Episode #179 - Why is consciousness something worth talking about?

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[AndreHeinemann]

Since you mentioned it, yes, I have actually listened to all 179 episodes. Some I have listened to more than once. Thank you for your awesome work!

[jackiez]

i have also listened to every single episodes and some more than once. absolutely my favorite podcast ever.

[marianpekar]

There is a "zombie" that matches the description in that thought experiment. It's my reflection in a mirror. It looks like me, does and reacts to everything as I do, yet does not have a conciousness of its own.
Btw thank you for making this show, I've so far listened to around 40 episodes and it really brings a lot of joy to my life.

[HEROFrogman]

This dude has awakened my passion for philosophy and I will be ever thankful for this. Thank you my dear creator <3

[pjaworek]

Thank you universe for the few problems and relative bliss, and these videos!

[Hobnobble]

I appreciate you putting these up on youtube. I enjoy having the sub-titles even though i dont necessarily read them at every moment.

[austinwyant]

Glad to see you’re still working on these! Used to listen to this podcast years ago in college. I’ve got some catching up to do.

[michaeldao]

The book 'the hidden spring' has some great insight into this

[chemquests]

The description of the society utilizing a consciousness hierarchy describes our society pretty well. Good job; very insightful approach

[Abi_]

I've been listening to philosophise this on Spotify for a couple of years and am always eagerly awaiting the next episode. I didnt know they were available earlier on here (Spotify is still showing ep #178 two weeks after #179 was released on YouTube). Now I know, I'll come here first!

[LukePalmer]

Also I'm super interested in panpsychism and I'm excited that you're doing an episode on it!!

[chrishu-zcfj]

Notes for this video, btw I think it would be really helpful if either some citations are made for further reading or just in general giving us some keywords for us to look more into this topic cause obv a 30 min video can't cover the nuance of the concept:
Why is consciousness something worth talking about?

Why do we study consciousness in philosophy? Is consciousness in Science not enough?
Science gives us empirical data and tells us what the world is, but philosophy tells us how to interpret that reality.

Access and phenomenal consciousness. The former is the area of our conscious experience that allows us to access information from the external world that is then used by our cognitive systems. People also call the latter as qualia. They are the individual, subjective qualities or properties of conscious experiences. These are the "what it's like" aspects of our mental states. For example, the redness of an apple, the taste of chocolate, the feeling of warmth, or the sensation of pain all have distinct qualia associated with them. Qualia are the unique, intrinsic qualities that make each conscious experience different.
Philosophers think neuroscience can never explain the correlates of parts of the brain that give rise to these experiences.
How do we have subjective experiences that are not themselves physical but they seem to arise from purely physical states of matter in the brain

Thought Experiment:
Imagine somebody standing next to you that from the outside appears to be an exact copy of you. This copy behaves exactly as you'd behave. It reacts to everything exactly how you'd react but it doesn't have internal subjective experience. We call this a zombie.
Do you think that the existence of something like this zombie is possible? Is it possible for something to look entirely conscious from an outside perspective but not actually be feeling anything like we feel in a phenomenal stream of consciousness where it feels like something to be me.

The implication is that we don't know at what point animals or AI need to be given certain moral protections. From a moral perspective what we're trying to protect is that subjective experience of being a thing that is in conscious torment something's going on against our will. We don't want other conscious beings to have to go through it either.

There was a monkey experiment where scientists removed a monkey’s visual cortex, but the monkey was still able to dodge obstacles as if it were still able to visually see objects. There are two main pathways where the eyes connect to the brain one of them the usual one we think about goes up to the cortex which the monkey had removed and the other is an ancient one that's descended from the visual system system used by fish frogs and reptiles. This is also why we too process information based on instincts and intuition that are not immediately conscious to us. This is an example that proves how animals can appear to act consciousness from the outside but don’t necessarily have to be for their evolution to take place.
Oftentimes we project our human experience onto animals like monkeys, presuming it has all the inner subjective experiences we have.

This affects discussions of abortion where then it’s not where life begins but where phenomenal Consciousness begins.

[LukePalmer]

The hypothetical world you described with a hierarchy of consciousness bears a lot of similarity, materially speaking, to this one

[areagray]

Thank you Stephen. Could be interesting to consider Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism.

[LittleMushroomGuy]

Looking forward to episode 180 about embodied cognition :)

[rajith.d.fernando]

Thanks man for another great video on another great topic. I personally find Canadian philosopher/theologian Bernard Lonergan's theory of consciousness with its four levels (attention, intelligence, reason, responsibility) fascinating. His interpreters add "being in love" as a fifth state of consciousness or the "apex of the soul" as medieval philosophers used to call it. I wonder if AI's, even if they become self-conscious, would be capable of human feelings of love and altruism.

[santacruzman]

Fascinating content. Thank you for this.

For those interested in this subject, I would recommend checking our Bernardo Kastrup's theory of analytic idealism which elegantly resolves the hard problem of consciousness as long as you buy into the idea that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality.

[stanleyklein]

The question is its own answer. OMG!!!

[tewtravelers]

We form the model of a brain using the mind. Mind is all we know. Full stop.

[wyattrydlewski]

These ideas are what solidified veganism as the right way to live for me a few years ago. Panpsychism is an interesting thought. If panpsychism holds water in reality, I hope that suffering is not a universal concious experience.