Nicholas Humphrey - Are Brain and Mind the Same Thing?

nicholas from my days as a neuroscientist and knowing many neuroscientists the large majority of them certainly feel that everything about the mind can be explained ultimately by the brain yet the majority of philosophers forget theologians think that in principle that is forever impossible you say that in the strong sense when we know everything about the brain we will know the entirety of consciousness how could you be so sure well it's i suppose you i would agree with you it's an article of faith but it's pretty well grounded faith i'm a materialist i believe that in the end matter is all that makes up this extraordinary world we live in um and i'm also a darwinist i'm i believe in the theory of natural selection and that the extraordinary thing which constitutes a human mind and the brain has come about through a slow process of of improvement by uh because of the consequences the way the brain worked was having better and better results for the animals which which which had those brains so it follows in that case that if the brain and of the mind has evolved it's evolved because of the effect effects it has in the world um if it doesn't have an effect on the world natural selection can't have seen it and therefore there's no way in which it could have been selected for um so if consciousness had no material consequences it wouldn't be there or it certainly wouldn't have evolved if it does have material consequences it must have them because it's influencing our behavior our behavior in many complex ways not only of course you know the things we everyday actions we take but the thoughts which you lead to different kind of actions our loves and beliefs and are being awestruck in the presence of god whatever it may be they're all consequences which have real world effects now if consciousness and the mind is producing changes in behavior then the only thing it can do be the only way it can be doing that is by influencing the material organ which is the brain um and so uh whatever is you know material causes produce material effects and nothing else does unless you believe in kind of some kind of cartesian dualism so we have to assume that in the end everything which we manifested in our own experience as consciousness and mindfulness must be a function of our material brain most people would agree with at least the first part of that description but when you think hard about what the brain is a very large number of neural impulses a little electrical activity 100 billion neurons maybe 10 000 different connections each one's a huge number of permutations but at the end of the day it's electrical charges moving along these neurons chemicals exchanged between the neurons and the fundamental question of philosophers is how can a sequence of neurons uh in their electrical activity literally be the seeing of red uh the the smell of uh of um of cheese all the different sensations of music how can literally one be the other it seems like that's a vast and obvious category mistake it depends how you want to describe the experience if as i would do i say that everything all our experiences actually and some at some level can be redescribed in terms of being a representation of something as something else um we you know the experiences we have may seem magical and strange but we can describe them in the end in a language which relates to real things in the world um we may not do it perfectly yet but in the in the end we're going to be able to those that means that uh everything which we call experience is not going to be in a different category from the things which we in the going on the brain which we equally can describe in terms of other things in the world so we're going to have an equation in which one set of descriptions is going to have to map onto another set of descriptions on the other side we'll give you the descriptions at some point in time will be perfect that you'll have a direct correlation in the brain between that smell of cheese or the visual ex experience of red with a sequence of neuronal activities and in all all of its glorious detail if if we give each other that still there's a profound question that it just seems so different that it it it seems incredible that one would be the other you could have the neuronal impulses registering on a computer causing a certain behavior but to say the experiences that we have literally are those neurological impulses seems bizarre so our experience is the way we represent something which is going on inside our brain and in fact i think that we literally create an extraordinary kind of art object a mysterious object or an activity mathematical activity in our brain which we then represent to ourselves in our mind as having these mysterious properties which seem so inexplicable and if the effect understands even indeed to be out of this world but that's because we are indeed the subjects of an illusion a wonderful illusion in which we've been set up by our own brains to think we're in the presence of something which doesn't translate into the ordinary world mundane world we live in so when philosophers point out that yes consciousness seems to have out of this world qualities and therefore the brit the gap can't be bridged i'd say yes exactly and that's the point um we've been we've evolved to have experiences which seem to us to be out of this world and are inexplicable by uh by by ordinary scientific means but that doesn't mean they are let me give you an analogy um we can create an object uh for example there's a famous illusion called the penrose impossible triangle which looks for all the world as if it's a triangle which is joined up in a way which doesn't physically make sense i'm sure many of your viewers will know it now it was first created simply as a drawing um and easy enough to do that because it's drawn on flat paper but the psychologist richard gregory realized that this could actually be created in real life and he set about to make a wooden model which when seen from one particular position has exactly the property of seeming to us to be impossible we represent this object as having qualities uh features which it actually can't have now i think this is in some ways a very interesting analogy for what we're doing when we create consciousness we're creating something in our mind which when we see it from just that one special position the privileged position of the subject of our mind then we see it as having properties which apparently don't make sense to us um but why shouldn't that be an illusion just like the real penrose triangle the royal impossible triangle and once you realize that we don't have to say that consciousness actually is the thing it seems to be which would be impossible and impossible to explain but when it seems to us to have those qualities then what we have to do is to explain why it seems to us to have those properties and that changes the game um it makes it the puzzle then is to see how we could have been tricked into representing things that way and of course you know there's a lot more work to do after that but at least we've moved the problem on to a different level at least the hard problem problem seems now to be something to which we have an entree nick allow me a thought experiment you have developed your theory of consciousness based upon your prior strength of belief in naturalism and materialism if i were to take that away from you and give you a neutral position on naturalism versus supernaturalism not not of believing in supernaturalism but a neutral position how would then you approach consciousness i'd approach it by uh making a choice between naturalism which is a satisfactory explanation of the world because it allows us to see the origins of the forces which exist in nature and supernaturalism which is just an ad hoc hypothesis which could explain anything if you have to choose of course i'd go for the first which is satisfying uh beautiful uh and in the end uh can deliver in a way in which the supernaturalist hypothesis can't if you were neutral on it not that you had a supernatural hypothesis or a natural just say it was neutral it was off the table how would your approach to consciousness change robert i think i wouldn't be doing it i'm in this game because i want to find a natural explanation and that's what motivates me um it's the joy of discovering how the world works within a consistent framework which runs across right across nature which drives this exploration on

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 16,080

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, Nicholas Humphrey, Are Brain and Mind the Same Thing, Philosophy of Mind, Physical Reductionism, Hard Problem of consciousness, mind-body problem

Id: RbAvhcE6v_A

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2022