How did consciousness evolve? – with Nicholas Humphrey

37 thoughts on “How did consciousness evolve? – with Nicholas Humphrey”

1. Consciousness is the Planck frequency of superfluid quantum space, it did not evolve……we are evolving towards consciousness.

2. I have always believed that 'consciousness' arises from the evolutionary advantage of modeling 'self' in the same way that 'perception' enables the primitive brain to model 'world.' Modeling 'self' allows us to consider alternative courses of action and their potential effects on 'self', greatly amplifying our ability to plan and therefore allowing a much wider range of potential survival strategies. Modeling 'world' only allows primitive brains to facilitate and adapt what are otherwise largely predetermined survival strategies.

3. He conflates consciousness and sentience which , according to the dictionary, are DIFFERENT things. Moreover he does not define either consciousness or sentience. This lecture is an utter waste of time if he is not going to do the simple task of defining his terms. Those of you who think this is profound lack the basic education to understand what nonsense this man is spouting.

4. His examples are rather weak evidence. The burden is on him to show that consciousness is a more likely explanation than simpler mechanisms which are also present in ectotherms.
   Bees have been shown to play with balls and ants rescue borrowed nestmates. Conscious? I'm not so sure…

5. Consciousness is the title given to the "LINK" that Links "AWARENESS" with The brain !
   
   Try this… Put your hand out in front of you and examine it to see IF the hand is either "AWARE" of itself or even you ??? That's right NOT a single part of the human Anatomy is "AWARE" of anything ! Only "AWARENESS" can be AWARE of anything ! "AWARENESS" is Non Dimensional, and is NOT part of the human Anatomy…

6. the second half of the lecture is really weird

   the suggestions that octopuses aren't sentient, and that sentience is unlikely ot evolve outside Earth weren't argued well at all

   if anyone sees clearly how he arrived at these conclusions, feel free to spell it out for me

7. "Oh let us never never doubt what nobody is sure about" wrote Hilair Belloc. I didn't quite catch the meaning of the word salad that was supposed to explain to us what consciousness is, but enough to understand that it wasn't an explanation at all. For instance, could you program a computer to do this process? And would such a machine magically become sentient (as the proponents of 'artificial intelligence' would perhaps like)?. I just don't believe that computers are sentient, but I cannot prove it. Unlike in science, we don't even have measurable parameters (like velocity or mass in physics) to measure consciousness. It remains outside of science, forever a mystery.

8. hmm… a being whom able to compose but outside self-composure have selected storing experience(s).

9. Wow the glorious supremacy of human beings rears its head in spite of the bare truth that humans destroy everything in their paths including each other at a rate that is definitely going to be our own undoing.

   Still I just read today that archeologists are racing the melting ice clocks all over earth to try to collect all our old artifacts before all the ice melts and they rot. Why? Because we think just that much of our magnificent me me me selves. I'm not buying it. I go to the park and sit on the bench and say "Wow this would be paradise on earth if not for the people and all their concrete and metal and glass and plastic trash and noise and bad manners and body odors." I've been seriously taking in a lot of current science by reading these popular academic/pop books and listening to a lot of lectures and there's nothing new under the sun for the last fifty years other than clearer images of the correlations of the energy expended in parts of the brain and thoughts and actions. And that's going to be used by the military to no good end. And then there is gene tinkering. Shivers. And robots spying on you in the subway in New York and caring for your elderly in Japan so you can spend more time shopping and taking selfies!.

   The big money is on getting off this planet and away from everyone else asap. The small-country-sized yachts do provide some respite in the meantime. I think this gentleman plead with us to make human-like robots before we go extinct so some semblance of our magnificent selves can live to fight another day. No one is going to miss us and no one is going to be glad to see us again IMHO.

10. No cigar attractor quailia anthropocentric poppycock

11. I don't think consciousness evolved. Before you start constructing theories of "consciousness evolution" you first have to know what it is. If you studied Wigner's friend and doing any kind of measurement, which is what a conscious mind is doing 24/7, you have to come to the conclusion that you are the only conscious thing in the entire universe.
    They say any person can do a quantum experiment and when the first person views the results they become entangled and then they tell friend #1 who becomes entangled and friend #1 tells his friend #2, It goes on forever. That is until you , yourself know about the results. That is the end of the line.
    How this would work is that it is like a complimentary system. there is you, and there is the rest of the universe less you. You are bouncing off the rest of the universe. By observing other people who have just done an experiment you actually impart into them a quasi consciousness but this is nothing like the real thing. The real thing is the final observer and that is you. This is like solipsism but with some more physics behind it. It could be that when you die , your quantum wavefunction expands to occupy the entire universe before it collapses again into someone else's head. Or into an animal or computer etc. Almost anything can be conscious , even an electron. When you die your wave function expands to occupy the whole universe, your memory of course is wiped but your location is totally uncertain which means your momentum would be very accurate. That is according to the uncertainty principal ∆x∆p>=h/2π. Your internal clock would be stopped. Just like a light photon. So from your view point you could hop through time, back and forth ,because to you the whole universe is an unmeasured wave function. Eventually you might be every person there every was and every alien or animal in the whole universe.
    This is the only way you can make any sense of the measurement problem.
    This seems like it goes against common sense. Other people must be conscious because they are constructed out of atoms and their brain is similar to yours and they will even tell you that they know they are conscious. But still you are the only person that you know of that is looking out your own eye sockets. How can this be. How can your consciousness be only confined to you and not everyone else also. When you sit down and have a conversation with another person, you are collapsing their wave function and in the process making a them kind of quasi conscious, to the point where they can tell you they are conscious. This will go away when they leave your presence. By leaving your presence , I mean they would have to get disentangled from you. Like the tree that falls in the forest and a fox is there to witness it. If the information about the fallen tree and it's related sounds never reached you. In other words only after information percolated through the environment about the tree falling will it actually have happened from your viewpoint.
    Schrodinger's car is half alive and half dead as long as you don't get entangled with the interior of the box. To keep the box isolated is almost impossible. the air in the box signals the box walls then the air in the room and eventually you become entangled and the cat jumps to either being dead or alive and not a superposition.

12. Well done 👌

13. Does this video include a defintiton of consciousness? These sorts of videos usually don't, and then they spend much time talking about an undefined thing.

14. He'll yeah, old Buk at Beatos channel. Nice.

    A Friday with a new video from you, is a good Friday.

    It's too good to be free

15. Octopuses engage in play and pleasure. The mab hasn't searched youtube enough.

16. The brain no more "invents Consciousness" than a TV set invents the images that flow through it.

    Consciousness cannot be objectified.

17. Is it just my ignorance or is this very close to Buddhism?

18. David Hoffman has made some interesting research using game theory and mathematical evolution. Im not sure he is completely right – but he opened my eyes to the idea that our perception of reality could vastly differ from actual reality. I always thought of it as minimal difference, but who really knows if being aware of actual reality really helps you survive in any meaningful way. We are probably "designed" to mostly care about what seems directly relevant to us. We are probably perceiving a representation that is tuned to efficiency for survival/energy consumption.

    Imagine the evolutionary disadvantage following from a brain that is able to perceive the entire physical reality. The energy consumption would be vast.

    We dont see magnetic fields, or most wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, except light. There are so many things about physical reality that we are not perceiving at all.

    I seriously wonder what else we are not perceiving.

19. At 20 minutes or so, the only response can be. "what anthropomorphic arrogance". Let's see if and how he pulls himself out of this morass of hypothesis.

20. It didn’t.

21. Why is she not walking on grass and spending her time smelling nature

22. The negation of "all statements here are false" is NOT "all statements here must be true" but merely that "all statements may or may not be true"; in addition the first statement has no bearing on the second. The status of the box is deniable. One statement limits itself to the box, the other makes reference outside of it; so it is a sleight of hand.

23. Seems to be a different take on Consciousness from what Julian Jaynes had in mind (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), where consciousness arose in humans and can be inferred from our earliest texts, such as the early books of the bible, and in that the journey from "bicamerality" to "consciousness" is manifested in the progression from the Iliad to the Odyssey. That interpretation of consciousness is a phenomenon that so far as we know applies uniquely to humans. Also in the observation that learning occurs when we are unconscious: to be sure we can practice a thing, like driving a car, or playing a guitar, and the next time we pick it up we are 'better' at it, and successively on; the learning occurs in the intervals between directed practices. Directed practice is a conscious operation, acting like a sort of laser of anatomization and reconstruction of the problem. Then something happens when we walk away from it, and we don't know how: it's ineffable. Moreover, the kinds and complexity of things humans learn are wholly different from what other 'warm-blooded animals' could learn. A young bird "learns" to fly – but the activity is already innate within it. There is no long, complex learning, failing ruminating and eventually succeeding.

24. Consciousness is about experiencing information, not thinking about the self (a sentient}.

25. To the Royal Institute: bad form! This lecture should not be allowed to have been given without at least asking the question, “Does the involuntary removal of Helen’s visual cortex constitute animal cruelty? Do we as humans have the right to treat Reeces monkeys like the Natzis did to Jewish people in WWII? – I get Dr. Humphrey didn’t perform the surgery nor that it was his idea, but it is dangerous to have a professional scientist present this type of subject matter and not once address morality concerns. At least insert a slide or some such addressing those issues, please. I quit a few minutes in as this glaring oversight and complete avoidance of at least mentioning the questionable ethics is appalling.

26. Wow. He is woefully incorrect and naive about the construct of consciousness.

27. Suffering is not something wonderful. Evolution is not a good role model.

28. How did consciousness evolve? It didn’t.

29. I think Nicholas does an excellent job here at explaining a complex topic. It seems like he's making two contradictory arguments however.
    Consciousness can evolve and the mechanism that it uses is fairly simple and very possible in just a few hundred generations.
    Consciousness is so complex that it must have only evolved once and only warm-blooded animals have evolved it.
    The idea that other species may have convergently evolved this ability and that the experience of consciousness may be different from our own are not really considered. An Octopus or lobster may have evolved consciousness entirely separately from warm-blooded animals and thus it may look quite different. In the UK the scope of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill has today been extended to recognise lobsters, octopus and crabs and all other decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs as sentient beings. There is strong behavioural evidence of their consciousness which Nicholas seems to be ignoring.

30. I read recently that octopuses enjoy punching fish for no reason. That might be sensation seeking. I don't think we know enough yet to discount phenomenal consciousness in octopuses 🐙

31. What bothers me the most about this idea of consciousness is: why to jump from entirely phisiological structures to "metal representations"? "Sensations are not material entities: they are ideas". Well, these ideas need substrate to exist, anyway, don't they? This way of speaking make these mental entities appear to be separated from the nervous system, despite being allowed by it. It seems rather a large explanatory jump to make.

32. And now go read Blindsight by Peter Watts 🙂

33. I would love to know what Dr. Humphrey thinks about synesthesia and the hidrocephalic conjoined twins who have formed a thalmic bridge allowing them to both perceive with their own eyes, ears, and senses and their twins’. I think the most fascinating questions to ask those twins is for them to articulate, now that they are in their teens, whether their individual perceptions are different when they switch to the twin’s senses. For example, does RED still look the same shade of red when switching? Is food X tasting equally salty? I would also love to know how much they switch to the other sense because of a noxious stimuli in their own. To me, neuroscience AND even physics as it relates to conscious measurement affecting the result, have a TON to learn from those twins. They are more of a gift than just medicine.

34. IDIOCY… Consciousness = simultaneous actual events idiots PERCIVE as memory.. nothing more.

    Your toaster (void of the brain) is conscious because it is aware (memory = consciousness) it is not in Kansas anymore.

    Materialist KEEP arguing they are real boys based upon what their moms say , but it will never happen, Pinocchio's.

    Ze universe is mental.. Your memories are forever stored on the cloud.. (actual simultaneous events)

35. Problem is still there's no explanation for how you assemble molecules together and create the separate entity of the 'individual experience'. "The conscience" is actually something we contemplate through a pre-existing means of experiencing things. Logically speaking you therefore have to have a means of experiencing things before you can even even have 'a conscience'. If you say they simply go 'hand-in-hand' your face the problem how to figure how a brain which involves only a few pounds of matter can somehow contemplate the entire universe, which contains essentially an infinite-comparable amount. Either way the conclusion is there's things that influence our lives which we can't possibly come to grips with.

36. Nice job🎉Living machinery.

37. Perhaps it started off in 11 dimensions and then devolved until it could occupy the brain of an academic.

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