Untangling the Worldknot of Consciousness #1 with Gregg Henriques - The Cognitive Science Show

This is the first in a series of dialogues between myself and Gregg Henriques about the problem of consciousness, as part of The Cognitive Science Show. Here we lay out the beginnings of how to formulate the problem. The problem of consciousness is actually made up of three problems:
1) The function problem: what does consciousness do?
2) The nature/generation problem: how something like consciousness fit into the scientific worldview?
3) The integration problem: what is the relationship between the answers to questions (1) and (2)?
Gregg and I are going to spend a lot of time in formulating these problems clearly through historical, phenomenological, and functional analysis before responding to them.
Gregg's slides can be found here drive.google.com/file/d/1iKq-...

[@word-pictures]

How fortunate are we to live in a time where we can watch intellectual giants like these two riffing. It's wonderful and fills me with such hope and gratitude. Thank you for making these public. ❤️

[@polymathpark]

Psychology is a floundering science, it needs re-integration and new perspectives like this, and I plan to focus my own channel on this issue as well. Thanks so much.

[@82472tclt]

Intoxicating gentleman! Loved the flow, precision and warmth that gathered in this dialectic. Really looking forward to the next one!!

[@dasburke1675]

Looking forward to Enlightenment 2.0 gentlemen. This is awesome!

[@tracywilliamsliterature]

An intriguing and inspiring conversation... the aspiration to transforming the prison cell of our modern vocabulary and its strait-jacketed concepts (which have all but killed me) in order that we might free ourselves from the stranglehold such language has on us is an aspiration I keep hidden from myself except in the darkest of moments... but, oh how I long for a better, more accurate language! your discussion gives me hope that great intelligence, wisdom and humility are working in pursuit of such improvements ...

[@johnvervaeke]

Thank you for your very kind words and support. Much appreciated.

[@dandimit8463]

I found you because of the JBP conversation. We appreciate your hard work. I’m subbed and I can’t wait to dig into your videos.

[@joeyfoster5799]

I found them the same way haha. Watched the entire Awakening from the meaning crisis series and the elusive I. The articulation and knowledge bases of these men are incredible.

[@LaymansPursuit]

@@joeyfoster5799 Exactly where I'm at

[@thevulgarhegelian4676]

John and Greg thank you thank you thank you thank you for sharing this with us.

[@victormacgill]

Very promising start to a journey revealing who we are and how we function. Waiting in anticipation

[@ben-sanford]

Thank you both for such a conscious conversation about consciousness. 😊 It is such a refreshing and honoring approach to this great mystery and I'm very excited to follow your journey.

[@york_zacharias1996]

Thank you

[@c_monster429]

What a gift...

[@Scenecorekid123]

I appreciate the measured approach to an obviously complex problem. I feel like as a lay person, I can still follow along and be on the same page.

[@anishupadhayay3917]

Brilliant

[@leedufour]

Thanks Gregg and John .

[@johnvervaeke]

Thanks Lee.

[@iwtbf48]

This is a wet dream. Thank you for open sourcing.

[@Ugoogolizer]

Part of why I'm drawn to this topic is because of a family history of mental... difference. My mother is schizophrenic and bipolar. Or she's a mystic or maybe a saint. Maybe a martyr? Maybe spiritually sensitive. Perhaps delusional or possibly a misunderstood sweetheart. Maybe just Irish ;). Or a lunatic... or mentally ill. Depressed? Manic? Joyful? Present? Scattered? Annoying? What if she's the town shaman or druid or something in a culture with no role for her to play? To what extent is her "illness" culturally imposed? What should I be doing about it? The language of psychology has really failed so far to give me a way to understand her properly (though I can say that great progress can be made by an individual who tries, and it's breathtaking how wrong one can discover one is about mental problems). That's not to disparage the greats and how much they've helped me illustrate her state of mind to myself and others. The idea of problem formulation really feels like the center of the bullseye of my particular cognitive struggles and ...anyway, love you guys for trying and I'm grateful for any small progress we make

[@digglerdsrecordings9680]

It's a long journey, that's for sure. My mother passed away last month. In her senior year in university she experienced a depression which I think was in part due to the fact that she was hoping that getting a bachelor's in psychology would help her after having grown up in a dysfunctional family. Subsequently she seems to have given up her personhood first by giving all her time to church and then to being a mother. She had the degree but she never talked about anything that she had learned. I like the work of Vervaeke and Henriques very much but there is still a ways to go. It takes a lot of intelligence to see how these things are to be applied in daily life.

[@MrMartinBigger]

I'm looking forward to this series! As awakening from the meaning crisis was very enlightening. Will this be in podcast format aswell?

[@82472tclt]

Thanks for the warning about how hard it is to be conscious! I promise to not do it!!!

[@82472tclt]

😉

[@michaelromeo4623]

Thank you John, and Thank you Gregg. There is a lot to digest but I am looking forward to the progression of this discussion as the subject matter fascinates me. Makes me wonder if memory is a sensory system? 🙂💚

[@lucrativeleadershipconvers5149]

And it opens space to introduce "affordances"!!

[@lucrativeleadershipconvers5149]

I think this could port very well to Enterprise Architecture models. This could be potentially transformational to break the deciplines "mechanical" spell.

[@bensadowyj1974]

Would be fascinated to see John have a discussion with Anil Seth.

[@pteronine9]

Another great conversation. Question: when we define living organisms, do we take into consideration a definition of death? If so, what is the nature of death for RNA? Specifically, what is it in RNA that dies, or is destroyed? Thanks, John and Greg!

[@meredith2767]

Fascinating. Is there a way to view these slides or read this? Really enjoying the diagrams.

[@eefgilbert9468]

Check the comment from Juhziz

[@gunterappoldt3037]

Husserl`s paradox: We experience ourselves simultaneously as being-towards-the-world and being-in-the-world!

[@adamgolding]

Is it just a analogue of metonymy?

[@gunterappoldt3037]

@@adamgolding no, it is the sum of phenomenological meditations (beginning with the "Cartesian" ones), affording some first-person insights into the Conditio Humana and the horizonal structure of consciousness. Maurice Merleau-Ponty extended it in his "Phenomenology of Perception".

[@notmyrealpseudonym6702]

@@gunterappoldt3037 Hope you are well Gunter (Mark from NZ (no longer on facebook)) ... looks like I am waaaay behind in John's work again.

[@gunterappoldt3037]

@@notmyrealpseudonym6702, I`m fine, thanks. The talks of J. Vervaeke and his colleagues are always inspirational. My personal "home-basis" is intercultural phenomenology.

[@adamgolding]

41:00 IIT provides an implicit answer to the function problem, right? I hope you guys get to it after this...

[@brentonbrenton9964]

Are either of you familiar with Bernardo Kastrup's work? I think one of the observations that might help in all this is that 'consciousness dreams'. This is a process of creating a world / universe - then entering into that world with a 'perspective' - that 1st person position we take. Upon waking up, we realize that the entire dream is just 'consciousness'. Every item in the world, your perspective, every thought that occurred, every action - the entire 'dream' is all 1 unified thing - consciousness. The illusion of the dream is shattered upon 'awakening'. If we can imagine consciousness as a fractal, able to 'dream' while being in a 'dream' at the same time (which is something that many people experience) - then I think we come closer to a proper picture of reality. The consciousness dreaming this reality we can label as 'God', and you, I , every animal / plant / insect, etc. are all the 'perspectives' this cosmic consciousness takes. We have consensus because we are both different perspectives in the same dream. Bernardo's work is great here because he highlights that we already know consciousness can 'disassociate' - that is to spin off another new perspective. We label this as schizophrenia or 'dis-associative identity disorder'. He draws parallels between disassociation and the 'image' of the disassociation, which we experience as a 2nd person perspective as a 'body'. Reality then is described as one cosmic consciousness 'God' dreaming, and creating disassociation within itself to experience the dream from infinite perspectives. This process is accompanied by other mental phenomena (ie. amnesia) to be a fully immersive environment where we believe we are humans living on a planet made out of actual 'stuff' - separated from the rest of it. Birth and death are those disassociations being created and dissolving back into the cosmic consciousness. Matter, like the matter in our dreams, is in reality 'illusion' - but it creates the stage for this cosmic dance to happen.

[@lucrativeleadershipconvers5149]

Yea!!!

[@dls78731]

Are the slides available somewhere? The zoom in the video cut off parts I'd like to see.

[@Scenecorekid123]

They were posted on John’s Facebook page: facebook.com/311922108854808/posts/3283492685031054/?extid=nZR8qSlRrWCw7FDV&d=n

[@eefgilbert9468]

Check the comment from Juhziz

[@vaenj.loreley25]

Why do you assume that consciousness develops? What if consciousness is, and we develop around it?

[@Pacmoar]

Let’s imagine you guys were to actually solve the problem, you 100% had the correct explanation.. is it even possible to verify the explanation scientifically? how could that even conceivably work? all you can get is data about matter and self-reports about psychic experience like “yep, it does feel like that.” seems to me like there’s a link that will always remain mysterious. am I missing something? my point isn’t to disparage the effort as pointless, im just wondering if it’s even theoretically possible to get a definitive answer to this question. have you considered this angle?

[@charleswood2182]

Let me butt in with an answer to your question as to our being prisoners of our subjective experience and hence, have no objective point from which to decide if evidence is merely subjective. We would need to find evidence from our physiology of an unconscious influence upon biological processes which in principle could attribute only to a particular phenomenal property of mind; and such property must be one we cannot influence directly or indirectly via our will.

[@Pacmoar]

@@charleswood2182 but we have plenty of examples of properties or elements of mind being linked to physiology and it doesnt make us any closer to understanding consciousness.. maybe I dont understand your point... how does what you’re saying differ from, for instance, the mental process of planning being linked to the frontal lobe or an unconscious sexual drive being linked to the hypothalamus and hormonal secretions?

[@charleswood2182]

@@Pacmoar We do have such neural correlates, but from them we can't say the direction of causation. So let's say we have a thought. The brain may have produced it, but the understanding we have of that thought? Is a moment of understanding, or generally, of recognizing something, itself a brain activity? www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538094/ particularly this quote: "There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008). The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail (Kaas and Collins 2003) and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry.” Where then develops the understanding that comes from recognition of the full field representation of a visual scene, the understanding of that which we experience? Call that consciousness, and then the evidence is that it is not the product of brain activity, but the interpreter of brain information outputs. You have data, and an interpreter. Two independent phenomenals logically. All we really know from the certainty of a sound mind is that we exist, and that the whats of our existence compose from imagery, and to that imagery, we respond. (It's philosopher Daniel Robinson who made the distinction between that we exist and the whats of our existence.) So if consciousness is fundamentally an activity, let's call 'activity' a property of consciousness. In fact, in Psychological Types, Jung defined consciousness as an activity. But what if that is just part of the story? All the concentration on mental activity and neural correlates to such activity is not germane to the larger question because, as I pointed out, covariation isn't causation, that limitation of such research method well known. Part of the story is of having an identity, a personal identity, which in and of itself isn't an activity. Activity potential resides there, in a 'me'. Of a 'me', consider: Since my identity is constant over my lifetime, since my identity never changes, since I'm always the first person of my first person experience, then no activity changed the fact that I am me. So what we would be looking for in our physiology is a correlate to something that never changes. A flat line that never moves. A flat line can never correlate to brain activity then, since something which doesn't vary can't correlate to something which does vary. That's some of the reasoning which leads to the approach I take in my own comment later in the queue, where I propose an answer to the question: what does consciousness do? The better question would have been: what does personal identity do? The idea that 'consciousness' fathered personal identity, that a self comes last to life, arising from some protoself, as Antonio Damasio conjectures, is speculation from the assumption that self can't be fundamental to life since inception. That self is fundamental to life since inception is logically possible, and not a idea taken seriously by an empirical science which measures variation against something which is also varying. I'm always the same self, but my conscious contents change. There is no variation in 'me' to measure since me being me isn't a conscious activity, it just is a fact which never changes. Logically, say life was self-aware since inception, able to act from knowing the simple fact that "I exist." How test for something which from variation we wouldn't know is even there? So what I think is that I have met that empirical challenge. Maybe not.

[@charleswood2182]

@@Pacmoar Not sure if I already replied. But my thought is this. The elements of mind you refer to are one's we are conscious of. We can correlate the process of planning as we plan to neural correlates of planning activity. And we know that a stomach ache can be psychosomatic. And you're right, that doesn't tell us anything. So I'm saying an influence upon the body which we are not aware of as involving mind, but by properties of mind, that influence the correlates to that property and hence is attributable to mind.

[@bradrandel5461]

How can we get to a point a little quicker to help people and existential crisis be able to develop agency to help themselves get into the flow state of being able to put food on the table or provide for family🤩

[@julesjgreig]

Thank-you John and Gregg. Without wishing to be cute, I genuinely appreciate the intentionality you have set out with and the clarity you are exemplifying. Thanks too for the invitation to comment which I'm led to take up. I kept thinking of the work of Rupert Sheldrake as you spoke (John, he is a frequent interlocutor of Mark Vernon's). Bearing in mind your admonition to avoid 1/2 hour quick-takes on this subject, the short story is that he's built on the biological theory of morphogenetic fields to theorise about our abilities to resonate with these fields in a way which is emanatory. I've extracted 3 mins of his justifications for consciousness to give an insight (includes Platonic and Neo-Platonic antecedents) here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hZiZeZR-aJ2ImsU and a very short brief (3 min) of morphic resonance theory here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y2TMemaAg8hmbrM . Sheldrake has been very successful at bridging science and spirituality and I hope this is useful to you both for your dialogue. His theory also gives a plausible, functionalist explanation for extended mind. Thank-you for considering and sincerely again, for sharing your dialogue.

[@joshuamitchell1733]

Why is it that in some cases information is synonymous with communication like in cells but information like seeing a tree with visual stimulation isn't synonymous with communication, at least in the west.

[@ryancarpenter447]

Id like this message to reach John. What do you think about reaching out to organizations and developing processes that enhance those environments and relationships to better Relevance Realize. It occurs to me that a lot of organizations could benefit from this kind of structure in their workplaces. You could be a consultant of sorts, an existential investicator. It would be fascinating to see you engaging with people that, for instance, are teaching each other skills that require mastery or with people in leadership roles. Your theoretical understanding is absolutely incredible, id love to see you being-in-the-world and 'grounding' some of this stuff. I realize you probably already are engaged with the world and have a life, but I have been so taken by your profound insight, and were in such a tumultuous time that I strongly believe you need to have some influence in peoples lives. I don't know if we need a religion that's not a religion, but I do know we need people like you as leaders. In fact, I think the gap between cog sci, religion, and the average person's life is exactly the meaning crisis, as I've seen one of your guests talk about. I hope this doesn't come off too critical, you are putting in the work with these important discussions, but I would love to see this theory in action. I think every institution could benefit from being "oriented towards" or "in communion" with what you are doing. Education is adrift, and again, im glad you are there at the university, especially considering Dr. Peterson's health, but I feel that you also sense the urgency present. We've got to start somewhere, and I think a lot of people are here and ready to take action if you can work out a plan. We need some Vervaekianism in our lives!

[@StephenPaulKing]

Why does this seem to be explicitly anthropocentric and materialist?

[@fpalisse]

Because it is. Though John would argue it's physicalist not materialist.

[@jasonaus3551]

Where do does Autism fit in with this

[@jasonaus3551]

Avoid Freud at all costs in regards to building anything on his work. He is more a fascination to look into. Never build work around his nonsense