Stuart Kauffman - How Free Will Probes Mind and Consciousness

Can free will reveal the nature of mental states? Free will seems so obvious, yet defies physical explanation. That’s the reason why free will can be a tool to explore the mind. Free will probes consciousness by examining what it means to pick, choose, select, decide in the closed physical system of the world. But is ‘free will’ just a trick of the brain?

Stuart Alan Kauffman is a medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He is a former professor at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Calgary.

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.

[Paraselene_Tao]

This is possibly the closest & fullest explanation to how consciousness works in the brain-body that I've ever heard. If he's right, then we're perhaps a few important research papers away from understanding consciousness in an empirical manner. What a great clip from this show.

[wattshumphrey]

KABOOM!

By far the most coherent speculative scientific hypothesis of what "consciousness is" that I've heard, here or elsewhere.

And refreshing - someone with a genuinely scientific approach: clear about what he knows and doesn't, proposing ideas with testable elements, etc.


Bit of a disconnected topic, but -- if recent "UAP" reports are as verified as they appear, we have strong evidence, if not proof, that our current physics is not anywhere near complete (visually observable objects which appear on standard sensors and move with effectively zero mass/infinite acceleration, and then vanish entirely).

A huge dose of humility is called for.

[futures]

I wish I understood even 1 percent of this

[patientson]

I will download this video and rigorously find the meaning of every word and add that to my living thought process. I am glad I listened to this completely to the extent where I am thinking of watching 46 more times. Sir, 72 years, you are still young and I strongly believe in you more than I believe in most people younger than yourself.

[williamcallahan]

As Rupert Spira says... "Only consciousness is conscious" . "We don't have consciousness, consciousness has us".

[saeiddavatolhagh]

The association between quantum measurement and consciousness is very appealing. But then one has to assume that everything around us must be conscious at some level.

[earthjustice]

The problem is in identifying brain with mind. Identifying contents of mind can only be done by referring to other contents of the mind. It is internal to the mind. Mind is roughly: perceptions, memories, and imagination. The relations between the mind's contents are not causal relations they are psychological associations. Experience is private, whereas observations of things, like the dissection of neurons or the recording of an MRI scan are publicly verifiable causal processes. Mind is really our way of understanding our social world which, of course, includes ourselves. It is a kind of understanding not a thing or a physical process. This understanding projects from memories of events to imagined predictions and conjectures about the people we live with and the places we live in. Most of what we think about is conjectures and predictions about things, people, and events that are not now present, but that either we experienced in the past or that we anticipate happening in the future. The fact that we are often thinking about things not immediately present means we our using our imaginations rather than our sense organs which implies a kind of internalized way of understanding things, just as dreams are a completely internalized experience, disconnected from the majority of sensations, and mostly associated with day-to-day memories. The mind is a kind of understanding, as opposed to our understanding of the natural world and its causal processes, which is mainly about empathizing with others, imagining ourselves in someone else's place, and utilizes metaphor, more than it utilizes causality. One could say that understanding the natural world is derivative from using our minds to understand our social world, which would explain why the first attempts to understand the world were all anthropomorphic, they were projecting human emotional traits onto natural processes like the weather.

[TheDeepening]

The total number of actions that any human in history has taken that wasn't rooted in a DESIRE stands at 0. Action is rooted in DESIRE as it states in the opening of the Upanishads: "You are your inmost DESIRE." An investigation into "Who did it?" is an investigation into the ORIGIN OF MY DESIRES!

[Great_WOK_Must_Be_Done]

"That's why a lot of people say the mind's an illusion."
"They're nuts. My mind isn't an illusion."

[Bassotronics]

There is no bigger irony than the brain trying to understand its own brain processes.

[gokhanqurnaz]

I would like to watch such a beautiful channel with Turkish subtitles.

[TracyWitham]

"The causal closure of classical mechanics" can be broken by an organism that can learn in accordance with adaptive principles: A new way of responding to stimuli introduces new causal actions into the world, actions that cannot be accounted for using information that precedes the new learned behavior/response/adaptation.

[quantumkath]

Stuart Alan Kauffman: That's what I was going to say! 😊 That's why you are in my top ten!

[wayneasiam]

A long argument, yet quite believable.

[juanfranciscogonzalez]

Hola. Felicitaciones o congratulation por tu búsqueda. Un aporte NO olvidar que el EPR fenómeno y entrelazamiento es media por fuerza ELECTROMAGNETICAS y la partícula es el FOTON. UN ABRAZO. DVM JFG Chile

[playpaltalk]

My mind and my tiny🧠are like my soul and my spirit fueling my Consciousness .

[thomassoliton]

The arguments in this dicussion regardng conscious are based on the premise that conscious involves decisions: that is, choices, and hence “free will” to make some decision based on available information. That’s not how the brain works. The brain process information and converts it to patterns that are stored in memory - words for example. Those patterns can be associated by processes that take place in dreaming as well as daily experience. But the fundamental aspect of consciousness is not a decision, but a comparison. Awareness of some bit of information triggers recall of another pattern and a “thought” emerges consisting of both patterns and other related patterns that lead not to a decision but to an action. No quantum measurement decoherence is involved. “Mind / Body” is a perfect example of how the brain is constrained to deal with comparisons. Dualism is a false-flag created by the brain to deal with information from different perspectives. Are you conscious now? How do you know? Because you were conscious a minute ago. But that state no longer exists! How does your brain deal with that? It invents “consciousness”.

[marvinedwards]

Consciousness is a physical process running upon the neural infrastructure. Because it is physical, it is already connected to everything it needs to make changes in the physical world, like opening a car door or pouring a cup of coffee. A small signal in the brain tissue is amplified by the muscle tissue. And that is how consciouness interacts with the physical world. Right now it is telling me that I just wasted 15 minutes listening to a bit of nonsense.

[paulwary]

Why isnt it enough for a deterministic algorithm running in our brain to simply call upon some quantum or chaotic process to generate random alternatives? Then it can evaluate the options so generated. (PS Ive been looking for videos like this since watching Sabine H's 'debunking' of free will, which I cannot agree with.) Even if those processes are only 'pseudo'-random and deterministic, with ~10^23 atoms involved, the distinction seems moot to me. In other words a chaotic process could give you a 'full' range of options for behaviour.

[brothermine]

Descartes erred by assuming "thinking" is on the same side of the mind-body divide as conscious experiencing of mental qualia. If instead we assume (1) thinking is a brain activity (analogous to computer processing) and (2) conscious awareness experiences the brain's thinking but doesn't in any way influence thinking, then the mystery of consciousness is less complex: the Hard Problem (as Chalmers described) only requires materialistic neuroscientists to explain #2: the conscious (passive) experiencing of (some) brain activities.
Although it would appear to a consciousness passively experiencing aspects of the brain's thinking process that the consciousness itself is the source of the thinking and isn't passive, that appearance is an illusion.
The experiencing, though, is not an illusion. I know by introspection that I am experiencing qualia (and that's the only fact I can be certain about). I presume you too are experiencing qualia, because everyone I meet appears to be constructed like I am. So, explaining conscious experiencing of qualia is the Hard Problem, because it's not an illusion.
I don't understand why Kauffman thinks lack of free will is a problem that must be solved by showing will is free. If moral philosophers' problem is to justify society holding people accountable for bad behavior, it can be justified without believing in free will, because accountability causes a deterrent effect: If someone's brain expects s/he will be held accountable, the brain will induce better behavior, and fewer people will be victimized.