыл бұрын

"Consciousness itself would therefore seem to be an emergency property that arises when all three criteria are met." That is correct. There can be no consciousness (subjectivity) without something to be conscious of. Therefore, what's fundamental can't just be consciousness, it has to be something else as well.

A few weeks ago I've read about siamese twins that allegedly somehow share one consciousness, so that when one of them is watching a funny picture, the other one would be laughing as well, although it can't see the picture with its own eyes. I found that mindblowing as their two bodies seem to be connected by one single consciousness, provided that the story is true. Some neuroscientists could allegedly detect some sort of biological bridge between their thalamus regions, apparently forming a single conscious entity. Of course that wouldn't get us any closer to the answer to the mistery of what the essence of consciousness actually is, but I find it an astonishing idea that qualia could indeed be shared between brains. Thanks for the podacst, I really enjoyed listening!

@SinHurr

Жыл бұрын

Could be that it's a horseshit story, too. Seems like the more parsimonious explanation.

@MoremItzum

Жыл бұрын

​​@@SinHurr Could be, yes. But if it is true this would actually mean that qualia could indeed be shared between humans, although we are of course far from understanding how it works (if it works at all).

@veridicusmind3722

Жыл бұрын

I think that their brains were connected by a corpus collosum (?) What is interesting is that they could also distinguish between whose pain they were feeling; she could distinguish between her sister's pain and her own pain. It seems that each of them still has privileged access to their own qualitative states and had their own way of knowing about *their* pain not accessible to anyone else.

@Iaotle

Жыл бұрын

What if I tell you I have an invisible unicorn? Would you believe that too? The story is obviously just a fabrication (try to find the source - you will fail).

@reubydoi7111

Жыл бұрын

There are definitely documented cases of similar things with people with brain damage to the corpus callosum (connection between the left and right brain). Do a bit of googling on split brain syndrome and you will find peer reviewed research with some bizarre results about the split between consciousness, communication, and sensory inputs.

Wow Phillip Goff!!! Yess this is a great crossover

Writing my dissertation on a lot of Goff's work regarding the combination problem/phenomenal bonding solution rn haha

Please talk to Bernardo Kastrup. He’s one of the best idealists out there. I think both of you (and the world) would benefit greatly from a conversation.

@vampyricon7026

Жыл бұрын

If he is one of the best, I can safely dismiss it based on the complete lack of even an attempt at academic rigor that Kastrup applies to physics.

@OneEmanation

Жыл бұрын

@@vampyricon7026 damn I see you under every Kastrup comment - are you his ex-wife or something? 🤣 you seem to take issue with him or his work but haven’t given an example of anything. I can’t poke holes in what he says so I’m very curious to hear what your interpretation is!!

I am currently reading Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality" and I am surprised that his ideas did not come up during the course of the conversation. I think it explores an important distinction between reality and the perception of reality by humans. Hoffman argues that we tend to believe that the reality we perceive is based on truth when, in fact, it is based on fitness (theory of evolution) and they can be quite different. A must-read for anyone interested in the ideas explored in this podcast. Another interesting (to me at least) factoid is that Roger Penrose who arguably knows as much as anyone alive about reality as described by physics (read his "The Road to Reality') does not believe that consciousness can entirely be explained by our current scientific disciplines. "There is something else," he says. A hunch maybe but coming from him, it is with noticing.

@tennicksalvarez9079

Жыл бұрын

Man that's a great point thank u

@theeternalvictim

Жыл бұрын

Not just quite different, 99% different

@ONeill01

Жыл бұрын

reality based on fitness is an apt explanation

@christopherhamilton3621

11 ай бұрын

Meh! This is a different point from panpsychism…

Thank you so much for this episode, I'm mind blown, wow.

Sorry for the long comment, but i feel it's worth the read. We start with less true truths, and accompanying original assumptions, and with them, move towards more true truths, with which we redefine the original assumption, and replace it with a new assumption. The original assumption is that there is a thing called consciousness. And thanks to experiment, which is like saying thanks using our senses and advanced senses to **look around** , we have discovered we only need create one set of constructive rules to explain everything we see: physical rules. Now we must redefine our original assumption. There no longer seems to be a need for consciousness. It is okay to let go of assumptions. It isn't dismissive to redefine our starting point based on new evidence. However, simply saying there is no need to define consciousness materially is a materialist cop out. Of course it needs defining. But it is simple. Physics is an odd mixture of analysing the vastness of the spatial unknown around our planet, cosmology, and the minute interactions underlying all we experience day to day. But for some reason we do not **call** physics our day to day macroscopic analysis of human physical activities, only inanimate objects. Why? Medicine, genetics, biology IS physics. Only it is the physics of more complex geometric shapes than the basic particles of nature. Biology, proteins, amino acids, molecular construction is simply more complicated physics. There is this complex scale of human biology, and afterwards, psychology, human behaviour in groups, and sociology. These are also physical sciences. Only... the amount of intelligence and pattern recognition ability it would take to predict how population movements wouid react based on a subatomic modification is far beyond our own abilities. We simply haven't yet widely noticed that we can modify large scale geometry, causally, with a subatomic change, that is enabled at the right time and place. This is yet to be experimentally confirmed, but it is a fair assumption. At the very least we can understand human biology as the continuation in scale of geometric construction. This implies we can treat all reality as a set of gradually more complex geometric shapes, and that the specific human shape we take is able to "sense" thanks to biologically explained neurons in our skin, and send a current that occasionally requires chemical interactions to the brain which is organised specifically to treat these impulses according to a set of imperatives that have helped us to survive, and recreate this giant biological system. Evolution. Survival. Survival is found in particle environments by the way. An environment that does not allow for certain geometric shapes to form or propagate, will by definition limit the ability for those shapes to survive. These worlds, the particle world, and the biological world are the same. The only difference, is the complexity of the shape. And careful analysis of the complex shape, biology, allows us to determine exactly what every part of our complex biological make up does. Just like checking with Feynman diagrams what every interaction of every particle with every other does. The possibilities are numerous, and on a new biological scale with all these complex biological processes, the complexity exponentially arises. **This is still a physics theory**. As such the materialist view does explain consciousness. It explains it via this acknowledgement of exponential increase in the complexity of shapes. Treating the human body like a shape, essentially. And consciousness need not emerge gradually. The shape, by adding all these biological abilities together, i.e. the ability to sense environmental changes (temperature, sound perception, sight, etc...) can react to them. Consciousness is only mysterious because of how impressive the human shape is, compared to a shape human brains can intuitively understand, like a crystalline structure, or a set of evolving vectors, like a flow of water, or of air. We now have to conceive of these unique shapes (neurons, all the different chemicals, serotonin, dopamine, ATP, etc...) acting quasi AT ONCE to create ONE MOMENT of what is called "the human experience", or colloquially, Consciousness. Therefore, materialism does explain what consciousness is. It is just that the average human Intellect (most people, I'm not saying people are average) is still mystified by a process that requires the simultaneous, intuitive tracking of the many physical processes, and we are more comfortable tracking much less. This is why we can read intuitively the currents in water, and determine where we may end up if we are in one. We can intuitively track all the variables, all the physical processes simultaneously. We cannot yet do this for our bodies, so we cannot be aware of our own complexity. And so this complexity is easier to mystify, and make unique, like the concept of infinity, nothingness, everythingness, the domain of past philosophy. Consciousness is no more and no less than your human experience. This is verified experimentally, by reducing your body's abilities, you reduce your ability to be conscious. If your senses are impaired, you are consciously impaired. We can physically define every part of our body's abilities, and if we destroy or impair a specific part, and we experience less, it is proof Consciousness is adding all these abilities, together. And that you can chop up consciousness into parts. And so, not all consciousness is the same, and all these different conscious abilities are directly, materially, traceable to a specific geometric shape. Therefore: it is the specific shape that makes the specific consciousness. And the material shape is required for that specific consciousness. This is the evidence. The only way to deny this chain of logic, is to refute the concept of evidence as valid to determine truth. And if panpsychists wish to forgo evidence because it is by definition, material, and they believe with no evidence, that consciousness is a magical force that requires no material evidence to explain, then they can, but they will always know that it is by choosing to refute material evidence, as material creatures, that their explanation can make sense. They choose to deny their own abilities. To determine their surroundings and survive in them requires material evidence of danger vs non danger, and I find it suspicious that they choose to ignore evidence when it comes to intellectual pursuits, but for day to day activities, are willing to construct their physical image of the world geometrically, with physical evidence. The aforementioned physical material explanation of consciousness is **consistent** . It explains consciousness as specific shapes, adding together, does not conflict with measurement, and allows for a prediction, even, a test: create physical shapes designed to detect new information or resolve information better (detect more photons per second in an eye for example), that are biologically compatible with humans, and you should be able to **increase** your level of consciousness. If you feel like body modification is too radical as a test, you can simply take our smartphones as a non invasive example. They allow us access to more information, and so we are consciousness of more information. We can make better, faster decisions, and this is **still a physics theory**, there is a direct cause and effect chain between the information online, and your decision making changing. This is like extending a sense. Adding consciousness. If your brain develops its multitasking ability better because of this increase of flux of information, you can track more information, and increase your **quality** of decision making, I.e. better decisions in the same amount of time. Naively, you could look at this new human as being being more intelligent than a smartphone-less human. More in tune with nature, the universe, more conscious of their surroundings. If we can directly associate a unique consciousness to a unique geometric shape, there is no more need for a generalised force called consciousness. It is now a collection of specific abilities. So we do need to explain consciousness materially, but to do so requires only a shift in perspective: thinking of the shapes we traditionally just **observe** in biology, from the exterior, as **actors** in other people's perception. And that sounds like an extra "intangible" thing to me. The intangibility of the modification of perception. As one thing can be material from the outside, it is experienced because of its ability to act only on the shape to which it is attached. To whom it is attached. Therefore making this a unique shape. As is every other shape in the world, every particle, every cell, every neuron, every human. No shape no matter how similar to others it may be, isn't unique, or it would BE the other shape. This creates an appropriate divide that satisfies the unique quality consciousness is given. I believe this is the mistakenly sought after intangibility panpsychists find compelling. Except here we can make it arise with a material view of the world, and a new acknowledgement: the importance of perception in analysing the physical.

Please have Bernardo Kastrup on

The episode I’ve been waiting for, your output has been impressive Alex, really enjoying it! In the interests of fairness, I think metaphysical idealism deserves consideration, and IMO none seem better equipped to defend it than Bernardo Kastrup!

@epicbehavior

Жыл бұрын

…and now he’s going to realize what God actually is, the universal infinite mind from which all material things manifest.

@98danielray

Жыл бұрын

​@@epicbehavior whatever that means

@epicbehavior

Жыл бұрын

@@98danielray With a name like fractal, I would expect more.

@98danielray

Жыл бұрын

@@epicbehavior definitely not into the new age mystical stuff you are in. to claim you expected more from a mathematical name is to ignore what a fractal is.

@epicbehavior

Жыл бұрын

@@98danielray But the structure of reality is fractals too. That is, infinitely big and infinitely small and patterns repeat at the macro and micro level. It all connects.

That's a really smart philosopher right there. Awesome discussion I love how you want for it and yes he handled it

Thanks for this Alex. Can I recommend Joscha Bach as an excellent potential guest. To briefly explain why, I'm a neurologist, PhD in neuroscience, and teach clinical neuroscience to medical students. In that context, I'm a materialist who recognises the challenge to explain how experiences of self and qualia arise (with a secondary question of why it confers adaptive benefit). Joscha Bach expounds the model I find most persuasive. It centres around loops of attention about focussed attention (creating a self model) and then attribution of sensory data to that (self model) entity as a multimodal account of what the entity is experiencing.

@sigigle

Жыл бұрын

It could grant an adaptive benefit by creating a reward and punishment motivating factor that favors behavior which is more likely to lead to the organisms survival? I side with idealism currently, as I can't imagine a way that what are essentially mechanical processes of the physical world could ever lead to a subjective conscious experience. And I haven't found panpsychism compelling as I don't understand what explanatory power it adds over idealism, and yet seems to add more factors/assumptions to the equation, so the logic of Occam's Razor would seem to favor idealism to me. Just my 2c.

I'm an hour and a half in and I still think panpsychism isn't anything other than god of the gaps for consciousness. We can't explain how it arises, so it must have been in everything all along. I also think this can be used against the panpsychist by saying that in that case it's a material property of matter. In any case, it seems obviously bunk.

@yadurajdas532

Жыл бұрын

Just change your hidden metaphysical materialist assumptions, then you won’t feel any God of the gaps

@Lanthardol

Жыл бұрын

@@yadurajdas532 I can’t tell if this is said seriously or in jest against the pansychism idea.

@dharmatycoon

Жыл бұрын

The difference is that people dont have a "direct experience of God", whilst people do have a direct experience of their conciousness.

@mikolmisol6258

Жыл бұрын

​@@dharmatycoonThat still does not allow us to assume that everything else is conscious. Besides, panpsychism has an enormous problem to solve; the combination problem. Panpsychism has no concept of how fundamental consciousnesses can compose together into a higher consciousness, such as those of humans.

@TheFuzzician

Жыл бұрын

pretty much sums the whole idea. Everything I kept hearing from him was just some variation of "well, it COULD be the case". But like you said, this idea is just as weakly supported as every religion. "Consciousness of the Gaps" really is a great summary of the whole idea.

Have Donald Hoffman on the podcast if you want to blow your mind on another level

Personally, I don’t find anything so special about consciousness. All it is, is a series of input, output, and feed back loop. Which means it’s possible to test it, as long as the sensitively is not at the quantum level. However, the way Phil’s describing panpsychism is how I see the material world. Atoms can take on inputs/outputs through electron states. I wouldn’t call that consciousness, but this exchange is the starting point of consciousness.

@Iaotle

Жыл бұрын

So you're just a regular materialist. I honestly can't tell why people use "physics/science can't answer x, therefore y" in this day and age. It's such a beaten to death argument.

@KeanuReevesIsMyJesus

Жыл бұрын

@@Iaotle yes, although I prefer the term naturalist. The term Materialist seems to imply we know all there is to know about the physical universe. Edit: materialist also seems to be a term theist or supernaturalist wants to push on people who don’t believe in magic. If theist and such are willing to agree God/gods/ghost/soul is of the supernatural, then those who don’t find evidence in such should naturally be called naturalist.

Early and excited!

The crux is that both the ethereal mind stuff as well as the tactile and tangible material stuff are all experiences directly through consciousness. Tacticity and tangibility are both experiences. Some experiences are localised - thoughts feelings bodily sensations, while other experiences are delocalised or shared and these experiences apparently evolve according to our laws of physics.

This is the motto of the spreaders of WOO: "Nobody can explain this, but I can explain it."

@glenecollins

Жыл бұрын

And I can explain it perfectly with this very simple explanation that explains absolutely nothing.

@Some_Deist

Жыл бұрын

Same with you materialists

@glenecollins

Жыл бұрын

@@Some_Deist there are a lot of people who are more of less materialist who will freely say “as far as I know no one can currently explain that.” It is super common with scientists because that is how we get funding to try to explain things or at least refine the current model and try to find a situation where the models we use break down, then build a better one which explains results the last couldn’t and makes more to test.

@mykal4779

Жыл бұрын

​@@glenecollinsthe point is panpsychism and materialism are on equal empirical ground; with our current knowledge it's more a philosophical question than a scientific one, to be argued on grounds of parsimony and consistency rather than evidence. it's no more ridiculous to lean towards panpsychism than to lean towards materialism.

@glenecollins

Жыл бұрын

@@mykal4779 I don’t think there is any point believing either it just sounded like that was what was being proposed. You can lean any way you want I don’t judge. I just think jumping to belief based on what I think are a bunch of fairly spurious arguments seems incredibly premature. Depending on how you define it materialism is incredibly broad compared with what it used to be before the enlightenment and then quantum mechanics etc so I can see the attraction however I don’t think panpsychism is any better than any of the basically infinite other options

If asking what a pawn is, it makes more sense to talk about it behavior. A pawn can be made of glass, wood, digital, but its still a pawn based on what it does and how it's used, therefore, what a particular paw. Is made of is irrelevant to its identity as a pawn.

1:39:40 This is called a conversation, a meeting, a group, a party, an organisation, a corporation. These are things made up of conscious things (humans) which themselves are made up of cells (which the panpsychist might argue are conscious). Humans are the cells of the organisation organism. Its embedded in our language too. We say "the conversation went from here to there" or "Google wants to expand to music" or "Russia has invaded Ukraine" etc. We recognise that these are groups that are making informed decision using an equivalent of a brain (e.g. CEO, Board of directors, President etc.)

“Panpsychism of the gaps” puts my feelings on this perfectly. I’m only an hour in but as yet the only reason he’s given to believe panpsychism is that materialism is bad and panpsychism would be a better explanation. He gives no reason at all as to why we should actually think it’s true. I’m sure we could all posit all sorts of scenarios that would be a good explanation IF TRUE.

@veridicusmind3722

Жыл бұрын

That something explains something, and is a simple explanation, is some reason to believe it is true.

@TheFuzzician

Жыл бұрын

his arguments remind me a lot of religious arguments. It, too, is an "explanation", in that it postulates a model of reality that we have not, thus far, conclusively disproved. But, just like religion (albeit, perhaps less so), there is no reason currently to take it seriously.

@veridicusmind3722

Жыл бұрын

@@TheFuzzician I am a theist, so I take God as a serious explanation for why there is stuff. Regardless of what it sounds like, a simple hypothesis that explains the data better than its rival hypotheses is good evidence for that hypothesis. If it is simple it has a high prior probability, and if the data increases the probability of the hypothesis over its prior, then that datum is evidence for the hypothesis. I agree that I fail to see much explanatory virtue (as of yet) in panpsychism. I'm just hammering home that Goff isn't portraying poor epistemology in emphasising what he takes to be panpsychism's strengths (it's ability to avoid common problems, and virtues like simplicity and explanatory power).

@angrashadow2958

Жыл бұрын

@@veridicusmind3722 An explanation being simpler doesn't make it any truer, and it's just lazy to use that as an argument or evidence.

@cardinalscience2600

Жыл бұрын

@@veridicusmind3722 I hear what you’re saying, but I think we need to be very careful with language here. A hypothesis can never be evidence in itself. It’s just a prediction made before an experiment. The later observations then go on to possibly provide evidence for the veracity of the hypothesis. That a hypothesis is simple and *could* provide an explanation if true doesn’t lend any actual credence to the idea that the hypothesis is actually true. I don’t mean to seem facetious, but if I were to postulate some form of magic and detailed how that magic explains consciousness/matter etc, it would have equal, if not more, explanatory power. It seems there is some confused correlation between potential explanatory power and the objective truth of the hypothesis.

It took 1 hour and 20 minuts for Alex to get him to admit that his whole reason for believing in panpsychism is basically a "..well, it might as well" kinda feeling

@philipgoff7897

Жыл бұрын

Did you miss the bit where I argued that the central explanatory task of materialism has never made any progress, whereas the central explanatory task of panpsychism is essentially completed?

@knowdudegamingshow2962

Жыл бұрын

​​@@philipgoff7897 most of us in the audience - us lay people - operate on a couple of base assumptions that I think are getting in the way of understanding you. These are: 1) anything which is true about the natural world must interface with other things which are true about the natural world. 2) anything which interfaces with other aspects of the natural world can be observed and tested for by means of its interface. So by these two assumptions, it would seem that materialism CAN be tested for, in the sense that once we have a full and complete causal understanding of brain activity and its impacts on consciousness, if there remains a missing piece of sorts, then materialism will have been falsified. As a side note, we're very far from that point in understanding. I think the hangup is that pansychism as you lay it out in this podcast does not have any clear, equivalent test for falsifiability

@philipgoff7897

Жыл бұрын

@@knowdudegamingshow2962 You're misunderstanding the view. Panpsychism is not adding anything to the causal dynamics of physics, so it's predictions are exactly the same as those of materialism. Rather, it's explaining those causal dynamics in terms of a more fundamental story.

@guillem.590

Жыл бұрын

@@philipgoff7897 I didn't miss that bit! I actually wanted to ask you something about it. The extent to which panpsychism actually answers its central explanatory task is obviously debatable, since it seems all we have been given is a kind of intuiton, which if one does not share, simply reduces to a "just so" story. And accepting the intuition seems to be more a matter of taste than anything (for example, you say panpsychism is the more parsimonious option, but to my mind there is nothing less parsimonious than postulating that subatomic particles literally are conscious). Of course, all this was discussed in the podcast, so its not the question on my mind. What I wanted to ask you about is the contrast between the explanatory results of panpsychism and materialism. You say materialism has never made any progress, but that seems to me to be a completely unfair claim. Materialism (as manifested in physics) has produced the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which reduces the question of the ultimate nature of things to the ultimate nature of just 17 elementary particles. One might say that, as long as the ontological status of those particles is not resolved, the question is not resolved, and thats true. But to say that reducing the question of explaning the nature of the universe (with all its black holes, galaxies, solar systems, plants, ecosystems, etc) to just explaning the nature of 17 specific particles is not progress is simply ludicrous. This is concrete, explicit, quantitative progress. In contrast, what has panpsychism offered in terms of progress, besides a "just so" story?

@philipgoff7897

Жыл бұрын

@@guillem.590 You're confusing the philosophical position of materialism with physics. Physics is neutral ground between all of these theories. The panpsychist explanation has nothing to do with intuition. Based on Bertrand Russell's insight, it can be demonstrated that there's a logical entailment from the panpsychist's story of fundamental reality to the facts of fundamental physics.

40:23 _"But actual redness itself in the brain just seems ludicrous"_ And yet, this is clearly what is indicated by connectionism. When one trains a neural network to recognize what "red" is, once the training is over, then we have "redness" right there. What is "redness" ?? It is a bunch of neurons in our brains organized in a network.

‘Redness’, if it exists, exists in the same way that the content of a schizophrenic person’s hallucinations exist. I find materialism to be consistent with the plausible idea that consciousness is a very intricate, multi-modal, controlled hallucination.

I think Alex did a fabulous job of politely exposing the frailty of this position. It became clear that it is an argument of speculation for the gap without any actual substantial information or explanatory girth. Just this layer underneath of..........

All of his descriptions of what we haven't made any progress in with physics seems to be missing an argument for why it's important or even what he think "knowing what something is" even means. Knowing that water is H2O isn't nothing. It's telling what separates water categorically from the huge number of other liquids. Knowing how many electrons hydrogen has separates it categorically from other atoms. What other aspects do you need adequately identify these things? It feels to me like he's just using "Why?" as a cudgel to reject things he doesn't like. On the subject of "redness", you're running straight into a problem of linguistics. We know what frequencies of light people usually associate with the english word "red", as well as what physical bits detect them and what paths the signals go along and even where in the brain they go. All we're really missing is the exact mechanics of one of the most complex systems in existence. Yet it sounds like you're not satisfied because the explanation doesn't establish "red" as an aspect of reality. My question then, is why "red" and not the version from a different culture with a different word that doesn't quite align. I don't know a good equivalent for "red", but if you go with "blue" instead, I can readily ask why not 「青」("ao"), which covers a decent portion of "blue" and a decent portion of "green". This isn't just quibbling either. I don't see why qualia can't be explained by just pointing to the mechanisms of the brain interacting with reality, creating culture to process it and then in turn using culture to shape how signals "feel".

@vampyricon7026

Жыл бұрын

Very good point about linguistics. I've dropped out of the consciousness debate a while back and got into linguistics, but this just reminded me that the ancient Indo-European literary classics (The Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, the Vedas, anything in Latin) all contain very limited references to color: Black, white, and the very occasional red. I've heard it posited that a fine differentiation of colors didn't arise until we gained the ability to manipulate color via inks and dyes. Prior to that, their subjective experience may be different.

@Elrog3

Жыл бұрын

You could bring up brown as well. Anyone who watches Technology Connections knows brown is not a color.

@SinHurr

Жыл бұрын

My favorite old "how do you know the blue you see is the same as someone else's?" as a gotcha that most children haven't bothered to think through. Like sure, I don't know someone sees the same wall as the exact same color I do, but we can paint other things the same or similar shades, to color labeling tests, and even measure the damned wavelength of the light reflected off a surface. Even if we don't see the color exactly the same in our minds, we can damned well come to a reasonable consensus on if the sky on a clear day is, in fact, "blue." Room for linguistic differences as noted below notwithstanding, of course.

I am actually in grad school studying physics now. I dont know how i feel about this whole pan-psychism thing. But i did really appreciate him describing really pushing the fact that physics tells us nothing about the fundamentals of nature itself. It only tells us how things in nature interact.

@gavinriley5232

Жыл бұрын

@@dextermorgan4490 Really the explanation is that the wave function travels through both slits, then interferes with itself. Making regions with high and low probability. Just think of a water wave going through the slit. At some points the wave peaks cancel out and at some points they make a higher peak.

Excellent conversation Alex! You really pushed the envelope and dove head into some messy topics with your guest. While I don't always agree with your takes, I thoroughly enjoy the nuance you are willing to entertain in important conversations.

@vhawk1951kl

11 ай бұрын

Alex lives with his mummy and daddy, don't you Alex?

@Fastlan3

11 ай бұрын

@@vhawk1951kl ohh... Someone is jealous and has mommy and daddy issues. Don't worry, it is a faze a lot of man-childs go through. I would consider getting potty trained though, your adult diapers are gonna get expensive.

@vhawk1951kl

11 ай бұрын

@@Fastlan3Cam down dear your shrill hysteria merely merely tells me, who am 70 that you are not a day over15 and being American that cannot spell mummy at that age you live at home. I left school and home to go to work, 55 years ago and my causes or parents are- screamingly obviously, dead, and my two eldest sons just turned 40, and I have grandchildren. You are trying project your concerns onto me; you simply assume that that everyone is a 15 year old child like you, because you know nothing else. Was it a pet that died on you or a relative? I am sad to tell you that what you imagine to be your suffering to date is as nothing compared to the the suffering you will have to endure if you ever reach my age. If your causes or parents have any sense they will boot you out the second you reach 16, which is what I did to my sons, all of whom are now adults , and two of them causes or parents

@vhawk1951kl

11 ай бұрын

@@Fastlan3 Shrug that tells me much more about you child than anything else.

@Fastlan3

11 ай бұрын

@@vhawk1951kl 🙄🤣 okay buddy...

Yes everything is conscious, my toaster was upset with me after I ate breakfast.

This is a fantastic conversation. It would be amazing if you could speak with Bernardo Kastrup about Idealism.

Wonderful content. ❤

The historical process describes how we get physics out of consciousness, ancient stories are records of ancient phenomenology. Shamanism was and still is the exploration of the archetypes of being.

@jmarch_503

Жыл бұрын

The historically methods is one of most varying standards of evidence .. also I sense a conflating ancient stories with historical process .. sure shaman is one archetype but there's many based on experiences or lack of experience like superman archetype .. plenty of people lacked a hero and thus motivated to create hero archetype this what I would expect ... Also historical process does not describe how you would get physics out of consciousness literally any historical methodology will not lead to that

@rabidL3M0NS

Жыл бұрын

@@jmarch_503 physics emerged from chemistry, which emerged from alchemy, which emerged from the confluence of the greek and Christian conceptions of the logos and their attempt to find spirit and truth in matter, which emerged from polytheism, which emerged from animism, which can all be traced back to a shamanic phenomenology and worldview. Ancient archetypes provide hints of the phenomenology and consciousness of our ancient ancestors. For example the common motif of the world tree surrounded by a serpent or dragon, and how this would likely relate to our ancient ape ancestors who lived in trees and were preyed upon by snakes. I’m not just talking about simple memes like superman, I’m talking about the archetypes of the collective unconscious, memes which have been so evolutionarily successful that they’re actually encoded within our genes. The laws of physics as such didn’t emerge with us, but history does describe the process by which a reflection of the underlying physics crystallises within the noosphere of the human ecosystem.

What I got from Goff: Panpsychism: Just making shit up, for no good reason at all.

@radioactivedetective6876

Жыл бұрын

And I was thinking I am too dumb to understand

@andreasplosky8516

Жыл бұрын

@@radioactivedetective6876 There was nothing there to understand. Just blah, blah, like you hear from theist fantasists.

@radioactivedetective6876

Жыл бұрын

@@andreasplosky8516 Goff is a theist? I guess that's why at so many points I felt that he was just about to say god

@andreasplosky8516

Жыл бұрын

@@radioactivedetective6876 I don't think he is a theist himself, but it is the same type of gobbledygook.

@radioactivedetective6876

Жыл бұрын

@@andreasplosky8516 true

Intresting discussion, I don't agree with much of this view, and after this even less.

A possible explanation to the fact that physics seemingly explains activity rather than identity is that our conception of identity wrongly assumes an essentialist attitude about observation: that there exist unique standalone features within observed entities which constitute what they inherently are. The physics example illustrates that such an expectation cannot occur, and the reason it illustrates this is because of the following fact: the more disinterested and ‘data driven’ our observations of entities are, the more reliance there is on their mere behavioural relations to the other parts in the observed system when identifying the those individual entities. This would explain how physics’ often cited status as the ‘hardest science’ paradoxically leads to a more diluted understanding of what things inherently are. For other fields, where their reliability of observation is comparatively weak, such problems occur less. A good example of this is something like political theory, where things like ideologies are very often defined in terms of clear necessary and sufficient conditions. The reason for this is that the nature of what’s being described (institutions, ideologies, movements, parties) are that of ‘social particulars’, i.e. things whose existence are reliant upon human consensus in defining the thing that a certain way. In other words, much of what is determining the identities of the phenomena are less so the observations of them independently behaving separately to us, but more-so our shared agreement for conceptualisation of the things in question. Unfortunately, our prior example (physics) exists at the opposite end of the spectrum, where conceptualisations are strictly shaped by observed occurrences of non-conscious objects. It’s only through the accumulation of such observations over time that properties begin to emerge in our minds which delineate those behaviours a given object exhibits which remain approximately stable across time, place and context.

i have a modest supply of grains of table salt in my shaker, and apparently most are neurotic. is there help for them anywhere, or should they simply be dissolved sooner rather than later?