Conscious Agents A Theory of Consciousness, Donald Hoffman

In 1869, Thomas Huxley wrote: “[H]ow it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.” In the years since Huxley,
neuroscience has learned much about brain activity and has catalogued many ways in which brain activity and conscious experiences are correlated. But these correlations remain as mysterious today as they were to Huxley. Most neuroscientists assume that brain activity causes conscious experiences, but they have not yet proposed a scientific theory—or even a remotely plausible idea—about how this might happen. I argue, using evolutionary game theory, that brain activity cannot cause our conscious experiences or our behaviors. The mystery of how brain activity causes conscious experiences has not yet been solved, and never will be solved, because brain activity does not and cannot cause conscious experiences. If we want to have a scientific understanding of consciousness, and of the many well-documented correlations between brain activity and conscious experiences, then we cannot start with brain activity or physical dynamics of any kind. We must start with a brand new, but rigorous, foundation. I propose a new foundation which models consciousness as interacting networks of conscious agents. I motivate and present this new theory of consciousness, and use it to solve some of the open problems in the field of consciousness, such as the problem of combining conscious experiences to create a new conscious experience, and the problem of combining conscious subjects to create a new conscious subject. I then consider how we can try to understand the correlations between brain activity and conscious experiences by using the theory of conscious agents to derive generalizations of supersymmetric quantum theory.

Donald Hoffman Ph.D., Cognitive Scientist and Author
Donald Hoffman has authored more than 90 scientific papers and
three books, including Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We
See. He received his BA from UCLA in Quantitative Psychology and

[bennguyen]

Regarding the connection between the brain, and the subjective conscious experience.. Alan Wallace suggests that if you calm the mind, you can penetrate beneath the conscious and subconscious, to get to the stream of non-human consciousness where all memories, collectively, are stored. Our brain and hippocampus are just the 'user interface' to access it. Would love to hear Donald and Alan have a discussion! BTW, Dr. Pieter Elsen says the brain has to be producing theta waves in order to access memories from previous lives.

Like a beehive, or an ant colony, Dan Siegel suggests mind/consciousnesses, is an emergent property of the the self-organizing parts of the brain/body.
Ira Schepetin / Atma Chaitanya studies the more popular Hindu texts (Vedas, Upanishads, Agamas, Bhagavad Gita, etc ), and suggests the dualism is an illusion, "I am that, that is me".
What I would love to ask of all these experts, their thoughts on NDE (Tsuruhiko Kiuchi), ghost, and reincarnation stories, that suggest one's consciousness remains separate from any collective intelligence.

[howmuchbeforechamp]

Yo top class philosophers in the comment section

[TheGreatAlan]

Just because we don't have an equation that explains consciousness, it doesn't mean that the brain alone doesn't explain Because it DOES (unless you can prove that some brain-less object has consciousness) and it's obvious to me that billions of brain cells working together produces consciousness..
WHY it's that difficult to understand??

[elenabodna]

Now I understand avatar “I can see you” thanks

[indioarmani]

this is just modern philosopher, trying to understand reality with mind is pointless, mind need data which gathered by 5 senses which only can perceive of reality, so conclusion using mind will not even scratch the surface.

[safedba]

Pablo Picasso was said to have said "Art is a lie, that tells you the truth." To me, the better view is to live and live well one must be good art appreciators.

[caricue]

This is an interesting concept, but like he said at the end, don't take it too far. Vision is only one avenue for knowing the world, even if it is our primary source. There are some really obvious lies that our brain is programmed to make us see. We can see that steak and really want to eat it, but in fact we are seeing a bloody slab of dead animal flesh in the earliest stages of decomposition. You get the opposite effect when you see a human steak and recoil, even though it is just as tender and marbled. When you look at a person and see beauty, you are not really seeing the elongated hairless simian body propped up on stilt like legs with a bulbous comically enlarged cranium topped with a mop of protein strands. It's actually something out of a horror story, at least it would be to alien eyes, but your eyes are programmed for fitness, so you see attractiveness in the monster.

[Nodenable]

Ohh guys, my english is poor however i really eager to understand this speech. Could anybody tell me what is basically conscious agent ? i wonder only this basic question because of i read this term many times in Sam Harris's books but i dont know what its mean exactly. (As far as i understand we creatures live limited perspective on reality on basis of this theory ? and we were just evoluated in accordance with our limited needs to survive, to be fitness.. ?

[TheGreatAlan]

I really like DH, but consciousness is an emergent property in the universe.

The universe was here before conscious agents... BILLIONS OF YEARS BEFORE..

[neuroscram]

Fantastic..! "Consciousness as interacting networks of conscious agents". Or - "windows on Gods infinite potential" as Rupert would put it :-)

[gireeshneroth]

Physical reality is a mere consciousness' perception of itself. It's consciousness about consciousness. Exclusively a consciousness activity.

[danohyeah]

Change the tomato for a red bus heading towards you at speed. That's reality.

[AlexIncarnate]

The brain is not really hiding the truth and is more conscious at a limited scale of ontology. It doesn’t need to perceive the world down to its quantum mechanics. That said, it doesn’t mean that what it sees is not the truth, it’s just confined to an emergent layer of reality that it needs to survive.

[liggerstuxin]

0:40

Did not realize that Aladdin came out of Genie’s lamp.

[jacobchateau]

truth will always tell fitness that it can convince it, and fitness will always try to endure :)

[SuperStargazer]

Fascinating video, I didn’t understand any of it. I did however nod a lot, with a knowing look in my eyes and pretended to understand all of it.

[MikeWiest]

This is baloney. “We have a theorem.” 😂

[rov]

Is it possible that there are levels to the perception of self and that this is sort of required training for what's real? a necessity to continue or advance to the next level per se?

[TheGreatAlan]

Consciousness is emergent ... Period... Sorry to kill his hypothesis here.

It's back to the drawing board, Dr Hoffman...

[johnb]

'Consciousness' is just another title for "LIFE The Real Self".... It is NOT possible for any part of the brain or the anatomy to see electrical signals in the brain, apart from using such technologies as MRI or EEG.
The brain also operates in an 'Encoded' format and there is NO 'Decoding' system within the brain. nor is there anything in the brain which is Aware of anything.
Decoding takes place externally in another Processing System, the brain (part of a Holographic Simulation displayed in "The Processing System of LIFE") is linked to.
Consciousness or "LIFE The Real Self" is Non-dimensional, so it is part of the dimensional world, just one of the reasons Consciousness or "LIFE The Real Self" is so illusive to Neuroscience.