David Chalmers - What is Consciousness?

dave what has always struck me as as astonishing is the tremendous number of really smart people who are arrayed all along this vast spectrum of what consciousness really is from people who say that it doesn't exist it's a mirage you should eliminate it to those who say that it's the only thing that exists not only is it fundamental but everything else is a mirage and then everything in between uh why is that the case and is that continuing well consciousness is about the most puzzling phenomenon in nature and something has to give to accommodate it in our picture of the physical world it's a bump in the rug and you can move the bump here and you can move the bump there but you know there's always going to be a uh some discomfort in your view so yeah you've got the eliminations who say there's no such thing as consciousness then you've got the reductionists who say consciousness is real but we can reduce it and explain it in terms of a brain process you've got the dualists who say that there's the brain and there's the conscious and there's consciousness and these are two different things then you've got the idealists or the pancythis to say actually consciousness underlies the whole physical world and even there you have a difference because you have those who say consciousness is part of the physical world equal at at at a fundamental level with the laws of physics and then those uh strong idealists who say that consciousness is the only thing and that somehow the material world is a product of that yeah i mean there's there's the kind of idealism that says the whole physical world is just in the mind of the observer or some big dream i'm having or i'm somehow constituting the whole physical world and that's somehow putting humans at the very center of the universe there's a somewhat there's an idea which is somewhat more respectful of physics and so on that says oh actually it's not just us this consciousness right at the ground level of the physical world and quarks and electrons are kind of little phenomenon of consciousness little conscious agents in their own right and yeah these are these are you know two different ways of going on on that extreme of the spectrum yeah and then on the physical side you have those who would say that you can explain uh consciousness we don't know how to do it yet in terms of traditional neuroscience which operates at the the level of the neuron maybe neuron circuits and those who say that you have to dig into the quantum physics or resonances and all sorts of very complex physical but still keeping it within the physical world but those are radically different points of view i mean so you have this in each area expecting are you seeing any kinds of convergence are you seeing more more divergence you know it is a field which by its nature is letting a thousand flowers bloom and they're blooming in different directions so yeah among on the materialist side of the story we have the computationalists who say it's all about computation basically we've got the let's call them the biologicalists it's all about the something about the neural wet wear and then you've got the quantum mechanics theorists i think it's all some fundamentally quantum phenomenon and uh you know all of these viewers are getting uptake in different ways yeah and and do you see them as uh ever working together as nesting within each other or each is each theory very uh egocentric in its own light and it it it it it tries to explain it totally on its own i mean i think there's certainly prospects for for convergence there you know you might believe it's it's really the computation that fundamentally does the work and giving your consciousness it's structures of information for example and to take one leading current ids the information structures that get integrated that gives you consciousness at the same time you might think oh that's got to be grounded in certain specific biological wet wear in a human brain and that biological wetware is going to be a key part of the story and maybe there's some way to work quantum mechanics in there but i haven't quite figured that out yet and in that model you do not need a pan psychic approach i would what's interesting the peop there are people giulio tanoni for example has put forward the integrated information theory of consciousness which is really a leading contender right now and his view is that consciousness is the integration of information in the human brain there's a huge amount of information being integrated all the time and therefore a very high degree of consciousness but in simpler systems um a dog a mouse a fly a computer there's still some integration of information so on his theory there's some little bit of consciousness even at the fundamental level of nature a photon an electron integrates a few little bits of information on his view there'll be a little bit of consciousness there so interesting interestingly even this computationalist theory ends up going in the direction of pound psychism the difference being though that in that case the the proto-consciousness in the in this wherever you find it is derivative it's not fundamental it sounds that way you should talk to tinoni about this but when i talk to him he says things like consciousness is fundamental integrated information is also fundamental and it's as if there's a fundamental law of nature where there's integrated information there's consciousness and he's putting that forward as his fundamental postulate and correct do you have integrated information in an electron i think you have a very small amount of integrated information here's a measure of integrated information called fire and the idea is hi-fi a lot of consciousness electrons are lo-fi there's still some fire there's some information there and on his view i think a smaller modicum let's say of consciousness and when you look at uh pan psychism and i've been impressed of a growing number of people and again i don't know if that's because i have certain friends or something that i uh but but it does seem to be a growing number of people who either either fully uh endorse it themselves or respect it enough to say that we we must consider it because everything else is not working is this a trend or is it just a few people who are making a lot of noise i'd say it's a trend i mean the jury is still out on whether it's flavor of the month flavor of the year or flavor of the decade so to speak whether it's something that's really going somewhere i mean it's interesting about getting convergence from people coming from very different directions some people very much on the pure philosophy side have grown to take it very seriously but then we've got neuroscientists like christophe koch and julio tanoni who are taking it seriously and people coming from physics like roger penrose who are taking it seriously so that's at least a convergence now that said i think there are still some pretty serious problems for the pan cyclist view how is it these little bits of consciousness at the bottom level you know photons or electrons in my brain every one of them a little conscious subject on the pan cyclist view how do they all add up to my conscious experience how do you put together the billions of little conscious agents in my brain and get the kind of familiar consciousness that we know and love that's what people call the combination problem for pansarchism and it's an awfully hard problem it's an aspect of the original heart problem of consciousness and there have been some panzakas putting forward some creative ideas about this but i'd say that no one is nailed it yet if we can't solve that problem then pansysm has a seriously uphill battle

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 29,183

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, David Chalmers, What Is Consciousness, consciousness, philosophy of mind, hard problem, philosophy of consciousness, ontology

Id: pnsgI4qllkY

Length: 7min 23sec (443 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020