Marvin Minsky - Is Consciousness Entirely Physical?
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- čas přidán 9. 06. 2024
- Here's the big question about consciousness, our inner experience of what things feel like. Is consciousness a product of the physical world alone?
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I never knew Minsky is also a very able music conductor.
Lol
Well said!
I was going to say the same thing
The arm waving helped immeasurably.
that comment was funny. LOL
Ralph Latham facts
Lmao!!! Kkkkkkkk
Minsky would never get drowned by sudden tsunami.
Please, fix the audio levels.
Professor Minsky, talk about a hand waving argument!
Man, Dennett looks super different without the beard.
At 1:48, he shifts from speaking of experience of qualia to speaking of retina cells without realizing he's changing the topic. It's impossible to even examine the question at issue from such an entrenched materialistic perspective.
When he's asked about AIs having 1st person experiences he replies that someday robots will report that they have experiences. In other words when specifically given a durect question about the 1st person perspective, he answers with a 3rd person prediction. This is very telling. He simply cant speak durectly to qualia, even when asked point blank.
@@cloudlessrainvisions3264 Or perhaps he believes them to be illusory as he discussed and implied. Here's an interesting article discussing this perspective: aeon.co/essays/what-if-your-consciousness-is-an-illusion-created-by-your-brain
The idea that consciousness could possibly be an illusion is the most stunningly delusional assertion in human history. If someone can't see why that is logically impossible, I have to seriously question whether they're conscious. Yes, I'm serious.
@@BugRib The point is that having illusions requires possessing consciousness.
@@BugRib philosophical zombie here, how could consciousness be an illusion when consciousness is the mechanism through which illusion is perceived? Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Strange to watch someone so obviously accomplished and well informed strain so hard against saying, “I don’t know”.
It seems to be a common character flaw in these pseudo-intellectuals. If you want to behold true genius, check out CTMU from Chris Langan
5:01 I read in a book that Minsky was quite engaged in the music. Now, I believe :)
I find myself reacting to this guy. Minsky: "When you know how the magic trick works then the sense of wonder goes away, although you might still remember how it puzzled you once." He's a lot like Quine, just dismissing our phenomenological world with the wave of his hand, and insisting all we need is to understand physical processes in order to understand the world. But how do we come to understand our use of the imagination, our ability to discuss things that are not physically present by pointing to things in the brain? No matter how many layers of neurons or brain "modules" that make up the brain, that's not going to help us to understand how we can know about infinity or our sense of ourselves in relation to others. I notice that this video has been around for seven years, but it hasn't had a lot of viewings, which means that Minsky's views are not particularly popular. I'm not surprised. I find them distasteful.
So easy to get hung up on “is that all there is?” Materialism is better called “physicalism “ because it’s obvious that our experience is not a material. It is, however, the behaviour of materials. Let’s remember E=mc2. This material we are talking about has an energy equivalence. Maybe we’re not made of material, we’re made of energy. Not “consciousness “ but energy. Just like William Blake said.
If there is nothing that exists beyond the physical world, is mathematics a part of the physical world? Are universals, concepts such as "triangle", part of the physical world? Every physical object, including every physical triangle, is individuated by matter (right triangles, isosceles, green triangles, etc), and yet universal concepts have real properties. Mathematics has real properties. Our conscious minds comprehend them. They are quite real, it seems.
Daniel Joseph watch more episodes of this these subjects are addressed if not tackled.
@@mycount64 they aren't tackled in any sense
Nobody says that concepts like math are physical. but you need a physical machine to give effect to these concepts. Concept of addition exists even if no physical world existed, but you won't be able to do additions if some physical entity wasn't performing it.
The claim in this video is that Knowing you exist (self consciousness) though a concept and not a physical thing, you need a physical machine to execute this concept, and a soul is neither sufficient nor necessary for reaching self consciousness.
In summary, claiming that a physical brain is all you need to sense consciousness is not the same as claiming that concepts like math or self consciousness are physical.
This guy moves his hands way more than Italians! (and I am one..)
Fantastic interview. Good spanking of the Searles, Chalmers and Nagels! Well done!
Turn up the volume please!
RIP Marvin.
He nailed that topic.
I asked Bing Chat AI "What do most people think is unintelligent but really is intelligent?". It gave me 3 answers with one of them being the following: "Being expressive: Expressive people use their voice, gestures, facial expressions and words to communicate effectively. They can convey their emotions, thoughts and intentions clearly and persuasively, which demonstrates their intelligence and confidence."
hes got his view and thats all he can have his view as any commentator will have the choice to repudiate my view of his if they so wish ,
i always see human consciousness is different from machine consciousness in the sense that a human will experience their own prognosis of a sensation. theres a general sense of what a color may mean or how they associate conditions, some deeper set in genetics than others - but theres no evidence that a machine or a human have any difference in the fact that they are some form of awake, only that in the death of either system, this awakeness becomes sleep. theres also no evidence that this awakeness cannot resurge after the death of the form - but residual energies are very much real in cosmological and genetic terms.
I think biology also does not take into account the features of quantum physics which allows us to see how light performs at the photonic level - experiments with light suggest that we are experiencing multiple quantum states at once, not one linear timeline. this also means we are interacting with multiple quantum states simultaneously, meaning that while we are unable to measure this process, it is there, present as divisions in the presence of light. we do not know it physically, but we do know that time is not linear and it has been true for a long time. the idea that energy has no momentum after death goes against physics itself, as it is one of newton's laws that things in motion wish to stay in motion - because energetic states compress into physical matter, its important to remember that energy is essentially motion and therefore retains momentum in the same way that physical things do.
this conversation completely miss the point, he keep talking about measuring when the qualitative aspect of consciousness is not measurable because is not quantitative
I don't think the argument sometimes people can more accurately predict how another person will react to something more than the person themself is a strong one against qualia/the first person perspective. Thats just people having poor self awareness and lacking introspection. We're often wrong about our own feelings and motivations but there is still a "self" being deluded about something. A therapist who can make accurate assumptions about a persons emotions still doesn't have access to what its like to be that person. I think thats a weak argument against qualia that misses the point
At the end of the day, this gentleman is in effect saying that I'm a Chess player and have made some good moves, so it's impossible that there is Beauty - because Beauty isn't Chess and there are no equations for it. Modern scientific exploration has fallen into a hole.
My two eyes sees different tints.....One eye sees a darker blue and I close one eye.
Winston Chang Late to the party, but this can be explained in terms of variability of cells within the eye, which we find in all parts of the human body. This is different however from the claim that everyone sees different colours - an extreme idealist position which tries to get out of materialism.
You still haven’t fixed the audio
consciousness could be coming from another universe or entity.....outside our universe. Consciousness could be in everything physical. the physical universe being just a brain. The truth is probably even stranger than either or these....we are so further near the beginning of our quest than the end.
Moving the hands is called behavior. When the motor processes are so closely tied to the brain processes we can say it is behavior all of the way down.
Inspirational mind, thanks for posting.
U can see he's a conductor and a probably a good one
Who is aware of this apparent material? How does material come to be conscious of itself? Perhaps consciousness is an illusion, but what is this 'thing' or phenomenon that is curious of it's environment?
And what are we supposed to do when we figure all this out?
Why would you suppose you are "supposed to do" anything in particular?
@@bobaldo2339 do what u want, but I foresee philosophical suicide. this is all meaningless to begin with......
According to his view that belief in God and our being created in His Image demoralizes us so that we never investigate anything is contradicted by Newton, Kepler, Boyle, Pascal, Faraday, Maxwell and other Christians who were pioneers in science and mathematics. What is demeaning is to say that we are simply collections of protoplasm with no intrinsic dignity.
Lol what
if consciousness is only material thing, then we are nothing more than material systems.therefore we are designed machines or may be robots, not actually life. if so, who is the engineer?
by adding 'not actually life', it is now logically coherent.
actually, if you follow me mindfully, you might have found i wanted to say more than that in between the sentences. when i have taken 'we' are 'designed' as 'machine'. you must interpret all the terms to figure out the entire sense of the argument. according to materialism, 'we' are nothing more than 'brain's material status ,that is, bio-chemical functionality,' and our brain can be treated as a designed machine on the basis of the system of the co-ordinated functionalities. that was my point.
however, how do you define specifically in your understanding the terms mentioned in my original statement? what is meant by 'we' by 'designed', by 'machine'?
what do you think, can our brain be defined as some thing more than only a dead-weight matter? or as a bio-functional computational-data processing and analyzing robotic system, as a matter of fact? sorry my English is not good enough.
Evolution is the engineer. We are what we are because we evolved that way. This begs the question, who created evolution? But, that's not the real question, is it? The question is, can something come from nothing? I'll tell you now, that is impossible to answer. No matter what you're looking at, you can always ask was there something before this. For this reason alone, both atheists and believers are both RIGHT. They can both be absolutely correct because definitions dissipate when you get too abstract.
Here's a thought experiment: Imagine a smooth, featureless white sphere floating in infinite black space. Now, stick a flag into the side of it. Now, if you see the flag rotating to the right, around and around the sphere, is the sphere spinning? Or are you rotating around the sphere? With no other defining features to be seen, the answer is BOTH.
This is the problem with abstract ideas, definitions are constrained by details. Without details, there are no definitions.
Here is the question that keeps me up at night, though: Is God 'the abstract'? Like, fundamentally? Is this why he can't be 'seen'? If there's no way to define high level abstractions, then God can't BE defined. Maybe, there was nothing that existed but abstraction, and the abstraction itself 'defined' something and, boom, the universe? I wonder...
Yes
Funny that he he says having a soul would spit in the face of human endeavor. If you believe in causal laws of physics, you can't exactly brag about human endeavor either, right? As long as matter obeys causal laws, that hard work that went into making those proofs is as much your effort as gravity pulling me onto the planet.
you are assuming physics is deterministic.
I don't think he is. Exactly the same argument applies if it is non-deterministic - there is still no "I" that deserves any credit for what - inevitably - happens.
Ha Ha I know, probably we just need a little bit less of self-infatuation and more fatuousness,as expressed.
@@user-ol2gx6of4g Physics is deterministic. I think you are thinking of hard determinism that says every event in the universe is already pre-determined with no chance of free will.
@@adrianaselena14 I don't think you understand what "deterministic" means ... certainly you're provided no indication of how it differs from "hard determinism". And by quantum mechanics physics is not deterministic, at least not on a small scale. It may be that, due to coherence, it is deterministic on a large scale. In any case, physics leaves no room for "free will" (other than the sort of crypto free will promoted by compatibilists like Dan Dennett).
Is this guy conducting a symphony
Facts
LOL
the audio level is too low ...
I find the logic of his last statement odd. If I were to believe as he does, that only the classical world exists so we are all nothing but atoms arranged in just a certain way, we are here and then we are gone, and that is it. That is the sort of reality that would drive most people to do nothing because eventually you and everyone else will be dead and whatever you did or didn't do will be completely meaningless, so what would be the point?
However if this is some sort of experiential journey, then you have some motivation to see what happens next. Otherwise if it is all meaningless then why bother? Mine as well just off yourself as soon as things get difficult because why go through all the hassle when in the end it is all for nothing?
Eric Michel Because we're scared of being right, since we are humans like you, who like feeling emotions, whether good or bad, and fear leaving them once and for all
You are both right, for different kinds of people.
Eric Michel This is why the rate of suicide among senior citizens (at least in the west) high. For a long time in our life regardless of our belief we feel like we a contributing to some greater goal (materialist or otherwise) at some point in time that starts to diminish and we eventually realize that other than some little sphere of influence (again diminishing over time) evaporates. There are exceptions.
There are other major reasons, like social isolation, loss of status among others and chronic illness. It used to be that seniors were more respected because there were fewer of them and their knowledge was more prized when it was less easier to access knowledge and their help was useful. In a tribe, for instance, seniors' knowledge of animal migration or weather patterns could be of life-or-death importance and they were also important for childcare.
Minsky was the exact opposite of "doing nothing". Amateur psychology does not help understand science.
I feel the interviewer didn't really press him on the hard question. A scientific explanation would only be regarding relational qualities. How do you go from relational qualities to the intrinsic experience of consciousness?
His response was that if a machine can do it, and we can then understand it, we will admit there is nothing special about the experience of being.. even if the machine doesn't have it and we do (or maybe he is implying that the machine would have it also... he didn't say). I'm not convinced at all. The interviewer did try to bring it up again, but then the strawmanning started about dualism and invisible forces and such. This ignores panpsychism, dual aspect monism, and other theories. Minsky may well be right here, but we don't know, and the fact that he goes so quickly to "invisible forces" tells me that he doesn't want to admit he doesn't know.
@@arletottens6349 You mean invisible forces like magnetic fields, dark matter, quantum entanglement, time relativity effects, whatever caused there to be something instead of nothing, etc. right? As to what is and is not physical, I challenge you to give a clear and exhaustive definition. Any time you talk about something as being fully understood before it is in fact fully understood, this is neither science nor philosophy.
@@arletottens6349 Are you aware of the problem of induction? Prove to me that you can predict anything such that it is not possible that you are wrong. Perhaps there is nothing that fits your definition here.
@@arletottens6349 "And that interaction can be studied with our instruments" Perhaps jumping to conclusions is both more boring and also vastly more limiting. Have you heard of subjectivity? What do you think of it? Does it matter what you think about it? What kind of measurement is occurring when you measure your thoughts on the matter (pun intended)? Most physicalists who take their position seriously end up denying that consciousness exists at all. So perhaps what you think about this is entirely irrelevant, based on your intellectual commitments. Einstein comes along and shows how wrong scientist were about something so seemingly absolutely basic and undeniable as the rate of time passing, but a few years pass and you have people like you trying to cram everything into presumptions of past experimentation again. I supposed if you are in the camp that humans understand 99.9% of everything and there are just a few sweeps on polish to go, that might make sense. The problem is that both physics and cosmology are getting worse, rather than better, at dealing with the big questions at the moment.
Fully agree. There nothing that suggests that there are other worlds that the one we live in, except... our imagination.
But is it a good idea to believe in imaginary worlds!?
I can imagine a computer experiencing blue, but it is harder to imagine it experiencing guilt, love, fear etc. That said, like Minsky, I don't actually see any evidence of anything "non-physical". However, I'm surprised that he concluded that the absence of a "soul" allowed him to take credit for his efforts and discoveries. I don't see how it could.
out of interest why ?
The Houdini analogy summed it up. Once we know how the machine works the magic is gone. Eventually we will figure out the magic trick. History is littered processes and systems we did not understand and through science have figured it out. You can believe we will never figure out the mind and consciousness and do nothing. I for one believe we still have intellectual and discovery of the mind and consciousness ahead of us.
I agree. It seems obvious to me that we will have a full scientific description of consciousness at some point.
@@Valdrex Don't hold your breath.
@@GarryBurgess right? It seems Minskey believes that once the easy problem is figured out that the hard problem will just fall into place. Easy way to sidestep the question
A universe that we can not measure does not exist until the means for measuring the soul, God ,whatever, come along and then that will become part of the natural world.
For a machine to be conscious, the prerequisite is that it should have life in it. First person experience came to us much earlier than 3 months age. Did we not feel hungry and pain as soon were born?
I'm not sure why that is such a radical notion. Everything we see in nature is either animated or inanimate. It would be useless to say that inanimate matter had consciousness. Only a living thing can be conscious, which is an active process, not reactive.
"For a machine to be conscious, the prerequisite is that it should have life in it"
No!
Conscious is not a material substance, it is a process.
It matters not at all what the substance is made of so long as that substance can support the process of being conscious. Obviously.
"Did we not feel hungry and pain as soon were born?"
Don't you remember?
I don't. I have absolutely no memory of my first six months.
In fact, my first memory is of me sitting in a pushchair in a bakery, which means,
as in 99% of cases, I must have been six months or older.
If one looks microscopically at living and at dead tissue, one discovers they contain exactly the same set of atomic types, chemically reactive according to the nature of the type, but in all cases the atoms are not living, nor the molecules, nor the small structures either.
So what distinguishes the living from the dead?
You already know!
Dead things don't move as much as the living, neither the entity as a whole
or the parts within it.
The parts in 'living matter' are engaged in many different kinds of the most extraordinarily complex dynamically patterned energetic chemical processes.
What's going on in non living matter is very slow and boring in comparison.
The structure of the rock in the wall that surrounds my garden is today pretty much
identical to its structure yesterday, a hundred years ago and ten thousand.
When these many processes in living matter cease,
every atom of the matter continues to exist
but the living ceased the moment that the processes did.
No process, no life, that's it, quite simple.
By the way, 'living matter' is just a manner of speaking.
It's not the matter that is living.
It's the matter *plus* the collectivity of processes going on within.
Yes, the existence of matter is *prerequisite* for the being of the processes
but both must be present for a thing to be living.
There is no magic spark that distinguishes the living from the dead.
(Which is what I firmly believed before I learned about photosynthesis, Kreb's cycle, Brownian motion, etc).
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL It's easy enough to just dismiss life as "mere chemistry", but while many of the processes involved in a living cell have been detailed, there isn't even a solid definition for life. Like you said, either it moves or it doesn't. That's exactly what animate and inanimate mean, so we haven't made any progress at all. I don't believe in magic, but the organizing principles that cause matter to behave and act are so deep and subtle that we haven't even begun to figure it out. This is why I maintain that the basis of consciousness and the subjective is a living organism. Even a single cell organism has to have basic awareness. It must be able to tell inside from outside, self from non-self. It must seek food and avoid danger. Many single cell organisms can detect light and make basic decisions. As cells become part of a larger organization, there are new functions that become possible, all the way up to thinking and detailed memory, but these are layered onto the base, so you can't just take brain functions like cognition and emotions and ignore the base of living cells that are the physical organism, or that which experiences.
@@caricue Seriously: Are you in conversation with any cell of the one hundred trillion or so that constitute your body? Do you imagine that any one of them is aware of Steve C in the way that Steve C is aware of Steve C? Do you imagine that their individual immaterial awareness processes mysteriously congeal like some metaphysical cloud into an immaterial whole in a way that constitutes your conscious mind?
Or have I misread what you are saying completely?
@@REDPUMPERNICKEL I'm just speculating, but if this view is true, then the question would be, how does a single unified consciousness get organized? Do only brain cells act as this central conscious structure? Is this why pain hurts so much? Are the peripheral cells transmitting their feelings? It does sound pretty crazy, but it would be totally biological and material, nothing immaterial or metaphysical. In a material world, everything is material at some level, so there has to be a substrate of matter that is alive and feeling. It would also explain why people feel a "cosmic consciousness" when they meditate. Maybe they are feeling the rest of the multitude that makes up a multi-cellular organism. And no, individual cells would only be aware of their immediate environment. Knowledge and thinking could only happen at the highest levels of brain function.
God is not the greatest mystery, we are!
interesting how at the end minsky claims his merit alone got him where he is now to prove physicalism, and yet hard ecological science has shown that humans are coextensive with our surroundings; this doesn't have to be analogous to a metaphysic, but it just shows how reductive our thinking can get if we don't factor in context
Don't discount the idea that Marvin is engaging in humor.
Minsky would never get drowned by sudden tsunami.
OBRA MAESTRA
Audio!!!!
Robots can't do what humans do but humans are just robots according to him hmmm? So what's the point of conciousness? It's redundant.
Audio soooo low
There is nothing beyond the physical world, there is no physical world itself. People just pretend and forget that it's a concept.
The fact that we make decisions, and weigh cost vs benefit, and use morals to choose, conscious must exist and it cannot be physical. If conscious was just a brain function, it would have to subscribe to the laws of nature. That would mean no one is able to make decisions of their own. So, how could anyone hold me responsible for my behavior if I wasn’t free to choose how I act?
I swear he's conducting
However, your theoretical speculations are confronted by the experimental evidence of unity conscious demonstrated in rigourous sttudies on monks with highly developed right prefrontal lobes. If they are able to experimentally demonstrate entanglement of responses then where and through which medium does that work? There is also now a vast body of research linking intention and consious focus to neuroplastic structural changes to specific areas of focus. Causality then can be seen to be occuring in both directions. The quality of conscious experience is determined by brain structure yet by itself, and itself is seemingly framed within a more delicate matrix than our measurements have been able to articulate other than to observe its temporal and spatial entanglement. Observation, imagination, observation, imagination, coherence
Marvin should try talking with his hands
Sir roger penrose who's arguably a better mathematician than Minsky has the humility to speculate maybe consciousness has a non-physical character. But Minsky is only defensive.
First, this is ad hominem and an argument from authority. Second, that's *not* what Penrose "speculates"; he's a physicalist through and through, but he doesn't think Turing Machines can be conscious, and instead appeals to quantum mechanics. His arguments have been widely criticized on logical grounds--which is what matters, not who is "arguably" a better mathematician. Your own terms like "arguably" and "speculate" undercut your already specious argument from authority. And Penrose is not humble in this regard--his self-admitted motivation is that he doesn't want to believe that he's "just" a machine. And if he were humble he would give more credence to arguments from people like Minsky or various neuroscientists who have spent decades studying cognitive processes--the fields of physics and mathematics really aren't relevant. And "Minsky is only defensive" is nonsense and projection--the defensiveness comes from people who aren't willing to accept that consciousness is physical.
@@JimBalter accept the appeal to authority. But saying minsky worked for decades doesn't have to mean whatever conclusion hes come to is right.
Penrose is a physicalist, i agree.
Penrose doesn't have to be "humble" in just accepting Minsky's "authority". Penrose not wanting to be a machine also doesn't make him not "humble".
"Minsky is defensive" is my observation on this interview. That being a "projection" of people who wont accept consiousness is physical is actually not an argument at all, its your speculation, also useless.
Amen brother!
RIP
I'm not certain that we can call quantum mechanics as material
He's burning in hell right now. It's so sad! It didn't have to be that way. People should check out CTMU, the work of Christopher Langan, a TRUE genius.
Each being's consciousness is subjective to themselves.
...posted two days after Marvin's death.
astronomical contrast between science content and sound volume. what a pity.
The physical is entirely inside your consciousness.
Joshua Nicholls the physical exists outside of us we only interpret it vaguely through our senses.
On the contrary, consciousness is entirely emergent from the physical.
Physician here, I'll give up watching scientists trying to explain consciousness - seriously. So far to me Freeman Dyson is the only one worth watching (not being disrespectful, only sincere)
"when you know how the magic trick works, then the sense of wonder goes away..." Uh yeah, but you still need to SHOW US (including the philosophers you have no respect for) how it works if you claim to know 🙄 FFS... Towards the end you find out the real reason he's so resistant to other ideas about consciousness.. "the idea of the soul is very demeaning.. I spent a lot of time doing math and science.." sounds like someone thinks they're a very very important scientist who can't explain consciousness.
It always amazes me that some people think they're right because the opposing argument doesn't have an answer. It's like claiming that a found wallet is yours because nobody else claimed it.
So the person who threw his hands up and said "I don't know! it must be due to something we don't see and is not physical and there is no way to detect it but I know it's there" is right because the guy working on finding the real answer hasn't worked out an answer yet!!!
Why talk to a materialist? The physical world contains immaterial things: thoughts, laws of physics,
But nothing exists in the material world that is not instantiated in matter or carried my modulated energy. Thoughts only exist in brains, ideas on paper or electronic media. If a thing is not contained in the physical, then how would you access it?
Bertrand Russel once said that he met a fellow logician who claimed to be a solipsist and was surprised few others were. He said that he was surprised that she didn't see the logical inconsistency of the statement.
I am reminded of this whenever someone claims to be a materialist and consequentialist. To be a consequentialist one has to admit that you have a free choice over your beliefs and actions. To be a materialist implies the self is an epiphenomenon and has no control over anything including one's beliefs and actions.
The only possible conclusions when someone comes along claiming to be a materialist _and_ consequentialist is that either they are stupid or a badly programmed automaton.
Dualism is silly, but Minsky's response to it is silly as well. Eliminating consciousness is self-refuting. To see a view that avoids the silliness of dualism yet preserves irreducible consciousness and mental causation check out *The Case for Monistic Idealism*
You're silly for calling anything silly . And i might be silly for calling you silly .
Monistic Idealism the entire western philosophical enterprise is built on universal dualism, not to mention the big three monotheisms which have been around for millennia - if one thinks they are able to simply jettison that double apparatus of metaphysics and just wade in a frictionless medium devoid of any traditional ideological latency, in exchange for another worldview, then they are fooling themselves and the joke is on them. Real or apparent, this theistic western syncretic tradition has seeped into everything, suggests itself everywhere. If one wishes to challenge it then one must grant respect for its ideas and engage them point by point rather than glibly dismissing it.
@@achraf844 You're silly for calling him silly. And I'm also silly calling you silly. What a silliful world.
@@vovos00 XD cycle of life
If G-d wants to lay claim to the fruits of Minksy's mental labors, well, he's going to have to fight as hard as Minksy did to render them. What we have here is an authorship dispute.
ahahahh yeah; that's very interesting and often it happens with materialists who seem selfless and immersed in their science that they actually get immersed in their own self; guess there's nothing to cling on when you shatter all gods and everything not materialistic;
probably the reason why Minsky was such a believer in eternal life and why his brain or body is frozen and waits for some nicer times
It seems to me that like Daniel Dennett, he talks about consciousness as if it is a misguided theoretical construction of philosophers, and he doesn't have a straight forward understanding through person reflection, of what people mean actually mean by consciousness .
He understands, quite obviously, what people "actually" mean by consciousness. He just wishes to dispel that notion.
If he was not capable of understanding what philosophers mean by consciousness, he would not have been interviewed by the program.
possible Zombies
Marvin Minsky rightly claims the credit for the hard work he has put in. But strangely, denies 'self'.
And once again, perception is mistaken for consciousness....
Exactly
It' so annoying when they dont' understand the question.
The physical world is all we know? Huh?
there's nothing wrong with saying "i don't know". what is consciousness? where does it come from? "i don't know". what people instead do is take the ambiguity of the concept and use it as a cloak inject their religious beliefs into it. "atheists don't have an explanation for consciousness, therefore, god." it's the god of the gaps. people didn't know what electricity was so they said it was thor banging on his anvil. they didn't know where waves came from so they said it was Jörmungandr was shifting his body.
A towering intellect. Science is poorer without him.
An excellent plumber, merely by virtue of that specific excellence, is no more the ultimate authority on M&M polishing, than Minsky is on Consciousness.
There are just so many fallacious comments here. One example. Consciousness being mysterious or spiritual (i.e. non material) doesn’t mean there is God involved. No one evokes God as to Time and space, which are both non material. Nor thoughts and feelings. It is also nutty to say that if consciousness was non-material, then somehow his precious credit for proving theorems will be take away. That is an unnecessary insecurity. A material universe can arise and coexist with a non-material component quite well. They do.
Consciousness mightn’t be spiritual, but Marv sure didn’t make many cogent articles to prove his point.
Self realization, self awareness, consciousness.....virtually impossible to explain. Look at it like this. If there is no god and we have no soul and we are nothing more than a collection of molecules and chemical compositions reacting to certain stimuli and positive and negatively charged particles expelling and attracting one another, then that would mean that we are matter and energy no different than the rest of the universe yet we can ponder and study the universe. In other words the universe is studying itself. It's hard for me to put into words but I'm sure an intelligent and philosophical person can get what I'm trying to say. I can see no other explanation for the existence of the universe than god. I'm positive that not only does god exist, but the universe quite possible is god. Imagine this, if god created everything including all souls then that insinuates a beginning. If god existing before everything then at some point he was alone, he was bored. I believe god created other souls and the universe so god would have something to do and no longer feel lonely. Ponder this for awhile. If this makes me sound like a ranting lunatic than so be it. I believe all souls are a piece of gods soul. Our existence and free will are the greatest gifts ever and I think we should thank and praise god every day for it.
Dom you are Very Polite !!!!! proof you ARE part of "a GOD Thing".....
i understand how crazy it is to accept an idea like that AND do science..... trust that its possible.
Science is not about believing things, neither is real spirituality.
I can see no other explanation for the existence of god than meta-god. Ad-infinitum. Turtles all the way down
Some people just don't get the concept of qualia.
there are ppl with so little intellectual honesty that they can say everything is physical cos mind is an illusion and pretend they've explained how physicality can produce illusions of subjectivity or illusions at all as though this is not exactly as problematic as the hard problem of consciousness ie. the hard problem of illusions
@@backwardthoughts1022 What's intellectually dishonest here is declaring that everyone who doesn't agree with you is intellectually dishonest.
In his book Society of Mind, Minsky makes a good case for how physicality can produce illusions of subjectivity.
Marvin Minsky was obviously brilliant, but it seems to me that he just didn't get the point about the question of consciousness. The machines he built/designed could do clever things, by having the ability to process information and to produce outputs - but I don't think anyone (including he) thought that they were _aware_ that they were doing them. How did that awareness come about in animals? And what is it _for_? Couldn't staying alive and reproducing happen without it?
A machine can be built so it will be aware of (most of) its internal processes, on the other hand are you aware of some of yours (your inconscious thoughts, your current glucose level in the blood, the number of iron atoms in your red blood cells...)?
@@LuigiSimoncini "A machine can be built so it will be aware of (most of) its internal processes" Really? If you have any evidence that any constructed machine was ever actually _aware_ of _anything_ , you should publish it. You'd probably win a Nobel Prize.
I think you missed all of Minsky's points that consciousness is not anything special, just a sense that you are separate from the world outside of you. And that can possibly be an unavoidable consequence of anything that has a certain threshold of analytical abilities. Once we make a machine that can think, and then the machine undoubtedly analyzes that it is reacting to an outside world, then that machine has reached self awareness.
The other important point was that we all believe we know us from the inside better than anyone, but what we know about ourselves is a very small part of who we are and how we operate.
Minsky doesn't claim that he built machines that are aware ... he said that *if* we built machines that have all the subsystems that human brains have (and we don't yet know the details of those), *then* those machines would be aware in the same way we are.
Also, you are using the word "aware" is a way that begs all the relevant questions by assuming that it's some magical mystical epiphenomenal essence. But even a thermostat is "aware" of the temperature, and certainly an amoeba is "aware" of food particles nearby via chemical sensing.
To talk about It on a Physical Phase is ABSOLUTELY POINTLESS ...
You are God projecting your reality for all eternity. You are I am and there is nothing else but consciousness.
same classic science argument: we don't know yet, but we are sure there is an explanation!
uhhh... yes? that's how it is
well, so far that line of reasoning worked way better than looking for answers in a book written by goat shepherds thousands of years ago, or in the guts of dead animals, or asking the dead
The magic of evading an answer because you don't have one.
7:20
Consciousness is a qualitative thing. It is by definition not a physical thing, which is quantitative.
Consciousness IS that other universe that you need to investigate because it exists.
I hope I may answer the question. First of all not all human are real human and alive human even if they have PhD. I mean their mind works like a good calculator but they are game's NPC. Their philosophy could look complicated and interesting but there is no life and spirit of life behind them. Don't ask them they will decept always. It is a part of the game. Second point is the first person experience or something is out of our mind that present our life spirit here in the reality is located outside of it. Let's say that our consciousness is projection in certain area of our head. The projection of consciousness is linked to the area of the head and to the quality of working perception sensor system. Based on physics is very possible that consciousness in fact is non-human consciousness but a limited manifestation of non-human entities from high dimension reality. And what is very possible that our shared reality is virtual world itself generetaed those non-human entities. I would say you are is not who you are at all. We are not humans we are others.
Minsky seems to me to be someone who knows a great deal but has little insight. Alternatively, he might be so committed to materialism that he refuses to see the special quality of consciousness. Its the arrogance of human science, to believe it knows everything whereas there are some things it clearly has no access to. There is however no way to prove that to someone who won't listen. The key to the whole thing might be in the last few minutes, when he talks about how proud he is of his own achievement. To my mind, it is a dangerous way of talking and thinking..
His ego doesn't let him see
First word of your username describes where your mental development stopped.
@@abhishekshah11 - No son, your ego will not let you learn. If you work your ass off the rest of your life, you will never hold a candle to Marvin Minsky. Now say you are sorry!
If you want to see the effect of the fatalism that Minsky is lampooning, just come to India and see for yourself what thousands of years of priestly fatalism have done to its people.
@@vinayseth1114 - India does not have a monopoly on supernatural nincompoops.
the issue isn't really whether consciousness is non-physical. the issue is whether our current understanding of physics can account for it. and right now it cannot - in any way, shape or form.
i suppose this kind of reaction comes about because proud scientists, like Minsky, feel that science is threatened by the question. it seems so strange to me, like they are brushing aside the mere thought that our picture of the universe might be incomplete, or that there are things about the universe which we do not yet fully understand.
Quite unscientific to deny this, if you ask me.
rich monk, I like that he specified that biology was the prerequisite for consciousness. I'm not sure why he capitulated on AI being conscious, unless it was a living machine.
@Erick we didn't ask you, when talking about scientific and unscientific stuff we prefer listening to people with a scientific track record, like Minsky
@@LuigiSimoncini This is an appeal to authority (and old guard, at that) and in this case it is fallacious (there is no sure answer or reason to trust established opinion - if you think there is, you don't understand the issue yet nor the history of science). Obviously, if this is how you think it is a sign of close-mindedness. But given the benefit of the doubt, I'll just add that the problem boils down to there being something about experience itself, such as the experience of color or any other, which cannot be in principle, apparently, described as a composite, in the way Marvin describes; it is just "there". Yes, the way we experience things is entirely human, biological and evolved; but the substance, the "stuff" of experience is real. It is the only thing we can claim to know first-hand that anything is actually made of. Whatever it "is".
This is gold
Good thing empiricism is done and gone away with!
Language makes no sense. We could be talking about anything indefinitely following different linguistic approaches. Even this answer makes no sense. Nothing makes sense. Noth... ... ... ... ... ... ...
His ideas about the brain and consciousness are as good as any I have seen. Western philosophy is usually just words about words.
i don't think consciousness is supernatural in any way, but i doubt that we are in the last paradigm we will ever be regarding those sciences, and science as a whole.
Right on. The doubters here make me want to throw up. I think that it is so obvious that were are all physically driven. It is just a hard problem.
Everything from 9:02 explains exactly the problem of science.
Exactly this.
Entirely phisical ? YES !
Not at all
SOUL is your ability to LOVE. Don't lose it.
On the contrary, emotions are some of the most primitive aspects of humans
To me: (Look at everything in existence as if it is all pure energy):
The body itself is energy and interacting energy. As energy is input into the body (by various means), energy goes over quantum thresholds and under quantum ceilings. If it can't get over the threshold, it doesn't move forward. If it doesn't fit under the ceiling, it gets "chopped off" and redirected or builds up to a higher energy pressure. Whenever energy frequencies align, they rise to higher levels. Standing energy waves and dynamic energy waves all interact. In essence, energy switches could be turned on and off depending upon the flow of the energy. As energy rises to higher and higher levels, "consciousness" emerges.
Energy, energy frequencies, and all the interactions of energy and energy frequencies are "information". The interactions of these energy and energy frequency "information" are what "thoughts" are.
So, "is consciousness entirely physical"? No, not in the context of what we define physical to be. Is consciousness and our thoughts attached to our physical brain? Yes, it appears so. When our physical brain dies, it appears so does our consciousness and our thoughts.
While I and all of humanity truly do not know what we do not know, I try to keep my mind open to other possibilities. But, at this time in the analysis, it appears that when we die, we are dead for eternity. We will forget all we ever knew and experienced. It currently appears that life itself is just an illusion from the human perspective as far as eternity is concerned. Our true destiny currently appears to be to cease to exist and be forgotten. (Eternity is a really, really long time, infinitely eternal).
Reductionists are lacking something fundamental to assume a machine that has photo-sensitive cells and can 'register' what wavelength is being emitted from a surface is the exact same thing as an organic being experiencing the same colour. It baffles me. I cannot ever imagine a machine could be programmed to be just as baffled, giving the correct inputs.
Minsky clearly established that consciousness is entirely physical. But, we are not "stuck" with our initial self-concept. We feel and perceive that we are the same person, but we have many versions of the self throughout life.
We also have many versions of our physical body. Thanks to metabolism maybe not a single atom of your current body is the same as in the previous version of "you" from 10 years ago. Yet the feeling of "you" persists.
@@baze3SC Our body and "self" are continually changing in small ways, and sometimes abruptly in large ways.
How did he “clearly establish” that?
@@idonotlikethismusic View the video and hear what Minsky says.
@@georgegrubbs2966 I did, and then I asked you. Nothing he said "clearly established," i.e. unequivocally proved, that consciousness is entirely physical, so I asked what did he say that you makes you think that.