Simon Blackburn - What is Consciousness?

What is consciousness? Consciousness is what we can know best and explain least. It is the inner subjective experience of what it feels like to see red or smell garlic or hear Beethoven. Consciousness has intrigued and baffled philosophers. To begin, we must define and describe consciousness. What to include in a complete definition and description of consciousness?

[jsuth]

I understand this is brief but his dismissal of the hard problem doesn't really capture what Chalmers is pointing to.

[cubefox]

His argument about memory is not sufficient. Of course we could be wrong about having been conscious five minutes ago, because our memory could be misleading. But we can't be wrong about being conscious now. So his argument about consciousness being less than certain fails.

[HimanshuSharma-oyss]

One possible answer to what consciousness is or rather it's presence is to learn to differentiate between what is creating your thoughts from what is listening to those lucid thoughts. The moment 'you' are able to separate yourself from thinking which is nothing but a manifestation of matter ( Neural activity in the brain) you'll be left with an identity void. It is then one realizes that consciousness is a completely abstract and separate faculty of human experience which cannot solely originate through neural activity.
On the other hand Consciousness can simply be the ability to detect changes in the environment in relation to body (self), which immediately, takes the fun out of it and makes it a ubiquitous phenomenon that occurs throughout the tree of life.
It may not be as special or worthwhile to define as we think. We might be looking at it through an overly complicated lens.

Finally as Dr.Simon said, it looks like an intractable problem of philosophy and psychology.

[stewartquark]

very easy to explain but difficult to separate oneself from traditional beliefs in order to understand it....

[xspotbox]

It's easy to forget body doesn't need to be self aware in it's entirety, most creatures survive with only vague sense of their own body shape and features. So there's a clear disconnection between material substance, spiritual sensation and self aware narrative. There are many layers of awareness that function like a flow of energy, constantly stacking and replacing body molecules. Consciousness can somehow coexist on a top of this life energy flow and create sense of virtual pilot. It's easy for us to behave because we are all used to biological, physical and social routines, so mind can jump to it's favorite third perspective and create virtual copy of the world when it can. We can seat inside a room full of people and listen to the man talking on stage, body will perceive this situation as biological reality, but mind can wonder in it's own replica of reality and think about something completely different or visualize event in a certain imaginary, augmented way. It's because everything is a flow, but consciousness must maintain film strip order of events, stacking meaningful forms in a predictable pattern. It's like we must start illusion with some basic elements, organic senses demand perception of air, geometry of space, ground, heat, aggregate states, ... or imaginary replica of the world wouldn't function as a realistic thought environment. There are things body will dream on it's own, no matter how consciousness perceive situation, it can also modify certain sensations after mental virtualization is complete and stable enough for deeper, more diverse and complex field of conscious thoughts. Movie strip like sense of reality can melt very quickly once person let go of unconscious sensations during certain forms of mediation, if mind can't grapple on any symbol it will fall a sleep, consciousness can't function like an abstract fractal flow on itself.

[Gabriel-chsx]

Please, interview neuroscientist Dr. Miguel Nicolelis. He's come up with a really interesting theory about consciousness that involves neural electromagnetic fields. He discussed his theory (alongside with matematician Ronald Cicurel) in the book "The Relativistic Brain: How It Works and Why It Cannot Be Simulated by a Turing Machine" as well as in his upcoming book "The True Creator of Everything: How the Human Brain Shaped the Universe as We Know It".

[Paulus_Brent]

I don't see in what sense the argument of Wittgenstein explains anything? Why on earth should the memory of past consciousness argument make any difference in understanding the hard problem of consciousness? Keep repeating that the hard problem is no problem won't make it disappear.

[saiedkoosha]

Not only did he dismiss any definition of consciousness, but also he was not clear in describing an issue with the definition by others. Simon usually speaks clearly but not in this one. Perhaps another indication for the fact that consciousness truly is a “hard problem”.

Admitting doubt when one doesn’t really know is a virtue, if not imperative, for a philosopher. Simon’s answer was far from this.

[jeffrourke]

He doesn’t even try to answer the question. It just points toward the difficulty of the endeavor. We are animated by *something* that we cannot quantity in empirical terms. Where does that leave us? Nowhere fruitful, if you believe that scientific reductionism is the only way to obtain real knowledge.

[reenatai]

He's ok but the previous vedio was better

[jameshudson]

they never seem to come close to explaining consciousness.

[J]

Why would I - in any mood - want to laugh at anothers misfortune?

[RalphDratman]

Like Mr. Blackburn, I have pitched my tent in the philosophical camp of Wittgenstein. So I agree that the supposed "hard problem" of consciousness is a red herring, a sidetrack, a mistake. Our "certain feeling" of awareness is interesting and worthy of discussion, but its existence does not create a problem from the point of view of natural science. If a robot were to say, "I am aware of that table, " the utterance might give me an eerie feeling because of the way it was expressed, but I would not panic and claim that the robot must therefore suddenly, unexpectedly be in possession of a self. There is no ghost in the artificial intelligence.