John Searle - Solutions to the Mind-Body Problem?

What's the relationship between our brains and our consciousness, between the physical stuff in our skulls and the mental experiences in our minds?

[caricue]

I really liked the first exchange where both men acknowledged that they really don't know what the ultimate answer really is. This is how science is supposed to work.

[whoami]

I bought a separate amp so I could hear the whispers of this conversation.

[fearitselfpinball]

I love the idea he closes with. I think people get mixed up about ‘illusions’ and consciousness and sometimes they’re thinking (vaguely) about philosophy of perception: My mind represents something (the colour red, for example), to me in direct experience—but is it anything like what red is really like ‘out there’ and objectively? Is it a match? (If not the perception may be ‘illusory’).

That’s true in one sense—in the sense that it may not be accurately representative… but the situation (with consciousness) is more like a first year art class in which multiple students of various levels of skill have sketched a painting of the sitter. You can look at each canvas and ask if it is representative. Yet though every canvas you inspect is not equally representative all are equally real… there they are before you presenting… something (even the one’s that have distorted the sitter beyond any likeness are just the same a real painting). Unequally representative—Equally real.

I would paraphrase Searl’s closing idea by saying that all that is required for consciousness to be real is that there is a way things seem to be (irrespective of whether it represents anything exterior to itself with accuracy or not).

[rfvtgbzhn]

6:45 I think if 2 brains have exactly the same material structure including the states of ever single particle in it, they also have the same "inner experience". Everything else would be ridiculous because it would imply that the mind at least partially exists outside the material world. I think dualism can't be explained without ridiculous assumption so I am a strict materialist.

[hnikudr]

Sorry for mentioning this again (I'm just assuming it has been mentioned a million times before), but can you PLEASE adjust the volume of your videos to something that doesn't require me to turn up my speakers to eleven? I'm asking because I just watched three CTT videos in a row (all great by the way, up-thumbed them all, like any gentleman would), before thoughtlessly moving on to a fourth, which happened to start with a pretty loud and pretty obnoxious-sounding intro (looking at you, The Jimquisition). I believe I permanently damaged not only my hearing, but also my dog's, my girlfriend's (she was sleeping in the next room and is since awake, but unresponsive) and my closest neighbor's hearings. So, please. It can't be all that difficult.

[whoami]

I mean, what if “matter” isn’t really matter at all? Why do we assume it’s just dead “stuff” that has no teleology? I find myself being repelled both by all dualism and all materialism, and yet I still believe there is a distinction to be made between my mind and my body. Sure they’re intertwined, but I really don’t think they could be identical.

[ThinkHuman]

Great and insightful videos, and awesome channel!

[vielbosheit]

I have my volume at MAX and I cannot hear the conversation. Come on, guys....

[vinm]

3:40 "What it feels like to be a
Jack London "Call of the Wild" hit the nail on the head.

[unerror]

Yeah, I have pondered about how it'd feel like to be a bat. After all, they are mammalian animals, even though they use sonar instead of eyes it's connected to the visual centers of their brains and I have done paragliding sometimes so I can imagine what it could feel like to fly...

But have you ever pondered about what it could feel like to be Windows 98, running on an x86 processor and 128MB of SD-RAM? I wonder, does it feel anything to be an operating system?

[unerror]

I have a counter-argument for the Chinese room thought experiment. Yes, of course, John Searle himself sitting in the room, mindlessly shuffling around papers according to the rulebook doesn't have the slightest understanding of Chinese - but the room itself evidently does!

Yes, the rulebook (and the room) might be just a shallow but successful agent of particular type of language task, like some of these novel deep learning systems. Those systems may very well converse with you, initially convince you that they 'know' what they're talking about, and when pushed they might use rather sophisticated rhetoric to hide the fact that they have no 'real' understanding of the topics.

But if you continue to push them, sooner or later you will realize how 'deep' their understanding of the human condition really goes - e.g. when you are talking about the Red-ness of things, how it feels to perceive the color Red, does it seem like it has the feeling of the importance of Red in its relations to the redness of a woman's lips or cheeks, redness of a ripe fruit, redness of the setting or rising sun, redness of blood and meat, redness of the Chinese flag?

In the end, in order for the rulebook to cover all the common sense humans seem so competent in demonstrating, it really needs to have the mechanisms to represent and process that common sense. If the rulebook and the memory processed by that rulebook isn't able to achieve our common sense of size and distance of everyday objects, our basic sense of perspective - no matter how clever it looks at first sight - it will inevitably make very dumb mistakes and give itself away. Conversely, if it indeed answers many of your questions like "I have a picture and on the picture are a truck and a glass of water, which seems to have the same size, so which one of them do you think is farther away from the camera?"; then it'd be safe to assume that it really has an understanding of our everyday geometry and how pictures are taken.

Now, it wouldn't be John Searle laboring in the room who has the understanding, nor the rulebook by itself; the understanding is achieved by the Chinese room - sum of all its parts working together. Just like it isn't our individual neurons or brain regions having our understanding of the world and ourselves, but all of it combined.

Obviously, this doesn't exactly refute the Qualia aspect of the Chinese room argument - we still can't be sure whether this room would have some sensation of conversing with you on top of its understanding, of its awareness of the conversation.

Finally, the most important reason this Chinese room isn't a fair comparison against a human is because almost the entirety of the Qualia phenomenon is predicated upon our senses. Without the memories of what we see, what we hear, what we touch, what we smell, what we taste, how can one have a sensation of eating a red juicy ripe apple? Without the memories of the feeling of acceleration from within our bodies, without the nerves connected to our muscles, how can we ever conceive how it feels to lay down, to grasp a tennis ball, to walk, to go on a roller-coaster ride? However the entire sensorimotor experience of the Chinese room is input and output text! If you would cut all the sensorimotor nerves to a human brain from birth, and leave only one input and one output nerve fiber to communicate with morse code, could it have any understanding, could it have any sensation as we do?

[jamesruscheinski]

Could energy provide inner experience of qualia / mind in the human brain? Can the human brain process energy, such that feeling or emotion is produced, like the processing of physical information produces an image or noise?

[davesorrell]

This was a great conversation. The sound was a bit muted on the video.

[jamesruscheinski]

can quantum produce qualia in brain for human consciousness?

[jamesruscheinski]

maybe physical brain recoheres into quantum through gravity? how might gravity recohere quantum in physical brain?

[KenshoBeats]

I doubt the zombie argument will hold in light of Husserl's theory of consciousness, and ones who followed it. Soulless maybe, but it's intentionality and directedness, toward me or humans, they always seem directed 'towards' the human prey, seems to make them at least conscious. Then again, maybe that's just zombie-instinct, it being dead and all..

[Navak_]

If "all conscious states are caused by physical brain states" then HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO TALK ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS?

When I DESCRIBE my conscious experience, my conscious experience is the CAUSE of that description. I saw something red, my brain processed it as red, I had a conscious experience of seeing red, and then that conscious experience is translated into words in my brain, which causes my mouth to move.

Therefore CONSCIOUS STATES CAN CAUSE PHYSICAL STATES. I DON'T LIKE THIS CONCLUSION BUT I CAN'T SEE ANY WAY OUT OF IT. HELP.

[stevenhunter]

It seems that Searle isn't so much arguing against materialism as he is against certain conclusions drawn by some materialists. He admits that consciousness is caused by brain function, so he must be, in some sense, a materialist. He just objects (and I think justifiably so) to certain explanatory models of consciousness proposed by some materialist philosophers and perhaps psychologists.

[JohnDoe-nmhs]

The example about the person experiencing colour for the first time does not explain what it's supposed to explain. Of course she hasn't "experienced" the colour red until she leaves the room, because explaining the colour red in a language isn't the same thing as seeing it! When you see the colour red then your brain forms certain neural patterns that create an image in your brain of that colour, there is no way to "explain" the image to someone who hasn't seen it before because our means of communication (spoken or written word) isn't qualified to create the image in our brain. But that's simply a limitation of our form of communication, it proves nothing about consciousness.

Imagine this, the girl in the dark room has never seen the colour red, but a futuristic alien sends a signal into her brain that changes some of the neural pathways in her brain to exactly resemble the neural pathways which cause the colour red to appear in its brain when it sees the colour red. Now she will be able to imagine the colour red as the alien sees it, without ever having physically seen the colour red for herself. There is no reason to believe that this won't work, and in the not so distant future we will likely be able to test this by injecting thoughts and feelings into our own brains with future technology that can manipulate neural networks.

You scan the brain of a test subject when it thinks of something it has seen (like a certain colour), then we copy the neural pattern which causes that thought and create the same pattern in the brain of another test subject, and now both have the same experience in their mind. Why would this not work?

When you think about the colour red then the neurons in certain parts of your brain behave in a certain way, we know this today from brain scans. If you reproduce this effect in another brain then there is every reason to believe that person will remember the same colour red, without ever having physically seen the colour red using their eyes.

[mr.knownothing]

She wouldn’t be able to see the rose if she was in darkness her whole life. She has to learn to see as the brain develops. David Eagleman talks about this in his books. It’s all physical and the physical experience of the brain and it’s development with the environment