What is Consciousness? | Episode 1302 | Closer To Truth

What is consciousness? Consciousness is what we know best and explain least. It is the inner subjective experience of what it feels like to see red or smell garlic or hear Beethoven. Consciousness is baffling. Featuring interviews with Simon Blackburn, Susan Greenfield, Christof Koch, Bruce Hood, and Roy Baumeister.

Season 13, Episode 2 - #CloserToTruth

Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn takes viewers on an intriguing global journey into cutting-edge labs, magnificent libraries, hidden gardens, and revered sanctuaries in order to discover state-of-the-art ideas and make them real and relevant.

Closer to Truth 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.

#Consciousness #Science

[drumday]

I enjoy this channel, and this episode in particular because my best friend in first grade school is interviewed. I wasn't expecting that, although I knew he was a recognized expert in his field. That was a special treat to see and hear him again. It's only been 60 years since my friend moved away. Thank you!

[virtuoskommunizieren]

Please don't stop doing these wonderful interviews!!! Best YouTube-Channel😊

[ronholfly]

Consciousness is the spirit that resides in you from birth to death. An example is an automobile a person enters the car and it becomes alive gets out and its dead. We are a means to an end that is far beyond our understanding.

[ginajoseph]

I love these videos! I must admit that a lot of this is way above my head, but I am beginning to understand some of it. I enjoy your interviewing style. I just subscribed.

[akashbehera]

The way I have understood consciousness is as follows :- Consciousness is the fabric of reality. Reality is made up of consciousness. It exists in spite of me. It also exists in me.

[glassassoc]

Your attitude stimulates us all to think and explore, thanks. Conciousness includes immages and pictures, often more inclusive than words in how we recapture experience, confession from a former Art Therapist of children and adults.

[fotografodapaz-culturaeciv]

Huge congratulations for your 'Closer to Truth'!
I am a photographer profoundly interested on consciousness/creativity, therefore the worth I personally credit to your show.
Thanks​!

[eismccc]

When the question first arose for me, I assumed we already knew what consciousness is... the answer to the following would better define what it is we consider consciousness to be: if engineers successfully 3D print an exact copy of us, its easy to assume that your consciousness will remain singular, it won't branch off and suddenly you have two seperate experiences... this tells me that consciousness is helped to be made real with our brain and its mechanics and chemistry etc, but the larger part of what it is we call consciousness, is beyond our physical selves in a big way. I think that as long as we constrict ourselves to answering the physical questions, understanding consciousness will remain out of reach by definition. Let's talk this through and branch the scope of the questions involved in order to start answering the important aspects systematically, naturally 😀

[prestonpittman]

I pretend to believe, ... in a moment, that I'm in a pitch black cave, floating in a gel that's the same temperature as my body, .. that I might escape Consciousness, ... yet I'm still aware of the cave, the gel, and not being able to see anything! 🤪

[williamburts]

I wonder why Robert never interviews those who study OBE's and NDE's

[jilleast]

I always thought conciousnes was a property of the universe and our brains and other brains were instruments to understand and appreciate it and survive.

[NewWorldAllstar]

Consciousness explained: "I am The Self and YOU are The Self. Since we are BOTH The Self, there is only One."

[asmomair]

"Is this reality? Or is it the Philosophy that is making the problem worse!" That was awesome!

[rickwyant]

I've observed brains without consciousness but never consciousness without a brain.

[bntagkas]

''if the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldnt''

[scott-qksm]

Puzzling if your truly seeking Truth to consciousness then why such phenomena like past memories related to reincarnation are being totally ignored? The University of Virginia has a small mountain of factual case data on this.

[CSST]

Here is my bit of speculation: The hard problem of consciousness is actually the same problem as "Why is there something rather than nothing", it's all nothing else than the mystery of existence itself being. There are actually 3 "levels" to this:
1st: The existence of the principles of physics upon which nature is based. We could already ask, why are these principles existing at all? There could not have been any principles at all, and of course you don't get much from there.
2nd: The existence of the material world. The material world seems to be nothing else than the materialization of those principles of nature - they take existence in physical form. Again, you can ask the same question: Why does this materialization have to take place, to give rise to physical existence? The principles could have sort of "been there" without any physical instance of them being enacted.
3rd: Of course, the last one is the hard problem of consciousness. Based on the 2 first ones, I think you should see now why I think this problem is very much similar to the others. Just like from principles of nature, mysterious material existence takes place, now from material existence, a mysterious subjective experience arises.
Based on this, my feeling is that we wil no sooner solve the hard problem of consciousness than we will solve the one of material existence, because it is the same sort of thing. Perhaps, it simply is inevitable that whatever form of existence can emerge, emerges. There can't NOT be principles of nature, those are most probably non-contingent in the sense that it couldn't NOT be that if A implies B and B implies C, than A implies C. The absense of those principles is an impossibility, and hence their existence a necessity. Why those principles can't simply "be" without taking a mateiral form, and the material form be without a subjective form, seems harder to see as necessary, but I suspect that in a similar way as for the principles of nature, they are necessary because their absence is somehow an impossibility.

[dinningproduction]

In the Dualism consciousness theory what role does Law of Polarity play if any? They seem to be connected to me.

[woofie]

The first guy is totally off base. I know..."Who are you to challenge an expert in the field?" No one, but in all of what he said not one thing could help in any way to understand consciousness. He sounded more like someone making up riddles and trying to appear superior while only confusing those listening.

[sjwendell]

So many point to the fact that consciousness is fundamental and what our experiences arise within.
To that end, some point out, the brain is what receives, processes and filters information *from* consciousness.
It is hard to define a non physical experience using math, concepts and language built to work with the physical. That is what some mean when they say, 'you can't get there from here'. It is rather surprising there is little here representing the science of non local consciousness, meaning consciousness outside the brain. REF University of VA - Bruce Greyson, MD