Simon Roper
This is another video that breaks away from my usual topics a little bit. I realised that I didn’t go very far into religious explanations of consciousness (unless you count panpsychism), because I don’t know much about them – but in a 30-minute video I think there are only so many things you can cover! Thank you very much to everybody who comments, critically or supportively.
________
This channel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/simonroper
Source
Can’t do it, too boring. Waited for you to stop bloviating, but it never happened.
That’s fascinating. You’re saying you don’t known what you’re going to say until you actually say it? For me it’s the complete opposite. In my mind I have a script that I think over before I say anything to anyone. This is how it’s always been, at least since I was very young. I can only talk spontaneously when I’m caught off guard, but that’s just muscle memory, simple phrases, stock responses. When having a conversation with someone, I’m basically reading off and reviewing a script. You must live a pretty blissful existence, because my internal monologue never stops. It’s a constant conversation in my head all day long and it can be exhausting, constant rumination. You’re lucky.
On the first subject of the video, I'm wondering how the brain could 'just calculate whether a fruit is rotten with internal calculations' without that materialising as a sense. Surely a sense would be needed to communicate with our conscious brain not to eat the rotten apple? Of course the sense could materialise as a different sense, but there has to be something which inputs to the conscious brain and those are generally senses. (You could say emotions aren't 'senses' but I think the difference is semantic in this case.) There would need to be some input to the conscious brain to affect the decisions made by the conscious brain, without the conscious brain itself having to do the calculation. I.e. subconscious brain abstracts calculation away from conscious brain.
I can think in words but I don’t often. I also can’t simultaneously observe my inner monologue in order to listen to it AND produce that inner monologue so that I have something to listen to. It is frustrating when I notice I’m thinking in words and then try to observe it and I can’t because the words stop once I do this.
If I didn't know better, and I don't, I would suspect you were a Buddhist in a prior life. You seem to intuitively understand what is important and what isn't; what is understandable or approachable and what is not.
You should consider exploring esoteric mysticism and its underground history through the ages. This will give you more tools to work with or at least improve the quality of those you are familiar with. The internal dialogue/monologue is, in large part, a byproduct of conditioning that unfortunately ends up getting hijacked by these poorly developed shades we call personalities.
Now I have a serious question? Do you believe it is possible for our personal awareness to survive the death of the normal body? Not forever or anything but even for just a little while.
You said the wall was blue, but it looked pretty white to me, with such a weak tint of blue I figured it was a trick of light and reflection rather than the actual color of the wall lol 😂
what is the mechanism that causes you to peer out of your eyes and not someone else's.What puts your "me" inside one specific body?
It was interesting to hear that internal monologue seems to be a multidimensional spectrum, appearing differently for different persons and so on. It's definitely something I'm keen to learn more about.
For my own part my internal monologue seems to be nearly exclusively concerned with simulating and preparing speech or texts. I sometimes internally verbalize a shopping list or some other reminder to myself that I might otherwise forget, and when I learned dancing I think I often kept an internally verbalized count to keep the rhythm, but apart from things like that I seldom make any commentary on things I'm doing, planning to do or that's happening, unless it concerns speech or texts.
I'm definitely aware of my intentions, though, and can plan actions in general without the verbal component, and to me that doesn't feel any less conscious than the internal monologue.
Regarding speech, I don't think I normally have any internal monologue preceding what I say in a relaxed carefree dialogue, apart from maybe trying to remember something I intend to say later while I let the other person finishing what they're trying to say. If there's some tension to a speech situation, let's say a heated argument that I'm trying to defuse, I often consider what I'm going to say more in advance, but it's mostly abstract rather than completely verbalized. It's primarily when preparing text or imagining future conversations that I completely verbalize sentence after sentence.
It would be interesting to know how people without an internal monologue, e.g. you, plan texts in general. Is it something exclusively done using external tools (or at least speaking out loud)? For my part I eventually "run out of space" in my capacity to plan text in my head, and of course I eventually forget what I've planned in my head, so writing things down is super useful, but if it's just about planning five sentences to say in a phone call I'm about to do, I tend to keep it all in my head.
And regarding the question of being less conscious with age, it seems that time runs faster nowadays, which I've ascribed to the lower frequency of new sensations and my brain just skipping a lot of information as not worthy attention, but I think that primarily concerns external stimuli, and I find that my consciousness is often more concerned with other things than what I have directly in front of me. I think about various topics, invent stories, imagine dialogues and so on, and I can't say that I've discerned any drop in conscious intensity over time. It's more that the focus is more on internal worlds than the external one, compared to when I was a child.
If anything I feel MORE conscious as I age (52 now). I think maybe because I can understand/contextualize myself and the world better…
I have a question for you Simon, If you were dropped off in the middle of a desert, and didn't talk to anyone or yourself for two days, are you saying that no thoughts would pass through your mind at all apart from your immediate sensory experiences? I find that hard to believe.
I'm a cognitive scientist/linguist. It seems to me likely that everyone can have an internal dialogue but that some use it more than others.
As for color, perception is represented as a black/white, a red/green, and a yellow/blue channel long before it is presented to the conscious parts. This is how we can see gray when there is no grey light. So the perception of blue, or better, purple, is not extraneous.
I can't decide whether this strengthens or weakens what people say about qualia. Maybe it shows that color is a bad example, or maybe it suggests all qualia are like this. It pretty much ruins direct realism, the basis of objectivism.
I started being aware of my inner monologue and physical actions after watching this and realized they don’t often sync up. For example, I will have thoughts of doing one, such as putting my shoes on, then I walk in the kitchen and make a sandwich without having “talked with myself” to make the sandwich. My point is, that even with the monologue, I do not mentally narrate what I am going to do. It doesn’t seem that my mind is consciously driving my actions. To those who think you can’t function without that monologue, I challenge you to track your thoughts vs. your actions.
I would define conciousness as the ability to ask questions, in general, as, once we are sure of something, there is no longer a need for us to second guess the decision we made about it, for example. The process is known and being automated. I can drive a car without being conciously aware of me doing it, as i can think about other things and even daydream while doing it. It is a completely known process and requires no more concious effort of me paying attention to it. So, i would say that anything that has the ability to wonder and NOT completely know should be concious in some shape or form. Im not sure i would include a rock in that, as i dont see how that rock would be able to experience anything, which i would define as a prerequisite for conciousness.
hi simon – it was 2020 that i finally found out that people seeing things in their mind & also constant narration in first person pov was not just figures of speech but really what was happening internally. i have aphantasia (for all senses except audio i think) & i can also "speak" in my head but when i do, it never feels like i am talking to myself – i speak the way i would describe it to someone. i'm hoping to go into further studies to research about aphantasia because i feel like it has a lot of undiscovered connections on how we go through life (^^ゞ
Dissociation and depression can cause that dulling. I look back on parts of my life and I feel like I was an NPC, but I have dissociative disorders. I'm just bringing it up because what you sit there reminded me of what I've gone through. Feeling myself slip out of a state where I realized I wasn't really there at all is scary. Unfortunately with all of the work I've done I am now much more aware of myself and unfortunately also much more depressed. It's like the deeper I dig to try to understand myself in order to get better, the more I break 🙂
There are years of my life where I look back at pictures just to try to remember. There are memories that I have that my brain has stored but it feels like someone else put there. I'm only 35, well 34. I really enjoy this channel although I have to watch very sparingly for the reasons mentioned above. But I'm glad that you're making these. Thank you.
It's hard to find other people that think about this kind of thing. I make video diaries where I just kind of go off on thoughts and that's really fun but kind of sad I think. But I'm glad that I can do it. Something else you said in these videos was you said that you don't think about what you're going to say before you say it and I'm glad that. I think a lot of us are like that, but for me personally it's not something I tend to say out loud for fear of judgment. It can be kind of scary to admit to people that you don't think before you speak when it is used as an aggressive question by adults toward children. Thinking before they act or they speak I mean. It seems to be associated with being stupid and I'm glad that you said it because you don't seem very stupid at all, you seem curious, and that's got to be a sign of intelligence, at least some sort. At least in my opinion. I wish I didn't forget everything I learn.
Ya for me it’s like talking to yourself out loud with out the loud
Kind of like a back and forth conversation sometimes, I don’t hear voices, as my ears arnt involved but I suppose imagined speech, more likely my mouth will move to match my monologue if anything which rarely actually happens
I am not sure why you have chosen to lie in this video. However, it is simply not possible that someone can not have an inner monologue. It is an essential part of being conscious. If this was true, you would in effect be a robot. Please stop spreading such harmful misinformation.
(27)
I feel "more conscious" than ever.
In that I feel more aware of the fact that I'm thinking, and that I am having increasingly more complex thoughts: not just thoughts, but thoughts about my thoughts and whether I agree or disagree with those thoughts.
compared to thinking back to my early teens where my thoughts felt all encompassing and "true to me"
and compared again with trying to think back to my childhood — I can't specifically remember thinking anything before the age of 7 — I will of course have been thinking things, but I don't have the knowledge or feeling of what those thoughts were, things seemed more instinctual and less cognitive/deliberate in general.
This is an old video by this point but I have to comment because I feel the exact opposite of conciousness and aging. I'm 20 and I feel like I am more concious now than ever, to the point I have doubts that I was even concious at all when I was 6 or 7. Really though I suspect this is poor memory and although I did experience it conciously, I just can't remember how it felt.
Good video, but it's OK for you to just disagree with some people who specialize in philosophy or a branch of science without just assuming a it's because you don't understand.
MAN you have some interesting thoughts.
Imma be a bit radical here:
Do people with severe mental handicaps experience consciousness? Do they realize they're experiencing consciousness?
If there's a massive spectrum across which people experience varying degrees and intensities of consciousness (for example, how you described being a child and feeling more conscious of sensory input), and there are people experience vairably dulled senses, does that mean that there are people out there experience an EXTREME form of sensation or consiousness?
Is this just what we consider things like synesthesia, perfect pitch, etc? Or is there something MORE? DO we consider the spectrum of consciousness to start from basically brain dead, pass up through varying degrees of (dare I say) mental handicap, all the way up to something BEYOND what "average" humans can perceive, but that SOME people actually DO percieve?
Idk if that makes sense. But it's an interesting musing. Someone with a severe mental handicap couldn't EVER imagine what it's like to have a relatively "normal" functioning brain. But then, is there someone to whom I can compare MY level of consciousness that has such a heightened level of being that I can't imagine their experience?
Huh. If anything I'd say I'm more conscious than when I was younger.
My internal chat is constant, but i dont have a clue what i will say untill ive said it,
Ive been stuck at 8:15 for the last 4 hrs my mind is blown
Maybe our eyes are projectors not receptors.
Flow state is pretty nuts for people who have experienced it. Almost miraculous things can happen, but it's so difficult to control, at least for me. I experienced it in sports, making unbelievable shots or off the wall crazy tricks that work. Ive got in modes where its like i literally couldnt lose. I've also been broke, took my last 20 dollars, and played club keno ( not something i would normally do) with the full knowledge that i was going to win. I walked into the bar, a couple bought me a drink, which never happens, i played keno, hit for a couple hundred bucks, bought the couple a drink in return, and left within 10 minutes tops. It happens during times of stress or times of struggle where you almost get the fuck its….but its more than that, its like the waters of reality part and a clarity sets in. I believe pro athletes are better at tapping into this. If you think to hard about a thing, you almost get in your own way. Maybe the lottery thing was just chance but i brought it up because it was the exact same feeling.
what are qualia https://youtu.be/2ib1jRqSZ0A?t=2543&si=XvGKQ3UU7VRIL8Bz
for me the monologue is inseparable from my thought. ive never considered this odd, but when i hear from people who dont think this way i wonder if it’s limiting; am i filtering (or some other verb) my thought through/with my language at too early a stage? i think ive never known conscious non-linguistic thought (save for pictures/sounds etc), but i wouldnt trust myself to recognise all my thoughts. maybe im just like you, doing the important thinking before words, but i also have a running set of words to keep me busy, and ive confused my absent-minded run-on sentence for my real train of thought and lost the ability to recognise my thinking in the process. or thinking is more associative and im just having words ‘activated’ the same way they might activate smells or colours
i struggled a lot with writing in school. not because i ever lacked words. when you described your words existing at the writing/speaking stage i think i felt jealousy. i always thought of my writing trouble as being my thought-words outrunning my hand-words, and then i would freeze up worrying that if i kept writing i would forget all the points i was trying to hold in my monologue. and the times i wrote well and fluently it felt like my monologue and my hands were using the same words, rather than one going ahead, then remembering, then writing then cross-referencing. but writing, for good writers, is more deliberate and consistent than that, so i dont know if im just complicating something as basic as “losing my train of thought”. but i know i always froze up writing about things i thought too much about, to the point where some teachers let me pass classes by answering Rant or Interview style. to me this seems relevant, to all my peers this seemed like a cunning excuse, to others this might seem like a misidentification of the problem.
this comment has existed as an internal monologue maybe monthly since this video was posted. its now in my notes app, because i assume if i went straight to the comment box i would forget some points from its dozen previous iterations. these are the types of comments i associate with Worrying accounts (five low quality videos of a “ufo” in the garden, a playlist of a newswoman, a rant about the council and a playlist of 00s rave music) but i guess it helps no one to try to be reasonable here, its better to put out my whole thought process delusions and all so we can judge it. ill dump more information here if it ever crosses my mind. thanks for the videos, love them
If you learn "Insight Meditation" such as that taught by Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh (RIP), Consciousness "improvement" (or intensification perhaps) is one of the fruits of the practice. Your state of health is an enormous factor in the single pointedness of your consciousness, and maybe even Visa Versa. Any practice of concentration, such as that of the Artist, Craftsman, Meditator or sportsman, may lead to improvements in consciousness. The Humanist "bookish" way of thinking is not that healthy in my opinion, and is likely a dead end, despite its' undeniable Power. I am glad you mentioned some of the non "Western" world views, because I have found Asian metaphysics to be far ahead of "Science" as regards the mapping of Consciousness, despite mostly having been documented centuries ago. It could be that there is benefit in that living traditions are passed on directly from one generation to the next, the practitioner is not alone with their books but rather the now living bearer of the life of the tradition. That can be the case for a scientist too, of course, but the idea is not built into the system as prerequisite. Practicing an Art, is worlds away from a proof, (in the Scientific sense). I love your films Simon!
I have a constant inner monologue, as well as songs and visual representations
.
–
Is our very sense of self, Interoception , merely qualia?
Very interesting and well done! Thank you!
Hello Simon, thank you for a great video.
I do think that people tend to drift away from conscious states as they age and that partially it is due to the reasons you mention, the dulling of senses and lack of novelty.
But I also know that it is possible to get it back. To become more aware during our everyday lives, instead of going on "autopilot", which is close to the term philosophical zombie.
We can gradually learn to bring the conscious awareness back into everything we do.
For example, it is easy to not see the paintings in our homes anymore, to completely ignore them. They've been there for years, after all. But we can make a conscious effort to stop and give them our fullest attention again, at that moment. And be amazed by them again.
The same with pretty much everything else.
With the feeling of water hitting the body when taking a shower.
With the sound our steps make when climbing stairs we climbed every day for many years.
With how it really feels to hold a firm glass in our hand and what it's like to drink that water. Etc.
And the beautiful thing is that when you do it, when you give your full attention (just senses and feelings, no mental judgment/concepts/labels) to what is happening to you at this very moment, it will enrich you and will elevate your life experience to levels you may rember from your childhood.
Because it is always new and wonderful, and it's just our mind and automatic expectations telling us it isn't.
It works for me very well and that way I can find wonder in pretty much anything, although it can sometimes be hard to get into that aware, silent state.
There are plenty of people talking about this subject. I find Eckhart Tolle and his book The power of Now to be the most approachable but others may work better for someone else.
You are absolutely awesome, by the way! You are younger than me but when I grow up, I want to be like you! 😊❤
I do not have an internal monologue most of the times in my native language (Italian), but I often find myself making the more complicated decisions in English in my head 😅
I could also argue that I have internal singing instead of monologue, when my brain is empty of thoughts there’s usually a song stuck there that plays nonstop (luckily it changes to a different tune after a couple of days) 😂
Amazing video 👏
I would love to see more philosophical meanderings on this channel!
I’ve wondered whether the differences in how people perceive and describe the presence or lack of an internal dialogue may be complicated by how we understand the definition of a thought. Might some people have non-verbal thoughts without considering them thoughts? Some of us are instinctively resistant to ambiguity, and to address the internal experience is (probably inevitably) an exercise in ambiguity. Of course its relatively nonambiguous that some people do or do not experience a constant stream of internal dialog, but I suspect there is a lot of middle ground and plenty of room for imprecision in how people convey these things to themselves and eachother.
I don't think you mentioned Russellian Monism – I think you'd enjoy thinking about it. It is a pretty interesting idea, and (from what I've found) the only direct way to address the Hard Problem of Consciousness without outright denying qualia. The idea is along the lines that since we cannot ever derive subjective experience from objective facts, perhaps we should go the other way, in that objective facts are a result of (or perhaps derived from the rules of) subjective experience.
Is there a difference between sub-vocolization and a internal monolog?
Simon, great stuff. And thank you for the introduction to Earl. Your consciousness isn't becoming dulled. It is just focusing on different things. Less interested in sensory input and more interested in thoughts and ideas. Keep asking questions. You are doing way better than a lot of recognized experts in the field.
I find this interesting as someone who is interested in autism, and is also autistic myself. I'm aware that my cognition is different from those who are not autistic (though I believe I can't say that it is as simple as 'autistic/not autistic'), an example would be not having an intuitive sense of what to do or say in a social situation. My brain doesn't compute it, so i find my social interactions have to be calculated consciously. For instance if a non autistic person knows they need to react in an excited way, they have a general and unconscious understanding of excitement that intuitely is expresses through the body, whereas for many autistics we have to consciously move our faces and bodies into a shape that we guess conveys excitement. Ofcourse this doesn't always work, and leads to many misunderstandings despite what we might be feeling on the inside.
While I was watching this I was reminded of a philosophical article on Wittgenstein which proposes that his theories were the product of autistic cognition. The article is called The World as Wittgenstein Found It
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a Model of Autistic Cognition, by philosopher Alan Griswold. It analyses his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where the first line is "The world is all that is the case". Strangely having recently looked into non duality, which is a kind of almost spiritual view of consciousness which i wont explain here, i have noticed that this statement and perhaps the interpretation of it in this article can be applied somewhat to this view of consciousness. Wittgenstein is famously difficult to understand and I am no philosophy expert I only have an interest in philosophy, but this article does shed some new light on it. I thought it might be interesting to mention, even though I haven't read it in a long time and do not have the best memory, I do trust it might be relevant.
Anyway I am also an abstract thinker, though strangely when I was younger I had an internal monologue. I find not so much now, in fact it's quite laborious trying to think in words. I have a general sense of something in the abstract, but translating it to language (especially verbally) can be difficult and a bit of a disconnect. I know what I am thinking, I understand it, sometimes the thoughts i have are very complex as they can be straight forward, but to translate it verbally is not sufficient or easy.
7:40 i am starting to understand that ( I ) ego or self itself is 'witnessed' , attention precedes Awareness/ recognition.
What are your views about it ? Because if that is true than whatever we are , we don't cause anything, things are just happening
Hey, just because I made it up (the colour blue), doesn't mean it's not real. I'm a part of the universe as much as any frequency of light.
Personally i feel like I both have an internal monologue that's literally a person talking, but also an abstract thought kind of a one too, and the abstract thoughts are what I'm really thinning, the monologue is just something that happens in top of it. My guess is that I started doing am internal monologue as I was thinking about how to say things aloud. I don't really read things aloud as much as other people, though often when I'm alone doing something I'll kind of just burst out my internal monologue as actual speech.
Another thing is that sometimes my internal monologue "sounds" like an actual voice, but sometimes it's just a more abstract experience of the word I'm saying in my head. If there's some other noise, I'll kind of synchronize the abstract sensations of the syllables of the word to the beats of the sound. Especially when I'm eating, my biting pattern will often be synchronized with the syllables.
Consciousness is fascinating. It's especially fascinating how widely people's experience of it can vary. Or how consciousness can happen when something is off or not quite right or broken.
The most fascinating mystery of the universe to our incomplete understating, for me, is that of consciousness, awareness, experience. What is it exactly about the universe that causes it to arise?