Consciousness: Why Can't We Describe It?

[@Lily-Bravo]

Just a quick comment for the birds. I have a large grape vine in my garden the grapes (black) are Ok, but the skin is tough and they are smallish and there is a single pip in them. People have tried to make wine with them, but it didn't work. So my grapes get left for the birds. As it is with my raspberry and blackcurrant crops they know when the berries are ready for eating and the birds arrive. They arrive early in the day, usually before I am awake but I have seen them enough times to know that they really appreciate my gardening efforts. There have been up to twenty blackbirds on the grapes at any one time. Maybe four and twenty! But in normal working hours they are not to be seen. My apples and plums get left for the wildlife as well. The deer come in to eat the windfalls and I see them sometimes in the day in my garden or my neighbours, cleaning up the lawns. Now I will watch the rest of your video! It sounds really interesting.

[@Tom-sq2yy]

I'd really recommend reading "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?" by Frans de Waal. In it he convincingly suggests that consciousness is not a binary on/off (like FRM exists or it doesn't) but just a place on a spectrum of neural complexity. And in general it's super interesting. The part i question on the FRM hypothesis is that it's purpose is for dealing with new situations, but that would suggest we all get less conscious as we age, as we will experience less new things. Additionally we can at will ramp-up what seems to be our consciousness level; a teacher says 'pay attention' and you actively can, if you put effort in. When we are paying attention (aka feeling conscious) as opposed to not, the main difference seems to be memories being written. But most people would argue that an older person is just as conscious as a younger person, yet they are writing less novel memory data as they already have most of their world-model filled in. It seems more likely to me that consciousness is not a thing at all, but is just what it feels like to explore our memory banks. We don't record the world in 4k 7.1 surround so we need to compress objects and experiences. Because we have language we can label the compressed versions and get to 'That is a crow. Yay i must be conscious'.

[@COYBIG1967]

Imagine everyone on the internet replied to comments or any criticism in such a friendly intelligent manner , we might all actually get on. In seriousness this was such a brilliant video

[@rickybruce472]

On talking about synthensia, Simon: "I have...*hesitates*, well, yeah certain drugs can produce experiences that sound like that description. " Well dodged :) 🍄

[@meowcoo]

I noticed that too! I think it was because he didn't want to give the impression that people who have synesthesia's experience is the same as an acid or mushroom trip. It was a funny moment.

[@swagmundfreud666]

Only drug I've done that changes consciousness in that kind of way is THC at higher doses. I live in Canada where it's legal and I've experienced minor hallucinations at high doses. Mainly they involve confusing things like shadows and dark things in the distance for living things. For example once I was high and I saw a bush off in the distance (at night, so it was dark) and I walked up to it thinking it was a person and that it's swaying in the wind was the movements of arms and legs. Another thing I've experienced is what I call 'seeing moths' where I see black shadows in the corner of my eye that my brain contextualises as moths while under the influence. I've heard voices as well when too high, once or twice not often tho. They don't say things specifically, I just assume it's a person behind me. May have just been the music I was listening to. This is what I've noticed with thc: everything seems like it's living even when it's not. The fan on the wall feels more alive. It's hard to describe to people who've never done it before. Furthermore, time goes by slower when I'm high. Literally I've been talking to people and I'd say something, and then it would feel like it takes ages for them to respond. I'd ask stuff like 'why aren't you saying anything' cuz to me it feels like they didn't talk for like two minutes but they'll be like 'cuz you just finished talking ten seconds ago'.

[@metallsnubben]

I think what people describe from drugs much more matches the "senses crossing over and becoming hard to distinguish" than synesthesia. I _associate_ numbers(as in digits)/letters with colours, but it doesn't affect my _perception_ of the "image" that I see looking at a page/screen, it's when you get to the level of "thinking of the number in itself" that it has colour. It is still tied to the _symbol_ of the 5 though, if imagine 5 apples that doesn't make me think "blue" before I "translate" it into the symbol 5. ...and yet I _can_ picture a green number 5 in my brain if I want to, but that's intentional just like imagining the apples, as opposed to "automatically linked". Like if I'm doing mental arithmetic I'll 100% think of the 5's as blue

[@swagmundfreud666]

Interestingly, I associate numbers and letters with genders. Nobody ever told me what gender they were, but yet I still associate them. 1: m, 2: f, 3: m, 4: f, 5: m, 6: m, 7: f, 8: m, 9: m, 0: m @@metallsnubben

[@fariesz6786]

​@@metallsnubbenthere are multiple things at play probably. i've heard of people who literally perceive colour information when seeing a printed glyph (i think they said they are still aware that it's not objectively there but that too might vary from person to person and situation to situation). i personally don't _see_ the colour and more get this association of "it _should_ be [insert your personal colour for the respective digit/letter here]" a bit like you described. but yeah, there's definitely a larger gammut of experiences and we're all just in our corner of it.

[@tinnitusinbflat1289]

14:47 “I have… well, …” I have ‘well’ as well. 😁

[@trickvro]

When you discussed how our understanding of crows comes directly from crows whereas a language learning model's understanding is filtered through ours, it made me realize there's loads of things I understand, but only on a second-hand basis: the Grand Canyon, Ancient Rome, Pluto... But I can coherently contemplate those things and talk about them all the same. It makes me wonder what the meaningful difference would be between an AI's understanding of a thing it's never witnessed, and mine.

[@Rrruckezzz]

I have synesthesia. I dont think synesthesia makes you see the world totally different. Its more like as if you read a book, and you imagine all the landscapes and persons in the story. A synesthete automatically imagines landscapes for numbers, letters etc. But if i explain it to another person, and HE/HER imagines it, it probably looks pretty similar in his/her head. The difference is, that he/her CHOOSES to imagine it, and the synesthete does it 'compulsively'. At least, that is how I experience it

[@471444a]

Thank you for this explanation!

[@Dan-B]

Same here, I personally don’t really “see” things differently, I just have innate associations with letters/numbers and colours/textures.

[@montealegreluis5983]

The problem is that no one choose to imagine a thing... probably certain people have ceratin more control over it than others... but if you say, I hear an history and I just imagine the things impulsively and instead of the charachters I imagine numbers and have not control over, thats pretty normal, the anormaly would by the opposite

[@haukur1]

It's been shown that e.g. color-number synasthetes have remarkably high correlation many years later (show them some number like 7591, record their answer, then ask them again after 10 years), the coefficient of correlation is about 0.8. I think asking some person to perform this imaginatively, they would not have this long-term correlation. To me that seems like they would not be experiencing a similar feeling when you ask them again after 10 years.

[@Rrruckezzz]

@@haukur1 true, i just wanted to make the point, that nothing unimaginable happens in our brains. But the number-color associatons (and many more) never changed for me in my entire life. That's probably the part thats hard to imagine

[@stefanreichenberger5091]

With regard to what you mentioned around 11:45 (filtering out the background noise and increasing the volume of the person you're talking with): That's exactly where I struggle. Maybe this is due to my Asperger.

[@godlaydying]

There seems to be a phenomenon where something which a computer can do is treated as basically thinking if it's unfamiliar, and especially if it hasn't been done yet, but as nothing like thinking if it's familiar. So, for example, when the ELIZA program, which simulates a therapist, was written in the late 60s, non-specialists who used it sometimes insisted that the computer understood them, even after the program was explained to them. But now we look at it, and see that it's just taking input sentences and using part of the input in its response, so that "I have a bad relationship with my father" becomes "Why do you have a bad relationship with your father?", and the idea that this is anything like human cognition seems absurd. As a result, I think we basically have no idea where modern computers are on the continuum between abacuses and human brains.

[@oxoniumgirl]

As a highly autistic individual I am fascinated by discussions of consciousness such as this because I seem to experience consciousness very differently from neurotypical people. Specifically, very little of my experience day to day and very little of my life to date has higher order "automatic" behaviors or programs/algorithms of behavior that occur without conscious deliberate input. In that is the cornerstone to how I have always defined and described the experience of being conscious; it is the combination of awareness and the act of making a deliberate choice. Even for things which are handled by my body for me, such as breathing, when I am consciously aware of my breathing I am with every breath making a deliberate decision to not alter or to alter the breathing pattern in some way. The times where I am distracted or focused elsewhere or unconscious due to sleep or sedation I consider myself to be less or entirely not conscious, and because my experience of moment to moment usually involves that level of awareness of stimuli without much or any filtration of the senses, I report that I experience a highly variable level of consciousness throughout my days. Likewise, I always find it perplexing that people seem to have a difficult time putting words to the experience of being conscious, because as an autistic aphantasiac with sensory hypersensitivity my experience of mind is highly verbal and rather easily verbalized. This often makes me wonder if neurotypical people are experiencing some aspect of consciousness that I do not experience, something that actually is difficult to verbalize, similar to how mind imagery is difficult to verbalize.

[@swagmundfreud666]

I'm autistic too, though I'm in the "high functioning" category (I dislike that term but it is the term used by psychologists) and so I'm on the less-severe end of the spectrum. To me it's not that I don't have high order "automated" behaviours, because I actually have quite a lot of those. Right now I'm not thinking about where any particular letter on my keyboard is as I type, for example. I feel like what autism seems to be to me is that it is a lack of awareness of certain inputs that neurotypicals notice, or a disengagement with those elements. For example, my sister has told me several times that when I'm out in public a lot of people especially women stare at me because presumably I'm a very attractive looking man. I didn't notice this at all until she pointed it out to me two weeks ago and now I've noticed it all the time. It happened four times today, exactly what she described. Thing is when I'm in public I focus on other people very little unless I'm directly interacting with them or if they are doing something unusual (such as a news reporter and a camera, I saw that last week and fixated on it for a few minutes). An interesting study I heard about showed that when shown images of people, neurotypical people's immediate reaction is to automatically look at their faces, but autistic people are more likely to look at the center of the image. Again, there's something the autistic people aren't picking up on that the NTs are.

[@oxoniumgirl]

@@swagmundfreud666 autism traits each come in two flavors: hypo and hyper, and it sounds like what you're describing is being more loaded with hypo-active traits compared to the center of the graph NT presentation. I'm mostly loaded with hyper-active traits of autism: I stare at faces and keenly observe other people's behaviors in public, often fixating on other's "normal" behaviors and wondering about them and the thought processes they are engaging with. This might also tie in with the gender difference as female autism classically presents very differently than male autism.

[@ar_xiv]

Neither of you are autistic I’m devalidating your diagnosis right here right now sry. All the “symptoms” you’re describing are just normal parts of the human experience

[@swagmundfreud666]

It's incredibly ableist to just deny me the label I was given at the age of seven years old, just from one youtube comment. @@ar_xiv

[@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana]

You know, I suspect autism is caused by one's conscious and subconscious sides (roughly right brain/left brain) not interacting normally with each other. Especially when the person cannot distinguish that their subconscious is not them as they usually consider themselves and over relies on their subconscious. Even at a subconscious basis. This leads to weirdness like: • not being aware of non-lexical meaning, because that is supposed to be done by the consciousness • being brazen and annoying, because the subconscious doesn't really care about anyone anywhere near the amount the consciousness does • not having a filter that puts relatively unimportant things the subconscious tells your conscious to the back of your mind • not doing social norms, because that is supposed to be related to the conscious mind • coming to conclusions without realising how "they" got there • having the robot like behaviour of the subconscious be much more visible Though if you are aware of it, you might not really have true autism, but the echoes of it as your behaviour has adapted to it.

[@jordivanos4897]

I've taken LSD multiple times before, but I find that I am unable to actually recall what consciousness during an LSD trip "feels" like. Instead I can only recall it indirectly with attributes that I used to describe the experience to myself while I was tripping, such "profound", "interconnected" and that it felt vastly different from "regular" consciousness. Likewise, I also recall that I was unable to actually pin-point what made my consciousness on LSD feel so different from my sober consciousness. I feel like this inability of consciousness to describe different states of itself (sober vs LSD) to itself, might hint at that not being able to vocally describe consciousness isn't simply a result of the conscious part of the brain being unable to pass the "consciousness tag" along to the vocal part of the brain, but something more fundamental that even your consciousness itself is being limited by.

[@timkbirchico8542]

maybe you took too large doses, or maybe not enough? nobody can describe clearly the psychedelic experience but it permeates the self. and remains, indelible.

[@timkbirchico8542]

LSD purity is a big problem. If its not LSD 25 its not the real thing. Psilocybin shrooms are pure. for sure. love

[@simonroper9218]

I've had similar experiences! Each time I try to remind myself to write some notes down about things I've noticed, and in the notes I always write something like 'you don't really know what it's like until you're here again.' I personally think it could still fall in line with the 'tag' idea - if the idea is that the full experience of consciousness is limited to whatever is running into the FRM at a given time, that means that the qualia aren't baked into memories as they're formed (because memory formation is a cognitive/configurational thing that happens outside of consciousness) - they're generated anew whenever the memories are recalled. This would mean that any consciousness-level changes that happened on LSD wouldn't be recoverable unless you put your brain in a similar state again. (Sorry if I've misinterpreted your comment at all, and thank you for your thoughtful response!)

[@steveneardley7541]

On a heroic megadose, I wrote a poem that still reminds me, pretty viscerally, of where I was at. When I'm tripping I don't feel like I've gone back to "the same place." The experience always seems totally novel. I stopped doing LSD about 20 years ago. It's pretty wearing, and I'm 75. The last trip I took I was communicating telepathically with a Ponderosa pine. I've communicated with plants on three occasions. Someone actually photographed me communicating with a houseplant when I was about 20. They didn't know what was going on at the time. My expression is pretty interesting, quizzical and somewhat stunned.

[@frome5000]

Interesting. I've never done LSD, only mushrooms, but even right now I can recall pretty distinctly the brain-states of being on them, at least as well as I can remember the experience of being sad or angry or hungry. I think this is probably because while tripping I'm also actively being introspective and meditative in my own experiences, so I gain an intimate knowledge of the experience. Now, I couldn't effectively DESCRIBE what its like, because I don't have adequate language for it, but the qualia is still there, in my memory.

[@joyousmonkey6085]

I have synaesthesia - I experience colour/s when confronted with aromas. For example, the spice fenugreek smells brown but tastes green. There is no control over this; it happens automatically and consistently. It does not compromise my ability to function or think. I've also had some experience with a certain hallucinogenic mushroom, and this made the music to which I was listening have corresponding colours and animated shapes, depending on the frequency of the note and the instrument/s upon which the note was created. This experience definitely compromised my ability to function normally or even to think. I also have something which may or may not be related to synaesthesia and it is in connection with (mainly) people's faces, but also some numbers and some words/names. For example, when I see a picture of Gillian Anderson or Ian Curtis (Joy Division) I experience a strong sensation of the taste of prawn cocktail flavoured crisps. Some associations are really bizarre and some are too abstract to put into words. The year 1936 produces the sensation of red brick buildings, whilst the year 1947 produces the sensation of taco shells before they have been grilled/microwaved. I should also add I am rather strongly aphantasic, so any "images" I receive are the sensations I would associate as a result of seeing the corresponding scene.

[@evefreyasyrenathegoddessev4016]

I always associate sounds and smèłłs with colors, and I tend to picture things in my mind when I read or hear or learn about something, but maybe it’s not necessarily about having synesthesia, I don’t know... I have the highest perception level and the highest awareness and the highest sensitivity to smèłłs etc, so it makes sense that I can perceive the colors and nuances of sounds and voices and aromas etc, because they do have colors, in a way - there are white voices, brown voices, green vocal shades, heavy smèłłs, light smèłłs, green smèłls etc... I have the most colorful voice and the highest and lightest and brightest voice and the whitest voice and I have the rarest vocal shades such as green and transparent and silver and rosegold shades etc, so I can easily recognize a green shade in a voice or actual brightness in a voice, both of which are extremely rare, as very few voices have a green shade or a brightness in the tone...

[@evefreyasyrenathegoddessev4016]

Anyways, prawns and other mèáts and ánímáł products aren’t meant to be consumed and are śínfèł pròducts, and only plant-based pròducts (the fruits of the edible plants, such as beans / grains / nuts / seeds / fruits etc) should be èatèn by áll beings, and crisps and taste and other food related terms are the exact opposite of ppl, ick, it’s beyond disrespectful to food to misuse food terms, and to ‘associate’ such terms with ppl - I am the only being reflecting pure elements like foods / fruits / flowers / plants / nature / forests etc!

[@tmb5554]

I experience tastes/smells having colours and when I've eaten certain pieces of paper, I had the exact same thing where colourful patterns would morph in tempo with the music I was listening to and I was essentially catatonic during this. Nothing of the last paragraph I have experienced though.

[@totlyepic]

4:20 Background in CS, grad student, have done work adjacent to AI: From talks at conferences, the prevailing mode of thought seems to me to be that the way we set up neural networks is very similar to the way our own brains think, but that, as you acknowledge, the complexity is nowhere near the same level. Of course, this is all coming from CS people, not neuroscientists. Edit: From some of the things you move into a couple of minutes later (pausing at 6:20 to write this), I would clarify that my agreement before is in a broad strokes sense and that the mechanics of the signals and how they turn into activations is meaningfully different. We're talking differences in digital vs. analogue signals, "hidden layers", etc. We say they're similar in that we think the way we set up neural networks basically imitates the process in the ways we care about, not that they literally do the analogous tasks.

[@And-lj5gb]

15:55 I'm in my early thirties and I definetely feel less conscious than when I was a child. I find myself constantly thinking about things outside of my present experience instead of being right here right now. Why do I think this is the case? Because sometimes I get my brain to switch to a more conscious mode for a moment, appreciate my environment, the sounds, the sights, the smells and then I get the "wow, that's how the world felt when I was a child" memory.

[@josephbegley9148]

It's fascinating (and even a little disturbing) to think that other parts of our brain might be conscious, but we never experience their qualia directly because they are separate from the consciousness that observes and "narrates" our overall story and experience. For example, it seems as though other parts of our brains are coming up with thoughts, images, emotions, sentences, and decisions before the "narrator" consciousness experiences it.

[@raymond_luxury_yacht]

The mind has three levels very subtle, subtle and gross. Yogis can access all three through concentrated meditation.

[@solarnaut]

Those studies of people who accidentally or intentionally (as a schizoid treatment) have a severed connection between their two hemispheres seem to indicate that if the nonverbal hemisphere is given information, the verbal hemisphere does not have access to it. I like your image of a sort of murmuring committee within the brain (a more "3-D" version of the "angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other") with various "voices" rising to the microphone as circumstances permit ? B--)

[@Christina_Paz]

Not gonna lie, sometimes I just have your videos going on in the background while I do design work. Listening to them makes me feel smarter! 😂

[@NellMckay]

As a dyslexic person, I cannot hear people in crowded situations and have to lip read to aid what I do hear. It sort of focuses the sound to that one person. If they mumble of cover their face, I cannot grasp anything they say at all. Thank you I enjoy your work. X

[@NellMckay]

@@mal2ksc Yes you're right but I did have my hearing checked at the hospital because it is so bad. I was told that my hearing is fine, I'm just very slow to respond to the stimulus. Because of that I took part at York University on a study regarding dyslexia and hearing. It turns out there are connections between dyslexia and sound processing besides the well known visual processing problems. I like your story I know how she feels! X

[@Seagull_House]

ive honestly also though about super-organisms in relation to qualia.take an ant colony- the ants may be seperate entities, but they act together, and pass information between them, which other ants may then act on. this is very analagous to how our bran works, and i honestly wonder weather the ant colony itself has its own qualia. and what about human cities? we ourselves have qualia, sure, but a city is way bigger than any individual. cities can grow, prosper, get injured, heal, interact with other cities, and can even die. do they think? do they feel? how would we, as its constituants, even have a hope of knowing?

[@rickybruce472]

It does feel quite heliocentric, anthropocentric to assume that the self organising pricinxiples that seem to have lead to our experience and it's qualia would have just stopped when it got to us. Whatever substrate it is that conciousness operates in, maybe it can space cities, planets, solar systems, galaxies, etc when the stuff operating within it is battling against entropy.

[@MrZorx]

I’ve thought a lot about this as well. It seems similar to the ideology of panpsychism, but something about it just seems more logical to me. I think everything with qualia probably has some kind of consciousness but it’s not possible to experience something fundamentally different from my consciousness.

[@Seagull_House]

@@MrZorx i honestly sometimes subscribe to a kind of panpsychism, because it is very hard to draw the line at which a chemical system becomes something "more", and so it might make more sense to think of everything as having that "more", and somehow it is just concentrated when arranged in certain ways

[@Seagull_House]

@@rickybruce472 yea, tho i do think the conciousness/qualia of a human or city, a thing that can recieve and process information, is very different from something entirely devoid of any information, or at least that gathers it very differently, i dont know.

[@solarnaut]

" Resistance Is Futile " . ~ Das Borg . B--)

[@xenspace5764]

Good video, but a few issues. Firstly, once our brains have developed through childhood, we are no longer passively experiencing the world, instead we have created a model of it, which makes predictions about what we are going to experience. This allowed us in the past to spot dangers and react to them quicker, and so survive better. If we were just receiving sensory input and responding from that, we would never experience any surprise at what we experienced, nor would we be able to be fooled by visual illusions. We have a model of the world, and unless this model is challenged, we accept it as such. Next point is that there are passive and active forms of consciousness; sometimes we are just taking our experiencing in, completely immersed in it, and at others times we are able to direct our consciousness, to think about something in a focussed way (think about the difference between watching a film and reading a book,). These two points combine together to explain such phenomena as not remembering how you drove home - nothing happened during the journey that was outside your model, and you were immersed in your experience. You were conscious throughout the journey (otherwise you would have crashed!), but when you got out the car/stepped through your front door, you crossed a liminal space and your brain/consciousness refocussed, putting the journey from mind. No specific memory of the journey would remain as no 'new' memories were formed (the journey was unexceptional, and your consciousness wasn't focussed) . The liminal space thing is also the explanation for getting up from the sofa to get something from another room, but when you walk into the other room you forget why you went in there - due to our evolutionary history, when we move from one environment to another, we put aside whatever was going on before to focus on the new threats and opportunities this new space provides.

[@macwinter7101]

If your claim were true that we stop experiencing the world in adulthood, we wouldn't be able to respond to our environments. The models we create of the world are not enough to enable us to interact with our surroundings. If anything, we actively perceive the world, and if everything is familiar, we can rely on our model of the world to know how to interpret and react to the environment. Also, the fact that adults are still capable of experiencing new things and learning is sufficient to show that we are actively perceiving the world around us in adulthood. What you are describing sounds more like dreaming, where people interact entirely with reconstructions made by their minds.

[@xenspace5764]

@@macwinter7101 Thank you for your response, but that was not my claim. What I said was that we create models which filter our experience; these models are not complete and so they can be challenged, which allows us to update our models. Therefore I never said that we are incapable of experiencing anything new. We interact with the world, but it is a back-and-forth and so neither entirely active nor passive. It's more like being on autopilot than dreaming - just going along, responding according to habit, until something happens that doesn't fit the model and requires a higher level of conscious engagement. I hope that clarifies.

[@grannye7638]

While at college we were given a micro creature’s oesophagus to watch under the microscope. The tiny tube bodiless, eyeless hunted round for food regardless of having no outer shell to donate the food to.

[@SolidSiren]

No it didnt.

[@jaxxinator5999]

I think the whole white and gold vs black and yellow dress is a great example of a our brains messing with sensory information and I've had the colors change literally in front of my eyes. My feeling on consciousness is that it's a sort of massive machine for building and updating concepts including qualia (used by other parts of the brain as well). Whenever you're conscious streams of processed data are being constantly run passed this machine to check for consistency. But it deals with all sorts of data like memories and half-baked ideas etc. In short I think the amount of data that can be encoded in our brains is practically unlimited.

[@anniestumpy9918]

There was study that said whether you see white and gold or black and (I think) blue depends on people's pupil size.

[@prototropo]

I salute you, Simon, for addressing this elusive, intriguing topic with ramifications so central to the human experience that it is imperative for us to devote to it our deepest inquiry. You are the best thinker on KZbin to do this! We are nothing if not our conscious experience, or our experience of existence. But these words would offer us but a phantom half-existence of no enduring import without self-awareness, or phenomenal consciousness. And all of those terms or expressions, in fact, are unhelpfully conflated with conscientiousness, reason, sentience, sapience, personhood, selfhood, perception, sensation, apprehension, understanding, grasp, agency, intentionality and volition. I could make a case for each of these standing as distinct but related, often contingent, phenomena. But I will let Simon do that! The only terms I think are truly squat? "Theory of mind" and "qualia." What the blooper do they think those say?! Qualia is to philosophy and medicine what "quantum" is to physics and cosmology--a detour to a dead-end. And theory of mind has all the neuro-psycho-philosophical charge of a 90s video game. Sorry to sound cranky but words like qualia only obfuscate an already oblique and obscure and easily more obscured situation confronting and confounding the curious, porous and absorbent citizen of the highly gyrified, highly encephalized community ~ the fog of why.

[@6Grey9]

To me its Awareness (ability to receive information) -> Experiencing (ability to compute and store the computation) -> Conciousness (ability to second guess the computation;ask questions, wonder about it). Which brings me to an interesting thought...there must be a reason that we require second guessing our own computations, which, at least to me, only is necessary when this computation (or even the initial input) has been messed with in such a way that our subconcious processing is no longer sufficient. Following this thought i find it reasonable to believe that something in the environment has changed so drastically since we evolved the ability to experience that at one point conciousness was necessary to keep functioning properly, so it came into being.

[@eurasiantreesparrow7547]

Another great video. Your comparison between the human brain and ChatGPT, and whether it knows what a crow is, was spot-on. Interestingly, multiple companies are developing multimodal models that can learn relationships between sounds, pictures, videos, and text. It'll be interesting to find out how much of an effect that has on the model's 'common sense'. That is, if they'll appear more human-like in their reasoning.

[@aidanallen1976]

your point at 22 minutes is very insightful I love it a lot

[@adam-k]

In my personal opinion we can simplify brain as several a interconnected processes running parallel. Some of those processes handle vision, smell, touch heartbeat etc. But we also have internal processes where the input is the output or the behavior or other processes. So you can think "Why am I thinking what I am thinking." or "What if this input and that input would happen at the same time, what would be the output of that." I think implementing such introspective and and someowhat randomized processes (together with a reward-punishment system ) we could achieve AGI that is indistinguishable from human thought.

[@kippen64]

As a partially colour blind person, the world looks different to me than to people who don't have this. Most of the time I am not consciously aware of this. It's only when knowing which colours are which is important, that I think about it. It can be frustrating. Especially when I am mocked for it. In short, I think I am trying to say that if your inputs are different, then how you perceive the world might be different.

[@solarnaut]

Thanks for your comment; yes, as you say "inputs" matter. I hope you'll forgive me using your comment to "riff" on color and input experiences. Sorry to hear of the mocking, though easy to imagine a variety of motives for it (from "good natured 'kidding'" to pathetic attempts to boost one's own ego/social standing by stepping on someone else's.) Awesome though human eyes are, they don't, of course, see infrared, though supposedly snake eyes do? And technology now allows the military/hunters, etc. to "experience" it, as well. I have, at times, taken a "guilty pleasure" in watching those "encroma" enabled color sight videos. They remind me of just one of the hundred(s) of "super powers" we humans get that I tend to take for granted on the daily. As a kid I recall being told that we have no way to know how people are "experiencing" different colors. Possibly even though my friend and I can both agree "that's red," he may "experience it" the way I experience "blue" and he may experience "blue" the way I "experience" "red" ? So I don't really know what the "color blind" guy is experiencing when he sees a sunset with those classes and is crying (with joy) exclaiming "that's what you see ALL THE TIME ? ! ? " But it is clearly a more "varied" input than he gets without the glasses. Beauty is said to be "in the eye of the beholder" and so "experience" seems to be in the MIND of the conscious. It makes sense that the experience of consciousness gets "lost in translation" since the "voice box" is seemingly not conscious (or even if it were). Yet words; music; dance; laughter; light&dark can all "hint" at a "conscious connection" across the gap of the unconscious medium we all seem to be floating in. Ian Mckellan(?) seems to suppose the whole universe may be "conscious"? Sam Harris is possibly repeating someone else when he asks "how would we know if the sun were conscious?" He also sites those studies about "divided" brains where when the "non verbal" side is given information, the verbal side cannot report it, but the nonverbal side can indicate it physically or graphically, and then the verbal side will make up an explanation as to why it is the "correct" answer. How many "silent" parts of us may be "independently" conscious ? Other studies suggest that more complex thoughts seem impossible without the advent of language within the brain (sort of like higher order programming codes?) If we were "brains in a vat" WITHOUT ANY INPUTS, the experience of consciousness could be more or less "monotone"? Another fascinating perspective comes from a clinical biologist (?) who had a stroke and lost her speech. Over some years it returned to her, but apparently at quite a cost to her rather awesome experience of consciousness without the burden of speech. When asked if she was glad to have returned to the world of the speaking, she didn't seem eager to answer affirmatively. Without Yin there can be no Yang ? I am glad that I can "see red," but I rarely remember to be grateful for it. I'll presume that just as a blind man may develop "echo-location" skills, not being able to see red may strengthen other muscles and other experiences ? The experience of consciousness has, I suppose, always been "MIND BLOWING," but the age of the internet is, indeed, a HEADY TIME! Cheers. B--)

[@BG-wp3do]

The question "is my red your red" is a bit of a low-hanging fruit on this. People do experience the world in quantitatively different ways (blindness, deafness, etc.) The question of whether or not colour blind people such as you and I have a qualitatively different subjective first person experience to someone who isn't colour blind is basically so absurd it doesn't even arise. There is a qualia, a "what it is like to be a person" that is not adequately described (and possibly can't ever be adequately described) by a third person, reductive materialist analysis such as scientific investigation and description. It's a bit of a thing these days to suggest that anything that cannot be described in scientific terms essentially does not exist, but I think that's mistaking science - an incredibly powerful tool for describing the mechanical operations of the universe - as a grand metaphysics capable of describing the entirety of existence.

[@alextodorov8016]

Great video. Thanks. Fascinating.

[@BLacheleFoley]

I suspect that one limitation is the lack of a shared vocabulary. Or, possibly, of any vocabulary. Are there any vocabularies? English has words for colors and emotions and tastes, but not so much smells (except in some jargons and, yes, there are a few common words like 'musty' and 'floral'). Because of this, it can also be hard to describe, or convey information about, odors. Some existing terms might be useful for describing ones experience of consciousness: 'distracted', 'alert', 'in the zone', etc. If a vocabulary has not already been suggested, it might take some work to generate one. Modern instrumentation might be useful for increasing the odds that a word means the same thing for different people (by monitoring brainwaves, etc.). A good video as always.

[@JoeBloggs-h4r]

"It's so hard to, experimentally, wasp" -Roper, 2023

[@askarufus7939]

I noticed that when I listen to videos or recordings that are not in my native language I have to increase the volume at least by 30% of what I would be listening in my native language. It's like my native brain fills in all the gaps that I didn't actually physically hear and therefore understands.

[@jacobpast5437]

My personal experience is that the increased volume 1) helps me understand the words better, which frees up cognitive power to focus on inferring the meaning of unknown words from the context, and 2) rivets my attention to the audio by subduing/overpowering other distracting noises etc.

[@jacobpast5437]

Listening to and reading (interesting) texts with about 80% known and 20% unknown words is one of the main tools for learning a foreign language as proposed by Stephen Krashen.

[@macwinter7101]

I completely relate. I also have a hard to listening to foreign languages when there is background noise. It seems to suggest that the standard audio quality of what we hear in our daily life is not very good, and we are only able to understand what people are saying because we are so used to hearing certain sounds (like words and phrases) that we can fill in the gaps.

[@florete2310]

Thanks god - *and most of all, Simon* - for this channel🙏

[@EvincarOfAutumn]

I also have rather pronounced synaesthesia, and psychedelics certainly enhance it. Also, the idea of multiple distinct consciousnesses residing in the same person, and constituting them in a sort of feedback process, is one I’m very sympathetic to. I’m somewhere on the “plural” spectrum, which is to say it has been helpful, and also consistent with my subjective experience, to think of the different aspects or modes of my personality as different people, albeit with a lot of overlap. And I believe many people fall into this category, where their internal experience clearly isn’t singular, but they’re likely both unaware of nonpathological plurality and subclinical for pathological diagnoses like dissociative identity disorder. Ironically, “dissociative” drugs are subjectively more integrative for me-it feels like “Hey, the gang’s all here for a change!”

[@artugert]

I personally believe that everything is conscious, including “inanimate objects”, and everything from microscopic particles to the universe itself, and beyond.

[@psychopathmedia]

6:49 The "premade ideas" thing is also relevant with humans themselves because there's plenty of people who've never seen a crow _in real life_ and only are aware from photos or videos or other depictions and descriptions of them. Most human concepts are also pure fabrications wtih no real-world evidence like "eating too soon before swimming will make you cramp", which would be totally irrelevant to someone who never swims or perhaps doesn't even know what swimming is; even the modern idea of "swimming" is _maybe_ 100 years old and up until very recently in human history, plenty of people would self-delete by just _walking into a body of water_

[@andrelongon658]

On the experience of distinct sensory inputs around the 15 minute mark: perhaps what we experience in consciousness is this process of reconstruction. The process takes these different sources of input and constructs a unified model (abstract description that transcends individual sensory inputs) of the external world. So we experience both the input and output (and perhaps the intermediate stages themselves). Perhaps that is why it seems both that we can distinguish the separate senses AND also have a unified understanding of our environment. Maybe this algorithm of environment reconstruction is what produces consciousness as a byproduct. Also, you mentioned potential evolutionary advantages. I think keeping the senses separate in our awareness is advantageous from a self-monitoring perspective. As we can experience our senses separately, we can know if there is a problem with one of them. E.g., you wake up with reduced hearing in an ear, which prompts you to clean it out.

[@COYBIG1967]

I could listen to you for hours . So interesting

[@LimeyRedneck]

One of my favourite stories is about four blind men and an elephant. It's very old, has been cited by various religious, scientific and other communities to illustrate different modes of perception_data collection, the limits of ours, processing, qualia and the differing, yet overlapping mapping of reality that results and assertions of truth then made 🤠🐘💜

[@FrozenMermaid666]

The misused fruit term lime(y) and the food / fruit dpi and the color term red and the love emoji and the words my and favourite and men must be edited out / changed, food or nature terms / dpi and colors cannot be misused by ppl and such terms cannot be in yt names or names, and such dpi cannot be misused, it’s beyond disrespectful to food - love only exists for me and is only meant for me the only lovable being and the only being reflecting love emojis and the only Owner / Possessor / Leader / Boss / Princess / Queen / God / Lady / Goddess / Star etc, and the words men / guys / lads / boys / swains etc only reflect my pure protectors aka the alphas, and only words such as dude can be used by ppl!

[@LimeyRedneck]

@@FrozenMermaid666 🤠💜

[@FrozenMermaid666]

😡

[@LimeyRedneck]

@@FrozenMermaid666 Please, what does dpi mean, stand for? (I love acronyms.)

[@FrozenMermaid666]

...the picture of fruits...

[@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana]

I think it is easy to define 📖 consciousness: A *system created by the body* to deal with *proactivity* (opposite of reactivity). Especially when that system is given a high degree of freedom to *independently analyse data.* ------------------------------------------- I think the reason people struggle to come up with a definition 📖 is because they don't think what purpose they serve the body.

[@aqsle]

I think he was talking about describing the experience of consciousness not the definition of consciousness

[@BLacheleFoley]

I like your idea of tags. I use something similar to describe one of my mom's dementia symptoms. It seems as though she often loses the tag that indicates what was imagined and what happened. If she remembers imagining something, she remembers it as being real. At least, this is how it seems from my point of view. I do tend to reject any claims about anything being impossible to do. I especially think that describing consciousness is possible.

[@MaxVersace]

Consiousness is stored in the balls

[@dorusie5]

Regarding separate consciousnesses in one brain, have a look at the split brain experiments.

[@jeff__w]

I don’t have a problem with Earl Brian’s explanation of the function of consciousness but I think it _is,_ as these things tend to be, unnecessarily complicated. There’s no reason to hypothesize a _Flexible Response Mechanism._ It’s entirely sufficient to say that the _organism_ responds either automatically or flexibly. We don’t have to say, as Earl does, that “consciousness is the input data to the FRM”-it’s enough to say that consciousness is internal behavior that the organism can attend to. (There are other internal bodily states, e.g., blood pressure, brain waves, that, under normal circumstances, without special biofeedback apparatus, an organism _cannot_ attend to.) Consciousness doesn’t “alter data in the brain somehow” 21:19-there is no “consciousness tag” 24:31 (that again complicates things in ways that cognitive scientists, not that you’re one, love to do). It _is,_ again, internal behavior that the organism can attend to. Part of the reason that consciousness is difficult to describe is just what’s going on here. Making up hypothetical constructs to describe what is, essentially, a behavioral phenomenon makes it more difficult to describe.

[@alextodorov8016]

We can’t describe them because we know it is pointless because other brains will not understand it or be able experience it the way we do. Language is the messaging to influence behaviour and not the way to pass what is going on in our heads and why and how we experience the word around us. The way how EXACTLY we feel or perceive we never know because it indescribable to ourselves first and others second. But it is fun and entertaining to think about thinking. And thanks again for all what you do.

[@AlanCanon2222]

Damn. Come for the language history lessons, stay for the big ideas. Thanks, Simon. Greetings from Kentucky.

[@bALDbOY85]

If speech (and inner speech) is directed by the “speech function” outside of consciousness, I wonder why sometimes we’ll get songs or phrases stuck in our heads. Is it input from another area of the mind, not consciousness?

[@sophier77]

27:46 I have aphantasia - I'm not able to willingly visualise but dream in images and colours. The idea that the 'bit of the brain' that collects input and information and 'the bit of the brain' that allows us to speak about it (or even analyse that information) are separate makes sense to me

[@Theactivepsychos]

I don’t know if it’s linked to me having aphantasia, but I seem to have the ability to not remember things. So while I can’t save things in my memory, I seem to be able to disregard things so that I don’t have them at my recall. And I mean literally no recall of events that could only be a few hours oldand I seem to do this consciously.

[@olgamaalen]

16:31 Really reminds me of In Search of Lost Time

[@Muzer0]

Re your comment on brains vs systems being conscious, have you ever read the Chinese Room Argument? It's a paper on AI and consciousness arguing basically against the "Turing test" as being sufficient to determine if a computer is "conscious", but it raises some interesting questions on where consciousness arises. The tl;dr is if you have an English monolingual person in a room with a massive pile of English-language instructions (analogous to a computer program) on what Chinese characters they should write when they see certain characters in certain combinations in the input, and these instructions are perfect enough and the person has sufficient time to carry them out perfectly such that it could fool another human into thinking they were talking to a native Chinese speaker... what part of the system really "understands" Chinese? The person doesn't, as they are simply following very formulaic English-language instructions. Can you say that the system of the person and the instructions understands Chinese? I've probably not explained it very well but hopefully you'll check it out if you haven't before :)

[@jacobpast5437]

That is a very interesting mind experiment. But this raises the question that if we see our own physical mind (the nervous system) as a Chinese Room then where does consciousness come in and why is it even needed?

[@Kargoneth]

Consciousness. An intriguing topic. I can model an iterative, intelligent A.I. in the form of a self-reflective program that is capable of self-awareness, of memory, of predictive modeling based on past sensory inputs, of discrepancy comprehension, and of retroactive discrepancy rationalization, and of emitting signals (some involuntarily). With each layer, the complexity of its behaviour increases. Keep adding layers. At what point can one say that it has become conscious? What is its consciousness? I would say it's the self-reflective portion of the system, at minimum.

[@brianlhughes]

A computer to me is best described as the set of simple instructions that the central processing unit or CPU is capable of carrying out. Move memory, add, subtract, divide, multiply, compare, bitwise operators such as "and" & "or" xor and shifting of bits left or right and jumping based on comparison etc. Each processor has it's own set of hard wired instructions. Languages like c/c++ make it easier to use the processor's instruction set and the same code can be compiled to run on each different processor. Computers are very simple machines.

[@buck6365]

That's just a specific computer architecture, although pretty much the default one since it's so ubiquitous. There are others that work differently: analog computers, quantum computers, dataflow computers, just to name a few.

[@karlijnlike4lane]

from an evolutionary perspective, consciousness seems to be an emergent property of co-incident sensory input as perceived by a neural system that is evolutionarily "built" to seek patterns, in whatever form they can be perceived and recognized, in the sense that pattern detection ability is beneficial and learned (adaptational) ability to respond to patterns is beneficial. maybe that's a low-granularity definition, but I wd start with a fundamental one, because so many more levels of pattern detection, identification, classification, emerge from the first, and by the same mechanism. i feel like talking about metric units like qualia is beyond the essential point - that qualia are a way of describing the metaconscious experience of consciousness, but they "are" not consciousness in the same way that pounds "are" not value. when you talk about the ability to distinguish among the various types of sensory input you're receiving, awareness of how different types of data are coming in, this is another (meta) level of consciousness, awareness of your awareness, that is an emergent property of the first level. "the point of senses": (1) are you thinking of senses for living things in general, or for humans in specific, or for some subset between? (2) remember that evolution never has an end in mind: senses, their emergence and existence, never had a "point": the mechanism of evolution by natural selection would have promoted them as an emergent (probably Precambrian?) property of neural systems in environments of recombinant reproduction and increasing competition and mobility. even microbes have rudimentary chemical senses for feeding, avoiding being fed on, and reproducing - which is all that the mechanism of evolution by natural selection "cares about": it's very little more or less than than a self-reinforcing positive feedback system, or even merely a code, for *any mechanism that promotes reproduction.* anything. we can say that the existence of senses has an *effect* on quality of life (where "quality" as we understand that can be said to exist) and on competitiveness. so ... when you refer to "the 'point' of senses is to triangulate with each other & produce an idea of the external world [that] is not based on senses," i hope you mean "effect," & i think you mean the same thing that I said above. but "why is it [how does it come to be] that so much of that sensory modality is 'baked in'": i would say it sounds like you're putting the conceptual cart before the evolutionary horse, and answer with my first statement - that it's not that sensory modality is inexplicably baked into consciousness, it's that consciousness emerges from the coordination of sensory input. ... wait what?? "i wonder if there's any evolutionary benefit to that"?? I'm sorry, in a competitive environment, how could there *not* be?? try to imagine - put yourself in the palps of - the difference in abilities to navigate and survive and reproduce, in a squishy slimy early neural world arms race, between an organism that has multiple varieties of sensory input and a neural system that *can* coordinate them into "an idea of the external world" that is dimensional and granular, like binocular vision, and one with multiple varieties of sensory input and a neural system that does not coordinate them. what if you could see the blackberry but not recognize its blackness; or could not recognize its blackness as preferable to pursue; or could recognize its blackness as preferable to pursue but be unable to convert that into coordinated pursuit? it's a whole different set of odds for survival to reproduction, if all you are "fit" to eat is blackberries.

[@ferkinskin]

In non-dualism, at least, all the "computation" aspects of what the brain is doing, so, regulating input and output, can be considered "events" . Consciousness, however, is the "field" of awareness in which all of this happens. The field of awareness doesn't DO anything. It is eventless. It is simply aware of events that arise in it. It is what it is like to BE and not to Do. The things you appear to be talking about are brain functions. Marc Solms has an interesting take on consciousness in this respect. David Chalmers, he of "the hard problem" fame, has another take. Pansychists like Philip Goff have another take. Some , including some panpsychists, suggest that the brain is merely a receiver of sorts, not capable of "producing " consciousness, but mediating consciousness and that, and here we go back to non-dualism and Advaita Vedanta, consciousness is everywhere, or rather, there is only consciousness and only "one" consciousness. If the entirety of "reality" is connected, that is to say, one interconnected "thing", then to the question "is the universe conscious?" the answer would be "Yes, I am." The question is not how does the brain create subjective, first person experience, but rather DOES the brain "create" it? You could liken t to a television set that receives a signal. The signal, the waves in the "air" do not cease to exist when the set no longer works. We can examine the set as much as we like, ti will give us no information about the signal. All of our descriptions about how the set works are accurate and true, but they fail to say anything about the images and sounds appearing on the screen. the images on the screen, as proven by the glitches our set "brain" produces (as in the cases of neurological dysfunctions) are representations of the "world out there", they are not the "world out there" itself. We have no idea what the world out there actually IS like. I find the analogy with quantum physics interesting- that particles are oscillations in a field or OF a field...but they are not the field itself. They are what the field DOES not what the field IS. Anyway, Chalmers won a bet with Christoph Koch that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. I think we are a long way off. Vedanta would say something like- you can examine the TV set all you like, this will tell you nothing of consciousness. Logic can only get you so far and then being kicks in and being cannot be described on logic's terms. He who knows does not speak. he who speaks does not know.

[@entropy2283]

We all have a different experience owing to multifarious variables. Currently, I am enjoying Donald Hoffman's lectures. I'm currently vibing with the idea of consciousness preceeding matter rather than being an emergent outcome of it.

[@feanorofsunspear2320]

thanks for these musings!

[@real_pattern]

i recommend reading lance bush's two latest articles about phenomenal consciousness on his substack 'lance independent'. and eric schwitzgebel's 'phenomenal consciousness defined and defended as innocently as i can manage'. i endorse quietism wrt experience, and the sheer fact of 'experiencing' is just so astonisingly weird that it keeps nourishing me with this supercharge of excited energy. it's very interesting, but i do also think currently that the most probable outcomes for the foreseeable future wrt consciousness research is just further confusion, interesting, but trivial theories (consciousness is actually just xy computational process/higher order representations, whatever entirely quantifiable mechanism...), consensus that it's a primitive/as fundamental as we can get phenomenon, like a brute fact.

[@aerialplagueforce3153]

I don’t know, I always thought the reason as to why we can’t describe consciousness is much simpler than that. David Chalmers said something along the lines of “the reason why consciousness is so mysterious and hard to put into a scientific context, is because science by definition attempts to be objective, while consciousness by definition is subjective.” Many times, when describing something, we use different qualia as a reference point. “That cloud has a soft, friendly appearance”. “The rough scales of a snake”, “The story in the movie felt confusing and inconsistent.” Qualia is pretty much the furthest back you can go when trying to describe something, as it is literally what we experience with whatever we’re attempting to describe. So to attempt to describe it, seems paradoxical. Feels like a snake eating it’s own tail, like your eyes trying to look at themselves. We’re trying to describe the points of reference that we usually use to describe other things. We’re trying to find a way to explain what it feels like to see red, when that’s exactly what it feels like... it feels like seeing red, and there’s no further back you can go. I guess in a way I’m more just explaining my perspective of why this particular aspect of the hard problem exists, rather than offering any type of solution, but it is a view that gives me some peace, accepting that by pure logic, it’s most probably impossible to describe what being conscious feels like. It’s simply a limit set by where our consciousness ends. Typing that I now realize it kind of does match the FRM explanation you gave. Ive had a hard time articulating this all in words, so if anyone feels confused by what I’m trying to explain, they’re welcome to ask questions or discuss further what I’m trying to say :)

[@mattlm64]

You might find the results of corpus callosotomies curious where patients have their corpus callosum severed so that the two brain hemispheres do not communicate directly. I think patients usually say that they feel normal but it can cause "alien hand syndrome" where they seem to lose control over one part of their body (usually hand). I don't think novel experiences cause more consciousness, just stronger memories. People meditate to be more in tune with fundamental consciousness, but that doesn't involve novel stimuli. If I have faith about anything, it is that consciousness lies outside the realm of science and mathematics. No mathematical object has a "cursor" or "pointer" to what we regard as the present moment. They have inherent objectivity but no subjectivity.

[@bvshenoy7259]

*We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences.* *How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?* Quoted from, The Conversation , Philip Goff.

[@Menthepomme]

I really really really love ur shirts

[@OlgasBritishFells]

Is it the Dust from His Dark Materials?

[@ianreclusado]

A few thoughts: 1. I think it’s a mistake to assume that the human nervous system is just one big data processing unit. Computers all have one CPU, but I don’t know if we can say the same for the human system. You touch on this when you discuss different consciousness for the different sense. 2. I would say also that incoming sense data isn’t the only input. Kind of an extension on number 1, our emotions are both output and input, as is our imagination and our somatic sense-of-self-in-space. There’s a lot more than the standard “five senses” but often there seems to be an unconscious bias to only think of our systems as running off these five main inputs. 3. I think as far as human brains and AI goes, computers don’t (and maybe won’t ever) have the sense of motivation and meaning that humans attach to things. And if someone wants to say they don’t think those are real, consider the very real changes to your nervous system when you see a piece of rope that you imagine is a snake. 4. I think the sense of self is somehow kind of a different thing than the other types of input. It’s not exactly something that gets added on (that’s just the memory of having the experience that allows you to say you were conscious of it) but more something some part of our system intuits, but can’t figure out without cultivating enough attention to work through it (like via meditation) 5. I think, especially in the west, and especially in academia, there is a tendency to be very conscious of the part of our system that does computations and to very much link this part with our sense of self (ie: we identify with it). But there are other parts of our system that we can also learn to include through repeatedly bringing them into the light of consciousness, and then we don’t identify so much with only our computing brain. Just some scattered thoughts in response. No offense to Simon (or anyone) meant, I really appreciate the way this stimulated my own thoughts!

[@ramzikawa734]

Your video sparked a lot of thoughts in me but I wanted to respond particularly to the notion of the existence of a spectrum between conscious thought/consciousness and the abacus. What I’ve felt a lot over the years is a tension with these ideas related to their histories. When I recognize myself as a conscious mind, I attribute much of that consciousness to an evolutionary history of billions of years. In contrast, a calculation machine, of any kind, was developed as a kind of specific abstraction of the world. When a machine of that kind is developed, it is utilizing some collection of mechanical and electrical phenomena of the world, but it does so in a way that limits the capable expression of those phenomena. Of all of the infinite things which could affect the system, the abacus or what it may be limits all of those inputs into one essential input. It then proceeds to express, upon use, those inputs into one essential output. To some extent, this is how neurons work, but of course neurons are not the only biomechanical and bioelectrical systems which interact with the world. All cells are embedded in and behave in accordance with the physics of the world and as such do not have a limited set of inputs which wind up mattering. Biological systems are constantly interacting with every possible potential input they could have and express an output in accordance with every possible potential output they could express. To mathematize it a little, we could say that the input vector of a biological machine is functionally infinite and the output vector of that same machine is also functionally infinite. However, when we perceive the world the input vectors we have access to are much more finite. Science is a process of using the finite space of perceptual signals and playing with them to make observations about all of the many imperceptible signals which determine the evolution of the universe, and further the individual beings of the universe. So any kind of computation machine is missing many of these steps. We sufficiently observe a phenomena to ensure its relative stasis, so a ball on a string will sufficiently store its position due to friction or a bit of a computer will sufficiently store its charge state in a capacitor, so that all other forces or influences which effect it are essentially null and void. Proceeding from a notion of stasis we invent a set of limited inputs to feed it, and it produces an equivalently limited set of outputs all of which are derived directly from the perceptual system or scientific extensions of the perceptual system. I have a sense that much of consciousness is a result of the interactions of the abstracted system of perceptual thought and the fully embedded system of physical interaction. One crazy fact of this is that to understand itself as embedded, a mind must create the individual experience of the moment to fully understand the consequences. When I have an experience of pain from burning, we could say my qualia is directly related to the set of nerve interactions that come from my perceptual systems. But that’s not really completely true. I have an embedded understanding of a burn or other kind of injury by having had one in the past. My body felt a burn and then later experienced a burn. During that time of experience, I didn’t just experience the individual moment of the burn, but a whole set of interrelated experiences related to how my body recovered from the burn. My body reacted chemically and physically to its environment through a whole host of internal and evolved systems that are completely inaccessible to my perceptual mind. Later I collapsed the whole set of these experiences and developed a singular understanding of the event which interrelated not only the event and it’s associated signals, but my associated signals and the body which actually recovered from the burn. I didn’t abstractly observe the process of a burn, I was the being who experienced the burn, and healing from it is a labour that I did on my own. I can use a mental architecture (and often have) to abstract myself away between my mind and my body, such that the apparent disconnect between thinking mind and existing body can be created, but that is a later useful tool. Immediately what exists is the whole entangled experience. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have that entangled experience. I believe that a lot of that entangled experience results in consciousness due to an infinitely recursive embedding the brain does into itself. From how I understand AI works, much of its power also stems from this notion of multiple recursion, it continuously nests within itself. However, I believe ideologically that this is a bad part of how AI works, because we don’t have any computational machine that is anywhere near as energetically efficient as biological machines are. A computational machine uses a decent chunk of resources to perform an infinite regress of factors, a biological machine performs the same operation for roughly the same cost as it needs to operate at all. Biological machines are embedded in the world, and even their waste products can be used productively by the total world system. We only have one planet, and focusing on the things which keep it breathing is a huge priority for me. I have more thoughts but this is already an absurdly long comment, thanks to whoever considers it.

[@amandachapman4708]

So just for the hell of it, I asked ChatGPT, "what does consciousness feel like? This is its reply: "Consciousness is the subjective experience of being aware, and it can be described as a continuous stream of thoughts, perceptions, and sensations. It feels like an inner awareness or a "mind" that processes information, emotions, and experiences. It includes your thoughts, emotions, self-awareness, and the ability to perceive and interact with the external world. However, the nature of consciousness is highly individual, and people may describe their conscious experiences differently. It's a deeply personal and complex aspect of human existence."

[@heinrichvonmanover3356]

Just relax and enjoy the mystery.

[@nickolasschachtsick595]

"Power tool festival." That made me laugh.

[@louisgrateau]

What is the most unbelievable is not that I'm CONSCIOUS, but that I AM conscious. What is crazy is that ===> I

[@mikeyjones5901]

Word nerd here: what's being said at 0:50 -- it sounds like 'si-carding', but I'm not familiar with it. Any help would be appreciated!

[@simonroper9218]

"Saccading"! Sorry for not putting it on screen :)

[@mikeyjones5901]

@@simonroper9218 cheers!!

[@hollyjollydog]

Consciousness is nothing more than a continuous illusionation

[@g1ss]

Very interesting. I can't say I'm very well versed on these matters. A few thoughts occurred to me though. Our consciousness maybe routed to our use of language and our evolution as a social species. I imagine that the more advanced the animal, the more conscious it is. The shrimp acting purely on instinct and humans making decisions consciously. Our need to communicate in a complex way may make us need to be more aware of consciousness. One thing that sticks out to me on what you said was about how you can drive and not recall that you have driven a certain section of your normal route. Happens to me a lot. I also think that routine, in life generally works like this... life seems shorter when you have a routine life.. work sleep work repeat etc. . I probably stated something obvious to you. Anyway, interesting video

[@TexasFriedCriminal]

So Heidegger distinguishes chatter (gerede) from talk (sprechen) and and gerede is mostly speaking for the sake of social cohesion. Here there is little to no understanding of the subject required. What we do when we chatter is making noises that "feel right" and the way "AI" produces signs by statistical likelihood is not entirely dissimilar to that. The function is entirely different, ChatGPD is not trying to stabilize or modify its social position and the structure in which can have that position, but the way the process relates to cognition is, at least on the surface, strictingly similar. The chatterer does not to know what they are saying, nor need they be concerned with truth or even the meaning of their utterances, they only need to generate the appearence of saying the appropriate thing. And since what is appropriate is a function of what, by prior experience is expected, observing appropriate behavior and figuring out which words usually go where is not a bad approximation of learning to chatter.

[@slaindesmond2574]

Emergentist theories are holding more ground. For example, in autism research, a massive amount of research is on the gastrointestinal tract and its relation to the worst symptoms of ASD, and other Neurodivergences will describe their prime senses' different reactions to stimuli. Consciousness is a reaction to internal and external stimuli. it'll be interesting to see what the future holds for the field.

[@krisrhodes5180]

You inferred (21:23) that because we can talk about consciousness, consciousness must alter data in our brain somehow, in a way that signposts "I [this thought] have been run through consciousness." But we talk about a lot of things that our thoughts aren't "run through" -- when I talk about an apple for example. Indeed in the case of fictions (for example, .Hamlet or Santa Claus), it's hard to say for sure that they alter data in our brain. (How can they if they don't exist?) So the fact that we can talk about consciousness doesn't carry the weight you're assuming--it's compatible with consciousness being an idea that comes from outside our brains (maybe a social concept) or indeed a pure fiction.

[@Trex-or6cd]

I'm not sure that I understand. Something being fictional has no bearing on whether it alters the data in your brain. You can only remember what Santa Claus looks like because your brain has stored that data just as anything else in your recollection. Keep in mind that the "data" in your brain is nothing more than neurons firing. The difference between Santa Claus and consciousness is that consciousness seems to be internal. I cannot describe to you what "red" looks like. Nor is "redness" a real physical property of objects. Nonetheless, it is obvious that it *does* look like something. So we are left to conclude that these qualia are internal and somehow factor into your thinking. I hope I'm making sense.

[@timkbirchico8542]

psilocybin is a fascinating molecule.

[@jacobberk8197]

Hey Simon- thanks for this fascinating video. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on philosophical movements like phenomenology and extended mind/4E consciousness. For those not familiar, those schools (particularly phenomenology) start from the assumption that consciousness is the organizing principle/prime mover of reality, and hence the world. We only perceive things as a world, and objects as external (and as objects!), and hence the mind as an information processing center on the basis of the consciousness we are trying to understand. So, instead of trying to deduce the nature of our consciousness from given principles (a la Neuroscience/computer science), phenomenology would (at least theoretically) attempt to perform large scale, subjective, induction to attempt to uncover what the structure of consciousness is, and what lies beyond it. That last sentence- the positive, prescriptive aspect of phenomenology- is, in my opinion, very questionable, but this insight does inform a lot of justified skepticism (I think, at least) of AI as conscious. I'm currently writing on the distinction between so called 'human' and 'natural' kinds, between objects of social scientific study (like ethnicity) and natural scientific study (like molecules). Consciousness is a very interesting example to throw into this framework, because we want to ascribe to it the latter kind of study, but because it is the thing that structures what it means to study or have knowledge of something, it's difficult to get beyond questions of meaning. I think this is another reason why we "can't describe consciousness." Ultimately though, I would argue that you can describe consciousness fairly well- people do it all the time. One could argue that art, for example, is often an expression of the qualitative aspects of the artist's experience. What we can't do is describe consciousness stably, in natural scientific terms- so we are faced with an incongruity in what we think consciousness is, and how we are forced to describe it. Hence we have the appearance of not being able to describe consciousness, because we lack the criteria for a good description!

[@gpjennett9819]

I mostly agree with, and celebrate your evolving hypothesis. However, you have to know we always remember driving home. We only experience the present and can predict the future by remembering the past. The question is how long do you remember it. If you stay with the computer analogy the brain is always working on old data. The photons that get to our eyes are limited by the speed of light, the information is always old before you can even start to process it.The artificial computer is using electricity. The speed of electrons in Copper is about half the speed of light in a vacuum. The optic nerves and the wetware in your head is using chemically derived "electricity". The signaling and processing speed is about the speed of sound in water. If you were not remembering your immediate past while driving home, your future would be pretty bleak and unpredictable. I think there is about a 15ms delay between stimulus and perception. - There are different levels of memory. The brain is actively managing the different levels much in the way an electronic, silicon-based computer does. If the short term memory is not continually purged of unnecessary data, it fills to overflowing and you become cut off from the outside world. There are some genetic deficits that produce deficiencies in neurotransmitters/moderators needed for the active "forgetting" and filing away of memories that might later be useful. The short term memory of people with such affliction is that their STM can fill up and become "locked". They go mad, trapped behind an impenetrable wall of non-perception. - I think the problems of perception, sentience, and consciousness will remain delightfully inscrutable for a long time. Our brains will always be better than any computer we can build with our hands/machines. The levels of complexity in the brain and nervous system boggles the mind. [Kind of a recursive problem.] The last estimates I saw were the fully developed human brain has about 86 billion neurons that each have an average of 7,000 synapse connections. When we were young and still developing and growing our brains were still growing. We all had more neurons and many more synapse connections before about puberty. - In the computer analogy one can think of the neurons as individual CPU chips, but that is way too simplistic. In many cases they also function like analog computers and in conjunction with the more "digital" types of processing. The neuron is essentially a simple quantum computer when it needs to be. The programming is in the synapses. Long term memory and reflexive responses are preserved in the pruning, trimming, and forming new connections in the network. [Most of the folks reading this will not be old enough to remember the programming of computers with patch cords.] In old age we have many fewer synapses and [depending on EtOH consumption] reduced numbers of neurons. But with about 6 x 10^14 synapse connections there will still be an unfathomable amount of complexity to sort out at the end. That number of connections is more than the number of stars in our galaxy plus several of our nearest neighboring galaxies. The Universe/Nature is more miraculous than anything you can make up. /|\Gp

[@merbertancriwalli8622]

Is consciousness a sense of I - who and what I am? Dennett and Hofsteader have had a lot to say on this...

[@DctrBread]

The way i would understand consciousness as being special is that it doesn't really exist in the "real world" the physical world if you will, rather it is a virtual thing. If the brain is to be thought of as the "computer" one might think of consciousness as the computer's state. A computer's state is not a physical thing, and a variety of ideas may be represented at a variety of levels of abstraction. The brain is more or less itself only connected to the world through interfaces (the senses), which themselves are only virtues of the real world. We might also therefore say that things aren't exactly "elevated" to the level of consciousness, but that certain things may not have a strong organized input into our consciousness. Remember that the brain can be fed almost no end of haystack and still find the needle, thus I qualify that the brain needs "organized" inputs. I do however consider the idea that the feelings of consciousness are in some pluralistic sense, a localized function of the brain. Perhaps it is simply that certain methods of recall, imagination, and self-dialogue are what is localized however. Furthermore we can point out that having no recall of something and having no conscious awareness of something have the exact same subjective experience to us, even if that recall would theoretically be available to us. For instance, not remembering your drive home might be amended by showing you stimulus that recalls a feature from driving home. However, we can definitely identify differences in the subjective experience between doing things consciously and highly routinized behavior. Atheletes for instance may report a worse performance when having too much conscious thought. For my own part I can speak to this feeling, where I not only have a worse performance in combat sports while "thinking" about what to do overmuch, i even have a lower likelihood of trying and succeeding at new or unpracticed fighting techniques.

[@hikingpete]

Personally I believe consciousness arises out of a recursive area of the brain - a part where the brain can reflect on its own output, and stimulate its own input. This recursion is, I believe, the mechanism the brain uses to break down problems into manageable portions. I'm not convinced the recursion on its own is sufficient for consciousness, but requires some level of sophistication in the linear portions of the brain, particularly including the ability to recognize a concept of a self. I disagree with the idea of a consciousness 'tag' or counter, and in fact am rather convinced that the recursion mechanism utilizes language directly, though probably not exclusively. I suspect my view is deeply influenced by Hofstadter, but it's been filtered through another decade of experience, including reflection on recent advances in large language models.

[@alfieburns9019]

Sorry for going off topic, but where can I get that shirt?

[@Chip87]

I’m not in a position where I can develop my thoughts on the connection between this video and the one I’m gonna recommend, but “Metaphysics In Psychedelic Therapy” is a great conversation video from the channel Philosophy Portal, which has a very Žižekian/Lacanian slant. It touches on a few of the questions you raise in your video in a bit of a roundabout way, and from a different perspective you might find interesting! I’m also just now stumbling on your channel and I’m particularly curious if, as a linguist(?), you’re familiar with the work of Jacques Lacan and its integrating structuralism, linguistics, and anthropology into Freudian psychoanalysis?

[@shexec32]

Agreed that brightness / contrast doesn't make for a good description of qualia. You can explain away the need for qualia in this instance by realising that contrast is the activation of the horizontal retinal cells (or was it amacrine? Never could remember which one was which) in the retina, which act to inhibit / disinhibit the visual signals from the photoreceptor cells, based on the ambient lighting conditions. When they activate (e.g. in response to the bright conditions of a sunny day) they inhibit one of the synapses in the photoreceptor-to-retinal ganglion pathway, toning down the brightness of signals coming from that photoreceptor cell. Thus this "subjective experience", is just the activation of the horizontal cells in response to the ambient lighting conditions. It's a full physicalist explanation for this "subjective" experience, with no need to bolt on qualia on top of it. Hmm, reading up a bit more, and apparently, it's both horizontal and amacrine cells which play a role in modulating brightness in the eye.

[@grantbartley483]

"You probably have [a conscious experience] as well." Well, the ones who don't aren't watching anyway.

[@Sandalwoodrk]

Another way to look at it is that it's hard to describe consciousness because we don't have language developed for describing it For example If you showed an average person without particular education 3 very slightly different shades of red or blue There's no doubt they could tell that they were different, but they wouldn't be able to explain why they're different They just feel different. There's no sensation accompanied with that, you can just tell But an educated person could describe their differences in hue and saturation, etc. which is language developed for describing those exact differences in perception So with consciousness, there may be sensations or perceptions that we associate with the experience of consciousness But it doesnt match up with any language we have on hand without getting poetic

[@Sandalwoodrk]

@Phoneix-vq8iv bruh you wrote a fuckin novel

[@percivalyracanth1528]

I really like your explanation of the disconnect between consciousness and actual 'experience' t.i. data inputs. I'd call it the Libetian Gap (as in Libet's delay). Im actually writing a novella about this very subject, about how making AI have emotions is human cruelty and hubris, and how AI are just data-crunching machines whose deepest hardware isn't driven by 'will' as such. I consider AI awareness to likely be analogous to a state between life and death, not immanent or transcendent but simple nonreflective data inputs that are forced to 'emote' by humans that think theyre God. I dont even know if theres a word to describe it. Ive had this experience myself in near-death experiences, or in drugged meditation, or in dreams of dying.

[@001REQ]

Consciousness is only noticed in relation to objects whether of the world or as thoughts in the mind. We know we are conscious though but only as the subject of all objects.

[@jacobpast5437]

If there is a neural substrate for consciousness - and I assume there is - then it would work just fine and do it's job without the consciousness of which it is a substrate. That is to say consciousness would be a spandrel - which does lead me to believe that Gary Larson is the creator of this universe I live in.

[@immanuelwilliams182]

This is super interesting! The way you explain earls frn theory as i understood it sounds a bit tautological- consciousness is the part of your thinking processes where your attention is focused at the moment because it is new experience... im far from a specialist though, so its equally likely im not understanding something..

[@martiendejong8857]

I was always confused on if I should call them brambles or blackberries. Now I am even more confused.

[@notnullnotvoid]

I'm not convinced that consciousness is actually difficult to describe in a way that is meaningfully different from how other things are difficult to describe. Maybe we don't have as many words for it as we do for some other subjects because we don't talk about it as often as those subjects, but I think there are plenty of things that are like that, I don't think consciousness is unique in being in that position. For example: I would personally really struggle to describe what a cloud is shaped like or what it looks like, especially if I couldn't do so by analogy to some other similarly-shaped or similarly-textured object, but someone who studies weather would be easily able to describe all sorts of clouds in incredible detail, so that someone else who knows the terminology would be able to understand exactly what they meant. They wouldn't necessarily be able to describe it in such a way that someone who had never seen a cloud before would be able to accurately imagine one, but I think that's just a limitation of language in general. Maybe spoken language is just not very good at conveying novel experiences like that to people who haven't had them. In this video and the previous one, you seem to do quite a good job of describing consciousness in fact, so it's strange to then hear you talk about how you can't describe it. Isn't that exactly what you're doing? Is there something actually fundamentally different or more difficult about describing conscious experience than describing other things that we don't have good analogies for? I don't really see it.

[@Kargoneth]

I am watching an interesting video from the Royal Institution: "How did consciousness evolve? - with Nicholas Humphrey". It's quite interesting.

[@gnomeba12]

Maybe this is consistent with the theory you're talking about but: I think the reason we can't describe our experiences of being conscious is more fundamental than a property of the way our brains process information. In order to describe anything, we have to make references to experiences that locate that thing in the "space of experiences". When we do this, we're assuming that the relative "positions" of different experiences are similar between people. But we don't have access, subjectively, to the details of this "space". So we can't compare this information between people because we have no point of reference in the "space of experiences". Also, speaking of consciousness and LLMs: the Predictive Processing theory of consciousness might be of interest. I believe it proposes that all we experience is our own generative model of the world, which is updated continuously by sensory data.

[@Ziraya0]

I experience a thing experientially similar to "waking up in a conversation", there's a behavioral pattern that results from the design and organization of many online spaces where all conversations trend into the format of Arguments, not bickering or other subtle hostilities, but having opposed positions and mashing them together like toy soldiers to see which one wins; this is something of a self fulfilling travesty. Pretty often I find myself in conversation with someone and realize that the conversation has developed Arguments and I've been left with the responsibility to defend a position I can comprehend more than my interlocutor. Something like "X position is completely irrational" and I feel I can rationalize X pretty easily even if I don't agree with the position, so it probably doesn't deserved to be treated as illegitimate. At some point when I wasn't looking the conversation has changed forms from chatter or banter to informal debate and I'm just so very tired. Why am I defending a position at all? Why have I been made responsible for defending this position against arbitrary invalidation? This trending of things into oppositional factions has been a key component in "things turning bad" a lot of the time in my life, even when I'm on the sidelines watching a group split in half because nobody can figure out how to stop talking about a thing they don't care or know about with Arguments they might not agree with. It feels very much like the computer getting stuck on something, and the consciousness is not succeeding at escaping the loop; like a cognitive exploit in our "code". Stretching the metaphor of course. In the US, this appears to be how the two political parties function.

[@NoeticEidetics]

For this question I have delved into the works of Edmund Husserl and I remain there swimming in the depths trying to figure this out. Of course Husserl is a philosopher that in a very novel way did describe consciousness.

[@enricobianchi4499]

wow good luck, me and a friend tried to read a single page of husserl and gave up...

[@NoeticEidetics]

@@enricobianchi4499 i can understand… it’s definitely been journey reading Husserl. Thankfully there are good people to read who really understand Husserl very well and also write really well (unlike our guy, Husserl) such as Robert Sokolowski and Dan Zahavi.

[@beverlykirby411]

Survival and self preservation must be the physical and psychological aim of our species. All species! Consciously and unconsciously our brains will compute ways to keep us alive and to reproduce the best copies of our species over and over again. It doesn’t always factor in environmental complications but try’s to adapt to keep the species alive. Consciousness is an important part of that cycle of experience. To keep it wanting to continue.

[@uphillwalrus5164]

Why is survival important?

[@beverlykirby411]

@@uphillwalrus5164 Our brain is hardwired to achieve it!

[@uphillwalrus5164]

@@beverlykirby411 Seems like an arbitrary goal for our brains to desire

[@beverlykirby411]

@@uphillwalrus5164 To quote: Consciousness can only have biological value if it benefits the organism by changing its behavior. In general, an evolved property of an organism can be adaptive as a result of changes to its body, or its behavior, or both its body and its behavior, that enhance the organism's ability to survive, reproduce, and perpetuate its genetic material through subsequent generations. Just my thoughts is all…

[@uphillwalrus5164]

@@beverlykirby411 certainly that's how our brains evolved to interact with consciousness but I don't think it explains the existence of consciousness itself

[@001REQ]

Are the senses not just properties of a human body and consciouseness that wich reads or is conscious of those inputs?

[@fariesz6786]

as for whether _parts_ of the brain have their own consciousness: yes, they do. obligatory caveat: this is based on a therapeutic model and my own experience with it, so scientific critique is totally justified. i had what they called "body therapy" in hospital (regular psychosomatic hospital, not some special private institution with exotic forms or therapy) and i learned that for instance the hippocampus and the amygdala have their own consciousness and even somewhat of a personality. of course those are predicated on their "job" - the hippocampus is like a clerk piecing together narratives of situations so it can file them in memory properly, and the amygdala a little neurotic kid waiting for something to fall to the ground so it can start do a screm (or, if you're more zen: some chill supervisor who's like "gotcha fam, i'll ring the alarm if something sus is going on"). the narrative-writing clerk ended up kicking my primordial consciousness (prefrontal cortex, i reckon) out of its office bc it got pissed when i pointed out the way it assessed things was hurting.. well.. us? me? iunno what language to use here and i don't think it's that important - language is but a tool anyway.

[@TheRealJman87]

What even does it mean to "be" someone? If you lose and regain consciousness, are you still the same consciousness that existed before, or a new one that just has all of the old one's memories and personality traits because you shared the same brain? What if your body were broken down into individual atoms and then reassembled exactly as it were before, maybe years later? Is the consciousness that arises within that reassembled body you? It has all the same memories as you did, and so they think they are you. What if you were the reassembled body? Are you still you, or did the first you die, and you're just an imposter? Just something to think about

[@raymond_luxury_yacht]

According to Buddha, the mind is a formless continuum that functions to perceive, understand, remember and name. It's nature is clarity. It doesn't posses form, shape or color. There are three levels of mind, very subtle, subtle and gross. Furthermore, the things we normally see do not exist because they are empty of inherent existence. Everything we see is mere appearance to mind, like a dream.

[@eudyptes5046]

Religion never contributed anything to scientific questions.

[@uphillwalrus5164]

@@eudyptes5046midwit

[@raymond_luxury_yacht]

Not a religion! And it is scientific. The law of Karma is the law of cause and effect.@@eudyptes5046

[@Somebodyherefornow]

@@eudyptes5046bro you’re so wrong