Donald Hoffman – Does Human Consciousness Have Special Purpose?

25 thoughts on “Donald Hoffman – Does Human Consciousness Have Special Purpose?”

1. There is a video out there on YouTube of Hoffman having a conversation in which he tries to find some common ground with his fundamentalist parents. For anyone who is not religious but comes from an ultra religious family, you will be able to relate. It's kind of heartwarming and worth a watch.

2. What have algorithms got to do with anything? The algorithms are all written by a conscious person. Remove the person. No algorithms!

3. can a conscious mind create an autonomous new conscious inside it ?! like why do we take time to choose the flavor of ice cream from the shop ? if we know our favorite flavor we can spontaniously choose the answer but we all spent time thinking what we actually want as if we are discussing it with other consciousness inside.

4. Materialism is cool thing now. It's a belief system. If you defend materialism they call you genius in the scientific community but if you say consciousness is fundamental they call you idiot and you lose credibility. Media is literally brainwashing us.

5. Does This Youtube Video Have Special Purpose?

6. Fittingly tough questioning for some big claims. Very good!

7. It seems that the qualitative and subjective nature of consciousness has a sense of immediacy that non-qualitative/non-subjective awareness/information processing does not have. This would clearly be useful for self-preservation and so be selected for by natural selection. Evidence suggests that the brain 'pushes' things that are immediately relevant to us into our subjective/qualitative awareness. This is the only explanation I can think of that gets around the problem proposed in this video

8. Whos the pompous interviewer who acts like he has it all figured out? He needs a slice of humble pie.

9. I would say in some way consiousness have evolved for self preservation. To have an ego.

10. Guy is a literal genius, but somehow cannot avoid starting thoughts or sentences with the word "so". Why is this word overused to this extreme? Very strange and annoying.

11. Didn’t the interviewer take money from a known rapist and pedophile…Jeffery Epstein?

12. Hoffman's work its exceptional

13. Why doesn't he ask Ken Wilber?

14. Donald Hoffman – Does Human Consciousness Have Special Purpose? NOPE! What a stupid idea!

15. i think the argument about the computer program is a terrible one. the "development" of our consciousness took millions of years, before we could write computer programs. so the 2 have no correlation.

16. May be there is no conscious being only a sum of mental projections which give us an idea of illusionary self

17. So you can experience emotion without consciousness?

18. By the way what if neither is fundamental reality? Why do we even think one of those has to be fundamental reality?

19. There are problems that cannot be solved with computation, which means they may require consciousness. See Penrose.

20. Nobody knows where consciousness comes from and what happens to it after we die.😏😏😏😏

21. Consciousness is the icing on the cake ! You want to get hold of the cake , the cake is the main objective of interest and that icing is just an extra property of the cake . Consciousness certainly rise from the brain . If you were to take the brain away you would not have consciousness but you can take consciousness away and still have a brain ! Perhaps a low sophisticated brain that can carry out only limited , low sophisticated functions but still a brain . Consciousness ought to have a function in the Evolution of our species otherwise we would have got rid of it already as it takes resources in order to keep consciousness alive , resources which could be put to a better use if consciousness didn't have a useful function .

22. Beautiful camera quality imo.

23. Does Human Consciousness Have Special Purpose?
    No!

24. Sadly, a rigorous mathematical theory won't do me any good but it might transform Dr. Hoffman into a kind of abstractionist high priest whose word the rest of us (mathematical simpletons) will have to take on faith, or just flatly deny.
    I picked up a book ("Neural Networks – An Introduction" by B.Muller & J.Reinhardt, Springer-Verlag 1990) imagining it would make a fascinating read and possibly give me some good ideas about how to improve the design of the control program I was writing for the microcontrollers in my gardening robot. I wasn't expecting any math at all. Chapter one was interesting and contained only one equation that, with more than usual effort, I was barely able to decipher (roughly: Hi(t) = SUM from j(WijNj(t) ). Chapter 2 was straightforward but from chapter 3 on the 226 pages of equations made that first one look like child's play. I despaired in my realization that my dear rule based robot would never become conscious, though it can fool the very naive.
    A word of advice to the young: do your math homework! If it puts you to sleep drink coffee, manufacture an interest, it doesn't matter that it seems inauthentic. There are a vast number of utterly fascinating careers dependent on mathematical literacy that right now you cannot imagine you might later be interested in pursuing. Remember, the older you get, the more crystalline your brain becomes and the more difficult it becomes to learn, do it now. I mean, you were just a child but look how easily you learned to speak, no mean feat. When they say your brain is plastic they don't mean it's made of plastic. They mean no insult, only that it can be melted into a better shape, metaphorically speaking.

25. @3:00– “the problem with that is it’s very easy to write computer programs that can do the same thing”.
    Do you not need consciousness to write the computer program?

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