A Universe of Consciousness | Donald Hoffman Ph.D.

so again I could be wrong but what I'm proposing is that consciousness is fundamental it's the fundamental nature of reality I honestly don't know but the nature of objective reality is but as a scientist it's my job to theorize I can make proposals I'm probably going to be wrong but the idea in science is to make specific precise mathematically precise if you can mathematically precise proposals about the nature of reality knowing full well that you're probably wrong but being so precise that you can then do experiments to prove that you're wrong and then figure out how you might change your theory so that you can get something that's not quite as wrong so that's what I've been working on and the direction I'm pursuing is motivated in the following way perhaps I know nothing there's a good chance that everything I believe is false but if I know anything at all I know that I'm experiencing headaches smells sounds visual perceptions and so forth as experiences not as a truth about an external world just as my experiences so a headache is a good example because the headache is you know something that no one else can see and you can't see my headache I can't see your headache I can't experience it it's my own personal experience and it's real as an experience it's not real as a claim about the external world but it is real as an experience to me if you said all your headache isn't real I'd be very angry with you mind just a real headache I know I might might need to aspirin for it so so my idea is to say I could be wrong about everything but if I'm not wrong if I'm wrong about experiences but having experiences then it's really game over there's not really any place I can go so I'm going to start with them I'm going to start with their our experiences and so have a mathematical model of what I call a conscious agent something like me that can have experiences conscious experiences of smells and tastes and colors and sounds so the idea then is to have what I call a conscious agent that has conscious experiences sights smells sounds and tastes that can then make choices based on what it experiences and then once it's made a choice about what it wants to do it can then act on the world whatever that world is in the net world will again affect our experiences and so there's a loop between the world affecting my experiences my experience is affecting the decisions I make about how to act and then those actions then working on the world it's a loop and then I also think about having a counter for every experience I have I can have my own little personal time which is a counter of the experiences and and I've discussed it here informally but we've made this a mathematical model and what we're trying to do is to develop this what we call a theory of conscious agents and having Network so the so the idea is there is a universe that exists independent of me whether or not I existed but it's a universe of consciousness of conscious agents agents that have experiences make decisions interacting with each other so I'm just one I'm one participating in this and in fact I'm not just one I'm when we look at the whole theory I'm perhaps an infinite lattice of these conscious agents all interacting but and then so are you so as everybody is not just one con you're one conscious agent but you're also two roughly corresponding to the two hemispheres of your brain and then within each hemisphere more conscious agents to perhaps an indefinite indefinitely large number so again I could be wrong but what I'm proposing is that consciousness is fundamental it's the fundamental nature of reality and but I don't want to just have that be some kind of loose you know semi spiritual kind of idea I'm trying to get it mathematically precise at yet so what do I mean by consciousness on getting a mathematical of what I mean by consciousness that's absolutely precise mathematically precise and I call this mathematical model of conscious agent so you mean most of the time when you hear people say I think consciousness is fundamental it's it's more about well let's meditate and hold hands and and and things like that the what I'm trying to do is to take that idea and make it very very rigorous here's a mathematical model of consciousness these are the equations of the dynamics so so so the goal is to get a mathematically precise model of consciousness that we can then use to solve one of the biggest unsolved problems in science the the so called mind-body problem this is a problem that has perplexed human beings for thousands of years and that is what is the relationship between our conscious experiences the taste of garlic the smell of an onion the sound of a trumpet and our physical bodies the physical world what is that relationship how should we understand it most neuroscientists and philosophers of mind today are trying to solve that problem by saying that neural activity in the brain is the foundation that's the reality so neurons in space and time physical objects and their dynamics create or are there are identical to consciousness so somehow when you get a complicated system of neurons somehow their dynamics or their properties boot up consciousness but the surprising thing is that we've never been able to get a theory of how that could be there are ideas maybe somehow information theoretic properties of the dynamics of neural networks maybe somehow those could boot up consciousness we do have correlations right we know that one that your conscious your brain has certain information theoretic properties of its dynamics that's certainly true so most neuroscientists and philosophers of mind are trying to start with properties of neurons neural networks and neural activity and to try to then get a theory of how consciousness could emerge from that or somehow be identical to that neural activity and there are a lot of ideas about how we might get a scientific theory information theoretic properties of the dynamics certain quantum properties of microtubules may be certain you know frequencies of firings of neurons and things like that but there's not yet been any scientific theory that's actually been proposed which says this neural activity with these say information theoretic properties has to be the taste of chocolate it could not be the taste of a strawberry it could not be a headache and these are the mathematical reasons why so we need laws that take us from neural activity whatever the properties of neural activity are that we want to propose our other foundation takes us from those properties of the neurons into the specific conscious experiences and explain exactly why this neural activity lawfully must be that conscious experience that has never been done so there so when I say there are no scientific theories that's what I'm saying no one has ever proposed laws that say this neural activity well based on this law must be the taste of chocolate it could not be the smell of garlic nothing is is even close to trying to do that so there so I'll put it very boldly there are no scientific theories that start with a physical description of the brain neural activity and give you consciousness there's nothing remotely plausible and there are no good ideas about how that might be done that's the state of play and we should be very very frank about it there are no scientific theories there are no remotely plausible ideas about how to do that and that's what got me thinking about this I mean I tried I'm a physicalist but it at heart like everybody else but when everybody's failing deeply and I have no good ideas no one has any good ideas about how to start with a brain and get consciousness I decided let's try the other direction so let's try to solve the mind-body problem with a theory of consciousness on its own terms so first start with consciousness and say proposed as a scientific hypothesis that consciousness is fundamental get a mathematical model of it and then solve the mine any problem the other direction so instead of starting with physics and getting consciousness start with consciousness mathematically described not a hand wave on mathematical model of consciousness and get back all of quantum physics and relativity theory so ultimately we as a scientist we want one theoretical framework that covers everything we know right from the physicalist point of view what most people are you want to start with what we know about physics you know string theory relativity theory and so forth and then neural networks and their activity and get consciousness out so we have one big picture that of the universe that gets it all in we haven't been able to do that because we can't get consciousness in so I'm trying to start with mathematical model of consciousness and its dynamics and then see if I can't get out you know string theory quantum gravity and maybe ideally make some new predictions that the physicists haven't made if I can do that then we're off to a real scientific adventure [Music] you [Music]

Channel: metaRising

Views: 65,497

Keywords: Donald Hoffman, consciousness, idealism, The Case Against Reality, panpsychism, monistic idealism, conscious agents, conscious agents theory, Cosmic Consciousness, Cosmic Mind, universal consciousness, Hard Problem of Consciousness, philosophy of mind, Science of consciousness

Id: n6-Q6seVViU

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018