states of Consciousness are not structures

heart and maturing into Soul Consciousness

science points to the fact that the world is psychoid that we are that the outer world is the collective unconscious it's like that literally it's like literally the world it's literally matter you know it's like the shadow is literally out there

states of Consciousness are not structures so you know I can huff and puff my breath for an hour or take some plant medicine or do a meditation technique that might open up a particular state now now that state might even stick but the state isn't the same thing as the structure which means whenever you come back to your structure you you you you come back to where you really are back to Baseline

first we've got to understand the difference between actual psychological infrastructure please and states of Consciousness so because for for our listeners states are cheap traits are expensive

the inside and the outside

hard problem proposed here has been suggested by David Chalmers as satisfying the following requirements

Privacy principle

Psychoinformational principle

Psycho-purity principle

The ontology derived by accepting consciousness as fundamental would be that objectivity and classical physics supervene on quantum physics, quantum physics supervenes on quantum information, and quantum information supervenes on consciousness.

So there has to be a reality, deeper reality, out of which these spacetime reality that we call reality emerges. So so therefore the model to think of the model in your following way, consciousness is a quantum field.

the problem here is that physicists am never worried about consciousness because that's the problem of neuroscientists. And neuroscientists don't know quantum physics. So what the hell then? You know, there is a hole in the middle right?

there is something in physics that cannot be copy. Quantum state, quantum state. Quantum state. There is the no cloning theorem, says do not copy. Not only that, but the maximum information that you can get if you make a measurement of the quantum state is one bit per quantum bit. Olivas theorem, Olivas theorem says that and we have or Labor's theorem ourselves. What I can say about what I feel is much, much less

Our ancestors knew better because only in the last 200 years have we abandoned. The idea that there is something that survives. Death of the body. Death of the body. Okay. Only the last 200 years, science has grown to the point where they think they know everything and they have forgotten that they may not know something about what they cannot test.

Now we understand why there has to be an inner reality which is made of qualia and an outer reality which is made a lot of symbols, shareable symbols, what we call matter.

it has to be taken as a postulate

you've mentioned the word theory a lot of times. How can we test this?

this suffering that we feel as a result of empathy with another who is suffering doesn't come from ignorance of our true nature on the contrary it is an expression of our understanding that we share our essential nature with the other and as a result of that we feel both their joy as our own joy and their suffering as our own suffering

in the ultimate analysis i think it is the impulse in us to revert to our natural state it is the impulse of a finite mind to divest itself of its limitations and revert to its natural condition of infinite consciousness

when infinite consciousness localizes itself in the form of each of our finite minds and becomes entangled with the content of experience it overlooks the knowing of itself in favor of its knowledge of objective experience and therefore the finite mind has to perform this activity of reflecting back on itself in order to arrive at the recognition i am pure consciousness

ultimately dissociation doesn't really happen it's um it's a model i think it's a an accurate a very useful model but the best way i can i can describe this is using the analogy of going to a 3d imax cinema

this localization process enables consciousness to perceive itself as the universe because infinite consciousness cannot perceive its own activity directly because it would have to do so from if infinite consciousness were to perceive the universe directly it would have to do so from every single point of view in the universe it would be the deepest darkest black image you could imagine so in order to perceive an object consciousness must localize itself as an apparently separate subject so this localization of the apparent localization of our self or the dissociation of ourselves as finite minds out of infinite consciousness enables um perception

when consciousness puts on the glasses of a finite mind a human mind it puts on the glasses that consist of thinking and perceiving it is that activity which seems to localize consciousness within itself as a separate subject of experience from whose perspective it views its own activity as the outside universe

amazon prime castle rock which is based on the work of stephen king

reality lies behind the multiplicity and diversity of appearances and is concealed by them

that's why the computer can never be conscious because basically he has none of the characteristics of qualia and he certainly doesn't have free will and Free Will and conscious must work together to create these fields that actually can can direct their own experience and create self-conscious entities from the very beginning

the second book irreducible you have many quotes at the start of each CH chapter and and it's kind of incredible when you realize how many physicists back in the day like Schrodinger Max plank all these people have these amazing quotes on Consciousness being such a fundamental aspect of reality

I was betrayed by physicalism

a big part of the book and a big part of your previous book as I've read both of them is your joury because you describe your life going into different phases

Consciousness is the perfect instrument to explore the inner reality which is exactly what we have been done all our lives when we think and when we understand the meaning and so on we are actually doing that in that Quantum reality we are not doing that in the brain

what you call CIP B which is the Consciousness information and physicality and how it links to opt which is operational probabilistic Theory

it's evolution of this state of this Quantum state in hilber space which then will allow us to compute the probabilities of what you might measure in space and time it will not tell you generally what you will measure he only tells you the probability what you can measure and that's crazy in a sense right because classical objects you can actually described trajectory so that at any point in time you can tell position momentum and so on but not for Quantum Quantum system so so this fundamental difference will will see that is essential to describe why the Consciousness and Free Will must be must be Quantum phenomena

As a result we reach a quantum-information-based panpsychism, with classical physics supervening on quantum physics, quantum physics supervening on quantum information, and quantum information supervening on consciousness.

every figure of consciousness is followedand replaced by a new figure of consciousness, until eventuallyabsolute knowledge is attained. Every figure of consciousness issooner or later confronted with its own incompleteness and in-ternal contradictions.

Thus the stoics, for example, believed in a purely internal free-dom that is in no respect related to external reality. The interior-ity of consciousness and the external determination of reality arehere thought, as it were, independently of each other. However,this is an untenable position,

the brain is Islam Islam is it is lousy and it is selfish and still it is working yeah look around you working brains wherever you look and the reason for this is that we totally think differently than any kind of digital and computer system you know of and many Engineers from the AI field haven't figured out that massive difference that massive difference yet

If this sounds arcane, at the most basic level you are indisputably woven into the quantum field

temporal conscientization” (becoming conscious of historical

Samuel Hartlib was well aware of this improvement. While extolling the clever invention of Harrison, Hartlib noted that combinations and links con-stituted the ‘argumentative part’ of the card index.60

what all the myths have to deal with is transformation of consciousness

Kevin Mitchell says in one of his books free agents he talks about I 00:27:10 move therefore I am is that yeah yeah no that's that's that's that's exactly right and all the work on um uh uh active inference

Mind1, which refers to the neurocognitive activity that allows you to behave in the world.

softness is not the kind of thing that's generated in my brain okay 00:06:36 softness is a word that describes how I am currently interacting with a sponge it's a mistake to go looking in the brain to understand why I feel it is soft rather than hard because it lies in 00:06:48 what I'm doing and the same for these other accompanying fields thinking this way about softness is a way of escaping from the explanatory Gap 00:07:01 because it it's a way of escaping from the idea that we need to find a brain mechanism that's generating the softness

there may be a little bit of a mystery is in the quality of the redness of red or in this case the quality of the felt softness and this is where 00:04:56 sensory motor theory has an original contribution

the explanatory Gap

let's assume that the price of oil uh is at least at the uh 75 range which keeps us out of trouble Keith is at least floating in Alberta maybe even 80 bucks 01:00:56 a barrel maybe even 85 so that we've got some extra money so uh we're going to appoint you and you get to look around for a female and uh 01:01:10 the two of you have to then look around for uh people who are uh indigenous male and female and the four of you are going to be a group and we're going to give you 01:01:22 um uh uh a hundred billion dollars to spend over 10 years which means that you've got uh 10 billion 100 million no we're going to do more 01:01:37 we're going to give you a billion dollars so you've got a hundred million a year and you're going to be able to give it away in 10 million dollar tranches

In the West we talk about how matter—body and brain—might be the necessary conditions for the emergence of the mind. That is the scientists’ assumption. However, there is another hypothesis, which is that consciousness itself is the basic stuff of the universe and that we are the emanation of that consciousness as opposed to the origin or the evolutionary source of it. Of course, to accept that we would have to give up the idea that everything is based on some material property

Phenomenologyexplains that consciousness, treated as an object, limits this pretension: human subjectivity is thefoundation of all scientific knowledge. Therefore, there is a logical error in trying to explain thefoundation through what it has founded.

The phenomenological approach projects a radical criticism of scientific naturalism,which assumes that the object of science is to find laws that govern reality, where the person isconceived as another object of nature.

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be muchless interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless

I 01:00:30 think that a proper version of the concept of synchronicity would talk about multiscale patterns so that when you're looking at electrons in the computer you would say isn't it amazing that these electrons went over here and 01:00:42 those went over there but together that's an endgate and by the way that's part of this other calculation like amazing down below all they're doing is following Maxwell's equations but looked at at another level wow they just just 01:00:54 computed the weather in you know in in Chicago so I I I think what you know I it's not about well I was going to say it's not about us and uh and our human tendency to to to to pick out patterns 01:01:07 and things like but actually I I do think it's that too because if synchronicity is is simply how things look at other scales

we've talked a lot about zooming in down and back on the evolutionary ladder like there's no obvious point at which intelligence emerges and there's a nice Elegance to pan psychism like it's 00:39:53 all always there and it's just on a continuum and maybe there's some bare minimum unit of Consciousness but if you scale it upwards again past humans even past social 00:40:06 networks at the at the most extreme level you would have okay treat the entire universe as a single system you get this kind of pantheist Cosmos psyche mind of God in Spinoza's terms what do 00:40:19 you think of that

you can train them it has memory you can train it you can take a a trained one and a naive one and fuse them they 00:39:24 they'll fuse together and then the memory sort of propagates and the naive one will now remember you know have the memory that that the other one had um no nerves no no brain um single cell

so I will explain in more details all these three premises the first one is that consciousness according to the theory is a specific process 00:05:34 while mind is a specific structure and if there is no such structure there is no such process

If you look at George Ellis’s Google Scholar, it’s clear that he has gone down the deep end a while ago. What is it with these cosmologists? (Ahem, Penrose). Suddenly they discover quantum physics and it’s the solution to consciousness. Or gravity makes wavefunctions collapse.

I'm going to kind of give you my 00:04:56 take on what I believe to have been the natural history of or what I believe is the natural history of awareness a sort of a sequence of innovations that occurred that facilitated the appearance 00:05:09 of consciousness on Earth

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However, neuroimaging experiments can sample brain activ-ity systematically and noninvasively in healthy volunteers (Pol-drack and Farah, 2015) and, with appropriate methodologies,they can also provide valuable information about the functionalspecificity of brain regions (Moran and Zaki, 2013; Poldrack andFarah, 2015).

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C

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Together, stimulation studies support the idea that some pos-terior cortical regions may contribute directly to specific contentsof experience, but the evidence for prefrontal regions is scarceand indirect.

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Electrical stimulation during neurosurgery is an important source ofevidence for a direct contribution of different brain areas to con-sciousness (Penfield, 1959; Desmurget et al., 2013), as indicatedby its superior value in predicting postoperative deficits com-pared with fMRI or diffusion tensor imaging (Borchers et al.,2011).

diffusion tensor imaging

Figure 2.

Although frontal injuries can slightlyincrease the threshold for perceiving some brief (16 ms) andmasked visual stimuli, patients still experience them (Del Cul etal., 2009), suggesting that these frontal regions may modulate theNCC (i.e., act as background conditions) rather than contribut-ing directly to consciousness (Kozuch, 2014).

By contrast, there is little evidence for loss of specific con-scious contents after frontal damage (Penfield and Jasper, 1954).

prosody

With regards to content-specific NCC, there is abundant neu-rological evidence that lesions in the posterior cortex can cause aloss of specific contents of experience (Farah, 2004).

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VS

A,

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Figure 1.

For content-specific NCC, experimentscan be carefully designed to systematically investigate possibledissociations between the experience of particular conscious con-tents and the engagement of various cognitive processes, such asattention, decision-making, and reporting (Aru et al., 2012; Kochand Tsuchiya, 2012; Tsuchiya et al., 2015; Tsuchiya and Koch,2016).

Several complementary methods can be used to distill the trueNCC. For the full NCC, within-state paradigms can be used toavoid confounds due to changes in behavioral state and taskperformance as well as to dissociate unconsciousness from unre-sponsiveness

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The full NCC can be definedas the union of all content-specific NCC (Koch et al., 2016a).

scious percept (Crick and Koch, 1990). Content-specific NCCare the neural mechanisms specifying particular phenomenalcontents within consciousness, such as colors, faces, places, orthoughts.

The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are defined as theminimal neural mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one con-

these guys are lemurs 00:19:09 taking hits off of centipedes so they bite centipedes literally get high and they go into these trance-like states I'm sure this is not at all familiar to anyone here 00:19:24 um they get super cuddly uh and then later wake up and go their way but they are seeking a kind of transcendent State of Consciousness Apes will spin they will hang on Vines and spin to get dizzy 00:19:37 and then Dolphins will intentionally inflate puffer fish to get high pass them around in the ultimate puff puff pass right many mammals seek a Transcendent 00:19:57 altered state of being and if they communicate they may well communicate about it

i find it very hard to imagine if we if somebody claimed to have a a good theory of consciousness and i 00:29:43 were to ask them okay well what is the prediction of your theory in this particular case i don't know what the format of the answer looks like because numbers and the typical things we get don't do the trick they you know they're sort of third person descriptions

as andy clark puts it quite succinctly is why do we spend so much time puzzling about why we are aware

what do you think about the so-called hard problem is there in fact a hard problem

we were once just physics all 00:02:27 of us were not just in an evolutionary sense but really in a developmental sense and you can watch it happen in front of your eyes so from that perspective i think developmental biology is is uh you know it's why i switched from doing computation in in sort of silicon medium to computation 00:02:40 and living media but i am fundamentally interested not just in questions of cells and why they do things but in morphogenesis or or pattern formation as an example of the appearance of mind from matter that's really right to me developmental biology is the most 00:02:53 magical process there is because it literally in front of your eyes takes you from from matter to mind you can see it happen

In order to solve this paradox, we need to explain two aspects of consciousness: How there could be natural phenomena that are private and thus independent of physical processes (or how come they seem private), and what the exact relationship between cognitive content and phenomenal consciousness is.

The zombie has functional consciousness, i.e., all the physical and functional conscious processes studied by scientists, such as global informational access. But there would be nothing it is like to have that global informational access and to be that zombie. All that the zombie cognitive system requires is the capacity to produce phenomenal judgments that it can later report.

It was after he heard a BBC interview with Marvin Minsky, a founding father of artificial intelligence, who had famously pronounced that the human brain is “just a computer made of meat.” Minsky‘s claims compelled Penrose to write The Emperor‘s New Mind, arguing that human thinking will never be emulated by a machine. The book had the feel of an extended thought experiment on the non-algorithmic nature of consciousness and why it can only be understood in relation to Gödel‘s theorem and quantum physics.↳Minsky, who died last year, represents a striking contrast to Penrose‘s quest to uncover the roots of consciousness. “I can understand exactly how a computer works, although I’m very fuzzy on how the transistors work,” Minsky told me during an interview years ago. Minsky called consciousness a “suitcase word” that lacks the rigor of a scientific concept. “We have to replace it by ‘reflection’ and ‘decisions’ and about a dozen other things,” he said. “So instead of talking about the mystery of consciousness, let‘s talk about the 20 or 30 really important mental processes that are involved. And when you’re all done, somebody says, ‘Well, what about consciousness?’ and you say, ‘Oh, that’s what people wasted their time on in the 20th century.‘ ”↳But the study of consciousness has not gone the way Minsky had hoped. It‘s now a cottage industry in neuroscience labs and a staple of big-think conferences around the world. Hameroff is one of the driving forces behind this current enthusiasm. For years he and Chalmers have run the biennial “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference that features dozens of speakers, ranging from hardcore scientists to New Age guru Deepak Chopra and lucid dream expert Stephen LaBerge. Hameroff‘s connection to Penrose also goes back decades. He first contacted Penrose after reading The Emperor‘s New Mind, suggesting he might have the missing biological component that would complement Penrose‘s ideas about the physics of consciousness.

Penrose‘s theory promises a deeper level of explanation. He starts with the premise that consciousness is not computational, and it’s beyond anything that neuroscience, biology, or physics can now explain. “We need a major revolution in our understanding of the physical world in order to accommodate consciousness,“ Penrose told me in a recent interview. ”The most likely place, if we‘re not going to go outside physics altogether, is in this big unknown—namely, making sense of quantum mechanics.“↳ Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now. He draws on the basic properties of quantum computing, in which bits (qubits) of information can be in multiple states—for instance, in the “on” or “off” position—at the same time. These quantum states exist simultaneously—the “superposition”—before coalescing into a single, almost instantaneous, calculation. Quantum coherence occurs when a huge number of things—say, a whole system of electrons—act together in one quantum state.↳It was Hameroff‘s idea that quantum coherence happens in microtubules, protein structures inside the brain’s neurons. And what are microtubules, you ask? They are tubular structures inside eukaryotic cells (part of the cytoskeleton) that play a role in determining the cell‘s shape, as well as its movements, which includes cell division—separation of chromosomes during mitosis. Hameroff suggests that microtubules are the quantum device that Penrose had been looking for in his theory. In neurons, microtubules help control the strength of synaptic connections, and their tube-like shape might protect them from the surrounding noise of the larger neuron. The microtubules‘ symmetry and lattice structure are of particular interest to Penrose. He believes “this reeks of something quantum mechanical.” ↳Still, you‘d need more than just a continuous flood of random moments of quantum coherence to have any impact on consciousness. The process would need to be structured, or orchestrated, in some way so we can make conscious choices. In the Penrose-Hameroff theory of Orchestrated Objective Reduction, known as Orch-OR, these moments of conscious awareness are orchestrated by the microtubules in our brains, which—they believe—have the capacity to store and process information and memory.↳“Objective Reduction” refers to Penrose‘s ideas about quantum gravity—how superposition applies to different spacetime geometries—which he regards as a still-undiscovered theory in physics. All of this is an impossibly ambitious theory that draws on Penrose’s thinking about the deep structure of the universe, from quantum mechanics to relativity. As Smolin has said, “All Roger‘s thoughts are connected … twistor theory, his philosophical thinking, his ideas about quantum mechanics, his ideas about the brain and the mind.”

In the West, the primary impact of the idea has been on literature rather than science: "stream of consciousness as a narrative mode" means writing in a way that attempts to portray the moment-to-moment thoughts and experiences of a character. This technique perhaps had its beginnings in the monologues of Shakespeare's plays and reached its fullest development in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, although it has also been used by many other noted writers.[184]

Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence.[1]

Has anybody or could anybody ever have   the experience of consciousness emerging?

we're beginning to demonstrate is that actually contrary to our perceptions Consciousness does not become annihilated just because a person has just died and in fact Consciousness 00:04:49 appears to continue at least in the first period the early period of death the first minutes or hours after death

Iain McGilchrist for my book, he shared that he views matter as ‘a phase of consciousness’ in a similar way to how ice is a phase of water

He began a process that would move past merely separating mind and matter, and toward a worldview that saw only matter as real. A contemporary of Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, went further and suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical processes happening in the brain. In doing so, Vervaeke points out, he was laying the ground for artificial intelligence:…what Hobbes is doing is killing the human soul! And of course that’s going to exacerbate the cultural narcissism, because if we no longer have souls, then finding our uniqueness and our true self, the self that we’re going to be true to, becomes extremely paradoxical and problematic. If you don’t have a soul, what is it to be true to your true self? And what is it that makes you utterly unique and special from the rest of the purposeless, meaningless cosmos?

it is a mental construct

The Buddhist doctrine of no-self implies that our fundamental repression is not sex (as Freud thought), nor even death (as existential psychologists think), but the intuition that the ego-self does not exist, that our self consciousness is a mental construction.

around that same time i got a call from my daughter you know leave it to your kids and she said you know mom it's 00:03:48 just that all the problems we're dealing with in the world right now are insidious and um you know it came up last night siva was talking about the insidiousness 00:04:01 of the facebook problem and and this was an unlocker for me of what what does it mean for something to be insidious so i looked it up and i started to 00:04:14 explore and it turns out that insidious is defined and i think this is from the you know the oxford on the internet not the original but um that there's proceeding in a gradual 00:04:27 subtle way but with very harmful effects in other words there's something that's that's gathering combining in an unseen way that's leading to danger

Those who hold the second position, usually called panpsychism or panexperientialism, agree that all this may be true but argue that emergence is not enough.

Lobsters have a very bad reputation among philosophers, who frequently hold them out as examples of purely unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Presumably, this is because lobsters are the only animal most philosophers have killed with their own two hands before eating. It’s unpleasant to throw a struggling creature in a pot of boiling water; one needs to be able to tell oneself that the lobster isn’t really feeling it. (The only exception to this pattern appears to be, for some reason, France, where Gérard de Nerval used to walk a pet lobster on a leash and where Jean-Paul Sartre at one point became erotically obsessed with lobsters after taking too much mescaline.)

Dennett’s own answer is not particularly convincing: he suggests we develop consciousness so we can lie, which gives us an evolutionary advantage.

Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.”

The Evolution of Human Consciousness and Linguistic Behavior

I'm going to just try to tell you as quickly as I can and in fairly straightforward way the story of how the human mind especially the modern mind 00:00:58 came into being it's a it's a it's a complex story but I think the the bare bones can be exposed rather rather straightforward matter rather quickly 00:01:09 my basic message is that what makes humans so different from other species from all the other species in the biosphere including our very close relatives the great apes is that we 00:01:21 build distributed cognitive networks

i think we must bear in mind that any any sort of verbalization about reality um is dependent on consciousness it's not possible to have a discussion about what is real 01:33:02 and not have consciousness in the discussion uh especially when we are to verbalize it i mean of course any reality that is independent of consciousness is not dependent on consciousness 01:33:15 is beyond verbalization and i think the buddhist position is very clear on that and i think arjuna if i read him correctly it's very clear that the when it comes to the ultimate reality to um 01:33:28 it's something that actually we cannot talk about and basically all discussion all this course is very much uh within the level of conventional the conventional real 01:33:42 uh so this is a very interesting i think um a point that i wanted to make that i think i can also raise it as a point for the two of you to respond uh from your respective uh 01:33:54 perspectives um because if consciousness from my understanding is primary to this discussion of what is real uh and if consciousness does not inherently exist 01:34:07 right well at least i mean barry also talked about the different kinds of minds um then how does all this discussion about 01:34:20 what is real what kind of claims can we ultimately make about what is reality now i think i have a feeling that carlos comes from a different perspective 01:34:31 then barry in answering that question so i'd like to really point to this question about can we make any claims about reality and if so based on what 01:34:44 from your respective disciplines so that's my um my question and comments

the question you were asking was what is mind or consciousness so here we're using the words synonymously um and from a buddhist perspective uh there are 01:11:50 six what we call primary minds and then there's a whole slew of secondary minds and some of the more common systems include 51 in the secondary minds now please understand that mind like 01:12:04 everything else that exists in the world doesn't exist permanently it exists there are a few exceptions okay but essentially everything that exists in the world um is not permanent therefore 01:12:18 it's changing moment to moment therefore everything exists as a continuum including mind so that means there'll be a moment of mind followed by a next moment of mind etc 01:12:31 and the next moment of mind is determined primarily but not solely by the previous moment of mind so from that we can extrapolate a continuum an infinite continuum and mind is an 01:12:43 infinite continuum from perspective of buddhism and that means that we've had that implies suggests rebirth and it suggests we've had ultimate we've had infinite rebirths there's been no beginning 01:12:56 and so this then comes up again with the notion of a beginning creator if you will a so-called you know god there are some some problems here to resolve this um 01:13:07 and so mind is a continuum it's infinite now each moment of mind is made up of a primary mind and a constellation of secondary minds these six primary or the five as you read from nagarjuna the five 01:13:22 sensory minds of seeing hearing smelling tasting touching tactile right these five plus what's sometimes called the mental consciousness and that has live different levels of subtlety on the 01:13:34 grossest level is thinking if we go a little bit deeper a little bit more so little subtler we have dream mind which seems like these senses are active but actually 01:13:46 when we're sleeping the senses are inactive so it's just something coming from our sixth or mental consciousness it seems like the senses are active in dream mind that dream mind is a little more subtle than a wake mind awake 01:13:59 thinking mind and then if we go more subtle we're talking now again about awake mind we we talk about intuition when we're in intuition we're not thinking right it's a non-conceptual 01:14:11 mind uh in that sense and deeper yet our minds we call non-conceptual and non-dual where there's no awareness of a subject or an object so subject object non-duality so 01:14:25 that's kind of the rough sort of you know lay of the land

let me comment on your quantum physics i have only one objection please i think it's uh uh it's 01:01:21 what you said about the two uh sort of prototypical uh quantum puzzles which is schrodinger the double slit experiment uh it's uh it's perfect um my only objection is that in my book 01:01:34 i described of course i had a chapter about schrodinger cat but i don't use a situation in which the cat is dead or alive 01:01:46 i prefer a situation in which the cat is asleep or awake just because i don't like killing cats even in in in in mental experiments so after that 01:01:58 uh uh replacing a sleep cut with a dead cat i think uh i i i i completely agree and let me come to the the serious part of the answer um 01:02:10 what you mentioned as the passage from uh the third and the fourth um between among the the sort of the versions of 01:02:25 wooden philosophy it's it's exactly what i what i think is relevant for quantum mechanics for this for the following reason we read in quantum mechanics books 01:02:37 that um we should not think about the mechanical description of reality but the description reality with respect to the observer and there is always this notion in in books that there's observer or there are 01:02:50 paratus that measure so it's a uh but i am a scientist which view the world from the perspective of 01:03:02 modern science where one way of viewing the world is that uh there are uh you know uh billions and billions of galaxies each one with billions and billions of 01:03:14 of of of stars probably with planets all around and uh um from that perspective the observer in any quantum mechanical experiment is just one piece in the big story 01:03:28 so i have found the uh berkeley subjective idealism um uh profoundly unconvincing from the point 01:03:39 of view of a scientist uh because it there is an aspect of naturalism which uh it's a in which i i i grew up as a scientist 01:03:52 which refuses to say that to understand quantum mechanics we have to bring in our mind quantum mechanics is not something that has directly to do with our mind has not 01:04:05 something directly to do about any observer any apparatus because we use quantum mechanics for describing uh what happened inside the sun the the the reaction the nuclear reaction there or 01:04:18 galaxy formations so i think quantum mechanics in a way i think quantum mechanics is experiments about not about psychology not about our mind not about consciousness not 01:04:32 about anything like that it has to do about the world my question what we mean by real world that's fine because science repeatedly was forced to change its own ideas about the 01:04:46 real world so if uh if to make sense of quantum mechanics i have to think that the cat is awake or asleep only when a conscious observer our mind 01:05:00 interacts with this uh i say no that's not there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that go in that direction they require either am i correct to say the copenhagen 01:05:14 school does copenhagen school uh talk about the observer without saying who is what is observed but the compelling school which is the way most 01:05:27 textbooks are written uh describe any quantum mechanical situation in terms okay there is an observer making a measurement and we're talking about the outcome of the measurements 01:05:39 so yes it's uh it assumes an observer but it's very vague about what what an observer is some more sharp interpretation like cubism uh take this notion observer to be real 01:05:54 fundamental it's an agent somebody who makes who thinks about and can compute the future so it's a it's a that's that's a starting point for for doing uh for doing the rest i was 01:06:07 i've always been unhappy with that because things happen on the sun when there is nobody that is an observer in anything and i want to think to have a way of thinking in the world that things happen there 01:06:20 independently of me so to say is they might depend on one another but why should they depend on me and who am i or you know what observers should be a you know a white western scientist with 01:06:32 a phd i mean should we include women should we include people without phd should we include cats is the cat an observer should we fly i mean it's just not something i understand

Psychologists call this mechanism activeinhibition (cf. MacLeod, 2007

Here, the card index func-tions as a ‘thinking machine’,67 and becomes the best communication partner for learned men.68

Simone de Beauvoir said that when she became an atheist, it felt like the world had fallen silent.

But Wanberg sees no contradiction in fighting gadgets with gadgets. “Can you sit down for three hours and just think about one thing deeply?” he asked me. “Because I can’t. And this device helps me.”

the really insidious part about it is not the idea of the noble savage actually there is no noble savage in Russo's 00:54:51 discourse because his state of nature involves creatures which are like humans but actually lack any sort of philosophy at all because what they call do is project their own lives into the 00:55:05 future and imagine themselves in other states they're constantly inventing things and chasing their own tails or rushing headlong for their own chains as he puts it they invent agriculture but 00:55:18 they can't see the consequences they invent cities but they can't see the consequences so we're talking about no imagination

there's an exception ah yes indeed there is an exception to that which is largely 00:08:28 when you're talking to someone else so in conversation and in dialogue you're actually can maintain consciousness for very long periods of time well which is why you need to imagine you're talking 00:08:41 to someone else to really be able to think out a problem

We report the first neural recording during ecstatic meditations called jhanas and test whether a brain reward system plays a rolein the joy reported. Jhanas are Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) that imply major brain changes based on subjective reports:(1) external awareness dims, (2) internal verbalizations fade, (3) the sense of personal boundaries is altered, (4) attention is highlyfocused on the object of meditation, and (5) joy increases to high levels. The fMRI and EEG results from an experienced meditatorshow changes in brain activity in 11 regions shown to be associated with the subjective reports, and these changes occur promptlyafter jhana is entered. In particular, the extreme joy is associated not only with activation of cortical processes but also with activationof the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in the dopamine/opioid reward system. We test three mechanisms by which the subject mightstimulate his own reward system by external means and reject all three. Taken together, these results demonstrate an apparentlynovel method of self-stimulating a brain reward system using only internal mental processes in a highly trained subject.

Some would go as far as to say and for at least the last twenty years, work is no longer a means to an end for us, it is our collective intellectual power that has driven the companies, societies, ecologies forward and it has come at the expense of our individual wellbeing.

thought is physical it is a matter of 00:06:23 brain circuitry

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The original function of consciousness was probably to direct a mobile self that was short of energy to a fresh supply of food. On the smaller scales of life, you don't need to be aware to find food. Trichopax adhaerens - one of the simplest of all animals moves around haphazardly. 00:02:54 It slows down in the presence of food, and speeds up in its absence. This is highly effective, and makes the tiny creature spend more time where there is food spend more time where there is food than where there is not. But it never moves in a particular direction towards a particular target, and there's no need for it to be conscious of its environment.

We are like someone who knows that a fever, a cough, and loss of smell are all symptoms of something, but has no idea about the virus that causes them.

Respect, Trust, and Equity

Both more fundamental than the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and more expansive in scope, the problem of integration/unification is also central to the problem of the origin(s) of life.

Granted, how a natural entity can have interiority, i.e., subjectivity, is a hard problem, but if the question of integration and unification is not identical to the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” (Chalmers 1995) it is also inseparable from it and surely a presupposition of the very possibility of interiority. Nor would even an understanding of how subjectivity could be resident to a single cell tell us how consciousness could become an integrated unity across many cells. If we assume consciousness is a physically based phenomenon, and that it draws upon the activity of various parts of the brain, let alone constituent cells, then we must face our deficits in understanding how the experience of a unified consciousness is realized at the level of an integration of some cells but not others albeit in the absence of evident, non-arbitrary, physical boundaries.

Its life out of its center enters into a relationship to it; the reflexive character of the centrally represented body is given to itself. Although the living being on this level is also absorbed in the here/now, lives out of the center, it has become conscious of the centrality of its existence. It has itself; it knows of itself; it notices itself -- and this makes it an I. (pp. 269-70)

The human sphere is defined by a jump from centric positionality to that further level of detachment that uniquely allows for that purchase upon its center that Plessner calls "excentric positionality." The human "I" which is the unique result of excentric positionality becomes the constant companion of human positional positing. It preserves, and inhabits its centered lived body, while also constituting its excentric detachment from its center by way of its reflexive awareness of its posited center.

Even at the level of a simple organism, the dialectics of double aspectivity suggests the emergence of a non-empirical, enactively posited center or core, the predecessor, for Plessner of the possibility of consciousness.