What Is the Nature of Consciousness? | Podcast: The Joy of Why

[@neilbeni7744]

Listening to Anil is like a form of meditation for I.... Thank You for this cast 😊

[@johnjoseph9823]

Thank you and another brilliant episode by Quanta Magazine.

[@a_bar8579]

I really hope to solve the mystery of consciousness before I die

[@danielpaulson8838]

I’m going to go with the Buddha and process it more. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts, it is based in our thoughts.” Verse 1. Dhammapada. We are born with a certain brain type. We will have fixed qualities that differ from each other. That is core. Beyond that we become the accumulation of our remembered and emotionally judged mass of life experiences. When do we remember becoming self aware? Conscious of thinking and remembering? Not just crying infants with life, but lacking the neural connections in the world to be aware. We can’t even see. We are not yet conscious. Our sense of self follows. Where would it logically emerge from? The manner in which our brain connects neural pathways. Then, we need to understand we are all coexisting in and of a quantum field and we share emotions at a deeper level. That can look supernatural. It’s natural. Awareness through the central nervous system not a physical sense.

[@anne-mariecote5646]

I would love a podcast on humor. It baffles me. The concept of 'funny' and how that translates neurologically.

[@observerone6727]

There is (must be) a solution to "What is consciousness ?". Two epistemological 'puzzle pieces' are 1) thought is physically made of forces flowing through the brain's neural structures and sub-systems that include loops, comparitors, differencing and summing, and 2) existence is always and exactly now (the duration of every Now is exactly zero). This is why when being in states of flow, the sense of time disappears. Feeling conscious is 'simply' experiencing those changing, merging, and opposing forces in every moment. After experiencing this conclusion, and with practice, one can step into this knowable state by simply choosing to BE. The causal continuum of forces (that is the entire universe) is just running; it cannot do otherwise. Enjoy the ride.

[@AmateurNeuroscientist]

Professor Seth says that the brain creates and updates a model of the world, which includes a model of "the self". This "self model" therefore becomes self-aware, and this is a pre-requisite for consciousness. I conclude that what I call "I" or "me" (what some people might call my soul) *is* actually this model - I perceive the world and my self from within this model and I can only be aware of things within, or connected to, this model. This explains why I cannot be aware of lower-level details of processing, even relating to my own brain processes, I can only be aware of a model of these things. I do not like the description of these models as "hallucinations", because they are my only way of perceiving things, so they are very real to me, and "my self" is also very real to me. I have documented how all this might work in a new website. I describe how "symbol schemas" can be created from incoming sense data and how the "self symbol schema" can be created from internal data about the processing of the brain in exactly the same way. The processing is hierarchical and recursive, and the final result is high-level models or schemas of the things being perceived. To find my website that give more details on this, you can do a google search for "self symbol schema" or the phrase "This set of more than 40 interlinked web pages contains my proposed explanation of the workings of the human brain".

[@ReginaldCarey]

10:58 Aspects such as sensing emotional state or feelings, come about via a process external to consciousness - maybe. Consider mind, it provides meta processing, the ability to reflect on the state of the brain. I suppose being able to perceive one’s own thoughts counts as a part of consciousness.

[@wernerHkeller]

Dependent origination explained like active inference from modelling of sensory signals. Add emergence of everchanging telos (ethics/values) based on integration of everchanging self interests with everchanging interests of others which everchanging telos updates models of prediction and evaluation. Such interacting selves can flock (interact as society) and appear "as if" collective intelligence while each having their own everchanging experience models. That is context for a model of how everchanging neural networks can feel like "being" a continuing unchanging something (self) in the models generating experience; thus, reifying nothing into something. (Hume, Buddha) 🤟

[@infinitygame18]

Welcome🙏

[@ReginaldCarey]

There’s nothing metaphysical about consciousness. It is the ability to perceive the environment. Perception is a combination of sensing and recognizing the space time patterns in the sensory input. For humans it’s our subjective experience of reality. For a plant it might be the signal of a caterpillar consuming it, or sensing a source of moisture in the soil via root fibers, or the direction of a light source.

[@gustafa2170]

Consciousness is a substance I have direct access to. You can't just call it something else that it is not.

[@igotbluesdevils]

That's my hunch as well. It most likely is a product of the brain, and its function is to select and aggregate sensory information input and incentives to behaviour in the form of emotions, in a practical and synthetic fashion, the goal being survival and gene propagation. For this reason it most likely also is a predictive tool as Anil says, since milliseconds can be of the utmost importance in critical situations. Still, this describes consciousness, and admittedly doesn't unravel the mechanism of how it's produced, but it seems as it should be a huge factor in this line of research.

[@thisisnotreal01234]

I think you are confusing intelligence with consciousness.

[@ahmoin]

I'm trying to learn about the mystery of BusyBeaver(5)

[@a_bar8579]

If your brain was creating the world, then why, for example, if you were blessed, would people continue to see the same reality that you were watching, and nothing would change except that you lost sight!

[@greatestone4eva]

the divide and conquer strategy will not lead to a wholistic view of consciousness. fyi, i spoke of those qualities as aspects of consciousness in whole.

[@calebbrunson7120]

It’s metaphysically impossible to reduce quality to quantity. Eventually, modern science will have to recognize the primacy of pure awareness, ideas, and meanings from which sensations are instantiations. Of course that entails a rejection of a quantitative science which cannot explain qualities.

[@GustavoOliveira-gp6nr]

I agree. The more I think about it the more it seems there is no other way around it. There is no way to compute qualitative experiences. My guess is that qualitative experiences are in mathematics what we call "uncomputable objects", which literally are objects that are not possible to have its information compacted to a finite string, be it a number or whatever math structure. So there we have it, language operate in the limits of computability with phrases and equations and all and qualia is something uncomputable which literally is something that contain infinite information and thus any attempt to express an idea with some finite sentence we are literally compacting doing a "lossy" compression in the information sense. The objects of the mind (ideas and qualia) are uncomputable objects

[@ALavin-en1kr]

I don’t see my reply showing up. Basically as religion has always known Consciousness is what has been named God. It is not elemental and does not emerge with quantum events. Maybe this will show up in comments.

[@ilyas8659]

At what age did we realize we exist?

[@belightwithinus]

Its Qualia😂

[@saliksayyar9793]

Neither the asker, nor the answerer knows.

[@theoneaboveaall]

i really froze when he said what composition of elements made consciousness?

[@theoneaboveaall]

fuckin awesome podcast

[@daveozip4326]

I can tell you what consciousness is… It is an organisational system, it is an extension of the process that adds meaning to data layer by layer as data gets processed by the brain. Each layer adds meaning to the pixels of information until a recognisable pattern emerges. But continue this same process a few more steps and simple recognition becomes more, it becomes alive with meaning and connection. That is what consciousness is; a process of pattern recognition on steroids. …you’re welcome!

[@DeeAreDee]

But who is having this recognition, and how and why is this recognition experienced? Without answering that, you haven't fully described the phenomenon of consciousness.

[@daveozip4326]

@@DeeAreDee I don’t have to answer that question. What I have to do is recognise a process which is evidently functional by looking at, for example, the action of the visual cortex and extending this process to an abstract level. By trying to answer your questions you inevitably sink to the level of infinite regress with no benefit. There is no ‘man in the head’, it is all process…

[@DeeAreDee]

@@daveozip4326 I think you do have to answer it. I don't even disagree with you that it is all process, but the onus is still on us to support our view. What evidence can we bring to bear that it is only process? Why does the experiential dimension even exist? No benefit...yet. We're still quite stupid.

[@AlgoNudger]

Intelligence and Consciousness are the most exploited word, nowadays. 😂

[@ALavin-en1kr]

What is not understood by materialists, now renamed physicalists is that consciousness is fundamental, predated, and did not emerge with quantum events as mind did, as mind is elemental. Materialists are waking up to the reality that there is more than the elemental. Religion always knew that consciousness was not elemental and that it had a Self which they named God. This will be a mountain material science cannot climb, a bridge they cannot cross. So, no, they are not the masters of the universe, they play a role within the universe they are not the universe; that is God; omnipresent, omniscience and omnipotent. Thank God for that, in no way do we want material science to be the master of the universe. We want push back against what does not respect the human as the microcosm of the macrocosm. No trans humanism or any other Frankensteinish nonsense because there is a bridge material science cannot cross, a mountain it cannot climb: Consciousness.

[@TheRando69]

@@ALavin-en1krprove it, or are you just going to make wild claims without backing it up?

[@danielpaulson8838]

@@ALavin-en1krComplete logical fallacy. You just said, “ existence, therefore God,” with incredible verbosity.

[@ALavin-en1kr]

@@danielpaulson8838 Well you must be conscious to have written this. That does not mean that you are consciousness itself; universal consciousness, you share in consciousness. Of course from your perspective your biology; your five senses enable you to be conscious as their inputs informs your brain based on the one internal electricity. There was a battle over electricity in the human form back in time now there is a battle over consciousness existing outside it.

[@danielpaulson8838]

@@ALavin-en1kr Lets put something tangible to the blabber. Tell me how to interact with this invisible, "universal consciousness." Just stick to that right there.

[@Fredericksburg10]

First