'Can Consciousness be Explained?' - Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Debate 2022

How can flesh and blood brains give rise to pains and pleasures, dreams and desires, sights and sounds? Some believe this ‘hard problem’ of consciousness can never be solved. Can we expect any breakthroughs as the science of the mind progresses?

Our annual debate this year considers whether the problem of consciousness really is intractable. Our illustrious panel is neuroscientist Anil Seth and philosophers Louise Antony, Maja Spener and Philip Goff, with the BBC’s Ritula Shah chairing.

Speakers
Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex.
Louise Antony is Professor Emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Maja Spener is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.
Philip Goff is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University.

Chair
Ritula Shah is a journalist and presenter of The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4.

[mikearchibald]

I always want to see a debate like this say 'can consciousness be explained?

Guest One Yes
Guest Two No
Guest Three Yes
Guest Four No

There you have it, thanks for joining us.

[JhonnySerna]

Loved the interventions of Louise. I think she got it right. You have to start studying consciousness in a top-down sort of way if you want to get to explanations. Without a clear picture of the functional states and the functional architecture, you cannot even start to make sense of the correlations at the more structural level of the nervous system. I wouldn't necessarily agree with her in that the visual processing is encapsulated, especially if she subscribes to a kind of fodorian full isolated modulatory, I think that fodorian modularity has all sorts of problems explaining integrated sensory processing among different regions of the brain and the neurological evidence at this respect from patients with brain damage speaks more in favor of non-isolated information processing.

I also liked some of the other points that were raised during the debate: we need to carefully distinguish between different kinds of introspection (attention introspection vs retrospective introspection, for instance) to improve our methodology, another point was that we can get more productive tasks by engaging in the materialistic perspective of consciousness rather than in the dualistic perspective say (I also follow Louise here in her short criticism that Chalmers' modal theory of possible worlds is an abstraction -useless for this problem at least, and that it doesn't tell us anything interesting about conscious agents; I would have gone further, possible worlds semantics is overestimated in general by some analytic philosophers).

Great debate anyway, I will surely have more authors and articles to add to my library. Thank you for organizing it!

[martychills]

This video helped me get the best sleep!

[DanjunaDJ]

My take on it after listening to everything I can find in consciousness is:

Consciousness is an organisms subjective, predictive experience and memory of its internal and external environment with the goal of obtaining energy to resist entropy.
It emerges from the unified accumulative processes of living cells and organisms that have evolved in a community for an evolutionary advantage to keep the sum and parts of the system alive.

It is the reactive narration of our sensory experience of the environment by the many organisms that have symbiotically evolved inside us.

As the sum of our parts are neither alive or consciousness then the whole cannot obtain something from nothing. It is a complex chemical conversation our atoms are having with the external world. The language... Chemistry and physics.

It is why when you are sedated and your senses are Numb, and thus your internal organisms and systems receive no input, so have nothing to say, our collective voice (consciousness) goes silent. It's just unfathomable to imagine the amount of cells and time that 1 cell had to harmoniously evolve into trillions to create the perception of 1 voice and why AI may simulate but never achieve our level of consciousness.

[dermorgendanach]

Ms Antony is amazing to hear, and all the speakers were amazing, this was an amazing debate

[NemsCutiepie-jjgn]

I am writing a book on this, thank you. Great arguments and key points.

[SpiritTracker]

Maya's attitude is the behind the scene's attitude of materialist in general. Whereas Anil is "trying " to be more diplomatic, Maya wants everyone to know that her study of philosophy is the real study of philosophy and to differentiate herself from the others she must continually remind everyone how the other philosophies are sub par quackery in a word. Yet she didn't have much to offer, other than the role of a materialist cheer leader.

[SpiritTracker]

The students did ask great and thought provoking questions, even though those questions weren't given the time necessary to answer properly. One doesn't have to look very far on YT to find more engaging and complex videos on this subject. The younger generation, please do not prematurely conclude that the above discussion encapsulates the wide span of ideologies on consciousness. No longer can it be said that the opposite of materialism is necessarily religion or spiritualist, because there are hundreds of sub categories in between that don't require or invoke anything religious or supernatural. Anil made a point that just because quantum physics and consciousness are both mysterious, it doesn't mean there is a correlation between the two. That statement was made to cast doubt on any correlation but self imploded shortly afterwards because "too wet and warm" aren't conditions that rule out a correlation. Why discourage further exploration?

[davecurry]

Just a reminder: no fire drills are planned. So you can safely ignore any alarm bells that accidentally go off.

[jjcpw]

That there can be a debate about consciousness and no discussion about analytic Idealism is mind (consciousness) blowing.

[wioswitchtoswitchdigitalpi]

On a physical level, the sound of running water produces sound waves. On the physiological level, sound waves stimulate the ear nerves, and neurochemical substances are produced by the interaction of tissues such as the brain stem and then transmitted to the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex decodes and encodes the incoming neurochemical information substances, and produces neurochemical substances that are transmitted to the brainstem and other tissues. Under the interaction, neurochemical substances are produced and transmitted to the thalamus. The thalamus decodes and encodes the incoming neurochemical information substances, and then produces neurochemical reactions. These reactions produced by the stimulation of the thalamus are called "consciousness" at the psychological level. This is why I emphasize that consciousness is produced by the thalamus.

[e-t-y]

Is consciousness another sense, a reflective perception as opposed to projected outward perception, or perhaps a housing or matrix of the other specific senses?

[RLekhy]

How old is the term consciousness? Who was the first to use consciousness or equivalent terms as a concept in other languages?

[graham]

What is hard to understand? We have drives and we typically adhere to them. We interpret the world as we perceive it in the cycles it presents itself in. What we are left with is our understanding. We use our understanding to predict the future.
Are people just making a massive meal of this?

[e-t-y]

Luv the point that introspection seems both indispensable and unreliable to studying consciousness. Progress will come from reorienting on takes about that.

[REDPUMPERNICKEL]

1:27:00 Everyone should be taught that sound reduces by the square of the distance.
i.e. The sound energy impinging on a microphone when the lips are 1x distant
is 4x greater than the energy impinging when the lips are 2x distant.

[woodygilson]

Came for Seth vs Goff, stayed for Seth vs Antony, and M3GAN showing up at 1:28:33 was a startling twist! Good show!

[indricotherium]

Can you really completely dissociate language from consciousness? For example, does an infant have an identical conscious experience of redness both before and after it has learnt the name for it is red?

[LydellAaron]

Nice talk. Let's build a system to demonstrate what they say.

[davethebrahman]

There is no place for philosophers with respect to this question. All they do is muddy the waters.