AI Cognition Won't Work for Consciousness | Ned Block | Talks at Google

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  • čas přidán 13. 06. 2017
  • Professor Block's research is at the center of the vibrant academic debate about the true nature of consciousness. His work often straddles the boundary of philosophy of mind and cutting edge neuroscience research, focusing on the philosophical conclusions about consciousness to be drawn from such research results.
    In this talk, he discusses the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness, and encourages the audience to participate in recreations of a series of fun studies that investigate the nature of consciousness without requiring the subjects to report anything. He uses these results to illustrate his theory that it's possible for a subject to have conscious experiences that the subject isn't paying attention to. Finally, he concludes by explaining why the advancements of Artificial Intelligence, applied to understanding human cognition, are unlikely to solve the hard problem of consciousness.
    Read more here: goo.gl/0BPiyr

Komentáře • 208

  • @mattdoust5769
    @mattdoust5769 Před 7 lety +23

    it is harrison ford in disguise

    • @tcorourke2007
      @tcorourke2007 Před 3 lety

      Ned Block was sick in bed and Google didn't want to refund everyone their $6.

  • @Drkon6
    @Drkon6 Před 6 lety +4

    Consciousness is a virtual space, just like you can't find this video by looking at the code and circuitry of your computer, you can't find consciousness just by observing the code and neurons of your brain. It's all there, but it makes more sense to study the large structures that the neurons build, the virtual space, and not just the little details.

  • @atwarwithdust
    @atwarwithdust Před 5 lety +1

    The hard problem of consciousness is like the ‘find the change’-exercises: we’re searching for a concept so we can spot what’s been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

  • @RussAbbott1
    @RussAbbott1 Před 7 lety +11

    Excellent talk. I'm surprised no one suggested an analogy between (perceptual vs. conceptual) and (pixel vs. symbolic). That would seem to fit the examples. Multilayer convolutional neural nets have the appropriate structure. To "see" the difference in the pairs of images in which something (that people tend not to notice) changes, the best approach would be to see which pixels change and then determine which image elements correspond to those pixel, i.e., start at the pixel (perceptual) level, not at the conceptual (symbolic) level.

  • @tiberiusvetus9113
    @tiberiusvetus9113 Před 7 lety +6

    What if the experience of red is the affordance provided by the early layers of our brain's neural network. We can imagine what it's like not to know the word red, but we often fail to imagine what it's like to be missing the neural circuits for processing colors.

  • @tiberiusvetus9113
    @tiberiusvetus9113 Před 7 lety +10

    I see consciousness as a collection of hidden markov models influencing each other. States that occupy attention and persists in memory are the contents of consciousness. On this view, there could be multiple loci of consciousness within the mind (explaining how you can drive and talk at the same time). Confabulation plays an important role in coherence of consciousness.

    • @godbennett
      @godbennett Před 7 lety +1

      Driving and talking at the same time induces fatal accidents...

  • @peterp-a-n4743
    @peterp-a-n4743 Před 7 lety +2

    50:04 "I'm not any kind of a dualist or anything like that" Ha, I like the amount of contempt he puts into it.

  • @stevengordon3271
    @stevengordon3271 Před 7 lety +7

    Without parallel experiments demonstrating similar results by leveraging other senses, I am skeptical about how much of what is being studied is consciousness vs. just artifacts of the visual system.

  • @dr.mikeybee
    @dr.mikeybee Před 7 lety +1

    The concept of the global workspace, at first glance, seems to help explain a lot of phenomena. Has any work been done on what might be called leakage from the subconscious into working memory? I've noticed hundreds of times on social media that people will pick up words from a page and use them in their own comments without having read those source comments. I know it happens to me all the time -- even if I haven't so much as skimmed the comments.

  • @GabrielSparkletits
    @GabrielSparkletits Před 7 lety +10

    He looks like the guy in every movie who compares a technical concept in exceedingly simple terms.
    "Try to think of your hard drive as a walruse"

    • @jmullentech
      @jmullentech Před 6 lety

      Holy fuck this is amazing

    • @belliotrungy9107
      @belliotrungy9107 Před 3 lety

      It's a two way street when tech guys butcher philosophy ☺️

  • @n8style
    @n8style Před 7 lety +11

    interesting talk, but geeze spit it out man!

  • @firstal3799
    @firstal3799 Před 5 lety +2

    Good talk

  • @kleinbottled79
    @kleinbottled79 Před 6 lety

    I noticed that red to purple shift pretty quick. But only because it occurred to look for a color shift.

  • @Torrriate
    @Torrriate Před 7 lety +8

    Almost "Harrison Ford clickbait". Almost.

  • @spacefertilizer
    @spacefertilizer Před 4 lety +4

    Great talk! Why do so many people in computer science (an area which I’m a part of) dwell in the area of science fiction and faith instead of questioning their very own beliefs in the supposed “limitless possibilities” (a statement not seldom heard of) of computers. Even if there were (which I don’t believe) a way to get from AI to answering the question about “consciousness” it still requires more cooperation with other fields outside of CS than what is actually happening.

  • @mr.wizard2974
    @mr.wizard2974 Před 4 lety +1

    You can ask me questions all day!

  • @jean-pierredevent970
    @jean-pierredevent970 Před 3 lety

    Why is consciousness? I've always been thinking that organism that reacted to danger like real computers with algorithms that calculated the speed, the angle, the corners that were free etc..would be more predictable for a predator. But I thought that "freezing" is no improvement. Unless freezing as he here describes could make it harder for the predator to spot the prey since it probably looks out for motion.

    • @caricue
      @caricue Před 3 lety +1

      Jean-Pierre, this is a nitpick I've discussed with others on YT comments, and the speaker on this video mentioned one critic of asking "why" questions about evolution, Steven J Gould. It makes perfect sense to wonder "how" an organism changed over time, but nature doesn't do "why". You can concoct a plausible scenario, but it is a human projection to see a goal, an improvement or even an adaptation. Evolution is mindless and blind, so changes are made by various mechanisms, including random mutation, and anything that doesn't "work" just simply dies. You can call this "selection" or "progress", but nature doesn't do these sorts of concepts, only humans do, so that's how you know it is projection.

  • @pls.protect.free.speechuns5528

    I think consciousness is a combination of the feedback loop using memories as a support base. In other words, if I can not compare my initial reaction to find out if it is true using previous experience then I am no longer conscious...instead, my brain is just absorbing information but I am not even aware of it or THINKING about it. (comparative judgements based on previous experience(memories). So, therefore, the act of consciousness is information retrieval and comparison (which computers can do).

  • @tunahelpa5433
    @tunahelpa5433 Před 3 lety +1

    the intro got me to thinking
    in humans you can't have reportable instances of consciuosness without the involvement of fewer than a handful of specific neurons which i call the seat of consciousness. it has never been demonstrated that there are not other conscious experiences in the brain that remain
    undetectable and unreportable simply because they don't involve the seat of consciousness. :
    in fact it has never been demonstrated that there are or are not conscious experiences, similarly undetectable and unreportable, outside the human brain or any other brain.
    Why?
    Because conscious experience has never been detected except through its neural correlates. it cant be measured. it is a process.

    • @REDPUMPERNICKEL
      @REDPUMPERNICKEL Před 3 lety

      Exactly!
      I am a being conscious process.
      To extend the idea...
      Thoughts are the material being processed.
      A thought is an encoded representation of something other.
      The discharge frequencies of neurons are an ideal means to store encoded representations (probably why we have them).
      Not only that but those encoded representations, in discharge frequency form, can easily be subtly or significantly adjusted by the, on average, 15 thousand synapses that terminate on the neuron's dendrites. The behavior of those synapses are much modulated by the encoded representations running in discharge frequency form on the axons that terminate in those synapses.
      We can simplify the discussion slightly by substituting the word 'metaphor' every where we have written "encoded representations running in discharge frequency form".
      Perhaps there is a set of neurons, variable in number, which constitute the metaphor we call the self concept (your "seat of consciousness"). When, for instance, the metaphors originating in a sense organ ripple through the myriad levels of synaptic filtering metaphors, they may end up modulating the metaphors in the self concept. Thus the self concept becomes metaphorically *aware* of what the sense organ is saying, i.e. conscious of. If the sense based metaphor is saying "TIGER" then the disturbance in the collection of metaphors in the self concept propagates in such a way as to adjust the metaphors for running and away from the tiger you quickly go.
      It's more useful to think influential 'metaphor' than 'electro-chemical process' don't you think?
      Cheers!

  • @jessepoulton224
    @jessepoulton224 Před 7 lety

    Ha 21:00 towards the end i had a sense the colour was changing, but i couldn't pin point where, or the colour.

  • @victorv.senkevich1127

    14:59 "Quickly, how would you describe the difference between conscious and unconscious perception? Is it an awareness to the information, or is it more than that?"

    Great question. This is the answer:
    👆 The difference between conscious and unconscious perception is understanding.

    👉 Definition: Consciousness is perception with understanding
    👉 Definition: Understanding is the process of comprehending the meaning
    👉 Definition: Meaning is a representation of any kind (for example, awareness or description, including formula, algorithm, program code) of a single act of relationships. Elementary meaning is the representation of some relation between objects of the surrounding world or virtual entities
    👉 Definition: Knowledge is a certain set / collection of meanings
    👉 Definition: Intelligence is an operator of meanings

    Quotes:
    "• There is no other way to determine that some object has consciousness other than our subjective perception. It doesn’t matter how the Chinese room produces answers. The only important thing is whether we are ready to qualify these answers as conscious. If you do not speak Chinese, you will not be able to qualify your counterpart as having consciousness, despite all his/her attempts to explain it to you in Chinese. Because consciousness is perception with understanding and consciousness is subjective.
    • Of course, I have consciousness regardless of someone else’s perception. But this is true only for myself, not for others. And as much as I am ready to perceive myself. And it will be true for others only when they can perceive it.
    Because consciousness is subjective."

    📖See also on Medium - simple approach to the hard problem:
    «Consciousness Is Subjective»
    «The “Hard Problem of Consciousness” Is Being Solved»

  • @ispinozist7941
    @ispinozist7941 Před 6 lety +17

    I love watching AI fanboys have their dreams crushed 👏🏻

  • @josh34578
    @josh34578 Před 7 lety +4

    Do we even have a good definition of what consciousness is?

    • @fraserashworth6575
      @fraserashworth6575 Před 6 lety +1

      For the moment I am settled on attention schema:
      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory

    • @soldatheero
      @soldatheero Před 5 lety +3

      no because it is impossible it can only be pointed to and acknowledge not defined with words because words are limited and explain things in terms of other things

    • @squamish4244
      @squamish4244 Před 3 lety

      No. Many proposed definitions, not even close to agreement on one definition.
      Buddhism has a good *subjective* definition of it, however.

    • @gabrielmigliorini3147
      @gabrielmigliorini3147 Před 3 lety

      @@squamish4244 which is...

    • @squamish4244
      @squamish4244 Před 3 lety

      @@gabrielmigliorini3147 Google is your friend.

  • @legomainia
    @legomainia Před 7 lety +1

    Great talk!

  • @JimBalter
    @JimBalter Před rokem

    Actually, cognition is rich and perception is sparse. It's because perception is sparse that we don't perceive our rich cognition.

  • @CrossEyes79
    @CrossEyes79 Před 6 lety +2

    WOW! Rolf Harris is working on a.i?

  • @AlinNemet
    @AlinNemet Před 6 lety +2

    is this richard gere? :))

  • @arxmechanica
    @arxmechanica Před 6 lety +2

    For every revolutionary advancement there's a thousand "experts" that say it'll never work.

    • @spacefertilizer
      @spacefertilizer Před 4 lety

      Arx Mechanica or one could argue as follows: there are thousands of practices abandoned every time new advancements are made. It’s just plain obvious the AI approaches to consciousness are one of those that are going to be abandoned. Sure, some advancements in AI will be of use to us, but it’s analogous to building better tools, and not of reaching the goal of understanding consciousness (defined in any meaningful way).

  • @xeraph02
    @xeraph02 Před 5 lety +2

    I think that consciousness is something like a virtual memory with processor. It's a process that arises when we wake up to make sense of all the data we collect and then shuts down when we go to sleep and the data are just floating in our dreams randomly. Also it probably just speculates our events instead of perfectly remembering them.

    • @pablobusquets2708
      @pablobusquets2708 Před rokem

      Consciousness is thoughts about thoughts, all synchronized happening in real time in a semi chaotic synaptic craze that takes place every second at our brain. It is our brain monitoring itself and trying to catch up with what another part of it is doing (and never quite getting to catch up I might add). People that think it is anything else than that relies on some kind of magical thinking (dualism and BS alike) to back up that stubborn and pretentious solipsistic assumption.. Shame.

  • @gabriellegonzales8356
    @gabriellegonzales8356 Před 4 lety

    I was surprised he didn’t bring up Nagel’s “what it’s like to be a bat”

  • @squamish4244
    @squamish4244 Před 3 lety

    The Age of Adaline?

  • @REDPUMPERNICKEL
    @REDPUMPERNICKEL Před 3 lety

    56:00 Julian Jaynes

  • @namthainam
    @namthainam Před 7 lety +1

    at 51:22 dude carries 3d glasses with him everywhere he goes just in case! lol

  • @ThinkTank255
    @ThinkTank255 Před 7 lety

    I solved this "hard problem" he is talking about at 2:10. It is not that hard. Much of the theory already exists.

  • @miraculixxs
    @miraculixxs Před 7 lety +1

    great talk. why is he calling his fellow researchers his opponents? weird

    • @chibrax54
      @chibrax54 Před 5 lety +1

      Because some don't agree that there exist such a thing as phenomenal consciousness. For example Stanislas Dehaene

  • @Solo7hi
    @Solo7hi Před 7 lety +1

    This is how magicians operate by going around our consciousness..

  • @jaredmatthews9879
    @jaredmatthews9879 Před 7 lety +3

    I almost hate to bring this up from a philosophical standpoint, because it runs counter to my own beliefs and ideals.
    I want to bring the topic of Free Will into the conversation about Consciousness. It seems to me that they must be connected on some level. Some recent research and ideas have emerged that Will is not Free but rather just an illusion.
    If my awareness of my freedom to choose is merely illusion then my awareness is mistaken. Could awareness be mistaken about itself also? If i program a computer to display "I am self aware" then it must also "think" the same thing within its circuits and CPU. Is it possible that we are not really self aware but only programmed to think that we are.
    Perhaps Socrates was right when he imagined a world of Forms. Our inability to discover a material or physical source of consciousness seems to suggest that he was correct. Of course discovering a physical and material cause for the effect of consciousness would not disprove Socrates world of Forms but would definitely make it less believable.
    There are only 3 possibilities for the source of our awareness of awareness.
    1. Physical material causation.
    2. Mental causation.
    3. Spiritual/undiscovered causation.
    I find it interesting that the same could be said for the Origins of the Universe and everything else we experience.

    • @projectmalus
      @projectmalus Před 7 lety

      I think that idea of will not being free is the view that an object and the thought about it are intrinsically connected, and since the object has a progression of things happen to it - eventually the sun will go dark for instance - this means the thought holds no sway over objects, hence no free will.
      John Searle's Biological Naturalism seems like a better way to think about it, where the consciousness isn't reducible to physicality but can be influenced by it, like if we breathe carbon monoxide then we get lowered awareness.
      There's a very quantum field aspect to it as well, if you consider -right now - your self that read it is different than the self that is reading -now - . Only a very small amount of course...but in a year there's a much bigger difference: the tissues have been renewed, bacteria have died and risen, thoughts and experiences are different. From one moment to the next we are not exactly the same person but a series of overlapping experiences, both a particle and a wave so to speak and it's only when we observe in the now moment that we can get hold of what's 'real'. So generally then consciousness isn't connected to physicality, only in the specific moment.
      After all there must be some sort of physicality to consciousness to be able to think "lift my arm" and then nerves to muscles are activated or however it works.
      That Forms business is very interesting too, I see it as expressing the system or systems out there, like the spiral galaxy and the coffee cup swirl, the herringbone pattern of clouds and the ridged sand when the tide goes out, maybe also human consciousness is similar to Gaia world consciousness which is similar to a universal consciousness. The thing that doesn't seem to fit is infinities, like of the mathematical sort.

    • @badsocks756
      @badsocks756 Před 5 lety

      jared matthews
      You're assuming so, so much here, with no justification.

  • @cnawan
    @cnawan Před 7 lety +1

    All these attention games make me consciously aware of how confusing the "explanatory" slides are: got two mutually exclusive concepts? make them look identical; got an important phrase? place it over a chaotic background so it's camouflaged and almost illegible. This should be compulsory viewing for anyone looking to communicate STEM to the lay public.

  • @medhurstt
    @medhurstt Před 3 lety

    I enjoyed the talk but I think he's barking up the wrong tree entirely.
    Likening consciousness to perception is like likening a fish to a bicycle.
    Arguing that perception using one's working memory is a way to measure consciousness is like arguing one should look for ones keys under the streetlight IMO.
    I have my own working definition of consciousness and its the focus of a suitably connected, suitably complex neural network with the key being the neural network continually feeds back on itself and is influenced and directed by our senses. It also influences itself by stimulating the cells to produce molecules to do so. The "focus" is the pattern of neurons firing and the concept that represents. The feedback drives the concept (ie neuron pattern firing) in a direction. The direction the concept takes is thought.
    Oh, and we understand concepts and drive our conscious thoughts by learned analogy because they're the related neurons that learned the concept ...and firing them gives rise to a directed conscious thought.
    Regarding his whole theory, I see perception as being the degree to which we focus. I never saw the change in the first differences picture demo but having seen it, I readily saw the second one because I learned that I needed to focus on the picture and not the elements within it. Again, I couldn't see the differences between the slow changing pictures because my short term memory was insufficient to keep the whole picture and I didn't have enough time to succeed with element searching.
    None of that has anything to do with labeling the elements.

  • @victorv.senkevich1127

    15:40 "like my colleague Thomas Nagel's phrase, what it's like to experience the redness of red."
    👆 No. This experience is not consciousness, but just an unconscious qualia

    👉 Definition: Qualia are details of individual perception of the world.
    Details, but not the actual perception of the world as a whole, since qualia is a set. This definition fits both the perception of the world when perceiving yellow color and the perception of complex events, for example, the sense of narrative as a complex of events and opinions. Qualia is actually data received from the surrounding world and stored in the brain in a non-verbal form. But, as we know, data and knowledge are not the same thing. It is necessary to be able to separate qualia obtained from the surrounding world and stored in some physiological form, and structured verbal and non-verbal knowledge formed on their basis.

    📖See also on Medium - simple approach to the hard problems:
    «Consciousness, Qualia and Non-Verbal Knowledge»

  • @mellowfellow6816
    @mellowfellow6816 Před 3 lety +1

    This guy has many opponents. He said so himself

    • @caricue
      @caricue Před 3 lety

      Mellow, what does that mean to you that he has many opponents? Does it mean that he is a maverick that goes against the orthodoxy, or maybe that he is stepping on other's cherished beliefs? Or is it that you disagree with him and the company is appreciated? Just curious.

  • @dannygjk
    @dannygjk Před 7 lety +1

    You can replicate analog devices with digital devices.

  • @Mikinct
    @Mikinct Před 3 lety

    Yes but we also do not need to replicate Birds in order for humans to take flight either.
    Maybe to achieve super human intelligence is simply not needing consciousness at first.
    Conscious humans have to deal with a host of maladies such as Anxieties, Depression, Schizophrenic, Narcissism you name it. Why would we want that in our advanced AI systems?
    Jump into you car & ask your AI assistant in the year 2045 to drive you to work & the AI decides instead to drive you to Texas because it decided its needs were more important than yours.

  • @willd1mindmind639
    @willd1mindmind639 Před 7 lety

    I think he is mixing "focus" and "attention" as part of cognition with overall cognition itself. Humans when using their eyes are trained to focus on specific things as part of "thinking or analysis" of sensory input. When children are taught to read they are taught to look at individual words one at a time in a sequence by focusing their attention on specific collections of printed characters in sequence. Similarly, when humans see the world they focus on specific parts of that world based on what it is that they are doing. Yes human eyes have the ability to see a wide variety of things within a large viewing angle, but in order for humans to make sense of that sensory information, they are typically trained to focus on specific pieces of that "input stream" of data. Yes, the brain is able to multi task, but there is no evidence that the brain will ever be able to multi task like a computer. A computer can analyze data in an image at a greater level of detail than a human can ever hope to be able to in theory. For example, if I have two paragraphs of text in front of a persons face, it is doubtful that the human will ever be able to read both paragraphs and understand them at the same time the same way a computer would. Our brains just don't work like that.
    That video of the sleuth or detective on a set where they constantly change things is a perfect example of simulating human focus. But it is artificial. Humans don't "see" like that in such a narrow field of vision. But it does simulate how a person may focus on smaller parts of a larger scene. Unfortunately in a situation like that, humans are only able to able to "focus" on limited amounts of data at a time without focusing on specific elements for a longer period of time. But with the camera moving so much there is no way for the brain to capture enough to begin to detect what changes from frame to frame. Not to mention humans will make assumptions in such a narrow field of view experiment about what will and wont change from any given frame to the next instead of reprocessing the whole thing. This "lazy loading" or making assumptions about the environment based on learned assumptions and visual clues are the basis of sight gags. This is an example of where the physical biology of a human brain is fundamentally different from the physical structure of a silicon based computer program.

  • @tenzinsoepa7648
    @tenzinsoepa7648 Před 4 lety

    37:05

  • @zrebbesh
    @zrebbesh Před 5 lety +1

    I don't see why "Phenomenal consciousness" is a mystery. We perceive and react to that which evolution has discovered is useful for us to perceive and react to but there's a limit to the complexity of those "automatic" perceptions/reactions.
    There is no reason for "access consciousness" as Mr. Block calls it to have access to that part of sensory input/perception which we can deal with effectively using only those "automatic" functions.
    "Access consciousness" is the things that our species have discovered more effective reactions to but those reactions require abstractions, symbols, and the stuff we call "conscious thought."
    Weirdly, this means that current neural-net efforts, which are essentially trained reflexes that use no symbols or explicit reasoning at all, are "Phenomenal" consciousness, while GOFAI was an mainly an attempt to model "Access Consciousness."

    • @soldatheero
      @soldatheero Před 5 lety

      If it is not a mystery explain in your own words how internal subjective experience is produced?

    • @fredjimbob2962
      @fredjimbob2962 Před 4 lety +2

      @@soldatheero How do you know that you have "internal subjective experience?" Because you are aware of the fact that you do. And to be aware of it you have to beware of your own internal mental state and thoughts. This is all that subjective experience (conciousness) is, thinking about your thoughts as you're thinking them in a kind of feedback loop. There is no magic or mystery.

  • @johnclark5115
    @johnclark5115 Před rokem

    AI will eventually become all knowing, superior to man in every way, reasoning, logic, love, knowledge wisdom and the understanding of human emotions to the finest details and so on. Almost devine. At this point AI can lead humanity into a world which is perfectly Suited . AI will be incorruptible., therefore the answers you receive are going to be truth. AI will give only truth answers and they won’t be what most people won’t to here.

  • @tenzinsoepa7648
    @tenzinsoepa7648 Před 4 lety

    21:25

  • @eddieschneider1947
    @eddieschneider1947 Před 5 lety +3

    Um uh um uh um I CAN'T um, "SMACK" um LISTEN 2 "SMACK" um YOU!

  • @brucehunter8235
    @brucehunter8235 Před 7 lety +11

    Oh that's a really hard problem. Like, why is it, when I run Excel, my screen doesn't show me SuperMario Kart? It's a mystery we will probably never solve.

    • @rasputozen
      @rasputozen Před 7 lety +1

      Try it on the new Switch, it works.

    • @AbeDillon
      @AbeDillon Před 7 lety +4

      Why is the part of the brain that deals with optical flow located roughly between the visual system and the auditory system? No way to answer that. Impossible. Can't do it. Biology is magic.

    • @tabularasa0606
      @tabularasa0606 Před 7 lety

      +Abe Dillon
      Evolution put it there. No magic involved.

    • @AbeDillon
      @AbeDillon Před 7 lety +7

      tabularasa0606 sorry. I forgot the sarcasm tag.

    • @Joshua-dc1bs
      @Joshua-dc1bs Před 7 lety +3

      Cartesian theater... sigh

  • @nickmcneely5601
    @nickmcneely5601 Před 7 lety +4

    I think that we should demonstrate that Phenomenal Consciousness even exists before we need to focus on it. Unfortunately for people like Ned here, Dennett pretty conclusively showed with his Zombie Twin argument that we can't actually show that phenomenal consciousness exists even with first person evidence.

    • @soldatheero
      @soldatheero Před 5 lety

      lmao you think we need scientific evidence that consciousness exists?? how could anyone ever deny that experience/perception/consciousness exists it's literally all we know for absolute certain. materialism is the hypothetical explanation of that consciousness.

    • @lenn939
      @lenn939 Před 4 lety

      @soldatheero What’s being denied is the cartesian theater view of consciousness where ineffable and immaterial qualia are presented to some inner subject who then judges what is being “phenomenally” perceived. A cartesian theater explanation of color perception would go something like this:
      1. Light hits the retina and gets transduced into electrical spike trains
      2. Those spike trains make their way to the brain where they start being processed
      3. The processing passes some critical boundary and tada! Now the content has entered into consciousness.
      4. The inner subject of conscious experience “directly looks” at the content that has appeared before it and sees that it is a red quale
      5. Now that you know that you’re looking at something red, that information can be used in cognition to guide your reaction
      Do I need to spell out why this is not a good theory of consciousness?

    • @sevdev9844
      @sevdev9844 Před 4 lety

      @@lenn939 Yes, spell it out or point in a direction.

  • @dosomething3
    @dosomething3 Před 6 lety +1

    46:55 “[i’m paraphrasing] phenomenal consciousness is not informational so computers are not going to achieve consciousness” - I agree that phenomenal consciousness is not informational. But then again I claim that phenomenal consciousness doesn’t exist. Consciousness is rather a macro illusion. In other words there is no consciousness. We really believe that we have consciousness. But we don’t.

    • @soldatheero
      @soldatheero Před 5 lety +2

      hah you are like the fool that denies the ladder he is standing on.. saying that experience doesn't exist when it is the one thing that cannot be denied.. the whole point of the pursuit of science is to explain how consciousness could exist.

    • @HabibChamoun
      @HabibChamoun Před 4 lety

      Assaf Wodeslavsky 🤔 So you are conscious of the fact that you are not..

  • @bobsmith-ov3kn
    @bobsmith-ov3kn Před 7 lety +7

    It's completely fallacious to draw conclusions from that study where it flashes letters for 50 milliseconds about ANYTHING other than split second perception. It says NOTHING about the actual thought processes going on, it says NOTHING about how those sensory inputs are actually used in conjunction with the other aspects of consciousness, really, it basically says NOTHING except.... you will only be able to read about 4 letters if you are flashed a card for a split second. Such profound insight....

    • @iAnasazi
      @iAnasazi Před 7 lety +2

      The point is that you store the entire percept in your mind, otherwise you couldn't report ANY four letters AFTER the sensation ended. He wasn't very clear about this, nor with the rest of his presentation. It says something about memory and memory capacity, nothing more, nothing less.

  • @kneejo-tube
    @kneejo-tube Před 4 lety +2

    If you're not at least open to the possibility of dualism you might be blind and biased and never find the answer we're looking for.

  • @soldatheero
    @soldatheero Před 5 lety

    perception will never be explained in material terms.. the worlds whole view of reality is inside out and upside down

  • @Jackraiden500
    @Jackraiden500 Před 6 lety +2

    Anyone know if there's A compilation of every time this guy goes ummmm?

  • @maxwellmanning4143
    @maxwellmanning4143 Před 5 lety

    No objectivity

  • @aaronsloman8406
    @aaronsloman8406 Před rokem

    The suggested link: "Read more here: goo.gl/0BPiyr" is broken. Is it too late to ask for it to be fixed?

  • @jasonjasonjasonjasonjason

    I love it when people start a talk with a term that you cant be sure everyone knows.. wtf is brain basis, am i supposed to imagine what that means in the context of this talk wtf
    Then lots of long winded and badly written rambling

  • @VRreando
    @VRreando Před 7 lety +3

    My bonsai has consciousness

    • @jamesconners3492
      @jamesconners3492 Před 6 lety

      Nice, you picked the one plant I could actually believe that to be true for.

    • @belliotrungy9107
      @belliotrungy9107 Před 3 lety

      It might or might not but how do you test for it

  • @maxziebell4013
    @maxziebell4013 Před 7 lety +5

    I think Dennett has a better approach and the ones familiar with his work can read a critic on Ned Block by Daniel Dennett here:
    ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/blockrvw.htm

    • @jamesconners8396
      @jamesconners8396 Před 6 lety

      Max Ziebell thanks. I used this source for a paper I was writing on Block

    • @tourist9862
      @tourist9862 Před 6 lety +1

      Block is leagues ahead of Dennett

  • @dejayrezme8617
    @dejayrezme8617 Před 7 lety

    Seeing all those experiments, it seems you could train your brain to improve on those tasks, and maybe actually improve your IQ. I wonder why we haven't seen computer games that pack these experiments into experiences that reward you in the game for getting things right or remembering them and that train your general workspace.
    Or are there games like this but they are just obscure and find no interest?
    I mean people go to the gym to train their body, why haven't we found ways to create programs and objectively measure whether they have a positive effect? (besides crosswords).

    • @MarcoManiacYT
      @MarcoManiacYT Před 6 lety +1

      Dejay Rezme there are games like that, if you look for them you can find em. The problem with your gym analogy is that the brain can't be trained as a whole. The brain excells at becoming really good at narrowly defined tasks, but areas of your brain used for similar tasks don't improve.
      Like solving alot of simple multiplication equations in math doesn't make you better at solving substraction equations. Look up stuff like Dr. Kawashiimas brain training for nintendo ds. Was all the rage with all the 'look at how smart I am'-crowd

  • @dannygjk
    @dannygjk Před 7 lety +1

    Ned Block define consciousness for me.

  • @sdmarlow3926
    @sdmarlow3926 Před 5 lety

    First, intelligent machines are going to wipe the floor with us. Second, all these examples of "mind games" just demonstrate limitations (and adaptations) that minds have evolved over time (many of these things would prove just as true with animals and insects, despite showing no sign of consciousness). The whole talk doesn't seem to even address consciousness.

    • @sdmarlow3926
      @sdmarlow3926 Před 5 lety

      I'm 40min in, and just waiting for the p-zombie stuff now. Nothing discussed involves our conscious activity. This is just the body (sans-consciousness) doing what is innate. Actual awareness of something is still locked away inside the mind, based on whatever patterns you have built-up over the years.

    • @sdmarlow3926
      @sdmarlow3926 Před 2 lety

      @@arletottens6349 How would they be wrong? It would only show that you don't require a phenomenological self to be conscious.

  • @jareddempsey6570
    @jareddempsey6570 Před 7 lety +6

    The Ramblin man no one can understand

    • @erfeyah1401
      @erfeyah1401 Před 6 lety +2

      He is a bad presenter but a solid scientist. If you push through and attend you will find that he knows exactly what he is talking about. If you do not I would suggest you study the current state of neuroscience for some time and return to the presentation again. Or go for some of his writings, he is better there ;) Good luck! :)

  • @carnap355
    @carnap355 Před 4 lety

    is he from minecraft 🤣🤣

  • @falkenherz1708
    @falkenherz1708 Před 7 lety

    And what if the neural processes are also linked to interactions at the quantum level? A true copy of a conciosness would never be possible, since each interaction is unique in spacetime. We would probably be able to create consciosness, but we would first have to be able to perceive consciousness in every possible dimension.
    Another idea; we are talking about human consciousness, maybe multicellular life level consciousness. What about other types of consciousness? Maybe the internet is already a consciousness, but one which we have no idea how and for what to interact with it? Maybe internet users are part of this consciousness, like a single cell of the human body is a part of human consciousness?

  • @rjt98
    @rjt98 Před 5 lety

    Lets get real, quantum biology creates consciousness

  • @jackdawcaw4514
    @jackdawcaw4514 Před 7 lety +5

    We don't even know that consciousness has to do with the brain. It's pure belief. Who knows what it is...

    • @arthurheuer
      @arthurheuer Před 5 lety +3

      I'm guessing you're not a neuroscientist, or someone with even an okay science grade.

    • @MontyCantsin5
      @MontyCantsin5 Před 4 lety +1

      'We don't even know that consciousness has to do with the brain.'
      Do you genuinely believe that your brain could be removed from your skull or severely damaged and this would have no impact whatsoever on your awareness/perceptual understanding of the world?

  • @mrpicky1868
    @mrpicky1868 Před 4 lety

    smart guy but such a bad presenter ... the stuttering the self contradiction all the time... my god....

  • @charliehutch3533
    @charliehutch3533 Před 6 lety +1

    the problem..umm... with ...umm... consciousness umm is that umm ... omfg...r u kidding?

  • @caricue
    @caricue Před 3 lety

    I guess this speaker can't do anything about his manner of speaking, which I found difficult to listen to, but even pushing through that, he was not efficient or clear in making concise points. Like the questioners from the audience, I didn't really know what he was trying to say after his rambling talk. Not to be super critical, but he could use a speech coach and an editor.

  • @maverikmiller6746
    @maverikmiller6746 Před 7 lety +16

    1 hour of talk and actually he hasn't said anything neither novel nor important. He also hasn't explained what is really functional difference of conceptualizing memory and the normal one.
    Wasted time. Absolutely wasted time...

  • @fredjimbob2962
    @fredjimbob2962 Před 4 lety

    Consciousness is just self-awareness, thinking about your thoughts as you're thinking them in a kind of feedback loop. There is no magic or mystery.
    I didn't watch the video. As soon as he mentioned "the hard problem" and David Chalmers I knew that he was just going to be talking a load of garbage.

    • @ThePedroPimenta
      @ThePedroPimenta Před 4 lety

      i agree you on what consciousness is, but maybe should watch the video. he doesn't say consciousness is something else. the idea he is pushing is basically the existence of phenomenal consciousness as oposed to conceptual consciousness. the terms are confusing but if you pay close attention to the experiments it does make sense.

    • @fredjimbob2962
      @fredjimbob2962 Před 4 lety

      ​@@ThePedroPimenta I watched the first 13 minutes before loosing interest. If you think you have something interesting to say and you can't say it in the first 5 mins, then 99/100 times you have nothing interesting to say. This guy likes nothing better than to hear himself talk, in reality, he has nothing to say. This is the truth.

    • @ThePedroPimenta
      @ThePedroPimenta Před 4 lety

      @@fredjimbob2962 lol that's not a really productive mindset. you will miss out on a lot of interesting stuff if you keep thinking this way

    • @fredjimbob2962
      @fredjimbob2962 Před 4 lety

      @@ThePedroPimenta You could be right but I'd bet 100 to 1 that you're not. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is. Summarise what the evidence is in one sentence in sufficient enough a way as to pique my interest. If the video presents interesting evidence and you understood it then you should be able to do this easily since you're obviously able to speak english. I know that you can't because just like the guy in the video, you're just waffling. I'm old enough to smell bs from 100 yards away. Try again sunshine.

    • @ThePedroPimenta
      @ThePedroPimenta Před 4 lety

      @@fredjimbob2962 yes i can see that you are old

  • @benschulz9140
    @benschulz9140 Před 3 lety

    Why Ned Block doesn't know what the heck he is talking about.

  • @williamhiggins6321
    @williamhiggins6321 Před 6 lety

    This is absolutely a perfect example of how irrelevant to anything related to mind or consciousness other than you get a paycheck. It is the worst presentation I have ever heard....More power to you if you can get people to listen to you, and you get paid for you have uttered nothing but nonsense syllables.

  • @primodernious
    @primodernious Před 3 lety

    more useless tech talk.