The Hard Problem of Consciousness Solved?

[@australopithecus_lucis]

A near 50 minutes long Simon Roper video is one of my favourite things on this platform, can't wait to watch this. Dropped at the perfect time

[@JHaven-lg7lj]

Same here!

[@InParticularNobody]

The sort of content that would have been commissioned by BBC2 in the early 1980s, but that you now have to deliberately seek out on KZbin....whilst simultaneously hoping that Simon keeps making these videos just for the love of it. In other words - THANKYOU.

[@shoresofpatmos]

I listened to this while sleeping and had some crazy dreams.

[@antonfredrick]

Always a good day when you drop a video!

[@goodquestion7915]

Simon focuses on low-resolution visual perception, but Consciousness performs low-resolution assessments of EVERYTHING at one point, or another; brainfart, misplacement, insomniac, and others are words that apply to that situation. For technological humans, what's really important is not our worst moment, but the moment where our Consciousness reaches a peak of activity on some novel problem. These moments invented the wheel, levers, motors, computers, etc.

[@johnstotts2131]

31:50 "Even though you know that cognitive neuroscientists can provide a description of how red is generated in the brain." Except that's exactly the point - they cannot. They may be able to describe the neural correlates of the experience of the color red but they cannot explain which the firing of such neurons should be accompanied by any subjective experience whatsoever. I think Bernardo Kastrup said it best when he said, "for the position of illusionism to have use, it has to be specific. Illusionism is either incoherent or it is useless. It is useless if we say phenomenal states aren't what they seem - that's why they are an illusion. This is coherent but it's useless, because it doesn't do anything about the hard problem of consciousness - because the seeming itself is already a phenomenal state. An illusion is a phenomenal state, insofar as it must be an experience. If it's not an experience, it cannot be an illusion. It's already an instance of that which one is trying to explain or get rid of. On the other hand illusionism would be useful if it said phenomenal states are an illusion in the sense they don't really exist - that they are additive digests of neuronal processes, and that's why our experiences don't look like neurons firing. This position is incoherent because there is an obvious infinite regress and it goes as follows: What is that 'additive digest'? Well it can only be neuronal processes because for the illusionist/physicalist there is nothing but neuronal processes at play. So the 'additive digest' of neuronal processes are themselves neuronal processes. So why doesn't the additive digest look like neuronal processes to us? Well because then you have a meta-additive digest. But that too can only be neuronal processes. So, you need a meta-meta additive digest. And you fall into infinite regress." Fundamentally any theories about internal representations and attention schema will fail to explain the existence of qualia in a specific and coherent manner, for these reasons. I recognize you seem to acknowledge such later in your video, that this does not fundamentally explain the existence of qualia, and while you may be correct that we could simply be wrong about qualia being irreducible, this acknowledgement does not, as you know, provide any explanation for the existence of qualia. In my opinion Bernardo Kastrup's conception of idealism is the only theory out there right now that allows for the existence of phenomenal consciousness/qualia while also explaining the existence of the apparently non-mental external world, and in a way that is completely consistent with physics.

[@simonroper9218]

This is a good point, and I did phrase that poorly - I should have said that neuroscientists can provide a description of how the perceptual judgement 'this is red' might be generated, rather than the actual subjective experience of it. When I look at most physicalist theories of consciousness, I have exactly the same issue - they're just descriptions of cognition, and don't explain (or even attempt to explain) why subjective experience exists or is correlated with it. Honing in on a description of the visual system doesn't seem to get even 1% of the way towards explaining why we have subjective experience of it. For me personally, the reason that AST is different is that it provides a decent model of how the brain might mistakenly produce claims about its own cognition being mysterious or irreducible. I'd considered incorporating some of Philip Goff's ideas about panpsychism into the video, as I quite like them as a non-physicalist (or at least not conventionally physicalist) perspective - I ended up not doing this as I thought the video was long enough. The brain is capable of producing judgments about things that are not only inaccurate, but also incoherent - and to me, as soon as information about qualia enters the domain of higher cognition, it is subject to the principle that we could be wrong about it. I think AST would describe qualia as being the most basic information about sensory percepts that is available to higher cognition - which of course doesn't seem like a satisfactory description of them, because qualia don't seem to 'feel like' neural computation. But AST accounts for this by saying that this judgement - that qualia don't 'feel like' neural computation - could be misplaced or inaccurate. As we are captive to our brain's perceptual judgments, we don't have the objectivity we need to really assess the validity of that feeling, no matter how strong it seems to be. We can't think about qualia objectively 'on their own terms', because the brain has to compute everything we think about them - and so if they were actually just pure information processing, we wouldn't necessarily be able to think our way into accepting that as true. I keep thinking about a certain panpsychist view (maybe similar to Kastrup's?) that qualia are just the true physical character of neural computations, and that we are only confused or surprised about them not resembling our scientific abstractions of neural computations because those abstractions only describe physical behaviour - but I keep coming to the question of how the character of those neural computations could influence their behaviour in such a way that we were able to think and talk about them, and I can't seem to make that leap. But I understand that different people will have different thresholds of being able to find a theory satisfying, and I might change my mind!

[@johnstotts2131]

@@simonroper9218 It seems to me that Graziano is subtly confounding phenomenal consciousness with meta-consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness, for example, is likely possessed by a bee - when the bee flies around and sees a yellow flower, I think few would doubt that in the moment there is something that it *feels like* for the bee to have that experience - to visually experience the yellowness of the flower. However a bee (probably) lacks meta-consciousness. It cannot think to itself, “the color yellow is now being experienced.” It lacks these re-representational abilities. Now, when Graziano makes the argument that the impression of ineffableness is a false impression generated by the brain’s inherent properties due to evolution, this is actually an experience of meta-consciousness, not of phenomenal consciousness. Why? Because he’s describing the way we THINK about qualia - the fact that we describe qualia as ineffable. So, it seems to me that he sets out to describe a solution to the problem of phenomenal consciousness - of qualia - but ultimately ends up explaining, at best, an instance of meta-consciousness. The underlying hard problem itself remains: why should anything the brain does be accompanied by any sort of felt experience? I don't think you and I are too far off each other, but ultimately it seems to me that this argument comes down to the statement: “The brain generates the ‘false impression’ that qualia have some sort of inexplicable/ineffable quality to them that they actually don’t have” The problem is that any impression, even a false one, is necessarily phenomenal in nature - that is, there is some kind of subjective experience of them. Now one has to explain how that false experience of ineffableness- itself a phenomenal state of consciousness - is generated from the purely physical processes in the brain. These neural processes that imbue within me this false impression regarding qualia - why should such neural processes themselves be accompanied by any sort of felt experience whatsoever? And into the infinite regress we go. For me, any satisfying explanation to the hard problem must be able to answer this question. If others may be satisfied without this, I am not going to judge.

[@travisbplank]

Thanks for typing my thoughts out for me.

[@johnstotts2131]

@@simonroper9218 It seems to me that Graziano is subtly confounding phenomenal consciousness with meta-consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness, for example, is likely possessed by a bee - when the bee flies around and sees a yellow flower, I think few would doubt that in the moment there is something that it feels like for the bee to have that experience - to visually experience the yellowness of the flower. However a bee (probably) lacks meta-consciousness. It cannot think to itself, “the color yellow is now being experienced.” It lacks these re-representational abilities. Now, when Graziano makes the argument that the impression of ineffableness is a false impression generated by the brain’s inherent properties due to evolution, this is actually an experience of meta-consciousness, not of phenomenal consciousness. Why? Because he’s describing the way we THINK about qualia - the fact that we describe qualia as ineffable. So, it seems to me that he sets out to describe a solution to the problem of phenomenal consciousness - of qualia - but ultimately ends up explaining, at best, an instance of meta-consciousness. The underlying hard problem itself remains: why should anything the brain does be accompanied by any sort of felt experience? I don't think you and I are too far off each other, but ultimately it seems to me that this argument comes down to the statement: “The brain generates the ‘false impression’ that qualia have some sort of inexplicable/ineffable quality to them that they actually don’t have” The problem is that any impression, even a false one, is necessarily phenomenal in nature - that is, there is some kind of subjective experience of them. Now one has to explain how that false experience of ineffableness- itself a phenomenal state of consciousness - is generated from the purely physical processes in the brain. These neural processes that imbue within me this false impression regarding qualia - why should such neural processes themselves be accompanied by any sort of felt experience whatsoever? And into the infinite regress we go. For me, any satisfying explanation to the hard problem must be able to answer this question. If others may be satisfied without this, I am not going to judge.

[@wabznasm9660]

@@johnstotts2131 Your first paragraph to a layman like me is what struck me immediately as off about this theory. It feels wrong to say that consciousness is an illusion experienced when a being examines its own consciousness, because to me that implies that the flow of unexamined consciousness that we experience isn't consciousness - or what a bee experiences isn't consciousness - until it is contemplated.

[@williamliamsmith4923]

Any discussion of consciousness should also include consciousness in non human animals, too. At least a passing reference. And further, a possibility of consciousness in trees. If so, the discussions about consciousness cannot depend heavily on human or animal organs such as eyes, retina, brain, etc.

[@dadsonworldwide3238]

This is a hi jackobianed arguement made by our reformation ancestors in opposition to assyrian greeko babyl devining nature conciousness everywhere violating poly exclusion principle by standing on the answers only allowing deformity, mystification and hulucinations. Its in direct opposition to spiritual essence darwin and evolutionary mythology. It is telling the sum of all parts will never allow that wholistic big bang. It is saying ( no to hi jackobian credibility of one step like invoked vectors over vacuum of space grounded dictating phase changes state of +/- then skipping to step 2 anyways and over inflationary expansionism of something you deny in the first place. It is an argument saying let me-assure you ( pagan god assure meglamanic syncrab plagerized correlated prescribed propagandized exploited all good measure in calendar counting record of historical past ) that no bad actors or magician will ever trick us into servitude & slavery again by telling us red apples low entropic state is really purple hi entropic cooked is really red. It is an argument z of textualized question of a Richard finneman logical precise of steam engine. Y axis factory tested method X axis will objectively peer review industrial revolution = nicean creed let my ppl go justfied new means of production good variation but bad profits are given away to buy family's freedom

[@dadsonworldwide3238]

I finite true infinity via renormalized maths if its wrong it won't qauntize. Thus only polymical hi ground full embodiment of animals mind can follow any and all lines of thought measure the universe can't. It states that only dialectical vision can be deformed ,mystified or hulucinate in this manner. Because planetary ground dictates phase states it's why American homes have y axis outlet and magnacarta states abroad who only loan out bread crumbs of freedom have delta with powers that be dictating state or phase changes.. No different on substrate of space +/- unfortunately Hitler and over reactionary response to reformation via enlightenment self destroyed itself by making genetic the ultimate grounded substrate.

[@gabew3506]

Yeah if theres no ability for a hypothesis to account for non-human animal consciousness (which undeniably exists) then honestly its useless to me. This seems promising though

[@tolkienfan1972]

Why?

[@dadsonworldwide3238]

@tolkienfan1972 because reality on the smallest scales tells us so in poly exclusion principle. Add in the ability for dialectical vision to violate any and all lines of thought measure that the universe can't and you have 2/3 of whats needed . This is actually one of the easiest Their They're There conversations that is not always such a clean-cut story of Embodiment in its infancy

[@the_neutral_container]

I for one got a recommend! One of my favourite topics delivered by one of my favourite youtubers.

[@davethebrahman9870]

As I’ve gotten older and my eyesight has worsened I’ve noticed phenomena that confirm the ‘controlled hallucination’ hypothesis. Sometimes things in the visual field resolve themselves into objects where a second before there was only background. This didn’t happen when I was younger. I once walked in to a room where I had a justified expectation that a bed would be empty. I had a second of confusion before the image of a person presented itself. It was though I had caught my brain in the process of updating its expectations with incoming data. I suspect that both the eyes and the brain process are slower, causing a very slight delay in the construction of a new model of the observable reality.

[@simonroper9218]

I'm so glad to hear somebody else say this! I was recently approaching a friend at night on the bench we usually sit on, and in the dark, it looked as if he was hiding behind the bench ready to jump out and pull a trick on me. As I got about ten yards away, my brain resolved the reality: he was sitting on the bench, but wearing a jumper with lines across it that lined up with the bars of the bench. In the fuzzy moonlight, it looked as if he had passed through the bars like a ghost and ended up in front of them.

[@davethebrahman9870]

@ Fascinating! I’m sure our ancestors would have interpreted experiences like these as supernatural phenomena!

[@Spratt86]

You mean they just appeared like magic? Thats super cool.

[@Nosirrbro]

I’ve always had terrible vision and this has always happened to me lol

[@squamish4244]

@@Nosirrbro Yeah maybe it's just if your eyesight sucks lol

[@joearnold6881]

I have a very deep and important question… What the heck is an “overlooker”? 😂

[@chluff]

an *overlocker is a type of sewing machine

[@RickDeckard6531]

Yes, I had to look that one up - it's a special type of sewing machine, as someone above already mentioned. An "overlooker", on the other hand, could be a sort of deity, or a person with a world schema that has lots of holes in it.

[@guineapigz.]

I also had this question but was too afraid to ask 😅

[@kadenfraser4525]

@@guineapigz. ha , i thought it was a microscope of some kind , never would have guessed sewing machine . i had to rewind as i drifted off into wondering what was an over looker and lost focus on the content of the show

[@jeffkirk4761]

In the US this is generally known as a "serger".

[@ConanDuke]

"The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience." ~Jamis

[@SeverusFelix]

The lighting is like "Inside you there are two Simons"

[@mujahidean]

I didn't get recommended this so only just saw it. Very well explained as always. Very satisfying and compelling explanation in my opinion. Complicated to get your head around but simple once it clicks; in the same way as a lot of science, engineering, and social studies explanations. Definitely the first explanation of consciousness that has felt that way to me. It fits perfectly with the idea that consciousness is intrinsically linked to memory as well. With something like dementia the integrity of your brain diminishes and thus your ability to recall and generate new memories diminishes and thus your perception/comprehension of the world diminishes and thus your consciousness diminishes. Transitive property means they must all be the same thing. At least from what I saw with my own family suffering from dementia, by the end they definitely seem to be about as close to a philosophical zombie as you can get in the real world.

[@jonaseggen2230]

This might interest you: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everywhere_at_the_End_of_Time And kzbin.info/www/bejne/rXu6nKaGjKl-hcU

[@NeilEvans-xq8ik]

I think that, ultimately, the mystery of consciousness is intimately bound up with the mystery of existence itself. Our assumption of being separate and distinct entities is an illusion; we are existence itself, talking to itself from within itself. And existence itself cannot have an explanation because explanations require the invocation of realities external to the thing being explained, and there cannot be anything external to existence itself.

[@davidchapman356]

I can see how logic could be validly described as external to existence. Of course, logic exists too, but in a different sense from physical existence.

[@davidchapman356]

One of your Likes here is from me, but I'm lukewarm about your assertion that we're not distinct entities, which seems just that - an assertion with no explanation.

[@mrwhitemantv]

How many existences are there? My grandfather died. Where is his existence now?

[@NeilEvans-xq8ik]

@mrwhitemantv If there's more than one thing that you're calling "existence", then what I mean by 'Existence' is the reality in which all of those existences exist. I mean base reality, encompassing everything. Just like every character in a soap opera is both the character they are and the screen on which they appear, your grandfather is both your grandfather and Existence itself, as we all are along with all things.

[@NeilEvans-xq8ik]

@davidchapman356 By 'Existence', I mean literally anything that exists, whether that is mental, physical, or abstract/ transcendent. Not any particular being or thing, but rather Being itself.

[@kitchensinkmuses4947]

This all reminds me, rightly or wrongly, of the incompleteness theorem. (hyper-simplified) "A system cannot demonstrate its own consistency", and "a system cannot contain itself".

[@Nosirrbro]

I think that’s about right. To expect that these deep kinds of questions should have any kind of satisfying deep answers implies that there has to be something outside of the physical universe that provides an explanation. Otherwise the lack of an answer would be the only possible answer.

[@robertreitze3192]

As a child, every time I would learn a difficult new word, I would start reading and hearing it around me, as though it had just started being used. I feel like this is also due to my world schema not allowing me to resolve that information that had always been there, but didn't have a meaning and didn't reach my consciousness.

[@sststr]

I'm always surprised how many people rely on notifications and recommendations for channels they are subscribed to. You have a 'subscriptions' page, which should have all the latest videos from all the channels you are subscribed to. Always use that, you'll never miss another video again!

[@trucid2]

Not everyone is a youtube addict like us.

[@pauldavisthefirst]

Or you can skip relying on YT at all, and use an RSS reader app. Very simple to add YT channels to, and get notified of new posts/videos/articles/whatever without any interaction with YT at a ll.

[@jjkthebest]

Seriously. I never understood why people use youtube notifications. Getting the notification at some random time isn't gonna make me watch the video at that moment. It's just an annoying interruption of whatever I'm doing. On the other hand, when I'm starting up youtube to watch videos I can easily check the channels I feel like watching at that moment to see if they've released a new video.

[@peterreddin6474]

Really enjoyed watching this video, found it very informative and insightful. Watched it a few times. What Simon says makes sense to me, the best description of consciousness I've heard from anybody. Thanks for your insight.

[@SimonRGates]

Red can't be decomposed, it really isn't made up of smaller things, and that is the difference between a glass and red. A glass has a size, a weight, a smoothness - it's made up of a collection of qualia in various quantities. This can't help explain qualia. The fact that consciousness is clearly a result of computations is not an explanation of it, merely the starting point for an explanation; we don't believe in magic so how does computation cause this affect? That's the hard problem and, by the end of your video at least, it has not been solved. Most of the 'solutions' to this problem remind me of the 'solutions' to the problem of free will, people either redefine it to be solved, or hand wave the actual problem as if they had solved it. Anyway, enjoyable video as always 🙂

[@viewsandrates]

I was having the same or similar thoughts as you. Red is dimensionless. Like a shape minus depth, then minus length and then minus height, and finally minus the infinitesimal point because red doesn't even have location like a single point does. And yet, red is there... Where? There. Similarly, where are we in the brain? We're here, there, but also sometimes not here and not there. We can remove a lot of the brain (a surprising amount) and still probably have consciousness/conscious experience... Though I have heard that the "I"-ness of consciousness has been found to be in a very specific part of the lower brain that connects to both hemispheres. There are those people that feel like they're not real or alive. This points to there being a disfunction in the "I" part of the brain, if it does indeed exist.

[@robotaholic]

The color purple that we experience doesn't even correspond to any light frequency. The brain completely fabricates it. Purple doesn't really exist except in our representations. So the brain generating red is no big deal to me. So many Chalmers worshipers get butthurt so easily

[@egoascendere8940]

What if red is a dude?

[@cameronmclennan942]

Saying that red can't be decomposed is like saying the sound of the word 'dog' can't be decomposed. Of course we can break them both down, but in each case they are still described by other components of the same physical type as the initial thing itself. You can only break down the sound of the word 'dog' by using other sounds. You can only break down the colour red by using colours (if you actually look closer and closer at what physically makes up colour, it is not just 'red' - difference b/w additive and subtractive colouring, illusions with shading, etc.). You seem to be mixing up the qualia feeling that there is only one red with the physical description of what makes something appear red in specific contexts.

[@SimonRGates]

@cameronmclennan942 what I mean by not decomposable is that 'red' is caused by the activation of one of the three types of colour cone on the retina. Without that activation you won't see red. You can't mix or shade colours to get red unless there are a red photons arriving at the eye. It's true that the eye/brain uses colour contrast to present colour to our consciousness, so a colour that we would normally not see as red appears as red (like in the green / gray strawberry illusion), but only if there is red in the colour.

[@Jon-mh9lk]

I still think that Julian Jaynes' theory of consciousness and the bicameral mind is the best so far.

[@cyrusposting]

Hell yes, very excited to watch this.

[@jeremythesmith]

You might be interested in Donald Hoffman who argues that our perceptions have evolved to hide reality from us. "Hoffman proposes a solution to the hard problem of consciousness by adopting the converse view that consciousness causes brain activity and, in fact, "creates" all objects and properties of the physical world. To this end, Hoffman has developed and combined two theories: the "multimodal user interface" (MUI) theory of perception and "conscious realism".

[@harrytaylor2479]

Flipping cause and effect? Why?

[@ElMois872]

​@@harrytaylor2479because he is explaining it wrong, Hoffman argues that cerebral activity creates consciousness, but what we see as "cerebral activity" is a representational image of what truly exists in reality, in other words cerebral activity is what consciousness looks like throught our subjective human/animal perspective

[@overnightparking]

@@ElMois872 I don’t know a lot about Hoffman but my understanding is that for him consciousness is fundamental not cerebral activity.

[@ElMois872]

@@overnightparking Yeah exactly, thats what I explained in my comment, what we call "cerebral activity" is what consciousness looks like through our subjective human perception

[@Mark.Slight]

Hoffman is clearly a very smart guy but his starting point means he will never get it right. Imo.

[@benwarnock]

Graziano has figured it out, good to see someone else talking about him and his theory not many people are aware

[@jeremythesmith]

What's an "overlocker"? Is it the same as a sewing machine?

[@stoobydootoo4098]

Qualia - When I was about 6 I asked my Dad - "What does an orange taste like?" He replied something along the lines of - "Dont be stupid. You've eaten oranges."

[@RJGilman1967]

Thank you for your basic explanation of this, it was constructive. And then how you expanded out on the teaching of it. Much appreciated.

[@ArturoStojanoff]

I feel like, for me, this didn't get rid of the problem of "red," it introduced the problem of "glass."

[@jonhowe2960]

crystal bowls, specifically, have always filled me with dread.....something to do with my late grandmother

[@firefieldandfork]

I don’t know why I love this channel, but I do.

[@jeremymahrer1832]

After years of thinking i've found every channel relating to questions of consciousness and an explanation of our brief existence, Simon's channel only popped out now, very strange how KZbin works or doesn't in my case. Anyway a nice surprise to subscribe.

[@andrewclifton429]

Graziano's theory - like every other physicalist approach to consciousness I've encountered in the past 40 years - is an account of what conscious information processing DOES, in the brain. Like all of these stories, it doesn't come close to explaining what consciousness IS; i.e., the qualitative nature of the way it feels to be conscious. It's misleading to say that such theories fall short of solving the "hard problem". They don't even address it.

[@guypanton8341]

A properly physicalist approach doesn’t really require an explanation of how it feels to be conscious, to my mind. Consciousness is the feeling of (the subjective experience of) the physical processes going on in the brain and greater nervous system. But perhaps it is still more accurate to say that those physical processes are at once those feelings, which, all taken together, is subjective experience or consciousness.

[@andrewclifton429]

@@guypanton8341 You appear to be saying that a physicalist explanation of something doesn't have to actually explain it. The rest of your post is just a dogmatic assertion of the physicalist view namely, that subjective experience is, in some sense, identical with the physical processes going on in the brain. The problem, of course, is that subjective experiences are characterised by qualitative properties ("qualia") - many of which we find have intrinsic value, or disvalue (e.g., joy or pain). We are unable to analyse these highly salient aspects of our consciousness into the abstract language of physical description - which is limited to notions of quantity, form, structure, and dynamics. Likewise, no objective descriptions of brain activity amount to descriptions of the qualitative states they're associated with, nor can we translate one into the other. Maybe one day, some genius will achieve this seemingly impossible feat - but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. In the meantime, this unsolved problem gives us good reason to doubt that the physicalism is necessarily true.

[@Storm_.]

I don't know why Simon spends so long talking about why we don't perceive the molecules in a cup, but perceive it as a ceramic mug. Isn't it obvious that the brain only perceives things from data it can actually interact with? Who's ever perceived a molecule? It just seems pointless to talk about it. Why not just talk about metaphysical subjectivism? I think this is what he's dancing around. Everything we perceive through our senses is coloured by our senses which aren't black & white pure data retrieval systems, they're flawed, analogue, biological systems. Then what the senses pick up is turned into neurological signals which get transferred to short term memory and maybe long term memory depending on the priority. So yeah that's how it works, we live on second hand interpreted information, which is also lagged out of time. So we live in a mentally constructed version of reality, not actual true reality outside of our minds. It's almost like an internal simulation. The actual consciousness aspect is even outside of all of this. Consciousness is the property of the observer, it's the flux potential that directs attention. Putting attention in one place versus another is the character of consciousness in action. I think Simon always gets stuck in the weeds when he talks about consciousness and never really gets anywhere with it. But it would be nice to have a conversation with him about it sometime.

[@andrewclifton429]

@@guypanton8341 You appear to be saying that a physicalist explanation of something doesn't have to actually explain it. The rest of your post is just a dogmatic assertion of the physicalist view namely, that subjective experience is, in some sense, identical with the physical processes going on in the brain. The problem, of course, is that subjective experiences are characterised by qualitative properties ("qualia") - many of which we find have intrinsic value, or disvalue (e.g., joy or pain). We are unable to analyse these highly salient aspects of our consciousness into the abstract language of physical description - which is limited to notions of quantity, form, structure, and dynamics. Likewise, no objective descriptions of brain activity amount to descriptions of the qualitative states they're associated with, nor can we translate one into the other. Maybe one day, some genius will achieve this seemingly impossible feat - but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. In the meantime, this unsolved problem gives us good reason to doubt that the physicalism is necessarily true.

[@abody499]

the idea that there _is_ a hard problem is magical thinking

[@Multirightguy]

Why would you come to the conclusion that there is no hard problem of glass? There is a range of perceptions that you can have of glass. But it being made of atoms you can only infer through thought. Your reaction to this information is less visceral but should be similar to when you think about the irreducability of red.

[@se6369]

That sounds like an easy problem of glass

[@mrwhitemantv]

Since speech involves the contraction of laryngeal muscles and corresponding nerve impulses directed to them, it is 100% a physical process. On the other hand, we only speak about what we are aware of; we describe our internal states-what we see, hear, feel, or think. We never speak about what we are unaware of. Thus, if the physical process of speech is fully determined by consciousness, we must either accept that the immaterial can influence the material or acknowledge that consciousness itself is entirely a material process involving nerve impulses from other brain areas acting on the speech center.

[@mrwhitemantv]

BTW, just dropped a podcast about consciousness on my channel, based on my thinking about it

[@markbadham3360]

I agree, I also find this explanation satisfactory. Having been used to programming computers to display red from a young age. I have no problem with thinking about the eye as being the reverse of the computer monitor. The RGB monitor has three different light emitters the eye has three different light sensors. Colours are just labels for light at different intensities in different combinations as detected by these sensors.

[@messmer777]

Philosophy renders the world asunder and then staggers back and exclaims "My heavens, its broken! How did it get this way??"

lol wut? you need to get out more mate.

[@jeremywvarietyofviewpoints3104]

This is the first time I have heard the word 'overlocker.'

[@cwcarson]

I can explain, he's from Blighty.

[@bobcousins4810]

Yes ironically I found my attention drawn away from the presentation to wondering what an overlocker might be.

[@markykid8760]

One difference between red and the glass is that red can be exhibited by a single “pixel” in our visual system, while the transparent effect of the glass requires more than a single photon input. Great video, really enjoyed it.

[@RonaldMcDonald-nf9jj]

red would also require more than a single photon input. there aren't red photons, or green photons. our eyes measure the wavelengths of light, which takes time. if you took an instanteanous snapshot of our sensory inputs, you would have no idea of color. i think you'd only be able to differentiate light and dark.

[@zimzob]

@@RonaldMcDonald-nf9jjof course this clown would be the expert on the color red 😉

[@karlramberg]

The more you learn about a subject, the more associations and the more space it will take up in your brain. Things you don't understand and recognize are virtually invisible. You can see this manifesting when brains get damaged or degrade, like with dementia. A thing you can't categorize and describe is very hard to remember.

[@markykid8760]

Well if red photons don’t exist then certainly nor do instantaneous snapshots. Frequency exists only in time. Anyway I think my point is valid because you would need to see groups of “pixels” in order to infer that something translucent is there. In that sense, it requires colour info at a more granular level than the visual size of the glass. But you can’t say the same about redness in relation to some “more granular” property than colour.

[@Matt-y5o1]

Hi Simon, great video, thanks! Take a look at this, I think it should be interesting for you: Rvachev, 2024, An operating principle of the cerebral cortex, and a cellular mechanism for attentional trial-and-error pattern learning and useful classification extraction, Frontiers in Neural Circuits, 18

[@fjskfkskfkdkd8790]

I am afraid of all journals that are named "Frontiers in" something something.... They are usually predatory.

[@albertconstantine5432]

My bicameral mind nods and shakes at the same time. Thank you with all good wishes. And the fire and the rose are one.

[@bonkers9182]

As someone that has a kind of a "second sight" in an spiritual sense, but still loves science, I often ask my mathematician husband if what I'm seeing is really there. Happened less often as I grew older and learned to tell apart, but as my eyesight gets poor, sometimes I cannot tell, so it becomes funny. Not a schizophrenic, but what in some cultures is deemed as being a shaman or a ritual specialist. I cannot explain scientifically a lot, but I remain open to research and curious as to why this has been my whole life experience. Loved your comment on your friend on the bench wearing a striped jumper for that reason. Thanks, it is nice to kow that others also get a more mundane version of my experiences. xD

[@Edsploration.]

Wonderful to watch this video and get a more functional vocabulary and theory for discussing consciousness. I've been thinking in the past year that a formulation for some real, mechanistic consciousness should be possible. 12:19 I hadn't fully considered that the primary limit to introspection could be practical hardware limitations, but it makes a lot of sense. It's a good reminder that properties and mechanisms hardly exist in the physical world without taking up physical space and energy. But even so, I think there may be a second reason. Consider an artificial, conscious mind created in software. Add that it's the kind of mind that could have emerged from evolutionary pressures. If that's too vague, you can consider a human mind transferred into software where it can be modified. It seems that such a mind must have an introspective attention component and control to direct it, but must also have something like pain or a goal-seeking drive away from threats and toward safety, propagation, etc. If the attention program was given unfettered read/write access to all internal state, it would likely find the lowest energy path to reach its goals is by affecting its internal state rather than the external world. By removing negative goals and simulating the experience of reaching positive ones, it would fail to propagate and go extinct. Therefore an evolved consciousness should probably have evolutionary pressure toward access to some, but not too much, of its internal state.

[@enricobianchi4499]

So, if Mary in the black and white room was indeed able to will herself into being able to see red, she would also in principle be able to give herself infinite pleasure (thus likely starving herself immediately)?

[@mrmanch204]

I think you are very brave Simon, thank you for your presentation. Its like looking at a pile of the component parts of a motorcycle and trying to get from it, a bucket of speed.... We use comparison and modelling of what we already think we understand to solve our perception of what consciousness is and how it works. The problem is as I see it, is we lack the adequate 'models' at our disposal to compare with even the fundamental actions of consciousness. The evidence is empirical and working in a way, the function of which is ethereal and thus (I would say), evidence in its self of a greater mechanism or law. But, we can't know all things.

[@Apodeipnon]

I feel like this video carved some new channels into my cortex

[@uruzrune7216]

You may be interested in Donald Hoffman's "dashboard" theory of perception. There are many parallels between it and Graziano's theories (as you described them)

[@ElMois872]

Also the best theory of consciousness, event philosophers as Kant and Schopenhauer agree

[@brendanjackman3600]

Another point: I don't think this "solves" the hard problem, it just dramatically narrows it down. The question of what exact details of self-attention and the structure of the brain lead to this outcome is still extremely difficult and fascinating!

[@AKASHDUTTA-pb6dy]

There are a large number of comments I'd love to respond to, but doing so would unfortunately scatter my thoughts to the detriment of what I'm trying to say. So I'm putting it all up in a single comment, for ease of reading; with hope that the other insightful commenters may see it. Great vid as always, Simon! (Your presentation of) Graziano's theory seems like a good way to address the why and the what of consciousness as self-awareness. I think that the idea of self-awareness as an "attention schema" - though this is my first time hearing the term - is actually pretty old. Sense organs come into contact with stimuli; and - based on past exposures to stimuli, on the needs, wants and suppositions of the individual, and on other simultaneous experience - these sensations are recognised as objects appearing, persisting or changing. The recognition of these objects and thoughts about them are then *themselves* objects of further cognition. I agree that this is a good way to understand the "deep, subjective experience of self". It resembles many philosophical ideas from the Buddhist Abhidharma texts, though these belong in a religious context and inherit ideological commitments from that context. (More on the Abhidhamma in an eventual reply to this comment.) However, this doesn't really address qualia, which are the parts of consciousness apart from self-awareness. Arguably, sense-qualia must exist in any sufficiently complicated organism because distinct sensations must have distinct representations, without all the overhead of knowing which neurons are firing. More than sense-qualia, mind/emotion-qualia must also show up; an organism must feel hunger and fear distinctly. This is *separate* from self-awareness. We can see a person, or feel hungry, without knowing we have seen or felt this - as witnessed by the phrase "a lack of self-awareness." How complicated must an organism be before the need for qualia becomes important? Can C. elongatus "feel" each neuron firing? (The question is a bit misleading, because it assumes the neurons having fired/not fired is information getting registered/not registered somewhere *outside* the neurons.) It is an important question, and it sheds light on something else - your "hard problem of glass." Certainly, the basic experience of variable visual acuity is important to why that doesn't *really* seem to be a problem. I think another highly connected aspect to the problem is this: the descriptions of a matter continuum, of smooth glass, and so on arise in the limit of a humongous number of atoms. As scientists, we can rigorously talk about getting closer and closer to this idealised and wrong notion of continuous matter as we add more and more atoms. As lay students, we can conceptualise this, maybe, using the experience of varying visual acuity - but it still appears in a limit. We have *no* knowledge of red emerging in a limit from sufficiently many neurons spiking. Heck, even if we set aside something like neurons spiking, which we cannot sense, we can certainly sense collisions. But in no way can we understand feeling a huge number of collision-qualia as building up to the hotness-qualium in a limit. (And it shouldn't - the mechanisms for sensing these are different and we actually aren't perceiving molecular collisions as "collisions"). I don't know how a scientist studying perception could ever ask - at what stage, at a network size of how many neurons, do qualia emerge? Operationalising that question, making qualia measurable, is the heart of the hard problem as it pertains to qualia. I don't feel like there's an answer in the attention schema theory. It may just be another perceptual judgement with nothing deeper or non-physical required; but I think it's not analogous to glass because the property of redness, as best as we can know, jumps into existence as a limit of an *unknowable sequence of simpler experiences*. If we could somehow feel a single neuron fire, and then more, and then more, until the visual cortex fired red - I would buy that! In other words, I feel like you've explained - I hope I'm getting the terms right - how to get to sapience from sentience. By this I mean getting from awareness of phenomena to awareness of the self being aware. But we haven't got any closer to the basic awareness and where it comes from. One last thing: I disagree that the qualia are purely non-representational in character, that all that matters is that two qualia be distinct. The relevant thought experiment here is inverting the sensations of pleasure and pain.

[@DustinBarlow8P]

Quick question.... WTF is an overlocker?

[@theskoomacat7849]

I have too many thoughts on this to express in comments. So thank you for this video.

[@the.olive.oil-06]

this series is sooo interesting and sparked so much rabbit-holing on my behalf !! i find how the attention theory handles the irreducibility of qualia really satisfying, but though i do think it solves the whole 'qualia summation' business, i don't think it actually addresses the hard problem ? like, in that it doesn't explain how 'experience' fits into the closed physical system of the brain... i am looking forward to the next video !!

[@sverrekvernmo]

Thanks for the talk & your take on Graziano (new find for me). As to the "detailed" properties of color, they're often revealed when seen in relation to their neighbours, be they other colors or an absence of such. I find the works of Bridget Riley particularily intersting in this matter, as she seems able to animate still images of color by moving around neighbouring colors and values, some times trapping the proverbial lightning in a bottle. Its mostly artist's toolbox stuff I guess - which colors to combine and which ones not to, but I figured I'd inject her name in here since a large portion of your examination delved into colors. On the whole, I guess a lot of this depends on the age old question of objective reality and whether one actually exists. If there is one - seems natural - and our mode of understanding was able to take it all in, I suspect the moments of realisation leading from our previous understading to a new one would entirely transform us as "individuals", to the point that one would have dissolved the perspective one is trying to understand. Small steps required, I suppose, towards that greater understanding. Though not so measured that they induce static hindrance. Anyhow, I digress - must have picked up a musebug off ya. Thanks for the vid man!

[@gossferneyhough]

31:00 the hard problem of glass, funniest thing I've heard in a while

[@phillyphilly2095]

Simon, I think you did a great job handling a difficult subject. From the comments, I can see that many people are desperate to keep their ghost in the machine.

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

The hard problem of consciousness *can't* be solved. Solving it is a logical impossibility (or, more precisely, a category mistake).

[@NeilEvans-xq8ik]

Why?

[@joseph1845]

consciousness is fundamental, and its not subject to anything, it is not created in the brain, the brain is more like a receiver.

[@RonaldMcDonald-nf9jj]

more?

[@whycantiremainanonymous8091]

@@NeilEvans-xq8ik The full answer is a bit long for a YT comment, but here's a condensed version: "Solving" the hard problem of consciousness means providing a causal account for the emergence of a conscious first-person point of view on the world. Causal accounts are, necessarily, entirely couched in external, third-person-perspective, terms. You can take it for granted that somebody is conscious, and create various accounts about how particular physical properties of their brain correlate with their (reported) conscious experiences. But that would be trying to answer one of the easy questions of consciousness. Answering the hard question means that you need to start your causal account from a purely physical description, without making any assumptions about a consciousness already being there, and end your account with a somebody who actually has a first-person perspective. That's a clear and obvious logical leap/category mistake. The only way to "solve" the problem would involve sneaking in the assumption that a consciousness is already there from the outset, or has miraculously appeared for no apparent reason at some point. The most "promising" direction for achieving that is to convince everybody that the term "consciousness" should be redefined to refer to some physical property of the brain or some mathematical notion that can be linked to it. But you can't prove that a brain (or whatever else) that has these properties actually belongs to a conscious being, in the original sense of "consciousness", nor that a system that lacks these properties is not conscious. So, basically, all major attempts to "solve" the hard problem of consciousness are attempts to perform a clever substitution of terms, and hope nobody who's important enough in the scientific community to make a difference notices the bait and switch.

[@sidarthur8706]

go on

[@divingdave2945]

I highly recommend Bernardo Kastrups Analytic Idealism. Maybe you checked it out, maybe it doesn't make sense to you, which is fine. But it makes more sense to me than any other philosophy on consciousness or anything else I have ever encountered. To me, it doesn't just solve the hard problem of consciousness, it solves the hard problem of isness, and it does so, without assuming any "magical" substance. To the contrary, it shows that physicalism is based on magical assumptions.

[@Ripred0219]

It kind of sounds like the act of neurons firing are just what a subject experience looks like at a certain perspective. When I invoke an image in my mind of being at the beach watching the waves crashing on the shoreline, this is what an image, act, or mental process looks like from my subjective perspective. Although from the perspective of some neurological measuring device, what that experience looks like, is the just neurons firing. Not sure where we go from here...

[@aa.8823]

If you can now somehow induce the same pattern of activity in the brain and experience it as an image of the beach, then qualia are just internal representations of some unconscious physical activity.

[@Ripred0219]

@@aa.8823 I noticed you used the word "representations" rather than painting the mainstream narrative of consciousness being an affect where the cause is the pattern of activity in the brain. Can I ask what your metaphysical belief is?

[@aa.8823]

​@@Ripred0219 Probably, I'm talking about the same thing, just using different words. Like, one part of the brain observes another one and makes a model. More or less the same stuff, as in the video. I think it's called physicalism. I don't even think there is such a thing as “self”. It's a useful abstraction in some (most?) cases, yes, but it's not something substantial by itself. Although, the sense of self may definitely be real, the same way as the sense of God.

[@ElMois872]

What you are describing is exactly what philosophers such as Kant and Schopenhauer said, also Donald Hoffman.

[@jonaseggen2230]

@@aa.8823 This was very well put.

[@tomekd789]

Great lecture, thanks! BTW you're referring to some presentation slides, but you show none.

[@hamishdomergue8810]

Sir Roper, i was just wondering if you haven seen the last video from EasyGeman about Low Saxon dialect from Ost-Frisland.🎉

[@hamishdomergue8810]

It's so similar to Scots.😊

[@jasonshapiro9469]

Your channel is super duper! I don't know why I haven't seen it earlier, maybe you offended the algorithm or somethin, I'm not sure how that works but it needs to tighten up

[@stuffandnonsense8528]

I want to start by saying that I think it is wonderful that you continue to engage with philosophical topics (philology is great but philosophy is just that little bit better). This video essay was great and were I marking it I would give it a very high mark. But I do have some thoughts about this focus on cognitive science as the best basis for thinking about the mind. In the end I think it is mostly a category mistake, you’re only thinking about efficient or material causes, when those are rarely our main concern when thinking about minds. Thinking about consciousness (being aware of one’s own thoughts - a second order of conscious phenomenon) is very distinct from consciousness itself. Focusing on ‘higher-order’ consciousness suffers from a similar problem, there’s an anthropocentric issue here too (thinking that the only kind of consciousness which counts is the highly intellectual kind of thinking (three-year-olds and dogs don’t think much about their own thoughts). Why is this any of this speculation about what makes up mind being done? Why make a claim about perception being indirect? Much of this seems to ignore a fair bit of thinking which has gone on in the philosophy of mind. It doesn’t have to be phenomenological, Wittgenstein can do similar things but with reference to meaning rather than to a kind of pseudo-idealism. We might (as aforementioned) even just think in terms of Aristotle’s causes. What does ‘direct’ mean here? Why are we talking about ‘representations’? This is fine when talking about the natural history of mind, of consciousness, but it is not exhaustive of what consciousness is. There is no sense in which metaphysical or cosmological reflections on how mind has come about or what functions different aspects of mind might serve in an evolutionary way do anything to address the ‘hard problem’. The problem is that awareness seems to be different in kind from other things in the world. It seems reasonable to assume that there are things which are not aware. Of course, some approaches to metaphysics do try to overcome this problem by suggesting that everything is aware (there is nothing which has no awareness). This strikes me as lazy, and is also somewhat beside the point when responding to this video essay. The only question is: are there things which are conscious and things which are not. One approach try to navigate the problem by suggesting everything is conscious and you (along with quite a few who work in the sciences… and Dan Dennet) try to suggest that nothing is conscious (that it is just a mistake). To clarify, I think it is quite wrong to say that we do not perceive things directly, directness is a concept which is often calibrated by analogy to physical contact, there’s a temptation to imagine everything in terms of stuff pressing up against other stuff, but that quickly dissolves under much careful inspection. I interact directly with the things in the world just as much as a billiard ball hits another directly. If the indirectness of perception is going to be a fundamental premise in this formulation of consciousness then the nature of directness needs to be explained. Similarly, it’s not clear what work ‘irreducible’ is doing here, what it means. Does it mean something like: what is most real? What is most true? That there’s nothing more detailed? Nothing smaller? I would agree that these kinds of ideas can be useful, but it seems as though the elements being invoked in cognitive neuroscience are being fetishised in their ‘irreducibility’ and the idea that an experience might be irreducible is taken as self-evidently questionable because that irreducibility is not founded on very particular kinds of observations of physical interactions. Another problem here is what is happening when claims are being made about ‘the brain being mistaken’. It is not at all clear what this means. And why resort to ‘magical essence’ as a description of that which is being thought about? This once again seems like a problem of conflating thinking about consciousness with consciousness itself. A good way to illustrate the error here would be to make a claim about something which is conscious but which doesn’t think about being conscious, is any such entity conceptually coherent? It seems self-evidently so to me (there are many times in our own lives when we are not reflecting on being conscious in any way but when we do come to that reflection it is clear that there is no hard division between different kinds of selves). Another way to think about this is to question the relationship here between a continuous sense of self (something extended in time) and reflections upon our own experiences, these seem to be distinct things but are being conflated in this fetishisation of cognitive science. We don’t need to characterise either conscious experience or a cohesive sense of self as magical thinking. We don’t assume that a piece of music being a single, cohesive thing as somehow magical (nor, for that matter, of any object being a cohesive entity as being magical). Thinking about yesterday as being a real thing (a thing about which truth claims can be more or less accurately made) doesn’t require magical thinking, nor any other kind of sequence or quantity. None of these things admit to investigation by scientific means (to clarify: by sequence and quantity I am talking about the things which are the basis of physics itself, the means by which physics/science is usually justified is something like pragmatism. It seems unwise to take only one kind of justification as justified (i.e. What the Tortoise said to Achillies - you can’t justify empiricism empirically). If someone is committed to the idea that anything which cannot be proven empirically should not be believed then they are going to be in all sorts of trouble - of course nobody actually lives like this, they only profess ideas like this and then continue to live a sane life. Yet another way to illustrate the problem with this thinking (which doesn't seem very different from Dennet's work) is to point out the 'Chinese room' or zombie/solipsism problem. Why do we assume that consciousness is necessary? By this argument (indirect perception) we have no experience of anyone else's consciousness, all we have are accounts of consciousness. If what is beneficial in terms of the evolution of brains is an account of the brain to itself that it is conscious (not necessarily the same as consciousness) and we can conceive of sufficiently advanced robots that can offer that account (entirely plausible) then there's no reason to assume that anyone else is conscious. It is much simpler (Occam) to assume that your own sense of consciousness is an aberration, your own genuine subjectivity is simply an accident and no other being has ever been conscious. There is nothing in the Graziano model which requires genuine subjective experience, it only suggests that a kind of report is advantageous, and that doesn't require genuine experience. Just as with The Chinese Room, Graziano is only describing syntax, not semantics. So, I’d say there are lots of philosophical holes here which I have only really just touched upon but which make this line of argument about mind highly questionable.

[@goodquestion7915]

The Hard Problem of Consciousness, Chalmers' copout, can be equated to the Hard Problems of Flight, Fast Travel, Boulder Lifting, Hill Flattening, etc. And we know miracles just need a few hundred years of technological progress to become common experience.

[@denntombstone7004]

This dudes vids make me think we need to find a way to expand our conciseness by expanding the actual brain. Like somehow we just don't perceive nearly enough

[@AquariusGate]

Consciousness is the predictable effect of an expressive nature. A natural awareness grows and expands into every field of potential; being and doing. Consciousness is doing one job it picked up organically, resolving stress into actions and concepts.

[@LucasRichardStephens]

Funny thing is the deeper you look at your mug the more you see! "Without stirring abroad the sage can know the world, without looking out of the window can know Way of heaven" Tao te Ching paraphrased.

[@JeffreyGruber-j7s]

This is a fascinating subject. This theory is very thought-provoking. I don’t know if you have ever heard of Julian Jaynes, the author of “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. If you haven’t read it, you should. This subject fascinates me. I have also read some of Dennett’s books. You would be fascinated by Jayne’s book since you are interested in language, anthropology, and evolution. Dr. Jaynes posits that at certain a point in human evolution, humans did not have actual subjective consciousness in the sense that modern humans do. At this point in human evolution, people actually heard an auditory hallucination of their own voice telling them what to do - similar to a schizophrenic person’s auditory hallucinations. Jayne’s called this arrangement, “the bicameral mind”. The “voice” they heard was generated in Wernicke’s area in the right hemisphere of the brain and “heard” by the auditory areas of the left temporal lobe. Check out the book if you are interested in this subject. Jaynes has some unique perspectives. The subject of language as the origin of consciousness would make a great subject for a video for you.

[@andrebenoit283]

Kant: The limits of reason restrict access to the phenomenal world as it appears to us, while the noumenal reality-hypothetical and postulated-remains beyond the reach of human cognition.

[@alexwells6267]

I loved this video, this theory is fairly satisfactory to me on the nature of consciousness although one aspect of the hard problem of consciousness I find hard to grapple with is the question of why I'm experiencing THIS specific illusion that I call consciousness. Unless I misunderstood the points made in the video I've taken the conclusions that the self is an illusion arising from calculations made in the brain and our sensory perceptions are a flattened version of reality as it truly is because our brains simply never needed to evolve to experience reality in a higher resolution. The question I have is that if my self primarily exists as a series of calculations and assumptions about my being, why do I experience reality as this specific set of calculations and assumptions?

[@rembo96]

Surprisingly, I understood everything and I agree. Usually the talks about such things are just blabbing.

[@So-Be-It_890]

I took photography for two semesters in college. I also took anatomy and physiology so I understand how the eye works like a camera. Go back to 52÷13=4. My parents owned a timeshare.

[@lairdkilbarchan]

Consider also the variance in hardware within which the input is processed. Some individuals perceptual judgements will be more highly defined than others.

[@vvvvaaaacccc]

19:00 "where you can see [...] 'I am paying attention to the mug, now I'm paying attention to the overlocker'". this, following the clear distinction between the attention system and the attention schema, is greatly interesting me right now. I would really like to know if this distinction is a crucial part of meditation instruction which has totally eluded me. developing any meditational skill has eluded me for the years I've practiced, and I've also been unable to explain why. I have the feeling that this distinction is new to me and very important.

[@alextodorov8016]

I think Alan watts talked about how you focus your brain on itself to stop the thinking about the world that the brain/ mind evolved to do

[@rasha9546]

Great video! I think AST is a fascinating framework, but I wonder if some of its assumptions might fall short in fully explaining consciousness. Reduction of Consciousness to Attention: AST equates consciousness with attention mechanisms, but subjective experiences often feel more all-encompassing. For instance, the rich bouquet of a flower or the depth of empathy seems to go beyond attentional processes alone. Explainability of Qualia: While AST tries to explain qualia through internal models, the "felt experience"-what it's like-feels inherently non-reducible and may resist even the most sophisticated models. Inherent Subjectivity: The richness and depth of personal experience seem to extend beyond what any functional description of attention can capture. The Explanatory Gap: Even within AST’s framework, the fundamental "why" of consciousness-why it feels a certain way-remains elusive. It risks staying within a physicalist framework without touching the deeper nature of consciousness. Would love to hear your thoughts on these points! 🌟

[@steve_jabz]

I always thought consciousness was some kind of reflection of our raw perception, but this poses a problem for neural networks. The attention mechanism in a transformer isn't a 1:1 replica of the brain, but it does function in the way you just described, allowing the system to assign more compute resources to one local area depending on contextual variables. But we can be pretty sure they're not conscious, because they're just doing some multiplication and moving bits around. There seems to still be something qualitatively missing that we have and a number being incremented by passing a current through a series of rocks doesn't. I think something like EM field theory of consciousness solves both problems and doesn't really contradict this one, but I'd be more satisfied with a biochemical explanation.

[@theoneunder]

I enjoy your videos. Good work man.

[@theoneunder]

Ah, interesting ideas on the bodily template. I'm an amputee and definitely experience some sort of template even to the point of pain. I'd imagine a detatched brain would still feel their entire body.

[@peanutpeanut123]

Love your content. Understand most of it, I think, but where does 'Snooks Eaglin, Funky Malagueña' fit into the picture?

[@SevenEightSE]

I'm always kind of afraid to watch these kinds of videos, for fear I might learn something I wouldn't want to know.

[@Jablicek]

The whole idea of not wanting to know something is worth exploring in yourself. Why, and why, and why? These are answers only you can find for yourself.

[@SevenEightSE]

@Jablicek Great question. I think the idea of having a consciousness operating in some way, and at least an illusory or "proto"-ego reinforces my everyday experience and makes my conscious existence worthy of continuing. If I am being fooled to the very core of myself, you can see how that undermines even the decision to continue existing in this state. There is almost a primal fear experienced there, similar to when you think of the universe for too long. I don't mind there being some operating mechanisms, but I couldn't function with my innermost sanctum stripped away

[@kadenfraser4525]

@@Jablicek yes that is exciting and interesting curious ...... until it's not ...dark night of the soul is no joke

[@Jablicek]

@@SevenEightSE This sort of insight is really rare.

[@reversefulfillment9189]

Ah, it sounds like the person was referring to an "overlocker," which is a type of sewing machine commonly used in the UK and other countries (known as a serger in the US). An overlocker is a specialized sewing machine designed to sew seams, trim excess fabric, and overcast the edges simultaneously to prevent fraying. It creates a professional, clean finish commonly seen in garment production. Key Features of an Overlocker: 1. Edge Finishing: Prevents fabric from unraveling. 2. Multiple Threads: Typically uses 3-5 threads for strong and stretchy seams. 3. Fabric Trimming: Includes built-in blades to cut excess fabric while sewing. 4. Specialized Stitches: Creates overlock, rolled hem, and flatlock stitches. Common Uses: Sewing stretchy fabrics like knits or jersey. Finishing raw edges for a clean, professional look. Creating decorative edges and rolled hems. If this aligns with what you heard, it likely was "overlocker," a term that might sound unfamiliar unless you're into sewing or garment-making!

[@andymccracken4046]

Thanks, I was thinking WTF is that.

[@abody499]

I don't think they are "commonly used in the UK" nowadays. They used to be so, but since the opening of global labour markets presented the opportunity to extract greater amounts of surplus value, such work has become rather niche in the UK.

[@Theaphilius_Mythology_Channel]

Sorry to say this - but no, the problem has not been solved. (If you want to comment on this, please be respectful - I am open for discussion)

[@azraphon]

There are two keywords I look for in a “solution” to the hard problem that tell me the problem has not been solved: “quantum” and “neurological”

[@Theaphilius_Mythology_Channel]

@@azraphon It is a very complex topic; and so far, I have not seen a single 'solution' that would be able to answer all of the questions that arise. In particular when it comes to the terms you wrote, it shows, we are nowhere near to an answer, not only because we are basically not knowing anything about the Brain or the Quantum world. And that does not even include things like 'extra sensational experiences' ESP [I do not say they are real or not] - and I am afraid, those things will not be accepted in the scientific world (because they are 'subjektive') -> I could talk for hours about such topics ...

[@simonroper9218]

No need to be sorry, I was absolutely expecting different perspectives :) I also found myself suspicious or dissatisfied by neurological explanations for a long time. The fact that this one has clicked for me doesn't mean that it will click for everyone.

[@Theaphilius_Mythology_Channel]

@@simonroper9218 Thank you for the reply. :) I am always very careful with comments, in particular when they are 'opposing' - I have seen to much bad things in comment sections (Diplomacy is the best way to avoid conflict). But that aside, the video was still interesting to watch. :)

[@tommeakin1732]

28:28 Can you tell me what the name of that illusion is? For a big chunk of my life (mostly as a child), I sometimes found that I'd get this really odd experience where, I'd be in bed at night, just staring into my dark room, and then I'd slowly start getting a "scale shift" where I'd start feeling like I could be inside a dollshouse or something. It's a very odd thing to explain, but when you spoke about this illusion, I wondered if it was tugging on those same mental strings.

[@abody499]

Holding an emergent materialist view, I think we get close to the same idea near the end in that there isn't really a hard problem at all. It seems to me that the so called hard problem is just a result of having developed the consciousness to be able to posit such a problem linguistically. With the linguistic schemata to reflect on experience, we reach a level of consciousness that forgets or takes for granted what it was like to be less conscious, as in when we are born, until we iteratively develop consciousness and the linguistic schemata to deepen the ability to reflect, which leads to the feeling that it is somehow magical - which is where, I think, you've proposed that it is just a result of computation.

[@jayabee]

I played with a prism as a child and figured we might be able to see more colors if we could split the light further. Then later learned how narrow the band of wavelengths of light we can see are vs what exists. To me that doesn't seem much different from knowing about atoms in a glass. The reality of Mary developmentally is that if she was exposed to color as an adult we can't say how her brain would interpret that. Our perceptions aren't passive. they come about through our interactions with the environment over time. It's not just attention it's manipulation of objects or thinking and remembering reflecting interpreting our experiences.

[@nottheevil]

I don't actually get why people say it's impossible for consciousness to be purely computational. If you imagine that your hand has its own brain without consciousness, purely reactional, it would be possible for said hand to feel and react to you sending a movement signal to it. It would have that same "irreducible" feeling as we have for colors or pain. Now imagine that its brain is inside our brain and its neurons are directly connected to our neurons. It would form a loop that would in fact react to itself, constantly modifying thoughts and reacting to these modifications. Here we have a second consciousness in our brain. Why can't "you" be the just same concept? And of course it wouldn't be possible to produce the feeling of movement (or of "red" for said Mary) through words and simple factual knowledge. Just because it needs to be associated with neurons firing. All of this becomes more natural when you learn more about neural networks, programming and consciousness together.

[@ElMois872]

Lets say that you create consciousness with a computer, how would you know purely from the computational process that the computer is conscious or experiences qualia? Considering we don't even know if other humans or living beings experience qualia.

[@SeverusFelix]

I like how Brits think a reference to their country by a disobliging nickname is "jingoistic." Meanwhile Americans with the stars and stripes flying over every door, "I'm not very patriotic"

[@superthing]

Really enjoying your forays into consciousness. Would love see you on Machine Learning Street Talk from your perspective as a linguistic expert.

[@sindelaradam]

The hardest part of the Hard Problem is how easy it is to go off track when thinking about it. The question is difficult to state in a useful manner, so you can trick yourself into thinking you've answered it without gaining any new insight. As a physicist, and in your terms, Simon, I think there is in fact a hard problem of glass: what is the nature of the elementary particles you've reduced it to? The atoms have protons in their nuclei, which are made up of quarks, which are a quantum field and this is where we run out of explanatory power with current physics. Many in the field now believe that the fundamental nature these particles is probably mathematical, not physical, but we just don't know. By analogy, the hard problem of consciousness is this: what is the nature of subjective experience? Why does it occur? It's not necessary for sufficiently detailed physics to explain why I am writing this reply, but it clearly occurs. It's something, and so it can't be nothing. By reducing it to constituent elements, which neuroscience might be able to do, you end up in the same place as physics did - at something you can't reduce any further. You just can't make subjective experience out of anything else, just like you can't make the number pi out of atoms. They're in different categories. One possible answer is to just say that the universe contains subjective experience as a fundamental property, just as it contains other fundamental properties, like the value of pi. I don't personally find that very satisfying, but as you've said, we have no good reason to expect the correct answer to be satisfying.

[@davidchapman356]

I believe we do have a good reason, but to express it in philosophical jargon, it's an epistemological reason not an ontological one. When we experience insight it's usual for human beings to find it satisfying, because it answers a mystery to our satisfaction, or to a great degree of satisfaction. If we relinquish this cognititive superpower, that is if we stop caring whether the answer we get is satisfactory or not, we are depriving ourselves of whatever guidance such intuitions can provide us with. I'm not making the claim that our intuitions are an infallible guide; but rather that we should always pay attention to them.

[@Angerslug]

Haven't watched the vid yet. I'm about ten seconds in. Looking forward to watching to the end (very cool subject). But I just wanted to compliment Simon's hairdew. He looks snappy. My man looks fresh as hell.

[@Miss_Toots]

Hair do*

[@islaymmm]

Does this theory imply that whenever you have a sufficiently complex system (organic or nonorganic and of any scale) akin to a human brain such a system has qualia?

[@alexwennerberg]

Highly recommend Martin Heidegger's writing on this topic in 'Being and Time'

[@JanKowalski-se7tn]

It sounds very similar to Metzingers Self-Model theory - any significant differences?

[@freepagan]

Simon, are you using your phone as a microphone? Just curious, because I'm not so good with technology but would love to know if that's a new thing. Also, interesting vid, thanks for your thoughts.

[@MeneltirFalmaro]

We haven't even formulated the actual question of the hard problem of phenomenological consciousness. What exactly should the explanation explain? What is the "why" in "why do qualia exist and why are these qualia not those qualia" actually demanding? Looking at the linguistic analogy, what would we be asking to be explained about the word "cat" if there was a hard problem of words? Why does it exist - because it's useful (though not strictly necessary) to have a representation of the category "cats" in a language. Why does it sound like it does - etymology ultimately arbitrary within the constraints of conveniently pronounceable and distinguishable sounds. What is the sound of "cat" - you can look at a frequency spectrum. How is it produced - you can look at the anatomy and physiology. The "usefulness" answer is the most immediately satisfying to me, but then we run into the question of "how qualia", and it's once again not really defined in the "hard problem" realm. In terms of "easy" problems it's almost certainly a matter of connectivity between specific brain areas. But what would a seemingly inherently physical "how" question in even mean in the "hard problem", I'm genuinely stumped.

[@martinwilliams9866]

Physicality is experience, consciousness is meta-experience, determined by the transverse Hall effect of the neuroglial network. Neurons are about the contents of consciousness, the neurons operating on the Glial network is involuntary attention, whilst the Glial operating on the neurons is voluntary attention.

[@stevevitka7442]

what this opens for me is how flexible and reprogrammable qualia could be, we know maschoschists can inverse pain. Also if non-representational details make all the difference is qualia, we should never expect AI qualia if they exist to resemble our enough that we would value them., as they are much less like us in experience than say, ants.

[@LionKimbro]

I just type "Ctrl+Shift+Escape" whenever I need to remember that my computer is conscious.

[@MCJSA]

Your explanation of schema for object recognition linked to cognition might be extended to concepts of "readibility" in the plastic arts. Looking at an artistic representation of something, we recognize what is being represented easily, with difficulty, or not at all. The mug / overlocker example could easily be taught to an AI visualization model while evaluating the readibility of something like tattoos would be considerably more difficult. Schema can only take us so far - at some point, we need to be able to disambiguate observed phenomena. What role does cognition play in this process?

[@TheKlauseHouse]

I'm not sure about the importance of all these schema's. It's not really talking about anything really, other than we are unaware of the finer details of our experiences. I can say there's movie schema's where you only get X amount of the details on the first watch, and upon rewatches that schema grows larger as you focus on details you missed previously. All this is saying, is we're limited by our hardware in the amount of data the watcher can watch at any given time. It's not really a discovery. We know, the longer we live and the more experiences we get to experience, the larger these schema's grow and change over time, unpredictably sometimes, and the less simplified they become. It mirror's the expansion of our universe, as the universe learns more about itself through our subjective unique experiences, it's own schema of it's self expands like one's mind does. Really, the hard problem is getting people to be aware that they are the universe observing itself, learning about itself, experiencing itself, for we are made entirely of it, we exist entirely in it. If we're alive, so is the universe. It's not dead, it's not a concept or a place no more than we are. The whole thing is conscious. We are equally made of the universe, and so is the universe made of us. We're dualistically bound, one cannot exist without the other once we exist. If all data about me is deleted, say right now, then the system would have a gap where I used to be, which is now unknowable and inexpressible in the system. Butterfly effect in all. The potentiality of me existing, before I existed, is a property of me, long before the big bang occurred, and now that I have emerged, and am an expression, that will continue to exist onward forever as well. It's why information cannot be deleted. Every bit of information is crucial for the entire system to exist, for everything is applying forces on everything else. You delete 1 thing, the entire system looses context of itself, everything part of the universe is important, we cannot comprehend how important each one of us is to the entire thing. Curiosity about the mechanics serves no evolutionary advantage, yet we have curiosity in heaps. We have virtually a never ending supply of questions that serve no evolutionary function, I think it's perhaps time to ditch the idea that evolution is the reason we do everything we do (blasphemy from an Anthropology point of view). We are sufficiently intelligent, to think and ponder beyond our biological needs/wants. We want to understand where everything comes from, and why things happen as they do. We're far more than just the product of evolution, we are distinctly different than every other animal on this planet, we're no longer slaves to evolution in the same ways other animals are. We don't accept our limitations, we advance them. Humans will probably remain looking like humans while all the other animals will change over a long period of time, because we're sufficiently intelligent enough to have attraction, which isn't directly tied to passing on genes at all, humans experience lust. Humans don't have sex to serve some invisible hand that only cares about reproducing and kicking the rock down the road. Most people are motivated to have sex, for the pleasure of experiencing the experience, with no intention of reproducing whatsoever, we will probably continue to select partners that don't deviate from the look of human (I believe this is the basis for stagnation in the Dune novels). People kill themselves all the time without ever having children. Humans do things that violate nature all the time; if you gave everyone on this planet the button to Armageddon, 1 person out of 8 billion people will press it. We do things that don't always make sense. Humans have evil in them. Sometimes, we're needlessly destructive for no good reason. Trying to describe anything about the human condition using evolution as the reason, just isn't sufficient, like it is sufficient for a "lesser species" like a cockroach. Humans are above all us, "experience sluts". We do things for the sake of the experience, we put ourselves in danger, we actively look for trouble. That's what makes us different than beast. We're not just survivors anymore. People need to get this idea out of their head. It's quite honestly offensive to what is means to be a human. That we're subjective puppets to an imaginary force that cares about reproducing, that cares about the survival of one's species. Perhaps that's true for less aware creatures. But that's not true for us. We mostly care about ourselves. We're selfish. Our ability to empathize is a special gift, but that has limits. I care about my neighborhood, I don't really care what's happening somewhere else I've never heard of, is some far away land, far from my ability to influence it and vice versa, with people with dramatically different views than me. Empathy extends so far. This isn't a bad thing, without this, we wouldn't have telescopes or computers or mass transportation. This nagging need to know more about ourselves, is not evolutionary. It's far deeper than that, and we know it. It's why we make 50 minute videos on this topic. We deeply care. It matters to us, but it shouldn't matter to the universe. Yet, I believe it does. I believe that's our purpose. Each person, is supposed to experience pleasure and avoid pain, to find where the pleasure is, and where the pain is. To experience the experience. To learn new things. To expand one's mind. To add onto the complexity that came before, and make even more complexity from it. To keep going, to never stop making brand-new experiences to experience. I imagine, without the ability to experience anything, there wouldn't be a point to life. Even simple life, knows what feels good versus what feels bad. For humans, what feels good is knowing more. What feels bad, is confusion. That's the mechanic to knowledge. No mechanic to our experiences can't be defined. It lacks creativity and introspection to have this point of view. Why we seek knowledge and enlightenment, even though, for the most part, the universe shouldn't care, and my purpose is fulfilled the moment I reproduce. There's no reason to continue on, yet, we do because there's so much left to experience. Why bother, if the universe isn't interested. We have a problem. We know, the universe logically needed to knock over the first domino for there to be any motion at all. From motion, does all other things emerge. We need motion to mix bits together, to create more complexities. Without motion, you can't have 1 bit mix with another and create you. More importantly than asking where everything comes from, is where does motion come from? Well, we know this innately as living things. That if you want to your blue mug to move, you have to move it, it won't move on it's own. It requires an agent that's conscious to choose. If people understood that they are the universe looking at themselves, and deduce why, I think people would quickly realize how similar they are to the universe. For we all individually have a matrix where a world schema exists, and that might as well be understood as a universe in it's own right, and that universe expands when new data is added into it over time, precisely how our universe expands. The more we look inwards, the more we understand what's around us. Is me-me, alive? Like, I know my brain has neurons on it, and they are alive. But the metaphorical me. My identity, am I alive? Or am I dead? Or does something have to be alive first, before you can say it's dead. Perhaps, me-me, is in another exotic type of state of existence, neither alive nor dead, but purely imaginary. However, it sure does subjectively feel like I'm real, and if I can confirm it for myself, then it is for certain. I can separate me-me from other things like a blue mug, and so, we're separate units in the system. Even if we're made up of fundamentally identical smallest possible things. But I'm lucky. Because I have a brain, that does all the computations for me, so I can experience reality in a way that a blue mug can't. But the blue mug exists consciously, because it's communicating as a unit, that it exists to me when I look at it. The simplest possible expression in our universe is "I exist". Everything is communicating this to it's neighbors, so everything is holographic in the sense that the smallest possible unit that could exist (the bit) would also know where everything else in the system is. Consciously, when you're imagining something for the first time, you're not creating it so much as you are discovering it. The potential for that thing has always existed, as well as everything else you can possibly imagine as well as everything you cannot. The universe is alive and aware the same way you are. Each thing in the universe, is like a neuron, all having their own subjective experiences, but unaware of the work they are doing, and the matrix they have created. The universe's mind is as real as our own. If you can reason your way into believing you are conscious, you can use the same reasons as to why the universe is conscious, then you can derive conclusions from that start place, rather than trying to brute force your way into answers.

[@TheKlauseHouse]

(continued) Anyways, that's how I see it. That's what feels the truest to me. I barely even scratched the surface of this topic to be honest. But there really isn't a hard problem to solve. We are literally made up of the universe, we are literally the universe looking at itself, trying to understand itself, and it's really no different than you trying to understand yourself by using unknowing neurons to do it. It's inherent mystery is fascinating because we'll never get close to knowing where everything comes from, in an infinite place, that will always be the case. There is only self discovery left. The more you explore yourself, the more the universe makes sense. At the end of the road, all there is left is acceptance of it's eternalness. But the fascination never wanes. The future is unpredictable, you'll never know what will arise and what will shock and surprise you. You will never grow bored of experiencing brand new experiences. This, is ultimatly what we're all about, and why we have consciousness in the first place. When we talk about evolution, we're talking about where our bodies come from. But it's not sufficient to explain where consciousness comes from. Consciousness is foundational. It's like, trying to explain gravity through evolution. People have mixed up the brain and the mind. My mind does not exist in my brain. It exists on the surface of my skin when I touch something. It exists on the surface of my eyes when I look at something. The locality of my mind might as well be the universe, for I can travel to distant stars subjectively like a massless photon, not experiencing the travel from Point A to Point B. I am simply one location to the next through imagination. My brain is less capable than my mind. I can experience greater depth of experiences if I had better hardware, or using substances to temporarily overclock my brain so I can experience the experience in greater depths which comes with a tax, liking feeling exhausted after a psychedelic experience even though you didn't actually physically go anywhere. With love and respect, that's just how I feel about existence. Evolution happened, and my brain does influence my subjective experiences all of the time. I get experience hunger for example when my body needs food. Or when I reactively protect my face without thinking when I'm about to be struck. My brain does do things that come from evolution, but that doesn't really touch on the human experience at all. Being hungry isn't uniquely human. What's uniquely human is this conversation. We can be sure, not another species on this planet is having these sorts of conversations. And you didn't make this video, nor did I type this comment because of some long chain of events. It's spontaneous you made this video, it's spontaneous I clicked on it when I saw it, it's spontaneous I bothered to leave a comment. Evolution had nothing to do with these interactions. Some of us would die happily if they got to know the answers to their most burning questions. Humans sort of break evolution. We're not nearly as enslaved by the invisible hand as our little critter friends. We have the power of mobility, we can push dominos.

[@wabznasm9660]

@@TheKlauseHouse I don't agree with all of your assertions but this was beautifully written. The more I study Buddhism the more I think that we do not 'contain' evil, or really contain anything; evil arises when we pursue pleasure (or comfort etc) and avoid any pain (or fear etc) at all costs, because both of those things are subjective to who you are in any given moment and are very mutable. We do not always know what we like, or even if we like a thing any more, but still we will pursue it. We do not have to create new experiences, because they are delivered to us effortlessly by the very nature of our expansion into the infinite expansion of time. Recognising that every experience is new, and that every pain is to be felt, is liberating. I think that all fits very well with the idea of us as the universe desiring to experience itself - its WHOLE self.

[@TheKlauseHouse]

@@wabznasm9660 I am still working on my communication of these ideas. I don't even know if written word is the best way to express such things, since the author looses the power in the exchange with the reader. I can write something, and to one person it can be trash and to another it could be treasure. I have way more power in deliver in other mediums, like through a video for example, that tells a story by engaging with multiple parts of yourselves, from sound design to manual pacing, to visuals and editing. I struggle to write it, because it's bigger than words. It feels easier to express in mediums where there is more levers of expression. I have more power, when I choose a song for example because I get to manipulate your emotions to align where I want them to be at that time. With text, all the power is with the reader. I am not satisfied with what I wrote, because it shouldn't be disagreeable. I need to work harder and better so my communication of these ideas are poignant and loud and screaming in your face it's so obvious. I don't at all subscribe to the idea that evil comes from pleasure. I think evil doesn't want to exist. By it's very nature, it wants to die. But it can't, because it's stuck existing in the system forever, so it gains temporary reprieve from the pain of existing by inflicting pain on others, for the sake of it. It's needlessly destructive. To me, pleasure is great. I chase pleasure. I love it. It's an experience worth having. It feels good for the soul. I cannot relate at all, to denying one's self of pleasure. That actually seems painful. Which is the opposite of the experiences I want to have. I have a golden rule though, I keep my evils to myself. If I let pleasure run wild, it does have the potentiality to cause harm, to become needlessly destructive, it's possible for me to feel pleasure through evil acts, I know this, and I push back on it every day because I want to be a good person, it feels good to do good things, but I am hyper aware of my demons. They will never come out, because I have a treaty with them. I've made peace with my demons. I give them what they need, without it affecting others. I have my vices, I have my alternatives. But I am not evil, I do not needlessly destroy things. I can confidently say, despite the demons inside of me, I am a good man. I know this to be true, I don't believe it, I know it. I have never intentionally hurt anyone, in my entire life, and when I accidently hurt someone, I feel so much remorse. Buddahist's view on certain aspects of life, do not jive with me at all, and that's fine. Each person is different. I have found my peace, I have found my middle ground. I love experiencing the experience. I fucking love pleasure. I'm a slut for it. What can I say? I love to love. There's nothing wrong with love. It's nothing close to evil.

[@ferkinskin]

Also, Sam Parnia's research into NDE during a cardiac arrests or rather thereafter, so NDEs, is very revealing! If any of these systems did not function, then any ability to have an experience would not be possible. There are patients however in whom there was no neurological activity after the cardiac arrest (I caveat with "measurable"- which is why we require a new definition of "dead") having experiences, "recalling" experiences after death with 0 measurable brain activity. There is the argument that, they may be recalling false memories or confabulating, but many are able to be confirmed as holding information that should not be accessible to a brain with 0 activity, not to mention experiences, equally with validation, that the person could not have been privy to. There are many positions with questions around what this may mean, many of which are answered by Sam Parnia in many podcasts and videos, but there are so many anomalies in the data that serious further research is a must. Pim van Lommel is also well worth a look at!

[@Theaphilius_Mythology_Channel]

I hoped for such a comment. :) Thanks for pointing this out; I am assuming you are (also) talking about the AWARE-II-Study?

[@rdklkje13]

Decades of work out of Virginia Tech too, for example. By now it really is entirely unscientific to dismiss NDEs as hallucinations or whatever. Just look at Shared DEs. The various versions of the idea that our brains are some sort of filter, or radio-like organs tuning in to certain frequencies in order to function here, seem to me to get the closest to the crux of where the actual evidence is at for those brave enough to consider it seriously. Too bad so few neuroscientists do this still, I really hope this will get the attention it deserves from many more researchers sooner rather than later (-:

[@ipkcle1500]

Analysis to the level of neuron activation doesn't steal the magic of red. Being a human is magical, if not totally unexplainable, and humans are part of the physical universe, therefore the universe is magical. I guess that's the panpsychist view. Specialness is an illusion of specialness is specialness.

[@lukejm5721]

It seems that my comment has not posted so I will post it again. I suspect the main problem here is that philosophers and scientists just assume that consciousness is something you can isolate, like studying an object in your back garden. This couldn't be further from the truth. People don't realize that these theories or worldviews, whether it's materialism, idealism, dualism, are just thought-pictures people have built up. And they just shuffle around the concepts in a different way hoping it will solve the problem. And I'm not claiming that these worldviews are useless, in fact, they have brought us many insights into external and inner reality. However, each worldview is only one slice of the pie, so to speak, and are, in my opinion, merely suited to gaining knowledge in their corresponding domain i.e. materialism for acquiring knowledge of material phenomena, spiritualism for inner phenomena, and so on. A crucial aspect of my point is that many people treat _thinking_ as something which has nothing to do with the 'things'; it merely stands aloof and contemplates them, as if the World is already complete by itself, or as if the things divine knowledge directly to us. This couldn't be further from the truth. The world is _only_ complete when we unite the concept with the percept; the concept belongs to the things themselves and isn't merely in the human head. The reason, however, we overlook the role of thinking is simply because our attention can only be concentrated on the object we are thinking about it, but not at the same time on thinking itself. Essentially, this assumption is the main reason for this 'hard problem of consciousness' and why people still believe in materialism or physicalism. I would like to share an excerpt from Rudolf Steiner's book _The Philosophy of Freedom_ to provide further elaboration on this, with an example of how thinking is intertwined with the world process: "It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through bare perception as a totality, as the whole thing, while that which reveals itself through _thoughtful contemplation_ is regarded as a mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state change continuously into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of development. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as _possibilities_ within the bud will not develop. Similarly I may be prevented tomorrow from observing the blossom further, and will thereby have an incomplete picture of it. It would be a quite unobjective and fortuitous kind of opinion that declared of the purely momentary appearance of a thing: this is the thing. Just as little is it legitimate to regard the sum of perceptual characteristics as the thing. It might be quite possible for a spirit to receive the concept at the same time as, and united with, the percept. It would never occur to such a spirit that the concept did not belong to the thing. It would have to ascribe to the concept an existence indivisibly bound up with the thing. I will make myself clearer by an example. If I throw a stone horizontally through the air, I perceive it in different places one after the other. I connect these places so as to form a line. Mathematics teaches me to know various kinds of lines, one of which is the parabola. I know the parabola to be a line which is produced when a point moves according to a particular law. If I examine the conditions under which the stone thrown by me moves, I find the path traversed is identical with the line I know as a parabola. That the stone moves just in a parabola is a result of the given conditions and follows necessarily from them. The form of the parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon as much as any other feature of it does. The spirit described above who has no need of the detour of thinking would find itself presented not only a sequence of visual percepts at different points but, as part and parcel of these phenomena, also with the parabolic form of the path which _we_ add to the phenomenon only by thinking. It is not due to the objects that they are given us at first without the corresponding concepts, but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sides, from _perceiving_ and from _thinking_. The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I as spectator confront the things. Which elements do, and which do not, belong to the things cannot depend at all on the manner in which I obtain my knowledge of these elements."

[@Tracequaza]

While I don't necessarily hear a sound and process it as "this is a series of waves cycling at different frequencies, the combination of which leads to the experience of timbre, and a prominent one that cycles at 440hz, with the specific frequencies of the others as harmonics that support the prominent one appearing prominent to me, and the dimensions of the space + medium of the waves + my eardrums etc etc", for almost my whole life I have been able to hear a sound and identify it by the pitch connotation we denote it in our 12 tone equal temperament tuning system tuned to the standard of A = 440, and in the past recent years I have been able to identify more details such as subtle distinctions of timbre, more fine differences in tuning to be able to hear the superposition of 2 very similar waves. If I focus my attention to my ears I can notice finer details such as background instruments and hidden layers that might not be noticed initially. In this sense I have seen my abilities grow not just over time, but in a second spurt later in life that I couldn't have initially conceived without that experience. I have also had access to electronic tools that illucidated to me very precisely what pitch is, and after enough experience of listening to sounds speed up from 1 Hz, where no pitch is recognisable, to 100 Hz where pitch is quite clearly recognisable, the experience of pitch feels less mysterious to me. I suppose this is similar to what was discussed at the start; it makes sense that pitch is a schema for very fast reptitive sounds, and I suggest anyone to speeding up a sound to the point where it becomes its own pitch, as it works with any sound sped up enough, it will slowly morph into its own pitch. Without fully being able to comprehend timbre aurally in the same way, I can still understand intuitively that as pitch is a complex and unique application of rhythm that our brains have simplified into a new representational concept, so to is timbre to harmony; we don't say a major chord is a different instrument to a minor chord just in the same way that we don't say that A4 is faster than F4, or that a man tapping once every second is tapping an octave higher than a man tapping once every 2 seconds. But if the sound is low enough in pitch, and if the frequencies are combined in the right way, you can see where the lines start to blur (for timbre, bells are great examples of where you start to hear multiple prominent frequencies but can understand how that makes it its own instrument). Due to all of this, I have become somewhat desensitised to the experience of sound; it seems this way when I describe my experiences or compare them to others. It's not that sound doesn't move me emotionally, but the raw experience of sound doesn't feel as perplexing as the colour red does to me. I feel that if I break it down enough, I can understand how it works consciously. I have heard evolutionary theories for why we evolved music, and this has significantly contributed to my experience as well. One thing that truly perplexes me about sound is how perfect pitch is acquired. My best understanding of it comes from the surface level of developmental psychology I learnt, where certain functions of the brain can only be acquired at certain times, known as "critical periods" (if you're interested in this, I recommend looking into the case of Genie who did not learn language properly due to severe neglect and abuse). It is usually explained that perfect pitch can be attained during childhood, and is almost impossible to attain in adulthood, with those who have tried only being able to attain a pseudo-perfect pitch at best, which requires the memorisation of one or a few key melodies as reference that they must remember and refer back to, and it is generally accepted to be distinct from perfect pitch attained during childhood. What has perplexed me the most is that I can't really think of a comparison to this phenomenon in other senses. The easiest comparison would be to visual perception, as (from what I know) colour can be partly thought of as combinations of frequencies of light. Perhaps in this way, the "perfect colour perception" is the norm, as distinguishing between the colours of things is so important for most of us in day to day life that we already automatically learn to identify between different classes of colours, and some can spend years of their life training their visual perception to be able to distinguish between more subtle boundaries of colours and learn how and why they combine to create certain effects, etc. From what I know, there are aspects to my aural perception that I was only able to attain in my childhood, and others I have trained myself over time, and I am strongly aware that my aural perception is very strongly affected by current technologies and the general soundscape of our time, for instance perfect pitch can't exist in a world where there isn't at least a local tuning standard to become accustomed to. I have used instruments that were slightly out of tune for long enough that it had started to affect my perception noticeably. I have learnt a great deal about how sound works, and theories as to why we perceive it in this way. My idea of the perception of sound has changed over time, and I remember thinking music was something more abstract and magical before intuitively before I learnt more about it, and yet I know that there is so much more I can do to train my hearing to better perceive and intuitively understand what I'm hearing in more detail. For this reason I believe that it is reasonable that it could be applied to the other senses in this way, and I don't believe that just because it is intuitively difficult that it is an impossible problem, however I am willing to grant that the problem of consciousness and qualia is significantly more difficult due to the difficulty of evaulating the senses, the immensely high skill ceiling of perceptual ability (that I believe has not been reached by any sense), and the various factors that lead to our perceptual experiences being so different that it is impossible to communicate those differences accurately with our level of understanding, as well as simply being evolutionarily impractical; why is it important that my red is different to your red? Look how long I've spent trying to explain my thoughts in this youtube comment and I've hardly scratched the surface. Even if we understood the perceptual differences, it would likely be too much work to explain all of them to someone else to the point of being satisfied that consciousness can be understood mechanistically. I don't know though, please share any thoughts on your aural perceptual experience as well as if you believe you can compare my thoughts to the perceptual experiences of other senses. Thank you for reading.

[@SonnyMoonie]

There are at least two distinct things going on in experiencing red that could be distinguished, if people learn to see more technically accurately by analogy with your learning to hear more accurate detail. If someone learned to be conscious enough of their own experience of color, hypothetically they could pick up that the more red light sensitive color receptor cells are more activated by red, and the green sensitive cells less, and the blue sensitive cells hardly at all. That's distinct from the qualia of red, which is the overall reaction of the ideas and emotions brought up by experiencing or imagining or remembering an awareness focus on an area of some standard intense red color. The experience of color at the color sensitive cell mixing level might be trained by practicing and experimenting with additive and subtract color drawing or painting or colored lighting. I've noticed that when I draw red, green, and blue circles, partly overlapping like a Venn diagram, with the subtractive primary colors where they overlap, yellow, cyan, and magenta, and white in the center, I could choose like an optical illusion that allows choice, to see that as a drawing of three colored spotlights with where they shine overlapping to create the subtractive primary colors and white. I've tried perfect pitch training, by a computer game that gives random 12-tone scale pitches in random octaves until I press the pitch classes of them all correct. I can do that successfully during the game, but I noticed that getting them correct usually involves thinking in the key of D, where they're all relative pitches to D, and if some sequence of tones happens to make more sense in the keys of Eb or C#, my perception might shift to that key, and if I don't notice that there was a key shift, I'll get pitches wrong until I shift back or correct my answers for the change in key by cognitive calculation. I used to take about 20 minutes of guesses to warm up at the game. Many hours of practice at that game, over years, made me reliable to win with only a few mistakes before completing a series of 12 correct answers on all 12 pitch classes. However, that didn't change my perception of music. Some MIDI instrument sounds I can select in the game lead me to give wrong answers in some octaves where the timbre and combination of overtones in the sound is less normal, off by usually a fifth in unexpected directions, until my ears adjust for the weird timbre. Of course, drum sounds and other nearly unpitched sound effects are impossible to use and play the game successfully. If someone's qualia of red is different, it might be actually that the encoding of the color is the same, in their neurons and their consciousness, but that the associations with ideas and emotions that they get from the color red are different from mine or yours. I would think from how the qualia of red seems, that there are instinctive associations with it, in addition to whatever learned associations. The instincts would probably include that it's the color of blood and in weaker shades the color of lips and gums and tongue, and the color of many sorts of ripe berries and fruit. The color of coals of fire is a possible association, but that's less likely to be an inherited association, since the time span that humans have used fire is only a small fraction of the history of mammalian color perception. There isn't room or mechanism, in evolutionary time or in biochemistry, for instincts such as color perception associations to be encoded in genes, which code for amino acid sequences in proteins, not any sort of schematic diagram of how to connect things in the brain. Even though I think consciousness is not the neural activity itself, and that genes couldn't handle producing color instincts with the difficulty level of that and the limitations of random evolution by selection pressure, it seems possible to me that there are nevertheless color instincts in how the human organism happens to grow, so that people's qualia of colors such as red would be fairly similarly presented by their neurons to their consciousness. It might be evidence of similar qualia, that people who have good visual taste tend to have similar preferences and dislikes for particular combinations of colors, since the usual old theory that color combinations are opposites and triads on some color wheel doesn't work very well, especially considering the arbitrariness of old color wheels compared with modern measures of color, and that old theory doesn't provide any reasoning to account for why some combinations produced that way are very popular and liked, and some are very disliked and called clashing. Of course in sound, the old theories of chords as based on intervals in scales tuned by approximate ratios of fifths work very well, a little too well, suspiciously, considering the distortions introduced by hearing sounds together and in various timbres. The so-called just intonation versions of chords such as a simple major chord in compact voicing, don't even sound right, to me, comparing side by side with approximately 12-edo tuning versions, unless it's about getting the sound to come through on a device that has a lot of distortion, where some of the just intonation chords are less noisy and so seem to "work better" than approximately 12-edo versions.

[@DrDanLawrence]

I first found a purely material explanation of consciousness by way of philosopher Daniel Dennett, though I'm sure others are to be credited as well. I get a bit tired of Dennett's adoption of computer science terminology to explain human experience (consciousness as a kind of "user experience illusion" for example, although it serves really well to explain what he's describing). Dennett also links consciousness up into a satisfying evolutionary narrative. [He has some popular books like "From Bacteria to Bach and Back.] I've yet to read Graziano's work to compare or synthesize. More recently the Stanford professor, neuroscientist, ethologist, etc. Robert Sapolsky gives a purely material account of consciousness in his popular works on determinism and biology, though I don't find it satisfying all the more difficult nooks and crannies. His goal is less to describe consciousness and more to describe behavior from a modern purely scientific perspective. I also never found the memetics theories to be fully fleshed out, and this is the direction Dennett started moving toward (building from Dawkins 1976 "The Selfish Gene). I've been long interested in the relationship between language and consciousness but I find nothing conclusive in the literature about the origins of language and consciousness, though there are a lot of fun theories. Without some really impressive models, new evidence, new theories, I don't know that we're going to get much closer to the answers. I'm working on a book right now that is presenting a new perspective on the origins of technology (building off of Sapolsky) and all these questions are parallel or deeply connected. Either way, how I see it, all language and technology are biological in origin by necessity of emerging from biological creatures. At some point, though, they start co-evolving and influencing each other in complex ways that we don't understand. I never appreciated Dennett's complete certainty that only humans have consciousness and that other animals do not have consciousness. This bothered me and I never found any evidence to make such a certain claim. Briefly looking at Graziano, now, it's interesting that this looks applicable outside human experience, accounts for issues like dissociation, etc. Will be interested to read more. Here's Webb and Graziano on "The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness." I don't yet understand the technical definitions of attention and awareness they're using, but it reads well so far. Link: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4407481/

[@enricobianchi4499]

What do you mean by "accounts for dissociation"

[@Nature_Consciousness]

Only spirituality and methaphysics can really respect and explain consciousness, everything else is just stupidity.

[@DrDanLawrence]

@enricobianchi4499 I was merely gleaning from Webb and Graziano when they write, "One advantage of this theory is that it explains how awareness and attention can sometimes become dissociated; the brain’s internal models are never perfect, and sometimes a model becomes dissociated from the object being modeled." I was just introduced to Graziano today so I had no further thought than "this is interesting and the authors seem to have also accounted for some interesting problems." Models of consciousness are way out of my area of expertise, for the record! I'm not certain if the dissociation of attention and awareness is a long-running issue in these types of models. You'd have to run through the literature I'd guess.

[@shocklab]

Hi Simon, I very much enjoyed this video, and I think that your description was spot on here and really does uncover something very deep. Have you read The Hidden Spring, by Mark Solms, which really asks us to think about consciousness primarily as being affective, and only later perceptual. I think that these two perspectives would fit well together. That, together with Active Inference as a biologically plausible way for the brain to infer about the world outside, and act on it in a phenotypically appropriate way is to me an exciting way forward. If you are interested in knowing any more about these topics, please reach out.