The Mind-Body Problem

How do we experience the world? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? Can cognitive science explain the subjective nature of human experience? Philosophers have grappled with these questions for centuries - and we'll explore them in this video.

0:00 - Intro
2:41 - The grounding problem
5:39 - The mind-body problem
11:06 - Qualia
13:29 - What it's like to be a bat
15:22 - The subjective-objective divide
17:24 - Functionalism and qualia
19:55 - Mary's Room
23:22 - Wrapping up
25:46 - Key concepts

Sources:

[ChikliChikliCha]

Your videos are very well made. You summarise these key ideas concisely and brilliantly. Thank you for that!

[AlisSpark]

In regards to Mary's room I think we can by now almost confidently say that she will have learned something. I'm saying this because there's been glasses called "enchroma glasses" for people who have been born with various forms of color blindness to make them capable of seeing colors more properly and there is a plethora of massive emotional reactions to colorblind people with huge emotional outbursts, tearing up and other things (check on youtube "colorblind people see color for the first time").
Now obviously unlike with Mary's room these people do not know everything there is to know about colors, but a bunch of them think they know really enough about colors and they don't even expect to "learn" anything new really or what the fuzz is about right until they have experienced the act of seeing the colors more nuanced. And most colorblind people actually are not monochromats, they do not see the world in black and white like in Mary's room, yet still the reaction to seeing the colors more properly is tremendous. Stern and hardened men breaking into tears from the very act of experiencing these colors for the first time. There is such a vast amount of people who have had such reactions to color that it seems to be a universally shared experience to be deeply touched and strongly emotionally moved simply by the initial act of moving from colorblindness to experiencing more color. A really interesting part about this is that the enchroma glasses do literally quite nothing to the chemistry of the brain, it's really just the switch to a more nuanced experience while wearing those glasses. It's not quite Mary's room but probably as close to it as we can get in the real world.

[hittman]

15:40 I think you nailed the AI one right here. Just not sure how you can program empirical data into a “mind” and then it develops subjective experience.

I feel humans have become enlightened enough to access this “thing in itself” dimension/substrate which we can’t prove exists, but gives rise to complex abstracts like consciousness.

[timothyjohnson]

When you say "Qualia", it also makes me think you are just describing phenomenology which is "subjectivity for objectivity". Now I'm not sure about AI or computers having consciousness, but phenomenology is a very real thing. I was also curious if you ever looked into the left-brain right-brain dichotomy or had any videos on that? This video reminds me of that as well. Very well made video for the pseudointellectual that I am!

[bigtexnick]

great video. love this topic. glad i found your channel!

[nitishgautam]

22:26 obviously it's true that experience exists ontologically subjective but I don't understand the differentiating line between physicalism and dualism . There are scientist who don't deny it but say because of brain processes the subjective experiences emerges. They just have different mode of existence

[bielr]

I think that the feeling of a new experience is related to us aqcuaring a model about that experience and making predictions about that experience. If the computer is not programmed to acquire a model of you, it is not experiencing.

[devonashwa]

there is way more to this problem than i can even explain, and is not fully captured in this video. i need answers and its killing me

[petersimon]

I think that a part of experiencing things comes from survival instinct. Do machines have survival instinct?, we can program a machine to mimic it but it can't experience it (just like the concept of qualia). We humans can experience fear, happiness, anger, sadness etc. which contributes to the survival of the species as a whole.

your videos are really great.

[gavinwince]

Q: Can an animated character experience consciousness? If not, then neither can a computer. Both animated characters and computers are created to mimic - which is not authentic.

[wolfgangstegemann]

Does the mind-body problem really exist?
If you look at the brain as a physiologist, you will describe the work of neurons, using the terminology of biology for this. If you describe the same brain with the terms of philosophy, you speak of consciousness. Both are different descriptions from different perspectives. But each time it's about one and the same brain. So it's not a real difference, but a linguistic one. And this linguistic difference makes us believe that we are dealing with two different entities. How do you arrive at this erroneous assumption? It is this deep-rooted dualism that has haunted us for two and a half thousand years. And so we then establish a causality between the two modes of description, which culminates in the question: How does spirit arise from matter. The absurdity of this question only becomes clear when one looks at another object, e.g. a car. It would never occur to anyone to see a causal relationship between the technology and the design of a car, i.e. how engine performance determines the color scheme of the car. With the brain, however, both perspectives are played off against each other. Why? Because on the one hand you have an organism of flesh and blood that can think on the other. In other words: an organism on the one hand and its excitability by nerves on the other, which have developed spatial and temporal abilities through centralization, which we call logical-abstract thinking in connection with language and which span a subjective space of experience.* And these two perspectives seem too different for us to easily consider them as one and the same. It is this phantasmagoria that presents our mind as something godlike and not as an organism that orients itself in the world and experiences it. Conclusion: the body-soul problem is a bogus problem and is based on a category error. But who wants to hear that? In the future, it will be better to continue wallowing in the philosophy of mind.
* At this point, the mantra-like question usually arises, yes, how consciousness actually arises, and this ultimately means how it arises from inanimate matter. There is no ontological answer to this question. It is comparable to the question of how (better: why) a universe could come into being. They can only be answered surgically, for example as a result of the activity of nerves. But that's not enough for most of the relevant questioners.

[quicknumbercrunch]

You started poorly but otherwise a good presentation. Light does not enter the eyes and go to the brain. It is important to reinforce that nothing but blood, neurons, cerebral spinal fluid enter and exit the brain.

[muks]

I'm a sort of a physicist..i stopped watching ur vid midway...plz don't use the word Physics and related...it makes the use of formal logic about what u say impossible! basis your ignorance of Physics! and as u started I found ur homunculus stuff trivial, and intuitive (or common sensical) and all about the rest ie this vid and everything unwatched by me about the topic, I can categorically say nobody till date knows anything about all those with a level of certainty...I also heard u mentioning freewill...that can be somewhat dealt with in physics but highly debatable with the advanced know how (of physics) and formal logic...but definitely nothing can be done with for not having any statistically significant consensus about mind and consciousness...and plz don't talk about AI...anybody with advanced knowledge of tech will think u r kinda illiterate outside these trivial things u r talking about....

[tatoplaz]

thank you for your videos man, you're doing an excellent job!