Colin Blakemore - What is Ultimate Reality?

What is the deepest nature of things? Our world is complex, filled with so much stuff. But down below, what’s most fundamental, what is ultimate reality? Is there anything nonphysical? Anything spiritual? Or only the physical world? Many feel certain of their belief, on each side of controversial question.

Colin Blakemore, Ph.D, FRS, FMedSci, HonFSB, HonFRCP, was a British neurobiologist who was Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and University of Warwick specializing in vision and the development of the brain.

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.

[stephenbesley]

Love your series, asking a great many of the questions I have thought about myself and I am so pleased that we all get an opportunity to reflect on the views of some of our great brainiacs.

[ameralbadry]

Great conversation. Rest in peace Colin. Thanks Mr Kuhn

[juricakalcina]

Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting and thought. Our reality

[davidlinnartist]

Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

[astonishinghypothesis]

Thanks for sharing. Rest In Peace, Colin.

[tedgrant]

The ultimate reality is waking up and realising you have to go to work.

[sustainabilityaxis]

The overall optimistic tone of the honorable guest is commendable as he has reasonable confidence on domain of science gradually gaining mastery of the various aspects of our existence. It may take due time to discover or invent tools or means to be successful. Secondly if we are corelating reality, morality and science as the host repeatedly emphasized in a linear fashion probably the biggest barrier is language. We may not have the answers in the same frame of reference in which we asked questions. Thanks and keep up your good work.

[jeffryblair]

This gentleman has a tremendous amount of faith.

[stellarwind]

Resolving the measurement problem would be the first step to understanding reality.

[brucekookli]

We are living on this round planet inside a large universe which we can observe and maybe comprehend.But where is the universe located? Is it a program in a supercomputer?is there a multiverse?how was space created?was it always there? Same goes for Time.is it infinite?is our brain capable of understanding infinity? I'm not really sure.My brain cannot.So the ultimate reality might be beyond human understanding.But what do i know.

[arthurkuntz-fy]

I was telepathed from my father and my oldest brother that passed away so it makes me wonder what is the spirit what is it made of and can we track the spirit with super computers

[TheAlf]

ChatGpt answer: There are infinite states of reality, the physical is only one of them

[Samsara_is_dukkha]

The subjective (aka "anecdotal") experience is the only ultimate reality we have and it is essentially ungraspable. That is true for everybody, including for scientists whose lives are made up of a continuous flow of anecdotal experiences regardless of whether or not they consensually agree on such and such aspects of phenomenal reality.

[stevefaure]

A pretty thoughtful answer to a question that has none. A great point to underscore that when you hit the 'Why" button science usually comes to a standstill. These are all very, very old questions that get reborn every time culture takes a new step in some direction or other.

[-by-_Publishing_LLC]

(2:20) *CB: **_"Is our brain capable of understanding itself?"_* ... I have always posited that we are microcosms of "Existence." Whatever existential dilemmas "Existence" suffers is equally made manifest through our lives. We struggle to comprehend consciousness and intelligence and to reconcile *how* and *why* they exist. The answers to why the universe exists and all of the other "big questions" that follow could have been a very simple explanation ... but for some reason _it's not!_

Whereas we think that the answers are already out there hidden within the cosmos, but it could just as easily be that "Existence" doesn't know the answers either ... and that's why it's all a mystery to us, as well. And if that's the case, then science alone isn't going to offer us (or "Existence") the answers.

... It's going to take *everything we do* and *all disciplines of thought* to reveal the answers.

[jamesruscheinski]

does ultimate reality have subjectivity?

[Censeo]

My thinking is that ultimate reality is always different from experienced reality. What we call objective is shared reality. Science is able to have a lot more knowledge about our shared reality. It is indeed a good pursuit. One shared reality science can't really explain is the shared reality we feel when focusing on the droplets of rain coming on our face, or the experience of seeing a thing that we determine is red like a cherry. We have words that has nothing to do with science, such as "betrayal" and "justice". These are just as human centric as three strikes and you're out in baseball, or the bishop only move diagonally in chess. And just like we have many human truths like these invented games or laws of the land, the physics could also be just an unescapable perspective from humans.

[CrowMagnum]

Why conflate intention with causation?

[benben-dnck]

Reality is both subjective and objective.Since we are at an elementary level of consciousness reality is subjective but as we enter into or evolve to a higher level of consciousness it gets more objective.

[AndreasGeisler]

Why on earth would you say "you can't prove a negative" at 6:30? Negatives are equivalent to positives, they are literally just statements and are equally possible or impossible to prove as positives. Any positive statement can be formulated as a negative and vice versa. Some negatives can be proven, some positives can be proven. It is a nonsensical claim that there is some magical property of negatives that make them improvable.