Stuart Hameroff - Can Consciousness be Non-Biological?

If consciousness is 100% physical, we would have to conclude that the same kind of consciousness that we experience as humans can be generated by non-biological entities (eventually). Conversely, if non-biological consciousness would somehow, someday, prove impossible, then consciousness would have to embed some nonphysical aspect. But how would we ever know?

Stuart Hameroff, MD, is a physician and researcher at the University Medical Center at the University of Arizona.

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.

[Livlifetaistdeth]

I applaud anyone who discusses this topic with a sincere desire to understand how and why.

[scotty]

I know they were speaking English but I didn't understand a word. I watch these videos just to see how intelligent people discuss a topic between themselves.

[jamesruscheinski]

do brain signals traveling between neurons move at speed of light or faster?

[MaxPower-vgvr]

Let me highlight some key mathematical and physical reasons why shifting to a Leibnizian monadological and relational framework can resolve longstanding paradoxes, integrate disparate theories, and provide a coherent overarching ontology for progress:

1. Infinitesimal Calculus and Non-Standard Analysis
Leibniz's original formulation of calculus using infinitesimals avoided many of the paradoxes that plagued the later Newtonian fluxional approach based on ill-defined limits. Centuries later, Robinson's non-standard analysis provided a rigorous mathematical model for infinitesimals as realizing Leibniz's intuitions about quantized, discrete continua built up from monic "pixel-like" elements. This maps better to quantized physical phenomena.

2. Eliminating Spacetime Singularities
General relativistic spacetime singularities like black holes result from treating 0D points as abstract limits of continua rather than irreducible ontological entities. In a monadological model, these "singularities" represent physical regions where the continuum approximation breaks down and discrete, pluralistic monic element interactions become essential - thus restoring calculative determinacy.

3. Grounding Quantum Mechanics
The measurement problem and other quantum paradoxes stem from attempting to fit an inherently holistic, entangled framework into a separable 3+1D spacetime model. Leibniz's monadology posits irreducible, entangled subjective perspectival origins (monads) as ontological primitives, from which the extended appearance of quantum fields and measurement outcomes can be derived as relational phenomena - avoiding paradoxes.

4. Unifying with String/M-Theory
String theory's viXra and M-theory's higher-dimensional brane concepts failed to attain empirical unification when constrained within classical geometric assumptions. However, category-theoretic reformulations have revealed suggestive analogies between strings as monadic perspectives, brane-worlds as derived relative state models, and string dualities as monadological equivalences - indicating deep structural resonances with Leibnizian worldviews.

5. Consciousness and Information
The hard problem of consciousness is intractable in physicalist frameworks due to the false dichotomy between qualia-subjectivity and quantitative objectivity. Leibniz's monadology grounds mentality and proto-perspectival awareness in monadic primitives. Recent work applying category theory to define integrated informational structural realists worldviews echoes these monadic principles.

6. Non-Contradiction and Coherence
Most crucially, Leibniz's philosophies were founded on the supreme metaphysical principles of non-contradiction, sufficient reason, and the identity of indiscernibles. His calculus, monadology, and relational approach flow from mandates of absolute logical coherence and ontological possibility, as opposed to the incoherent classical frameworks generating intractable paradoxes.

In fields as diverse as non-standard analysis, quantum information theories, category-theoretic unification models, pluralistic geometries, and metaphysics of mind/consciousness, modern research is uncovering deep unifying resonances with the relational monadological worldview Leibniz originally envisaged as a remedy to Cartesian-Newtonian incoherence.

By centering zero/monadic elements as ontological primitives, their pre-geometric pluralistic interactions become the locus for deriving extended, entangled quantized phenomena that stymied classical geometric approaches. The truly relational neo-monadological paradigm emerging has the potential to provide the non-contradictory coherent foundations integrating physics, mathematics, and philosophies of mind into a unified, possibility-realizing architecture.

While much work remains, the rediscovery of Leibniz's rationalist anti-materialist framework seems increasingly compelling from diverse theoretical and empirical fronts. His vision may finally fulfill its promise as the coherent pluralistic metaphysics supplanting the now self-undermining materialist/empiricist tradition stemming from Descartes and Newton. A monadological renaissance could catalyze a new era of unified, non-contradictory, possibility-based model-building - resurrecting the hopes of physicists, mathematicians and philosophers working at the frontiers.

[scrollop]

Where are the full conversations? these four-minute teasers are but a glimpse!

[patientson]

Oga Sir, Robert, it is you that need the workout and believe to do your part on a daily basis. We all live in consciousness. You have to actively seek it just like you ask a question requesting an answer from another.

[srhawk]

at mark 3:25 he says 'you couldn't be in both places...' How about quantum superposition?

[nypala]

Consciousness ≠ mind. It's baffling to see so many scientists not being able to tell them apart.

[enigma]

Maybe consciousness and biology happen and can happen but it isn't necessary or indeed exclusively needed for consciousness to exist. Maybe the biology is a suitable medium to house consciousness but once said medium has expired consciousness can exist and move on without the medium it inhabited.

[richardharvey]

Hi Closer To Truth, it seems to me that so much here depends on an exact definition of consciousness, this requires the establishment of reliable material parameters that are not themselves reliant on human awareness, in much the same manner as we assume that things like heat and light and mass exist in consistent forms in a material reality. It is only in this manner that permits the identification of the consciousness and isolation of non-consciousness that any progress can be made, the implication of this is that as of now all that we can do is speculate!, all and any ideas might be true but we have no way of testing any of them.
Cheers, Richard.

[MarkThomas-hmju]

Besides brains there exists "neural networks" in Nature an example being mycelium organisms in forest ecosystems. There is a symbiotic relationship that was established between fungal organisms and trees. Maybe neural networks exist on other planets that we don't look for. Maybe a neural network is required for consciousness or self awareness. Theories of consciousness are like trying to nail jelly to a wall.

[tomazflegar]

It doesn't matter if it is biological. The problem is in category. One is tangible, non subjective and the other non tangible and subjective

[jamesruscheinski]

could an energy spike in neuron produce objective reduction?

[glassjester]

"I'm gonna program a video game character to act just like me, and then when I die I'll magically *become* that character." Yeah, ok. lol

[miguelrosado]

I believe that for an entity to be conscious it must have the capability of sensing and processing sensory information. I don’t think the universe can sense a part of itself and think “it is too hot here, let me balance the temperature”.
Eventually human made entities will develop consciousness once they are provided with the capability to get a sense of self. We might have to define machine consciousness in an arbitrary way to categorize certain levels of capabilities, but I believe we should choose other terms to define those capabilities.

[thumptank]

A lot of commenters on this video would benefit from a refresher on the "scientific method"


Seeing a lot of bold assertions based on personal bias, with no evidence.


Please stop bringing down our collective IQ

[bjarterundereim]

How can you - HOW can you - duplicate what you really do not know the nature of??
Everybody and his neighbor discusses consciousness - as if there is a fundamental consensus of what it is.
What is it? Anyone??
Possible containers; possible routes for it in the world - but what and where is the content??

[tedgrant]

Every philosopher starts life as a single biological cell.
A single cell is not able to do philosophy !
The ability obviously grows.

[swamybk]

Out of Consciousness everything, everything is expressed and evolved.
Without Consciousness nothing can exist.
Like in clay elephant, though elephant is made out of the properties, Consciousness is clay.

[ofthesonsoflight]

Yes consciousness can be non biological, everything however created is or was a living thing at one instance consciousness can be preserved in objects