There's No Such Thing As Orange

what a miracle life is how lucky we are to exist on this planet if even for a short time and i'll tell you what makes me feel better about wasting that time and probably dying alone regularly consuming gigantic quantities of chocolate yes delicious eh but how does chocolate end up in your terribly clever brain as the taste of chocolate well your tongue and your schnoz of course your tongue is covered in several thousand taste buds made up of about 50 gustatory receptor cells each it's fairly accepted there are five building blocks of taste sweet sour salty bitter and umami umami is basically the taste of savory stuff green tea and shiitake mushrooms are good examples if you're curious that thing about different tongue sections tasting different flavors isn't true by the way but heiho now for taste you'll need your nose too your nose is full of cells called olfactory sensory neurons quite high up different smells play these cells like molecular keys on a piano anyway the information about the taste and smell of the chocolate from your excellent beak and mouth waggler get transmitted electrically to your brain specifically the gustatory and olfactory cortex and that's a great olfactory cortex you have there by the way and that information ends up somehow turning into the perception of the taste of chocolate easy right okay but you don't see chemical information about chocolate scrolling across your eyes like the terminator you experience it as a sensation and that is the rub because we don't know yet how mata how chemistry how sugar and cocoa end up going from electrical signals in your brain to the taste of chocolate the experience of chocolate in your mind this is called the hard problem of consciousness and if you don't mind i would like to convince you today that it is the greatest mystery in history the sensations of experience are called qualia qualia are the feels of something how an experience tastes or looks or sounds take a sunset if you will in reality all we're really seeing is wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum in this case around 600 nanometers if we're being fancy schmancy but your eyes turn those wavelengths into information and your brain turns that information into yellow and orange into experience and the colors themselves as you see them are the qualia the orangeness of orange it's the same with the hotness of heat the sweetness of chocolate the nausea of a tummy ache the elements of experience imagine you were talking to someone who can't see color how would you describe the color orange to them now you might say it's like red but with more yellow in it but that's not gonna work silly they don't know what the experiences of red and yellow are have you ever chomped on some asparagus then gone to pee a little while later and almost passed out from the disgusting smell if you haven't that's because you don't have the gene or genes to detect asparagus metabolites and you are one lucky papa because the smell is [ __ ] vile as far as we know only about half the world population are lucky enough to have the genetics to detect it the funny thing is if you don't have the genetics you'll never know what it's like you could train as a scientist and specialize in the asparagus piss effect and become the world's leading authority on it bit weird but you do you you could know everything academically there was to know about the asparagus piss effect everything accepts the disgusting smell itself everything except the qualia and the qualia are everything if you've never seen a certain color if you've never tasted a particular flavor hell if you've never been in love you can read 10 000 eloquent descriptions of whatever but that will never be the qualia description and experience live in two separate universes in reality of course there is no such thing as asparagus piss or the color orange or the sound of a kettle boiling or the coldness of snow and if somehow we could experience objective reality directly whatever that [ __ ] means all you would find in the real world outside of our heads is chemical compounds and wavelengths of em radiation and vibrations in the air and relatively less energetic atoms there is no orange it is just one of the many millions of veils our brains drape over reality to understand reality and if the brain is an electrochemical computer if it's just meat how does it turn electricity into experience into the sweetness of chocolate into the orange of a sunset or from asparagus into the fine bouquet of satan's taint the hard problem of consciousness how does the brain create qualia now there are the so-called easy problems of consciousness stuff like how is it that you that is your brain can shift your focus of attention between stuff or how do you categorize information these are a bit like the problem of how we'll get humans to mars or something they're tricky problems but they're technically feasible with enough cocaine coffee scientists will probably crack them one day the reason why the hard problem of consciousness is often considered the big boy of questions the hard problem is because as it stands today we don't even have the beginning of the beginning of a sensible answer to it how does this turn this into this how does electricity get transformed into colors and sounds and experience and as much as us clever 21st century carbon units know about the furniture of reality about the curvature of space-time and the unpalatable presentation of a baboon's arse nothing yet in our now vast libraries of the qualities of the natural world have much to say about how meat makes a mind despite the fact that we're made up of elements you'll find everywhere else in the universe hydrogen carbon nitrogen oxygen accounting for 99 of our bodies something about the way those elements are put together turns into something that knows it's made of matter in the first place and has experiences we're made of universe but we actually know we're universe we are food that can enjoy food and yet the hard problem remains now what we're getting very good at doing recently is finding correlations between what your brain and body is doing physical you and what your mind is doing at the same time the wibbly consciousness [ __ ] we know that the hormone cortisol correlates very closely with anxiety we know that an altered gamma brainwave pattern correlates very closely with epilepsy and several mood disorders or vice versa we know if you're enjoying downton abbey erotic fan fiction you'll probably be using your cerebrum for processing the text and so on we have a huge map of what brain area and biological process correlates with which mental state but that doesn't tell us what the mechanisms of qualia and consciousness are yet any more than if you asked how voting works in the uk and someone just showed you a picture of number 10 downing street that's where that's not how incidentally that little feline outside is called larry he is the current chief mouser to the cabinet office that's not me being quirky it's true and he's a very good boy alright the brain is a huge unbelievably complicated network of inputs and outputs it can do graphics and audio and parallel processing and storage the thing is clearly a computer of sorts but computation can't be the end of the story because computers are great at manipulating information like us but as far as we know computers don't experience information like us something is in this gap turning meat into experiences if indeed we are just meat there are a million theories as to what that process is of course maybe consciousness is a fundamental property of matter distributed across the entire universe and brains focus it somehow maybe it's just what happens when you integrate enough information in the right way or maybe it's a fancy illusion and what it feels like to be you is just the side quest your brain is playing after it's already decided what it's going to do anyway but one thing is for sure every proposal we have so far for qualia generation and consciousness requires the kind of explosive leap one only experiences the morning after eating california reaper peppers elaborate as they are every explanation so far is a physical description of matter but what we want to know is how mata becomes experience we must propel ourselves off the toilet of the brain mind correlation towards the imodium of a final theory of consciousness we must collapse the duality of the subjective and objective worlds once and for all and talking of which gosh humans love dualities don't we good versus evil wads of paper versus le washi bumble mind versus body the mind body problem is about as angry as you can make a philosopher how can we explain what it's like to be a mind if minds are made out of universally dead stuff so in a condescending pattern head fashion the battle boils down to materialism versus non-materialism firstly the argument from materialism then materialism is basically the idea that everything in the universe from galaxies to the weather to little hourly wows spring from physics from mata from quantum fields not wibbly extra physical stuff the heart is a machine there's no wizards in your spleen as weird as it may be why can't consciousness be a biological process like digestion or cell division humans have a bit of a tendency for claiming stuff we don't understand is supernatural well it turns out the sun isn't pulled up by a chariot germ theory was a lot more of a powerful explanation for disease than getting cursed yes consciousness is super weird it's unlike any other phenomenon we've discovered so far and we are in quite the pickle trying to explain it but we've been in pickles before the origin of species the formation of galaxies the answer is almost impossible to imagine until someone explains it scientifically and then it's so obvious we can't believe we didn't get it earlier give science and philosophy some time with consciousness we've done it before we'll [ __ ] do it again then there is the non-materialist response to that and it sometimes goes a little like this yes science has been super powerful in explaining the world around us but hang on there dick pump everything explained so far has been dead stuff you can explain stars mechanistically because they are mechanistic how using our current picture of matter are you going to jump from interactions and physical qualities to matter that knows its matter that feels like a mind that has experiences this isn't a gap because we don't have a materialist theory yet it's a gap because materialism can't account for it even if you had a perfect map of correlations between what the brain is doing and how the person with the brain feels even if you had a special recipe that goes take some neural oscillations add in x amount of integrated information sprinkle in some quantum coherency do a [ __ ] backflip and then brains will be conscious isn't that still just a description rather than an explanation again anyway that's a pretty [ __ ] caricature of the materialist versus non-materialist debate as it stands today if i've mischaracterized your position please accept this vintage depiction of a pomeranian i hope we can still be friends and on top of that you might reasonably wonder why anyone should even give a [ __ ] about the hard problem of consciousness or how consciousness arises anyway we are conscious we can see sunsets shut up but to that i would reply no you yes we might be far off cracking this thing but if we crack it if we finally set up a sturdy bridge between descriptions of physical states and mental states if we have a working theory of the relationship between the brain and the conscious mind it won't just herald in a shower of nobel prizes it will mean we can start addressing actual endgame meaning of life questions we will have codified answers to the existential quandaries dating back to the ancients like do we actually have free will and is consciousness baked into matter or is it an emergent phenomenon and how do mothers turn food into thinking conscious people in their tummies and could we one day make other stuff conscious like machines or new artificially organized states of matter and how did evolution create conscious animals anyway was it advantageous somehow and okay why was it how is it better than just evolving biological robots and for that matter how conscious are our animal mates and just what is a thought how are we thinking or feeling for that matter how the hell are we collecting binding and experiencing sensory information from the dead mathematical world beyond our minds and translating that into chocolate and rakia and cold and rough and misery and curiosity and indifference and satisfaction and ambivalence and being just the feeling of being a being what is qualia how is experience even possible why the [ __ ] is orange i'm going out for the day and don't smoke all my weed again there's a weird feeling you get sometimes if you're into all this consciousness stuff because you can get knee deep in the isms and the mud slinging and philosophers bullshitting each other and you suddenly step back and think oh my god this isn't some highfaluting academic problem the mystery is in me the mystery is me right now at the center of our heads is the point of contention of millennia of debate conscious experience it is the greatest mystery and if the greatest mystery of all time was hiding anywhere else but inside our own heads we'd never stop [ __ ] talking about it but because it's so close because it's us it barely gets mentioned outside of academia every sense coming in every color every sound every taste the mystery is yelling at us the whole time how is experience possible how am i possible what is inside me doing all of this and maybe the same goes for mammals for marine life god knows who else a bunch of non-human animals seem to have internal lives of some kind don't doggos go mental when we come home because they're actually feeling happy to see us didn't the killer whale j35 carry her dead daughter's body for a thousand miles refusing to let her fall to the ocean floor not out of some robotic inbuilt reflex but because she was sad because she was grieving beyond narrative beyond nations beyond history possibly even beyond species in some cases there is a common insane experience being a living thing in a cosmos of apparently dead things being a thing that doesn't just process information but feels and hopes and regrets and hate and longs and dreads the never-ending chatter of ourselves talking to ourselves who am i i wonder how mum's doing i'm hungry i'm thirsty should i be married by now i think the milk is off do you still love me i still love you how will i die when will i be happy i should phone the post office i should buy more toilet roll i should worry less i should worry more will anything ever make sense we don't know how the consciousness trick is done yet and to be honest maybe we never will but even then even if we never do the mystery is here and it's gorgeous and it's everywhere as gk chesterton put it but now a great thing in the street seems any human nod where shift in strange democracy the million masks of god it is not a pleasant condition to endure living in an age when we know more about the heavens than we do the mechanisms of our own heads personally some days i find it [ __ ] horrifying but things are changing inside the sciences today it's finally becoming fashionable to study consciousness the science of how we experience is just getting going now science is coming home from its mad flight in the stars back down the telescope to ask about the mind looking up the telescope we're living at the birth of a theory of us and i will bet you my cash on this in the miraculous event we actually get through this teenage phase in our development we might stand the chance of maturing into an adult species we might live one day in a time of perfect explanations and finished science when most things have been measured and explained when the mechanisms of consciousness and experience are as well understood as the dynamics of flight are today but i will also bet you my cat that there are eyes in that enlightened time looking back longingly wishing they could know what it was like for us today to have lived in the great age of mysteries to have looked around and seen question marks everywhere and found the courage in spite of the dreadful uncertainties in spite of not knowing how our souls work to still carry on and still be at least half decent back when humans were clueless about their own mental mechanisms back in the quiet ignorance of the 21st century in the days of wild unknowing when all you needed to do to remind yourself of how gorgeously weird the world is was to remember that for all we could explain sound we had no idea how it became music in our minds and to remember that for all we could explain light we had no idea how it became color when all that was required to remember just how close the unknown is to us was to look up to the horizon around evening and to know that for all the mysteries of the sky and beyond the sky for all the mysteries of our sun and the dust she came from on any given evening below any given sunset as the heavens look down on us clearly the real mystery all along was looking back up at the heavens [ __ ] out that ending is too pretentious even for me bogeys willies etc don't forget to brush your teeth being alive is weird until next time then

Channel: exurb1a

Views: 913,194

Rating: 4.9723144 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: WX0xWJpr0FY

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/_Rynzler_]

Everytime he uploads i gotta prepare myself mentally for like a week to watch it. His most recent videos haven’t been too depressing so there is that.

[u/GooseCH]

What a really nice video explaining the problems of consciousness.... man I'm a bit lost for words

[u/UrbanScholastic]

Mystiverse is going to cream to this one

[u/ScytheJay]

Whats the music towards the ending bit of the song, the violin part? Because the song in the description didnt have that violin part. I am no music expert, i am just guessing its a violin.

[u/Yato_Delivery_God]

Why the fuck is orange

[u/Quatricise]

Damn, the moment I remember he exists and decide to check if he's got a new video out - its here. Must be some kinda telepathy.

[u/ConstantDeenos]

WHAT THE FUCK IS ORANGE

[u/DareToDaredevil]

I feel like everytime he uploads a new video I say it's his best one yet. Is that possible? Can every single one of his videos be his best?

[u/TheHypnobrent]

His voice seems to be rather raspy in comparison to what he usually sounds like.