David Chalmers - What Are Brains?

dave in order to really understand what reality is the mind body problem is one of the classic ways that we've begun to think about how reality is constructed how do you see the mind-body problem how would you structure it so we can begin to approach it well we have bodies we have minds we have physical properties we have mental properties the mind-body problem is how do those relate to each other how are our thoughts and feelings connected to the mass of cells and neurons and processes that make up our body are there is there any fundamentally one thing here are we fundamentally bodies and brains and the mind is derivative are we fundamentally minds and is the body derivative or are we fundamentally unions of bodies and minds with both of them equally fundamental and if the latter do they interact does each one work on their own is causality one way or the other way or both ways yeah are they separate realms here which have nothing to do with each other i mean it's obvious there are some connections and correlations between the two you affect my brain you affect my mind you you know you cut out my eyes i can no longer have conscious experiences of seeing so it's obviously a connection but is it just straight from the brain to the mind how can the mind actually affect the body you know that's uh that's that's one of the big mysteries of philosophy let's start simply and look at the entities of the mind-body problem we say body we really in today's world mean brain how would you define a brain brain is just this big lump of stuff inside our heads that seems to be intimately involved with our thinking and reasoning now it's made up of neurons little nerve cells and there's a great gradation i mean we can find brains in in earthworms that are little nodes of ganglia or clumps of neurons that there's a very vast uh uh uh spectrum of brains and and what do we do do all of these figure into the mind body problem well the mind body problem really arises in the first instance with humans because those are the ones that we know are conscious and have minds actually i'd like to say you know my mind body problem arises first with me and with my mind you know i think you probably have a mind and other people i can't be sure of that i can be sure of mine so my mind body problem arises with me your mind body problem arises with you and collectively our human mind body problem arises with us now dogs is there a mind body problem for dogs well as long as they have minds we think they do we can't be sure they do because you can't observe a mind directly from the outside we define brains the spectrum of clumps of neurons that get bigger and bigger and ultimately fill our cranium so how do we define minds minds are multifaceted for me the central aspect of the mind is consciousness subjective experiential consciousness something that feels like something from the first person point of view so does a dog have a first person point of view is there something it's like to be a dog if there is it has a mind does a rock yeah most people would say no a rock doesn't have a first person point of view therefore a rock doesn't have a mind but in any case that's the cine clan for a mind for me it's got to feel like something from the inside i i would think uh there's the problem of other minds i don't know whether you have a mind but i would think don't take this personally that if you have a mind in the sense that you've defined it with this inner experience that a dog has a mind too that it if if i'm willing to admit that you do i think the correlation that the dog has is about a hundred percent i find that plausible i mean some people say consciousness requires language without a language you can't really be conscious you can't really have beliefs i don't see why consciousness requires language you could hive off language still have experience well i think i think you've been human beings who can't lose their ability of consciousness don't lose their their inner quality of their inner experiences i i i think your consciousness is limited you can't express a lot of things and have beliefs and thoughts of certain kinds but the the experiencing the the inner experiences are are i would think the same at least again if i believe you have it i believe a dog has you know i mean people can affect their brains in pretty serious ways drinks and drugs and brain injury it still seems like they have basic consciousness you know they can still see and feel they can feel pain that's a fundamental primitive kind of consciousness i think probably a dog could feel pain and they have that inner experience of it yeah it feels like something so if we then define minds in terms of this inner experience we define brain in terms of of clumps of neurons certainly when they get expressed in mammalian brains in our case we know that it's at least correlated with inner experiences uh how then can we then make the next step in defining brains to to non-biological brains because uh you know computer is called electronic brain now that's sort of a metaphorical word but it is a sophisticated computer a super computer a quantum computer that ultimately may be built uh with more processes that then our brains will be able to to to have per second maybe maybe a trillion times more computations per second than our brain is that is that a brain is that conscious well i think it's really a convention of language whether we would call a computer a brain or not not in the biological sense maybe in some extended sense the really interesting question though is not the question of is it a brain but does it would it support consciousness you know would there be something it's like from the inside to be that computer you know when you turn it off at night you like winking off somebody's mind if you are and that makes a really big difference to how we interact with computers certainly we'll increase the electricity bill exactly my own view is that my own view is that at least if not now then eventually there's no reasons why computers could not be you know fully conscious beings like you and me kind of strange and bizarre that silicon processes in a computer could somehow generate consciousness but equally strange and bizarre that neurons in a brain do it neurons do it i don't see why silicon chips shouldn't well if that's the case why aren't current computers having some rudimentary consciousness like a frog mite or an earthworm i'm not sure what the how low you have to go on the biological scale to get the equivalent of today's super computers well you know i don't rule out there's some very primitive kind of consciousness that goes along even with primitive information processing nothing we'd call a person or a you know an intelligence maybe some primitive kind of feeling of course as the information processing gets more and more complex as it does in the brain then we get more and more complex experience of the kind we normally call consciousness so maybe this proto-consciousness deep down maybe even there's you know i don't rule out there could be proto-consciousness inside the processes in a computer crazy idea but yeah we can't tell from the outside if metaphorically speaking god the omnipotent metaphorically speaking if god an omniscient being could tell you for sure that in principle no matter how complex the computer will ever be quantum computer no matter how many processes per second there will never be an internal experience in that non-biological entity so that it will never be the case that it is something to feel like to be that computer how then would your uh impression about consciousness change i would then think that one would have to just say god told me that computers couldn't have consciousness i would then think okay there's something important about biology it's not just organization right now i think it's organization and information is what matters to consciousness could turn out that i'm wrong if i was wrong about that then i think what i decide is what really matters is the intrinsic nature of the matter you've got to be made from the right kind of matter and consciousness is really tied to certain kinds of matter in generating consciousness not just the patterns but the matter itself and that's okay that's another alternative view but i think that's where that would force me but as of now you see that if general organization of matter can either create consciousness or be correlated with consciousness then it is entirely natural in your natural world consciousness being a part of it for a computer to be conscious well i think consciousness is something more than processes in the computer but i think it's also something more than processes in the brain the question is what would correlate with it in the physical world i think the best core that we have of consciousness in the physical world is processes and patterns and those processes and patterns can just as well be embedded i think in a computer as in a brain

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 14,402

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, David Chalmers, What Are Brains, philosophy of mind, hard problem, neuroscience, how brains work, how do brains work, brains and consciousness

Id: Vs0fWhhbqHo

Length: 9min 17sec (557 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020