Jaron Lanier - Is Consciousness an Ultimate Fact?

jaron let's just say we accept the reality of consciousness which is an arguable point but let's say we accept it i think then we have two questions is it derivative it is a product of the brain that somehow comes out or is there something irreducible some would say that consciousness is a an ultimate fact of the universe we have to deal with it and whatever the implications are we have to deal with it in its own right it's it's a minority position but um do you see any validity to that i'm in a bit of a tight spot here because uh i do believe in consciousness experience consciousness whatever you prefer to say and as i've said many times consciousness is the one thing that isn't reduced if it's an illusion so saying it's an illusion reduces nothing for me at the same time i am very clear that i know nothing beyond that i really don't know what it is and i think it would be overreaching to present these theories um that one runs across that everything has a little bit of consciousness and it's something global that the toothbrush has a little bit of consciousness or whatever i really don't know and so i think the art of this is to be a dualist because it's honest but to be an honest duelist which means saying almost nothing at all and so the the the discipline of talking about consciousness is to try to say something but not even a smidgen more than you can really say and so you really can't say very much well but this is important because a lot of people would would start out where you're starting that we can't say very much but they would then say but of course dualism is impossible because there can't be anything other than the physical world so we have to eliminate that and then we eliminate and so it's a very different approach okay look here so everybody says they want to be simple and only say we know but then they everybody the next step is very different you got two choices either you know everything or you organize your ignorance in some intelligent and honest manner dualism is the most honest manner of organizing your ignorance okay and so i'll ask you to defend that because i would say to start that there might be three separate ways one is to say i mean you can always say we don't know and i'm not going to talk about it but that you know that means nothing all right i mean if you're going to go forward you've got to do one of three things you've got to say okay uh we don't know much but it's all physical in one way or another it's going to be physical you can say in some for another there's a duelist we don't know or you can take the mysterian approach say we don't know we can't know or we can't know yeah so you're not a mysterious i am not no no no i'm not a mysterian at all i'm not making any claims about what ultimately cannot be known right all i'm making a claim about is what i do not know okay and i feel it's it's precious to hold on to an honest acknowledgement of one's own ignorance or else you make yourself phony and you make the world more boring i mean it's it's just i'm very comfortable with that but i'm fascinated by you the perch that you sit on yes it's a very fine fight while you wait for developments or while you appreciate your own ignorance your perch you use a a kind of your own kind of dualism well you know i sometimes think of it as as being like a tight rope walker where if you fall to the left you succumb to superstitions and if you fall to the right you succumb to unjustified reductionism and there's this very very fine line that you can walk to to keep a balance and i think it's it's uh very possible and worthwhile to do that all right so i want to explore a little bit about dualism okay well um that's a word that in in intellectual circles i think you know uh is a little bit uh disparaged oh it's terribly unfashionable it's terribly unfashionable but i'm in this for the long game good good yeah yeah and uh people who follow fashion are um silly you know i just you know who has time for that so um i would say we can start from the most uh basic questions of what what we have to work with and what we have to work with is the this persistence of the empirical world that we we come to trust so we can do science okay we have this mysterious thing which is mathematical truth um we have some of us maybe some of us don't have it but some of us have this sense of consciousness and experience um you know what there's not a lot else i mean that's kind of what you got to work with here um a little bit more perhaps um but the the uh how does that move you into your own kind of dualism well you know i find it more honest more efficient more graceful to package my ignorance in such a way that i say there's some channel of experience that i have which is where dualism comes in because i i don't pretend to be able to describe that in terms of this empirical world that i measure through it you know this is i'm not the first person to say this certainly this is a and i think the only thing that might distinguish me from various other people who might unfashionably allow themselves to be called duelists is that i'm very very insistent on not having anything else put in my mouth about you know whether consciousness what happens when you die or whether dogs have it or any of the stuff i truly don't want to go there i just want to hang on to the data i have which is the sense of experience you know this seems simple enough to me and that to you as as much as you know about the physical world and you've certainly explored it with virtual reality and we're here in the exploratorium in san francisco where we have all these marvelous projects and and things that the human consciousness has done and so we see the product of what we've done and you you see that without without a hundred percent confidence that that ultimately can be reduced to a hundred percent explanation in the physical world you know is that fair i think the stupidest project that scientists can undertake is to attack the sense of wonder and the way to attack the sense of wonder is to pretend that genuine ignorances that we still have don't exist okay yeah and so um so this notion that we're just a smidgen away from a complete description of reality that all we have to do is get the the the the uh relativity guys and the quantum field theory guys together and then we fix up physics then all we have to do is a little bit more computer modeling of the brand and some data gathering and we have the brain and then we're done yeah right right right you know i mean could happen but um i think that that loss of wonder kills science and you know it's a strange thing i've often wondered about writing a science fiction story about a civilization that decides it knows everything and stops discovering things that actually are out there waiting to be discovered and i sometimes wonder if we could talk ourselves into that and and that's um i don't think we ever could quite do that but sometimes it seems to me we're getting awfully close to it i think some people are and i think there's a reaction against that but i have an aversion to worry to to being concerned about what the results of what we say if if the results of the truth that we come up with are very unpleasant that's okay i i mean you know so be it maybe it's an unpleasant world i i i'm i don't want to be constrained by what feels good or what looks good for society i really want to know what's true maybe right well you know i thus far what science has shown us is a mixture of pleasant unpleasant things i mean for instance understanding evolution is largely unpleasant because evolution is such a nasty process all of these little features of us are not the result of some creative deity designing us to be nice instead it's what's left over after everybody else was killed i mean it's it's it's the leftovers of just endless endless horrible violence and starvation and awful stuff or heartbreak through sexual selection right and so so um you know this vision of the world that we see through science is not all sweetness and then one has to adjust to that and i think it isn't easy

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 52,639

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, Is Consciousness an Ultimate Fact?, Jaron Lanier, closer to truth consciousness, what is consciousness, is consciousness real, understanding consciousness, consciousness explained

Id: KNb96Z8eJFA

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021