Alex O’Connor
Get all sides of every story and be better informed at https://ground.news/AlexOC – subscribe for 40% off unlimited access.
For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.
To donate to my PayPal (thank you): http://www.paypal.me/cosmicskeptic.
– VIDEO NOTES
Keith Frankish is a British philosopher specialising in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of cognitive science.
– LINKS
Frankish, “Illusionism as a theory of consciousness” (2016):
https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf
Keith’s Website:
https://keithfrankish.com/
Keith Frankish and Philip Goff co-host a channel ‘Mind Chat’, where they debate panpsychism versus illusionism, and explore cutting-edge thought on consciousness:
https://www.youtube.com/@UC1AxUq1hSacfkzyvDepJRaw
– TIMESTAMPS
0:00 – Is Consciousness An Illusion?
4:02 – Do We Have a Private World?
10:00 – The Nature of Visual Experience
20:13 – Is Awareness Behavioural?
28:17 – Isn’t Introspection Itself a Private Experience?
33:04 – Philosophical Zombies
43:05 – What Motivates Illusionism?
50:02 – Psychedelics and the Dissolution of the Self
59:23 – Why Are Philosophers Always Categorising?
1:10:31 – Does Alex’s Triangle Exist?
1:21:40 – Is Pain Just a Reaction to Stimulus?
1:49:05 – Is Pain an Emergent Phenomenon?
1:55:52 – What Illusion Is Actually Happening?
1:59:07 – Can AI Be Conscious?
– CONNECT
My Website: https://www.alexoconnor.com
SOCIAL LINKS:
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskeptic
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskeptic
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskeptic
TikTok: @CosmicSkeptic
The Within Reason Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/within-reason/id1458675168
– CONTACT
Business email: contact@alexoconnor.com
Brand enquiries: David@modernstoa.co
——————————————
Source
The earth is round and so an oval viewing panel called "myself" has emerged in its electrostatic field. Individual people, plants, and animals are not each conscious each with their own private oval viewing screen. Proof: ask "myself" any question and the question then the answer emerges from the ground, trapping what asked the question in the ground not in the brain, as promised.
An empirical person is an electronic marvel but without free will. The equations for an electrical field empirically include typing this paragraph which had to circumvent needing to be edited by anyone with free will. We are free to explore that domain with theory, even edit our theories, but be aware that only technically logical theories survive since without free will every theory is made of electricity and technically only following some other theory's equations. Which theory survives? The equations for "always try to survive" tend to survive, which is the numerical path called consciousness when taken by an unconscious path follower, which is identical to the numerical path called life when taken by an unconscious path follower. Note there is only one path, the fusion of life and awareness of life, otherwise eventually a blind person will realize they are blind (by bumping into something) and become conscious that way. Summary, awareness of this text is a demonstration of round earth electrostatics. We can have this conversation after 4 billion years of automatic pruning of possible electronic futures down to only one, positive definite, living electrostatic charge state or mental bubble: "automatically make it appear that there is physically room for everybody".
Matter only moves if a force is applied, therefore to write our ideas we wish to say with a mechanical typewriter, our mental state has to be converted to living electricity to move our hands. So, electricity is fundamental not mental states, because publishing in writing about the mental state of "I fundamentally control all electricity myself subjectively" falsely implies an electrical universal consciousness where you invented your own parents as an electronics project. Life therefore speaking here on its own, is the electrical state called mental consciousness, where what you (the earth not each person) wish for comes true but apparently automatically.
If we feel we said what we felt, consciousness is forced to be the author of what you say (by moving your bioelectrical hands to type), because we can consciously stand back and see if we feel we said what we felt. Therefore, consciousness is electrical force.
A sociable philosopher must equate what they write with what they mean to write. What you mean to write is determined by any of the following: yourself, I, me, the soul, subjectivity, and the observer. What we write is determined by the laws of electricity since your hands are electrical. Your hands will not move to write anything unless electricity is moving them. Therefore, causing your hands to write what you mean to write has to be explained in writing as 100% electrical physics (note, except for the weight of your hands, thought and typing are purely electrical).
Suppose that Maxwell's equations are correct, and that "No Self" means each person is not independently studying philosophy. A core, or self, that is privately owned and in control of its study habits would be the opposite of "no self". On the other hand, reading and writing are demonstrations of electricity, and through a microscope, studying philosophy is verifiably virtually predetermined physics following Maxwell's equations. So, either a philosopher's mouth moves automatically to say what an opinionated self would say, or Maxwell's equations are wrong.
If you think of existence as the most beautiful story, ever told…. It makes sense… because you couldn’t even tell a story without the universe…. It made it happen
The potential for understanding consciousness is electrical potential since to write down the understanding we have to move our hands to type. A wave of spirited information of which you are conscious that shapes itself into your hands typing was always an electrical wave, otherwise your hands would not move. I, the author of what I type and what I say that I am thinking, is entirely electricity aware of itself in a stable looping of the potential to be conscious.
The illusion is that "I, the subject, exist holding on to an awareness of the moment". Any grasping or holding behavior is inherited from a moment ago, hence I exist as a verb now or as the past itself. The physics is that "I, the past, exist holding on to an awareness of the moment". Consciousness of earth physics is an Eigenfunction of earth physics, the best example of which is that all animals with a sense of self, grew curled in a self referencing fetal position from one cell.
Instead of the rusting bike, I think a drop of oil repealed by soup in water. Other chemicals can "attract" the oils drops. You can get pretty complicated behavior depending on the chemicals you use.
This babbling piece reactive meat wasted almost 2 hours of my life.
Each philosopher grew from an egg without knowing any organic chemistry, so owning yourself is an illusion. And, owning yourself is necessary for consciousness not to be an illusion. So, yes, consciousness can be an illusion.
If you're asking this question, obviously there's no you in you.
this dude got anxiety attacks as he speaks.
The blind turned seeing had no motivation to attribute meaning to sights because they were already an adult and learned how to survive in "their world". -typical children who have sight need to learn to master that sight to survive their environment and what's the best motivation to learn something 🤷🏽 attach meaning to your studies. My theory to the blind person who choose to stay blind after surgery
If you (any conscious philosopher reading this) electrically hand type your opinion you can define yourself, the author of all your hand written statements, two ways. If you feel your authorship is free will, also called agency, then you describe yourself as having commandeered the laws of electricity for a few moments to move your hands at will to type your statement. Otherwise without any actual control over the electricity around you, you define yourself as observing the laws of electricity as an opinion with which you agree was typed by hands that only can move by electrical force. Hence, the subjective mind is occurring in earth's electric field as soon as that is its opinion. Corollary, consciousness of electrical life and electrical life both occur as interchangeable as soon as that is your opinion.
Alex gets to something interesting when he takes the complicated difficult bits to describe reactions as a substitute as qualia.
I read the book, ''A brief history of intelligence'. It goes through stages of evolution of brains in humans and draws on some AI development to parallel this development. Also work by Karl Friston on the brain as a predictive meat computer which uses Markov Blankets and homeostasis and Baysian prediction to model activity seem relevant.
I spaced out, but did he mention that controlled hallucinations are supported by data? It’s the rubber hand experiment. It’s also the reason optical illusions work.
Consciousness is not something we can describe in words or conceptualize by the mind (यतो वाचो निवर्तन्ते । अप्राप्य मनसा सह ।, Taittiriya Upanishad). It is illusory. That doesn’t make it an illusion.
Keith should do mushrooms and get back to us. Great Discussion.
In my view, 1:22:00, your counterclaim is actually a natural synthesis and not an antithesis. The downstream effects form a spectrum where your brain can self-stimulate at a variety of stages, where you could dedicate some portion of your brain to a literal whiteboard canvas for drawing arbitrary image experiences, and some people are more or less skilled at using such a canvas and so are more or less restricted to only experiencing the downstream effects or literally regenerating them from simulated qualia
man what a great conversation, thank you!
Excellent discussion of the migraine! Recommend having on Michael Graziano for more illusionism. Daniel Dennett explicitly endorsed him toward the end of his life.
Pyrrhonism. The brain in a vat, except the vat is also the brain.
So many of your guests are a bit sad. Wanting to deconstruct and take the magic out of everything. They talk about false comfort but when nearly everyone in the world sees things in a more positive light it's clearly they who are grasping at cynicism.
5:33
When the organism detects, models, discriminates and reports a stimulus, what makes all of those mental/cognitive events manifest or known at all?
The wording feels semantical
What a rambler. Get somebody who can actually explain an idea from the ground up instead of blathering jargon.
the chatgpt question really turned out to be the strongest counter-argument, surprisingly. instead of just saying "yes, I'm fine with saying it's conscious. However, we could define it as non-conscious if we wanted to because consciousness is just a term/concept, the definitional boundaries of which we determine" Keith tried to make sense of the intuition that chatgpt is not conscious. that intuition of "chatgpt is not conscious because chatgpt lacks an internal experience" is the "what it's like-ness" stipulated by qualia-defenders (i.e. there is nothing it's like to be chatgpt), so to concede that you share this intuition (without the asteriks that you think your intuition is illusionary) is a bad look. "study bats carefully enough and you everything there is to know about bat consciousness" is a ridiculous claim even from the perspective of illusionism. illusionism doesn't need to claim (nor does it usually claim) that first-person experience is the same as third-person data. I still don't know what it's like to be a bat, I do not have the consciousness of a bat because I am not a bat, even if I knew every neuron that fires at every moment and understood every single bio-chemical/physical process involved, because understanding these processes is in fact not the same data as the data one would get by experiencing the effects of these processes first-hand (my mirror neurons are not imbued with the magical ability to emulate the neuronal processes of a bat, such that my patterns of reactivity become the same as those of the bat).
Any discussion of consciousness is incomplete without advait Vedanta.
Bramha sataym, jagan mithya
Rajneesh the philosophy teacher (before he became osho)was years ahead of his times! This discussion reminded me of one of his talks
The ability for debate to exist in the physical world is proof that consciousness is material, otherwise what we were debating takes over the debate as a conscious experience of a debate. QED.