Consciousness and material reality | Avshalom Elitzur | Consciousness and material reality

we would do exactly the same thing has there been no consciousness in our mind my dear Oscar how are [Music] you we I know about myself we believe we have conscious experience each of us is sure that they have conscious experience and we assume that the other has also but science cannot give us any certainty about that because if you are talking about a mechanism nothing can help you that and let me give you a few examples here are I'm a physicist so here are billiard balls and I'm analyzing their behavior so all I need to calculate it is the laws of mechanics there is no place for the experience of the balls say feeling pain and then repelling from one another this is absolute nonsense but it is not only that I don't need it for the calculation if I put take it into account I'll I'll get a wrong answer the physical world is completely full and energy momentum matter there are conservation laws there is no room for any like that it's only the laws of mechanics I come home and I see that one of my pots the the plant is almost dry and I say oh my goodness it needs to have water so I I water it and then I can see the turg pressure within the leaves and I say it was it was 30 no it was not and this is all just physics not different than the billyard balls just much much more complicated so there are laws and people here who know some physiology know what happens there is water outside there is water with seeline or or sugar inside and there is there is osmosis and so on we don't have to go into the details once again I don't have the precise calculation of like the bilard balls but if I have a computer strong enough which computes it then of course I can't put into it anything The Thirst of the plant because I will get a wrong result less water more water our world is very tight and when I go to the doctor and he just examines my my patella reflex that that's the same thing my Consciousness is not needed for that although I am conscious of being Hate by the hammer and um uh replying with a kick now you know what goes at the end of this scale here is Romeo singing love songs to Juliet and what science tells you is that if conservation laws are correct and if psychology is reducible to biology which people believe it is and biology is reducible to chemistry and physics then it's just the same the fact that Romeo has the conscious experience of loving Juliet has nothing to do with what he and she are doing according to another Great British Giant Charles Darwin and The evolutionary theory actually what we do has been shaped by Evolution procreation and so on we would do exactly the same thing has there been no consciousness in our mind just brains I know it's it sounds really strange but here it is machines computers do what we do and sometimes even better than us in some functions which are called mental and they keep advancing there we don't have to assume that there is anything conscious there that there is any subjective experience of red and blue there there doesn't have to be anything like that only the process so here is the problem the laws of mechanic completely explain the Motions of bilard ball plants and even even us just to make my point clear from another perspective when I was in the in the bathroom I washed my hands with some detergent with soap so I say that the the deter molecule is hydrophobic in that it it it is repelled of water now come on there is no real phobia there there is no fear it just electric electric uh interactions now here this unicellular creature is photophobic right if I shed light on it it swims away I don't need any fear I don't need to invoke any fear just you have these flagella when light hits them they move and then you get the net motion away from from light what about this guy now he he or she it I don't know shows some fear from me I can say that there is no real fear there this is only just the mechanism but you understand I think it was beron brussell who said a a person who was not a communist in his youth has no heart a person who has not seed to be a communist has no brain so here I either have no heart or have no brain because I don't know where to go to the extremities if I say that this Lobster which is going to pinch me is not afraid of me and it is only the sum of its reflexes what about this case here is a human between it there is my cat there my the chicken in my garden where along Evolution do I talk about Consciousness and rather than physical events this may happen to you if you don't have too many roaches at your home if you have too many then it won't happen to you if you don't have it won't happen either but if you have a few cockroaches every few weeks you may understand what happened to me one day I saw a cockroach in my Saloon I didn't like the idea so I went to this cockroach to do what humans usually do to cockroaches with whom they don't want to share their their home that cockroach didn't really like my plans about about here or her future and it climbed on a chair of course I was not going to give up so I picked up the chair looked it was not there I turned it around it was not there come on it it was there a minute ago so perhaps it went to the other side I flipped I turned it around I didn't see it and then I turned it around carefully and slowly and then I saw the Cockroach carefully and slowly moving to the other side now you can imagine how silly I felt at that time and a person standing there with with that creature on the chair and I'm thinking does he does she have real fear or is it only reflexes if I say that it has fear I can go to the detergent molecule or to to to uh that uh unicell organism if I say that there is no fear what would I say about a human uh I didn't solve the problem at that evening I just walked out placed the chair and say do me a favor go away and but the mystery is still there so philosophers have invoked all kinds of isms in order to in order to explain it I'll review them very briefly so we all know physicalism there were some eminent British philosophers who argu this way there is no consciousness it's some illusion you think that there is something unique to it because it's very complex but actually what you have in the universe is only physical laws matter energy and that's it with relativity quantum mechanics but there is nothing other than the material world this is what our for fathers believed in our ancestors there is dualism there is matter there is mind something comes from God the we have a soul which goes into the matter and this is the the the source of the mystery now the wor case here is interactionist dualism which all philosophers and especially physicist like me abor which say that there is actually something non-physical which interferes in what we do this is what religion believes this is what I mean even even the person in the street believes that there is something which is distinct from from the body which interferes with it it from the physical Viewpoint it is an anathema because that means that conservation laws are somehow wrong think again and you can pause for a minute to think about it think again about the billiard balls the billyard balls if anything interferes with their motions you will get a different result in the lab and we never get it what's the difference between bilard balls and brains as far as we know it's just a matter of complexity but it's the same laws they can be even when quantum mechanics comes into the picture they can turn into something statistical but conservation laws are always obeyed so this is what most physicist fear most uh interactionist do ISM the majority of philosophers and the most genius among them tried all kinds of non- interactionist dualism they would didn't want to be as silly how is Oscar can I say him for a minute my dear Oscar how are you here you see the pristine consciousness of somebody with the greatest mystery and as we say in Hebrew have a happy New Year byebye there's a mystery there okay and it's great so non- interaction is dualism this is what people like Bon Russell and others believed there is another aspect of matter which is distinct from from the matter but it's it's just the same you can ignore it because there is nothing which is immaterial which goes and interferes with what we are doing so let me give you a few examples and you can't help admiring The Genius of these people I'm coming back to Li nits epiphenomenalism in German it's called statan theoria the theory of the Shadow and it goes something like this I'm walking and My Shadow is walking next to me whatever I do my shadow is doing who is affecting whom or in order to H use liit as uh example there are two clocks one big one large and they show exactly the same hour so I may think that it's one clock which affects the other or the other which affects the the first and I we understand that it's wrong one watch maker just made the two clocks and from now on they're in parallel so suppose Oscar is thirsty and he cries and daddy gives him something to drink so there are two clocks going on here the phys iological one which is the the process of being thirsty kidneys throat and so on and Bin and so on and the mental one being thirsty having the experience of drinking something being happy and so on Liv said we have two parallel worlds we just have the illusion that they affect one another and of course he was a deist he believed in God so for him it was not a problem I think that it's genius but it does help us it doesn't help us much uh no actually sorry I was confusing this was sorry this is parallelism matter and mind run parallel to one another so this is live nits others proposed epiphenomenalism that said only one thing affects the other somehow my my ER brain gives rise to my Consciousness but my Consciousness never interferes with with with my brain okay so sorry for for the the the confusion parallelism says that there are two worlds which do not interact with one another epiphenomenalism says there are two worlds one of them affects the other without somehow violating the conservation laws but the other is not affecting the the first and this is how we have this mystery there is something mysterious but we don't have to fear for conservation laws and we don't have to worry about about physics and then there is identity Theory which actually is so dumb that I have not they say that they are the same sorry for saying that but they say that they are the same but we think they are different it should be come back to physicalism but they admit that there there is there are two sides of it and yeah and there is one which I like I don't have much time to it and it says something very radical it says here's your problem you have studied physics chemistry biology and neurophysiology you went up at the scale of complexity and then you came to the brain and you say ah there is something mysterious there there is Consciousness and I can't understand how the working of the brain with the more and more details that I work and understand the brain I still can't understand why there are conscious experiences perhaps you neglected something from the very beginning perhaps there is something in matter itself in any grain of sand in any Rock in any drop of water in any molecule in any particle that there is something mysterious that you don't understand and then when they become very complex they give rise to Consciousness here is your mystery I admit that I like this this one but here is now my my question and here I come to what I believe to be my original contribution to the to to the debate I didn't solve the problem I made it I believe I made it much worse so here it is all of them are non- interactionist dualism common to all of them is the Consciousness in essentialism postulate okay for every action which looks like a consequence of a quail yeah I forgot to say what a quail is red the subjective experience of red is a quail so science is talking about quanta in Consciousness has to do with qualia the quality of red versus blue versus yellow or the quality of sweet versus salty and so on which are distinct from the structure from the process of seeing red or tasting it so the problem is with qualia and here goes the the postulate for every action which looks like the consequence of some Quail there is a neurophysiological explanation explanation which ignores Quia altogether so I still say that Romeo kisses Juliet because he loves her actually it is a shorten shorter way to say that Romeo kisses Juliet due to very ancient you know instincts and having to do with his education and so on which is a consequence of earlier physical causes so this is what is common to all these theories which I think are ingenious but it kills actually what is the most essential part in our lives and this is the quilia the quail the subjective experience to continue watching this video click the link in the top left 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Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

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Keywords: learning, education, debate, lecture, IAItv, institute of art and ideas, IAI, philosophy, avshalom, avshalom elitzur, consciousness, physics, what is consciosuness, what is consciousness, what does consciousness mean for physics, determinism, free will, determinism and free will, determinism vs free will, avshalom elitzur physics, ashalom, avshalom elizur, avshalom elitzur physicist, elitzur, iyar, Israeli Institute for Advanced Research, philosopher physicist, אבשלום כורש אליצור, אבשלום, אליצור

Id: OrTIVlw2Xzc

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2024