Brian Greene on Consciousness

the progression is you have living beings that ultimately emerge from these processes some of those living beings acquire some degree of conscious self-awareness conscious self-reflection and the very same conundrum that for the browser scientists in the 1800's comes to the fore here again because you can just articulate the same question but swap out some words how can mindless thoughtless particles come together in a configuration that somehow yields the inner sensation of thought feeling emotion how can they possibly generate that if they themselves don't have any intrinsic version of those conscious qualities from the get-go now some people respond much as those in the past did with life they say those particles can't create consciousness on their own there has to be something else a consciousness field that we somehow tap into or the particles themselves may themselves have a little proto conscious quality so the electron might have electric charge and mass and quantum mechanical spin David Chalmers idea exactly yeah and in addition to the properties of particles that we are familiar with maybe they have a little bit of consciousness and when you put a lot of them together you got a lot of consciousness and that's what we are my own feeling and there's no proof to this but my own feeling is that we are recapitulating the same story with life and that at some point when we fully understand or better understand the brain and mind we will no longer invest such mystery in the emergence of consciousness we'll look back at these days and kind of quaintly smile at the ideas that were put forward and we will recognize as we do with life that consciousness is nothing but particles coursing through a gloppy gray in our particular structure head and within that motion those particles generate the conscious sensations that we all experience to my mind when you describe consciousness in the manner that we have just now I don't think that in any way diminishes consciousness some had these conversations you know I remember having an on-stage discussion of this sort a couple years ago and when this discussion of consciousness happens someone in the back yelled out you're describing hell you know and it's like and I get it because if we're used to thinking of consciousness as this pristine spectacular quality that we are endowed with from something magical in the external world to frame it in a reductionist way can feel like you're flattening it however I think it's utterly spectacular that the very same physical processes that are responsible for this pitcher of water are the structure of this table is what's responsible for conscious self-awareness how miraculous that collections of particles can do and think and feel what we do that I think is the conclusion it amplifies and elevates the wonder of it all it doesn't take away from it

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Id: 9qLQh9DfbMs

Length: 3min 17sec (197 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020