David Chalmers - Why is Consciousness so Mysterious?

Dave I have always been fascinated by the concept of existence and when I think about existence what that means I'm always back to consciousness but then I see some philosophers telling me that consciousness is an illusion doesn't really exist do you think otherwise I think consciousness is the thing we know about more directly than we know about anything in the world you know the great philosopher Descartes said we can doubt the existence of anything in the world I could doubt that you exist maybe this is just a dream I could doubt that any of the tables and chairs around us exist I could maybe even doubt the existence of my own body but the one thing I can't doubt is that I'm conscious right now I think I am conscious therefore I am my consciousness is presented to be more directly that anything else in the world if this is an illusion then the illusionist consciousness some say ok that's they car they ridicule him they say now that we know about the brain you know how the neurons work the speights of activity the synapses the chemical positions the complexity that out of that complexity of hundred billion neurons and trillions of connections consciousness can emerge still an illusion maybe consciousness emerges from something else I mean this is a further question downstream but the number one datum of the science of consciousness and the philosophy of consciousness is there is consciousness now is it a primitive is it the first element of reality or is it something derivative is it sort of a second element of reality that somehow emerges from the brain well that's an open question at least at the beginning of the discussion you can't question the consciousness exists well you can question that that I think consciousness exists and that I seem to have a focal point but you can show that activity at the brainstem so-called reticular activating system makes you focus on visual things or auditory things so you know you think you're this unified conscious but really you have these streams of data that you're focusing on and that's all it is I tell you what I can question your consciousness I can't be a hundred percent certain that you are conscious right now maybe you're just like acting and walk it you're walking the walk you're talking the talk maybe nothing's going on in there maybe you're a zombie I can't question my consciousness I'm experiencing I'm experiencing it directly it's more real to me than anything else tell me about zombies you've really had a major impact in the philosophy of mind by talking about zombies it's a funny word but there's some significance there well there's a lot of kind of zombies you know there's a zombies in the the Hollywood movies I guess they're I guess they're dead they come back to life and then there's your Haitian zombies I guess they've had some kind of Voodoo poison they lacked some kind of free will but the zombies the Philosopher's are concerned with they're just like you and me but they lacked consciousness they walk around acting like a conscious being talking like a conscious being but they're not conscious you stick with the pin they say Oh exactly and you ask him are you conscious they say yes and no one thinks zombies actually exist right I'm not a zombie I don't think you're a zombie but we can at least make sense of the idea this they seem to at least be imaginable you know you say could God have created a world with zombies to use a metaphor here for a second seems like God could have done that our world is not a world of zombies we're not robots we're not automata we're conscious that itself is something that needs explanation it does so the fact that it that you can conceive of a zombie means that there is a possibility of something else being needed to differentiate us from a zombie I would say that when God created the world that he could have created a purely physical world just atoms and the void no consciousness at all that would have made sense that's a logically consistent world our world isn't like that our world contains consciousness that suggests that when God created the world he had to do some more work he had to put consciousness in now subtract God from the metaphor now and just use this as a way of thinking about what exists in the world you need the matter then you need the consciousness okay evolutionary theory would say particularly evolutionary psychology that during an evolutionary process consciousness somehow came in it was selected for B we have been awareness in an environment we can avoid the Tigers a little better maybe plant the crops better who knows what but consciousness was a selected factor maybe it emerged at random and then developed well it sounds plausible on the face of it the consciousness plays some role in evolution the fact is any story anyone's ever told about the evolutionary story role of consciousness has been quite obscure and doesn't really quite make sense the trouble is anything you want evolution to explain how we react what we see and so on I can find some explanation for how that happens that goes wholly in terms of mechanisms algorithms in the brain and so on once I spoke once I spell out that story we say why do you need consciousness for that so the evolutionary story it could have worked with just reflexes maybe higher-level reflexes but same reflexes but no leaner experience a really complicated inner computer really complicated inner mechanisms computers are getting better and better and maybe one of these days they're going to be able to do all the things that we can do but then the question is why do you need consciousness ok now this brings up the word that philosophers use qualia what's qualia qualia is the raw sensation of experience so I look around me I see colors reds and greens and blues and they feel a certain way to me I hear the sound of music afar off clarinet in the distance the smell of mothballs all of these feel a certain way to me they have a quality of experience and you got to experience them to know what they're like I mean I could you could give me the whole map of my brain what's going on when I see colors when I smell mothballs and some but if I haven't seen a color for myself that's not going to tell me about the quality of seeing red of seeing green smelling the mothballs you actually have to experience it for yourself we've talked about a advanced scientist who's colorblind but knows every wavelength of every color and what happens when she finally sees color yes Mary the famous colorblind neuroscientist spends her entire life in a black and white room she's never seen a color but she learns every think there is to know about the neuroscience of color the wavelength of the light the neurons of fire in response the behavior it gives rise to she can tell you all about red and green and blue it's just one incredibly important thing about color she just doesn't know she doesn't know what it's like to see red to see green she doesn't know about the conscious experience of red and green all the bread the brain science in the world isn't going to tell her that imagine one day she has an operation she leaves her room she's ahh that's it that's what it's like to see red she said she's learned something new about consciousness what follows from that that to me suggests that there's more to consciousness than a physical process in the brain because you could know all there is to know about the physical processes in the brain and you wouldn't know other is to know about consciousness you've become quite well known for defining the easy problem and the hard problem go for it there's a lot of things we want to explain when we explain consciousness people use the word in lots of different ways you might want to explain things like how it is that my brain perceives something in the environment and a stimulus is my retina my brain integrates information I react I point I say something maybe you could give an explanation of those things in terms of circuits in my brain algorithms in my brain but those are just the easy problems of consciousness that we say easy they're really hard but but relatively easy I'd say you know a good century or two more and more ingenious brain science is going to get us there we're going to isolate the neural circuits the computational mechanisms that make us behave the way we behave do the things we do the hard problem of consciousness is why is all that processing accompanied by conscious experience why does it feel like something from the inside why do we have this amazing inner movie going on in our minds all the time and it looks like oh the whole story you tell about neural circuits and computational mechanisms it just leaves that question out take a thousand years into the future at the same rapid growth of science a hundred thousand years million years do you see in principle can the hard problem as you've defined it be subject to neuroscience analysis I don't think the hard problem of consciousness can be solved purely in terms of neuroscience I think neuroscience has a huge contribution to make to its solution but if we just stay with the level of neurons and processing alone there's only so much that's going to explain because neurons and neuroscience is all about objective mechanisms objective mechanisms that perform functions that ultimately issue in behavior so if you want to say explain language explain perception explain memory the things we do the functions of the brain that's just fine but it just explains those functions those behaviors and this always leaves this further question why is that behavior those functions accompanied by consciousness for that we need an extra ingredient in the picture I think we need to bring in consciousness itself on my view is fundamental where do we go from there if we agree with that how can you make a next step in science we're used to the idea that we explain some things in terms of other things say we explain biology in terms of physics we explain molecules in terms of atoms but we take some things as fundamental you know space and time we don't explain them in terms of more primitive things or we needn't we just can take space or time as fundamental mass or charge is fundamental my own view is that's the attitude we have to take to consciousness don't try to reduce consciousness to some more basic things it's just a process in the brain so the consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe in the way the space and time and mass are once you've done that you can build a fantastic science of consciousness in the way that we've developed the science of space and time and mass most people tend to think that the world is divided between scientists or materialists who only see the physical world and theologians or theists or people who believe in religion who see God or some higher power involved and that's the dichotomy of the world it's one way or the other posing consciousness in there kind of disturbs the dyadic two-part picture I think consciousness is something that everyone should believe it it's not this science versus consciousness if you're a good scientist you have to explain the data and one of the most fundamental data of our existence is the fact that we're consciousness that we're conscious if you leave that out of your picture you just haven't haven't started to explain one of the first things that needs explaining so following good scientific principles I think we need to expand our theories to let consciousness into the picture and if that expands our science a little bit from the purely materialistic science with which we started well ok we got there by following good scientific principles just trying to build an adequate theory of the world that were confronted with

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 104,068

Keywords: David Chalmers, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Closer To Truth, Consciousness, Brain, Mind, Philosophy (Field Of Study), Neuroscience (Field Of Study), Philosophy Of Mind (Field Of Study)

Id: hTIk9MN3T6w

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 07 2013