Galen Strawson - How Brain Makes Mind?

What must the brain do to generate the mind? The mind consists of sensations, thoughts, cogitations, intentions, feelings—the felt inner experiences that constitute what we are. How are these capacities or mental qualities produced by the three pounds of warm wet tissues in our skulls? This is science's toughest problem.



Galen Strawson holds the President's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Liberal Arts. He studied at the University of Cambridge before receiving his BPhil and DPhil in philosophy from the University of Oxford.


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.

[thehistoryprof]

The more I learn or think I learn the more I'm convinced of my abundant ignorance. Based on human history and scientific growth I don't believe in the supernatural either, but I remain agnostic, not an atheist...this is the most intellectually honest position for me and leaves me endless opportunity to consider other positions as science replaces better science supplemented with growth in every other discipline. Love this whole series. Thank you.

[dabonemarrow]

Tough question!! Very smart man!! Thanks

[Paul_Marek]

Loved this one. You can’t deny the experience and that the nature of the brain is to produce experience. Not much of a further leap to go to; the nature of the universe is to experience itself.

[JamyRyals]

Excellent back and forth on this interview!

[TheTroofSayer]

Much the same question was asked of Christof Koch, a couple of days ago: What do brains do? I know what they don't do... they don't compute, they're not computers.

Every neural-plastic brain does exactly what every human-plastic city does.

Just as a modern city self-organizes into its functional specialisations, so too, does a brain. In a modern city, the mechanism that connects all the experiences of every human is the telecommunications network (internet, tv, media, etc). This network, in effect, provides every human with IMMEDIATE access to collective knowledge, and based on that knowledge, we structure our lives, we form into our divisions of labor, and self-organize into the city's functional specializations. And this provides the city with city-level "thoughts" (fashion, values, traditions, language, technology, armies, etc) that enable the city to function as if it were an agent making its own choices.

Just as every city-dwelling human's life is characterized by the motivations, associations and habits that define their being (CS Peirce), so too, is every brain-dwelling neuron's life (see Erik Kandel's research on Aplysia and associative learning). Neurons (and glia) have activity specializations just as humans have career/life/gender specializations. Some neurons in the visual cortex specialize in movement detection, others in vertical/horizontal distinctions, others in color recognition, etc. And it is the collective neurons (brain) that integrates all these specialized experiences into the collective context, or meaning. For this, my conjecture is that DNA entanglement is essential (correlations between separated neural networks have been experimentally demonstrated, e.g., Pizzi et al, 2004, "Nonlocal correlations between separated neural networks").

The brain is NOT a computer, nothing like one. The computer metaphor provides no solution that might shed light on the nature of consciousness. Our brain-city metaphor, however, provides solutions to: the mind-body problem, the binding problem, the entropy problem. Bodies (the experiences intercepted by bodies) wire neuroplastic brains (Norman Doidge was a pioneer of this insight).

In principle, none of this should be new to many of us - systems theory, autopoiesis, complex adaptive systems, etc, we've heard it all before. What is different this time, however, is the suggestion that meaning (semiotics) is the driver, not emergence in the material-mathematical sense. Motivation, association and habituation relate to the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and the biosemiotics of Jakob von Uexküll.

[MrSanford]

I think if consciousness is purely material that would mean that all abstractions are material also. So time would have to be a physical thing in order to make an imprint on a physical brain for the purposes of memory . And also the fact that we are aware of our brains, aware of the malfunctioning of our brains -tells us that awareness is outside of the brain looking in

[carlosenriquegonzalez-isla]

Good questions of Robert, he always exposes people like this that have no idea of neuroscience and arrogantly talk about something they know nothing

[MrSimonduan]

Agree totally that the most parsimonious, elegant and simple theory has to take consciousness as fundamental.

[pattipotvine]

The human mind is capable of perceiving what it cannot see. Suppose the "mind" actually occurs in an alternate dimension, (which does not mean universe). That the human brain is a three dimensional object that actually exists in four dimensions. Which would explain things like "collective" learning. Suppose we all consciously exist in that dimension as individuals just as we do in our 3D universe, that we can all interact in that dimension but are not yet consciously aware of each other there. Suppose that people who hear voices in their heads are better at perceiving the consciousness of others in that alternative dimension. Suppose what we think are ghosts are actually interactions with another's consciousness. Suppose we haven't considered that we can "see" other dimensions through consciousness. Suppose. Think about it.

[ErandaGinige]

Thank you for these stimulating conversations. Please allow me to add some thoughts. You can approach this question by asking "Why" does the "mind" exist? A human being is a collection of cells. Whatever we do we do it for the existence of cells. We eat because the cells need food. We build homes because the cells need protection. You get the point. But in order for the cells to exist they need to assemble as the human body. And the body needs to function in such a way that the cells can exist. That function itself is the mind or the consciousness or the soul or whatever you want to call it. I used the cellular level so that it's easy to understand. But you can go deeper and look at this as how the sub cellular chemicals need to exist. And then the atoms need to exist, And then the subatomic particles need to exist. And you can go even lower and come to existence duality and then nothingness. At which level existence and non-existence becomes the same. I hope this make some sense. This is one of the fundamental teachings of Theravada Buddhism. There is no "I", just a process of existence.

[mr.spinoza]

The amount of reused clips this channel posts is disappointing. I've seen this exact interview many times, years ago.

[buckaroo]

Great video. Time for my nap, so my brain can stay current with the latest software updates. I'm always hoping for a big update, similar to the "seeing blue" update that came out after "wine dark sea" was the thing.

[sebastianverney]

It’s natural to watch the person speaking (Galen Strawson) as he's speaking, rather than having to watch someone else (Robert Lawrence Kuhn) listening to the person speaking. Director Peter Getzels could learn a lot from John Freeman's interviews in Face to Face. We never see Freeman, which is part of what makes the interviews so good.

[DeanHorak]

The issue many people get stuck on is the idea that the “feeling” of something is inherent in the neural activity itself. That is, the signals in the form of action potentials or other mechanism somehow carry these feelings inherit within them.

That is incorrect.

We “feel” things because those signals are sent to regions which interpret them, and what we “feel” is the interpretation - we have no other frame of reference other than these interpreter circuits. We know what red feels like because the interpreter tells us we’re feeling red - we have no other source of information.

[mintakan]

I wish we can go beyond the discussion of."correlation" vs. the "hard problem" (phenomenology, "feeling", "qualia"), to the neuroscience of "modulation". (It's not exactly "causation", because it doesn't directly explain the phenomenon.) But it's more than just "passive correlation".

E.g., can one make something "less red", by dulling consciousness with alcohol, or even anesthesia? Can you make it "more red", by heightening the senses (actually intra-regional brain communication), with psychedelics?

Once one starts reliably inducing the response, a lot of the mystification of phenomenology starts going away. It's not some mysterious stand-alone "essence". You can say, "see, we can turn it off. Now we turn it back on. Or dim or enhance things, do different degrees." Even if we can't explain the exact phenomenon, it becomes clear, it has a mechanical basis. Science will never explain the phenomenology. That's because it's not in its skill set. It's not in its vocabulary. It can only describe "how things work", the "mechanical surface". Not the "poetry" of the "qualia".

We went through the same thing with biology. The "elan vital" (life force), has not been disproven. Just rendered unnecessary. We certainly do not understand everything about biology. But we can store the DNA code on a computer. Through synthetic biology, "print it out", plug it into a cell, and create the life forms (currently bacterial), for the intended purposes. A lot of mystery behind the "elan vital", has been taken out. Neither do I think the panpsychist attempt to imbue matter with "a little bit of consciousness", is necessary.

[kehindesalako]

I am a dualist but Glen's position is interesting!

[ReynaSingh]

I think the only reasonable assertion when it comes to consciousness is to accept that we don’t know

[tunahelpa]

Everything is conscious, but only humans have the ability to tell us so

[jshdhdyjfjdjfhfyyene]

The more goes into the ras of Bhakti the more one is able to relate with the Bhagavad Gita in reverse (from chapter 18 to 1) with the conclusion that the question to be answered is  the hard problem of matter

[havenbastion]

Brain does not make mind. They cannot be separated. Mind is a metaphor for the patterns in the brain.