Hard Problem of Consciousness

[Kostly]

The hard problem of consciousness cannot be solved by investigating the physical....at this point. The data is too vague regarding the bubbling up of images, from thoughts, from firing of neurons. Consciousness is beyond the scientific protocols. It can't be measured, and it can't be sensed. But, it can be experienced.

[cunnidvd]

she's a boob

[craigblack1234]

Matt is clearly a gifted philosophical genius with a deep understanding of philosophical topics. The haters here may make think themselves intelligent, but they lack the faculties to actually engage in a debate or dialectic with Matt. After he waxes deep and eloquent, they counter with vacuous stupidity. If you don't have anything intelligent to say in response, please do yourselves a favor and be quiet.

[AnOrdinaryAmerican1]

We in the business call this "mindless chatter". You do, however, get points for keeping a straight face.

[Cinerary]

So is this where the jobless philosophy majors pass the time betwixt collecting their welfare checks in the morning and eating their TV dinners alone in their 1 bedroom shitholes at night?

[ainodmelvado]

I wasn't going to watch this video b/c you looked rather young and thought it was going to be a rant from a young naive boy, but after listening to it, I must give you kudos. You are very articulate and my first thought was you must be Jewish b/c you sound so intelligent. With a last name of Segall, I'm probably right!

[cmpresents]

Even cells are conscious, not of themselves, but conscious nonetheless, consciousness is life itself. You need to have consciousness first, then intelligence, you can't have intelligence without conscious.

[Jarrodmontelius]

@othouartthat0 ty for posting somthing deep and of actualy meaning, this is what our world is missing

[pingala10]

Problem with philosophers and neuorolists is one is abstractist and another is heuristic. Both have really wrong approach to the problem . Counciousness is just part of nature as our body is, Problem with the western notion is trying to treat Counciousnes experience as Abstract entities and try to solve by Axiomatic approaches, little do they know Solving Continues system in Axiomatic systems in unsolvable,

[Nevyfling]

google Doe's Account.

[leaka13]

omg.... rattle, rumble......i'm fascinated by the subject. but you bore me to tears with your monotonous, droning voice.

[jeffkosmo]

Descartes failed to employ his bumper-sticker motto, de omnibus dubitandum, when it came to his statements about the self.

David Hume was on the right track.

There IS a self, but it's a collection of agents. It's "singular" like a city is a singular concept.

As long as philosophers insist on modeling the mental self as a Cartesianesque, singular thing that "has" sensations and "thinks" thoughts, they're doomed to failure.

Qualia are self-expressing and require no final "experiencER".

[confission]

i was searching for more info on chalmers and came across your video. i raised the question "what does a sperm feel?" at the straight dope message board and i was soon making p-zombie arguments but i had never heard of p-zombies until someone brought it up, and i've been researching it. i'd be interested in knowing if you have any ideas on what a sperm feels

[faunflynn]

I could of course be dead wrong but mysticism has been losing ground to science for a while now and I see no reason as to why we would turn out to be an exception to this.

If quantum states are involved I suppose it could remain intractable but remaining unknowable in principle as well as practice just seems unlikely.

My 50 pence worth.

Good post.

[faunflynn]

There is a big flaw in charmer's thought experiment.

Just cuz you can imagine something does not mean that it could exist. A human sans experience would not behave like a normal person as it would have no language. There is a girl in a US hospital who was denied language. She does not alas seem normal.

The hard problem is I think a red herring and will probably be totally solved within the next 50 yrs or so. Consciousness is just an emergent phenomena there's nothing spooky about it.

[Huesos138]

I don't mean to be rude, but it seems that you haven't quite understood Chalmers argument. I was going to explain it in more technical detail, but youtube doesn't leave me enough room to do so. In any case, I highly recommend Chalmers book "The Conscious Mind". I think anyone who wants to refute his arguments has to have read and understood them first. :)

[otakurocklee]

You need to explain why a human sans experience cannot exist. If all human beings can be analyzed in terms of the physics of particles, where does experience come in?

Chalmers is not saying that it could exist. Chalmers is saying that something is unexplained by physicalism. How does physics show that the motion and interaction of particles causes experience?

[SweetRandal]

Thank you for posting your thougts, I would've written them if you didn't.

[otakurocklee]

@SweetRandal No prob. :)

[jeffkosmo]

@faunflynn

I fully agree with your statement about Chalmers', "If you can imagine it..." baloney.

Please check out some of my videos on the topic if you're interested, especially, "Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness in under 10 minutes".

[ijmalloy]

then you better tell matt to get a phd.  it was a good video, but didn't have enough original insight to keep me interested. The concept of Lived v. Living body was interesting, as was the idea of a body-body interaction; however, as I've said, it wasn't original enough. The consequent solution to the Hard problem was intriguing, I believe it is a thing that can be solved, but I don't think we can so easily rule out an experience after death.

[otonanoC]

Matt needs to be lecturing in a university. The material on Descartes' meditations here is astonishing.

[trifelgeputinage]

I thought this was excellent and very clear, it's a very difficult topic to tackle!

[unassumption]

We cannot ever know another person has consciousness; we can only know of our own consciousness. All we can know of everyone else is their physical behaviour. There would be no way to differentiate between a zombie and anyone else. When we see others acting as though they are conscious, the simplest explanation is that they are conscious. This is the method by which we identify that other people are likely conscious. Examining the brain can tell us about behavior and thus consciousness.

[jonatanfrota]

Right. And that's Dennett's view too.

[movieflickz]

I think this dude just likes to quote text books and look pretty, and not making a clear point. He just talks bs and bores the hell out of me! I think you should become an actor, not a philosopher. Well, he is 23 (just a child still) so I will cut him a break!

[BlazzingSun]

Could Counciouness just be interpretation...

Of life maybe..from single cell on...

a taste of its own exsistence...

Growth development to greater understanding...just appetite for greater more expanded experience...

thru transformation devopment growth.

[DivisionbyZer0]

Prima facie I do not see how the body-body problem is a huge difference from the mind-body problem though it is clear from the physicality paradigm of science that mind is itself excluded from the start as being a "part of nature" if you will.

[DivisionbyZer0]

There is still a massive explanatory to be closed. I have not fully read Thomsons new book but you seem to be alluding to what I wold term as pan experientialism in your description which is broadly that everything has an elementary or atomic experience but not everything is necessarily structured so as to have memory of this experience as we have in consciousness.

[DivisionbyZer0]

Maturanas notion is that a living system is by default a cognitive system according to it's autopoeitic realization, in that it is continually regenerating itself through it's own space of interactions and conserving its sturctural identity through a medium of perturbations, thus through its own doing it is coupled to an environment in such a way that permits it to exist as a discrete unity.

[DivisionbyZer0]

Of course he does not ascibe consciousness to these systems, and tends to focus soley on postlinguistic consciousness if one understand consciousness as being built up from more elementary cognitive processes... to me this leads one to ask why stop at autopoietic systems, along this continuity but I do not quite have an answer for that one way or another.

[DivisionbyZer0]

Actually a big problem in a lot of these theorists is their anthropocentric conceit and focus on post-linguistic consciousness. There is a general poverty of research and theory on animal cognition.

[DivisionbyZer0]

And get a new book on consciousness. Blackmoore believes in memes which are a thoroughly inellectually bankrupt notion. :D

[Idallian]

Logically flawed

[FeelsLikeVomiting]

Dualism is an "ontic" or "objective" designation. It is the result of taking substance as an ontological constraint on all beings. Get rid of the substance ontology and the ontic problems of dualism (how we get the mind and body together) dissolve. Ontological dualism is impossible; dualism is always only ontic.

[MaBu888]

Some integral thinker created holistic mathematics... he devised a way to represent gross physical reality as a line, psychic and subtle level as a circle, causal as a point and nondual as radiance, as in radiation of that poin tin infinite directions in infinite distances, reducable to neither this nor that... and he achieved it through mathematics... the name of the man is Peter Collins... the name of the trade is holistic mathematics... steps beond visionlogic and materialism.

[zezt]

Blackmore's assumption that 'sceince will SOOn sort it out, have patience' spiel is exactly same as the shrinks who when challenged they dont have medical tests for 'mental illnesses' claim that 'medical science will SOOn sort it out, have patience'

[delerium2k]

I believe the trend in experience which began with the emergence of life and samsaric experience itself is now culminating in experience experiencing itself - meta-awareness. I think that what's going on now (with humanity leading the way) is a transcendence of life's duality cycle. Perhaps we're on the cusp of the third major stage of cosmological evolution. From essence (physiosphere) to experience/time/space/life/dea­th/duality (biosphere) to something more... These are beautiful times.

[0ThouArtThat0]

interesting thoughts, delerium. We shall see!

[JJJPaxton]

I would recommend this vid:

watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU&feature=ch­annel_page

[TheObnubilators]

i thought it was the soft problem?

[Rorty00]

The "soft problem" is that of mapping out the brain, or the problem of finding each and every "neural correlate" of conscious experience.

[TheObnubilators]

seems like a lofty task

[Rorty00]

Its amaizing how far they've come though.

[DivisionbyZer0]

An impossible one as where the boundaries of the elements of conscious experience are is not clear. It also presupposes if you will a finite state machine and that range of conscious experience is if you will finitely countable.

[zencat01]

Consciousness arises through certain massively interactive, combinatorial, and dynamic structures in the brain. (It is a process, not a thing)

Have a bowl of red pills for breakfast.

[TheObnubilators]

i wish i would have taken that damn red pill

[technepisteme]

In making claims about how "consciousness arises", you're already engaging in a philosophical debate, the very one you are criticising. Either that, or you are simply stating it as an assumption (in that case, rightly so).

[0ThouArtThat0]

I would say consciousness is something like that, but I think we also need to understand how the brain relates to the rest of the body, and how that body relates to other bodies and the world. These larger questions are necessarily also part of the consciousness question. I don't think an explanation for consciousness will be found that focuses merely on the brain and leaves these other elements out.

[DivisionbyZer0]

"In the brain"? A disembodied brain has no consciousness and the brain has continuous connections to the brain which have ongoing transactions with the wider envinronment, therefore you would be prudent to not specifically localize it to a well defined boundary residing in the head. This is a form of phrenology.

[DivisionbyZer0]

ermmm continuous connections with the rest of the body...

[shilohwillcome]

@zencat01 That does not at all solve the hard problem of conciseness.

[fishybishbash]

@zencat01 "Consciousness arises through certain massively interactive, combinatorial, and dynamic structures in the brain." No. Consciousness is 'perceived' through those structures that you refer to. Consciousness is something we 'tune into'. thats what out brains are, tuners. Consciousness drags our physical being toward it like a magnet. The process is a result of consciousness, not vice versa. An understandable mistake you make, however.

[kasaduhallo]

@zencat01 So present the evidence!Good luck!No amount of red or any other pills can help you.

[zencat01]

Utter rubbish. Philosophers have gone out of their way to describe all these problems centered around dualism. Neuroscientists never really have seen a problem in the first place.

Consciousness is what you lose when you go to bed at night, are under deep anesthesia, or what you see in other humans. The permanent loss of consciousness through severe trauma or disease is considered the equivalent of death.

[0ThouArtThat0]

Neuroscientists should continue doing their scientific experiments and collecting data. The philosophers should continue trying to work out what this data says about human life. It is a match made in heaven.

[granvilleguy]

People interested can go to the Journal of Consciousness Studies and read the original David Chalmers paper on the "hard" and "soft" problems of consciousness. In addition, there is access to other excellent papers in their entirety.

[technepisteme]

Hey Matt,

(As we've discussed), from a purely neuroscientific POV we really have little choice but to work from a materialist ontology. Or at least some monism. It provides the best fit with scientific presuppositions and the knowledge (or rational belief) that science has thus far provided. But I do agree that from a metaphysical standpoint Churchland is stuck in a Cartesian ontology. It might be reasonable to attribute all this to a history of the diverging disciplines from a Cartesian point!

[TheObnubilators]

do you think science would be able to embrace paradigm that includes both the materialist ontology, and the metaphysical one? Not sure what it would look like as a finished product, but we can say it would be like a synthesis of the two

[technepisteme]

Any ontology is metaphysical. Materialism is a metaphysical position, and I think Matthew and I agree that it is a necessary presupposition for the scientist. If you mean to ask if science can embrace a materialist ontology and a phenomenological one at once - then no, it would lose the power of generality and universal application.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I wouldn't say that phenomenology offers any specific ontology. I think it tries to avoid metaphysical problems and instead just looks to experience to bring out "the things themselves." Certainly phenomenology can aid us in our metaphysical work, but it is not doing metaphysics on its own. Have you watched the series I uploaded of Evan Thompson talking about how phenomenology can be useful to neuroscientific research? I posted it as a response to LennyBound's Churchland video.

[leawardseif]

But phenomenology does seem to imply a specific ontology. It claims that things of which we are conscious exist independently of other things; and it claims that immediate conscious awareness of the lebenswelt (or lebenskorper) is necessary for other things, such as the posits of science. These claims answer questions about existence, substance and essence which seem squarely ontological.

[0ThouArtThat0]

The claim that the life-world is prior to the world of scientific abstraction is more of an epistemological claim than an ontological, though admittedly we can't get too far into either knowledge or being without having to take up their relationship with one another.

When I say we can do phenomenology without making strict ontological assumptions, I am referring to our ability to "bracket" certain findings, putting them aside and exploring the experiential terrain again from scratch.

[leawardseif]

Well yes. But the particulars of *the experiential terrain* then take on the ontological status of being essential and substantial; in which case, if conscious experience is a mental state, phenomenology is a form of idealism.

It is difficult to shed our ontology :-s

[DivisionbyZer0]

It is nearly impossible to speak of anything at all without a tacit expression of some form of heuristic ontology.

[Xenophanes21]

@leawardseif indeed, and this was heidegger's argument. He saught to ground phenomenology ontologically as the hermeneutics of facticity (in a book by that name) and in 'phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle" and "Basic Problems of Phenomenology"

[0ThouArtThat0]

I don't think neuroscientists need to work already having decided their ontological position. This is why phenomenology is so useful; we can ask many research questions about how 1st person experience and 3rd person brain states relate and gain interesting results without making metaphysical assumptions beforehand. Neuroscientists can do science and leave the metaphysics to the philosophers.

[Scottkiloby]

Love your videos. I expect you to become a well-known philosopher some day. I responded with my videos about "No Point of Reference." I hope that you will view them not through the rational mind but through awareness itself. The rational mind will stay stuck on agreement and disagreement. Awareness is nondual

[0ThouArtThat0]

thanks scott, I'll take a look.

[weyjoh]

If science has not answered any question with 100% certainty, why expect it to answer this one? The only reason this question is "hard" is because you demand more "proof" than normal before you accept the fiction as fact. The only thing to be found is your level of fear.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I'm not so much after certainty, just a continual revelation of deeper and deeper truths. Certainty seems too dead and stagnant to be interesting.

[2bsirius]

In Susan Blackmore's book, "Conversations on Consciousness" [2005], she interviewed the Churchland's [among lots of others] . It's a good capsule of Churchland's position...I don't see Churhland as a dualist, and I wasn't able to follow your reasoning in that part of the vid, Matt. What IS a 'lived body'?....I was completely lost & defeated by the explanation...I feel the same when I read Evan Thompson...I can't get a handle on what he's getting at...It seems unnecessarily convoluted to me.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I will post a video response to clarify this.

[CousinoMacul]

If you're trying to get me to forgive and/or embrace Descartes, it's a very big hill to climb.

"body/body problem" I like that perspective.

[0ThouArtThat0]

The more I think about Descartes, the more complex he seems to become. I will always reject the strict mind/body ontological divide, but as a purely phenomenological discovery, the cogito is quite fascinating.

[CousinoMacul]

Yes (I originally came here from the debateinmendham chatroom, but the frustration has worn off), I also reject mind/body dualism. But those three simple words (cogito ergo sum) can easily (and justifiably) be interpreted in many different ways. At least one of thos einterpretations is quite congruent with my thinking.

[weyjoh]

How many fictions does it take to make a fact? What does thinking have to do with anything?

[mariospassov]

according to Wilber (see Sidebar E to "Boomeritis") Descartes lends himself to a Vedantian reading. Authors as Kroy, Bonnett, Catherine Kahill, Margaret Sullivan he says, are getting this point.

Have y checked them out yet? Are they any good?

have you further read Taylor's "Philosophical Papers" and "Philosophical Arguments"? He refers to the German tradition of Herder and Humboldt a lot, which seems to me to be the actual counter-position to yours, much more than materialism.

keept it up!!!

[MaBu888]

But Descartes would not read himself like that. To him brahman andmaya were completely separate... even though he can be read as a vedantist.

[weyjoh]

Fascinating, but incomplete. He says that he is, but he doesn't say WHAT he is - which makes his point rather pointless.

[0ThouArtThat0]

Descartes said he was a thinking thing.

[RowanFortuneWood]

That was a fascinating video and an excellent critique of Churchland and neurophilosophy in general. I'm glad to be subscribed to your channel. ***** and Favourite.

[cloudmonkeys]

I think that Nagel said that conciousness was what it was like to be something. I like that. I might of misremembered his phrase though.

[Rorty00]

You're on the right track. Nagel's famous essay on consciousness is called "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" He says: "Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to BE that organism--something it is like FOR the organism." Nagel's bats are fun. In relation to this topic he says: "Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable."

[captcaveman4201]

ask me the specific question that you are looking for the answer to. and i will give you the answer.

[0ThouArtThat0]

I think I'm just trying to enter an ongoing conversation about the nature of consciousness and experience. I have no preformulated question I'd like answered.

[captcaveman4201]

this is a dream.. a persistant one.. but a dream none the less. focuz on what you would like it to become. and it changes accordingly. it is the ultimate gift.

[weyjoh]

A gift from who and a gift to whom? Zen masters carry a zen stick for people who think life is a dream.

[captcaveman4201]

a gift from you.. for you. in this dream you are in control. and you can make it as real or as unreal as you want. whatever your conciousness is focused on.