Michael Graziano: Consciousness, Animal Minds, and the Neuroscience of Suffering

[@ryanhewitt9902]

I'm so excited about this, I watch all of Graziano's talks / interviews. You've been killing it lately with the guest choices.

[@colesmatteo]

good episode. graziano is compelling. you know the interviewer is good when they only need to ask a question every 10-15 min.

[@robinsonerhardt]

hahaha thanks!

[@ArtChic_]

That happens when they actually listen

[@charc4819]

Robinson, you don't need to "better understand" the nature of animal experience, consciousness and suffering. I see you with your two cats practically every podcast. You know exactly the answers. What's more , you know that you know. The step you, we, all need to take.. is the one we all know but conveniently pretend we don't. It's the 'Am i prepared to think of other, be selfless, or does nothing come before my needs, wants and desires, am i selfish first, second and last'. Congratulations on having the integrity to address it. Hope you land on the correct answer. You seem like a great guy. Let's hope you get there. ie. it's not just cats you think deserve not to be tortured. Also, something... anything.. is better than nothing. So do what you can. :-)

[@austindenny7094]

that's certainly one step in the chain, but one shouldn't get too comfortable and assume the work is done there. After our individual actions we must consider the much more harmful, but also more difficult to change, actions of the society we live in. After all, when one as an individual stops eating meat, however admirable that might be, it does little to affect the actual number of animals suffering or the quality of that suffering. Not to mention the suffering society causes for people. What is our responsibility in that regard? It would be hard to argue there is zero responsibility, after all society is made up of individuals, if no one has any responsibility for the undertakings of society then you end up with a pretty meaningless world

[@cwcarson]

1:23am was going to go to sleep but Robinson says this is an absolute banger so it looks like I'm staying up for another two and a half hours.

[@robinsonerhardt]

This is the dedication I hope to have cultivated among the Geeselings.

[@endoalley680]

What's a Geeseling? I held off to about 4:30 in the morning to begin listening.

[@katayoonkalaeirad2238]

I am SO HAPPY that I found your channel. Thank you 🩵

[@rafazubiria679]

Minute 18 and I can confirm, it is a BANGER

[@andystewart9701]

Great episode! Great questions and great guest. Thanks so much!

[@juliarekamie]

Oh, that live setup with 3 cameras is well done 📷 🤝🏻🖤 And of course the levels of conversations as always - top 💆🏻‍♀️

[@tophersonX]

One of the few sensible theories of consciousness out there! May the hard problem dissolve away!

[@robinsonerhardt]

I'm glad you found this!!

[@drcsaikiran]

lol.. you guys don't even know what you are asking for.. the hard problem is the only hope for meaning and purpose to life.

[@drcsaikiran]

@@robinsonerhardt Hey man, can I pay you to present my theory of everything to you? I know this is a very arrogant ask. But I don't mind paying since it's for giving meaning to people's lives (including mine)

[@tophersonX]

@@drcsaikiran that's like, your opinion man. I don't see anything hinging on the hard problem; the lives of philosophical zombies can be full of purpose and meaning.

[@drcsaikiran]

​@@tophersonXexplain how are you calling it a zombie and trying to say it has a purpose at the same time?

[@websmink]

Thank you Robinson. This was a great episode. The only animal products I consume are most fish, eggs from private or personal farms where they don’t kill the chicken, the same goes for very occasional dairy I can find. I am a neuropharmacologist and the question of animal suffering and pain is a very important topic. I hope we get to advance grown meats and dairy products soon. I know it will take society a while to accept those products. Beef industry in California is responsible for 80 percent of the water use because of the food they require. So even for environmental reasons, less meat consuming helps. Also, there are good videos on KZbin that discuss highest sources of plant or legume protein, including the scores. I only mostly eat fish and eggs for ethical reasons that are very simple: if you don’t feel ok causing pain to your child, cat , dog, or raccoon on the street, extending your compassion to animals that are ruined by pain, seems logically consistent, even if the main impulse is compassion.

[@robinsonerhardt]

Thank you for listening! And for sharing your thoughts!

[@pierrelouw9064]

The best interview on consciousness I have ever seen. Also helps that the interviewer is a likeable guy

[@MasoudJohnAzizi]

This was great. 👍. Sharing my perception: While Dr. Graziano’s "Attention Schema Theory" is an innovative and well-funded approach to understanding consciousness, it faces significant challenges (as all physicalist theories do). Critics argue that it oversimplifies the complexity of consciousness, fails to address the hard problem, and lacks direct empirical evidence for the attention schema. Alternative theories, such as GWT and IIT, provide competing explanations that are supported by different sets of data, raising questions about the completeness and accuracy of AST in explaining the full scope of conscious experience.

[@2394098234509]

Man this is a phenomenal interview. Love your style and approach. Glad I found this channel

[@codyjackschwartz1712]

thank you for the introduction to this guy, i'm excited to explore further

[@MattAngiono]

After listening to whole podcast, I'm still left wondering a lot about this theory of consciousness. I found it very interesting, so my point is not to put it down. I'm just not seeing how this addresses the fact that I am experiencing the world. I get what he's saying about some brains having lot enough complexities and all that, but this seems more like a "consciousness arising out of complexity" issue, consistent with the hard problem. We seem to struggle with even defining the term let alone be able to decide which lifeforms do or don't have it. It just seems like a shortcut to me. If there's no "magic" then i still can't see how this explains the fact that i do experience. Whether or not the argument is circular, this doesn't seem like a sufficient reason to discount experience itself

[@ryanhewitt9902]

This episode doesn't introduce the theory very deeply, since they had done that in a previous episode. It's worth checking out the first one, or I highly recommend his book "Rethinking Consciousness". It's very short, you can get it on Audible. The book affected me like this: I used to think there needed to be an additional explanation that described how the magic of experience comes about. After the book, I felt that all of the magic really had been accounted for. No matter how hard I look, I can no longer put my finger on an aspect of felt consciousness that remains elusive or mysterious. I feel satisfied by the explanation - which is something I had come to believe was impossible. Please give the book a chance.

[@benwarnock]

His point is that the claim ‘I am experiencing the world’ is your brain made of atoms creating information models of a self and and internal experience. The brain is convincing itself that it’s actually experiencing ‘redness’, but really it’s just information

[@bejita7831]

59:36 - 1:00:05 - I feel like this best demonstrates what seems to be lacking in this argument. Michael has been describing experience as useful "self-models" to process information and focus attention, but I'm not hearing any reasons as to why it would be useful for those processes to produce experiential phenomena. As he describes here, why not just be philosophical zombies that attend to our needs? 46:07 - This reminds me of "consciousness is an illusion" arguments - in an attempt to bypass the difficulty explaining conscious experience, the "what it's like to be X", they introduce some process that produces all the elements of conscious experience while not *actually* being conscious experience. The brain telling itself that it has a "what it's like to be me" is the same thing as having a "what it's like to be me". I don't see how this is any different to saying "you don't experience pain, it's just useful for your brain to tell you that you experience pain". Still a great listen, just not as fun to type about all the stuff I agreed with :P

[@emilianosintarias7337]

i think you got it exactly. The assumption in this theory is that our selves really, objectively, discreetly exist - which is useful in zoology but is not consistent with physics, let alone introspection. Once we accept that we don't exist at that level, what's left is where we do exist, the operating systems of experience, including our constructed selves. They are appropriate to it and experience is appropriate and meaningful to them. Who else is trying to make sense of the universe and life, who is the scientist in the chair talking about this topic and why?

[@JohnE-c2k]

Thank you so much, Erhardt!

[@robinsonerhardt]

My pleasure!

[@TimZM]

yes! michael is terrific.

[@robinsonerhardt]

Indeed.

[@annmariemccard4709]

Your consciousness has the ability to change its focus, direct its focus. It is like a searchlight. When you choose to focus in one direction, you are attending to what is in the field of the searchlight beam.

[@peterz53]

Thanks for bringing this. Almost vegan for 12 year - still a little wild fish, but mulling that over. Missed Pins during intro. BTW, consciousness (awareness/experience?) and free will seem to overlap in some ways, but Sapolsky didn't want to touch this even though it would be good to try to clearly distinguish between them.

[@robinsonerhardt]

12 years! Amazing! Also sadly Pins is a fickle beast and none can tell whether she will stir from her slumber to grace us with an intrusion during any given recording.

[@JoeLebrick]

This is terrific!

[@robinsonerhardt]

agreed.

[@martinstuemmler1494]

I found this Podcast 6 Month ago. Its fresh and informative, also evolving in a positive way. Half 1:47:33 way in and i am hungry for shrimps 😊 thx for your work Robinson! Thumbs up and greetings from Germany

[@fnamelname9077]

I would love to see (with any guest) a deep discussion of what consciousness means - what problem do we solve by posing the word? I'm a little disappointed you never discussed the intersection of AST and qualia.

[@eugeniobevilacqua4606]

Maybe I miss the point but given that shrimps feel pain what is the point that they don’t have a model of themselves? The ‘thing’ suffers anyway even though it doesn’t know it is suffering.

[@brendawilliams8062]

Well, for some of the females experiencing ww11. Bet that led to baby boomers

[@samfawlia]

just another typical conflation of metacognition with consciousness

[@austindenny7094]

I'm guessing you don't think rocks suffer. If not at shrimps, where do you draw the line? I think you could probably make a good argument for anything with a central nervous system. But probably you can't make a good argument for plants. However, although you could make an argument for nervous system equating to suffering, I wouldn't agree, I think all a nervous system has to do is to send a signal of some part of the organism being damaged and then the organism reacts by moving away or something, but that action is probably automatic. I think the argument that only creatures with a model which acts as consciousness could feel pain because feeling pain is a specific way of interpreting a nerve cell signal into the schema of consciousness as a feeling.

[@samfawlia]

@@austindenny7094 pain is qualia simple as that. i don’t know if shrimps are conscious. but if someone admits they can feel pain, they admit they experience qualia and therefore consciousness as it’s usually defined in these types of discussions.

[@AaronChy19]

Hell yeah, consciousness episode!

[@robinsonerhardt]

oh yeahhh

[@brendawilliams8062]

We know what shares their food and what doesn’t.

[@bloopbleepnothinghere]

I'm still super impressed that all of this experience comes from complex data. Consciousness as an emergent property of complex data means the universe is definitely aware. Unless there is something magical about complex systems only when those systems are contained in a skull.

[@Belialith]

Awesome intelligence! Thank you for this interview. Beautiful! And he has gorgeous hands which remind me of an ancient artists sketches.

[@joeldream6842]

i have long appreciated Grazianio's ideas and theory on consciousness. However I am skeptical of his assertions that because certain animals don't have the same brain structure that correlates to human control of attention that they therefore dont have an attention schema and cannot have consciousness. It seems like attention and an informational model of attention are the only requisites for consciousness in his theory. He admits that octopi likely have a well developed model of attention (and therefore consciousness) due to their nature as visual preditors, and yet they nessisarily must have developed and use a different neurological anatomy from humans for this purpose. It seems like attention and an attention schema are incredibly useful for all sorts of animals that require selective informational processing. And making informational models about the world from the senses, including about the nature of other entities as dangerous or food or sexual partners and the boundary of the self would be extremely helpful for a fish (for example) to have. It seems strange to imagine that they woudnt have a nessesity for selective attention considering the complex demands of their behaviors and world and sensory inputs that requires dynamic computational constraints, and it is a small leap to assume that an informational model of this attention would be nessisary to effectively make use of their dynamic attention. So given that many animals such as fish have rich sensory and neurological processing abilities that enable them to hunt and hide and selectively attend to the world in functionally intelligent ways how can we assume that they dont have an attention schema? His assertion that this hypothesis is laughable for fish because they don't have the similar brain anatomy and yet is quite likely for octopus is fascinating for me, and is an assertion I am deeply skeptical about.

[@bernardofitzpatrick5403]

Seems to dovetail nicely with the model-making-approximations of the scientific method. Would love to hear him on Friston and minimising free energy , Markov blanket approximations , Bayesian Brain etc This approach may go some way to “revising” a platonist view of math. Grounding it squarely in a non-dualistic-materialist-only approach. Just my random thoughts Robinson. Banger episode.

[@James_Orrico]

Great episode, Robin!! If you’re interested in animal consciousness, you should try and reach out to professor Colin Allen. I took a philosophy of science class from him when he was at Pitt and his academic focus is animal consciousness. Talking to him was always so insightful. He is now a professor at UC Santa Barbara.

[@bernardofitzpatrick5403]

Seems to me, at least, to dovetail nicely with model making approximations of the scientific method. Would love to hear him on Prof Friston and free energy principle minimisation, Markov blankets etc. would go some way to explaining the extraordinary effectiveness , or not, of math , in a Bayesian probability way, in approximating the physical world. Another banger Robinson. Love it!

[@arnoldkotlyarevsky383]

The thing I don't get from the host's fixation on shrimp consciousness is why it is necessary to care about the consciousness of shrimp in order to decide if it is morally ok to kill them for food when you have other options. It would be purely for your gustatory pleasure - and from an ethical perspective, it seems dubious to justify killing an animal on that basis. All of which is to say nothing about the moral implication of the environmental toll associated with shrimp farming/fishing.

[@annmariemccard4709]

In Plato's Timaeus, vision is explained on the principle that "like is known by like" a fire stream issuing from the eye meets a fire stream issuing from the object of vision (Empedocles).

[@Belialith]

At 1:23:20, this man is a genius....and Robinson is also, for the fact you brought up the Hellen Keller metaphor. Can I use this metaphor to describe what he just said? Hellen was describing to us that she was a thing put together with enough parts and pieces to make a life form, a reactionary life form. Self preservatory life form. It was only after she heard the Word, or was gifted with the Word, now did she have awareness of her existence. In other words, she was a model that came from somewhere, and now someone put a certain part or piece into her, and that brought her into, well, independence, for lack of a better word. Because now, she could use her own... uhm... whatever that is. This man has some fabulous and high intellect ideas, which trickle down into our feeling area, and birth new understanding, that expands all our lives, in some way or other. It is so high and deep, which ever word fits, that it's... I need a lot more knowledge before I can grasp where it came from.

[@stevevitka7442]

Essentially the hard problem of consciousness' is solved by saying consciousness is a bad descriptor because of model of self-attention is necessarily compressed from a 1:1 map to reality? Well, it might be as close as we get, but mismeasure or not it is all we got, and it does help preserve some essential qualities of the process we don't understand/ represent with our model.

[@oliverjamito9902]

Michael what is speed?

[@oliverjamito9902]

Remember keep watch!

[@real_pattern]

i'm not quite understanding how one can eliminate experience and retain empirical inquiry coherently. graziano also seems to talk about 'matter' with the same magicalist stance. what explains the metaphysical conception of 'matter'? it seemed to me that for graziano, unexplained phenomena / brute facts are magic. but i doubt he can explain 'matter' or that anything exists at all in terms of something else already understood. so are these phenomena, like 'matter' and existence simpliciter magical for him?

[@Steve-xh3by]

Humans like to think we are so special. Natural selection built "consciousness" from simple building blocks. Natural selection is a blunt instrument. No complex engineering was involved in the construction of "consciousness." I love listening to philosophers twist themselves in knots trying to come up with complex and nonsensical explanations for consciousness. In the end, it is just an emergent property of complex computation systems. I agree with Michael. My personal experience is that my consciousness has something to do with the fact that part of my brain can model the future and predict the steps needed to move from the present to the imagined future state.

[@nyworker]

Others will argue that mathematics and computationalism are just products of our minds and conscious brains or the way we observe nature. Like observing your self in a mirror and saying "that's really you" and not a reflection/measurement of you

[@Hubris030]

The evolutionary path of different species of fish is so entirely unrelated to one another that humans can be more closely related(on the evolutionary ladder) to one species of fish than that fish is to another species of fish. Of course fish share lots of 'features' through convergent evolution but it would be next to impossible to say that ALL fish lack a feature based on any group of species of fish

[@TheEivindBerge]

He started out as an illusionist but brought dualism back when he spoke of the user experience. Computation is not an experience. A model is not an experience. A story of the self is not an experience. Whatever your physicalist theories, you need magic to breathe subjective experience into it -- or else deny that it is like anything to be anyone (including suffering!), which Michael Graziano (correctly) is unwilling to do consistently. The analogy of seeing white is bad because it is qualia, and as such pure, not a "mixture" of anything. That the stimulus producing it is a physical mix is beside the point. This line of reasoning does not disprove subjective experience at all.

[@ZIGZAGBureauofInvestigation]

All Forms of Life Have Minds & a Mission !

[@brendawilliams8062]

You have creatures that can read to a certain extent by color. If an advanced brain could read by color instead of symbols then white would fry them

[@zachcooper9102]

Uuuuhh did anyone catch the echo’d “living in parallel” at 57:29

[@jamesragsdale8202]

Dogs and other animals are aware so they are conscious but they don't have free will. They have their behaviors and when certain thresholds are reached they act. We however are not only conscious but we have (or feel we have) choice and free will.

[@billusher2265]

please interview David Wengrow, Steve Keen, Shinzen Young and Daniel Ingram,

[@robinsonerhardt]

Thanks for the recommendations!

[@bendybruce]

Wow that opening dialog really was quite something. Not saying I necessarily agree with his hypothesis but it's certainly worth considering as I don't think there is any actual proof to discredit it.

[@benwarnock]

My gut feeling tells me Grazianos figured it out, but then again my gut also tells me I’m having an internal experience 🤷‍♂️

[@annmariemccard4709]

The mind is a non-physical psychic process which you use to interpret and form reality. For example, you choose to focus yout attention in one direction not another.

[@ptrc-reptilian]

excellent

[@robinsonerhardt]

Thanks!

[@brendawilliams8062]

I t would be interesting to as to what he computed morphic resonance to be in a construct

[@marcodallolio9746]

This position is the actual deep reason we are all depressed in the west, and won't stop being depressed. Our culture thinks ourselves computational machines, and that will always produce massive, collective, inescapable depression

[@andrewedwards3278]

Iain mcgilchrist is that you?

[@Robotwesley]

“So when I was reading about salmon consciousness…” ❤

[@tminusmat]

U can come to the same conclusions, making consciousness a sense that is developed. So our brain describing its experience of consciousness.

[@nyworker]

Brains enact heuristics or natural shortcuts. Thoughts themselves are heuristics and all of the theories from AST,IIT, Dualism, Idealism, Materialism, Physicalism etc. are all highly effective heuristics for describing how brains enact minds.

[@annmariemccard4709]

I point out that he does not actually say what pain ids, only that it is complicated. You know like "magic happens".

[@grantwest3951]

Reminds me of Joscha Bach's view on consciousness.

[@vicp7124]

1:21:15 Global Workspace Theory is the proper way to model the brain.

[@LeonidPetrin]

I never thought about shrimps until this podcast.

[@mablak2039]

Even a 'brain describing itself to itself' shouldn't produce experience. Under physicalism, all of this could be going on 'in the dark', just like the beating of our heart, so why do we have qualia that accompany 'the brain describing itself to itself'? The most fundamental problem with a physicalist view is still the intrinsic nature of matter. Arguments like these posit that certain physical things, whether information, fields, etc, are fundamentally real. What are those things? If we only explain what these fundamental entities are in terms of what they do, or how they interact with other physical things--as physics currently does--then we get a circular explanation for what any particular physical thing is. To actually provide an answer as to what anything fundamentally is, we have to posit consciousness.

[@simesaid]

I like Michael, and agree with much of what he has to say, but as you point out, there are still some questions surrounding the nature of our first-person, subjective, conscious experience of the world that don't seem to be satisfactorily explained by merely a straight physicalist interpretation of the situation. This is an explanation wherein synaptic connections, axons, and calcium-ion channels hold within them all of the necessary neural correlates to describe conscious experience. And this may well be true. But, then, well... it may not be. I don't know, and I must admit to agnosticism here, but were it not for just one or two very personal experiences - ones that in no way can be explained by materialism - then I don't really have an issue with _how_ we could have come to be conscious, much less _what_ that conscious experience feels like. I mean, you can argue that conscious experience is independent of physical experience, but it seems like quite a different thing altogether to argue that just because "redness" doesn't exist out there in the world, it must then be an intrinsic property of consciousness. After all, dogs are clearly conscious creatures, and yet they don't "see" in colour at all. If consciousness _is_ independent of the physical body, then I think it probably exists purely as a "witness" to whatever physical system it resides in. Consciousness in dogs would see what a zombie dog would see, and consciousness in humans would see what a human zombie would see, in colour. But hell, _much, much_ smarter people than me think otherwise, so who knows... but just personally, I've never understood why our experience of qualia _must_ therefore demonstrate consciousness. Anyway, have a great day! I

[@stephenparker7478]

I don’t understand why the layering of modalities isn’t enough to explain phenomenal experience? We hear chords in music and that experience is phenomenally different from a single note. You can stack layers of paint and eventually reach something we term art. We mix spices to create blends that are phenomenally different from the flavor of those spices individually. In fact, we have examples all over the place in every day life that these phenomenal “essences” are just stacked compositions of smaller parts. To me it seems easy enough to imagine that a similar thing happens with our own modalities. What we really needed an answer to was the self model and AST gives us that.

[@mablak2039]

@@stephenparker7478 We can't create a pile of sand without actually stacking individual grains of sand. Similarly, you wouldn't be able to produce a complex experience like the sound of a B chord, without smaller forms of experience that constitute it. A physicalist (i.e. illusionist) approach to consciousness means we don't even have these individual grains of sand to work with; we could never create a pile of sand, because we don't have these smaller grains of qualia to create a more complex conscious experience. Qualia don't exist in the physicalist view. The hard problem of consciousness remains even if you think the brain constructs a model of itself as in AST: why should any internal models actually result in experience, when they could just as well be going on in the dark, without consciousness, just like so much of our internal processing? But going back to the intrinsic nature of matter argument, a model like AST still posits physical things like information, and you have to give some account for what's meant by information. The argument would be that any physicalist account of information, fields, etc, is ultimately circular, and incoherent.

[@stephenparker7478]

​@mablak2039 I got that. Appreciate you sharing some thoughts. For me, I don't see a difference between stacked modality and qualia because qualia doesn't define a thing in me that I otherwise find to be undefined. I do have a rich inner experience, etc. But I'm also biased; I've spent the majority of my life as an art director creating phenomenal experiences for people, and I do it by working and thinking in layers.

[@dj098]

​​​​​​@@mablak2039AST is an attempt to answer exactly that question - namely, to explain how subjective experience could have arisen from from purely computational mechanisms that underlie a complex system's capacity to model its own attention. Saying that this doesn't even address the original hard problem of consciousness constitutes a perfectly natural reaction to this argument, but unfortunately it further solidifies the erroneous idea which AST was designed to dismantle, according to which there is some deeply mysterious, non-physical aspect to consciousness.

[@oliverjamito9902]

A little LIGHT with a Candy as an offering to comfort the Oliver. In front of all running out of room in front the Meeks among them will say?

[@jamesragsdale8202]

@1:05:20 he says "as a user of a brain" but we don't use our brain we are our brain.

[@BarackObamaJedi]

Do y'all realize that the zombie scenario doesn't discriminate "animals from humans", like as a paranoid autistic I don't just assume "other" people are real, or conscious, or free willing, every action and emotion is clearly performative. There's just cognition, that is, the mind interpreting the body computing from axiomatic beliefs - while emotions are the print out of cognition, sent back down so that the body might interpret the mind. and even that, it's not some magical second substance doing magical stuff, it's just abstraction. Which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it means it exists as a strong emergent layer. So people don't exist, unless you concede that society is "real" and not some constructed game, because a person is just the role within a social setting

[@endoalley680]

It is interesting that the arguments here centered around what is the minimum neurological threshold a creature must have to experience pain and suffering. And that once this threshold has been met it is arguably immoral to kill or cause suffering in the creature. And yet the discussion never mentions developmental stages of consciousness in the human fetus. This seems to be at least as compelling and relevant a subject of study as the ethics of killing animals for food.

[@greatestone4eva]

suffering is not an illusion it's a sensor firing off to let your body know something is wrong. the biological basis for the evolution of self-awareness begins with pain sensors. bless up. i didnt watch the video because i dont have time to waste but i hope this helps you in your journey. a little bit of neurobiology evolutionary theory in 2 sentences saves us all quite a bit of time. like meetings that should have been emails this video should have been an article. hope you make something more concise and meaningful i expect more from this channel because i've seen you deliver excellence before and i wont accept anything less. bless up and good day

[@nicolasglemot6760]

I haven't watched all the way through yet, I'm at the shrimp portion, but I think the whole discussion about the ethics of eating certain animals is going on the assumption that for something to be considered a moral patient it has to be conscious, and really I'm not sure there is or could ever be any evidence to support that, since morality seems to be ultimately stemming from our own feelings about what's right and wrong anyway and not any objective truth about the world. So like, if we have moral intuitions that suffering is bad, why would the moral criteria for moral patienthood be having a consciousness, rather than being able to suffer at all regardless of whether or not that suffering is felt subjectively? Both seem equally as arbitrary (because morality, being an invention of our minds, is arbitrary anyway), so then why choose the most restrictive criteria, which would cause a greater risk of making morally bad choices if someday you change your mind and for some reason start to think that having nociceptors is the more appropriate criteria for a moral patient after all? It kinda seems you're going this route primarily because you just REALLY wanna eat shrimps! X')

[@patrickirwin3662]

Recommenting here because comments on the clip you posted are turned off. Curious, as to why? What he says there (and here) is philosophically incoherent, to put it charitably; warmed over Dennett without Dennet's complicating afterthoughts (some might say doublespeak). Thinkers as different as Tim Maudlin and Bernardo Kastrup, who couldn’t even hold a civil conversation they are so at odds over approaches to reality and ontology, could easily dismantle his assertions. He never makes an actual argument for those assertions. He assigns the word "magical" to others and considers that a refutation. He is a fine scientist I am sure but a very clumsy thinker about foundational questions. Has he ever debated anyone?

[@annmariemccard4709]

Suffering, like pain, is a judgement by the non-physical mind of a representation in the physical brain.

[@StephanieSoressi]

If language was necessary for memory or consciousness, a honeybee's dance would not inform the hive of where to find the flowered field. And how could my chickens mind a pecking order without a certain amount of self-consciousness? One cannot blame mere instinct for a social order that changes as new chicks grow up, and as old roosters die.

[@tolgauzmanoglu]

AI can only exhibit what we might call "consciousness" through human interaction. Without this engagement, AI remains inert and meaningless. It’s the way humans interact with, guide, and direct AI that brings out its potential and gives it value. In essence, AI's ability to function and be useful is entirely dependent on how we use and shape it. Thus, AI’s so-called consciousness and effectiveness are reflections of human input and direction.

[@vicp7124]

Great theory because everything in nature has some form of attention. Anything tbat exists in time and space follows an attention paradigm. From a human to an amoeba. Can even argue that a simple particle follows fixed physical laws. Like turtles all tbe way down. Consciousness was an avoided field. Physics had its own method and following fixed by rigorous observation yielding physical laws. Biology was more of a macrolevel of species. Psychology was restricted to behavior response and conditioning. Consciousness dwells in the nexus of the three fields. My field is engineering science. A field and skillset which is rately introduced into the bridging of these fields.

[@troywalkertheprogressivean8433]

17:55 God set infinity into the hearts of mankind

[@ALavin-en1kr]

If there was unity rather than duality there would not be any suffering. For anything to manifest from the causal to the finer forces, to the dense material forces, it is necessary that there be duality or more accurately triune forces. As ancient philosophy has it; nothing happens without three. Where there is duality there is choice and suffering. We could be programmed to be good but we might not be consciousness because we would be machine like, so we are human and conflicted instead. It is necessary to learn to stop doing stupid things and that will lessen the suffering; although nature will still be independent and will not bend to our will. Just as well unless we are enlightened and know not to do harm, by doing things for selfish reasons rather than for the common good. It is time science learned that consciousness is fundamental; and that mind is elemental emerging with quantum events as does the gross elements. Material science does not like the idea of consciousness being fundamental as that posits that it may have a Self and brings up the God question which they do not want. Atheistic humanism posits humanity not only as being the apex of creation but its lords and masters with nothing to rein in its overreach, even in relation to eliminative materialism or trans humanism. Thankfully, religion does and will rein it in

[@teawhydee]

Seems to me he simply avoids the question. Anyway, "computation" happening in the brain? As far as I can tell there are just particles bouncing around (or strings vibrating, whatever). Suddenly "models" and "computation" and "attention" exist? Seems kinda dualistic to me.

[@teawhydee]

"in the global workspace theory [...] information gets in the magic box and then the feeling is there, how?" please someone point me to where he explains where the feeling comes from in his theory.

[@darknesshole4638]

Man immediately I thought the guest had not understood the hard problem of consciousness. That the brain has concepts and schema of things is one thing, but this still doesn't explain anything about the subjective nature of consciousness. And what are the metaphysical claims of this theory? If there are schema and concepts describing things about the brain, where are they? Do they exist on a sort of higher plain of logic? Because something that actively notices itself as one thing, our consciousness, is definitely in some way something different from mere physical processes. Our brain has a concept of itself, but it is conscious of that concept instead of that concept being consciousness. It's always sad when people dont even understand the hard problem of consciousness and the go on calling it magical to make these thoughts seem illogical.

[@annmariemccard4709]

The mistake he makes is failing to recognize that the "magic dust" of consciousness, as Mike Levin has also called it, is a form of energy itself, "you can't touch it, you can't measure it, it has no physical sub stance to it."

[@layeggistrue]

You do attempt to clarify, but I don't think he has correctly internalized or represented Helen Keller's situation, as she described it. It seems pretty clear her memory was just fine, there was just nobody in the driver seat, and no abstract representation of stimuli. She places profound importance on language instantiating her into being. I'm unsatisfied with the answer.

[@MsSeb7777]

All this research into consciousness and never is the question asked “who/what is aware of consciousness for it to be looked at?” Otherwise this is just consciousness examining itself

[@annmariemccard4709]

Animals only act by instinct, respond to a loud bark for example. Humans have the ability to reflect on their own thoughts and actions. Humans are reflexive. Animals not so much.

[@propos05]

Is the reason humans choose not to eat other conscious creatures because of their morality or their feelings of guilt?

[@telemarcelo]

Dogs are concious but Wolves are not??? We bred conciousness into existence!!! Wow, only we and our friends have it. Way to go Danny!

[@MrCartmannn]

Consciousness is a model of the self. 🤯🤯🤯🤯 Wow what a revolution in philosophy! 😅.

[@erikwallsten8381]

Thinking is content in consciousness. Thought can not touch what is before it. The best way of understanding animal consciousness would be total memory loss. Take the man to a herd of cows or horses then erase all theories and concepts and let him be with the animals for a day. He will experience directly, without a doubt, the non conceptual nature of being. Then if memory and thinking boots up again, he will yet again be deluded from the distortion of thought

[@oliverjamito9902]

Why to have compassion to love with patience, mercy, and grace?

[@Simon-xi8tb]

"We have computational machinery that is building self descripting models" "And so we think we have all this properties, but we dont.." It looks to me that he is trying to convince us that we are self referencing machines that illude ourselves. And to him, the phenomenological experience does not even exists, it is just a machine saying to itself what the experience is ? Am I reading this guy correctly, because this sound so silly.

[@emilianosintarias7337]

Long ago, like many people, I had pondered "what if consciousness is just a side effect , is just what it feels like to be, a meat computer? " But it didn't seem convincing. The natural retort is - "that's only unconvincing because that thesis goes against your self modelling program, as you yourself are a meat computer." Is that what this gentleman is arguing? Because it seems unfalsifiable and almost paranoid.

[@PaulaHawk99]

No telling what we'll see come upon the Earth. Gird your consciousness loins.

[@oliverjamito9902]

Beloved remember HIS shared minds doesn't have to be overwhelming!

[@brendawilliams8062]

Yeah, and I was just trying to link crows and octopi to hypnotism. Another reason to eat what is not as hard to hunt

[@annmariemccard4709]

It is unfortunate that Micheal does not know about what is presently undetected consciousness, the units of consciousness, the carriers pf perception, each one sends out to perceive its reality.

[@le-ore]

🐙

[@LoveJungle420]

You guys are missing a huge part when it comes to animal cruelty. It's not just about whether or not the animals can feel pain. It's also about getting to live their lives out naturally instead of having it cut off early or f'd up. Now obviously the rebuttal is, "Well animals get eaten by other animals". And to that I would say, Not at the rate of 70 billion land animals per year and 1 to 3 trillion fish per year. Animals should not be treated like crops. Being raised only to be slaughtered or milked repeatedly till every last drop is squeezed out and then forcibly impregnated again, with their newborn calf ripped away, to start the milking process all over again. Most of these cows are kept in stalls their entire lives and many are tied down. These animals are not living out their natural lives. They are food slaves for humans. A crop to be harvested.

[@SarahL-d1q]

gOaT of consciousness

[@robinsonerhardt]

[@top115]

oh Dude, Look again you commented in the wrong Episode. Joscha Bach was here a few weeks ago...

[@TribalRhythmPosse]

Nah

[@barrybrent3955]

if there is nothing but computation and Robinson wants to know what organisms suffer, then what computations are "suffering"? is this person claiming that no living being suffers?

[@oliverjamito9902]

Beloved bring all the professors came with their CLIPBOARDS concerning time given unto them in front!

[@oliverjamito9902]

How is that possible?

[@dadsonworldwide3238]

He should start with String theory coded for when line of thought is stochastically building cast systems. I like it but it can't both eco system and evolve in same conversation. can't echo the universe you can never make an xyz manmade time hierarchy knowledge of good evil equation. Sure it computes but if don't have a brain to both input not mind output vice versa. Cartesian coordinate electrodynamical z Fluidlike y Thermodynamical x Mind / brain duslistic hemisphere triangulated measure categorically is represented by each dialectical vision & model we know . That's really

[@troywalkertheprogressivean8433]

I think I computated in my mouth a little. 🤢

[@Silvain1]

Michael Graziano and his parallel clone be like 57:30

[@leonsteffens7015]

I think, therefore I am not?

[@oliverjamito9902]

In the beginning shared "i" AM come forth! Why LIFE?