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What is the PHYSICS of CONSCIOUSNESS? Richard Dawkins & Brian Greene
Full discussion here: https://youtu.be/7iQSJNI6zqI
#richarddawkins #briangreene #consciousness #physics
An Evening with Richard Dawkins & Brian Greene in NYC on Nov 1st 2018.
The awe-inspiring Dawkins sits down with Theoretical Physicist Brian Greene to talk all things science.
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You can watch this full discussion here: https://youtu.be/7iQSJNI6zqI
God bless this man. I totally disagree with his ideas but I respect his freedom to choose and to embark on such a lonely boring and sad existence possibly for the sake of duality…
The premise is the problem,. Matter only looks like matter to the finite limited sense perceptions , however when matter is looked into deeper, it is definitely not what it appears to be. Consciousness is the only thing you can be absolutely certain about. Matter/brains appears IN consciousness, not the other way around. This is everyone's experience. Science has never found Consciousness in a brain anywhere, the best they could do is point to a correlation, and as we know, correlation does not equal causation. A physicists "belief" in matter existing prior to Consciousness contradicts his experience of the world. Physicalism of the gaps.
It may be that we tune in to a wider consciousness.
Maybe the soul and the holy spirit is our real conscience!! 🤔
Dawkins has no idea
Why not opens up the idea of the soul as a divine energy driving up consciousness?? Theology may have some clues!! 🤔
Dawkins is very much a religious zealot.
He's a Darwinian.
He believes in a Theory which has not been proven.
How rich!😊
And he certainly cannot answer the hard problem of consciousness. More materialist, reductionist nonsense.
Next…
History is littered with examples of supposed intellectuals who are left behind in the dirt as views evolve and change around them. What's amazing is these days we get to watch it happening on YouTube. Dawkins is a relic. The fact that both of these guys are wedded so rigorously to the materialist metaphysical position is hilarious. Greene shoukd know better, but i expect it from dawkins. Deepak chopra wpuld run rings around Dawkins, despite the insults.
The theory of everything: Consciousness emerges from biology. Biology emerges from chemistry. Chemistry emerges from matter. Matter emerges from spacetime. Spacetime emerges from energy. That is all. The most fundamental question is: what is energy? The next question is: where did energy come from? Without these answers, deism and theism are simply comforting crutches, but nothing more. They offer no explanation whatsoever, and should never be the basis for violence or hatred.
Consciousness is selfishness. Thinking of oneself. The Selfish Gene? It's what natural selection has created. It's made us successful, therefore is exists.
The majority of academics are always searching for answers to consciousness from the perspective that is a product of matter. The truth of course is that consciousness does not come from matter, matter comes from consciousness. Brian mentions Schrodinger who famously and firmly understood this simple and fundamental truth. Read any of his quotes or writings. Same goes for Max Plank or Amit Goswami or Niels Bohr or from the psych prospective, Stan Groff. All of these guys understood that consciousness comes before matter. It's really not that hard to understand. The brain is the interface to consciousness while also being the processor of the biology. The biology can be described as the vehicle of perception, the means by which consciousness has a human experience or an animal experience. There is only one mind and it has all experience simultaneously. Schrodinger also said this; "the total number of minds in the universe is one"
The answer is simple, and humans have perceived it since time began. Consciousness is in our souls resident in the spiritual dimension of existence. The complexity of our brains is just the interface to this physical dimension. No wonder why they can't explain it as they've closed their minds to anything non-physical.
Talking about consciousness without investigating it is like trying to describe the taste of a strawberry without ever having eaten one.
It's amusing watching these materialist 'monkeys' try to figure out consciousness while denying the one factor necessary to resolve the issue.
Real life experiences and emotions expand consciousness. Replicating experiences isn't the same because the reaction and effect varies by person. Conscious organisms have life in them because it comes from an alive being.
I doubt the idea that elementary particles have some special property related to consciousness. It’s a Von Daniken approach needlessly creating more complexity than needed. If consciousness is somehow related to special properties of elementary particles then we still have to explain that level of complexity. I suggest rather that consciousness is a thing which emerges out of a level of complex signal processing. It’s something that has logically evolved from responses to our environment. You poke a simple organism and it reacts. We are at a point of consciousness as a result of millions of years of evolution. We have to process a whole heap of information coming at us and compress it into a world model and associated planning capacity so we know how to react to survive. Somewhere in that process consciousness and language emerged. That’s what must have happened in a “non Von Daniken” process. So it would appear that a whole bunch of neurons can be built up forming many layers of data processing and control systems culminating in a conscious world modelling goal driven planning system. As a new born baby we have no language, and cannot understand what things are and do, we learn we become conscious of our environment. Is it just a question of building a humanoid robot with a big electronic brain operating with nonlinear control elements and some basic training and allowing it to learn to operate in the world? Will consciousness emerge? If we have the right environment and learning ability I don’t see why not!
Apes can look into a mirror and realize they are looking at them self. Apes does have a notice of self.
WHENCE CONSCIOUSNESS?
Consciousness is indeed a difficult problem for science. We still have no equation for very the thing that actually discovers, creates, solves and comprehends equations.
And we don’t even need to look to inanimate atoms free-floating in outer space to ask whence consciousness? We need look no further than our own brain passing in and out of consciousness on a daily basis as it cycles through the oblivion of deep and dreamless sleep to waking. Thus is our own consciousness regularly interrupted even as it retains the complex activity associated with life, meaning originally inanimate matter that is now sufficiently self-organized in biological systems.
Coma and anaesthesia are even more pronounced instances. Do we not say consciousness lies dormant in the comatose brain perhaps able to emerge again in some cases after several years? Is this not an instance of claiming dormant consciousness in matter?
Returning to atoms, panpsychism is the notion that consciousness lies waiting in the energy of all matter and arises when matter is sufficiently self-organized. It is perhaps an untestable theory. But then so is the alternative, that when a person awakes from deep sleep or is born into the world their consciousness arrives from somewhere outside the known universe and then returns again to somewhere outside the known universe when that person dies or falls back into deep sleep. Indeed, this explanation is something rather akin to the supernatural.
Personally, I find partial relief from the problem in deep meditation. For a time at least you don't have to explain consciousness because you BECOME consciousness, i.e, pure awareness absent of thought content.
Observable by science, those in deep meditation exhibit highly distinctive brain wave activity. It lends at least circumstantial evidence to the claim these individuals can voluntarily stop normal thought patterns and "turn off the internal dialogue" as Don Juan put it. I humbly offer my own anecdotal confirmation. It's like an observational experiment that can only be done at the level of individual consciousness. Still doesn't explain 'whence consciousness' but at least you have a more direct observation of the subject matter.
There is no real problem 'of consciousness'. The first thing is to realise that 'consciousness' is much less impressive than we think it is. What we do 'unconsciously' is a great deal MORE impressive since almost none of it could we do 'consciously'! To the extent that it exists, it is simply the inevitable consequence of complexity. The truth is that it is impossible to imagine that degree of complexity WITHOUT it giving rise to a phenomenon that you could only describe as 'consciousness'.
If we ever encounter intelligent aliens, it will mean that they've discovered a way around the speed of light limitation. The distances are just too great (unless it's electronic, AI "life" I suppose). Perhaps a way of decreasing the apparent distance between things like another spatial dimension or wormholes (which might be the same thing). That would be exciting too.
Consciousness is the most intriguing aspect of life to be sure.
Human consciousness rests gently upon the electrochemical mechanism below and delicately touches the spirit energy system above. Of neither of these two systems is the human being ever completely conscious in his mortal life; therefore must he work in mind, of which he is conscious.