George Lakoff - What is the Mind-Body Problem?

How is it possible that mushy masses of brain cells, passing chemicals and shooting sparks, can cause mental sensations and subjective feelings? How can brain chemistry and electricity be ‘about’ things? Can physical activities literally be mental activities? Physical and mental activities seem so radically different.

George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[Sylar-]

Wow this guest George P. Lakoff is possibly the best speaker I've seen on CTT!

Brilliant observations and clarity ❤

Going to be searching for more of his ideas

[JungleJargon]

This is like a “take my word for it” interview. There are so many things beyond what he was talking about. Faith in the truth is believing what is outside of the mind. The mind could never arrive at truth without external direction.

[michaelcorenzwit]

One of your best programs. Your guest spoke with clarity and provided much important information.

I now have shifted my perspective and understanding that the mind is the body and not some mystical universal force that enables thinking. Profound insights.

Also, I am extremely hard of hearing and your closed captions are synchronized with the speaker which is a great help in understanding what is being said.

I really appreciate your posts and always find them stimulating and informative. This was one of your most informative and interesting.

[halleuz]

He says that qualia and awareness may never be explained and yet he declares the mind-body problem solved by mind = body. Amazing! I suppose his peer-reviewed publications in cognitive science do not contain such gaps, or let's be clear: blunders. But when it comes to philosophy, obviously he thinks there are no standards and he can just claim what he likes. Philosophers of mind are usually well-informed about cognitive science and brain science ...

[quicknumbercrunch]

Lakoff's lecture (s) on why people vote against their own best interests was brilliant. Seldom happens that a lecture answers one or more of my nagging questions. That lecture was a guide through the maze. I figures out what qualia and awareness are and I solved the problem of consciousness. I am writing it up and getting feed back from others. For now: Everything is matter/energy moving through space-time. Start there, learn how neural activity works, never forget what neural activity is for, and you can get to the answers.

[caricue]

Of course he can't understand where "qualia and awareness" come from. He and Kuhn are convinced that Life is "just chemistry" and since they know for sure that there's no way for "just chemistry" to generate qualia and awareness, then it must be a mystery.

[ywtcc]

There's a broader way to think about the mind-body problem.
(Spoiler: the solution is randomness, and every time there's randomness, you can find the problem.)
In psychology/neuroscience it's perception and sensation that are being studied.
In physics, it's physical measurements that are being studied.
In economics, it's money transactions that are being studied.
It's not that the neuroscience is incorrect, it's that it doesn't really capture what Plato and Descartes were talking about.
If you consider a communal consciousness, where a science, or school of philosophy, may engage in its own sensation and perception, and by using language, create a body of knowledge independent of the minds of any one of the individual participants; then the theory of measurement pertaining to that field is an attempt to solve a specific mind body problem essential to considering that field a science.

When we see a branch waving in the wind, we can tell that it's windy outside, because of our theories of how branches and wind interact.
By this process of theorizing about the world, the branch waving in the wind becomes a sensory object in its own right.

In this more abstract consideration, it's the intersection of theory and reality that are being described.
The solution to this more abstract problem is chaos, or randomness.
Chaos is at the intersection of theory and reality, because that's exactly what's perceived when the real and the imaginary can not be differentiated.
In physics this is described by the Uncertainty relationships.
In psychology, this effect is what allows the mind to differentiate between real and imaginary intuitively.
We know we're interfacing with the real because it seems random and chaotic. The imaginary seems predictable in a different way.
A sensory neuron receives signals from the world, as opposed to an internal neuron that receives signals from other neurons.
It's the presence of randomness that lets us know the data is real!

[BugRib]

He said lots of interesting stuff, but none of it even touched the Hard Problem. Nothing of what we've discovered about the brain is even the beginning of an explanation for conscious experience, qualia, intentionality, the non-quantitative (i.e. purely qualitative) nature of experience, the experiencing self, etc. Conscious experience is completely inexplicable in physicalist terms. I personally think it must be a fundamental aspect of reality--probably the _most_ fundamental.

[gettaasteroid]

"You can't be rational without being emotional", like in William James' "What is an emotion?" “Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him.”

[ianwaltham]

He admitted "qualia and awareness" have not been explained in terms of brains. Hard problem of consciousness: Not solved.

[catherinemoore]

So no big mystery to the mind-body problem. No problem in fact, just a bit of a puzzle around the personal subjective experience.
My Subjective expeience... Is me though. Thats who i am.

[ResmithSR]

I like what Woody Allen said about immortality."I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying." 😂

[rc]

7:29 at the body level of complexity there's certainly uncertainty but when seemingly inert objects or elements are considered then do they cause their own properties 🤔

[stephenzhao]

1:08 Well the first thing you find out is that our conceptual system depends completely on properties of the brain many different properties of the brain there are the brain is a least energy system like any physical system it has what are called best fit properties many of our concepts and the way concepts fit together depend upon this property of the brain so that the mind is not just separate from a physical system it's it's not separate from the way physics work and works and chemistry works it depends upon the way physics and chemistry works to fit concepts together in the best way so that when you hear a sentence you fit together the best ideas that you can the best understanding you can we best is understood in terms of exactly what a neual system how a neural system works 1:58 ... 3:18 are the categories of mind something real and uh independent of the brain even though they are uh create caused by the brain 3:30 GL: No. and that's the interesting thing. 【What's body or matter? Human body or any 3d object appears because of quantum decoherence, therefore, there's difference between sleeping and waking body.】 ... 4:46 which kinds of properties of the brain will those categories follow 4:50 GL: let me give you an example let's take narrative right you understand your life in terms of the narratives that you live out well narrative tur out to have small narratives that build up into bigger ones we have a rags to riches narrative we have uh you know pull youself up by you bootstraps narrative we have many different we have a battle narrative where we defend ourselves there are heroes and villains and so on many narratives those narratives by or fit together by into narratives by what is called neural binding they fit together seamlessly but narratives also have emotional content if you have a hero villain story where there's a villain a victim and a hero and some villainous act you have emotions that go with it you have emotions like anger 5:35 ... 6:42 ... what would seem to follow is that therefore mental categories are things that are uh directly caused by brain structure and that what we used to think has some sort of an independent existence uh that has to be explained by the brain rather the brain itself is what created those categories. 7:02 GL: exactly they mental categories are a result of both brain and body structure and the world the interaction with the real world together and when you put all that together that's where you get an explanation of what the mental categories are (so how do we then bring it back to the old mind body problem) the old mind body problem is solved in the following way ❤👍the mind is the body ✌💙 7:31

[sujok-acupuncture]

Problem is when we don't accept body instincts. When morality, religion, society all comes in between mind and body.

[ghaderpashayee]

The magic of Bias, makes the reality distorted for him!

[nietztsuki]

This talk was disappointing. George P. Lakoff completely conflates the "hard problem" of consciousness, with the "soft or easy problem" of consciousness, i.e. the latter being the identification of the neural correlates of the brain during certain cognitive processing. I'm surprised Robert did not push back at least a little.

[EduardoRodriguez-duvd]

I have the impression that Kuhn hopes to find justifications that allow him to preserve his interpretation of reality. Where he has an immortal soul.

[MaryKDayPetrano]

That may be a Neurotypical neurotype explanation. But I would like to hear your explaination for Autistic neurotypes. TY.

[RuneRelic]

How does this explain mental imagery of physical or alternate reality 'when the brain is clinically dead' ?