Henry Stapp – What’s the Essence of Consciousness?

47 thoughts on “Henry Stapp – What’s the Essence of Consciousness?”

1. That was one slow dance, the fact is all living things have microtubules where collapse of wave functions take place. These collapses build a potential that cause neuron spike gaps to fire. Our thinking and decisions are a quantum physics process.

2. Awareness is known by awareness alone.

3. It has something to do with gravity collisions, and holes moving through a loop.

4. Human Beings can never accept the unknowable and that leads to all kinds of speculation, i.e., string theory, quantum mechanics, the universe existing in a Black Hole, you name it. When it comes to consciousness one need only look at the human brain or any brain for that matter to realize, hopefully , with its rows of wrinkles that it's a real waste of time going down this rabbit hole. I mean you can't extract a single cell and look at it and glean from that fact that the sky is blue, which in the purest meaning of that phrase is untrue. The brain, I think is the truest example of 'communal existence'.

5. Interesting. 💯 The word 'psychogical' is meant to represent an aspect of consciousness.
   Maybe we are creating reality by simy living? 🤔

6. If Brain Science, Neurological design, had the answers society would be very different.

7. 1. Something not a part of the physical world, mind/consciousness, interacts with the physical world constantly and in more ways than we understand. 2. Physical world is not a closed system. There is much we do not know yet or understand about the physical world.

8. This question is so tricky. It would be interesting to put the following question to Khun: If You Believe that the brain causes consciousness, then a brain would be alive without a living body. So what gives Life to my body? For me it's Earth, because living beings depend on the environment. There is no brain without Life, and Life is just another word for Consxiousness.

9. I would really like my consciousness to have some special character some independence of the physical world how very interesting i and extremely revealing

10. Smoked a doobie plus two glasses of wine and I got it. It's umm you know something we don't know what doing we know not what.

11. I like this explanation. The deterministic view that our choices do not influence the world we find ourselves in seems totally depressing to me. The universe is continually evolving. Initially, the collapse of the probability waves was random and chaotic. Eventually, random collapsing waves resonated and gravity emerged.
    Stars, galaxies and planets formed. Life sprang from random chemical reactions. Complex life forms and then consciousness evolved.
    Consciousness attemps to make order out of chaos.
    We shape the environment (universe) now to make it more to our liking by asking questions, projecting ahead mentally considering different potential answers to our questions and choosing our path.

12. This is the first video on this channel where I decided to stop because I didn’t understand which points were being made. It was the suspense without the pay-off so to speak. I just didn’t get it 😀

13. If i understood it right, the brain itself is determined by quantum mechanical potentiality and something which asks the questions, so the brain can can actualize it's states or collapse the wave function. What i'm taking out of this is that this psychological aspect of nature must be everywhere, actualizing the state of the universe, even when no human consciousness asks a question.

14. Stapp kept cycling back on the same information that didn’t seem to register with Kuhn. The question to pose back to Kuhn might have been: “Where and how is information stored in the physical brain, and how do changing chemical and electrical potentials resolve down to an experimenter “deciding” and formulating one question versus another?”

15. I Feel stupidous for not understanding 😂

16. Consciousness, like all things is simply a (highly evolved) thermodynamic process. Energy "wants to" escape matter, matter "wants to" self organize through the use (or conservation) of energy, gravity ensures it in perpituity. His thoughts on evolution are laughable; the Universe, our planet is not filled with apex predators but with clumps of matter that are both either extremely well equipped at releasing energy (the sun) or well adapt at conserving it (a diamond) or something on the spectrum of that duality, like you and me simutaneously and apathetically destroying our planet and loving our children. Consciousness is the highly evolved process by which mass and energy manipulate our masses into confronting and completing those dual motivations. Quantum mechanics suggests that the universe seperates processes maximally and minimally, NOT that those processes

17. So basically quantum physics describe the universe as possibilities, which consciousness actualizes (collapses) as one instance that we experience. This sounds to me like a possible bridging of the gap, through science, between eastern and western philosophy.

18. Is he talking about idealism?

19. The Brain is the exceptionally beautiful receiver of Consciousness

20. Sometimes I wonder how such smart people can seem so lost. How could a conscious observer be necessary for quantum mechanics to function? Does anybody really believe that physical processes don’t work when nobody’s watching? imagine a world where quantum mechanics is being measured by an observer, vs. the exact same world with nobody around. There would be no difference. Simply put, there’s a lot going on outside the laboratory, and outside of any perception..

21. There is a metaphysical universe. Some are controlled by it and very few control it…
    None are aware it exists.
    It where our thoughts originate.
    What we choose to act upon is where our self and the Ego is created.
    Choose wisely.

22. Consciousness –
    There is heedfulness is characteristic .
    There is no forgetting and not confuse as a mission.
    Have custody as a result .
    Have accurate in emotion memory is cause to happen.

23. "That which is known can never be an object of its own knowledge."-Adi Shankaracharya

24. You can tell when an answer is smart and we'll articulated and when it is not. This is an example of the first case, in my opinion. Even though I think the case for a deterministic mind is strong, I admit I'd also like the argument for consciousness as a non deterministic process to be true.

25. Brilliantly interesting 😆 🤣

26. I'll politely disagree. The wave function does NOT collapse making his point moot. How would you explain the delayed choice modification of the double slit experiment if consciousness "decides" outcomes in quantum incertainties? You'd need some retrocausal nonsense to happen where the consciousness collapses the wave retrocausally in the future while somehow this same retrocausal mechanism wouldn't collapse the wavefunction in a regular double slit experiment even though there should be no discernable difference. It simply doesn't work. Wave collapse interpretations fail but especially those that claim consciousness causes it.

27. Strong emergence as linguistic basic unit, the self, and the self as composed of words. Consciousness flats between these two strong emergent concept.

28. with causation related to change in space less change in time, and causation squared energy over mass; how would these two causation equations interact with quantum mechanics and gravity?

29. something with reasons makes a choice how to measure quantum wave(s) / fields?

30. conscious perceptions and awareness participate in causation?

31. what might ask questions in quantum mechanics for nature to respond to?

32. what are the four distinct processes of quantum mechanics?

33. how would consciousness come about in classic mechanics, and for what reason there?

34. could there be a super-physicality for consciousness and subjective experience?

35. All of the intelligent people having this discussion and no one agrees with the other. We are all blissfully stupid. Have a phenomenal and fantastic life experience my friends. Peace and joy

36. How then do other organisms which probably do not have consciousness function in a world of potentialities…..

37. Not this again. Indeed, classical mechanics is incomplete. Stapp is arguing that the fact that quantum uncertainties are enough to allow a non-physical consciousness to cause physical actions. There are so many problems with that.

    Say a conscious spirit wants to cause a specific neuron to switch from off to on or from on to off in order to force its desired outcome: strawberry ice cream instead of chocolate ice cream. First, the activation energy to of a single neuron is many orders of magnitude larger than the typical energy of a quantum perturbation; to flip the nerve firing would require something like 10**20 orchestrated quantum events in a specific spot at a specific time to flip that one nerve.

    Second, somehow this conscious entity would not only need to be as smart as the person it was driving, it would also need to be aware of the entire state of that body's neural wiring and potential moment to moment in order to calculate (somehow) which nerves to flip at that instant in order to achieve its goals.

    Third, even though a butterfly flapping its wings could, in theory, cause a tornado across the world a week later, it requires a million things to line up just so. Or in other words, 99.999999999% butterfly wing flaps don't affect the weather. My point is: even if, in theory, a little quantum nudge could effect a macroscopic outcome, it seems absurd to think that conditions are right such that a disembodied consciousness could make a string of forcing changes.

    That said, Stapp looks great and is really sharp for someone his age.

38. After three minutes my mind exploded!

39. I really like the content of this guy’s answer, but I love how he mentions quantum mechanics as many times as a six-year-old kid who’s trying to explain his favorite superhero movie and mostly just repeats the hero’s name. 😆 That’s real admiration right there.

40. Why is it so inconceivable that consciousness is a spectrum? Animals have instincts, some of them have what I would call low degree of consciousness, some humans are also pure instinct (ie later stage dementia patients).

41. @11:26 the thing that is escaping the discussion is that the choice as to what the question is in the quantum realm has already been made, and the outcome of what is measured is therefore not a consequence of that question as if consciousness dictates the real world but rather is simply on the same plane of simultaneity as all the possible outcomes

42. Consciousness is mechanical.. Biological.. Physical.. Obviously..

43. My takeaway is that quantum mechanics states the experimenter’s choice is a probability among many possibilities and therefore cannot be causally determined as per classical model. This means that choice is a unique input that affects outcomes. We observe that choice is the result of a conscious process,i.e., consciousness. Therefore consciousnesses must be the source of the causal input. Thoughts?

44. Any measurement of a physical quantity involves some interaction between the measuring device and the object under study. In this case, not only the object under study affects the device, changing its state (due to which measurement becomes possible), but the device also acts on the object under study, changing its state to some extent.
    Thus, in the general case, the observer is an evolving (- when measuring, his state changes), researcher of the spontaneous evolution of the Universe.
    That is, the result of the measurement is a change in the state of the measuring device; a change in the physical state of the observer; and, finally, a change in the intellectual state of the observer (+ changes in the intellectual state of everyone with whom the researcher shared his observation/measurement results).
    P.S. After two stages of cognition of reality: the monologue of the observer without a physical experiment (natural philosophy) and the observer/nature dialogue – a physical experiment (science); the third stage begins – a physical experiment in the "reception" mode, which changes the state of the observer (a monologue of nature).
    In this case, the object, of course, affects the observer (changing his state), and it is thanks to this that measurement becomes possible: and this is not an ordinary astronomical method, and this is not "peeping", but the desire: "Read the thoughts of God" (Kepler – Einstein) – to cognize the root cause.

45. THE ESSENCE OF CONCIOUSSNESS IS CONCIOUSSNESS ITSELF

46. Universe Exist's In A Boundless Light & That Light Is The Essence Of Everything , Including Consciousness .

47. Which question is easier to understand? What is the essence of consciousness? or. What is the purpose of consciousness?

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